Author: john-borgmeyer

It’s a sunny Friday afternoon in late May, that time of year when school is almost over and the days begin to feel like summer. Ari Berne, a 16-year-old junior at Charlottesville High School and a rapper who goes by the name Ghetti, has no time this afternoon to either study for finals or enjoy the fine weather.
    Instead, Berne sits alongside Damani Harrison, his friend and musical mentor, in the basement of what used to be Mount Zion Baptist Church on Ridge Street. Now the home of the nonprofit Music Resource Center, the building houses all kinds of musical equipment, which is used by around 500 local teenagers, for free, under the instruction of local musicians. Hunched over a mixing board the size of a coffee table, Ari and Damani nod along to a wicked beat as they put the finishing touches on Ghetti’s debut album, Requiem for Reality—probably the only hip-hop record in the world referencing Jack Jouett Middle School.
    Charlottesville hip-hop? Is there such a thing? Up until recently, the answer was a resounding “hell, no.” We’ve got pickers and grinners, jazz cats, jam bands and indie rockers, but for years locals have made the drive to Richmond or Virginia Beach to hear live hip-hop. A few violent incidents (most notably a 2001 shooting at the old Tokyo Rose and a fight three years ago at Starr Hill) had local club owners nervous. Nobody got seriously hurt in these altercations, but, as a result, many club owners refused to book hip-hop acts. For the past few years even Harrisonburg had a better hip-hop scene than Charlottesville.
    But times are changing. This year Starr Hill hosted a wildly successful performance by GZA and DJ Muggs, and another by Ghostface Killah (GZA and Ghostface are rap royalty from the legendary Wu-Tang Clan; Muggs runs the wheels of steel for Cypress Hill). Another music venue, the Satellite Ballroom, recently brought underground rappers Blackalicious and Lyrics Born to town.
    Meanwhile, Harrison’s group, the Beet-nix, have established a local fan base that’s expanding far beyond Charlottesville. At the Music Resource Center, young talents like Ghetti are finding the equipment and tutelage they need to turn their notebook verses into booming tracks. Along with the MRC, there is Light House, a nonprofit film academy, which gives young hip-hop artists an opportunity to put their energy into creative projects. The music that once provoked fear in certain circles now sounds like an opportunity for hope.

Making a scene

“It’s not that Charlottesville didn’t have a hip-hop scene,” says Harrison, who assumes the stage name “Glitch” as rapper and producer for the Beetnix. “The problem was that there was nobody to champion the scene.”
    The current incarnation of the Beetnix formed about five years ago, when Harrison teamed up with fellow rapper Louis “Waterloo” Hampton after meeting him at a party. Now the pair usually perform with a DJ, guitar player and violinist.
    “The idea was to do hip-hop based on influences other than funk, R&B and soul,” says Harrison. Their gigs at Rapture and Starr Hill bring together fans from across the music spectrum. In the early days, though, Harrison says some club owners heard “hip-hop” and reflexively balked.
    “People would just throw up their hands and say, ‘There it goes again. Another shooting. Another fight. That’s just the way it goes with hip-hop,’” Harrison says. “We didn’t want to do that.”
    When local clubs finally gave the Beet-nix a chance to perform, the group let fans know that the stakes were high.
    “We told people that we’re trying to do something different, and if you’re not with us then you’re against us,” he says. “We had to build our reputation. There are cats who come to our shows who are living that grimy lifestyle, but they know to leave it at home.”
    In addition to performing, the group also works as an ambassador to local venues, helping to book and promote national hip-hop acts. When Starr Hill booked Ghostface Killah, for example, the Beetnix took an opening slot and helped make sure the show went down peacefully. “The Beetnix are really helpful in marketing the hip-hop that comes through town,” says C.A. Fabio, Starr Hill’s music club manager. “They have a connection to the scene, and their professionalism really helps.”
    “We helped make sure the shows are promoted in the right way,” says Harrison. “Like, you don’t put a big-booty chick on the flyer. If you put out a smutty flier, you get a smutty audience. You can be street and still have some class.”

