A report by David Grann appearing in the September 7 New Yorker about the trial and execution of Todd Willingham reminds us of how thoroughly appalling our judicial system is, especially when faced with testimony about technical/scientific matters, and beyond that, how intransigent judges and all levels of appeal up to governors and the Supreme Court are once a verdict hes been passed.
The unwillingness to rescind the verdict of the hallowed, uncomprehending jury on the grounds "We have faith in the jury system," is utterly baffling and must make anyone wonder why a sane man would trust his fate to a trial in any of these United States, but most especially in Texas, where being accused of a capital offense appears to be the equivalent of conviction; you might as well write your will if you find yourself in jail in Texas.
Briefly, what Mr. Grann meticulously presents is the case of Mr. WIllingham who was convicted of setting fire to his own house, and the fire killed his children. The evaluation of the arson investigators Douglas Fogg and Manuel Vasquez sounded reasonable and well founded and thorough as Grann lays it out at the beginning of the article. I found myself thinking, yes, the accused is guilty.a I know next to nothing about arson or the science of investigation of arson, and given what "facts" I was, the case seemed clear enough.
But then the "facts" got challenged, or rather the science or lack of it underlying
the interpretation of the data emerged, once an arson expert who actually knew what he was doing, who questioned assumptions very clearly annihilated the prosecution's case, and in doing so, proved beyond any reasonable doubt.
Various groups concerned to correct wrongful convictions got involved. Appeals were made to the governor and to the Supreme Court of the United States but all appeals were rejected and the accused was duly executed.
During the course of this fiasco a forensic pathologist who routinely testifies to the guilt and homicidal streak in every defendant, Dr. James Grigson, proclaimed the accused was a homicidal maniac.
What is so astonishing about this case is not so much that junk science convicted an innocent man--any physician who has ever been drawn into that circus called a malpractice trial knows science ends at the courtroom door--but the most amazing thing is the unwillingness of the courts and the executive branch to admit an error.
The really galling aspect of all this is how determined the judges and prosecutors and governors are in their refusal to admit mistakes. The happy exception to all this is the governor of Illinois who put a hold on executions once he had reviewed enough cases where DNA exonerated clearly innocent men accused of rape, men who were on death row. He said what any citizen should have believed: If we make mistakes this often, if we make mistakes even rarely, we should not be burying our mistakes.
The most convincing argument against the death penalty is not that killers do not deserve to die. The most compelling argument is our judicial system is too often wrong about who gets accused and we ought to be humble about our own judgements.
Scientiss, doctors are accustomed to living with doubt. Diagnoses are made, hypotheses are proferred but everyone in the discussion knows the most convincing theory can and often does prove wrong. So the scientist does not tie up his ego too closely to his judgment. He is more concerned with the process--did I think this thing through well enough? He is not mortified when his theory is disproved.
This is not the ethos of the judge.
Antonin Scalia said in an opinion there has not been a "single case--not one--in which it is clear that a person was executed for a crime he did not commit."
How different is Justice Scalia from James Grigson, for whom every one accused in the docket is guilty?
T
Friday, September 18, 2009
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Charity Ward
Recently, at a journal club one of the most erudite hematologists I know, a man who can explain the intricacies of DNA repair mechanisms, departed from his usual sphere of molecular biology to comment on a journal article about the suggestion for a "Public Option."
He told a story about his father, a radiologist in Maine, who had opposed the proposed Medicare legislation in 1965. His father had said government cannot do anything right, cannot be trusted. But, his son asked him forty years ago, what then to do about all those elders who were living on pensions and unable to pay for surgery or for hospitalizations?
"We always take care of those folks," his father said. "We write it all off. They come to the hospital, pay what they can, if anything, and if they can't, well we just take care of the patient and don't worry about the money. We won't starve."
That sounds pretty magnanimous, doesn't it?
But when you examine that idea, especially if you use that to guide public policy or consider it an expression of ethical behavior, it becomes very disturbing.
From the point of view of the doctor, it works pretty well. He may not get paid, but this approach leaves him with a good feeling about himself. It reinforces his sense of saintliness, of practicing medicine as it ought to be practiced, as a calling.
But one must ask, beyond the doctors, who will pay the nurses, the ER clerk, the guy who cleans the patient's room, and who will pay for the equipment? The doctor's fee is only the beginning, from the patient's point of view.
From the point of view of the patient, how does he feel? Does he feel grateful for the free care? Or does he feel humiliated?
The impulse toward charity, toward acting in a Christ like way to give to those in need conjures up all sorts of warm and fuzzy feelings, but what does this approach say about America?
When you listen to this doctor, what you are hearing sounds eerily familiar: "We take care of our people." Heard another way, you might hear the master of the plantation: "Our people are like children, and we take care of them." See where I'm going with this? When the master of the plantation gives out benefits to his slaves, he feels good about himself. And the slaves on the plantation are supposed to be grateful for his largesse. But of course, the master is better off under this system because if he doesn't feel like it, he doesn't have to do a thing. Nobody is taxing him, forcing him to pay for someone else's care. His obligation to his slaves is totally discretionary.
But the problem is the slaves should never have been put in the position of needing a hand out to begin with.
The whole structure of a dependent group of people, who depend for their lives on the beneficence of a powerful set of masters is pretty obnoxious.
My high school history teacher, Mrs. Von Doenhoff, used to declaim, in
moments of exasperation when her students had claimed she had violated their rights, "You have only one right on this earth and that's the right to starve and die."
This is as bald a statement of "American values" as you get.
Or at least, this is one strain of American values--the living off the grid set of values.
My home is in the Live Free or Die state. But how many people in this country have actually considered what that might mean? If you live off the grid, you are free. But if your appendix blows up in the middle of the night on your self sufficient off-the-grid farm, with its windmill generating electricity, and its fields of food growing around it, you still need the help of others at that dark hour. Someone has to haul you into a hospital and some surgeon, who has been trained in a medical school and in academic teaching hospitals (all creatures of a large government and large bureaucracies), someone has to help you or you will forfeit your life for the principle that you live off the grid and don't need the rest of the world.
Now, I do not accept uncritically the notion, "Healthcare is a right not a privilege." Do you have the right to make me get out of bed in the middle of the night? Someone has to pay me to do that.
On the other hand, Governor Mario Cumo once used the image of the wagon train going across the Great Plains and when someone fell of the wagon, the others stuck out a hand to pull him back on again. Or you might like the image of a boat, as in we are all in the same boat. You get the idea.
The fact is, that image of all of us sharing a fate, of looking out for your fellow American, that is not something which even half of this country embraces. We do not like each other that much.
