Irony

When Joe Paterno, the Penn State football coach, died on January 22^nd, his record of 409 wins was the most in the history of major college football. As of yesterday morning – after the NCAA vacated Paterno’s 111 victories between 1998 and 2011 in the wake of Jerry Sandusky’s conviction for child molestation – he had 298. Perhaps only in our culture would the forfeiture of games played long ago be considered “severe” punishment for enabling and then covering up the abuse of young boys. And it’s hard to see what difference it can make. Joe Paterno is beyond caring about his won-loss record. The players are not going to rewrite their memories of the games they played. Nor are the memories of the men who were victimized as boys going to change.

The college football powers had to do something in the wake of the report from former FBI Director Louis Freeh that “Four of the most powerful people at the Pennsylvania State University — President Graham B. Spanier, Senior Vice President-Finance and Business Gary C. Schultz, Athletic Director Timothy M. Curley and Head Football Coach Joseph V. Paterno — failed to protect against a child sex predator harming children for over a decade.”

So perhaps it’s fitting in a sordid kind of way that the punishment for pretending something wasn’t happening over all those years is to decree that games that were actually played were never played at all – to change the history of things that don’t matter because Penn State turned a blind eye to things that mattered desperately.

I am going off into the woods for a few days, so I probably won’t bother you again until next week.

Aurora

The killings at the Century 16 movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, are a tragedy. For now, I don’t know what more can be said about them, and yet hundreds of reporters continue to turn out millions of words. The city of Aurora is under occupation, as news people seek some new angle, some overlooked teacher of James Holmes or neighbor of a victim, some anecdote that will create a headline.

Every detail will be analyzed for a clue to the motive of the shooter, to his state of mind. My 90-year-old mother keeps saying, “he doesn’t look like a mass murderer.” I know what she is thinking: that he is clean cut, nice looking, white – like Charles Whitman, who shot 48 people from the University of Texas tower in August 1966, like Ted Bundy, who raped and killed over 30 people. My mother doesn’t know what a mass murderer looks like, and neither do I.

We talk about life’s randomness, but most of us cannot stand it. So we grasp at any straw that will let us think we have some control, and we fit people into stereotypes that don’t exist. We hold vigils with recognizable icons – bouquets, teddy bears, the flag – which have become not just outlets for community grief, but national theater for the rest of us.

I believe that thoughtful insights will emerge from this tragedy over time, long after the nation has moved on from this obsession, leaving the victims’ families to cope however they can. I cannot begin to imagine their grief.

Stumble of the Week

Rational Discourse 1. A sign in front of the Baptist Church in Palermo, Maine: “The Big Bang. God Said It. Bang It Happened.” I must admit, that is simpler to grasp than Higgs Boson. Rational Discourse 2: Ron Christie, a former aide to Dick Cheney, defended the voter identification laws recently passed in 10 states by reminding us that “voting is a privilege, not a right.” While the effect of the laws will disenfranchise millions of poor and minority citizens, Christie told NPR that their intent is to “preserve the integrity of the ballot box.” So it must be a coincidence that the laws were passed by Republican-controlled legislatures and the vast majority of those who will be turned away have traditional Democratic profiles.

Christie’s position, however ethically obtuse, has been upheld by the Supreme Court, which has granted the states broad discretion to determine voter eligibility. In the early days of the Republic, most states limited that eligibility to white male property owners over 21. But over the years, we have extended the vote to blacks, women, 18-year-olds, etc. – and we have made “free and fair” elections the cornerstone of our foreign policy. Both here and abroad, people have shed blood for the “right to vote,” and our landmark legislation on the matter is the “Voting Rights Act” of 1965.

A privilege is something that somebody grants me. A right is something that inheres to me as a member of the community. And if voting ought to be a fundamental right for everybody else in the world, it certainly should be one for me as well.

Against All Odds

Jock Hooper was a fourth-generation member of one of the oddest clubs in North America: the Bohemian Club, a 140-year-old organization best known for its Bohemian Grove, a campground north of San Francisco, where many of the nation’s most powerful men gather for two weeks each summer to camp, perform skits and bond. The Grove is a place of remarkable beauty and tranquility, and Jock spent hours hiking its remote 2,700 acres, which hold some of the last stands of old-growth redwoods anywhere. One day he noticed that several of the finest redwoods were marked for cutting, and the more he walked the more appalled he became at what he saw.

