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| Sunday, February 22, 2015 | Tampa Bay Times
Perspective >
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TELLING
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it’s a rare chance to talk publicly about
what they have gone through. “When
you are only talking to other veterans,
you feel isolated,” said combat veteran
Taylor Urruela, 29, who lost part of a leg
from roadside bomb explosions in Iraq.
“Most people get their understanding
of the military from movies, which is so
off base it’s crazy. This is a great way for
the community to understand.”
“Telling: Tampa Bay” is sponsored
by the Florida Humanities Council
as part of the national “Telling Project,” founded in 2008 to help promote
meaningful communication between
veterans and their country. The seven
local cast members were selected from
numerous veterans who applied to
become involved in the project. “Telling
Project” founder Jonathan Wei interviewed each cast member at length and
then wrote the performance scripts
based on what they said.
Wei began the “Telling Project” in Oregon while working as a university counselor for nontraditional students. What
began an organization for student veterans grew into a nationwide initiative to
help veterans tell their stories on stage.
“Telling: Tampa Bay,” the project’s 25th
installment, will also be the subject of a
public television documentary next fall,
produced by WEDU PBS-Tampa and the
Florida Humanities Council.
Wei says theater works well as a communication platform for veterans to
speak and to be heard. “Theater offers
a process that prepares them. There is
a respect in that space, a sense that people came to listen.”
Lisa Powers, director of the “Telling:
Tampa Bay” performances, is uniquely
qualified to help prepare the veterans
for the stage. An experienced actor and
former artistic director of St. Petersburg’s
American Stage, Powers also has a master’s
degree in drama therapy from New York
University’s Steinhardt School.
Powers says she
Director Lisa
is there to guide the
Powers has
veterans as they get
witnessed the used to telling their
courage of
stories on stage.
“As they learn their
the actors.
own story, they start
to reveal more and learn more about
themselves,” she said. During rehearsals she has watched as her actors “register” their own traumas in the moment.
For each of the veterans involved, this
public journey takes courage, she notes.
In addition to working with injured veteran Urruela, she worked with a cast
that also includes Iraq War veteran
Scott Owens who, with his wife Shannon, talks on-stage about the difficulties of dealing with injuries and posttraumatic stress disorder and trying
to reintegrate back into a society that
doesn’t understand what they are going
through. Others in the cast represent a
wide array of veteran experiences.
Some of the stories may make audience members flinch. But audiences are
ready to hear it, Wei says. “We’ve been
at war for 13 years and we (citizens)
are understandably curious. We understand that we don’t know something
important. And now we can listen.”
This report from the Florida Humanities
Council was compiled with information
from freelance journalist Arielle Stevenson
and Florida historian Gary Mormino.
TO LEARN MORE
“Telling: Tampa Bay” is sponsored by the
nonprofit Florida Humanities Council,
an independent affiliate of the National
Endowment for the Humanities that
funds and develops public programs
around the state exploring the stories of
Florida, its history and cultural heritage.
To see more details and a video
on “Telling: Tampa Bay,” go to
FloridaHumanities.org/veterans.
PERFORMANCES
Programs begin at 7:30 p.m. and are free
and open to the public.
MARCH 3
The Studio@620
620 First Ave. S, St. Petersburg
MARCH 6
The Players Theatre
838 North Tamiami Trail, Sarasota
Lobby opens at 6:30 p.m. with community resource tables for veterans.
To reserve seating, call (941) 365-2494 or
go online: www.theplayers.org
MARCH 13 AND 14
Hillsborough Community College
Campus Theater
Northeast corner of East Palm Avenue
and North 14th Street, Ybor City, Tampa
APRIL 1
Largo Cultural Center
105 Central Park Drive, Largo
Lobby opens at 6:30 p.m. with community resource tables for veterans
These programs contain adult language
and themes of war and combat
violence. Audience discretion is advised.
Seating is on a first-come, first-served
basis unless otherwise noted.
tampabay.com/opinion
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Getty Images
35
National Portrait Gallery
White House
White House
Ranking all the presidents
BY BRANDON ROTTINGHAUS
AND JUSTIN VAUGHN
W
e surveyed 162 members of the American
Political Science Association’s Presidents &
Executive Politics section and asked
them to rate the U.S. presidents. Here
is what we found.
