STENGEL MOMENTS

Sometimes, no matter how hard I try to speak clearly, the situation makes me sound like Casey ("All right everyone, line up alphabetically according to your height ") Stengel. Okay, I can grasp that the end of Daylight Saving Time means it gets late earlier now. But my husband just asked me why we turned the clocks back today instead of two weeks from now, the way he heard on the news a while back. And I had to explain that that was for next year. So this year, it still gets late earlier this week, but next year it gets late earlier two weeks later. Anyway, ggsloth.blogspot. com says Daylight Saving Time makes no sense and probably causes global warming. My own position is that using Standard Time in the winter causes street crime and makes working people feel overworked, because going home from work in the dark makes you feel as if you've been working longer than you really have.

THE LATEST FROM JON

Odd Lots #11 (the Battle of Hastings, the apparition of Our Lady of Guadalupe, and Mark Twain)--"Mark Twain was the clue"--he was born and died in years when Halley's Comet appeared. The other two events also coincided with the comet.

NO SECOND CHANCES

Remember the quaint phrase about ex-cons who have "paid their debt to society"? We haven't really believed that for a while now. I keep seeing articles about how dreadful it is that people with criminal records are working as school bus drivers and nursing home attendants. No doubt the next alarm will be issued over ex-cons who work in restaurant kitchens or construction sites, where the general public, including--omigod!--children, might possibly cross paths with them. (The solution to that problem is actually a no-brainer. If we want a higher quality of people working in those places, all we have to do is increase the wages, so that more respectable people will want to work there. If the compensation and benefits of a particular workplace make it a job of last resort, it will get applicants of last resort. Duh.)

A listfriend of mine once complained that "we seem to think after we put an offender in prison for a while, he's 'cured', and it's okay for him to live next door to me." She's a perfectly nice person, not especially vindictive or judgmental, and I think she echoes the sentiments of a lot of Americans.

Sex offenders are a special category. If by "sex offender" we mean predatory pedophile, the data seem to indicate that it's just about impossible to rehabilitate them. So maybe it's okay to keep passing laws restricting where they can live and work, until they are all segregated into a single neighborhood on the Northeast Side of Chicago, and the Cook County Department of Children and Family Services decides it is per se child neglect to allow anyone under 18 to enter that neighborhood. In fact, we aren't that careful in defining "sex offender," and a lot of people get included who are guilty of nothing worse than being five years older than a teenage girlfriend, or "mooning" a cranky neighbor. More and more local governments are forbidding "sex offenders," whatever they may be, from living or working in, or in some cases driving or walking through, their municipalities.

But your common-or-garden-variety mope, who is increasingly likely to have committed a drug offense, rather than a violent crime, has been caught up in our demand for "safe" neighborhoods and workplaces. No, doing prison time won't "cure" them. In the first place, the US legal system doesn't consider them "sick." In the second place, if it did, prison is the last place in the world to send somebody to "recover" from criminality. In the third place, the US criminal justice system is officially based on the premise that we do not restrict people's freedom because of what they are, but for what they have done.

This is wildly counterintuitive, to any ordinary reasonable person. "Character," says Aristotle, "is fate." What people are determines what they will do and what will happen to them. And we can tell what people are by what they have done in the past. That's pure common sense. A person who has served his prison term may now be an ex-convict (that is, no longer a prisoner), but most people will not regard him as an ex-criminal. He may or may not have "paid his debt to society," but we will, not unreasonably, continue to suspect him of being the same kind of person who incurred that debt in the first place.

Which might be a manageable situation if we were not locking up a higher proportion of our citizenry than any country in the world outside of the Third World, and if so many of those we lock up were not taken from the same ethnic and socioeconomic groups. Which means they return to the same neighborhoods, and the decent citizens in those neighborhoods are deprived of their right to "safe neighborhoods."

On one hand, all of this could be easily resolved by imposing life sentences for all crimes. Indeed, only mere sentimental liberalism stands in the way of executing all petty criminals. It was good enough for our pre-Victorian ancestors.

On the other hand, we aren't quite ready for that, not yet. So if we assume that most of the people now in prison will someday get out, we really do need to accept the fact that everybody needs to live someplace. As a condition of parole, ex-cons are also required to work someplace. So we need to figure out just where they will be allowed to live and work, and how to protect the public without generating hysteria in the process.

Because the alternative is to create a group of second-class citizens, into which it will become all to easy to push all kinds of unpopular people, from racial minorities and poor people to non-Christians and liberals, to thee and me.