Assuming there must be some mistake, he notified club officials, who patted him on his figurative head and told him to mind his own business. Angry, not cowed, Jock kept pushing. He wrote a letter to the members describing what he had witnessed. The president called that “unbohemian,” which is apparently about as low as you can go.

In truth, Jock had loved being a Bohemian. He is a performer who will burst into song with almost no provocation. But in the end, he loved the trees and his principles more. He resigned from the club to carry his fight, which became an 11-year odyssey, during which he was belittled, ridiculed, threatened and shunned. Old friends crossed the street to avoid him. Others wished him well in private but kept silent in public.

Against all odds, he prevailed.

One person can make a difference.

Greetings!

Israel’s “unity government” collapsed yesterday. The issue that brought it down was the draft. Contrary to my assumption, there are lots of exemptions to Israeli conscription – primarily to Ultra-Orthodox Jews who are excused to study the Torah, and Israeli Arabs, whose status in the country is, well, complicated. In fact, Israel’s “universal service” is so laced with loopholes that only half the young people actually serve. The issue has seethed for years below the surface . . . and the Supreme Court declared the system unconstitutional last February.

In this country, which spends far more than any other on its military, less than one percent of the population currently serves, and the growing gap between military and civilian life has: led to multiple tours in war zones for soldiers and families already under great stress; made the rest of us far less concerned than we ought to be with what is happening in those places; and exacerbated a class system in a country that refuses to recognize it has one.

A democracy only works if there is (1) a shared burden (n.b. the rich pay taxes) and (2) civilian control of the military. Both these are threatened by the current situation. The only solution I can think of is national service (with non-military alternatives) for everyone, without exception. There is so much that needs to be done in this country, and we all need to pitch in and do it.

Most of us didn’t want the letter from our draft board that opened with “Greetings!” But it’s time to bring it back.

Shoes

One of my earliest memories is my first visit to the shoe store. Above the doorway hung a sign that read, “I had no shoes and I complained . . . until I met a man who had not feet.” In hindsight the shoe store seems an incongruous place for such a sign, as it counted neither the shoeless nor the footless among its clients. But it made an indelible impression on me. Perhaps the sign was simply aimed at telling kids like me to be grateful for what we had. But I read a deeper message, one that required me to think about my connection to others who had no shoes, or even no feet – and that demanded, not just gratitude for what I had, but compassion for those who had little or nothing.

I thought of that sign as I drove recently to Flint and Detroit, places where large numbers of people have so little and feel increasingly unconnected to the America in which I live. And when I drove back to Maine, where I write this, I was struck by how little we know of – or think about – the people in our crumbling cities.

When Ferdinand Marcos was deposed from the Philippines’ presidency in 1986, the enduring symbol of both his corruption and his detachment was the allegation that his wife, Imelda, owned 1,700 pairs of shoes in a country filled with shoeless people. And I fear for an America where those who have so much are increasingly insulated from those who have so little.

Following the Herd

Americans have long had an antipathy toward “government” . . . except, of course, when we need it for things like growing old, regulating child labor, rescuing the economy from plundering plutocrats, protecting clean air and water, enforcing civil rights . . . things like that. Otherwise we like to picture America being built by rugged individualists clearing the frontier and small businessmen creating jobs, while the scalawags in Washington plot to tax away their life savings.

This election is giving us that image in spades. We have a socialist president pursuing big-government policies that will enshrine inefficiency, class warfare and the herd mentality, opposed by a businessman fighting to unleash the power of the private sector and the creativity of visionary individuals.

So, I was surprised by the bank employee who told the Fed official that Barclay’s reported false interest rates because it wanted to “fit in with the rest of the crowd.”

You might think that, after wrecking the world’s economy four years ago, the big banks might at least pretend to care about the public’s trust or their clients’ welfare. But it’s hard to see a scintilla of shame, as reports in the last three days show:

• Analysts giving advance information on corporate earnings to large hedge funds.
• JP Morgan losing $2 billion in rogue trades. Oh, sorry, $3.5 billion. Well, actually, it’s closer to $6 billion. Um, would you believe $7.5?
• HSBC apologizing for money-laundering.
• Peregrine Financial unable to account for $215 million in customers’ money, going bankrupt and being charged with fraud

The brazenness of the crimes, the baldness of the lies and the pettiness of the excuses reveal a financial system out of control.

