Obama, Oil and The Deep Blue Sea

You have to feel sorry for anybody who sits in the White House. It’s a trap. You can’t go out for pizza; you can’t take a walk; you can’t put the place up for sale and move. Bush found that out when Katrina landed on him five years ago.
The City of New Orleans had spread out into lowlands that no one in his right mind would have built a house on during its first couple of centuries. But it had gotten crowded and poorer people had moved out where land was cheaper—and far less safe.
Whooooosh. Everything was gone. Somehow it became Washington’s job to move tens of thousands of people out of the way of a massive (and entirely predictable) natural disaster overnight—in moments. This while New Orleans police and rescue personnel were going AWOL in great numbers to rescue their own families, and mayor was holed up in the upper stories of a hotel.
Everybody hates Washington—until the floods come. Reminds one of Kipling’s poem dedicated to “Tommy” the soldier. Despise him, keep him away—“until the guns begin to shoot. Then it’s Tommy, savior of your country!” In this country, it’s why can’t Washington do the impossible—yesterday or even the day before.
Now it’s Obama’s turn. I watched on ABC News as Obama knelt down on a Louisiana beach and vowed to do something, to stay with you. And do what—send several million gallons of gushing oil into outer space?
Then the cameras switched to some civilians in diners and on the street. Did they believe him? The headshakes were eloquent. Of course they didn’t and, unless Obama is far less sane than I think he is, he didn’t believe himself.
What are you going to DO about millions of gallons of oil pouring out into water one mile straight down? Realistically? Kneel down and the beach, get some squishy, oily mud on your fingers and vow to hang in. No other real options.
Churchill made one of his heroic World War II speeches, knowing that the British Army basically didn’t have enough rifles for each soldier to have one. He had to kneel down on the beach and sound brave. “We will fight them on the beaches, we will fight them in the hills” and so forth.
Then he put his hand over the mike and muttered, “We will hit them over the head with beer bottles as they crawl ashore. That’s all we have left to work with”.
He didn’t have to reach a mile down to the ocean bottom in order to do it. (Roosevelt found a couple of million World War I rifles and rushed them to England.) Obama’s got a tougher problem to deal with. No one’s got a beer bottle with a long enough neck for an undersea oil spill.
As I say, everybody should pause a moment to feel sorry for a president, Democrat or Republican. You come to Washington trailing clouds of campaign glory. You are going to reform education, reform health care, end war, put the economy back on track—and the war goes on; people too selfish to join a pool to pay for universal health care prove intractable, and the economic problems are absolutely terrifying in their complexity.
Maybe he made the right calls, maybe he didn’t—but the fact is they are still shooting in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the consequences to us of a European collapse are unthinkable. Nothing is truly cured. Our biggest curse—total dependence on Arab enemies for our fuel—seems unsolvable. So he tries to drill for more (just like Bush) … .
Pop goes the whole rig, pipe and oil deposit. A whole mile down. One more disaster to solve—with beer bottles; it’s all he’s got to work with.

Is Washington Reading The RIGHT Books?

Well, it’s official. What we are blowing off in the Gulf is now the biggest oil spill in American history. We see it beginning to clog up the fisheries and wild life preserves along the Louisiana coast, it is threatening to take a ride on the Gulf Stream and wreck a few beaches on the Atlantic side. Nobody seems to have a handle on how to stop it.
Obama has just ordered a halt to all deep sea drilling—and without it our dependence on our Arab friends (in places terrorists come from) is increasingly total. It would be like finding, in the throes of World War II, that we were dependent on the Axis for our ammunition.
Oh, goodness gracious, would we work to find a substitute! (We got caught in such a bind during the Civil War when none-too-friendly England was in a position to cut off our munitions and threatened to do so. The South would have won instantly.)
You would think being at the mercy of a few mercurial Arab states would inspire us to start serious work at finding a substitute for petroleum. (No! I don’t necessarily think building more windmills or growing more corn is going to do it. Got a windmill that will propel your car?)
I mean finding a substitute for petroleum itself. Something that burns in an eight cylinder engine just as effectively as gasoline. After all, the Germans came up with a recipe for synthetic oil during the Second World War. They had very little fuel.
So they came up with something that would fly an airplane engine that burned 100 octane gas with great efficiency. Where is that recipe? As I’ve written before, it was brought to Washington after the war—but never translated. I don’t think anyone in Washington even remembers that such a thing exists. Or perhaps “existED is the more apt word.
It seems our schools aren’t the only place where no one reads. They don’t seem to do a whole lot of it at the Pentagon, the White House or Congress. I’ve written before how, during Vietnam, no one in charge seemed to have ever read the official evaluation of strategic bombing during WWII. (If they had, they never would have imagined they could lick North Vietnam with bombs.)
They bombed—more tons that we dropped on Europe or Japan throughout the big war. They accomplished nothing beyond killing a few people. Nobody read the report on what bombing could actually accomplish—and what it could not do.
No one in the State Department ever read DeGaulle’s “Memoirs” after they were translated. If they had, they never would have been surprised—shocked, I mean, SHOCKED—when De Gaulle threw us and NATO out of Paris in the 1960s.
I hear about each president that he busies himself reading about what past presidents wrote and thought about life. Interesting and sometimes useful. But how much time do you think either Bush or Obama spent poring over intelligence reports on the backgrounds of people running the training camps in Yemen or Pakistan?
Has anybody got any kind of a fix on the nuclear armed, saber rattling North Koreans? I’d be reading intensely on what it would take for us to stop them if they pulled another 1950 on us. That time they pinned us into a tiny little corner of southeastern Korea.
Who’s reading up on the Chinese military? What are its real capabilities. What kind of weapon systems are they building? Stuff aimed at Tibet and the western wastes—or stuff that could carry them all the way to Hawaii. In how many years?
What’s our backup plan if we ever lost our bases in Britain? What do we plan to do if Canada splits into warring factions? Does it spill over into Vermont and New York? Do we live without the St. Lawrence Seaway? Whom do we back? What’s the price of neutrality?
Again, what can we use as an alternative to petroleum that can actually run my Buick or my wife’s Dodge Caravan? Those are the matters we should be reading about—and trying to figure out.
It’s not just Johnny who doesn’t read.

Trinity Sunday--And the Price of Oil

Today is Trinity Sunday. That’s not a Protestant term and most conventional Catholics don’t pay a great deal of attention to it either. But it opens the longest season in the ancient liturgical year. Advent begins four Sundays before Christmas and runs about four weeks. Christmas Season runs twelve days. Epiphany goes approximately six or seven weeks until Lent which lasts 40 days. Easter Season runs for seven weeks until somewhere around June 1st.
Trinity lasts about six months—from now until next November 26, this year. It is a far more significant liturgical moment than it is recognized as being. It commemorates the day, described in the second chapter of The Acts of The Apostles when the entire Trinity was revealed.
We meet God The Father in the Old Testament (Jewish Bible). This is the person of the Trinity who delivers the Ten Commandments, parts the Red Sea, punishes Israel by allowing the destruction of the Temple and takes vengeance on those who destroyed it.
We meet God The Son at Bethlehem. He is the Jesus who walks around Judea and Galilee (and makes a single foray into Lebanon), healing, teaching and generally annoying conventional religious leaders. He is crucified on Good Friday, raised on Easter—and promises to send a “comforter who will guide the church into all truth”.
Forty days after Easter (or Passover as it was then celebrated), Jesus leaves the Earth and tells his followers to wait in Jerusalem until “The Holy Spirit” comes upon them. Ten days later, on the Jewish Feast of Shavout—which celebrates harvest and the fiftieth day after the Exodus when, Jews believe, God The Father gave the Ten Commandments, the Holy Spirit arrives. Here, on this day, the Church is to get its spiritual and, even, physical power.
Thus we are introduced to the Holy Spirit (or Ghost) and the Christian Trinity is complete. The Trinity is, of course, the foundation upon which orthodox Christianity rests. Christians who did NOT accept the notion of a Triune God became Muslims in the Eighth Century; Trinitarians remained Christians—and that quarrel goes on to this day. That alone makes this a significant day, if only because it affects oil supplies for both believers and non-believers.
The very notion of a Holy Spirit who gives the church both power and authority has proven bitterly divisive—far beyond the quarrels between Christians and Muslims. During the Reformation (beginning 1517), Protestants objected so strenuously to certain church practices—like selling the powers and gifts of the Spirit for cash—that they overreacted.
Out with the bathwater went the baby—to this day conventional Protestants are very, very uncomfortable talking about the Third Person of the Trinity. They don’t call the day “Trinity Sunday”; they prefer the term “Pentecost”, which is safely more Jewish—since the Jewish feast comes 50 days after Passover (in the Christian—solar—calendar, after Easter).
I’ve actually been told by a Protestant Sunday School teacher that, after the people present in Jerusalem on Shavout in approximately AD 30 died off, the Holy Spirit went back up to Heaven and no longer bothers us.
So, most Protestants will make a quick mention of the fact that some strange things happened nearly two thousand years ago, and move on. Catholics, legitimately embarrassed by some of the corruption associated with Holy Spirit power, don’t dwell on the matter.
The phenomenon known as Pentecostalism (or as the Charismatic movement) attempts to bring back the wonders and the powers of the Spirit. But Pentecostals often get lost in the confusion over the meaning and manifestation of the charisms, the powers, the gifts--and often sinks back into standard, no-nonsense Protestantism.
So Trinity Sunday passes and Christians move on. For many of them, the only significance of the day is reflected in the price they pay at the gas pump. But Trinity Sunday should be so, so, so much more—for those who call themselves Christians.

Reading Skills--Where Have They Gone?

