What is Education?

When older people think about education, those older people who are not in the field, they typically look back, rather than forward.

This is not necessarily a bad thing; in order to understand what it is you are trying to accomplish for those generations which follow you, it helps to have some idea of where you would like to see them go.

One of the distinguishing features of Homo Sapiens is they possess not just brains and muscles and highly complex central nervous systems, they possess a culture and they can pass it on to succeeding generations, not through chromosomes or plasmids, but by teaching their young. In this way the young have a better chance to survive and they do not have to go back to square one with every newborn.

So the next generation is taught how to use and how to make tools and most important, they are taught values, abstractions about the purpose of life, the best rewards and what to avoid. Children whether in America or China are taught engineering, i.e. problem solving for the practical world in which they live and they are taught philosophy, i.e., why bother?

Reading Higher Education? in which Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus describe the Humanities 2510 course at Florida Gulf Course University, a course taught on line without live professor or classes, in which students are taught the names of paintings and then asked in multiple choice questions who painted a particular painting (Starry Night--van Gogh) and they now think they have an appreciation of art, I laughed aloud.

Then I asked myself, what made my own college experience so life changing?

Well, there were social, personal things. There was self discovery and reinvention of self and all those things which have to happen when you leave home and travel 500 miles away from your parents and all the friends you grew up with from age 8 to 18.

But, more important, there were moments, good and bad, which occurred in class.

I looked forward to class because I spent most of my time in the library, and class was one of the few times during the day I was actually interacting with people. Sometimes I spoke in class, but mostly I listened.

And the most exciting thing was, unlike my public high school, where, with perhaps five exceptions, I thought the teachers had nothing to teach me, I was lucky enough to have real professors, even as a freshman, who knew their subjects in great depth. When a student asked a question, the professor would spin off into a realm of knowledge which had me sitting there thinking: Wow, that was an amazing answer. He actually knows something. (As opposed to high school, where it was obvious the teacher was caught and faking it.)

Even now, I remember a class with a professor named Rosenfeld, a class in literature, in which Rosenfeld asked a student what he meant by the word "fact." They went back and forth for some time and it was really exciting.

Another professor, David Krause, was teaching Shakespeare and he could reel off stuff from any of the bard's plays at will, to illustrate a point, but more than sheer feats of memory, he made it mean something in today's world; he showed us why we still read Shakespeare, not because it's Shakespeare but because what he was talking about then, is still so important today. "There's honor for you," says Falstaff, pointing to a rotting, swollen corpse, a dead soldier. Falstaff has no desire to die honorably. He wants to live, to enjoy wine and women. Dying for king and country has no appeal. In 1967, when every male in that class was thinking about the Vietnam which awaited him as soon as he graduated, the ideas of "honor" and "Peace without Honor," were relevant.

Then there was Professor Thomas, who taught the one and only gut course at my college. Every football player, every hockey player signed up. Thomas gave the questions and the answers for the final exam, all typed up, twenty five pages. All you had to do was read through them and write your exam from them. Of course, Thomas was cagier than we knew: He got all those jocks focused on that playbook and they learned at least that much.

One day, Thomas started talking about the Bible story of God, Abraham and Isaac. God told Abraham to kill his son. But why, asked Thomas, did Abraham not say to himself, wait a minute, the God I know would never tell me to murder a child, my own child? Must be the Devil speaking. There were objections from around the room. No, in the Bible, the people always knew the voice of God. The whole point was: would you do what God told you to do, on faith?

No, Thomas persisted, you have to ask yourself, does this make sense? Otherwise, how different are you from the guy who hears his dog commanding him to murder young women? The class erupted, there were Bible thumping defensive lineman who'd grown up in Alabama Baptist congregations just about levitating from their chairs; their teammates, guys from Maine and Wisconsin, who were laughing at them. They thought they knew each other, from so many hours on the practice field, and now they were fighting pitched battles over how you know what you know.

It was thrilling.

I was a science major, and there were some pretty well done classes in biology, but never anything like what I experienced in Philosophy, English lit, courses in drama and poetry which still stay with me even today, forty years later.

MaybI suppose you could do this sort of thing with Sykpe or some other videostreaming program.e, but I doubt it. I suppose you see some real interaction on The News Hour, but that takes a lot of production skill.

I visited a class with a girl I knew at the University of Maryland. We filed into a huge amphitheater with 400 students and there was a big screen in front and the professor was giving his lecture in another building. This was 1968. I was appalled. How could you learn anything in a setting like that?

When she visited me later, we went to Professor Thomas's class. It was one of the biggest classes at my college, about 100 kids in the chapel, sitting in the pews with Thomas on stage.

"Well," she sniffed. "This isn't all that different from Maryland"

Then, Thomas prowling around his stage fastened on her.

I'm not sure why he called on her. Probably because most of the other students were scribbling notes or looking out a window and she was staring right at him, and, truth be told, she was a very fetching young lady, eyes the color of azure skies, dark hair, high cheekbones and heads turned whenever she walked into a room, if there was anyone of the male persuasion lurking about.

So there she was, staring at him, and he did a double take and asked her some question, and she missed the point completely, and I tried to save her by saying, "I think what she is saying is..."

Our relationship went straight downhill from there. If I hadn't noticed before, she was as clueless as she was beautiful, and looks could get you on the train but eventually, they didn't take you where you wanted to go.

She was not stupid. And she was not without character. She put herself through Maryland as an undergraduate and then through law school and ultimately became a judge and she stood up to some local politicians, at some cost to her career.

But that day, she was unprepared. None of her courses in rooms filled with 400 students and professors in another building had taught her to analyze and to think abstractly. She was fine on the multiple choice tests. She had an excellent memory. But faced with a question about how we know what we know, how can we trust what we think we know, she was at sea without a rudder.

There is a great line from The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, in which Miss Brodie says education is the leading out from students. She does not mean teachers have nothing to put in to students' heads, but she means you must bring the learner from where they are to where they must go, and that is a more difficult task than simply asking, "Who painted Starry Night?"

Boy's Dream

"He who cannot learn from defeat cannot profit from victory."

--The Phantom, 2011









I don't watch baseball, or any sport much, unless I'm on the treadmill in my basement and need something, anything, to divert me. Usually, It's The Wire, which can make an hour on the treadmill simply evaporate.

But October 27, 2011, I thought, well, I'll just watch the World Series until it gets really boring. Never did. Cannot recall a game I've watched which was as wonderful, ever. I've played in two games which were just as crazy and unlikely and fantasy like as this one, but never seen a major league game like this one.

Usually, baseball is a game of anticlimaxes, but this time it was a game of one climax after another. The St. Louis third baseman, David Freese, who I had watched drop a routine pop up, allowing Texas to score and take the lead, comes to bat in the last of the ninth, gets two strikes on him. St. Louis is down to its last strike, understand, and Freese hits a shot to right field and Nelson Cruz, who had homered just an inning before, races back to make the Series winning catch and can't quite get his glove on it. The ball sails just a bit to his left and below his glove and Freese, who hit the ball, the guy who dropped that easy pop up just innings earlier, winds up on third, having driven home two runs to tie the game. And that does not even begin to explain how much more went into setting up that moment.