So President Obama is correct when he says the reason this debate over health care has gotten so hot is because it emanates from the one of the most basic disagreements we have in this country, which is how much the government ought to be doing and how much ought to be left to the individual.
Democracy ordinarily means compromise. Medicare actually began as a very limited program in which the government paid for only doctor's services in hospital. No lab tests, no out patient care, no X rays. When it was apparent America had not gone communist with socialized medicine after a few years, more things were added. In fact, those doctors who decried it, soon discovered they were making more money than ever because now more of their services were actually paid for. Now you cannot get doctors to think about life without Medicare, which may be one reason 70% of American physicians say they prefer the "Public option."
He told a story about his father, a radiologist in Maine, who had opposed the proposed Medicare legislation in 1965. His father had said government cannot do anything right, cannot be trusted. But, his son asked him forty years ago, what then to do about all those elders who were living on pensions and unable to pay for surgery or for hospitalizations?
"We always take care of those folks," his father said. "We write it all off. They come to the hospital, pay what they can, if anything, and if they can't, well we just take care of the patient and don't worry about the money. We won't starve."
That sounds pretty magnanimous, doesn't it?
But when you examine that idea, especially if you use that to guide public policy or consider it an expression of ethical behavior, it becomes very disturbing.
From the point of view of the doctor, it works pretty well. He may not get paid, but this approach leaves him with a good feeling about himself. It reinforces his sense of saintliness, of practicing medicine as it ought to be practiced, as a calling.
But one must ask, beyond the doctors, who will pay the nurses, the ER clerk, the guy who cleans the patient's room, and who will pay for the equipment? The doctor's fee is only the beginning, from the patient's point of view.
From the point of view of the patient, how does he feel? Does he feel grateful for the free care? Or does he feel humiliated?
The impulse toward charity, toward acting in a Christ like way to give to those in need conjures up all sorts of warm and fuzzy feelings, but what does this approach say about America?
When you listen to this doctor, what you are hearing sounds eerily familiar: "We take care of our people." Heard another way, you might hear the master of the plantation: "Our people are like children, and we take care of them." See where I'm going with this? When the master of the plantation gives out benefits to his slaves, he feels good about himself. And the slaves on the plantation are supposed to be grateful for his largesse. But of course, the master is better off under this system because if he doesn't feel like it, he doesn't have to do a thing. Nobody is taxing him, forcing him to pay for someone else's care. His obligation to his slaves is totally discretionary.
But the problem is the slaves should never have been put in the position of needing a hand out to begin with.
The whole structure of a dependent group of people, who depend for their lives on the beneficence of a powerful set of masters is pretty obnoxious.
My high school history teacher, Mrs. Von Doenhoff, used to declaim, in
moments of exasperation when her students had claimed she had violated their rights, "You have only one right on this earth and that's the right to starve and die."
This is as bald a statement of "American values" as you get.
Or at least, this is one strain of American values--the living off the grid set of values.
My home is in the Live Free or Die state. But how many people in this country have actually considered what that might mean? If you live off the grid, you are free. But if your appendix blows up in the middle of the night on your self sufficient off-the-grid farm, with its windmill generating electricity, and its fields of food growing around it, you still need the help of others at that dark hour. Someone has to haul you into a hospital and some surgeon, who has been trained in a medical school and in academic teaching hospitals (all creatures of a large government and large bureaucracies), someone has to help you or you will forfeit your life for the principle that you live off the grid and don't need the rest of the world.
Now, I do not accept uncritically the notion, "Healthcare is a right not a privilege." Do you have the right to make me get out of bed in the middle of the night? Someone has to pay me to do that.
On the other hand, Governor Mario Cumo once used the image of the wagon train going across the Great Plains and when someone fell of the wagon, the others stuck out a hand to pull him back on again. Or you might like the image of a boat, as in we are all in the same boat. You get the idea.
The fact is, that image of all of us sharing a fate, of looking out for your fellow American, that is not something which even half of this country embraces. We do not like each other that much.
So President Obama is correct when he says the reason this debate over health care has gotten so hot is because it emanates from the one of the most basic disagreements we have in this country, which is how much the government ought to be doing and how much ought to be left to the individual.
Democracy ordinarily means compromise. Medicare actually began as a very limited program in which the government paid for only doctor's services in hospital. No lab tests, no out patient care, no X rays. When it was apparent America had not gone communist with socialized medicine after a few years, more things were added. In fact, those doctors who decried it, soon discovered they were making more money than ever because now more of their services were actually paid for. Now you cannot get doctors to think about life without Medicare, which may be one reason 70% of American physicians say they prefer the "Public option."
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Oh, South Carolina
South Carolina has tradition in this arena. In 1856, a South Carolina Congressman, Preston Brooks, walked into the Senate chamber and expressed his indignation to remarks made by an anti slavery Senator by reigning blows with a wooden cudgel upon the skull of this Senator, the unfortunate Charles Sumner. Sumner's legs became entangled in his Senate desk which was bolted to the floor, and rising to defend himself against the surprise attack, he wrenched the desk free from its moorings while the South Carolina Congressman continued to deliver blows to the skull. The Congressman from South Carolina managed to blind the object of his displeasure, but only in one eye, and it took three years for his victim to recover from the hail of blows.
I suppose one could call this maneuver, the South Carolina blind side.
In South Carolina, such attacks are apparently regarded as a sign of courage and resolve and moral superiority; Brooks received scores of canes from admirers throughout South Carolina, who urged him to use these cudgels on other opponents of slavery. The Congressman became a hero to that locus of paranoia and resentment which had as its umbilicus the Palmetto state.
Was it merely a coincidence the first shots of the Civil War were fired in a South Carolina harbor?
I think not.
Where else would disagreement degenerate so predictably?
The Congressman either suffers from Tourette's syndrome or he is from South Carolina.
Has to be one or the other.
And I realize I am being quite unfair to sufferers of Tourette's.
The Congressman is either an imbecile or he is simply from South Carolina. But then, this may be a distinction without a difference.
Do we know anything about this man? Do we need to know more?
Does he listen faithfully to Rush Limbaugh and Imus? Of course he does. He has not had an original thought his entire life. He simply listens and smiles idiotically when something Rush says appeals to the few functioning neurons he manages to synapse.
Where was his little hand held poster of Obama with the Hitler mustache? Other Republicans throughout the chamber were armed and ready with little placards to wave at the President that night, although none saw fit to interrupt him with a shout out.
