Andrew Hacker and the Perversion of Meritocracy: Is Algebra Necessary?

                             Professor Andrew Hacker (Amherst BA, Princeton PhD)

Prove:    (x²+y²)²= (x²-y²)²+(2xy)²

Should every doctor be able to solve this problem? Should every doctor who is admitted to Harvard Medical School or Johns Hopkins be able to solve this problem? Should every freshman admitted to college be able to solve this problem? 

Should every graduate of Rice University be able to solve this problem?

Should a talented 17 year old, who writes well, whose analysis of Thoreau is breathtaking, be able to solve this problem, if he wants to go to Harvard? Would Sylvia  Plath have been able to solve this problem? Or Katherine Anne Porter? Or F. Scott Fitzgerald?

Writing in the Sunday New York Times today, Andrew Hacker makes the case that the math is being A/ Taught incorrectly, i.e. too abstractly  B/ Used to flunk out worthy students and this  is harmful to the national economy, to individual lives, to American industry and to American education.

He uses algebra as his illustration, but he eventually gets around to an even more egregious example: calculus--which has been thrown in front of generations of aspiring pre medical students--as another case in point of a totally meaningless hurdle placed to discourage, to narrow the field rather than to actually identify people with the right stuff. 

We have been selecting out exactly the people with the wrong stuff for decades, discouraging people who would make really good doctors, lawyers and welders by making them prove themselves at irrelevant tasks.

It is as if we have been selecting a football team or a baseball team by making everyone pole vault over 16 feet. Anyone who do this is not on the team.  Of course, coaches would never be idiotic enough to eliminate everyone who cannot pole vault: They are looking for other attributes which are more relevant to each position on the team.

But Harvard et al have been, for years, cutting everyone from consideration who cannot score above 700 on the math portion of the SAT--anyone who is not able to vault over quadratic equations is not invited to be on the team.

"Meritocracy" implies the selection process looks not for family ties, nor for race nor for money but for merit,  and the very institutions in America which ought to know how to analyze for merit have failed at this task for decades.  
Well, not every part of the those institutions: The football coaches know merit when they see it. Ironically, the one part of the university which does not really belong at a university, the football program, has been better at assessing real talent, at defining scientifically exactly what characteristics constitute "talent" than the parts of the university whose business it is to select for academic talent.

 It's Moneyball in action.  

Remember Moneyball? The whole idea of that work was that "talent scouts" had for years been bad at what they were being paid to do. They were looking for the wrong attributes of merit. When someone actually took the time and invested the effort into figuring out what made a player successful and valuable to a team, they started drafting entirely different sorts of players.

But why should the Ivy League change its practices? They are smug and fat. Same for medical schools--people are banging at their doors. Why change, just because you could actually improve what you do?

Because, we are in a world economy now, and the Japanese or the Chinese will eat our lunch, once they figure out what real talent is and how to identify it. 

Sure as hell we will not.

Hugging in America

I really hate pictures of people hugging.

They always trot out a hugging picture after some crazy shoots people, or after a natural disaster or whenever sad things happen. The editors must have a drawer full of hugging shots.

It reminds me of that comment in the 5th season of The Wire, where the newspaper editor is looking at the photos from the scene of a Baltimore fire, shaking his head. The photographer always sends in a photo of a singed teddy bear found in the wreckage of the fire.  The editor says, "He must have a trunk full of burnt teddy bears, and he just plucks one out, snaps a shot, sends it in and goes off to the bar."

Or we have some TV bimbo news reporter telling us, "And here's a heart rending story...a real heart breaker.
Okay, we get it. This is supposed to make us make a sad face and say, "Awww."

I mean, why bother?

So today, on the front page of the NY Times , we have people from Aurora, Colorado hugging.

Fact is, those kids killed in Aurora are the price Americans are willing to pay for their guns. 

When and if, the voters in this country decide they are sick of the sporadic, random shootings by crazies, they can do what voters in Japan have done, and take guns out of the equation. 

Of course, then the crazies can turn to bombs or Saran gas or some other ugly thing. Timothy McVeigh used a fertilizer bomb. 

Ronald Reagan famously said, "There will always be poor." And in doing so, the President washed away a lot of liberal guilt about having money, when others have so little. He was saying, "It's not your fault you are rich and others are poor. It's their own fault they are poor. Or maybe it's someone's fault, but not yours. So enjoy."

