Charlie Wilson’s War No More
August 25th, 2008 at 2:48 pm
After a long morning of credential-gathering and logistical planning (aka wandering around downtown Denver looking for a place to park that cost anything less than the car), it was an air-conditioned relief to step into Denver’s Hard Rock Cafe and catch the tail end of a speech by former Texas Congressman Charlie Wilson. Good Time Charlie is best known for inspiring the Tom Hanks bomb Charlie Wilson’s War, about the Trinity native’s semi-covert appropriation of hundreds of millions of U.S. defense dollars to support anti-Soviet CIA operations in Afghanistan in the 1980s.
Wilson wielded his influence on this Monday morning brunch crowd to speak out against war, specifically the array of entanglements — Iran, Iraq, Georgia, etc. — promised by Republican presidential candidate John McCain, or, as he’s known around Denver this week, John McSame.
Wilson acknowledged the need to take the fight back to Afghanistan — to redirect military attention diverted to Iraq by the Bush administration — and so skirted the whiff of potential irony in his stance against further warmongering, but that’s not to say that the event was entirely irony-free. Not with those ceiling-hung big screens bannering the names of the event’s sponsors — military contractor Lockheed-Martin prominent among them.
August 26th, 2008 at 6:58 am
Parking all day for the convention is only $5 in the Denver Center for the Perfoming Arts, a discount from the normal $8.
I attended the Education and Retirement Security Roundtables, I’ve got tickets for Wednesday’s sessions on International Relations. Denver’s Mayor John Hickenlooper stopped by both sessions to modestly remind everyone that the Roundtables were his idea: “We wanted this to be a meaningful convention.” http://www.2008rmr.org/tickets.asp
There was no real diversity of thought at either session. It wasn’t really so much a discussion as it was a mass interview, live sound-bites in what was called a crescendo
format.
It was announced that since the convention was green there was no written agenda. Sound through out each session and annoying picture and names of each speaker rotated on large screen TVs.
U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, NBC News journalist Tom Brokaw, former U.S. Senator and Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, actor and director Ben Affleck and Google Foundation Executive Director Larry Brilliant are scheduled to participate.
Turnout at both sessions I attended was light, which surprised Mayor Hickenlooper, “We thought we were sold out,” he said at the afternoon Retirement Security session, “traffic must be really bad.”
The gist of the education session: what’s needed now is better testing (“it’s not wrong to teach to the test if you have the right test” said Colorado’s former governor Roy Romer, who has since been Superintendent of Schools in California, now heading Bill Gates “Stronger Schools”), better teachers using 21st century classrooms who are better compensated, with better principals and administrators. Someone from the Piton Foundation asked one of the few questions from the audience that was allowed: “These are the same things we’ve heard for the last 25 years, what’s really changed?”
If I could have asked a question it would have been, “Are we too focused on schools? Instead of stronger schools, don’t we need life-long, self-directed learners? How do we become a learning society, instead of a hedonistic society that rarely reads a book?”
The Retirement Security session message: “Save Social Security, reform pension plans to go back to defined benefit payments.” I asked, “Is the problem that we need to retire the concept of retirement? It’s a recent development, becoming popular in World War II when retirement plans were used as a way to get around wage freezes. From Ben Franklin to Art Linkletter, retirement has just not been the American way.” My question got a surprisingly positive respnse from the panel. “I never want to retire.” “Retirement kills.”
September 4th, 2008 at 8:03 am
Tyer are you nuts? Air conditioned relief? I was about to melt at that reception!
And, great job to you and the entire Observer team on the Denver coverage!