Category Archives: Culture views

1970 with Amy

Winston Churchill most famously decreed, “If you’re not a liberal at twenty, you have no heart; if you’re not a conservative at forty, you have no brain.”  The journey we’ve made in the last forty years follows that well worn path.  Much is written about current gridlock and which political leader is most divisive, but even a cursory look at the United States demonstrates deep divisions for our whole history.  The early Republican party led by Abraham Lincoln carefully negotiated extremely tricky political waters to the Emancipation Proclamation, followed later, after his death, to amendments to our Constitution to first free, then enfranchise (at least the men) 3 ½ million Americans of African descent.

During the time both before and during a Civil War, emotions ran rampant; a pro slavery South Carolina Democrat Congressman, Preston Brooks, severely beat and nearly killed Massachusetts Republican Senator Charles Sumner with a metal headed cane on the floor of the Senate after Sumner delivered an impassioned Abolitionist speech likening slave owners to pimps.  Sumner took three years to recover sufficiently to return to the Senate.  Brooks was fined $300 and was overwhelmingly reelected to Congress by his constituents. We haven’t yet seen physical violence in Congress yet, although a few like former Senator John Edwards almost certainly would benefit from a sound thrashing.

The leaders on the liberal side of the current schism were produced through the Vietnam War and post Vietnam War periods, during which few compromises were countenanced.  In 1969, Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King were murdered martyrs to the anti war and civil rights movements. The eventually disgraced Richard Nixon was the President of the United States, and from the perspective of early twenties dilettante radicals like Rita and me, prospects seemed bleak.  We read rags like “Ramparts” Magazine, books by Eldridge Cleaver and tracts about the Chicago Seven. There was Cambridge, Berkeley and Haight-Ashbury, Ann Arbor and Boulder.  Because we wanted to see the Rockies, we put our few pieces of furniture in storage over Rita’s father’s garage and headed to Boulder, Colorado. “Power to the people.”

In retrospect, we were remarkably uninformed, entitled by the sacrifice of our parents, naïvely idealistic and determined to make a difference – whatever that meant.  A couple of years before, after graduating from college, my military career turned out to be a one day adventure for a physical that I failed when the Army doctors discovered I take an anti-convulsion medication due to a severe head injury from a high school car accident.  I have never had a day time incident, so it didn’t seem crucial, but it was one and out for me.  Things went Left after that.  An arm chair psychoanalyst may discern that my early job choices for dangerous work were possibly compensatory for a young man.  I was a skilled tree worker; Rita was a Boston hospitals trained RN.  Neither one of us had a moment’s doubt that we would find work out West, which turned out to be a problem solved the third day after we arrived.

Our revolutionary efforts were pedestrian and embarrassingly feckless.  One demonstration at the University of Denver; a Joan Baez concert at Red Rocks the same month she performed at a farm in Woodstock, NY (she spoke amusingly of the then Governor of California, Ronald Ray-Gun); a few joints around campfires under the black night of a billion stars on back packing trips into the mountains; a visit or two to the American Friends Service Committee (an offshoot of the non violent Quaker center for conscientious objection), and small gatherings in friend’s apartments to cavil about “the cause” and tell stories about Cam Bishop, whom I once met, a living off the land FBI’s Ten Most Wanted fugitive, who blew up the power station that fed Fort Carson.

With David and Kris Levin, our upstairs neighbors, we decided to take a week’s vacation and drive to San Francisco over Loveland Pass.  David was my chess partner at the University of Colorado Chess Club, until they threw us out when they asked us both to join their chess team, and we confessed to not being students.  He worked for the American Friend’s along with a Catholic priest, whose name escapes me.  David had been a wilderness guide in Talkeetna, Alaska, and they had lived for a while in Mexico City.  Their wanderings were not uncommon.

Driving through eastern Utah, we stopped in Vernal around midnight for fuel at an all night, coin operated gas station – two long haired couples in a worn out station wagon with a mattress in the back, so we could drive straight through to Frisco.  While there, a Camaro SS with a hood scoop pulled in with five twenty something well trimmed guys looking for something to do on a Saturday night.  We qualified as the entertainment, especially after a few beers.  As we pulled out of the station, they followed us.