Now we can say, "There will always be crazies killing innocents. Guns are not the problem. It's the crazies." 

End of guilt. Nothing we can do.

So just run the hugging photo. Take it from a stock of say, a dozen hugging people, young people hugging, old people hugging young people, old people hugging old people, everyone making it better by kissing the boo boo and hugging.

I don't know. Hugging does not pass my smell test. It smells phony to me.

But, that's just me. 

I'm just saying.

Olympic Bowel Movement

Before there was a Wide World of Sports, or an ESPN or the internet, seeing a downhill ski race or a swimming competition or track and field events on television was a rare joy.  


Even today, seeing a high hurdles race is a novelty and fun, and in that sense, the Olympics, like other international sporting competitions constitutes a welcome dash of variety in an otherwise monotonous entertainment universe.


On the other hand, the monetization of the games, the relentless drive to make the games and the competition yield up big bucks has cheesed up  the games, at least for me. Where once amateurs swam, ran, rode, shot, leaped for the "pure" joy of competition, now all the athletes train year round and are paid to do their sports. It's not really the athletes making money doing what they do so well, it's the lame attempts to dumb down the experience by the sponsors and the directors of the show--they've got to throw in the jingoistic commentary about how the Americans are likely to do in this event, as if that's what we should really care about--will an American win?


Still, it's exciting to see anyone who is really good at anything do that thing, and I can watch the show to see the athletes perform and turn off the sound.


The whole idea of an Olympic "movement" is pretty absurd now.  It may have once been seen as a way to get past war and to a sportsmanlike, high character way of competing on an international stage without people shooting each other.


But all that got poisoned fairly quickly, as Hitler tried to turn the 1936 games into a demonstration the supremacy of the Aryan race. You may say it didn't turn out that way because of a man named Jesse Owens, but that's not the way Hitler spun it. Even Jimmy Carter used the games as a way of making a political statement, a principled statement, but he injected politics into the games.


And then there was the Munich massacre. 


In more recent years, the major point of the games seems to be to make money for someone--for the host country, for the sponsors. It's not all that much different from a Barnum and Bailey circus. And since Cesar, government leaders have known about the political value of bread and circus. Now the Olympics has become  a joint government/ private commerce escapade, with governments paying to arrange police protection as the "Olympic torch" is carried through streets, like some sort of Barnum and Bailey's stunt.


And woe be to anyone who objects to this stunt--as the Bong Hits for Jesus kid discovered when he attempted to satirize the whole experience of his being pushed out of school as the torch was borne by,  and his case wound up before the US Supreme Court, which of course thought it was reprehensible this child should object to this brazenly crass display of commercialized nationalism. The school principal was irate at the spoiling of her big moment in complicity, and she stormed across the street and ripped down the kid's offending banner: Bong Hits for Jesus. The United States government upheld her action as perfectly reasonable, and in fact necessary, to maintain order by brainwashing her students in the ways of government glorification of this commercial enterprise called the Olympics.


The other thing I hate about the Olympics is the sheer imbalance, the bullying aspect of it. We have countries like Barbados and Cameroon competing against behemoths like the United States and it's like rooting for Notre Dame or Penn State against Gettysburg College or Swarthmore in football. And the television networks start adding up medal totals and they run the flags up the flagpole so we can pound our chests about an American, one of 300 million, an athlete who has trained in million dollar facilities, with paid coaches,  having defeated some poor kid from Ethiopia and the American is standing, swelled chested,  above him on a platform, just to rub in the fact that USA is #1. We are the dominant dogs.


What a bunch of blow hard Goliath worshipers we have become.  
But, then again, we're #1!


Well, not us exactly, but our professional Hessians are #1, our alter egos are #1, which makes us feel all self important and proud, because, after all, we paid for them.

