Thursday February 23, 2023

FEATURE: Game On! | ANALYSIS: Worse Than Non-transparent | GREAT LIVES SERIES: Rembrandt - Painter of Stories

FEATURE: Game On!

by Martin Davis

Last week a familiar shout went out across the country - “Pitchers and Catchers report!”

It’s baseball season again, but baseball wasn’t on people’s minds Tuesday night inside Rebellion Bourbon Bar and Kitchen, where Joel Griffin formally announced his candidacy for the 27th District State Senate seat.

A baseball expression, however, captures perfectly the mood Griffin’s announcement set for the race to earn the Democractic nod in June - “Game On!”

For a State Senate race, the Democratic field is crowded. Griffin will be competing against Ben Litchfield and Luke Wright, both of whom have been on the ground and knocking on doors for the better part of the past year.

Though Griffin doesn’t have the early start Litchfield and Wright enjoy, he brings heavy-hitters to this game. State senators Scott Surovell and David Marsden, along with former House member Joshua Cole, were on hand to pump up the shoulder-to-shoulder crowd at Rebellion. And they made it clear Griffin was the candidate they had been awaiting.

When introducing Griffin, Marsden - who’s spent a decade recruiting candidates - said: “Sometimes you just know.”

The level of confidence that the party’s establishment has for Griffin is going to be critical to his chances in the June primary. It gives him instant credibility, and access to funds he’ll need to be successful.

Those factors alone, however, don’t guarantee success. As important as the party’s support is Griffin himself and his approach to running this race. In that way, Griffin has already created separation from his opponents.

Whereas Litchfield has taken a more-populist approach to running his campaign, and Wright has pressed his bona fides as military man and a problem-solver, Griffin sounds a lot like Congresswoman Abigail Spanberger. On the campaign trail last fall, she described herself as a “Big D” Democrat, with the D staking out her position on major social issues like abortion. In most other areas, she’s a problem-solver capable of working across the aisle on most issues.

Now consider the three points Griffin gave Tuesday night to explain his decision to go after this seat.

The first is his growing concern about the threat to our democracy posed by militants, a threat that was all too publicly visible on January 6. Citing his service as a Marine, he spoke of the importance of standing up to that type of threat.

The second point is his concern about the increasing legal assaults on women and their ability to control their own health care. And the third is his commitment to economic development.

A Big D Democrat - just like Spanberger.

Griffin; Litchfield; Wright.

The lineup card for the Democractic nod is set, and Griffin made clear last night that his team ready to go.

Game on, as they say.

This is going to be a fascinating primary to watch.

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COMMENTARY: Worse than nontransparent

by Martin Davis

The Spotsylvania School system has a new advertising slogan - “Together, we are.”

The problem being, who are the “we” coming “together”?

There’s good reason to believe that “we” doesn’t include anyone who happens to disagree with Superintendent Mark Taylor, and the four majority members of the school board - Lisa Phelps, Kirk Twigg, April Gillespie, and Rabih Abuismal - who continue to destroy the democractic ideals that are supposed to undergird school boards.

Over the past couple of weeks, however, things have taken an even darker turn.

Nobody’s home

Emails sent to Mark Taylor’s school account are now met with the following automated reply:

Thank you for your email. 

As Division Superintendent I receive a plethora of emails concerning a variety of topics every day.  We do our best to provide timely and appropriate responses. 

Requests for information may be referred to other staff. All observations and suggestions will be given appropriate consideration.  You may not receive an individualized response in addition to this acknowledgment, but please know that your email is important to us.

* Special Note to Spotsylvania County School Board Members:  Please refer to policy BGR and directly relate your request to Board Chairwoman, Lisa Phelps.

The response is insulting on its surface to any thinking person.

Not only does Taylor whine about the “plethora” of emails he receives, he makes it clear that the odds the writer will receive a response are thin. The kicker?

“You may not receive an individualized response in addition to this acknowledgment, but please know that your email is important to us.”

Anyone who has spent hours on the phone trying to reach a live person at a faceless corporation while bad music plays, stopping only every 30 seconds or so for a recorded voice to tell you “your call is important to us,” knows that your voice doesn’t matter at all.