Keepin’ it real

Hip-hop is emerging in Charlottesville at a time when the entire hip-hop industry, from huge stars like 50 Cent to teenage up-and-comers, struggle with a tension between image and reality. While rappers always talk about “keeping it real,” a closer look reveals that the hardest gangstas are often poseurs with a slick marketing team.
    Although the term “hip-hop” covers a vast variety of styles—the zany funk of Outkast, the self-deprecating rhymes of De La Soul, the “dirty south” crunk grooves of Lil Jon—record companies have mostly seized on one particular style, known as “gangsta rap,” as the most lucrative (see sidebar, p. 25). Rappers who stray from the gangsta lyrical formula—dominating women, procuring wealth, getting drunk and shooting enemies—find it hard to get attention. From Berne’s point of view, it’s all getting a bit ridiculous.
    “I don’t even listen to the radio anymore. It’s like NSync with guns,” Berne declares. He doesn’t look like the stereotypical rapper—dressed in a t-shirt and jeans, the soft-spoken Berne sports not a single piece of bling (unless you count his sensible, no-nonsense digital watch).
    “Now everybody feels like they have to be a gangster,” he says. “Even if you have something to say, you don’t want to say it because you want to make some money. It’s messing up rap, in my opinion.”
    Berne started rapping in sixth grade, imitating the gangsta rhymes he heard on the radio. When he got to the MRC, however, Harrison set him straight.
    “I was rapping the tough-guy slick talk,” says Berne. “Then Damani introduced me to quality hip-hop, the underground stuff. It opened my mind. A week later I was working on my own stuff.”
    The result is Requiem for Reality, a 16-track album Berne hopes to release this summer. Berne performed many of the tracks at an underground hip-hop showcase the Beetnix hosted at Starr Hill.
    Like the Beetnix, Ghetti’s music combines adrenaline-shot beats with rock riffs from the likes of Radiohead and Nirvana. Ghetti’s dense raps, intricate rhymes and philosophical insight sound like they’re coming from a man twice his age.
    “Ari is a great model for what we’re trying to do,” says Sibley Johns, executive director of the Music Resource Center. “The point is to get kids to reflect on the things that are happening in their own life. They don’t have to pretend to be something they’re not.
    “When Ari first got here, he was the new kid on the block. Now he’s up on stage, doing videos, and he has kids looking up to him,” says Johns. “I think Ari understands that making music comes with a certain responsibility.”
    That responsibility, says Harrison, means telling the truth. An Army brat who grew up in the rough neighborhoods of West Philadelphia and spent his school years in Germany, Harrision says that living in two worlds gave him the perspective he needed to see more possibilities for his life. Now he tries to help other kids do the same.
    Each Wednesday he visits the Blue Ridge Juvenile Detention Center, reaching out to the kids locked up there. Some of the kids involved in a recent gang-related beating, which has prompted local police to finally take the possible presence of gangs in Charlottesville seriously, had visited the Music Resource Center.
    “When they get back here, I’m going to say, ‘Tell me what happened. Give me both sides of the story,’” says Harrison. “It made you feel like a big man to kick that dude’s ass? That’s the first verse. The second verse is how bad the food is in the detention center, and how you felt like a bitch when you got the rubber-glove treatment.”

Another day

On the wall above his bed, Brandon Dudley has a picture of Jesus the Good Shepherd carrying a lamb. Tucked inside the frame is a newspaper clipping with the headline “Brother Held in Girl’s Shooting.”
    The article tells the story of Quanmetrice Robinson, a 15-year-old girl accidentally shot by her 14-year-old brother in their home. News of the tragedy shocked the community, especially Dudley and the rest of Robinson’s close friends. Dudley and his friends took their grief to the Music Resource Center.
    “The kids were here in the studio the day after Quanmetrice was killed,” says Johns at the MRC. “What do you do with those feelings? They came to the studio. It gave them a place to immediately tease out their emotions, and to memorialize her death and what they went through with it.”
    In seventh grade, Dudley discovered a passion for hip-hop alongside Joseph “Jay Dot” Scott, his friend since kindergarten. Like most fledgling MCs, they started by rapping along with instrumental tracks of popular songs, then graduated to crafting their own songs using drum machines and synthesizers. “My friend told me one day there was a studio. I started going, and that was it,” says Dudley, who raps under the name “Lee Bangah.”
    He learned to craft beats and soundscapes, the best of which induce a spine-tingling chill. Older rappers helped him write rhymes that now flow effortlessly off his tongue, fluttering with the playfulness and precision of jazz drumming. Most importantly, he learned to tell a story. The story of Quanmetrice Robinson, which affected Dudley deeply, eventually became “Another Day,” a rap ballad that implores listeners to cherish their fleeting lives, because you never know what could happen tomorrow.
    “You probably think this won’t happen to y’all,” Dudley raps, “until an accident happens, Lord Jesus just waits and calls.”
    After recording the song at the Music Resource Center, Dudley made a video with the help of Light House’s production studio. The video for “Another Day” is an elaborate effort, featuring Dudley and dozens of friends in various locations, including a cemetery and a packed church. The Listen Up! Youth Media Network selected “Another Day” as one of their best submissions of 2004. Another one of Dudley’s Light House videos, for the song “You’ll Never Know Me,” was a finalist for a Listen Up! award this year, and the video was also shown last month at the Future Filmmaker’s Festival in Chicago.
    If you still doubt Dudley’s commitment to his music, check out his forearms, which are tattooed with the words “Live Easy”—his personal philosophy, and the title of his upcoming debut album.
    “When I write, I just think about things that happen in my own life,” he says. In songs like “The Survival” and “You Don’t Know Me,” he tells of the age-old teenage quest for identity in an often unfriendly world.
    Part of teenage life is trying on personas like clothes, looking for an identity that feels right. More than ever, today’s media-saturated culture gives teens millions of options, almost unlimited ways of being. Yet, in the pandemonium of sounds and images screaming for kids’ attention (and money), something often gets lost: the soft, true sound of their own inner voice.
    As Dudley says in the introduction to the “You’ll Never Know Me” video, hip-hop provides a way to reflect on his own life, to tell his own story in his own voice.
    “People talk about how I’m not going to be nothing in life, just an original black boy living where I’m living,” Dudley says. “This video is telling people, like, just listen to what I have to say. Don’t judge a book by its cover. ‘Cause deep down, I have some stuff to tell that people really need to hear.”

