Calendar........................................12,13 News & Notes

PAGE 14 |DECEMBER 29, 2022- JANUARY 04, 2023

LOCAL

FALLS CHURCH NEWS-PRESS | FCNP.COM

News-Press Community News & Notes

ON DECEMBER 17TH, MAYOR DAVID TARTER, city officials, and civic groups participated in the inaugural Wreaths Across America (WAA) Day at historic Oakwood Cemetery. The Falls Church Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) hosted the event, having initiated the WAA application with the support of the Oakwood Cemetery Manager and

Board of Trustees. (Photo: Jim Inskeep)

Winner Named at People’s Choice at F.C. Arts Show

Astrid De Vachon’s mobile “Good Mood Diamond Suspension” has received the Falls Church Arts’ People’s Choice Award. The prize is sponsored by DuBro Architects + Builders, 429 S. Maple Avenue, Falls Church, VA 22046.

De Vachon’s piece, available at Falls Church Arts for $300, is a 24” x 24” work created with wood, washi paper and paper. The piece was chosen by the visitors to Falls Church Arts as the People’s Choice award winner. The theme for this exhibit is Bits & Pieces. The show runs through January 8.

City of Falls Church Holiday Closures Happening Soon

City of Falls Church government programs and services will be closed for the upcoming holidays, except for the Farmers Market, as listed below:

City Hall (300 Park Ave.): Closed Monday, January 2, 2023. Community Center (223 Little Falls St.): Closed Saturday, December 31, 2022, and Sunday, January 1, 2023. Building available for Farmers Market patrons on Saturday.

The Mary Riley Styles Public Library (120 N. Virginia Ave.): Closed Sunday and Monday, January 1-2, 2023.

Weekly Farmers Market (City Hall Parking Lot, 300 Park Ave.): Open Saturday, December 31.

Keegan Theatre Announces Cast of “The Lifespan of a Fact”

The Keegan Theatre is pleased to announce the cast and creative team of the acclaimed serio-comedic play “The Lifespan of a Fact,” written by Jeremy Kareken & David Murrell and Gordon Farrell, making its DC Premiere at Keegan January 28 — February 25, 2023.

About the play: Jim Fingal is a fresh-out-of-Harvard fact checker for a prominent but sinking New York magazine. John D’Agata is a talented writer with a transcendent essay about the suicide of a teenage boy — an essay that could save the magazine from collapse. When Jim is assigned to fact check D’Agata’s essay, the two come head to head in a comedic yet gripping battle over facts versus truth.

The cast of “Lifespan” includes Colin Smith as John D’Agata, Sheri Herren as Emily Penrose, and Iván Carlo as Jim Fingal.

Inaugural Wreaths Across America Event Successful

On December 17th, Mayor David Tarter, city officials, and civic groups participated in the inaugural Wreaths Across America (WAA) Day at historic Oakwood Cemetery. The Falls Church Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) hosted the event, having initiated the WAA application with the support of the Oakwood Cemetery Manager and Board of Trustees. The local Girl and Boy Scouts of America, Children of the American Revolution, and the Falls Church Veterans Council joined the DAR and city officials in laying the more than 100 wreaths donated via the national WAA site. Oakwood Cemetery is now among more than 3,700 sites in all 50 states to honor military Veterans every December.

VA DMV Connect Coming to the American Legion Building

The Falls Church City DMV Connect visit is held twice a month, usually for 10 days, on 5 consecutive days of one week, and then 5 days of the next week (frequently it’s the 2nd and 3rd weeks of the month) at the American Legion Building, Post 130, located next to the W & OD Bike Trail, at 400 N Oak St, Falls Church, VA 22046. The Connect’s hours are from 9:30 a.m. — 3:30 p.m. They close for lunch for 1 hour from 12:30 to 1:30. It is mostly by appointment, through the DMV’s website under “DMV2Go or DMV Connect” and then under “Falls Church American Legion,” but the DMV Connect staff can usually accommodate walk-ins, so please do come by. Walk-in opportunities can occur when there are cancellations, noshows, and overbookings. The wait time is usually very short.