What followed included huddling in the back seat with a tire iron in my hand while we held the mattress up to the window to protect ourselves from flying glass as they threw full beer bottles at the car and almost running them over when they raced ahead to block the road.  On either side of the road, there was a hundred miles of desolate nothing.

Finally they joined up with another car of their friends, and we knew it was a matter of time before they trapped our old beater.  It took three hours to drive the thirty miles to the next town; David pulled into the yard of a house with the lights still on.  David and I stayed at the car as our tormentors pulled up near us.  Kris and Rita pounded on the door of the home; the owner answered the door for our terrified wives with a lever action 30-30 Winchester at port arms.

The young couple in the house was up with an ill child, so Rita’s pediatric nurse experience was welcomed.  Once he sorted us out, the father recognized the cars parked out front with one belonging to the county sheriff’s son, who had been implicated the summer before in the disappearance of a hitchhiking couple.  We called the state police, who were at first reluctant to come, but after my non violent friend, David, threatened to shoot a few of them, they sent the cavalry.  When the police car approached with lights blaring from a long distance, both cars left back towards Vernal.  After we assured the trooper that it wasn’t just (in his words) “drunk Indians”, he agreed to look for them.  We rode in his car back to Vernal and identified the Camaro in the parking lot of an all night diner.  The trooper dropped us at the courthouse, then went and arrested five of them.

Couples and five harassers then sat in a waiting room at the courthouse for another hour and a half waiting for a judge to show up.  The ensuing conversation confirmed the implacable nature of our differences.   The smooth one was conciliatory after Rita’s pregnancy became obvious.  Another was headed to Vietnam in the Army the following Monday, which had prompted their partying.  They despised us; the hatred was palpable at first, but by the end of the hour and a half, most began to see one another as human beings.  Discussion softened, except for the departing soldier, who kept trying to start a fight, but who could blame him?

We found out a bit about life for young men in rural Utah with fast cars being the extent of available distraction; we all learned to reify the other side’s point of view through discussion held in neutral territory.   No permanent bridges, and conciliation was nearly impossible given the polarity, however all of us became more than caricatures to the other.

When the judge finally came, we filled out complaint forms.  The judge assured us we would be called back to testify when the trial came up in a month or so.  Even though it meant several hundred miles of driving through the mountains, we agreed to come back.  Exhausted, we never made it past Salt Lake City, where we rested and turned around, carefully avoiding Vernal on the way back.

Of course, from the courts of Vernal, we never heard a word.

Still dancing after all these years

For myself, I am an optimist – it doesn’t seem of much use to be anything else.  Winston Churchill.

Effortless grace

“I could never be a manager.  All I have is natural ability.”  Mickey Mantle in Great Sports Reporting.

In 1968 Tim was ten when his Dad, Bob, was given tickets to a Red Sox/Yankees game at Fenway.  Like many in Rhode Island Tim grew up a Yankees fan and Mickey Mantle was his hero.  “The Mick” was taking a farewell tour in his retirement year, and it was to be his last series in Fenway Park.  Bob managed a district for Suburban Propane, but with a wife and four boys, they had little money to spare for entertainment.  A family Sunday afternoon at Scarborough Beach was as close as Tim had been to a vacation.  Yankees games were a world of imaginings he heard on the radio; Tim had never been to a major league baseball game.

An equipment supplier offered to take Bob and their top salesperson to the game along with a night of extravagant dining in Boston.  Bob asked first the salesperson and then the benefactor if he could take his sons to the game instead.  Everyone agreed.  When Bob came home, he told Tim and his brother Chuck the news, and it was all Tim thought about until game night.

Every kid remembers his first trip to the ballpark, whether it’s Fenway or Yankee Stadium or Wrigley Field, but Fenway, the grand old “bandbox” is surely special.

