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Edwards to End Term With Farewell Tour
Mon Nov 29, 1:57 PM ET
ASHEVILLE, N.C. - Democrat John Edwards (news - web sites) is pondering his future as his tenure as a North Carolina senator winds down, but says even his campaign for vice president fit his view of public service.
Edwards has planned a three-day farewell tour around North Carolina this week to thank those who sent him to Washington.
"I want to make sure North Carolinians know how much I appreciate and am honored to have represented them," Edwards said last week.
"I saw my job as helping make sure ... that the voices of regular North Carolinians were heard and someone was fighting for them and trying to help them."
After his Senate term ends — Republican Richard Burr won the election for the seat that Edwards gave up to run for vice president with John Kerry (news - web sites) — Edwards will concentrate first on his wife's battle against breast cancer.
Edwards will be giving up a seat that no one has held for very long. Democrat Sam Ervin's re-election in 1968 marked the last time someone kept the post for more than a term.
The 51-year-old Edwards has ideas about the path his party should take for the future.
He said the party needs to be sure that voters understand Democrats have the same values as the people Edwards grew up with in South and North Carolina, where Republicans have dominated national elections.
"I wish we'd had better chances, better opportunities (in the 2004 campaign) for me to talk about what my personal values are," Edwards said.
"How important my relationship with God is, how important my faith is in our day-to-day lives, the struggles my family's had in the past, plus what Elizabeth is facing now."
Democrats also need to reach out to those who voted for Bush, he said.
"In order for us to unite the country ... those voters have to believe that our values — my values and the values of other Democratic leaders — are the same values they believe in. That means we have to be touching them, reaching out to them."
Edwards said that even without a forum in the Senate he plans to keep a high profile.
"We've had lots of proposals and offers out there," he said. "The bottom line is: I have to sort my way through all of that stuff and figure out what makes the most sense and what's the best way to fight for these things I care about."
Edwards said he will continue to give speeches around the country and may publish another book. He also plans to build a new home near Chapel Hill.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Edwards to End Term With Farewell Tour
Mon Nov 29, 1:57 PM ET
ASHEVILLE, N.C. - Democrat John Edwards (news - web sites) is pondering his future as his tenure as a North Carolina senator winds down, but says even his campaign for vice president fit his view of public service.
Edwards has planned a three-day farewell tour around North Carolina this week to thank those who sent him to Washington.
"I want to make sure North Carolinians know how much I appreciate and am honored to have represented them," Edwards said last week.
"I saw my job as helping make sure ... that the voices of regular North Carolinians were heard and someone was fighting for them and trying to help them."
After his Senate term ends — Republican Richard Burr won the election for the seat that Edwards gave up to run for vice president with John Kerry (news - web sites) — Edwards will concentrate first on his wife's battle against breast cancer.
Edwards will be giving up a seat that no one has held for very long. Democrat Sam Ervin's re-election in 1968 marked the last time someone kept the post for more than a term.
The 51-year-old Edwards has ideas about the path his party should take for the future.
He said the party needs to be sure that voters understand Democrats have the same values as the people Edwards grew up with in South and North Carolina, where Republicans have dominated national elections.
"I wish we'd had better chances, better opportunities (in the 2004 campaign) for me to talk about what my personal values are," Edwards said.
"How important my relationship with God is, how important my faith is in our day-to-day lives, the struggles my family's had in the past, plus what Elizabeth is facing now."
Democrats also need to reach out to those who voted for Bush, he said.
"In order for us to unite the country ... those voters have to believe that our values — my values and the values of other Democratic leaders — are the same values they believe in. That means we have to be touching them, reaching out to them."
Edwards said that even without a forum in the Senate he plans to keep a high profile.
"We've had lots of proposals and offers out there," he said. "The bottom line is: I have to sort my way through all of that stuff and figure out what makes the most sense and what's the best way to fight for these things I care about."
Edwards said he will continue to give speeches around the country and may publish another book. He also plans to build a new home near Chapel Hill.
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Scrooge's nightmareDespite Bush's election, the cranky old conservatives' days are numbered. The future belongs to middle-aged boomers and their kids, who embrace the tolerant values of the '60s.
- - - - - - - - - - - -By Leonard Steinhorn
Nov. 25, 2004 Cowed by exit polls showing that "moral values" motivated one in five American voters on Election Day, chastened journalists have begun to spin a new narrative about our national political culture: that "ordinary Americans" can be found only in socially conservative red-state pews. "Ordinary people, the people in the red states" is how conservative media critic Bernard Goldberg puts it, and many in the press seem to be saying amen.
But once again the media have it wrong. Missing in this discussion is that most Americans -- even many Bush supporters -- would recoil and rebel if the evangelical right ever got its way and began to limit the personal freedoms most of us now take for granted.
All the claims about mandates and values notwithstanding, the very fact that one-fifth of voters cited moral values means that four-fifths didn't. In fact, we heard much the same talk about the rise of conservative social values in the Reagan '80s, yet scholars who have studied attitudes in that period have found little evidence to suggest any reversal of the social liberalism that began in the '60s, particularly on issues involving family, women, morality, sexuality and overall tolerance. We must be careful not to confuse election results with cultural trends.
As survey after survey of contemporary social attitudes demonstrates, social conservatives no more represent the mainstream or the future than Prohibitionists did in the 1920s. If anything, it's the baby-boom sensibility spawned in the 1960s that has become mainstream in America today. As conservative columnist George Will lamented a few years back, politics "seems peripheral to, and largely impotent against, cultural forces and institutions permeated with what conservatives consider the sixties sensibility."
How little the "moral values" voter represents the future is evident in surveys of today's youth, who may be the most inclusive, tolerant and socially liberal generation in our nation's history. From the media we hear all about the controversies of the so-called culture war, such as the occasional school superintendent who shuts down all school clubs to keep gay and straight high school students from forming "gay-straight" clubs. But what we don't hear is that these clubs have quietly formed in about 2,800 schools nationwide. In fact, research on young people confirms that they have little patience for intolerance, that they have no problem accepting homosexuality, that most even support the right of gay people to marry.
Indeed, today's youth reject many of the social rigidities, prejudices and orthodoxies of old. As many as half of all teens say they've dated across racial or ethnic lines, including more than a third of white teens, and most of these are "serious" relationships. On race, homosexuality, premarital sex, gender roles, the environment and issues involving personal choice and freedom, younger Americans consistently fall on the liberal and more tolerant side of the spectrum.
If younger voters were the only ones with these attitudes, social conservatives might be able to lay claim to a "moral values" mandate for a very long time. But younger voters represent the mainstream much more than the initial exit polling would indicate. The illusion of a predominant "moral values" voting bloc has much to do with the fact that the most traditional and socially conservative Americans, pre-baby boomers, are living much longer lives and voting in very large numbers -- skewing exit polls and thus our image of the mainstream. Once younger voters begin to replace them, the socially conservative vote will return to the margins of American life.
There's a good reason why young people feel the way they do, and that's because their baby boomer parents overwhelmingly agree with them. So forget any talk of a generation gap between boomers and their children. On a wide range of social and cultural issues, they are united in their attitudes of tolerance and inclusiveness. The only generation gap that remains is the same one that began in the '60s, between pre-boomers and the rest of us. What we have today is a pre-baby boom cohort that's steadfastly conservative, with the vast majority of everyone younger leaning the opposite way.
Take race, for example. Young whites who date across racial lines feel comfortable doing so because their boomer parents say they have no problem with it. Yet for older white Americans, who in surveys continue to oppose the idea of a close relative marrying a black, interracial dating remains a taboo. Should blacks push themselves where they're not wanted? Two-thirds of pre-boomers in one survey said no, a view rejected by a vast majority of everyone younger.
It's the same with the hot-button issue of gay and lesbian rights. Pre-boomers are the only group that believes society should not recognize homosexuality as an acceptable way of life, according to a 2002 poll by the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement. Those who still oppose the idea of gay teachers may recall the glory days when Anita Bryant's antigay crusade to "Save Our Children" seemed to represent a broad national consensus, but today they are a minority.
So powerful is the new norm of tolerance and inclusiveness that more than 200 cities and counties now have laws protecting gays and lesbians from discrimination, and among Fortune 500 companies, 227 now offer domestic-partner benefits. Straight job seekers have been known to ask whether companies offer same-sex-partner benefits not because they're secretly gay but because they prefer a company that promotes diversity and tolerance. Even in this supposedly conservative political year, exit polls found three in five voters supporting marriage or civil unions for gays.
Nor is it any different in the way we view the family: The socially conservative attitudes held by many evangelicals and older Americans are simply out of step with what most Americans believe.
According to my cohort analysis of surveys conducted by the University of Chicago's highly regarded National Opinion Research Center, large majorities of Americans born from 1943 onward strongly reject the traditional view that families and children suffer if Mom works full time or if Mom works and Dad takes care of the kids. When asked during the 1990s whether it was better for men to work and women to tend to the home, 60 percent of those born before 1943 said yes, while nearly three-fourths of those born afterward said no. Young and old are united in support of families, but from boomers on down it's equality in a family that is believed to make it strong.
Many conservatives, of course, continue to resist the realities of the modern family, arguing that working mothers don't really want to work but have been hoodwinked by liberal elites who want to impose their feminist views. But when women are asked if they would continue working even if they didn't need the money, as many as two-thirds say yes. And when NORC asked in 2002 whether "both the husband and wife should contribute to the household income," fewer than 10 percent said no. The egalitarian model -- not the Donna Reed stereotype of 1950s sitcoms -- represents mainstream America today.
This mainstream liberalism also reaches into the most intimate of decisions. On cohabitation and sex before marriage, few in the older group call it acceptable, while most in the younger cohorts seem unfazed. The younger groups tend to be more pro-choice than their elders. And while no one wants teenagers engaging in sexual activity, only the pre-boomer group would deny birth control to sexually active teens. Two-thirds of the younger cohort would support it.
Does all this mean that boomers and younger Americans reject the traditional family and all restraints on personal behavior? Of course not. They simply accept that people are different and have a right to make their own choices and lead their own lives, and that the moral imperative is not to condemn those who are different but to include and support them. Diversity is not just a slogan -- it's a moral value for these generations.
Much has been made of the Roman Catholic hierarchy's opposition to John Kerry's pro-choice stance, and by inference the press has bought the stereotype of the socially conservative Catholic. But again the stereotype misleads. Among boomer and younger Catholics, NORC finds, only 27 percent label themselves traditional, compared with 44 percent among pre-boomers. And religious liberals now exceed traditionalists in this younger cohort. Most Catholics now reject, if not resent, church dogma restricting social tolerance and personal freedom. Recent surveys by the New York Times and Newsweek show large majorities favoring married priests, female priests, gay adoptions and birth control. And barely a third want abortion outlawed, no different from the proportion in the rest of America.
Nor are these mere attitudes. Most estimates suggest that Catholics obtain abortions at the same rate as other Americans, and despite the church's ban on divorce, the percentage of Catholics separated or divorced is right at the national average. Growing numbers of boomer and younger Catholics also believe you can marry outside the church and still be a good Catholic, and about a third of younger Catholics do just that. If the church required adherence to its traditional teachings, one Jesuit writer observed, "I'm afraid we're going to have nobody taking Communion."
What we see among Catholics is happening with Americans of all faiths. Indeed, the traditionally religious American -- what the press has anointed the faith or moral values voter -- may well be in decline. According to NORC's 2000 General Social Survey, only two in 10 Americans born from 1943 onward attend religious services once a week or more, while six in 10 attend infrequently -- at most a few times a year -- if at all. That's almost the opposite of older Americans, 55 percent of whom attend once a month or more and 36 percent of whom attend once a week or more.
In fact, the fastest-growing group of religious Americans are those who claim no religious identity at all; their number now almost equals the number of people who call themselves Baptists, according to the 2001 American Religious Identification Survey. These numbers track with findings by Independent Sector, a group that studies nonprofit trends, which show that the share of Americans giving their time to religious organizations declined from 28.6 percent in 1989 to 22.8 percent in 1998.
It's not that Americans aren't seeking spiritual guidance -- they are, and in large numbers. But they're finding it in nontraditional ways. Much has been written about the number of baby boomers who have returned to the religious fold after the turbulence of the '60s and '70s, but as religious scholar Wade Clark Roof has reported in his various books on boomers and religion, many of them are "re-traditionalizing" their faith, elevating individual worship over deference to authority and embracing modern values over outmoded rules.
This yearning for spirituality over religiosity can be seen in the estimated 20 percent of Americans who show interest in New Age ideas, and in the 20 million who take yoga classes, which approaches the number of boomers and younger adults who attend church at least once a week. A generation ago, most Americans believed in moral absolutes, biblical truth and the authority of their religious leaders, but today, the vast majority say that religious morality is a personal matter. And the trend is increasingly in that direction; only the social conservatives think otherwise.
Nervous Democrats who counsel their party to offer a me-too religious moralism fail to grasp that mainstream morality has changed over the last generation. What's different is that most Americans no longer feel comfortable imposing their personal morality on another's private behavior. But that doesn't mean this new majority is any less moral.
For baby boomers and younger people, there's nothing equivocal about their views of right and wrong. These Americans condemn bigotry, intolerance and discrimination. They reject constraints on personal freedom and don't like it when women are not treated as equals. They find pollution objectionable and see nothing moral in imposing religious beliefs on others. They believe a moral upbringing is teaching kids to think for themselves, not to follow another's rules. What they embrace are pluralism, privacy, freedom of choice, diversity and respect for people with different traditions. Perhaps the only thing missing from this new morality is a politician capable of articulating it.
Why isn't this new mainstream more vocal in our politics today? To borrow a phrase from Richard Nixon, they've become a new "silent majority" -- not the socially conservative silent majority of old, but a silent majority that's fairly content with the new morality and unwilling to believe that America will turn back the clock on their rights and freedoms.
Yet if anyone crosses this silent majority, by passing laws to restrict personal freedoms, they will be silent no more. When the trustees at James Madison University in rural Virginia voted to ban the morning-after pill from the student health center in 2003, the largely conservative student body rose up within 36 hours and demanded change. Consider that a microcosm of what would happen nationwide.
And why do social conservatives loom so large in our politics today? The best historical parallel for them may be the Luddites who terrorized Britain two centuries ago, the workers who traveled around the country smashing machines for fear that the Industrial Revolution would destroy their jobs and way of life. They were loud, and their tenacity gave the impression that they represented more Britons than they actually did, when in fact they were merely acting out their despair and outrage at a world that was passing them by. Today's social conservatives are our cultural Luddites.
In the aftermath of the 2004 election, religious and social conservatives have begun to demand their spoils and due. Evangelical leader Bob Jones III, head of the eponymous Bob Jones University in South Carolina that until 2000 banned interracial dating, has called upon President Bush to appoint conservative judges and pass legislation "defined by biblical norm." Pro-choice Republicans like Sen. Arlen Specter have been threatened with loss of power if they refuse to rubber-stamp anti-Roe judges. The president himself has said he's ready to spend his "political capital" to enact his moral values.