A brief history
of hip-hop

To understand why hip-hop is currently mired in gangsta cliché, we have to go back to the old school—the mid-1970s, when hip-hop culture emerged from the housing projects in the South Bronx, New York.
    The godfather of hip-hop was Clive “Kool Herc” Campbell, a Bronx teenager who began throwing parties using a massive sound system based on those he saw in his hometown of Kingston, Jamaica. Herc noticed that the crowd went especially wild during the solo drum and bass parts (called “breakdowns”) in funk songs, so he devised a way to extend the drum break indefinitely by switching back and forth between a pair of turntables, producing a raw, rhythmic, bass-heavy music. This “breakbeat” is the key innovation that gave rise to hip-hop.
    The breakbeat spawned a new kind of dance called breakdancing. As Herc played his beats, friends would grab a microphone and, in the style of Jamaican “toasting,” encourage people to get up and dance. These proto-rappers soon became known as MCs (for “masters
of ceremony” or “mike controllers”). Following Herc’s innovations, pioneers like Afrika Bambaataa and Grandmaster Flash developed hip-hop as we know it today: a culture that encompasses four art forms (DJing, MCing, breakdancing and graffiti art). This nascent hip-hop culture was infused with a sense of competition, a peaceful, intellectual form of battle for rival street gangs. Songs like MC Shan’s “Kill That Noise” and KRS-One’s “The Bridge is Over” fought it out on record and at block parties, with the MCs exchanging snappy insults instead of bullets.
    A few rap acts, like Run-DMC and the Beastie Boys, went mainstream in the 1980s, but most record executives still considered hip-hop a fad until 1989. Then N.W.A. released Straight Outta Compton, featuring such memorable ditties as “Fuck Tha Police” and quotable lyrics like “life ain’t nuthin’ but bitches and money.” Straight Outta Compton was deemed so offensive that radio and television wouldn’t touch it—yet the record sold 2 million copies on word of mouth alone.
    Straight Outta Compton defined a genre of hip-hop now known as “gangsta rap.” When record executives realized that N.W.A. was selling huge amounts of re-cords to white heavy metal fans, gangsta became a money-making formula. Companies made stars (and huge profits) out of Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Tupac Shakur and 50 Cent, while rappers with more nuanced, socially conscious messages were largely forced “underground,” struggling to be heard above the gunshots and booty smacks.—J.B.

Digging up the roots
Not feeling the gangsta vibe? Here are some underground heroes whom you might not know—but should.—J.B.

A Tribe Called Quest
Their 1991 album The Low End Theory defined “progressive” hip-hop as an alternative to gangsta rap.

Gang Starr
MC Guru and DJ Premier (who is widely regarded as one of
the greatest DJs of all time) are kings of East Coast hip-hop. Check out their greatest-hits compilation, Full Clip (1999).

Mos Def
His 1998 release, Black Star, with
fellow New York MC Talib Kweli, sparked an
underground rap revival.

Murs
The newest underground sensation, Murs doesn’t swear or exploit the N-word on his latest record, Murray’s Revenge. His record label, Def Jux, is the home of fellow underground star Aesop Rock.

