Dissociated Press

TAANSTAFL, or GETTING RICH BY PICKING MULTIPLE POCKETS

2007-12-10T12:32:00.000-08:00

Mr. Dissociated and I are on Medicare. In addition, he has an HMO, and I have a state retiree supplemental policy. You'd think that would leave us pretty well-fixed on the medical front. Gee, all that insurance for nothing, and all that health care for nothing!
Uninsured friends of our are a bit envious, and I can't blame them.

But on the other hand....

Medicare is not "free." Part A is sort of free. It's built into the federal budget, and we pay for it with our taxes. Part B has a monthly premium, which goes up to $94.00 per month this year. For us, as for most people, it gets deducted from our Social Security benefits up front, so we never really see it and don't miss it. But it is nonetheless not free.

My husband's HMO isn't free either, though it comes with no separate premium. Instead, the HMO collects his medicare premium from medicare as their premium.

And my state retiree insurance, though it also has no separate premium, was also paid for, up front, in twenty-plus years of radically underpaid teaching as an adjunct in the state university and community college system.

Which is how a lot of people's "employer-paid" health insurance gets paid for--in lower wages for the employee. These days, "employer-paid" health insurance and related benefits comprise from 25% to 40% of the total wage-benefit package. Since there ain't no such thing as a free lunch, this means that the employee's actual paycheck is roughly 25 to 40% smaller than it would be without these benefits. (Well, not necessarily. Big Business is perfectly capable of pocketing some of the difference if it gets the chance.)

But, once the insurance policy or (more often) policies are purchased, that does not end the consumer's expenses. On the contrary, it's just the beginning.

In the early days of managed care and health insurance planning, policy makers worried that, if people didn't have to pay anything out of pocket for their health care, they might make frivolous decisions and waste precious health care resources. There are always, undoubtedly, people who figure that, if something appears to be "free", there is no reason not to throw it around with wild abandon. But nobody has ever established how many such wastrels there are, or how much they will actually waste. We just figure, perhaps as an outgrowth of our puritan heritage, that if we don't attach some kind of cost or unpleasantry to an apparently free good, it will be wasted and ultimately devoured completely. ("Give," as Ayn Rand so authoritatively pronounced, "is a four-letter word.") This was the origin of the co-pay. People who had already paid, directly or in the form of diminished wages, a monthly premium for managed care, were now required to pay an additional small but not insignificant sum out of pocket on every occasion on which they actually used what they had already paid for. In the beginning, it was often a dollar for doctor visits, or for filling a prescription. Not as a revenue-raising device, but just to make people conscious that their health care wasn't "free." These days, Mr. Dissociated's co-pays (for example) have risen to ten dollars for primary care visits, and thirty dollars for specialist visits. Co-pays for prescription medications can range from four dollars (Wal-Mart's current loss leader) to well above one hundred, based on various arcane formulas. These co-pays are now a significant revenue source for the health care provider.

Similarly, many health insurance policies carry a "deductible." That has nothing to do with income tax policy (more about that later.) It just means that the insurance you have already paid for doesn't cut in until you have spent a specified sum out of your own pocket for health care during a stated period, usually a year. The thinking behind the deductible is that people should expect to cover a certain amount of their own health care costs before dipping into the insurance benefits (which of course, they have already paid for. Forgive me for repeating this, but it's easy to forget.) The deductible was never calculated to be a nominal sum, unlike co-pays. It was intended to be what people should reasonably expect to pay out of pocket (on top of monthly premiums.)

An increasing number of people have started buying secondary insurance policies to cover the increasing out-of-pocket costs posed by deductibles and co-pays. This is especially true of people on Medicare, who buy "Medigap" policies for that purpose. Which is yet another set of premiums paid for up front by the consumer. Conceivably at some point a tertiary insurance market could open up to cover what the primary and secondary sources don't. And so on.

On top of all that, there are some other sources of payment for health care. The federal government pays 42% of all health care costs in the US, through Medicare, Medicaid, the VA, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Champus/Tricare (for active duty military personnel and their families) and various programs to provide capital funding for hospitals, nursing homes, and medical schools. State and local governments pay for some hospital and clinic programs. In addition, various churches and other charitable organizations support hospitals and clinics, usually in conjunction with one or more governmental organizations. Ultimately, all of that money comes from the taxpayer, the individual donor, and the individual member of a church or other religious body in his or her capacity as donor. Supposedly, the ability of the various government and charitable agencies to consolidate all of these individual payments and use them to run the system results in economies of scale, so that the individual gets far more for his or her dollars than would have been possible if the money had all come directly out of millions of individual pockets to health care providers.

How does the health care industry deal with this multiplicity of revenue sources, all ultimately coming out of my pocket and yours?

Well, imagine that you are running a service plan for consumers. Say, you provide school books and other basic reading materials for children. You start out just getting paid a monthly book club fee directly by the children's parents.

Since you are in business to make money, you raise the book club fee every so often, until people start dropping out of the club. You calculate the break-even point, where you are getting maximum revenue despite the dropouts, and that's your efficient market price. It may rise with inflation, or sink with lowered costs, but only within limits.

But the kids don't seem to value the books, and often tear them up or lose them. So you institute a 25-cent co-pay, so the kids will take the program more seriously. Maybe you even refund it when the book comes back in good shape.

As time goes on, you discover that most kids have their own allowances, and are actually willling to invest some of their own money in the program. So you stop refunding the co-pays. Then you raise them, bit by bit, until the kids start dropping out of the program, or borrow fewer books. You calculate that break-even point, and you have another efficient market price.

So now you're getting the monthly book club fee from the parents, and the co-pay from the kids, both at the maximum market price.

But you find out that there are families that can't afford the efficient market price, who would gladly become your customers if they could afford it. So you write a grant proposal for the US Department of Education, explaining how many more families you could serve if you only had some extra money. You luck out on your first try, and get your grant. Of course, that grant is paid for by the US taxpayer, including the families you are already serving, and the new ones you can now afford to serve. For those new families, you can offer a lower monthly book club fee, or maybe no fee at all at the start, and a lower, or refundable, co-pay for the children, or maybe none at all at the start. Over the years, however, you will try raising the "reduced"monthly fee, and the "reduced" co-pay a little at a time, until you run into more dropouts, telling you you have once again found the efficient market price for this particular segment of the market.

But next year, your costs have gone up a bit. So you re-apply for the grant, asking for a bit more money, both for the expenses and families already funded, and for some new aspect of the program or a new set of families or a new type of media. What you end up getting is more than you got last year but less than you asked for this year. Which tells you that you have tapped out the US Department of Education source--found another efficient market price--and need to look elsewhere for more funds.

So you write another grant application, this time to a private foundation, asking for funding to provide kids with educational computer software. Again you luck out, and get what you asked for. Next year, you re-apply, and get exactly what you got this year. Which tells you you need another source of revenue. Note that the private foundation gets a large portion of its revenue by virtue of being tax-exempt (see, I told you I'd get back to IRS.) The foundation pays no taxes, and the donors to it pay no taxes on their contributions to it. Which means that the rest of us taxpayers, including the families who benefit from the program, have to pay more taxes.

Anybody who has ever worked in the non-profit sector can tell you that this elegant choreography can and often does go on for years. The more sources of revenue you can find, and dip further into until you find the market limit for each in turn, the more money you make for providing more or less the same service to more or less the same people.

So that's how the health care system functions, and malfunctions. There are two possible ways out of it. One is to put all of the responsibility for finding, and paying for, health care directly on the shoulders of the consumer, and then subsidize him/her to the extent necessary to purchase an appropriate level of care. The consumer decides when a particular provider or course of treatment is "too expensive," given his or her total resources. A health care provider may not agree with the consumer's choice of when to stop. Indeed, the consumer may choose to avoid apparently expensive preventive care, and thereby incur even heavier treatment expenses later for a once-avoidable problem. The health care industry has brought these difficulties on itself by not giving the consumer a realistic cost-benefit analysis when asked for it.

But the real problem, from an economic point of view, is that the subsidy received by the consumer is likely to result in a price increase of at least the same size from the health care industry, leaving the consumer to pay almost exactly what s/he had been paying before the subsidy. The most stellar example is the fact that the average American Medicare recipient is now paying slightly more for medical care out of pocket, both in absolute dollars adjusted for inflation, and in the proportion of his/her total income, as the average senior paid out of pocket for medical care before Medicare was instituted. Essentially, we have poured large amounts of water into the sand, and it is as dry as ever. Even if we reduce the number of income streams for medical care to two (Medicare and patient out-of-pocket), each will still be maximized, and the patient will be no better off than before.

The other alternative is what its supporters call single payer. The taxpayer pays into the system, and government pays out what it defines as a reasonable sum for the various goods and services provided to the patient. There is only one stream of income. When the health care provider raises its prices beyond what the single payer deems reasonable, the single payer will take its business elsewhere. The provider will find its market-efficient price for that single payer, and get paid that much and no more. This minimizes the money spent on health care per unit of service, and thereby reduces the enormous burden health care currently imposes on the American economy. But....

Now we run into the problem common to all third-party payer systems: when the ultimate receiver of the goods and services in question does not decide what is to be paid for those goods and services, he has no incentive to minimize what is paid for them (much less to refuse to pay for really bad service), and no effective way to transmit his valuation of the goods and services received. At the same time, the provider of the goods and services has no incentive to please the receiver or keep its prices within his means. Third-party payment without price controls inevitably leads to hyper-inflation. It has, clearly, happened in health care, and it has happened in higher education. If the third party refuses to pay more than its means allow and forbids the provider to dun the recipient, the providers may drag their feet, or flee the system (or in some cases the profession or the country) rather than accept what they see as sub-market conditions. (They may define "sub-market" as either "less than the cost to me of providing the goods and services plus a profit sufficient to maintain an appropriate professional lifestyle", or "less than I could get from the same patients on the black market", that is, willing patients buying what willing providers will sell at a market-efficient price, off the books.) We see such scenarios in many countries with single-payer systems or price controls.

Steering between these two extreme problems, a health care economy can approach perfection, but can never achieve it. The best possible system would have to include:

1) the fewest possible income streams

2) maximum possible input from patients and providers, and

3)the fewest possible middle-people.

At the moment, of course, we seem to be heading in precisely the opposite direction on all three counts. Any bright ideas?

BRITNEY, OBAMA, AND PORN-SPAMMING IN IRAQ

2007-12-05T15:36:00.000-08:00

I have been reliably informed that the above title should attract lots of hits. In fact, the only one of the above-listed items I'm going to be mentioning is Obama, because I have just for the fourth time seen Barack Obama compared to the late Adlai Stevenson. Most of the people making this comparison probably never even heard of Stevenson until last month. They're probably still pretty vague about when he lived or what he did. Which is partly, of course, because Stevenson is mainly famous for what he didn't do--namely, get elected President, despite running twice against Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956. The comparison with Obama, apparently, arose because Obama has made the mistake of appearing to be a literate nice guy. The last presidential candidate anybody can even vaguely remember who fit that description was, evidently, Stevenson. He was also, with one exception, the last governor of Illinois who didn't leave office one step ahead of the sheriff.

So Obama needs to get himself some street cred. He needs to talk about America's self-interest, and advocate some kind of punitive or violent solution for some current problem, like capital punishment for at least a select group of illegal aliens. Or maybe he needs to invent a new problem, or a new group to hate. Martians, say. Real aliens--three heads, six purple tentacles, and no visa. You heard it here first.

Back to the Bell Curve

2007-10-27T17:28:00.000-07:00

James Watson, the co-discoverer of DNA, has made the news recently by saying, and then trying to unsay, that the natives of Africa and their descendants are almost certainly less intelligent than Europeans and their descendants. I'm perfectly happy to leave that part of the argument to the experts in genetics, who seem to be doing a fine job on their own. But in the course of his unfortunate pronouncement, Watson also referred to The Bell Curve as a fine book. I don't know as much as I should about genetics, but I know a lot about The Bell Curve, which I taught in a couple of college courses and reviewed for a small newspaper. So following is that review, somewhat fine-tuned and updated:

The Bell Curve: an Idea Whose Time Has Come--and Gone

Premises: 1) There exists such a thing as “g” (or “general intelligence”), which is heritable in considerable part

2) g can be accurately measured by several tests, including some of the ones to which children and adults in this country are most commonly exposed

3) To a considerable degree, g is immutable

4) Which is to say that Head Start and similar programs designed to increase g are a waste of money

5) g correlates, not only with academic and occupational success, but with numerous character traits essential to the maintenance of a civil society

6) People with low cognitive ability are out-breeding people with high cognitive ability in the US

7) Both the “cognitive elite” and the “cognitive underclass” are isolating themselves from the rest of society

Conclusion: What society should do in response to these phenomena is to put the underclass on a relatively comfortable reservation, give them useful non-taxing work to do, and subject them to the discipline of a simplified legal system.

I think I’ve got all of that right. But I’m not altogether sure, because my cognitive ability may have been seriously eroded by reading the book. It can’t be good for the reasoning faculties to spend hours absorbing a book that repeatedly says things like “The evidence shows intelligence is most likely 40 - 60% heritable,” and then draws political conclusions based on a presumed 100% heritability. Again and again, the authors lay out the scientific data, explain it, and then ignore it. Again and again, they tell us that statistical data about the behavior and characteristics of populations tells us nothing about individuals--and then they draw political conclusions based entirely on the presumption of individual incompetence and depravity. They caution us repeatedly that the available data are partial and unclear--and then draw political conclusions that would be only barely acceptable based on 100% certainty. And they do all this in a writing style which (speaking of cognitive ability) would earn them (and their editors and proofreaders, if any) no better than a C+ from a competent English composition teacher. For instance, on p. 145, the authors state “...the first decades of the [twentieth] century saw American high school education mushroom in size without having to dip much deeper into the intellectual pool....”, and, on p. 157 “...the long-term employment trend of [young men’s] employment has been downhill....”

Arguably, this is really two books--a scientific treatise which (some scientists tell us) has serious faults in its collection and treatment of data, and a political treatise which purports to be based on the science, but in fact bears only the most tenuous relationship to it.

Aside from its flimsy scientific basis, the political treatise has serious logical problems of its own, mainly resulting from the authors’ unwillingness to follow their own argument to its ultimate conclusions. For instance: they admit that, whatever g is, East Asians have more of it than white Americans. Granting the premise that g correlates with various socially necessary character traits, would a Japanese reader not be justified in attributing various Western character traits of which the Japanese have always disapproved--our individualism, sloppiness, imprecision, poor manners, and tendency to violence--to our deficiency in g, and proposing to put us on a reservation where we can stay out of the way of the people most qualified to do the world’s brainwork, the East Asians? Obviously, despite their repeated references to East Asian cognitive superiority, the authors don’t really believe in it, or they would have raised such questions. On the contrary, the whole book is suffused with a “we happy few” tone of self-congratulation, extending from authors to readers, and presuming that both, being most likely white American, are and deserve to be, the “cognitive elite.” The East Asians are merely a statistical blip located in an interesting but minimally consequential place.

Secondly, if g is fundamentally genetic, why do the authors not confront the problem of cognitive sexual differentiation within ethnic groups? That is to say, the genetic endowment of the average woman of any given ethnic group is in most part identical to that of the average man in the same group. Black men are no blacker than black women. It would follow from that that the spread of measured g should be identical in men and women of the same ethnic group. In fact, it is not. The range is the same, but women cluster much more strongly in the center of that range. Genetics could not possibly account for that. The only genetic differences between men and women lie in the material on the sex chromosomes. We don’t, of course, know exactly what genes are to be found on those chromosomes, nor can we fully explain sexual differentiation in areas other than g. But if intelligence were mostly genetic, it would have to be sex-linked to account for the gender differences in g within ethnic groups. And those differences would then be much greater than in fact they are. If intelligence were sex-linked (assuming as usual that the male is the norm) women would barely be able to drool and breathe at the same time. Obviously this is not the case. The only hard data suggesting a major gender difference in intelligence is the well-established fact that women, generally speaking, marry men, whereas men, generally speaking, marry women. This can easily be accounted for by environmental factors.

But seriously, folks--looking at the book from a purely textual/editorial viewpoint, the fact that it is the acknowledged work of two authors is significant, particularly since one of the authors is now deceased. It is tempting to hypothesize that Herrnstein (may he rest in peace) did all the science and Murray did all the politics, and that the latter never seriously read the former’s work. It would certainly explain the non-sequiturs with which the book is littered.

But what concerns me most about the book is not the exiguous link between the scientific and political material, but the even scantier connection between the premises of the political argument and the concluding proposal supposedly drawn from them. If I seriously believed that the increasing isolation of the elite and the underclass from each other and the rest of society were a problem, I would not propose to remedy it by putting the underclass on a reservation. And Murray’s proposal that members of the underclass should be given some “valued place” in such a reservation means nothing at all without some concrete link to the real job market, which Murray never draws. This general shoddiness in the conclusory section suggests strongly that these are not Murray’s real conclusions at all, but only the ones he feels pressured to write to avoid being completely discredited by the sinister forces of political correctness. If Murray had the courage of his convictions, he would be advocating forced sterilization and genocide, which are in fact the only social policies that follow logically from his premises. Murray may intend his overt proposals to be taken seriously long enough to be tried and proved useless (the way General Motors first tried installing cumbersome and unworkable seatbelts after being mandated to by law), or he may have meant them as an in-group joke shared with the other members of the cognitive elite. But anyone as smart as Murray thinks he and his readers are should have no trouble figuring it out.

Finally, Murray is actually missing a much more factually substantial bet, if he is really serious about wanting to find a variable that correlates with occupational and academic success, high socio-economic status, and most of the pro-social character traits he talks about. There actually is one, and we can measure it with absolute validity, with a lot less controversy and at negligible cost--namely physical height. Which is heritable up to a point, but can be strongly influenced by well-known environmental factors. Of course, using it for the purposes for which Murray proposes to use intelligence testing would eliminate a lucrative service industry, whose lobbyists may have influenced Murray to leave them alone.

Intelligence, Merit, and Rank

But, assuming it is possible to get past the literary and editorial drawbacks of the book, what happens when we look more closely at the thinking behind it? Murray and Herrnstein talk not only about “g” but about a closely related phenomenon, merit. They, and most of us, have taken for granted, without seriously examining it, the notion that there is some real quality called “merit”, which we can and should usably define, accurately measure, and appropriately reward. Only by doing so, we believe, can we encourage the achievements necessary to the survival of our society.

This principle goes back at least as far as Plato’s Republic. Plato was willing to grant that merit might not be directly inherited and might even turn up among the children of the less meritorious. Nonetheless, once found out, the meritocrats should be encouraged to reproduce, preferably in conjunction with other meritocrats. Which suggests that Plato had already figured out most of the little we really know today about merit: that the children, and the parents, of meritorious people are more likely to possess similar merit, than those whose parents and children lack it. We still don’t know why. Which means we still don’t know how to increase the proportion of meritorious people in the population, should we choose to do so.

Let’s begin with definition--is merit equivalent to intelligence? Neither term is especially precise, but merit generally includes attributes of character as well as ability. On the other hand, many authorities, including the authors of the Bell Curve, presume that intelligence usually correlates with positive character traits such as sexual morality and law-abidingness. They also presume that “intelligence”, whatever it is, is something our society needs more of. If they defined intelligence only in terms of intellectual competence, the ability to perform certain cognitive tasks, then they might pay more attention to making better use of the intelligent people we know we already have. But they generally presume that society would be better off if everyone were “intelligent”--which suggests again that they are really concerned with the characterological dimensions of “intelligence.” So, for the moment, let’s stick with “merit”, and presume that it includes both cognitive and characterological dimensions, which are visibly related to each other in some as-yet-unclear way.

To the extent that we have elevated the testing of human abilities to a science, we are able to link certain test behavior in certain populations with certain other behavior patterns, including academic success and, in some cases, occupational competence. In larger populations, the same kinds of test performance may correlate with better socio-economic status and more conventional social behavior. As mentioned earlier, so does adult physical height, especially in males. (By the way, test performance in females is less closely linked to almost all other outcomes than it is in males.) If what we are looking for is a predictor of socio-economic success and lawful behavior, could we not save a lot of money and time (and eliminate a major service industry) by simply measuring and rewarding height, and doing everything we can to increase the height of the next generation? Since height correlates with good childhood nutrition and especially with high prenatal and childhood protein intake, we actually know how to achieve that end. Which gives us the opportunity to think about whether we want to. As Gilbert and Sullivan’s Duke of Barataria pointed out, when everybody is somebody, nobody is anybody. A society of people equally endowed with what we now define as merit would have no way to decide who takes out the garbage and who directs the fate of major corporations. In all likelihood, it would waste no time coming up with some other criterion--amount of melanin in the skin, for instance.

Face it, what Murray and Herrnstein actually want is not a society in which everyone is more or less equally intelligent, but one in which there are slightly fewer unintelligent people and slightly more intelligent people than we now have, and in which that ratio remains constant over the generations. They are aghast at what they seem to consider a recent development--that the underclass is out-breeding the intelligentsia. So was Caesar Augustus. So were the eugenicists and their predecessors beginning in the 17th century. All of them are dealing with a phenomenon only secondarily related to intelligence: people who have enough access to resources to have some control over their own lives are likely to exercise that control, inter alia, in the area of family life, and specifically how many children they will rear. If they perceive children, or more than a few children, as a liability for any reason, they will therefore have fewer of them. While the people with less access to resources, and less control over their own lives, will have all the children they can, and raise all of those that survive. The vagaries of history and geography may make poor people and peasants more fertile (this also correlates with diet, to some extent) and infant mortality lower in some places than in others, while making the birth and rearing of upper-class children more or less expensive. An additional factor in some cultures has been the amount of personal involvement in child-rearing required of the upper-class mother. In most pre-20th-century cultures, upper-class women could and usually did have their children reared by lower-class women, which considerably decreased the disincentives of large families for them. But once lower-class women found ready employment in factory and service work, they were less likely to be willing to spend their lives raising other women’s children. Upper-class women are now required to invest a lot more time and energy rearing their own children than their grandmothers ever did. Which makes them far less inclined to do so more than once or twice. Apparently, Murray and Herrnstein, without ever talking about it explicitly, have already accepted that fact (unlike the earlier eugenicists, who wasted a good deal of energy trying to persuade upper-class women to have more children.) Murray and Herrnstein are concentrating on the other side of the equation exclusively: there will never be any more of Us, so we must do something to reduce the number of Them.

On the other hand, how many fewer of Them do We really want? I suspect strongly that what Murray and Herrnstein really want isn’t a world full of Einsteins, but one in which it is possible to sign and send out one’s secretary’s letter without having to proofread it first, or in which one can hop in a cab and give the driver the address of one’s destination without having to instruct him on how to get there. And that, it seems to me, is a function not of the general level of intelligence in a society, but of where the market directs that intelligence. Just about all the really competent legal secretaries I have ever known were born before 1935. Younger women with the same interests and aptitudes went to law school instead--not because they were “too smart” to do secretarial work, but because they were smart enough to refuse to work for a secretary’s salary, and lucky enough to live in an era when they had other choices. Similarly, the omniscient and omnicompetent cabbie who could find any address in New York and deliver babies, was also either a full-time Yellow Cab employee with benefits, or an entrepreneur with a medallion of his own. Today, most cabbies are lessees who have to work the first 8 hours of their shift just to cover lease fees and insurance, and then make their own living in the next 5 hours or so. Anybody with the intelligence, the knowledge of English, and the citizenship or immigrant status to do anything else is doing it.

In short, before we complain about the lack of intelligent people in our society, we should pay closer attention to what the intelligent people we do have are doing. In far greater proportions than in other industrialized countries, they are practicing law; if they are doing scientific research or engineering, they are very likely to be doing it for the military; they may even be high school dropouts if they are African-American or Hispanic (yes, Virginia, smart people drop out too. They also commit crimes, engender children out of wedlock, and in general engage in antisocial behavior.) If they are female and their parents never went to college, they may be cashiers or waitresses. In general, if their parents never went to college, smart people may be virtually indistinguishable from the people they grew up with, except perhaps that they have an unusual grasp of sports statistics, or the Civil War, or model boat-building or some other quirky autodidactic fascination. Murray and Herrnstein presume that current social realities make it possible for more of the highly intelligent to achieve the rank they “deserve”--but accepting at face value their caveat that data about populations tells us nothing about individuals, we have to presume that there is still a lot of cream on the bottom, where it is either totally wasted or, worse still, put to antisocial uses. And if we really want a greater role for intelligence in our society, shaking up the bottle is still a faster and less expensive way to do it than either the solutions The Bell Curve overtly proposes, or the ones the authors probably really had in mind.

Nomads, Migrants, and People on the Move

2007-10-24T12:50:00.000-07:00

The Jewish annual round of scripture led us, last Saturday, to the part of Genesis where the Holy One tells Abraham to "get yourself out...from the land of your birth and from your father's house." This comes out of the blue to Abraham, and his swift and unquestioning compliance is one of the things that makes him a biblical hero. And, yes, at least until the end of Deuteronomy, the bible is a history of nomadism and migration. And of course, anyone steeped in the history of Europe from the classical age through the Turkish conquest of Constantinople knows that it is all about the migration of one tribe after another out of someplace in Asia into Europe.