It was a gleeful Karl Rove who let the evangelical genie out of the bottle to win this election, but what worked this year may come back to haunt the GOP in the decades to come. For as much as Rove needed these religious voters to get his guy over the top, let us not forget that the primary reason President Bush won is that he quite successfully turned the election into a referendum on leadership qualities for the war on terror, and in the process subsumed all other issues.
Perhaps Rove should have sat in on my undergraduate course on this year's presidential campaign, which I've been teaching this fall at American University in Washington. About two weeks before the election, I asked the students, "Would you be more or less likely to support George W. Bush if you knew he would appoint Supreme Court justices who would erode the right to an abortion, the right to sexual privacy, gay rights, church-state separation, federal environmental regulation, family leave laws, and both affirmative action and diversity programs?" And before I let them answer, I added that these were not mere abstractions, that Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas had both voted or vowed to erode these rights and protections, and that these were the two justices Bush has cited as his model nominees.
Predictably, the Kerry partisans shuddered at the idea of a Supreme Court stacked with Bush appointees. But more interesting was the reaction from the Bush supporters. With clear discomfort, most wanted to wish the question away, saying they don't vote on hypotheticals, and anyway, they couldn't imagine the Court reversing such settled law. But when I pressed them and asked them to take the president and his favorite justices at their word, one finally conceded that his perspective was based on "wishful thinking."
The "wishful thinking" student intrigued me most because he was a hard-nosed thinker, a strong Bush supporter from the heartland, and he spent much of the semester critiquing the Kerry supporters for "wishful thinking" about terrorism, saying that we needed to stand tough against Islamic fascists regardless of what the rest of the world says. So after the election I asked him about his "wishful thinking" on the Supreme Court, and after a few moments of cognitive dissonance, he admitted that a rightward Court that overruled Roe vs. Wade and other rights might eventually force him to rethink his political loyalties.
So be careful what you wish for, Mr. Rove. The moment the courts start reversing our personal freedoms -- or the religious right overreaches and tries to impose its will -- millions of Americans who voted for President Bush might regret their decision to let wishful thinking guide their choice back in 2004.
The new silent majority will rise again.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
About the writerLeonard Steinhorn teaches politics and media at American University and is the author of the forthcoming book "The Greater Generation: In Defense of the Baby Boom Legacy," to be published by St. Martin's Press in 2005. Sound OffSend us a Letter to the Editor
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Scrooge's nightmareDespite Bush's election, the cranky old conservatives' days are numbered. The future belongs to middle-aged boomers and their kids, who embrace the tolerant values of the '60s.
- - - - - - - - - - - -By Leonard Steinhorn
Nov. 25, 2004 Cowed by exit polls showing that "moral values" motivated one in five American voters on Election Day, chastened journalists have begun to spin a new narrative about our national political culture: that "ordinary Americans" can be found only in socially conservative red-state pews. "Ordinary people, the people in the red states" is how conservative media critic Bernard Goldberg puts it, and many in the press seem to be saying amen.
But once again the media have it wrong. Missing in this discussion is that most Americans -- even many Bush supporters -- would recoil and rebel if the evangelical right ever got its way and began to limit the personal freedoms most of us now take for granted.
All the claims about mandates and values notwithstanding, the very fact that one-fifth of voters cited moral values means that four-fifths didn't. In fact, we heard much the same talk about the rise of conservative social values in the Reagan '80s, yet scholars who have studied attitudes in that period have found little evidence to suggest any reversal of the social liberalism that began in the '60s, particularly on issues involving family, women, morality, sexuality and overall tolerance. We must be careful not to confuse election results with cultural trends.
As survey after survey of contemporary social attitudes demonstrates, social conservatives no more represent the mainstream or the future than Prohibitionists did in the 1920s. If anything, it's the baby-boom sensibility spawned in the 1960s that has become mainstream in America today. As conservative columnist George Will lamented a few years back, politics "seems peripheral to, and largely impotent against, cultural forces and institutions permeated with what conservatives consider the sixties sensibility."
How little the "moral values" voter represents the future is evident in surveys of today's youth, who may be the most inclusive, tolerant and socially liberal generation in our nation's history. From the media we hear all about the controversies of the so-called culture war, such as the occasional school superintendent who shuts down all school clubs to keep gay and straight high school students from forming "gay-straight" clubs. But what we don't hear is that these clubs have quietly formed in about 2,800 schools nationwide. In fact, research on young people confirms that they have little patience for intolerance, that they have no problem accepting homosexuality, that most even support the right of gay people to marry.
Indeed, today's youth reject many of the social rigidities, prejudices and orthodoxies of old. As many as half of all teens say they've dated across racial or ethnic lines, including more than a third of white teens, and most of these are "serious" relationships. On race, homosexuality, premarital sex, gender roles, the environment and issues involving personal choice and freedom, younger Americans consistently fall on the liberal and more tolerant side of the spectrum.
If younger voters were the only ones with these attitudes, social conservatives might be able to lay claim to a "moral values" mandate for a very long time. But younger voters represent the mainstream much more than the initial exit polling would indicate. The illusion of a predominant "moral values" voting bloc has much to do with the fact that the most traditional and socially conservative Americans, pre-baby boomers, are living much longer lives and voting in very large numbers -- skewing exit polls and thus our image of the mainstream. Once younger voters begin to replace them, the socially conservative vote will return to the margins of American life.
There's a good reason why young people feel the way they do, and that's because their baby boomer parents overwhelmingly agree with them. So forget any talk of a generation gap between boomers and their children. On a wide range of social and cultural issues, they are united in their attitudes of tolerance and inclusiveness. The only generation gap that remains is the same one that began in the '60s, between pre-boomers and the rest of us. What we have today is a pre-baby boom cohort that's steadfastly conservative, with the vast majority of everyone younger leaning the opposite way.
Take race, for example. Young whites who date across racial lines feel comfortable doing so because their boomer parents say they have no problem with it. Yet for older white Americans, who in surveys continue to oppose the idea of a close relative marrying a black, interracial dating remains a taboo. Should blacks push themselves where they're not wanted? Two-thirds of pre-boomers in one survey said no, a view rejected by a vast majority of everyone younger.
It's the same with the hot-button issue of gay and lesbian rights. Pre-boomers are the only group that believes society should not recognize homosexuality as an acceptable way of life, according to a 2002 poll by the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement. Those who still oppose the idea of gay teachers may recall the glory days when Anita Bryant's antigay crusade to "Save Our Children" seemed to represent a broad national consensus, but today they are a minority.
So powerful is the new norm of tolerance and inclusiveness that more than 200 cities and counties now have laws protecting gays and lesbians from discrimination, and among Fortune 500 companies, 227 now offer domestic-partner benefits. Straight job seekers have been known to ask whether companies offer same-sex-partner benefits not because they're secretly gay but because they prefer a company that promotes diversity and tolerance. Even in this supposedly conservative political year, exit polls found three in five voters supporting marriage or civil unions for gays.
Nor is it any different in the way we view the family: The socially conservative attitudes held by many evangelicals and older Americans are simply out of step with what most Americans believe.
According to my cohort analysis of surveys conducted by the University of Chicago's highly regarded National Opinion Research Center, large majorities of Americans born from 1943 onward strongly reject the traditional view that families and children suffer if Mom works full time or if Mom works and Dad takes care of the kids. When asked during the 1990s whether it was better for men to work and women to tend to the home, 60 percent of those born before 1943 said yes, while nearly three-fourths of those born afterward said no. Young and old are united in support of families, but from boomers on down it's equality in a family that is believed to make it strong.
Many conservatives, of course, continue to resist the realities of the modern family, arguing that working mothers don't really want to work but have been hoodwinked by liberal elites who want to impose their feminist views. But when women are asked if they would continue working even if they didn't need the money, as many as two-thirds say yes. And when NORC asked in 2002 whether "both the husband and wife should contribute to the household income," fewer than 10 percent said no. The egalitarian model -- not the Donna Reed stereotype of 1950s sitcoms -- represents mainstream America today.
This mainstream liberalism also reaches into the most intimate of decisions. On cohabitation and sex before marriage, few in the older group call it acceptable, while most in the younger cohorts seem unfazed. The younger groups tend to be more pro-choice than their elders. And while no one wants teenagers engaging in sexual activity, only the pre-boomer group would deny birth control to sexually active teens. Two-thirds of the younger cohort would support it.
Does all this mean that boomers and younger Americans reject the traditional family and all restraints on personal behavior? Of course not. They simply accept that people are different and have a right to make their own choices and lead their own lives, and that the moral imperative is not to condemn those who are different but to include and support them. Diversity is not just a slogan -- it's a moral value for these generations.
Much has been made of the Roman Catholic hierarchy's opposition to John Kerry's pro-choice stance, and by inference the press has bought the stereotype of the socially conservative Catholic. But again the stereotype misleads. Among boomer and younger Catholics, NORC finds, only 27 percent label themselves traditional, compared with 44 percent among pre-boomers. And religious liberals now exceed traditionalists in this younger cohort. Most Catholics now reject, if not resent, church dogma restricting social tolerance and personal freedom. Recent surveys by the New York Times and Newsweek show large majorities favoring married priests, female priests, gay adoptions and birth control. And barely a third want abortion outlawed, no different from the proportion in the rest of America.
Nor are these mere attitudes. Most estimates suggest that Catholics obtain abortions at the same rate as other Americans, and despite the church's ban on divorce, the percentage of Catholics separated or divorced is right at the national average. Growing numbers of boomer and younger Catholics also believe you can marry outside the church and still be a good Catholic, and about a third of younger Catholics do just that. If the church required adherence to its traditional teachings, one Jesuit writer observed, "I'm afraid we're going to have nobody taking Communion."
What we see among Catholics is happening with Americans of all faiths. Indeed, the traditionally religious American -- what the press has anointed the faith or moral values voter -- may well be in decline. According to NORC's 2000 General Social Survey, only two in 10 Americans born from 1943 onward attend religious services once a week or more, while six in 10 attend infrequently -- at most a few times a year -- if at all. That's almost the opposite of older Americans, 55 percent of whom attend once a month or more and 36 percent of whom attend once a week or more.
In fact, the fastest-growing group of religious Americans are those who claim no religious identity at all; their number now almost equals the number of people who call themselves Baptists, according to the 2001 American Religious Identification Survey. These numbers track with findings by Independent Sector, a group that studies nonprofit trends, which show that the share of Americans giving their time to religious organizations declined from 28.6 percent in 1989 to 22.8 percent in 1998.
It's not that Americans aren't seeking spiritual guidance -- they are, and in large numbers. But they're finding it in nontraditional ways. Much has been written about the number of baby boomers who have returned to the religious fold after the turbulence of the '60s and '70s, but as religious scholar Wade Clark Roof has reported in his various books on boomers and religion, many of them are "re-traditionalizing" their faith, elevating individual worship over deference to authority and embracing modern values over outmoded rules.
This yearning for spirituality over religiosity can be seen in the estimated 20 percent of Americans who show interest in New Age ideas, and in the 20 million who take yoga classes, which approaches the number of boomers and younger adults who attend church at least once a week. A generation ago, most Americans believed in moral absolutes, biblical truth and the authority of their religious leaders, but today, the vast majority say that religious morality is a personal matter. And the trend is increasingly in that direction; only the social conservatives think otherwise.
Nervous Democrats who counsel their party to offer a me-too religious moralism fail to grasp that mainstream morality has changed over the last generation. What's different is that most Americans no longer feel comfortable imposing their personal morality on another's private behavior. But that doesn't mean this new majority is any less moral.
For baby boomers and younger people, there's nothing equivocal about their views of right and wrong. These Americans condemn bigotry, intolerance and discrimination. They reject constraints on personal freedom and don't like it when women are not treated as equals. They find pollution objectionable and see nothing moral in imposing religious beliefs on others. They believe a moral upbringing is teaching kids to think for themselves, not to follow another's rules. What they embrace are pluralism, privacy, freedom of choice, diversity and respect for people with different traditions. Perhaps the only thing missing from this new morality is a politician capable of articulating it.
Why isn't this new mainstream more vocal in our politics today? To borrow a phrase from Richard Nixon, they've become a new "silent majority" -- not the socially conservative silent majority of old, but a silent majority that's fairly content with the new morality and unwilling to believe that America will turn back the clock on their rights and freedoms.
Yet if anyone crosses this silent majority, by passing laws to restrict personal freedoms, they will be silent no more. When the trustees at James Madison University in rural Virginia voted to ban the morning-after pill from the student health center in 2003, the largely conservative student body rose up within 36 hours and demanded change. Consider that a microcosm of what would happen nationwide.
And why do social conservatives loom so large in our politics today? The best historical parallel for them may be the Luddites who terrorized Britain two centuries ago, the workers who traveled around the country smashing machines for fear that the Industrial Revolution would destroy their jobs and way of life. They were loud, and their tenacity gave the impression that they represented more Britons than they actually did, when in fact they were merely acting out their despair and outrage at a world that was passing them by. Today's social conservatives are our cultural Luddites.
In the aftermath of the 2004 election, religious and social conservatives have begun to demand their spoils and due. Evangelical leader Bob Jones III, head of the eponymous Bob Jones University in South Carolina that until 2000 banned interracial dating, has called upon President Bush to appoint conservative judges and pass legislation "defined by biblical norm." Pro-choice Republicans like Sen. Arlen Specter have been threatened with loss of power if they refuse to rubber-stamp anti-Roe judges. The president himself has said he's ready to spend his "political capital" to enact his moral values.
It was a gleeful Karl Rove who let the evangelical genie out of the bottle to win this election, but what worked this year may come back to haunt the GOP in the decades to come. For as much as Rove needed these religious voters to get his guy over the top, let us not forget that the primary reason President Bush won is that he quite successfully turned the election into a referendum on leadership qualities for the war on terror, and in the process subsumed all other issues.
Perhaps Rove should have sat in on my undergraduate course on this year's presidential campaign, which I've been teaching this fall at American University in Washington. About two weeks before the election, I asked the students, "Would you be more or less likely to support George W. Bush if you knew he would appoint Supreme Court justices who would erode the right to an abortion, the right to sexual privacy, gay rights, church-state separation, federal environmental regulation, family leave laws, and both affirmative action and diversity programs?" And before I let them answer, I added that these were not mere abstractions, that Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas had both voted or vowed to erode these rights and protections, and that these were the two justices Bush has cited as his model nominees.
Predictably, the Kerry partisans shuddered at the idea of a Supreme Court stacked with Bush appointees. But more interesting was the reaction from the Bush supporters. With clear discomfort, most wanted to wish the question away, saying they don't vote on hypotheticals, and anyway, they couldn't imagine the Court reversing such settled law. But when I pressed them and asked them to take the president and his favorite justices at their word, one finally conceded that his perspective was based on "wishful thinking."