Fenway at twilight

“Fenway Park, in Boston, is a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark.  Everything is painted green and seems in curiously sharp focus, like the inside of an old-fashioned peeping-type Easter egg.”  John Updike in the New Yorker on the occasion of Ted William’s retirement.  1960

Coming past the fortress front of Fenway, the boys and their father entered into the catacombs underneath the stands.  Dirty, noisy, crowded, a bewildering array of young and old, more male than female, pushing, bumping, looking at tickets and anxiously following signs to the right section.  Finally they found their ramp, ascended with the crowd, at first seeing only the twilight, the blinding high arrays of lights just coming to life, and then emerging into the aisle to encounter a breath stopping, beatific vision of green, The Wall, natural grass, base paths with freshly limed lines, dugouts full of champions and players stretching and throwing the ball around.  The boys, as all boys, were wide eyed, open mouthed, trying in vain to see it all at once.  Fenway is intimate; they felt on the field, yet it seemed immense; they were flabbergasted just how far their heroes had to bat and throw.  How high the ball went and how amazingly quickly the ball traveled from one end of the field to the other.  Untainted wonder.

Their dad led them down, down until they were four or five rows behind the visitor’s dugout. One further thrill when Dad bought hot dogs wrapped in napkins passed hand to hand down the row while the money went the other way; maybe a bag of peanuts later, thrown twenty feet by another vendor?  “Don’t drop them, Dad, they’ll boo ya!” They were close enough to hear the players shout back and forth and laugh.  Oh my, there was Mickey.

When Mantle first came up in 1951, he made $7,500 and played in the outfield with a guy named DiMaggio.  The Yankees took the World Series in four over the Giants in a subway series. Phil Rizzuto was the shortstop; Bobby Cox played third.  Mickey was an almost mythical farm boy from Oklahoma; he moved with astonishing grace and speed, a god even among all the other amazing athletes.  There was nothing he couldn’t do with bat, ball, glove or legs.  Mickey Mantle was arguably the greatest switch hitter in baseball history and a lock for a first ballot trip to the Hall of Fame with 536 home runs by the time his career wound down. In 1968 he made the kingly salary of $100,000 in the last year of his contract, and played part time first base on worn out wheels.

“I can’t play anymore.  I can’t hit the ball when I need to.  I can’t steal second when I need to.  I can’t go from first to third when I need to.  I have to quit.”  Mickey Mantle in 1968

Neither the Yanks nor the Sox were going anywhere that summer; they finished 4^th and 5^th in the American League the season Denny McLain pitched 31 wins  with a 1.99 ERA, and the Tigers won the World Series.  It was a tired game in a tired year, but Mickey was there, and both the Sox and Yankee fans loved him.  It was enough. Mick sat on the bench early in the game, but came in later under fan pressure.  He got a standing ovation the first time he got up.  He struck out awkwardly – a gimpy, sore guy, just a vestige of when he owned the game.  Mickey came to the plate one more time late in the game.  The crowd stood again and lifted the roof.  Tim doesn’t remember the score or the outcome, but he remembers this.

“…if I had played my career hitting singles like Pete, I’d wear a dress.”  Mickey on Pete Rose, in The Mick

The Mick fouled the first pitch back.  The second bounced in for a ball.  At the third pitch, he swung with a brief, magnificent flash of his youthful strength, balance and speed; the ball exploded towards left field.  It hit the tin of The Wall with a bang heard throughout the park, an unforgettable sound unique to Fenway Park.  Mick grimaced as he headed towards first, barely able to imitate anything near running.  A young, future Hall of Famer, Carl Yastrzemski, roamed left field like a lion and already had learned like an art form how to play balls hit off The Wall.  He positioned himself perfectly and plucked the ball in the air off the wall.  He spun to throw it in and Mickey was barely halfway to second.  Yaz pumped with the ball towards the infield.  He pumped again, and yet a third time as Mickey pulled into second base; only then did Yaz throw a rope to a grinning Rico Petrocelli covering the bag.  The fans rose as one to applaud this tribute to greatness back before baseball became “Moneyball” spreadsheets of stats and millionaire salaries.  When baseball was still America’s game.

“I would change policy, bring back natural grass and nickel beer.  Baseball is the belly-button of our society.  Straighten out baseball, and you straighten out the rest of the world.”  Bill Lee in an interview with a sports writer about the state of the game he loved.

