Thought for Good Friday

When hope dies ... then what?

Florida gun permissiveness strikes again

It's not just that George Zimmerman could (apparently) legally shoot Trayvon Martin that raises incredulous eyebrows. Security arrangements for this summer's GOP shindig have run into a snag.

TAMPA -- Hoping to head off violent protesters during the Republican National Convention, Mayor Bob Buckhorn has proposed a litany of items that will be considered security threats during the week-long event.

The list runs from air pistols to water pistols and also includes items such as masks, plastic or metal pipe and string more than six inches long.

Conspicuously absent from the list of potential weapons: Firearms.

That's because state law bans local governments from placing any restrictions on the carrying of guns in public spaces.

Oops. Mustn't risk the wrath of the National Rifle Association. Be sure to pack heat.

Nicholas Beaudrot has a suggestion for those of us who think perhaps there should be limits on guns.

… the quickest way to enact restrictions on walking around while carrying a gun is probably for the "wrong" kinds of people to start carrying firearms, causing a freakout among the people who wrote the laws in the first place.

Oh, you mean to re-enact scenes like this ...

That 1967 episode may have something to do with the fact that California still has some of the most stringent gun regulation in the country. Law enforcement solved the problem in its own way: infiltrate, imprison and sometimes just execute the Black Panthers.

Meanwhile, in Oakland, the nursing school shooter who murdered six people the other day had "a string of debts but no criminal record that would keep him from buying a gun." From a memorial service for the victims:

One of the speakers, Mayor Jean Quan, said the gun violence that shook Oakland this week could occur anywhere in America.

"This is America, where you can find a gun easier than mental health services," she said.

Meanwhile the NRA is working to undermine what gun laws we still have. forcing all states to allow concealed weapons permits issued anywhere.

… despite the concerns of the mayors, law enforcement and constituents, the gun lobby and their allies have already jammed this dangerous legislation through the House. And now they’re trying to push it through the Senate. If this measure becomes law, dangerous people, including sex offenders and domestic abusers, could get a permit in a state with lax standards and your state would have to accept it no matter what.

Protest here.

Pizza envy

24th Street; pretty good pizza too.

I usually cheer about living in San Francisco, but this story inspires Manhattan envy:

It’s best to start at $1.50 a slice.

That is what pizza was selling for about a year ago at a family business that is a combination vegetarian Indian restaurant, candy store and pizza parlor on Avenue of the Americas (also known as Sixth Avenue), between 37th and 38th Streets. It is called Bombay Fast Food/6 Ave. Pizza.

Then a Joey Pepperoni’s Pizza opened near the corner of 39th and Avenue of the Americas, offering pizza for $1, a price that has in recent years been favored by a number of New York pizza establishments.

So Bombay/6 Ave. Pizza shrank its price to $1 too.

All was good until last October, when a third player entered the drama.

A 2 Bros. Pizza, part of an enlarging New York chain of 11 shops that sell slices for a dollar, opened virtually next door to Bombay/6 Ave. Pizza. The only separation is a stairwell that leads up to a barbershop and hair salon.

Price stability at a buck all around persisted until eight days ago, when both 2 Bros. and Bombay/6 Ave. Pizza began selling pizza for the eye-catching price of 75 cents a slice, tax included — three slender quarters.

Hey, I thought New York was the most expensive place to live in the country ...

Wage theft in the 'hood

Young Workers United turned out on 22nd Street on Tuesday to let neighbors know that Panchita's #3 restaurant is a lousy place to work. (Yes, there are other Panchita's ... this is the one with pretensions to high class dining. I don't know anything about the labor practices of the excellent cheap Salvadoran pupusa place on 16th Street.)

Latina former employees explained they were paid only $200 a week and abused on the job. Young Workers United says this kind of "wage theft" is common in the Mission and I find that easy to believe. There are lots of folks desperate for any job.

Warming Wednesdays: Baseball opening day edition

H/t to A Change in the Wind.

Despite every other legitimate concern, we cannot ignore that our economic and social system is rapidly making the planet less habitable. So I will be posting "Warming Wednesdays" -- unpleasant reminders of an inconvenient truth.

An ethical about-face

A couple of months ago I wrote about the bravery of El Dorado County Supervisor Ron Briggs who has turned against the California death penalty law he worked so hard to pass in 1978. Now the author of that law, Donald H. Heller, has explained his own change of mind in Sh'ma: a journal of Jewish Ideas.

A considered, evidence-based analysis has led me to conclude that capital punishment should be abolished. But that has not always been how I felt.