But this nonresponse doesn’t stop at insulting parents and teachers. It offers a “special note” to school board members, ordering them to consult “policy BGR” and telling them if they want to talk to Taylor, they first have to go through Phelps.

Why publicly humiliate the three board members that this response is clearly targeting - Dawn Shelley, Lorita Daniels, and Nicole Cole?

For the same reason that any authoritarian leadership group humiliates those they don’t want to deal with - It sends a clear message that your voice doesn’t matter.

How cold has the relationship between Taylor and the majority board members become with the minority board members?

Thanks to emails, we’re beginning to get an idea.

You Don’t Matter

Board members Shelley and Cole have been keeping track of emails to Taylor and other board members, and how many of those emails have received any response. They recently shared their findings with F2S.

Shelley reports sending 129 emails to Taylor, and receiving just 18 responses from him or staff. That’s a response rate of just 14%.

Breaking these emails down by topic, Shelley reports the following:

9 Emails about security firm sent         One response that didn’t answer my questions.

16 sent about lack of communication  One response

11 sent about Budget One response

7 sent about parent requests Zero responses

12 about Anthem/MWHC  One response

29 General Inquiries or ideas Five responses

16 Various other requests                   One response

8 requesting a special meeting               Zero responses

The numbers from Cole are a little better, but not by much.

She reports sending 41 emails to Taylor, with a response rate of just 27%. Here’s the breakdown of the (non)responses:

No Response - 30

Late Response (more than 5 days after) - 1 [3 weeks later, after at least 4 more emails on same topic. Was told he would address and follow up - that never happened]

Timely Response (within 48 hrs) - 6

Received auto response - 1

Sent to Staff, cc Taylor with No Response from either - 3 (this started right after Taylor started 11/4)

We’ve known for some time that Taylor and board members in the majority were nonresponsive to the public. That’s inexcusable, but these people are under no legal obligation to respond.

Refusing to answer emails from the people you report to, however, is quite another matter. Again, there’s no legal obligation to respond, but in the world of business, there’s a term applied to those who refuse to answer to their superiors - “Insubordinate.”

Even those who support what this board is doing should be deeply troubled by Taylor’s inactions. A superintendent who refuses to be responsible to those who hired him is a direct threat to everyone he supposedly is there to serve.

That’s more than nontransparent, that’s an insult to every citizen paying his outrageous salary.

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GREAT LIVES SERIES: Rembrandt - Painter of Stories

by Marjorie Och, Professor of Art History, University of Mary Washington

This lecture is open to the public free of charge and begins at 7:30 p.m. tonight, Feb. 23, in Dodd Auditorium, George Washington Hall, on the Fredericksburg campus of the University of Mary Washington. The auditorium opens at 6:30 p.m.  Each lecture concludes with an audience Q&A session with the speaker.

The seventeenth century was rich in artists -- Caravaggio, Bernini, Rubens, Van Dyck, Velázquez, and Artemisia Gentileschi, to name a few.

Into this galaxy of formidable talent, we find Rembrandt, an artist endlessly imagining and depicting himself playing different roles throughout his career, from a cautious self-effacing young painter (ca. 1628), a prankster (1630), frequently as a gentleman (1639, 1640, 1642, 1652), and a sovereign from a far off Biblical or mythological land (1658).

Rembrandt's self-portraits are not only studies of expression and costume, but occasions the artist tried out narrative moments he could return to in his larger canvases. Each of his paintings engages the viewer, often making us stop to confirm what our eyes tell us. There is both honesty and mystery in Rembrandt.

His self-portraits and painted narratives chronicle every aspect of human existence from birth to death, love and loss, fear, sorrow, and joy.

Living through what we still refer to as the Dutch Golden Age of the seventeenth century, Rembrandt's narratives not only reveal life in a global and increasingly modern world, but human experience in any time and place.

This talk will explore one narrative from each of his working decades, placing it in the context of artistic practices of the time as well as Rembrandt's life to see what was important to him in the telling of a story and why he continues to draw us into images of such intimacy.