Migration is different from nomadism, though we tend to see them as identical. Nomadism is usually cyclical. Nomads usually go over the same track, often at the same times of year, and always with the same people, usually in the same order of march. There is nothing "rootless" about that kind of nomadism. The roots are just distributed over a wider area. Migration, on the other hand, means leaving a place forever, usually because it has suddenly become inhospitable, often because some other tribe has migrated into it, leading ultimately to a domino series of migrations, always straight out in one direction, rather than in the circular path of nomads. But, like nomadism, most migrations also involve a group of people who stay together on the march, rather than individuals.

I think what we are experiencing now is different from both nomadism and migration in their historical sense, and that the change was brought about by the birth of the nation-state with its non-porous borders. Nation-states deal with individual immigrants, with varying degrees of competence and organization; they never deal with mass migrations. And within any given nation-state, mass migrations happen one person or family at a time (we find out they were "mass" only in retrospect, as with the Okies, and the Great Migration of African-Americans out of the South.) The Roma (and the Tinkers and the Travelers) are the only exceptions to this pattern, and they have become pariahs as a result.

According to the Bureau of the Census, 40% of us do not live in the states where we were born. The median duration of residence (how long a person has lived at his/her current residence) was 4.7 years as of 1996 (the most recent data I could find in a hurry.) Older people, married people, people without children, people with a high school education or less, people with very little money, and people with lots of money tend to stay put longer than the rest of us. And people with lots of education tend to move around more than the rest of us. Hispanics moved more often than the rest of us, and 14% of us moved last year.

The stats don't tell us much about why people move. Common sense tells us that a move can result from good things, like making more money and therefore being able to get a bigger house in a better neighborhood, and from bad things, like losing a job and being evicted or even becoming homeless. It can result in being farther away from one's extended family, or in moving back in with them. It can cause stress, or alleviate it. It can result in accumulating more "stuff," or in losing a large proportion of it (an aunt of mine used to say that three moves were the equivalent of one fire in terms of loss of household goods.) It can create a "home base" for an extended family or constellation of friends, or destroy one.

We may be unduly nostalgic about "going home again." We Americans are, after all, a nation of runaways. We are the descendants of people who decided the Old Country was no longer a viable home for them. "Lighting out for the territories" is practically programmed into our genes. When the going gets tough, the tough get going--and they keep going until they are safely out of town. Recent DNA studies of human genetics only underline the fact that almost everybody belongs to a family that comes from someplace else, just as the earlier history of migrations only underlines the fact that almost every indigenous people gets to be indigenous only by displacing somebody else.

We don't usually think about these issues much until they hit us on either the personal or the political level. Until, that is, somebody's elderly parent 2000 miles away becomes unable to live alone any more. Or until a nation formed by a bloody and forced migration out of Europe suddenly becomes a target for indignation and violence from the "locals," and its denizens are urged to "go back where you came from."

A part of us yearns to do just that, to recover the places and people of our brightest memories, or maybe of the memories of our parents or grandparents. But another corollary to the harsh reality of life on the move is that if we do get a chance to go back, we are likely to find that those people and places have vanished, and only the vaguest outlines of the geography remain. The hospital I was born in closed down long since. The place I went to kindergarten has been paved over and turned into a shopping mall. The school building in which I attended first through seventh grade burned down, though a new school was erected on the same spot. My high school was torn down for condominiums. My college has been amalgamated into a larger university. The street on which I lived during my last year of college--not merely the building, the street--has disappeared. So far, all five of my graduate schools are still pretty much intact, but it is obviously only a matter of time before they too slide off into nothingness or radical transformation. After all, I spent most of my childhood in southern Florida, and there is a good chance that most of that state will be under water by the time I myself slide off into nothingness or radical transformation.

And I'm one of the holdouts, the exceptions. My husband and I have been married to each other for 43 years, and have lived in the same place for 38 of them--almost half the time our building has been in existence. While we stayed put, most of our contemporaries were moving into "starter homes" and then having kids and moving on to larger homes in better school districts, and maybe getting divorced and moving apart, or following jobs around the country a couple of times, and are just about now starting to think about "downsizing" or retiring to someplace in the Sunbelt.

The Buddhists may have the best handle on all this: Everything changes. Everything vanishes. Maybe nothing was really there in the first place. You may as well accept impermanence, because you yourself are impermanent too. Not only is there nothing to hold onto, you have no solid hand to hold onto it with.

Or maybe the physicists have it right. We are, all of us, made of the first matter that was ever created. Everything changes, but nothing vanishes. Everything moves around, but nothing moves out.

CREATIVE RUMOR-MONGERING 101

2007-10-21T18:09:00.000-07:00

Things we'd like to get more people to believe:

The last three digits of Dick Cheney's Social Security Number are 666
It is possible to make a recreational drug out of broccoli, carrot peels, and dog manure
Watching Reality TV brings on premature Alzheimer's
Leonard Nimoy is the messiah
Wearing fur makes women look fat
It makes men look even fatter
AT&T and Wal-Mart are actually wholly-owned subsidiaries of Al Quaeda
Reading scientific reports causes cancer
The GPS satellites are programmed to navigate your car to a takeoff port for the Klingon slave camps
Wearing an aluminum foil hat makes your hair fall out
When people close their eyes and raise their arms at evangelical church services, an usher goes around stealing their rings and watches
Voting Republican causes erectile dysfunction and divorce
Driving an SUV causes obesity
Sexist men are lousy lovers
Under-tipping causes gastric reflux

Give Me Your Tired...

2007-10-02T09:41:00.000-07:00

of arguing over immigration. Like me. I guess it's better than arguing about poor Terry Schiavo, may she rest in peace. Or late-term abortions, or gay marriage. Immigration is actually a substantive issue with implications for the lives of ordinary Americans. Given that we are a nation of immigrants, we probably need to talk about it every so often.

But it would be useful not to schedule that recurring debate in a presidential election bi-year (yes, let's admit it, the election campaign season now lasts two years.) Then we could actually talk about reality, rather than set up a field of straw men and take turns knocking them down.

Conservatives claim to worry about terrorists sneaking in from Tijuana and Vancouver, while liberals think anybody who wants to set any kind of limits on immigration is an anti-Latino racist.

Full disclosure: I'm a Latina, sort of. Both my parents were born in Cuba. Spanish was the language they told their secrets in. I'm more or less bilingual and bicultural. One of the great trials of my life is my current inability to find canned cascos de guayaba in any grocery store, even the ones in Latino neighborhoods. (I mention that here in hope that some reader can help me out with a well-placed comment.)

Does that give me any kind of license to talk about immigration? Dunno. Most of my ruminations on the issue arise out of (a) recurring arguments with Mr. Dissociated, an Anglo with four immigrant grandparents, and (b) a long-standing family feud with INS (now ICE), which screwed around with my mother's citizenship and has thereby become my least favorite federal bureaucracy, ahead of even Selective Service. I used to practice a bit of immigration law--the simple stuff, green card and citizenship applications, re-entry permits and so on. Now none of it is simple, the stakes are very high, and I refer all inquiries about it from my clients to experts who practice nothing else and are very very good and very very expensive.

And, as usual, I like to look at the history of the issue before coming down to current events. The history of immigration law is pretty short. There wasn't much of any immigration law before 1900 or so. People who found their current residence economically or politically uncomfortable just migrated. Wherever they migrated to, the locals might welcome them, or passively accept them, or ignore them, or riot against them, or massacre them. The quality of their reception, and the severity of the situation they had fled from in the first place, would determine whether the migrants would stay, go home, or move on to someplace else. But law had nothing to do with it.

That changed as the United States suddenly realized that its population was becoming ethnically different from the way it had been in the era of its founding. We looked around at ourselves and discovered "we" were no longer the "us" we had been in 1776, or even 1865. That led to the establishment of Ellis Island and other screening ports, where immigrants were checked out for criminal records, moral character, and physical and mental health. There were racial restrictions. You had to be "white," whatever that meant. Not African or Chinese, at any rate. It was a binary system--you either passed inspection and got to stay, or failed and had to leave. Whichever happened, happened fast, at most within weeks, usually within minutes.

When Mr. Dissociated, and many other who insist they aren't anti-Hispanic or even anti-immigrant, they're only anti-lawbreaking, talk about how their grandparents came here "legally," that's what they mean. Those grandparents were "white," more or less healthy, and unencumbered with criminal records. Bully for them.

It was World War I that changed all that, all over the world. Two generations later, INS was interrogating my mother about how many of her "formative years" she had spent in the States. This was still something of an improvement on what happened to my paternal grandmother, born and brought up in Marietta, Georgia, a generation earlier, who lost her US citizenship automatically for marrying a Brit. In between, anarchist Emma Goldman's husband was deprived of his naturalization after his death, so that she could lose her citizenship and be deported to Russia.

The legal system with which current would-be immigrants are expected to comply is cumbersome, complex, and arbitrarily and often abusively administered. It is underfunded and understaffed. Its personnel are badly undertrained in "people skills." Things that should take weeks take years. To add insult to injury, the process has now been made outrageously expensive by piling four- or five-figure processing fees on top of the costs of the high-powered legal representation that is now almost essential for most immigrants, and the usually-required trip back to the Old Country.

And, worse still, immigration is the one area of our national legal system in which the influence of high-ranking people is openly available and routinely applied for the benefit of those who know the right people. That is, if all of your attempts to immigrate legally into the US have failed, but you know the right people, you can get naturalized by a special bill passed in Congress by your influential buddies, all open and above board, without so much as a "wink-wink nudge-nudge."

But for the ordinary working immigrant trying to make a decent life in the US, compliance with the law is always difficult, usually expensive, and often impossible.

Nonetheless, many conservative opponents of illegal immigration insist that illegal immigrants, specifically because they are violating the law, belong in the same circle of Hell as Al Capone. Which is fairly remarkable, since most Americans, regardless of their political leanings, aren't all that crazy about legality, except where they can use it as a lock on the moral high ground against people they don't like anyway.

I found that out most recently when a dear friend of mine was killed by a truck that crashed into his van at an illegally high rate of speed, after running a red light, and with gravely defective brakes. Once it had been established that the trucker was not under the influence of alcohol or drugs, even the good sympathetic people we knew all said, "Speeding isn't a crime. Running a red light isn't a crime. Everybody does that. It was just an accident." So far, the State's Attorney of DuPage County, Illinois, seems to agree with them.

Is it fair to conclude that most of the opponents of illegal immigration are really opposed to immigration in general regardless of legality, or even to the presence of ethnic Hispanics on our soil, regardless of their legality? Dunno. It's hard to tell, sometimes. When the same people declaim against illegal immigration and allowing anybody to speak Spanish in public, that does make one wonder. When they deplore illegal immigration, or immigration in general, because immigrants will take the bad jobs that "Americans won't do" and thereby drive down wages and working conditions for native-born and legal-immigrant workers, and because they will take good jobs that Americans deserve, and because they will take no jobs, and sponge off the American taxpayer instead, it's hard not to suspect some kind of prejudice at work. The poor immigrant can't win.

And, on the other hand, the orthodox liberal position seems to be that anyone who comes to the US to improve his economic prospects has the right to do so, regardless of legality. Regardless of the effect on wages and working conditions? Dunno. The mostly-Hispanic United Farm Workers union used to oppose illegal immigration. Now, understandably, they are more worried about the general prejudice against illegal immigration/ immigration/Hispanic visibility. The newer labor unions (SEIU, UNITE HERE, and the American Federation of Teachers, for instance) seem to be heading in the same direction. The older, bread-and-butter unions have always opposed illegal immigration and been somewhat dubious even about legal immigration. But their influence is waning.

So much for the bad arguments on the subject. Are there any good ones? If, as seems obvious to almost everybody, the current system is broken and fixing it will cost a lot of time and money, should it just be shelved in the meantime? Or should the whole idea of immigration regulation be thrown back into the dustbin of recent history? After all, the nations of the world got along without it pretty well for several thousand years.

Broaching this argument, even tentatively, has gotten me some very strange bedfellows. Julian Simon, the conservative economist, for instance, who once wrote me a very flattering letter about an earlier article I wrote on the subject of immigration. He and his "let the market do everything" pals oppose regulating immigration because it prevents willing workers and willing employers from finding each other, and keeps wages "artificially" high for American workers.

Or at least they used to. Now, "small government" conservatives like Simon seem to be parting ways with "big gun" conservatives. Republican orthodoxy has trouble deciding whether it's more important to keep wages low, give American workers somebody to hate, or keep potential terrorists out. They haven't thought this through

At the same time, as mentioned earlier, Democratic orthodoxy isn't sure whether the rights of Hispanics not to be hassled are more important than maintaining the standard of living of American workers. They haven't thought this through either.

One of my favorite speculative fiction novels has a character who comes from a planet where "you have not thought this through" is a deadly insult.

We should be so lucky.

Odd Lots # omigod I can't remember

2007-10-02T09:37:00.000-07:00

Jerry Ford, Gary Hart, and Vladimir Putin--what do they have in common that one wouldn't expect?

MAINTENANCE

2007-08-05T15:15:00.000-07:00

Every ten years or so, some major public construction falls down or apart, and we spend a few weeks worrying about our decaying infrastructure. This time, it was the bridge in Minneapolis. One of the questions nobody seems to be asking is why so few people were killed--it would be nice to know that, so as to prevent loss of life in the next disaster. But the decaying infrastructure we have always with us.

I recently finished Cullen Murphy's book Are We Rome? in which he points to physical decay and lack of maintenance as among the reasons for the decline and fall of Rome. I'm not at all sure I agree with that. The Romans were big on maintenance. Mostly it was done by private wealth, for private glory. The Romans posted plaques to people who maintained things like bridges, aqueducts, and roads. And as a result, Roman bridges, aqueducts, and roads lasted a long time. Some of them lasted a lot longer than ours. Some of them are still useable today.

But we have very little respect for maintenance and the people who do it. Maintenance is what janitors do. And housewives. And ditch-diggers. We for sure don't post bronze plaques to them. We post bronze plaques to the people who build things, or have them built, in the first place.

It would be interesting to create a map of buildings and other human constructions with indications of when they were built--kind of like the rings on a tree. It would obviously be different in different places. Many of Chicago's public improvements, like sewers, water works, electric generating plants, libraries, and public schools, were built at the end of the 19th century and early in the 20th. A lot of the public and private buildings in Chicago were built in the 1920s (including the one Mr. Dissociated and I live in.)

There was another burst of residential building in the 1950s, and a spate of public buildings (universities and public office buildings, mostly) in the 1960s. The latter (mostly made of cast concrete with flat roofs, which I think is always a bad idea in cold wet northern climates) started falling apart within 15 years. I have taught in two of the schools in question and watched the process of decay close up, while regularly walking around the buckets catching the leaks whenever it rained. One of those schools rebuilt its entire front section, where the worst leakage was; the other moved a couple of blocks west and built an entire new campus (out of red brick, by the way) which just opened last month.

Here in Chicago, our sewer and water systems are dangerously leaky but still functioning. Considering they're more than a century old, that's pretty good, but still scary. Apparently New York City's major systems are about the same age and in even worse condition. Nonetheless, when pundits bewail the conditions of our "older" cities, I have trouble taking them seriously. Our oldest city is still a whole lot younger than Rome, Athens, Jerusalem, or Benares. All of those cities have had their declines, and their rebirths. At the moment, most of them have functioning sewer and water systems.

"Deferred maintenance" may be the curse of the modern world. It's less of a problem than it used to be for automobiles, now that warranties have become a lot longer. But proper maintenance of buildings is pretty rare. The condo the Dissociated family lives in (built sometime around 1920) is in surprisingly good condition except for the electrical system, which gets upgraded piecemeal from time to time, but has never been completely updated in at least 50 years. Our condo board does a good job; we have had repairs on the roof, the furnace, and the water heaters at regular intervals, and the windows were all replaced about 10 years ago. Amazingly, we have never had a special assessment--this all gets done out of our regular assessments. Which are, of course, a lot higher than those of most condo owners around here.

That's what it takes to keep an 85-year-old building in good shape. I mention all this because most people, including but not limited to condo residents, aren't willing to do it. They manage the cosmetic basics, like painting, but ignore the rest until something breaks down (at which point it's really expensive to fix.) They go on fixing things piecemeal for as long as they can afford it, and then they dump the place. This system works reasonably well for cars, but it can be a disaster for buildings. The only good thing about it is that, as buildings, and neighborhoods, and city systems, and for that matter cars, get older and more rickety, they also get cheaper. Which is the only reason poor people in America have anyplace to live or anything to drive.

This is the trickle-down theory of urban planning. No, I'm not being facetious. Some years ago, some local politician proposed an aggressive program of maintenance for buildings and systems in Chicago. He was immediately denounced by one of the alderman from a particularly down-and-dirty ward, for plotting to drive poor people out of the city. Similarly, I used to work for an organization called the Lawyers' Committee for Better Housing, representing local tenants. One of the landlord lawyers half-seriously suggested that we rename ourselves the Lawyers' Committee for More Expensive Housing, except that of course, we would lose our client population if we did. The market works. One of the ways in which it works is that poor people can afford only the housing etc. that nobody with more money would want. If we really did maintain our buildings properly, our cities would be surrounded by shantytowns.

As I am fond of telling my students, this requires more thought.

RAGING GRANNIES, GRAY PANTHERS, AND OTHER VANGUARD TROOPS

2007-08-05T14:10:00.000-07:00

I turned 65 recently. It was an interesting experience. I now have Medicare, and Social Security, and a small state pension plus retiree health insurance from Illinois, and half-price passes for the bus and the train, and occasional cut-rate "senior special" meals at local eateries. It's not bad.

But what I find especially attractive is that I now have very little to lose. I'm still working, but I could live without the income if I had to. My days are numbered--I have started listing my relatives from my parents' generation and their ages at death, so I've got a pretty good idea how much time I have left, and how much of it is actually "good time," during which I can do something useful. Gruesome? I don't think so. Like any other deadline, it helps me get organized.

The generations after mine have all kinds of scary stuff hanging over them that I no longer have to worry about, or never did. Student loans, for instance. I'm a member of the last generation of lawyers to finish law school with no loans. My friends ten or twenty years younger are still paying theirs, and may well have to keep doing it long after they could otherwise have retired. The Supreme Court recently ruled that if you're getting Social Security and you've defaulted on your student loans, they can take the money from your benefits.

Or trying to keep a splendid-looking resume--once you're past 50, nothing else on your resume matters. To hell with it. Yes, there are laws against age discrimination. There are all kinds of legal rights working people supposedly have. Try to get them enforced.
Hoo ha.

Sex appeal--who needs it? I keep myself neat and clean and attired suitably for the pursuit in which I am engaged at the moment. My husband loves me, and other guys occasionally still hit on me.

Government wiretapping and eavesdropping--who cares? At the click of a google, the government can find out most of what it wants to know about me. As I prepare to settle into dignified obscurity, all they can accomplish by busting me is publicize the causes I have worked for. Sounds like a fair trade.

I have increasing respect for organizations of radical seniors, like Raging Grannies, the Gray Panthers, and local groups like Chicago's Metro Seniors in Action. They aren't just fighting for Social Security and Medicare, they're fighting for a decent world for the next generation, because the System keeps the next generation too busy and intimidated to fight for itself. We are the last group left that has any time for amateur politics, and has nothing to lose by engaging in them. Elders of the world, unite. You have nothing to lose.

TO CATCH A NUMBSKULL

2007-07-31T13:00:00.000-07:00

No doubt you have watched NBC Dateline’s “To Catch a Predator” at least once or twice. (More would be redundant. Not only is each episode pretty much the same as the next, but they frequently recycle episodes.) There are two really curious aspects to each episode. The first is the legal premise—that online sexually chatting up a person one believes to be underage, even if s/he isn’t, is a crime in and of itself. Yes, that is the law, at least in Texas, where online solicitation of a minor is a felony, regardless of what (if anything) happens afterward. This completely overrides the common law premise that mistake of fact (unlike mistake of law) is a defense to most crimes. It actually doesn’t matter whether the “solicitor” ever meets the “minor” or engages in sex with him/her. The online conduct is sufficient, and the physical meet-and-greet is mainly evidence that the cops have arrested the right person, the person who actually did the soliciting.

The second curiosity is the fact that, increasingly, the men arrested have seen “To Catch a Predator” on television, and they still show up at the decoy’s house. Sometimes they recognize Chris Hansen, the M.C. of the show. Sometimes they acknowledge having had a “bad feeling” about meeting the decoy. But nonetheless, there they are.

Which is probably closely related to the reason so many people who get arrested, on any charge, choose to waive their rights to silence and legal counsel, and spill their guts to the police. By the time a person is old enough to be tried as an adult, s/he has probably heard the Miranda warnings on assorted cop and lawyer shows at least 1800 times. And yet somehow nobody manages to figure out that “you have the right to remain silent,” etc., means “shut up until your lawyer gets here.”

This problem arises in plenty of places other than police stations, and is not confined to poorly-educated people with scanty knowledge of standard English. In one of my college classes, an intelligent, literate student who speaks standard English with no accent whatever barely escaped disaster on my one-hour midterm exam. The instructions indicated clearly that the time allotted to questions 1 and 2 was 15 minutes each, and question 3 was 30 minutes. The student told me afterward that she read the instructions carefully (which I always remind them to do), including the time limits--and then spent more than 50 minutes on the first question.

In my other incarnation, as an attorney, I once had a client who promised to make a substantial payment on fees he already owed me, if I would represent him in a pending hearing. After the hearing, I asked him when I could expect the payment. He said something like “I won’t be paying that.” I asked him whether he recalled making the promise--he did--and then I asked him what he had meant by it. “I don’t know what I meant,” he replied. Now, that may have been only his rather ungraceful way of avoiding admitting that he had made that promise solely for the purpose of inducing me to represent him when he really needed it, and had never had any intention of paying me. Which, however disturbing it may be, is a problem in ethics, rather than in processing information.

But I have seen too many parallel cases to believe that. The problem--which probably has some Greek-root neurological name known only to Oliver “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” Sacks--is not a perceptual disability, but the inability to allow information to influence behavior, even in the most crucial situations. Socrates, who held that all evil results from ignorance, would be dumbfounded.

Or is it inability? Is it perhaps a habit, long-hidden from consciousness and therefore almost impossible to break, a habit of resisting the impact of information on our behavior? Is it, perhaps, a necessary but overused defense mechanism arising out of a culture in which we are bombarded with constant demands that we stop, go, don’t smoke, see, hear, visit, buy, above all buybuybuy? Is ignorance the last refuge of the free mind? That would certainly explain the fact that most Americans--even highly educated intelligent people in intellectual occupations--will not admit to having learned anything in high school. And indeed, most of the first two years of college in this country (unlike the rest of the world) for all but the smallest elite, consist of a hasty review of what the students were taught in high school, precisely because they either did not learn it, or because they felt obliged to forget it immediately upon receiving their diplomas (in rather the same way the Pythagoreans postulated the soul, going from its previous incarnation into rebirth, was required to forget everything it had learned in its previous lives.)

There is similar resistance to allowing oneself to be influenced by religious objurgations. (Indeed, the willingness to actually pay attention to “preaching” and change one’s behavior as a result, is often regarded as proof positive of having joined a “cult”) and political speeches. Jurors regularly ignore judicial instructions (though studies indicate that may really be a problem of comprehension), and many of them also ignore evidence.

Unfortunately, of all of the sources of information in our universe, advertisers actually seem to have done the best job of circumventing customer resistance, apparently by casting their message as much as possible in terms other than informational. They try to provide either a non-cognitive esthetic experience which leaves the customer with a good feeling about the product, or a non-cognitive bonding experience which--especially among young male customers--builds loyalty. Information is not only irrelevant to those kinds of messages, it actually gets in their way.

Another source of such resistance may be the American legal system, with its proliferation of unenforced and often unenforceable laws. “It’s none of anybody’s business how fast I want to drive!” one respondent was quoted as saying in a newspaper article on people who drive 55 mph in the left lane (Chicago Tribune, Section 2, p. 1, 5/1/95). “It is...judgmental to decide how fast another driver should or should not travel. If and when I am stopped for speeding, I have no quarrel with receiving a ticket....However, I don’t appreciate another citizen justifying traveling just the speed limit in the passing lane in order to keep my speed in check.” Another respondent said “If I choose to risk a ticket by traveling at a more efficient rate of speed, the only people who need be concerned are myself and the local state trooper. To those who mistakenly believe that they are in danger simply because I am going faster than the arbitrarily-set speed limit, all they need to do is move over. To those who feel it is their job to keep me within the limits of the law, butt out!”

If, for instance, Chicago’s ban on downtown street parking (in effect for the last two years) had been enforced, there would be no need for the various physical barriers now being erected outside the federal building to prevent car bombings. Similarly, there have been numerous cases of a legislator proposing a criminal statute, only to find out (usually from his embarrassed research staff) that the conduct it would penalize was already forbidden by another law currently on the books but long forgotten. The NC-17 movie rating (not a law, but a voluntary regulation of the film industry) essentially means “R--but we really mean it this time!” If they had really meant it last time, it would be unnecessary. We try over and over again to command changes in behavior, and the only result is the piling of one ineffective prohibition on top of another (something the behaviorally savvy Jewish tradition specifically forbids, by the way. If you are going to eat bacon, you don’t have to have the pig ritually slaughtered.)

“Preaching,” “scolding,” and “nagging” are the words we use for any kind of discourse intended to change our behavior when we don’t want to change it. But ultimately, all information gets treated like “nagging” by most people most of the time.