SCHADENFREUDE

Schadenfreude is defined as the pleasure we take in the misfortunes of others. I asked our rabbi the other day whether the Jewish tradition has a position on schadenfreude, and was informed that we're not supposed to indulge in it. The Bible says so (somewhere in Proverbs. Something like "Do not rejoice when your enemy fails.") I did once write a song about it, to be sung, of course, to the tune of the choral movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, with a four-part chorus and backup from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra:

We indulge in schadenfreude when the other side gets screwed,
When the other candidate gets caught cavorting in the nude.
Someone else's team gets faded, someone else's house burns down,
Someone else's bar gets raided, pass the cup of joy around.

There's no freud like schadenfreude, blazes like magnesium,
Dances like the lovely green-eyed daughter of Elysium;
Other cheer when we're down-hearted, we rejoice when others fall;
If it weren't for schadenfreude, we might have no freud at all.

Anyway, President Bush has now been pressured by both sides in Congress to reinstate the requirement that hurricane disaster reconstruction workers be paid prevailing wages on the Gulf Coast. And there are rumors that somebody is going to get indicted for blowing Valerie Plame's cover, possibly today. But I will try to avoid the moral hazards of schadenfreude for a while longer.

IT'S MORNING IN CHICAGO

I'm not a serious baseball fan, but when a team in my home town wins the World Series for the first time in 80 years, I figure I might as well enjoy it. I'm more of a fan now than I was before the Summer of the Impeachment, when the home run duel between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa was the nicest thing happening on the news, so I actually started paying attention. Anyway, it was a nice thing to wake up to.

It was at least interesting to wake up to the announcement that Harriet Miers has withdrawn her name from consideration for the Supreme Court position. Like most Democrats I know, I found her less objectionable than most of the possible alternatives. I think, in fact, that she really was what Reagan thought he was getting in Sandra Day O'Connor. I still don't understand why the Hard Right fought her nomination so hard, though. Are they just throwing their weight around unnecessarily? (By the way, in Arabic, there is a word which means literally, "to act like a person from Baghdad" and colloquially, "to throw one's weight around.") Or were they trying to sneak her past the Democrats in Congress by making them think she might be a closet moderate? Now, of course, we may never know.

The other thing that somewhat perplexes me is Miers' official reason for withdrawing her name: that she doesn't want to "burden" the White House with the possibility of having to release materials about her work as White House counsel that might breach attorney-client confidentiality. I find this odd because I distinctly remember from the Summer of the Impeachment that everybody was taking it for granted that there was no attorney-client confidentiality between Clinton and his White House counsel.

And finally, if the Hard Right was really serious in opposing Miers, does this presage a split in the Republican party? Are there really enough people in the party who think Bush has gone too far in reversing the work, not only of Franklin Roosevelt but of Teddy Roosevelt, that they might be willing to form--what? A New Bull Moose Party? Led by McCain, no doubt. Or maybe the Hard Right would split off to form their own party. The mind boggles at the possible names for that, most of which I find too blasphemous to print here. But I think the majority of American voters would find a moderate Republican party, by whatever name, really attractive, and its candidates would be a shoo-in in 2008.

DON'T OPEN THAT CLOSET, FIBBER!!!!!

My husband is an old-time radio junkie. Among the shows he listens to through the marvels of on-line broadcasting is one from the 1940s and 1950s about a couple named Fibber McGee and his wife, Molly. And a running gag throughout the series was their closet, which was crammed full of miscellaneous household goods to the point where, every time it was opened, a cascade of sound effects assaulted the ears. Right before McGee opened the closet, invariably, Molly warned, "Don't open that closet, Fibber!" And, always, he opened it and the sound effects ensued.

And then there was the time, many years ago, when I was living in Cambridge MA and doing my shopping at a place called Star Market, which had a transport service for both groceries and shoppers. Since I didn't have a car at the time, I found that pretty helpful. Anyway, one day I bought a couple of bags of groceries, including a carton of eggs, and got into the transport station wagon. The driver, as usual, loaded the groceries (mine and several other people's) into the back. Mine were loaded last, and the driver left the tailgate open with my stuff sitting right behind it. I pointed out to the driver, as delicately as possible, that if he stopped short or took a tight corner, my groceries, including the eggs, would fall out, and the eggs would probably break. "Don't worry about it," he said cheerfully. "I know what I'm doing." Needless to say, he stopped short in the next block. My groceries, including the eggs, fell out, and the eggs broke.

Well, that's about how I'm feeling these days. Like most people I know, I can see the approaching disasters. I've tried to warn some of those in charge. "Don't worry," they tell me. "We know what we're doing." And then Fibber opens the closet and everything crashes noisily onto the floor, or the station wagon stops short and I watch helplessly as the groceries slide off the tailgate and the eggs break. "If you cut taxes and start a war at the same time, we'll run up a record deficit."/"Don't worry, we know what we're doing." "If you keep appointing incompetent cronies to crucial positions like FEMA Director, the next time we have a natural disaster, it'll turn into an administrative disaster."/"Don't worry....etc." You get the idea. Sometimes, I wouldn't mind being as stupid as the people running the country. At least then I could be surprised by all these disasters.

