Sneaky retreats

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				THE
Column Archive				VIRGINIA GAZETTE
				WILLIAMSBURG, VIRGINIA
Sneaky retreats				January 28, 2004

It used to be that retreats were the specific purview of religious groups who wished to cleanse their souls by leaving urban blight behind and traipsing off to some mountain hideaway to commune with their divinity of choice.

Now, however, it seems that any group, be it political, social or educational, can remove itself from its surroundings and go elsewhere for a few days of brain bathing, kitchy-kooing and dining at expensive restaurants.

Just last December, Vice President Dick Cheney and some of his cronies decided that they’d had enough of bunker life and betook themselves to the sunlit radiance of the Rolling Rock Club in Ligonier, Pa. There they shot 417 of the 500 pheasants and mallard ducks that had been released for their bushwhacking pleasure. Accompanying Cheney and his retreating pals on yet another duck-shooting retreat in Louisiana was Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who apparently came along to assure Cheney of the court’s continued support of the White House in the upcoming November elections.

So those were successful retreats, though there were no reports of what happened to the 417 ducks that went down. Perhaps they’re all now safely ensconced in the retreaters’ freezers as a hedge against mad cow disease.

Closer to home, the WJC School Board last week decided to leave its mental baggage at the Amtrak station in Williamsburg and retreat to, of all places, Richmond, the dinge capital of the South. There, said chair John Alewynse, they could “forge a collective identity.” What kind of gobbledygook a forged identity involves is anyone’s guess, though we do know that the taxpayer bill for all this forging came to around $1200 plus meals and another $2250 for two consultants who would “facilitate.”

Facilitate? Facilitate what? Are the members of the new School Board really so at each other’s throats that they have to import facilitators to administer Prozac and settle them down to making nice with each other? Or did the facilitators enable them to decode the psychobabble inherent in this rather communistic notion of a collective identity? If what they want is a collective identity, why have a board at all?

All that aside, what I really don’t understand is why they couldn’t have forged their collective identity in Williamsburg. They could, for instance, have retreated to the Tazewell Club, before the Visigoths at CW rape and pillage that. Or to the less elegant Community Center. There they might have pumped, ridden, rowed and run themselves into a state of utterly harmonious apoplexy and soothed their communal body in the bubblies of the whirlpool.

Throw in a few pizzas and beers after all that and they would have been so collectivized that they might well have agreed to four more high schools, three more middle schools, five more elementary schools, ten more trailers and gone home feeling absolutely fuzzy about themselves. In addition, they would have avoided that loopy facilitating nonsense and left behind all the mental baggage that Alewynse says they’re carrying around – as well, I might add, as a few pounds.

But no. They preferred to go to Richmond, get facilitated, eat themselves silly, forge some nebulous identity and dabble in problem solving. And all at our expense.

Not so the James City Board of Supervisors, however. Representing the epitome of retreat in all its tergiversations, they were off last Saturday to a local 4-H camp to discuss the budget. They, of course, are so completely oblivious to the concept of a collective identity that they don’t even consider such niceties as facilitators.

Rather, their idea of a retreat is getting as far out of the public eye as possible to discuss the county’s business. Hence the 4-H escapade was not televised, as it had been in the past, but rather open only to whatever citizens could find where on earth the 4-H camp was located.

But the supes are so adept at retreating that they really have no need of a separate location in which to secrete themselves from probing public eyes and ears. All they have to do is appeal to the legerdemain known as a “closed session,” which essentially means that they tell the public to go pleasure itself elsewhere while the supes go into their hidey-hole.

This is what they did, illegally, as it turns out, on Jan. 5. In a blatantly partisan attempt to transform lone Democrat John McGlennon into an impotently querulous queen bee, the Republican drones buzzed behind closed doors and bolstered their collective identity by appointing themselves to most of the 20 boards and commissions on which the supes serve. “We probably shouldn’t have done it, “said board chairman, Bruce Goodson, after the fact.

And they probably shouldn’t have done it, just as Cheney and his buddies shouldn’t have whacked off 417 defenseless ducks, or Alewynse and his crew shouldn’t have slogged up to Richmond at taxpayer expense in search of some crazed collective identity.

Yet, that seems to be the point of retreats. Get out of the public eye and do something silly, if not illegal. In short, retreats, like conventions, frequently represent a kind of Dionysiac denial of reality that probably should best be left to those graced by religious fervor, as opposed to those dealing with the knotty problems associated with public service.