And, as noted earlier in the case of the Delinquent Defendant (the Cashless Client?), this resistance to information affects not only how we deal with what we hear, but also what we say and how (if at all) it relates to what we mean. If I will not change my behavior because of what I hear or read, I also won’t change it because of what I say, nor will I expect you to pay any serious attention to what I say. (In the words of the old song, “How could you believe me when I told you that I loved you, when you know I’ve been a liar all my life?”) Probably the most outrageous example of this phenomenon in recent legal history was a case in Juvenile Court in Cook County, Illinois about ten years ago. The state’s child welfare agency sent two neglected children who were in its wardship to an out-of-state foster home, and then made virtually no attempt to oversee their care. They kept filing reports, though--based on absolutely no information--that the children were doing well. A couple of years later, one of the children died as a result of abuse by the foster family, and the other was hospitalized with severe injuries. The office of the Public Guardian sued the child welfare agency for gross negligence in failing to check on the children regularly and report accurately. The child welfare agency responded by challenging the right of the Public Guardian’s office to bring the case, on the basis of a conflict of interest, because the Guardian’s office had believed the reports! (The Court didn’t buy the argument, fortunately.) We seem to have accepted all too readily the oriental maxim “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.” Anybody fool enough to believe anybody about anything (even once) deserves to be deceived, exploited, and railroaded. The deceivers are merely doing business as usual and cannot be held responsible for the consequences of the behavior of others who choose to believe them.

I have spent a fair amount of time in class explaining the legal consequences of various kinds of mendacity in the media, and my students have no trouble grasping that what Rush Limbaugh says about Hillary Clinton is probably libellous and what Ronco says about the Vegematic is probably fraudulent. But most of them have real trouble grasping why it matters. “Of course people lie on television,” they tell me. “That’s what television is for.” Which is a close relative of the old joke about how you can tell when (name your favorite crooked politician) is lying--”His lips are moving.” The medium is the utter absence of any reliable message. Orwell’s prediction of New-speak--the total corruption of language to make a vehicle of political control--turns out to have overshot the mark. In our efforts to avoid Newspeak, we have turned American English into Nospeak--a vehicle of nothing at all. To choose to believe any communication, and modify our behavior in accord with it, is a tremendous and terrifying leap of faith, which most of us make once or twice in a lifetime, at most.

What, if anything, can a teacher do to breach the barrier between perception and behavior? How do we get across to students hardened against “nagging” the antiquated notion that letters have sounds, words--and combinations of words--have meanings, and it really matters whether you say “uninterested” or “disinterested”, “lie” or “lay”? Does repetition do it? (Probably not, or they’d come out of high school knowing a lot more than they do.) Is there a way to slip under the barrier, using the techniques of advertising? This is precisely what “Sesame Street” has done, with pretty good results. Can an individual teacher, without the high-powered special effects and resources of a national television show, do nearly as well? Or can a more subtle esthetic approach quietly dissolve the barrier, without the student even realizing it? I have known this to happen, often under the influence of poetry (either reading/hearing it or writing it.) “To every door,” says the Talmud “there are many keys, but the greatest key of all is the ax.” Or do we just keep throwing out bits of information and hope that some of them stick? The barrier is almost never completely impermeable (that way lies autism), but the things that penetrate it are likely to be an oddly-assorted and not especially useful conglomeration. Merely throwing out as much high-quality information as possible in hope of raising the quality of the total mix is too haphazard to be satisfying to most teachers (or for that matter, preachers, writers, poets, and politicians.)
Most commentators who predict the demise of literature, or of a particular literature or language, have done so largely in hope of getting credit for single-handedly reviving it. The current generation of English teachers and professional “naggers” has no such high-flown expectations. Most of us would be happy if high-school graduates would remember their sixth-grade grammar long enough to complete a sentence whose subjects and verbs come out even. We pity the high school teacher whose job seems to amount to painting the Mona Lisa on sand. We try to talk faster, so as to keep our instructions within the limits of our students’ current attention span, but we are not yet capable of being the “One-Minute Teacher,” and it’s probably just as well. Long ago, an unnamed talmudic wise guy asked the scholar Hillel to tell him the whole law “while I stand on one foot.” Hillel actually had an answer: “Love the Lord your G-d with your whole heart and soul and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself. This is the whole law and the prophets. Everything else is commentary.” But he could not resist adding, “Go and study it.” Presumably sitting down.

THE RUSH FROM JUDGMENT

2007-07-31T10:23:00.000-07:00

Our political discourse these days seems to get bogged down in mutual accusations of being “judgmental,” “opinionated,” and playing the “blame game.” Liberals and conservatives accuse each other of believing in their own invincible rightness and the other side’s utter wrongness. For anybody who takes such discourse seriously, the result is mental paralysis.

Of course I believe that my beliefs and opinions are right. Why else would I have them? Which means I believe that those who disagree diametrically with them are wrong. How could it be otherwise (as Socrates would say)? I suppose I’m more nuanced than some people, in that I don’t necessarily see everybody on the Other Side as disagreeing diametrically with my position—there are plenty of ways for both of us to be right. (Remember the old Jewish story about the rabbi and two disputants? Disputant #1 sets out his case, and the rabbi nods sagely and says, “You’re right.” Then Disputant #2 states his case, and the rabbi thinks about it a while and says, “You’re right.” The rabbi’s wife, who has been sitting on the sidelines, says, “Wait a minute! They can’t both be right!” To which the rabbi replies, “You’re right, too.”) But it matters to me that my beliefs and opinions are right. If I thought they weren’t, I’d change them.

And of course I believe that people who do bad things are behaving badly. In that sense, I am judging them. Aristotle says that’s one of the most human things human beings do.

Progressives, of course, are the most vulnerable to being paralyzed by accusations of being “opinionated” and “judgmental.” We pride ourselves on being open-minded, tolerant, and willing to listen to the other side. And then, we are suddenly confronted by an issue on which we cannot conceive that there is another side with any valid argument—female genital mutilation, for instance—and we are brought up short. Oops! Conservatives don’t have to worry about that kind of thing; they can denounce “relativism” at every turn, and in addition have the fun of ridiculing the relativists who fall short of their own claims of virtue.

But all of us, I think, on both sides, have lost track of what tolerance really means. Tolerance is not what we extend to the opinions of others. We can and should reserve the right to say that other people’s opinions are wrong, at least occasionally. Tolerance isn’t for opinions, it’s for people. And “judging” other people’s behavior isn’t the same as condemning the people themselves.

Not that we should leap to brand other people’s opinions as wrong or other people’s behavior as blameworthy without careful consideration in the first place. We need to start considering moral/political issues with an open mind. What are the facts? Who are the authoritative sources of information? Has anybody really considered all the angles on this issue?

There is even a situational aspect to all this that rarely gets looked at these days, which the Talmudic rabbis did a pretty good job on. The Bible (in Numbers 5:11-31) describes an ordeal to which a husband who thinks his wife has been fooling around but can’t prove it can subject her, to test her fidelity. It’s unpleasant but does no permanent damage, except perhaps to the relationship between them. Done properly, it should resolve the question one way or another and close the book on the suspicion—at least that’s what the Bible has in mind. But, a couple of thousand years later, Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai pointed out that the ordeal contained what had now become a fatal flaw—if the husband who administered it had himself been unfaithful, one could not expect divine judgment to solve his problem. He didn’t deserve it. In short, he said, we are no longer decent enough for this ritual to work.

I think the same thing could be said about the different views on organ donation in the US and in western Europe. In the US, it is presumed that anyone who has not consented in writing to post-mortem organ donation is refusing. In Europe, anyone who does not consent must put his refusal in writing, or it will be presumed that he consents. Some organ donation advocates in this country, gravely concerned about the shortage of organ donors here, suggest that we should adopt the European practice. For a while, I thought that might be a good idea. Now, I’m not so sure. I think that, in a country like the US (and unlike Europe) where there are wide disparities between the rich and the poor, and where one of those disparities is the availability of health care, we are not decent enough to presume consent to organ donation by the most likely prospective donors, the poor. That doesn’t mean I believe the Europeans are wrong. I just don’t think their practice transplants well to this culture right now, and anybody who thinks it does probably needs to do some more thinking.

So let’s start out to form our opinions as carefully and openly as possible. At least let’s be clear about the authorities we rely on if we feel unable or unwilling to start from scratch for ourselves. (The mother of a friend of mine once drove me absolutely nuts by telling me she was opposed to the Equal Rights Amendment, but couldn’t tell me why. What she meant, I suspect, was that she was relying on some authority she couldn’t point me to at the moment. Although what bothered me the most was that she had started that particular line of conversation, and that was all she had to say about it.)

Then, when we have formed an opinion, let’s look at the Other Side to see whether, or to what extent, it is diametrically opposed to our own, and where we actually agree. Only then does it make sense to say, “I’m right. You’re wrong. Here’s why.” And even then, we need to avoid saying, “and that makes you a person I can’t talk to.” The guy on the Other Side may decide that himself, and there’s not much we can do about it. But if at all possible, we need to accept him as a human being like us, some of whose opinions we disagree with.

We also need to try to avoid the sweeping sociological generalizations about the links between belief, behavior, and disposition that are to be found, for instance, in books like The Authoritarian Personality, which presume that we are what we believe, or as the gospels assert, “as a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.” The Jewish position, to which I try to adhere whenever possible, is that we mostly don’t care what people believe, as long as they behave decently.

Similarly, we have the right to judge other people’s behavior. But we don’t have the right to condemn the people who engage in behavior we disapprove of. This problem arises most often today in sexual politics. I have no problem with the behavior of gays and lesbians as such. But when homosexual relationships involve a component of violence, I disapprove of it as much as I disapprove of violence in heterosexual relationships, and for exactly the same reasons.

But how do I deal with people who believe that the sexual behavior of gays and lesbians as such is wrong? Many of them, most notably the Catholic Church, take the “hate the sin, not the sinner” position on this issue that I generally espouse on other issues.

Most gay people I know hate that rhetoric. They think it reeks of hypocrisy, that the Catholics or whoever don’t really mean it anyway, and actually hate gays and lesbians as well as their behavior. Which may be true in many instances, but certainly not all. Catholic institutions do good work for people with AIDS and HIV, for instance, far beyond the demands of mere hypocrisy and public relations.

Possibly the real problem is that we aren’t necessarily good at our relationships with the sinners we claim not to hate. We really are being hypocritical. We want credit for a virtue we aren’t really practicing. This needs more work.

Which is a phrase we need to think about. Back when I was an English teacher, I tried to grade papers carefully, so as to give the student the information she needed to improve her writing, rather than just make her feel bad. “This needs more work” was one of the phrases I used a lot. Maybe it’s an alternative to being judgmental or opinionated. Maybe it’s what we all need.

BEHIND CLOSED DOORS

2007-07-13T12:04:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I read a really sad newspaper article by a woman whose husband is being detained, pending deportation, as an illegal alien. I won’t comment on the situation that led to his being (a) illegal and (b) detained, because immigration law is my least favorite area of administrative practice these days. But in the course of describing her husband’s situation, the author stated that she had to visit with her husband through a thick plastic barrier, and didn’t see any difference between the “detention center” where he was being held, and a jail.

And that’s something we need to talk about. In the first place, there is a very clear and important difference between the “detention center” and a jail—the character and quality of the inmate’s neighbors. An illegal alien in a detention center is surrounded only by other illegal aliens, people who, in general, are guilty of nothing except being illegal aliens. People who can reasonably be expected not to rape, assault, or murder their neighbors, or even pressure them to join a gang. Compared to the standard county jail, that makes a detention center a veritable country club.

We don’t talk about this because we tend to be confined to the perspective of constitutional law when we talk about jail. From that perspective, the only significance of being in jail is “deprivation of liberty,” as the Fifth Amendment calls it. From that perspective, there is no difference between Cook County Jail and a suite at the Ritz Carlton with a door that locks only from the outside. All that matters, constitutionally, is the fact of not being able to pick up and leave any time one wishes, not where one is confined, and certainly not the conditions of confinement.

Every now and then, some prisoner sues the government for some really egregious condition of confinement, like getting no medical treatment for a broken bone, or food not fit for human consumption. Occasionally, the prisoner actually wins. Even more rarely, a bunch of prisoners sues and wins, often being vindicated by a resolution that puts the court in charge of running the prison. Usually, the public reaction to such outcomes is outrage that someone convicted of a crime that warrants imprisonment still has any rights at all, much less the right to complain of the conditions of his imprisonment. But note that the conditions that do turn up in court almost never include harm inflicted on an inmate by fellow inmates, even when that harm includes rape or murder. Things like that are considered, by everybody on all sides, to be part of the normal conditions of confinement. (The one major exception is that a couple of courts have recognized the applicability of the necessity defense to justify escaping from jail in order to avoid a life-threatening situation.) Inmates can prevail in court only for acts or omissions of the “correctional” authorities themselves. The courts, the “correctional” systems, the lawyers on all sides, and even the inmates, take this for granted.

There are a few organizations specifically concerned about rape in prison (google that phrase and they will turn up,) but they are trees falling unheard in the forest, as far as the legal system is concerned. As a practical matter, “correctional” systems assume no responsibility for the conduct of their inmates toward each other. On the rare occasions when official notice is taken of an inmate assault, it is generally defined as a “fight,” and all parties to it are punished equally. Inmate assaults are treated not much differently from schoolyard bullying, except that the stakes for the injured parties are a good deal higher.

The only alternative to the “war of all against all” among inmates is solitary confinement; some inmates deliberately seek it out for self-preservation, but the conditions (aside from the company) are often worse than in the general population. Inmates in solitary, for instance, are often denied visitation with their friends and families, and may also be denied reading and writing materials.

The American public is not likely to become concerned about this state of affairs anytime soon, since we regard prison inmates as, at best, the undeserving beneficiaries of our undue squeamishness about the death penalty. The fact that several religious traditions consider visiting and aiding the imprisoned to be singularly virtuous mostly gets forgotten. Unlike our forbears, we know who deserves our concern, and we would never put such people behind bars. If they’re locked up, they deserve it, or worse.

So chalk this blog up to a voice crying in the wilderness. We’re okay. Screw the other guys.

Talking Right and Doing Wrong

2007-06-16T11:40:00.000-07:00

Geoffrey Nunberg has written an enthralling but depressing book called Talking Right: How Conservatives Turned Liberalism into a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show. He does a terrific job of describing the problem, though Rodney Dangerfield could have done it almost as well with four words: We (liberals) don’t get no respect.

When I was a girl, my mother taught me that the way to insure fairness in dividing a scarce or disputed resource was for one person to cut the cake (for instance) and the other to choose the first piece. Experts in game theory have refined this procedure so that it works equally well for multiple players. But in dogmatic disputes, the trick is to be able to cut the cake and choose the first piece. That is, first you divide the universe into (say) Coke and Pepsi drinkers, assigning to the former all the most desirable traits, and to the latter everything else, and then you define yourself and your buddies as Coke drinkers. It’s not that different from the way sixth-graders do things: boys are big and tough and do fun things, and girls are whiny and weak and have cooties. (Or, for that matter, girls are smart and sensible and neat, and boys are nasty and gross and stupid and have cooties.) Which is exactly what the Right in the United States has done, Nunberg shows us. The constellation of preferences, behaviors, and beliefs they have adopted for themselves don’t have much of any logical interconnection; but they can be and have been sold to the American public as (a) good things, and (b) what the Right espouses. Which leaves all the other stuff (an even more disconnected farrago of mannerisms and beliefs, such as those listed in the book’s subtitle, which have in common mainly that they can be made to appear bad things) for the liberals, who can thus be made to appear bad people. The fact that nobody could possibly be simultaneously as wily and weak and stupid and dangerous as the Right describes the liberals is utterly irrelevant to the marketing process.

Nunberg eventually says there isn’t much the Left can do about this situation, except wait for time to do its work and the pendulum to swing back, and in the meantime maybe jump on the really egregious occasions of Rightspeak quickly and hard, without wasting energy on the small stuff. Which is perhaps nothing but a sophisticated way of saying (as we often advised sixth-graders) “sticks and stones can break my bones but names will never hurt me.” That was nonsense in the sixth grade, and hasn’t improved since then. Names can hurt, very badly. (“Give a dog a bad name and you might as well shoot him,” as our grandparents used to say.) But objecting to Rightspeak puts us on the sinister side of “political correctness.”

So it is time to start defending political correctness. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, when someone says he is about to say something politically incorrect (usually with a snigger) he means he is about to say something mean-spirited and both factually and morally insupportable. This is the same spirit in which bad drivers honk before going through a stop sign or a red light. It is a way of saying, “I know our mothers don’t like us talking this way, but playing the dozens is fun.” It’s hard to tell whether the fun lies primarily in defying maternal etiquette or in offending other people and risking a fight. Either way, you know you are dealing with someone who believes he has a divine right to act and talk like a jerk. “Political correctness” means not being a jerk. It is not cowardly or namby-pamby, or even un-masculine. It is, essentially, the Golden Rule, which presumes that other people have the same sensitivities and needs and rights that we do. But what do you do when dealing with someone who won’t accept that presumption? That is the problem Nunberg is really facing, and like the rest of us, he’s short on useful answers.

SNITCHES, RATS, AND MARTYRS

2007-06-03T09:41:00.000-07:00

A major topic of discussion in law enforcement circles these days is the increasing public dislike of "snitches." (For the clearest possible example, see Who's a Rat.com) Rap music and t-shirts counsel the public "don't be a snitch." And witnesses are subjected to intimidation of the most vicious and dangerous kind as a result. "Nobody likes a tattle-tale," we are told, as we were once advised in first grade.

We are placed in a difficult conflict, because, on one hand, anyone who follows criminal prosecutions at all closely knows that prosecutors rely heavily on "confidential informants" whose background is, at best, no better than that of the defendants they help to convict, and whose incentive to inform usually has a lot more to do with promises of leniency than with civic-mindedness. And on the other hand, we have all heard horrifying tales of witnesses of crime being intimidated, assaulted, and even killed to keep them from testifying.

The conflict arises out of the fact that we are really looking at two different phenomena, which require two very different moral responses. The "confidential informant" is almost always a criminal himself, often a higher-ranking criminal than the defendants he helps to convict. That's how he comes by the information the prosecutors need. And the prosecutors have trouble acquiring the information by any other means because either the crime in question is a "victimless" one, usually a transaction between a willing buyer and a willing seller, or the organization that perpetrates the crime has really tight internal security (for instance, the code of omerta' for which the Cosa Nostra is famed.) The other reason the prosecutors have an incentive to get their information from criminal colleagues of the defendant is that such informants have a strong incentive to cooperate--immunity from or at least leniency in their own prosecutions. Which means in turn that the information they provide may or may not be accurate or complete. The incentive to inform is also an incentive to lie or invent. It is, above all, an incentive to give the prosecutors what they want. And the prosecutors wouldn't need the informant's information at all if they had any other way to get at it, so they can't cross-check its accuracy, by definition. So using "confidential informants" is morally and legally questionable, and being a CI is even more so.

"Snitches" exist at all levels of the criminal world, from the pettiest local mopes to the upper reaches of the Mafia. Their rewards range from an occasional twenty-dollar bill to immunity from prosecution for murder. The "Don't Be a Snitch" t-shirts may be effective at the low end, where the stakes and rewards are small. Probably they matter not at all to Joe Valachi and his successors.

But none of that has anything to do with the plight of the innocent civilian witness, the person who happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time when a drug deal or an assault or a murder is going down. When I was in my first job out of law school, running a legal aid office in a fairly rough ethnic neighborhood, my secretary came to me one day to tell me that she and her husband had seen a murder the night before. "Does this mean I'm going to get in trouble?" she asked me. It took me a while to figure out what she was talking about. Was she going to be questioned by the police? she meant. Would they threaten her in some way if she didn't tell them what they wanted to hear? Could she be held as a material witness? And could she be threatened by the shooter or his friends? All I could recommend was that, if the police contacted her for questioning, she should call me immediately before telling them anything. That was thirty years ago. If anything, the plight of the innocent civilian witness has gotten a lot worse since then. The scholar will remind you that, in the original Greek and in Arabic, the word "martyr" means "witness." That is not an accidental link.

The fact is that nobody likes an innocent civilian witness. Cops and prosecutors don't like them because, from the point of view of the prosecutorial process, they're loose cannons. They have no incentive to testify, or to testify in any particular way, other than their own civic-mindedness. The legal system has nothing to offer them. It can, on occasion, threaten them (with being held as a material witness, or being subpoenaed and being held in contempt for refusing to testify.) A case dependent only on evidence from innocent civilian witnesses is generally regarded by prosecutors as unwinnable, no matter how strong that evidence may be.

Criminals don't like innocent civilian witnesses for pretty much the same reason--they can't be bought. They can, increasingly, be intimidated, and of course they can always be assaulted, their houses burned down, and worse. We are unlikely ever to know how effective these tactics are, since by definition their success means utter lack of public information. But most witness protection programs are not even available to innocent civilian witnesses, and anything short of a complete identity transplant is likely to be inadequate. If there is one thing the average resident of a high-crime neighborhood knows with absolute certainty, it is that the police cannot protect anyone.

So on one hand, the criminal justice system needs to get rid of its dependence on "confidential informants" in victimless-crime cases, and on the other hand, it needs to find ways to protect innocent civilian witnesses in violent crime cases. This is the only way law enforcement can rehabilitate its own questionable reputation in the communities it is supposed to be protecting.

Odd Lots New Series #1B

2007-05-26T13:09:00.000-07:00

Eleanor of Aquitaine
Graca Machel
Emma of Normandy

(It's not cheating to google.)

TEN LITTLE INDIANS revisited

2007-05-26T12:20:00.001-07:00

This is the part of the presidential campaign process I really hate. The media and the back-room boys select a batch of "serious" candidates, put them through their paces, and then pick them off, one by one, until only one candidate on each side remains. Some of them just run out of money, the demand for which gets almost exponentially higher with every campaign. But the criteria for deselecting those who pass the financial bar usually has to do with the discovery of skeletons in various closets, or bloopers made on the way to the White House. Which means that the survivors are likely to be those with the fewest skeletons, or the best apparatus for keeping the closets locked, or the most practiced skills at avoiding or at least concealing bloopers (often by avoiding all spontaneous speech and action.) Which leaves us, at the end, with the most processed and boring candidates, on both sides.

The ability to conceal past or current bloopers, of course, also depends on the attitude of the media and the various power brokers to each candidate, as well as the candidate's financial and political resources. The way the media pounced on Howard Dean's infamous barbaric yawp in 2004, for instance, still amazes me. Football fans all over the world have been not only forgiven but lauded for the same level of enthusiastic expression, so what on earth was wrong with Dean's doing the same thing? My guess is that he was perceived by the media and the power brokers as a dangerously competent and innovative outsider. He had, after all, come up with the first significant new wrinkle in fundraising (the internet) since Richard Viguerie discovered direct mail. If he was not to invade the preserves of power, they had to find some way to stop him, and this was the first thing that came along. Given Dean's personally stainless life and successful tenure as a governor, it might have been the last chance they got.

Sexual pecadilloes have been ammunition for potshots at candidates ever since at least the first elections in ancient Rome. The Romans were a lot more explicit and probably somewhat less careful about fact-checking than American reporters, since the laws against libel and slander were still in their infancy. Google "sex and politics US" and you will probably find a lot more than you ever wanted to know about the frailties of Alexander Hamilton, Andrew Jackson, Grover Cleveland, Gary Hart, and Bill Clinton, among others far too numerous to mention.

The latest variation on this theme is divorce. Reasonably enough, a few advocacy groups for "family values" have started to wonder why almost every major Republican politician has been divorced at least once, often under seriously scandalous circumstances, while almost all the front-runners of the party of abortion and gay rights are models of monogamy. Most of this concern seems to be directed at Giuliani, who at one time was known to be simultaneously two-timing his wife and his mistress with yet a third woman. (Is that three-timing?) Although he is still a promising front-runner, with lots of money and media behind him, if he fails, it will almost certainly be because of his personal life.

On the Democratic side, the two clear front-runners are Clinton and Obama. Everybody else, in both parties, is working on knocking them off (that's one of the drawbacks to being an early front-runner--it paints a target on your back.) If they survive that process, they may well end up as running mates.

But if they don't, I'd like to suggest another winning team. At the moment, both of them are just barely hanging onto "serious candidate" status, not because they don't want the job, but because they don't have much in the way of financial or media backing. You heard it here first: Gravel and Kucinich.

You may not even remember Mike Gravel. He was the Senator from Alaska during the Pentagon Papers-Watergate era. He was the one who managed to get the Pentagon Papers (the documents that revealed the lies that got us into the Vietnam War and the atrocities we committed during that war) into the public record when the government was trying to hide them. He supports a proposal for a national initiative, enabling citizens to get nationwide legislative proposals onto the ballot when Congress fails to act. He opposes the Iraq War. He is, in general, a good guy. For more info, see The National Initiative for Democracy vote.org and Senator Mike Gravel. Main disadvantage, aside from the perceived lack of "seriousness" would be his age. At 77, he would be the oldest candidate ever.