Antonin Scalia Instructs

Nina Totenberg has an interview with the "charming" and "voluble" Antonin Scalia this morning,  in which he tells about being assigned to write an opinion about some case but he finds "the law just wasn't there" and he has to write the opinion in the opposite direction, because, as he examines the law, he finds the decision just has to be the opposite of what he originally thought it should be.
This is the most transparent attempt at dissembling.
This is story addresses the very most telling criticism of the court--that the four horsemen of conservative persuasion, the Republican court, which usually includes Anthony Kennedy as the deciding 5th vote, decides cases with any significant social content on the basis of their conservative instinct to deny the powerless any redress of grievance and to decide in favor of authority and vested power.
"The law," has nothing to do with it.
"The law" is simply their excuse.
The ruse is that they sit down and struggle with the sacred texts and these impartial justices just get dragged they know not where--through no fault of their own, to a decision they cannot resist.
The fact is, these justices (Scalia, Thomas, Roberts, Alito, Kennedy) know exactly where they are going as soon as they hear the first sentence of the description of the case--they are going toward the powerful and against the powerless.
The most egregious example is the strip search case in which the power of jailers to "defend" themselves against the possibility of missing an armed prisoner, who is handcuffed, but possibly concealing a knife in her vagina or his rectum, over rides the protection against unreasonable search. 
There are, of course other examples--the right of the rich to grab the microphone and to command the discussion by simply having more money to spend on mass communications (which our 18th century founders could hardly have imagined) and, of course, my favorite, the Bong Hits for Jesus case, in which a high school student whose instinct was to rebel against his school principal who ordered her students to act as dummy props for the unconscionably jingoistic and commercialized enterprise of the Olympics--during a parade of "the torch" which ran down the road by the school. The justices found that any sort of resistance to this whole fiasco was insufferable and deserved to be suppressed, free speech notwithstanding.
But, oh, the law. The law guides its humble servant, Justice Scalia, he knows not where.
Justice Scalia, the master of mumbo jumbo, along with the rest of this black gowned lot, those high priests, who invoke the sacred text, The Constitution, as if it were engraved in stone tablets, handed down from the Mount, and they mumble words in Latin and are listening to the words tumbling off the lips of gods, and carrying out the orders of their superiors.

Joe Paterno and The Catholic Priest Scandal

"I never heard the boos because I never heard the cheers."
                                                  --Bill Russell




What is really intriguing about the process of herofication is the need on the part of some people, apparently not a small number of people,  to deify other human beings.  Mothers who invite a priest over for dinner feel so thrilled, or at least they once did, if those scenes from Madmen are at all true.
I've certainly seen that willful urge to invest doctors with powers and goodness they do not possess. Some people just want to believe in Santa Claus, and they get really angry when they find no human being is really all that powerful or flawless.
So we erect statues and tear them down.
And we make Babe Ruth a "role model."  Don't you just love that idea, "role model?"
I guess Joe Paterno was a role model for decades.  Now, not so much.
But was that Paterno's fault? 
Or was it a problem with those who needed the role model?

Church and State

Damon Linker reviews a book by Martha Nussbaum, The New Religious Intolerance, in today's Sunday New York Times. Her main thesis seems to be America is more tolerant of minority religions than are other freedom loving nations, particularly the Europeans, where mosques have been forbidden to build minarets (Switzerland) and school girls have been forbidden to wear burkas or head scarves in school, or in some cases, in public (France and Belgium.)

Linker notes Americans, thus far, have avoided voting down the expressions of religion in their secular state schools and in most communities--although there was an attempt to forbid the building of a mosque near Ground Zero, the site of the World Trade Center.   On the other hand, Linker adds pregnantly, Americans have not been faced with a Muslin community as radical as that seen in France, England and Scandinavia. 

What do you do when the religious community which has arrived believes in religious intolerance?  What do you do when a group arrives in your midst which proclaims their message is the only right message and all others must not be allowed to speak? What do you do when intolerance challenges your value of tolerance?

Well, you can say we have a Constitution, which you cannot vote on. This is the law which must be obeyed: And the first Amendment, as it is generally understood insists the government cannot select one faith, cannot establish a religion or prevent the practice of any religion.

But where in the Constitution does it say we must tolerate all the teachings of any religion?

Maybe in the First Amendment, where it says Congress cannot abridge freedom of speech.  Of course, it does not say the President cannot abridge free speech, or the courts cannot abridge free speech. 

I suppose, if a group says women should not show their ankles or walk around with their hair uncovered, that would have to be tolerated, until that group takes actions to impose its will on unwilling members of the community.

Linker has written a book and several op eds insisting we have a right to ask candidates for public office how their religious views might bring them into conflict with their obligations as a public servant: For example, we ought to ask a Catholic candidate if he could enforce a law which grants citizens the right to abortion.  This seems reasonable enough.  Of course, we can ask these questions of candidates for the executive or legislative branch, but not of candidates for the judicial branch--and we now have a Roman Catholic Supreme court, in effect, as a result, and we can see the consequences in their decisions. 