In the fall of 1977, I wrote the death penalty initiative (the Briggs Initiative) that became the law of the State of California after voter approval (82 percent in favor) a year later. The initiative dramatically increased the number of defendants eligible for the punishment of death. I wrote the initiative after spending almost 8½ years as a prosecutor, first in the Manhattan District Attorney’s office and then in the United States Attorney’s office for the Eastern District of California in Sacramento. By the time I left the United States Attorney’s office, I was a skilled and experienced legal writer and I was certain when I wrote the initiative that capital punishment was the appropriate punishment for willful and intentional murders and for murders committed in the course and furtherance of other serious felonies.

Within four years of the initiative’s enactment in 1978, California’s death row began to fill with inmates; today, the population is approximately 750. The zeal of prosecutors in populating death row was exceeded only by the lack of skill of defense counsel as reflected in the disproportionate number of death row cases that were reversed for ineffective assistance of counsel. For those of us who participate in a criminal justice system predicated on the right of defendants to have the effective assistance of counsel, especially when they face death as punishment, this was a grave problem.

I became concerned when legitimate questions of disparate treatment of defendants of color and defendants who were indigent were raised. At the time I wrote the initiative, I believed in the idea of “an eye for an eye,” and I never considered unacceptable the issue of communally sanctioned executions.

At the time I wrote the initiative, the cost of financing capital punishment was never considered. Now, it has become clear that death penalty cases are generating huge capital expenditures for California. The government must pay for both the defense and prosecution, since the vast majority of homicide cases involve indigent defendants. The government never disclosed the real cost in dollars, but a recent study under the direction of Judge Arthur L. Alarcon, senior circuit judge for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, shows that more than $4 billion has been spent on the mechanism of death, and that taxpayers will continue to pay upward of $180 million per year for the prosecution and countless appeals of capital cases. …

There's much more. Heller now fears that the system he created may still condemn an innocent person, despite all the expensive safeguards. He speaks out for the SAFE California initiative to replace the death penalty with life without the possibility of parole. You can read the rest at the link.***Heller's willingness to admit a mistake and work to rectify it is morally admirable. In a political environment full of Etch-a-Sketch candidates and poll-tested posturing, ethical seriousness about the consequences of our policy choices seems almost naive. It shouldn't.

The war that goes on ... and on ... and on ...

U.S. Army 1st Lt. Spencer Tadken (right) reviews aiming techniques with an Afghan soldier during training at Forward Operating Base Shank, in Logar province, Afghanistan, on March 13, 2012. Tadken is with the 1st Armored Division's 3rd Infantry Brigade Combat Team. DoD photo by Spc. Tia Sokimson, U.S. Army.

On his return from earning five combat medals for his fighting service in Vietnam, Senator John Kerry famously asked

"How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?

U.S. troops currently in Afghanistan would be beyond human if they are not wondering the same thing. According to CNN writing last week:

One third of all American troop deaths in Afghanistan this year has been at the hands of Afghan security forces. The latest occurred Monday when a man alleged to be a local Afghan policeman killed an American service member in eastern Afghanistan.

So far this year, 16 of the 46 American service members killed in Afghanistan have died in what are euphemistically called "green on blue" attacks: Afghan troops who have turned their weapons on allied forces.

Meanwhile, someone (the U.S. Army insists it was ONLY one) from among those troops massacred 16 (or 17) Afghan non-combatant women and children in a remote village in the rebellious Pashtun southeast of the country.

The always thorough Marcy Wheeler aka emptywheel has brought together what U.S. and Afghan sources have revealed about this atrocity and doubts that it adds up. We'll see.

A National Catholic Reporter editorial asks what gets lost when something like the massacre momentarily draws our attention to the empire's wars.

.. the inescapable question that immediately surfaces, if contemporary war is viewed to any degree objectively, is: What makes such an incident a crime? What makes it different from large-scale civilian killings that are part of more massive, ordered military action?

What makes My Lai different from aerial napalming of entire villages? What makes Haditha different from the untold thousands of Iraqi civilians, including children, who died as “collateral damage” from bombings? Or for that matter from the half-million children under the age of 5 who died as a direct result of American-inspired U.N. sanctions during the 10 years before the last phase of the war?

Why do we find the killing of civilians by a single soldier in Kandahar province different from the scores upon scores of civilians killed in drone attacks?

The newspaper offers a damning answer to its own question:

…We want to know what went wrong; we want to find the previously hidden trigger that can explain the behavior.

Finding that will make it [Sergeant Robert] Bales’ problem, not ours. We won’t need to face the questions, then, about all the other deaths that occurred within acceptable military boundaries.

It's time to get out of there.