Every boy who has played backyard ball has dreamed up something like this, but I doubt any boy ever dreamed up the build up to that moment, which involved two Texas home runs which seemed to come out of nowhere, as if God were speaking and saying, "Okay, let's just get this over with."

As they say, you could not make this stuff up.

Then, the same player comes up in the bottom of the eleventh, with the score tied. Freese gets down to his last strike, two strikes on him, and hits one out to the deepest part of center field and wins the sixth game, sending the Series into the seventh game.

No way.

So that's what childhood and life are made of.

This is what dreams show us. Dreams show us you can dream big, but life can dream even bigger.

And then there is the reality of school. And there is the subject of how school can crush dreams and childhood and imagination and make minds constrict, if we are not very careful.

If we allow burnt out adults to burn out our children, we get...What? A burnt out aristocracy maybe.

The New York Times ran a story about Dalton School, an exclusive private New York City school, which is considering lightening the homework load and all the agonizing about this. One parent says he doubts Chinese or Indian parents are worrying much about over working their children: The message being, don't be wimps; we've got to not spare the whip, if our children are to compete in a global market place.

But does that line of Dalton School to Princeton to Harvard Business School to Goldman Sachs really constitute the playing fields of Eton (as in, the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton)?

I cannot know, but I doubt that parent knows what parents of children at competitive schools in India or China think, and I doubt he has much of a clue about the homework successful Indian or Chinese children are doing.

I wonder whether the Dalton School or the Horace Mann School homework assignments have much to recommend them beyond the length and ponderous heft of the reading and workbooks.
James Atlas's recent article about "Super People" in the Sunday Times, described people who seemed to be buffing their own personal stories for publication in the Style section wedding announcements, with prestigious fellowships, mastery of classical piano and brand name schools.
Could these parents be grooming their trophy kids for this ultimate accolade?
Are these parents really worried about stoking their kids' competitive spirit or are they simply creating trophy kids for their own ego gratification, so they can brag on their kids and feel superior and strut?

It's a given none of the parents mentioned, save Adam Gopnik, will read Andrew Hacker's fine examination of the outcomes of all this effort at resume building, Higher Education?: When Dr. Hacker examined what happened to the members of the Princeton class of 1973, the results were eye opening, dismal and predictable.

These were not kids with something to prove. They had already proven themselves just getting past Dalton or wherever, and getting into Princeton, or Harvard. Some of them probably stopped working--and Hacker tells stories of Harvard students telling their parents their classes weren't important, it was being at Harvard which was important. Can you blame these kids for resting on their laurels? Maybe they are not so much burnt out as simply recovering. But they are not kids with something to prove. Been there, done that.

The outcomes in terms of performance of this highly select class was one of, overall, moderate success, yes men and yes women who fit in as organization people, who made their low six figure salaries but were in no way really remarkable, and in no way changed the world; they sustained the world as it was given to them. They earned money for their law firms or financial firms, but they squandered their brainpower and lived lives with bound feet, in straight jackets.

People whose highest ambition had been self promotion and striving for effect, had gone on, for the most part, to undistinguished careers and, one imagines, lives of much disillusionment.
Is this the glittering prize these parents covet? Admission to one of the big three? And if the ultimate outcome beyond those campuses is uninspiring, then why?

At this point, you may be wondering what the epigram at the top of this posting has to do with any of this? It's about kids who have had too much success, who have had too little failure and feared failure too much and who play not to win but not to loose. It's about being able to shake off a defeat and move on. This is the root of persistence. It's what made U.S. Grant the essential general. He could absorb defeat, mistakes, and press on. Steve Jobs, same thing. It's what the chief of Radiology at Duke meant when he said he preferred jocks to the medical students who had never had anything but A's when he selected his residents. The jocks were accustomed to getting things wrong, correcting and getting better the next time. The never less than an A kid got corrected and fell to pieces.

Adam Gopnik is likely on to something, when he asks if the parents at Dalton are robbing their kids of their childhood.

The best thing he might do for his kids is to remove them from the pressure cooker and place them in a greenhouse, and allow them to grow.

What a curse, if the best thing you can say about your life is you went to Dalton School, and then Princeton, or Harvard, or Yale, or you name it. You have measured out your life in teaspoons, and with Eliot, found a wasteland.

Higher Education? The Emperor's Clothes

Memory is a slippery and shifting thing, but as I remember it, my friends in high school drove each other crazy competing to get into Harvard, Yale and Princeton, and if you didn't make that cut, well you could live with the rest of the Ivy League or some of the smaller schools like Swarthmore, Haverford or Amherst, and we were all very shocked when the class valedictorian, a kid who never had a single grade below A since elementary school,l shoved off to Stanford. Did he know something we didnt'?

No pleasure in life was permissible unless it somehow helped you take a step toward Harvard: You like to swim? Well, if you get on a team and compete in the leagues around town, you might interest the Yale swimming coach. Oboe appeal to you? Maybe your ticket to Princeton. And so on.

The only kid I knew who did not got straight to college after high school joined the army in 1964, and we all felt very sorry for him. His life was over. He'd spend the rest of his life struggling. Met him three years later, 1967. He had just got back from Germany and was going to college on the GI bill. And he, unlike all the rest of us, was not sweating bullets about getting drafted and being sent to Vietnam. His path less taken had proved to be smarter.

Then there was the guy who dropped out of college and wound up working in a General Electric aircraft engine factory, doing a sort of welding which is so high tech welding seems a very poor description. He is a bright fellow and moved up the ranks to the manager level, but there GE drew the line; he could not become part of management because he did not have a college degree. So a bunch of guys who spent four years drinking on their fraternity veranda got moved ahead, until the plant managers got tired of calling in this non college grad to fix all the messes the college boys made, and now this guy, who put in 32 years at the plant has retired, quite comfortably at age 55.

Around here, in New Hampshire, there are legions of men and women who work at small factories, fewer than 300 employees making stuff for airplanes or spacecraft or submarines, or they work on the nuclear submarines at Portsmouth Navy Yard, and they are not living in McMansions, but they have nice homes, boats, cars and time off. And maybe, if their companies do not screw up too much, they will have good pensions.

Which brings me to the book by Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus, which examines the value, beyong bragging rights, of an education at one of those elite colleges which parents in New York City begin grooming their kids for in kindergarten.

Hacker and Dreifus do not deny the cachet these brand name schools carry among parents, nor does he deny the sense of validation of the gene pool, parenting prowess, good karma, sense of the cream having risen to the top and all those things which parents of children who receive those fat envelopes from the big three or the golden dozen may feel; you have arrived. Now what?

What actually happens once the phone calls to the grand parents are made, once the neighbors are casually informed of the family triumph, once the faculty at the high school know, once the congregation hears, once the decals go up triumphantly on the rear window of the car?

It should come as a great satisfaction to anyone who was ever turned down by Princeton to read of Hacker's study, such as it could be a study, of what happened to the Princeton class of 1973. After acknowledging the many famous and important people who have been Princeton graduates, Hacker and Dreifus make the point that for any school with thousands of graduates, you would expect some to become rich and famous and important.