The most highly ranked presidents
contained many of the usual suspects.
Abraham Lincoln was rated the greatest president, with an average score
of 95 out of 100, followed by George
Washington and Franklin D. Roosevelt.
The rest in the top 10 were Teddy
Roosevelt, Thomas Jefferson, Harry S.
Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Bill
Clinton, Andrew Jackson and Woodrow Wilson. Those presidents with a
score of more than 50 are shown on
this graph.
This list is similar to past ones,
except that both Clinton and Eisenhower crack the top 10.
We also asked respondents which
president should be added to Mount
Rushmore, and Franklin Roosevelt was the overwhelming favorite. Almost two-thirds of respondents
chose him. The next highest vote-getters, Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan,
were supported by only 5 percent of
respondents.
Who were the worst presidents?
James Buchanan was the lowest
ranked, and was joined at the bottom
by Warren Harding, Andrew Johnson,
Franklin Pierce and William Harrison.
Presidents with shortened terms tend
to fare worse, on average, as in other
rankings.
The views of these scholars differed from the views of regular Americans in some interesting ways. For
example, in 2010, a plurality of Americans polled nationwide would have
put John F. Kennedy on Mount Rushmore, followed by Reagan and Frank-
Presidential scholars’ ranking of top Presidents
Obama ranks 18th overall and, among
the modern presidents (those since
FDR), he is in the middle of the pack.
He ranks behind not only Clinton and
Eisenhower but also Reagan, Johnson, Kennedy, and George H.W. Bush.
Obama ranks ahead of Gerald R. Ford,
Jimmy Carter, Richard Nixon and
George W. Bush (who was ranked 35
overall).
Perhaps because of the era in which
he governs, Obama was considered
the second most polarizing president (after George W. Bush). Of the 19
presidents dating to Teddy Roosevelt,
Obama was rated 13th in terms of legislative skill, 11th for diplomatic skill
and 10th for integrity and military
skill. Consistent with this, only 2 percent of respondents suggested adding
Obama to Mount Rushmore.
Of course, it is too early to fully
assess Obama or even Bush. History is always shaping and reshaping the legacy of former presidents.
As in the case of Eisenhower and Clinton, presidential legacies can improve
with time. This seems especially likely
when presidents serve more than one
term, preside over economic prosperity, and effectively handle international conflict.
For Obama in particular, the next
two years may therefore prove crucial in determining whether his legacy
will put him among the nation’s better
presidents.
Average rating (0-100 for all who scored 50 or above)
Lincoln
Washington
F. Roosevelt
T. Roosevelt
Jefferson
Truman
Eisenhower
Clinton
Jackson
Wilson
Reagan
Johnson
Madison
Kennedy
Adams
Monroe
H.W. Bush
Obama
Polk
Taft
McKinley
Quincy Adams
Cleveland
Ford
0
20
40
60
80
Source: Data from 2014 survey of the American Political
Science Association’s Presidents and Executive Politics section
lin Roosevelt. The Kennedy mystique
looms larger in the public mind than
for most scholars.
Indeed, when asked about which
presidents were most overrated and
underrated, our survey of scholars
found Kennedy to be the most overrated, followed by Reagan and Andrew
Jackson.
100
Washington Post
The most underrated? Eisenhower,
George H.W. Bush and Truman. All of
these underrated presidents, to some
degree, were consensus-builders. They
also all managed international conflicts, something that most of the top
10 great presidents did.
How does Barack Obama fare?
Scholars had a mixed view of him.
About the survey: 391 members of the
American Political Science Association’s
Presidents & Executive Politics section,
the premier organization of experts of
the American presidency, were invited
to complete the online survey, which was
administered by Brandon Rottinghaus
of the University of Houston and Justin
S. Vaughn of Boise State University. 162
surveys were completed online between
May and November 2014.
© 2014 Washington Post
A Little Perspective
Robots as hot
button issue
Presidential candidates have been
arguing for more than two decades
now about whether free trade is hurting middle-class workers. In 2016,
they may launch a similar debate
about robots and computers. As campaign demons go, automation may
be the new outsourcing.
