Posts Tagged ‘George Bush’

Under suspicion in 9/11 school

November 1st, 2008

Sarasota, Florida

“We are what is called a school in need of improvement”, says Ms Marya Fairchild assistant principal of Emma E Booker Elementary in Sarasota, Florida, scene of a once famous video featuring George W. Bush.

This is where, on September 11, 2001, the president got the news that commercial planes had been flown into the Twin Towers. He was, as some people might recall, listening to second graders reading ‘My pet goat’ at the time. (There is controversy over whether he had his own copy of the book upside down, but let’s not digress.)

In the minutes before he heard the attacks had taken place, President Bush, heard the words “get ready” repeated over a dozen times. But it wasn’t Dick Cheney speaking into his earpiece it was a, teacher orchestrating a performance as the President promoted his recent ‘No Child Left Behind’ (NCLB) legislation.

Seven years on, it turns out that not just one child, the whole school has been ‘left behind’.

Booker Elementary remains a ‘C’ school, whereas every other school in the county is rated A. “Think of it like a trajectory”, says Fairchild, “we’re not on the path to meet requirements.”

How can it? It is a ‘neighbourhood’ school in the town’s roughest neigbourhood. “If you were to pull out a demographic report by this zip code, my guess is that this area would have the highest crime rate in Sarasota”, says Fairchild.

The school has 537 kids, 94% of them are from the (mostly black) minorities and 91% live below the poverty line. To get to it, you pass places that sell soulfood on the outside and drugs on the inside. You cross shacks and shanties and bums and cats. And, of course, a railway line. This is where most of Emma Booker kids live.

Here, you can find every reason why the Republicans trail in Florida. People are wary of four more years of the same. A lot of them blame the war for everything. For instance, couldn’t the poorly funded ‘no child left behind’ program benefit greatly from a fraction of the $10 billion monthly war bill?

Ms Fairchild taught history at the Booker middle school, to which a number of kids from the elementary school end up going, till 2005. I ask her whether she taught any of the kids who were there in the classroom when President Bush visited on September 11, 2001.

She says she doesn’t recall this having come up with any of her students. And then, quite suddenly, she doesn’t want to take any more questions. The interview is over. She tells me to get in touch with the school board for more information.

I step outside onto the parking lot and am in the middle of a call to Gary Leatherman at the board’s communications desk, when a police car pulls up next to me. It has been less than five minutes since I left the school building.

Deputy Perrin, from the Sheriff’s department asks me how I am doing–and what I am doing. He then tells me the reason why he asks: “Someone called saying a guy was roaming around the campus–with a bag.”

This is true. I tell him I have just been inside and spoken to the assistant principal. He says he’d better go and check.

A few minutes later, he finds me again at the head of the road. As he pulls up, another cop car arrives. Deputy Scott has been sent over as well. Perrin asks for my passport and is diligently entering its details onto the computer in his car. He tells Scott that I was asking about 911.

For a brief moment I don’t hear that right, I am about to say that I didn’t call 911 (the emergency number) when I realise that someone from the school did. Fantastic.

Scott, to me: “You don’t have any weapons or anything, do you?”

I laugh, somewhat nervously, and say: “Certainly not.”

Scott to Perrin: “You patted him down yet?”

As Perrin keeps working with my passport, Scott starts another round of questioning. Knowing that anything I might say may be held against me, I tell him the whole truth and nothing but the truth. I was there because George W. Bush was in one of the classrooms on the campus on September 11 2001, I say.

Scott’s badge said he’d served the department since 1994. He goes: “Oh, I was there that day. Spent anxious hours, traffic blocked all over the city. The president could have been a target. We had to get him out of here.”

I was thinking, well, the President was probably safest around here. The guys who executed 9/11 had been based closeby a few months ago, learning how to fly in flight schools in nearby Venice, but they’d reportedly left by August. On 9/11, President Bush was safer at Booker Elementary than he would have been at the White House, which was a definite target.

