February 23, 2007
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- Inconvenient Truths
On Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa, a scene from “An Inconvenient Truth,” about global warming.
Lonnie G. Thompson/Paramount Classics and HBO Documentary FilmsA scene from “Iraq in Fragments,” which examines everyday life there.
FilmNow Playing: Inconvenient Truths
“An Inconvenient Truth” is the name of the film favored to win the Academy Award in the documentary feature category on Sunday night. Directed by Davis Guggenheim and mainly consisting of a lecture about climate change given by Al Gore, the movie has had the highest profile and the largest box office of the five nominees, but its title could, without too much distortion, apply to any of them. For the moment, at least, one of the jobs of nonfiction filmmaking, perhaps its major responsibility, is to deliver uncomfortable news to a reluctant audience. While other documentary modes continue to flourish and cross-pollinate — biographies of the famous and notorious; wrenching tales of individual misery; uplifting stories of success against the odds; archival excavations of history — the Academy seems at the moment especially focused on larger problems, on public issues that won’t go away no matter how fervently we might wish they would.
Global warming may be the most urgent and all-encompassing of these. When Mr. Gore displays maps and graphics projecting vanished coastlines and violent weather, the scale of the catastrophe makes everything else look trivial. But if the prospect of inundated cities and melted ice caps is not your worry of choice, there is plenty of bad news from other quarters. Iraq is falling apart. America is riven by religious and cultural divisions. The Roman Catholic Church has failed to protect children from molestation by priests.
The Iraq situation is observed in Laura Poitras’s “My Country, My Country” and James Longley’s “Iraq in Fragments.” Amy Berg’s “Deliver Us From Evil” focuses on the case of an especially repellent pedophile priest. And “Jesus Camp,” directed by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, looks with fascination (and alarm) at a politically charged, militant strain of American evangelical Christianity.
None of the stories these films tell are, strictly speaking, news. Movies, which take a long time to make and reach their audience over a period of weeks and months rather than hours or days, do not score many scoops. And it does not take any great sociological expertise to suppose that much of the audience for the five nominated documentaries will have at least some knowledge of their subjects going in. The fissures dividing Sunni, Shiites and Kurds in Iraq — and their violent intensification since the United States invasion four years ago — are by now familiar to American newspaper readers, as are the sex scandals in the Roman Catholic church, the rise of religious conservatism and the long-term danger posed by carbon dioxide emissions.
Furthermore, the audience for these movies is likely to have opinions on such matters more or less congruent with the point of view — implicit or overt — of the filmmakers. And there probably aren’t too many conservatives among Academy voters. Liberal bias? Preaching to the choir? Maybe so. It is a fact of our cultural life — noted with all due qualifications and exceptions — that documentary filmmaking tilts leftward, much as cable news and AM talk radio skew right. But to take this statement of the obvious as a reason to dismiss or discount the work of committed and serious filmmakers is not only to miss the complexities of that work, but also to refuse the possibility of serious conversation.
As a form of visual journalism, documentary filmmaking has more often, especially in recent years, inclined toward advocacy and argument rather than neutrality. The apparent objectivity of the filmed image — the deeply ingrained assumption that the camera does not lie — is both a powerful polemical weapon and a source of internal tension. Sometimes, that is, the pictures will be selected and arranged in support of the argument. But at other times, the particularity of what we see on screen — the unrehearsed, captured moments of other lives — will bring us face to face with a reality deeper than politics or ideology.
Maybe because public discussion of the Iraq war has been, since before it began, so thoroughly politicized, the conflict has inspired an unusual number of films that pointedly refrain from overt position taking. Over here, opinions — steadfast or changeable, coherent or self-contradictory — proliferate like weeds. But an intimate acquaintance with the facts of daily life in Iraq, of the kind offered in “Iraq in Fragments” and “My Country, My Country,” is more likely to increase confusion than to bring decisive clarity. And that is very much the point of these films and others like them, including Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein’s “Gunner Palace” (2005) and “The War Tapes,” directed by Deborah Scranton and released last year.
“Iraq in Fragments” and “My Country, My Country” both adapt the impersonal, fly-on-the-wall techniques of cinéma vérité to focus attention on the lives of individual Iraqis. “My Country, My Country” concentrates on the experiences of a Sunni doctor in the months leading up to the January 2005 elections. His daily struggle to retain a shred of optimism in the face of proliferating frustration becomes a microcosm of Iraq’s political and moral crisis.
Mr. Longley’s “Iraq in Fragments” ranges more widely — its three sections take us from Sunni to Shia to Kurdish perspectives — but it is similarly committed to examining the texture of daily life rather than the abstractions of ideology. It is also entrancingly, almost disturbingly beautiful, as Mr. Longley uses the grainy, smeary palette of digital video to create vivid, haunting tableaus of urban and rural Iraq.