But what happens to most of the graduates? The answer for this Princeton class appears to be: Not much. They become middle managers, and most lead comfortable lives. The median income was--and I may not have the exact number--but in the neighborhood of $160,000, which means half fell below that and some were probably several multiples above it . But, as a group, they were remarkably unremarkable, mediocrities, yes men, yes women, not cage rattlers or earth shakers, just people who had learned to game the system, not to change the system.

Which is not to say we don't need people who can keep the law firm running, who can manage the automobile plant or plot the marketing strategy for General Motors, but it does mean that if you go to Princeton, your roommate is not going to be the new incarnation of F. Scott Fitzgerald, or the intellectual heir to Albert Einstein, or even, most likely as interesting to listen to as Paul Krugman.

He'll likely be a guy who is really good at video games and can play these all day, then cram all night and ace the calculus exam the next morning.

Harvard grads speak of "Dropping the H bomb," on people when they are asked where they go or have gone to college.

The effect of the name in a bar or at the beach or on the cruise may be worth all the effort, which is to say, it may get you to first base, maybe even second base with the girl. But what happens then?

But the best reason I've heard for going to HYP is you'll spend four years having really interesting conversations with very bright people and you'll make friends you'll never forget.

I hope that's true, for all the effort and expense, but from personal experience, not by any sort of scientific survey, judging only by the people I have known who went through HYP, I'm not so sure.

Beyond the competition and the social cachet, there is the more important portrait drawn by Hacker and Dreifus: The university as a center of unworthiness. Faculty who are overpaid, who spend their time pursuing consulting gigs off campus, who regard their own students as a burden and impediments to their own self advancement, constitute a pretty unappetizing lot.
Faculty who, once established, work remarkably little and are burnt out and uninspiring. Classes taught by undergraduates to undergraduates or by graduate students. Papers graded, not by the professor who teaches the course, but by graduate students.

There are wonderful teachers who love what they do in the classroom, but no mechanism to select for these teachers and against the unworthy ones.

It's not a pretty picture.

The famous remark: "The battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eaton," may have been the prototypically English snob statement. But it is this basic faith which guides so much public support for our own universities: From these playing fields will come the future leaders in thought, science and finance. But no. The big leaders lately have all been college drop outs: Gates, Jobs, Zuckerberg. Reminds me of the remark attributed to Tony Fauci, who now heads the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, the man organizing research to combat AIDS. He was offered a cushy position on the faculty of Cornell University Medical College and turned it down to the stupefaction of the faculty, who were scandalized. How could he do this, he was asked, to turn down such a plum? "Someday, I'm going to be either very rich or very famous, but if I stay at Cornell, I'll be neither." He denies having said that, but the story will not die. Probably because it so neatly summarizes what so many, who have been through the drill at elite institutions believe. Education at these places is not what the Greek source of the word "education" means: To Draw Out. Education is the pouring on, the beating down. People who have real internal compasses flee it. They have more important things to do.

Makes you wonder how our country is going to do, in the coming decades. Look at our institutions: The universities of Hacker and Dreifus; the courts and police of The Wire; the banks and financial institutions of mortgage backed securities; government thwarted by a disloyal Republican opposition; a "professional" or some would say "mercenary" military given missions by the likes of George W. Bush; the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer.

Gads, what dystopia. George Orwell would blush.

On Commercial Religion

Greater minds than mine have aimed withering fire at "organized religion."

There is, of course, a parallel line of thought which aims not just at the structures men erect to worship their God or gods, but at faith itself. Nietzsche said, "Faith means not wanting to know what's true." Voltaire added, "If we believe in absurdities, we shall commit atrocities."

I will not enter into that fray, the big ideas of whether or not there is a God, or whether or not we can know what God wants us to do.

I start from what I see on television, when I'm channeling surfing, looking for a baseball game while I'm on the treadmill. I have to pause at the televangelist channels. Here we have earnest, impassioned men and women beseeching you and me to come to their church, and to embrace what they say, and underlying every sentence, from every faith, from Christian, to Islam to Judaism is the tacit assumption: If you do right (as I tell you is right), you will be rewarded, or at least, (in the case of Judaism) you will not be punished quite so severely.

Listen to me, and you will profit. God will grant you wishes like the genie from the bottle, God will make you rich. God will heal your cancer. God will bring you a wonderful mate. God will take you into eternal paradise. God will get you laid. Whatever it is you are looking for, listen to what we say and God will do something good for you.

So, here's my question: How many people would go to church, would send these preachers money, would pray, if they believed God is not going to do anything for them?

Praying, is after all, always asking God for something.

Even those prayers which thank God for something, grace said over dinner, it's saying to God, thanks for the food, keep it coming.

But what if you knew God is out there, watching, but he is not going to do anything to help you, or--just as interesting a thought--he won't punish you for doing evil?

What if you knew when you got to Heaven, there would be Hilter and Stalin standing there at the golden gates, on the receiving line?

As the saying goes: Character is what you do when there's nobody around to see it.

What does it mean to "worship" God? Does "worship" not really translate into identifying all the things you like, and asking for more and more?

And then there is the whole social structure of "organized" religion. As soon as you have a mortgage to pay on a church building, or salaries or food to buy for a preacher, or money spent for Bibles and prayer books, or even money spent on soup for the soup kitchen, you have introduced something beyond what goes on inside your skull with neurons synapsing, into something money starts changing hands over.

I could dream up a religion which is organized which does not have any of that. You could meet in somebody's living room and talk about God, without a paid rabbi or priest. Maybe the Amish do something like this. But as soon as you have this, you have someone speaking for God, and then, pretty soon you have people asking for help again.

Just calling it "organized" religion is too neutral. Really, every religion I know about, and I'm sure there are many I don't know about and some that I think I know about but am misinformed, but from the perspective of a common man citizen, the better description of all Christian sects, from Catholic to Lutheran to Baptist,Mormonism, Judaism, Islam and even Buddhism, all offer something good for you if you follow, believe, and for the most part, pay money. (Buddhism may be an exception here.) So, the better, more accurate phrase should be "commercial religion." Try that on your focus groups.

And of course, where money is found, politics will follow.

In Texas, I read, there is a law that no one can hold public office if he doesn't believe in God.

So there you have it, believe and you will be rewarded: You can be governor of Texas.

This America, Ain't It?

Nicholas Kristoff, in today's New York Times lets loose a few broadside cannon blasts which, by themselves, ought to sink any Republican Man O'War in the water--if they are true:

1. The 400 wealthiest Americans have a greater combined net worth than the bottom 150 million Americans. (Remember the country has only a little over 300 million Americans, so that means 400 rich guys own more than half the country owns.)

2. The top 1 percent of Americans possess more wealth than the entire bottom 90%. When he says "bottom 90%" that's a bit of editor's glitch: he means "the other 90%" or 90% of all the rest of the population. Any way you slice it, that's a pie graph which ought to knock your socks off.

Even in at the height of the British empire, when kings had multiple castles and estates, there were barons and knights and other wealthy people who, I would bet added up to more than 400 people and their families. The rest of the population may have lived in huts and squalor, so that is different from now, when the other 90% likely has hot and cold running water, electricity and television, Pop Tarts and dinner four times a week at McDonalds or Godfather's pizza.

But still.