Yesterday I substituted for a series of high school AP English classes. These are the advanced classes for upper classmen that supposedly earn the student college credit. I can tell you from personal observation they are more difficult than regular English classes.
I was in the same classroom exactly one week previous to yesterday. What I observed, comparing both days, stunned me. The class was reading Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451”. It’s a short book—just over 200 pages in a small page format.
A week ago the classes were reading a chapter that ended at approximately page 40. In a week’s time, these advanced students had gotten all the way to page 95. I repeat, these were advanced students, receiving college credit for their work.
This is typical of all the AP classes I have watched over the past few years.
When I was in high school, they would have handed me a book this size on a Friday, told me to have it finished within the week—and expected I would have a three to five page report ready within the same week. Those weren’t AP classes (they didn’t exist where I was in high school); they were just standard college prep courses.
Every day I substitute I am surprised by some way in which the same courses I took in the 1950s have been “dumbed down”. Can you imagine giving a present day high school student a seven to eight hundred page book to read and report on—as just one additional assignment, on top of the chapters in the text book?
The kid would probably require the services of a defibrillator. I wrote several reports like that in high school—it just came with the territory. But today, the high school classes at the highest degree of difficulty require forty or fifty pages a week. Easy pages—“Fahrenheit 451” is not a hard book to read. It’s short and the vocabulary really should be in reach of a college bound senior.
But this isn’t the most troubling thing. In class after class, the kids finish the assignments I’ve been instructed to give them and, then, many of them tell me they have nothing else to do. So I suggest that they read a book (I always carried one when I was in school).
Some of you might be amazed at how many high school students (smart ones, suburban schools) tell me they never read. They hate reading. They never carry a book with them. I’ll catch them trying to text on their Ipods or sneak a call on their phones. Read, never?
It is a trial for them to wade through 50 whole pages in a week. A two hundred page book that is essentially an “easy read” is a violation of the “cruel and unusual” clause in the Constitution. The reading situation is not getting better; it isn’t even stabilizing. I just read a report that indicates reading ability has dropped substantially SINCE the passage of “No Child Left Behind” legislation.
Something we’re doing isn’t working—in fact it seems to be working backward. When I was a kid and we had some free time, I remember that even the poorer students grabbed a volume of the World Book Encyclopedia and paged through it. Such a scene would be unimaginable today.
I snicker at the thought. A room full of teenagers peering through volumes of an encyclopedia when they have nothing else to read. Forget it!
But if you don’t read, school becomes pretty meaningless to you—no matter how large or small the budget or how good or bad the teaching skills. I stumbled on a book the other day that gave me some real insights into what has happened to reading in America.
It’s called “Readacide”. I’ll talk more about it tomorrow.

Times Square Bomber--Ineptitude vs Luck

Over and over again I’ve been hearing how lucky we were that the “Times Square bomber” didn’t know how to build a bomb. Just lots of smoke and a big scare. And some credit to the former GIs who run concessions in the area and watch out for the rest of us.
Yes, we were lucky. There’s a reason for that luck—and it won’t last forever. I remember very vividly sitting at a sidewalk café in Beirut in the late ‘60s, watching two men in Bedouin robes trying to run an air hammer during some street repairs.
They seemed so clumsy. I concentrated on their hands. They were the hands of men with desert and riding skills—generations of them. They were not the hands of people raised to run modern machinery, be it a dishwasher or an electric drill. They had no feeling for it.
Holding the jackhammer put them in an alien world. In their own element they wouldn’t have looked a bit clumsy—but in my world, they were completely out of sync (yeah, as a kid I ran an air hammer on a summer job. Picking it up was instinctive and natural.)
The generation of Arabs I watched that day would never, every master the machinery of a modern, industrialized society. I thought of the great warrior king, Charlemagne (c.a. AD 800). He could carve an empire in central Europe. You wouldn’t have wanted to face him, sword in hand.
He learned to appreciate education. He created the first “university” in Europe after the fall of Rome. He mastered the art of reading—rare for a Dark Ages warrior; it was even considered unmanly. But he never learned how to hold a pen and write.
His sword hardened hands just wouldn’t grip the thing. It wasn’t his milieu. He was like the Arabs I was watching. They would have understood Charlemagne’s frustration at trying to master a pen; he would have seen their problem trying to direct the jackhammer.
I thought of World War II—where one of the “secret weapons” we had against the Germans was the fact that a lot of GIs came from rural or suburban settings where they learned early how to fix the engines of their cars and tractors.
When their army trucks broke down in the desert, a lot of these drivers just got out and, using bailing wire and bobby pins, got the thing running again. German drivers were, by and large, raised on farms that depended on horse drawn conveyances.
The whole German army simply was not mechanized. (In a speech, Churchill reminded the world that the German troops invading Russia were walking the thousand miles—they had so few vehicles.) If a German truck broke down, the driver had to send back to a motor pool to get a trained mechanic to the front and fix things, no matter how simple. He had no idea how himself.
The Germans have learned how to drive and maintain cars and trucks. In a war between us now, I doubt if there’d be a material difference in capabilities. My jackhammer friends will learn how to use their equipment, too. They may already have.
Right now, some people in the Arab world seem inept at bomb making. Again, it involves a sort of technology many of them are not comfortable with. They too will learn.
They too will finally learn how to build bombs that go BOOM effectively. Then we won’t be so lucky any more.
Then the last thing a concession stand operator ever sees may be a bright flash. Eventually people in Charlemagne’s court learned how to write. Making a bomb is probably simpler.

Earth--Fixing The Unfixable?

We live on a planet that acts more like a mortally wounded creature than a home for living beings. Its waters, its winds and the violent movement of its tectonic plates, and the sudden up thrusts of its volcanoes are more like death throes than natural phenomena.
They are all dangerous to human and animal life; they all kill. Coming out of the Christian tradition, I am struck by the fact that Christian prophecy makes no pretense that this earth will long endure. Biblical prophecy predicts that it will be destroyed.
Many traditions and myths talk about a destructive past in Earth’s ancient history—battle and war between gods and Titans, angels and demons, aliens and terrestrial life forms. Genesis states that after these battles the planet is reduced to a formless void with no habitable surfaces left at all.
Many religious traditions hold that man can look forward to leaving this planet—most notably our Muslim friends who hold that believers will enjoy an extra-terrestrial Heavenly Paradise. Jewish tradition has held that man leaves earth and goes to a place called Sheol.
Hindu tradition holds that man reincarnates until he has finally reached a level of goodness that takes him out of the reality entirely. In any case, off the planet. Buddhism basically denies the existence of person hood entirely and sees salvation as a form of non-being, again, off the planet.
Christianity is unique in that it holds not merely to the concept of resurrected beings—but of a completely resurrected planet (the “new Earth” of the Apocalypse of John—that descends from a renewed Heaven.
The entire cosmos is remade (Revelation 21). There is a new Heaven and a new Earth. None of the world’s religions hold that the Earth is salvageable. Only Christianity suggests that it will be completely renewed.
That it needs to be completely renewed suggests strongly that it could not be put back together—the damage that was done in the eon’s before man appeared on Earth finally proves fatal.
Totally non-scientific, I grant you—but does science offer a better explanation for all the things that go wrong on this planet. Above all, does science offer ANY sort of solution to earth quakes, shifting plates, ice ages, violent storms, weather shifts that result in drought and destruction?
The only thing scientists seem able to suggest is that driving cars and generating electricity causes all the woes on this planet.
Let’s admit: we do a wonderful job of making bad situations worse. We built shoddy buildings on fault lines, we drill for highly pressurized oil deposits so far under the oceans we cannot easily get at them to correct mistakes or fix accidents.
We use poisons to increase the yield of our farm fields—without reminding ourselves that what kills boll weevils and corn borers may not be healthy for us either. We log off forests and over cultivate fertile plains and valleys—and wonder why they erode and become arid.
But, fundamentally, what’s dangerously wrong with this planet is not a result of any human activity. It so far has shown no sign of being fixable by human actions.
That’s like looking up at the stars—on the one hand it is humbling; on the other—when you realize one of those lights may be an asteroid racing toward us—it is scary. Looking at the Earth—and all the things we cannot fix—is also humbling and scary.
Walter Hoving, when he ran Tiffany’s, may have had a point—even in the area of global warming and natural catastrophes. Remember the little pins he created and sold? What was it they said? “Try God.”
Likely to be more effective than another round of Kyoto Protocols.

Earth--Unfixable?

Science gives us our first clues to what may have reduced this planet to the chaos described in the first few verses of Genesis. Something wiped out the dinosaurs all at once—we suspect it may have been a direct hit by an asteroid or something else extraterrestrial.
Something that wiped out so many life forms must have done horrendous damage to the entire planet—possibly to its magnetic field, the positioning of its continents, its gravitational field. If an individual took that big a hit, it might well prove fatal.
Earth has suffered ice age after ice age. At points air was so super chilled that it could descend on a tranquil field and freeze the mastodons grazing their quickly enough that, thousands of years later, their steaks can be eaten today. The mastodons at the outskirts of these freeze zones are shredded the way only a super tornado could possible manage.
We find the remains of cities underneath sea floors. Afghanistan, for one, contains a gigantic urban complex that was abandoned millennia ago—due to … lack of water? We don’t even know what its name was. We know the Sahara was once verdant.
There were living things on Antarctica. Could a Kyoto Protocol have saved them? Had a group met in Copenhagen back then, could it have saved the dinosaurs? Or kept the water flowing to the Pueblos in the American desert? Or to the abandoned cities in Yemen?
At Genesis 1:2, we have a description of a very badly damaged planet. In anthropomorphic terms, a very possibly fatally wounded planet. “Formless and void.” There was no life left. Mist had been blasted into the atmosphere so thickly that you could not distinguish light from dark.
The first thing that had to be done—for anything to grow or live—was to let some light in. So the mist thinned out enough that you could detect light in the day and darkness at night. This is a perfect picture of what would need to happened after a very destructive bombardment of the planet.
Next the watery chaos is separated into seas below and clouds above.. But verse 7 makes it clear an awful lot of water was still up in the air, but there is finally a living space between them.. On what Genesis calls “the Third Day” the water below the clouds is separated into seas and dry land.
Now we have light, land and watery mist—and seeds begin to grow, very possibly left over from before the cataclysm that created the chaos. The land part of the planet is now covered with vegetation—as befits a greenhouse environment.
More mist continues to fall. On the “Fourth Day” you can finally distinguish individual lights from somewhere above the atmosphere. Visible now is a bright light by day and a lesser light by night. You can even see some of the brighter stars and planets.
At the beginning of a “Fifth Day”, the seas begin to teem with animal life. Next come winged creatures that can fly in the ever more air-like atmosphere. With a “Sixth Day” comes animal life on land and, finally, a protected garden is created in which mankind can be placed—safely.
He needed the protection—Genesis 3:14 makes it clear human beings were not the only people on earth—and humans had reason to fear the “others”. When man got himself thrown out of the garden, he became a killer and a destroyer—and had to live in fear of others who might kill him.
So, after chaos, the earth is—according to the Biblical account--recreated. Human beings are then introduced to the planet—at first to “dress, till and keep it”. But then to fight for every grain and morsel of food, killing and eroding as he went.
But did human beings somehow make the planet so unstable, so prone to violent storms and quakes that nothing can stand before them? Neither science, nor Biblical writ nor any other creation myth known throughout human history suggests such a thing.
That, if we think about it, probably happened before we ever got here—before the first humanoid ever walked the Rift Valley. If you look at the scientific record of the history of this planet, our hopes of staving off catastrophe with Kyoto Protocols or any other accords are minimal. We live on a wounded planet, one knocked permanently off kilter. This we probably cannot change. This lies at the core of our problem with living on Earth.
More later.

