The Living Wage

This morning striking Wendy's workers were interviewed on the picket line outside a New York restaurant. One worker said she could not afford to buy her child's school uniform on the $7.50 hourly wage she earned at Wendy's. 

They interviewed another woman who said, "Wendy's jobs are not for people who need to support a family or even to support themselves. My teen aged son. who can read and write and play computer games can earn money for college and for spending working at Wendy's but these jobs shouldn't be for people who need to earn a living. You can't blame Wendy's because a worker has to work three jobs at $7.50 an hour. You can't blame Wendy's because the worker has so little education he is unmarketable."

As our capitalist system works, the arugment goes,  Wendy's has no interest or obligation to provide its workers anything more than it needs to produce profits for its stockholders. Only if Wendy's cannot find workers for $7.50, in order to sustain itself and its profits, will it have to pay more. That is the way the game is played, they say. Free market for labor. The invisible hand of the free market. Survival of the fittest.

Unless, that is, Wendy's has other motivations for being in business.

Henry Ford, a nasty human being, a rabid Anti-Semite and founding member of the capitalists' hall of fame, famously decided to pay his assembly line workers $5 a day, which at the turn of the 20th century was double what they could make elsewhere because, he said, he wanted them to be able to afford to buy the cars they made. A great suction occurred as workers from the South flowed in torrents to Michigan, to latch on to those jobs.

During World War II, with full employment, there was competition for workers.  General Motors decided to lure and retain workers by offering health insurance as a benefit. (The nation, spared the necessity of providing healthcare through government, has been paying for that decision, ever since.)

One might argue the people who say Wendy's should have to pay $15 an hour so their workers can support families are placing an unfair burden on that inexpensive, fast food restaurant. Nobody is forcing anyone to take that $7.50 an hour. If  you don't want a job at Wendy's go find a job where they pay $15 an hour. 

The worker will reply, "Love to, but nobody's offering me $15 an hour."

The employer replies, "Our job does not require much of the employee, so we don't pay much. If you are worth more, go sell your skills to someone who will pay you more." Wendy's HR people smile smugly, believing they are hiring the dregs of the workforce, and anyone who has to take a Wendy's job is not good for much else and should be grateful to have any job.

So the Wendy's employee quits her $7.50 an hour job and goes on welfare and gets food stamps and public housing assistance and becomes a burden on the state. Had she stayed on the job, she may have made just enough to disqualify her for all these payments. At least this way, she can stay at home and not have to pay for child care. Financially, she comes out ahead. 

But  the government and the taxpayers, do not come out ahead.  If Wendy's employees can earn enough to stay off welfare, the government and the taxpayers are spared that burden.

The government might say, "Look if we raise the minimum wage to a 'living wage,' to $15,  then the burden of taking care of these low skilled people will fall on business and we can balance our own budgets."

In whose account ledger should the burden of low skill workers fall?

What does a business owe its workers?

What does a business owe society?

It is difficult to think about these questions in a dispassionate way, but we ought to try. 

Arguments about the deprivation and hardship which befall the $7.50 an hour worker are designed to appeal to emotion, but are completely irrelevant. If $7.50 is a trap and a misfortune, you cannot blame the man who makes the offer.  Every deal requires a willing buyer and willing seller. If you are unwilling to sell your labor for $7.50, do no take the deal. That is the way the game is played. 

It is curious, however, that those who are unsympathetic to the unskilled workers are curiously most sympathetic to the farmers who live on the government dole with each year's farm bill. "Free market" forces are not allowed to diminish the standard of living of the rich men who own the huge agribusiness farms which the Federal government has been supporting with huge taxpayer doles every year. Nobody cries foul when the government sets prices for the farmer; but great howls go up when government considers setting the prices for a laborer's work.  The same people who argue for unfettered free market forces, for allowing the "invisible hand" of the market, are only too happy to drag the government into intervening when it means the government is giving money away, rather than asking for it.

We might decide to change the rules in favor of labor, just  as we changed the rules to enrich agribusiness titans.   We might say, "Business pays taxes to the local government which builds the roads which brings Wendy's its customers. Wendy's gets water, sewers, electricity and it has to pay the government and the utilities for providing that. We do not actually see Wendy's negotiating this cost of doing business."
 If the government can demand a tax payment for the essential infrastructure Wendy's needs to do business why can it not say, "The workers are infrastructure, too. If you are going to do business in this community, you need to give back to the community for those reviled hamburger flippers?"

It's possible the franchise owner of the Wendy's may try to reduce the number of  hamburger flippers, but once the lines start getting too long and angry customers stomp out of the store because the fast food was too slow in coming, the Wendy's owner will realize he cannot run his store without employees, and he'll have to pay the going rate. He will feel the slap of the invisible hand of market forces as his customers desert him for the fast food joint across the street which has enough workers to deliver his food lickety split.