Inquisitions Ancient and Modern

Cullen Murphy has written a very odd book. Not a bad one, just an odd one. God's Jury: The Inquisition and the Modern World is a meditation on the institutions of torture and oppression made possible by increasingly complex technological capacities in Western societies, loosely rooted in the history of the Roman Catholic Inquisition with side glances at other historic repressive apparatuses. If you don't already have a grounding in Europe-centered Christian history, this book won't give it to you; to get one, you probably should look elsewhere. But if you care about the past and future of authoritarian encroachments on individual conscience and social freedom, you might give this a look.

It's not hard to recoil from the regime of horror that was the heresy-seeking Inquisition. Late Medieval and early modern inquisitors had the full organized power of church and state behind them, interrogating, torturing, and sending to be burned presumptive apostates and Jews. They frightened whole populations into numb submission, as in the south of France. Murphy insists we recognize the close kinship between that terror regime and the activities of the U.S. empire in the first decade of this century.

Torture was an integral part of the inquisitorial process, though it was reserved for difficult cases and was technically subject to certain restrictions. [Nicholas] Eymerich [a Dominican theologian and author of a renowned torture manual, d. 1399] and others granted wide latitude to inquisitors, For instance, although the accused was supposed to be subjected to a single "cycle" of torture, if he failed to confess or retracted a confession the inquisitors could decide that the cycle had not proceeded sufficiently: the accused, to use the term of art, had not yet been "decently" tortured. The cycle could therefore resume. Half a millennium later, the interrogators of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11, employed similar reasoning to expand their options. …

The inquisitors became astute psychologists. … Eymerich was well aware that those being interrogated would employ a range of stratagems to deflect questions and disarm the interrogator. In his manual, he lays out ten ways in which heretics seek to "hide their errors." They include "equivocation;" "redirecting the question;" "feigned astonishment;" "twisting the meaning of words;" "changing the subject;" "feigning illness;" and "feigning stupidity." For its part, the [U.S.] army interrogation manual provides a "Source and Information Reliability Matrix" to assess the same kinds of behavior. It warns interrogators to be wary of subjects who show signs of "reporting information that is self-serving;" who give "repeated answers with exact wording and details;" and who demonstrate a "failure to answer the question asked."

No reader is allowed to miss that Mullen is lumping Dick Cheney, David Addington and Donald Rumsfeld in with Tomas de Torquemada.

The unhappy similarity Mullen points out is not primarily between bad people in power, but founded in structures that states build to enforce conformity.

"Systems find ways of protecting themselves," [Irish professor of the history of Christianity at Cambridge] Eamon Duffy had said, "and ways to justify those measures to themselves." The measures, though sometimes rolled back, seem mainly to accrue. In [Reformation] England, the efforts of [Catholic Queen] Mary built on actions by previous monarchs, just as the efforts of [Protestant Queen] Elizabeth built on the actions of Mary. Motivations may change, targets may shift, but the infrastructure builds by increments. Proof of identity, record-keeping, informers, surveillance, denunciation, interrogation: these are the basic instruments. And as medieval kingdoms remade themselves into modern states, the instruments became better and were applied in a more systematic way.

Along the same lines, the Bush administration invented its torture regime on the fly when given an opening by the 9/11 attacks, offering up renditions, Guantanamo, enemy combatants, military commissions, etc. When elements of society committed to previous legal limitations on state power pushed back, under both Bush and Obama administrations the Congress and courts have codified and approved the innovations, while the executive has further articulated and streamlined systems of unchecked repression. The extraordinary has been regularized. And therein comes the horror of what the early 21st century United States is offering the world:

What separates an inquisition from other forms of intolerance is its staying power. It receives institutional support -- creating its own or relying on what exists. It goes on and on. Today, the basic elements that can sustain an inquisition -- bureaucracy, communications, the tools of surveillance and censorship -- are more prevalent and entrenched, by many orders of magnitude, than they were in the days of Gregory IX or Tomas de Torquemada. None of them will be reduced in significance in the years ahead. They will only become more powerful.

So should we all just go bury our heads and hope the new Inquisition keeps its focus on somebody else -- Muslims, immigrants, the poor …? Mullen's prescription for a turnaround is essentially ethical; we need to recall a virtue not much prized these days (or by any empire):

Humility is the Counter-Inquisition's most effective ally. It can't be legislated, but it can come to be embraced.

Well yes, but it's hard to imagine this country embracing humility unless we (including our elites) are taken down a peg or two. Losing remote mercenary wars in Iraq and Afghanistan doesn't phase us. Climate change havoc might get our attention -- though the purveyors of fossil fuels continue to do their best to keep us focused on illusory bogeys and circuses.