The "wishful thinking" student intrigued me most because he was a hard-nosed thinker, a strong Bush supporter from the heartland, and he spent much of the semester critiquing the Kerry supporters for "wishful thinking" about terrorism, saying that we needed to stand tough against Islamic fascists regardless of what the rest of the world says. So after the election I asked him about his "wishful thinking" on the Supreme Court, and after a few moments of cognitive dissonance, he admitted that a rightward Court that overruled Roe vs. Wade and other rights might eventually force him to rethink his political loyalties.
So be careful what you wish for, Mr. Rove. The moment the courts start reversing our personal freedoms -- or the religious right overreaches and tries to impose its will -- millions of Americans who voted for President Bush might regret their decision to let wishful thinking guide their choice back in 2004.
The new silent majority will rise again.
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About the writerLeonard Steinhorn teaches politics and media at American University and is the author of the forthcoming book "The Greater Generation: In Defense of the Baby Boom Legacy," to be published by St. Martin's Press in 2005. Sound OffSend us a Letter to the Editor
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November 29, 2004
Initial Findings of Arctic Expedition Upend Old NotionsBy ANDREW C. REVKIN
he ice-cloaked Arctic Ocean was once apparently a warm, biologically brewing basin so rich in sinking organic material that some scientists examining fresh evidence pulled from a submerged ridge near the North Pole say the seabed may now hold significant oil and gas deposits.
This is just one of many findings from a pioneering expedition that in late summer sent dozens of scientists and technicians on three icebreakers - one with a drilling rig nine stories tall - into the drifting, crunching plates of sea ice to retrieve the first long-term record of climate and ocean conditions there. The expedition drilled 1,400 feet deep, retrieving cores of sediment that, with some gaps, span 56 million years. Scientists from around the world gathered in Bremen, Germany, this month to analyze the samples.
They hope that a better understanding of how Arctic climate has varied over the millenniums will help them project the implications of the region's recent warming trend, which many scientists have concluded has mainly been propelled by emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases.Just retrieving the samples was "a technical tour de force," said Dr. Richard B. Alley, an expert on Arctic change at Penn State.
And the initial findings are already up-ending old notions, among them that the Arctic Ocean lacked sufficient sediment and biological activity to record past conditions in its bed.
"Everyone thought this ocean basin was starved of sediment," said Dr. Kathryn Moran, an oceanographer at the University of Rhode Island who was a co-leader of the 14-nation project. "We've already knocked that ball out of the park."So far, the coring project has mainly garnered the attention of climate experts, but word is slowly spreading among geologists focused on oil as well.
Petroleum deposits are already charted along the shallow shelves fringing the Arctic from the North Slope of Alaska to northernmost Europe. But the cylinders of dark, ancient rock extracted from the submerged mountain range, the Lomonosov Ridge, are the first hint that such deposits may lie in the two-mile-deep basins near the top of the world.
The cores provide the first evidence that vast amounts of organic material created by plankton and other life settled on the seabed, experts say. That kind of carbon-rich accumulation is a vital precursor to the formation of oil.
Some of the deepest, oldest, most carbon-rich layers, dated to around 55 million years ago, formed during a period called the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, when the world was running a raging temperature. Scientists believe that this relatively brief period, far warmer than the present, was caused by a spike in heat-trapping greenhouse gases far greater than the human-caused buildup that has occurred over the last century.
The initiating cause was a vast release of submarine deposits of frozen methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, but scientists do not yet know whether those gases were liberated by volcanic activity, a shift in warm sea currents, or some other force.
Around 49 million years back, with the climate cooling and the atmosphere's greenhouse burden declining, the retrieved shafts of sediment also speak of an extraordinary, short-lived era of several hundred thousand years when so much warm fresh water apparently topped the Arctic's oxygen-starved salty depths that the polar sea became matted with tiny Azolla ferns, resembling the duckweed that can choke suburban ponds.
Altogether, about 600 vertical feet of sediment from the ridge is rich dark organic material, implying that there could easily be two vertical miles or more of similar organic layers in the deeper adjacent basins, said Dr. Henk Brinkhuis, a geobiologist from Utrecht University in the Netherlands who participated in the coring project.
If subsequent accumulations of sandstone and clay formed the appropriate lid, the deeper material could have cooked into oil or gas, he said. He stressed that this remained "crude speculation" until more surveying was done. But withdemand for oil skyrocketing and known reserves dwindling, even the subtlest hint is significant.
"This could indeed be a promising sign for oil and gas prospectivity in the Arctic Ocean," said Prof. Harry Doust of the Free University of Amsterdam, who is a former exploration geologist for Shell.
He, too, stressed that more drilling would be needed before anyone could contemplate an eventual oil boom in the deepest Arctic. "Nevertheless, oil prospectors will be very excited," he said, "and will be watching the results of analyses with keen interest."
Already, under a provision in the Law of the Sea Treaty, Denmark, Russia and other countries with Arctic territory are sending out mapping expeditions aimed at expanding their seabed claims. The United States, under pressure from some conservative Republican senators who oppose many such international compacts, has not ratified the treaty. But new American Arctic surveys are planned, in part on the presumption that the United States will ratify the treaty soon.
For the moment, any long-term implications of the research for oil markets are secondary to the scientific value of the cores, Arctic experts said.
The preliminary analysis eveals that the Arctic Ocean has been constantly icy for at least 15 million years, far longer than scientists had previously theorized. Dr. Moran said scientists had previously put the last ice-free conditions at four million to seven million years ago.
Experts involved in the research said these findings added sobering context to the current Arctic warming trend, which climatologists have linked to accumulating greenhouse-gas emissions and say could lead to a largely ice-free sea in summers this century.
No one expects ferns to cover the polar sea any time soon, but some experts involved with the research said the recent changes in the Arctic could result in a long-lasting warming that is likely to change the nature of the Arctic profoundly, for better and worse. In outlining the pattern of change during and after the last big Arctic warm-up, 55 million years ago, the new cores show "you can get a really strong cascade" toward warming that then can take hundreds of thousands of years to reverse, said Dr. Brinkhuis.
Whatever the future holds, it is becoming clearer with every new scientific poke at the freshly recovered shafts of layered shale, microscopic plankton fossils, pebbles and other material that the coring project will provide an unparalleled view of past climate changes at the top of the world, Arctic experts said.
"This information will be extremely valuable for placing the recent observations of Arctic change in the proper context," said Dr. Peter Schlosser, who is not involved with the project but is the current chairman of the National Science Foundation's Study of Environmental Arctic Change and a researcher at Columbia. The coring expedition took a decade to plan and grew out of a series of seismic surveys, starting in 1991, that bounced sound waves more than 1,000 feet into the Lomonosov Ridge and pictured the kind of layer-cake striations that can reveal climate and ocean history. The ridge, four Eiffel Towers deep, was chosen instead of the deeper sea floor in part because such features - rising as high above the seabed as the Alps rise over Europe - tend to accumulate the neatest layers of deposited debris over time, without slumping and other movement that can scramble geological evidence elsewhere, Dr. Moran said.
The sediment layers on a ridge also tend to present a compressed version of geological and climatic history, like a Reader's Digest condensation of a novel, meaning that a core need not penetrate deeply to capture the whole story, some of the researchers said.
The $12.5 million project was conducted under the auspices of the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program, which is systematically coring seabeds around the world to reveal geological history.
From mid-August through early September, two icebreakers ran interference for the vessel with the drilling rig on its deck, trying to fend off the thickest floes so the drillers could remain motionless while bringing up dozens of shafts of ever-deeper sediment in sections 15 feet long.
While the greatest concern had been defeating the ice, the main impediment to getting samples was a lack of certain equipment and fairly mundane breakdowns, scientists on the project said.
After nearly three weeks, they finally accumulated a series of cores cutting through all the sediment that had built on the ridge since it broke off from the continental shelf between Europe and Greenland some 57 million years ago and began to subside and drift toward the North Pole.
The sediment, building on the bedrock over tens of millions of years, includes thick organic layers of fossilized fern spores and plankton remains from the warm eras, and speckled layers of coarse sand and pebbles that were carried from coasts in drifting sea ice and icebergs and rained down as the ice melted.
The initial analysis looked only at small samples taken every 15 feet, Dr. Moran said. But even in that subset of the material, the big patterns of Arctic history leaped out, she and others said.
One of the most remarkable revelations is that the Arctic Ocean apparently briefly bloomed into a great matted soupy superlake.
Dr. Brinkhuis, who had worked for oil companies, said that previous drilling efforts by oil teams around the perimeter of the Arctic also captured this brief flowering of water plants, but no one had conceived that the layer might hint that the entire Arctic basin was one great matted pond.
"It's spectacular," he said. "Right at this transition from supergreenhouse to cooling, that's where there's this evidence of a bathtub situation there that is so fresh that this Azolla can really bloom and boom."
He said it was possible that the fast-growing plants, by absorbing huge amounts of carbon dioxide, might have contributed to the eventual decline in the atmosphere's greenhouse gas concentration and climate cooling.
But he and many other experts said much more research, and sampling, would have to be done, given the limits of the initial project.
For example, the cores show big gaps in the sediment record from 49 million years back to around 15 million years ago, Dr. Moran and other participants said, some layersprobably removed when either currents or giant ice sheets or icebergs scoured the ridge.
But from 15 million years ago until the present, the sediment layers contain coarse sand and small pebbles that could only have reached the ridge top by riding on raftlike floes of floating ice, implying the presence of a near constant Arctic ice cap. The layers from those years contain no trace of microscopic plankton that thrive only in sunlight - and thus will appear only if the ocean is free of ice at least part of the year.
Samples from the cores are heading to laboratories around the world for months of additional, detailed analysis of their chemistry, fossil contents and even signatures of past shifts in the earth's magnetic field, which provide a precise clock for dating different layers.
The initial success has already bred half a dozen ambitious new proposals to drill in new places around the basin.
"This is a huge leap forward," said Dr. Martin Jakobsson, a geologist at Stockholm University who worked on the project. "We have shown that we can master the ice."
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November 28, 2004FRANK RICH
The Great Indecency Hoax
H, the poor, suffering little children.
If we are to believe the outcry of the past two weeks, America's youth have been defiled en masse - again. This time the dirty deed was done by the actress Nicollette Sheridan, who dropped her towel in the cheesy promotional spot for the runaway hit "Desperate Housewives" that kicked off "Monday Night Football" on ABC. "I wonder if Walt Disney would be proud," said Michael Powell, the Federal Communications Commission chairman who increasingly fashions himself a commissar of all things cultural, from nipple rings to "Son of Flubber."
It's beginning to look a lot like "Groundhog Day." Ever since 22 percent of the country's voters said on Nov. 2 that they cared most about "moral values," opportunistic ayatollahs on the right have been working overtime to inflate this nonmandate into a landslide by ginning up cultural controversies that might induce censorship by a compliant F.C.C. and, failing that, self-censorship by TV networks. Seizing on a single overhyped poll result, they exaggerate their clout, hoping to grab power over the culture.
The mainstream press, itself in love with the "moral values" story line and traumatized by the visual exaggerations of the red-blue map, is too cowed to challenge the likes of the American Family Association. So are politicians of both parties. It took a British publication, The Economist, to point out that the percentage of American voters citing moral and ethical values as their prime concern is actually down from 2000 (35 percent) and 1996 (40 percent).
To see how the hucksters of the right work their scam, there could be no more illustrative example than the "Monday Night Football" episode in which Ms. Sheridan leaped into the arms of the Philadelphia Eagles wide receiver Terrell Owens in order to give the declining weekly game (viewership is down 3 percent from 2003) a shot of Viagra. From the get-go, it was a manufactured scandal, as over-the-top as a dinner theater production of "The Crucible."
Rush Limbaugh, taking a break from the legal deliberations of his drug rap and third divorce, set the hysterical tone. "I was stunned!" he told his listeners. "I literally could not believe what I had seen. ... At various places on the Net you can see the video of this, and she's buck naked, folks. I mean when they dropped the towel she's naked. You see enough of her back and rear end to know that she was naked. There's no frontal nudity in the thing, but I mean you don't need that. ...I mean, there are some guys with their kids that sit down to watch 'Monday Night Football.' "
Yes, there are - some, anyway - but you wonder how many of them were as upset as Mr. Limbaugh, whose imagination led him to mistake a lower back for a rear end. (He also said that the Sheridan-Owens encounter reminded him of the Kobe Bryant case; let's not even go there.) The evidence suggests that Mr. Limbaugh's prurient mind is the exception, not the rule. Though seen nationwide, and as early as 6 p.m. on the West Coast, the spot initially caused so little stir that the next morning only two newspapers in the country, both in Philadelphia, reported on it. ABC's switchboards were not swamped by shocked viewers on Monday night. A spokesman for ABC Sports told The Philadelphia Inquirer that he hadn't received a single phone call or e-mail in the immediate aftermath of the broadcast.
Even the stunned Mr. Limbaugh, curiously enough, didn't get around to mounting his own diatribe until Wednesday. Mr. Owens's agent, David Joseph, says that the flood of complaints at his office and Mr. Owens's Web site also didn't start until more than 24 hours after the incident - late Tuesday and early Wednesday. Were any of these complainants actual victims (or even viewers) of "Monday Night Football" or were they just a mob assembled after the fact by "family" groups, emboldened by their triumph in smiting "Saving Private Ryan" from 66 ABC stations the week before? Though the F.C.C. said on Wednesday that it had received 50,000 complaints about the N.F.L. affair, it couldn't determine how many of them were duplicates - the kind generated by e-mail campaigns run by political organizations posting form letters ready to be clicked into cyberspace ad infinitum by anyone who has an index finger and two seconds of idle time.
Like the Janet Jackson video before it, the new N.F.L. sex tape was now being rebroadcast around the clock so we could revel incessantly in the shock of it all. "People were so outraged they had to see it 10 times," joked Aaron Brown of CNN, which was no slacker in filling that need in the marketplace. And yet when I spoke to an F.C.C. enforcement spokesman after more than two days of such replays, the agency had not yet received a single complaint about the spot's constant recycling on other TV shows, among them the highly rated talk show "The View," where Ms. Sheridan's bare back had been merrily paraded at the child-friendly hour of 11 a.m.
The hypocrisy embedded in this tale is becoming a national running gag. As in the Super Bowl brouhaha, in which the N.F.L. maintained it had no idea that MTV might produce a racy halftime show, the league has denied any prior inkling of the salaciousness on tap this time - even though the spot featured the actress playing the sluttiest character in prime time's most libidinous series and was shot with the full permission of one of the league's teams in its own locker room. Again as in the Jackson case, we are also asked to believe that pro football is what Pat Buchanan calls "the family entertainment, the family sports show" rather than what it actually is: a Boschian jamboree of bumping-and-grinding cheerleaders, erectile-dysfunction pageantry and, as Don Imus puts it, "wife-beating drug addicts slamming the hell out of each other" on the field.