Earlier this month the U.S. House Appropriations Committee allocated $2 million for a pedestrian bridge to cross Jefferson Park Avenue, part of UVA’s $105 million South Lawn project.
The allocation comes as part of the 2007 Transportation, Treasury and Housing and Urban Development Appropriations Bill, which would provide $67.8 billion in federal spending; the House and Senate, however, have not cast the final vote on the proposed appropriations. The $2 million for the South Lawn is one of only seven projects in the Commonwealth to receive funding in the bill.
If passed, the bill will send money for a grassy expanse, pitched as an echo of “the Lawn,” the site of Jefferson’s original campus (as well as throngs of naked, sprinting undergraduates). The grassy bridge will link the old Lawn to new buildings to be constructed on what is now a parking lot on JPA. UVA’s Office of the Architect expects to begin construction next year.
In a statement, UVA President John Casteen praised the work of Fifth District Congressman Virgil Goode, who apparently took a break from harassing immigrants to help get UVA on the fed gravy train. “This project is another example of the significant impact of his work,” said Casteen.—John Borgmeyer

Construction contractor Blake Caravati has worked in local government since taking a seat on the Planning Commission in 1989. After losing a Council race in 1996, he won two years later; voters re-elected him in 2002. During that time Caravati earned a reputation for a sharp mind and a sharp tongue—both instilled, he says, by the Catholic Jesuit priests who schooled him in Richmond. Now that he is set to retire from Council at the end of this month, C-VILLE sat down with him in hopes of getting a few more good quotes before he’s gone. Here’s some of what he said.—John Borgmeyer

C-VILLE: You always say politics is no joke, yet you often seem to be having fun on the dais. Is politics a game?
Blake Caravati: It is definitely not a game. It is about truth and assembling the facts to make a decision. I ask hard questions, and some people see that as aggressive. The unfortunate part of elected office is that we’re too serious. We’re all human. We all make mistakes. Humor takes the edge off.

Do you make decisions quickly, or do you agonize over them?
My style is to hear a first run-through of the evidence, and my gut says, “Here’s the answer.” But I know I have to ask questions, reach out to people and other Councilors. Sometimes on the night of a meeting I’ll change my vote on the spot after hearing some public comment.
One of the worst things about politics is that people are too into sound bites, but the decision is not a sound bite. It is always gray and always complicated. Then you have to go to the grocery store the next day and see the people you voted against. Like the Meadowcreek Parkway—I ran against it in 1996 and ‘98, but I eventually voted for it.

Are you going to run for other offices?
I have no plans right now. Clearly, though, politics is in my blood. My wife has been my biggest supporter in this, and right now I have a 16-year back-up on my “honey-do” list.

A roadway runs through it: Meadowcreek Parkway will soon overshadow the Bermuda grass and sand-filled greens of the historic course.

Places Well Lose
An occasional series about local sites facing the bulldozer

The McIntire Golf Course “clubhouse” consists of a tiny brick bungalow, a small office and a public restroom—outside, a single picnic table sits on a shaded patio. There’s a metal door spraypainted: “Honor System 20006 (sic) $5.00 City $5.00 County.” Credit-card-size manila envelopes on a hook, with blue tickets stapled in each corner. A hand-lettered sign: “Put money in the envelope. Take ticket as your receipt. Envelope with money goes in the slot. Thanks!”
    The nine-hole McIntire course, built shortly after Paul Goodloe McIntire donated this rolling countryside to the City in 1926, is an example of “pasture” golf—that is, a course reflecting the sport’s rural Scottish roots, as opposed to the hyper-manicured country clubs so popular in America. It’s a throwback place, where a stroll returns you to Charlottesville’s sleepy Southern roots—to a time long before condos, traffic jams and $70 greens fees became the norm.
    “I played my first round of golf on this course in 1938, when I was 8 years old,” says Lynn Cubbage, who has managed the McIntire Golf Course for the past 14 years. “It cost 50 cents back then, and you had to have three clubs in your bag. Both my sons learned on this course. I’ve got the course record here. I shot a 28. In 14 years, nobody has shot that.”
    Soon, the McIntire golf course will change, just as so much else has changed around it. This month, the Virginia Department of Transportation is scheduled to begin acquiring rights-of-way for the Meadowcreek Parkway, a long-planned road that will run from the McIntire Road/250 Bypass intersection north to Rio Road. A steering committee is currently meeting to figure out how to best design the Parkway’s Bypass intersection. When the road and interchange are finally built, (construction is tentatively scheduled for 2008) the McIntire golf course will be altered forever.