“The War Tapes,” overlooked by the Academy (which could easily have filled out its roster of documentary feature nominees with Iraq movies alone), was one of the most formally radical films of 2006, even as Ms. Scranton’s method seems, in retrospect, head-smackingly obvious. She provided members of a National Guard unit with digital cameras and edited the video they shot into a film that is raw, honest and moving. It also, fittingly enough in the age of YouTube, collapses the traditional distance between director and subject.
The same might be said about Mr. Guggenheim’s film, which is more commonly referred to as “The Al Gore movie.” Because Mr. Gore is so central to the film, and because it is not really about him, it is easy to forget, or to underestimate, the filmmaker’s role. But turning the spectacle of a man talking onstage into cinema — even a man making use of high-tech props and gadgets — is no easy feat, and turning data into drama is Mr. Guggenheim’s accomplishment as much as it is Mr. Gore’s.
But “An Inconvenient Truth” is, in the end, a case in which the message is the message. If Mr. Longley takes documentary technique to the edge of poetry, using a logic of associations and impressions rather than of argument or narrative, Mr. Guggenheim and Mr. Gore work in a more essayistic, op-ed vein. Most documentaries these days operate between these two poles, trying to balance thought and emotion, immediacy and analysis, the rational and the uncanny.
“Deliver Us From Evil” and “Jesus Camp” both occupy this middle ground. Ms. Berg’s “Deliver Us From Evil” is a passionate piece of advocacy on behalf of the victims of Oliver O’Grady, who molested dozens of children in several California parishes before he was defrocked, imprisoned and deported to Ireland. But the molten core of the movie — what makes it gripping and horrifying and queasily fascinating to watch — lies in the extended interviews with Mr. O’Grady himself. He is a genial, almost twinkly figure, whose expressions of regret do not seem to emerge from any deep sense of remorse, and Ms. Berg, somewhat in the manner of Errol Morris, allows him to talk on camera until the truth of his character begins to emerge.
And it is not a truth that is easily summarized or explained. The power of documentary depends on the fiction that the world will reveal itself to the camera in all its rough, obdurate actuality, and the practice of documentary often consists of trying to control or curtail this power, to maintain a safe distance. “Jesus Camp,” which travels deep into the world of a Pentecostalist retreat where children are trained to be culture warriors, includes lengthy speeches by a liberal talk show host warning of the dangers these Christians pose to democracy. Within the film, his arguments provide a kind of ideological prophylaxis, a protection against the charm, sincerity and seriousness of purpose that the children manifest, a reminder that we should find them scary rather than appealing.
And maybe we should. But the real achievement of “Jesus Camp” is to make them, well, real. It may be strange that reminders of this kind — that Iraqis are real; that the violation of children is real; that global warming is real — should seem so necessary. But then again, documentary film has always held out the promise of being stranger than fiction.
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company- Long Iraq Tours Can Make Home a Trying Front
Long Iraq Tours Can Make Home a Trying Front
In the nearly two years Cpl. John Callahan of the Army was away from home, his wife, he said, had two extramarital affairs. She failed to pay his credit card bills. And their two children were sent to live with her parents as their home life deteriorated.
Then, in November, his machine gun malfunctioned during a firefight, wounding him in the groin and ravaging his left leg. When his wife reached him by phone after an operation in Germany, Corporal Callahan could barely hear her. Her boyfriend was shouting too loudly in the background.
“Haven’t you told him it’s over?” Corporal Callahan, 42, recalled the man saying. “That you aren’t wearing his wedding ring anymore?”
For Corporal Callahan, who is recuperating at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, and so many other soldiers and family members, the repercussions, chaos and loneliness of wartime deployments are one of the toughest, least discussed byproducts of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers and loved ones have endured long, sometimes repeated separations that test the fragility of their relationships in unforeseen ways.
The situation is likely to grow worse as the military increases the number of troops in Iraq in coming months. The Pentagon announced Wednesday that it was planning to send more than 14,000 National Guard troops back to Iraq next year, causing widespread concern among reservists. Nearly a third of the troops who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan have done more than one tour of duty.
Most families and soldiers cope, sometimes heroically. But these separations have also left a trail of badly strained or broken unions, many severed by adultery or sexual addictions; burdened spouses, some of whom are reaching for antidepressants; financial turmoil brought on by rising debts, lost wages and overspending; emotionally bruised children whose grades sometimes plummet; and anxious parents who at times turn on each other.
Hardest hit are the reservists and their families, who never bargained on long absences, sometimes as long as 18 months, and who lack the support network of full-fledged members of the military.