Yet Mullen chronicles in his glancing way one era that did end an Inquisition; maybe we do well to look at how European societies and the cultures that grew out of them cast off the Roman Catholic Inquisition beginning in the 1600s. Maybe there are some lessons there. He quotes an historian of the early modern period whose assessment seems pertinent.

"The Inquisition was extinguished." [Historian Francisco] Bethencourt said, "because it couldn't cope with the profound change of values in Europe throughout the eighteenth century. It started in Protestant countries, mainly in the Netherlands, then in England. It was in these two countries that the issue of tolerance was raised -- not for the first time, but as a new value, a new positive value. … This idea spread. And the Inquisition collapsed." It was a development for which there was no cure -- the intellectual equivalent of habitat destruction. …

For the old Inquisition, "tolerance" was "the intellectual equivalent of habitat destruction." Certainty of moral virtue that allowed, even required, institutional torture and intellectual repression to enforce conformity no longer could command space in which to flourish.

What would it take to deprive the New American Inquisition of the moral certainty that undergirds its bureaucratic operation? One answer is obvious: on-going globalization continually scrambles both cultural differences and cultural commonalities, making the assertion of any One Way more laughable than convincing. The closest thing the globalized world has to a universal God these days is unfettered market capitalism -- the Good Greed -- but the natural world and human resistance contest that orthodoxy everywhere. The habitat that supports the New American Inquisition may prove to be quite short-lived.

Saturday scenes and scenery: Prerequisites for co-existence

The newts and frogs wander the roads near Rodeo Beach. The ducks walk around Stowe Lake in Golden Gate Park, even more slowly than the people.

A grim reminder

For a lot of people, it is not at all clear we've hit bottom. There's still a limping economy out there -- even if you live in relatively prosperous northern California where there are intimations of another tech boom.

Yesterday a friend reported that her construction worker husband is once again out of work. Jobs have been hit and miss for awhile. What's this mean?

"Well, he rebuilt the engine on his car …

"And in a couple of months we'll have to choose -- will we make the house payment? or pay our local taxes -- they call them "fees"? or will we buy health insurance?" We'll only be able to do one of these ...

This was a solidly middle class family until Wall Street's speculative "bets" crashed their livelihood.

Even if her husband gets a job next week and they escape their immediate crisis, these are not young people. They have few resources for retirement and no time to rebuild.

The one percent trashed their dreams and walked away with their bonuses and our political system seems unable to help them -- or any of us.

Yeah, I'm angry. And I intend to remain active. Nothing else to do ...

Munching on those tablets from Mt. Sinai

David Hazony's The Ten Commandments: How Our Most Ancient Moral Text Can Renew Modern Life struck me as a mirror image approach to Biblical texts to Bart Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus. Ehrman is all minute explication of the written word; Hazony is about spinning dense meanings out of spare exposition of old rules enunciated in almost unimaginably foreign societies.

I greatly enjoyed this book. I guess I like my apprehension of "the rules" to derive from cheerfully creative moral imagination more than from reverent search for The Answer. Not that I loved or agreed with all or even most of Hazony's conclusions, but I loved his method, his freedom, his wit, and hence was willing to interact with his wisdom.

This is an extremely dense book, a series of arguments, not something that is easily excerpted. To give just a bit of the flavor, he's talking here about ancient Israelite response to their demanding, exclusive, and novel God.

In most of the ancient world, the prevailing belief was that neither gods nor men could change the basic functioning of the universe, that there was a certain primordial reality that everyone needed to adapt himself to. In the Bible we have the opposite. God creates the universe, and he does not stop there. His continued interventions include also catastrophic acts of destruction -- the tower of Babel, Sodom and Gomorrah, Egypt under Pharaoh. God continues to impose his will, and indeed much of the biblical narrative is dedicated to his interventions. Every word he utters, every punishment he metes out, every act of redemption is another act of creation, for he is acting in freedom, imposing his will, changing things. One need think only of the flood, when God, having seen the depth of human corruption, “repented” at having created the world and sought to begin again. He is an inventor, forever tinkering with his imperfect work. God “re-creates the universe each and every day,” says the Talmud.

When we change things, we re-create the universe just as God does. A changed world is a new one, even when the change is small. One of our most important discoveries in early childhood is that the world is not a given, but that we can affect it: A baby pushes buttons on a toy, causing a light to flash and music to play; a toddler builds a tower of blocks; an older child invites her friends over and avoids an afternoon alone; a teenager changes his attitude toward schoolwork and begins getting better grades. All these minor successes give us a rush of the effectiveness of our will -- something especially cherished by children who are so used to having the world and its rules presented to them as unchangeable.