Earth--Something We Can Fix?

This year marked our fortieth “Earth Day”. I rather agree that it is a good idea to remind ourselves—especially if we are of the Christian Faith—that our Bible tells us we were put on this planet to “dress, till and keep” it.
That means we should be conscientious conservators and observant environmentalists. After all, you cannot keep (preserve) what you haven’t bothered to understand. As far as “Earth Day” goes in agreeing with that, I have no problem.
The problem I have with “Earth Day” and Environmentalism as it is practiced today is that it goes beyond this. It almost becomes a kind of worship of the Earth itself, for its own sake. Implicit in that attitude is the belief that man, by himself, both knows enough about the Earth to know what it needs and that he has the power to do something about it, again, by himself.
No. I don’t think so. I disagree profoundly with some very basic assumptions made by “Earth Day” adherents.
The first of these assumptions is that whatever may be wrong with our planet we caused it. The second is that we can fix it, using means and technologies we have at hand right here and now. I doubt both very, very much.
We are not powerful enough—our destructive capabilities not great enough—to produce all the problems this planet is having now or has had in the past. To think so is to indulge in an absurd kind of arrogance. We are saying that not only are we captains of our souls and masters of our fates, but we are masters of the workings of this planet.
Stop a tornado. Turn a hurricane aside. Tell a volcano to cease spewing ash or a forest fire to turn back the way it came. Halt or deflect a Tsunami. Break up El Nino and bring the rains back to our continent—or direct the Monsoon rains to fall, or make them stop. We can neither cause nor prevent any one of these natural phenomena.
We couldn’t stop the last ice age; we haven’t the faintest idea what we might do to halt the next. We have no idea how to stop hot and cold masses of air from crashing into each other and producing violent storms. We can’t keep a sand dune from eroding.
We assume that our power plants and carbon emissions are the cause of global temperature change. This is a comforting assumption indeed. It implies that we had the power to do this—and, as an obvious corollary, we have the power to stop it from happening.
The alternative is to horrible to contemplate. What if we didn’t do it? What if we have no control at all of the natural forces at work here—forces that may have whipsawed the planet a thousand times since it was formed out primordial space dust?
What if we are no more masters of the fate of the planet than we are of our own selves? We cannot guarantee we will not be stricken with a fatal disease or mishap—or Christopher Reeves would be making “Superman VII” as I write.
Equally we cannot guarantee that we caused the climate changes we all sense occurring around us—or that we, by some action of our own, can change them back. That’s a far more scary thought than believing that if we just cut back auto emissions all will be well.
So what happened to the planet that the Biblical writer, Isaiah, says was not created as a “chaos”, but was formed “to be inhabited”? (Isaiah 45:18) The present planet—with no help from humans at all—is closer to chaos than we like to think.
Ask people who’ve faced unexpected Tsunamis, tornadoes, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions or sudden sink holes that swallow whole houses. Or mudslides, forest fires, killer floods, drought, vicious predators (by land or sea), lightning, hail, sand storms, giant seas (vertical walls of water 50 or more feet high that defy all survival rules on the high seas), blinding, freezing blizzards—I doubt if many of them would call this planet “fit to be inhabited” or the least bit benign.
So if our power plants and automobiles didn’t do it—what happened? What reduced the planet to the shattered chaos described in Genesis one. Not carbon emissions. Let’s look at a few clues tomorrow.

Bombs, Oil Spills, Stocks and Prayer

The past few weeks have not been good for the ulcers of anyone trying to run this country. Stocks, for instance, plunged a thousand points in a single day—and no one knows why. Computers becoming peevish with other computers? Mindless panic?
Who knows? No one. They went down a thousand and then came back up a few hundred points—losing all the gains they’ve made so far this year. Which way will they go next. Again, no one really knows.
The Staten Island Ferry loses it and piles into the landing slip. (I remember all the times I stood at the bow and watched this controlled collision as we piled into the slips, bouncing from side to side as we finally settled in. But this one was for real.) Several people actually got hurt. The engine seems to have raced, Toyota style, out of control. (I used to imagine this happening years ago—this time it really did. Again, why?)
Then, again, there’s the little present the Pakistani Taliban left for us in Times Square. We can all heave a great sigh of relief that the bomb didn’t go off—the perpetrators were inept, the disable vets who sell souvenirs in the area were alert, we were lucky.
We were lucky in 1993 when some inept bombers tried to blow up a World Trade Center tower with a van full of explosives. It went boom; the building stayed up. We heaved a great sign of relief and congratulated ourselves, just like now.
Eight years later the same folk came back with a better plan—hijack airplanes full of fuel. Both towers came down. Our congratulations were premature. Yes, boys and girls, the Taliban and Al Qaeda have the ability to learn.
Oh, and Afghanistan is beginning to remind us more and more of Vietnam. The generals in Kabul are sounding ever more optimistic. The surge is working; we are winning against the Taliban. Of course, those generals are ignoring the fact that a counter surge of Taliban fighters is pouring in every night from Pakistani recruitment centers.
The top brass in Saigon remained optimistic about the course of the war right up until North Vietnamese tanks rolled into town and renamed it Ho Chi Minh City. Then, finally, everybody scrambled to put his Vietnamese mistress on a plane and get out.
Kabul seems to be living in the same dream world. The troops on the ground in dangerous rural areas don’t see quite as many signs of victory as the generals do. But the generals aren’t facing the same waves of incoming Taliban fighters. A Brit in Kabul has opened a bar and grill named after the hill where Afghani guerillas slaughtered an entire British army in 1842. Maybe the top echelon should go have dinner there.
The fancy cap BP Oil built to contain the spill in the Gulf didn’t work. They are down to their last hope—drilling a new well to relieve the pressure and capping the old with cement. This is all going to happen a mile down in the water under unbelievable pressures.
We hope. And if it does, it will take another couple months or so. Meanwhile gallons and gallons of crude oil are spilling into some of the finest fishing grounds in the world. The Icelandic volcano is still shutting down flights all over Europe.
That ash can play hell with jet engines—it can pit aircraft windows so badly you can’t see out of them. Nature keeps reminding us that she is NOT our friend—at best, she is indifferent or neutral. But she has no intent to benefit us.
And, of course, it is becoming less and less legal to pray to the divinity we have, historically, believed could control nature. So, prayerless, ignorant of basic causes, unable to control natural forces, we find ourselves completely at their mercy.
The White House, the Street and our troops can only ask, “What next?”
If we suggested that everyone pray—which we have done throughout our history—we would have whole cadres of federal judges and civil libertarians telling us we are violating the Constitution itself. So, “what next?”

BP This Time--Another Oil Spill

We need oil. Anyone who thinks we can slip out of this fact by adding vegetable oil to the mix or building trucks that run tons of produce on electricity isn’t with us in real space and time. All the conservation in the world isn’t going to get everybody who lives in suburbia to work tomorrow. Windmills are great; they won’t power New York and Chicago. We have trapped ourselves into NEEDING oil.
On April 20, BP became the latest oil company to cast its oil upon the waters. As approximately 200,000 or more gallon pump themselves into Gulf waters from a leak that’s a mile straight down, we have the makings of a serious disaster.
The oil has already created a slick about 130 miles wide. It is threatening some of the richest fishing grounds on the planet and some of the finest shoreline wetlands and beaches. BP is already facing at least a dozen law suits.
There is no guarantee we can turn this thing off anytime in the next three months. By then it will have become the largest spill ever in American waters. So we shouldn’t have been drilling so deep down; we shouldn’t have been drilling in water at all. But we still NEED oil.
Continuing dependence on Arab oil could start limiting all sorts of our options. Can you guarantee that the Saud family will still rule Saudi Arabia in ten years? Will the successors be any more friendly than Iran? Can we rely on Iraqi or Iranian oil? For how long?
Increasingly, they don’t need us as a market. There’s always China, India and Japan to sell to. American oil that could cut back this reliance is increasingly found under water—leaving us exposed to more spills like this one.
My adult years have spanned the oil embargoes of 1973 and 1979, the rise of the Third World as an oil drinking industrial power house and escalation of American trade deficits. I’ve heard lots of discussion on conservation, alternative energies and new oil drilling.
One subject that has completely eluded my awareness—and that I’ve been thinking about since 1973—is the question of completely synthetic oil. Have you heard anyone talk about it? I’ve not heard a mention. Nary a peep.
Before you say, “That’s impossible”, let me refresh our memories with a few historical facts. We were totally dependent on RUBBER tires to run our cars, trucks and military vehicles before World War II. We lost ALL our rubber at the start of that war.
We came up with a substitute—synthetic—substance that makes perfectly fine tires that we use to this day. (Whoever thinks of Vietnam and rubber in the same breath anymore?)
We found ourselves in a deadly race with both German and Japanese scientists during World War II to build a super bomb using a technique that had never been tried, never even been attempted, and we put together a program that delivered an atomic bomb—from pencil notes on an envelope to a major “boom”—in about four years.
The Germans were cut off from most sources of oil during World War II. They came up with a synthetic gasoline that could deliver 100 octane fuel to top-notch fighter aircraft as well as trucks and cars. We captured their notes and took them to Washington.
Big Oil screamed “Foul!” We never even translated the recipe. (Does anyone have any idea if it still exists today—or where?) Even if we destroyed the files, if it could be done once, it could be done again. If a Los Alamos Project could deliver a bomb, a similar project today could reasonably be expected to deliver something that would run my Buick, your Toyota, the trucks on the road and all those big airplanes—that didn’t have to come out of the ground in Saudi Arabia or the Gulf waters. How great would that be?
It would also be PRACTICAL in a nation that has painted itself into a corner where there is no feasible alternative to the gasoline engines that deliver our food, our power, our workers to the office and keep our lawns mowed.
We need oil—like we needed rubber. We found a substitute for the one; why not for the other? We just aren’t talking about it. No one has the political will to order it done. BP will eventually wind up paying a few million in fines and move on.
Somebody’s got to start talking about it.

