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A tale of two cities?

Several months ago, the Winston-Salem City Council put the brakes on a Wal-Mart in the Old Town section of the city. Concerns about the impact of the Wal-Mart Supercenter on other businesses, as well as neighboring communities, raised troubling questions.

Flash forward to the present. Greensboro says yes to Wal-Mart in the old Carolina Circle Mall, an area that desperately needs the development. Fair enough. As our editorial noted last year, east Greensboro is underserved by the retail community. (An ongoing comment thread on this blog wrestles with that nagging reality.)

Writes Michael Christopher in that thread that began (no kiddin') on the lack of diversity on NPR: "How about turning on ourselves? When was the last time any white liberal Greensboro resident ventured into East GSO and had a comfortable dinner with his wife and kids? Or, how many bloggers wax poetic about the multi-cultural diversity of the Wendover Wal-mart as opposed to the monochrome Elm Street Empire Room? Our nostalgia for a revitalized downtown may be as much a rejection of the reality of our diverse world as it is an affirmation of the architectural beauty of those buildings."

Michael makes a valid point.

Try to find decent places to eat or shop in east Greensboro. Try to find a movie theater.

But the idea to ante up $300,000 in incentives for a center that would house the Wal-Mart and other shops seems inappropriate and ill-considered.

Such incentives traditionally haven't covered lower-paying retail jobs. Wal-Mart is an especially odd choice given the fears that it not only pays meager wages but could stifle other retail growth.

This just doesn't feel right.

Greensboro City Council member Sandy Carmany on the proposed incentives for a new shopping complex in northeast Greensboro that would contain a Wal-Mart:

"Does the city really need to be paying incentives to attract this type of development and its lower salaries? The response our city attorney received from the Institute of Government when she consulted them about this proposal was, "Yes, it's legal, but why would you WANT to do it?" My sentiments exactly!"

Yes, there is a Thomas Friedman column on today's Second Opinion page. No, it does not mean the column will continue to appear. It's the last one we received from The New York Times before our subscription officially ended.

I hope this doesn't add to salt to the wounds of those who have protested the newspaper's decision to discontinue the Times News Service. But we thought you deserved some sort of clarification.

We're not the only newspaper in the hot seat because of a controversial content decision.

The Chicago Sun-Times has decided to trim its daily printed stock market report from nine pages to a two-page summary. Many readers are outraged.

The full tables still will be offered online.

"We are putting our resources to work where they will do the reader the most good," the Sun-Times' business editor, Dan Miller, said. "Sun times.com/markets offers readers a chance to track and research stocks that would be impossible in the published Sun-Times."

Miller also has said the Sun-Times could do much more with those nine pages to serve its readers through other news content.

The reader response, Miller later admitted in an NPR interview, has been blistering.

From comics to commentarty, newspapers have to change to survive. We do our best, but not all of our calls will be the right ones. Yet doing nothing in this challenging era for newspapers is not an option. And because the most loyal readers have such strong bonds with their newspapers, nearly any change, large or small, will be met with opposition.

Honestly, I still could be running letters today about the cancelation of the "Mark Trail" comic strip (not that I want to stir that up again).

You can see it from U.S. 29, clear as day. Acres and acres of gray emptiness.

Time was, legend has it, that there were actual human beings in Carolina Circle Mall -- living, breathing consumers who shopped there and ate meals there and even saw movies there.

Now all that's left is a big, cold space that seems to sap the life out of any good intention that ventures near.

Not that some haven't tried.

From a flea market to a police substation to court facilities to a GTCC branch to a postal encoding center to a place to walk and not get rained on, the defunct shopping center has seen its share of bright ideas and would-be saviors.

In 1999, the county considered locating social services offices, courtroom space and a branch of GTCC there. It was one of the most promising new uses for the building. The county needed more space; GTCC needed to expand.

But the commissioners balked at what in hindsight would have been a bargain. The motion failed, as it often does among this bunch, 6-5.

In 2001, an entrepreneur staged what he described as "an upscale flea market" at the mall.

That same year, Dr. Don Linder came along with the most grandiose vision yet, a sprawling sports and fitness complex that would span 100 acres and fill 1 million square feet of building space.

There would be a health club, an indoor swimming center and a gym. There also would be shops, offices, theaters and restaurants.
Linder plowed up part of the sprawling parking area and installed towering lights and soccer fields.

He had vision. He had money. And he had the numbers.

He regaled visitors with page after page of charts and demographics that showed why this part of town was a place to be. Growth and residential development were on the way, he said.