But there's another, more insidious game being played as well. The F.C.C. and the family values crusaders alike are cooking their numbers. The first empirical evidence was provided this month by Jeff Jarvis, a former TV Guide critic turned blogger. He had the ingenious idea of filing a Freedom of Information Act request to see the actual viewer complaints that drove the F.C.C. to threaten Fox and its affiliates with the largest indecency fine to date - $1.2 million for the sins of a now-defunct reality program called "Married by America." Though the F.C.C. had cited 159 public complaints in its legal case against Fox, the documents obtained by Mr. Jarvis showed that there were actually only 90 complaints, written by 23 individuals. Of those 23, all but 2 were identical repetitions of a form letter posted by the Parents Television Council. In other words, the total of actual, discrete complaints about "Married by America" was 3.
Such letter-writing factories as the American Family Association's OneMillionMoms.com also exaggerate their clout in intimidating advertisers. They brag, for instance, that the retail chain Lowe's dropped its commercials on "Desperate Housewives" in response to their protests. But Lowe's was not an advertiser on the show; the advertiser who actually bought the commercial was Whirlpool, which plugged Lowe's as a retail outlet for its products under a co-branding arrangement. Another advertiser that the family-values mafia takes credit for chasing away, Tyson Foods, had only bought in for one episode of "Desperate Housewives" in the first place. It had long since been replaced by such Fortune 500 advertisers as Ford and McDonald's, each clamoring to pay three times as much for a 30-second spot ($450,000) as those early advertisers who bought time before the show had its debut and became an instant smash.
But perhaps the most revealing barometer of the real state of play in American culture in 2004 is "Desperate Housewives" itself. Conceived by Marc Cherry, who is described by Newsweek as a "somewhat conservative, gay Republican," it is a campy, well-made soap opera presenting suburban American family life as a fugue of dysfunction, malice and sex. It's not for nothing that its characters are seen running off to Alfred Hitchcock and Billy Wilder retrospectives or that some of the episodes are named after Stephen Sondheim songs like "Who's That Woman?" and "Pretty Little Picture."
The children of Mr. Cherry's Wisteria Lane can be as poisonous as that small-town brat in Hitchcock's "Shadow of a Doubt": one preadolescent girl is an extortionist and one teenage daughter all but pimps for her divorced mother. The career-driven husbands are as soulless as the office rats of Wilder's "Apartment," and their wives are, yes, as desperate as those in the Manhattan high-rises of Sondheim's "Company." Whatever else is to be said about "Desperate Housewives" - and I haven't missed an episode - it is not to be confused with the kind of entertainment that the Traditional Values Coalition wants to impose on the airwaves. It not only emulates HBO Sunday night hits like "Sex and the City" and "Six Feet Under" in its cheeky, sardonic tone but brushes right up against them in language and action.
In one recent show the most oversexed character on screen, a 17-year-old jock having an affair with a married woman, is revealed to be a member of his high school's "abstinence club." (Surely it was a coincidence that this revelation butted right up against a commercial for Ortho Tri-Cyclen, a prescription contraceptive.) In another, a wife collapsing under the burden of stay-at-home motherhood slugs her spouse when he contemplates not using a condom. Then there was the dinner party where another of the wives tries to humiliate her husband by telling the assembled that he "cries after he ejaculates."
"Desperate Housewives" is hardly a blue-state phenomenon. A hit everywhere, it is even a bigger hit in Oklahoma City than it is in Los Angeles, bigger in Kansas City than it is in New York. All those public moralists who wail about all the kids watching Ms. Sheridan on "Monday Night Football" would probably have apoplexy if they actually watched what Ms. Sheridan was up to in her own series - and then looked closely at its Nielsen numbers. Though children ages 2 to 11 make up a small percentage of the audience of either show, there are actually more in that age group tuning into Mr. Cherry's marital brawls (870,000) than into the N.F.L.'s fisticuffs (540,000). "Desperate Housewives" also ranks No. 5 among all prime-time shows for ages 12-17. ("Monday Night Football" is No. 18.) This may explain in part why its current advertisers include products like Fisher-Price toys, the DVD of "Elf" and the forthcoming Tim Allen holiday vehicle, "Christmas With the Kranks."
Those who cherish the First Amendment can only hope that the Traditional Values Coalition, OneMillionMoms.com, OneMillionDads .com and all the rest send every e-mail they can to the F.C.C. demanding punitive action against the stations that broadcast "Desperate Housewives." A "moral values" crusade that stands between a TV show this popular and its audience will quickly learn the limits of its power in a country where entertainment is god.
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November 28, 2004
The Making of a Wise ManBy LANDON THOMAS Jr.
TEPHEN A. SCHWARZMAN was standing backstage at the Kennedy Center in Washington last month, perusing the speech he would give in honor of Lorne Michaels, the creator of "Saturday Night Live." It had been a giddy night for Mr. Schwarzman, the Wall Street financier and the recently appointed chairman of the center. He had spent the evening sharing chuckles with Dan Aykroyd, Steve Martin and Senator John McCain, and was about to offer his closing remarks.
"And now, live from Washington, D.C., please welcome Lorne Michaels!" he shouted as he took center stage.
For Mr. Schwarzman, the evening represented a high-water mark of what appears to be a campaign to rise above his status as just another fabulously rich deal maker and to achieve renown on the larger, more alluring public stage of the arts - and Washington politics.
Since the early 1970's, he has moved with ferocity and guile in the jungles of Wall Street, staying largely unknown to the wider world. He rose to the top of his class at Lehman Brothers before breaking off, in 1985, to be a co-founder of the Blackstone Group, a hugely successful boutique investment house.
His net worth approaches $1 billion, and he has accumulated the totems that such wealth bestows: a $30 million Manhattan co-op; an estate in East Hampton; a mansion in Palm Beach; a hideaway in the south of France; and the use of a corporate jet and a Sikorsky S-76 helicopter.
He has also become a patron of the arts, joining all the right charity boards, including those of the New York Public Library and the New York City Ballet, and donating generously to a wide variety of New York philanthropies.
But unlike many bankers who are happy with having a few charity boards to enhance their public profiles and smooth the sharper edges of their riches, Mr. Schwarzman has kept striving for more. An avid supporter of President Bush (they lived in the same dormitory at Yale), he has distinguished himself from others on Wall Street by giving thousands of dollars to the Republican Party at the state level, in swing states like Wisconsin, Ohio and Minnesota.
Such double-barreled munificence has led to his name appearing in New York's gossip columns, and speculation has built in some quarters that he may even be a candidate for Treasury secretary - a job he is said to covet.
Republicans who have been briefed on the administration's plans say that John W. Snow, the current Treasury secretary, is expected to remain in office for as much as a year. They say, too, that Mr. Schwarzman has not appeared on any prospective short list for the job.
But that does not mean that Mr. Schwarzman, a career deal maker who has made no public speeches on any aspect of fiscal policy, cannot aspire to it.
He cites as role models two former Yale graduates, often called the Wise Men, who mixed successful business careers with government service: Cyrus R. Vance, who was a corporate lawyer before serving as secretary of state, and W. Averell Harriman, who left Wall Street to become a trusted adviser to presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Lyndon B. Johnson.
"I just want to give something back," Mr. Schwarzman said, as he tucked into a bowl of cereal in the sun-splashed breakfast parlor of his 24-room duplex at 740 Park Avenue, at 71st Street. "To the extent that I can add value and make my country a better place, that's a good thing to do."
THAT Steve Schwarzman, who is 57, wants to be a Wise Man - and could even end up becoming one - should not be surprising.
Wall Street has a long history of titans forgoing the blunt power of their capital for the prospect of a purer form of influence in and around the White House. And the legend that Robert E. Rubin created for himself by abandoning a Goldman Sachs partnership to counsel President Bill Clinton on economic matters has made the lure of Washington all the more intoxicating.
But this ripening desire also reveals the extent to which the rigid class strictures that once applied to Wall Street and New York society have softened. Much has changed since men like Mr. Harriman and Mr. Vance left for Washington. Then, to be tapped by a president for a high-level post was more than a professional honor. In many ways, it was the final reward for a life spent going to the right schools and belonging to the right clubs - a modern form of the old honors curriculum in Rome, where rising officials were obligated to hold a series of offices before finally reaching the highest professional rung.
"The old honors curriculum used to consist of a frightful boarding school, an Ivy League education, time spent at war and success at a major investment bank or law firm," said Nelson W. Aldrich Jr., the author of "Old Money." "Only then would you be tapped. Now what matters is that you make a pile and start giving a lot of it away. In many ways, this new curriculum has replaced the old class system."
A product of the meritocratic boom that hit Wall Street in the 1960's, Mr. Schwarzman - who attended public school in a suburb of Philadelphia and whose father ran a dry-goods store - skipped many stages of the curriculum. He got into Yale on his intelligence alone and used the Ivy League degree and a stopover at Harvard Business School to start a career on Wall Street.
With success came wealth, and with wealth came patronage and the gradual efflorescence of his public image - a purposeful metamorphosis that in some respects could happen only in New York City.
"There is no real class structure in New York anymore, just relative degrees of publicity," said Michael M. Thomas, a former partner at Lehman Brothers and an author of novels about class and money on Wall Street. "Some people find that a more acceptable form of class system because it is easier to manipulate."
Mr. Schwarzman dates his interest in public service to a three-hour lunch he had with the 78-year-old Mr. Harriman, also a Yale graduate, in 1969 at Mr. Harriman's town house opposite the Metropolitan Museum of Art. "I wrote him a letter and told him I was interested in the public world," Mr. Schwarzman recalled. "He asked me to lunch, so I went out and bought my first suit and we had lunch on trays in his living room."
Mr. Schwarzman, then a Yale student, still remembers the small details: the man in the white coat opening the door, the bust of Robert F. Kennedy on the mantle, the calls from Mr. Vance updating Mr. Harriman on the peace talks with North Vietnam, and not least of all the Impressionist paintings on the wall. "I thought - 'jeez, this is remarkable,' " he said. "And, 'wouldn't it be wonderful if I could have some elements of this in my life when I grow up?' "
SO he went off to seek his own fortune - the vast bulk of which has come to him since he has served as president of Blackstone. People on Wall Street familiar with Blackstone's business guess that Mr. Schwarzman will take home $75 million to $100 million this year. It is an extraordinary figure, even by Wall Street's bloated standards, and it could well surpass the compensation packages of the chief executives of Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch combined.
When investment bankers and top executives speak of Blackstone and Mr. Schwarzman, they do so with a hush of respect, if not a small degree of awe. That is partly because Blackstone, with its $27 billion worth of private equity funds and its propensity to cash in its stakes quickly, can sprinkle more than $700 million in fees across Wall Street in a year.
But for executives whose wealth is largely tied up in the stock of their companies, there is also a sense of wonder at the efficiency of the Blackstone money-making machine. Not only do the top partners at the firm divvy up hundreds of millions of management fees each year, they also take personal stakes in the wide variety of companies that the firm buys. When the stakes are sold - as a few were this year - Mr. Schwarzman and his partners often take home additional chunks of cash.
Despite his growing public obligations, Mr. Schwarzman has kept a steely grip on activities at Blackstone, signing off on all the major deals. Like many other deal makers, he can be impatient and blunt when talking to those around him, no matter if they are colleagues or kitchen staff.
During one interview at his home, he was interrupted by a phone call from a top banker at his office who asked him to weigh in on a deal in the making. "It's a very marginal return," he said with distaste as he quizzed the executive on the investment's finer points. "I like things with upside. That's how you make money." And when his white-coated houseman did not respond to his frequent buzzings for more coffee, Mr. Schwarzman ran off to find him: "I called you six times," he said, confronting the man in the kitchen. He also has a quirky side, and will call his banking friends to sing "Happy Birthday" to them.
For a banker of Mr. Schwarzman's stature and means, becoming a patron of the arts has been fairly straightforward. The role models are many; among the most prominent have been Sanford I. Weill, the chairman of Citigroup and an energetic benefactor of institutions like Carnegie Hall, and Henry Kravis of the buyout firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts (which competes with Blackstone), who has achieved his own éclat through his good works at the New York Public Library and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Mr. Schwarzman approaches his socializing with the same determined vigor and attention to detail that has characterized his style as a banker and investor over the last 30 years. In some ways, it has the feel of a political campaign, and his grinning visage has become a regular feature on NYSocialDiary.com, a Web site that chronicles the social and charitable activities of New York's upper class.
With his wife, Christine, Mr. Schwarzman has appeared at events small and large: from a book party he gave this spring for Princess Michael of Kent, to a benefit in October for the charity Casita Maria - his wife and Prince Dimitri of Yugoslavia were two of the leaders of the dinner - and, earlier this month, the Library Lions ball for the New York Public Library.
One evening this fall, before the tribute in Washington, he had a cocktail reception at his apartment for Mr. Michaels. The apartment, which once belonged to John D. Rockefeller Jr. and more recently to Saul Steinberg, the 1980's corporate raider, is lavishly appointed and has 13 bathrooms. It even bears some of the touches that widened the eyes of the young Mr. Schwarzman when he sat in Mr. Harriman's living room back in 1969.
Paintings by Monet hang throughout the apartment, and one of Cy Twombly's celebrated blackboard works dominates a wall in the living room. Instead of a Kennedy bust, a large silver-framed photograph - bearing the presidential seal - showing Mr. Schwarzman and President Bush arm in arm and grinning broadly, is displayed on an antique writing table in the living room.
On that night, Mr. Schwarzman planted himself near the apartment entrance and received the swirl of Manhattan socialites that the elevators disgorged directly into the foyer. A bit hunched in appearance, with an ever-present smile that can veer from impish to smug, Mr. Schwarzman anchored the teeming throng. Caroline Kennedy dropped by, as did Ahmet Ertegun, the record producer, and a passel of lesser-known habitués of the Upper East Side's cafe society. Shaking hands, throwing air kisses, slapping backs, Mr. Schwarzman did not desert his post until his last guest had left.
The thrill of it all continued the next day. Paula Zahn! Mike Nichols! "And did you see Lesley Stahl?" he asked, with the enthusiasm of a teenage boy recalling a chance meeting with his baseball heroes. "Mike Bloomberg was also there - he came early."
It was almost as if Mr. Schwarzman were pinching himself: the parties, the art, the celebrities - yes, he had finally arrived. And his friends and peers agreed. "If you have all that money and all those pretty houses, I think you have made it socially," said Richard Jenrette, a founder of Donaldson Lufkin & Jenrette, the investment bank where Mr. Schwarzman started his Wall Street career.
Even the mayor, a former partner at Salomon Brothers who in many ways perfected the model of using Wall Street money to get a leg up in New York society, is impressed. "This guy has spent a lot of time in business making money, and he leads the good life, too," Mr. Bloomberg said. "He goes to one dinner a night and I go to five. I think it's great that he is reaching out. Successful people have an obligation to give back."
