Paul Krugman and the Demise of Sandlot Baseball

Larissa MacFarquhar has, unwittingly, given us a revealing piece on Paul Krugman in the March 1st New Yorker. Tucked in among all the writerly bits of irrelevant, but supposedly illuminating details about the furniture in his St. Croix condo are really illuminating bits about his visit to a science fiction convention, and about the connection between the study of economics and science fiction, which neither she nor Mr. Krugman seem to grasp, to wit, economics is simply a branch of science fiction.

The dismal science is dismal indeed, but not science, which is to say you can put forth a hypothesis in economics but you cannot test that hypothesis with an experiment. So instead you do "modeling" which is to say you trot out big numbers which nobody can understand and you draw lots of graphs, and you develop a language, which only members of the club can fathom and you then allow certain communicators to enlighten the brain damaged public about the important things your field has to say.

Sprinkled among the sentences are little revealing tidbits about Professor Krugman. He has no kids, for one thing, just two adorable cats named Doris Lesing and Albert Einstein, which proves, as if we needed any more evidence, his wife and he are intellectuals. And they live in Princeton, because he is a professor at Einstein's old digs and they have a pied de terre , which is to say, he's fabulously successful, which is the proof he is really smart, in a real world way, which we already knew because he has a weekly column in the New York Times, which, of course, he resisted writing for fear it would dilute his academic reputation and a reputation is important for a public figure.

And don't forget he got the Nobel Prize in economics.

But don't forget also a prize is actually not an achievement. It's actually a recognition of achievement, but remember we are talking about achievement in economics here. And Milton Friedman won that prize and he hadn't a clue what he was talking about, at least when it came to the FDA and probably when it came to who was responsible for the Great Depression, but we'll never know about that because, as I said before, you can't do any experiments to prove or disprove that. Which just goes to show the Nobel Prize in economics is worth just about a bucket of warm spit, as Sam Rayburn once described the Vice Presidency.

And as I was reading this article about a man who has given voice to many of the things I was thinking, like how frustrating it's been to love Obama but having to watch him let the Republicans run all over him and over anyone who is actually serious about change--while I was reading this I kept getting all these neurons synapsing, bringing to my mind's eye that scene in the third season of The Wire (there we go with The Wire again, but it's better than Shakespeare and people have used Shakes as a touchstone for generations, so why not?) that scene where Howard "Bunny" Colvin, the police lieutenant who actually tried the experiment of legalizing drugs in his sector of West Baltimore (that's as in Bodymore, Murderland) and the results of that experiment were both encouraging and demoralizing. Bunny has moved on to a job with a University of Maryland project in the public schools, trying to yank bad actors out of the classroom, to find out what makes them explode and the study involves intervention to do something to help the bad actors and the schools they destroy.

What Bunny discovers is the only thing which will ever happen as a result of this project is the academics will write papers and they will then write papers about the papers which are written about this, but nobody will actually ever do anythng about the problems identified. And certainly, nobody will ever do an experiment in this setting.

Bunny tried doing an experiment once and it cost him his job and his pension.

And there, buried in the MacFarquar piece, is a sentence from Krugman saying he really wouldn't want a job in government, where he'd have to put his ideas into action because, well, you know, then he would have to see if they are actually true.

Or, put more generously, he might see his ideas compromised when other people refuse to accept them and that would be like being President, not getting what you want.

So what does all this have to do with Sandlot Baseball, you ask?

I loved sandlot baseball. Wish I could find a bunch of guys to play on weekends. There you had the true essence of the game--just trying to make good plays, make good contact with the ball, diving catches and all the rest. Never knew what the score was. Didn't matter. It was the great play that mattered. We hardly even kept score. All that was semi ruined when I played as an adult and guys kept trying to beat the other guys. You have to beat the pitcher every time you step up to the plate, but that wasn't enough. I thought winning and score keeping actually ruined the game, but that's my problem.

So,anyway, I hated the idea adults got in the way of kids learning to love baseball. Adults coached little league and it was no longer about baseball. It was about winning and about the adults and about competition.

I also hated the culture my second son grew up in, where he got sucked up into wrestling at age seven and spent hours being taught by adults how to beat another kid and what he could expect and how he could counter the stuff thrown at him and how he would feel when he was losing or had lost and how to cope with that to stay in the game. My son had more one on one time with adults teaching him stuff during those dozen years he wrestled than I had until I got to medical school and housestaff training. My father's idea of instructing me was to shout at me from the porch as I was mowing the lawn if I missed a spot.

But the thing is, that intensive passing on of knowledge, of cultural artifacts, overbearing and time consuming and annoying as it may be, is crucial to the achievement of manhood in the modern age.

Watching Master and Commander was to see a very familiar experience, as Lucky Jack, captain of the Suprise continues the midshipmen's lessons in use of the sextant even as the French warship closes in from behind on his ship and cannon balls are landing nearby. I recognized that scene from medical school, where a cardiac arrest was being run and throughout the action, the resident or the attending, continued the discussion of mitochrondial action or resistance factor among bacteria, to emphasize that nothing was more important than learning medicine, not even the practical action of caring for patients. Nothing interrupted teaching rounds. Not even the French frigate firing cannon at you.

So what does that have to do with Paul Krugman and economics?