It's not that we can see decisions against abortion in this conservative, Catholic court, not yet. But we can see something which is not a matter of doctrine--rather a doctrine of training. And that is not so much a matter of a single denomination, but it is a matter of the love of authority and doctrine:  Given any case which pits a powerless individual against the authority of reigning authority and we have justices talking about "original intent" as if they were talking about the handing down of stone tablets from the mountain, and whether it is the case of Bong Hits for Jesus, a school boy thumbing his nose at his Principal's attempt to make students cheer the commercial enterprise we call the modern Olympics, or strip searching of a Black man, who has had the misfortune to be riding as a passenger in an automobile stopped for a minor infraction, the justices who were raised by nuns, or who got taken to church every Sunday and told that an orderly world is a good world, these justices rule for authority and against the rebel and the dispossessed. 

Personally, I'd like to ask one question about organized religion:  How many people would "worship" God, if they knew there was nothing in it for them, personally?

On Random Violence

There was a nurse in my clinic who used to say about certain diabetic patients who did not take their insulin or test their blood sugars: "I don't see why I should work any harder for this patient than he works for himself."

In some ways, that's the way I found myself reacting when news of the shooting at the Aurora, Colorado theater reached New Hampshire. We will continue to see bad news if we don't do some work to avoid it.

The question becomes: What can we do to protect ourselves from the occasional gun wielding maniac out there?  Even Norway had its own crazy, shooting kids at a camp.

My father in law, a lifetime member of the NRA, used to say even if we outlawed the sale of any guns from today onward, there are so many millions of guns out there, we would still have crazies shooting innocent people for the next hundred years.

And the crazies in the NRA are now saying the solution to the latest Colorado shooting is to have everyone in the audience armed, and we should arm legislators and kindergarten  kids.

I really do not have an answer.

Yesterday, I heard on NPR a young woman talking about getting out of the subway at Gallery Place and heading for her ritualistic morning coffee at the Starbucks on 7th Street and I knew exactly the spot she was describing in Washington, DC. So, I kept listening, expecting to hear a little piece about the pleasures of everyday life in the nation's Capitol, within sight of the Capitol building on The Hill. Then, she very calmly described feeling a sudden pain in her neck and then another in her back as an attacker stabbed her from behind with a knife. She fell to the sidewalk and looked up at this attacker, just some random crazy with a knife, who stood over her looking down, fury distorting her face.  

Just another day in the big American city.

Or in the quiet suburb at 1 AM at the new Batman movie.

One thing which does give me pause, and which is so politically incorrect to say, it belongs only in an anonymous blog, is the Chris Rock routine about white crimes vs black crimes. You hear about a man opening fire on a group of kids in a playground, right away, you know the shooter is a white guy.  You hear about somebody who grabs a purse off the shoulder of some little old lady and whaps her on the head with it and runs off down the street, leaving her in a heap on the sidewalk, black guy.

Somehow, according to Rock, the one on one, personal assault, motivated by money or some interpersonal spat, even if that spat is over an unfriendly look or a remark about the sneakers you are wearing, somehow you've "dissed" someone, that provokes the black man to violence. But the white guy, he just cuts down the innocent and the helpless, people who've never done him, personally, any harm.  That shooter's motivations are incomprehensible, at first blush.

Of course, the Virginia Tech shooter was Asian.

It's not about race, of course, but about psychopathology.  The sort of guy who sends bombs through the mail, shoots a Congresswoman at a shopping mall, sends Anthrax through the mail, climbs a clock tower on a campus and just shoots random people he doesn't know, the guy who loads a van with a fertilizer bomb and blows up a building with a day care center,  that guy has demons which are hard to fathom. 


Now, you will bring up the Washington, DC sniper, who was black, who shot people he didn't know, randomly--but that turned out to be related to someone he did know. He was planning to set up a fake random shooter so he could shoot the person he wanted to shoot, his ex wife, without anyone pointing to him as the one person who had the greatest motive to shoot his ex wife--she would be just another random victim of the sniper. So that was a twisted effort to settle a personal score.