Immigrantion--Arizona On The Firing Line

I’m not sure I’d want to live on the Arizona border. On one side you’ve got the vast sucking vacuum coming from employers in the United States desperate to hire illegal immigrants to harvest their crops or work their meat packing plants.
It’s an ideal labor source. They can be paid less than minimum wage, they have no legal rights, if they make any sort of fuss they can be packed back to Mexico. Some form of slavery has been necessary to maintain every advanced society since ancient Egypt. Illegals are ours.
In the mid-1800s, a flood of induced immigration from southern and eastern Europe kept our factory wages at a dollar a day, year after year after year. Now the Latino immigrants provide us with cheap food and meat.
That’s almost as much suction drawing immigrants in as you have from a Black Hole in space. Then there’s the pressure on the Mexican side of the border coming from people to whom American peonage looks like riches beyond belief.
Arizona, Texas, New Mexico and California are caught smack dab in the middle. They didn’t create either pressure source, but the consequences of both pass across Arizona desert by the hundreds and thousands nearly every day.
(Growing up in Michigan, amidst some of the richest vegetable growing muck land in the world, I was always aware that migrant Mexicans came and went with each harvest season. Things have changed today—that irreplaceable muck is now covered over with houses and parking lots. No one harvests celery or veggies any more.
(Fewer and fewer migrants come; more and more stay. Now whole communities—and whole neighborhoods in cities—are Hispanic. They vote; they demonstrate—and they vote instinctively in favor of the migrants they once were.
(They have no love for the majority white/black communities around them and very little concern for what the concerns of those communities might be. Emotion and ancestral memory of crossing the deserts and rivers of the American frontier guide them.)
So Arizona enacted a law like those in nearly every other nation on earth. A police officer in that state can walk up to anyone and ask to see identification to prove he or she has a legal right to be in the United States.
You would think they had been granted the right to strip search them in the public square. Hundreds of thousands of people are expected to demonstrate against Arizona’s new law tomorrow. There was a time when objection to such a police power might have been justified.
After all, many of the native born white Americans who settled our frontiers had excellent reason not to be identified as they walked the streets of Dodge City or Yuma. Outstanding warrants or bankruptcy service in Ohio, New Jersey or Alabama were best forgotten.
Hopefully that’s not true of quite so many Americans today. I, for one, would have no problem showing an officer my picture I.D. at any point. I carry it with me almost always anyway. Frankly I’m a bit suspicious of the motives of those who protest.
It seems to me to be eminently reasonable to ask people who look like they might come from Mexico, Haiti, Central America or the Caribbean to show some valid American identification. (Since that designation can cover nearly all colors, including my own, I would expect to be asked from time to time myself.) It’s a first step to getting our borders back under control.
No one has come up with a better idea. I understand the emotion of those who protest—just as I would understand the emotion of a man who fled to Texas one step ahead of Illinois law—but sometimes you just have to pull a weaving driver over and test for alcohol—for the safety of all. For the safety of all, it may be necessary to check the validity of someone’s—or my--presence on the street. I’m content to share my identity with you or anyone else.
Sorry, the days of Doc Holiday and Jesse James are over. These champions of the fabled American right to total privacy are gone. We’re none-the-worse for it.

Schools--Are Our Kids REALLY Worth It?

The other day I was subbing in a nice, safe suburban school. When I could let my eyes wander from keeping things from flying through the air or people from slipping in or out of the door, I looked up at a sign I’ve seen on many classroom walls.”
“Our kids,” it says, “are worth whatever it takes”. A lovely sentiment. Repeated over and over in classroom after classroom. Whatever it takes—our kids are worth it. The question crossed my mind—Is there any truth to that sign?
(No! I’m not talking about budgetary woes or millage shortfalls. I’m talking about the emotional and intellectual exertion, the sheer mental effort it takes to get kids to understand, question, learn and grow. Are we putting THAT into them?)
Do we really care? Are “our kids” worth the effort it would take to make serious, growing student s out of them? Let’s ask what would be really “worth it”.
Are our kids worth HOLDING ACCOUNTABLE? Are they worth going through all the hassle and complaining involved in telling them that they have work due tomorrow—and it MUST be done? Are they worth telling them there will be no retests?
Are they worth letting them fall flat on their faces if they have spent sixteen years refusing to listen or respond? Are they worth letting them flunk if they do not do the work? Are our kids really worth that much—or would we really prefer to go on shielding them from reality until it is too late to escape it?
Are our kids worth DISCIPLINING? Sometimes discipline has to be downright unpleasant to be effective. It may even have to hurt. Losing a job, smashing up a marriage or getting arrested can be seriously hurtful. Discipline that might prevent such experiences can in no way hurt more.
The Bible, interestingly enough, doesn’t say, “Spare the rod, spoil the child.” It says something much stronger and more thought provoking: “He that spares the rod HATES his son; he that loves his son punishes him when necessary.” [Proverbs 13:24]
Ask yourself, what’s more loving, more caring. Letting the kid careen into flunking and failure, or getting his attention by making him hurt—and preventing the disaster?
Are our kids worth allowing them to reap CONSEQUENCES of really bad choices and actions. Some day you won’t be able to shield the kid from things that really happen. There’ll be no more retests or forgetting about it. Better a few consequences should land on them now than when they are legal adults with real responsibilities.
Are our kids worth INSISTING THAT THEY DO THEIR SCHOOLWORK and not keep sloughing it off? (it is a horrible pain to go through all the excuses, whining and bellowing that kids can throw in the path of a determined parent or teacher.)
That would be really caring enough—showing that the kids are “worth whatever it takes”. You’d have to give the teacher some tools to work with—including punitive ones. I’m sure this is definitely not what the “educator” who composed the sign had in mind. He or she was going for something far more saccharin and feel-good at the moment.
But fear is, after all, one of the impelling reasons people come to work on time and turn their projects in on time as adults. Fear keeps our speed down to fairly reasonable limits. Fear of the sergeant keeps the raw recruits jogging with their backpacks on. (It eventually keeps them alive when live ammunition is flying around.)
It’s sometimes necessary in the home and at school. It is—as any employer or military leader will tell you—a necessary component of leadership and of getting positive results.
Believe it or not, making certain you are at least a little bit feared is a necessary part of showing that your kids are really “worth whatever it takes”. It shows you care enough to go to the trouble to make sure they succeed. That’s real caring.
Just don’t expect to be thanked—now.

Obama and NASA

Obama has slashed the space program budget. This will offend people of my age who remember the Glory Days when we beat the Russians to the moon (“Rah, rah, rah—go team”) as well as those who profess a love of knowledge for its own sake.
Neither are adequate reasons for maintaining the space program in its present form. Were I in Obama’s place, I would probably have cut NASA way back too. Years ago I began looking at the space program through the eyes of historical precedent. I didn’t like what I saw.
Compare NASA today to the court of Henry the Navigator in the 1400s. Henry knew there was land (planets) out there; he knew there was MONEY to be made from those lands. He invested on a century long program of exploration that eventually paid off in billions if not trillions.
We can’t say that about NASA or any aspect of the space program today. (Yes, to paraphrase “Cabaret”, “Money, money, money is what makes exploration go around”.) Columbus was sent to make money. When he didn’t find it, they tossed him in jail.
Cortes found it—and began a long chain of successful exploration that brought back vast fortunes in gold, silver, spices, tobacco, sugar, furs, cotton, coffee, bananas, diamonds, rare metals and oil. To merit serious funding, the space program has to pay for itself the same way.
NASA has to begin working on four things, right here on earth, before we buy it any new, big toys. ONE) Ships with bigger payloads. Right now over 90% of the space on our space rockets is wasted on fuel. The payload (cargo) is limited to a few hundred pounds.
It’s going to be hard to build mining and living stations on other planets transporting materials in such tiny increments. We won’t be able to bring the goodies back in large enough amounts to pay for the huge number of flights needed.
We’ve got to get past gravity. Fantastic? No more so than taking building blocks of the universe that we cannot even see and creating atomic energy. We don’t even understand electricity, but it seems to make my computer and my refrigerator work just fine. In the 1940s, we had to build an atomic bomb; today we have to get past gravity. Improbable—but we did it then.
TWO) We have to start working on locating stuff we need. We have to make plans (and equipment) for how exploratory teams are going to look for it once we get to this stuff on other planets. How are we going to get it on the ships? How are we going to get it onto the planet?
If our spectrometers locate an unknown substance on Mars even now (like sugar, oil or potatoes in the new world), we have to be figuring out possible uses of it even at this stage. No one in Henry’s court could have told you what they were going to find in Montezuma’s back yard.
THREE) We’ve got to work on speed. Admittedly, the entire “age of exploration” took place in times when it took weeks and months to cross from one land mass to another. But the industrial age, which eventually produced a slave-free modern society, didn’t really get rolling until we could cross oceans in a few days.
Just like atomic energy and gravity, we have to get past the speed of light. Trickier, no doubt. Not an immediate need—but our imaginations are already nibbling at it. We’ll certainly never get to the age of Kirk and Spock without doing so. We should work on it, beginning now.
FOUR) We have to come up with “shields” of some sort to protect our ships and space stations. Space is full of nasty little projectiles that hurtle about at dangerous speeds and smash into things. Our atmosphere mostly protects us from them. Ships in space don’t have protective atmosphere.
Scientists tell us that our current space station has just been lucky so far. A fleet of ships that travel regularly from one planet to another will probably need more than luck. When we put people and equipment up there we will need to protect them from meteorites, asteroids and who knows what all else may be whizzing about.
Tell NASA, stay home and worry about basic things like these. When you’re on your way to solving them, we can talk about big budgets and voyages of exploration. We should still dream of “boldly going where no one has gone before”, we just aren’t ready yet.