Making it in New York is one thing; in Washington, however, it can take an extra bit of work. That is why Mr. Schwarzman has sought the wisdom of a local insider there, Kenneth M. Duberstein, a former chief of staff for Ronald Reagan who now runs a well-connected lobbying firm.
It was Mr. Duberstein, then the acting chairman of the Kennedy Center, who recommended that the search committee break a deadlock by considering Mr. Schwarzman for the chairmanship, then strongly advised him to take the position.
While the job may not set the blood racing for veterans of the New York charity circuit, it is considered a plum for those seeking to assume a more forceful presence in Washington. Past chairmen have included James D. Wolfensohn, a former investment banker based in New York who leapt from the Kennedy Center to his current position as president of the World Bank, and James A. Johnson, the preceding chairman, who many felt would have been either chief of staff or Treasury secretary had Senator John Kerry won the presidential election.
And don't forget: the job also requires the approval of the president.
"I thought this would be a good stage for him," Mr. Duberstein said. "It gives him New York and D.C. at a high level of involvement in not only the arts but the politics of an administration and Capitol Hill."
To celebrate his appointment, Mr. Schwarzman and his wife were given a private lunch with Laura Bush this year in the upstairs residence of the White House. It was his first visit to the White House, and he still revels in the moment - from the guided tour of the quarters to the cake - in the shape of a Kennedy Center stage and bearing his name - that was sprung on him by the first lady.
"It was two feet by a foot and a half," he said, using his hands to describe the pastry, as if it were a trout hauled in from a stream. "There was a black chocolate background, with the stage done in sorbet, the orchestra in peaches and the audience individual raspberries. It was such a kind, considerate thing for Laura to do."
When asked if he has any interest in a high-level job in the administration, Mr. Schwarzman said he has "a great life." Still, that does not mean that it could not become greater: within Republican fund-raising circles and on Wall Street, Mr. Schwarzman's desire for the Treasury post has become well known.
As for his credentials, his supporters point to his experience as an international financier. He is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, along with a multitude of other bankers who fancy themselves as globetrotting statesmen.
All the same, unlike Peter G. Peterson, his co-founder at Blackstone and a former commerce secretary who has written book after book cautioning against the ravages of out-of-control deficits, Mr. Schwarzman has written no major op-ed articles or books on public policy.
Others on Wall Street wonder whether he could extricate himself from Blackstone, a small firm that has succeeded largely on the basis of his energy and contacts, and question how he would fare in a large bureaucracy like the Treasury Department.
NOW, as he casts his eye toward Washington, even some of his friends are still unsure of his stand on issues or even what party he belongs to. "Isn't he a Democrat?" asked John F. Welch Jr., the former chief executive of General Electric, when asked about Mr. Schwarzman's political ambitions. "I had no idea. I just talk to him about deals."
But what Mr. Schwarzman does have going for him is a relationship with a president known to put the highest stock in personal ties.
"It's a personal connection," Mr. Schwarzman said of President Bush. "I was fascinated about how that transition occurs with someone who was not achievement-oriented. He could have ended up like most guys from a privileged background."
All the same, Mr. Schwarzman is cagey about the depth of the bond - as well he should be: the cardinal rule for prospective appointees is never to let on how badly you want a job. But he cannot resist the odd, if not somewhat revealing, joke.
"I'm being announced tomorrow," he said when asked about any contact he has had with the White House since the election.
"Oh come on, you have to have a sense of humor," he added quickly, when no laughs were forthcoming. "I'm just kidding." Or is he?
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dispatchesDispatches From RomaniaThe children stuck in the adoption pipeline.By Sarah E. RichardsUpdated Friday, Dec. 3, 2004, at 3:12 AM PT
From: Sarah E. RichardsSubject: The Dictator's GroupiePosted Monday, Nov. 29, 2004, at 3:45 AM PT
BUCHAREST—Once a month, at 6:30 in the morning, Angela Boteza arrives at the Ghencea Civil Cemetery in western Bucharest. She walks down a gravel path to a nondescript grave, where she clears away dead leaves and candle wax and leaves yellow gladiolas in a wine bottle with a handwritten note: "May God forgive your evil deeds. Rest in peace. May the earth not be heavy upon your soul." A modest granite cross bearing a red star reveals the grave's occupant: Nicolae Ceausescu, 1918-1989. She then she goes to the other side of the cemetery to do the same at the graves of his wife Elena and son Nicu.
Boteza has been making regular visits for the past seven years, but my Romanian driver wasn't sure we had the right place. He'd seen the TV coverage of the dwindling crowd that still visits the dead dictator on Jan. 26, Ceausescu's birthday, but he had to ask directions from the cemetery groundskeeper, who led us to the sad little plot overshadowed by statelier monuments to other families. Besides Boteza's offering, the only other item decorating the resting place of Romania's president of 22 years, who was executed along with his wife on Christmas Day 1989, were some droopy flowers in a plastic cola bottle. Elena's grave looks even worse; her name is painted on a crude iron cross. Nicu, who died of liver cirrhosis in 1996, is entombed more respectfully in sleek black-and-white marble.
The story goes that Nicolae is buried backward, with his feet at the headstone, as an insult. But it's only assumed he's at Ghencea. After the revolution, it was never revealed where the couple's bodies were buried. Their graves were supposedly "discovered" in 1992. A year later, on what would have been his 75th birthday, Communist Party members donated the current headstone, and a flood of visitors came, leaving tributes and planting flowers on what it now a weedy patch. Today, only about a dozen people, mostly the curious en route to another grave, stop by on weekdays, and 30 to 40 make their way over on weekends. "They just look, stay 10 minutes, and leave," the groundskeeper said. "Nobody asks about Elena." Romanians believe Nicolae's vilified wife was behind his decision to order security forces to quell a popular democratic uprising that started in Timisoara to protest lack of freedom, food, heat, and electricity. More than 1,000 people were killed. The couple was found, arrested, tried, and killed by a firing squad within hours. (The timeline is up for debate, too, since everything was done in secret.)
A guard said party members recently asked to move Nicolae to a better location with fancier marble digs, but their request was denied.
Boteza left her phone number on her tribute, and my driver called her up. I could hear her shriek her address. "She said we can come over right now," he said.
After a quick tour of her three-room apartment, Boteza ushered us to the living room. She perched at the edge of her sofa, lit up a cigarette, and began: Ceausescu made a good life for Romanians, but he was judged rashly by people who wanted power and denied his rightful honor of a proper burial in a military cemetery. So, she has appointed herself the keeper of his legacy. She monitors the family's graves and throws out items she feels are insulting. Recently, she's tossed a dirty flag, a frayed Bible, and papier mache flowers.
Life was better under communism, she continued, parroting the refrain: "There was nothing to buy, but we had money. Now, there's everything to buy but no money." At age 52, Boteza is an unemployed accountant who gets a temporary pension of about $50 a month, through April 2005. Her son, who, she boasts, is a military officer, helps her out some. She owns her own apartment, which she bought shortly after the revolution. "I don't eat so much. I have a few cigarettes and coffee, but it's OK," she said, staring at me intently with big somber eyes. She was confident that she would find another job but admitted that she's having sleep problems.
During the 10th anniversary of the fall of communism five years ago, much was made of Romania's lack of celebration. Polls showed that four out of five Romanians were unhappy with the way they lived, and 61 percent said they would be better off under Ceausescu. Such amnesiac musings ignored the nightmares of the Stalinist dictator: the rations, the torture of anyone who opposed the regime, the deadly winters when the energy sector collapsed, the razing of villages and historical Bucharest to make way for his projects, including the so-called House of the People. His megalomaniacal monument, which is widely believed to be the second-largest office building in the world after the Pentagon, was built while the people suffered austerity measures to pay off a $10 billion foreign debt at one point.
Now the nostalgia is tempered. "Yes, it was better under communism. You had a job, a house, a car," said 20-year-old university student George Pascaru. "But you could not have your own thoughts."
But such talk makes few feel better about the giant elephant making its way east. Romania, a country of 23 million, is lumbering toward entry into the European Union in 2007. Despite robust economic growth and low inflation, corruption is rampant, and the average Romanian makes slightly more than $2,100 a year, or just 30 percent of the EU average in purchasing power.
The shiny Bucharest Mall, which opened five years ago and includes a Marks & Spencer department store, a Ruby Tuesday restaurant, and a 10-screen movie theater, is eerily empty. New cars occasionally zip down the highways, but gas-spewing Dacias still dominate*. For every new building, there are miles of crumbling, Soviet-era apartment blocks. Add some bitter, chain-smoking locals; street children; and packs of mangy stray dogs that seem to roam every city, and you get the feeling the country isn't going anywhere soon.
The mention of the European Union is met with cynical laughs. People tell how Hungarians have been forced to raid Romanian grocery stores because they were priced out of their own when their country joined the union this spring. There are rumors that EU regulations will force polluting old cars off the road, and drivers won't be able to buy new ones. And how will people buy houses?
"[President Ion] Iliescu said he will make Romania a rich country, but I just don't see it happening," Boteza said, lighting another cigarette.
Correction, Dec. 1, 2004: This dispatch entry originally claimed that "diesel-spewing Dacias dominate Romanian highways." In fact, Dacias run on gasoline. It also said that Bucharest's House of the People is the second-largest building in the world; this statement has been modified to note that it is "widely believed to be the second-largest office building in the world."
From: Sarah E. RichardsSubject: King of Roma EverywherePosted Tuesday, Nov. 30, 2004, at 5:01 AM PT
SIBIU—Mention the name Florin Cioaba to the average Romanian, and you usually get a laugh, followed by a head shake and a muttered, "That crazy guy!" In 1997, Cioaba inherited the title "King of Roma Everywhere" from his father, Ioan, who sort of invented it in 1992. There's at least one other royal, namely Cioaba's relative Emperor Iulian Radulescu, who also lives in the Transylvanian city of Sibiu. But Cioaba is the best-known, largely because of the publicity surrounding last year's lavish wedding for his then-14-year-old daughter, Ana Marie, to a 15-year-old. Reports claimed that the bride tried to escape but was forced to return, sparking headlines like "Gypsy child bride scandal" and prompting British Euro MP Baroness Emma Nicholson to threaten to remove her from harm. Romanian officials ordered the couple apart until she reaches 16, the legal marrying age.
Cioaba, 49, a Pentecostal minister, defended the practice by arguing that early marriage was an important part of Roma tradition that must be preserved. (Roma, rather than gypsy, is the preferred term for the poor migrants who arrived from India a thousand years ago and are scattered mostly in Central and Eastern Europe.) The dozen or so ethnic Romanians I spoke with were quick to dismiss Cioaba as an eccentric but then indulged in gossipy speculation about how much the bridal dress cost and what goes on in that gated compound with the Mercedes S320 parked inside.
I gained access to the king through his English-speaking sister Luminita, who publishes poetry, is making a film on the Roma survivors of the Transnistrian concentration camp during World War II, and likes to talk about her recent trip to New York City to buy a camera. After we waited an hour in the so-called "king room," which features a large fresco of Ioan mounted on a horse, wearing a cape, a gold crown, and a ridiculous grin, Luminita finally escorted me into the living room to meet his current majesty.
Another half-hour later, the king emerged. Clutching his back, he limped toward the glass-and-gold table and carefully set himself in a chair, allowing his open shirt to reveal the sleeveless undershirt covering his ample gut. "Sciatica," he explained. Cioaba is a member of the wealthy 300-strong Kalderash tribe, who are known as skilled coppersmiths. But his lifestyle is a far cry from that of the country's estimated 2 million to 3 million Roma, who are known mostly for being dirt poor. They're subject to rampant discrimination and are mistreated in police stations, prisons, and psychiatric hospitals. Roma children are segregated in many schools, and tales abound about job offers being rescinded once employers learn that applicants are Roma. The latest report from the European Union on Romania's progress toward meeting entry criteria pointed out that, despite some improvements, the legal system still has a long way to go in protecting Roma rights.
Cioaba is the Roma's spokesman and represented them at a meeting on Roma rights in Budapest last year sponsored by the World Bank, George Soros' Open Society Institute, and the European Commission, which is an arm of the European Union. The meeting's brainchild was the "Decade of Roma Inclusion" beginning in 2005. Nine countries committed to support programs targeting poverty, health, school enrollment, and employment to close the gap between Roma and non-Roma.
"There's a new beginning for the Roma," Cioaba said, insisting that integration does not mean assimilation. "We don't want to change our culture," he said, explaining why he defied the law to let his daughter marry young. "I was married at 14. This was our tradition 100 years ago. We have agreed to change, but not in one night."
Delia Grigore, head of the Roma human rights organization Aven Amentza, wants Roma to reclaim their heritage by taking advantage of new constitutional protections to learn the Romani language and wear traditional clothing. "They think their identity will stigmatize them, but this is a process of self-rejection," she said, smoothing out her long flowing skirt. "Our grandparents had to assimilate to survive. There is a cultural re-emergence happening. I came into the movement to really be a Roma."
Despite all the heady talk of a "cultural nation," many Roma see little use for the movement, especially when they can't pay their bills. In fact, they say the Roma fared best during communism. They were forced to leave their nomadic lifestyle and permanently settle and faced deportation, but they were guaranteed housing and factory jobs.
"In Communist times, I worked 30 years in an iron factory," said Sandu Stana, who is 71 but looks 80. "In capitalism, it's hard to have a job. When the jobs are open, and they see our face, they say, 'Sorry, it's been taken.' "
Activists insist that embracing the Roma identity is the only way to move the community forward. For example, the government recently hired 200 health-outreach workers and set aside 400 university spots for Roma in 2004 compared with 10 earmarked in 1994. About 2,000 have graduated, said Marius Taba of the human rights group Romani Cris. About 80 percent of Roma drop out of the system before high school. For those who do go, there are tales of bus drivers refusing to pick them up and school officials segregating them in separate buildings. Discrimination is everywhere. A French film crew followed Taba and several other clean-cut Roma young men on a night out around Bucharest. Five of eight bars they visited kicked them out.
In an informal ghetto north of Bucharest, Roma residents had more immediate concerns. One woman showed me how they were stealing electricity by attaching wires from the power pole into their apartments because they couldn't pay their utility bills; they're worried the police will come soon.
Back at the king's house, Ana Marie just wanted the media to leave her alone. "They say that I left my wedding, but I just went to have a cigarette," she said, playing with the cell phone dangling from her neck. "I was angry about it, and it hurt my father's reputation. They wrote in the papers that I will go to an institution for kids. There are so many kids in the streets. Why me?"
Some press reports said she was 12 at the time of her wedding, but the king said she was 14, and given her curvy body, I believe him.
Ana Marie received a quick education in public relations. She went out of her way to let me know that, per the baroness's instructions, she was in school, and she and her "husband" are just "good friends." She didn't seem too stressed about her future. "The women stay home to raise kids. It's easy.'"