When we were in our early thirties and living in Maine, Rita gave birth to Angela in Portland.  She was 2 pounds, 6 ounces at birth and 28 weeks in the womb.  She spent the next seven weeks in the neonatal intensive care units of Maine Medical Centers in Portland and Lewiston.  Angela now has two beautiful daughters of her own (Gianna and Elena), a great husband as well as a master’s degree in education.   Since Rita’s own OB_GYN doctor lived ninety miles north and near where we lived, the second year resident who delivered her was Dr. Bruce Churchill.  He carefully explained to us what to expect and that because of her early arrival, she most likely wouldn’t cry; that was the only thing he was wrong about.  Angela was a fighter from the jump.

Dr. Bruce Churchill

Dr. Churchill’s grace under pressure, skill and personal warmth will never be forgotten by us.  He was named “Physician of the Year” by the Portland newspaper in 2000.  At one point during those trying first few weeks, he offered us the second bedroom in his apartment because of the travel required by Rita’s successful effort to establish her nursing.  She initially used a breast pump and delivered frozen milk in half ounce containers, which the nurses would feed to Angela a little at a time.  When researching this post, we learned that Dr. Churchill was diagnosed with ALS (Lou Gehrig disease) in 2006, but continues to practice at the Coastal Woman’s Healthcare Center in Scarborough. He and his wife, Cindy, lead the annual ALS march in Portland to raise research funds to fight his terminal disease.  He was the varsity girl’s volleyball assistant coach at Greeley High School.  The annual girls volleyball state championship tournament has been renamed “The Bruce Churchill Classic”.  He specializes in adolescent care and menopause.  His increasing disability forced him to stop delivering babies in 2008.  Not many deserve the honorific, “Doctor” more than Bruce.

The other end of the spectrum fell in Kansas.

Kelly was fourteen and pregnant since she was thirteen.  When her baby was twenty weeks developed, and after four days in a Wichita, Kansas motel during which time her cervix was incrementally dilated, her womb and amniotic fluid were injected with a saline or urea solution.  The baby swallows the stuff; she suffers burned skin and is poisoned.  A saline poisoned baby can take up to an hour to die.  A baby at twenty weeks recognizes her mother’s voice, moves her mouth, grasps, blinks, has hair and fingernails; her gender is distinguishable with ultrasound, and she feels pain.  Kelly was taken into a room with four or five other mothers and awaited the doctor’s order to bring her to a smaller room that served as the final solution.  The nurses instructed her to sit on what resembled a toilet and push.  Her dead baby fell into the toilet.  The remains of the babies were burned in an incinerator, which emitted smoke not unlike the smoke produced at veterinarian clinics or Auschwitz. Link to interview with Kelly.

Dr. George Tiller

Dr. George Tiller owned one of the three abortion facilities nationwide that performed late term abortions into the final month of pregnancy, killing many babies as developed or more developed than our Angela. Until the procedure named as “partial birth abortion” was banned in 2003, Tiller did them. This “intact dilation and extraction” method involved turning the baby and delivering all but the baby’s head, then jamming a pair of surgical scissors into the baby’s head and opening them, finally inserting a vacuum catheter in the wound. The baby’s brain is sucked out, collapsing the skull.  After this barbarity was proscribed, Tiller was left with two still legal procedures for late term abortions: the saline burn and poison method and the other D&E (Dilation and Extraction).  The cervix is dilated and forceps are used to literally tear the baby limb from limb, twisting legs off like one would test a cooked chicken, crushing the skull, snapping the spine and pulling the baby out piece by piece.  In most states, if someone is convicted of doing this to a live guinea pig, they will go to jail for up to five years.

Tiller’s clinic performed between 50,000 and 60,000 abortions during his career, which exceeds the total number of Americans killed in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.  His father was also a physician and did illegal abortions before Roe v Wade, a mentor while young George was growing up starting a multigenerational thriving business.   Tiller made millions and donated to many politicians through his ProKanDo PAC.  ProKanDo was the largest PAC

Tiller and Sebelius

in Kansas.  One of the major beneficiaries was former Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius, now the Obama Secretary of Health and Human Services.  She collected tens of thousands from Tiller over the years and profitably helped keep the law off his back.