THE OTHER PRO-LIFE POSITION

In Virginia, the gubernatorial campaign is heating up over the death penalty. Kilgore, the Republican challenger, is for it. Kaine, the Democratic lieutenant governor, is--sort of--against it. That is, he is a Catholic and shares his church's opposition to capital punishment, but says that, while it is the law, he will enforce it.

So as a practical matter, the difference between the two candidates is not what they will do when a death penalty case comes up, but how they will feel about it. The Republicans evidently consider Kaine insufficiently enthusiastic about frying a Death Row inmate.

We went through the same thing here in Illinois a while back, by the way. In 1994, Republican Jim Edgar beat Democrat Dawn Clark Netsch, who took precisely the same position on the death penalty as Virginia's Kaine (except that she claimed no religious basis for her belief.) But Edgar evidently succeeded in convincing the voters that being able to pull the switch with a smile rather than a wince made him a better person.

If Kaine suffers the same fate as Netsch, we need to stop and think about this. We have had two Quaker presidents--Hoover and Nixon. (The Quakers, mostly, oppose the death penalty.) For very different reasons, they were both among America's least popular leaders by the time they left office. But neither of them was ever subjected to any kind of religious test on the death penalty. Nixon would undoubtedly have passed it. I'm not sure about Hoover. We have had one Catholic president--Kennedy. When he was in office, however, the Vatican had not yet adopted its current position on the death penalty.

So we are only now, for the first time, being faced with a political candidate from the Religious Left--a person whose liberal position is based on a rather conservative religion. Can we expect the Republicans to start invoking the separation of church and state again? Or will they try to revive the anti-Catholicism that was once a staple of Southern politics? Will the Klan once again bar Catholics from membership (they did, up until about 20 years ago)? I can hardly wait.

ODD LOTS #11

The Battle of Hastings, the fall of the Alamo, the apparition of Our Lady of Guadalupe, and Mark Twain.

ALONG CAME WILMA

Hurricane Wilma is currently a Category 5 storm, headed for South Florida. Of course, both the strength and the destination could change any time. I just sent an e-mail to a client of mine who was in Fort Myers, FL the last I heard, telling him to get the hell out of there. Wilma is a record-setter in several rather impressive ways. Maybe we should all consider moving to a quieter planet?

GEEZ, DOESN'T ANYBODY BUT JON KNOW ODD LOT ANSWERS?

He got Odd Lots #10 right--microwave cooking, post-its, and the Western Hemisphere are all accidental discoveries, made while looking for something else. Like, as Jon says, his third child (there is obviously an interesting story behind this...)

ODD LOTS #10

Microwave cooking, post-its, teflon, and the Western Hemisphere.

MORE KUDOS TO JON!

Odd Lots #9 (Marilyn Monroe, Jesse Jackson Sr., and William the Conqueror)--the link is being born out of wedlock. Jon apologizes for late submission, but it took me by surprise to the point that I have no Odd Lots #10 waiting in the wings at the moment. Watch this space.

SIGNS OF THE TIMES

We've all gotten used to geezers on Harleys. But yesterday in the parking lot of our local liquor store, I saw a first--a 30-something guy on a Harley, wearing pale pink sneakers!

THE EXPERTS CATCH UP

Evidently I'm not the only person wondering if we should evacuate some of the Gulf Coast permanently rather than just for the duration of any particular emergency. According to the NY Times News Service, several scientists, developers, and environmentalists are urging politicians to give serious consideration to identifying "those sections of shoreline that are clearly so vulnerable to storm damage that they should no longer receive any federal subsidy...[and] should be yanked out of the flood insurance program." (That's Robert S. Young of Western Carolina University, who studies coastal development.)

At the same time, the owners and managers of the celebrated Antoine's restaurant in New Orleans have realized that, aside from the flood and wind damage to its physical building, their major problem is going to be the loss of most of their lower-level staff. Most of their busboys, janitors, and other basic food workers lived in the Lower Ninth Ward, which was almost totally wiped out. These are the folks who have the least resources to move back. Antoine's, of course, is just one major hospitality venue among many with this problem. The hospitality industry runs on--let's not mince words--poor people.

The development mavens who were building their fantasy new New Orleans over the last few weeks were dreaming about being able to do it without poor people, kind of like a Disneyland version of a great American city. They had been operating on the same assumption most of us have, that poor people are really unnecessary, like pigeons. If you're building, or rebuilding, a city from scratch, you simply don't include them, and the city will be a neater, cleaner place.