There is a wonder scene in The Wire--you knew this was coming, The Wire, where Jimmy McNulty has to go down to Quantico, Virginia to the FBI academy to get a profile on a serial killer. Of course, McNulty knows there is no serial killer--he has created a fake crisis to keep the police department funded--but the FBI profiler, who has the details of the "crimes" outlines a perfect description of McNulty, which the viewer sees as a double whammy of an irony.

Fact is, we are shocked by these random explosions of pathology, but when the French collaborators of the  Gestapo or the German SS did this same sort of thing, rounding people up, brutalizing them in the streets during the 1930's and 1940's on a daily basis, it was just  an expression of hate we could "understand," and it didn't surprise anyone. It all made sense. 

Thing is, listening the the Norway shooter, what he did made perfect sense to him, and  probably the Colorado shooter thinks he did what he had to do. He probably thinks he was the victim.

Aaron Sorkin: What's Wrong with Preachy?

George Bernard Shaw was accused of being preachy in his plays. His characters, his critics said, were little more than stage props for his own political ideas. He sacrificed emotional development of character and complexity to philosophy and ideas. 


He did write extensive prefaces to his plays, to develop and articulate the ideas which drove his stories. He did not deny the importance of ideas in his art.


Aaron Sorkin is a writer I have somehow not thought about much. He wrote A Few Good Men and The West Wing and now, The Newsroom. 


In The Newsroom, there are some touches which are too facile, as when Sam Waterson tells Jeff Daniels  about the importance of newsmen with a point of view, "Edward R. Murrow had a point of view, and he brought down McCarthy. Walter Cronkite had a point of view, and he brought down the war in Vietnam."   Well, not really. Both were a day late and a dollar short in their opposition, and neither had all that much impact on events, and for  far too long, they remained neutral, afraid to lose their audience or their jobs.  But you make allowances for poetic license. 


On the other hand, that disturbing hyperbole does not significantly undermine the power of Daniel's diatribe against the sorority sister who, all dimples, throws a softball question about what makes America the greatest country on earth. I did not see it coming, but when it came, the fireworks were wonderful to behold.  


That whole stupid drivel which the great American moron loves to gush about, how we are number one, we are the greatest country on earth, is something liberals have never figured out a way to attack. Just once, I'd like to see a Democrat launch a blitz like the one Daniel's unleashes.  The closest I've ever seen is Barney Frank, but he got tired and opted out of public office.  But that garbage is damaging lie.  If we think we have the best healthcare system in the world, then why change it? Why fix what isn't broken? If America is the greatest country on earth, why change anything?


To improve things, you have to understand there is something wrong.  You have to be willing to dig deeply into the festering wound and dig out the maggots and clean it out, or it just gets deeper and uglier.


I don't mind the speeches. I love the speeches. They are statements full of truth and beauty.


Sorkin's grandfather was an active member of a dynamic union, the ILGWU, and the families of that union, and their descendants still carry a certain flame. I'm glad it still burns somewhere. The Newsroom, like most shows in development, has its flaws, but it is a fresh, invigorating breeze from left field, for which we can all be grateful.

The Cost of Talent

French President Francois Hollande intends to lower the pay of CEO's of French companies to 20 times that of the lowest paid employee. For most this will mean a cut in salary from $1,900,000 to $550,000 a year. This will take the typical CEO from earning 64 times what the lowest paid employee makes to 20 times as the lowest paid. The CEO's will not starve. The national debt will be unaffected. But, as the President explained, this is an effort to call attention to the "intolerable hyperinequalities" which currently exist in France.


Of course, there have been howls protest from the CEO's and those who support them, with all the expected dire warnings--CEO's will quit and go work for companies where their talents are adequately compensated and France will suffer. I wonder--where will all those CEO's go? Will hundreds of CEO's find new CEO jobs outside France, uproot their families, leave their roots behind in pursuit of that extra 500K a year?

What, exactly, does a CEO do which makes him/her worth all that money?


Take the case of the CEO of Exeter (New Hampshire)  Hospital: This CEO  has presided over a shutdown of the hospital over a dispute over reimbursement from Blue Cross, which lost the hospital and the community practices it owns untold numbers of patients. And then there was an outbreak of hepatitis C among patients catheterized at the hospital's  cardiac cath la, owing to an employee who was self injecting the Fentanyl drawn up for the patients, and then substituting saline in the now contaminated syringes.  Lawsuits against the hospital are still piling up for that one. Most conspicuously, and most egregiously and over many years,  this same CEO  missed hiring the best physicians, who went down the road to Portsmouth and found employment at the competing hospital there. For this stellar record, he has made roughly $1 million a year.