Well, just this. You see, to be a man in this world, you have to be taught intensively by men and once you learn what that have to tell you, you are equiped to use that knowledge, to overcome your own perfectly reasonable fear using what you've been taught and drilled to do to stand up in the face of fear and to perform and to see the results of your training, to put the knowledge to the test. You have to have faith in what you've been taught, to use it and to succeed with it.

In my own case, as a sandlot player as a kid, I was terrified by a really powerful fastball thrown in anger. I'd fall back away from the plate and not even swing. So, as a kid, playing without the benefit of adults imparting knowledge, I failed to develop a theory of hitting I could act upon.

But, years later, as an adult, I acquired a guru who taught me about hitting. After hours in the batting cage and with the teaching of a good hitting coach, I learned to stand in that batter's box, learned what to expect and how to react to it. And in game situations where I had failed as an unschooled child, I succeeded as an adult.

In my son's case, we had to go out into distant lands, almost like hiking up the mountainside to the guru, but we did it so he could learn from the master. And the master taught him one move which he used when all seemed lost and he prevailed.

And what was that all about? The triumph of preparation, teaching, execution of theory, testing of knowledge on the hot anvil of oposition and proving the worth of the theory.

Economics has none of that testing, in any meaningful way. So enconomists, as a group, remain children.

The ordinary medical intern has more verifiable knowledge than the most revered, Nobel Prize winning economist. A patient comes into the hospital with ketoacidosis, or pulmonary edema, the intern has a theory about the pathophysiology, does the experiment, acts on that theory and saves that patient's ass.

That intern stands in the batter's box and doesn't blink.

Milton Friedman, Paul Krugman, Larry Summers, John Cochrane, David Levine, Jeffrey Sachs, none of them can say that. They may be asked to consult, but none of them really know what they are doing because they are trying to practice science without doing the experiments to verifiy what they teach.

Obama, Health Care Summit

(Chop Suey, Edward Hopper)


Does anyone have patience for the health care deniers any more?

President Obama, either out of obtuseness or shrewdness--it remains to be seen--invited the likes of Big John Boehner and Mitch McConnell and their nattering nabobs to "discuss" health care reform and he got the party line of generalities which form, as far as I can tell, the entirety of their objections to new legislation.

The Just Say No crowd has no specific objections or plans, only deep seated anxieties that a new approach will violate some holy tenets of conservatism. These talking points have been repeated ad nauseum with conservatives/Republicans portraying themselves as the only hope, the right minded people to prevent change, read change as catastrophe.

You can read them in the New York Times (Feb 22) or on any of their websites, but the clue is they stick to generalities, and abhor specifics. Which is to say, they like to stick to their imagings and their own illusions, which need no specific substantiation, rather than dealing with the tangled woof of reality, where one has to govern, where the auto mechanic, the electrician, the plumber and the medical doctor have to operate.

Here are the tenets of belief:
1/ Government health care is ipso facto bad healthcare. Never you mind Medicare and the VA -- if it's government it's part of the problem; cannot be part of the solution. The fact is, as Congressman Weiner from New York recently observed: "If you ask 100 fifty year old citizens whether or not they'd sign on for Medicare, if they had the choice. How many do you think would do it?" Answer, we're betting about one hundred and one.

2/ Government solutions mean we will be stripped of all choice and left only one choice, the government run health care. During the election one good tag line was, "All I'm asking for Senator, is the same health insurance you get." And the fact is, the federal government workers have more than a few choices and seem happy with what they choose.

3/ Choice among a wide range of private (commercial) options has got to be better than whatever choices the government run program could offer; shopping in a competitive marketplace is want people want to be able to do (Mark McCellan) The fact is, the people I see every day, really would rather one or two good choices, Medicare or one other option than a hundred choices which have so much fine print they cannot hope to be able to be smart buyers. This was the philosphy which gave us the infamous Medicare part D, which paid for drugs, some of the time, through a welter of different insurance plans, all of which had different provisions and left the average citizen hopelessly confused. When Mark McCellan, who oversaw this Bush program was asked if the program was made so complicated to discourage anyone from actually using it, he acted as if it was the simplest thing imaginable. Think again, Dr. McCellan.

4/ The people do not want health care legislation. This is the mantra which every Republican seems to be chanting in hopes that if they say it often enough, it will come true. It probably is true, if you ask people whether they want an uncertain future vs an imperfect present, many will go with what they know. If you ask people whether they want the thousand page healthcare bill now in Congress do they want that? Well, no, it's scares me. But do you want inexpensive healthcare which cannot be cancelled when you finally need it, which cannot be withdrawn on the claim you failed to reveal a pre existing condition, which can be owned by you no matter who employs you, which is as solid as the US government, well then maybe you get a different asnwer from John Q Public.

5/ Government run, centrallly organized health care systems are "Top down" organizations,(Bill Frist) and such organizations always fail, as the experiment with Soviet style government showed. It will lead to rationing, death panels, Big Brother, "Kafkaeseque" (James Pinkerton) totalitarianism. Okay, then let's just throw out Social Security.

6/ All we need to control costs is to reign in the lawyers, frivilous lawsuits and liability law. Doctors tell us that 25% of health spending is spent on unnecessary care, which means doctors are spending patients' and insurance company money doing tests to avoid lawsuits (Newt Gingrich) Anyone who has ever become involved directly with the medical jurisprudence system knows its essential corruption, based as it is on what you can sell an uncomprehending jury rather than on what is possible in medical practice. The malpractice system is so outrageous it belongs on The Wire as one more dysfunctional institution which is only concerned about money and power but not about patients or justice. Having said all that, if you eliminated it tomorrow, it would do nothing substantial to the overall balance sheet of medical costs. You can make up any number you want, "25% of health spending is unnecessary," is a fiction. Nobody knows what goes through the minds of 500,000 physicians; certainly not Newt Gingrich.