With that, the king went to lie down, and his wife sent the teen upstairs to bring down some scarves to sell me.
From: Sarah E. RichardsSubject: The Babies Left BehindPosted Wednesday, Dec. 1, 2004, at 9:01 AM PT
ORADEA—Michelle Sims picked up the floppy infant and showed him to me. "He looks like a 2-month-old, and he was left here almost six months ago," the American social worker said. "They call him Little Bird Boy." The puny child with a mat of black hair and big brown eyes that stare blankly was abandoned at birth at the Oradea Children's Hospital in northwest Romania, near the Hungarian border.
If his mother has not shown up to claim him by the end of six months, the hospital can declare him officially abandoned, making him eligible to be adopted domestically, according to current Romanian law. But that is unlikely to happen, Sims explained, since Little Bird Boy's dark skin identifies him as a Roma, or gypsy. Romanians aren't lining up for Roma children. They make up 10 percent of the population but about 60 percent of abandoned babies.
"Any American family would take him because he's so cute!" Sims said, squealing the compliment and squeezing his foot. But after accusations surfaced that adoption agencies were selling children to the highest bidder, the European Union pressured Romania to permanently shut down foreign adoptions. It is one of a flurry of new initiatives drafted to overhaul the child welfare system as a condition for EU entry in 2007 and to show that Romania can take care of its children.
Sims runs a foundation called Children in the Son, which is affiliated with a South Carolina church. It is building a home for pregnant mothers, hires foster parents for about 10 children, and pays for infant formula and clothing for the 30 or so abandoned babies. They are one of several nonprofit groups that hire women from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. each weekday to hold, rock, and sing to the babies to try to prevent attachment, failure to thrive, and sensory-deprivation problems.
"You should have seen it before," Sims said, a refrain I would hear repeatedly during my stay in Romania as people described malnourished, under-stimulated children screaming for attention and biting themselves in the infamous orphanages, which were exposed in 1991 and led to a wave of international adoptions.
This Sunday, hospital workers change diapers only on scheduled rounds and prop up baby bottles on blankets because they don't have time to hand-feed their charges. Despite the forest murals in the sterile hallways and the donated Fisher-Price toys in the corner, the place is pretty grim. The smell of feces hits you as soon as you enter the floor, and babies don't stop crying. The noises are not the sharp outbursts that signal the need for attention or the whimper of a fussy baby resigned to a nap, but rather the unfocused wails of neglected infants. "Nurses don't hear the crying anymore," Sims said, as she looked for a supervisor to release another baby to his new foster parents.
Sims suspects that Little Bird Boy's mother was one of the many women who drop their babies off at the hospital, listing a false address, and then disappear. Some babies have been there a while because their mothers use the hospital as a form of child care, especially during the winter months, when many poor families don't have heat. If a mother visits her baby once every six months, she can keep her parental rights. "One told me, 'I'll get him in a couple of years when I can afford it.' I must hear stuff like that a dozen times a year," Sims said.
In the meantime, babies like Little Bird Boy languish. But in what appears to be an "a-ha" moment for the Romanian government, a new law will require hospitals to report abandoned babies within 24 hours to the local departments of child protection, which will place them with foster families. The police have 30 days to locate the mother and encourage her to take back the child. If she can't be found, local authorities will give the baby a name and birth certificate.
The reforms also mandate that babies under age 2 will no longer be placed in institutions. The government is slowly shutting the orphanages anyway in favor of group homes and foster care, but the babies will benefit first. Marv and Diann Tieman, an American couple who run a private home for abandoned babies in Galoti, a few hours north of Bucharest, were told they would receive no new babies after Jan. 1, 2005.
But no one seems to know where the state is going to find enough foster families. Marv Tieman said he had to keep some of the babies for months before families could take them. Sims had to turn down requests from the state hospital asking her foundation to find and pay for foster care for five children because she couldn't afford it. And a group of foster parents from Olt County in southern Romania recently staged a protest claiming they were being forced to care for more children than they had agreed to.
"We're developing a foster care network. But it's hard to find so many parents. It's very expensive," explained Sanda Gancevici, a pediatrician who specializes in developmental disabilities at Orphanage No. 1 in Bucharest, which is in the process of closing. She is a slight woman with a hard face who became resigned to the sluggish, exasperating system long ago. A quick tour of the orphanage showed that the children were well tended to, but they still had the telltale signs of having spent years in institutions—the hand-waving, head-rocking, and morose faces.
"It's improving, but a child in an institution is forever a damaged child," she said.
Despite pledges to close all the big institutions by 2007, about 37,000 children still live in them, according to the latest EU report on Romania released last month. The same number live in group homes run by the state or nongovernmental organizations, and nearly 50,000 live with foster families. Romanian government figures are even rosier: They show that only about 32,000 children remain in institutions—down about 5,000 since last year. But critics claim that children simply have been moved around to make the numbers look better.
Then there's the problem of how to find permanent homes, since international adoptions are no longer an option. "We can't solve the problems with Romanians," Dr. Gancevici said, folding her arms and leaning back in her chair as if challenging me to prove otherwise. "No Romanian will adopt a gypsy or problem or disabled child."
In the meantime, the Romanian government is trying to figure out how to cut off the supply of unwanted children by forcing desperate mothers to rethink their decisions. The current law requires mothers to wait 45 days after the birth of a child before she can legally sign over her rights.
Anna, 16, who didn't give her last name, was forced to take her newborn daughter back after she tried to abandon her at a hospital in the suburbs of Bucharest, "A social worker told me, 'You can't leave it here,' " she said. "I first thought about abortion, but I couldn't do it because the baby was too big, almost five months. I was confused. I didn't know what to do," she said.
She explained that she was kicked out of her parents' house, so the social worker sent her to a shelter for mothers and children run by the charity Hope Worldwide. Loredana Bogdan, who helps run the 6-month-old center, where women lounge around the kitchen with their babies, said two women decided to keep their babies after the waiting period ended.
Anna has been there a little over a month, and from the way she can barely be bothered to prop the baby's head up, it's clear she's counting the days.
From: Sarah E. RichardsSubject: Please Keep Your Children, or Don't Have ThemPosted Thursday, Dec. 2, 2004, at 12:11 PM PT
SIBIU—Eni Gall has one of the most depressing jobs in Romania. Equipped with a minimal range of social services, a couple of loaves of bread, and an earnest idealism, 25-year-old Gall works as a case manager visiting poor, dysfunctional, and marginalized families. Her assignment is to keep families together so they won't abandon their children.
Gall is one of a slowly growing number of social workers in a country that, during communism, didn't recognize it had social problems. Today, Romanians know they have problems, but there is scarce public funding to even begin to address them. They can clean up the orphanage system in an attempt to become a EU–worthy country by 2007, but there's no mechanism in place to stem the supply of deserted children. "There are no public social services in Romania, only institutionalized ones for the disabled or orphans," explained Calin Blaga*, director of Gall's employer, Arapamesu, a nongovernmental agency founded in 1995 by an American nun and funded by U.S., European, and Romanian donors. It provides counseling, tutoring, support groups, and children's activities for around 330 at-risk families in the Transylvanian city of Sibiu. "We need services, services, services!" he said.
The little agency with an annual budget of $100,000 takes on the big demons of Romanian society: poverty, alcoholism, domestic violence, unemployment, and bad housing. "Families are in a difficult situation, and they have children, and they don't know what to do anymore," he said, explaining that older children, not just babies, were at risk of being abandoned. "We don't have shelters in Romania. This is a problem of abandoning 2- and 5-year-olds."
I accompanied Gall as she made a surprise visit to the Zeng family. Gall briefed me on their story in the car: The husband and wife both grew up in orphanages, where they met. He's 31 and asthmatic; she's 24 and anemic. They have two pre-schoolers. The wife recently returned home, after living with a new boyfriend, because she's sick. In the meantime, the husband let a homeless pregnant mother and her 16-year-old daughter move in. He once was so desperate for better housing that he doused himself with gasoline in front of the mayor's office and threatened to light a match. It didn't work.
On this rainy morning, all six were hanging out on two small beds and a couple of chairs in their spartan one-room studio. There was no television, and I couldn't imagine what they did all day. The smiley and precocious kids, ages 2 and 4, jumped on the beds, and the group seemed glad to see new faces. Gall delivered the bread she brings weekly. The husband supplements his meager pension of about $60 per month by doing odd jobs, such as repairing tables for the greengrocer in exchange for vegetables, or secretly selling used clothing donated by Gall's agency. "He came to us to see if we knew where he could work," she said. "We have a program to repair homes, but it was winter, and he's asthmatic."
Gall giggled after we left and rolled her eyes, as if to say, "What can you do?" The house was a circus, but Gall thought the kids were safe. "He loves them too much," she said.
More troubling was the next stop at the apartment of the Boier family, which consists of a tubercular uncle, an alcoholic grandmother, and her 5-year-old granddaughter, who she retrieved from an orphanage a year ago after the child's mother had deserted her. The man who answered the door refused to invite us in and barked that the grandmother was out. Gall thought it was her boyfriend. Even from the doorway, I could smell old garbage, and Gall took a deep breath before peering inside and waving at the timid, cross-eyed child. "I want to go to child protective services. The girl is living in a bad condition. But the state never checks up," she said bitterly. "Sometimes the grandmother is so drunk she can't speak to me." Gall once offered to take the girl to her agency's youth club, but the grandmother said she couldn't afford the bus fare. "This job is hard sometimes," Gall said, turning quiet on the ride home. "But it's necessary."
If social workers are trying to help people keep their children, public health officials are attempting to show women how to avoid having unwanted children in the first place. Contraceptives are taken for granted in most of the world, but in Romania, they've only recently become widespread. Many forms of birth control were banned or unavailable during communism in an effort to boost the birth rate. Doctors weren't trained to prescribe oral contraceptives, and many Romanians thought they were carcinogenic anyway.
Now, condoms are discussed on the Romanian version of MTV, and doctors must join a waiting list to attend birth-control information seminars. Three years ago, the Romanian government—with help from John Snow Inc., an international health-care consultant, and funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development and the United Nations—started a campaign to offer free birth control to poor people. Recently, the healthy ministry and a Roma human rights group trained 200 Roma health coordinators to educate a community still stigmatized by the old joke, "A gypsy woman is washing her baby and drops him in the mud. She asks her husband, 'Should we pick him up or just have another one?' "
Two years ago, residents of a gypsy ghetto north of Bucharest didn't even know contraceptives existed. I met health coordinator Florica Petre, who blushed as she recalled showing a roomful of men how to put on condoms. She said that whenever she gets a new delivery of prophylactics, the men scoop them up for visits to local prostitutes. (Apparently, the equivalent of $6 buys a visit to a French or a Japanese hooker, the neighborhood favorites.)
Petre is responsible for teaching 2,300 people in her area about vaccination and family planning options. That includes trying to persuade women that the pill won't make them fat or that that missed periods from contraceptive injections, which are given every three weeks, won't cause blood to build up in their stomachs. It's been a slow sell.
She introduced me to Angela Bitbea, a 30-year-old woman with five children, who stopped using birth control pills after they gave her headache. Since she hasn't gotten pregnant in two years, she assumes she is no longer fertile. Her husband doesn't work, and the family lives off a monthly pension of about $100.
And Mariana Burdulea, 36, got hot flashes when she tried the pills, so she stopped using them. She is the mother of two children "who are enough because life is so hard." She thinks she is pregnant now and will look into an abortion, which would be her fifth. "She's pregnant all the time," interjected her husband. She thought the termination would cost her the equivalent of $30; she will borrow the money to pay for it. Petre added that the price didn't include the $10 consultation fee.
"Before, women were ignorant," Petre said, with a satisfied look on the face. "Now, I've helped to emancipate them."
Correction, Dec. 7, 2004: This entry originally misspelled the name of the Arapamesu director quoted in the second paragraph. He is Calin Blaga, not Braga. (Return to the corrected sentence.)
From: Sarah E. RichardsSubject: Stuck in the PipelinePosted Friday, Dec. 3, 2004, at 3:12 AM PT
TIMISOARA—Larissa is a bossy, bewitching 3-year-old whose family hangs on her every word. Lari wants to watch Finding Nemo again. Lari had a dream about a "skalamander." Lari saw a truck today. Lari likes blue M&Ms. "What did she say?" they ask each other, with eager anticipation of bursting into laughter. It's not the novelty of having a young child in the home of a couple with older children. The Heisey family, from Lancaster County, Pa., is completely in love with this kid. And every day they wrestle with a sick anxiety in the pits of their stomachs that someone will knock at the door and take her away.
Peter and Julie Heisey have worked as missionaries for nearly six years in Timisoara, Romania, the epicenter of the 1989 revolution that ended the Ceausescu regime. Ever since Julie received a call from a friend telling her about an 8-day-old gypsy baby, whose teenage mother planned to take her to an orphanage, the Heiseys have tried to legally adopt her.
In November of 2003, after years of delays in the long, maddening process to make it official, their file was finally completed. The Heiseys had taken psychological tests. Julie had been re-fingerprinted, after the first set was unreadable. Their home had been inspected. They had included another copy of Lari's most recent medical exam.
It's not easy to adopt a child in Romania, and at first, the Heiseys thought they were following the law by hiring lawyers to notarize the signing over the birth rights and applying for her birth certificate. That began a local legal brouhaha that involved more lawyers, social workers, abandonment proceedings, commission meetings, and mandated visits of the birth mother to the Heisey's home to make it clear that she indeed did not want this child.
There's an old joke that Romania is the land of possibility, where anything can happen—anything bad and anything worse. So, when Peter proudly plopped the file containing every single document carefully copied and collated on the desk of Larissa's assigned social worker at the local office of the National Authority for Child Protection, he wasn't surprised when the clerk told him she couldn't send it on to Bucharest. The Romanian government had passed an emergency ordinance forbidding international adoptions. For the previous three years, the government had imposed a moratorium stopping such adoptions after a report in 2001 on Romania's membership application to the European Union claimed that hundreds of children were sold into trafficking networks under false adoption claims. It also said that some were used for organ donation.
Hoping to join the union in 2007, the Romanian government said it would resume international adoptions once it had a chance to straighten out the corrupt child welfare system. In the meantime, there had always been a special clause allowing exceptional cases, such as those involving older or disabled children. The Heiseys filed to declare Larissa a special case. After all, she had joined their family as an infant, lived in Romania with them, and was a gypsy girl who few Romanian families would want to adopt. But Peter knew this latest decree was more serious. It banned all adoptions, except to relatives living abroad. Parliament approved the legislation this summer, President Ion Iliescu signed the ordinance into law, and it's scheduled to go into effect Jan. 1, 2005. Still, the Heiseys thought they were safe. They had a registration number.