Mitt Romney, we are told, should be president because he knows how to run a business. Suddenly, that’s not particularly reassuring.

Stumble of the Week

National Pride. As economists detected a slight uptick in growth indicators at a pace The New York Times described as “sluggish, if not dismal” (which is the first time I have seen "dismal" used to describe a hopeful trend), ABC News was reporting that the sharp new, Ralph Lauren-designed, red-white-and-blue American Olympic uniforms were “made in China.” Perhaps there’s a connection. The U.S. Olympic Committee responded: "We're proud of our partnership with Ralph Lauren, an iconic American company." Perhaps American manufacturers can get a piece of the knock-off business. The Bris. A regional German court’s decision that circumcision of young boys “amounted to grievous bodily harm” has united Jewish and Muslim organizations as no political negotiations have been able to do. The groups, however, took no stance on female circumcision, which is practiced widely in parts of Africa and the Middle East.

Communication. When former Irish Republican Army commander Martin McGuinnes shook hands with Queen Elizabeth, whose family he had once plotted to assassinate, he gave her a Gaelic blessing, "Slán agus beannacht." Neither McGuinnes nor the queen speaks Gaelic.

Maturity. It’s only July and already the presidential campaign rhetoric is racing to the bottom, with the Romney and Obama teams squabbling over whether the former left Bain Capital in 1999 or 2002. Ostensibly it has to do with job-outsourcing (see above), but it’s really about petty personal shots most of us left on the playground. I’ve got to believe even Romney remembers the year he left Bain.

Bombs Away

“The United States dropped more bombs on Laos than on Germany and Japan in World War II.” The BBC newsman uttered that sentence yesterday as I was driving along thinking of nothing in particular. He had one of those professional British voices that lull you into a half-listening sense of a world in order – “I say, Jeeves, will you pack the soup-and-fish, and we’ll jump into the two-seater and toodle on down to Blandings.”

Then it sunk in: more bombs on Laos than on Germany and Japan. We dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, and over just three days in 1945, waves of US and RAF bombers made 15 square miles of downtown Dresden disappear.

We weren’t even at war with Laos. Yet an average of one B-52 bombed the country every eight minutes, 24 hours a day, for nine years. When we were finished, we had delivered 260 million bombs – a ton for each Laotian – making them the most heavily bombed people, per capita, in the history of the world.

About a third of the bombs failed to explode, and they have killed an estimated 20,000 people since. Hilary Clinton returned to Laos yesterday, the first official American visit since we left Southeast Asia in 1975, and one of those who greeted her was a young man who had lost both hands and his eyesight on his 16^th birthday.

He is what we now call collateral damage. If it happened here, we’d undoubtedly find another name for it.

Vision Matters

On Monday I wrote about language and yesterday I mentioned Ireland. Today I combine the two. I read somewhere recently that in ancient Ireland it was a greater crime to kill a poet than a king. I can’t find a citation and, although it seems apocryphal, I suspect it’s true, because in ancient Ireland poets had equal status with bishops and kings. At any rate, it helps explain the history of a people who have been far better served by their poets than their rulers and have, as a consequence, developed a rich culture and a strong identity that have enabled them to survive centuries of oppression. Perhaps it’s just his Irish-sounding surname, but I believe that Barack Obama’s appeal in 2008 was to the poetry in us. In his rhetoric, in his persona and in a biography that brought together so many disparate strands of America’s heritage, he appealed across conventional political lines in a way that contrasted with the deeply unpoetic presidency of George Bush. It is ironic that the result has been polarization to the point of gridlock and a Republican opponent for 2012 who is nothing if not prosaic.

Not everyone is enamored of the idea of poet as president. In fact, this election is increasingly focused on management styles and problem-solving techniques. But right now, I think what we need above all is a new vision of ourselves as a people . . . such as Havel gave the Czechs, Churchill gave the British, and Lincoln once gave us.

Democracy

Not long before the first democratic election in Egypt’s long history, an observer said, “I hope they will select correctly.” But isn’t that, by definition, what the democratic process is meant to determine?