7/ Paying for preventative medical practices will save the system substantially over time (Mark McCellan) and this can be done by less expensive practitioners ( Nurse practitioners, pharmacists, wellness programs). Here's another fantasy, one shared by Peter Orszag and liberals as well as conservatives. I wish it were true, I really do, but if you actually deal with patients, in the trenches, you listen to the histories of people who supersize every drink, every meal, smoke, drink and consider heaven a week spent in a recliner in front of the TV with a domestic brew in one hand and a supersized soda in the other. Not going to happen folks; wish it weren't so.

8/ Medicare is a terrible system because it is fee for service, rewarding volume and is inherently inflationary (Charles Kolb) I was once asked on Cleveland television, what I thought about Dr. Crile's assertion every doctor in this country ought to be on salary, the way docs at the Cleveland Clinic and Mayo Clinic are. Get that profit motive out of medicine and focus doctors on taking care of patients. All I could say is I certainly would be happy with Dr. Crile's salary. And putting everyone on salary sure would change who applies to medical school and that might be a good thing. But not even the Democrats are talking about that. Dr. Crile was a demi god in Cleveland, revered, and so mainstream they were naming babies and streets after him. But what he's talking about is real revolution, not the tidal changes whcih the Democrats are trying to push through.

9/ Current legistlation being considered will create a catostrophic bureaucracy which will banrupt the country and result in loss of therapy and care for the average citizen.
Fact is, neither the Republicans nor the Democrats know whether or not this is true. What Washington has done, when it does anything at all, is to try something and see how it works, always prepared to beat a hasty retreat, never blowing up the bridges.

What the Republican party has presented is the same old objections based on conservative theory without specifically saying what we can do to address:
1/ People denied health insurance because of pre existing conditions.
2/ People being tied to bad jobs to keep health insurance.
3/ Companies failing because they carry overhead costs, mainly health insurance, with which their competitors in other countries are not burdened.
4/ The roughly 1/3 of American citizens who are either uninsured or underinsured place a burden on local and federal government by using emergency rooms as their primary care.

At least the Democrats are proposing to address these problems. Trouble is, the institution. None of these lawmakers want to pack up their offices into cardboard boxes and hire moving vans and pull their kids out of schools and move back to Peoria and have to find a real job. (Except for the senator from Indiana.) So the Democrats, who are more nervous because they are actually being asked to say, "Yes," to something, are suffering from the knocking knees syndrome.

One thing the Republicans have got correct: The Democrats are wusses. Their leadership is tepid, Casper Milquetoast. The Democrats simply do not have the guts to lead or to govern. The only visible exception to this may be President Obama himself, who is not a strong leader in the sense Roosevelt or Churchill were strong--he cannot rally the troops and embarrass the cowardly. Roosevelt excoriated the greedy and Churchill lacinated the timid. They made their citizens stronger. Obama, thus far, has not.

Oh, Ya Think?

(Edward Hopper)



Paul Krugman, writes a column on the economy for the New York Times, but I don't hold that against him because he calls 'em as he sees 'em, whether that means being critical of President Obama, as he was frequently during the depths of the financial crisis, or if it means looking at Republicans and what their arguments, votes and actions have added up to over the past year and calling a spade a spade.

Barney Frank is another voice I will turn up the radio dial for; I'll stop what I'm doing if I see him on T.V., because he seems unconcerned about saying things which will get him elected or which might be bent or quoted and used against him; he just says what he thinks. Either you like him or you don't. He's gay, he doesn't expect everyone to like him. And he speaks for me, sometimes better than I could, as when he was confronted by that woman who compared Obama to Hitler and the Democrats to Nazis and he said, "On what planet do you spend most of your time?" He finished her off with, "Trying to have a conversation with you would be like arguing with a dining room table."

Now that was a cathartic, vicarious thrill. If only the President would let loose a few of those.

It has been amusing to see both of these gentlemen blinking in the bright light of truth as they see it in front of them and they are fairly amazed.

For Paul Krugman, he pieces together the actions of the Republicans slowly, methodically and you can just see his mind whirling, cobbling together what has looked pretty obvious from New Hampshire, but has apparently been somewhat obscured by, I don't know what, the smog in New York City? What he saw was this: Republicans have said they don't like government. Government, according the the patron saint of modern Republicans, Ronald Reagan, is the problem, not the solution.

Of course, that was such a catchy phrase, people forgot all about Social Security and Medicare in their enthusiasm to embrace the idea that government is...bad.

So what Newt Gingrich and John Boehner and Mitch McConnell and, yes George W. Bush did was they said, well, we can't take away Medicare and Social Security--people like those-- so we'll just take away taxes--people don't like those--and that way we won't have the money to pay for those two great success stories of good government and we'll be able to say we can't fund them, and by necessity, they'll die.

Which is to say, if the Republicans can bleed government dry, they can kill it.

That's the insight from New York.

Meanwhile, in Washington, Barney Frank is looking at the Republicans voting against everything finally scratches his head and says, you know what this means? The Republicans want Obama to fail. They want government to fail. They always said they don't like government, they want to reduce government down to the size where they can drown it in a bathtub, because government is...bad. And now they are trying to do it.