"He's a good businessman, got a level head," someone said back then. "If anyone can make it work, he can."

He couldn't.

Linder rolled up the soccer fields and folded his tent. Another one bit the dust.

My gums and lips have been numb since noon.

Had two fillings today.

Took two needles' worth of anesthesia to do the job.

Dentist says those nerve endings connected to the lower teeth can be tricky. There's only an 85 percent success rate of deadening all that needs deadening.

I'll take the extra needle any day --even if it feels as if the Goodyear Blimp is docked under my mustache.

A letter writer today laments the rudeness at Page High School's graduation this year. She is not alone.

NPR ran a thoughtful piece over the weekend on high school graduations and the continuing trends of grown people to hoot and holler at commencements like hooligans at a rasslin' match.

In one interview, a valedictorian from last year recounted how her commencement speech, near the end of the program, was drowned out by an impatient audience. One heckler yelled, "Get on with it!"

In the other interview, people were expelled at a ceremony by school officials who had perhaps overreacted to growing commencement misconduct.

One of them reportedly had clapped out of turn. He was asked to leave. Also expelled: a minister wearing his clerical collar who had come to the offending applauder's defense.

Yes, the administrators overdid it, the minister said in an interview. But you've also got to have reasonable rules of decorum.

Amen.

The Wal-Mart incentives request was withdrawn at Tuesday night's City Council meeting. Good.

The city may try other ways to help the project without cash incentives. While they're at it, the council also ought to strike retail incentives as an option altogether.

Even in an underserved area such as northeast Greensboro, they are bad public policy.

Honestly, folks, John Robinson and I were not separated at birth.

I sometimes wonder whether we were, because our jobs and responsibilities are often confused, if not our identities. I get his calls and he gets mine. Same with mail and e-mail. If I had a nickel for every time someone calls me John or asks me to send a news reporter somewhere, I probably could afford a full tank of gas.

Don't blame John for the paper's endorsement of candidates; he has no voice in them. Don't blame me for what the paper runs on the front page or the local front. I have no more control of that than tomorrow's weather.

I know John and I look a lot alike: We're both tall, middle-aged guys with mustaches. But I am not him and he is not me. As you can plainly see here, John is slightly, uh, taller.

Beyond that, we both work for the News & Record, but in different areas.

The paper's news and editorial departments are distinctly separate operations. The news department has nothing to do with the paper's editorial stances and the editorial department has nothing to do with news coverage decisions. As we say on our corporate Web site, "That's the way we want it and the way we like it."

Both John and I report to the News & Record's publisher, Robin Saul. John is in charge of the news department and directs news coverage. I am in charge of the opinion pages. Call John if you have a question or concern about news coverage. Call me if you have a question about editorials or op-ed columns.

This is not to say John and I work in separate worlds. We talk often and we share information.We coordinate efforts where it's appropriate to do so. For instance, the news and editorial departments planned a town hall meeting on school discipline last fall; editorial writers consult news writers about stories they're working on. We invite news reporters to editorial board meetings with news makers and vice versa.

While there is a wall between our departments, John and I like to think there are plenty of doors and windows.

John and I don't always agree (though we agree much more more often than not) but we genuninely like each other. We also know each other pretty well; we've been News & Record colleagues for more than 18 years. I respect John's news judgment and have found him reasonable and open-minded. I also appreciate the initiative he's led to make the News & Record more innovative and interactive.

So don't blame him for anything I write and don't blame me for news coverage decisions.

A footnote to all this: Another newsroom colleague of mine, Betsi Robinson (who used to be an editorial writer in another life), is married to man named John Robinson.

But not the same John Robinson with whom I'm frequently confused. Her John Robinson doesn't work at the paper.

Got all that? There'll be a quiz later.

This just in from Jesse Helms' upcoming memoir:

"We will never know how integration might have been achieved in neighborhoods across our land, because the opportunity was snatched away by outside agitators who had their own agendas to advance," according to the uncorrected proof. "We certainly do know the price paid by the stirring of hatred, the encouragement of violence, the suspicion and distrust."

If only we'd waited a few more decades.

Coincidence? Doug Clark reports that Louisville police officers have rated their chief, Robert White, formerly of Greensboro, in a survey remarkably similar to the one being used here to rate White's successor, David Wray.

David Wharton offers a thoughtful update (in words and pictures) on the rebirth of Morningside Homes as the Willow Oaks community.

Wharton is right. The makeover is stunning.

I recall a few years ago spending four days in a Morningside Homes apartment and being taken by the stark contrasts in the public housing community there -- which we called "the Old Projects" and the "The Grove" growing up in east Greensboro.

