Public Schools

As I listen to Rick Santorum proudly proclaim he has home schooled his children, and as I listen to Republicans of all stripes of deride public education as one more intervention by government into the lives of people, I have to laugh. Public schools as the heavy hand of government. Better replace them with vouchers for private schools or charter schools, but kill the Department of Education and dispense with the whole idea of spending your hard earned tax dollars to educate the children of the undeserving poor or the recently arrived.

My wife and I both went to public schools, she in a suburb of San Francisco and I schooled in an affluent suburb of Washington, D.C. Both school systems were supposed to be wonderful, the best money could buy.

One of my sons went to the same public schools I had attended and the other, floundering, ultimately wound up in a very upscale private school, the sort of school where your schoolmates had parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles who had preceded them.

What I think I saw was the public school my son attended, for all its success getting kids into the Ivy League, was jarringly uneven in its academic quality. For one advanced placement class in world history, his homework was coloring maps. On the other hand, he had two English teachers out of the four during his tenure, who taught him how to write, who taught him critical thinking. As idiotic as some of his teachers were, there were some who were very high quality, as high quality as any my son had at the renown private school .

What I saw in the private school, clearly among the parents, and this was conveyed to their children on some level, tacitly or explicitly, was a sense of superiority. This ranged from an unctuous smugness which came out at dinner parties where parents reminisced about their days at Harvard, as if everyone around the table was expected to have attended Harvard. And one parent endured a good deal of good natured ribbing because his daughter had decided to attend Stanford, and there was a lot of joshing about the disgrace her father must feel.

What I saw at the public school, among the parents, at back to school night, was a sense of community. I sat through the teacher's presentation about the music theory course and walking out of that room with my neighbor we looked at each other and blurted out, "I would not last a day in that class. It is way beyond rocket science."

We saw each other at the community swimming pool and we asked after each other's children. When a child, driving drunk, collided head on with another car on a bridge, we all knew the kid who was driving and we knew the man he sent to the hospital. We lived through each other's ups and downs. When a kid we had all watched as a seven year old soccer phenom did not make the high school varsity, we all commiserated and decided soccer was not that important after all.

The private school rescued my son, academically. The small classes left him nowhere to hide and he more or less had to succeed. He loved the school and he still has friends from that school, now even in his twenties. But he has friends from his neighborhood, too. He went to the private school only for high school. He wasn't there long enough to have internalized that sense of being a chosen person, who was meant to be privileged, and programmed and guaranteed to succeed.

There was a sense of having been benefited beyond what I had earned, when I went to a private college. It was the 60's and a lot of us struggled with rich man's guilt which some called winner's guilt. We were not severely afflicted because, although we were Ivy League, we were in the bottom tier of the Ivy League, not the big three, so we could feel less than the Elect.

Somehow, in a way it's hard to describe without going into more detail, there was something a little poisonous about the private school experience.

One quick story: At dinner, after a lot of hearty congratulations about children who were going off to Harvard and Stanford and Princeton, I piped up with a story about having watched the Stanford girls' softball team defeat the team from Texas for the national championship. I was new to the group, and there were indulgent smiles around the table, as I babbled on with my non sequitur. "Yes," I said, "Those girls were wonderful athletes, those Stanford players. They interviewed some after the game. And listening to them, you know, I somehow did not think these particular girls had scored 1600 on their college boards."

An icy silence gripped the room. Finally, the woman at my right elbow, Harvard '73, looked at me and said, "I think you might be surprised."

Oh, I thought, I think not.

That Bloom of Youth

There is a wonderful bar scene in Mad Men with Don Draper, who is about 32 and his boss, who is in his early fifties.

They spot two young women further down the bar, looking in their direction, playing eye games with them.

The boss says they've got that bloom of youth which you can only see in the young, must be no older than 30, these ladies.

Draper says they would be lucky to have 30 years between the two of them. The boss continues rhapsodically, about that ineffable quality they have, of youth, which women lose when they get much past thirty and Draper gets up to make a call leaving the older man smiling at the two nubile young things, who are still looking in his direction, but their eyes follow Don Draper and their heads turn away from the boss, as they follow Draper move toward the phone.

And you can see the fade in the boss's smile, as he realizes their interest was not in him; they were not toying with the idea of becoming a foursome; they were simply looking at his younger colleague. They were interested in the same things the boss was interested in, and those did not include him. He was old now, at least in comparison.