Kathleen Sebelius and ??

Tiller managed to circumvent Kansas law for thirty years.  He aborted the babies of many minors and did not report the sexual abuse or statutory rape as the law requires.  Kansas law also states that two physicians must authorize late term abortions and both certify that the abortion would prevent a “permanent and irreversible injury to a major bodily function” to the mother, an occurrence that was used by Tiller in 414 cases in 2005 alone.  When these were investigated by Dr. Paul McHugh, a psychiatrist contracted by the Kansas Attorney General, he found only one or two that may have actually qualified.  Among the justifications were such things as delaying the mother’s education and missing a rock concert.  Link to Obama record on life issues

Ann Kristen Neuhaus

The abortionist who helped to certify the abortions, Dr. Ann Kristen Neuhaus, had her license to practice medicine revoked in 2012 after a six year effort, when she was found to have participated in numerous illegal late term abortions while working with Tiller.  She routinely used a computer multiple choice quiz for her psychological “evaluations”, and in some cases never met the patient. Tiller had announced his intention to voluntarily surrender his license and retire in 2009, when he was shot dead through the eye while in church.  Which church is hard to imagine.  His killer was sentenced to life imprisonment.

Tiller and Churchill.  A tale of two doctors.  Your call.

Angela and the girls

A trademark of the National Socialist German Workers Party was meticulous central planning.  Adolph Hitler had a plan for everything.  And everyone.  Hitler remembered well Napoleon’s admonition that an army marches on its stomach and was determined that this time around Germany would not lose the food war.  Both supply and demand had to be addressed.

To secure a steady food source for the German people, Hitler’s design for his Lebensraum (‘living space’) was a fertile land of about 20 million acres east of Germany. That this acreage was then occupied and governed by Slavs, Poles and Russians was an inconvenient speed bump. In his “Hunger Plan”, his preparation for the demand side was just as direct: to cut down the “useless eaters” by cutting off their food or killing them more expeditiously.  Chief among the eaters were Jews, Slavs, Poles, Russians, the disabled, the mentally challenged and the “degenerates” such as homosexuals. His implementation was carried out efficiently with accurate records kept along the way.  Many were murdered outright; many more died of deprivation and starvation.

Before we indulge in self congratulatory smugness about our moral superiority to the Nazi monsters, examine a few instances where this type of utilitarian ethic presents itself in our own time and culture.  In the most recent edition of the Journal for Medical Ethics there was an article entitled, “After Birth Abortion:  Why should the baby live?” by Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva.   The authors contend that all the reasons for abortion should be equally valid for new born infants.  If the infant is disabled or imperfect in any way, it is a given that they can be eliminated since newborns are just another species of “potential” human being.  They blandly state that other justifications would include health and inconvenience for the mother, such as a new job offer, financial stress or they just don’t like the kid, so it would be difficult for the family. Up until some time line in the sand to be determined, the contention is that a “potential” human being (or “useless eater”) can be put down like an old blind dog.  We already have a euphemism, not infanticide, but “after birth abortion”.

This is not a new argument.  Peter Singer, President Clinton’s bioethics advisor, was the founder of the animal rights movement.  Within that PETA group, it is dogma that an animal’s life is morally equivalent to a human life.  Dr. Singer, still a bioethics professor at Princeton, published an article forty years ago entitled, “Killing Babies Isn’t Always Wrong”.  The bizarre twist to this is that with the current interpretation of the law, killing a baby (read ‘aborting a fetus’) is permissible up until the moment of birth.  Why is Dr. Singer’s, Dr. Giubilini’s and Dr. Minerva’s position any different ethically than current law?  The answer, of course, is that it isn’t, but merely a natural extension of accepted principle.

A subtle, but nonetheless troubling, example of a utilitarian perspective occurred just a few weeks ago from the Obama administration.  HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius deliberately ran rough shod over first amendment religious freedom with the administration’s edict to force private Catholic institutions to contract with health insurance companies to provide abortifacient drugs and contraceptive drugs, clearly violating the Church’s moral law.  President Obama offered a transparent and cynical “compromise”, when they protested.  Don’t worry, he patronized, we’ll just make the insurance companies pay for it.  The American bishops responded with the obvious – that insurance companies won’t put these drugs on their bill, but would certainly build the costs into their rates.