Of course, whenever something happens, like the hep C fiasco, the CEO says there was nothing he could have done,  to have prevented that.  So, when things go wrong, it's not his fault. But if the hospital turns a profit, all the credit goes to the CEO.


This reminds me of a conversation I had with a lawyer from one of Washington DC's priciest firms at a cocktail party. Larry Summers had just been sacked from his job as the president of Harvard, and I said I could not understand why they paid Summers so much for doing that job. The lawyer, resplendent in his shirt with white collar on blue trunk, yellow power tie and his $100 haircut objected:  "Oh, I beg to differ. Larry had such a rare combination of talents and insights--someone like him, with his vision and energy, and his c.v. comes along only once a generation."


"And, what, specifically were those talents?" I asked. And when he could not bring any to mind, I said, "President of Harvard has got to be one of the easiest jobs in the world.  All you have to do is keep your mouth shut, except once a year, when you have to give some forgettable, and hopefully brief, commencement speech."


I believed that then and I believe that now.


In the world of academic medicine, I did see where a strong leader made a difference: We had a disaster of a department of surgery at Cornell Medical Center in the early 1970's--patients were not making it off the table alive, after by pass surgery.  Then they hired a taciturn man  who was a pretty spectacular surgeon, and he went about getting rid of the bad surgeons, attracting new good surgeons, fixing the problems which in turned lowered the mortality in the operating rooms, and he brought anesthesia under control, fixed the recovery rooms, improved the training and recruitment of surgical residents in training and he was worth whatever they paid him. If that was 64 times what the guy made who mopped the operating rooms between cases, then that chief of surgery was worth that. 


But he, of course, could move to any of a variety of other academic medical centers, and, in fact he did. Not because they didn't pay him enough at Cornell, but because his wife hated living in New York City.

Now, in his case, you could see what people meant by "talent."  You could measure it in his mortality statistics, in the time it took him to repair a heart, in the low rates of post op infections--by all the many measures they track for surgeons. And you could see how other surgeons wanted to be in his department because they wanted to be around a surgeon like that.  He was not a very good teacher--he was surly and he had no idea about the different levels of sophistication among different people in his department, so he'd ask a medical student a question appropriate only for a senior resident, and he'd humiliate the medical student.  But people learned that about him, and they set that aside because they knew he was good for the department. 


But what does the CEO of a hospital do? What does the president of a university do? What does the CEO of a financial institution have to know?  Or the CEO of Hewlett Packard?  Or General Motors?  Can you dream up a certification exam which would select out good people for these positions? 


In the case of Penn State, we have recently seen what the high cost talent at that university was worth. It cost plenty, but was it worth it?

We Are Not Alone

"When the first savage saw his hut destroyed by a bolt of lightning, he fell down upon his face in terror. He had no conception of natural forces, of laws of electricity: he saw this event as the act of an individual intelligence."

                         Upton Sinclair

When I hear Republicans (and they are mostly only Republicans) insisting global warming is a hoax, or insisting creationism be taught alongside evolution in public schools I sometimes think this is all a new pernicious descent into a sort of societal dementia. We are just getting dumber and dumber and when we get enough really dumb people around, they will all vote in a new truth for us to accept as official doctrine and the sun will revolve around the earth, which is flat as a saucer.

But then I read someone like Upton Sinclair who was writing at the dawn of the 20th century and I realize there has always been a moronic Right. The wonder is we have an enlightened Left. 

With respect to global warming, and the contempt and vitriol  which flow from the mouths of Republicans from Texas and oil producing states, Oklahoma, Louisiana, directed at that public enemy number one: The Environmental Protection Agency, well there is that other Sinclair observation:  "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

And I think, we have been through all this before. As Lincoln remarked during the most horrific days of the Civil War, when the casualty lists were distributed to sobbing mobs, "This too, shall pass."

It is comforting to read of really nasty times--just read Howard Zinn--and you realize as bad as things are now, we've seen worse. 

If,  as Mephistopheles tells Dr. Faustus, the worst hell is remembering happier times, then in a sense, there is a little solace, if not a little  heaven, in realizing we've sailed through stormier seas before.