In that scene, the most important parts conveyed not by dialogue but by the visual exchange of looks and where eyes go, is encapsulated the boss's dilemma. He is having an affair with a young woman in the office and he is ogling young women in the bar and he is being left behind by life.

It's the perfect expression of Mimi Beardsley and JFK and all of that.

Of course, there was something a little bit more bizarre in JFK, a man who seemed to enjoy watching his friends and brothers being afforded the pleasures of oral sex at his command. That gets beyond a desire to cling to youth by having affairs with younger women.

But Mad Men has a lot of touches like this, deftly done, and there if you notice them, but not all that critical if you miss them.

People Who Matter

Okay, I'm done now. Finished the book.

Oddly, the book is really two books: The first book is about this 19 year old girl who is thrilled to be involved in a straightforward sexual affair with John F. Kennedy and the second book is the book about the boring life she led after the affair.

And there is the problem: How do you top that wild, mad 18 months?

In a larger sense, it's the problem most of us have as we move through our 60's and 70's--we don't matter much any more, except to our kids or our closest friends.

Bill Clinton once said what he really liked about being a former President is he could say whatever he wanted to say without wimping around and worrying about the implications of each phrase; the only problem is, he noted, nobody cares what he says now.

I had a colleague, Bill, whom I eventually learned to like, from a very blueblood Philadelphia family. He had gone to Yale undergraduate, Penn for medical school and he would say things occasionally which would stop me in my tracks. Once, he was describing somebody he had known at Yale, a young man who was struggling to find his place in campus life, but his basic problem was, Bill said, he was "not a very important person." Bill said this with a twinge of real sympathy, pity almost, real feeling for this guy, who was not in the Social Register, whose family was simply put, in Bill's world, not very important.

And that's an amazing concept, when you think about it. The concept that some people are simply not important.

When I was a medical student at the very blue blood New York Hospital, on the chic upper East Side of Manhattan, the most downtrodden Bowery bum admitted through the ER was always, "Mr." So and so. We were taught by our Park Avenue faculty, there was no higher status than that of "patient." The attendings treated these people, the patients, with elaborate respect and we all got the message.

I don't know whether or not they still believe that at New York Hospital, which is no longer the same hospital, really, with new buildings and a new name, built over the old place, but I hope they still believe that, even if it's, in these days of Republican one percenters, a fantasy.

But Mimi Beardsley, that 19 year old girl is fascinating because she accepted the idea she was unimportant, that what was important was the world she had entered, and that made her interesting.

It's the same thing that put young men in fighter planes--the idea that I am not all that important, but what we do here, what I'm part of, does matter.

Comparing the President's mistress who spends her time having sex , with a young man who risks his life in battle over the English channel, saving Britain may seem absurd, but the common element is the sense of I am doing something which is more important than anything I'll ever do again.

But what do you do with the rest of your life, after you've had that intense experience?

The sad, and disappointing part of the book is watching Mimi trying to piece together an answer to that question. She details the demise of her first marriage; she outlines the weariness of her life after that marriage, her search for something worthwhile, and she claims to have found peace of mind.

But you can see the reveal. She is talking about her affair with JFK, she says, as therapy.

It's not therapy, it's living in the past.

It's seeking a better time and trying to recapture it.

Mephistopheles says, in Dr. Faustus, "The greatest sorrow is remembering happier times."

That's what you feel as you leave 1963 and live through the next five decades with Mimi and her secret. The sad thing is, she never found anyone she liked as much.

Once Upon A Secret

Okay, I know you are growing weary of my enthusiasms.

I am Toad, of Toad hall, gripped by each new sensation with eyes spinning like tops, sprawled on the road thinking, "What Have I been missing?"

First it was The Wire, then Downton Abbey, then Mad Men, and now it's Once Upon a Secret.

It's not (just) that this memoir by one of JFK's mistresses spins a fairy tale of the girl picked out of the litter by the King and swept along. Mimi Alford spins her web, giving just enough background about the events surrounding her affair, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the desegregation crisis at the University of Alabama, but she tells the tale of the hand maiden to the King who is also the consort.

She tells it from the point of view of a nearly seventy year old woman who is beyond embarrassment or need for fame or fortune and the voice is warm and tempered and she says she did sleep with another man's wife, and it never bothered her and she says why: It was clear she was no threat to the wife, that she enjoyed the sex, enjoyed the places sex with this powerful man took her, enjoyed the adventure and enjoyed being used. If she was a ruined woman, she was enjoying every minute of it.