The DMV Connect hosts Remote Knowledge Testing Services, in addition to regular DMV services, this can occur during any day of the visit, if it is reserved 24 hours in advance through the DMV’s 3 rd party vendor, for the Learner’s Permit Test and CDL Test, e-mail: testconnect@dmv.virginia.gov for info and an appointment. Tom Clinton’s COR office number is: (703) 2485450, the office email is: commissioner@fallschurchva.gov if one has questions, or if one would like the latest monthly Connect schedule e- mailed to one. One can just try a walk-in as they are usually accommodated, the Connect has shorter wait times and is calmer and quieter than the big DMV Customer Service Center (CSC) offices like the Tysons or the Arlington Office. The Falls Church American Legion next dates are January 10 & 11 with new hours again 9:30-3:30 and closed for lunch from 12:30-1:30

ASTRID DE VACHON’S MOBILE “Good Mood Diamond Suspension” has received the Falls Church Arts’ People’s Choice Award. De Vachon’s piece, available at Falls Church Arts for $300, is a 24” x 24” work created with wood, washi

paper and paper. (Photo: Astrid De Vachon)

FOR THE SECOND YEAR IN A ROW, SkyPoint Federal Credit Union championed an annual holiday angel tree drive to help support families in our community who need it most. This year’s beneficiaries have been selected from Clopper Mill Elementary School in Germantown, MD. (Photo: Lana Sansur)

FALLS CHURCH NEWS-PRESS | FCNP.COM

OUTLOOK

DECEMBER 29 - JANUARY 04, 2022 | PAGE 15

Protect Our Democracy. Support Local News

Lydia Polgreen

NEW YORK TIMES

Like a lot of folks, I have been thinking quite a bit lately about how to shore up our democracy. We voted in November, and that seems to have gone pretty well. Election deniers and conspiracy-mongers running in swing states lost. Common-sense candidates focused on kitchen table issues won. But after voting, what’s next? In this season of giving I have a modest suggestion: Support your local news organization.

I have spent most of my career focused on international news, covering stories such as the civil war in Congo and ethnic cleansing in Darfur. This kind of journalism is, of course, important. But like a lot of journalists of my generation, I started my career in local news, in my case as a reporter at The Times Union, assigned to cover a handful of communities along the Hudson River near Albany, New York. It was there that I first learned to overcome my fear of knocking on strangers’ doors, to make cold calls to politicians and business leaders, to talk to people living through the worst day of their lives.

The Times Union, which is owned by the Hearst Corp., has been through employee buyouts, as have many local papers, though it continues to break news, publish ambitious investigations and win awards. But the bigger picture for local journalism is catastrophic. Northwestern University’s Local News Initiative put out a report in June on the state of local news, and its findings were grim. Since 2005, more than a quarter of the country’s newspapers have closed. Those that survive have shed journalists at an alarming rate: There are roughly 60 percent fewer journalists working in newspapers today than in 2005.

There is significant evidence that the erosion of local journalism has accelerated some of the worst trends in our civic life. “In communities without a credible source of local news, voter participation declines, corruption in both government and business increases, and local residents end up paying more in taxes and at checkout,” the Northwestern report said.

As local news gathering shrinks, people spend more time in places likely to deepen partisan divides: on social media, on platforms such as Nextdoor, or watching national cable television. A 2019 study in Scientific American found that voters in areas where local news outlets closed were less likely to vote a split ticket, a signal that points to deepening polarization in those communities.

“Local newspapers,” wrote the report’s authors, “serve as a central source of shared information, setting a common agenda. Readers of local newspapers feel more attached to their communities.”

Local reporting matters so much that one of my journalism heroes and the former editor of The New York Times, Dean Baquet, created and will lead a New York Times fellowship to help local reporters take on big, challenging investigations like the ones he deftly shepherded over his career.

Some of the most important and powerful examples of accountability journalism started as local stories. Watergate wasn’t a scoop by political reporters; it came from a couple of hungry metro beat reporters at The Washington Post. Local reporters at The Boston Globe broke wide open the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church.

These became national and global stories, immortalized by Hollywood movies. But every day, local journalists uncover news that really matters to their communities.

Take Greg Smith, a reporter for a local nonprofit news organization in New York called The City, which I have donated to. At 5 p.m. on the Friday before Labor Day, he got a text from a source at New York’s public housing authority. The drinking water in a large public housing complex in Manhattan had tested positive for arsenic, and city officials had known about it for two weeks. It was only after Smith asked the housing authority and City Hall for comment on his scoop that the city hustled to provide bottled water to the thousands of tenants living in the complex.

Getting immediate results like this is part of what drew Richard Kim to leave the highpowered world of national media to become editor-in-chief of The City. He had been the executive editor of HuffPost, and before that, of The Nation. He and I worked together when I was editor-in-chief of HuffPost, and we often bemoaned how hard it was to make a real and direct difference with our reporting.