In the latest disturbing development of the Romanian adoption saga, which began nearly a decade ago when the world learned of orphanages full of 100,000 malnourished, abused, and neglected children, approximately 2,000 pending international adoptions are currently in legal limbo. That figure includes nearly 300 American families who filed so-called exceptional cases after the first moratorium went into effect in June 2001. One group called For the Children SOS, which includes prospective adoptive parents, has been lobbying the U.S. government to pressure the Romanians to put through the cases that have matched children with American families and, in many cases, have been approved by local Romanian authorities.
Emotions have run high on both sides of the Atlantic. Romanians gossip about corrupt officials charging Americans $50,000 a child or approving adoptions to 60-year-old parents in Spain. Or they claim that Americans abandon or abuse their adopted children once they discover they have emotional or developmental problems. Then there are charges that Romania rebuffed American efforts to draft new legislation because of pressure from the European Union.
Romania heeded an EU warning this summer not to amend the law or yield to U.S. pressure to process the pending cases, even those involving sick babies. However, last month, France and Romania agreed to set up an international committee to sort through the so-called pipeline children, many of whom are disabled or older.
In the meantime, families and children are waiting for answers. Thomas and Margarida Harr of Gilford, Conn., already received theirs. After flying to Romania four times in two years to visit the two children they had been on track to adopt, the couple received an e-mail from the agency notifying them that the boy and girl had been adopted by Romanian families. "It was shattering," said Thomas. "We were so, so disappointed. We knew it could happen. But we never thought our two would be taken, especially both of them. Some woman decided she wanted to adopt the girl, and the boy was adopted by his grandparents."
The Heiseys wait, too. Peters schemes about his legal options and writes impassioned posts on a Yahoo group. Julie refuses to fantasize about Larissa's future. A couple of months ago, she had a dream in which she saw a baby crawling on a railing with two other babies on her back. She wanted to help them, but she couldn't leave Larissa behind.Sarah E. Richards is a freelance writer based in New York City. She can be reached at sarah@saraherichards.com.Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2109971/
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From: Sarah E. RichardsSubject: The Dictator's GroupiePosted Monday, Nov. 29, 2004, at 3:45 AM PT
BUCHAREST—Once a month, at 6:30 in the morning, Angela Boteza arrives at the Ghencea Civil Cemetery in western Bucharest. She walks down a gravel path to a nondescript grave, where she clears away dead leaves and candle wax and leaves yellow gladiolas in a wine bottle with a handwritten note: "May God forgive your evil deeds. Rest in peace. May the earth not be heavy upon your soul." A modest granite cross bearing a red star reveals the grave's occupant: Nicolae Ceausescu, 1918-1989. She then she goes to the other side of the cemetery to do the same at the graves of his wife Elena and son Nicu.
Boteza has been making regular visits for the past seven years, but my Romanian driver wasn't sure we had the right place. He'd seen the TV coverage of the dwindling crowd that still visits the dead dictator on Jan. 26, Ceausescu's birthday, but he had to ask directions from the cemetery groundskeeper, who led us to the sad little plot overshadowed by statelier monuments to other families. Besides Boteza's offering, the only other item decorating the resting place of Romania's president of 22 years, who was executed along with his wife on Christmas Day 1989, were some droopy flowers in a plastic cola bottle. Elena's grave looks even worse; her name is painted on a crude iron cross. Nicu, who died of liver cirrhosis in 1996, is entombed more respectfully in sleek black-and-white marble.
The story goes that Nicolae is buried backward, with his feet at the headstone, as an insult. But it's only assumed he's at Ghencea. After the revolution, it was never revealed where the couple's bodies were buried. Their graves were supposedly "discovered" in 1992. A year later, on what would have been his 75th birthday, Communist Party members donated the current headstone, and a flood of visitors came, leaving tributes and planting flowers on what it now a weedy patch. Today, only about a dozen people, mostly the curious en route to another grave, stop by on weekdays, and 30 to 40 make their way over on weekends. "They just look, stay 10 minutes, and leave," the groundskeeper said. "Nobody asks about Elena." Romanians believe Nicolae's vilified wife was behind his decision to order security forces to quell a popular democratic uprising that started in Timisoara to protest lack of freedom, food, heat, and electricity. More than 1,000 people were killed. The couple was found, arrested, tried, and killed by a firing squad within hours. (The timeline is up for debate, too, since everything was done in secret.)
A guard said party members recently asked to move Nicolae to a better location with fancier marble digs, but their request was denied.
Boteza left her phone number on her tribute, and my driver called her up. I could hear her shriek her address. "She said we can come over right now," he said.
After a quick tour of her three-room apartment, Boteza ushered us to the living room. She perched at the edge of her sofa, lit up a cigarette, and began: Ceausescu made a good life for Romanians, but he was judged rashly by people who wanted power and denied his rightful honor of a proper burial in a military cemetery. So, she has appointed herself the keeper of his legacy. She monitors the family's graves and throws out items she feels are insulting. Recently, she's tossed a dirty flag, a frayed Bible, and papier mache flowers.
Life was better under communism, she continued, parroting the refrain: "There was nothing to buy, but we had money. Now, there's everything to buy but no money." At age 52, Boteza is an unemployed accountant who gets a temporary pension of about $50 a month, through April 2005. Her son, who, she boasts, is a military officer, helps her out some. She owns her own apartment, which she bought shortly after the revolution. "I don't eat so much. I have a few cigarettes and coffee, but it's OK," she said, staring at me intently with big somber eyes. She was confident that she would find another job but admitted that she's having sleep problems.
During the 10th anniversary of the fall of communism five years ago, much was made of Romania's lack of celebration. Polls showed that four out of five Romanians were unhappy with the way they lived, and 61 percent said they would be better off under Ceausescu. Such amnesiac musings ignored the nightmares of the Stalinist dictator: the rations, the torture of anyone who opposed the regime, the deadly winters when the energy sector collapsed, the razing of villages and historical Bucharest to make way for his projects, including the so-called House of the People. His megalomaniacal monument, which is widely believed to be the second-largest office building in the world after the Pentagon, was built while the people suffered austerity measures to pay off a $10 billion foreign debt at one point.
Now the nostalgia is tempered. "Yes, it was better under communism. You had a job, a house, a car," said 20-year-old university student George Pascaru. "But you could not have your own thoughts."
But such talk makes few feel better about the giant elephant making its way east. Romania, a country of 23 million, is lumbering toward entry into the European Union in 2007. Despite robust economic growth and low inflation, corruption is rampant, and the average Romanian makes slightly more than $2,100 a year, or just 30 percent of the EU average in purchasing power.
The shiny Bucharest Mall, which opened five years ago and includes a Marks & Spencer department store, a Ruby Tuesday restaurant, and a 10-screen movie theater, is eerily empty. New cars occasionally zip down the highways, but gas-spewing Dacias still dominate*. For every new building, there are miles of crumbling, Soviet-era apartment blocks. Add some bitter, chain-smoking locals; street children; and packs of mangy stray dogs that seem to roam every city, and you get the feeling the country isn't going anywhere soon.
The mention of the European Union is met with cynical laughs. People tell how Hungarians have been forced to raid Romanian grocery stores because they were priced out of their own when their country joined the union this spring. There are rumors that EU regulations will force polluting old cars off the road, and drivers won't be able to buy new ones. And how will people buy houses?
"[President Ion] Iliescu said he will make Romania a rich country, but I just don't see it happening," Boteza said, lighting another cigarette.
Correction, Dec. 1, 2004: This dispatch entry originally claimed that "diesel-spewing Dacias dominate Romanian highways." In fact, Dacias run on gasoline. It also said that Bucharest's House of the People is the second-largest building in the world; this statement has been modified to note that it is "widely believed to be the second-largest office building in the world."
From: Sarah E. RichardsSubject: King of Roma EverywherePosted Tuesday, Nov. 30, 2004, at 5:01 AM PT
SIBIU—Mention the name Florin Cioaba to the average Romanian, and you usually get a laugh, followed by a head shake and a muttered, "That crazy guy!" In 1997, Cioaba inherited the title "King of Roma Everywhere" from his father, Ioan, who sort of invented it in 1992. There's at least one other royal, namely Cioaba's relative Emperor Iulian Radulescu, who also lives in the Transylvanian city of Sibiu. But Cioaba is the best-known, largely because of the publicity surrounding last year's lavish wedding for his then-14-year-old daughter, Ana Marie, to a 15-year-old. Reports claimed that the bride tried to escape but was forced to return, sparking headlines like "Gypsy child bride scandal" and prompting British Euro MP Baroness Emma Nicholson to threaten to remove her from harm. Romanian officials ordered the couple apart until she reaches 16, the legal marrying age.
Cioaba, 49, a Pentecostal minister, defended the practice by arguing that early marriage was an important part of Roma tradition that must be preserved. (Roma, rather than gypsy, is the preferred term for the poor migrants who arrived from India a thousand years ago and are scattered mostly in Central and Eastern Europe.) The dozen or so ethnic Romanians I spoke with were quick to dismiss Cioaba as an eccentric but then indulged in gossipy speculation about how much the bridal dress cost and what goes on in that gated compound with the Mercedes S320 parked inside.
I gained access to the king through his English-speaking sister Luminita, who publishes poetry, is making a film on the Roma survivors of the Transnistrian concentration camp during World War II, and likes to talk about her recent trip to New York City to buy a camera. After we waited an hour in the so-called "king room," which features a large fresco of Ioan mounted on a horse, wearing a cape, a gold crown, and a ridiculous grin, Luminita finally escorted me into the living room to meet his current majesty.
Another half-hour later, the king emerged. Clutching his back, he limped toward the glass-and-gold table and carefully set himself in a chair, allowing his open shirt to reveal the sleeveless undershirt covering his ample gut. "Sciatica," he explained. Cioaba is a member of the wealthy 300-strong Kalderash tribe, who are known as skilled coppersmiths. But his lifestyle is a far cry from that of the country's estimated 2 million to 3 million Roma, who are known mostly for being dirt poor. They're subject to rampant discrimination and are mistreated in police stations, prisons, and psychiatric hospitals. Roma children are segregated in many schools, and tales abound about job offers being rescinded once employers learn that applicants are Roma. The latest report from the European Union on Romania's progress toward meeting entry criteria pointed out that, despite some improvements, the legal system still has a long way to go in protecting Roma rights.
Cioaba is the Roma's spokesman and represented them at a meeting on Roma rights in Budapest last year sponsored by the World Bank, George Soros' Open Society Institute, and the European Commission, which is an arm of the European Union. The meeting's brainchild was the "Decade of Roma Inclusion" beginning in 2005. Nine countries committed to support programs targeting poverty, health, school enrollment, and employment to close the gap between Roma and non-Roma.
"There's a new beginning for the Roma," Cioaba said, insisting that integration does not mean assimilation. "We don't want to change our culture," he said, explaining why he defied the law to let his daughter marry young. "I was married at 14. This was our tradition 100 years ago. We have agreed to change, but not in one night."
Delia Grigore, head of the Roma human rights organization Aven Amentza, wants Roma to reclaim their heritage by taking advantage of new constitutional protections to learn the Romani language and wear traditional clothing. "They think their identity will stigmatize them, but this is a process of self-rejection," she said, smoothing out her long flowing skirt. "Our grandparents had to assimilate to survive. There is a cultural re-emergence happening. I came into the movement to really be a Roma."
Despite all the heady talk of a "cultural nation," many Roma see little use for the movement, especially when they can't pay their bills. In fact, they say the Roma fared best during communism. They were forced to leave their nomadic lifestyle and permanently settle and faced deportation, but they were guaranteed housing and factory jobs.
"In Communist times, I worked 30 years in an iron factory," said Sandu Stana, who is 71 but looks 80. "In capitalism, it's hard to have a job. When the jobs are open, and they see our face, they say, 'Sorry, it's been taken.' "
Activists insist that embracing the Roma identity is the only way to move the community forward. For example, the government recently hired 200 health-outreach workers and set aside 400 university spots for Roma in 2004 compared with 10 earmarked in 1994. About 2,000 have graduated, said Marius Taba of the human rights group Romani Cris. About 80 percent of Roma drop out of the system before high school. For those who do go, there are tales of bus drivers refusing to pick them up and school officials segregating them in separate buildings. Discrimination is everywhere. A French film crew followed Taba and several other clean-cut Roma young men on a night out around Bucharest. Five of eight bars they visited kicked them out.
In an informal ghetto north of Bucharest, Roma residents had more immediate concerns. One woman showed me how they were stealing electricity by attaching wires from the power pole into their apartments because they couldn't pay their utility bills; they're worried the police will come soon.
Back at the king's house, Ana Marie just wanted the media to leave her alone. "They say that I left my wedding, but I just went to have a cigarette," she said, playing with the cell phone dangling from her neck. "I was angry about it, and it hurt my father's reputation. They wrote in the papers that I will go to an institution for kids. There are so many kids in the streets. Why me?"
Some press reports said she was 12 at the time of her wedding, but the king said she was 14, and given her curvy body, I believe him.
Ana Marie received a quick education in public relations. She went out of her way to let me know that, per the baroness's instructions, she was in school, and she and her "husband" are just "good friends." She didn't seem too stressed about her future. "The women stay home to raise kids. It's easy.'"
With that, the king went to lie down, and his wife sent the teen upstairs to bring down some scarves to sell me.
From: Sarah E. RichardsSubject: The Babies Left BehindPosted Wednesday, Dec. 1, 2004, at 9:01 AM PT
ORADEA—Michelle Sims picked up the floppy infant and showed him to me. "He looks like a 2-month-old, and he was left here almost six months ago," the American social worker said. "They call him Little Bird Boy." The puny child with a mat of black hair and big brown eyes that stare blankly was abandoned at birth at the Oradea Children's Hospital in northwest Romania, near the Hungarian border.
If his mother has not shown up to claim him by the end of six months, the hospital can declare him officially abandoned, making him eligible to be adopted domestically, according to current Romanian law. But that is unlikely to happen, Sims explained, since Little Bird Boy's dark skin identifies him as a Roma, or gypsy. Romanians aren't lining up for Roma children. They make up 10 percent of the population but about 60 percent of abandoned babies.
"Any American family would take him because he's so cute!" Sims said, squealing the compliment and squeezing his foot. But after accusations surfaced that adoption agencies were selling children to the highest bidder, the European Union pressured Romania to permanently shut down foreign adoptions. It is one of a flurry of new initiatives drafted to overhaul the child welfare system as a condition for EU entry in 2007 and to show that Romania can take care of its children.
Sims runs a foundation called Children in the Son, which is affiliated with a South Carolina church. It is building a home for pregnant mothers, hires foster parents for about 10 children, and pays for infant formula and clothing for the 30 or so abandoned babies. They are one of several nonprofit groups that hire women from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. each weekday to hold, rock, and sing to the babies to try to prevent attachment, failure to thrive, and sensory-deprivation problems.
"You should have seen it before," Sims said, a refrain I would hear repeatedly during my stay in Romania as people described malnourished, under-stimulated children screaming for attention and biting themselves in the infamous orphanages, which were exposed in 1991 and led to a wave of international adoptions.