Here’s the rub. The president’s rejoinder to the bishops? The insurance companies wouldn’t have to charge because dispensing contraceptives and abortifacient drugs saved them money; it’s cheaper than having babies.  Chemical contraceptives act as abortifacients on occasion and for some like the “morning after” pill, it is their intention.   Think about the ethic that undergirds the president’s rationale for a moment.  What should make this morally acceptable to the bishops and people of faith, according to the president, is that the insurance companies can afford to give these drugs away because it saves them money.  As long as it costs less to abort a baby than to carry her to term, the moral calculus works for the insurance company, so it should be acceptable to the Church.

Utilitarian ethical theory, developed over two hundred years ago by John Stuart Mill and others, differs profoundly from deontological (or rule based) ethics.  Traditional Socratic ethics teaches that true happiness comes from doing what is right; for the utilitarian, happiness is the first goal, and the “right” is fungible.  The utilitarian holds that the overriding standard is the greatest good for the greatest number. What works, not what is right.   Killing, stealing, lying, cheating, breaking promises and manipulation are not intrinsically evil.  Nothing is intrinsically evil; what is good is what serves the greater good and happiness of the many. Understood, but unspoken is the axiom that the intellectual and power elite get to determine who is to be made happy.  And who is to be made dead.

from Psalm 31

Affliction has broken down my strength

and my bones waste away.

I am like a dead man, forgotten,

like a thing thrown away.

My life is in your hands, deliver me

from the hands of those who hate me.

The ancient Greek legends surrounding Prince Theseus have lessons for today.  Periodically, the king of Athens had agreed to send seven boys and seven girls to Crete to be fed to the Minotaur to appease King Minos.  The Athenian king’s son Theseus volunteered to be one of them, but said he would slay the creature to end the sacrifices.  The Princess Ariadne, daughter of King Minos of Crete, fell in love with Theseus and betrayed to him the secret of killing the Minotaur, a fearsome monster, which was half man with the head of a bull.  She smuggled Theseus a sword and a ball of twisted threads.  The Minotaur lived deep in an impossible labyrinth; the challenge for Theseus was to find his way out should he prevail over the monster.  He needed both a sword and then the twine to leave a trail back.

We have labyrinths today and seem to be losing the thread to find our way back.  A few anecdotes portray some of the twists in the maze.  Some of these seem trivial, but illustrate that we are becoming lost in some fundamental way and are confused about our priorities.    These are mostly unrelated, but seem somehow of a piece.