Technological advancements are
making it easier for companies to buy
software or machines to handle tasks
once performed by people. That’s
true in traditional blue-collar bastions
of middle-class work, such as manufacturing, but also increasingly in
higher-skill white-collar sectors such
as accounting.
Experts divide sharply on whether this
is good or bad for the U.S. economy.
Techno-optimists predict big breakthroughs that create good jobs that
would be as unimaginable today as
“auto worker” was in the late 1800s.
Pessimists forecast an economy
where only a small slice of workers have the skills and education to
stay ahead of the automation wave.
Where almost everyone agrees is that
the phenomenon is growing, and that
helping already strained middle-class
workers adjust to it calls for big policy
debates over education, entrepreneurship and the social safety net.
Which is to say, robots, as a political issue, could be ripening in time
to snag a lead role in the economic
debate of this campaign.
Jim Tankersley, Washington Post
Flying under the bats’ radar
Like a caterpillar blending into a leaf to
escape a bird’s gaze, luna moths that
have tails can use them to generate a
noise that guides attacking bats away
from their bodies. Using high-speed
infrared cameras, researchers at
Boise State University watched big
brown bats hunt moths by means
of echolocation. The ones with tails
had a 47 percent survival advantage
over those without, the researchers
reported last week in Proceedings of
the National Academy of Sciences.
Douglas Quenqua, New York Times
Still the same
old bacteria
A violin’s
sweet sound
Scientists have discovered microorganisms living beneath the ocean
floor that appear to have not evolved
for more than 2 billion years, a finding that nonetheless may support
the theory of evolution. Researchers
examined communities of fossilized, sulfur-cycling bacteria found in
two rock deposits in Australia. The
first, 1.8 billion years old, contained
bacteria that was nearly identical
to the second, 2.3 billion years old.
“That’s the evolutionary distance
from the earliest trilobites to human
beings,” said J. William Schopf, lead
author of the study in Proceedings of
the National Academy of Sciences.
Researchers then compared the
specimens to modern communities of sulfur bacteria, which were
essentially no different. The lack of
evolution stems from the bacteria’s
unchanging environment. “They’re
completely protected in an environment that’s existed on the Earth,
unchanged, ever since we’ve had
oceans,” Schopf said. “Evolution is
a result of organisms adapting to a
changing physical or biological environment. The corollary to that is if the
environment doesn’t change, then
you would predict the organisms
wouldn’t change, either.”
Douglas Quenqua, New York Times
Some of the world’s most prized
violins were made in Cremona, Italy,
in the 17th and 18th centuries by the
Amati, Guarneri and Stradivari families. Researchers at MIT wanted to
know what accounted for the instruments’ unique acoustical properties.
Using technical drawings, X-rays and
CT scans of the instruments, the team
compared hundreds of Cremona-era
violins, conducting laboratory experiments to see how air flowed through
the F-shaped holes on the surface.
The scientists found that the length
of the holes, not the width, and the
strength of the back plate had the biggest effects on sound quality. When
air escapes a violin, “most of the
airflow is coming around the edges”
of the holes, said Nicholas Makris, an
engineer at MIT and the lead author.
Guarneri violins had the most elongated holes, and hence the strongest
sound. Makris, whose work was
published in Proceedings of the Royal
Society: A, believes the Guarneri construction was not a matter of design,
but evolution. “If you try to replicate a
hole exactly, you’ll always have a little
error,” he said. The holes most likely
grew gradually longer as violin-makers tried to replicate the work of their
predecessors.
Douglas Quenqua, New York Times
Whose dog?
Some people believe dogs look like
their owners. To put this theory to
the test, the New York Times photographed Westminster Kennel Club
Dog Show entrants with their prize
pups. See if you can guess who owns
Pepé, the saluki. Try more examples
by going to nytimes.com/sports. (By
the way, Pepé’s owner is top right.)
Global killers
Worried about what to worry about?
Accidents should move up your list.
Worldwide, road injuries kill more
people than AIDS. Falls kill nearly
three times as many people as brain
cancer. Both fire and poisonings have
many times more fatal victims than
natural disasters. In 2013, the combined death toll from all unintentional
injuries was 3.5 million people. Only
heart disease and stroke were greater
killers. These findings, published in
the Lancet, are from the “Global Burden of Disease” study.
Jeremy N. Smith, New York Times