“Since my husband has been gone, I have potty-trained two kids, my oldest started preschool, a kid learned to walk and talk, plus the baby is not sleeping that well,” said Lori Jorgenson, 30, whose husband, a captain in the Minnesota National Guard, has been deployed since November 2005 and recently had his tour extended another four months. “I am very burnt out.”
In the next couple of months, Ms. Jorgenson, who has three young children, has to get a loan, buy a house and move out of their apartment.
Even many active-duty military families, used to the difficulties of deployments, are reeling as soldiers are being sent again and again to war zones, with only the smallest pause in between. The unrelenting fear of death or injury, mental health problems, the lack of recuperative downtime between deployments and the changes that await when a soldier comes home hover over every household.
And unlike the Vietnam era, when the draft meant that many people were directly touched by the conflict, this period finds military families feeling a keen sense of isolation from the rest of society. Not many Americans have a direct connection to the war or the military. Only 1.4 million people, or less than 1 percent of the American population, serve in the active-duty military.
“Prior to 9/11, the deployments were not wartime related,” said Kristin Henderson, a military spouse whose husband served as a Navy chaplain in Iraq and Afghanistan and whose recent book “While They’re at War” explores the impact of today’s deployments. “There were separation issues, but there was no anticipatory grief and no fear and no medical overload.”
It is common for spouses to wind up on antidepressants, Ms. Henderson said, a situation made worse by the repeat deployments. The more deployments, the less time that families have to mend before the stress sets in again, she added.
Ms. Henderson recalled having a panic attack in church while her husband was away and crying in the shower most mornings so no one would see her. “The common misconception,” she said, “is that the more you do this, the better you get. That is not true.”
Some relationships grow stronger as distance and sacrifice help bring into sharp focus what is important. Before Robert Johnson’s deployments to Iraq with the North Carolina Army National Guard, he and his wife, Dawn, faced difficult decisions about how to care for their seven children, including four living at home. They decided their two severely disabled teenage twin sons would be best cared for elsewhere, one in a group home, the other with grandparents.
But Ms. Johnson, 41, who works full time at a pharmacy, said she felt there had been an upside to the ordeal. “Now I know,” she said, “that I can pretty much survive anything.”
Other marriages, especially young marriages rushed by deployment, may have been destined to fail from the start.
Seeking Help
As the war stretches into its fourth year, more troops and their families are reaching out for help, turning to family therapists and counselors. The Army and the Marines, partly in response to a jump in the number of divorces and a rise in domestic violence reports, have created programs to help couples cope, including seminars and family weekend retreats. The Army has also improved the family readiness groups that often serve as a lifeline for spouses.
Divorces, which had hovered in the 2 percent to 3 percent range for the Army since 2000, spiked in 2004 to 6 percent among officers and 3.6 percent among enlisted personnel. The rate for officers dropped to 2.1 percent in 2006, but the rate for enlisted personnel has stayed level, at 3.6 percent.
Married women are having the hardest time. The divorce rate for women in the Army in 2006 was 7.9 percent, the highest since 2000, compared with 2.6 percent for men.
Demand for counseling has grown so quickly among military families and returning soldiers that the military has begun contracting out more services to private therapists. Reservists must rely largely on networks of volunteers.
“For a while a lot of soldiers coming back were not being seen because there was such an overload of patients and so few mental health providers on base,” said Carl Settles, a psychologist and retired Army colonel who runs a practice near Fort Hood, Tex.
The military recently called him to ask how many of several hundred patients he could take on, Dr. Settles said.
Corporal Callahan, who is on the brink of divorce, said his marriage, his second, had been troubled before his deployment but became unsalvageable once he shipped out. His deployment also forced him to transfer guardianship of his children temporarily to their grandparents because of problems at home, he said.
His injury, which has left him unable to walk, has now complicated his chances of remaining in the Army. “I felt like I had hit bottom,” he said. “I had so much bitterness in me. I have been so angry. So many nights I have cried and tried to figure out what I can do and what I can’t do.”
Capt. Lance Oliver, Corporal Callahan’s commander in Iraq, said he kept close track of Corporal Callahan’s personal situation, and while disintegrating marriages are not uncommon, Captain Oliver said, Corporal Callahan’s was the most dramatic.
“I can’t think of one that is more heartwrenching,” he said.
Spouses’ Secrets
Extramarital affairs, hardly rare in other wars, are also a fixture now.
David Hernandez, who is in the Army and is based in Fort Hood, said his relationship with his wife of 10 years crumbled between his second and third deployments. She was frazzled and lonely, he said, with two children to care for; he came back moodier, quieter and more distant. Now his wife is living with another man, Mr. Hernandez said in e-mail messages from Iraq. He, in turn, has started a relationship with a female soldier, despite his hope for reconciliation.