Deputy Perrin finally completed the data entry and said that his colleague required a photograph of me. I was, of course, the picture of cooperation. So right below the sign that said Booker Elementary, I posed for the snap.

I called a cab after the shoot was over and my passport was safely in my bag. Deputy Scott then asked me where I was headed next. I told him that I was bound for Orlando, then on to Alexadndria, Virginia, on to Toledo Ohio, to Chicago, Illinois, to Madison Wisconsin to parts of North Dakota…

“Man”, he said, “I wish I could travel like that. But I’m stuck here.” He is. On a patch across the street, till the time my cab arrives. Protecting the kids at Booker Elementary.

And I, with depressing visions of now being on a suspects’ database which says ‘must strip-search’ at every airport, head back to the familial warmth of the Sunshine Motel.

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Ron The Plumber …

October 31st, 2008

Sarasota, Florida

One of the most discussed characters in this Presidential election is a man called Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher–Joe the plumber of Toledo, Ohio which is a swing state. The gentleman who was terrified of Barack Obama’s ’spreading-the-wealth-around tax plan’. And who has became the centrepiece of the McCain campaign ever since the Republican senator repeatedly mentioned him in the debate.

Turns out Joe is actually a little too working class to be affected by the Obama plan. It taxes individuals and businesses with earnings of over $250,000. Joe makes $40,000 annually (but nevertheless aspires to buy a business worth several times his salary). The Obama plan woke him from his American dream rather rudely.

Ron the plumber, of Sarasota, Florida, which is also a swing state, has a very good handle on reality however. Sure, he dreams too: about steady work for himself and his college degree-holding wife. And for the employment to be a little less back-breaking than it is now at the hospital remodelling site he’s at.

He gets on all fours to show me what he does all day. Bunching his shoulders , twisting his neck at acute angles in imaginary closed spaces to simulate how he cuts, welds and rivets pipes that run unseen under neat buildings, keeping them functioning.

He’s on his knees ten hours a day, and they hurt. His clothes are covered with muck. He doesn’t get paid that much–most likely even less than Joe of Toledo.

But it wasn’t always like that. So what happened?

“What happened was the war. George Bush done this. Four years ago ,there was so much work here in Sarasota, work everywhere. Construction, hotels… and then the war started. And all the money had to go there…

“People that are rich, they can survive, but ordinary folks, they can’t. I used to have money in the bank and stuff. Now I’m living week to week.” The emphasis on the last phrase is as heavy as the burden of an unaffordable mortgage payment.

Fortunately, Ron doesn’t own a house he needs to pay for. He lives in a motel, where he makes the rent by doing odd plumbing and maintenance work for the property. If he earned $250,000 a year, he’d be thrilled to pay the extra three per cent.

“My wife’s trying to find a job. She got two college degrees. She can’t find no work. I’m grateful for what I got and I’m lucky… My trade, everybody needs that.” Then he chuckles and says: “When you get up in the morning what do you do? You know, so everybody needs that.”

As essential as it is, plumbing is still affected by constipation–in credit flows. Ron says so: “No new houses being built. So I’m lucky that I got a job with a company at the hospital.”

But he keeps blaming the war for the blighted times. “Osama Bin Laden is laughing at us from his cave or whatever and we’re spending billions in Iraq. It’s been seven years, he’s laughing.”

9/11 is quite close to the bone for people in Sarasota. It was in flight schools in Venice, less than an hour away from here that Mohammad Atta and other hijackers learned to fly aircraft.

Venice is a beautifully designed retirement town built in the 1920s, with wide roads and blue wave beaches, very attractive looking funeral homes, a small airport and several flying schools. But house prices in the area have been very badly hit: they are down an an average by about 40% from their 2007 levels.

Nothing new is being built, so Ron’s got fewer job options. You pass neat homes everywhere, with yard signs that say might say ‘McCain’, ‘Obama’ or ‘For Sale’.

Going by the numbers, if this guy ‘For Sale’ was in the race, he would defintely win–along with his running mate, ‘For Rent’.

Florida facts:

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