So, we are not alone--we have that great majority to comfort us, to offer us security, to speak to us from the past, the majority of all  human beings who have ever  lived,  their lives now over. They have  died and preceded us to the great beyond, and they comfort us from there even now.

And Let Us Not Forget Strip Searches

Here's one other thing which distinguishes Republicans from Democrats.  Republicans defend the idea of strip searching anyone who is arrested and brought to a police station in handcuffs.


It's all part of the idea that we have to defend law and order. We have to be tough on crime by stripping naked some terrified 16 year old girl who was just arrested for rolling through a stop sign, or some 17 year old boy who was stopped with a dead tail light and found to have a case of beer in his back sit, which his mother forgot to bring in from the car after she bought it in North Hampton.


So we strip search these kids and we can all sleep better at night knowing our nation is safe from people like them. It's all part of the war on terror, part of protecting our police, who have guns, from that girl who may have stuffed a weapon up her vagina and needs to have that explored.

At every candidate's debate every candidate ought to be asked where they stand on the Supreme Court's ruling allowing indiscriminate strip searches. 


And every day we ought to ask ourselves: Why are we not more aggravated by this?

Why Can't He Just Say It?

This morning, on NPR I heard Mitt Romney say, "I want tax cuts for ALL Americans. I don't want to kill the job creation by job creators with higher taxes."  And then they played President Obama saying, "I want to extend tax cuts for the middle classes, but for the 1%, like me, I think we need to let those tax breaks expire."  
Or words to that effect.
The President may have said something about the rich having to pay their fair share.
Trouble is, hearing all this, to my ear, the Republicans sound more persuasive.
Why is the President incapable of a direct, forthright statement of principle, in the same way Mitt Romney, Mitch McConnell and John Boehner are?
I would love to hear Mr. Obama say: "Mitt Romney, the Republican Speaker of the House, the Republican leader in the Senate all want to protect tax cuts for the millionaires and billionaires. These Republicans say  they are concerned about discouraging  the job creators with taxes, as if people who run businesses will just fold up their tents and move to Somalia if we tax them anything at all.  The fact is, what these Republicans are really concerned about is dancing on the strings held by the ultra rich.  Republicans, from the leadership in Washington, right down to the Congressmen in their districts, are in the pocket of the rich, bought and paid for. As the old saying goes, 'You cannot bring a man to understanding, if his income depends on not understanding.' That is the Republican party in a nutshell. Vote Republican and you are dangling from the same strings they are."


I do not understand why President Obama and every other Democrat cannot say this emphatically and often.

Sending Your Kid to Harvard: What It Buys

This morning, another NPR story about student loans and the diddling of Congress and the effect of the availability of these loans on college tuitions.  
Apparently, the existence of Stafford grants has prompted colleges to raise tuitions, knowing that students can now use that available money--much as when patients were no longer paying out of pocket for medical services, physicians raised their fees and started making much more money because now the patients had health insurance to cover the costs.


Of course, parents in the upper income brackets now believe the best thing they can do for their kids is to get them into an elite college and pay for that four years. 


All this reminds me of some people we met--the father went to Harvard and went on to make millions in publishing and the mother went to Smith. They had two sons, one of whom got into Harvard, but the other was rejected and had to "settle" for Swarthmore. 
The father went ballistic: He has contributed over $35,000 a year to Harvard and he damn well thought his son ought to have a place at Harvard for that kind of tangible loyalty. The son, eventually, got into Harvard, where, from all reports, he was miserable, but ultimately, after some time off, graduated. 


When the father asked me where my son was going to college, I said "NYU," and he smiled smugly and said, "Oh, he'll have fun there."


And I thought, I sure hope so. It's not Harvard, of course, but he just might have a chance to learn something.  Actually, I think my son did learn something at NYU. We were talking about something and I was trying to make a point and my son remarked, "Oh, that's just Freud, of course. Civilization and Its Discontents." As part of his four years, they read a core of significant works--Freud, Kant, Thoreau, GB Shaw, the Iliad--and he apparently could see when some line of thought was derivative.


I don't know what happened to the sons who went to Harvard, but I wonder whether they were propelled into the upper 1% as their father expected. 


From what I see in New Hampshire, that would not happen here. You can tell people here you went to Harvard and they say, "Oh, that's nice. Now what do you want to do about this problem at hand?"  