“It was very stressful for her doing everything and worrying about me,” he said, adding, “I spent so much time away; it drove us apart to seek other relationships.”
“Now I’m back out here,” he said. “I feel helpless. What can I do? It makes it a little easier being with someone out here. Temptation was the hardest, and I gave in.”
Dr. Settles sees about 40 soldiers a week in private practice and says a majority of soldiers cope well. But those with problems feel them deeply.
“Infidelity and financial issues are major issues,” Dr. Settles said, adding that there are abundant cases of wives who clear out their husband’s bank accounts or soldiers who come home and go binge shopping. “Even a good mule needs a few oats once in a while,” he said. ” Some of these guys, they are kind of at their limit.”
Some therapists say they are bracing for this year’s divorces. Mary Coe, a marriage and family therapist working near Fort Campbell, an Army base on the border of Kentucky and Tennessee, said she was seeing “many, many divorces” right now. The 101st Airborne Division recently returned from its second deployment with an astonishing level of rage, she said. “Now we are seeing 15- to 20-year marriages not making it, and these are families that survived 20 years of deployments,” Dr. Coe said.
Lei Steivers, whose husband is a senior noncommissioned officer at Fort Campbell, has been a military wife for 25 years. But it took her husband’s second yearlong deployment to Iraq to cripple their marriage. They are now in counseling. A family leader on the base, Ms. Steivers, 46, also has two sons in the military. She said a number of men she knows came home last year for rest and relaxation and demanded a divorce.
Many spouses, she said, blame the presence of women alongside combat units. The blame may be misplaced, but the anxiety is not.
“They are side-by-side fixing an engine, the girls live upstairs, the guys live downstairs,” Ms. Steivers said. “We are just more and more in awe, saying, What is going on?”
Some wives have uncovered their husband’s pornographic pictures on Web sites like MySpace, she said, adding, “I’ve seen them because the wives show them to me.”
Dr. Coe said she had been surprised by the number of soldiers who had come home and sought counseling for sexual addictions fueled by DVD’s and Internet pornography.
While pornography is blocked by the United States military in Iraq, service members gain access to it with laptops through their own Internet service providers, Corporal Callahan said.
At the same time, spouses back home sometimes hook up with men on the Internet. When the relationship surfaces, it sometimes leads to violence, said Robert Weiss, who co-wrote “Untangling the Web,” a book about Internet pornography, and who has been hired as a consultant by military family groups looking for guidance.
Family Trumps All Else
For some spouses, concerns about infidelity take a back seat to the demands of a household. Lillian Connolly’s husband of 21 years, a staff sergeant in the Army Reserve in Massachusetts who now works at a Lowe’s Home Improvement, was sent to Iraq twice. The first deployment, in 2003, lasted 11 months. The second one, for which he volunteered, was much harder on the family. Even before his father’s second deployment, the couple’s 12-year-old started having tantrums. When his father left their home in 2005, the boy started to misbehave at school, Ms. Connolly said. He and his sister were the only children with a deployed parent, and the school, she said, was mostly unsympathetic. If anything, Ms. Connolly said, she got the blame.
“He really worried about his dad every day,” Ms. Connolly said of her son. “They couldn’t understand he had an anger problem because his dad was gone.
“That was more stressful and harder to deal with than my husband being gone.”
Mary Keller, the executive director of the Military Child Education Coalition, a private nonprofit group that helps children and schools cope, said two million children had experienced deployments. Worst hit are those in schools that are isolated from military culture.
“It is highly likely that the teacher doesn’t have a personal experience with the military,” Dr. Keller said.
At home, spouses say, they try to keep their young children connected to their deployed parents. Ms. Jorgenson lets her three children pull Skittles out of a bowl to mark the passage of time. She buys them surprise gifts from their father, like boxes of Fruity Pebbles or camouflage sheets. Meanwhile, she thinks, “Will I ever get through bath time and get them to bed without screaming and losing my patience?”
Parents of young soldiers often appear the most tormented, counselors say, especially if opposed to the enlistment. There are also few resources for them.
“Mothers are in worse shape than wives,” said Jaine Darwin, a psychoanalyst and co-director of Strategic Outreach to Families of All Reservists, a volunteer group that offers counseling to military families in many states. “Mom is not allowed to cry. And that is certainly a problem.”
Esther Gallagher, 50, who works in a counseling office at a high school in Goodrich, Minn., has two sons in Iraq. She worries about both but frets most about her youngest, Justin, 22, a gunner who has seen a lot of violence in Falluja. He joined the Minnesota Army National Guard and has spent most of the past three years on deployment; the last tour was recently extended, which angered his mother and disheartened the soldiers in his unit.