Much of America’s foreign policy since World War II has consisted of public demands for free elections and quiet support for autocratic allies. No wonder we view the uprisings in the Arab world and elsewhere with both excitement and trepidation. What we advocate is happening, and we have no control over it.

Who could have imagined:

• In Belfast, Queen Elizabeth, dressed all in apple green, shaking hands with Martin McGuinness, Northern Ireland’s current deputy first minister and former Chief of Staff of the Irish Republican Army, which assassinated the queen’s cousin, ignited a series of lethal bombings across Britain, and plotted the murder of the royal family.

• In Cairo, Mohamed Morsi, the candidate of the Muslim Brotherhood, which had been banned since 1948, being sworn in as Egypt’s president.

• In Rangoon, Aung San Suu Kyi released from two decades of house arrest and promptly elected to Burma’s Parliament.

Indeed, the one country where cynicism about the electoral process seems to have taken firmest root is this one. Barely half of America’s eligible voters participate in presidential years, a third in off years. The amount of money unleashed in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision undermines our confidence in the fairness of our own elections.

Instead of patronizingly judging the outcomes of elections on the other side of the world, we should focus on fixing what is happening here.

Getting the Words Right

In her review of a new edition of A Farewell to Arms, Julie Bosman writes of the 1958 interview in “Paris Review,” in which Ernest Hemingway told George Plimpton that he had written 39 endings to the novel before he got it right. Many of the early endings, which are in the book’s appendix, were simple and beautiful, and Plimpton asked what the stumbling block had been.

“Getting the words right,” said Hemingway.

Writing is an art form in which each word is as important to the whole as a brush stroke on a canvas or a note in a symphony. And yet we live in a world which seems to have little respect for the beauty of words.

We learn to write with a thesaurus, as if words were interchangeable parts without any particular meaning in themselves.

We mistake $20 words for erudition.

We use words to obfuscate our meaning, to hide our own lack of clarity, to dazzle our audiences.

In political campaigns, candidates are drilled relentlessly to stay “on message,” which means, not to choose the right words in response to a question, but to repeat the same words robotically over and over again.

In doing so, we rob language of its beauty . . . but not of its power, for we become vulnerable to those who manipulate it for their own uses. “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty told Alice, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”

The difference between the art of writing and propaganda is the truth of the words themselves. It is getting the words right.

Stumble of the Week

My brain stumbled (mightily) this week over Higgs boson, the so-called “God particle” believed to be the foundation of life in the universe. I understand almost nothing about it, and yet its apparent discovery has excited, unsettled and bewildered me.

• The excitement is that of discovery – and the quest to understand the biggest and most basic questions of life. The thousands of scientists involved in this project are literally “out there,” pushing against the limits of what we think we know. This particle was an idea almost 50 years before it was discovered. To pursue something so small for so long is a testament not just to intelligence but to faith.

• Frankenstein’s monster reminds us that not all knowledge is beneficial to mankind; and Faust made a bargain with the devil he eternally regretted. What if one day we do unlock the origins of life? Then what? We must hope that the universe has always one more secret.

• Finally, I am bewildered by the people who turn their backs on discoveries such as this. It didn’t take Higgs boson to suggest that the world was not created in seven days 8,000 years ago, at least as we count time. Yet that is what many school boards want taught in their classrooms and what more than a few members of Congress espouse.

It is, in the end, wonder that sustains our lives: Where did I come from? Why am I here? How beautiful is that flower! Why do I love her?

American Exceptionalism

I believe in American Exceptionalism, the idea that America is a unique nation with a special mission. This does not mean that America is “better” than other places, nor that other peoples don’t have their own exceptional stories. But even before the first European settlers had disembarked on the New England coast, America was as much an idea as a place, and it was a land were people came – among other reasons – to work out their destinies. As Americans continually fell short of their ideals, someone would arise, like a biblical prophet, to call us back to our principles. In particular, four men – writing across more than 300 years of history – remind us of America’s destiny to be a beacon to the world.

• In his 1630 sermon, “A Model of Christian Charity,” John Winthrop urged his small band of Puritans to “be as a city upon a hill,” for they would be judged – by themselves and by the world – on the principles they had come to live by.