I showed some pie graphs to some friends and I was surprised to hear from two of them that if they had the choice of living in a country where the pie was divided evenly into 5 parts or in a country which had a slice only 1/10 of a pie thick which owned 40% of the wealth and another slice 1/5 of the pie which owned another 50% and the rest of the pie was the people who split the remaining 10% of the wealth, these two people said they'd choose to live in the country with the uneven division of wealth.

These two immediately recognized the even division of wealth, where the 1/5 richest part of the population owned 1/5 of the nation's wealth could only happen in a country which had laws which redistributed the wealth, a socialist country, like Sweden. And no matter how you sliced the pie, they didn't want to live in no socialist country.

They said two things: 1/ The uneven distribution between winners and losers is the price you pay for a vigorous capitalist economy 2/ The losers in the capitalist economy were still better off because the whole pie is so much bigger being poor in the capitalist country still leaves you richer than being in the top 20% in the socialist country.

They also doubted the truth of the numbers and asked how they were derived. Could we look on the internet, say at the Internal Revenue Service website and see where these numbers came from? And even the IRS website would have data on only income, not net worth because some of that may be in forms for which no taxes are owed.

On the other hand, when I pressed them with assertions (which I cannot back with numbers any better than what Rick Perry makes up as he goes along) that this wealth grab is not the result of hard working, risk taking tycoons who have succeeded because they were willing to gamble but because the tycoons have bought themselves tax loopholes and the banks have gotten away with privatizing profits and socializing risks, well they simple reject all that as being untrue.

The rich are rich because they deserve to be rich and, conversely, the poor are poor because they deserve to be poor--they aren't as smart or as hard working or as brave as the rich.

So here we have one of those it comes down to what do you want to believe propositions: The slave owner wanted to believe he was a great hero for taking care of the poor, incompetent, stupid and lazy slaves who were in his "care." He fed them, clothed them, gave them work and a place to live and heat in the winter.

That was his comforting delusion.

That the rich deserve their wealth and the poor deserve their lot is the comforting delusion of the Republican party.

They should be easy to beat, because you can only sell a mass delusion for so long.

As Democrats, we ought to be handing out T shirts with pie graphs, and T shirts with Got Medicare? Thank Democrats on one side and Got Social Security, Thank Democrats on the other and we ought to be handing out those same words on bumper stickers.

You are probably wondering about the picture and the title.

The picture is a class of American kids, at a public school in 1927, New York City, first generation kids mostly, born in this country to families of immigrants. Most of them grew up to buy houses, cars and to contribute to this country in industry, science, medicine, law and the military. The government paid for their education and got back that investment a thousand fold.

As for the title, it's not a quote but an allusion to the opening scene from The Wire in which a white policeman is interviewing a black teenager who describes how Snotboogie, a local kid, would join the daily game of dice and every day, he would wait until the pot got big and then he would scoop up all the cash and run away with it, only to be chased down and beaten up. The policeman asks him, well if Snotboogie always stole the pot, why did the local kids even let him play in the first place? The teenager looks at the policeman, a little indignantly, and says, "Got to, man. This America."

That's what the Republicans count on: Got to let those rich guys steal us blind; can't kick them out of the game. This America, man.

It's Not Who We Are--George W. Bush--Or Is It?

Here’s a therapeutic exercise for you: Whenever you think the current crop of imbeciles occupying the wood paneled offices of Congress are so impossibly inane they threaten the life of the nation, pull out a really good history book and look at what preceded them. The catch here is finding a good history book—start by avoiding any book ever handed out in a public high school. My own favorite is The American Past by Roger Butterfield, but Amazon is loaded with other options; really anything by Howard Zinn will do.

When you see the vitriol our predecessors poured on each other, when you see what passed for intelligent discourse before our time, and when you consider these people managed to reproduce and to bring forth the next generation, well, there is hope yet.

On the other hand, you may run across a example which causes you to despair, and to wonder why we cannot do what Americans of nineteenth century managed in a much more rancorous time. I just read the transcripts of some of the Lincoln-Douglas debates. The first thing which struck me was that Lincoln spoke for a few pages and then remarked he knows he has only 10 minutes allotted him so he will get to the point.

Can you imagine a debate between Rick Perry and Barack Obama where each spoke for 10 minutes, posing questions for the other to answer, asserting his own truths and rebutting the arguments of the other? Well, let me put it this way, can you imagine Rick Perry trying to talk for 10 minutes continuously, without a script?

Oh, the horror.

But I digress. What I am talking about is form and function. The form of these debates was designed not for an audience of Americans afflicted with attention deficit disorders; this was not stuff for listeners with the attention span and immediate retentive powers of fleas, but for the newspapers, which printed the text in full and these papers were read, I imagine, around pot belly stoves at general stores in New Hampshire, by groups of citizens, one reading aloud to the others who puffed on their corn cob pipes and either nodded in agreement or leapt to their feet to object.

Lincoln was struggling with the problem of an opposing group which simply could not see the evil in what they did: The slave owner did not see that he had harmed or demeaned or degraded another human being. He thought he had not robbed another man of his dignity, but the white slave owner looked at that cringing black man and thought himself a hero of sorts: The slave owner had clothed that Negro, had provided an overseer to protect the slaves from one another, for surely they would, like a pack of dogs, fall to fighting among themselves. The slave owner provided for his slaves, protected them and cared for his property as any sensible man would take good care of his carriage or his roof and his well.

Now allow me to turn to the Supreme Court. Stay with me now, eventually there is a thread here.

Yesterday, a transcript of the argument before the court in the Case of Florence vs. Board of Chosen Freeholders [Don’t you love that name?] of the County of Burlington was released.

Now, I understand, I am ignorant of the workings of the court. I infer written briefs have been submitted to the justices, who presumably actually read those written arguments prior to the oral presentation, so what we see in these pages does not, I dearly hope, represent the complete thought process of the court.

On the other hand, the exchange, which runs over sixty pages in my hands, is illuminating. First, the lawyer for the petitioner is grilled, then the lawyer for the respondents and then some guy who is a friend of the court, unfortunately from the Obama administration,arguing for strip searches, a profoundly disappointing thing.

The justices pepper the lawyers with questions. The lawyers never get a chance to complete a sentence before the judge who asked the question cuts him off, or some other justice cuts him off to ask a new question. Justice Thomas remains silent and his name never appears in the pages, but you know he’s probably there, although, now having seen the circus, I can see why he might not want to be riding a pony in this particular show.

For 59 of 60 odd pages of back and forth, mostly forth, because as I said the lawyers rarely get a word in and it’s not entirely clear any of the justices is really listening, although some do pick up on a trail of argument with which to skewer the unfortunate lawyer, for roughly 59 pages arguments rage about how the justices can be expected to come up with a rule for policemen and jailers all over the country to follow in the wide variety of setting which constitute county jails and other forms of lock up which are the first responders to the incarceration of citizens dragged in off the street by policemen who have arrested them.

Well over 50 pages are spent with questions about whether it is less of an indignity for such prisoners to be stripped searched if all prisoners have to undergo a strip search or if only some of the prisoners are strip searched.

Justice Kennedy, the swing voter [Because we already know how Scalia, Thomas, Alito and Roberts are going to vote. Has any of these guys ever voted against the jailers?] remarks:

“So it seems to me that your rule imperils individual dignity in a way that the blanket rule does not.”