Then there's Dennis Kucinich. Since he's the younger of the two (at 61), he would presumably be running for the veep spot. Former mayor of Cleveland (the youngest ever, when he was elected), he has represented his Ohio district in congress for ten years. He has proposed impeaching Vice President Cheney, and is a staunch opponent of the war in Iraq. Reagan nostalgiacs may be attracted by the fact that Kucinich is a member in good standing of The International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, Moving Picture Technicians, Artists and Allied Crafts of the United States (IATSE), an AFL-CIO affiliated union. For more info, see Dennis Kucinich and Congressman Dennis Kucinich .

You may have some other personal favorites in this race. Don't let me derail your enthusiasm. But whatever you do, whoever you suppport, don't let the media and the power brokers decide which candidate you will take seriously. This year, most of the "serious" candidates are pretty interesting and worth checking out. Make your own choices and back them seriously. Your vote belongs to you.

FAMILY VALUES AND THE GOP

2007-03-27T13:15:00.000-07:00

Apparently evangelical Christians are just starting to notice what has been obvious to liberals for at least 20 years--that the politicians who most fervently espouse "family values" are the least likely to practice them. Specifically, virtually the entire leadership of the Hard Right have been divorced at least once, and often two or three times. While Democrats seem to stay married forever, which one salient exception--Joe Lieberman--who really "proves the rule", since he is also the least liberal of the batch.

Rudy Giuliani has the rare distinction of having cheated on both his wife and his mistress with yet a third woman. Newt Gingrich was not only twice divorced but a deadbeat dad. Ronald Reagan cheated on his first wife with Nancy, who was pregnant when he married her.

A case could be made that staying married doesn't necessarily make Democrats -- like John F. Kennedy, Bill Clinton, and for that matter, Grover ("Ma, ma, where's my pa? Gone to the White House, ha ha ha!") Cleveland--more moral than their divorced adversaries. Indeed, during the worst of the Clinton scandals, many conservatives actually blamed Hillary for not divorcing Bill. They apparently took this to mean that she condoned or even endorsed his wrongdoing, rather than merely standing by her man. But then, they were the same bunch who evidently blamed Gore for the pecadilloes of his boss, despite Gore's picture-perfect family life. Any stick will do to beat a dog you don't like.

But I would really like to see evangelicals, and conservatives generally, take a serious look at their own family values. Divorce rates are apparently higher in the Bible Belt, and among born-again Christians in particular, than in the general population. Doesn't anybody--and in particular born-again Christians--worry about this? Is there something about the conservative Christian culture that makes marriages more fragile? Or does the Christian Right actually believe divorce is preferable to --- it's hard to finish this sentence. Gay marriage? Abortion? Premarital sex?

Admittedly, I also don't know any liberals who have bothered to explore our tendency to long-term marriages. Does it equate to fidelity and monogamy, or just to imperfect people tolerating each other's imperfections? I have theories about why divorce lawyers (like me) tend to stay married forever--we know the real costs of divorce, up close. I have no theories about why marriage counselors seem to divorce and remarry at unusually high rates. And I have absolutely no idea why liberals stay married. Especially why (or for that matter how) liberal politicians stay married--politics must be a minefield for marriages! Lawyers and computer consultants don't face many serious threats to their relationships, but politicians can be drawn into all of the Seven Deadly Sins before breakfast, most days.

Is this a proper subject for sociological research? Has any such research already been done? Can anybody out there point me to it?

Happy Spring.

BREAKING INTO THE MADHOUSE

2007-03-20T14:08:00.000-07:00

I started law school very shortly after the Supreme Court ruled that a person cannot be committed to a mental hospital merely to get her out of the way of the public. To commit somebody for involuntary hospitalization, you have to prove that she is dangerous to himself or others. Once she's in there, you have to treat her, not just warehouse her. As a matter of fact, one of my professors brought the case in which that groundbreaking ruling was made.

At the time, it was pretty easy to get people committed for just being a bother to their friends and relatives. It was also pretty easy to get insurance companies to pay the costs of such hospitalization. When there was no private insurance, it was equally easy to get the state to take care of it.

On the other hand, at the time that the courts ruled that mental patients had to be treated, there really wasn't much treatment available for most people with mental illnesses. There was electroshock therapy, of course, and surgery, and there were a few tranquilizers. That was about it.

We are all familiar with the dismal chronicle of "courts make commitment more difficult--large state mental hospitals close down--patients thrown on community mental health resources--Reagan cuts funding for community mental health." At the same time, private health insurance became less and less willing to pay for mental health treatment or hospitalization beyond a very bare minimum. Treatments for mental illness were changing at the same time. It really was possible for some people to pop a pill and stop hearing voices. So private health insurance companies came to mandate pill-popping as the norm for mental health treatment.

Now we have a couple of sets of problems. One is that the legal system that deals with people with mental illness was devised when The Problem was the tendency to hospitalize people who didn't need it. Now The Problem is our inability to hospitalize people who do need it. It is next to impossible to force a mental hospital to accept a patient. There is an obscure clause in the Illinois Mental Health and Developmental Disabilities Act providing a procedure for a patient or her parent or guardian to appeal a discharge from a mental hospital. So far as I know, it has never been used.

A few years ago, a young man with a mental illness drove his car into the State of Illinois building in Chicago. Nobody was hurt, and some architecture buffs might consider the result an improvement. It was later revealed that the young man's father had been trying to get him hospitalized for at least three years, but that the hospitals kept releasing him after the minimal 72-hour evaluation. We never did find out if the car crash succeeded in getting him hospitalized long enough to tackle his problems. But I suspect the Chicago area is now full of parents and guardians with architectural hit lists of their own. Apparently that is what it takes these days.

The other set of problems results from, as usual, our belief that our technology works better than it actually does. In this instance, I'm talking about psychoactive medication. The fact is, psychopharmacology is still an art rather than a science. Some meds work on some people with some disorders. For some people, with some disorders, nothing works. Many of the meds that do "work" cause side effects that some patients consider worse than the disease. When the medical profession claims that a psychoactive med "works", they usually mean that it gets rid of the symptoms most disturbing to the patient's family or friends or caregivers.

Normally, we figure that if we feel bad, we should be able to take a pill and feel better. After all, it works for headaches. But increasingly, our pharmacopeia is full of things we take when we feel normal, or even absolutely terrific, and then they make us feel awful. This is especially true of patients with bipolar disorder. In the manic phase, they feel great, really great. Then they take the meds, and immediately feel either "blah" or totally miserable. This is not, we fondly believe, what medical science is supposed to be about.

But we still believe that forcing people with mental illness to take their meds will solve all the problems they present to the public, and at least the worst of the ones they suffer themselves. Sometimes we're right. Often, we're not. There are patients for whom we haven't yet found a medication that will "work", even within this limited definition. And other patients for whom the medication that "works" from the point of view of society is sheer misery for the patient herself.

So now we are trying to find ways to make people with mental illness take medications that may not alleviate their condition, or may make them feel worse in the process, because at least they won't bother us so much. The Supremes were pretty clear that minimizing public nuisance is not valid grounds for locking somebody up. Is it valid grounds for forcibly medicating people? Since we haven't really found a way to forcibly medicate people yet, the issue has not yet been litigated.

In the meantime, people with mental illness afflict our esthetic sensibilities of sight, sound, and smell, and commit occasional crimes, some of them violent. Proving that such a person is "dangerous to himself or others" usually requires predicting human behavior, which even mental health specialists aren't very good at. It requires depriving people of liberty on the basis of what we think they might do, rather than what they have done. In any other context, that would be unconstitutional. In 21st-century, it is merely a bad game of guesswork, in which the judgment of the police is clouded by a desire to get minor criminals off the street, and the judgment of the mental health professionals is clouded by the inability to get needed treatment paid for. As a result, the two largest mental health facilities in the country at the moment are the Cook County Jail and the LA County Jail, not necessarily in that order. The one thing everybody assumes the American public will pay for is jails.

Okay, I'm kvetching. I have clients with mental illness, and it's impossible to do the right thing for them. All I can do is fall back on the Canons of Ethics, which require me to do what my client wants unless he is actively and seriously threatening some third party. So I have no trouble figuring out what to do, I just don't know how to handle the results. Neither does anybody else who works with mental patients.

Many years ago, my mother volunteered at the local mental hospital as an interpreter. Like many such places at the time, the hospital staffed some of its less taxing jobs with its more stable inmates. One of them, on this particular day, was answering the phones at the front desk when Mom came in. The phones were ringing nonstop, and after several minutes of this, the inmate-receptionist looked up at her and sighed, "This is a madhouse." Which of course it was. Where is that receptionist now that we need her?

ODD LOTS new series #1a

2007-03-11T16:17:00.000-07:00

Robert Heinlein, Abraham Lincoln, Henry David Thoreau, Les Paul, Jack Johnson (the boxer) and Hedy Lamarr

(what do all of these people have in common?)

ANOTHER TRIAL OF THE NEW CENTURY

2007-03-11T11:02:00.000-07:00

"Scooter" Libby has been found guilty of lying to government agents about who leaked the name of a CIA covert agent. Which, while still kind of picayune, is certainly more significant than whether Bill Clinton lied in a deposition about not having had sex with "that woman."

It took me until this week to figure out why anyone would have bothered leaking that information in the first place. Partly that was because I was distracted by NPR coverage of the story which involved Lewis Libby's trial developments being narrated by a reporter named Libby Lewis. But mostly it was because I couldn't figure out why it mattered to the Bush administration or any of its more sinister functionaries that Joseph Wilson's trip to Niger to double-check Bush's yellow-cake story was arranged by the CIA, (through the machinations of Wilson's wife, the covert agent in question,) rather than by, say, Travelocity. Wouldn't that make his ultimate conclusion (that there was no yellow-cake purchased by the Iraquis) more credible? I kept asking. One of the print stories finally clued me in--the administration considers the CIA "soft" on terrorism!

But isn't the CIA part of the administration? Apparently not. Their problem seems to be an undue devotion to facts rather than ideology. They may be unscrupulous about how they get their facts, but not about reporting them accurately to a government which then mostly ignores them. The CIA's motto is "The truth shall make you free." The motto of this administration seems to be "the right lies shall make the Republicans a perpetual majority party."
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AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT

Our cat likes to sleep in the bathroom sink. Most of our various cats over the years have liked it too. It's just the right size and shape for a cat to curl up in. And the only way to dislodge them when we have other uses for the sink is to turn on the water. Our cat walks around with a perpetually dripping tail. Any bright ideas, gentle reader?

ADVERTISING IS THE BOMB

2007-02-10T10:43:00.000-08:00

Many years ago I almost took a job with an ad agency (that was before I even considered going to law school.) I have never regretted deciding against it, but now I have a whole new reason to rejoice: the infamous Boston Brite-Lite Hoax. Lots of other people are using the incident to decry the loss of America's sense of humor since 9/11 (see http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/020807R.shtml for instance), but where is our pity for the poor advertisers?

Over the past thirty years or so, there have been fewer and fewer ways to attract public attention to advertising. It is now taken for granted that most television commercials are being used primarily as an opportunity for snack or bathroom breaks or some other form of multi-tasking, and that billboards are being just plain ignored. On-line ads attract whole new varieties of retaliatory software previously used only to block viruses and worms. People are actually willing to pay to avoid being exposed to advertising.

In response, advertisers have looked for new locations for their wares, like elevators and washroom stalls. And those who use such space merely develop new ways to ignore their surroundings.

So these days the only way to attract public attention is through what in other contexts is more solemnly called performance art--hoaxes. The Boston police have given them a pretty hard time for it, but no matter--it will happen again. The advertisers will just factor in the cost of legal representation and pump up their budgets a bit. After the first year or so of ad hoaxes, the public will find their own new mechanism for tuning them out, and the arms race will escalate yet again.

Because the advertising industry, and the economy that rests on it, can't figure out any other way to operate in the light of the incontrovertible and obvious fact that most people hate advertising and will do almost anything to avoid having to attend to it. Virtually all of our mass media depend on advertising. So do organized sports. So, increasingly, does education (did you see the story about a high school kid who got suspended for wearing a "Coke" t-shirt in a school that had an exclusive contract with Pepsi?) And then there's the continuing arms race between those who advertise on movies and tv programs, and the viewers who tape the programs and "zap" the ads.

At some level, I think the advertisers are motivated by a puritanical urge to make media consumers pay for their pleasures by doing something they hate. The increasing number of people who resist are seen as free-loaders, the same sort of people who want to drink without getting hangovers, or have sex without getting pregnant.

What worries me is the escalation. On one hand, people trying to resist advertising often do it by blocking out all kinds of external stimuli, including some very useful ones. And on the other hand, trying to overcome this resistance can lead the advertisers to some really disruptive tactics. If Brite-Lite can't get the consumer's attention with fake bombs, are real bombs the next step?

NOT FOR SENSITIVE READERS

2007-01-16T09:39:00.000-08:00

or: The Grossout Factor vs. Humane Execution

I'm opposed to the death penalty. For a more complete explanation of why, you may want to look at Rabbi Joshua Waxman's discussion of the ignominious death of Saddam Hussein at: http://www.beliefnet.com/blogs/virtualtalmud/

But the recent execution of Barzan al-Tikriti (Saddam's half-brother and henchman) draws our attention in the wrong direction for a reasoned examination of capital punishment. The adjustment of the rope in his case resulted in, not merely strangulation and a broken neck, but in outright decapitation. Surprisingly, this is neither novel nor unknown in the literature on the subject. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanging for probably a lot more information than you really want. It is, essentially, an engineering blunder.

Why is everybody so perturbed about it? Why, for that matter, are we so perturbed about use of decapitation in the murder of various hostages and captives by Iraqui and Afghan insurgents?

It's not because decapitation is more painful and less "humane" than other methods of execution. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. Depends on how it's done. If it's done right--which was the whole point of the invention of the guillotine--it is as close to painless as an execution can get. Our search since that invention for more "humane" methods has resulted only in one gross and inhumane fiasco after another, from the horrors of the electric chair (look it up in Wikipedia) to, most recently the discovery that lethal injection, if not done right, is horrendously painful.

But deep down, we aren't as interested in sparing the victim from pain as we are in protecting the spectators from being grossed out. Decapitation, no matter how painlessly done, is gross. Lethal injection, if the paralytic agent is properly administered, is relatively easy to watch, no matter how much the victim may be silently and motionlessly suffering. Similarly, even when the indignities of being hanged, drawn and quartered were mostly performed post mortem, as they were in the latter days of the use of that punishment, people responded to that procedure as "inhumane." At the time, of course, grossing out the general public was the whole point of doing it. It was intended to be the ultimate in deterrent punishment.

Which brings us back to our original point--capital punishment is intended to affect both the victim and the general public. We need to make separate decisions on how we want it to affect each one. A punishment can, like the guillotine, be relatively "humane" toward the victim and totally gross out the general public. Or it can be ferociously vengeful toward the victim, like lethal injection when bungled, and relatively easy for the general public to observe. History is, of course, replete with methods that are cruel and repulsive in equal measure.

If we really wanted, we could no doubt invent methods equally "humane" for the victim and visually acceptable for the general public. I'm not sure we want to. A general public that allows trailers for Texas Chainsaw Massacre to be shown during prime time has a lot more tolerance for grossout than our Victorian forebears. Did Barzan al-Tikriti suffer unduly at his death? Obviously, we'll never know for sure, but we can be quite sure his suffering, such as it was, was brief. Possibly too brief, in the eyes of some of his victims. But let's at least try to look at this question in the light of the two sides before us. Let's not confuse our own delicacy of taste with a concern for the suffering of the victim.

BUSH'S SURGIN' GENERALS

2007-01-10T17:58:00.000-08:00

I can still remember when it was called escalation. Well, now it's a surge--just one more disaster, like the Katrina floods, or the South Asian tsunami. Twenty thousand more of our soldiers thrown at an enemy that, like a hydra, grows more heads as we chop them off, or like the Tar Baby, binds our hands tighter the harder we strike. Our Glorious Leader seems equally unclear about where these soldiers are to go, and where they are to come from. "We'll just kind of weasel their enlistments around the edges," the experts tell us. "Deploy them to Iraq a little earlier and keep them there a little longer." And, no doubt, call them back a little more often, like the poor guy who was called back for deployment after three tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, and told the brass not to wait up for him. Eventually they backed down. Are they planning on trying it again?

The alternative--some would say the unavoidable alternative--is a draft. As the war becomes less popular, recruiting becomes more difficult. There is a limit to the lies they can tell and the tricks they can pull on reluctant recruits (one young woman I spoke to said she called her recruiter to tell him she was not going to report for active duty. The recruiter asked her to come in and talk to him. The next thing she knew, she was on the plane headed for Boot Camp. She is now in the process of being discharged for depression.) So why bother with the illusion of voluntariness? Let's stick to drafting teenagers, instead of deploying middle-aged reservists. Physically, they're probably in better shape, and mentally they're a lot better at shutting up and doing what they're told.

A conscript army would not only be younger, but would include a lot more ethnic minorities, including the children of immigrants. It would also be fatter, and probably less educated than the army we have now. Fewer of its members would be aiming for college. Fewer of its members would be motivated by the desire to serve and to "give back." Most of them would probably view military service as just an extension of high school, and would try to get through it the same way.

Are the American people ready for another draft? Did the Vietnam experience turn us off so completely that we can never again accept it? The generation that dealt with the Vietnam-era draft are the parents and even the grandparents of today's potential draftees. Are we prepared to remind the country of what it was like?

Well, for further information, take a look at an earlier posting here, called "Backdraft." Those of us who were there owe our children and grandchildren an accurate picture of the part of our past that may lie in their future. In the immortal words of Nancy Reagan, just say no.

PEACE ON EARTH TO ALL CELEBRANTS OF GOOD WILL

2006-12-22T09:18:00.000-08:00

For the last couple of years, conservative Christians have been claiming that there is a "war on Christmas" being conducted by those (including the First Couple) who send "Season's Greetings" cards, or wish their friends and customers "Happy Holidays" or call the school vacation over Christmas and New Year's "Winter Break." On the other hand, many Orthodox Jews not only refuse to have anything to do with Christmas, but decry the fuss being made over Hanukkah, which, they insist, is only a "minor holiday." The current hoopla over Hanukkah, they claim, is merely a first step on the road to assimilation.

As a Jew, I have some rather strong opinions on the institutionalization of a Christian holiday so that all of us have to celebrate it in some way whether we like it or not. But I'm also an American, steeped in the culture of Dickens, Peanuts, and George Friedrich Handel. Not to mention heavy-duty British holiday cooking (I like fruitcake, plum pudding, mince pie, and hard sauce, the harder the better.)

Even more significantly, I live in a northern climate. By late December, what I see and feel around me is cold, gray, damp, and depressing. Like many northerners, I get at least mildly depressed by the long nights and short days. Coming home from work in the dark makes me feel as if I have worked longer and harder than I really have, and therefore feel tireder than I really am.

The wisdom of our northern ancestors, I think, has to override the traditions of our Mesopotamian and Northern African forebears, for the sake of our own sanity. All of us, Jew and Christian and Muslim and Buddhist and Hindu, who now live in the cold frozen (well, okay, given the trend to global warming, the cold slushy) north, need a winter holiday!

That holiday should emphasize light and warmth and companionship and family and good food and music. It should give us an excuse to shut down from work for a while and stop fighting the elements to do business as usual. Above all, it should give us a chance to recognize that we are all in this together, regardless of the religious or cultural gloss we put on our individual celebrations. Giving presents to our fellow workers, dropping money into the red kettle at the mall, sending cards to friends and family, are partly a way to touch bases every year and reassure ourselves that we have made it through another year. But more important, they are a silent pledge that if your car is stuck in a drift, I will help you get it out, and if I slip on an icy sidewalk, you will help me up, and if we are all blizzarded in, I will check to see if you need anything when I go out for provisions. If our respective religious and cultural traditions do not require this, anything else they do require is merely "sounding brass and tinkling cymbals," as Paul would say to the Corinthians.

So I like Winter Solstice celebrations, since all of us recognize this cosmological event. I like celebrations involving fire and light and good food and good music. So far, nobody seems to put out Winter Solstice cards. But this year, as I made my last shopping foray for cards and gifts, for the first time I found a bunch of Happy New Year cards, and picked up a couple of batches. I found that they said, to my friends who do not observe Hanukkah, what I really want to say: I am glad you have been in my life this year, and I hope next year is better for all of us. Keep warm. Peace and light.

PHONE BOOK TIME AGAIN

2006-12-18T14:48:00.000-08:00

As I walked out of our building the other day, I passed a stack of new phone books in the vestibule. The next day, a couple of them were gone. Since then, nobody has removed any of them. I haven't taken any, partly because, having busted a couple of ribs, I'm in no shape for heavy lifting right now. I don't know what everybody else's excuse is. I'm not sure I would bother with them even if I were physically up to it, so why should my neighbors?

Why should anybody? What use are they? I read someplace a while back that, at least in the Chicago area, roughly one-third of the information in our phone books is either inaccurate or outdated. The Bureau of the Census says that every year, 20% of us move. So we're starting out with 20% of the information being inaccurate for at least part of the year, assuming that they got it right in the first place. Which they don't, necessarily. Their spelling is questionable, especially with non-Anglo-Saxon names or odd business titles. (My favorite veggie restaurant, the late lamented Mama Peaches, was listed by Directory Assistance as "Mama's Peaches.") Sometimes the numbers are transposed, much to the dismay of, for instance, perfectly respectable customers who discover their numbers are listed under "phone sex" or "pizza."

Most of us these days can check out phone numbers online at home or work. Those unfortunates who need to call from someplace else won't be able to find a phone book anyplace else anyway. Certainly not at pay phones (a rapidly-disappearing convenience.)

As pay phones vanish, phone books grow and multiply. These days, they aren't necessarily produced by the same people who provide your phone service. After all, the wisdom of deregulation has brought us multiple phone service providers. Some of them produce books, some don't. And some independent companies, who have nothing to do with providing phone service at all, do produce books. In the Chicago area, there are at least two separate and more-or-less identical sets of phone books stacked up in our hall every year.

And that's just counting information for phones within the Chicago city limits. There are something like 248 municipalities in the Chicago area. They get grouped into three supplementary sets of phone books, for the north, south, and west suburbs. (We are fortunate in that Lake Michigan occupies the space that would otherwise contain the east suburbs.) We city-dwellers have to special-order the suburban books, and pay for them. And provide space for them. People who do a lot of business in the suburbs probably have no choice, especially since Directory Assistance is utterly useless for finding suburban phone numbers unless you happen to know which suburb contains the place you're looking for. But the rest of us generally choose to do without and take our chances.
The alternative, after all, is three Chicago phone books (white pages, consumer yellow pages, and business-to-business yellow pages), plus white and yellow pages for three sets of suburbs. That's 9 very large books, total, weighing approximately 5 pounds each. A pain to store, a pain to lift, and increasingly difficult to use, given that the print keeps getting smaller (no, that's not an illusion caused by aging--publishers are trying to save paper and delivery costs, and one of the ways they do it is by either shrinking the print size, or cramming the letters closer together, or both.)

The only commercially produced phone books that are really any use are the small neighborhood and local suburban books; they're no more accurate than their big brothers, but they are a lot easier to store and to use.

Making phone books, of course, requires cutting down trees. Roughly 17 of them per ton of paper. At 45 pounds per household, that's roughly 75,000 tons a year, killing roughly 1,275,000 trees. Plus all kinds of minerals (mostly toxic) for the ink. Plus the water it takes to sustain the forests.

Once you're finished with the phone book, you have to figure out what to do with it. It's yet another serious burden on the ecosystem. For some reason, phone books don't biodegrade. They last forever. They make up roughly 20% of the contents, by volume, of the average landfill. They are made from a low grade of paper that must be "downcycled" into lower grade recycled products. And they're contaminated with toxic minerals, plastics, and magnets that mess up the recycling process.

So, like an increasing proportion of people all over the world, including apparently most of my neighbors, I have decided not to bother picking up this year's new phone books. I will throw out my old ones wherever the city recycling authorities mandate, and use the space for something more interesting.

TO SERVE AND--WHAT?

2006-12-10T12:28:00.000-08:00

Last week was another tragic lawyer-shooting in Chicago. This one had no connection to family law--the intended victim was an intellectual property attorney who had handled a patent case for the shooter (the inventor of a toilet for trucks.) The intended victim, another attorney in the same office, and a clerical worker were all killed, and a paralegal was wounded. The shooter was also killed--last I heard, nobody was sure whether it was by his own hand or by the SWAT team which finally turned up a bit too late. The shooter was apparently yet another person who had anticipated the legal system solving his problems, who expressed his disappointment with a gun when it didn't.

There will undoubtedly be more commentary on that part of the story, both in and out of the profession. For the moment I'm concerned about the requirements of yet another "profession," namely "building security." The shooter entered the building at the only available entrance, which was covered by security officers. They asked for his ID and checked at the law office to see if he had an appointment. Finding out that he didn't, they sent him away. But he came back with a gun, which he pulled on the security guard. The guard then took him up to the law office.

Like all the rest of you, I have spent lots of time waiting to be allowed into buildings in which I had perfectly legitimate business, so that "security officers" could check me out and decide I was an acceptable visitor. Being female and not especially big, I probably didn't make any of them nervous enough to stop me. But if I had, I would have put up with it, because like just about everybody else, I was willing to sacrifice a certain amount of convenience and freedom so that other people could be safe.