Black/White Distrust II

Over the past decade I’ve had the interesting experience of substitute teaching in over 50 different buildings, ranging from inner city to completely rural, from less than 10% black to better than 90%. It has been an education.
I cannot say that I have particularly enjoyed my time in schools that were mostly black. Interestingly, the district wouldn’t let me sign up for the blackest schools. “They don’t want you, and you don’t want to be there.”
When I took an assignment in a middle school that was only about 90% black, a black teacher’s aide who seems to have pitied me warned, “You are an older white male. When you walk around here, you have a target on your back. Don’t forget it.”
She was so right. In that school—and only in that school—I had my briefcase rifled. Some days I had to break up two fights before the bell even rang. There were non-stop accusations that I was racist—try telling a black student that he has to do the same assignment anyone else has to do. He is almost certain to try to back you off with that charge.
I came up at a time when whites were being forcefully re-educated about using the term “black” rather than “Negro”. (W.E.B. DuBois had forced us to switch from “black” to “Negro” fifty years before—it gets confusing.) One day an angry young student vituperatively corrected me again, “We are called ‘African-Americans’!” she snapped at me.
I asked her what in the world THAT term meant—pointing out that I have a French neighbor who was born in Africa and is now an American. John Kerry’s wife qualifies—she is Portuguese, born in Africa, now a naturalized American. I admit my frustration resulting from accusation after accusation of being “prejudiced” or “bigoted” came to the fore.
My oldest friend, I went on, is married to a lovely French woman born in Africa, now American. I’ve known Dutchmen and Englishmen who qualified. I could have pointed out that my two lily-white sons could qualify—descendent as they are from a Swede who was born in Africa in 1635. For good measure, he was probably a slave trader.
The young lady marched to the principal’s office and declared me racist. The principal, a black man who had grown up in the neighborhood and even gotten himself expelled from that very school—and who knew me quite well—took her to his computer and showed her the history of “black” nomenclature. Then he sent her on her way.
Then there’s the line, “I ain’t your slave!” (I was citing a school rule.) Or, “You’re only telling me to be quiet because I’m black!” (No, because you are the loudest most disruptive fellow in the room—he had to grace to shut up.)
Walk into a largely white school at 7;00am. There will be smiles, occasional greetings. If they know you, they will call you by name and even ask how you are. Walk into a black school. They will studiously avoid looking at you. If accidentally they do meet your eye, you will see raw animosity. Eventually you feel like an idiot for smiling yourself. I definitely felt like I was a prison guard coming on duty—with the need to watch my back constantly.
The hostility is rooted in the absolute certainty that I am not there to do any of them any good. They trust no white person. It has to come from things their families inculcate in them—rather than any experiences they have yet had in their young lives.
And, if I’m in my right mind, I’d better no trust any of them. One time I left my reading glasses on the desk as I walked to the door to excuse the class. They were deliberately broken when I got back to the desk. (The school eventually replaced them—but they dragged their feet for months and, shortly after, dropped me from their list of available subs. I don’t miss it.)
Mendela showed us the way. After 27 years in prison, he dropped his own animosity and proclaimed everyone, black and white, to be a South African. If we can’t do that here—and make it stick—we are in for a long, rough future.

Black/White Distrust I

We are talking about black/white distrust. About why it is so much easier to befriend an African or Caribbean black person—about why I instinctively distrust even Barack Obama and his wife—just because he is an American born black man. I am certain that if we ever met, the feeling would be entirely mutual. Because of who and what we are.
I’ve seen the insides of a hurting white person more than once in my life—whether it was pain from death, betrayal, loss of a job, loss of a hope or dream. Only once have I been permitted to look beyond the grinning face of a black human being and observe the real person.
Let’s call him J.J. He was about my age, in his late twenties. I had grown up in a reasonably tony area of Grand Rapids; he had grown up in the bowels of segregated Washington, D.C. He would look at his very dark skin and reminisce, “I was so black even the niggers discriminated against me. When I talked college, my counselors advised trade school.”
He made it through college (and, later, law school). He served four years in the army. His colonel was a southerner who hadn’t adapted to Truman’s integration of the military a decade before—but because of his sheer competence he advanced J.J. to captain in less than four years.
(He just didn’t let J.J. actively command troops.) By the time I knew him, he was a Special Assistant to the President of the United States. I’ve known few men I respected more. We met while we were both working for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
In the fall of 1967, a year before the 1968 election, LBJ and his advisors took a look at the explosive political situation (rife with civil rights riots all over the nation) and realized he wasn’t going to get re-elected without a lot of help from angry white voters.
So he began to dial back the activities of agencies like the EEOC. He placed a very wealthy black man from “Strivers’ Row” in Harlem as Chairman of the EEOC and had him bring in a lot of his white Harvard buddies to help run the agency—more circumspectly.
The new white guys didn’t know diddly squat. Someone had to break them in. The agency chief gave J.J. the job of taking these clueless white folk on a intimate tour of the Washington ghetto. So he took them out and showed them.
I was the person who sat with him after he returned from these tours and unwound. All the humiliation, pent up memories, frustration in the man poured out as I listened and watched.
Some of it was funny. He would walk past a couple of kids, reach down inside a bag they were carrying—and show the burglary tool to the newbie. Or he would walk up to a group of young black men standing on a corner, start a conversation and bring the white man into it.
At the next corner where there was a group of young men, he would turn to him and say, “Now you do it.” Easier, far easier, for that man to empty the Pacific Ocean with a teaspoon. But no humiliation of his clueless white charge could quite measure up to his own.
He told me how, at a White House reception with all manner of hors d’oeuvres on display, conspicuous at one side of the table would be a platter of fried chicken for him and any other blacks present. He learned to live with it.
I mistook our relationship for actual friendship. One weekend I was throwing a party—I casually invited him to bring his wife and come. He looked at me. “A lot of invitations I can’t turn down—but yours I can. I’m sorry; I’ve been the nigger at too many parties.” Ouch. How stupid of me. But some mistakes you simply cannot take back.
We went on working together. We covered each other’s back in an increasingly treacherous environment—but nothing was ever quite the same between us. I had foolishly presumed. My education in racial distrust was continuing.
But he had let me—wittingly or no—see into his real self. I had seen at least some of his insides. I never forgot that—I never stopped respecting him.
But we could never have been friends.
More next time.

Michigan's Hiroshima--Black/White Distrust

I wrote yesterday about the chasm of distrust between whites and blacks in Detroit, in Washington and in most of the nation. I was telling the story of an experience I had in the 1960s when I tried to organize a community to keep it from being destroyed.
The immediate cause for this destruction was a white apartment management that had so much contempt for black Americans that they felt no need to continue to maintain apartment buildings blacks moved into. I was fighting to force them to.
I had come to rely on a wise old black preacher who was seated next to me when the door to our community meeting burst open and some drunken, angry white men advanced on me with clubs and ax handles, cursing me as a “dirty, commy, nigger loving Jew.”
The danger was real and serious. I didn’t know yet just how serious. Something happens to me when things get nasty—in a traffic situation or on the streets. It isn’t courage; I don’t know what it is. My insides go cold and I feel nothing. Time slows so much that it nearly stops.
But, I thought, I am not alone. I looked over at my “steering committee”, nearly all black. They were frozen in place, fear all over their faces. The old black pastor stood up suddenly, looked at the drunken deputy sheriff and pointed at me.
“If I had known,” he shouted, “what sort of a person this man was, I would NEVER have had anything to do with him.” It dawned on me that I was utterly alone. My black “allies”—even though they out-numbered the white bullies by a substantial number, and were mostly young and strong—were going to sit on their hands and watch me get pounded.
My eyes went back to the advancing drunk. He was half-way down the aisle, coming toward me, right where a cross aisle went from right to left across the auditorium. Somehow I felt moved to ask, “What are you so afraid of?”
His bully boy followers hawed and hooted. Him? Afraid? He’s not afraid of nothin’! The sheriff, however, came to a full stop. He turned to his left, ran down the cross aisle and out a side door. His bully boys stopped, looked confused, then turned and followed him out.
I felt the meeting had gone its full length. I dismissed them and they left (I would hope sheepishly). One of the younger, husky black men came up close to me and said, “We thought they were going to kill you.”
Well, duh, thanks for all your help—verbal and otherwise.
The next morning as I was going up the steps to my office one of the attendee’s slipped up side of me. He asked me to understand, “You’re a white man; you have options. You can live anywhere. We’re black—we don’t have options—so we couldn’t help you.”
I looked at him, “I thought that was the whole point of what we were doing. Helping keep the places you could live maintained and decent.” He gave me no answer. I took his brown arm, held it next to my white arm and said, “I guess we were born with our uniforms on.”
I moved out of the complex a few weeks later. Some of the black steering committee helped me load a U-Haul truck. I appreciated the help—but I do suspect they were just happy to be rid of me. I never saw any of them again.
Over the next years, the scales fell from my eyes. I made no further efforts to assist in areas where I would find myself alone and without backing. I expressed no surprise when a charming black hostess invited me to dinner and then went into a tirade about how all whites should be killed (I tend not to accept invitations to any more black homes—we smile and chat in public venues).
I learned in a hard and dangerous way that I am not trusted on their side of the fence (imaginary fence or real) and I learned the sad reality that I cannot trust them. Many of the million folk who have fled Detroit learned the same hard, unhappy lesson.
If somehow, someway, somebody doesn’t trust somebody, we’re going to have a lot more dead cities like Detroit—and it won’t be all the auto companies’ fault. God help us.
More later.