“It has been particularly gratifying for me to do journalism every day where you put a story up and the outcome is produced, by that story, that day,” Richard told me. “We write about a subway station that is disgusting and hasn’t been cleaned, and it gets cleaned. We write about neighborhood playgrounds that are closed and then the mayor comes and opens them the next day.”

In my other hometown, St. Paul, Minnesota, a different kind of local news nonprofit has been making waves. Mukhtar Ibrahim, an immigrant from Somalia, founded Sahan Journal after working as a local journalist in the Twin Cities. In 2014, nine young men from the Somali community were charged with plotting to fight in Syria for the Islamic State group. Ibrahim was proud of his coverage of their trial, but wanted to go deeper.

“Newsrooms really invest in covering terrorism cases involving communities, but when things wrap up they just move on,” he said. That’s why he started Sahan Journal. “The idea is to provide real, comprehensive coverage of these communities so they feel seen and feel engaged in the civic process in Minnesota,” Ibrahim told me. “We’re trying to make these communities more informed and included.”

Minnesota is home to the largest Somali community in the United States, as well as large numbers of Hmong, LibeContinued on Page 18

Why Dickens Haunts Us

Maureen Dowd

NEW YORK TIMES

I had always been a bah humbug sort of person about Christmas.

It seemed like a season of stress, as my parents scrambled to find the money to buy presents for five kids and have a big feast. I didn’t like the materialism or the mawkishness. Why should there be one week of the year when we were all supposed to be Hallmark happy?

“You’re weird,” my mother told me.

Then I took a course on Charles Dickens at Columbia University with the estimable Prof. James Eli Adams, and I began to fathom the magic. As Dickens said in his sketch, “A Christmas Tree,” published in his journal “Household Words” in 1850, “Oh, now all common things become uncommon and enchanted to me.” His biographer Peter Ackroyd wrote that “Dickens can be said to have almost single-handedly created the modern idea of Christmas.”

Christmas morally radicalized Dickens. The disparity between the circumstances and fates of different people offended Dickens in the Christmas season. For him, it was a time to think about what we owe one another, how we live with one another; a time to have a proper sense of outrage about inequality and injustice, and to think about the past, present and future and how much they have to do with each other; a time to consider the good values we’ve thrown away and the bad values — selfishness, egotism, social snobbery, condescension and the worship of money — that infiltrate the heart.

Dickens became an outsider looking in when his middle-class life got disrupted by cold, grinding reality: His father went to debtors’ prison and, at 12, Dickens had to leave school to work in a boot-blacking factory in London.

During a childhood in which he sometimes felt deprived and isolated, he put his faith in fairies. He found a portal to an ensorcelling invisible world, an Ali Baba’s cave of magical transformations and mythical kingdoms and became a Victorian Scheherazade. He was one of England’s greatest defenders of fairy tales because he believed these “nurseries of fancy” could teach positive values and imbue life, for children and adults, with transcendence; he also felt the macabre side of fairy tales — evil stepmothers, menacing monsters and big, bad wolves — was just as valuable for socialization as the reassuring side. His obsessions were the things at the core of fairy tales: clear-cut heroes and villains, defenseless children and hyper-dysfunctional families.

“I always think of make-believe as a way of making beliefs,” Maria Tatar, a folklore and mythology expert at Harvard, told me. “He understood the deep human need for myth, fantasy, imagination.”

In “A Christmas Tree,” Dickens wrote, “I felt that if I could have married Little Red Riding Hood, I should have known perfect bliss.” As Tatar explained: “She is the child in the woods who is the ultimate victim of the predatory. She is an innocent, powerless girl preyed upon by the rich and powerful. So you can think of Dickens as the first charter member of the MeToo movement.”

Ebenezer Scrooge resonates just as strongly now because we remain absorbed with the comeuppance of the 1 percent. Elda Rotor, a vice president and publisher for Penguin Classics, said that Dickens is a steady seller and that “A Christmas Carol” perfectly fits the definition of a classic book, acting as a bridge from how you relate to the past to how you forge forward.

Paul Giamatti played Scrooge in a Verizon ad this month; Ryan Reynolds and Will Ferrell starred in “Spirited,” a new rendition of the novella, first published on Dec. 19, 1843, now on AppleTV+; Steve Martin and Martin Short did a takeoff on the tale for a recent “SNL”; The New Yorker offered a humorous take on Scrooge’s Instagram; and Jefferson Mays has gotten raves for his one-man version of “A Christmas Carol” on Broadway, in which he plays all 50 characters, as well as a boiling potato. Dickens is also a fairy godfather hovering over the Hallmark Christmas movies: There are Dickens festivals; the characters quote Dickens to each other; and one movie’s heroine has a dog named “Charles” after the writer.