When Sergeant Gallagher came home for two weeks last year, he walked out of the room any time anyone talked about Iraq.
“Every day, they are in harm’s way,” Ms. Gallagher said, her voice quavering. “I mean, that’s your baby — to have him out there in harm’s way, and not knowing. Your life has been to protect these kids.”
Fred R. Conrad/The New York TimesThe 42-member Pizza Lunch Committee of the Collins Elementary School PTA in Livingston, N.J., uses a professional business plan.
Richard Perry/The New York TimesThe parent-teacher organization convenes in Wyckoff, N.J.
PTAs Go Way Beyond Cookies
LIVINGSTON, N.J. — After years of losing money, the PTA at Collins Elementary School here decided last fall to operate its Friday pizza lunch service more like a business.
The Pizza Moms now require students to preorder the $1 slices; they collect the money in advance and track the sales on spreadsheets — turning a chronic deficit into a profit of $100 a week.
The new pizza process was carried out by the 42-member Pizza Lunch Committee, which is itself overseen by seven co-chairwomen. It is the largest and most popular of the school’s 55 PTA committees, which are charged with everything from running kindergarten orientation to landscaping the school garden.
“All of us had a lot of college, but there’s no training for this,” said Cindy Charney, a stay-at-home mother and veteran of the pizza committee. “If you don’t get them the pizza at the right time, they cry.”
The transformation of Livingston’s pizza lunch reflects how parent groups across the country, especially in affluent suburbs, are undergoing a kind of corporate makeover, combining members’ business savvy, technological prowess and negotiating skills to professionalize operations.
With many members who stepped out of high-profile careers to become stay-at-home parents, traditional parent-teacher associations (and the similar parent-teacher organizations, or PTOs) have evolved into sophisticated multitiered organizations bearing little resemblance to the mom-and-pop groups that ran bake sales a generation ago.
Last month, the Scarsdale Middle School PTA in Westchester County began posting podcasts of meetings on the Internet as a way to reach more parents, while the PTO at Squadron Line Elementary School in Simsbury, Conn., now has its own reserved parking space at the school. (To raise money for the school playground, parents bid each month for the right to use it.)
And in the Washington suburbs, the Arlington Traditional School PTA developed training manuals with past meeting minutes, treasurer reports, and program evaluations for its six vice presidents last year.
But as these corporatized PTAs have grown into powerful forces at many public schools, they have alienated some parents who say they have become self-important and make too many demands on members. There have also been conflicts with teachers, principals and local elected officials who chafe at being told how to run their schools by some parents with their own agendas and little experience in education.
“It can be a fine line between parental involvement and overinvolvement,” said Joel R. Reidenberg, a school board member in Millburn, N.J., who called the new breed of parent groups both a “great asset” and a “tough challenge” for a school system. “Right now in the suburban schools, our society is grappling with the right balance,” he said.
While few school officials were willing to speak publicly about their specific conflicts with parent groups for fear of antagonizing them, many said parents routinely go over their heads to the superintendent or school board as matter-of-factly as if they were complaining to a restaurant manager about bad service. Other principals said that some PTA parents request special treatment for their children, like assigning them to a popular teacher or excusing them from gym.
Assemblyman Richard L. Brodsky, a Democrat from Westchester County, said that he hears from parents on issues varying from zoning disputes to state funding, and that many are not used to being told no. “Some of these parents who are temporarily retired from professional life have come from positions of authority and are very much used to giving orders,” he said. “In some cases, it’s become a problem.”
In suburbs like Livingston, the ranks of parent groups now include lawyers, bankers, marketing executives and other professionals who tote laptops and briefcases to monthly school meetings — where refreshments are catered rather than homemade. They have raised tens of thousands of dollars for extras like new playgrounds and writing workshops amid budget cutbacks, and have taken over administrative functions that principals no longer have the time or inclination to do, like screening acts for school assemblies or signing contracts with instructors for after-school programs.
High-powered PTA parents in Millburn organized an e-mail and letter-writing campaign last fall calling on state legislators to allow more local flexibility in school budgets and administrative services. And this month, PTA leaders for the Scarsdale schools met with their teachers’ union to discuss, among other things, a proposal that no homework be assigned during vacations.
“It was like a fashion show when my mother went to PTO meetings in the ’80s,” said Gina Convery, a mother of three in Wyckoff, N.J., who has been required to attend PTO meetings herself since she became a class mother last year. “It’s totally different now. These parents really have a goal in mind.”