Then Represensative Frank's eyes really grow wide. You know, he says, they had government, the White House, both houses for years and they were really terrible at governing and now they don't want to see the Democrats succeed. It's as simple as the old playground thing: If I couldn't kick the ball through the uprights it's not because I'm no good; it's because nobody can kick that ball through the uprights. Can't be done. The game is ...bad.

I was standing on a corner in Hampton, New Hampshire, holding up a sign for a Democratic candidate, talking to another sign holder, I mentioned I was new to the state and she set about educating me about how politics work in the granite state. Now, this is a very proper New Hampshire lady, with a down vest, LL Bean waders, a waxed cotton slicker with cordouroy collar and no make up and high cheekbones. She said, "Well, New Hampshire Republicans aren't assholes. You disagree with them, but you can still sit next to them at the PTA and go hiking with them."

Of course, part of the shock was hearing this Mayflower lady, this woman whose great great grandfather probably fought in the Revolutionary War and signed the Constitution use that word, but it was a well considered and deliberate phrase. She was saying, there is an emotional content you reserve for people you loathe. But you don't loathe Republicans around here. You just disagree.

But that was before Republicans started showing up outside the Portsmouth High School, where President Obama spoke soon after his election, showed up carrying assault rifles and other sorts of Second Amendment hardware.

And what were they saying by their show of arms? These were little white men who felt bigger when they toted their guns. These men were saying, "You may be the President, with your security detail and your Air Force One, but I am as important and potent and strong as you, because I have this gun."

Lee Harvey Oswald, after all, was just as important as JFK, because he had the power to destroy JFK in the barrel of his gun. Or something like that. Little, unimportant men, who cannot be ignored because they have guns.

So do we still not loathe Republicans?

You will say, not all Republicans. We cannot abide the smirking John Boehner and Mitch McConnell. But there are also Olympia Snow and Susan Collins. It's true these two ladies from Maine are not as unappetizing as the smug, smarmy couple, the Ohio Congressman and the Kentucky senator, but apart from their demeanor, how different are any of these Republican obstructionists from one another?

Not a one of them wants a government program which can succeed.

Either from malevolence or myopia, they vote the same way.

Atul Gawande, Obama, Health Care and Dartmouth Atlas

(Louisiana Blue Heron--James Audubon)



Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding.

--Abraham Lincoln
Second Inaugural Addresss

The New York Times today publishes a letter from Atul Gawande, who, we are reminded, is not only a surgeon at the Brigham and Women's Hospital (one of the three big Harvard Medical School teaching hospitals) and but he is also an associate professor at the Harvard School of Public Health.

Now, with that set of bone fides here is a man who ought to know of what he speaks.

It seems Dr. Gawande is concerned we know criticism of the Dartmouth Health Atlas appearing in the New England Journal of Medicine which criticized the way the authors of the Atlas collected and analyzed data about the quality of care rendered by different hospitals does not taint the way he used that data in a New Yorker article which so impressed President Obama he made it required reading by anyone at the White House engaged in efforts to overhaul healthcare.


Dr. Gawande was honest enough to say in an interview it was a sort of journalist's dream come true to think something he wrote might have such impact on the forces of government and on the formulation of policies controlling health care, so it is understandable he might be sensitive when criticism or backlash comes his way.

The truth is, many of us who viscerally desire a fundamental overhaul of our health care system winced more than once at Dr. Gwande's article and the response to it by President Obama's people (including Peter Orszag) at the White House, who could not see through it.

The basic premise of Dr. Gawande's article was you could use Medicare data to see that there are radically different health care practices out there in the country--there are those who are more expensive and less successful at what they do and then there are the heroes, who practice the highest quality care and couple that with lower cost. So now we have the villains and the good guys, neatly presented. Those wonderful docs at the Mayo Clinic, the Geisenger Clinic, who generally speaking are salaried and not motivated by the profit motive functioning in a fee for service private sector, versus the bad guys in McAllen, Texas, who send in exhoribitant bills and rape the system.

What Dr. Gawande implied, which was not lost on the White House, was this is where the cost savings could be found to fund the Healthcare Reform Act. Just rout out all that waste and over charging by bad docs doing bad medicine and send the patients to the good guys.

The problem, and what made so many docs who sympathize with President and who want to see him succeed in restructuring the system, is Dr. Gawande depicted a few outliers, a few exceptional cases and he suggested there are enough docs like them to make a difference. He had them saying, over beers at a bar how they knew they were running up costs, and he painted a picture of the guilty "knowing" full well they were responsible for the runaway costs in Medicare.

Those beery docs may have believed that, but as many of us out here in the trenches (as opposed to the rarefied place Dr. Gawande practices) as we know--there aren't enough outliers out there to eliminate to save enough money.

It's difficult for anyone to know what is really going on by examining data and numbers, because the way those numbers are collected is simply too difficult to understand and to analyze. So the average doc can only know what he sees from his own particular hole in the ground, and even when Dr. Gawande hops a plane to Texas, he goes back home to Boston and writes from his own hole, even if he's stopped off briefly at Rochester, Minnesota to be wowed by what he sees at the Mayo Clinic. He expresses an honest astonishment at how easily a cardiologist at Mayo could be called out of his office to hear a case presented and render an opinion--and what that vignette meant to the medical (as opposed to surgical) docs reading the article was how callow Dr. Gawande really is. What he was exclaiming about is something that happens in a variety of settings among physicians (not surgeons) all the time.