The "market" can determine the going rate for the hamburger flipper. That great invisible hand. Or the union can, if the government insists Wendy's deals with a union. Or the government, speaking for the community, can set the rate. None of these choices is more fair than the others. It's all just the cost of doing business in an economy which is far from being an free market, a pure capitalist society. If we can control markets for American agriculture, we ought to be able to control a little bit of the way in which the products of those farms are delivered to customers.

The Killing: Film Noir in Seattle

The Phantom has surfed past the picture shown above innumerable times, as he pedaled on his stationary bicycle in the basement.  Even the blurb caused a reflex click, something about a conflicted detective.  

Nothing prepared The Phantom for the power and the mesmerizing effect of this film noir detective procedural, which follows all the standard rules of detective/thriller fiction: Put the vulnerable woman (Mirelle Enos) at risk as the diminutive, fragile looking detective. Develop one suspect after another who looks like this one really must be the one.  Resolve the case in a surprising way you didn't see coming, only after you've resolved it in another way you didn't see coming.

But what makes this extraordinary series (seasons 1&2) so extraordinary is the development of the reltionship between the two police--Linden (Enos) and Holder (Joel Kinnaman.)  Their connection is entirely believable, slowly developed, interwoven and deepened with each episode, almost with each scene. 

The backgrounds of each actor, it will come as no surprise after watching them, is complex:  Enos is the daughter of an American Mormon and a French woman. Kinnaman is the son of an American who left the States during the Vietnam war and moved to Sweden, as some men of conscience did during those years. Kinnaman has starred in a variety of Swedish films and TV shows, but his English is flawless--he spent an exchange year in high school in the States. He actually sounds like an inner city Black--there is even a line when a suspect steals a line from The Wire--"You do know you are white, don't you?"

The other character is the city of Seattle, which is shown in establishing aerial views at the beginning and during each episode.

Nearly every scene occurs in the rain, even most indoor scenes show it raining outside, windows running, or the sound of rain drumming on the roof.  There is a dark, dark feel to the place, to the people, to the soul in this production.  

Faces convey with great economy a flicker of contempt, disbelief, amusement.  Kinnaman has the only leavening humor. Enos is relentlessly somber, but somehow you never get bored, or think less of her for it. Somehow, the few times she does smile, usually with great effort, it makes her pain even more palpable, and on the very few occassions she is actually amused, you feel like you have been given a special treat.

But the greatest thing is information management: You are given just enough to keep you coming back, and background on Linden is hinted at, mentioned and dropped until the last few episodes when she is confronted with a psychiatrist, who you can see is completely outmatched by a vastly superior intellect.

This is not The Wire.  It is not social commentary masquerading as fiction. It is fiction, meant to be seen as fiction, meant to be enjoyed as one enjoys waking up from a nightmare.

It is an American adaptation of a Swedish show, The Crime.  And it is very darkly Scandinavian in its sensibilities.  If the depiction of the family of the victim is laid on a bit too thickly, you have to forgive them in the end, when you find out more about who they lost. 

There is a third season, which can only be a disappointment. But The Phantom is wild to see it. If it is even half as good as the first two, it will still be head and shoulders above any show on American T.V., except of course, The Wire.

Loyal Opposition

Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-WI)

Rep Eric Cantor (R-Va)

Senator Ron Paul (R-Ky)

Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas)

Private Bradley Manning

"As Michael Ignatieff, a former leader of the loyal opposition in the Canadian House of Commons, said in a 2012 address at Stanford University: "The opposition performs an adversarial function critical to democracy itself... Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

--Wikipedia

For Senator Joseph McCarthy, traitors were everywhere in the federal government. He could not find them, but he knew they were there or China would never have gone Communist, and the Soviet Union would never have gained dominance in eastern Europe.  Traitors, disloyal citizens, who took their marching orders from Joseph Stalin and the Soviet communists had to be doing their dirty work and that is what explained every ill which beset America of the 1950's.

For today's unappetizing Republicans, Cantor, Cruz, Paul, we have the same sort of mentality--name a problem and you will find some free spending liberal, determined to unbalance the budget, blow the deficit up to monumental proportions, at the root of that problem. They only occasionally question the loyalty of their Democratic Party opponents, but they suggest the outcome is the same. The Democrats may or may not be intending to inflict lethal blows to this country, but they are inflicting those blows intentionally or not, so the outcome is the same. In an outcome analysis, the Democrats are as pernicious and dangerous to the National health as any traitor could be. So the Republicans simply refuse to participate in any government which has two parties. The Republicans simply refuse to have a democracy, which depends, at the bottom line, on compromise.

What is perplexing is the attitude of the Obama administration toward Private Bradley Manning, whom it has labeled as a "traitor." That is a strong word, coming from a party which says it believes in hearing both sides, believes in compromise and open discussion. To say the release of embarrassing documents is treason makes one wonder how different Mr. Obama is from Mr. Bush in this area.