I suspect the value of a brand name diploma from Harvard, Yale or Princeton is getting limited to a smaller and smaller circle of people who recognize that as a glittering prize which merits you special treatment. Certainly, if you look at the classes at the most elite medical schools--Columbia, Harvard, Stanford, Duke, University of Pittsburgh, Hopkins--there are 20-30% from those brand name colleges, but the rest are from far less star lit colleges. By that token, if you have your heart set on getting into top tier medical school, you'd be smarter going to a state school or an NYU, Vanderbilt, Swarthmore. 


But what it does for the future of your kid is not what really drives these decisions--it's what it does for the bragging rights of the father and mother. 

Pamela Susan Karlan: A Woman for All Seasons

Sometimes, just when you think the country is going to the dogs, you trip over something on youtube or in The New York Times, or both, which restores your faith.

For some time, I've been clinging to the notion there is actually intelligent life in the universe on planet earth because I can read Gail Collins once a week. 

Now, there is Pamela Karlan, a Stanford law professor who, if you have not made her acquaintance, you really owe yourself a visit. Go google her, or youtube her. You could put her and Elizabeth Warren and Gail Collins into a room with President Obama and he might actually develop a backbone.

Her article in the New York Times today lays out just why Chief Justice Roberts' "shift" to vote with the liberals is not such a game changer, or at least not in the way we have been told it is. What she points out is the decision basically said to Congress, the only power you have is the power to tax. Forget about that commerce clause stuff, or the power to promote the general welfare or the power to enforce the 14th amendment--naw, you can just tax. Now, go try and do some liberal things like Medicare, Social Security or regulating the stock market, suckers.

So, while Thomas Friedman is having a feel good moment about what a hero John Roberts turned out to be, Pamela Karlan has seen the wolf beneath the sheep's cloth and sounded the alarm.

Any time you find yourself in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Professor, I'm buying the beer at the brewery. Your money's not good here.

The Things We Know

A United States Senator from Texa, John Cornyn, responded to the US Supreme Court decision upholding Obamacare  with the standard Republican line: We have the best health care system in the world, which, of course, he went to say Obamacare can only ruin.

This statement of fact, uncontested by Judy Woodruf and never challenged by any reporter on reputable television, is important because it means if we fiddle with the best, we are in the position of fixing what isn’t broken, of breaking a finely engineered machine.

Don’t you love hearing we have the best of everything in the USA?

We are number one.

Before the US News and World Reports started ranking hospitals and medical schools, I used to hear this from patients all the time: “Oh, my cardiologist is one of the top ten cardiologists.” They never gave a frame of reference, so I assumed they meant “In the world and of all time.”

And now that we have the USN&WR rankings, we believe whatever they tell us, no questions asked.

Of course, we have among the highest infant mortality. We rank 49^th in post operative infections, and we rank lower than every European country save Greece in emergency room waiting times, and we have the fourth highest complication rate following cardiac bypass surgery and knee replacement surgery and we have the third  highest error rate in reading of diagnostic  X rays, and we have the highest rate of X Ray induced cancer in the world and we lead the world in rejections for medical care by authorities, whether insurance companies or government

I know all this the same way Mr. Cornyn knows what he knows:  I just now made it up, or I want to believe it, or someone told me.

Someone told me: That’s the way Michele Bachmann knew vaccinations cause mental retardation.

Sometimes, when pressed, Americans will cite some bogus study for what they know.

Congressmen are particularly sure of what they know. Each has a staff feeding him information which supports whatever he wanted to say. That’s one of the wonders of the 21^st century and internet searches. There’s always somebody out there in cyberspace who says what you wanted to hear. In the New Hampshire House of Delegates a representative from Merrimack assured the eager throngs, in front of flashing cameras, that abortions cause breast cancer. When queried, she cited some lunatic chiropractor from Wisconsin, who also believes iodine can cure chronic fatigue, cancer, heart disease, what have you.

Deans of medical schools, learned men these, rip open their USN&WR to find out whether or not they have done well by their own medical schools, whether or not their ranking has risen. Heads roll and careers flourish based on these rankings, which, of course reflect little more than Hollywood gossip reflects who’s on top and who’s hot.

So why do we let these people in the game?  To quote the first episode of The Wire: “Got to man: This America.”