We often forget how easily we may be agents of change. We no longer live in a world where the crucial choices of spouses, careers, and religious commitments are dictated by our parents and communities. Our lives are our own to a degree unimaginable just a few centuries ago, and even as we grow older, we are free to make both major and minor changes in the contours of our lives. Some of these, such as embarking on a new career, marriage and divorce, or religious conversion, entail not only promise but also enormous risk and pain. But as major acts of change, they reaffirm the infinite possibilities of which every one of us is capable. In a sense, every time we exercise our will in recrafting our lives, we imitate God in re-creating the universe.

Our modern, democratic world could never have sprung from a civilization that did not believe in change the way the Bible, and pretty much no one else in the ancient world, did. Modernity, if nothing else, is the unleashing of the individual’s creative will, through political institutions that protect our right to make choices, and through the cultural reverence for the individual as a source of change. …

I don't pretend to know whether what I've just quoted is defensible as history. It might be; it might not. But I do know I am offered something worth chewing on.

Anyone up for a good chew on the Ten Commandments would do well to try this book.

While the Supremes ponder whether we can have health care ...

... maybe they should watch this.

Not slick, but true.

Thanks again to The Blog's Best Friend.

Adrienne Rich, 1929-2012

She was probably the most honest person I ever enjoyed some tiny acquaintance with. That's the same as saying that for me she embodied courage.

The New York Times obituary by Margalit Fox does some justice to a woman both poet and prophet.

Art, Ms. Rich added, “means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage.”

Of Rich's poems, I always come back to this:

I

When my dreams showed signs
of becoming
politically correct
no unruly images
escaping beyond border
when walking in the street I found my
themes cut out for me
knew what I would not report
for fear of enemies' usage
then I began to wonder

II
Everything we write
will be used against us
or against those we love.
These are the terms,
take them or leave them.
Poetry never stood a chance
of standing outside history.
One line typed twenty years ago
can be blazed on a wall in spraypaint
glorify art as detachment
or torture of those we
did not love but also
did not want to kill

We move but our words stand
become responsible
and this is verbal privilege

Your Native Land, Your Life.

Again from Margalit Fox:

What she and her sisters-in-arms were fighting to achieve, she said, was simply this: “the creation of a society without domination.”

Warming Wednesdays: Allergy season came early

Every morning my partner gets up and complains: "Every tree in the city is trying to have sex in my nasal passages." Not fun, all this seasonal exuberance among the plants.

Apparently for those of us who respond unhappily to spring pollens, climate change is going to make the season more uncomfortable.

It's pretty well-documented that climate changes are affecting pollen production, pollen exposure, and allergies.

USDA scientist Lewis Ziska, among other researchers, has found that ragweed is one of the plants whose growth is most enhanced by exposure to higher concentrations of carbon dioxide. Not only does the ragweed grow faster when exposed to more CO2, it also produces more pollen. This is especially an issue in cities, which have higher concentrations of CO2 than rural areas, thanks to having a higher concentration of cars and other CO2 emitting sources. Extra bonus: There's also some evidence that allergy seasons are getting longer, as Spring starts earlier and Winter takes longer to truly set in.

Boing-Boing, March 21 2012

Climate Central discusses the earlier arrival of spring, regional differences, and how warming trends might project into the future.

Despite every other legitimate concern, we cannot ignore that our economic and social system is rapidly making the planet less habitable. So I will be posting "Warming Wednesdays" -- unpleasant reminders of an inconvenient truth.

Health insurance reform is before the Supreme Court …

and most of us still barely know what Obamacare does. In the interests of clarifying some of the fog of partisan war, here's a part of one the government briefs (via Balloon Juice.) This description is really quite readable, despite having been written by lawyers.

First, Congress made health insurance available to millions more low-income individuals by expanding eligibility for Medicaid. Beginning in 2014, Medicaid eligibility will extend to anyone under age 65 with income up to 133% of the federal poverty level. Currently, Medicaid beneficiaries are primarily children in low-income families, their parents, low-income pregnant women, and low-income elderly or disabled individuals. The newly eligible persons will consist primarily of low-income non-elderly adults without dependent children.

Second, Congress enacted taxing measures that encourage expansion of employer-sponsored insurance. The Act establishes new tax incentives for eligible small businesses to purchase health insurance for their employees. In addition, the Act’s employer responsibility provision imposes a tax liability under specified circumstances on large employers that do not offer adequate coverage to full-time employees.

Third, Congress provided for creation of health insurance exchanges to enable individuals and small businesses to leverage their collective buying power and maintain health insurance at rates competitive with those charged for typical large employer plans.

