Opinions
Daily Chronicle • www.daily-chronicle.com • Page 7• Wednesday, February 12, 2014
8OUR VIEW
8SKETCH VIEW
‘One-to-one’ program a good start
For sale, the MLK legacy “I won’t have any money to leave behind. I won’t have the fine and luxurious things of life to leave behind. But I just want to leave a committed life behind.” – Martin Luther King Jr., Feb. 4, 1968 Maybe we should take up an offering. Obviously, the heirs of Martin Luther King Jr. are hard up for money. That must be why they keep selling off pieces of his legacy. Have you heard the latest? King’s youngest child, Bernice, issued a statement last week after her brothers, Dexter and Martin III, filed suit to force her to turn over their father’s Nobel Peace Prize and his traveling Bible. She says they want to sell them to a private owner. According to the suit, King’s heirs agreed in 1995 to turn their inheritance over to a corporate entity, The Estate of Martin Luther King Jr. Inc., where Martin is chairman of the board. The complaint said Bernice has “repeatedly acknowledged and conceded the validity” of the agreement, but still refuses to surrender the items. The suit makes no mention of a sale. I called the King brothers’ lawyer for comment. He didn’t return the call. In her statement, Bernice writes, “While I love my brothers dearly, this latest decision by them is extremely troubling.” She said she is “appalled,” “ashamed” and “disappointed” by their behavior. “It reveals a desperation beyond comprehension.” Their father, she said, “MUST be turning in his grave.” Turning? Martin Luther King must be
VIEWS Leonard Pitts spinning like a record album. Not just because of this, but because over the years his family has missed no opportunity to pimp his legacy. That verb is used advisedly. I am mindful of its racial freight, but frankly, no other word adequately describes the behavior of this family with regard to its most celebrated member. Every year, they remind us to respect his legacy, but it seems increasingly apparent they don’t respect – or even fully understand it – themselves. If they did, they could not have licensed his image for a commercial with Homer Simpson. Or put his personal papers on sale for $20 million. Or demanded money to allow his likeness to grace a memorial on the Washington Mall. What would King think of them fighting Harry Belafonte for the return of papers King gave him as a gift – especially since Belafonte helped finance King’s movement and the upbringing of these selfsame children? What would King think of the fact that these bickering, tiresome children of his are forever in litigation and public squabbles with one another and that money always seems to be at the root? Especially since he famously disdained “shallow things” like personal gain?
So yes, let’s pass the hat. How much do you think it would take to induce these people to grow up, shut up, and stop using their daddy like an ATM? I admit to being selective in my vexation. If Woodrow Wilson’s heirs sold his Nobel Prize, or Booker T. Washington’s his Bible, I doubt I would even notice. The difference, I think, is that King is nearer to us in time and of a magnitude of greatness those men, great though they were, do not approach. He resides on a pantheon of American heroes occupied by the Founders, Abraham Lincoln and no one else. Moreover with him there is, especially for African-Americans but really for all believers in human dignity, a sense of communal ownership and collective investment – a sense that he is ours and his memory is sacred. His children are the caretakers of that memory on behalf of us all. To trade on it for the love of money is starkly appalling and profoundly offensive. The fact that they either don’t understand this or don’t care speaks volumes. King’s kids may be legally entitled to sell his legacy to the highest bidder. But the fact that a thing is legal to do does not make it right to do. Considering who their father was, you’d think that’s something they’d know.
• Leonard Pitts is a columnist for The Miami Herald, 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, Fla., 33132. Readers may contact him via e-mail at lpitts@miamiherald.com.
8 VIEWS
The price of becoming ambassador to Hungary By JEFFREY GOLDBERG Bloomberg News Watching John McCain set-up a fellow senator like a bowling pin is a rare Washington pleasure. Even when he does it in Budapest. A couple of weeks ago, McCain made a visit to Budapest, to meet with Hungary’s wily prime minister. McCain also decided to hold a news conference with two dozen Hungarian journalists. I suspect that McCain decided to meet the press in Budapest mainly so that his delegation would be asked questions about a woman named Colleen Bell. Bell is a soap opera producer – “The Bold and the Beautiful” is her masterwork – who was nominated by President Barack Obama’s administration to serve as U.S. ambassador to Hungary. Bell, one of Obama’s larger fundraising “bundlers,” bought this nomination with more than $500,000 of mostly other people’s money. At her confirmation hearing last month, McCain asked Bell an exceedingly simple question: “What are our strategic interests in Hungary?” She gave the following imperishable answer: “Well, we have our strategic interests, in terms of what are our key priorities in Hungary, I think our key priorities are to improve upon, as I mentioned, the security relationship and also the law enforcement and to promote business opportunities, increase trade” McCain interrupted her: “I’d like to ask again what our strategic interests in Hungary are.” Bell plowed ahead. “Our strategic interests are to work collaboratively as NATO allies, to work to promote and protect the security, both – for both countries and for – and for the world, to continue working to-
gether on the cause of human rights around the world, to build that side of our relationship while also maintaining and pursuing some difficult conversations that might be necessary in the coming years.” To which McCain replied, witheringly, “Great answer.” Bell’s performance didn’t draw much media attention, mainly because she was blessed to be testifying that same day with the administration’s nominee to serve as ambassador to Norway, the Long Island hotelier George Tsunis, who didn’t seem to know that Norway is a monarchy, and who also called a party in Norway’s ruling coalition a “fringe” element given to spewing hatred. Tsunis, like Bell, and an unfortunately large number of other Obama nominees for ambassadorial slots in consequential countries, is also a bundler. Tsunis became a bigger YouTube star than Bell, but not in Budapest. In Budapest, they’re highly interested in her. When a reporter, early in the news conference, asked McCain about Bell, a devilish smile played across his face. “We’re very fortunate,” he said, “to have with us today the chairman of the committee that holds the hearings that these nominees come before, and that is Senator Murphy, and he is very knowledgeable about these issues.” Three things then happened. First, most everyone at the news conference laughed. Second, one of the people who didn’t laugh, the aforementioned Sen. Chris Murphy, a freshman Democrat from Connecticut, approached the podium as if it were covered in rat poison. Third, McCain winked – not at all subtly – at the three American journalists sitting in the front row. McCain had set up a test for Murphy, who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s Subcommittee on European Affairs.