Michigan's Hiroshima--Distrust in Detroit

Last time I wrote about the desolation we still call Detroit. I referred everyone to the blog posted by Jeremy Korzeniewski on “autoblog”. It showed appalling pictures of what has become of vast tracts of the city of Detroit: falling down ruins, streets with no buildings left standing, something that looks a lot like Hiroshima after the big blast.
I conceded his point that the factories and auto industry that made Detroit a powerhouse have declined and even gone away. But I also pointed out that Detroit is a city known for its racial hatreds. Riots, military blockades and open hostility have marked its 20th Century history.
This history—and its ongoing aftermath—has made salvaging what’s left of Detroit much more difficult. It would be hard, indeed, to talk a middle class (both white and black) into coming back into a city so manifestly without services and unsafe.
They have fled—and taken their ability to pay the taxes necessary to maintain services and create new ones with them. What’s left cannot support itself. Detroit’s big problem right now is money—there isn’t any. Nada. Let’s look at some of the reasons for this.
The big companies (big tax payers) are limping badly. The age of the automobile and truck has made it possible to move businesses out into suburbs, abandoning the inner city. The sheer distrust and hatred that exists between black and white segments of the population.
That last one made me look at myself in the mirror of reality. I must confess that, way down deep inside, I find it hard to trust Barack Obama and his wife. (NOT because I think he was born in Africa, is a socialist or a Muslim, for crying out loud!!!)
My distrust is based solely on the fact that he is an American born black man. (I’ve known and been at ease with several AFRICAN and CARIBBEAN blacks—they somehow don’t carry with them the innate paranoia I’ve seen in too many American blacks. And also, American blacks do not trust me—it is often wise not to trust a man who will not trust you.)
Let me tell you a story. In the 1960s, I was blue eyed soul. I worked for blacks, I fought for blacks, I marched for blacks. They accepted me and I was permitted to call them “nigger” (as they called me) in the intimacy of friendship. I was too naïve to sense the distrust.
Washington, D.C. was just being integrated. One year they suddenly “integrated” a section of my all-white apartment complex. That meant they moved a group of black people in (did not screen them as they did whites—so some prostitutes set up business in that section) and stopped maintaining those areas.
I wanted the same standards maintained for black tenants that had always been there for white tenants--and the same maintenance. I met some of the black tenants, professionals like myself, and found we all agreed.
Working for the White House, I had access they lacked. I brought to bear upon the management of that complex the Americans for Democratic Action (a power in those years), the law firm of Nolan and Porter (the most influential in Washington then) and the “Washington Post”.
Then I located a white liberal pastor who had long worked to integrate the neighborhood and knew it well. I helped him call a community meeting. Hundreds came. Foolishly I turned the meeting over to him. He drew round after round of applause and, just when the iron was hot, he failed to strike. To use salesmen’s parlance, he didn’t ask for the sale.
He had no one sign anything, join anything or do anything. He just sent them all home with a promise of another meeting in a few days. I was horrified. I left with a very bad feeling. This would not be good.
But the next week I created a steering committee and we met several times. One man there proved to be a tower of strength, knowledge and wisdom. He was an elderly black preacher—who could fill me in on more neighborhood details than I had ever dreamt of.
I leaned on him. When the next meeting came, I had him sit right up next to me. Only fifty or sixty people showed up. Even the white preacher wasn’t there. But my friend was. I called us to order—when suddenly the door flew open.
In marched a drunken, retired white deputy sheriff with a club in his hands. Behind him were four or five more white bully boys. They advanced toward me, breathing threatening and slaughter. I have probably never felt more like an endangered species.
Let’s continue next time.

Detroit--Michigan's Hiroshima

I grew up in a Michigan where Detroit was the engine that pulled the rest of us along. Grand Rapids, Michigan’s second city, lived to make parts for the auto industry (which still included Studebaker, Packard, Hudson and Nash—as well as Pontiac, Oldsmobile and DeSoto.) If Detroit sneezed, West Michigan collapsed with pneumonia.
Today Grand Rapids looks fairly vibrant. Last week my wife and I took a stroll down Division Avenue—long a haunt of prostitutes and gangs. There were lots of couples and single women out walking. Construction cranes are all over downtown.
Detroit has eight supermarkets left within its 140 square miles—at least 40 square miles of which look like downtown Hiroshima right after the blast. Empty spaces, collapsing factories, streets that have no buildings on them.
A lot of this catastrophe can indeed be blamed on the collapsing auto market. GM’s market share is down from over 50% to around 20%; it has shed two out of five of its core brands. Chrysler looks a great deal like a dead company walking.
Ford is doing better but that is a very relative term for a company that once put a nation on wheels and created the largest auto market in the world. (China has that honor now.) If Huxley wrote “Brave New World” today, he would not refer to the “year of our Ford”.
The aerial photos of Detroit that were released online today were appalling. A chap named Jeremy Korzeniewski posted them on something called “autoblog”. If you didn’t get enough pictures of Dresden, Tokyo, Berlin, Hamburg, downtown Rotterdam or London after World War II, these are well worth looking at. These are taken right here.
It’s a city that died—without the help of an enemy air force. One of things they are thinking of doing there is clearing everything manmade out of whole sections of Detroit—and bringing back farming, for instance. After all, the city has lost nearly a million residents since 1950.
It would be much cheaper not to have to plow streets or maintain water lines and sewers that don’t service anyone any more. Fewer police and firemen would be needed—in numbers more in line with the present tax base.
But it isn’t just the car companies that did this. I remember walking through bustling business districts in the 1950s and turning off to walk through neat, prosperous urban homes to visit friends. No boarded up buildings, no thought of danger, no trash to kick my way through.
You wouldn’t do that today. Race relations played a big role. It wasn’t just bigoted whites fleeing. I was part of “white flight” out of a once lovely urban neighborhood in Grand Rapids. It was once chock full of college professors, business owners, MDs, dentists, teachers, executives and other professionals. If you are white, don’t walk those streets after dark today.
I’ve been mugged there twice, once in front of a 3,000 sq ft home, the second time in front of what was once one of the best men’s clothing stores in the city. I don’t recollect how many times a car pulled up along side of me or my wife and we were told, “You’re in the wrong neighborhood, white man, get out of here or we’ll kill you.”
When live ammunition started flying, our entire family moved out of the neighborhood my mother and then I grew up in. (Much “white flight” occurs for similar reasons.) The head of the Michigan Civil Rights Commission agreed with me that this was part of a deliberate strategy of terror to drive whites out.
Detroit went through the same thing. In schools, on sidewalks, with bricks through windows. And the tax base ran for its life. I watched a downtown mall die in Muskegon for similar reasons—mommies with money to spend would no longer go there.
If the hatred—not just of whites for blacks, but of blacks for whites—is not assuaged (and we can’t all wait for “them” to stop hating “us”—they may never), then we are going to have more and more Detroits and boarded up homes in places like Grand Rapids and Muskegon.
Mandela of South Africa, who spent nearly 30 years in a white prison for being black, understood this. We need a lot more people—on both sides of the color line—like him. Mr. Korzeniewski’s pictures are a good reminder.

Simple Arithmatic That Tea Partys Miss

Last time I talked about what I consider to be the absurdity of the Tea Party position—however mainstream American it may be. Now let’s talk about some valid concerns Americans do have about our present governmental activities.
Last evening I stopped to chat with a neighbor who has run his own construction business for several decades, does good enough work to be prospering in recession, and is much too busy to take time off for tea parties of any kind.
He just evaluates the fiscal policies in Washington from the standpoint of the simple arithmetic that has to govern his own business decisions. If you earn $1,000 a week and you continually spend twelve or thirteen hundred, at some point something bad is going to happen.
Very basic—a well educated third grader could probably walk you through it. Neither he nor I are refuting Keynes—but Keynes in his wildest imagination probably didn’t contemplate a level of governmental spending in GOOD TIMES and BAD that led to consistent and often huge deficits on a regular basis.
We haven’t just spent our way out of recessions and depressions. If bad years were the only time we had run deficits, our national debt would be infinitely smaller. Keynes’s idea was to ramp up government spending when everybody else was flat—and, hopefully, to PAY IT OFF IN GOOD YEARS. Like a nearby power plant works in Michigan.
At night when demand for electricity is low, it expends energy pumping Lake Michigan water into a huge reservoir. When day comes and homes and factories turn on the juice, the water flows back out, turns the turbines and generates power.
This is the backup plant that is used to restart electrical plants all over Michigan in cases of major power failure. It’s precisely the sort of thing Keynes had in mind in government finances. Unfortunately the United States has been running the water out without pumping much in for decades.
My neighbor’s concern is that at some point the fiscal reservoir is likely to run dry—even if he doesn’t say it in those terms.
He’s right. The American lust for a free lunch—first noted when we refused to pay our fair share of defense taxes during and after the wars with France—is eventually going to catch up with us. Since the 1960s (the game began long before Reagan) we’ve been cutting taxes (water being pumped into the reservoir) and piling on new programs, Medicaid, college aid and grants, Medicare, Social Security entitlements, enhanced welfare and fighting wars (water flowing out), without paying for it.
Had we been regularly replenishing the reservoir, we might well have afforded a few trillion here, a few trillion there to bail out our economy in 2008. (Then again, if we had always been the kind of people willing to PAY for government services, we might never have gotten into the mess we were in a year ago.)
At some point, as Greece found out, the reservoir really will run dry. Then there will be no more juice generated—and nothing with which to restart the plant. But the problem isn’t a “socialist Obama” who is the first president ever to run us into debt.
The problem is us. WE stood at Bunker Hill or at Boston Harbor and shouted that we wouldn’t pay for the services we demanded from government. WE voted for what George H.W. Bush called “voodoo economics” back in 1980 when we elected Reagan.
WE cheered as Lyndon Johnson slashed taxes, created vast new programs and launched a very expensive war all at once. WE loved George W. Bush as he cut taxes and launched his world wide war on terror.
Someday we definitely are going to get a notice: “Your credit limit has been exceeded”. That’s when the tea party people will really have something to be mad about.