• In 1776,Thomas Jefferson looked out on an America that had become a sprawling and diverse land; and whereas Winthrop had stressed community (“we must be knit together, in this work, as one man”), Jefferson wrote that individual equality and liberty must be the foundation of the new nation.

• Eighty-three years later, Abraham Lincoln warned his audience at Gettysburg that the ideals of the Declaration were threatened by war and undermined by slavery.

• And in 1963, at the base of the Lincoln Memorial, Martin Luther King, Jr. referred directly to the earlier documents to call Americans back to the national ideals we espoused but did not live by.

As we remember America’s founding, it is well, also, to remember the enduring tension between America’s ideals and America’s reality.

The Other Decision

I am the recipient of the Joint Services Commendation Medal, which was awarded to me near the end of my military career 40 years ago. It is not a grand medal in the hierarchy of such things, but it is not the least distinguished either. I don’t remember the word “valor” in the citation, but I do recall, perhaps, an “above and beyond.” I mention this because last Thursday, in a decision that got buried under the reaction to its health care ruling, the Supreme Court overturned the federal “Stolen Valor Act,” which had made it a crime to falsely claim you had won a military medal. I never have heard of anyone claiming to have won the JCSM, to be sure; the Supreme Court’s decision concerned a man named Xavier Alvarez, who presented himself as a Medal of Honor winner at a meeting of California’s Three Valleys Municipal Water District Board. He also said he had played hockey for the Detroit Red Wings and had been married to a Mexican starlet.

In a 6-3 decision, the court ruled that Mr. Alvarez’ claims were contemptible but not unconstitutional. Justices Clarence Scalito dissented, saying that lying was not protected by the First Amendment. Clearly they haven’t been paying attention to the current political scene, where the Pulitzer Prize-winning PolitiFact.com has a position on its “Truth-O-Meter” called “Pants on Fire.”

Perjury is a crime. Libel is a crime. Slander is a crime. But braggadocio, however contemptible? Congress has more important matters to address.

Paradigm Shift

While the Supreme Court’s decision last week has spawned a fierce backlash, it did make Affordable Health Care the law of the land – at least for now. This is an enormous step, for it proclaims it a national goal to provide good health care for everyone. As we address the critical question of how to pay for it,  two things are worth remembering: (1) the United States already spends more on health care than any other country; and (2) those currently uncovered either go without care or get emergency treatment at public expense. In either case, the cost to the nation is enormous.

As discussed in a post on Woody Brock’s book, the key is to increase the supply of health-care providers faster than rising demand – something that has not happened under the current system. The source of that new supply already exists, but to take full advantage of it requires a shift in how we think about medical care.

The source is nurse practitioners and the shift is from surgical invasion to preventive and community care. (Full disclosure: my daughter is an NP and I have served on the board of a nurse-managed health center). This is not new. In the 19^th century, surgeons were considered skilled craftsmen; now they command superstar salaries from competing institutions. As someone with titanium knees, I know the value of good surgeons. But the key to universal health care is preventive medicine, good health habits and clinics that understand the needs of their clients. It is the dearth of these things now that is both driving up health costs and damaging the nation’s health.

Stumble of the Week

Mitt Romney. John Roberts persuaded the Supreme Court’s “liberal bloc” to uphold Romneycare, limit the power of Congress under the Commerce Clause, and put a “strict constructionist” stamp on the decision . . . and Romney is still complaining. What does it take to satisfy the man? Standing in front of a sign that read “Repeal and Replace,” he pledged to repeal the act on his first day in office. And replace? Surprisingly, he was a bit vague on those details. Roberts is being compared to a lot of things this morning, but no one has yet mentioned John Marshall, the Chief Justice who established the doctrine of judicial review in a case that appeared to hand a significant victory to his arch-rival, Thomas Jefferson, but actually protected the prerogative of the court. Broccoli. The futures market collapsed when it became clear that we were not going to be forced either to buy or eat it, even though it is good for us. Only Antonin Scalia and Rush Limbaugh continued to insist that the ruling could be so construed.

CNN famously got it wrong, announcing that the individual mandate had been overturned (which it actually had under the commerce clause). Meanwhile, the rest of the world appeared to stand still yesterday, as the American media ignored it for Obamacare. Of course, the rest of the world has never understood how its richest country can provide such lousy health coverage at so great a cost. Yesterday was an important first step toward fixing that.

