Commentary

It’s widely understood that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. evolved significantly on the issue of reparations during his short lifetime. Toward the start of his career, he was a moralist in his thinking, rather than the radical economic thinker he later became. In 2018, I befriended Dr. King’s former barber, Nelson Malden, now in his late 80s, and wrote a book with him titled “The Colored Waiting Room” about Nelson’s life and the American civil rights movement.

On the morning of Sept. 5, 1972, I was 15-years-old and days away from the start of school. When coming downstairs to breakfast, my mother informed me that Israeli athletes and coaches had been taken hostage by Palestinian terrorists at the Munich Summer Olympics. For the rest of the morning, until I left to go to JV soccer practice, I periodically checked the television news, which in 1972 meant ABC and Maryland’s Jim McKay anchoring the coverage.

The coattail effect in politics is the theory that the popularity of a candidate at the top of the ticket redounds to the benefit of those in the same party down ballot. You vote Democratic for president, then you might vote Democratic for senator or mayor. But what do we call it when the person from whom the benefit flows is not actually on the ballot? What if the person isn’t even personally that popular?

There was widespread disappointment when the expanded Child Tax Credit (CTC) was lost as Build Back Better eventually became the Inflation Reduction Act. Included in last year’s American Rescue Plan, the expanded CTC, now expired, raised the maximum value of the credit, increased the number of families that were eligible and provided payments on a monthly basis. It made a real difference, particularly for lower-income families, who reported spending much of the money on their children as well as using it to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table.

Last week’s Democratic rally in Rockville, headlined by President Biden and featuring an all-star cast of party luminaries, was a big hit, a rollicking show. It gave the party faithful the red-meat rhetoric they were looking for, and just as important, it gave them hope. Maybe the midterms won’t be as disastrous as the Democrats once feared. As I sat in the press section of the raucous gym at Richard Montgomery High School, penned in by the camera riser and some temporary fencing, I found myself wondering, why Maryland and why now?

In May, literary critic Christian Lorentzen published a Substack newsletter about being bored. “Hollywood movies are boring. Television is boring. Pop music is boring. The art world is boring. Broadway is boring. Books from big publishing are boring,” he wrote. Since I have been rather bored, too, I paid $5 to read the entire piece, but was unconvinced by his conclusion, which lays the blame for artistic stasis on the primacy of marketing. The risk aversion of cultural conglomerates can’t explain why there’s not more interesting indie stuff bubbling up. I had hoped that when the black hole of the Donald Trump presidency ended, redirected energy might allow for a cultural efflorescence. So far, that hasn’t happened.

The big news this week regarding Baltimore’s economic future is the announcement that DLA Piper, the international law firm with city roots, is moving its local office back downtown after two decades in the suburbs. The move from Mount Washington just over the line in Baltimore County to the heart of Harbor East is minimal in terms of distance, just 8 miles down the Jones Falls Expressway. But in terms of reasserting the city’s importance to Maryland’s economy, it’s enormous.