Tea Parties--The Ultimate American Party

Americans have always loathed being asked to pay their fair share of anything. This is, after all, the “land of the free—lunch”. If they can’t get it free, they want it cheap—quality be hanged.
I’ve talked about how an American secretary will go to a discount store and buy a dozen cheap outfits that last only months—whereas a European secretary, specifically the French, may buy only three or four outfits—but they will last (and look good) for years.
American car manufacturers understood their market for years—making cars designed to go only about three or four years and then be replaced. Only when cars started to cost as much as small houses did Japanese and European cars that run longer appeal to the American buyer.
GM and Chrysler’s troubles aren’t all of their own making. They have for decades given the American consumer exactly what he wanted (as K-Mart and Walmart did with clothes); they were blindsided by the change in consumer sentiment brought on by high prices.
And—have you noticed?—American voters have made an art of keeping both parties in enough power to ensure that no one will take their government freebies (Social Security, Pell grants, etc.) away and no one will make them pay the full cost for them.
That has gone on for so long that both voter and government seem to assume that it can go on forever—after all, who says that what goes up must absolutely come down? It hasn’t happened in American politics; why should it start now?
Now the people who object to making health care available for all Americans are rallying their troops with “tea parties”. If you don’t have health insurance, the attitude seems to be, “Go out and get a job”--ignoring the fact that fewer and fewer jobs come with benefits.
The hostile attitude toward government comes with a horrific fear of government. The government that we trust to build roads, highways, airports, water mains, sewers—to protect us from the outbreak of strange new diseases, to fund medical research, to fight to keep our oil supplies coming—that government would suddenly be a monster if it took over health care.
By building roads and highways, government has made the auto industry the most heavily subsidized industry in human history. And where would Boeing be if government didn’t build airports and maintain safe air routes? But subsidize health care for the poor and sickly, the under-insured, those in jobs without benefits? God forbid!
It’s a bit like the situation back in the 1760s when the British government asked Americans to pay their fair share of the costs of a war that protected them from the French and Indians. We rioted, we burned houses, we boycotted—until London gave up.
Or in the 1770s when London—admittedly to save some British investors—subsidized a tea company (no American government would EVER subsidize a company, right?) and allowed tea prices to fall far enough that it became cheaper to buy legal tea than the stuff brought in by American smugglers like John Hancock, we held the “Tea Party” to end all tea parties right there in Boston harbor. A huge amount of money was lost.
The British government reacted by defending the investors (again, no American government would act to defend investors over the desires of price-driven consumers, right?)—and we had a shooting war on our hands.
We would have been in serious trouble if the French, our old enemy, hadn’t taken the opportunity to get revenge on Britain by supplying us with 90% of our munitions, cannon, warships and troops. We repaid them by signing a separate treaty with England that left France in the lurch. She went broke, her government collapsed—and we didn’t have to pay.
Yes, indeedy, tea party time is definitely American. Especially when someone has the nerve to ask us to pay for something. We’ll take it free when we can, cheap from the lowest bidder when we absolutely can’t get it for nothing. Ah, piffle.

The New Discrimination--Freedom of Religion

Here we go again. The University of California’s Hastings College of Law has skewered itself on the horns of dilemma it never needed to have created or to have faced. The whole matter goes before the Supreme Court tomorrow.
It seems that Hastings College of Law has a rigid policy that no organization that uses school property, enrolls students or advertises its meetings on campus may discriminate on the grounds of religious or sexual orientation.
Which immediately spelled trouble for the local chapter of the Christian Legal Society—a reasonably innocent group (no militia members here)of future lawyers of the Christian persuasion who want to meet with fellow Christian law students.
Christianity—like Islam, Judaism, Hinduism and Buddhism—is by its nature exclusionary. Most Christian organizations expect members to believe that Christ is God, part of a divine trinity, that he died in place of men for their misbehaviors, and so forth.
Voting members and officers of the society are expected to adhere to these basic principles. One of the principles that most annoys Hastings is the Christian attitude about homosexuality. Like theft, cheating on one’s spouse or blasphemy it is considered unacceptable.
In fact, conservative Christians go so far as to agree with the majority of the American Psychological Association membership who held that homosexuality was a perverse form of personality disorder. This was their belief back in the early 1970s when a minority group of APA members rammed through the position that it was merely a life style choice.
So the Christian Legal Society, in the mind of Hastings College of Law, joins a select group of student organizations deemed unfit for future lawyers. It will not be allowed to use campus facilities for its meetings. (No one said, incidentally, that non-Christians could not attend; merely that they could not be voting members or officers.)
The Supreme Court must now decide (again—and again and again, no doubt) whether the position of the college violates the First Amendment or whether Christians are truly discriminatory when they limit membership in a Christian organization to Christians.
The First Amendment’s “freedom of religion” clause reads as follows: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; …”. That says two things.
One) Congress shall NOT establish a national state church (like the Episcopal Church in England, the Reformed Church in the Netherlands or the Presbyterian Church in Scotland)—especially not one that would SUPERCEDE the established STATE churches that existed in several of the states at the time the Bill of Rights was ratified.
In other words, all it PREVENTS is the creation of a federal government run/funded national denomination. It doesn’t even contemplate the new notion of keeping Christian groups off public college campuses because this might discriminate against non-Christians or atheists.
Two) In absolutely no way can CONGRESS pass any kind of law that would keep the Christian Legal Society from “the free exercise” of its religion—even if that keeps non-Christians from becoming voting members or officers.
Once again the Justices must put on their spectacles and see if they can still read the clear wording of that wonderful old 18th Century document, the Bill of Rights. They should remember that the entire basis of their legal and political power rests on their willingness/ability to interpret the Constitution and its amendments.
Why should Hastings College of Law be permitted to do what Congress itself is expressly forbidden to do? Will the court decide it has the clear power to ignore or overrule a fundamental principle of the American Democracy and its Constitution?
If the Court chooses to step beyond the protection that the Constitution provides them, then more Presidents may feel free to disregard their decisions—as Andrew Jackson did when he said, “John Marshall [chief justice] has made his law; let him enforce it.” They might take the defiance Obama has already shown more seriously. Future Chief Executives more do more than waggle a finger at them during a State of the Union Address.

Goldman Sachs Gets A "Good Smack"

That’s what mothers used to say—as in, “You need a … .” So now it’s Goldman Sachs turn to take one. Whether it will ever come to more than that, whether anyone will ever succeed in proving that this was the naughty kid who started the mess-- or not-- is yet to be seen.
After all this is an election year. There are a lot of peevish folk out there who lost chunks of retirement funds and other investments. There are a passel of poor souls who blame their unemployed status on the financial collapse of 2008. You have to be able to say, “Look, this was all done to you by wicked people, and we are punishing them.”
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has brought a lawsuit against Goldman Sachs, a hither-to untouched sacred cow of Wall Street. It made tons and tons of money last year and paid tons of money to the employees who took the wild risks and made the company’s profits.
“Some of those risks were too risky for the investor and not risky enough for Goldman Sachs,” the SEC is suggesting. When you sell somebody else a really risky investment—and then bet it will fail, thus betting against your own trusting customers, that can be fraud. So says the SEC.
Those were the “derivatives” that Goldman Sachs and several other major firms spent the last several years selling—to pension funds, foreign banks, each other, mutual funds and private investors. Everybody took a bath—except Goldman Sachs.
Congress voted to allow unregulated derivative trading ten years ago—and the market has grown to over 600 trillion of those little items scattered all over the place, all unregulated. They were a big part of the collapse a year ago last fall.
Of course, a having a lawsuit filed against you doesn’t mean you’re going to lose a lot (other than very major legal fees, which Goldman Sachs can probably afford—but it will put a dent in profits). But, up until now, derivatives have been left totally alone. Congress hasn’t even been willing to talk about regulating them. There has been no legal action or threat thereof. Until now.
So the SEC, which largely sat on its hands as speculations and deceptive financial instruments went wildly out of control over the past few years has finally taken action. I asked myself what this reminded me of—and came up with the following allegory.
A man robs a bank. He shoots someone. The police (government, SEC, Congress, White House) comes in to investigate. They find the bank tellers at fault for having too much money on hand—and thus tempting the robber. They say nothing to the shooter.
They find the bank guard at fault because he allowed himself to be hit over the head and disarmed. They find the bank’s customers at fault because they deposited so much money in that bank. The shot person is at fault because he visited the bank at the wrong hour.
Oh, and there was blame for the bank manager. If he had just had procedures in place to hand the money to the robber without fuss, no one would have been hurt. But no one says anything to or about the shooter. He goes free—to invest the money he got and make himself an ever larger fortune. After all, he was just being a good capitalist.
And now they are actually going to sue the shooter. Of course there is a great hue and cry among his fellow bank robbers—I mean other Wall Street investment bankers—that business will be greatly impaired if the shooter is penalized in any way, and this way of raising capital is curtailed.
I don’t know how it will all play out. A judge could throw the case out; Congress could make an unpredictable move; the White House could offer to mediate in such a way the keeps Goldman Sachs safe from all harm; juries in cases like this can be about as predictable as the path of a tornado—our national history is replete with such eventualities.
But, for the moment, some guys who caused a lot of misery with their recklessness—and, very possibly, chicanery—are having a bad evening. However briefly it lasts, that at least is some satisfaction for the folks who trusted Goldman Sachs—and its ilk—to have their backs.