Fourth, Congress enacted market reforms that will make affordable insurance available to millions who cannot now obtain it. Certain reforms have already taken effect, including provisions that bar insurers from canceling insurance absent fraud or intentional misrepresentation and from placing lifetime caps on benefits, 42 In addition, the Act establishes medical loss ratios for insurers, i.e., minimum percentages of premium revenues that insurers must spend on clinical services and activities that improve health care quality, as opposed to administrative costs or profits. The Act also requires insurers providing family coverage to continue covering adult children until age 26, which has led to an additional 2.5 million young adults gaining coverage. Beginning in 2014, the Act will bar insurers from denying coverage to any person because of medical condition or history, (guaranteed-issue provision), and from charging higher premiums because of a person’s medical condition or history, (community-rating provision).

Fifth, Congress enacted new tax credits, cost-sharing reduction payments, and tax penalties as incentives for individuals to maintain a minimum level of health insurance. The Act establishes federal premium tax credits to assist eligible individuals with household income up to 400% of the federal poverty level purchase insurance through the new exchanges. These premium tax credits, which are advanceable and fully refundable such that individuals with little or no income tax liability can still benefit, are designed to make health insurance affordable by reducing a taxpayer’s net cost of insurance. The credits will be available even to families with incomes at (and above) the median level, which, in 2010, was $75,148 for a family of four and $42,863 for an individual. For eligible individuals with income up to 250% of the federal poverty level, the Act also authorizes federal payments to insurers to help cover those individuals’ cost-sharing expenses (such as co-payments or deductibles) for insurance obtained through an exchange. CBO projected that 83% of people who buy non-group insurance policies through exchanges will receive premium tax credits, (20 million of 24 million), and that those credits, on average, will cover nearly two-thirds of the premium,

In addition to those incentives through tax and other subsidies to purchase health insurance, Congress assigned adverse tax consequences to the alternative of attempted self-insuring. Congress provided that, beginning in 2014, non-exempted federal income taxpayers who fail to maintain a minimum level of health insurance coverage for themselves or their dependents will owe a tax penalty for each month in the tax year during which minimum coverage is not maintained.

Emphasis added for readability. There, that wasn't so bad, was it?***Whenever I think about Obamacare, I find myself wondering what inspires such violent resistance to what seems a simple moral imperative. I understand objecting that we've been gifted with a poorly designed Rube-Goldberg apparatus that still serves the interests of insurance companies as much as of patients. I don't understand the willingness to just let people die if they haven't found a way to get insurance from a profiteering system. We have at least 49 million people with no health insurance either because they lack the cash to pay for it or insurers refuse to cover them because they've been sick. But some Tea Party people cheer at the thought of person who makes the mistake of not having insurance being left to die. Somehow those who suffer don't qualify as real people, real neighbors, to those who cheer. I don't get it. Mere prudence -- self interest -- would seem to argue for wanting to find a way to extend care to everyone.

Once we finally win some kind of medical care for all, I doubt very much that there will be hardly any who don't avail themselves of it. Most of us know a good thing when we enocounter it.

Nothing to be happy about in this

The case of Rutgers College freshman Dharun Ravi, convicted last week of invasion of privacy and "bias intimidation" (a "hate crime") for spying on his gay roommate, has haunted me. If the roommate, Tyler Clementi hadn't jumped to his death off the George Washington Bridge, we'd never have heard of any of this. But he did. Ravi wasn't charged with causing the suicide, but obviously that tragedy hung over the case.

What follows are some observations, but few conclusions. It's hard to see how any good comes of this.

• I'm instinctively respectful of the findings of juries. They heard it all; the rest of us just caught tidbits through the media. The jurors in this case shared their reasoning and should be listened to.

  The bias intimidation charges were the most difficult to agree upon, jurors said. And what tipped the scales there, they said, was that Mr. Ravi had discussed spying on Mr. Clementi not just once, but repeatedly, even inviting his online friends to watch Mr. Clementi and the other man in a second encounter.
  
  That, said Ms. Audet, is what elevated the case from one of teenagers behaving cruelly and insensitively to a crime.
  
  “To attempt a second time, is what changed my mind,” she said. “A reasonable person would have closed it and ended it there, not tweeted about it.”
  
  The webcam did not work for the second encounter; Mr. Ravi, 20, claimed that he had turned it off. But Ms. Audet said evidence suggested that he was lying. “He was at ultimate Frisbee practice,” she said, and evidence showed he then went to a dining hall. “We came to the conclusion that it was Tyler who turned off the computer to make sure he wasn’t filmed a second time.”
  
  She added, “That hit home big.”
  