There were flower gardens and close-knit families. And gunshots and drug dealing. (I tossed and turned on my borrowed cot Saturday night as one gun blast erupted after another).The drug pushers at an old shopping center nearby would scatter like roaches when the police would drive by. Then they'd gather once more.

That seems so long ago and far away now.

The new community is government-assisted housing done right. It deserves much more credit than it's received as a local "urban renewal" success story.

My neighborhood is overrun with jackrabbits.

They scamper through yards and across streets. They park in yards and twitch their noses. They are pretty much unintimidated by all the human traffic, which they seem to tolerate as a necessary nuisance.

After all, they were here first.

People come and people go.

This just in from Jesse Helms' upcoming memoir:

"We will never know how integration might have been achieved in neighborhoods across our land, because the opportunity was snatched away by outside agitators who had their own agendas to advance. We certainly do know the price paid by the stirring of hatred, the encouragement of violence, the suspicion and distrust."

If only we'd just shut up and waited a few more decades.

It's as if Helms expected the civil rights movement to happen by osmosis, some grand, rapturous mass epiphany where goodness fills everyone's hearts and we all decide, suddenly, to clasp hands and get along.

If only as a child I'd sat a little longer in the blacks-only balcony of the old Carolina Theatre and bided my time until someone from below cheerily popped up one day and said, "Y'all come on down; it's OK now."

If only Rosa Parks would have just given up her seat on that bus.

If only the A&T Four hadn't caused all that fuss with the sit-ins.

Of course, Helms always could afford to be patient. He's never had to suffer the denial of his basic rights.

"I did not advocate segregation," Helms goes on to write in proofs of the book, "and I did not advocate aggravation. By that I mean that I thought it was wrong for people who did not know, and who did not care, about the relationships between neighbors and friends to force their ideas about how communities should work on the people who had built those communities in the first place. I believed right would prevail as people followed their own consciences."

That presupposes that Helms truly believed in desegregation as a laudable goal. He did not.

Just when you thought it was safe to return to morning TV, the "Today Show" began airing shark attack stories again last week.

Now Michael Jackson has been acquitted in One of the Most Overcovered Trials of All Time.

I won't go near that remote tomorrow morning.

A recent lunchtime walk took me to Southside, the most forward-thinking old idea in urban revitalization.

The residential/commercial community on the edge of downtown is thriving and growing with its mix of townhouses that combine shops with living spaces and the adjacent neighborhood of restored old homes.

But the most engaging feature I've seen is Tin Pan Alley, a narrow drive through a cluster of buildings that reveals a neighborhood within a neighborhood.

There are more homes, neverending porches, detached garages and even a basketball goal. Across Martin Luther King Drive there is more construction on the way. Southside and the Willow Oaks community are two sterling examples of how public-private redevelopment can and should work.

Mayor Keith Holliday has announced that he will run for a fourth term. That's no surprise.

A bigger surprise would be if anyone on the council gets decent competition from serious challengers.

Now that David Hoggard has said he won't seek an at-large seat, the fall election is looking less and less interesting.

Ben Holder does observe on his blog that District 1 Councilwoman Dianne Bellamy-Small may be vulnerable because she hasn't endeared herself to neighborhood groups. But who would step forward to oppose her in a district that's been saddled with weak leadership?

This council deserves decent competition at the polls. And it needs at least occasional infusions of new blood. The council also should be held accountable for recent missteps, including Project Homestead and the Generals fiasco.

But that'll hard to do if no one runs against them.

As another troubling saga of another missing woman plays out in national media, an equally troubling question about the coverage resurfaces:

How are these stories chosen?

When do they become national news?

When will a missing black woman command the same type of day-to-day attention?

In a comment on the continuing thread about race (we tend to have a lot of those, don't we?), govtwriter links to this morning's USA Today story that raises the same puzzling questions.

The story notes the continuing mystery of Tamika Huston, a Spartanburg, S.C., woman who disappeared in June 2004.

Her aunt, who works in public relations, tried vainly to attract the same type of media attention given to a succession of other women, among them runaway bride Jennifer Wilbanks, murder victim Laci Peterson, kidnap victim Elizabeth Smart and missing Alabama teenager Natalee Holloway. "I spent three weeks calling the cable networks, calling newspapers — even yours," Rebkah Howard told USA Today this week.

There was more than a hint of frustration in her voice last year at the Unity Convention of journalists of color when PBS's Gwen Ifill (a black woman) indelicately labeled it "missing white woman syndrome."