By which he means, if the rule is only some people get strip searched as opposed to everyone (the blanket rule) then the person being strip searched has his dignity imperiled, but if the guy getting strip searched is told “Well everyone has to do this,” well, his dignity is intact.

Justice Kennedy will have to explain this further when the court considers the case of the girl who was raped when she walked into the fraternity house and she was told not to feel her dignity had been compromised because every girl walking into a fraternity house gets raped.

For some time,reading along, I imagined the way this must be done is every time a new prisoner is brought in all the other prisoners are sitting in an amphitheater waiting to see how the strip search show is going to unfold. And if some prisoners are not strip searched all those prisoners who were strip searched would jump up and exclaim they had been treated unfairly and their dignity had been imperiled.

So the justices go back and forth about whether a rule should be made to strip search a prisoner only if there is a "reasonable suspicion" he has a weapon hidden in his rectum or if the rule is everyone is strip searched, good reason or not.

One other thing which becomes clear: The justices imply they are just as worried that what is hidden in all those rectums of men and women pulled off the street for running a red light or for speeding or for not paying their parking tickets, what is in all those unexplored rectums and vaginas may be not just weapons, but “Contraband.” And what contraband? Once or twice the word “drugs” is mentioned. So what concerns the justices, what justifies the probing of orifices is the prospect some teenager who had a packet of marijuana in his pocket has stuffed that packet up his rectum as he sees the policeman approaching and once in the city jail, that teenager will ten sell that drug inside the prison sowing disorder among the prisoners.

Now let us consider what sort of weapons that teenager might have stuffed up his rectum or her vagina. Now this is an anatomically challenging proposition. Outside of Circ De Soleil, I cannot imagine anyone getting an AK-47 into a body cavity, at least not a loaded AK-47. I think we can be fairly safe we are not talking about a loaded pistol either. So what are we down to? A knife. Not just any knife, because an open blade…well, let’s just imagine a switchblade or pocket folding knife. That could work.

So we are protecting the jailers and the other prisoners from boy scout and Swiss Army knifes.

There is much allusion to the burden on the jailers if they have to think about who to strip search or if they have to make a judgment, rather than just strip searching everyone. There is no discussion about the burden on the individual being strip searched.

This all brings to mind those pictures of naked prisoner at the Abu Gharib prison. And George W. Bush goes on TV and looks the American people in the camera and he says, “This is not who we are.”

And now I’m thinking, well, apparently, yes it is. We strip our prisoners naked. And then we argue about whether or not we should do this to everyone or just to some of them.

Of course, as far as I know, Mr. Florence, who was strip searched once, then allowed to dress then strip searched again, Mr. Florence did not have to play Let’s build a pyramid. He just had to squat down in front of a jailer, grasp his scrotum and cough. (The justices call this move the "genital lift," sort of like the high crotch move in wrestling only done to yourself.)

But his dignity was not imperiled because, well everybody had to do that.

This goes back to the Lincoln-Douglass debates: We are faced with people who simply cannot see that stripping another person naked, a person you have in your power, is not wrongful. The Justices, the jailers, the police, how different are they from the slave owner who thinks he is not wronging his slaves? As Lincoln said, "As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a slave master." Why? Because he can see the experience from the point of view of the one most intimately involved.

There is some discussion about whether all this is necessary because at some jails prisoners are thrown into a common room where all those Swiss Army knives could be expelled out of rectums and vaginas and used to slash other prisoners or even jailers. The justices were confused on this point. Apparently, they feel compelled to make a rule for all jails, those with rooms where prisoners mingle and those for jails with private cells.

But this problem does not keep their attention for long. They want to make a rule. What is clear is they have no idea for whom they are making the rule: What is the landscape? Will the strip search rule be carried out in jails at a small police station with two cells and Andy Griffith and Don Knox scratching their heads or will the jails look like those holding pens in The Wire? They are making a rule for circumstances they don't bother exploring, as if a rule for passenger safety should be applied to a 747, a F15 fighter plane and the space shuttle.

They never concern themselves with the problem of whether or not common rooms into which men and women who might be dangerous are thrown is a violation of anything.

Then Justice Roberts asks brightly, “Is there a distinction between the simple strip search and the visual body cavity search?”

Well, I don’t know, I suppose there might be a degree of difficulty factor: I mean how do you accomplish a visual body cavity search? X ray vision?

Justice Alito really gets into the imaging of the scenes. (We are beginning to wonder about Justice Alito.) “Suppose a jurisdiction has the policy of requiring every inmate who is arrested and is going to be held in custody to disrobe and take a shower and apply medication for the prevention of the spread of lice and is observed while this is taking place from some distance by a corrections officer, lets say 10 feet away. Does that require a reasonable suspicion?”

Now we are back to the slave master again: Here is the assertion strip searches, like lice shampoo are for the prisoners' benefit.

So far, nobody has raised the issue: Just how often are Swiss Army knives actually found in rectums or vaginas after all this effort, across all 50 states, in all those jail houses?

Justice Kennedy does remark: “I think—in my practice at least—county jails were much more dangerous than penitentiaries, because you don’t know who these people are. You arrest them for traffic and they may be some serial killer.”

Well, there we are.

And think of all those people getting on airplanes: You are scanning them and you may be scanning serial killers, or mad bomber terrorists!

Squat! Genital lift!

Then it comes out the jail in question strip searches about 70 people every day.

This, the justices murmur, might present an “administrative problem,” if an individual decision had to be made about whether or not to strip search someone, about who to strip search. Maybe you could do only the pretty ones.

We could look to a really efficient system for guidance: Didn’t the Germans come up with something in the 1940’s when they had trainloads of people arriving at detention centers? They stripped everyone and they de loused them, too. No lose of dignity in Germany. Lose of life, but dignity remained intact,.

Another set of numbers: The US Marshall Service has an “intake” of 220,000 inmates a year and the Bureau of Immigration Customs Enforcement has 384,000 and ICE does 600,000 people. Just think if jailers had to make a decision about each of those people! Unworkable! We need a rule.

Finally, after much deliberation about whether a prisoner’s dignity would remain intact if the jailer ogled him or her from 2 feet or 5 feet or 10 feet, Justice Breyer finally asks (on my page 38 of the transcript) about whether any of this strip searching is productive, in the sense of discovering what the strip search is looking for: Swiss Army knives.

“My law clerk thinks it’s one out of 64,000 or less.”

He doesn’t actually say what is 1 out of 64,000, but I am inferring he means that’s how often they actually find something of interest, to wit, a Swiss Army knife or “Contraband,” which could be anything from Cocaine to medication for attention deficit disorder.

Ah, but the attorney for the defense has a ready answer: “This Court said that the fact there is not a lot of contraband being found may be a testament to the effectiveness of the deterrent.”

Let’s think about this for a moment. You are driving down the road and you see the flashing blue lights in your rear view mirror. So your first impulse is to stuff your marijuana and your Swiss Army knife up your rectum, but then you think, Oh, wait, they will have me squat down and do a genital lift in the jail. I’ve read about that.

So you swallow both instead.