Here in New Hampshire, during the run up to the voting last November, a local Democrat was educating me about New Hampshire Republicans. I was new to the state and standing on corner with her and she was holding up an Obama for President poster. She told me, "Well, New Hampshire Republicans are Republicans, but they are not assholes." Coming from this very primlady in her Talbot's jacket and her pressed blue jeans and her L.L. Bean field shoes, I was a little taken aback. Such language from this lady who had Junior League written all over her.
Just then, a car drove by us, and a man leaned out of the window and I could see he was angry because the neck veins under under his tattoo were bulging. He screamed, "Nigger lovers."
I looked to her for an explanation.
"I'm not sure he's a Republican," she said. "I'm not sure he's even from New Hampshire."
Maybe a tourist, from South Carolina.
The mystery is not that people like this exist--we saw them at all the town hall meetings this summer. They crawl out from under their rocks now in then, into the sunlight to spew.
The mystery is why the President clings to the notion you can engage in civil discourse with people...like that. By which I mean, the Republican party.
They waved their little placards at the President during his speech. They are so smug and self satisfied.
They believe in being born on third base and thinking they've worked hard and deserve all the good things and all the advantages they have.
We cannot be rid of the Republicans. We have to tolerate them, even if we ignore them.
But let's just saw off the entire state of South Carolina with its statehouse flying the stars and bars, that symbol of "Southern heritage" and "history," a proud history of defending slavery and then tobacco and whatever other slime ball institution like states rights, segregation, lynching uppity black people--let's just saw off the entire state, which is, thank our lucky stars, on the eastern seaboard, and we can hope it will drift out to sea.
There are several states we would not miss at all. South Carolina has to be a leader of the pack. Mississippi and Alamba are not far beind. But South Carolina has always had a special place in the black little hearts of the really demented.
What would we miss about South Carolina, if it simply got its 150 year old wish to separate from the Union? It has no institutions of higher learning, although it has some football teams attached to things they call colleges. There may be a few golf courses. There is a fort off shore which has historical significance. But can you name anything you'd really miss?
The place is an abscess which ought to be incised and drained and excised if possible. All the hate and poison of the country has flowed right there.
Let's be done with that wretched state. It may pollute the Atlantic, but eventually the ocean will claim it and we'll be a much healthier country.
Sunday, August 23, 2009
Questions I'd like to Ask
James Audubon
Here's a few Questions I'd like to have answered by particular people
AFGHANISTAN/HEARTS AND MINDS/ THE MISSION/ 911/ SLEEPING SOUNDLY
For President Obama or possibly Linda Winslow, (executive producer or The News Hour): Why do you believe in rabbis to answer questions where "expert" opinion is clearly not expert?
Picture this panel of experts, which, I've read has actually been assembled.
A dinner is thrown at the White House for the President and historians sit around the table as the wise men, the rabbis, and they are asked to expound on the differences between Vietnam and Afghanistan: It snows more in Afghanistan. Afghanies do not speak Vietnamese.
Now I never got a chance to take a single history course in college, but I have listened to the Lyndon Johnson tapes, and I heard LBJ sound very insightful when he was discussing a farm bill, and he sounded pretty resolute about the Civil Rights bill.
And contrary to public perception, he wasn't crassly strong arming the Congressmen and Senators he wanted to vote for his bills; he was any but strong armed.
But when he talked about Vietnam, he was clueless. He would fall back into the posture of, "I'm just a good o' boy. Can't understand the whole thing, but I rely on the bright boys who went to all those big named schools to tell me what to do and they say we got to draw the line in the sand right there in Vietnam--or the whole world will fall to this nefarious, plotting, conniving, mysterious threat to Western civilization thing called communism."
Now President Obama is saying we've got to fight in Afghanistan because those nefarious, plotting, conniving terrorists are all going to gather there and plot and train and connive if we don't find them there and kill them.
So here's the question I never hear the President answer: If we do succeed in driving the terrorists out of Afghanistan, what makes you think they will just give up and stop conniving? Why would they not simply move to Somolia or some other place where there is little or no government?
What is with this concept of a training ground for terrorists?
Oh, we got to clean up those training camps and wipe out all those terrorists. As if you can pull up crabgrass around the tree and flower beds in the front yard and never have to worry about the flower beds in the backyard?
Another way of putting it: What exactly is the mission? How do you know when you've won and can bring home the boys and girls back home?
Richard Holbrooke, seasoned diplomat that he is, had a ready answer for the question of how we define victory in Afghanistan: "We'll know it when we see it."
Oh, that's cute. That means he's clueless, too. Another rabbi without answers.
As I said, I'm no historian, but I had reached the age of reason by the time of the Cuban missile crisis, or at least I'd reached an age at which I could form my own unfounded conclusions and I remember thinking Kennedy's big problem was he was always trying to show he was tougher on Communism than Richard Nixon.
And it was difficult to out tough Nixon when Nixon was accusing people of being pink right down to their underpants.
I really like President Obama. But is he going to try to out tough the Darth Vader of the Bush administration about terrorism?
At least he's abandoned this "War" talk. As if we have a war here. Wars have beginnings and endings. They occur between identifiable enemies, who usually have an identifiable home base. Or, like Ghengis Khan and the Mongol hordes, at least there's an army to defeat. But the wars on crime, cancer, drugs, pornography and terrorism, who's going to come to Appomatox and offer to hand over his sword?
I am unschooled, I admit, when it comes to history, but I did have the good fortune to get in some courses in Anthropology in college and I know from that you are not going to win the hearts and minds of Afghanies with American soldiers who speak no Afgh anie, who look like space invaders and who are, when you come right down to it, infidels.
You might win some hearts and minds with Michael Jackson, Madonna, the Neville Brothers, but not with soldiers.
I'm no history professor, but I was in college during Vietnam and I remember that stuff. It's not history to me. I remember what I saw. And I know what my brother told me when he got back about winning hearts and minds--that sort of thing is just not going to happen.
You cannot win hearts and minds with an army of anthropologists, although you might learn a lot more than you will with the current army.
Anthropologists are, if they are very good, and if they are lucky, and most of all, if they are given enough time, capable of telling you what the Afghanies are thinking, what their values are, how they are willing to live inside and outside those values, but anthropologists do not change a people's mind.
So where was I? Oh, yes, Afghanistan. Here's the question: What is the best outcome you can wish for with those 70,000 American troops?
That's a question for the President. It's a friendly question, really. I'm open minded. Maybe I just don't have enough information. All I know so far is what I read in The New Yorker and what I've heard from a few friends who have recently returned from Afaghanistan.
The Taliban is composed of people we Americans find easy to hate. The Taliban does not place a high value on tolerance. They tend to demonstrate their displeasure by chopping off heads, often in front of helpless children. They are a hard bunch to develop much sympathy for.