Govtwriter cites it all at last partially as a diversity issue: As she and others see it, mostly white media executives are drawn more to stories about other whites.

You could argue also that men are shortchanged. There are more missing men in the FBI's database than missing women. And, by the way, a disproportionate number of African Americans.

The coverage does matter, say law enforcement, by focusing attention on a case and attracting important leads.

In a related development, fake abductee Jennifer Wilbanks has signed a movie and book deal.

I'd love to read David Wharton's take on the Village at North Elm.

I am not so sure the mixed-use development at Pisgah Church near Elm quite works for me. Maybe it's the architecture, which is a little too gaudy for my taste. But what do I know?

I do like the idea of mixing office, retail and residences. I just wish the visual look wasn't so over-the-top pretentious.

David, how about a critique?

Was it mere coincidence that the Michael Jackson trial was closing just as I was opening a little book called "On B.S."?

Actually, the title does not use any abbreviations, but I do so in the interest of keeping my job. We don't write those kinds of things in family newspapers. At least not intentionally.

Anyway, the book, as you may have heard, is a New York Times best seller, a scholarly tome by a retired moral philosopher on the delicate art of bending words and twisting meanings, of soft-pedaling and sidestepping, hoodwinking and bamboozling, through carefully crafted doublespeak.

A book on B.S. seemed a timely thing to write, for Harry G. Frankfurt, professor emeritus of philosophy at Princeton University, because there is so much of it in so many places these days.

"Everyone knows this," Frankfurt writes in his opening paragraph. "Each of us contributes his share."

And so we did last week, when the Jackson trial got more exposure than Iraq, and Katie and Matt tried to justify it all by asking, quite seriously, from time to time, why are we so fascinated with this stuff — as they continued to be fascinated by it.

The Jackson trial was a circus of unenlightened self-interest, where everybody had an angle, from the defendant to the alleged victim's parents. Where the defense attorney wore a bad wig and the Jackson family strolled daily like runway models before the cameras.

And where the Rev. Jesse Jackson parachuted in as a "spiritual adviser."

"This has been an excruciating process," Jackson said in the wake of Jackson's acquittal. "The jury has spoken. I hope that many lessons will be learned from this." B.S. heaped upon more B.S. Aggie, hast thou no pride?

Like my colleague, Doug Clark, I, too, made it to First Horizon Park Saturday night for the game between the Grasshoppers (I still want to call them the Bats) and the Asheville Tourists.

We sat in Section 110 on the first base side of home plate on a perfect night for baseball. More than 6,800 other fans apparently agreed.

A few impressions:

1. The cupholder-equipped seats are quite comfortable (one minor complaint: the legroom for someone who is 6-foot-2 like me isn't plenitful, but it'll do -- and it sure beats the wooden bleachers at War Memorial.

2. The concourses are spacious and the sight lines are wonderful.

3. The food is overpriced. We decided to get a real meal at a real restaurant after the game ... to save money.

4. The critics who claimed parking would be a problem were wrong. There are vast choices after dark in downtown Greensboro, all of them only a few minutes's stroll from the park.

5. The video scoreboard is a classy addition. I'll bet visiting teams love coming to Greensboro for the crowds and the amenities.

By the way, the team continues to draw very well, and already has surpassed last season's total attendance even though the current season has a full half to go.

For a dissenting view, see Ann Stringfield's comments in Letters to the Editor.

Katie Couric and NBC tried to stretch an exclusive interview with the Runaway Bride into an hour-long prime time special, two appearances on the "Today" show and one appearance on the "NBC Nightly News." They did not succeed.

You can't go home again.

Or more precisely, for some reason, I rarely choose to.

Home in this case is UNC-Chapel Hill, where I attended undegraduate and grad school, and where I overcame first-semester home sickness during my freshman year to fall absolutely in love with the place.

I spent my summers there and even some holidays. I resented it when the great unwashed masses returned in the fall , spoiling the peace and tranquility and crowding the best restaurants.

I thought about my infrequent returns to Blue Heaven during a conversation this week with a UNC-CH schoolmate, Vanessa Gallman, editorial page editor of the Herald-Leader in Lexington, Ky. Vanessa asked if I was attending a reunion in October.

Well, possibly, I said, but I almost never go to those things.

Maybe it's because the place barely resembles the school I remember. It's too cramped, like a living room with too much furniture.

They've plopped a new building onto every open space. Let no patch of green go unbuilt upon. Let no blade of grass go uncovered.