Now, you are probably wondering about that 1 in 64,000 number. If I proposed to do a blood test for some disease, maybe a fatal disease, and I could tell you that you would find a case once for every 64,000 people screened, would Medicare pay for it?

And what is really interesting about this is that 1 is the 1 you found. Most medical studies try to assess the numbers you miss with your procedure. Suppose you knew you found 1 case out of 64,000 screened but you missed 1,000 cases? Would that not affect your decision about funding?

Here we are told by the lawyer for the jails: “The single biggest problem in Kentucky prisons and the biggest cause of death is drug overdose, which suggests there is a serious contraband issue in Kentucky.”

Or, looked at another way, what this suggests is all those strip searches missed a whole lot of drugs.

And, you may ask: I thought the strip search was to protect the jailers and the other prisoners from Swiss Army knife attacks: What do I care if some guy does himself in in jail? He would just as likely done himself in if he were not in jail. At least in jail somebody might be around to help him.

The lawyer for the strip searched plaintiff does cite some study which reviewed 25,175 admissions which produced 14 instances of “contraband.” And that was strip searching everyone. It is not known how many of those 14 could have been identified by a little questioning, say the way passengers flying El Al airline get grilled every day before they are allowed to board the plane. The administrative problem of dealing with large numbers in individual ways has not thwarted El Al for the past 40 years.

And here we get back to the thread I promised you. Here we have form and function in conflict. If the function of the oral arguments is supposed to be the thoughtful examination of the most basic issues presented in a particular case, would it not make sense for the lawyers to make a five minute presentation and then give the justices a few minutes each, if there are 9 then say that would take 30 minutes total, during which they could each ask either of the lawyers a set of questions. Then give the lawyers 15 minutes each to reply to the questions and you are out of there in under two hours.

In this particular case, the oral argument could have been opened and closed by Justice Sotomayor.

By page 42, Justice Sotomayor finally asks: “But what are we doing with the presumption of innocence?”

Sixty odd pages, how many hours, and one Justice asks the one question that matters and nobody even bothers to respond.

Your taxes at work.

Strip Searches for Fun and Degradation

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
----Constitution of the United States of America, Fourth Amendment

We conclude that, in the field of public education, the doctrine of "separate but equal" has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.
----Supreme Court of the United States, Brown vs Board of Education


We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
----Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, et al



The Phantom is very eager to see the text, to be released tomorrow, of the questions posed by the justices of the Supreme Court, in the case (Florence vs Board of Chosen Freeholders) of man who was arrested, (in error, it turned out) in front of his family, taken to not one but two police stations, where he was strip searched, not once, but twice, made to squat and lift his genitals before police or jailhouse officials.

The Phantom eager to see the questions from the learned justices because the Phantom is not learned in the law, and in fact has only middle school Civics class as formal training in constitutional law, and so is eager to be educated by the highest authorities in the land on the constitutionality of strip searches in the land of the free, home of the brave, this beacon of freedom and individual liberty, this first citizen among nations, when it comes to protection of the individual against the heavy hand of the state.

Now, you are all wondering, why should a man not be strip searched? I know this is not obvious.

You may well wonder, as does The Phantom, who the Chosen Freeholders are and how they got that name, but some things are better left alone.

The Chosen Freeholders, aka the jailers in New Jersey and all forty nine other states, assert that they are strip searching prisoners (who have been convicted of nothing, simply taken into custody by the twenty year old cop in the car) to be sure they do not have hidden “contraband” which they might use to harm other prisoners being held in open pens at the jailhouses.

So let’s think about this: What, exactly, could you have hidden in what body cavity which would be revealed by squatting in front of the jailer and holding up your genitals?

The Phantom can only imagine.

Well, we can imagine. Let’s see, how about a switchblade knife secreted in your rectum, which will pop out when you squat. Has this ever happened? Is it possible for that switchblade to not pop out? If it pops out, will it pop out five of ten squats? Three of ten? What is the study? Where is the data?

For all those strip searches done in local jail houses, how many weapons of individual destruction have been actually found?

How many videos of naked prisoners have been surreptitiously made and brought home for the entertainment of the jailers?

And how much questioning does it take nine justices of the United States Supreme Court to see the obvious? If ever there was an unalienable right, is it not the right to keep your clothes on in public. (In fact, if you take your clothes off in public, those same police can arrest you and bring you back to the station house where they, what? Make you put your clothes back on.)

As any inveterate viewer of The Wire knows, there is no need to fear what a prisoner may bring into a jail, because there are already shivs and guns and drugs aplenty in the jail already, so at most these weapons of individual destruction will only add to the count, not begin it. Weapons can be fashioned from stuff already present, and looking for weapons in rectums, vagina's, buttocks cracks is like searching out cudgels in a furniture factory.

What is the real reason for these strip searches? Well, let’s not go there quite yet.

If ever there was something which is “inherently” apparent, is it not that strip searches of any kind, in almost any circumstance, is “inherently” unreasonable?

If those eighteenth century gentlemen in their wigs were not thinking of strip searches as a violation of being "secure in their persons" against unreasonable searches, it could only be because in the eighteenth century not even the British soldiers did strip searches on American colonists they had arrested. Some outrages hadn't even been invented when the Constitution was written, but they were prescient, those founding fathers. Apparently, these dead white males, when alive, were less docile than the Rush Limbaughs of present day--Rush can see the authorities as having a reasonable case for wanting to do strip searches. For someone like Rush, it may be the only socially acceptable way of seeing naked human beings, and he can talk himself into the notion these arrested citizens pose a threat to other prisoners, somehow, in someone's pathological imagination.

And, of course, the poor jailers will say they cannot afford those machines they use at airports. But what fun would that be? No opportunity to humiliate or titillate there.

If separate but equal is inherently unequal, then a strip search is inherently unreasonable. Ipso facto.

Next question. Next case.

Dead Seals, Tuna, Birds

It's odd watching other people trying to figure out a mystery.

I've been involved in pursuing diagnoses for some time, and I know I want to go to the scene, as much as possible.

Whatever I know of police investigations, they feel the same way. Go to the scene and don't allow anybody to disturb the scene.

So, when I arrive on the scene and observe things, I look around for investigators. I see none. But then again, I'm not at the scene for more than fifteen minutes on any given day.

At the beginning of the week, October 1 or thereabouts, I walked along the beach with my dog and found an adult seal, dead, Further down the beach, at Plaice Cove, we found a dead fish, later identified as an eight foot blue fin tuna.

For several weeks prior, small seals had been washing up in Plaice Cove, about one every other day for a week. And birds, maybe half a dozen dead gulls, washed ashore.

I phoned the numbers in the paper to report the findings. I imagine others did, too.

The seals disappeared fairly promptly, usually within three days. The birds too. The fish is still out there. He must be tougher to haul off. Must weight 300 pounds.

One marine biologist from Maine was interviewed and mentioned a prior event with deal seals a decade or more ago, which sounded like this one, but he did not mention the birds or fish being involved.

Another biologist raised the issue of avian influenza. Now that rang a bell--the birds and the seals connected.

But what about that tuna?

The Hampton, New Hampshire marine biologist said it was nearly unprecedented to have a full grown tuna wash ashore at Plaice Cove. She could not recall another instance.

So we are talking about something which makes a leap cross species, if all the deaths are caused by one cause, which has not been established.