In fact, the big picture is often hard to see. It's like that scene from one of the Indiana Jones movies where Indie is looking for a big X but he cannot see it because the X takes up the entire surface of the floor he's standing on and it's only the person standing on the railing near the ceiling who can perceive the X.

The big picture was enunciated not by a surgeon from Harvard, but from a more modest source, a Congressman from New York named Weiner, on The Daily Show. What he said was so simple and so obvious it could hardly be seen by those close to it. He asked, "What fifty year old when asked if he would like to have Medicare would not say, 'Yes'? Or what about the kid who has graduated college and can't be carried on his parents' policy? He wants Medicare, too."

The fact is the government option is too radical a choice, a result too fundamental and astounding, for anyone faint of heart to embrace. Only the bravehearted can face it.

As much as we love President Obama, he has not shown himself to be bravehearted. He has not said, "Look, the Republicans are determined to dig in and prevent real reform. What we need is to make Medicare an option for every American, cradle to grave.

Given the slice of the federal budget fixed expenses claim, extending the option of even a bare bone Medicare to the whole population is a real revolution in the idea of what our government is all about. When you look at that pie, Social Security and Medicare already look like the lion's share. That leaves everything else which is not a fixed expense, including military/defense/Homeland Security struggling for the rest. And then there's the need for infrastructure repair and expansion and all the other things we need to do.

The Republicans may be correct about one thing: If a nation decides to provide medicare care for all its citizens instead of simply allowing them to be culled by the relentless progress of disease and inevitable injuries, then it has made a fundamental choice about what the government owes its citizens and about what its citizens owe each other. In the land of the free and the home of the Brave, we have, until now, chosen to allow our fellow citizens to die without helping them. We'll help our family members; we'll even help our co workers, but we do not feel an obligation toward our countrymen.

So that is what we are talking about: a result more fundamental and more astounding than we are willing to contemplate.


Universal healthcare would fundamentally change this country. People would not have to remain at jobs they hate for the health insurance. Big companies like General Motors would no longer be at a competitive disadvantage competing against Japanese, German and other foreign companies who do not pay the freight for their employees' health insurance. The Veterans Administration would no longer be saddled with the longterm care of Vets who eventually enter the phase of life where their coronary artery artery disease, which has nothing to do with their service as twenty year olds, catches up with them. They would be taken care of, but not by the VA any more.

Restructuring our healthcare system would fundamentally restructure our economy and unlike any other government program save Social Security and the IRS, it would touch us all.

Are you read for that America?

Or, asked another way, do you think we can really remain the dominant nation we once were if we are afraid to make the same committment to our own people other nations have made to their own?

Terrorists, Trials, Holder and the Oxbow Opposition

Is there a more revealing phenomenon than the debate about whether or not to bring those accused of terrorist acts into federal criminal courts for trial?


This is not a single issue: It involves basic questions about why we believe or reject the idea of "Rights," about who is capable of voicing useful opinion and about the value of those voices of opinion we hear so often.

So why ought we believe in "Rights?"

Of course, there is that thing we learned about in school called "The Bill of Rights" and the constitution and we learned about how that nasty King George threw helpless colonists in jail, where they rotted, but compared to Osma Bin Laden and his crew, Old King George and his merry band of red coats look pretty benign, especially with the passage of centuries.

The forces of government didn't look all that benign in the eighteenth century when British soldiers and their hired guns chopped off colonial heads and spiked them on pikes in front of their encampments. In those days, the face of governmental authority looked pretty fearsome to those who wrote the constitution; those founding fathers had good reason to resist government power. King George looked a lot like Dick Cheney to them.

The British government, like most governments, insisted unrestrained power of throwing people into jail was the lesser of two evils: sure, you may occasionally throw someone into jail who had done nothing wrong except walking down the wrong street at the wrong time, but it was a case of greatest good for the greatest number. Some individuals would suffer unjustly, but society would gain order and safety and predictability.

The argument which prevailed back then, and for much (but not throughout all American history,) was you can still have order and safety without nailing the hapless and innocent along the way.

An unexpected benefit of the process which attempts to treat the accused as innocent until proven guilty is it made the masses believe they might actually be treated fairly if they were falsely accused.

The other benefit of this process of painstakingly trying to be fair was it made the system of trying to determine what actually happened and who did what look legitimate.

While elsewhere in the world, all that matters is who your family knows, how effectively you can grease the palms of judges or some other governmental official, in this country, we tried for that lofty and often impossible goal, to seek the truth.

We didn't always try all that hard.

Soon after the constitution was adopted the government decided it was just too scary to allow criticism of the government and the Alien and Sedition acts were passed. During the communist witch hunts of the 1950's Senator Joseph McCarthy managed to convince enough people for some of the time, the threat to our government and our way of life was so immediate and so extreme, the danger so clear and present, we did not need to bother trying to distinguish the innocent from the guilty.

The analogy was to the approach to lethal infection. The little buggers which can kill you are invisible and it's better to use antisepsis and antibiotics which may kill a lot of innocent and harmless bacteria if it means you can kill the bad ones. We had just got through killing a lot of innocent people at Hiroshima and that seemed to end the war and to spare a lot of American lives, so most people were okay with the killing of innocents on some occasions.