And now I learn that all I had to do to get personally escorted wherever I was going was to pull a gun on the security guard. Excuse me? Aren't these guys being paid, and armed, and trained, to prevent attacks on building occupants? Shouldn't the guard have done something at the lobby checkpoint, like pull a gun, or mace, or a taser, or at least alert one of the other guards before going upstairs, or jam the elevator once they got in? Something other than escort the killer into the office of his victims and then (so far as I know) go back downstairs before the shooting started?

Yes, I know that the guy was not a real police officer sworn to serve and protect and put his own life on the line to do it. Yes, I know that he was probably "temporary" and/or "part-time" with no benefits, and was getting paid maybe 5% of the hourly pay of the attorneys he allowed to get shot. But nonetheless, he was uniformed, trained and at least in some fashion armed, to provide the building's occupants with the illusion of safety.

And, apparently, nothing else. This is not a position the building management should have allowed itself to get into. If there is one thing lawyers know how to do, by definition, it is sue. The friends and families of the decedents in this case will probably go after every asset of the building management and the owners who hired them. And those of us who have given up ever-increasing amounts of convenience and freedom to "building security" personnel will be sitting in the stands cheering them on.

TIME (LIKE LIFE AND FORTUNE) MARCHES ON

2006-12-05T09:39:00.000-08:00

A couple of weeks ago I turned 65. I've spent the last month getting acquainted with the implications of that. First, there are the benefits. I won't get full benefits if I apply for Social Security retirement before next August (the age of official retirement has been creeping up for a while, unnoticed by most people.) But I do get Medicare, which is terrific, since I have had no health insurance for the last three years. Now I have an insurance policy that gets me all kinds of useful things. I can pay for prescription meds, instead of relying on my doctor and the kindness of strangers in pharmaceutical companies for samples. I can get on the bus for half-fare. When I do, people get up to give me a seat (usually, by the way, women--interesting, isn't it?)

One of the benefits that came with my insurance was a free membership at the local Y. With which comes one of the drawbacks of getting older--last week, I slipped on a wet floor in the locker room and broke a couple of ribs.

In the course of dealing with this, I discovered an Urgent Care facility in my PPO network, a block from my office. For a mere $10 co-pay, I saw a doctor and got a set of X-rays. What that gets me in practical terms is limited. There isn't much they can do for broken ribs. It all has to do with managing symptoms (especially pain, of which there is a lot.) "If wrapping yourself in an Ace bandage makes you feel better, do it," says my doctor. "Don't do anything that hurts. No pain, no pain." I have a prescription for painkillers, which I try to take as seldom as possible.

This creates certain practical problems. After 10 days of not taking out the garbage, I begin to feel like Shel Silverstein's Sarah Sylvia Cynthia Stout (read the poem if you haven't already.) So I call a friend who very kindly comes over and deals with the garbage.

I can't do heavy lifting, so now I get the groceries delivered. When the house gets intolerably dirty, I will enlist the very nice woman who cleans the office. In the meantime, when I see a dust bunny on the floor, I just leave it there and try not to think about it. Aging may be easier on men, who don't have the "If I don't clean it up now, I'll just have to do it later" reflex.

I need to get a bone density test; osteoporosis runs in my family (not just the women, either--my father had it.) Are the ribs the beginning of a trend? If so, I may not be able to use many of the current standard meds, since they can aggravate my ulcer. Thus I get introduced to yet another problem of aging--the tendency of multiple medical conditions to get in the way of each other's treatment. This is, presumably, how even young gerontologists get gray hair.

I'm getting used to the fact that I am now too old to die young. I feel as if I'm in a biological free fire zone.

But on the other hand, like many lawyers my age, I feel entitled to cut back on work a bit. Lawyers don't generally retire, but they do cut back. One of my colleagues just turned 96, and he's still practicing. I come in to the office later on days when I don't have to be in court. When I'm in the office, I work as hard as ever (maybe even harder, to make up for the late mornings), but I don't feel quite as driven.

I contemplate having spare time, and doing things with it. I'm on the board of my congregation, and have taken on the congregational library as my special project. So I need to learn about software for cataloging books. This can be fun. (I remember my father saying he was busier after he retired than he had been when he was still officially working.)

Am I the only senior citizen blogger? Probably not. Peace and light to you all.

EDUCATION BUBBLE II

2006-11-24T09:28:00.000-08:00

In the course of reading my latest bar association journal, I just found out that people graduating from law school these days can owe between $60,000 and $100,000, and that many of them are signing up for 30-year repayment plans. Thirty years to finance a hundred grand--sound familiar? It's pretty much the standard "starter home" mortgage. That's scary. Does it mean that these folks are paying their student loans instead of buying a home? I suspect it does, at least for the first few years. Med school is probably even worse. So much for the American Dream.

BACKDRAFT

2006-11-21T10:24:00.000-08:00

Charlie Rangel is once again proposing military conscription. He does it every decade or so, just to get the point across that none of the pro-war bigwigs has ever heard a shot fired in anger, and none of their kids are currently on the firing line. I certainly don't mind keeping that salient point before the public eye. But the logic behind it is weaker than it looks, for those who actually have had some experience with the draft.

I was a draft counsellor during the Vietnam War. Which meant my colleagues and I had to know more about the Selective Service system than the people who administered it--they could (and often did) just make things up as they went along, but we had to be able to cite chapter and verse in the applicable regulations and laws. So we can talk from highly knowledgeable personal experience. We know that the draft was never the great social leveller that Rangel's enthusiasts envision.

The Vietnam War draft worked with a manpower pool considerably larger than they really needed, most of the time. That was the point of the infamous "lottery"--a number was assigned to each birthdate, and the people whose numbers were above a certain limit never had to deal with the draft at all. The number was usually well below or just above 200, out of a possible 366. Got that? One-third of the potential pool never heard from the SS at all.

What about the other two-thirds? Well, half of them failed the physical exam. That's not news. In fact, ever since people first started keeping these statistics (World War I, to be exact) half of everybody has failed the physical. How do you fail the physical? Not, generally, by walking into the examining station, being carefully checked out, and being found to be physically, mentally, psychologically, or morally unfit for service. The enlistment/induction physical has been cursory at best--anybody with the usual number of limbs and no visible deformities is likely to pass, unless--

Unless he presents documentation from a physician that he has some kind of serious but not immediately visible medical problem. Like having one of anything the normal human being made to standard specifications is supposed to have two of. Or a history of asthma. Or a history of mental disease or disorder. Ulcers. The list set forth in Army Regulation 40-501, Chapter 2, (www.army.mil/usapa/epubs/index.html.) goes on for 32 pages. Most of the conditions listed there are not immediately visible to the naked eye of an examining physician in a hurry. I won't even go into the numberless stories of young men with problems that were (or anyway should have been) visible to the naked eye, who passed the infamous induction physical anyway.

And how does one get documentation from a physician? Think about it. First, you have to have a doctor, or at least be able to see one regularly, as needed. And then the doctor in question needs to have the time and the inclination to actually write up comprehensible and relevant documentation. None of this is much use to a young man from an urban or rural ghetto, whose only source of medical care is the emergency room of an overcrowded, understaffed hospital, from a doctor whose idea of medical documentation is to scrawl across a prescription pad, "Sick--no work." In short, what we are accustomed to thinking of as the fairest and most democratic draft exemption is in fact available almost entirely to the middle and upper classes.

Never mind the less common exemptions and deferments, such as family hardship, conscientious objection, or academic. Academic deferments were mostly eliminated in the last phase of the Vietnam draft, and family hardship and CO never accounted for more than 10% of all deferments and exemptions anyway.

The fate of our current Commander in Chief tells us all we need to know about the usual lot of draftees with family connections--if they actually do have to submit to some sort of military service, they can manage to perform it close to home (or, as in W's case, close to one's girlfriend's home,) on a convenient part-time schedule, in a completely safe venue.

Which is pretty much the way the system works in countries that still have "universal" military service--if the sons and daughters of people with clout have to perform it at all, they get the safe, cushy jobs.

None of this should surprise us. The military establishment is anything but a class leveller. In fact, it is the only American institution in which class-mixing (called "fraternization") is actually a court-martial offense. The line between officers and enlisted personnel is not quite the same as it was a century ago, when officers had to purchase their positions. Now they just have to have a college degree. But the result is the same (and arguably costs roughly the same amount of money, controlling for inflation.)

The only area in which the United States Army has succeeded in overcoming social barriers is race. The US Army is the most integrated institution in America. But the draft had nothing to do with that. The integration first occurred back when we had a draft, but if anything it has improved with the advent of the all-volunteer army. It happened because the brass decided it was going to happen, and made sure it did. That's one of the advantages of effective top-down organization.

The rewards of military service, for those who have served, are far from race-neutral, much less class-neutral. The World War II/Korean War GI Bill, which moved a whole generation of working-class youth into the middle class by providing home mortgages, higher education, and health care, is long gone. This generation of veterans gets a lot less, and if they started out poor, they may still not be able to afford college without going into serious debt.

So from the point of view of forcing the middle class to take a personal interest in whatever foreign adventures our leaders may decide to undertake, the draft is less than a panacea.

In fact, it may serve to encourage the hawks in their adventurism. My grandfather, a career soldier, always told his kids, "Never pick up a gun if you don't intend to use it, never point it if you don't intend to shoot, and never shoot if you don't intend to kill." The draft puts a loaded gun into the hands of leaders who may not be any smarter or wiser than George W. Bush. Give it a thought, folks.

A THOUGHT FOR OUR VETERANS

2006-11-11T16:27:00.000-08:00

Two thoughts, actually. The first is that this year, the retailers have come up with a brand new institution: the Veterans' Day sale. At least around here, all the department stores are advertising like mad about it. It seems to be the latest way to move the Christmas season earlier, and encourage the people who are smart enough not to be caught dead trying to do their holiday shopping on the Friday after Thanksgiving to get ahead of the game. Is there any holiday that can't be turned into a sale? They've already done it for King's Birthday, so I'm not sure there's anything left, except maybe Good Friday. In the Pakistani neighborhoods around here, there are sales just before Ramadan, so I can't even blame Western civilization.

The other is that, amid the Democratic landslide, the only viable Democratic candidate around here who didn't win was Tammy Duckworth, the Iraq War veteran who lost both legs in a copter crash. The GOP spent an amazing lot of money buying huge amounts of air time for some of the slimiest negative ads I have ever seen. They weren't actually putting that much effort into most of the other races (which may be why they lost so many of them) but they were really determined not to let Duckworth win. She lost by a very small margin, but it still bothers me that she lost at all. The campaign against her reminds me all too much of the Swift Boat ads in 2004, against yet another war hero. The GOP gets really fierce about liberal veterans, more than about most other liberals, even. Maybe what they really are is scared, that liberal veterans could expose the current batch of Republicans for the gutless chicken hawks that they are, willing to put everybody's lives on the line except their own.

Anyway, next time you see a panhandler, remember that chances are one in three he's a veteran, and treat him decently--at least give him a smile, if you can't donate.

Also, a poetic remembrance of all departed warriors:

ARLINGTON

The bloodied sun sinks in the west,
And lights us all with glory;
Here sleep the brave in honored rest;
The bugler tells our story;
O dulce et decorum est pro patria mori;
O dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.

Go tell the people, passer-by,
Read the stone before ye,
'Tis sweet and fitting that we die
For our country's glory;
Obedient to your will we lie
Pro patria mori;
O dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.

From under stone we've often seen
These lures to empty glory;
We know what deaths these words can mean,
Lonely, cold and gory;
We find these Latin words obscene,
Pro patria mori,
O dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori.

We have no country of our own,
We who sleep in glory;
We died your hatreds to atone,
Still you shun our story;
Oh write no more on any stone,
Pro patria mori;
O dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori.

MY DOGMA CHASED YOUR KARMA--AND CAUGHT IT

2006-11-09T11:35:00.000-08:00

I've seen some writers describe the election as the result of a "perfect storm." The war has been going spectacularly badly; Tom Foley got caught sending dirty e-mails to the pages; Reverend Haggard bought meth from a gay masseur--well, you get the picture. If the US had a parliamentary system like that in most European countries, Bush would have lost a vote of confidence and we'd have a new president too, but let's not get greedy. After all, Rumsfeld got canned, and the Democrats have taken both houses of Congress.

So where do we go from here? Nancy (the Speaker presumptive) Pelosi says the main thing Congress has that really matters is subpoena power. Apparently a lot of Democrats are thirsting for hearings and investigations, mostly about the war. Nobody has yet uttered the "I" word, and I'm conflicted about whether they should. Impeachments cost a lot of money, create a lot of rancor and blood feuds, have a lot of unintended consequences, and rarely accomplish their original goals. A strong case can be made that the Clinton impeachment battle was just the GOP's delayed revenge for the Nixon impeachment battle. Do we really want to go that way again? More to the point, can we afford it? We're in the middle of a disastrous war, a Middle East crisis, and a 10-year window for doing something to alleviate global warming before climate change spins out of control. Congress has much better things to do with its time than impeach a president who is now the lamest of ducks, with only two years left to serve anyway. If he starts vetoing everything Congress sends him, they may have to do it or become lame ducks themselves. But if he makes even a pretense of cooperation, they need to take it and run with it.

And yet..... Why is it always liberals who are required to transcend the baser passions of partisanship and work for the common good? We've chased the car and caught it--why can't we take it home to the kennel and gnaw on it for a while?

I guess the main reason we can't is that the next two years have to be seen by everyone as a dress rehearsal for a Democratic administration after 2008, and that means we have to offer the American people more than the titillation of laying bare the sins of the GOP. But damn! wouldn't it be fun??

TAKE A RUMOR AND SPREAD IT 'ROUND 'ROUND 'ROUND

2006-11-02T10:05:00.000-08:00

For the last two weeks I've had a nasty cold. Eventually it will go away, I suppose, but I keep thinking it would go away faster if I could buy some serious medication for it without the hassle of asking the pharmacist. You know, the hard stuff. Sudafed or whatever.

Which in turn has led me to wonder what the next war on drugs is going to attack. Will the chowderheads out there figure out how to make a recreational drug out of aspirin and milk of magnesia? Or Vitamin C?

Why not get a head start on them, by starting a rumor that they're now making homebrewed euphorics out of, say, dog poop? Or the dust at the bottom of potholes (why else do they call them potholes?) Or--no, here's the ultimate solution, a homebrewed euphoric that is made out of dog poop and then triggered by televised commercials!!! (You're not really going to watch that Cialis ad, are you? "Just Cialis, I think she'll know...." Omigod, call the Streets and Sanitation people and get out the scooper before a child comes around!!)

Yours for cleaner streets and no commercials...

MORE BAD NEWS FOR WESTERN CIVILIZATION

2006-11-02T09:41:00.000-08:00

Borscht is an eastern European delicacy, a soup made of beets and various other things depending on where in eastern Europe it is being made. There are numerous commercially-sold varieties of borscht, available in most grocery stores. It's great served cold in summer, but pretty good in winter too. Borscht is a robust and nourishing dish, high in fiber, folate, vitamin C, and various polysyllabic substances that combat cancer and heart disease (for more info, see http://whfoods.org/genpage.php?tname=foodspice&dbid=49 )

Mr. Dissociated and I periodically go on binges of eating lots of borscht. But this month's binge has caused a surprising amount of trouble. All of a sudden, I have difficulty finding just plain borscht. Thank heaven nobody is manufacturing chocolate borscht, or cherry vanilla borscht. No, what they're doing is taking things out of the borscht. You can now get borscht without sugar. Without salt. Low-calorie. No sodium. "Clear" borscht (no pieces of beet.) If you look really hard, you can sometimes find "borscht with chopped beets."

The word mavens call that a "retronym." Like "acoustic guitar," or "manual shift," or "solar clothes-drying." What just plain borscht used to be before the tinkerers got at it and started taking things out. No wonder we all suffer from road rage and air rage and hospital rage and everything rage--you can't even get a decent bowl of borscht any more! Western civilization is doomed, doomed I tell you!

SAVING AMERICAN SCHOOLS

2006-10-18T08:19:00.000-07:00

In a free economy, people get the market they deserve. In a democracy, they get the government and the public institutions they deserve. In either case, that's not necessarily the market, or the government, or the institutions, they want.

In the USA, we get the schools we deserve. We've been worrying about that since at least Brown vs. Board of Education and the advent of Sputnik 50 years ago. And well before that, John Dewey and the progressive education movement made us question what we wanted from our schools.

What we have today appears to be the worst of both worlds. We have eliminated recess. We are making 3-year-olds attend school for 7 or more hours a day, and carry backpacks half the size of the children themselves. By the time they are in high school, most youngsters start school well before 8 AM, get home from after-school activities at 5, and do homework until late into the night.

But despite a workload that would make even American adults feel overworked, nearly half of all children of color do not graduate. The students, of all racial backgrounds, who do graduate, are as likely as not to have to take remedial writing and math in college. If there were remedial history classes, more than half our college students would need those too--we just don't think history is important enough to rate "remediation."

Simultaneously, we decry the inadequacies of our schools and demand that our children spend ever more time in them--like the irate restaurant patron complaining that the food is terrible and the servings are too small.

We want our children to have the standard of living we now enjoy, and we know that they can't do it with the same kind of education we had. In today's "information economy," they have to know a lot more than their parents ever did just to stay even with them. But we can't imagine how to operate schools that will teach those needed skills to all the young people who need them.

As Bill Gates and the experts he listens to are telling us repeatedly, the real problem happens in high school. We're actually doing a pretty good job with preschool, kindergarten, and elementary school, and a reasonably decent job in college. Until puberty rears its ugly head, our schools are at least in the running with those of Europe and Japan. And then, chaos takes over.

Some basic axioms:

1) what most people graduate from high school knowing shouldn't take 12 years to learn. In fact, a case can be made that many students actually lose ground in high school, and come out knowing less than they did in the 8th grade. In my own experience as a college English composition teacher, in both remedial and non-remedial courses, I have found myself teaching 5th-grade grammar and spelling over and over again. In many of the schools where I taught, my superiors told me not to bother--just give up on grammar and go on to the finer points of writing. This is like giving up on teaching a baby to walk, and going on to the finer points of the marathon. Nonetheless, our adult workplaces are now full of people whose education has followed this direction, with the predictable dreadful results.

2) Many people see high school as the place where children learn to become social adults. That's often true, but it's also even scarier than teaching composition to people who don't know grammar. The adults who became who they are in high school are usually those who never went on to college and will never go on to a career that can support a family. The "social skills" they learn in high school mostly involve either bullying or submission to bullying, casual sex, substance abuse, eating disorders, cheating, and assiduous avoidance of work.

3) The skills children will actually need in the adult world, they will almost never acquire in high school. The luckier and more affluent kids will learn from their parents, or some other adult role model in the family or at school, how to envision and plan for a future, defer gratification, pick up useful information wherever it is to be found, manage money, and stay out of trouble. The rest of the generation will learn either by accident along the way, or not at all.

How could we improve this system? Why not use the mostly-wasted four years of high school to teach the things kids so desperately need:

money management and financial planning
some marketable entry-level skills
ethics, including sexual ethics

and set up a context in which these things can actually be learned, by

separating the sexes
providing apprenticeships
abolishing intermural team sports.

Graduates of such a system will be able to support themselves while going to college to prepare themselves for careers. The colleges will be teaching pretty much what they teach now, but probably will need considerably fewer remedial courses. (Right now, the first two years in most US colleges are at best a rerun of the last two years of US high school. The difference between good colleges and mediocre colleges is that the former repeat the last two years of good high schools and the latter repeat the last two years of mediocre high schools. The only way to achieve a net gain for the high school graduate would be to send graduates of mediocre high schools into good colleges and graduates of good high schools into the third year of good colleges. Given the socioeconomic class system in this country, the former is not going to happen, though the latter happens increasingly often through Advanced Placement courses.)

Yet another suggestion that might improve the college experience and the life that follows it would be to limit college admissions to people over 21 (and certified child prodigies.) Thus, college administrators would no longer have to function in loco parentis, the issues related to underage drinking would vanish, and the students and administrators could quit fighting each other and get on with real education.

That, of course, leaves a 3- or 4-year gap between high school and college. In Israel, that's when kids join the army. I'm not suggesting a draft, but some sort of program of civic apprenticeship, whether military or civilian, might work. The various proposals for compulsory national service that get floated in Congress periodically are basically a poorly-concealed scheme for union-busting in the public sector. But there are plenty of entry-level jobs in the public sector already which could be filled by high school graduates who need to try their wings.

Yet another possibility for the use of this gap might be early marriage and childbearing. If women could bear their children, and get them out of diapers and into preschool, before college, they would be able to begin their careers after graduation at the same starting point as their male agemates, and not have to take any time out of the workforce after that. This could conceivably eliminate or at least reduce the earnings gap between the sexes. It would also reduce the biological problems now resulting from delayed childbearing, such as infertility.

But probably the greatest benefit would be that high school graduates would enter college with a serious desire to learn what colleges are prepared to teach them. Having already had a taste of the working world for people without degrees, they would be prepared to buckle down to gain real-world skills and credentials.

Right now our school system is up for grabs. If we are ever going to uproot and replant, this is the time. Good luck to all of us.

FOLEY'S FOLLY and other oddities

2006-10-01T13:55:00.000-07:00

A congressional representative who has led the fight to stop internet child predators turns out to be one. This is a whole lot more interesting than Barney Frank's upfront gay love life, much less Bill Clinton's utterly heterosexual pecadilloes. No doubt the Texas Republican Committee will have to promise whoever takes Foley's place in the election all kinds of support for something much more appetizing in the following election. This places the group of politicians formerly known as God's Own Party just behind the Catholic Church in the eyes of the protective parents of America. Soccer moms, NASCAR dads, waitress moms, security moms, and other brands we haven't even imagined yet will be lining up to vote for the dullest candidates they can find in either party (or maybe even try out a third party just for its lack of history.)

Meanwhile, Bill Clinton, having apparently tried and failed to kill Osama Bin Laden, is going after Fox News instead. As regular readers know, I actually prefer leaders who conduct foreign policy by single combat, or at least assassination, rather than the more indiscriminate methods of modern warfare. Maybe he can start a fad?

And finally, I have discovered something worthwhile about golf. My father played it avidly, one of my aunts actually almost went pro (she was left-handed, which apparently is a major advantage for a woman golfer), and my law partner takes off for it every Wednesday afternoon for as long as the weather is decent (which may turn him into a fan of global warming.) But I have just never found it that interesting. Until I realized that golf is almost the only trendy thing that slow people can do and enjoy. We live in a culture that privileges people in a hurry, people who have to multitask to avoid death by boredom, One Minute Managers (and probably One Minute Lovers), and people who cannot take more than an hour and a half for a movie or a religious service. We live in a culture that prizes Attention Deficit Disorder and Hyperactivity. But get them out on a field of grass with 18 strategically placed holes and miscellaneous sand boxes and ponds, and suddenly they have nothing but time. My law partner (for whom the word "hyperactive" was probably coined in the first place) says it's like meditation. I can't imagine anything except golf that would make him care about meditation, though he certainly needs it.

Admittedly, I have always related oddly to organized sports. The Clinton impeachment ruckus turned me into a baseball fan, because the home run duel between Mark Agwire and Sammy Sosa was the only halfway-nice thing happening in the news that summer. So anyway, golf is the last refuge of the Slowskys. Long live golf!

THE LONG WAR?

2006-09-11T20:31:00.000-07:00

General Anthony Zinni is now talking and writing about the "war on terrorism" as "the long war." Other people are talking about it as World War III. We need to do some re-numbering here. Several historians consider World Wars I and II to be mere installments of a single war (with a 20-year intermission, from 1919 to 1939.) And, on the other hand, we've already had World War III--otherwise known as the Cold War. It lasted fifty years (from 1945 to 1995.) Does Zinni think the current war will last longer than that?

What disturbs me about both World War III and the current World War IV is that, unlike I and II, they were arbitrarily declared by American leaders. The Cold War was kept going for fifty years largely, one suspects, because it gave our leaders an excuse to do pretty much anything they wanted. Anybody who pays serious attention to history knows that the best way for any ruler to seize dictatorial powers is to start a war. The word "dictator" comes from a Roman title for a general given absolute power in order to pursue a defensive war. So are we looking at another Fifty Years' War, used as a pretext for even more blatant seizure of power?

A LABOR DAY PROPOSAL

2006-09-03T18:10:00.000-07:00

Well, here it is. The one day in the year on which we actually commemorate and celebrate working people, instead of ignoring and crapping on them. And how do we celebrate them? The same way we celebrate all our holidays now--we have sales. And how do we manage that? We have sales "associates" working all day, that's how. And most of them, like most sales "associates" anywhere anytime, are part-timers, so they don't get overtime, they just get their usual pittance per hour.

It's time for some brave politician to change that. Let's make Labor Day a real holiday for real laborers. We can't shut down the malls and the sales, of course. That would be unAmerican. But we can legally require anybody who works on Labor Day to be paid four times his or her usual hourly wage. Probably the result would be lots of middle managers hogging the overtime for themselves. But at least the ordinary salesclerks would be able to stay home and picnic with the family.

STRANGE THINGS ARE HAPPENING...

2006-08-30T16:51:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago, I decided to try driving more or less at the official speed limit, in an effort to save gas. In the first place, it seems to have worked--I got 40 miles more out of my last tank of gas than I had been accustomed to. But in the second place, other people seem to have slowed down too. Last time I paid serious attention to traffic speeds (back last Fall, I think), Chicago-area traffic generally moved at about 15 mph faster than the official speed on any given road, and even people doing 5 mph faster were likely to get dirty looks and tailgating. (A few years ago, my husband, when trying to keep to the official limit, actually got forced off the road by a truck.) Now most people seem to be doing 5 mph over the limit, and I have gotten no unpleasant reactions from my fellow drivers. Are people taking gas prices seriously?