Of course, as a member of the United States Army, Private Bradley should have understood he was living not in a democracy but in a hierarchical dictatorship--you give up rights when you enter the military. You follow orders, play by the rules. But to compare Private Bradley to General Benedict Arnold, who actually left the forces of the United States and joined the opposing Army strikes The Phantom as a bit of pique on Mr. Obama's part. He embarrassed me, therefore he committed treason.

Come again?

President Obama would do well to look at those creeps who undermine him on the Republican side of the aisle and be sure when he acts, he takes pains to avoid doing anything of which  they might approve. He should not ask, "What would Jesus do?" He should ask, "What would Ted Cruz do?" And then he should do exactly the opposite.

Windmill Manor: Nursing Home Sex and the American Psyche

Julie Christie in "Away From Her"

When NPR carried the story of Windmill Manor, an Iowa nursing home which imploded after an 87 year old woman was discovered enjoying sex with a 78 year old man, both of whom had "dementia,"  the Phantom thought, "What a stupid story."

Stupid, because the reaction of the people at the nursing home, the affected families and the media all seemed so thoroughly unintelligent and incapable of asking the relevant questions.  Having seen the News Hour piece on the same story, which revealed a few more details of the "facts" of the case, and having now read more details, the Phantom has now reconsidered: this is not such a stupid news story, even though it appears to be grounded in bureaucratic stupidity. It might be an intelligent story about stupidity.

As the Phantom's professor of ethics in college used to say, all ethical analysis begins with an examination of the "facts." What is pretty clear in reports of this case is we do not now--and may never-- have the relevant facts of the case. The woman is now dead of "natural causes" unrelated to her having sex with her 78 year old swain. So we cannot know more about her.  And knowing more about her is the essential part here, because she is the one who is presumed injured by having sex, despite her protestations that she wanted to continue having sex with her paramour and her somewhat combative reaction toward the nursing home staff who tried to prevent her from having sex.

Of course, the real "injury" is to the psyche of her 59 year old son, who raised a howl and possibly to her 90 year old husband, if he still remembers who she is.

The fury  arises over the idea of older people wanting to have sex. IThe claim is made  that dementia played in rendering the woman incapable of deciding for herself whether or not she ought to have sex. She is being placed in the same class as a retarded institutionalized child having sex with the janitor--doesn't know what she is doing. Doesn't understand the implications. And this presumption is based on: what? Do we have the results of her mental assessment, of her cognitive function tests?

In the 2007 movie, "Away from Her," Julie Christie plays a woman who can feel her own dementia settling in, and insists her husband of 50 years place her in a nursing home, because she does not want him to be burdened with her care, despite his protest. Her love for him drives her to leave him.  She quickly loses memory of  who her husband is  and she no longer recognizes  others from her prior life. She then engages in a romance with another elderly, likely demented, nursing home resident. The husband sees that she is made happy by the new man in her life, and he walks away from the love of his life, leaving her to her new love, realizing he has lost her and she has lost herself, not to another man, but to the ravages of the disease. She is no longer herself. Without her memories, that person who once was contained in that body exists no more.

Those who fired the administrator and the head of nursing of the Windmill Manor nursing home should have seen this film. You can only imagine the reasons for the firings--higher ups running for cover, lawyers screaming, money going down the toilet, the irate 59 year old son of the woman screaming rape and failure to protect my mother from the ravages of this dirty old man. Everyone thinking in headlines and what's-in-this-for-me rather than about the woman most concerned.

As far as public reports go,  some "facts" appear uncontested: 1. The woman emphatically asserted she wanted to have sex with the man. 2. The woman was still legally married to a living husband not in the nursing home. 3. Both the woman and the man had "dementia" which was undefined, beyond that name. 4. The nursing home staff devised a plan to feed the man involved drugs to "diminish his sexual appetites" which could only be either some antidepressant or some central nervous system depressant (like Valium.)  5. The woman was not physically injured and in fact relished the sexual contact. 6. The lawyers for the nursing home felt the nursing home was responsible to prevent the woman from having sex with any man but her legal husband, as long as she lived in the facility. 7. The woman insisted on calling her lover by her husband's name.

But let us ask: Suppose the nursing had found her husband having sex with her in the nursing home?  Suppose the woman sneaked out of the nursing home to have a tryst with her lover?  Suppose it was clear the woman no longer recognized her husband or her children? Is it alright for the woman to have sex with a husband she no longer recognized but not with a man she expressed desire to have sex with? Suppose the woman had rejected her husband,  but expressed the desire to have sex with her new lover?  On what basis do you decide whether the woman is "competent" to decide with whom she wants to have sex?

As the reporter who "broke" this story said, with the baby boomers entering their 60's and getting dementia and lusting about the countryside,  this story is not just a little story about a horrified 59 year old  son wanting to deny his mother whatever pleasures might remain in her last years of life,  but it is "much bigger." The story certainly has got the reporter a spot on national news shows, but to what effect?

