We long ago accepted the facts that we live in an age of apparent austerity, that chief executives from presidents down to mayors are pledged to live frugally, and that public services everywhere are due to be downsized. Even so, we have to acknowledge our disappointment in Governor Sundquist's 1997 State of the State address, that paean to belt-tightening which he delivered Monday night in Nashville to a joint session of the General Assembly.
The governor was perhaps justified in boasting of his increased commitment to the Better Education Program begun by former Governor Ned Ray McWherter, his extension of TennCare benefits to all children under age 18, his welfare reforms, and his juvenile crime package.
The problem is that, in order to finance these newly enhanced programs and simultaneously cut $110 million from the total of last year's budget, Sundquist had to rob Peter to pay Paul. And we fear that Peter has suffered more than Paul has prospered. In particular, the governor seems to possess an ingrained insensitivity to the plight of state employees. He had already asked them to remain at current pay levels, all the while he was raising the salaries of his own personal staff by an average of almost 30 per cent. On Monday night he announced that he would cut no fewer than additional 738 of them from the state payroll. That's an awful lot of social dislocation.
Worse is the fact that the governor proposes to severely trim the state's higher education budget, reducing what was already a bare-bones affair by another 4 percent. What is the point of feeding one end of the educational food chain if we intend to starve the other?
And whatever happened to the redress of local grievances that home-boy Don was supposed to be taking care of up there in mean old Nashville? The same man who went out of his way to obligate the state to bring the Houston Oilers to the state capital now seems indifferent to the needs of his own home base in Memphis. Mayor Herenton, who gave Sundquist tacit electoral support in 1994, asks for riverfront development money? Forget about it! The University of Memphis, Shelby State Community College, and the State Technical Institute at Memphis all face serious spending cuts. And MMHI looks like its been targeted for closing.
So what? So we think that at some point the state's chief executive -- either this one or his successor -- is going to have to rethink the current knee-jerk ideology of no new taxes for any purpose whatsoever. For governments as for households, there are things -- education and mental health perhaps preeminent among them -- that are worth spending money on. Maybe we shouldn't we bragging about how penny-wise we are if it turns out that all we're dong is being pound-foolish.
Eventually, O.J. Simpson's name will fade from the conversational map, replaced by the scandal du jour. But his two trials and their outcomes have forever changed the way we view the American system of justice.
Many of us still feel a bit uneasy about the apparent paradoxes in the Simpson case. Why wasn't it double jeopardy to try a man twice for the same crime? If one jury found him responsible for the murders and the other jury didn't, what is Simpson's status now? Not guilty, but liable? It's hard to reconcile the two verdicts and decide where "truth" resides.
Yet each jury reached what it believed to be a logical conclusion based on the evidence at hand. The criminal-trial jurors, faced with a standard of "beyond reasonable doubt" and presented with a disturbing picture of the LAPD's ineptitude, could not in good conscience say that Simpson's guilt had been proven. The civil-trial jurors, on the other hand, heard Simpson's own testimony -- heard him deny ever beating his ex-wife, despite photographs and a 911 call that suggested otherwise -- and judged him to be a liar.
Was justice served? Thanks to two trials, all factions can claim at least a partial victory. And since none of us will ever know for sure what really happened that night in 1994, let's give it a rest and let history be the judge.