A window to the past

The McIntire course’s first hole affords a view that you can’t get anywhere else in Charlottesville, (outside the master bedroom of a swanky condo, that is). The tee sits below a canopy of gnarled trees; hit a true shot and the eye follows an arc through a wide blue sky, a path of lazy clouds that disappear over the forested ridge rippling to the east, dropping into a broad fairway of Bermuda grass among ancient old-growth oaks—some with trunks wider than a bundle of telephone poles.
    The second hole stretches across the hilltop toward Charlottesville High School, where the public address system announces a starting lineup, echoing quietly above the birdsong and squeaking chipmunks: “A senior… No. 12…”
    The third hole’s fairway plunges down a steep hill toward a red-sand green tucked behind a tricky tree line. McIntire is one of the few courses in the country that still use greens made of sand—more expensive courses cultivate smooth, closely shorn grass. “We used to put motor oil on them to keep the dust down,” says Cubbage. “We had to stop doing that, though, because of the water table.” These days he uses a wide, double-handled broom to smooth the dirt. By afternoon, sneaker footprints and tire tracks from golf carts mar the perfect broom pattern as it spirals outward from the hole. A plastic pole, topped with a faded flag that was probably once orange, sits in the cup, marking the target.
    Even on a sunny Monday, early evening, the course is nearly empty. On a park bench beside the fourth tee, layers of sound—Meadow Creek babbling, backhoes grunting somewhere behind the trees—soundtrack a view that draws the gaze up a steep hill topped with the wide oak arms. The fourth tee runs along McIntire’s bottomland, hugging Meadow Creek. When the Meadowcreek Parkway is finally built, it will wipe out this portion of the golf course. “They’ll replace the holes,” says Cubbage. “We need that road out here.”
    The fifth hole sends golfers back up the hillside, near the Vietnam Dogwood Memorial facing 250. A concrete slab, yellow flowers springing through the cracks. Brown wreaths tied with faded ribbons from American Legion Post 74, DAV Chapter 33, William A. Jones III Chapter. Carved in the stone: “The Dogwood Memorial” and “Dedicated to the lasting memory of all who served our country in Viet Nam.” Twenty-three engraved names, “and especially those from the Charlottesville and Albemarle area who gave their lives in that service.” The Parkway will likely include an interchange that will cut into the hillside at this spot. City officials say the Vietnam Dogwood Memorial will be moved to higher ground.
    A stone path traces the hillside from the memorial to the Bermuda grass summit, winding among the ancient trees. A pair of golfers pull their carts across the eighth fairway, ignoring the incessant whine of traffic. “They’ll put condominiums on this place sometime,” says Cubbage. “Maybe not while I’m around, but they will.”

Another Virginia summer is about to slam us with triple-digit temperatures and Ecuadorian humidity, and local neighborhoods are abuzz with the sound of central air-conditioning. But what about the homeless?
According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, summer is no less dangerous for homeless people than winter. Heat stroke and hyperthermia can be life threatening, especially when accompanied by the dehydrating effects of alcohol and a lack of water—not to mention lesser health problems like athlete’s foot and severe sunburn.
Now a local group is stepping up their efforts to provide Charlottesville’s homeless with a place to go beat the heat. The project is called COMPASS Day Haven, and its members aim to find a house where local homeless can go during the day to shower, watch television, do laundry, eat snacks and get instructions on where to find local social services. “This is not designed to be a sleepover,” says Erik Speer, the new project coordinator for COMPASS.
Speer is hitting the streets trying to round up real estate and money. The ideal location, he says, is a house with at least 1,000 square feet within a one-mile radius of Downtown.
Zoning is also a problem. Most places around Downtown are zoned either residential or commercial, but the COMPASS house needs a multiuse zoning. “We’re looking at parts of Cherry Avenue, Albemarle Street, down Meade Avenue and Market Street, and the lower High Street area,” says Speer. The City is currently considering rezoning more of Cherry Avenue for mixed-use development, a designation that would make more houses available to COMPASS.
So far, COMPASS has collected about $9,000, with $6,000 coming from an anonymous foundation and two anonymous individual donors. Speer hopes to get the shelter open by August.—John Borgmeyer

Leading up the Senate primary election on Tuesday, June 13, Democrats Harris Miller (left) and James Webb have both come under attack for their alleged Republican sympathies.