Then the follow up question is: Okay, we've captured Osama Bin Laden. We've routed the Taliban, we've got all those farmers in every valley and every mountainside growing wheat and soy and corn and pansies instead of poppy. And we clear out.
Do we think we have prevented the next 911 attack?
Is that the goal?
Do we really believe there are no sleeper crazies in the USA, in Brazil, Argentinia, Bolivia, Somolia, Indonesia, Mali, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Iran, North Korea?
So now we are safe again and we can keep our shoes on at the airports?
HEALTHCARE:
President Obama has the right instincts here.
His first instinct was, okay we'll do what the Brits did forty years ago: We'll set up a public system which will cover anyone and we'll allow a private system to run alongside it, where you can get your high priced doctors, your high tread count sheets on the bed in the hospital, but at least everyone will be covered, and we'll get the burden of health insurance off the backs of American industry and we'll likely save money for the US economy in the long run because now all those uninsured are not burdening hospitals and emergency rooms.
But why--here's the question--why do you then back off at the first sign of resistance?
Did you not expect the Republicans to fire a shot? Why do you charge in on the stallion but then retreat when the first shot is fired?
Did you not expect to see Betsy McCoughey with her notebooks with the thousand pages of the bill all highlighted, making some really outlandish, inane and scary pronouncements about how this means pulling the plug on grandma?
(That's what Betsy did with Clinton's healthcare and it make her famous, got her on TV and got her appointed Lt Governor of New York. She claimed to be the only person in America who had actually read the entire Clinton health care proposal, so we was virtually the only authority around.)
And now she sees her big chance for a second act.
Did you have no plan for people like her?
One thing her performance on Jon Stewart did elucidate: The bill she was reading from was horrifyingly detailed. It mandated (on page 432, no less) what the doctor has to discuss with the patient and the family about end of life planning, how it has to be documented. So now the end of life industry has a page in the bill. As far as I know, none of the other industrialized nations with health care systems get into micromanagment to this extreme. Only in America.
Now, suppose every group who has employees making a salary to advocate for vaccinations (a different group for or against each vaccine: Mump) gets a paragraph inserted into the primary care doctor's boilerplate note, where does that leave the doctor? He's got to hire a nurse or a front office person to be sure all thoses paragraphs are signed, dated and so forth and you then have the meet with the auditors who will base your compensation on how pretty your records look.
Do we have better medical care now?
Here's another question for the President: How are we going to pay for the 50 million who are uninsured and the 100 million who are underinsured?
The administration got the CEO of the Cleveland Clinic to appear on the News Hour and give the answer to that one: Well, see, what we are going to do is to get doctors to work with their patients to lose weight and to stop smoking and then everyone will be healthy and we'll not have to pay for their healthcare.
Question for the Cleveland Clinic CEO: Are you serious? Better question: Who put you up to this?
The other answer has come from Atul Gwandi and Peter Orszag, and that is there is lots of waste and overcharging in the system. We'll cut out that fat. They looked at an outlier group of doctors in some town in Texas where the doctors looked at patients as "profit centers" instead of looking at them as patients and they decided this is what all the doctors all over the country are doing--except some at the Mayo and Cleveland clinics.
Here's another problem.
Doctors, in some ways are like auto mechanics. Customer arrives, says there's a squeaking screech every time she hits the brakes. Customer doesn't know what the mechanic knows. He can take some time to figure out the problem. If it's just brake pads, he's got an hour's work, and not much of a charge. Or, he can find it's not just the brake pads she needs but axles,wheel bearings. Now we're talking boat payments for the mechanic.
The incentives are not hard to see. Some mechanics, maybe most, resist the incentives and simply fix the brake pads when that's all that's needed.
We can devise a system, and in fact Medicare has moved in the direction of devising a systems where the doctor is in the same position as the mechanic: He only gets paid a lot if he finds something serious. Before Medicare changed its rules, doctors got paid by the time they spent. They got paid the same, in the end, if the patient turned out to have something simple and non life threatening. But recent rules virtually eliminate the hourly salary effect and install rules which pay hansomely only for the bad stuff. Micromanagment run amuck.
It doesn't have to be this way. Government can do things right, but someone has to be watching.
What is the solution?
Personally, I'd be happy to see doctors on salaries. Then they really do what's in the interest of the patient. They are then "Disinterested" in the sense they've got no stake in a life threatening diagnosis, in doing invasive expensive tests.
But then you've got the arguments about whether you pay the heart surgeon more than the family practitioner.
And here's the question for President Obama: Who are you looking to for the answers?
Are you looking only in the easy places? Someone writes an article for the New Yorker so you listen to him. Someone is the CEO of the Cleveland Clinic, so you visit him? Or are you listening to the answers these visible people propose and asking yourself: Does this really make sense?
President Obama is a smart man. I hope he'll wind up listening to his own inner voice. Amid all those voices clamoring for his attention, hopefully, he'll finally find his own voice.
Sunday, July 19, 2009
American Tough Guys
>"He had a lot of frustration with what an insurgency is--that we are fighting a bunch of cowards who won't fight us man to man, who hide amongst women and children, who don't wear uniforms."
American soldier describing his sergeant in the 101st Airborne in Afghanistan, from Raffi Khatchadourian, the New Yorker July 6&13, 2009.
>"They wouldn't fight us like men. They wouldn't wear uniforms. They'd shoot at us from the fields and run away.They should have stood and fought, like men."
Former German soldier explaining why it was necessary to shoot villagers who lived near the scene of an attack against German troops, The Sorrow and The Pity.
>"In 2005, he forced nearly seven hundred prisoners, wearing nothing but pink underwear and flip flips, to shuffle four blocks through the Arizona heat, pink handcuffed together, to a new jail...The men were strip-searched both before and after the march...Arpaio also told reporters, 'I put them on the street so everybody could see them.' He marched another nine hundred this April."
William Finnegan, The New Yorker July 20, 2009.
>"This is not us. This is not America," President George W. Bush, in a televised speech about Abu Garib prison photographs showing naked, blindfolded prisoners forced to form human pyramids.
So what is a tough guy? Who is Us? Are these guys, Sheriff Arpaio in Arizona, the officers of the 101st Airborne, the jailers at Abu Garib not Americans?
I think they are very American. They are American Tough Guys. Our home grown phony Tough Guys.
To my mind, a real tough guy is the little kid who faces an apparently physically superior opponent and goes right at him, as if being smaller, weaker in body meant nothing. It's the old, "It's not the size of the dog in the fight; it's the size of the fight in the dog," thing.