So no Right is absolute. Not even the right of Free Speach, as Justice Holmes argued, you have no right to shout "Fire" in a crowded theater.

There is risk in respecting rights, in being deliberate, trying to be fair and there is always delay and there is something unsatisfying about entertaining doubts.

On the other hand, there is risk to the rush to judgment to the "Aw he's guilty, string him up," approach, emotionally satisfying as that may be at the time.

Two of the greatest American statements on the value of deliberation as opposed to vituperation and swift action are The Oxbow Incident and, of course, To Kill A Mockingbird. Stephen Colbert, who often I just don't get recently did one of the most astonishing and ingenious treatments of this whole issue, in which, split screen, he argued against rushing to judgment against the underpants bomber, using the words of Atticus Finch, from the famous trial scene in Mockingbird. His highly reasoned side, his better angels side, manages to convince his more impulsive and impassioned side it makes more sense to try the accused than to simply lock him away or execute him. In fact, he manages to convince the emotional Colbert the guy is actually innocent. Once he has persuaded his lesser half, of course, the cerebral, principled side says, "Naw, of course he's guilty, nail him."

So why do we do this deliberative, possibly risky, dance?

It has a lot in common with why we do funerals. It's not for the dead;it's for the living. Some part of us thinks the recently departed is still there, hovering overhead, being grateful and entertained, but as someone who has dealt with the dead, I gotta tell you, I'm not at all convinced. Those people are gone.

So what's the point of the whole performance?

We do it to convince ourselves we are better than those who do nasty things. We likely will never convince the perpetrators, who only rarely internalize the idea. All the guy on trial is feeling is fear and how am I going to get out of this and what are they going to do to me? The accused are not likely to be impressed by our deliberations, so it's not for the accused.

And we do it for the group--to convince ourselves there is something real in the idea of "Justice."

We like the idea you can judge and you can render a just verdict, just as we like the idea of a just God. If there is no such thing as justice, what do you have in the world? You've got the law of the jungle, as seen on Animal Planet, where there no good guys and no bad guys. Hideous hyenas eat adorable little lion cubs or antelope or baby elephants and nothing bad happens to them. In fact, the hyenas survive, thrive and multiply.

Animal Planet is a very disturbing experience.

We want to live in a world where the good survive and the bad are eliminated.

So now we come to survival, which is the argument made most famously by Dick Cheney and more recently by Scott Brown and always by Rush Limbaugh, and every week by the television program 24. Oh, yeah, these sources say, you can worry about those nice ideas of deliberative justice and handling the accused with kid gloves while they blow up atom bombs in Washington, DC and New York, and worse yet, Peoria.

Then what have you got left to protect?

Even Abraham Lincoln, our greatest President, suspended habeus corpus during the Civll War.

Of course, then you are arguing that the shoe bomber and the underwear bomber and even the 911 crowd were as much a threat to the survival of the nation as Jubal Early's confederate army charging up to Fort Stevens, inside the District of Columbia. You are saying that right now our nation is as imperiled as it was during the Civil War. Same argument Senator McCarthy made. All those communists infecting our government were just seconds away from destroying our nation from within. It's the crying fire in the crowded theater argument: We cannot afford "Rights" when it's the right of the guy with his hands around your throat.


So that's the argument of those who say no trials in American criminal courts; lock up the accused and throw away the key.

Of course, those making that argument would object to the description, "The Accused." For them, it's "The Guilty."

Can there be any doubt about the guilt of the shoe bomber or the underwear bomber, why waste the time and money on a trial to determine guilt, when guilt is so obvious?

The answer is, because the trial is for us. It demonstrates in the most dramatic way possible the difference between them and us. It demonstrates that difference to those who may not know a lot about what these guys did. And it's great theater, just as the Nuremberg Trials were great theater. It lays out for the world to see, just how slimy these bastards really were.

And when they get up to defend themselves, they feel all self justified, but they look even worse.

And some of the things they say to elucidate just how they justify themselves to themselves are instructive to later generations: "I was just following orders." Well, it didn't work for those Nazi scumbags and it's not going to work for you, Lt. Caulley. And it wont' work for any American soldier who is told to mow down a line of women and children villagers, so he can refuse to do it and say, "Court martial me for refusing to obey your outrageous order. I'll see you at Nuremberg, Sir."

The principle argument is the accused do not "Deserve" the rights of American citizens accused of crimes, as if we are giving these demons a gift.

But of course, we are not doing it for the accused; we are giving that gift to ourselves. Reading the accused Miranda rights does not make us into wusses. It makes us stronger. It does nothing much for the guy listening. And if you really think every interaction with the terrorist on the plane is a scene from 24, well then you haven't been on the plane. Nobody was shouting out Miranda when they are wrestling with the underpants bomber.

Calling these guys prisoners of war is a gross insult to prisoners of war. Even if this were a war, which it is not. Wars end. Wars on crime, wars on cancer, wars on drugs do not end, because they are not wars.

Okay, the practical objections: It's too costly, causes too much disruption--both of which are pretty revealing arguments coming from the mouths of Rudolph Giuliani (a former prosecutor) and Charles Krauthammer (a pseudo quasi lawyer.)

We have over 3,000 dead, the towers in rubble and it's too expensive and disruptive to the life of New York City to hold a Nuremberg trial about this?