I asked Mays why Dickens endures. “His sense of social outrage, his descriptions of misery are balanced by a celebration of the zest, the fun of life,” he replied. “Eating, drinking, dancing, loving. And that’s as important today as it has always been.”

As Mitch Glazer, who co-wrote “Scrooged,” the hilarious 1988 movie with Bill Murray, put it: “Dickens hits us with the setup: regret, loss, mistakes, missed love, wasted life, and the punchline: ‘It’s not too late!’ In every version from his novella to Mr. Magoo to ours, I get emotional when Scrooge is reborn.”

Dickens has taught me that it’s not too late to focus on the sweet memories, like the time my mom somehow bought me a doll’s kitchen I longed for that my parents couldn’t afford, or the way she would be aghast if we didn’t wear red and green.

The magic is there, if you look. So on this Christmas, as Tiny Tim said, God bless us, everyone!

By Maureen Dowd © 2022 The New York Times

PAGE 16 | DECEMBER 29, 2022 - JANUARY 04, 2023 Governor Abbott’s War On Christmas

BY BRIAN REACH

FALLS CHURCH NEWS-PRESS

“’This is my command: Love each other. If the world hates you, keep in mind it hated me first’” (15 John 17:18)

“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” (11 Matthew 28)

“If I had a cat, I’d buy another one so I could kick one and then the other.” – Republican Governor of Texas Greg Abbott

The underlying theme of every holiday season is giving: taking time to sit with loved ones, exchange gifts, acts of kindness, supporting charity, providing refuge, gathering as a community... it is a time when selflessness and introspection is in rare form. During this time, those of us who celebrate often congregate on Christmas Eve, retelling the two-thousand year old story of a couple who couldn’t find a room in a busy town even for a woman in labor; traditionally praying in unison for food for those who are hungry, shelter for those who seek, and peace and justice in all the world.

While many of us were at Christmas Eve services, visiting loved ones, or wrapped up in a blanket avoiding the polar vortex, three charter buses arrived unexpectedly in DC (a day before they were supposed to arrive in New York City before the weather changed the plan). The buses unloaded 139 asylumseeking families, including children, who had crossed the US-Mexico border in Texas seeking asylum. Dropped off in front of the Naval Observatory, where the Vice President resides, with no winter clothes and unprepared for the artic blast they encountered, they wrapped in blankets as best they could as organizations scrambled to transport them to a nearby church. Finally. After a twoday, two-thousand mile journey (during which DC temperatures dropped fifty degrees to near record lows).

On December 20th, in a pompous and insulting letter addressed to President Biden but clearly designed for a conservative media parade, Abbott expressed pious concern for the well-being of migrants in the face of oncoming “perilous temperatures” (but failed to mention he was about to dump a bunch of them into even colder temperatures as pawns in a cruel stunt). This shouldn’t come as a surprise, given Abbott’s track record. In 2015, after the terrorist attacks on Paris, Abbott incorrectly attributed the attack to Syrian refugees and vilified all Syrian refugees, stating “any one of [them] could be connected to terrorism.” The attackers were French, Belgian and Iraqi; although some had snuck back into France with Syrian refugees, none were Syrian.

“…Things that cause people to stumble are bound to come, but woe to anyone through whom they come.” (17 Luke 1)

So far Abbott has sent over ten thousand legal asylum seekers, primarily to DC and New York City over the past eight months, in response to the Biden administration not engaging in the extreme “deterrent” approaches of the previous administration (which included separating infants from their mothers and losing them in foster care systems throughout the country).

“Woe to you… you hypocrites! You build tombs for the prophets and decorate the graves of the righteous. And you say, ‘If we had lived in the days of our ancestors, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.’” (23 Matthew 29:30)

Abbott’s willingness to weaponize human beings for attention is not surprising; the Trump-era right is almost constantly claiming killers are inherently among groups of non-white asylumseekers. Given the staggering number of people that have crossed the southern border over the last thirty years, one must wonder if perhaps criminals have decided the bureaucratic process of asylum-seeking isn’t a terribly attractive or efficient way to do terrorism. If it were, what would be left?