David might have been considered a tough guy, conquering his fear of the giant. From the giant's perspective, however, David should have been forced to fight with a sword and from Goliath's point of view, David's use of technology which allowed him to strike from a distance and to run if he missed, might make David a coward who should have stood and fought like a man.
One question: Is it possible to be "brave" in the asymmetric warfare of the American army vs the Afghani insurgents? Is the sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona a tough guy only as long as he is surrounded by armed deputies?
From where do American males get their notions of bravery and toughness?
There's a great Second City line, "You ain't gonna become a great basketball player working moves against your father in the driveway. You got to play inner city on the playgrounds with no referees."
At some level, white American males like Sheriff Joe Arpaio, and like Colonel Michael Dane Steele and his murderous sergeant Eric Geressy,of the 101st Airborne in Afghanistan, all know they have been playing in the driveway their whole lives, protected and supported by the Man. And they know, deep down, they are wusses.
Overcompensating wusses.
In my white suburban high school, members of the wrestling team could look across from their locker room into the locker room of the basketball team. After practice, the wrestlers were always pretty beat up, dehydrated, mauled really; it was all they could do to pull on their clothes over the battered shoulders and necks and hips. They look across the hall to the basketball players in their dressing room, trying to get all inner city in-your-face with each other, doing the male displays of pseudo ferocity.
And the wrestlers would shake their heads and look at each other from under their brows and smile. "Tough guys," someone would say, and everyone would laugh. The wrestlers knew what tough meant.
Tough meant stepping out on the mat with nobody but yourself on your team. Tough meant when the whistle blew you had to step toward your opponent, never take a step back, and there was nobody to pass the ball to, no heavy artillery or helicopters to call in to help.
Anyone who has watched The Wire from start to finish knows what tough is. Those inner city Baltimore kids on The Wire are tough guys, heaven help them, and not because they really want to be. They have to be. They are as tough as any one in Mogadishu. And they are not imagined characters, they are not fiction. Nobody could make those kids up. Those are kids who David Simon and Ed Burns know. They have no parents, no homes beyond what they can scrounge in a vacant building, no support beyond the drug organizations for which they work as hoppers on the corners, which treat them as dispensable pawns. Those kids exist on the corners of every American inner city. They are tougher than Col. Steele and certainly they are tougher than Sheriff Joe Arpaio.
So who is tough?
Let's examine the American tough guy, Colonel Steele. (Great name for a tough guy.)
"We give the enemy the maximum opportunity to give his life for his country."
Cute, huh?
How about, "The guy that is going to win on the far end is the one who gets violent the fastest." Steele exhorts his guys to "whip somebody's ass." His soldiers are going to go after the enemy and, "Kick their feet out from under them...bring them back and put them in a room...give them an open-mouth kiss and tell '''em we love 'em...If you mess with me, I will eat you. You're the hunter. You're the predator. You're looking for prey."
(Khatchadourian, New Yorker)
Steele walked on to the University of Georgia and made the team as an unrecruited offensive lineman. That's how tough he was. Of course, that is only one step away from playing in the driveway with your father.
It's not exactly surviving on the corner in Baltimore.
So he gets to Mogadishu and he tries to be all tough with a helicopter and all the firepower of the United States Army and he gets his ass handed to him and loses eighteen soldiers. Those corner boys in Mogadishu didn't have to make tough talk and hang a sign above their office door, "Carnivore." They were looking across into Steele's locker room and laughing at him.
Of course it's frustrating when the other guys don't get dressed up for game day in their uniforms and they see your guns and your airships and they decide they can hurt you by being smarter than you.
It's no surprise there are people like Sheriff Joe in Maricopa, Arizona. He's real tough, as long as he's got the attack dogs on his side.
When he builds his tent prison he says, "I put them next to the dump, the dog pound, the waste disposal plant." He creates chain gangs. He gets himself a tank, paints the howitzer muzzle with flames and paints "Sheriff Arpaio's War on Drugs," on the sides. He has his jailers overpower prisoners, fourteen to one (real brave guys these jailers) has them strap the prisoner in a restraint chair and Taser them with stun guns. Got to be tough to do that.
That men like Sheriff Joe exist, is no surprise. He runs his own little Abu Garib right out in the Arizona desert.
But what is really interesting is President Bush's remark that this sort of sadism is not what America is like, at its core. Americans are not like this. This is not us.
Or is it? Sheriff Joe has been elected to five four year terms in Maricopa County.
For twenty years he's been parading prisoners and everyone in Maricopa County knows what he is doing. The good people of Maricopa County cannot even claim, as the Germans claimed when the concentration camps were opened, "We were unaware of this evil."
There's a great scene in Band of Brothers (the HBO adaptation of the true story of Easy Company) where the 101st Airborne liberates a concentration camp just outside a picturesque German village and the soldiers of the 101st airborne in 1945 are sputtering with rage and they storm into the village and confront the villagers who claim they had no idea.
"No idea? That camp is less than half a mile from here: On a hot day, when the wind shifts, you had to smell it from here."
I'm not sure any of the soldiers from the 101st Airborne which liberated those camps would recognize much more than the screaming eagle patch about the current 101st Airborne.
On the other hand, there were soldiers of the 101st who refused to shoot Afghani men who were simply digging in fields, farming, when the soldiers arrived.
Ordered to shoot, the soldiers refused.
Now that was tough.
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Experts, Economists and Posers
I love experts. Don't we all? Remember in that distant dim past when your father was an expert? He had all the answers, or at least he had some answers and sometimes he was actually correct.
My own father was not an expert about a lot of things, particularly mechanical things. You could not ask him how to fix the lawnmower or the car. He'd tell you to take it to the mechanic.
The mechanic though, now there was an expert. He could get the car started, which was truly miraculous. He crawled under our car once and whacked something underneath with his hammer and the car started right up without anybody having done anything to the battery. "You have to know where to whack it," the mechanic said.
So, yes, there are some experts in the world, but mostly they are technicians, scientists or engineers. Those guys know stuff that works.
But then there are economists, especially Nobel prize winning economists.
Milton Friedman fascinated me, because for a practitioner of the dismal science, he seemed very sure of himself--none of that self doubt or obsfucation you got from Alan Greenspan. Milton Friedman knew precisely what caused the Great Depression: The government clamped down on the money supply, raised interest rates and poof, there went the economy. None of those other problems you might have heard about which contributed were important: The government had driven farmers to plant fencepost to fencepost with consequent erosion, the Dust Bowl and the Grapes of Wrath. And then there was the worldwide economic mischief emanating from the treaty of Versailles, none of that mattered. Milton Friedman could point to a single cause: regulation. The Federal Reserve should have loosened its grip on interest rates and there would have been no Depression.