I suppose it would have been no surprise if the Germans felt it was too much trouble to hold those trials after the war, but, fortunately, they were not given the choice. The Americans and the British and the Russians, who had some pretty tough financial problems of their own in the immediate aftermath of World War II thought it was worth the expense and the disruption to put those monsters on trial.

Those guys, Goering, Hess, Goebells the whole lot proclaimed themselves soldiers who fought the holy war for the Fatherland. But would anyone today argue those trials, which laid out the details of what they did, how they did it and the suffering they caused were not worth the inconvenience and the cost?


The most serious objection is holding those trials just a stone's throw from the World Trade Center is a practical one: It would attract every holy jihadist on the planet to New York City with his bomb or whatever he's got in his underpants.

This of course, is the argument of fear.

It's curious this argument comes from the mouths of Scott Brown, Charles Krauthammer, Rush Limbaugh who are always the first to proclaim how brave and tough and relentless and fearless they are in the pursuit of the bad guys while that lily livered Obama and all those who sail with him are too fearful and meek to protect the good people of this land of the free and home of the brave.

The trial of those accused of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln occurred in the immediate aftermath of the Civl War, in Washington, DC and they were hanged within the District of Columbia, not far from Ford's Theater and the White House.

And all that happened when the wounds were fresh, the city still aswarm with Southern spies and sympathizers and it wasn't even completely clear all the Southerners who supported The Cause were actually finished fighting.

But somehow, Americans then were brave enough to risk the wrath of those who had threatened the nation, murdered the President and still wished ill for those who fought for Union and the abolition of slavery. If any time in our history is a good basis for comparison, it's that perilous time just after Lincoln's assassination, when the nation was greviously wounded, by no means safely delivered from danger and angry voices resounded throughout Washington, DC the North and the South. Fortunately, leaders back then were men of fortitude. They would have put the Limbaugh-Krauthammer-Giuliani crowd on their butts on the sidewalk.

In other words, when it came time to stand up for justice, we did not flinch, despite the risks.

Now, what are the advantages to a public trial? All of the above and the idea that we can say to a world which will undoubtedly be watching on television in Iraq, Iran, Palestine, Syria, Pakistan, Indonesia and even in Afghanistan, wherever they actually have electricity, we can show what these guys did, or tried to do, and we can remind everyone about the horror of September 11 while we still have American soldiers in the field, and we can put out those images just as the images of the Holocaust were shown and we can show why we are better and different.

Some have objected we'll be giving the defendants a soap box from which they can make speeches. We did that in Nuremberg, and those miscreants buried themselves with their own words.

Of course, whatever the terrorists say will get an "Amen, brother, Ali Akbar," among true believers among the Palestinians, in the caves on the Afghan/Pakistan border. But what do we care what those maniacs think?

Do we or do we not have a righteous cause? If we have a righteous cause, then why do we want to lock it away behind military courts and make it invisible?

Now, I am prepared to admit what Rush Limbaugh, Charles Krauthammer and Scott Brown are not prepared to admit: When it comes to knowing exactly what happens in the criminal justice system, I have no real life experience.

Not that lack of knowing what you are talking about stops the lunatic fringe. On December 5, 2009, a throng of them gathered at Foley Square in lower Manhattan and cries of "Holder's gotta go!" and "Communist" and "Traitor!" and "Lynch Holder!" were documented by the print media. Relatives of people who died on September 11, who somehow are presumed to have special authority , proclaimed it would be wrong to try the accuse 9/11 terrorists in Manhattan because "We need to tell Eric Holder that we will be victims no more."

One woman asked, "How can someone whos is not an American have any right to our rights? Holder wants to help the terrorists."

When it comes to the likelihood of accused escaping justice in our very dysfunctional criminal justice system, I take as my primary source, The Wire, which is real life non fiction masquerading as fiction. If you watch all five seasons, you see how criminals game that system and how they escape punishment. Having watched the wire does not make me an expert in our criminal justice system, but it has provided an experience. I have, over the course of that instructive post graduate course, gained at least some insight to how the system fails and how, less often, but still occasionally, it can be made to succeed.

What I think I learned is there are times the prosecutors have got the scum bags dead to rights and scum bags go to jail.

I may have too much faith, but I suspect Eric Holder knows he holds all the cards and the accused will not walk free.

On the other hand, what we are saying to the world is we put people on trial because we are brave enough to take the risk the accused will walk free. And that makes us a lot braver than the Rush Limbaugh's, the Dick Cheney's, the Scott Brown's and the Rudoph Giuliani's would are so terrified of the terrorists they will not allow them on American soil, will not allow them to be tried in open court.

Which is, of course where we can do them and all those who sail with them, the most harm. There is nothing worse for a bad product than good advertising and what these terrorists are trying to sell is the ultimate in a bad product.

Do we want to dignify these guys with the label "Enemy Combatants?" or "Prisoner of War?" Prisoners of war are soldiers we treat according to the Geneva Convention, whom we exchange at the end of the war. They are Hogan's Heroes.

And, of course, this is no war.

The 9/11 terrorists may have thought of themselves as warriors but we ought not agree with them. Even if their motives were religious or psychopathic or even if they were brainwashed or simply confused, what they did made them criminals, not soldiers.

Where better to dispense with criminals than in open court, where the world can really see who these self described freedom fighters really are?