From classroom teaching to building renovations, many school administrators have made changes in recent years largely at the urging of parents. For example, Briarcliff Middle School in Westchester updated its report cards in 2005 after parents complained at a PTA-sponsored coffee that they were hard to read. Afterward, the PTA sent out an electronic survey to find out if parents approved of the changes. (They did.)
Long Branch Elementary School in Arlington, Va., extended its recess period to 30 minutes from 20 in September under pressure from PTA parents who felt their children were not getting enough exercise. Felicia Russo, the principal, said she was skeptical about the change — she had to refigure the master schedule to accommodate it — but agreed to try.
Because if she had not, “there would have been huge resistance,” Ms. Russo explained. “I think they expect to be heard.”
Rosalind Wiseman, an educator who wrote about PTAs in her book “Queen Bee Moms & Kingpin Dads,” said she hears all the time from principals who say they have been bullied into doing something by their parent groups. For example, a high school principal in Virginia recently confided to Ms. Wiseman that he had had to replace a perfectly acceptable food service in the school cafeteria because the PTA was unhappy with the presentation on the serving line.
“If a principal has gone through the year without having to negotiate the politics of the PTA, then it’s been a good year,” Ms. Wiseman said.
Still, Gail Connelly, chief operating officer of the National Association of Elementary School Principals, said her members rely more than ever on parent groups. “Many principals may view it as a mixed blessing,” she said. “But the reality is they are willing to assume the added pressure because the PTA provides a wonderful forum for parent-principal partnerships to flourish — and that partnership brings tremendous resources to support the goals of the school community.”
As PTAs and PTOs have become more high-powered, so have their internal politics. In some school districts, parents were embarrassed to admit that they had expended far more energy and time lobbying for good committees, jockeying for leadership posts and otherwise trying to get ahead in their PTAs and PTOs than they ever did in their paid jobs. Many complained that parent groups tended to be dominated by cliques, and, just as in the school hallways, those not in the popular cliques were shut out from coveted assignments.
“Some parents — particularly those who’ve come from the work world —see this as a useful way to get in with the teachers,” said a mother in Simsbury, Conn., who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of backlash at her children’s schools.
At the Collins School here in Livingston — with 55 PTA committees to choose from — parents squabble over who gets to serve the pizza, a sought-after task that provides a chance to see their children while socializing with teachers and the principal. The Pizza Lunch Committee assigns six people each week on a rotating schedule, but some parents complain that those in favor get more turns.
As on the playground, parents do not always play nicely. In Wyckoff, some families boycotted a PTO-sponsored Teen Canteen last fall, holding alternative house parties on the same night to protest what some viewed as too many rules. Susan Geering, a former Manhattan investment banker who wears a business suit to the PTO meetings where she presides, responded by urging parents to bring their objections directly to her next time.
“I think you have people who are going to question and test and push,” said Mrs. Geering, a stay-at-homemother of two who took the PTO gavel last year. “You have a group of very demanding individuals, and I think it’s a balance to keep that in check.”
At James E. Lanigan Elementary School in Fulton, N.Y., north of Syracuse, some families have complained of being bombarded with too much news about PTO activities. Many still laugh about an elaborate disco-themed dance in which the PTO spent $90 on silver-fringe curtains for the cafeteria that fell apart when the students grabbed at them.
Carol Ireland, the PTO president, admitted that the curtains, which took days to clean up, were “the biggest mistake I ever made.” But, she said, the PTO has more than tripled its membership in the past five years, as it incorporated as PALS (for Parents at Lanigan School) and created an official logo — a stick-figure family — for correspondence. “The bottom line is parent groups are getting more and more responsibility,” she said. “They have to raise more money and get involved in politics, and it’s really a business.”
In Livingston, the PTA at the Collins School sends out a fat packet about its 55 committees to all new kindergarten families. Some have questioned why a school with 426 students needs so many committees; as one mother pointed out, the House of Representatives runs an entire nation with fewer than half that number (then again, there are all those subcommittees).
With an annual budget of $45,000 raised mainly through an auction every spring and gift-wrapping sales, the Collins PTA in Livingston routinely books performers for school assemblies, is installing a $6,000 rock-climbing wall in the gym, and recently gave each teacher $200 for supplies for this school year.
“If we just packed up and went home,” said the president, Susan Ochs-Scher, a stay-at-home mother who previously sold instructional textbooks at Scholastic, “it would be a shock to the school and the parents.”
- You can make money in the new economy
10 New Ways to Make Money Online
So you want to ditch your corporate cubicle and join the ranks of web workers? But you have a mortgage, maybe a dependent or two, and a taste for Venti Mochas from Starbucks? You can make money in the new economy, though it might not be as easy or cushy as keeping your old economy job.I’m not talking about advertising or affiliate marketing or selling your junk on eBay. Those are so last millennium! I’m talking about the new new economy.