ODD LOTS #13

2006-08-27T14:59:00.000-07:00

(Jon, are you still out there?)

Rachel Barton Pines (violinist)
Heather Mills McCartney (soon-to-be ex-Beatle-by-marriage)
Sarah Bernhardt (actress)

JonBenet Ramsey and the Coming of Martial Law

2006-08-17T08:34:00.000-07:00

The FBI has tracked down the man who killed JonBenet Ramsey. Nightline spent its entire program last night on the case. If Ted Koppel were dead, he'd be spinning in his grave. I would be less nervous if the killer had been caught by the local Colorado cops. But the FBI is under federal executive branch control. What they find, and more important, when they find it, can also be controlled by the executive branch. "How convenient," as my mother would say.

A US Army officer has been charged with murder in Iraq. I can't even find that story online.

The ceasefire across the Israeli-Lebanese border seems to be holding, but nobody has yet taken responsibility for restraining Hezbollah. They aren't a country, they aren't under the official control of any country, so the UN and all of the other national and international authorities are just sitting back and hoping they will be good boys.

But none of this is as important as the FBI conveniently turning up the killer of JonBenet Ramsey? Gimme a break! I know that Edgar Allen Poe says nothing moves the emotions so deeply as the death of a beautiful young girl, and JonBenet was only a few years younger than the lost love of Poe's own life. At the time of her death, I found the pictures of her beauty-queen career far more repellent than the picture of her dead body, and was far more saddened by the premature sexualization of her life than the violence of her death. I believe that, intentionally or not, her parents and the child-beauty-queen industry made her a target, and that the pervasive sexualization of childhood is making targets out of most young girls today, exposing them to similar violence.

But I still think that when the FBI chose to announce that the killer had been caught is just awfully convenient for an administration that really wants the American people to be watching something other than the violence in the Middle East and the corruption in Washington.

And the fact that the administration was able to pull it off is even scarier. They have been doggedly working at limiting what the people are allowd to see and hear--retroactively classifying thousands of documents, chasing down leakers of information that needed to be leaked, telling the American people that it is none of our business what our government does on our money, in our name, and presumably for our benefit. But the Ramsey ploy takes disinformation to a new level. The administration is not only trying to empty the news of important content, but deliberately replacing it with a purely local, back-page story, replacing Nightline with Entertainment Tonight.

If they are allowed to get away with it, I don't know what the next step will be, but it's entirely possible that the step after that could be a declaration of martial law and cancellation of the 2008 elections. After all, we are at war, aren't we? And this particular war is likely to go on for at least the next ten or twenty years, right? And we can't change horses in midstream, right? Watch this space. You heard it here first.

NEW WRINKLES IN AIRLINE SECURITY

2006-08-10T12:43:00.000-07:00

Air travel is returning to its roots. "Back in the day," the word "travel" was closely linked to "travail," which at the time meant "torture." Because of the latest plot to blow up planes, airlines are now forbidding passengers to board with any liquids except medicines and baby formula. The list of stuff British passengers can't carry on board also includes purses and handbags, and food purchased in the airport. Given the current quantity and quality of airline food, this is serious deprivation.

Don't get me wrong, I believe in making flight as safe as possible. I just don't think the airlines have gone far enough. First of all, airports and airplanes are all climate-controlled these days. So why not require passengers and airline and airport employees to disrobe immediately on entering the airport? Never mind strip searching--just plain strip. Actually, I think that may just be a pilot program (you should pardon the expression) for a more general movement toward nudity for purposes of crime control. Think about it--right away you've gotten rid of indecent exposure and peeping-tom offenses, not to mention concealed weapons and a lot of other possessory crimes. For airline passengers, the plane would have to provide blankets, of course.

The British restrictions also include electronics such as radios, CD players, Ipods, telephones, and computers, and make it really hard to carry books and magazines. So once you board, you not only have nothing to eat or drink, you have nothing to do. But that's okay, because the next move on the part of the airlines should be to sedate all passengers and just stack them like cordwood. No more worrying about reclining seats or putting tray tables in an upright position, or that awful center seat, or getting up to use the washroom--you board, you get your shot, you nod off, and the next thing you know, you're landing. This is the natural limit to the trend toward making air travel more and more uncomfortable. The unconscious feel no discomfort and make no demands. They also don't hijack or blow up planes. You heard it here first.

TIME FOR THE TOO LATE SHOW

2006-07-16T10:29:00.000-07:00

Hezbollah is bombing Haifa. Israel is bombing the coast of Lebanon. The US is asking Israel to “exercise restraint.” So far as I can tell, nobody is trying to restrain Hezbollah. In spite of the fact that Hezbollah is violating a UN-established national boundary, the UN is doing nothing. President Bush has squandered both the credibility he would need to serve as an honest broker and the military resources he would need to intimidate Hezbollah, by his feckless behavior in Guantanamo, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

Thomas Friedman says Hezbollah has hijacked the government of Lebanon. So why isn’t somebody offering the Lebanese help in controlling them? That would actually be a nice approach for the Israelis to take, but understandably they’re too mad to bother. Syria has on occasion kept the lid on in Lebanon, but at the moment they seem to prefer letting the situation play itself out. From their point of view, it’s almost too good to be true.

In the meantime, Iran is trying to establish itself as a nuclear power, ostensibly for peaceful purposes. (Why one of the world’s great oil nations needs nuclear electricity has not yet been satisfactorily explained.) North Korea is pleading for attention like a typical juvenile delinquent, and, like most such bad boys, is unable to get it except by the ultimate in bad behavior. Then there’s the recent bombings in India. And in those regions too, the United States has been crippled both as an honest broker and as a military big-stick-wielder by the desert quagmire in Iraq.

In short, we may actually be on the verge of a World War (by my calculations, it would be Number Four. The Cold War was Number Three, though of course nobody would admit it at the time.) Those of us who have opposed Bush’s foreign and military policy from the beginning have a whole new batch of reasons for our opposition. But, at the same time, we find ourselves (or at least I do) hoping he gets away with it this time, because the alternative is too horrible to contemplate outside the realm of dystopian sci-fi. Like Jefferson, sometimes I tremble when I reflect that G-d is just.

WHO DEFENDS THE DEFENDERS?

2006-06-09T11:16:00.000-07:00

As most of you know, I'm a lawyer. I work in specialties that attract clients with serious personal problems, not all of them connected with their current legal problems. I handle family law, landlord-tenant problems, and employment issues. Occasionally I deal with minor-league criminal cases, usually as a favor to friends.

So, like most lawyers in those specialties, I get my fair share of "crazies." You know, people who use the legal system instead of psychotherapy or social work. They may not necessarily be clinically diagnosable (though some of them unquestionably are), but they're definitely on the down side of normal. Flaky, as my husband sometimes puts it, "like rush hour at the baklava factory." (For the culturally deprived, baklava is a very sweet Greek pastry made out of filo, or very thin very flaky covering, around a filling of nuts and honey.)

This is not necessarily a laughing matter. The first year I was in practice, my life was threatened twice. That was the same year that a lawyer on the West Coast got shot and killed by his client's soon-to-be-ex husband. It was also the same year that a lawyer here in Cook County was shot and killed by his own client, a wife about to lost custody of her children. Before the police caught up with her, she had murdered her children as well. A year or so later, also here in Cook County, a judge and another divorce lawyer were shot and killed by a husband tired of being hauled into court to make mandatory payments for life insurance. Some years later, I did some research for an article on the subject, and discovered that threatened and actual violence against lawyers was frighteningly common. Still is. It tends to cluster in the area of family law. In the course of researching my article, I interviewed several colleagues, who mostly said it goes with the territory. One said, "If your life doesn't get threatened every so often, you're probably not doing your job."

Last year, as some of you may have heard, an unrepresented litigant in the federal court for the Northern District of Illinois killed the mother and the husband of a federal judge who was presiding over his case. It wasn't a divorce case, of course--the feds don't do divorce. Instead of his children, the litigant had lost his home and his savings.

All of this came back to mind this week because the other day, as I was leaving the courthouse and walking across the plaza, a colleague stopped me to ask, "What do you do about difficult clients?" Turns out he has been asked to represent a man whose real estate case seems to be meritorious and winnable (again, it has to do with loss of his house), but who is bad-tempered to the point of being abusive to my colleague's staff. Some of the staff are scared of him.

I gave him all the usual advice (what does it say about the profession that this is usual advice?) about having a few physically fit and imposing-looking staff people around when scary clients come to the office (I used to have an officemate who had worked in the violent ward of a mental hospital before going to law school, for instance,) but that wasn't what he was looking for. I pointed out, rather unnecessarily, that if this guy wasn't his client yet, he certainly had no obligation to take him on. Also that a lawyer's first duty is to his staff's personal safety. Nobody goes to work in a law office to get her head blown off.

My colleague, of course, already knew all that--he's been in practice at least as long as I have. What he wanted to know was, assuming that most lawyers are smart enough to avoid taking on scary clients, where are those scary litigants going to go for representation, and what's going to happen to them in the court system?

Which in fact leads directly back to the dreadful fate of Judge Lefkow's husband and mother last year--the man who killed them had been dumped by at least one set of lawyers, and had no representation when he snapped.

There are no legal aid organizations set up specifically to deal with crazy clients, although there are a number of good organizations that work with people with various kinds of physical and mental disabilities in handling problems that arise from those disabilities.

Crazy people have the same right to representation, under the Sixth Amendment, as anybody else. On the other hand, if I were in the business of defrauding consumers, it might make sense to choose "crazies" as my victims, since they would probably have a really hard time defending their rights. And I think there are some con artists out there doing precisely that, or at least choosing victims who are more likely than not to have mental health problems.

Even crazies have some control over their choice of victims. What does it say about the legal profession that our faces appear so often on their dartboards?

Part of it, undoubtedly, is that our profession brings us into contact with people during some of the worst times in their lives. We may become linked in their minds with those bad times. And we can rarely make everything all right again, even if we succeed in winning the case. Even the process of winning takes time (lots of it, in Cook County, which is the largest court district in the country), and money, and a lot of unpleasantness. Given the law of averages, we lose roughly as often as we win.

But I think a large part of it is that these days, lawyers are everybody's favorite bad guys. Well, not just these days. Even back in Shakespeare's time, lawyers were not well-loved by the public. "The law's delay" was one of Hamlet's reasons for considering suicide. Jack Cade's revolutionary manifesto started out "Let's kill all the lawyers."

Criminal defense lawyers are widely considered to be sharks, pond scum, at least as loathsome as their clients. The most popular cop and lawyer shows have succeeded in convincing most viewers that innocent people don't need defense attorneys, and guilty people don't deserve them. (This has been known to cause serious problems for innocent people accused of crimes.)

So when someone on the thin edge of sanity decides to take out his aggressions, he probably has an easy time choosing a lawyer as a target. It's not like killing a schoolteacher, or a preacher, or a doctor, after all. He may even feel he's doing society a favor.

I take exception to this attitude not only because I am a lawyer, but also because, however flawed the legal system and its operatives may be, in industrialized societies, we are the only alternative to resolving conflicts by intimidation, bribery, and violence. So far as I know, there is no recorded case in history of a lawyer murdering a client. Which, given the frequent and extreme provocations, is a remarkable testimony to legal ethics. It doesn't solve the problem posed by my colleague, of course. But what does it say about the profession that my colleague considers the plight of unrepresented crazies a problem?

GIVE ME YOUR TIRED, YOUR POOR...

2006-05-14T11:26:00.000-07:00

It's hard to make sense of the "immigration crisis," or even to determine what makes it a crisis now, as opposed to five years ago or two years hence. Let's get that argument out of the way first--immigration is being turned into a crisis now to distract us from various shady dealings by the administration, most recently the indictment of Karl Rover for perjury and obstruction. Yes, there is a bill pending in Congress that proposes to turn illegal aliens into felons, based (so far as I can tell) entirely on the fact that their presence in the US is "illegal." My presence on my neighbor's front lawn would be illegal too, but the law has decided to call it "trespass" and make it a misdemeanour at worst. Eating my lunch on the CTA bus is illegal, but it's a mere regulatory offense, not a felony. If all illegal acts were felonies, our criminal justice system would be in an even bigger mess than it is. Deciding to call a particular illegal act a felony requires more than mere illegality. It requires a serious policy decision that this particular illegal act threatens grave harm to society.

So okay, is the presence in this country of several hundred thousand illegal aliens a threat of grave harm to society? Depends. Do they drive down wages and working conditions for workers who are legally in the US? Or do they take jobs that those workers wouldn't take? That's the way the issue is usually phrased. And that's part of the problem. Because there is no imaginable job that somebody wouldn't take if the pay were high enough and the working conditions pleasant enough. It's true that many African-Americans will not do domestic labor as it is currently constituted. Turn it into a contract housecleaning service at twenty dollars an hour, and people of all races and nationalities will beat down the door to apply. Working on a garbage truck is an unpleasant prospect at best. But doing it with the protections of both civil service and a strong union, at upwards of twenty dollars an hour, attracts far more applicants than the city of Chicago can possibly hire. At the moment, there is a waiting list for such jobs.

Similarly, the anti-immigrant lobby bewails the dreadful working conditions of illegal immigrants who work in the "hospitality" industry, sleeping ten to a room in restaurant basements, working 14-hour days and 7-day weeks. We are expected to believe that employers treat them this way only because they are illegal and therefore do not dare quit or complain. But there are plenty of workers legally in the US who put up with the same kinds of conditions, and do not dare quit or complain for fear of being fired or blacklisted, or becoming homeless. The fact is that we could protect all these workers, regardless of their immigration status, if we really wanted to. Instead, we choose to blame the victims.

There may once have been a time when workers legally in the US actually had legal protections for their wages and working conditions, and illegal workers did not. Most people currently under retirement age have trouble remembering such a time.

The nicest people in the anti-immigrant chorus merely say, "My grandparents immigrated legally, so why can't these people?" My husband's grandparents, for instance, came to the US from eastern Europe in the early part of the 20th century, when all you needed was the money for fare and the ability to give the right answers to a bunch of intrusive and racist questions when you got here. Now, legal immigration usually involves applying from one's own country and then waiting for years until one's number comes up. It often involves separation from one's immediate family. It can involve expensive return trips to the Old Country for more bureaucratic hassles. And above all, it involves interaction with a system that is (deliberately, one suspects) overburdened, understaffed, and underfunded so that everything takes three times as long and costs three times as much as it is supposed to. If the system for legal immigration were in good working order, I wouldn't object to requiring people to use it, and probably most of the immigrants involved wouldn't either.

Should we be solving the problems of Mexico's economy? That's a whole nother batch of questions, beginning with whether we bear any responsibility for any of those problems in the first place, given our age-old fondness for corrupt and cooperative governments in Latin America. But suffice it to say, immigration is a fake crisis, and most of the problems illegal immigration is connected to in the popular media could be solved without touching immigration itself.

WHERE THERE'S SMOKE, THERE'S MIRRORS

2006-05-04T08:43:00.000-07:00

Another thing that has taken up a lot of the last month is the huge public uproar about immigration. This raises two sets of questions:

1. What do we do about the millions of undocumented workers in the country, one of whom cleans my office and occasionally my house? and

2. Why is it such a hot issue now? What has happened in the last couple of months to bring it into the public eye?

Let's start with the easy question first. Immigration is a hot issue now for the same reason that gay marriage was a hot issue a couple of years ago and Terry Schiavo was a hot issue a couple of years before that--because the Right needs something to distract voters from real issues, like the increasing unfairness of the tax system, the decline in real wages for almost all working Americans, and the dismal consequences of the war in Iraq (which itself started out as a distraction from the other real issues.) It's a fake issue, in that nobody is seriously proposing to do anything about it that gets in the way of Business As Usual, but a lot of people can be aroused to blind fury by discussing it.

And blind fury is exactly what the Right wants us to experience. The Left, unfortunately, has allowed itself to be baited into blind fury about immigration, just as it did about gay marriage. I'm all for gay marriage (though, as a lawyer doing a lot of family law, including various procedures to make unofficial gay and lesbian families look like official straight marriage, I should oppose it, since it would probably reduce my client load.) I'll go into my position(s) on immigration further on, but, although I always enjoy a good demonstration, I think the immigration marches may have generated the same kind of backlash as the media blitz over gay marriage, and the Right probably counted on that in both instances.

All of this stuff is part of the Culture Wars. The essence of the Culture Wars in this country is that:
1. My dream is someone else's nightmare,
2. And vice versa.
3. All the fulminating and marching in the world will not change the culture overnight. Culture changes at its own pace, the slow, hidden pace of individual decisions and individual awareness of other people's individual decisions.
4. Culture consists of two crucial components: what people do, and what they believe people ought to do,
5. Which are rarely the same.

So the fulminating and marching can't change the culture, and aren't intended to--at most, they express what different groups of people believe people ought to do. But while we're fulminating and marching, the Right can carry on its grim agenda of impoverishing American workers and then punishing them for being poor, without anybody on either side noticing, including those most seriously affected.

So next time you see a hot issue surface out of nowhere, ask yourself: why today? why this issue? and, most important of all, what's the other hand doing? And try not to get distracted.

MONTH IN REVIEW

2006-05-04T08:20:00.000-07:00

It has been a productive and exhausting month. I spent most of it doing a divorce/child custody trial in a "local" suburb (how local can it be if it takes two hours to get there?) and part of it preparing for and enjoying my friend's wedding, an interesting study in contrasts.

Obviously client confidentiality prevents my giving too many details about the trial. It involves some rather nasty issues of child abuse and religious bigotry, and once again confirms my belief that most couples who get divorced break up for reasons very similar to those that brought them together in the first place. In this case, my client was initially attracted to her husband because he was so good with kids. Now they're fighting over custody of the kid.

I don't believe in divorce, except where one of the 4 A's is involved (Abandonment, Abuse, Addiction, and Adultery), but I seem condemned to make a living from it anyway. Most of the cases that don't involve the 4 A's could have been prevented if the parties had learned manners in kindergarten. Which leads me to wonder: if everything we need to know, we learned or should have learned in kindergarten, what do we do with people who got "social promotions" from kindergarten without learning that stuff? Every time I come to a 4-way stop, I seem to be catty-corner from somebody who flunked the part about taking turns, for instance. Since testing is now in and social promotion is out in elementary and secondary school, why not take the same tough stand in kindergarten? It would certainly improve the quality of our politicians.

On the other hand, my friend's wedding was surprisingly encouraging. He's my age, she's a bit older, and it's the second time for both of them. He has spent years building up a reputation as a partyer, but in the section of the service he wrote and spoke, he talked about lifetime commitment with a seriousness that amazed me. Given that she is somewhat older than he and wears a pacemaker, one has to think of lifetime commitment more seriously than kids getting married ever do. Anyway, they were both beaming. I've seen them both almost every day for two years, and I've never seen them happier.

A CASE AGAINST ASSISTED REPRODUCTION

2006-03-21T14:17:00.000-08:00

The two largest growth areas in American medicine are assisted reproduction and cosmetic medicine (it's not just surgery any more.) Why? Mainly because, unlike most other areas of medicine, these are things that people want, rather than things they need. Purveying goods and services that people need is not good business, because many of the people who need them can't afford to pay and will nonetheless purchase them and then default on the payments. But dealing in things people want is usually very good business, because only the people who can afford the things they want will buy them. (Which is why advertisers are cutting their own throat by trying to convince consumers that they need the things their parents merely wanted. But I digress.)

I'm not going to talk about cosmetic medicine here. But I do want to talk about assisted reproduction. And it's a difficult thing to talk about, because many really nice people I know personally have used it to produce some really great kids. Nonetheless, I think it is essentially a bad idea. Not for the reasons most right-to-lifers oppose it--that the process creates and discards more fetuses than it allows to develop into babies--because my religious tradition teaches that a fetus isn't a person until it's born.

But, in the first place, the human race is doing a perfectly fine job of reproducing itself the old-fashioned way. We not only have enough people, we have too many people, in terms of environmental impact. And the people who are using assisted reproduction, generally speaking, are those with the most serious impact on the environment--affluent people from industrial countries.

In the second place, many of the people already crowding this world are children in need of parents. If the people best able to help care for these children are forming their families from petri dishes instead of orphanages, isn't that an injustice to the orphans?

And in the third place, I believe the impetus behind the popularity of assisted reproduction is a distorted idea of family, a kind of idolatry of one's own DNA. Sure, my genes are probably pretty interesting, and my ancestors were cool people, mostly. But are my genes me? Are they the substance of my humanity, the most important thing I can pass on to the next generation? Not hardly. What I can pass on to the next generation is my deepest beliefs and my most decent impulses. None of that came with my DNA. It came from the way my parents raised me, the examples they set for me, and the innumerable other good people whose paths have crossed mine during my lifetime. The people I know whose families have been formed by assisted reproduction are raising some pretty neat kids. So are the people I know who have adopted children. That's because, in both instances, they are pretty neat parents.

The process of adoption is probably more difficult than it needs to be, and not always very well thought out. That is not an argument for avoiding it. It is an argument for cleaning it up, and making it accessible to people who couldn't possibly afford assisted reproduction and who can't afford adoption either at its current price. What makes us smug First-Worlders think our DNA is better than the DNA of the world's orphans, here and elsewhere? Matching up parents in search of children and children in need of parents is a holy task. What makes us think we are superior to it?

WESTERN CIVILIZATION STILL SAFE

2006-03-19T14:18:00.000-08:00

Forget what I said in previous post. We are once again getting one or two credit applications (mostly "pre-approved") every postal business day. Think about that--roughly 450 of these things a year. No doubt there are people out there getting lots more. What would happen, I wonder, if everybody stamped them "Refused--return to sender" and sent them back? Could we bankrupt anybody that way?

Other personal musings--my new Palm Pilot is finally up and running with most of the stuff I need on it. I would have kept the old one, but its software wouldn't run on our new computer, so I had no choice but to get rid of it. Controlled obsolescence strikes again. Also we are throwing out huge quantities of VHS tapes to make room for our DVDs. All of this is part of a grand project to get the house cleaned up before Passover. Wish me luck.

LATEST UPDATES

2006-03-12T10:26:00.000-08:00

Yesterday was a momentous occasion. It was the first business day in roughly six months when our daily mail did not include at least one invitation to apply for a credit card (usually two, sometimes three, most of them "pre-approved.") Getting all those applications gave me the creeps, but suddenly not getting them makes me a little nervous too. Does it mean the business mavens are finally catching on that even serious debt addicts are about to go cold turkey? Does it mean the corporate bigwigs are finally noticing that they are the only people whose income isn't going down?

I mean, our local Sunday paper has, for at least the last couple of years, included a real estate section the size of the city phone book, and a jobs section the approximate thickness of a wedding invitation. Am I the only one wondering who buys all that real estate?

Is The Almighty Economy, like Wile E. Coyote, finally looking down to notice that it has run off the edge of the cliff and is poised above empty air?

BAD NEWS FROM SOUTH DAKOTA

2006-02-26T16:32:00.000-08:00

South Dakota is about to enact a law banning abortion except to preserve the life of the mother. I think I heard that there were 800 abortions performed in South Dakota last year. They’re trying to get the case up to the Supreme Court to see what Roberts and Alito will do with it. Obviously they’re hoping for a decision endorsing the right of the states to regulate abortion any way they like, i.e. reversing Roe v. Wade, but they’ll probably settle for a broader set of restrictions than the states are currently allowed to impose, which is probably what they’ll wind up with.

I’ve never had an abortion myself, but I know several women who have, one of them very close to me. It hasn’t ruined any of their lives, though it did destroy the relationship of one of them with a really good guy whom she might otherwise have married. The world is full of things that can do that, and might have done it in that instance. I also once represented a young woman whose parents threw her out of the house because she wouldn’t get an abortion.

I do believe the US Constitution should protect a woman’s right not to be pregnant. I would vastly prefer to work out ways to do it that don’t involve abortion. But most pro-lifers don’t object to involuntary pregnancy and wouldn’t be willing to cooperate with me and those who share my beliefs to reach a middle ground. Certainly not if cooperating involved endorsing solid sex education and safe, reliable, accessible, reversible contraception.

But I think both sides in this impending battle may have lost sight of the real people making real decisions in South Dakota. The abortion controversy is no longer about an individual woman terminating a pregnancy, for whatever reason, and hasn’t been for a long time. It’s about Which Side Are You On. I prefer the “pro-choice” side, because most of the people whose opinions I value are on it—but I don’t necessarily share all of those opinions, and neither, I suspect, do most pro-choice women of childbearing age in South Dakota. I’m no longer in that age bracket, which is just as well. Making a decision like that would be hard enough without all the shouting and side-taking. Face it, the most traditional “family value” these days is making life difficult for women.

THE GAPS IN MY RESUME'

2006-02-24T11:03:00.000-08:00

These days, everybody has a resume. Most people make a point of keeping it up to date and ready to send out at a drop of the job market. Google “resume'” and literally thousands of websites will pop up on how to write one, where to send it, and what to do next. I look at mine, and marvel at its utterly linear monotony. It does exactly what it is supposed to do. It keeps my name and address from being circular-filed for jobs I really qualify for. It’s supposed to be the trajectory of a career. At least at my age, it’s supposed to be an ever-accumulating catalog of accomplishments. And, yes, here they are, sort of.