Of course, we are not panicking.

The nuclear power plant at Seabrook, two miles away had to shut down two days ago. Something about a pump failure. Now that might be something to panic about.

But these seals, the fish, the birds, are they the canaries in the coal mine? Are they the dead rats who are harbingers of the Black Death, Yesina Pestis?

One of the biologists interviewed sounded pretty annoyed at all the citizens who have been finding these seals. It's a federal offense to come within 100 feet of such beach kill, such detritus.

That's the sort of remark that gives authority a bad name. What an officious remark. You can understand the guy is concerned if he thinks there may be some sort of marine Ebola virus running a muck off the New Hampshire coast. But if he thinks that, why is there not more evidence of government concern? Where are the guys you see in the movies in the white suits? And why is that tuna still on the beach?

The fact is, I'm pretty impressed somebody in authority has bothered to do autopsies (necropsies) on two seal pups. They presumably sent off lung tissue for viral cultures. They did mention the seal pups had plenty of blubber and did not starve to death. But nobody mentioned bird or fish examinations.

Meanwhile, the good citizens of Hampton, New Hampshire continue to walk the beach with their dogs and children.

And we look out to sea, past the breakers, and think about the life out there we never could see before. We wonder about what sort of seal lives those wonderful, sleek looking creatures have been living, beyond our sight.

And we wonder about our own reaction. I felt genuinely sad for those fellow mammals. Seals, I know, eat penguins, who are also adorable. And they eat fish. They compete for life in those waters. But I've never heard a surfer say he's ever been bitten by a seal.

The surfers know if they see a lot of seals, there may be sharks not far behind.

Nobody around here has much sympathy for sharks.

But then again, no dead sharks have washed up.

If we start seeing sharks on the beach, we might work up a little sympathy for them.

Thing is, when you see these magnificent creatures, there is a sort of instant wonder. They are so perfect for their environment.

It brings to mind the Blake poem

Tiger, tiger burning bright.
In the forests of the night.
Oh, what hand, Oh what eye,
Forged thy fearful symmetry.

Which is not to toss in a vote for the creationists.

I don't know how these creatures came to be. In college, I was taught it was eons of evolution, mutation, environment and genetic selection.

Fact is, I don't really care how these wonderful animals came to be. It's just stunning to see them outside a zoo, on my beach, in all their staggering power and fit. They belong to this world somehow, in a way no humankind ever could.

Prizewinners

When I was elected to an honor society in college, my parents were delirious but my older brother remarked, "He's no smarter today than he was yesterday, before you heard about this prize."

This is all about perception, of course, and something called "Consensual validation."
The same thing applies to Nobel prizes and to Academy Awards. You do not think you are smart enough to judge a person's intelligence, creativity, work for yourself, but when the committee speaks, well, then you know genius or talent.

In the case of the Nobel prize in physics or chemistry or medicine, you have the excuse that you cannot judge someone's work in such arcane fields. But in literature, you are perfectly capable. Somehow though, when Ernest Hemingway's book has a little label that says, "Nobel prize winner," well, then The Old Man in the sea is transformed from an affected small tale of a fisherman into a freighted, symbolic masterpiece and it has all sorts of gravitas.

It's the old Being There thing. Once Chauncey Gardner gets on TV and people start telling each other how brilliant he is, well then a simpleton becomes a sage.

Fact is, there is much in Hemingway which is puerile and badly done, but there is something in his best work or parts of his best work which is wonderful.

When it comes to economics, Paul Krugman gets listened to because he's won the prize, but every day in the pages of the New York Times, you can judge for yourself. Fact is, he sings the same song, and if he's right that we ought to be spending more government money to lift the economy out of recession, it's not true because he won the Nobel Prize.

That committee doesn't know any more than you do, when it comes to the dismal science.

In literature, I can say without any doubt, the Nobel committee knows nothing. The day they vote Bob Dylan a Nobel prize in literature, well then I'll say, whoever was on the committee that day got it right. Until then, I can judge the committee wanting all by myself.

When it comes to the Academy Awards, or the Pulitzer prizes, well, I don't need their help to know what good is. The fact is, those awards are just commercial enterprises. The explosion of awards shows, which now approach the number of reality shows, should expose that truth.

There is some value in celebrating achievement.

We just ought to be very careful to distinguish accomplishment (the work) from the award (the recognition or assertion of the value of that work)

Fact is, here in New Hampshire, I can count on one hand the number of people I know who can name any Nobel prize winner in any category. They do a lot better with Academy Award winners.

I'm not sure what that means.

Stastistics: Numbers Don't Lie, but Analysts Do

When I showed the pie graphs from Paul Solman, demonstrating the distribution of wealth in the United States compared to wealth distribution in Sweden, to a co worker, she dismissed them immediately. "Oh," she said, "That's all just numbers. You can bend and twist them any way you want."

I was astonished by her response, and assumed she simply did not want to deal with the implications of what those numbers implied: Namely, that capitalism, at least American capitalism is broken.

But today, in the New York Times, a shining example of the necessity to look closely at how numbers are gathered is essential. Emily Owens, a professor of Policy Analysis at Cornell, takes us through, step by step deconstruction of what those numbers actually mean. Such an exercise is the negative pole to the positive of the Rush Limbaughs and Bill O'Reilly's of the world, who find a number which supports what they already believe and run with it.


The numbers in question concern the murder rate in the United States before and after the initiation of Prohibition after the passage of the 18th Amendment . Census mortality statistics showed the national homicide rate jumped 40% and after it was repealed in 1933, murder rates plummeted. So, QED, criminalizing alcohol caused a huge increase in murder and, by extension, major crime.

It turns out, there are a few problems with this conclusion. In 1900 the Census counted deaths in only Indiana, Michigan and in the New England states. After 1910, states like Nevada and Texas were counted and those states had then and continue to have higher murder rates, before and after Prohibition. You simply started to count the murders in the murder states.

Second, it turns out Prohibition did not happen all at once: Prohibition began at the state level 70 years prior to the 18th amendment. By the time the 18th amendment took effect, 32 states were already dry. And when Prohibitions was ended by the 21st amendment, many states remained dry. Comparing murder rates in individual states from the dry to the wet years shows a 26% difference, not 40%.

But, you may say a 26% difference is still large.

So we get to thirdly: Other variables changed over the 14 years of Prohibition. Urbanization, population shifts of displaced Southern blacks into urban Northern ghettos created an explosive mix, as did the stock market crash of 1929. Immigration was also in the mix, as immigrants from Europe and China flooded into the inner cities.

Then there is the effect of murder committed by inebriated people. During Prohibition, there may or may not have been less drunkenness, but likely there was not more--and this would have contributed to fewer murders rather than more. This is a number which is difficult to tease out. Different analyses place the effect of Prohibition in a given state as anything from a 5% increase in murder to a 13% decrease.

The public perception through TV dramas and movies and newspaper headlines is that Prohibition resulted in a rampage of crime and murder, but the effects of fewer drunken murderers, the effects of urbanization, new racial mixing, immigration, financial stress caused by the stock market crash and the Depression, all likely had as much effect, if not more, on murder rates during Prohibition, which may have risen, fallen, or stayed unchanged during the 14 years of Prohibition.