1. Offer your professional expertise in an online marketplace.These days, you can do more than just sell your old books via Amazon and your old Coach handbags via eBay—now you can sell your professional capabilities in a marketplace. No longer are you limited to looking for a permanent or contract job on Web 1.0 style job sites like Monster or CareerBuilder. The new breed of freelancing and project-oriented sites let companies needing help describe their projects. Then freelancers and small businesses offer bids or ideas or proposals from which those buyers can choose.
Elance covers everything from programming and writing to consulting and design, while RentACoder focuses on software, natch. If you’re a graphic designer, check out options like Design Outpost or LogoWorks–you don’t have to find the customers, they’ll come to you. Wannabe industry analysts might sign up for TechDirt’s Insight Community, a marketplace for ideas about technology marketing.
2. Sell photos on stock photography sites. If people regularly oooo and aaaaah over your Flickr pics, maybe you’re destined for photographic greatness or maybe just for a few extra dollars. It’s easier than ever to get your photos out in front of the public, which of course means a tremendous amount of competition, but also means it might be an convenient way for you to build up a secondary income stream. Where can you upload and market your photos? Try Fotolia, Dreamstime, Shutterstock, and Big Stock Photo.
3. Blog for pay. Despite the explosion of blogs, it’s hard to find good writers who can turn around a solidly-written post on an interesting topic quickly. GigaOM is always looking for bloggers with great content ideas and solid writing skills. How do you get noticed? Comment and link to blogging network sites. Write blog posts that are polished and not overly personal (although showing some personality is a plus).
4. Or start your own blog network. If you like the business side of things–selling advertising, hiring and managing employees, attracting investors–and have the stomach to go up against the likes of Weblogs, Inc., GigaOmniMedia, b5media, maybe you should make an entire business out of blogs. Don’t make the mistake of thinking you’ll get a lot of time to write yourself though.
5. Provide service and support for open source software. Just because the software is free doesn’t mean you can’t make money on it–just ask Red Hat, a well-known distributor of Linux that sports a market cap of more than four billion dollars. As a solo web worker, you might not want to jump in and compete with big companies offering Linux support, but how about offering support for web content management systems like WordPress or Drupal? After getting comfortable with your own installation, you can pretty easily jump into helping other people set them up and configure them.
6. Online life coaching. Who has time to go meet a personal coach at an office? And don’t the new generation of web workers need to be met by their coaches in the same way that they work: via email, IM, and VoIP? You could, of course, go through some life coaching certification program, but on the web, reputation is more important than credentials. I bet Tony Robbins isn’t certified as a life coach–and no one can argue with his success. For an example of someone building up their profile and business online as a coach, check out Pamela Slim of Ganas Consulting and the Escape from Cubicle Nation blog.
7. Virtually assist other web workers. Freelancers and small businesses desperately need help running their businesses, but they’re not about to hire a secretary to come sit in the family room and answer phone calls. As a virtual assistant, you might do anything from making travel reservations to handling expense reimbursements to paying bills to arranging for a dog sitter. And you do it all from your own home office, interacting with your clients online and by phone. You can make $20 and up an hour doing this sort of work, depending on your expertise.
8. Build services atop Amazon Web Services. Elastic computing on AWS is so cool… and so incredibly primitive right now. Did you know that you can’t even count on your virtual hard drive on EC2 to store your data permanently? That’s why people are making money right now by offering services on top of AWS. Make it easier for people to use Amazon’s scalability web infrastructure like Enomaly has with elasticlive, a scalable web hosting platform built on AWS.
9. Write reviews for pay or perks. If you blog for any length of time on a particular topic–parenting, mobile phones, or PCs, for example–you will likely be approached to do book or product reviews. You can get free stuff this way, but are you selling your soul? Is there any such thing as a free laptop? These are decisions you’ll have to make for yourself, because no one agrees upon what ethical rules apply to bloggers. Even less do people agree on services like PayPerPost that pay you to write reviews on your blog. Check out disclosure rules closely and see whether such a gig would meet your own personal standards or not.
10. Become a virtual gold farmer. A half million Chinese now earn income by acquiring and selling World of Warcraft gold to gamers in other countries. If you’re not a young person living in China, this probably isn’t a viable option for you. But what’s intriguing about it is the opportunity to make real money working in a virtual economy. People are making real-world money in Second Life too.
What other new ways do you know of to make money online?