There are big issues here, but they are mostly not about sex. Sex is simply the animating driver here, the thing which piques interest of the public which otherwise could care less about demented nursing home people.  The big issue is what constitutes compis mentis, who makes that judgment and on what basis and who are the legitimate stake holders here? The people who fired the administrators likely acted out of fear, fear of lawsuits, fear of "how it would look."  Apparently, neither elderly lover had any complaints. The Phantom suspects the elderly lovers were the last people anyone in power cared about. 

Another question: Suppose these were two teenagers on a psych ward? Suppose the girl was thought to be "acting out" as a result of some personality disorder which drove her toward prolific sexual behavior? Would we be horrified? Are we horrified because a woman had sex or are we simply reacting to the idea of an 87 year old wanting to have sex?

Who has the right to decide whether or not another person may have sex? On what basis do we decide whether or not another person is "competent" to make the decision to have sex? 

What, in fact, was the nature of this woman's dementia? Did she simply have the loss of short term memory or was she unable to recognize people from her past--as her calling her lover by her husband's name would suggest?  

What constitutes the person? If a person has changed physically so much that people who knew her in her 20's would not recognize her today, is she still the same person?  Is memory not an essential ingredient in identifying a person as a distinct person?  If you lose memory of prior events and people, if you can no longer recognize your own children, are you still their mother in anything but a historical or genetic sense?

And who, in this case at least, was offended and injured?

And did the husband of the 87 year old woman, once he was told by his son of his wife's affair express any reaction of note?
 Or had the husband, like the husband in "Away from Her" concluded he had lost his wife long ago and he was happy she could have some pleasure in whatever universe she was currently living?

New Hampshire Day

This morning, the heat and humidity which has, for the past week,  made New Hampshire feel like Savannah in August, gave way to a seventy degree morning, blue skies and a refreshing breeze.

On a green field in Dover, men from ages 35 to 65 took advantage of the day to play baseball. 

Baseball is a game of frustration: The best hitters fail 2/3 of their attempts. Fly balls arcing gracefully three hundred feet in the air are caught, or not caught; ground balls skeeter by lunging players; base runners launch themselves toward bases 30 yards distant with varying success. Umpires miss some calls, make others,  and even the moderate heat takes its toll on cardiovascular systems.

The Phantom drank three quarts of Gatorade during the first three innings and did not feel the urge to visit the grassy area hidden behind the backstop to relieve a bulging bladder,  because that three quarts was simply replacing what was lost in sweat . 

The Phantom returned today to something he had done, probably with more grace and less effort, over half a century ago, and it was a reminder the time had not passed without taking a toll. But there ensued a peculiar sensation: Here was a game played 600 miles from where he learned it, with the same rules, the same skills, the same joys which obtained over that great distance of time and miles. 

The men on that field today shared little else than a love of baseball: Some were rich, some financially struggling; some were politically conservative; some liberal. Some religious, others not at all. Some were raucous, profane; others quiet, proper. Some were lithe and fast; others portly and lumbering. But everyone could play. As John Kruck told the lady: "I didn't say I was an athlete. I said I was a baseball player."

With basketball, football, hockey, you can anticipate, plan, project.  In baseball, it's all reaction, unless you are the pitcher.  You wait for the batter to swing, and you react.

And then there is that orb, spinning in space, that diamond laid out with those precisely measured intervals, as if you are playing in a galaxy devised by some power who has figured everything out, and you are simply trying to play within the rules set by that old, enigmatic power.

It's New Hampshire. It's baseball. It's wonderful.

Julian Rubinstein, The New Yorker Cures Terminal Ennui

Mark Thomas and Guy Shorrock track the egg vampires

Just when you think you are suffering from terminal ennui , and a great cloud of stupidity and group think has descended upon the firmament, and it is just too much effort to care about anything, the New Yorker arrives with a piece so elegant and electric, you realize there is no end to amusement, if only you know where to look.

So it is, with the vigilant stalwarts of the British Isles, ever alert to pernicious doings from stealthy stalkers skulking about-- adventure abounds tracking down terrorists bent on laying waste to vital centers in planet Earth.

"It was 4 P.M., too late to catch the last ferry, so he drove halfway to Mallaig, a tiny port town four hours away, where he could take the first boat out in the morning."

So begins Julian Rubinstein's enthralling tale of crime, dedicated police work and intercession.

"The ferry ride the next morning was choppy; clouds hung almost to the water. Everitt, a moonfaced man of forty-six, wondered what kind of day lay ahead."

What our heroes are doing in their relentless pursuit, to thwart the dastardly doings of villains, as determined and diabolical as Professor Moriarty:  these miscreants targeting Great Britain's nesting populations. These eco terrorists steal into the nests of beautiful, often endangered or rare birds, steal their eggs, puncture the eggs and suck out the contents of the egg (eco-abortionists) and scurry off with their prizes: empty shells.  These are the "egg collectors." These are the serial murderers of incubating chicks, driven by compulsions, unable to stop. When Daniel Lingham, an egg collector whose home contained 3,600 eggs, was finally apprehended, as the agents of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) splintered his door, Lingham sobbed, "Thank God, you've come. I can't stop."