Sarah Appeal

(Chop Suey--Edward Hopper)



I heard clips, sound bites from Sarah Palin's speech to the Tea Party audience. I almost said, "Convention," but since the attendees paid hefty ticket prices for admission, it struck me as more of a performance, or rock concert than a political convention. Although, what do I know? It may be delegates to the Democratic and Republican conventions also pay hefty ticket prices, just in different ways.

I did not feel I was missing much by just getting sound bites from Sarah. Listening to her is not like listening to Barack Obama, where one thought, one sentences leads to another and you miss something if you just hear his punchy one liner at the end of his sixth paragraph, because he's been building toward that line, investing it with meaning for six paragraphs. There's nuance, thought, the on the one hand, but then again on the other, with President Obama.

None of that with Sarah.

Sarah is about zingers.

She knows her audience. Unlike Obama, she is not trying to persuade. She is not trying to say, well I know you may disagree with some or all of what I say, but let me show you I understand, I hope, the basis for your objections and I respect them, but I'm going to show you why I came to the opposite conclusion.

Sarah is not about any of that.

She is about reinforcing what is already out there, about turning resentment into outrage, about stoking the flames, arousing passions.

And who exactly, is she trying to arouse? I choose that word deliberately. She is not trying to seduce, which implies bringing someone along gradually, enticing, being aware of some basis for reluctance to respond, overcoming that and finally bending them to your will. No, she is dancing on the stage to those who are where they are because they've already decided what they want. She is not a strip tease artist; she's a pole dancer.

Sorry about that image. Sexist, I suppose, but so hard to resist.

So who is this crowd who is already in the club, drinking at the bar when Sarah gets up to perform?

They are the self perceived losers. They know full well they do not own the country or run it. They have had the experience of being dismissed, disrespected and shunted aside by professors, classmates, strangers. They look at their own homes, the failures of their children to finish school or obtain athletic scholarships to college or to achieve any measure of success. Their kids are not going off to Harvard or Swarthmore--for that matter they have never even heard of Swarthmore. Their kids have gotten pregnant or got someone pregnant at sixteen and are now in the process of temporary employment, getting laid off, losing their automobiles to repossessers, and all the other indignities of life among the struggling class of non graduates.

And Sarah is saying, it's all right.

That Sarah's daughter got pregnant, unmarried, was viewed gleefully by her detractors. Oh, right Sarah, just say no. Now she's sunk. Au contraire my friends, the pregnant daughter was the best thing, culturally speaking, that could have happened to Sarah Palin. I'm not at all sure Karl Rove did not set that up. That pregnant daughter was the perfect credential for the loser class. I'm with you. I'm one of you. I know what you're going through and I'm not going to let anyone tell me that experience disqualifies me from the Presidency or leadership of the Right or the right.

In representative forms of government, performers (i.e. politicians) have to decide who their audience is. For whom do you feel most comfortable performing? Most politicians do not have the range of a Meryl Streep. They have a tough time playing a grocery store clerk in Lower Yorta, PA one moment and a high flying editor of Cosmopolitan magazine the next.

Beyond that, politicians have a certain imperative to stay in character. If Sarah is just folks one moment and the sophisticate the next, then she is not sincere. It's just a role.

Beyond that, Sarah and most politicians are not well enough trained to play different parts convincingly, even they wanted to.

So she creates a persona which is a magnification, a clarification of what she thinks she already is.

The fact is, she is not a questioner, or a person who thinks about the complexities of issues. She is ignorant of many of the issues which perplex people at the Brookings Institution, the World Bank or the Center for Strategic and International Sudies. She does not bother trying to do her homework before her interviews, because, well, she never was much about homework.


And she's saying, that's okay. No, I didn't do my homework, which is why I kept flunking out of various schools, or leaving before I could flunk out. Just couldn't read and absorb all that stuff. But I know what I've learned in the school of hard knocks.

There is a wonderful scene in The Wire, where Howard Colvin, a former Baltimore police, is trying to persuade one of the toughest soldiers in the Barksdate crime organization, a man named Wee Bey, a man serving life without parole, to allow Colvin to adopt Wee Bay's son.

Colvin presents himself as cut from the same cloth as Wee Bey, no better, no better educated, no more successful in life, in no way morally or intellectually or personally superior to Wee Bey. Colvin turned right down the street and Wee Bey turned left, and they wound up on opposite sides but neither side was morally superior. There but for the grace of God, sort of thing. Colvin is saying, you and I came up on the mean streets and we are what we are, but your son has a chance to be something different, maybe something better. Let him go.

You don't find out until much later Wee Bey has actually responded to what Colvin has said. It happens when Wee Bey's wife, his son's mother, visits him, sits across the glass divide and objects to giving up the son she wants out on the corner earning her a good living selling drugs. She tells Wee Bey the son has to be a soldier to man up as Wee Bay had done when he was growing up.

And Wee Bay looks at her with some sympathy, the first time you ever see Wee Bay show even the faintest trace of sympathy, and he says, "Yeah, and who would want to be me? If he didn't have to."

There it is. The loser finally sees he's a loser and has faced it.

But Sarah is the mother saying this lot in life is just fine. We can be proud of ourselves. We are losers and proud of it. Not Sarah, nor her thousands of followers has the courage or the honesty or the sheer personal fortitude to look at their lives as Wee Bey has done.

But if you vote for me, and if I'm President then you are as good as anybody.

Sarah's not the first to play that card. Won't be the last. She's just prettier than most who've tried it.

Works for her, apparently.