I listened to him interviewed on NPR and he knew we over regulated the world. My father, who had lived through the Depression never seemed to understand what caused it, but here was Milton Friedman who was so certain. I was so impressed I mailed away for the casette tape of the interview and I listened to it over and over to be sure I was not misunderstanding what he had to say.
On the same tape, in the same interview, he left the topic of the Depression and he started talking about disbanding the Food and Drug Administration. The FDA is just another federal bureaucracy up to no good, restraining the wild horses of inventiveness in the drug industry. No need for the FDA, Nobel laureate Friedman said. Regulation is bad.
But what about all those people who would be harmed by dangerous drugs if we didn't have the FDA to interpose itself between the drug companies and the population of unknowing people out there willing to swallow whatever they find on the shelves of their pharmacy? That's what we have the courts for, replied Dr. Friedman. That's what Tort law is all about. A self correcting system. The invisible hand made visible by the jury system. If a drug company was irresponsible and made a harmful product, it would be sued into oblivion.
Dr. Friedman knew that answer. He was very sure of himself.
I thought he was kidding. But he wasn't.
I started talking to my casette player, as if he could hear me: But what about all those people who took the drugs for years before the wayward drug company got sued into oblivion? What about all those thousands of English kids born without arms or legs because their mothers took thalidamide? The FDA stood between thalidamide and American mothers, and spared us a lot of suffering, lives lived in disability.
The other problem with Professor Friedman's facile solution to preventing mischief by drug makers is our legal system is actually a pretty miserable tool for controlling mistakes rooted in technology, science and other things lay juries cannot understand.
The doctors who get hauled in front of juries tend not to be the careless, the indifferent, the "bad" doctors. They tend to be doctors who got thrown into a situation where a bad outcome was going to happen, one way or the other.
The chief of neurosurgery at Cornell New York Hospital once told me he never had any fewer than seven suits pending against him and the same was true for the head of every other head of neurosurgery around the city. "Now, we may not necessarily be the best neurosurgeons in New York City, but it's not real likely the chief of neurosurgery at each center is going to be the worst surgeon. So why do we get to spend so much time in court? Because we get the cases dropped at our feet who have been hauled around and rejected everywhere else."
What this meant to me is this Nobel prize winner did not have the faintest idea what he was talking about. When he talks about economic models, numbers, and uses lots of economic lingo, he can intimidate me into thinking he knows more than I do. But when he starts talking abut something I know about, I see the emperor with his clothes.
Which brngs to mind the whole notion of what a Nobel prize in economics means. These economists cannot do controlled, double blind prospective experiments. If they cannot do testing of their theories, what could they possibly know?
There are Nobel prizes in chemistry and in physiology and in medicine. The prize committees may not get the credit to the right people, but they generally point a spotlight on an important advance: The discovery of insulin, the identification of the HIV virus, the understanding of cholesterol metabolism.
But what does a prize in economics mean? Would a prize in astrology be any less meaningful?
Admitedly, I do not know what I am talking about here. I cannot understand the mathematical models which economists generate, display and defend. I am as uncomprehending as those juries who hear medical malpractice cases and patent cases.
But I can at least understand the verbal descriptions of the implications of the inscrutable math. One may be thoroughly intimidated by the numbers, but in the end, you get a statement in words: When Milton Friedman says all we need to prevent a Depression is the Fed loosening up the money supply by lowering interest rates and you see the Fed dropping the interest rates to zero and the econonmy continuing its plunge as if that safety net did not exist, does it not make you wonder?
When Friedman says markets stabilize because smart investors will buy when all the morons are selling, but that does not happen in 2009, does that not make one wonder?
In science, there is sometimes a tenuous consensus: We accept the propositions the heart pumps blood (except when it doesn't) and insulin lowers blood sugar, (except when it doesn't), but there is far more unsettled than settled. Physicians (we are not talking about surgeons here) are humble. They know what we know today, what we are using as current knowledge will be disproven or at least altered with time and we do what we can with the tools we have until we have something better. But we do not snigger at those with whom we disagree because we know we may be right today and wrong tomorrow.
A friend of mine, who was an analyst at the CIA on the Russian desk, told me about her boss, who placed a very tightly organized, concise and authoriative document on the President's desk which said, in essence, the Soviet Union was firmly in the grip of the Communist party and the reigning powers and would remain that way for the foreseeable future. That was 1989, a week before the Berlin wall fell. I think I recall correcty that savant was fired.
But what of Mr. Greenspan and even Mr. Bernanke?
We all want to believe there is an expert out there who actually knows. Like our fathers, when we were kids. Maybe Paul Krugman, who sounds like he knows. His stuff is there edged in print in the New York Times. It must be correct.
And he won a Nobel prize in economics. Just like Milton Friedman.
My own father was not an expert about a lot of things, particularly mechanical things. You could not ask him how to fix the lawnmower or the car. He'd tell you to take it to the mechanic.
The mechanic though, now there was an expert. He could get the car started, which was truly miraculous. He crawled under our car once and whacked something underneath with his hammer and the car started right up without anybody having done anything to the battery. "You have to know where to whack it," the mechanic said.
So, yes, there are some experts in the world, but mostly they are technicians, scientists or engineers. Those guys know stuff that works.
But then there are economists, especially Nobel prize winning economists.
Milton Friedman fascinated me, because for a practitioner of the dismal science, he seemed very sure of himself--none of that self doubt or obsfucation you got from Alan Greenspan. Milton Friedman knew precisely what caused the Great Depression: The government clamped down on the money supply, raised interest rates and poof, there went the economy. None of those other problems you might have heard about which contributed were important: The government had driven farmers to plant fencepost to fencepost with consequent erosion, the Dust Bowl and the Grapes of Wrath. And then there was the worldwide economic mischief emanating from the treaty of Versailles, none of that mattered. Milton Friedman could point to a single cause: regulation. The Federal Reserve should have loosened its grip on interest rates and there would have been no Depression.
I listened to him interviewed on NPR and he knew we over regulated the world. My father, who had lived through the Depression never seemed to understand what caused it, but here was Milton Friedman who was so certain. I was so impressed I mailed away for the casette tape of the interview and I listened to it over and over to be sure I was not misunderstanding what he had to say.
On the same tape, in the same interview, he left the topic of the Depression and he started talking about disbanding the Food and Drug Administration. The FDA is just another federal bureaucracy up to no good, restraining the wild horses of inventiveness in the drug industry. No need for the FDA, Nobel laureate Friedman said. Regulation is bad.