Rubinstein traces the struggle back to the turn of the 21st century and beyond--egg collectors have been wrecking avian havoc since the 19th century, but only recently have their nefarious doings been outlawed.

"In the spring of 2001, the RSPB received a call from a bird watcher on South Uist, in the Outer Herbides. It is a Galelic-speaking area with severe weather, rough terrain, and a number of endangered birds, including golden eagles. About four hundred and fifty pairs of them are left in the U.K.
The birder had reported seeing a man scrambling along the side of a rock face in a hailstorm. Eagles often build their nests, or aeries, among rocks like the ones the man was scaling. An island-wide manhunt commenced. It culminated two days later, at the Howmore Hostel campground, where the suspect was found near his tent. "

The egg collectors have their own Society--this is England, after all--The Jourdain Society.  
The story winds through the infiltration of the Jourdain Society with the use of "attractive female agents" who chat up egg collectors in bars and elicit the location of secret stashes of purloined eggs and bird collector journals,  which record meetings and plans for egg abduction.

It's better than any James Bond or John LeCarre tale because IT'S ALL TRUE!

Run right out and buy this week's New Yorker. 
While you're at it, read the article on the "Beach Builders." (Speaking of eco terrorism--what we are doing to the East Coast is something to contemplate. The best part of this story is the case of a couple who refuse to allow an artificial protective dune to be built in front of their beach house, not because they have ecological reservations, but because it would ruin the view of the ocean from the ground floor of their house. As a result, the Army Corps of Engineers is nearly prevented from completing a protective dune, but it gets done, just in time to save all the homes along the dune line during Hurricane Sandy. The couple, however, persists in its law suit to remove the dune. Their view is obstructed! Neighbors be damned!)

The game's afoot! There is action, struggles between good and evil, and above all proof that not all the craziness of the world resides in the United States. Some of it does--New Jersey, Florida, all of the South, but there is craziness enough to satisfy us abroad--the U.K. a very fertile ground. Cuckoos and their eggs and their egg collectors and the Royal Society for Bird Protection.

New York Times She Can Play That Game, Too

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/14/fashion/sex-on-campus-she-can-play-that-game-too.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Two extraordinary articles appear, almost side by side, in The New York Times Sunday Styles section today. One is called, "She Can Play That Game, Too," and the other,  "Every Teenager Should have a Summer of 65."

They are remarkable because they both report the thinking and attitudes of American women about the place they think they ought to assign to men, sex and planning in their lives. 

The Phantom was stunned because he had, when he was in college, thought women ought to think like this, but 50 years ago if any did, nobody would admit to it.

The implications of what these women say are broad ranging, from the reality of what the meaning of "career woman" has for the life and for the sources of happiness and satisfaction in lives of American women, and for the meaning of "date rape" and for the meaning of "romance" and for the role elite universities play in the lives and thinking and class values of those who strive.

The link to the article is posted above, and may work. Apparently, it first appeared in some form, 2 days ago and has already attracted many comments.

Susan Patton, a 1977 graduate of Princeton, has argued women at elite institutions should look for husbands on these campuses, because, "You will never again have this concentration of men who are worthy of you."

Of course, this sounds very Princeton, to the Phantom, who has heard at least one Princeton woman who said she would never marry a man who had not graduated from Princeton. This woman, who is Jewish, does not seek a Jewish male, as Jewish women once did. For her, the necessary qualification is Princeton.

There is a certain echo here--of the efforts during the late 1930's to breed a master race by creating camps where blond, blue eyed young women would mate with blond blued eyed SS men to create a master race.

Today's co-eds are "Keenly attuned to what might give them a competitive edge..many of them approach college as a race to acquire credentials: top grades, leadership positions in student organizations, sought after internships."
One is quoted, "Ten years from now, no one will remember--I will not remember--who I have slept with. But I will remember, like, my transcript, because it's still there. I will remember what I did. I will remember my accomplishments and places my name is hung on campus."

The Phantom has news for this young lady: It's actually just the opposite.  (Of course, she may not recall whom she slept with because, apparently, in the hook up culture, getting blindingly drunk is part of the ritual, so sex may not be all that memorable.

One Penn co-ed described "the night to her friends as though it were a funny story: I was so drunk, I fell asleep while I was having sex! She played up the moment in the middle of the night when the guy's roommate poked his head in the room and asked, 'Yo, did you score?' Only later did Haley begin to think of what happened as rape."

For the coeds who have a life plan which includes business school, a corporate job in New York "lugging a relationship through all those transitions was hard for many to imagine." 

As one said, "I've always hear this phrase, 'Oh, marriage is great--you get to go on this journey of change together.' That sounds terrible. I don't want to go through these changes with you. I want you to have changed and become enough of your own person so that when you meet me, we can have a stable life and be very happy."