In my day there were lawns and trees. And we walked to class 10 miles, barefoot in the snow -- in the wintertime. And we liked it.

Hmmmmmm, so Robbie Perkins isn't running for re-election on the Greensboro City Council?

And neither is another long-term incumbent, Claudette Burroughs-White, who apparently has groomed retired teacher Goldie Wells to take her place in District 2?

What's more, Tom Phillips is running for Perkins' District 3 seat instead of one of the at-large slots he currently holds?

In one way, this does shake up the council race, which was in danger of suffocating in terminal sameness.

Then again, it also smooths the paths for other incumbents to remain on the council.

Phillips will face an easier, less expensive campaign as a district rather than an at-large candidate.

And Florence Gatten, whose fate seemed tenuous as an at-large candidate, now has a decent shot at staying on the council.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

On the other hand, District 4 could be intriguing, especially if former county commissioners Mike Barber and Mary Rakestraw choose to to run.

I could not convince my significant other to see "George Romero's Land of the Dead" at the Grande today (she'd had her fill of entrails as entrees last year, in the remake of "Dawn of the Dead") so I went by myself.

This one was pretty good, as movies about flesh-eating zombies go.

The cool thing about Romero's "Dead" films, from super-low budget cult classic "Night of the Living Dead" to the original "Dawn of the Dead" to "Day of the Dead," is that they make their most profound comments about the living.

"Dawn of the Dead," for instance, is set in a shopping mall, where the undead look no different from the living in their blank-faced reverence for buying stuff.

They mill aimlessly through the stores, same as us.

The original, "Night of the Living Dead," contains a haunting subtext about race (its tragic hero is a black man) and lynching.

Romero said he hadn't planned for his lead to be a brother. He just happened to be the best actor.

The struggling Winn-Dixie grocery chain announced last week that it is closing every one of its stores in North Carolina.

All told, the chain is selling or shuttering 326 stores and eliminating 22,000 jobs.

That includes 13 Piedmont Triad locations, at a cost of roughly 900 jobs.

It also means another blow to limited shopping opportunities in east Greensboro. A nearby Harris Teeter already has closed, and before that, a Kroger.

The Winn-Dixie "Marketplace" store at East Cone Boulevard and Summit Avenue will be among the first to lock its sliding glass doors for good. That saddens me in more ways than one.

It's where my dad worked before he died eight years ago, a part-time gig that began as a little something to rescue him in his retirement from daily overdoses of Montel and Oprah.

Yet it became, in time, a way for him to find a new side of himself.
Doing odd jobs at Winn-Dixie, my dad connected to people in a way he hadn't before.

Bill Moyers is not alone.

Tavis Smiley, who hosts shows on both public radio and public television, was the target of a "monitor" paid by the chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to quantify the political leanings of his guests, The New York Times reports. The man was paid more than $14,000 to code whether guests were L's for "liberal" or C's for "conservative."

Smiley's reply to Richard Prince: "An unpaid intern using Google could have concluded that my show is about political and cultural fairness. The guest list and the transcripts from the interviews with political leaders from right to left are available on the Web site www.pbs.org/tavissmiley. It would have saved the CPB a lot of time and money."

I'm watching Steven A. Smith on ESPN's coverage of the NBA Draft. He's getting his own show on the cable network.

I remember when he was a young reporter for the News & Record. You know, one of those minority hires in which the News & Record compromised its journalistic standards.

My colleague, News & Record Editor Mr. Robinson, passed this email to me today. It reflects a growing concern I share with the writer, Richard L. Yarbrough Sr. of Greensboro:

I, for one, am growing weary of some of the blogs on the Letters to the Editor. Today's responses to Herman L. Browning's letter are juvenile, hateful, and offensive. I have participated in some really thought/idea provoking conversations, but it appears that a few of the "regulars" have decided to downgrade the conversations to their lowest levels, terms and conditions of participation notwithstanding. I can put up with griping and complaining, but there is a point where one has to decide to maintain some decorum instead of showing his/her lack of taste and class.

There is probably not much you can do unless there are "cyberspace police" available but I just thought I would share my opinion with you.

Mr. Yarbrough:
I agree wholeheartedly. We created the blogs to provide places for thoughtful discussions and respectful debates. We also created guidelines that most commenters, thankfully, are following.

As for the vocal minority, one of the best remedies is peer pressure. Or the lack thereof. Ignore them. Refuse to be drawn into name-calling and other silliness. Don't feed their appetites for tastelessness.

And don't let them spoil the blogs for the rest of us.

We had assumed that adults would behave as adults. We were wrong.