But what about all those people who would be harmed by dangerous drugs if we didn't have the FDA to interpose itself between the drug companies and the population of unknowing people out there willing to swallow whatever they find on the shelves of their pharmacy? That's what we have the courts for, replied Dr. Friedman. That's what Tort law is all about. A self correcting system. The invisible hand made visible by the jury system. If a drug company was irresponsible and made a harmful product, it would be sued into oblivion.
Dr. Friedman knew that answer. He was very sure of himself.
I thought he was kidding. But he wasn't.
I started talking to my casette player, as if he could hear me: But what about all those people who took the drugs for years before the wayward drug company got sued into oblivion? What about all those thousands of English kids born without arms or legs because their mothers took thalidamide? The FDA stood between thalidamide and American mothers, and spared us a lot of suffering, lives lived in disability.
The other problem with Professor Friedman's facile solution to preventing mischief by drug makers is our legal system is actually a pretty miserable tool for controlling mistakes rooted in technology, science and other things lay juries cannot understand.
The doctors who get hauled in front of juries tend not to be the careless, the indifferent, the "bad" doctors. They tend to be doctors who got thrown into a situation where a bad outcome was going to happen, one way or the other.
The chief of neurosurgery at Cornell New York Hospital once told me he never had any fewer than seven suits pending against him and the same was true for the head of every other head of neurosurgery around the city. "Now, we may not necessarily be the best neurosurgeons in New York City, but it's not real likely the chief of neurosurgery at each center is going to be the worst surgeon. So why do we get to spend so much time in court? Because we get the cases dropped at our feet who have been hauled around and rejected everywhere else."
What this meant to me is this Nobel prize winner did not have the faintest idea what he was talking about. When he talks about economic models, numbers, and uses lots of economic lingo, he can intimidate me into thinking he knows more than I do. But when he starts talking abut something I know about, I see the emperor with his clothes.
Which brngs to mind the whole notion of what a Nobel prize in economics means. These economists cannot do controlled, double blind prospective experiments. If they cannot do testing of their theories, what could they possibly know?
There are Nobel prizes in chemistry and in physiology and in medicine. The prize committees may not get the credit to the right people, but they generally point a spotlight on an important advance: The discovery of insulin, the identification of the HIV virus, the understanding of cholesterol metabolism.
But what does a prize in economics mean? Would a prize in astrology be any less meaningful?
Admitedly, I do not know what I am talking about here. I cannot understand the mathematical models which economists generate, display and defend. I am as uncomprehending as those juries who hear medical malpractice cases and patent cases.
But I can at least understand the verbal descriptions of the implications of the inscrutable math. One may be thoroughly intimidated by the numbers, but in the end, you get a statement in words: When Milton Friedman says all we need to prevent a Depression is the Fed loosening up the money supply by lowering interest rates and you see the Fed dropping the interest rates to zero and the econonmy continuing its plunge as if that safety net did not exist, does it not make you wonder?
When Friedman says markets stabilize because smart investors will buy when all the morons are selling, but that does not happen in 2009, does that not make one wonder?
In science, there is sometimes a tenuous consensus: We accept the propositions the heart pumps blood (except when it doesn't) and insulin lowers blood sugar, (except when it doesn't), but there is far more unsettled than settled. Physicians (we are not talking about surgeons here) are humble. They know what we know today, what we are using as current knowledge will be disproven or at least altered with time and we do what we can with the tools we have until we have something better. But we do not snigger at those with whom we disagree because we know we may be right today and wrong tomorrow.
A friend of mine, who was an analyst at the CIA on the Russian desk, told me about her boss, who placed a very tightly organized, concise and authoriative document on the President's desk which said, in essence, the Soviet Union was firmly in the grip of the Communist party and the reigning powers and would remain that way for the foreseeable future. That was 1989, a week before the Berlin wall fell. I think I recall correcty that savant was fired.
But what of Mr. Greenspan and even Mr. Bernanke?
We all want to believe there is an expert out there who actually knows. Like our fathers, when we were kids. Maybe Paul Krugman, who sounds like he knows. His stuff is there edged in print in the New York Times. It must be correct.
And he won a Nobel prize in economics. Just like Milton Friedman.
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
Phrases To Make You Oh So Proud
1/ Giving Back to the Community:
This is one of those lovely ditties which has been transmogrified. It started, near as I can tell, with athletes who were making a shameful amount of money for playing baseball or basketball or whatever, and they spent some money on athletic equipment for neighborhood kids or something of that ilk and they said they were, “Giving back to the community.” Which meant: “I’m so filthy rich, and feeling a little guilty about it, so I’m giving some back to the people who pay way too much to come out to see a game so I can get this outrageously inappropriate salary and live in a twenty-five room house far from the inner city where these kids and whatever parents may be available to them live and struggle to make ends meet. So I’ll spring for some balls or bats or whatever the sports companies who endorse me will sell me for cost.”
All that was bad enough, but now you’ve got all sorts of shady characters wanting to use the phrase.
I was at a meeting where some doctor was trying to persuade other doctors to take call for free for the emergency room, so his group could keep control of the hospital and ensure his own revenue stream would not be impaired. He said this would be a good opportunity for the doctors to donate their time to a worth cause, “To give back to the community.” Of course, what it really came down to, was he wanted the other doctors to give more to him, but giving back to the community sounded so much better. Then one of the other docs stood up and said, “I give back to the community every time I walk through my office door, every time I accept five dollars from Medicaide for a twenty minute office visit, every time I answer my beeper at three in the morning for some patient who just ran out of her pills and wants me to call the all night pharmacy, every time I write out my check to the bank to pay off my medical school loans. I’ve given back to the community more than I ever intended to. It’s time the community gave back a little to me.”
So GBTTC is a red flag. It usually means, you are about to be screwed again.
It’s a kissing cousin of “Volunteerism.” Ever hear some politician who voted against day care for kids of working mothers, or voted against support for food for the poor start talking about how all that should be done through the private sector, until it’s pointed out there’s plenty of stuff like that the private sector doesn’t want to touch with a twenty foot poll, so then he says, “Well, we need some good hearted volunteers to take this on?” Which means, he’s not willing to stick his neck out and pay for these necessary services, these safety nets, but maybe the churches or some local club will do it. But virtually every time you have some well meaning church member serving food to the homeless, cleaning up a park, scrubbing graffiti off a wall, that’s a job he is taking away from somebody who could be getting paid for it, making an honest dollar for work which, if it’s important enough to get done is important enough to pay for.
I see a volunteer and I see a scab, some well meaning soul who hasn’t thought about what might be going through the mind of the unemployed stiff who would love to get paid for that service of cleaning or serving or working on infrastructure that volunteer is devaluing by doing for free.