  … Mr. Ravi’s lawyer pointed to apologetic texts that Mr. Ravi sent Mr. Clementi, in which he said he had no problem with homosexuality and even had a close friend who was gay. (At almost the exact moment he sent the apology, Mr. Clementi, 18, committed suicide after posting on Facebook, “jumping off the gw bridge sorry”).
  
  Mr. Leverett, a student and Twitter user himself, was unmoved. “I can’t speak for everyone on the jury, but me, personally, I believe it was something where he realized what he did was wrong, and it was just too late to amend for what he did.”
  
  Of the apology, Ms. Audet said: “My first impression was to believe what he said. Then, as we started reading stuff, we found things in there that I interpreted more as covering.
  
  “The friend he claimed was a good friend in high school, that person was never presented as a defense witness. If that person had come forward and said, ‘Hey, we’ve been good friends, and he knows I’m gay and he doesn’t have a problem with it,’ that might have swayed me in the other direction.”

  New York Times, March 17, 2012

  Whatever we may think of the verdict, we can't say the jurors didn't work at constructing a thoughtful understanding of the events.

• In general, I'm a supporter of hate crimes laws. I'm always aware that their application requires an underlying crime, something that would be illegal even if the target of the crime were not in need of protection from a history of bigotry. But it does seem that the way the New Jersey hate crimes enhancement worked in this case was based on asking the jurors to intuit how Clementi felt about Ravi spying on him. The verdicts do seem properly described by this summary from attorney Elie Mystal:

  ... the jury believed that Ravi did not invade Clementi’s privacy for the purpose of intimidating Clementi over his sexual orientation. But they thought that Ravi should have known that Clementi would feel intimidated, and that Clementi believed he was intimidated, and so Ravi is guilty and going to jail.

  That is, the jurors were required by the way the case was framed to try to read the mind of someone who is dead. Now their conclusions may have been obvious -- and may have been correct -- but that seems a lot to ask and not, perhaps, a basis on which to deprive someone of freedom.
  
  A local New Jersey newspaper sought the opinion of a "prominent defense lawyer."

  Lawrence Lustberg said that subsection bases guilt "on the state of mind of the victim as opposed to the state of mind of the defendant."
  
  In most criminal statutes, the intent of the perpetrator is a key element in there being a crime. Predicting a hard-fought appeal, Lustberg said the argument would be that "it is unprecedented for a conviction to be based on the state of mind of the victim."
  
  "It is very worrisome to me that a defendant could be subjected to these very severe penalties based upon the state of mind of someone other than himself," Lustberg said before the verdict.

  I have to say I agree with that. The jurors concluded that Clementi was intimidated and/or humiliated because he was gay and therefore the invasion of privacy deserved the hate crime enhancement, even though what the evidence seems to show (via media accounts) is simply that Ravi was a garden variety jerk, not a dangerous intentional homophobe.

• Unhappily, the style in which Ravi was a jerk seems quintessentially heterosexual suburban American -- but the conviction makes it very likely this young twit will be deported because he is in the U.S. on a student visa. Deportation is the law if his felony conviction holds up. In a complex and sensitive article about the case in Colorlines, Rinku Sen reports the opinions of South Asian community activists who take a wide view of human rights.

  Deepa Iyer, the director of South Asian Americans Leading Together, supported federal hate crimes legislation as well as related state and local laws, but says the consequences have to be proportionate to the act. Iyer notes that the automatic deportation of people with convictions amounts to double punishment.
  
  “When these incidents occur, it’s not just the individual that’s being assaulted, bullied or murdered, it’s the entire community that’s being victimized,” said Iyer. “At the same time, when it comes around to the court system, especially around sentencing, these cases and alleged perpetrators need to be assessed for whether the punishment fits the crime.” Deportation after a jail sentence -- essentially exile for someone like Ravi, who was born in India but raised in the U.S. -- constitutes double punishment in Iyer’s mind.

  That seems right to me.

Meanwhile Tyler Clementi is still dead and coming out is still fraught with anxiety and sometimes rejection for young people. Nothing to cheer about here.

Photo by way of John Munson/The Star-Ledger.

To understand the past ...

This blog often includes items discussing books of history. For example, last year I focused heavily on accounts of aspects of World War I. I hold decided opinions about what is good historical writing and what is not.

In this context I was fascinated by discussions about the profession of history between the late Tony Judt and Timothy Snyder in Thinking the Twentieth Century. I consider Judt one of the few historians I've ever read whose work significantly re-ordered my thinking. (My discussion of his monumental Postwar is here.)

Judt is dismissive of most members of his own scholarly discipline. I imagine his colleagues found him a difficult guy to appreciate, but for this reader, it not hard to sympathize with his strictures.