Gentrification

Everybody needs a little gentrification, but too much of it can turn you into a snob, The same is true for our cities, where empty buildings, collapsed property values and empty space have created opportunities for urban homesteaders and real estate predators alike. Places like Detroit and Flint badly need investment – in their economic base, in their physical infrastructure, in their neighborhoods, in their schools and public institutions, and in their people.

But in their desperation to increase their tax bases, city governments seem only too willing to once again displace their poor. The signs are not hard to see. The downtowns in these cities are relatively safe places, as the first step of most investors is to provide security for the suburban workforce and monied visitors.

“Gentrification wants to move us out, however they can,” said Charity, “Benign and malicious neglect, market forces, erosion of services, even eminent domain.” She knows. Her childhood neighborhood on the river was taken by eminent domain and turned over to a developer. There are gated communities even within the city limits, places that have almost no interaction with their neighbors, who are sometimes only a block away.

The current cliché of the 99% misses all this. In the neighborhoods, where crime is rising and is primarily “black on black,” there is little sense of community, no great solidarity. People talk of the sense of powerlessness and the apathy, the epidemic of alcohol to numb the pain.

Any effort to revitalize our inner cities that once again pushes these people out of the way will fail, as it should.

American Apartheid

For a city that was built by and for General Motors, Flint has the most terrible roads. In fact, its entire infrastructure has collapsed, and there is no money to fix it. One of the city’s most dramatic sights is the 235-acre “Buick City,” which was once the largest industrial complex in North America and is now a vast, deserted concrete desert. Flint belies our image of urban decay. With no high-rise projects, it is a city of tree-lined neighborhoods of single-family houses where 200,000 people once lived and half that number remains. But on those streets are hundreds of abandoned and burned-out houses, which remind you that Flint is the most violent city in America.

Flint’s automobile plants provided thousands of well-paying jobs through the 1970s, and the city attracted a diversity of peoples to work in them. With the need for only a high-school diploma, there was little interest in higher education. “My mother made $18 an hour on the line,” my friend Delma remembers, “which was good money, especially for a Black woman.” But it was exhausting, mind-numbing work, and “she came home miserable every day.”

People sought solace in liquor and religion, and while there is only one grocery store within the city limits today, there are churches and liquor stores wherever you look.

Ironically, the University of Michigan is buying much of the downtown for its fast-growing Flint campus, and the city’s symphony orchestra still plays monthly in the Cultural Center, a peaceful oasis of museums and the library cut off from downtown by I-475 – the bypass that destroyed the city’s most stable Black neighborhood 40 years ago. It’s a small oasis: less than a block away sit abandoned houses on tree-lined streets.

Charity

The History. As you drive along the flat Michigan plain, Detroit rises before you with the power of its past – the city that was built by America’s first cars and went on to build the world’s automobile industry. With the creation of Ford, General Motors and Chrysler at the turn of the 20^th century, the city grew rich, and it grew rapidly through World War II, when it converted its massive production capacity from cars and trucks to tanks, ships and planes, becoming the “arsenal of democracy.” The decline came swiftly. The Horror. Entering the city, the first thing that hits you are the great barren gouges of concrete that let suburbanites come in and out of the city without touching it. And then, the emptiness – the absence of people, the expanses of empty lots, the abandoned buildings whose glassless windows rise 12 stories into the air, the black shells of burned-out houses and charred dreams. Detroit has lost over one million people since 1950, half its population since 1970. Those federal highways began the process by carrying city dwellers to subsidized homes in segregated suburban neighborhoods. The collapse of the auto industry finished it. Ninety percent of the population today is non-white, impoverished and vulnerable. Unemployment is epidemic. Crime and hopelessness have joined hands. “There are people here,” my friend Charity says, “who would kill you without thinking about it.”

The Hope. Rising in the neighborhoods like the grasses that push through the empty sidewalks are small signs of hope. There are 27 urban farms in Detroit, 15-1800 community gardens. “We don’t want Wal-Mart here,” says Charity, who notes that 150,000 people live outside the cash economy. “There is power in these gardens,” she says. “They show our resilience and our resistance.” Imagine: the future of Detroit, once the symbol of industrial power, may rest on local agriculture and small family businesses.