Poor George Allen. Back in March, The New York Times reported that the Virginia Senator is bored with his job. The paper quoted him telling a crowd in Iowa that the Senate is “too slow for me.” Well, be careful what you wish for—the Republican pseudo cowboy now has a pair of Democrats injecting some real excitement into his life.
On Tuesday, June 13, Democratic voters will head to the polls in the Senate primary to see whether James Webb or Harris Miller will get the chance to run against Allen in November. Charlottesville and Albemarle have emerged as a battleground area for these two candidates, says Fred Hudson, chair of the Albemarle Democratic Party.
As an author of military suspense novels and a former Secretary of the Navy under Ronald Reagan, Webb enjoys a great deal more name recognition than Miller, who is a telecommunications lobbyist from Northern Virginia. Both men have one thing in common, though: Each has been criticized inside their own party for excessive Republican ties. Webb endorsed both Allen and George Bush in 2000, while Miller has previously lobbied Congress on behalf of Diebold, the voting machine manufacturer run by a Republican (and suspected by some Dems of helping the GOP rig the 2000 presidential election).
The good news for Democrats is that a May poll from Survey USA found that George Allen had a 47 percent “favorable” rating among Virginia voters; the bad news is that more than a third of respondents said they were “unfamiliar” with both Webb and Harris. Hudson says Harris’ strategy has been to campaign across Virginia, including rural areas, while Webb has focused on population centers. Both have visited Charlottesville in recent weeks.
Hudson says his biggest hope is for a high turnout, even though primaries do not usually generate much voter excitement. “A low voter turnout can give you a candidate that only a small number of people support, and that’s not where we want to be,” he says.—John Borgmeyer

Always look on the bright side of life: UVA prof Jonathan Haidt found that if you want to get happy, start thinking positive.

Are you happy? The question blares at us from magazine covers and pharmaceutical commercials, but most of us realize that true happiness isn’t as simple as a fad diet or a popped pill.
In his new book, The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom, UVA psychology professor Jonathan Haidt looks at happiness through the viewpoint of ancient philosophers and modern scientists, and he discovers that their ideas about what makes people happy are quite similar. The journal Nature called Haidt’s book “the most intellectually substantial book to arise from the ‘positive psychology’ movement” (an area of study that tries to provide scientific insight into the nature of happiness, creativity and fun). Since those things seem to be in short supply these days, we asked Haidt to lay some positive psychology on us. Here’s some of what he said.—John Borgmeyer

C-VILLE: What is the happiness hypothesis?
Jonathan Haidt: The book is about 10 ancient psychological ideas. One of the ideas is that happiness comes from within—that you should not change the world to meet your desires, you should change yourself. Is it true? Well, the Buddha is correct. You should work on yourself. But the real answer to happiness is that it comes from between: between the right engagements between yourself and others, yourself and your work, yourself and something larger than yourself. We only get energized from engaging with things outside ourselves.

What misunderstandings do we have about happiness?
There’s a long list of answers to that one. We think happiness means feeling lots of pleasant emotions all the time. That’s not true. A flourishing life is going to have some richness and texture to it, ups and downs. Happiness is about the conditions of the journey.

You write a lot about self-righteousness. In today’s political climate, we could all use some help with that.
One thing I, as a liberal, learned doing this book is that both sides make a lot of sense. We all want to save the world and make America a better place, but our moral psychology blinds us to the other side, and makes us see only evil motives. Bush is a paragon of this thinking, when he sees world events through the lens of good versus evil. Research shows that liberals are a little more open-minded, but, at the extremes, the Left is just as bad as the Right. This is why I support Mark Warner, because he can see the wisdom on both sides and compromise. The party that learns to speak to Americans’ noble aspirations will win. You can bury the hatchet and praise your opponent and still stick to your principles.

June will mark the final month on City Council for Blake Caravati, Charlottesville’s premier rhetorician. For the past eight years, Caravati has baffled supporters and opponents alike with more non sequitur folkisms than H. Ross Perot.
As Caravati enters the home stretch, this week we offer a quiz to help you get the most out of his final meetings. One of the witticisms below was actually uttered by Caravati—we cooked up the rest by stabbing blindly at the keyboard. Can you pick out the real Caravati quote? If not, tune in to the last few Council meetings before his words are lost to history.—John Borgmeyer

1. “You can put lipstick on that pig, but you can’t make it fly.”
2. “Mr. Mayor, aren’t we putting the charette before the horse?”
3. “I would rather swing a big stick now, and save the carrot as a snack for later.”
4. “You let the cat out of the bag, so don’t ask me to shave it.”