Today’s PapersA Helping Hand
By Daniel Politi
Posted Friday, Feb. 23, 2007, at 5:43 AM E.T.The New York Times leads with word from officials that U.S. involvement in the Ethiopian invasion into Somalia was greater than had been previously reported. In addition to helping out with training and intelligence, the U.S. military used an airstrip in Ethiopia to carry out airstrikes against Islamic militants. Officials are apparently releasing details because they see it as a “relative success story.” The Los Angeles Times and Washington Post lead, and the Wall Street Journal tops its world-wide newsbox, with yesterday’s release of the latest International Atomic Energy Agency report that says Iran continues to defy the United Nations and has stepped up its program to enrich uranium. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice warned Iran it will face more sanctions but emphasized that talks can begin whenever Iran agrees to suspend nuclear activities.
USA Today leads with the new government ratings that measure miles per gallon and show that gasoline-electric hybrid cars use more gasoline than initially thought. On a new Web site, consumers can compare how different cars fare with the new ratings, and hybrids have seen a decrease in as much as 20 percent in their MPG figures. The new ratings are part of an effort to make the number more realistic to modern driving conditions.
Although the attacks in Somalia did apparently garner some victories in killing or capturing some leaders, the officials emphasized these don’t include two al-Qaida leaders wanted for their role in the 1998 embassy bombings. The United States had apparently been training Ethiopian troops in counterterrorism operations for years and provided the country with a large amount of battlefield intelligence. After the quick success of Ethiopian troops, more special operations forces were sent to the region, and besides carrying out airstrikes (and the already known strikes using gunships) they also worked with the Kenyan military to capture militants trying to cross the border.
If Iran’s large underground facility is completed, it could produce enough highly enriched uranium to produce about one nuclear weapon within a year. Experts doubt it is close to doing that but admit the country has progressed toward its goal. Iran keeps insisting the facility is for nuclear energy and not weapons.
The Post notes that the administration’s talk about Iran’s involvement in Iraq has raised concerns among several key countries that are now trying to get Iran to the negotiating table even if all the conditions aren’t met. “The goal is not to have a resolution or to impose sanctions … the goal is to accomplish a political outcome of this problem,” said Russia’s U.N. ambassador. The NYT points out the United States will also try to persuade banks to cut off ties to Iran.
The WP fronts word that Democratic leaders in the Senate will release a plan next week to repeal the 2002 resolution that authorized the war in Iraq to replace it with one that sets limits and begins to get troops out of the war zone. Some Democrats in the House, led by Rep. John Murtha, wanted to link further funding of the war effort to troop readiness but they have dropped the efforts after bipartisan criticism. Although most Democrats agree they want to go beyond nonbinding resolutions (“I’ve had enough of ‘nonbinding,’ ” said Sen. John Kerry) there is still disagreement on how exactly to proceed.
Everyone reports another Iraqi woman came forward and said security forces raped her. A police official said that a military officer and three soldiers admitted to raping the Sunni woman and recording it with a cell-phone camera. The Post reports that Iraqi President Jalal Talabani took a not-so-indirect swipe at Prime Minister Maliki al-Nouri by saying that the courts are “the only legitimate place to examine” allegations of rape.
The WSJ fronts a look at the “latest remarkable political reincarnation” of former U.S. darling Ahmad Chalabi. He was appointed to a new post to help maintain support for the security crackdown. Chalabi will be helping residents get reimbursement for any damage caused by the crackdown. The position is limited, and the paper makes clear that “it is to early to tell how much power” he’ll have but Chalabi is, of course, already talking about getting involved in other areas.
The Post and the NYT both stuff good dispatches from Iraq that illustrate the seemingly never-ending divide between Iraqi and American soldiers. The NYT takes a look at the street patrols in Baghdad that are part of the new security plan and says nothing much has changed. U.S. troops are still taking the lead and highly outnumber their Iraqi counterparts, who often make their sectarian affiliations clear and sometimes even warn residents of the approaching Americans. The Post spends some time in a police station in Baqubah that has both Iraqis and Americans. Again, it’s the Americans that have to take the lead, and there is not much communication with the Iraqis, who are relegated to a different part of the station and have fewer rations and inferior equipment.
The NYT fronts a look at the effect the long deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan are having on soldiers’ families and loved ones, which it says is “one of the toughest, least discussed byproducts of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.” In a similar vein, the LAT fronts a look at the story of one woman whose husband lost an arm and a leg in Iraq to illustrate the ordeal the spouses of amputees often go through.
Meanwhile, the Post reports that the Iraqi diplomatic mission in Washington is spending tons of money and its embassy is undergoing major renovations. The Iraqi government recently purchased a $5.8 million mansion in Washington that has more than 7,000 square feet of space. And, yes, it does have a Jacuzzi.
Daniel Politi writes “Today’s Papers” for Slate. He can be reached at todayspapers@slate.com.