But what isn’t there is both the really interesting stuff, and my own enthusiasm for the stuff that looks boring. Nothing at all about the roads not taken. Nothing at all about my having turned down a role in an Equity company play when I was just out of college, or an offer to be lead singer for a group called the Electric Underwear when I was in grad school.

And nothing about what I was doing while doing the Official Job stuff—making a respectable second income as a free-lance writer, taking care of a disabled family member, keeping a small religious congregation organized, helping my father and my aunt through their retirement and final illnesses and dealing with the loose ends of their estates, doing the same thing for my in-laws, playing guitar in one of the very first proto-neo-klezmer groups, integrating the “men’s bar” at a local flagship department stores, raising a foster daughter through her teen years and after, helping get my kid brother through the devastating first years after our mother died—you get the idea.

Not even much about the meaning of the Official Jobs themselves. One lists me as the director of the midwest office of a small nonprofit, providing information and research to lawyers and paraprofessionals in a rather esoteric field of law. Actually, what I was doing—what I and everybody who knew me believed I was doing—was helping to end the war in Vietnam. Another lists me as a staff member of a legal organization that provided similar information to attorneys in the area of family law. Well, yes, I did that. In the process I helped write the first version of the domestic violence law in our state.

For a while I was a federal law enforcement official—which really meant I was trying to keep crud out of the waters of the United States while the folks in Washington were trying to keep us from being too successful, by reorganizing our office and chain of command every four months or so. And while doing it, I was dealing with a life-threatening health crisis in my own family. No prospective boss is ever going to know about any of this.

Will anybody? These days, our local paper (the Chicago Tribune) has a wonderful policy of writing really interesting obituaries about ordinary people. I don’t know if other papers are doing it too, but it’s really neat to celebrate the amazing things ordinary people do with their lives. I guess that’s where all the stuff that doesn’t show up in our resumes will show up. But wouldn’t it be great to be able to show it to the people whose paths we cross while we’re still alive?

Alas, no, not necessarily. Showing one’s real self to a prospective boss is a sure way either to never get hired, or to hold the job only long enough for the boss to find somebody less visibly interesting. There are no dull lives. There are no dull people—being interesting is part of being made in the image of the Holy Blessed One. But there are organizations and even whole societies and cultures in which one is required to appear dull, and to be enthusiastic about very dull things. It’s the interesting things that get in the way of the Ordinary Course of Business. It’s the interesting things that make the utterly predictable dullness of imagined robots look better and better to the corporate world.

At the beginning of a journey, and at its end, we tend to look curiously at the map. On the road, we are usually too busy driving. So here I am, near the end of the journey, looking at my resume' and being absolutely certain that it is not all there is, and wishing wishing wishing that it were not all there is of my social/public/work self.

THUNDER ON THE LEFT

2006-02-05T17:15:00.000-08:00

I am not always ecstatic about what the leadership of the Democratic Party does and doesn't do these days. And I can remember back to the Good Old Days when there really wasn't a dime's worth of difference between them and the GOP, not because the Democrats were so conservative, but because the Republicans were so moderate. I can recall having voted for three Republicans in my life, back in that day, and I still don't regret any of those votes.

But these days, there is considerably more than a dime's worth of difference between the two parties. Maybe not as much as I'd like, but enough to make it absolutely clear who I'm voting for and contributing to. Those who don't find that difference wide enough to be inspiring should bloody well be working on some serious third party.

Those who just say (as I've seen all too many people say since the State of the Union message) that the Democrats don't deserve our support because they have no policy and no spine, are clearly doing the work of the GOP. If they are not getting paid by the GOP, they should send in their vouchers now, so that at least somebody will get something out of their irresponsibility.

In fact, the Democrats have lots of policy--try American Progress Action Fund progress@americanprogressaction.org or "Tom Matzzie, MoveOn.org Political Action" moveon-help@list.moveon.org or "Howard Dean" democraticparty@democrats.org or progress@americanprogressaction.org if you want to get into the dialogue. No, they don't "speak with one voice." And a good thing, too. This is too big a country, and its problems are too big, to be competently examined in a single voice. If you don't like the voices you hear, quit whining and contribute your own voice. Happy Superbowl.

BACK TO THE FUTURE

2006-01-31T10:10:00.000-08:00

We hear that W is proposing a new approach to health care. He wants to increase the use of Medical Savings Accounts. The citizen (or her employer, if she's lucky enough to have that kind of deal) puts money into the account tax-free, for ordinary day-to-day health expenses, and buys a large-deductible insurance policy to cover "catastrophic" medical expenses. The premium for that policy may or may not also be tax-deductible.

The advantages of such an arrangement are: (1) that it will be "portable" and available to people whose employers don't provide benefits, or who are self-employed or unemployed or have just lost a job, and (2) that it brings market forces to bear on the medical industry--that is, if the patient has to pay for a doctor visit or a lab test, s/he is likely to choose the least expensive one, and thereby encourage the medical industry to restrain its price gouging.

What nobody on either side of the discussion of this plan seems to notice is that it is almost exactly what we had in the 1950s and early 1960s. In those days, if you had health insurance on the job, it covered only inpatient hospital care--not doctor visits, inoculations, or prescriptions. But those, and all other medical expenses, were tax-deductible.

Why did we give up that system? Two major reasons: if preventive care comes out of the patient's pocket, s/he is not likely to get much of it, which makes the eventual consequences of not getting it very expensive. And if only care given in a hospital is covered by insurance, more and more procedures and tests will be done in the hospital. That's how market forces really work in the health market.

That doesn't mean the average medical consumer is a free-loader trying to get something for nothing. It does mean that, once s/he has paid a health insurance premium, s/he will do everything possible to make sure that s/he gets health care only in ways that are covered by that premium.

And remember, back then, health care was both cheaper and simpler. Doctors still made house calls. And charged ten dollars more for a house call than for an office visit. Both doctors and hospitals regularly wrote off the bills of uninsured or medically indigent patients. The medical industry really was restrained in its pricing by market forces, and always had been. Now, after 40 years of unrestrained price increases paid without question by private insurance and governmental agencies, the total cost of health care is far beyond the means of all but the richest citizens.

Arguably, we are getting more for our money (or the money of whoever is actually paying.) Chronic and degenerative diseases that our grandparents just lived with and eventually died with are now treatable, and those treatments give many of us almost ten more years of active and useful life. If we go back to the health insurance system of the 1950s, does that mean going back to the health care system of the same era? Are we really willing to do that? Let's give this some thought.

FAREWELL TO KIRIBATI

2006-01-30T12:23:00.000-08:00

Kiribati is a small nation in the middle of the Pacific, consisting of a bunch of atoll islands, none of which is more than 6.5 feet above sea level. At the current rate of global warming, the entire nation will be swamped within the next decade, if not sooner.

For the rest of us, global warming is a more mixed blessing. Mr. Dissociated has decided we need not worry about retiring in Florida or Arizona, because by the time we're ready to retire, Chicago will be growing its own palm trees. On the other hand, people living in Europe may find themselves buried in the snow if global warming shuts down the Gulf Stream current which now warms that continent.

But Bush's spokesman says, "We will adapt, as we always have." If he means homo sapiens, so far we have always adapted, but then, we have occupied this planet for only a flicker of the time spent here by, for instance, the dinosaurs. And, as we all know, they didn't do such a great job of adapting. The Bushman's pronouncement reminds me of the old joke about the rabbi notifying his congregation of an impending flood by telling them, "We all have thirty days to learn to breathe under water."

In the meantime, anyone who wants to see Kiribati should buy tickets immediately, and then get trip insurance in case the airport floods out before the flight arrives. Happy landings.

A MORAL DILEMMA

2006-01-30T11:44:00.000-08:00

I have recently started reading all the blurbs that go with my blogspot subscription. One of them offers me a chance to get advertisements posted on my blog and get paid for allowing them. It's an interesting thought. They promise ads that bear some relationship to the content of the blog. Not sure what that would entail here on DP. It might even be interesting to find out what the adsters thought my blog was related to. If anything.

But why on earth should I subject my loyal readers to commercials? I'm not quite that broke, and the blog itself doesn't cost me a cent. And, even more to the point, advertising on my blog violates my principled objection to what advertising is doing to our culture.

The stalwart conservatives who managed to get "The Book of Daniel" pulled from network television last week seem to have no trouble at all letting the free market advertise cures for genital herpes and erectile dysfunction during prime time. The pundits who loudly deplored Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction have no problems with advertisers using women's mostly-undressed bodies to sell cars, liquor, and vacations. Not only does advertising debase our appreciation of the human body, it debases our relationship to communications. We expect advertisers to lie, and that gets us in the habit of assuming that everybody lies, and everybody is entitled to lie. Which in turn gets us in the habit of ignoring everybody who tries to tell us anything, including the purveyors of some very useful information.

For instance, even though most people who get arrested have had the opportunity to hear the Miranda warnings at least 1800 times on assorted cop shows before they are old enough to be prosecuted as adults (do the math yourself!), most of them still don't know that "you have the right to remain silent, etc." means "shut up until your lawyer gets here," and instead they spill their guts. Apparently what they learn from the cop shows is not the fine points of the Fifth Amendment, but that only guilty people call lawyers.

So I guess for now you may continue reading this blog without being subjected to anybody's ads. You'll know the economy is bottoming out when I have to change my mind about this. Happy Muslim New Year (tomorrow, I think.)

STATE OF THE UNION

2006-01-30T11:25:00.000-08:00

It's that time again. All of our favorite TV shows will be interrupted, delayed, or omitted altogether so that we can watch W try to explain the various messes he has gotten us into this year. I suspect I will be running the vacuum cleaner.

The Radical Right seems to think they have disposed of the President's opposition by branding them "Bush-haters." Makes them sound like the same sort of totally irrational blokes who can't stand tunafish or the color pink or dogs. But most of the people I know who are less than enamored of Bush don't actually hate him, they just wish he'd open his mind and close his mouth. Many of us sincerely wish him a long and happy retirement, beginning as soon as possible.

Would I cross the street to avoid shaking his hand? I'm not sure. I seem to be as immune to his fabled "charm" as I was to Reagan's. I may simply have been born with a deficiency in my charisma receptors. I have spent a lot of time over the last 20-plus years feeling like a tone-deaf person at a concert, unable to figure out what all the applause was about. It's not that southerners turn me off. In fact, real southerners, like Clinton and Carter, kind of turn me on. But W is a fake southerner, and that may be part of what fails to enchant me. (After all, I grew up around real southerners.)

So anyway, I won't watch The Speech tonight, but I'll pick it up online later. Watch this space for comments.

HAPPY NEW YEAR -- AGAIN!

2006-01-23T09:46:00.000-08:00

Next Monday begins the lunar new year celebrated by the Chinese and many other Asian peoples. Mr. Dissociated and I have gotten into the habit of celebrating every New Year's day that comes along, because we need all the fresh starts we can get. Once again, we can make resolutions to change. Not just the usual trash about losing weight and exercising, but serious stuff, the stuff I would want to do if this was going to be my last year on earth (which last year nearly was.) For that purpose, giving up french fries just doesn't cut it.

On January 1, I resolved to give more money to panhandlers. So far I've been doing reasonably well, but could certainly do better. I know some of you out there may consider that either a neutral goal, or a downright bad one. Your mileage may vary. The religious tradition I come from tells us that everyone we meet, including street beggars, could be the prophet Elijah or some other celestial VIP in very effective disguise. The first time I ever saw a beggar was in South America in 1962. The first time I ever saw a beggar on an American street was sometime in the early '80s. I can't remember the last time I walked down the street in either the neighborhood where I live, or the one where I work, and didn't see at least one beggar. I toy with the paranoid fantasy that the panhandlers started out as out-of-work actors hired by the Radical Right to scare working people into accepting less pay and worse working conditions to avoid ending up on the street themselves. It certainly worked out that way. So for my Asian New Year's resolution, I think I'm going to come out of the closet about giving to panhandlers, and at least make their presence and needs something we can talk about.

Happy New Year!

QUESTIONS TO WHICH EVERYBODY SHOULD KNOW THE ANSWER

2006-01-20T13:13:00.000-08:00

There's another cute little book of weird questions nobody ever thinks to ask for some very good reasons--I don't remember the author's name, but the title is also one of those questions: "Why Do Men Have Nipples?" I leafed through a copy at my favorite local bookstore today. The answer given was the usual thing about how the human embryo is basically female through most of its early development, etc. etc. Which is true as far as it goes, but geeze, doesn't anybody read the Iliad any more? If the author had bothered to do his classical homework, he'd know exactly what use male nipples are--they're ideal targets for spear-throwing. Not sure how you'd put a Darwinian spin on this, but it's probably worth trying.

THE GOOGLE SUBPOENA--UNCONSTITUTIONAL OR JUST PLAIN LAZY?

2006-01-20T12:18:00.000-08:00

So the Department of Justice wants to subpoena a randomly chosen week full of Google's data, so they can figure out the chances that an ordinary person searching for anything other than porn will be led into a porn website by Google. This is part of a larger project involving other search engines who have already given DOJ what it wants. The point of the whole thing is to support the government's case for the necessity (and therefore the constitutionality) of a law restricting online pornography.

The proposed law, of course, is a crock. I applaud Google for refusing to give DOJ what it wants. I am not going to do any more of my searches on Yahoo until they grow a spine.

But what piques my curiosity at the moment is why DOJ feels it needs a subpoena (and a subpoena against a third party not involved in the proposed legislation at all) to do this research. If I were trying to get information like this for a client, I wouldn't subpoena a bunch of search engine proprietors, I'd just hire a bunch of ordinary people to run one search after another on the various search engines, and keep track of the results. If I had the resources of DOJ, I could hire a lot of ordinary people to do a whopping lot of searches and get a statistically significant result. So far as I can see, the only reason DOJ chose to use a subpoena is force of habit--if your primary research tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

And frankly, I don't want the government to get in the habit of using a subpoena every time some flunky in DOJ wants to get the phone number of an attractive person s/he met in a bar last night.

FALSE HOPE?

2006-01-10T11:23:00.000-08:00

Sorry to have been out of touch over most of the last two weeks--my computer has been in total disarray. Anyway, the Sago W. Va. mine disaster is still on my mind. If you can find it, take a look at Studs Terkel's comments on it in the Sunday Chicago Sun-Times, which are far beyond my poor power to add or detract. He says, essentially, that the only false hopes the miners have been dealing with are the hopes that the federal government would impose, and the mining companies would implement, effective safety regulations, and put the lives of miners ahead of profits.

On one hand, I myself have spent a grim night waiting for news of someone close to me who had disappeared and was feared dead. I can't imagine what it would have been like to hear, first, that he was found safe, and then, that the first news was a mistake and he hadn't made it. It is something no one should have to suffer.

But on the other hand, can't we stop obsessing about how bad news is communicated, and look at the reality behind it? Twelve miners died, for pete's sake. Long after the families have gotten over the emotional roller-coaster of one night's miscommunication, they will still be grieving for the loss of the dead. Yes, the mining company's communications could have been better. But even if they had "done everything right" that dreadful night, there would still be 12 bereaved families, because the mining company had done so much wrong in the past.

MORAL EQUIVALENCY?

2006-01-03T11:52:00.000-08:00

I'm just about to commit the ultimate journalistic sin--talk about a movie I haven't seen yet. So I apologize in advance, especially to the people who made Munich and those serious reviewers who have gone to the trouble of seeing it first. But the key term I keep seeing in other people's reviews of Spielberg's latest film is "moral equivalency." Spielberg either is or isn't (the reviewers have a hard time agreeing) saying that the Palestinian terrorists who murdered 12 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympic games in 1972 were no worse than the Israeli intelligence agents who assassinated the terrorists.

The dispute over "moral equivalency" had its beginnings not long after the actual occurrences of Munich in 1972. That was roughly when an increasing proportion of the American and European Left began to see the Palestinians as "freedom fighters" and the Israeli government and its various military and civilian agencies as fairly close to fascism. It was also, not altogether coincidentally, right around when the US finally made a mutual defense treaty with Israel (1974, to be exact.) It was right around when the Know-Very-Little wing of the American Left began simultaneously denouncing Israeli influence on US foreign policy and denouncing Israel as a puppet of US imperialism in the Mideast. (Never before or since have I more deeply regretted my inability to draw--imagine a cartoon of two puppets, Uncle Sam and Moshe Dayan, for instance, pulling each other's strings!)

I don't know whether Spielberg's film espouses moral equivalency or not. I rather suspect not, judging from the large number of people denouncing it from both ends of the political spectrum. He must be doing something right.

But I'm not sure I am totally opposed to "moral equivalency", either. No, I don't believe the Israeli Army in any significant way resembles the SS. But, if I were a Palestinian civilian, I might have more trouble telling the difference. From the point of view of the average civilian in any war zone, it's hard not to see the soldiers on both sides, and for that matter their spies and secret agents, as virtually identical. As Joseph Heller's Yossarian said in Catch-22, "the enemy" is anyone who's trying to get you killed. In that WWII classic, Yossarian decided that the enemy was not only the Axis powers and their armed forces, but the Allied brass, who kept requiring his squadron to fly more and more missions when they obstinately kept coming back alive from the last batch.

And then there's the matter of theological equivalency. If you start with the premise that all human beings are made in the divine image, then all homicides are at least equally problematic, if not equally sinful. All homicides should impose at least an equal spiritual and emotional cost in decision-making beforehand and in trauma afterward. I hope this is what Spielberg is saying.

NEW BEGINNINGS

2006-01-02T16:14:00.000-08:00

Once again, everyone around is resolving to smoke less, drink less, eat less, exercise more, and lose weight. Good grief, is this all we can worry about? Are we really doing everything else perfectly? Are we really as kind as we can be? Have we learned everything we need to know? Are we as grateful to those who care for us as they deserve? Are we doing everything we can for the communities we live in? Are our homes havens of peace and thoughtfulness? Honestly, if I thought I had mastered all these other virtues, I wouldn't care how much I weighed.

I want to start the new year with a vote of thanks to Faris Hasan, the 16-year-old from Florida, who took off to Iraq on his own savings in pursuit of a story for his journalism class and the truth about how the people of Iraq are living. Although his parents are Iraqi immigrants to the US, and he did get some help from a family friend in getting from Beirut to Baghdad, he doesn't speak Arabic, and basically operated entirely on his own. His parents, of course, are talking about grounding him until he qualifies for Social Security. It's hard to blame them. If my kid did that, I'd probably feel the same way. But bless his heart--he wanted to know what life is like for the people living in the country his parents left, the country our country is invading. And he used his own resources, at his own risk, to find out. I can't wait to read the journalism paper that comes out of this trip. Is there a special Pulitzer for teenagers?

California has too much water. Texas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico don't have enough. By comparison, the gray, damp Midwest is pretty lucky.

And, finally, there's the eavesdropping scandal. It doesn't have an official name yet. But President Bush has admitted to eavesdropping on private phone calls and emails involving US citizens on US soil. And now he wants a congressional investigation. To be specific, he wants a congressional investigation to find out who leaked this information to the NY Times. I'd kind of like to know too. Whoever it is deserves some kind of award. But somehow I doubt that's what the President has in mind for him, her, or them. The President seems to think the Leaker has made us less secure. I think he/she/they have made our freedoms more secure.

RECENT DEVELOPMENTS

2005-12-21T11:25:00.000-08:00

His not-so-serene Majesty -- sorry, that's President -- Bush, has admitted to ordering NSA eavesdropping on phone calls and emails in the US without court orders. He asserts that there just wasn't time to get an order beforehand, but has no explanation for why he couldn't get a retroactive order afterward, which the law allows.

Let's backtrack on that: the law in question is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA. It was passed 20-odd years ago, and created a special secret court called the FISA court, which has the authority to issue warrants for various kinds of eavesdropping without any input from or notice to the other side. It also has the authority to grant such warrants after the fact, within 48 hours after the eavesdropping or search occurred. Not surprisingly, the FISA court has granted warrants almost every time the government requested them. Most of Congress thinks this should be enough of a restraint on arbitrary use of presidential power. I find this hard to swallow. My gut says the FISA court is part of the problem, not part of the solution. It has refused warrants in less than .01% of cases where the government requested them. But this lapdog court apparently is still not tame enough for Bush.

And, finally, somebody in Congress has used the I-word. California's Barbara Boxer is publicly using the word "impeachment." It's bloody well about time.

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THE DECEMBER BATTLES

Do you say "Merry Christmas" or "Happy Holidays"? What kind of tree do you put in your living room -- a "holiday tree"?

Apparently the American Family Association has run out of genuine grievances, and is now trying to bully seasonal store clerks into greeting customers with "Merry Christmas" rather than "Happy Holidays." As if the clerks don't have enough problems trying to keep customers happy and afford their own holiday festivities on what the stores pay them! But Donald Wildmon is demanding that we put the Christ back in Wal-Mart. He not only accepts the commercialization of Christmas, he demands the Christianization of commerce. Not, of course, the stuff St. Paul says about how "the laborer is worthy of his hire," or "thou shalt not muzzle the ox that treads the grain," nor the nasty things Deuteronomy and Isaiah and Jeremiah have to say about people who oppress laborers. No, just "Merry Christmas and shop till you drop."

Okay, let's talk about "political correctness." Whatever that means. Apparently it means that the privileged majority is entitled to assert its privileges in public regardless of who else feels excluded or offended as a result. They whine about a "war on Christmas" whenever people who are not evangelical Christians have the audacity to claim that they too are entitled to have a good time around the winter solstice. Please, guys. This isn't war. It isn't politics. To the extent that "P.C." is an issue, it means Plain Courtesy. Can't the clergy move over and listen to Ms. Manners?

IN SEARCH OF A FEW MEN OF GOOD WILL

2005-12-14T09:07:00.000-08:00

George and Laura are in trouble with the fundies. They made the mistake of sending a million of their closest friends a card that uses the scriptural passage "The Lord is my strength and my salvation" (from the Psalms) and wishes the recipient "Happy Holidays." The fundies are outraged that the card uses "only" a quotation from the Old Testament, and doesn't even mention Jesus or Christmas. Laura graciously responded that "we have friends of all faiths," which, while undoubtedly true, probably only makes the fundies madder. Why is the First Couple palling around with infidels?

And, of course, the American Family Association is still demanding that good Christians boycott any retailer whose employees wish them "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas." The AFA appears to be totally ignorant of ecclesiastical and American history--our highly Christian founding fathers, the New England Puritans, not only didn't celebrate Christmas, they made its observance a crime. They considered it a pagan festivity.

Anthropologically and historically, they were right. The "Christmas tree" which the First Family is not allowed to call a "Holiday Tree"--it's pure Norse and Celtic paganism! Martin Luther hijacked it for his flock because it was a good symbol for a good party. It didn't make its way into Anglo-Saxon society until a couple of centuries after that.

The use of the December 25 date was hijacked from pagan sun-worshippers by the Roman emperor Constantine when he made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire. Any halfway-competent biblical scholar can tell you Jesus was not born on December 25, but sometime in the spring of the year (when shepherds kept their flocks--outdoors--by night, which they sure wouldn't have done in midwinter.) But Constantine decided the December 25 date would appeal to a lot of people who had been celebrating it anyway in honor of the Winter Solstice. Which is to say, once again, it was a good symbol for a good party.

Unlike our Puritan forbears, I have nothing against a good party. Especially during the darkest, coldest, gloomiest part of the year. A good winter solstice party is a significant contribution to the quality of life. The Holy Blessed One undoubtedly endorses that concept. What She almost certainly doesn't endorse is using a religious symbol as an excuse for a low-level ill-mannered religious war.

So, gentle reader, when somebody wishes you a "Happy Holiday," please don't growl "Holiday, bah humbug." Let "peace on earth" begin with you!

HEADLINES IT'S HARD TO RESIST

2005-12-14T09:06:00.000-08:00

"DeLay Demands Speedy Trial."

RAISIN CONSCIOUSNESS

2005-12-06T07:18:00.001-08:00

Physicists say that time

Is what keeps everything from happening at once.

But holidays

Are what keeps everything from feeling as if it’s happening at once.

Holidays are like the raisins in rice pudding.

Without them, it turns into a glutinous untextured mass.

The raisins add texture,

And sometimes, sweetness.

WINTER SOLSTICE SONG

2005-12-06T07:16:00.000-08:00

I wish you more

Of whatever lights your darkness;

Fire by night, a friend's embrace,

A lover's touch, the wisdom of the past,

Whatever bears you up through life's endeavor

And whispers to your heart that winter

Will not last forever.

I wish you more

Of whatever warms your winter,

Wine and tea and coffee,

Song and dance and sweet waiting silence,

Whatever ties to life time cannot sever

That call to your mind that darkness

Cannot last forever.

As winter closes,

Night devours your days,

Join me and those who light

The candles, logs, or trees that fire our faith

That life is more than bending to the weather,

And sing, proclaiming in the winter darkness

That darkness will not last forever.

Marian H. Neudel

2000

THE EDUCATION BUBBLE

2005-11-27T13:57:00.000-08:00

My latest issue of the AARP mag has a piece in it about people whose Social Security retirement checks are being threatened with attachment to pay off delinquent student loans. The federal courts are trying to figure out whether this is legal.