It is remarkable how clearly she can articulate the thrill of having an affair with someone who you find so exciting, unattainable and attractive. Even now, she cannot see Dave Powers, whom some would call JFK's pimp, as anything other than a very nice man.

The most fascinating thing about her account is how it allows you to see something through someone else's eyes. Her values are so clear, as are the prevailing values of the time, both on stage and back stage.

This is a book which is rewarding on many levels. I was always a sucker for memoir, whether it's called a novel or an autobiography, whether it's The Bell Jar or A Farewell to Arms.

It does what really good literature can do--it gets you into someone else's head. So, if you are seeing things from the point of view of Stringer Bell, murder makes perfect sense. If you are seeing things from the point of view of Robert Fredricks, desertion from the army makes perfect sense. If you are Mimi Beardsley, having sex with the President during your summer internship and on weekends down from college seems entirely the right thing to do.

What is so wonderful about this book, at least as far as I've gotten into it, is even pushing 70, she can look back and say, "I was a lucky girl."

We Are The Lucky Ones

What a wonderful age we live in. This morning, I opened the New York Times and was able to read two pieces from either side of the planetary experience: A review of Katherine Boo's book about garbage collectors in Mumbai, India, who live on the precipice of economic disaster, eking out a living from scraps and a memoir of the "outed" paramour of President John Kennedy, who enjoyed what would have to be labeled a life of privilege.

I was able to download the books right in my own wireless home to my Kindle and to begin reading.

I started with the paramour, Mimi Beardsley Alford, who was 18 when she was first introduced to Kennedy in the Rose garden, and he, speculatively registered her blond rangy good looks and arranged for her to be invited down for a summer internship in the press department, working for Pierre Salinger, alongside Fiddle and Faddle, two other young women with whom the young President was cavorting whenever opportunity presented, and she became one of his stable of young women.

The man took his pleasures where he found them, apparently.

Alford's description of the world of boarding schools, women's colleges, debutante balls is straight out of Mad Men, and, despite myself, I find myself enthralled. Best thing since The Bell Jar.

As a young woman, Mimi knew she was living out of the Social Register, which her mother kept on the study desk at home.

What made this particularly piquant for me is Mimi is just four years old than I am and she was coming down to the White House during her summer breaks from college, just 9 miles from my own home in suburban Maryland, living in those years 1962-1963 which are years I can well remember, along with the mores of the time, when a woman was supposed to be virgin on her wedding night, and when women were deflowered and "ruined," as if the first sexual encounter was some sort of transformative, defiling event.

But what really struck me, as she described her debutante world was the memory of my own teachers telling us how very privileged we were, living in Montgomery County, Maryland, which, they said, had the highest per capita income in the country, and we were attending the Walt Whitman High School, from which 95% of the graduating class would go on to college and a high percentage to elite colleges.

We felt so privileged, we were almost apologetic, we had so much given us. Dr. Zhivago had just come out in movie form, and I could well imagine, some day, we would all be the targets of some proletarian revolution, like Marie Antoinette or the czar's family.

Now, reading, I realize none of us public school kids would ever have been welcomed into Mimi's home by her mother. We did not have debutantes and none of our names, to my knowledge, were in the Social Register.

But oddly, Mimi went to Wheaton College, from Miss Porter's, and I went to Brown. The snobs of my years at Brown thought the young ladies of Wheaton College had more money than brains and we, most of us public school boys, had no interest in going up the road to Wheaton College. We were breaking a tradition which held that road trips there were part of the social order. But Social Register did not count much by the mid 1960's. Those girls may have been debutantes, but they could not hold a candle to the Pembrokers, the women on our own campus, who were as highly selected as the women of Radcliffe, Vassar, Barnard, Bryn Mahr, Mount Holyoke, Smith and Wellsley.

In fact, debutantes were dealt with by none other than Bob Dylan, in a single line: "Your debutante knows what you need, but I know what you want."

Apparently, Mimi discovered what JFK wanted, only 4 days into her internship.

Mimi did not, apparently, fall into ruin or lead a life much worse than her mother would have hoped for her. Certainly, her life, as the lives of my public school mates was worlds better than what we would have led in Mumbai, or Bombay as it was then called.

But what of happiness? Did my mates, or Mimi's cohort live lives which felt wonderful?

She speaks of the electric feeling she had when she arrived at the White House, that she was part of something really important, that her life mattered, that she mattered. Of course, this idea, like the idea of love may simply be a delusion.