Here is the answer that I hoped that Murphy would give: “Colleen Bell was nominated to serve as ambassador to Hungary not because she knows anything about Hungary, or about Europe, or NATO, or the democratic development of former Soviet satellite states, but because she raised just an ungodly amount of money for President Obama, and in our country, we have a bipartisan tradition of selling ambassadorships to vulgar people of great means. The good news is that Bell is a successful, ambitious person who has at least a small chance of gaining direct access to the president or at least to his people – admittedly none of whom particularly care about Hungary – and also, she will throw excellent parties to which I’m sure at least some of the less-unwashed journalists among you might be invited.” But what he actually told the media was both entirely predictable and wholly dispiriting: “I think Hungary and the bilateral relationship is going to be very well-served by Colleen Bell’s arrival. Ms. Bell has had an extensive history of involvement with a number of very important causes in the United States. She has visited Budapest and Hungary, and I think she is going to be a very strong ambassador, and we look forward to coming back and working with her in the very near future.” The corruption here is multilayered. There is the corruption of governance and diplomacy, in which ambassadorships are sold to the highest bidder. And then there is a more subtle form of corruption, in which the people’s representatives are made to feel as if they must provide cover for the corrupt practices of the executive branch.
• Jeffrey Goldberg writes about the Middle East, U.S. foreign policy and national affairs for Bloomberg View. Follow him on Twitter at @JeffreyGoldberg.
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Many students today have access to a variety of electronic devices at their homes that they routinely use in completing their schoolwork. One challenge that many public school districts face is how to make those same devices accessible to all students while they are in the classroom. Although the challenge of years past might have been providing enough desktop computers for classrooms, the landscape has shifted: More students rely on portable devices such as smartphones and tablets than the traditional home computer. These devices come at a cost, but they should only become more commonplace in classrooms. DeKalb School District 428 has an opportunity to commit some serious resources to this effort by launching a pilot “one-to-one” technology program. The program would provide students at Lincoln Elementary School and eighth-graders at both of district middle schools with a computer device they would also take home at night. It would cost $560,000 to launch the program, an expense that seems worth it for the benefits it could bring. Educators at the district said it will allow students to work together in small groups more easily, while allowing teachers to work more closely with students. School board members are expected to vote on the proposal at their meeting Tuesday. They should approve it, and hopefully after some experimentation with how the model works and how curriculum can be shaped to accommodate it, they will expand it. The district, which has much of a $21 million construction grant salted away, could provide many more students with technology access that would be the envy of many public schools around the country. They also could level the playing field for students in households that can not afford such devices or do not place value on them. The goal should not be to teach students to rely solely on electronic devices as the go-to solution to every problem, or see them as a substitute for actual life experience. But the wealth of knowledge available on the Internet, and the window it provides to the greater world, have tremendous potential to enhance education. Virtual field trips, street view maps of cities around the world, news coverage from many perspectives on current events – there are seemingly endless possibilities for innovative teachers to bring educational topics to life for students in ways that textbooks cannot. In the Internet age, part of the goal should be teaching students how to see the Internet. They must learn that not all information sources online are credible or appropriate, that sometimes false information is disseminated once, then copied and echoed by others, that researching a topic is a more involved process than typing a term into a search engine and reciting whatever the first result shows. They also should learn to think about new ways that they can harness our society’s new connectivity to do amazing things. Most children are immersed in online culture and the digital tools they use to access the digital world. Issuing students their own electronic devices will help educators to connect with students in ways they intuitively understand. Incorporating more technology into classrooms will only help prepare our children to be citizens of the 21st century.
8 ANOTHER VIEW
Bring on the chip-and-PIN If you worry about your privacy and carry a credit card, the Target data breach ought to be a startling wake-up call. A massive theft from card-swiping machines between Nov. 27 and Dec. 18 took information such as numbers and names from about 40 million customers and compromised personal information – names, addresses, email addresses or phone numbers – from about 70 million. Although there may be overlap, perhaps one in four people in the United States were exposed to fraud and potential loss of privacy. The data were siphoned off by crooks and sent abroad. How did it happen? According to John Mulligan, Target’s executive vice president and chief financial officer, who testified Feb. 4 before the Senate Judiciary Committee, intruders crept into Target’s network and installed malware designed to skim off creditand debit-card information. How they did that is not known, although cybersecurity sleuth Brian Krebs has reported that they may have gotten into the network through a vendor to Target; the vendor said it was a “victim of a sophisticated cyber attack operation.” The crooks then spread the stealthy malware to the pointof-sale machines. The data were skimmed off in the seconds after customers swiped their cards during the busy holiday season. Chastened, Mulligan told the Senate panel that Target was accelerating a $100 million investment to convert to so-called chip-and-PIN technology that is more secure. He pledged that Target would have it in place early next year, six months earlier than planned. Mulligan’s response raises a larger question: Why isn’t the United States as a whole moving more quickly toward chip-and-PIN technology? The Washington Post
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. – U.S. Bill of Rights, First Amendment