2/ Role Model
Oh, here’s a good one. Started in sports like so many other stupid clichés. Babe Ruth ought to be a role model. In America, we can’t have somebody in public life who is simply good at one thing, like hitting home runs without his being good at everything, flawless in character, loving to children and dogs, faithful to his wife, proud to fight for his country, giving back to the community, volunteering to pick up trash by the river and donating to church charities. A freaking paragon of virtue.
It’s not enough to hit home runs.
If he did it on steroids, what kind of role model can he be for kids? Well maybe kids can learn that you can be a hero at home plate but pretty flawed in a lot of other ways. Maybe that would teach kids a more complex world view than, “He hits home runs. He good man. Be like him.”
Kids, most kids, are probably smarter than that. It does a severe disservice to kids to present them with “Role models.” We deprive kids of all sorts of complexity in their thinking when we start yammering about, “Role models.”
We ought to be feeding kids a steady diet of “The Wire.” That would teach them about “Role models.”
We ought to be telling kids about guys who are nice to their dogs and wives and children but they are commandants of concentration camps and so when you look at someone who seems admirable in some ways, look again and see if you can see the blood stains on his hands.
3/ Support Our Troops
All you have to do is buy the $2 decal for your car and you are an instant patriot. That’s actually more than is usually asked of you to display and reaffirm your patriotism. Usually, the biggest patriotic duty is removing your baseball cap at the ballpark and singing the national anthem with tears running down your check and across your American flag enamel pin on your T shirt and then you can go home and cheat on your income taxes.
4/ Utilize
Why use a cheap easy to spell word like “Use,” when you can utilize a 50 cent word like “Utilize.” Hemingway tried to kill “Utilize” in the Sun Also Rises, and he did a pretty good job, but people don’t read much any more and certainly not The Sun Also Rises, so the weed grew back.
5/ Reticent
Politicians, radio personalities, virtually everyone except people who went to Catholic schools, or maybe the better public schools say someone was reticent to take action, or reticent to do this or that rather than “hesistant.” Of course, people can be reticent when they are hesitant or just too smart to speak.
This is one of those lovely ditties which has been transmogrified. It started, near as I can tell, with athletes who were making a shameful amount of money for playing baseball or basketball or whatever, and they spent some money on athletic equipment for neighborhood kids or something of that ilk and they said they were, “Giving back to the community.” Which meant: “I’m so filthy rich, and feeling a little guilty about it, so I’m giving some back to the people who pay way too much to come out to see a game so I can get this outrageously inappropriate salary and live in a twenty-five room house far from the inner city where these kids and whatever parents may be available to them live and struggle to make ends meet. So I’ll spring for some balls or bats or whatever the sports companies who endorse me will sell me for cost.”
All that was bad enough, but now you’ve got all sorts of shady characters wanting to use the phrase.
I was at a meeting where some doctor was trying to persuade other doctors to take call for free for the emergency room, so his group could keep control of the hospital and ensure his own revenue stream would not be impaired. He said this would be a good opportunity for the doctors to donate their time to a worth cause, “To give back to the community.” Of course, what it really came down to, was he wanted the other doctors to give more to him, but giving back to the community sounded so much better. Then one of the other docs stood up and said, “I give back to the community every time I walk through my office door, every time I accept five dollars from Medicaide for a twenty minute office visit, every time I answer my beeper at three in the morning for some patient who just ran out of her pills and wants me to call the all night pharmacy, every time I write out my check to the bank to pay off my medical school loans. I’ve given back to the community more than I ever intended to. It’s time the community gave back a little to me.”
So GBTTC is a red flag. It usually means, you are about to be screwed again.
It’s a kissing cousin of “Volunteerism.” Ever hear some politician who voted against day care for kids of working mothers, or voted against support for food for the poor start talking about how all that should be done through the private sector, until it’s pointed out there’s plenty of stuff like that the private sector doesn’t want to touch with a twenty foot poll, so then he says, “Well, we need some good hearted volunteers to take this on?” Which means, he’s not willing to stick his neck out and pay for these necessary services, these safety nets, but maybe the churches or some local club will do it. But virtually every time you have some well meaning church member serving food to the homeless, cleaning up a park, scrubbing graffiti off a wall, that’s a job he is taking away from somebody who could be getting paid for it, making an honest dollar for work which, if it’s important enough to get done is important enough to pay for.
I see a volunteer and I see a scab, some well meaning soul who hasn’t thought about what might be going through the mind of the unemployed stiff who would love to get paid for that service of cleaning or serving or working on infrastructure that volunteer is devaluing by doing for free.
2/ Role Model
Oh, here’s a good one. Started in sports like so many other stupid clichés. Babe Ruth ought to be a role model. In America, we can’t have somebody in public life who is simply good at one thing, like hitting home runs without his being good at everything, flawless in character, loving to children and dogs, faithful to his wife, proud to fight for his country, giving back to the community, volunteering to pick up trash by the river and donating to church charities. A freaking paragon of virtue.
It’s not enough to hit home runs.
If he did it on steroids, what kind of role model can he be for kids? Well maybe kids can learn that you can be a hero at home plate but pretty flawed in a lot of other ways. Maybe that would teach kids a more complex world view than, “He hits home runs. He good man. Be like him.”
Kids, most kids, are probably smarter than that. It does a severe disservice to kids to present them with “Role models.” We deprive kids of all sorts of complexity in their thinking when we start yammering about, “Role models.”
We ought to be feeding kids a steady diet of “The Wire.” That would teach them about “Role models.”
We ought to be telling kids about guys who are nice to their dogs and wives and children but they are commandants of concentration camps and so when you look at someone who seems admirable in some ways, look again and see if you can see the blood stains on his hands.
3/ Support Our Troops
All you have to do is buy the $2 decal for your car and you are an instant patriot. That’s actually more than is usually asked of you to display and reaffirm your patriotism. Usually, the biggest patriotic duty is removing your baseball cap at the ballpark and singing the national anthem with tears running down your check and across your American flag enamel pin on your T shirt and then you can go home and cheat on your income taxes.
4/ Utilize
Why use a cheap easy to spell word like “Use,” when you can utilize a 50 cent word like “Utilize.” Hemingway tried to kill “Utilize” in the Sun Also Rises, and he did a pretty good job, but people don’t read much any more and certainly not The Sun Also Rises, so the weed grew back.
5/ Reticent
Politicians, radio personalities, virtually everyone except people who went to Catholic schools, or maybe the better public schools say someone was reticent to take action, or reticent to do this or that rather than “hesistant.” Of course, people can be reticent when they are hesitant or just too smart to speak.
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