“Woe to you… you hypocrites! … You have neglected the more important matters of the law – justice, mercy, and faithfulness… You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel.” (23 Matthew 23:24)

A good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and an evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart. For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of. (6 Luke 45)

One might wonder how Abbott felt sitting in the pews on Christmas Eve, knowing the buses were arriving. Given he’s recently been doubling down one should probably conclude no ghosts visited him that evening to give him a change of heart or, if so, did to no avail. FALLS CHURCH NEWS-PRESS | FCNP.COM

Is the In�lation Storm Letting Up?

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NEW YORK TIMES

The average national price of regular gasoline this Christmas was almost 20 cents a gallon lower than it was a year earlier. Prices at the pump are still higher than they were during the pandemic slump, when economic shutdowns depressed world oil prices, but the affordability of fuel — as measured by the ratio of the average wage to gas prices — is most of the way back to pre-Covid levels.

Now, gas prices aren’t a good measure either of economic health or of successful economic policy — although if you listened to Republican ads during the midterms, you might have thought otherwise. But subsiding prices at the pump are only one of many indicators that the inflationary storm of 2021 to ’22 is letting up. Remember the supply-chain crisis, with shipping rates soaring to many times their normal level? It’s over.

More broadly, recent reports on the inflation measures the Federal Reserve traditionally uses to guide its interest rate policy have been really, really good.

So is this going to be the winter of our diminishing discontent?

After the nasty shocks of the past two years, nobody wants to get too excited by positive news. Having greatly underestimated past inflation risks myself, I’m working hard on curbing my enthusiasm, and the Fed, which is worried about its credibility, is even more inclined to look for clouds in the silver lining. And those clouds are there, as I’ll explain in a minute. It’s much too soon to declare all clear on the inflation front.

But there has been a big role reversal in the inflation debate. Last year optimists like me were trying to explain away the bad news. Now pessimists are trying to explain away the good news.

What’s really striking about the improvement in inflation numbers is that so far, at least, it hasn’t followed the pessimists’ script. Disinflation, many commentators insisted, would require a sustained period of high unemployment — say, at least a 5 percent unemployment rate for five years. And to be fair, this prediction could still be vindicated if recent progress against inflation turns out to be a false dawn. However, inflation has declined rapidly, even with unemployment still near record lows.

What explains falling inflation? It now looks as if much, although not all, of the big inflation surge reflected one-time events associated with the pandemic and its aftermath — which was what Team Transitory (including me) claimed all along, except that transitory effects were both bigger and longer lasting than any of us imagined.

First came those supply-chain issues. As consumers, fearing risks of infection, avoided in-person services — such as dining out — and purchased physical goods instead, the world faced a sudden shortage of shipping containers, port capacity and more. Prices of many goods soared as the logistics of globalization proved less robust and flexible than we realized.

Then came a surge in demand for housing, probably caused largely by the pandemic-driven rise in remote work. The result was a spike in rental rates. Since official statistics use market rents to estimate the overall cost of shelter, and shelter, in turn, is a large part of measured inflation, this sent inflation higher even as supply-chain problems eased.

But new data from the Cleveland Fed confirms what private firms have been telling us for several months: Rapid rent increases for new tenants have stopped, and rents may well be falling. Because most renters are on one-year leases, official measures of housing costs — and overall inflation numbers that fail to account for the lag — don’t yet reflect this slowdown. But housing has gone from a major driver of inflation to a stabilizing force.

So why shouldn’t we be celebrating? You can pick over the entrails of the inflation numbers looking for bad omens, but I’m ever less convinced that anybody, myself included, understands inflation well enough to do this in a useful way. Basically, as you exclude more and more items from your measure in search of “underlying” inflation, what you’re left with becomes increasingly strange and unreliable.

Instead, my concern (and, I believe, the Fed’s) comes down to the fact that the job market still looks very hot, with wages rising too fast to be consistent with acceptably low inflation.

What I would point out, however, is that many workers’ salaries are like apartment rents, in the sense that they get reset only once a year, so official numbers on wages will lag a cooling market, and there is some evidence that labor markets are, in fact, cooling. Official reports in January — especially on job openings early in the month and on employment costs at the end — may (or may not) give us more clarity on whether this cooling is real or sufficient.

Oh, and with visible inflation slowing, the risks of a wage-price spiral, which I never thought were very large, are receding even further.

So we’ve had some seriously encouraging inflation news. There are still reasons to worry, and the news isn’t solid enough to justify breaking out the Champagne. But given the season, I am going to indulge at least in a glass or two of eggnog.

By PAUL KRUGMAN © 2022 The New York Times