Got that? These are retired folks whose student loans have been pending for upwards of fifteen years. The article indicates that they are not lifelong deadbeats. They just never got a chance to make all that education pay off well enough to pay for itself.

They are, undoubtedly, the tip of the iceberg. I know a couple of people who are on the verge of retirement and still paying student loans. The situation is apparently not unique. I myself am a member of the last generation of lawyers to enter the profession with no student loans hanging over me. I graduated in 1977.

What’s a bubble? you may well ask. The cutest and most memorable one is probably the Tulip Craze in 17th-century Holland. For reasons best known to gardening enthusiasts, everybody suddenly went wild over tulips. Preferably tulips with unusual colors or fancy stripes and dots and streaks. Tulips, it seems, are unpredictable. You don’t know what a tulip is going to look like merely from knowing its ancestral stock. It’s a gamble. So people started buying into tulips as an investment, much as some people buy into art today. They were betting on what kind of tulips they could produce, but mostly they were betting on how much other people would be willing to pay for them. This went on for several years. And then, suddenly, the Craze faded. Nobody was interested in tulips any more. Which left a lot of people with a lot of tulips on their hands, for which they had paid (and often, borrowed) a lot of money, and could now recoup absolutely nothing.

Today, a number of economic mavens worry about a real estate bubble. People are bidding up the price of houses and condos. When you buy a home, you expect it to be worth three, or five, or ten, or even one hundred times what you paid for it, one of these days. So far that’s been a good bet. Our own humble condo is now worth at least five times what we paid for it 25 years ago. And, like most homeowners these days, we have refinanced it to the hilt. So, like the economics mavens, we occasionally worry that the bottom might drop out of the housing market, leaving us with a mortgage worth more than the property behind it.

Well, friends, that has already happened to James Lockhart and Dee Ella Lee, the parties to the court cases mentioned earlier, and to lots of other people too. The educations they bought, and borrowed money to pay for, are no longer worth the price. Possibly they never were.

Part of the problem is that, unlike a winning lottery ticket, the value of an education depends partly on the demographics of the purchaser. Education pays off less for women than for men, less for racial minorities than for whites, less when purchased by middle-aged workers than by twenty-somethings.

Yet another determinant of how well an education pays off is at least as speculative as the Tulip Craze—how much a student seeking a particular credential will be “worth” when it is finally obtained. The longer it takes to get the credential, the harder it is to guess what will happen in the meantime to the job market it gets you into. Engineering credentials are always zipping up and down like a roller coaster. People who go into engineering programs this year because engineers are “hot” right now may graduate just in time for their degrees to be a dime a dozen. Medical degrees are worth a lot less now than they were ten years ago. You get the picture.

In short, the value of some kinds of education is already less than what the graduates paid (and borrowed) for it, and this seems to be an accelerating trend.

Analysts of education trends among racial minorities and “lower socioeconomic groups” (poor people) decry the unwillingness of youth in those groups to take out student loans and get all the education they can mortgage. The result of that unwillingness, often, is a lifetime spent in dead-end jobs with no benefits. But the alternative may often be a lifetime in the same dead-end jobs with the vultures circling to pounce on the one dependable asset such people will ever have—a Social Security check. Scary, folks?

A NEW CONTRACT FOR AMERICA

2005-11-13T07:43:00.000-08:00

For the first time in literally years, we are hearing the words "moderate" and "Republican" in the same sentence, not merely once, but repeatedly. This has been going on for nearly a month now, and shows no sign of stopping. Republicans who had been pounding their chests and proclaiming their conservatism on every possible public occasion are now, suddenly, backing off from supporting Bush's proposed budget, not merely for rhetorical purposes, but to the point where he cannot get it passed.

A few postings back, I mused about the possibility of a New Bull Moose Party, led by John McCain. Now it's starting to look as if the moderates could actually take back the Republican Party, leaving the Hard Right to form their splinter party (Christian Republicans?)

And, quite a while earlier, I also mentioned how badly the Democratic Party needs some Southern governors in the presidential pipeline. Well, they have one now: Mark Warner, the former governor of Virginia, who just proved his potency by getting his successor elected governor.

At this point, the Democrats need to stop battling about who the 2008 candidate is going to be, and start working out a serious platform for him. Pundits are suggesting a Democratic version of Newt Gingrich's 1994 Contract for America. I think that's going a little far, but it does have possibilities. Let me make some suggestions:

1. Health care. Handled properly, this could be the magic bullet. The current system of employer-based health insurance is not only bad for workers, it is horrendously bad for business. It puts American businesses at a huge disadvantage in dealing with businesses in nations where health care is the responsibility of government. It has been the major or only cause of most strikes and labor disputes over the past ten years. It adds $1500 to the cost of every American-made automobile. It is a historical fluke, the result of a deal with the devil made by Harry Truman and John L. Lewis. WE CAN DO BETTER.

2. Science. Another area in which American business is getting trounced: most of our science and engineering graduates come from outside the US. Most of our research and development is happening in military areas, funded by DoD money. Our research in genetics is being forced outside the country by government fiat against funding stem-cell research. WE HAVE TO DO BETTER. WE CAN'T AFFORD NOT TO.

3. Tax fairness. Teddy Roosevelt knew the value of requiring the people and corporations who have been enriched by the American system to repay the favor. Let's get back to that model.

4. "Moral values." Fiscal responsibility is perhaps the most important positive moral requirement for governments. We cannot keep piling up deficits for our grandchildren to pay. We now know, (as we did not before the Clinton administration) that a US government can not only eliminate deficits, but accrue surpluses. We've done it before, within living memory. Let's do it again.

5. And the other "moral" issues? This is perhaps a more daring proposal, and not quite so much of a slam dunk. But how about the Democrats becoming the party of Minding Your Own Business? Back in the '90s, I was suggesting that the next Democratic platform include a promise that no American will ever again be required to testify under oath about sex between consenting adults. I still think that's a worthy goal, and might be a very popular one.

Closely related and even riskier, but worthy of serious consideration, would be the end of the War on Drugs. It has cost huge amounts of money. It has not reduced drug use appreciably. All it has done is created new, cheaper, and more dangerous drugs of choice, most notably methamphetamine. (The house my husband grew up in, whose most recent owners turned it into a meth lab, has been all but destroyed by the resulting fire and explosion.) And all the War on Meth has brought us is more hassle in trying to treat our own cold symptoms. (Have you tried to buy Sudafed lately?) If this trend goes on, the next recreational drug will probably be made with aspirin and milk of magnesia, and over-the-counter self-medicating will become impossible.

So let's decriminalize recreational drugs, regulate them at least as strictly as we regulate alcohol and tobacco, and put some of the savings into addiction treatment programs. This will also free our prisons to accommodate the really dangerous criminals, and to rehabilitate those who will sooner or later end up back in our communities.

Oh yes, and what about abortion? I still like Clinton's goal of making it "safe, legal, and rare." And I have been uncomfortable for a while about both the Democratic Party and the women's movement making the right to abortion the keystone of their ideology. I believe there is a lot more to both liberalism and feminism than the right to choose abortion. I also believe that most abortions result from either:
a. ignorance--we are doing a lousy job of sex education
b. poverty--anything that makes single motherhood more difficult makes abortion more likely, or
c. sorry, guys, male irresponsibility. We need to educate young men to be willing to ask themselves, when contemplating unprotected sex, "Would I want to be paying child support to this woman for the next 18 years?" (BTW, some young men apparently ask themselves this question after a pregnancy has occurred, and their answer is sometimes homicide, which is now the leading cause of death among pregnant women in the US.)
So why can't the Democratic Party espouse sex education programs and job training and child care for young women and men?

6. Education for non-college bound youth. Which is closely related to the issues involved in abortion, and also to crime, drug use, and poverty. And, BTW, the success (such as it is) of the military in recruiting young people for whom we have not set out any other path toward useful adulthood. We do not expect a new high school graduate to have any useful skills or knowledge, but we offer very few affordable and accessible ways to attain them.

In the first place, we need to reshape high school education so that it teaches more (and more positive) intellectual and vocational skills, and fewer negative social skills (like bullying, binge drinking, and casual sex.) We need to create a generation of high school graduates who can support themselves and take the next steps toward adulthood with the help of the communities they live in. Then, we need to make post-high school education available to every high school graduate.

Stay tuned.

INKLINGS OF HOPE

2005-11-06T14:55:00.000-08:00

Tilly Smith, 10, put her geography lessons to good use last year. By quickly recognizing the warning signs of a tsunami [last December], the British schoolgirl saved about 100 people from almost certain death at a Thai resort. On November 4, she got an award for it. I'd like to see an award named for her, and given regularly to somebody who saves lives by remembering and using something learned in elementary or secondary school. It would be such a refreshing change from the perpetual "English was my worst subject," "I hated math," and, worst of all, "I don't remember anything I learned in high school."
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This has been a wonderful autumn for leaf colors here in Chicago. The weather mavens had predicted the usual around here--overnight, the leaves would all turn brown, and the next night, they would all fall off. Not this year. We have had wild displays of red and orange and yellow and brown and green-gold for the last two weeks, despite several episodes of wind and rain. A lot of leaves have fallen, but there is still a lot of beauty out there.

THE INVISIBLE POLL TAX

2005-11-05T20:28:00.001-08:00

Does anybody today remember the poll tax? It was an iniquitous device of the Jim Crow South, requiring people to pay a tax for the privilege of voting. The amount of money involved was usually enough to put the vote beyond the purchasing power of most poor people and almost all African-Americans in the South. The Twenty-fourth Amendment, ratified in 1964, outlawed the use of this tax (or any other tax) as a pre-condition in voting in Federal elections. The 1966 Supreme Court case Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections held that the poll tax as applied to state elections violated the equal protection clause of United States Constitution.

But careful examination of voter demographics in the US and in other Western industrial countries tells us that poor people are a good deal less likely to vote in the US than elsewhere. Is there some obvious factor that could account for that difference, now that the official poll tax has been abolished? Well, yes, I think there is. In every other industrial country in the world (and, so far as I know, almost all of the other countries that have elections at all) elections are held on a non-working day, usually a Sunday. (Iraq's latest election was held on a Saturday.) In this country, elections are ALWAYS on a Tuesday. Which means that people in the lowest tier of the job market, who typically get no paid time off for any reason, have to take unpaid time off from work to do it. Losing money for the privilege of voting is--let's be blunt about it--a poll tax. The mere fact that government doesn't collect the money is beside the point. The effect is the same, and is, I suspect, intended to be the same. This has the makings of a really interesting lawsuit.

TRUTH IN CAPITALISM?

2005-11-05T20:13:00.000-08:00

We keep hearing that the free market is the best way to organize production and consumption. But do its proprietors really believe that? If they did, wouldn't they be willing to give the people they deal with complete information about the deal? Like, wouldn't they tell a job applicant what they actually pay the other workers? Wouldn't your television tell you exactly how many minutes of commercials to expect in the next break, so you'll know whether you have time to nuke your dinner? Wouldn't your local merchant tell you the actual markup on his product, so you could decide whether it's worth it? The economists consider these deficiencies in information an "imperfection" in the market, but obviously it's just perfect for the people who profit by concealing the info.

For that matter, employers certainly don't want a really free labor market--a market in which people are free to refuse to work under inhumane conditions, even when those are the only jobs available. One of the reasons married women used to have a hard time getting decent jobs (back in the '50s and earlier) was that the employer presumed that a woman who was dissatisfied with her job would have no qualms about quitting, since her husband could support her. ( Now, of course, it takes at least two incomes to support a middle-class family, so that is no longer an issue.)

The only improvement in informative capitalism is that those who make products which can cause harm to the user or other human beings or (sometimes) the environment are now under legal pressure to warn the consumer, especially in the area of health-care. They don't always do it, but they are often sued (sometimes successfully) for not doing it.

I'm not crazy about capitalism, but I could live with a system of rational, completely above-board capitalism (one which recognized, for instance, that products which shorten human life are ultimately bad for business.) I don't expect to see one anytime soon, however.

ODD LOTS # 12

2005-11-01T08:06:00.000-08:00

Walt Whitman. George Gershwin. Danny Kaye. Larry King. Ellery Queen. Beverly Sills. Malcolm Forbes. Mae West. Norman Mailer. Louis Gossett Jr.

STENGEL MOMENTS

2005-10-30T16:06:00.000-08:00

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

2005-10-28T12:48:00.000-07:00

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

2005-10-27T13:31:00.000-07:00

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

2005-10-27T09:42:00.000-07:00

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

2005-10-27T09:16:00.000-07:00

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!!!!!

2005-10-26T09:42:00.000-07:00

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

2005-10-25T20:30:00.000-07:00

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

2005-10-20T12:23:00.000-07:00

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

ALONG CAME WILMA

2005-10-19T13:29:00.000-07:00

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?

2005-10-19T13:27:00.000-07:00

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

2005-10-16T15:15:00.000-07:00

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

MORE KUDOS TO JON!

2005-10-16T09:46:00.000-07:00

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

2005-10-16T09:13:00.000-07:00

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

2005-10-16T08:52:00.000-07:00

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

2005-10-14T13:47:00.000-07:00

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

2005-10-14T10:35:00.000-07:00

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

2005-10-02T17:41:00.000-07:00

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

2005-10-02T17:32:00.000-07:00

"...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.

THE BIG VIRTUAL EASY?

2005-09-28T12:52:00.000-07:00

We see all kinds of postings on all kinds of lists from people who used to live in the path of Katrina and Rita, connecting with each other and with old friends and colleagues elsewhere. The Internet has eased the plight of people displaced and thrown apart from each other in a way that would have been impossible twenty years ago. A number of schools in the Gulf Coast area are pulling themselves together by offering online courses and other services to their displaced students. This trend works in opposition to all the forces that have been operating for years to separate us from our families, friends, and neighbors. Maybe we need to think about ways the Internet could be used more consciously and in more routine situations to keep us in touch with each other.

For instance...

I don't think I'm unique. But the hospital I was born in has been long since closed (Newton Hospital, Newton MA). The kindergarten I attended (The Outdoor School, Hollywood FL) has disappeared altogether. While the public school I attended from first through seventh grade (Hollywood Central School) is still in existence, the actual building in which I went to school burned down a while back. My high school (Assumption Academy, Miami FL) has been bulldozed for condos. My college (Radcliffe) has been merged into Harvard. The street I lived on during my senior year (Hayes Street in Cambridge MA) has disappeared--not the building, the entire street. I sometimes get to feeling like the Nowhere Man in "Yellow Submarine"--remember the grey blobby guy whose world disappears as he walks through it?

I think the recently-deplored epidemic of "hoarding" may result from this kind of living--we hold on to stuff because we can't hold on to our physical world.

Additionally, we can't always hold on to what happens to us in that world. On August 28, 1968, here in Chicago, I went to a rally in what was then the Grant Park Bandshell (the replacement of which has since been replaced) to protest the Democratic National Convention, which was being held due west of there at the time (at an amphitheatre that has since been torn down and replaced by condos.) I went with a friend who was a reporter (for a newspaper, by the way, which has also since disappeared) who did his job by asking one of the cops on duty there for a crowd count estimate. The officer told us that the capacity of the bandshell was 10,000, and there were obviously people standing in the aisles and around the edges, so he figured something like 12,000.

I went home that night (after being tear-gassed while attempting to catch my train) to watch the news; the official crowd estimate for the rally at that point was somewhere around 8,000. When I woke up the next morning and caught the news again, it was down to 2,000. I quit listening at that point, afraid the event would disappear altogether.

And now we have actually seen real physical towns and neighborhoods wiped off the map. But we still have ways of holding on to them, on line, and keeping in touch with those we lived near. It looks as if some people are going to start moving back into New Orleans. It also appears that a fair proportion of the city's population will never move back. But they can form a city on line, with its own celebrations and communities and even business endeavors. This may be the first of the virtual cities. But it will probably not be the last.

HERE WE GO AGAIN!

2005-09-23T12:06:00.000-07:00

Hurricane Rita is rolling inexorably toward the Gulf Coast, and hundreds of thousands of people are trying to get out of her way. This time, the authorities are really seriously trying to get everything right. They're using buses to evacuate people who can't drive themselves; they're evacuating hospitals and nursing homes; they're getting people onto the roads as early as possible. And it may still not be enough. Already a bus full of nursing home patients has exploded, killing more than 20 people in a fire that was probably intensified by their oxygen tanks. Many evacuees have run out of gas before getting anywhere near a safe destination. Some of the levees in New Orleans are in trouble again, and the hurricane hasn't even made landfall yet.

On one hand, it's good that the disaster mavens are getting a second chance to do right what they screwed up last time. On the other hand, it's really scary when, with a lot better information, a lot more willingness to pay attention to that information, and a serious commitment to protecting all the people in harm's way, they still CAN'T do the job.

I am still seeing right-wingers claim that global warming has nothing to do with the fact that we are getting more hurricanes every year, and more of them are Category 3 or higher. As I understand it, the relationship of large bodies of warm water to the frequency and intensity of hurricanes is Meteorology 101, right up there with the cycle of rain and evaporation of water. The only people who can seriously deny it are the flat-earthers. But we have elected a government that puts flat-earthers in positions of responsibility requiring scientific know-how and common sense. That probably means that, for the next 3 years, we are committed to taking no long-range action to protect the southern US from more and nastier hurricanes.

What would such long-range action entail? Maybe a permanent evacuation of barrier islands, beaches, and low-lying Gulf Coast areas. Maybe a permanent evacuation of the entire Gulf Coast. Certainly a revision of building code standards in that part of the country, and a revised flood insurance plan that either bans residences in flood-prone areas, or makes it outrageously expensive. Maybe a plan to move hazardous chemical manufacture and storage away from parts of the country prone to hurricanes, tornadoes, and earthquakes. Whatever it takes, we probably won't get around to it under this administration. So the next election becomes literally a matter of national life or death.

A month or so back, my husband and I watched the ultra-disaster movie, "The Day After Tomorrow." It purports to portray the ultimate result of global warming--a nationwide plague of hurricanes and tornadoes culminating in an instantaneous ice age. At the time, it looked pretty far-fetched, to the point of absurdity. It still does, but not quite as much. Probably its producer will not enjoy telling us "I told you so" any more than I will. Seize the time.

ANOTHER WIN FROM JON

2005-09-19T08:40:00.001-07:00

And Jon does it again, for Odd Lot #8 (Ludwig Van Beethoven, Friedrich Nietsche, Lord Randolph Churchill, and Al Capone)--the link is syphilis (all of them are believed to have died of it.)

Here's Odd Lot #9: Jesse Jackson (Sr.), Marilyn Monroe, and William the Conqueror.

COMMON SENSE

2005-09-19T08:27:00.000-07:00

We are suddenly confronted with a catastrophe which is both crisis and opportunity. Can we start with what my mother always considered the three basic questions to ask in such a situation:

What do we have lots of?

What do we need?

How do we turn what we have lots of into what we need?

Any comments on any of these points will be passed on to readers. My own immediate reactions: one of the things we have lots of is good ideas. Let's not let them go to waste.

Another thing we apparently have lots of is good will and eagerness to contribute.

What we need is, first of all, some way to meet the government's inescapable deficit from meeting relief and reconstruction needs without (given the tax priorities of God's Own Party) raising taxes.

Another thing we need is a way to encourage Americans to save more--we have one of the lowest rates of saving in the Western world, and we now know that retirees can no longer count on employer pensions to provide for them.

So: can we turn that energy and eagerness into a solution for the deficit and the relief needs of the Gulf Coast by starting a government relief bond drive? My husband is an old-time radio junkie, so I spend a lot of time overhearing broadcasts from World War II, when every other commercial urged the listeners to buy war bonds. Lots of them did, apparently, much to the benefit of the war effort. It was a way of harnessing the popular energy at the home front behind the "good war." Why can't we do this again? Use relief bonds as a way to both pay for Katrina relief and reconstruction, and fund the retirement of today's workforce. Please, pass this on. It's an idea whose time has come.

SOME GOOD LINKS AND INFO ON KATRINA RELIEF

2005-09-19T08:13:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Kate Walsh, who keeps sending me all this great stuff. The following piece is from:
Henry Breitrose
Professor of Communication
Department of Communication
Stanford University
Stanford, California USA 94305-2050
+650-723-4700

"quite clear~ as to where the essential responsibility lies; not with the mayor or the governor as many would like to insist. This is a reflection of the extreme dangers of the Reagan ideology, magnified x 10 with the current group in power. That all protections from the government are "entitlement" and that the people are, essentially, on their own. With all the benefits of a hearty economy going to the few insiders. Again, isn't this what we got rid of in the late 1700s? Privilege for a few, and misery for the many?
Will this reality be enough to wake people from their sugar dreams?

"CHRONOLOGY.... Here's a timeline that outlines the fate of both FEMA and flood control projects in New Orleans under the Bush administration:

"January 2001: Bush appoints Joe Allbaugh, a crony from Texas, as head of FEMA. Allbaugh has no previous experience in disaster management.

"April 2001: Budget Director Mitch Daniels announces the Bush administration's goal of privatizing much of FEMA's work. In May, Allbaugh confirms that FEMA will be downsized: "Many are concerned that federal disaster assistance may have evolved into both an oversized entitlement program...." he said. "Expectations of when the federal government should be involved and the degree of involvement may have ballooned beyond what is an appropriate level."

"2001: FEMA designates a major hurricane hitting New Orleans as one of the three "likeliest, most catastrophic disasters facing this country."

"December 2002: After less than two years at FEMA, Allbaugh announces he is leaving to start up a consulting firm that advises companies seeking to do business in Iraq. He is succeeded by his deputy, Michael Brown, who, like Allbaugh, has no previous experience in disaster management.

"March 2003: FEMA is downgraded from a cabinet level position and folded into the Department of Homeland Security. Its mission is refocused on fighting acts of terrorism.

"2003: Under its new organization chart within DHS, FEMA's preparation and planning functions are reassigned to a new Office of Preparedness and Response. FEMA will henceforth focus only on response and recovery.

"Summer 2004: FEMA denies Louisiana's pre-disaster mitigation funding requests. Says Jefferson Parish flood zone manager Tom Rodrigue: "You would think we would get maximum consideration....This is what the grant program called for. We were more than qualified for it."

"June 2004: The Army Corps of Engineers budget for levee construction in New Orleans is slashed. Jefferson Parish emergency management chiefs Walter Maestri comments: "It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay."

"June 2005: Funding for the New Orleans district of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is cut by a record $71.2 million. One of the hardest-hit areas is the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, which was created after the May 1995 flood to improve drainage in Jefferson, Orleans and St. Tammany parishes.

"August 2005: While New Orleans is undergoing a slow motion catastrophe, Bush mugs for the cameras, cuts a cake for John McCain, plays the guitar for Mark Wills, delivers an address about V-J day, and continues with his vacation. When he finally gets around to acknowledging the scope of the unfolding disaster, he delivers only a photo op on Air Force One and a flat, defensive, laundry list speech in the Rose Garden.

"A crony with no relevant experience was installed as head of FEMA. Mitigation budgets for New Orleans were slashed even though it was known to be one of the top three risks in the country. FEMA was deliberately downsized as part of the Bush administration's conservative agenda to reduce the role of government. After DHS was created, FEMA's preparation and planning functions were taken away.

"Actions have consequences. No one could predict that a hurricane the size of Katrina would hit this year, but the slow federal response when it did happen was no accident. It was the result of four years of deliberate Republican policy and budget choices that favor ideology and partisan loyalty at the expense of operational competence. It's the Bush administration in a nutshell."

Following are some good links:

http://www.suheirhammad.com ("A Poet Describes What She Has Seen")
www.beliefnet.com/story/174/story_17484_1.html ("I Was Fired For Helping")
www.counterpunch.org (September 17-18 "A Student Report from Louisiana"

KATRINA RECOVERY ISSUES

2005-09-15T11:50:00.000-07:00

The latest word is that residents of New Orleans' driest sections may be able to start moving back home as early as Monday. But the city is still 50% under water. This may be the time to start planning for an interim census of the whole Gulf Coast area, and absentee voter registration for those who can't get home yet. Otherwise, several legislative districts may just be wiped out. And most of them, in all probability, will be Democratic districts. Since God's Own Party appears to believe in multi-party elections only in Iraq and Afghanistan, Congress will need to be heavily lobbied to get started on reconstructing these constituencies.

ODD LOTS #8

2005-09-14T20:06:00.000-07:00

Ludwig van Beethoven, Friedrich Nietsche, Lord Randolph Churchill (Winston Churchill's father) and Al Capone.

CHARLTON HESTON, CALL YOUR OFFICE

2005-09-14T07:37:00.000-07:00

Where is the NRA now that the citizens of New Orleans are being systematically disarmed without the authorities even (so far as I know) bothering to check first for proper gun ownership documentation? Why doesn't the Second Amendment apply to displaced persons in situations where (one would think) being armed could make the most difference?

JON DOES IT AGAIN!

2005-09-14T07:32:00.000-07:00

Odd lots #7 (Albert Camus, Jacques Derrida, and St. Augustine) were all born in what is now Algeria, and all (I'm not actually sure about this, and will check it later, but this is as esoteric as you can get) wrote commentaries about Plotinus. Actually what I had in mind was just that they were philosophers born in Algeria, but I'll certainly go with Jon's answer. Which came in so fast I haven't had time to concoct the next Odd Lot. Watch this space.