Don Draper tells Ms. Menken, the Jewish heiress who runs a large Manhattan department store, that love, that electric jolt which changes your life and transports you to a life of ecstatic hope is all a delusion, and he ought to know delusion because that's what he does for a living, in advertising.

I very much like Ms. Alford for never saying how sorry she was for her part in JFK cheating on his wife. She says now she is only a little sorry she had not been more sorry, but that is the socially correct thing to say. Fact is, JFK was looking for outside business and Mimi was not hurting Jacqueline Kennedy, or threatening JFK's home life or political life. She was simply enjoying the ride and she is honest enough to say she's glad she had it.

It made her happy then.

When you look at life among the garbage merchants, in a teeming, sweltering country like India, like China, like any African nation, you might say, "You can keep reality; I'll take the life of fantasy and illusion any day."

Cause and Effect

There is a wonderful remark in Downton Abbey about an aristocrat who loves dressing up in a military uniform with all the medals and ribbons and the belts and riding boots and whip, but, as the lady who tells it says, "The problem is, I don't think he connects that splendid army uniform at all to fighting."

The military, after all, fundamentally, is about killing.

I get much the same feeling whenever I hear some politician say we have to get the high school graduation rate up or we have to get the masses into college, if we are ever going to compete with Asian nations.

After all, if we could just award more sheepskins with more names on them, then the problem of a workforce which cannot add or subtract or multiply or measure would be solved.

As if putting on the cap and gown is the point, rather than what that uniform is supposed to signify: real, useful, transformative learning.

Nicholas Kristof speaking of a book by Charles Murray, about the decline of the white American middle class focuses on the statistic that in 1970 only 6% of births occurred out of wedlock among white women who had only a high school degree but now that figure is 44%.

Both Kristof and Murray bemoan the disintegration of marriage as a terrible thing, for its social consequences, namely children raised by one parent, or often by a grandparent with no parent to be seen. As if the problem is that the parents never married, rather than the problem they didn't marry had to do with the parents who were unemployed and unemployable, with no real prospects beyond, if they are lucky, driving a truck or working at McDonalds.

Kristof acknowledges the problems revealed by that statistic goes far beyond the problem of a demise of marriage. He mentions the theory that young men are civilized and tamed by women, who force them to form stable family units. As if that can really happen in the absence of good paying jobs.

Black society is very familiar with the troubles rural, under educated white men and women are now facing: where there is no prospect of steady, good money, there is social disorder, failed child rearing, crime, disease, drug abuse and general mayhem.

Of course, it will take a while for the problems of the bottom 40% to percolate up to the upper 20%. The rich are well guarded in their gated communities and their fast cars.

But someday, the restive masses may yet awaken.

Why We Need Fantasy

William S. Burroughs and my father both said the same thing, toward the end of their lives: They said they had stopped reading fiction.

I have stopped reading fiction, too, but I still watch it on TV and I see movies.

Reading a book is more effort, and the reward is simply not frequent enough--there seem to be a lot of disappointing novels. Not to say there are not a lot of disappointing movies and TV shows, but it's easy to walk away from those and you have not invested much time or effort.

As you may have guessed, I'm now hooked on Downton Abbey.

Why? You may well ask.

For one thing I now have a whole group of new friends, and I can watch them do and say interesting things and I am disappointed infrequently.

One disappointment: Julian Fellowes needed to bring the baby heir, displacing Matthew as heir to a close, but rather than carrying that plot line across several episodes, he wraps it up abruptly by having Lady Cora fall on the soap left for her by the nasty, conniving Miss O'Brien. And, Heaven knows, all you have to do is to fall when you are 4 months pregnant and that fetus is dead, dead, dead.

But the device worked: It made Mary show her colors. She "loves" Matthew, but not enough to give up the upper class life for a middle class life, for a middle class place in the world.

This makes us each think, "What would I do?" You cannot help but mentally put yourself in that scene and begin playing out a part.

People do this with novels. If you were Kitty in the Hotel room when Air Ben Canaan comes off the balcony and through the window, would you have sent him packing? Or asked him to stay?

And this may be why older people stop reading: They stop dreaming. They know these adventures are no longer possible for themselves.

They move on.

Fantasy is an indulgence of youth.

Are the Brits Simply Smarter, or Do They Just Sound That Way?

Julian Fellowes, a Brit, wrote Downton Abbey, and he sets a scene in which Mary, the eldest sister, sketches out her own situation at dinner, in the presence of her father and her reluctant suitor, using the Greek myth of Perseus and Andromeda in a way you would never see in any American drama.

