The end of Gerbergate

Our long Vo Dilun nightmare ended last week when Ed "Gerber Baby" DiPrete was sentenced to prison after acknowledging his guilt in the corruption, bribery and kickback schemes that marred his administration as governor. While plenty of people believe that he got off easy (son Dennis "Deer in the Headlights" DiPrete certainly did, with a mere $1000 fine), Phillipe & Jorge say there is more to be praised than criticized in this agreement.

This scandal has eaten up enough of the state's time and money, and considering that the outcomes of such notoriously difficult-to-prosecute cases are not exactly foregone conclusions, we feel that Attorney General Jeff Pine did the right thing in seeking a quick end to this.

Just like that of Nixon, Clinton and a number of other public officials we could name, the DiPrete case came replete with the obligatory years of stonewalling and denial. (No wonder politicians have such a tawdry public image!) And not surprisingly, the Gerb's public statement after admitting his guilt continued to feed into the public's disillusionment.

A pattern of corruption is explained as "mistakes in judgement" as Gerb continues to play the befuddled naif whose perspective was clouded by "the pressures of raising money for campaign spending." But most gratuitous was the Gerb's contention that, despite the pay-for-play scenario, "every citizen of Rhode Island . . . received the very best." To this, P&J can only respond, "the Jamestown Bridge."

The bridge was just the most notorious example of waste, however. Indeed, the DiPrete years are rife with examples of firms that ponied up the requisite campaign contributions, low-balling bids on building and renovation projects and then amassing massive overruns only to have the extra expenses rubber-stamped and passed along to you, the taxpaying consumer. Is that "the best"?

So sorry

P&J ventured out of Casa Diablo last week to take in the University of Rhode Island freedom-of-speech forum that had been hastily assembled in the wake of a flap over an allegedly racist cartoon in the Good 5cents Cigar. Bolstered by a panel of national and local experts on First Amendment rights, as well as by Mark Hardge of the fledgling Brothers United for Action campus group and Cigar managing editor Patrick Luce, the forum was indeed a very beneficial move. Hopefully, the issue ultimately will have a positive impact on race relations on the Kingston campus.

The fact that comments from the audience were often self-serving and immature should hardly come as a shocker, given that the crowd was predominantly college students. To his credit, though, Hardge avoided incendiary remarks like those our old friend, Ray Rickman, threw around in his role of shit-stirrer -- a necessary piece of the overall puzzle.

After the idiotic "freedom of speech crap" comment made by a neophyte member of the student Senate at the height of the uproar, Hardge and the BUA obviously realize now the inherent censorship in asking the Senate to close down the Cigar by denying it funds. What's more, if any bad blood existed between Hardge and Luce, it certainly wasn't evident as they sat next to each other at the forum and responded to questions. In fact, our only advice to the BUA is that the issue of campus diversity might play better coming from an organization that isn't predominantly black and entirely male, as that's not exactly what we'd call providing a broad perspective.

Overall, what the forum did was expose problems on campus deeper than just an offensive cartoon. There is a culture of sniping and backbiting at URI, and not just on race issues. President Robert Carothers, for instance, has been a frequent and all-too-easy target for students, faculty and alums -- groups that also would call Mohandas Gandhi a wussy policy wonk, Malcolm X a jumped-up publicity-seeker and George Washington an elitist patrician lapdog of the military-industrial complex to fit their personal needs.

In Kingston, time is viewed as much better spent on ranting and raving than on finding solutions to problems that go on and on over time. While we understand the Cigar's reasons for not apologizing for printing the inflammatory cartoon, comments P&J heard during and outside the forum made it clear that the paper's motives for doing so may not be as readily apparent to the student body as the editors think. And this is the same sort of misreading of the Cigar's audience that caused the problem with the cartoon in the first place.

Luce and the Cigar management would do well to stand their ground on the freedom-of-press issue, but to also loudly and clearly express their sincere and profound regret for causing obvious offense to so many people on campus. This would go a long way as opposed to a poorly understood and understated Clintonesque line like, "Well, sorry if we kinda goofed, but we're really good guys. You should forgive us."

Historical context matters

Although racial myopia is not unique to the Biggest Little, your superior correspondents were flabbergasted to see a letter in the BeloJo's Lifebleat "Mailbox" column in which a pop history-challenged correspondent raved on about the Amos and Andy 1950s television show.

The writer complains about how the program "that produced the type of laughter that was good for anyone's health" was taken off the air because the NAACP objected to its stereotypical image of blacks. "We who watched the show didn't pay any attention to image or color," the writer contends. He then goes on to say how this is no different than the poor image of whites depicted on the Jerry Springer Show.

The letter screams out for context, of course, because unlike television today, no other show in the 1950s featured an all-black cast. What we got in those days as representative of black life, then, was Beulah the maid and Amos and Andy. Oh, for a short time there was Nat "King" Cole's program, but that was taken off the air when sponsors, pressured by white supremacists, pulled their advertising. We guess the image of a sophisticated and hugely talented black artist was too much for people to bear. And we also might point out that Jerry Springer has plenty of bizarre guests of a variety of races.

This just goes to show that ignorance of the past continues to plague us today and why so many white people had difficulty in understanding why people of color were upset with the "pro-affirmative action" cartoon that sparked the recent uproar at the University of Rhode Island.

Butterflies and Baron Samedi

Phillipe and Jorge visited New York City last week for a performance by Batoto Yetu ("Our children" in Swahili), an incredible children's dance troupe from Harlem that we raved about in this space last year -- and hope to have a hand in bringing to Vo Dilun this spring.

Naturally, we sat right next to Isabella Rossellini, although it was only J.'s prescience in realizing that P. was about to launch into an impersonation of Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper's role in the David Lynch masterpiece, Blue Velvet) that prevented your superior correspondents from getting slapped into submission by Hopper's former drop-dead beautiful costar.

Almost as delightful as Batoto Yetu was a visit to the American Museum of Natural History, which is featuring special exhibits of live butterflies and voodoo art, a pairing, of course, that everyone views as two peas in a pod (providing the pod is from Invasion of the Body Snatchers). The butterflies swarm all around you in a room-size version of an iron lung. And until you've had a bright-blue iridescent butterfly sitting on your chest, you ain't seen nothin' yet.

Likewise for the voodoo artwork, which appears to have been inspired by excessive amounts of rum, LSD and Catholicism, not necessarily in that order. So if you're in the Big Apple these holidays, give it a whirl.

Still hungry

Statistics recently released by the Rhode Island Department of Education indicate that last year's decision by the General Assembly to make school-breakfast programs mandatory in public elementary schools might need a little adjusting. The report indicated that, while 10 percent of fourth- and fifth-graders acknowledge going to school regularly without eating breakfast, the numbers increase as the students age. By junior high, they go up to 16 percent; for high-school students, it's 22 percent.

Considering the overwhelming evidence linking nutrition and scholastic achievement, we might want to think about extending the breakfast program to older students. And by the way, does anyone see a connection between the precipitous decline in those who receive food stamps and reports that soup kitchens, food banks and other social-service agencies are more overcrowded than ever? Your superior correspondents still would like to understand why the "economic boom" seems to extend to so few people.

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