This coed is happy with finishing her studying at midnight, calling up her "hook up buddy" and having un-freighted sex. "Instead she enjoyed casual sex on her terms--often late at night, after a few drinks and never at her place because then she would have to wash the sheets."

The phantom smiles to see today's 18 year old women reach this place, but, on the other hand, there is the story (Summer of 65) of the woman who had a semi-affair with a man early in her college career who turned out to be the best man she ever met, but she was not ready to appreciate him. She does now.  And she wonders whether any of what she ultimately got--career, New York digs--was better than him.

For the Phantom, the big red flag in these stories is the idea that becoming phenomenally successful in college, having your name hung in honor (where?) having been summa cum laude, president of the sorority, head of the model UN, leader of the Greek counsel, acceptance at Wharton or Oxford, whether any of those merit badges in college mean much in the greater world. Maybe they get you in the front door at Goldman Sacks, or Chase or a bank in Hong Kong, but what is that worth?

Which is to ask, simply: If you could, on day one of your college,  write your own resume and have the most dazzlingly successful college career you can imagine--would that actually set you on the path to a wonderful life? 

What is it, exactly, college can do for you? The hyper-competitive women whose words ring throughout this story may be disappointed when they eventually cash in the glittering prize that is Princeton or Penn.

For the Phantom--who got his name from living in the library during college, and thus his dormitory brethren dubbed him "The Phantom" as one who is never seen--the rewards of college turned out to be the actual learning, oddly enough. He actually learned how to think, how to ask the right questions, how to doubt and he acquired a wide range of new friends--Camus, Sartre, Bertrand Russell, George Bernard Shaw--and a host of others, who became life long friends.
  For the Phantom, observing life histories, the model for women who "succeed" is his high school senior prom date, who could not get into the Ivy League out of high school.  She had something to prove.After her freshman year, she transferred from Carnegie Mellon to Barnard, and from there, burning with ambition, she attained Columbia Law and from there to a succession of more and more high profile jobs at more and more glamorous companies, from movie studios to financial behemoths.  She has the life all those Penn coeds would love to be looking back on, fifty years from now.

Or  has she?

Burn All The Teachers

A Nigerian Student is Treated after Attack

Adolph Hitler's boys burned books. They burned them in great piles and laughed and celebrated. 

Today, in Nigeria and Afghanistan, and other areas of the world where religious--it must be admitted they are mostly Islamic--extremists roam, they do not burn books; they burn teachers.

Reports from Nigeria describe a school teaching "Western" subjects was attacked by the Bocca Something group of Isalmist extremists,  who locked teachers and students in the school building of a village, doused it with gasoline and set it ablaze, shooting any students who managed to escape.

The SS had a similar technique they employed,  as the Wehrmacht rumbled through Poland: They'd push Jews into barns and set them ablaze, picking off escapees with rifle fire.  Brave young flower of German youth: shooting down the unarmed.

A friend, Alan Gross, returned from Afghanistan some years ago and described arriving in an Afghan village where a school teacher had been teaching girls and boys together in a village hut and the Taliban arrived, dragged the teacher and all the children outside, beheaded the teacher while the children watched,  and told the children, "Let this be a warning to those who violate Allah's word."

Today, teachers are the focus. 

And the weaponized self-appointed messengers of Allah or God have discerned something important. They may hate the nudity, the debauchery, the money seeking, the pork eating, the alcohol drinking, smoking, sex obsessed, happy Westerners, but the real problem for the fanatic is the teacher. 

It is teachers who, if they are good, open the minds of children to ask questions when the man with the sword announces he knows God's mind, when he says he has a special connection, a private line to God, not shared by the infidels. 

Maybe these fanatics are on to something. Here in America, we relegate teachers to a sort of red headed cousin status--we tolerate them, underpay them, and we do not invite them to A list dinner parties.  We gather them around politicians for grip and grin photos, and we use them, but we really do not respect them.  They do not make enough money to earn our respect.  We are nice to them when our kids need letters of recommendation to Harvard, but then, once our kids are safely on, we walk past the teachers at Hannaford's with barely a hello-how-are-you? 

In Hampton, there are howls of protest whenever anyone suggests we raise teachers' pay.  The Phantom was hooted when he suggested taxes be raised to pay teachers more. "You don't even have children in the schools. What's it to you?"

 Well, it's about what makes a community.  Good schools. I'd like to think that if a boat load of Taliban unloaded at Hampton Beach, they'd make a bee line for Winnacunet High School, Hampton Academy and Marston School. 

And the townspeople would be there,  with pitchforks and torches, to meet them. 

Does England Have a 4th of July? And Other Tales of the Poisoned Meritocracy

Andrew Mellon, who thought the poor deserved to be poor

If it is true that Jefferson and John Adams died within 5 hours of each other, both after 80 years of life, on precisely the same day, hundreds of miles apart,  on the Fourth of July, then one might be forgiven for seeing the hand of God in that, and, perhaps, a message.