One of the great pleasures of this scene is that the middle class Matthew rises to the occasion and uses his more finely honed professional training to parry her thrust, more than parry, but he strikes home and wins the battle with a humble, yet telling remark. His intelligence is to question the assumptions, which are contained in Mary's telling--that gods are superior to mere mortals, and that romantic immortals are always preferable to the more humble mortals. Mary says the princess daughter in question was won by a god, rather than by just some mere mortal, which is more fitting. After all, this daughter is a great prize, is it not more fitting for her to be won by a god?

"That depends," says Matthew, shrewdly, but without raising his voice. "I'd have to know more about the princess and the sea monster in question."

Brits also wrote Jesus Christ Superstar, another incomparable melding of literature and classic text.

Maybe it's the tutor system at Cambridge. Maybe it's the dank climate.

On the other hand, these Brits are essentially trapped by what came before. They have simply never got over the Bible, Shakespeare, the classic Greek myths.

But we make our own, brewed up from our own more recent experience. Not we, but the best among us: After all, a local kid from Bethesda, Maryland migrated to Baltimore and wrote The Wire. And Americans wrote The Sopranos. To the English, this is just American Dickens and American Shakespeare.

But the comparisons cannot diminish the power of either work. Downton Abbey can evoke an imagined world of kindly aristocrats, haughty princesses, great wealth and erudition, a fictional world of imagination made to seem real, but for sheer power, one cannot match the real world of an ignored city made more vivid and more real in a fictional rendering.

Lifetime Appointments to The Supreme Court

"The Judges, both of the supreme and inferior Courts, shall hold their offices during good Behaviour, and shall, at stated Times, receive for their Services, a Compensation, which shall not be diminished during their Continuance in Office."

--Article III, Constitution of the United States

Article III is one of the lengthier Articles, but if you pick your way through it, this is the only sentence which describes how long the judges of the Supreme Court will hold their office. There is no mention of lifetime appointments. There is no mention of how many supreme court justices there ought to be. There is no mention of electing judges to the "inferior courts."

Most of the discussions I find on line say this is "generally understood" to mean lifetime appointments or it "is widely accepted" that saying the judges hold their offices during good Behaviour," means a lifetime appointment.

Excuse me. I realize I am a simple New Hampshire rube. But I went to college once and I can still speak and read English, despite all that, and I do not see a lifetime appointment in "during good Behaviour."

Nowhere in this article is the number of justices spelled out to be nine. When Franklin Roosevelt suggested he might add more justices to out vote the nine old men thwarting the will of the people to take some action to fight the Depression, he was accused of trying to "pack" the court in an unconstitutional seizure of power and even his own Democratic legislators declined to support him.

But nowhere in the Constitution, far as I can see, is there anything that says nine justices or appointed for life.

Rick Perry, in one of his rare moments of lucidity, has proposed a constitutional amendment to limit the terms of the justices of the supreme court--but I don't see that is necessary. Looks to me as if Congress could simply pass a law. The supreme court could over rule it, but then we could go for the amendment.

Of course, if Rick Perry is for anything, it does give one pause. Perhaps we ought to think this through more carefully.

But his argument, that the current system is broken, that justices hold on until a President who shares their own political views is in office so they can retire with a replacement who shares their beliefs, that a President can, by appointing a conservative (or a liberal) justice have power long after he leaves office, that we are stuck with bad justices for longer than is healthy for the country, are all cogent arguments.

The usual arguments for lifelong supreme court tenure coalesce around the idea we want the justices rendering opinions uninfluenced by political passions of the moment; we want "judicial independence" which means wise men and women applying the law to individual cases and we do not want judges imposing politics or personal philosophy through verdicts; we do not want justices in effect, imposing laws of their own by using case law to do it.

But examples of the supreme court justices doing all of these undesirable things are legion; none of the desirable effects we have hoped for have come to fruition: the justices use their own prejudices and philosophies as the basis for their decision and use the law only as window dressing to justify how they reached the conclusions they began with.

That you can look at a justice and know in advance how he or she will vote if you are given a three sentence summary of any given case with significant social/cultural content means if you know the judge's personal prejudices you know how he or she will rule and that means we do not, and likely never will, have a really "independent" judiciary which rules as the law dictates without injecting their own beliefs into the case.

So, we might as well admit the obvious--judges are political appointees who rule according to their own conservative or liberal philosophies. So let's fashion a system which recognizes this and try to make the best of an inherently imperfect situation.