The same sort of analysis can be done for "Death Rates" from various diseases which are always quote in papers in the medical literature and popular press. Knowing how death certificate data, from which these numbers are generated, I always dismiss all death rate data as bogus.

Ever since academic and local hospitals stopped doing autopsies, and more people started dying at home, and cause of death was "determined" by local physicians, death rate numbers have been sheer fantasy. Nobody knows any more what diseases are killing people in American communities.

It's simply "Garbage in, garbage out."

The Rich Stay Rich; The Poor Get Fantasy

--The Good Lord must love the common folk; he made so many of them.

--Abraham Lincoln



My grandfather had nothing but contempt for capitalism and the politicians who supported it. It was no better than monarchies or any other form of despotism, by which he meant any system which placed a lucky few at the top and which suppressed the mass of common folk, either by force of arms or by conspiracy.

But he was a man of another century, actually another two centuries, born before 1900, having got on the ship to America about the time of WWI.

I thought he just didn't understand America, that he brought resentments from the old country here, and kept seeing the same injustices everywhere.

But now I'm not so sure. He may, with his old eyes, have seen more clearly than I could with my young eyes.

Commenting in the New York Times, John J. Donohue, professor of law and economics at Stanford, sees the case of Leo Aopthekar, fired after a few disastrous months as CEO of Hewlett Packard, who then walked away with $13 million dollars in "termination" benefits, as an emblematic case of how people at the top of the economic pyramid rape the system, especially when they fail. And we all pay a downstream price, just as surely as when the dam collapses.

Capitalism, as most understand it, is about taking risks and being rewarded when you succeed and being punished, sometimes ruined, when you fail. But the boards of directors of publicly owned companies have conspired with the CEO's they hire to pervert that system into a you-can't-lose system.

Witness the recent financial meltdown, where everyone--anyone who owned a house--got hurt but the fat cats at the top made money.

It is all perfectly legal, because our laws are written by legislators who are in the pockets of the rapists of this system. The legislators, as my grandfather was fond of saying, are the best congress money can buy.

So at the front end, Mr. Apotheker gets more than $4 million dollars as a relocation allowance when he takes his new job--that must have been quite a large moving van--and, at the back end, when it becomes clear the guy is a terrible CEO, he gets a cash payment of twice his base pay and his earned "target" bonus, and his unused vacation pay.

Although he was fired by the board, he was not fired, legally "For cause," but just for failing to perform. (Go figure.)

Did nobody ask why he had been fired from his previous job, before they hired him? Did anyone listen to his answer with even a shred of discretion?

When asked why board of directors would agree to such a breath taking deal, they always talk about the cost of talent, (as if they know it when they see it) the need for a unique combination of skill sets, the difficulty of luring away a person who is clearly at the top of the game from one team to your own. They start floating names like Reggie Jackson or Babe Ruth, athletes who once acquired brought their new teams longterm strings of championships, leaving their former teams in shambles, as if that were really an appropriate analogy.

But that's all a lie. Nobody knows who will be a successful CEO. It's not like you can time his fastball. Every CEO ought to be hired on probation and he ought to share the risk as much as the company and its board. If the board members stood to lose money if he failed, they'd be asking a lot more questions.

I don't know, but I'd bet CEO's of very large concerns, whether it's GM or HP or even the USA usually are not able to carry the entire team or to make that much difference.

So why would a board of directors vote for such an unconscionable pay package?

Well, look at the members of a board of directors. Usually, these are people who have other jobs, like professorships at a university, or head of a bank, but they can triple their own incomes if they get on a few lucrative boards, and they get paid for being on these boards even as they draw salaries from their day jobs. Once on the boards, they may not have much real work to do, and nobody gives them exams, or report cards; they just take their cut.

A good friend of mine was named to the board of directors of a medical device company and at the first meeting he listened to the financial report of the million dollar loss for the previous quarter and that was added to three prior quarters of losses. The next item on the agenda was to vote to increase the stipends of each of the board members by $100,000.

"But how can we do that, given the first report we heard today. The company is losing money?"

There were knowing smiles around the conference table, "Oh, you don't understand yet. You'll catch on," the board members told him indulgently.

He resigned later that month.

The company struggled on for several more years and was finally acquired by some other company whose board of directors likely had no idea what they were approving, but they were getting their own checks.

At a Washington, DC party I found myself talking to a lawyer in an expensive looking shirt with a white collar and cuffs and blue body and a tie which probably cost more than my suit. He had gone to Harvard College and Yale Law and he worked for Hogan and Hartson, a blue stocking Washington firm, and we got on to the recent resignation cum firing of Larry Summers as president of Harvard. This lawyer said the magic words, "Well, he had such a unique mix of talents and skills, a really brilliant guy, so he was a great catch for Harvard, but sometimes the chemistry just isn't there, the fit just doesn't happen."

And I said, "I could be president of Harvard. So could you, or anyone in this room, including that guy over there holding the food tray, or the guy behind the bar. All you have to do as president of Harvard is to keep your mouth shut and read the speeches some grad student writes for you at commencement. It's one of the easiest jobs in the world."

He was shocked, just shocked.

But then he thought about it and said, "You may have just said something profound. Larry's problem was he just always had to prove he was the smartest guy in the room."

Fact is, the top job in many companies and institutions is easy money.

Not true for the guy who has to run a department of surgery, who has to come up through the crucible of fire that is surgical training where he learns what good is, where he has to solve problems or wash out. The head of the department of surgery at a university may make more than the president, and he ought to. The head basketball coach at Duke makes more than the president of the university, but then he can echo Babe Ruth, "Well, I had a better year."

It all comes back to those pie charts showing how small a portion of our populations owns such a huge slice of the pie of the wealth of the nation. That happens through all those board rooms and CEO payment packages and it is bringing down our nation. This country has always done best when the wealth was more evenly distributed, when everyone had a stake in the outcome, when we all pulled on the oars together rather than trying to paddle our own boats separately.

We won WWII because we could out produce Germany and Japan in making warplanes. Our workers won the war in the factories as surely as our troops on the ground and our sailors at sea.


Yes, there were talented men at the top, like Albert Einstein and Fermi and Oppenheimer, who made a difference by advocating for and building an atomic bomb, but their talents did not have to be bought with multimillion dollar salaries.

If Moneyball has taught us anything, it's that we really do not know how to evaluate talent or genius--we can try something different and see how it performs. But that's not what is happening in this country today.

Omar Little, of the wire of course had the best take on who controls the world and who ought to and on the difference between them. He has just testified (falsely) in the murder trial of a street thug and the defendant's lawyer says, "You are amoral. You've admitted it. You make your living by the gun, by stealing from drug dealers on the corner, at gun point. Why should we believe you. Why should this jury believe a word you say? You are a manipulator and you have no conscience."

Omar is unruffled, "Just like you," he says.

"What?" the lawyer expostulates.

"I do what I do with the shotgun. You got your briefcase. Same game. Different looks."

The lawyer looks, astonished, to the judge, who simply shrugs as if to say, "You started this counselor. He simply answered your question."

It's an answer we should all take to heart. The Apothekers of the world may not think of themselves as thieves but they are all part of that thieving game.