They had ignored the experience of places like Saudi Arabia, which had been able to use its oil revenues to pretty much eliminate poverty among native citizens--and then discovered that they had to import a whole population of poor people to do poor people's jobs. You know, street cleaning, child care, garbage pickup, bussing tables, stuff that nobody with enough money to choose any other job (or no job at all) would do.

For some reason, we and the Saudis, and maybe most people everywhere, would rather have imported poor people doing those jobs than the home-grown variety. So I'm betting Antoine's and the rest of the new New Orleans hospitality industry will start lobbying for a bracero program for busboys. You heard it here first.

INFO WANTED

Does anybody out there know whether the United States is the only country in the world (or just in the industrialized West) that holds its elections on work days? The Iraqis are voting on Saturday, for pete's sake!

BACK INTO THE YEAR

The High Holidays are over, and I'm back in my office, dealing with 36 hours worth of voice mail and email from frantic clients. Fires have been extinguished, reassurances have been given, appointments have been set up, stuff has been mailed out. The world continues to roll on at its pre-holiday pace. I always feel strange, stepping in and out of the regular-world dimension and the other-world dimension. This year, instead of my usual holiday greeting, I have been telling my friends "I hope next year is better." After a tsunami, two hurricanes and an earthquake on the global level, plus major illness and recovery on the personal level, that kind of makes sense.

On the other hand, for once I can be really pragmatically glad not to be a Republican. This year has been really bad for them. Some of it is pure James Fraser-style folk politics. James Fraser, author of the anthropological classic "Golden Bough", tells us that back in the good old days, when a tribe had a bad crop or a famine or really awful weather, they would take the chief out in the field and stone him to death, because the chief was responsible for keeping the gods happy on behalf of his tribe. I still remember back in 1979, when Michael Bilandic was mayor of Chicago and we had a horrendous series of snowstorms that left most of the city buried. And the hapless mayor went on TV saying there was no parking or traffic problem. We Chicagoans had no problem voting him out of office, though we were nice enough not to throw rocks at him first. Presumably Bush has the Secret Service to protect him from outraged natives, but the election is getting to look ominous. May this year be better than last.

A GOOD YEAR TO ALL OF YOU

Every so often, somebody writes a piece about why starting the year in January really doesn't make much sense. In the natural world, January isn't really the beginning of anything. At best, it is the dead of winter, and starting the year then gives us an excuse for a good party to break the monotony. At worst, it is too cold and miserable to go out to the parties. Why not, the writers inevitably ask, start the official year when we start the academic year? That corresponds to a real place in the natural year--harvest, and the autumnal equinox, and for that matter, the football season and the World Series, more or less.

I saw another such piece this year, and I can't even remember where any more, but this posting is addressed to its author, whoever she may be. Some of us always start the year near the autumnal equinox. That's what the Jewish tradition does. And it really does seem to fit better with the academic year, the natural year, and even the year of organized sports.

On the other hand, the Jewish tradition actually has three or four different new year's days. I won't go into detail, but they fall pretty much evenly distributed around the year.

For that matter, so does everybody else. Lots of businesses, and many government agencies, have fiscal years beginning at various times other than January 1. The Asians have a lunar new year that falls roughly a month later than January 1. Orthodox Christians celebrate their new year three or four weeks after the civil new year. The Buddhists have their own new year, which I'm foggy about the timing of, and the Muslim new year, like the rest of their purely lunar calendar, rotates all the way around the solar year over a decade or so.

At some level, all of us seem to realize that we need all the fresh starts we can get. So today I wish all of you a good year, a year of health and peace, whether you celebrate Rosh HaShanah or not.

THE FRUITS OF WAR

"...it has often been said by pacifists...that war creates more criminals than heroes; that, far from developing noble qualities in those who take part in it, it brings out only the worst. If this were altogether true, the pacifist's aim would be, I think, much nearer of attainment than it is....our task is infinitely complicated by the fact that war, while it lasts, does produce heroism to a far greater extent than it brutalises.

"Between 1914 and 1919 young men and women, disastrously pure in heart and unsuspicious of elderly self-interest and cynical exploitation, were continually rededicating themselves...to an end that they believed, and went on trying to believe, lofty and ideal. When patriotism "wore threadbare," when suspicion and doubt began to creep in, the more ardent and frequent was the periodic re-dedication, the more deliberate the self-induced conviction that our efforts were disinterested and our cause was just. Undoubtedly this state of mind was what anti-war propagandists call it--'hysterical exaltation,' 'quasi-mystical, idealistic hysteria'--but it had concrete results in stupendous patience, in superhuman endurance, in the constant re-affirmation of incredible courage. To refuse to acknowledge this is to underrate the power of those white angels which fight so naively on the side of destruction." Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth, pp. 369-370.