If you asked my colleagues: what is the purpose of history, or what is the nature of history, or what is history about, you would get a pretty blank stare. The difference between good historians and bad historians is that the good ones can manage without an answer to such questions, and the bad ones cannot. But even if they had answers, they'd still be bad historians -- they would simply have a framework within which they could operate. Instead of which they have little templates -- race, class, ethnicity, gender and so on -- or else a residually neo-Marxist account of exploitation. But I see no common methodological framework for the profession.

That is, he thinks most of his colleagues are in thrall to various identity concerns or to an intellectual framework that has outlived whatever usefulness it once had. And so their efforts neglect what he considers the fundamental object of history: "to understand the past."

Furthermore, though students may be exposed to "history" in high schools and colleges, what they are too often getting fails to meet their need to integrate an orderly sense of where we come from with their perceptions of where we are. Contemporary history teachers have too often prioritized equipping students to look for what historical accounts neglect or how they implicitly argue with each other rather than getting down to the prosaic but necessary business of passing on largely agreed accounts of what happened. This has been profoundly destructive of the capacity of young people so educated to engage with the questions that rend their current societies.

…Before anyone -- whether child or graduate student -- can engage the past, they have to know what happened, in what order and with what outcome. Instead, we have raised two generations of citizens completely bereft of common references. As a result, they can contribute little to the governance of their society. The task of the historian, if you wish to think of it this way, is to supply the dimension of knowledge and narrative without which we cannot be a civic whole. If we have a civic responsibility as historians, this is it.

Snyder, also a distinguished historian, amplifies Judt's critique. If history is as malleable a commodity as much current teaching asserts, students become unable to judge what is is real and what matters.

I think that a lot of apparently critical history is actually authoritarian. That is, if you're going to master a population, you have to master its past. But if the population has already been educated -- or induced -- to believe that the past is nothing but a political plaything, then the question of whether the play-master is their professor or their president becomes secondary. If everyone's a critic, everyone seems free; but in fact everyone is in thrall to whoever best manipulates, with no possibility of resort to fact or truth as self-defense. If everyone's a critic, everyone's a slave.

History's fundamental ethical responsibility is reminding people that things actually happened, deeds and suffering were real, people lived thusly and their lives ended in such and not other ways. And whether those people were in Alabama in the 1950s or Poland in the 1940s, the underlying moral reality of those experiences is of the same quality as our experiences, or is at least intelligible to us, and therefore real in some irreducible way.

Both Judt and Snyder adhere to a standard for judging whether something is "good history" that must be infuriating to their detractors; as Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart memorably declared about pornography, they claim to "know it when [they] see it." Says Judt:

… there has to be a plausibility in your story. A history book -- assuming its facts are correct -- stands or falls by the conviction with which it tells its story. If it rings true, to an intelligent, informed reader, then it is a good history book. If it rings false, then it's not good history, even if it's well written by a great historian on the basis of sound scholarship. … My younger colleagues find this a completely mystifying proposition: for them, it's good history if they agree with it.

I loved this stout declaration; it is exactly how I judge the many works I read, though I certainly can't claim these two gentlemen's erudition. I have some academic historical training and am widely read, but ultimately, I judge written history in this partially subjective manner. Simply put, I judge most of the books I read and write about within three categories:

• Niche amplifications of the past: these explore small areas of past experience that need to be noted if our picture of the past is to be rounded. They create the raw materials of historical synthesis. History would be limited indeed without them, but they are not necessarily deep, or well written, or even much integrated with contemporary history. Lots of dissertations fall in this category. This book about free African communities in Canada before the U.S. Civil War is good example of this sort of history. I'd be poorer for not having read it, but it is not good history

• Tendentious histories: These are written, ultimately, to use aspects of the past to make commentary on the present. An example of one whose author might endorse that description is this story of Social Security. Some are very good history, despite (or perhaps because) of their usefulness. I'd put The Fiery Trial in that category.

• Good, even great, histories: These ambitious books make the world a more explicable, if no happier place. I think immediately of Freedom from Fear or Christianity: the first three thousand years or Destiny Disrupted.

All of these have something to offer, but their limits need to be understood. Judt and Snyder contend that the academy has failed to educate us to be informed consumers of history and that the results are bad for civil society. I believe them.

Perfidious communists at work

Captured from the New York Times, March 24, 2012

Saturday scenes and scenery: more BART commuters

Here's a set of cell phone snaps of my fellow commuters riding home on the train. Another set is here.






Many of us look a little spaced out after a work day. I can say "we" here. One of these is me.

Intimations of spring!

Lake Lodi in California's agricultural central valley, contributed by a friend. I am so ready for the change of seasons.***Yet another day when I'm too pooped to blog.