This Sunday, hospital workers change diapers only on scheduled rounds and prop up baby bottles on blankets because they don't have time to hand-feed their charges. Despite the forest murals in the sterile hallways and the donated Fisher-Price toys in the corner, the place is pretty grim. The smell of feces hits you as soon as you enter the floor, and babies don't stop crying. The noises are not the sharp outbursts that signal the need for attention or the whimper of a fussy baby resigned to a nap, but rather the unfocused wails of neglected infants. "Nurses don't hear the crying anymore," Sims said, as she looked for a supervisor to release another baby to his new foster parents.
Sims suspects that Little Bird Boy's mother was one of the many women who drop their babies off at the hospital, listing a false address, and then disappear. Some babies have been there a while because their mothers use the hospital as a form of child care, especially during the winter months, when many poor families don't have heat. If a mother visits her baby once every six months, she can keep her parental rights. "One told me, 'I'll get him in a couple of years when I can afford it.' I must hear stuff like that a dozen times a year," Sims said.
In the meantime, babies like Little Bird Boy languish. But in what appears to be an "a-ha" moment for the Romanian government, a new law will require hospitals to report abandoned babies within 24 hours to the local departments of child protection, which will place them with foster families. The police have 30 days to locate the mother and encourage her to take back the child. If she can't be found, local authorities will give the baby a name and birth certificate.
The reforms also mandate that babies under age 2 will no longer be placed in institutions. The government is slowly shutting the orphanages anyway in favor of group homes and foster care, but the babies will benefit first. Marv and Diann Tieman, an American couple who run a private home for abandoned babies in Galoti, a few hours north of Bucharest, were told they would receive no new babies after Jan. 1, 2005.
But no one seems to know where the state is going to find enough foster families. Marv Tieman said he had to keep some of the babies for months before families could take them. Sims had to turn down requests from the state hospital asking her foundation to find and pay for foster care for five children because she couldn't afford it. And a group of foster parents from Olt County in southern Romania recently staged a protest claiming they were being forced to care for more children than they had agreed to.
"We're developing a foster care network. But it's hard to find so many parents. It's very expensive," explained Sanda Gancevici, a pediatrician who specializes in developmental disabilities at Orphanage No. 1 in Bucharest, which is in the process of closing. She is a slight woman with a hard face who became resigned to the sluggish, exasperating system long ago. A quick tour of the orphanage showed that the children were well tended to, but they still had the telltale signs of having spent years in institutions—the hand-waving, head-rocking, and morose faces.
"It's improving, but a child in an institution is forever a damaged child," she said.
Despite pledges to close all the big institutions by 2007, about 37,000 children still live in them, according to the latest EU report on Romania released last month. The same number live in group homes run by the state or nongovernmental organizations, and nearly 50,000 live with foster families. Romanian government figures are even rosier: They show that only about 32,000 children remain in institutions—down about 5,000 since last year. But critics claim that children simply have been moved around to make the numbers look better.
Then there's the problem of how to find permanent homes, since international adoptions are no longer an option. "We can't solve the problems with Romanians," Dr. Gancevici said, folding her arms and leaning back in her chair as if challenging me to prove otherwise. "No Romanian will adopt a gypsy or problem or disabled child."
In the meantime, the Romanian government is trying to figure out how to cut off the supply of unwanted children by forcing desperate mothers to rethink their decisions. The current law requires mothers to wait 45 days after the birth of a child before she can legally sign over her rights.
Anna, 16, who didn't give her last name, was forced to take her newborn daughter back after she tried to abandon her at a hospital in the suburbs of Bucharest, "A social worker told me, 'You can't leave it here,' " she said. "I first thought about abortion, but I couldn't do it because the baby was too big, almost five months. I was confused. I didn't know what to do," she said.
She explained that she was kicked out of her parents' house, so the social worker sent her to a shelter for mothers and children run by the charity Hope Worldwide. Loredana Bogdan, who helps run the 6-month-old center, where women lounge around the kitchen with their babies, said two women decided to keep their babies after the waiting period ended.
Anna has been there a little over a month, and from the way she can barely be bothered to prop the baby's head up, it's clear she's counting the days.
From: Sarah E. RichardsSubject: Please Keep Your Children, or Don't Have ThemPosted Thursday, Dec. 2, 2004, at 12:11 PM PT
SIBIU—Eni Gall has one of the most depressing jobs in Romania. Equipped with a minimal range of social services, a couple of loaves of bread, and an earnest idealism, 25-year-old Gall works as a case manager visiting poor, dysfunctional, and marginalized families. Her assignment is to keep families together so they won't abandon their children.
Gall is one of a slowly growing number of social workers in a country that, during communism, didn't recognize it had social problems. Today, Romanians know they have problems, but there is scarce public funding to even begin to address them. They can clean up the orphanage system in an attempt to become a EU–worthy country by 2007, but there's no mechanism in place to stem the supply of deserted children. "There are no public social services in Romania, only institutionalized ones for the disabled or orphans," explained Calin Blaga*, director of Gall's employer, Arapamesu, a nongovernmental agency founded in 1995 by an American nun and funded by U.S., European, and Romanian donors. It provides counseling, tutoring, support groups, and children's activities for around 330 at-risk families in the Transylvanian city of Sibiu. "We need services, services, services!" he said.
The little agency with an annual budget of $100,000 takes on the big demons of Romanian society: poverty, alcoholism, domestic violence, unemployment, and bad housing. "Families are in a difficult situation, and they have children, and they don't know what to do anymore," he said, explaining that older children, not just babies, were at risk of being abandoned. "We don't have shelters in Romania. This is a problem of abandoning 2- and 5-year-olds."
I accompanied Gall as she made a surprise visit to the Zeng family. Gall briefed me on their story in the car: The husband and wife both grew up in orphanages, where they met. He's 31 and asthmatic; she's 24 and anemic. They have two pre-schoolers. The wife recently returned home, after living with a new boyfriend, because she's sick. In the meantime, the husband let a homeless pregnant mother and her 16-year-old daughter move in. He once was so desperate for better housing that he doused himself with gasoline in front of the mayor's office and threatened to light a match. It didn't work.
On this rainy morning, all six were hanging out on two small beds and a couple of chairs in their spartan one-room studio. There was no television, and I couldn't imagine what they did all day. The smiley and precocious kids, ages 2 and 4, jumped on the beds, and the group seemed glad to see new faces. Gall delivered the bread she brings weekly. The husband supplements his meager pension of about $60 per month by doing odd jobs, such as repairing tables for the greengrocer in exchange for vegetables, or secretly selling used clothing donated by Gall's agency. "He came to us to see if we knew where he could work," she said. "We have a program to repair homes, but it was winter, and he's asthmatic."
Gall giggled after we left and rolled her eyes, as if to say, "What can you do?" The house was a circus, but Gall thought the kids were safe. "He loves them too much," she said.
More troubling was the next stop at the apartment of the Boier family, which consists of a tubercular uncle, an alcoholic grandmother, and her 5-year-old granddaughter, who she retrieved from an orphanage a year ago after the child's mother had deserted her. The man who answered the door refused to invite us in and barked that the grandmother was out. Gall thought it was her boyfriend. Even from the doorway, I could smell old garbage, and Gall took a deep breath before peering inside and waving at the timid, cross-eyed child. "I want to go to child protective services. The girl is living in a bad condition. But the state never checks up," she said bitterly. "Sometimes the grandmother is so drunk she can't speak to me." Gall once offered to take the girl to her agency's youth club, but the grandmother said she couldn't afford the bus fare. "This job is hard sometimes," Gall said, turning quiet on the ride home. "But it's necessary."
If social workers are trying to help people keep their children, public health officials are attempting to show women how to avoid having unwanted children in the first place. Contraceptives are taken for granted in most of the world, but in Romania, they've only recently become widespread. Many forms of birth control were banned or unavailable during communism in an effort to boost the birth rate. Doctors weren't trained to prescribe oral contraceptives, and many Romanians thought they were carcinogenic anyway.
Now, condoms are discussed on the Romanian version of MTV, and doctors must join a waiting list to attend birth-control information seminars. Three years ago, the Romanian government—with help from John Snow Inc., an international health-care consultant, and funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development and the United Nations—started a campaign to offer free birth control to poor people. Recently, the healthy ministry and a Roma human rights group trained 200 Roma health coordinators to educate a community still stigmatized by the old joke, "A gypsy woman is washing her baby and drops him in the mud. She asks her husband, 'Should we pick him up or just have another one?' "
Two years ago, residents of a gypsy ghetto north of Bucharest didn't even know contraceptives existed. I met health coordinator Florica Petre, who blushed as she recalled showing a roomful of men how to put on condoms. She said that whenever she gets a new delivery of prophylactics, the men scoop them up for visits to local prostitutes. (Apparently, the equivalent of $6 buys a visit to a French or a Japanese hooker, the neighborhood favorites.)
Petre is responsible for teaching 2,300 people in her area about vaccination and family planning options. That includes trying to persuade women that the pill won't make them fat or that that missed periods from contraceptive injections, which are given every three weeks, won't cause blood to build up in their stomachs. It's been a slow sell.
She introduced me to Angela Bitbea, a 30-year-old woman with five children, who stopped using birth control pills after they gave her headache. Since she hasn't gotten pregnant in two years, she assumes she is no longer fertile. Her husband doesn't work, and the family lives off a monthly pension of about $100.
And Mariana Burdulea, 36, got hot flashes when she tried the pills, so she stopped using them. She is the mother of two children "who are enough because life is so hard." She thinks she is pregnant now and will look into an abortion, which would be her fifth. "She's pregnant all the time," interjected her husband. She thought the termination would cost her the equivalent of $30; she will borrow the money to pay for it. Petre added that the price didn't include the $10 consultation fee.
"Before, women were ignorant," Petre said, with a satisfied look on the face. "Now, I've helped to emancipate them."
Correction, Dec. 7, 2004: This entry originally misspelled the name of the Arapamesu director quoted in the second paragraph. He is Calin Blaga, not Braga. (Return to the corrected sentence.)
From: Sarah E. RichardsSubject: Stuck in the PipelinePosted Friday, Dec. 3, 2004, at 3:12 AM PT
TIMISOARA—Larissa is a bossy, bewitching 3-year-old whose family hangs on her every word. Lari wants to watch Finding Nemo again. Lari had a dream about a "skalamander." Lari saw a truck today. Lari likes blue M&Ms. "What did she say?" they ask each other, with eager anticipation of bursting into laughter. It's not the novelty of having a young child in the home of a couple with older children. The Heisey family, from Lancaster County, Pa., is completely in love with this kid. And every day they wrestle with a sick anxiety in the pits of their stomachs that someone will knock at the door and take her away.
Peter and Julie Heisey have worked as missionaries for nearly six years in Timisoara, Romania, the epicenter of the 1989 revolution that ended the Ceausescu regime. Ever since Julie received a call from a friend telling her about an 8-day-old gypsy baby, whose teenage mother planned to take her to an orphanage, the Heiseys have tried to legally adopt her.
In November of 2003, after years of delays in the long, maddening process to make it official, their file was finally completed. The Heiseys had taken psychological tests. Julie had been re-fingerprinted, after the first set was unreadable. Their home had been inspected. They had included another copy of Lari's most recent medical exam.
It's not easy to adopt a child in Romania, and at first, the Heiseys thought they were following the law by hiring lawyers to notarize the signing over the birth rights and applying for her birth certificate. That began a local legal brouhaha that involved more lawyers, social workers, abandonment proceedings, commission meetings, and mandated visits of the birth mother to the Heisey's home to make it clear that she indeed did not want this child.
There's an old joke that Romania is the land of possibility, where anything can happen—anything bad and anything worse. So, when Peter proudly plopped the file containing every single document carefully copied and collated on the desk of Larissa's assigned social worker at the local office of the National Authority for Child Protection, he wasn't surprised when the clerk told him she couldn't send it on to Bucharest. The Romanian government had passed an emergency ordinance forbidding international adoptions. For the previous three years, the government had imposed a moratorium stopping such adoptions after a report in 2001 on Romania's membership application to the European Union claimed that hundreds of children were sold into trafficking networks under false adoption claims. It also said that some were used for organ donation.
Hoping to join the union in 2007, the Romanian government said it would resume international adoptions once it had a chance to straighten out the corrupt child welfare system. In the meantime, there had always been a special clause allowing exceptional cases, such as those involving older or disabled children. The Heiseys filed to declare Larissa a special case. After all, she had joined their family as an infant, lived in Romania with them, and was a gypsy girl who few Romanian families would want to adopt. But Peter knew this latest decree was more serious. It banned all adoptions, except to relatives living abroad. Parliament approved the legislation this summer, President Ion Iliescu signed the ordinance into law, and it's scheduled to go into effect Jan. 1, 2005. Still, the Heiseys thought they were safe. They had a registration number.
In the latest disturbing development of the Romanian adoption saga, which began nearly a decade ago when the world learned of orphanages full of 100,000 malnourished, abused, and neglected children, approximately 2,000 pending international adoptions are currently in legal limbo. That figure includes nearly 300 American families who filed so-called exceptional cases after the first moratorium went into effect in June 2001. One group called For the Children SOS, which includes prospective adoptive parents, has been lobbying the U.S. government to pressure the Romanians to put through the cases that have matched children with American families and, in many cases, have been approved by local Romanian authorities.
Emotions have run high on both sides of the Atlantic. Romanians gossip about corrupt officials charging Americans $50,000 a child or approving adoptions to 60-year-old parents in Spain. Or they claim that Americans abandon or abuse their adopted children once they discover they have emotional or developmental problems. Then there are charges that Romania rebuffed American efforts to draft new legislation because of pressure from the European Union.
Romania heeded an EU warning this summer not to amend the law or yield to U.S. pressure to process the pending cases, even those involving sick babies. However, last month, France and Romania agreed to set up an international committee to sort through the so-called pipeline children, many of whom are disabled or older.
In the meantime, families and children are waiting for answers. Thomas and Margarida Harr of Gilford, Conn., already received theirs. After flying to Romania four times in two years to visit the two children they had been on track to adopt, the couple received an e-mail from the agency notifying them that the boy and girl had been adopted by Romanian families. "It was shattering," said Thomas. "We were so, so disappointed. We knew it could happen. But we never thought our two would be taken, especially both of them. Some woman decided she wanted to adopt the girl, and the boy was adopted by his grandparents."
The Heiseys wait, too. Peters schemes about his legal options and writes impassioned posts on a Yahoo group. Julie refuses to fantasize about Larissa's future. A couple of months ago, she had a dream in which she saw a baby crawling on a railing with two other babies on her back. She wanted to help them, but she couldn't leave Larissa behind.Sarah E. Richards is a freelance writer based in New York City. She can be reached at sarah@saraherichards.com.Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2109971/
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