Jefferson was a nasty man in some respects: Not only did he own slaves, but he was so fearful of anything which might foment slave rebellion he agitated to forbid anyone from freeing their slaves after he died (amanuensis) and he freed only two of his own slaves, brothers of the mother of his own children, Sally Hemmings. 

It is difficult to "know" historical figures, no matter how much you read about them. Think about what might be said of you by a biographer living even 50 years after you died.  Mersault, in The Stranger,  remarks with own fascination at his own trial as a portrait of a man he did not recognize springs up before his jury--and it was a portrait of himself.

Jefferson did write a document which enunciated the proposition that kings enjoyed their wealth and power not because they were chosen by God, but because they were born lucky, and other men, like Jefferson and his plantation monarchs were every bit the equal of King George III.  This was a truly revolutionary idea, that the randomness of birth did not have to determine ones fate, because it was not the expression of God's will, but was actually, quite random.

Out of this idea that it is a man's opinion of himself which ought to determine his own fate grew the idea that in the ideal society, "merit" rather than an accident of birth should determine who gets the prizes society can offer.

But what is "merit" and how do you determine, test for merit?

In 21st century America there are two well known pathways to the glittering prizes along the road of "merit."  There is the road less traveled, that road of Bill Gates, Zuckerberg, Bob Dylan, nameless nerd tech entrepreneurs, but it is a risky road, strewn with the corpses of a thousand failures for each trumpeted success.  Then there is the more reliable road, through good schools, examinations and salaried jobs.  The boy or girl who grows up in Winnetka, Illinois, Shaker Heights, Ohio, Chevy Chase, Maryland, Scarsdale, New York, the upper West Side of Manhattan and progresses from Phillips Exeter Academy to Princeton to Chase Manhattan Bank has done so, not by accident of birth, from having been born into royalty and wealth but because he/she has "merit."

It is this more orderly, predictable, safe and monitored pathway which is the numerically significant path to the glittering prizes and to the creation of a stable upper class in America.  In one sense, it is this pathway which is the socially and psychologically significant pathway because it offers that workable dream: Work hard, get ahead. The Bill Gates pathway is too fraught with failures to create anything like stability in a society. Few would argue Gates did not earn his success with merit, but you need the more reliable pathway, based on persistence and planning rather than extraordinary brilliance to make a nation work.

But, as it has played out over the centuries, the meritocracy has been perverted, and is now based on a lie. The "tests" are "rigged" in ways which are hidden, but real.

Thinking Fast and Slow elucidated one way in which the tests (like the SAT and the ACT) which select those who will go to Princeton etc seem fair. Take the question: Two balls together sell for $1.10. The larger ball costs $1 more than the smaller. What is the price of each ball?  Most students leap at the obvious answer: the large ball costs $1 and the small ball costs 10 cents, go on to the next question. The test is timed. You are in a hurry. Tick, tick, tick.  But, if you stop to think, that would mean the large ball is only 90cents more than the small ball. The answer is $1.05 and 5 cents.  So, fair enough, the 75% of kids who got into Harvard saw the trick and got the question right.

But why did those kids succeed? Well, maybe because they were more intelligent, or because they were more thoughtful and didn't leap to a tempting conclusion but asked themselves: Is there more to this question?  Or maybe, more likely, because their parents paid for the Kaplan course, which prepared them for this sort of question. Were these kids actually smarter, more thoughtful, more meritorious, or just richer? Were these kids taught a habit of thinking and the tricks of the test, taught how to game the system?


Consider the question:  "Does England have a Fourth of July?"  Well, of course the English look at their calendars and see July and there is Thursday, July 4, 2013 right there. But one student may see to the meaning of that phrase "Fourth of July," and think, well, the English likely do not celebrate the loss of the American colonies, so, yes, they also have a Fifth of July, but they do not celebrate either in England. So the answer is "No."  There is an implied meaning in that question and a literal one. The kids who answer the literal question go to Harvard. But are they better?

Or, how about the question:  Pick the word which is closest in meaning to the word "Want":  A/ Hunger  B/ Need C/Advertise D/Job E/Appetite.

If you picked "Need" you go to Yale. But if you think about that word, "want," you might say, a "want" is something desired , which you may not need at all, where a need is something required. So everyone from the Rolling Stones to Noah Webster might say, that is a major distinction here and melding those two words shows a lack of respect for that difference. You might pick "hunger" figuring that is closer to the idea of desire, even though hunger implies a stronger compulsion than simply wanting something and some people hunger for something (or someone) they know they should not want.  Advertise is an intriguing choice, in that Want Ads are advertisements for people who need help. And a person who has an appetite for something definitely wants something or has want, but appetite can be subtly different from want, because some people have an appetite for cigarettes but they do not want to smoke.  "Need" is pretty close, but it does have that problem with necessity versus preference or desire.  