Empathy ("Justice") and Law at The HIgh Court

Back during the election campaign of 1960, I got caught in a rainstorm in the middle of Manhattan. I took shelter under the flap of a newspaper kiosk somewhere around 23rd Street. It was pouring; there were no customers; so we talked.
We started talking about Kennedy. Then we segued into American attitudes toward a Catholic President (a major issue in 1960!). I was astonished to learn that he and his Italian-American compatriots had little use for Irish Catholics in general, Kennedy specifically.
From there we somehow got on the subject of the Mafia. I expressed the attitude of a mid-western WASP that the Mafia was an evil organization. He took no offense; he merely set out to explain what to him were patently obvious facts to a callow youth.
“In Sicily my uncle was a ‘capo’”—a Mafia chieftain. “A poor man came to my uncle. He said a wealthy neighbor had stolen two of his few sheep. Yes, he had gone to the Carabinieri. They had dismissed him—‘What can we do about two sheep?’
“So he came to my uncle. My uncle went to the hall or records and went through all the recorded sheep transactions of the past several years. Then he went and counted the rich man’s sheep. Two too many.
“He told the rich man, ‘Return the sheep or they will find your head in the woods’. The sheep were immediately returned. Justice was done. I can still remember the way he waggled his finger at me. “Now I tell a story about here, in New York.”
“I used to be a barber. The most valuable things I own are my old barber tools. They cost hundreds of dollars. One day I came home and found that I had been robbed—all my pants were taken and my barber tools.
“I got to thinking. At the back I share a fire escape with the apartment next door. A welfare family lives there. They are always home. One day I felt sorry for one of the older kids and I gave him one of my suits. He gave me back the coat; only the pants fit him.
“So I went to the police—explaining how easy it would be to get from their apartment to mine, about the pants. They told me there was nothing they could do.” (Police in New York limit their concern over petty robberies to filling out insurance forms so the robbed can collect on their policies. They do nothing else.)
“I went across the street to the candy store and went in the back room where the bookie was. I told him my story. He said, ‘I can’t do everything for you. What do you need to have back?’ I told him I wanted my barber tools. He nodded.
“Next day I came home and my tools are lying on my kitchen table.” He looked at me with disdain, “So, who do you think I vote for? The police—or the Mafia?” (He was speaking of the old, italian Mafia—which made its own streets the safest, quietest in New York.)
The rule of law failed him. It failed the poor man in Sicily. So they came to the local “king” for Justice. He dispensed pure, equitable Justice—with no reference to precedent or legal jurisdiction. Several of the more liberal members of the Senate are calling for what is really the same thing is they contemplate appointing a new Supreme Court Justice.
They want empathy. Admittedly the Carabinieri showed none. They want emotional considerations taken into account. The bookie did that. Failure at law—as it did when the original Equity Courts were created—has left the door open for this kind of appeal.
But what do we want? The bookie or an improved police force? How do we improve it—or the courts? These are the questions the Senate is actually facing. President Obama—a black man from our most prestigious law school—is looking at the same questions.
The problem is ancient. The solution is, at best, imperfect. But let us understand what we are really deciding. As a Democracy we have the power to choose whichever one we want; let’s just understand what the choices really are.
I think my little news vendor still has lots of company.

Justice or Law at the Supreme Court?

Many years ago I entered law school, glowing with visions of doing justice and rescuing fair damsels and other wronged souls from distress. I maintained that view for about a year. Then one evening I found myself in company with two older men, both experienced lawyers.
One was a White House counsel; the other, his friend, a Duke University law professor. Over a bottle of bourbon we began to argue. We went at it until well into the wee hours. I had made the mistake of expressing my desire to “do justice”.
They were horrified. By three or four o’clock they were yelling. “Law,” I remember the professor shouting, “has NOTHING to do with justice!! Justice is a fascist concept. Law is PROCESS!” It took me years to fully understand what he meant.
Other lawyers have called it “system”. You build it, point by point, case by case, on precedent. If you concern yourself exclusively with avenging poor widows and making everything “fair”, you run the risk of creating “bad law” as Justice Holmes put it.
I think the best lesson I ever got in what law actually is and does came from a wealthy man who bought and sold real estate. He explained what he expected from his lawyer at a closing. “I want someone there who doesn’t care a snap whether or not the deal goes through or whether it’s a good deal or a bad one.
“I want someone with me whose ONLY concern is whether all the “I’s” are dotted and all the “t’s” crossed. I’m the one who’s all excited about the deal and the purchase. I want him to be completely indifferent.”
THAT, it can be validly argued, is the proper function and behavior of LAW—a sublime indifference to the situation of any individual, a concern only that the procedure runs its proper course—based on past decisions and experience.
Anything else is in fact EQUITY. (Equity was tossed out of the American legal system around 1876.) The best example of Equity is found in the Jewish Bible, in the story of King Solomon who determines just which woman is the real mother of the living child by taking a sword and offering to cut it in half, giving each woman a share.
It set no precedent (we know of no other case where a judge/king resorted to a similar measure), it changed no law, it had no effect on “Stare decisis”—it simply got the real mother to identify herself when she begged Solomon to keep the child alive and give him to the other woman.
That is how “justice” gets done. It really has no place in law. My drinking friends were correct. The best legal decisions ignore questions of who’s right, who’s wrong—and simply try to satisfy both sides enough so that there is no rioting or assassination in the streets.
They take vengeance completely out of the hands of the aggrieved party and, as impersonally as possible, inflict it in the name of process and the state. Anything else could risk dropping back into darker times when a victim’s family was expected to exact eye for eye, tooth for tooth.
As a result, we have “unjust” verdicts where the wrong man is sent to prison or when a really heinous act by a human or a corporation does not seem to draw sufficient punishment. Law’s only concern, historically, is to maintain the “king’s peace”—to do just fair enough a job to keep the injured parties from taking things into their own hands.
It’s NOT to “do justice”—it’s to “keep the peace”. And it IS more peaceful when judges deal with murderers rather than private individuals. I don’t know if the alternative is properly called “fascism” or not, but it would be a lot less tranquil. (Drive by shootings by peevish gang members are a perfect example of some peoples’ notion of “justice”. The Mafia is legendary for exacting “justice”. Do they do a better job than the courts?)
We’re picking a new Supreme Court Justice this summer. What much of the arguing will be about is the question: Is his interest scrupulously and only the law and its precedents—or does he allow considerations of equity and “justice” to sway him? Will he create “bad law” by settling Holmes’ “hard cases” with too much empathy and fairness?
So what will we have on the Supreme Court this time? Law or Justice? Impartial process or emotion ridden empathy? Do you suppose a bottle or two of bourbon might help?
(My two mentors and I parted friends. Foolishly, I now think, I quit law school. With more patience and a better understanding I might have made a decent lawyer. Who knows?)

Public Schools--Why They Were Created

Few would argue that the American educational system—for all the billions spent on it—suffers from some serious glitches. Too many kids squeeze through with skills far too minimal to make them employable in today’s world.
It worked when a kid could walk out of school at sixteen, go into a factory and pull the handle on a punch press for several decades, and then retire on some kind of pension. It worked really well in the 1950s and ‘60s when wages for unskilled labor soared along with their pensions.
Except for a relatively few scientists and scholars—who tended to get their learning from private, parochial are public schools located in affluent districts filled with motivated—and motivating—educated parents, we did all right with the semi-literate punch press pullers.
Now the underlying problems with the system—that were always there, but of no real significance—are showing up. Brutal fact is the average public school was never designed to teach people the skills they need to live in a technologically challenging world.
Let’s go back to the beginning—1837, when Massachusetts’ Horace Mann became the first State Secretary of (Public) Education in history. The way we tell the story now, both Mann (who may well have been, personally) and the tax payers of Massachusetts were motivated by an altruistic desire to see all the little children properly educated.
Something doesn’t ring true here. Massachusetts basically invented the American (UNSKILLED) factory system—at this period in time. Kids went to work there at ages as young as eight and nine—and got no education at all.
So what got the same voting tax payers who owned the factories and employed the children at lovely low wages fired up to create a public school system? Blame the unwashed, illiterate, unwashed, Catholic Irish for that.
The factory owners were protestants—at a time when the nation was militantly protestant. Catholics were at best heretical, at worst treacherous and evil. The factory owners were largely from the Island of Great Britain, where contempt for the Irish has been epidemic for centuries.
After all the Pilgrims and Puritans who founded New England were all English protestants. Scotch Irishmen (also protestant, originally from Great Britain) gained great respect during the Revolution for their ability to shoot British sentries at vast distances—and they kept largely to the frontier areas of the new nation.
There were Germans in Pennsylvania—protestant. (New York City was always suspiciously diverse—14 languages were spoken in the city by 1660.) The rest of the new nation was largely White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (except for a few hundred thousand black slaves).
But, by 1830, Ireland had begun a century-long process of emigration, in which two out of every five living Irishmen fled the island—five million coming to America alone. The most Irish city in America became that once bastion of Puritan probity, Boston.
The Anglo-Saxons were shocked, to say the least, at the unwashed and illiterate condition of the new immigrants—the first of subsequent wave upon wave of non-English, Welsh or Scots folk. These “new” immigrants simply weren’t at all like the old Puritans and Virginians.
It became necessary to teach these barbarians how to be proper Americans. Teach them how to write and speak proper English, to wash their hands and bodies, to forego some of their most offensive Catholic superstitions. What better way than to fund a “non-sectarian” public school system that would teach all children to be good, clean, protestant Americans? As more immigrants flooded in, more “public” schools were created.
(Some of that kind of instruction was still found in our schools when I attended in the 1940s.) The Irish reacted, not really surprisingly, by creating parochial Catholic schools so that they could hang onto their own traditions.
But the real point is: can a public school system originally structured to teach cleanliness and protestantism and English values do an effective job of teaching math, the sciences or other purely academic disciplines? Or do we have to go way back to the beginning and construct a completely new system designed to meet the needs of our post industrial, knowledge oriented society?
Might problems with the purposes for which and ways the system was originally structured be part of the reason it isn’t working today? If so, we have bigger problems than can be solved simply by increasing or cutting teachers’ pay.