So when we pick our star players, if we want to separate out the truly smart from the dull, we had better have meaningful, well thought out tests.

The Phantom knows a man who at age 12 applied to the Sidwell Friends School in Wasington, D.C. He applied because a friend on the Sidwell wrestling team wanted him to join that team, and the friend's parents urged the parents this promising wrestler to apply because admission to Sidwell could be "life changing."  The wrestler took the standard private school admission test, and while he scored high in some areas (reading comprehension) his scores in math and grammar were abysmal.  Discussion in the admission committee came down to:  "We have 130 students with better grades and higher test scores than this kid. Why should he get one of only 15 slots in the 9th grade over these other 130 kids?  Really, it comes down to the wrestling coach wants a star to build his team around. Is this what this school is really about? Aren't we supposed to admit kids based on merit?"

Someone on the committee argued  the non merit angle:  "Those other 130 kids are super bright and will do well in Montgomery County Schools, which are after all, excellent public schools, especially at the magnet programs, where those 130 will wind up. But as a school, we might just make a significant difference in this kid's life. He will be a challenge for us. He is a white kid. If he were a black kid, we would not even be having this discussion. We'd be admitting him in a flash for "diversity." Why not admit a kid whose diversity is in his academic talent?"

This wrestler's first year was a struggle. His grammar and syntax required a lot of attention. He made progress in math, but slow progress.  In fact, he was pinned in his first match, to the chagrin and embarrassment of the parent who had sold this kid to the wrestling coach as the messiah.  But by his senior year, this student was indistinguishable from his classmates in grammar, writing skills, classroom performance; even his math was passable. And he did, in fact, turn out to be the best wrestler in the school's history and as team captain, he brought along his teammates and the school placed #10 out of 145 schools at the National Prep tournament. 

He went on to Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons, and is now a vascular surgeon, a specialty which has fewer spots than any other in surgery. In other words, he was successful and talented. He exceeded even his parents' expectations, especially his parents' expectations. (They had thought he was bright, but did not foresee much academic success because he was disorganized and messy. What they had not seen was his tenacity, persistence and discipline.) Did Sidwell set him on a track to success?  Likely not. He got into a college he likely would have gone to from a public high school. He struggled there but eventually followed the same pattern of marked improvement with each year, graduating at the top of his class. What explained his success was not his academic pedigree but his persistence and his ability to compensate around his academic weaknesses with reliance on his academic strengths.

At the level of selection for high schools and colleges, a deranged testing process is merely misguided and ill considered, and even if it is perverted, there may be time to recover from it.  The child who is turned down for Yale College may, through persistence wind up at Harvard Law, where the Yale College kid winds up at Suffolk Law.

And what of the meritocracy beyond schools?  Doctors are trained first in medical schools, then selected for "residencies" at university hospitals based on their medical school performance and then for "fellowships" based on performance in residency, but also based on standardized examinations.

And after they have finished their training they take "Board" exams to be "certified" in different specialties. After 4 years of medical school and another 2 to 8 years of training whether or not they get certified in their specialty depends on an examination. If a doctor goes to St. George's medical school in the Caribbean and trains at a community hospital in South Dakota and he passes his Board exam, he can claim superiority to the doctor who went to Harvard medical school, trained at Mass General but failed the certifying exam.

In some specialties, like Internal Medicine, this examination process is, to say the least, tainted.  The American College of Physicians, which prepares the exam also sells a "review" program for close to $1,000, and puts on "review courses" for another $1,000.  And woe to the doctor who thinks, "Hey, I'm well trained. I don't need to spend that kind of money to pass another exam."  The kid from South Dakota scrapes that money together and he sees all the exam questions and their answers before he sits for the test and he finds he is superior to the guy who spent 8 years toiling away at the high powered programs.  

In other words, the exam is a commercial enterprise and can be bought, and the idea of "merit" becomes, once again, the reality of shrewdness, money and gaming.

What is real merit in a doctor?  The Phantom thinks he knows. But the Phantom would be hard put to dream up a written exam to discern merit in a doctor.  He surely sees the lack of merit in doctors who have passed all their Board exams and he sees great merit in some doctors who have gone to very humble medical schools. But quality in good doctors is unmistakable, over time, when you see what they do for their patients, and you see it in discussions at medical journal clubs, where doctors meet to analyze the medical literature and you see it in the notes doctors write referring physicians in which they analyze what is wrong with patients.

Somehow, the ideal of real merit in American medicine, and likely in academia in general has been replaced by the will to make a dollar. Merit has been monetized, and gamed. 

Someday someone will write an Animal Farm allegory about the dissolution of that great, animating ideal of "meritocracy." In the beginning all the creatures feel so liberated from the yoke of your-birth-is-your-fate. A new day dawns with individuals who work hard, who strive, who improve themselves through tenacious effort, rising to the top. But then, the well born figure out how to game the merit system and at the final dinner scene, you look from face to face and you cannot distinguish the people from the pigs.