•  In Belmont, Massachusetts recently, the animal control officer found a badly injured coyote.  Coyotes have become increasing vexing to suburban Boston communities, and Belmont is among the most affluent.  Twice in the last year, they have attacked children in Massachusetts, and routinely pet cats and small dogs disappear to coyote packs.  The town official didn’t dispatch the coyote to end its suffering.  No, she brought it to an animal rescue hospital in Grafton, MA, which at a cost to the taxpayers in excess of $2,000 nursed it back to health over three months.  The coyote was a fertile, young female, which they did not spay.  Then, of course, they brought it out to release in a remote part of Western Massachusetts, right?  No, it was released with great celebration to the “wilds” of Belmont to reunite with its pack mates.  Does this seem misguided to anyone else?
• The Federal government has initiated a suit to set prices on e books because they are too high.  The Federal government apparently has solved all the problems of deficit spending, foreign wars, health care, poverty, education, religious freedom, Social Security and contraception, and has the time to turn their eye and insinuate their considerable power into the market place to “correct” the alleged malfeasance of publishers and book sellers.  What happened to a consumer shopping for a book, whether print or electronic, and if they could afford the price, buying it?
• The Federal government subsidizes with tax credits the manufacture, construction and operating costs of windmill power.  Recently, the Bonneville Power Authority in the Pacific Northwest, another Federal agency, asked the local wind power producers to shut down their windmills seasonally.  Since the existing hydroelectric plants on the rivers produce all the power needed when the rivers are flowing strongly, the windmills were redundant, and their power had no place to flow.  The rivers flowing and the wind blowing tend to peak at the same time of the year. The dams, which are far less expensive per kilowatt hour to run, don’t kill birds and are equally renewable.  Dam generators need to run when the rivers are high because, if they don’t, the salmon run to spawn will be endangered.  The windmills have to stop and lie fallow, not unlike farm subsidies.  The BPA will pay the windmill owners up to $50 million per year to do nothing, and the wind will only howl.
• The Justice Department has embarked on yet another crusade, most recently in Texas and South Carolina, to stop states from requiring identification of voters.  According to the department filing, voter photo IDs, even if provided free by the state to all who don’t have driver’s licenses, will have a disparate impact on the poor and minorities.  Voter fraud is a problem in many of the large cities where the dead cast their ballots early and often.  Since inner city votes favor almost entirely Democrat candidates, one might suspect an ulterior motive from Eric Holder, the current Attorney General.  Not so, says he.  His enthusiasm even with Fast and Furious, Supreme Court challenges to the health care mandate and myriad other pressing issues extends well above and beyond duty.  He has the time to decide how each state should determine who votes and how voter’s citizenship, right to vote and even their existence above the ground are verified.  Such dedication should not go unrecognized.
• Finally, we drop all the way through the looking glass into Wonderland.  And the looking glass is a wavy fun mirror that distorts all reality.  The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) petitioned the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva to stop the same voter photo ID laws in the U.S., even though Indiana’s ID laws were upheld by our Supreme Court in 2008.  It seems that the U.N. should have more authority over U.S. laws than our courts.  Among the member nations on the U.N. Human Rights Council are such human rights luminaries as Cuba, Russia, China and Saudi Arabia, where women can’t vote at all.

We wander through the labyrinth running the thread through sweaty palms, just hoping to find our way back to the light.  Just a few of these cited twists and turns expose how tricky the journey is.

Marge, it takes two to lie. One to lie, and one to listen.  Homer Simpson

Meg and her fiance Marty Gilbert

Mayor Bloomberg, complying with a court order under a Freedom of Information suit, recently released the test scores and rankings of 18,000 New York City teachers, publicly listing their names.  Rankings were based on their students’ performances in the standardized tests under the No Child Left Behind program begun during the Bush administration and continuing today.  The list purports to identify effective and ineffective teachers.  My daughter, Meg, now in her fourth year teaching in Harlem, posted a note on her Facebook page regarding this.  She was not damaged in this listing, but fine, dedicated colleagues she well knows to be hard working teachers were.   Here is an excerpt from her note addressed to Mayor Bloomberg:

“You do not consider the fact that many of these ‘ineffective’ teachers are attempting to teach children who enter their class severely deficient, are emotionally unstable, are living in shelters, are victims of domestic violence, have drug or alcohol addicted parents, are in the middle of child services cases or are even learning disabled, but are not yet labeled as such since the process to do so can take up to two years.

There are so many aspects that we, as teachers, deal with on a day to day basis.  I’d like to see you come into some of the underperforming neighborhoods of Harlem, Brooklyn, the Bronx and teach for one day.  You wouldn’t last an hour.

Why don’t you find out which children are failing these ridiculous tests that measures so little of their actual intelligence and ask their PARENTS why they continue to fail?  Every teacher knows that in order for a child to succeed, there needs to be a pyramid of effort.  The pyramid consists of the student, the teacher AND the parent.”

Since she took her job in NYC, Meg has related the horror stories to us of what her students face at home, if indeed, their domestic arrangements can be called a home.  And what she deals with daily with classroom disruptions, appalling student behavior and bureaucratic foolishness.  In her elementary school, NYPD police sit full time in the hallways – not security guards, but fully trained professional NYC cops.  Three major studies looked at why students fail or succeed in the United States and illuminate these issues.  These were cited in Dr. Charles Murray’s noteworthy book, “Real Education”.

The Coleman Report, resulting from a mandate of the 1964 Civil Right Act, was commissioned to determine the effects of inequality of educational opportunity.  Dr. James Coleman led the most exhaustive study before or since, involving 645,000 students nationwide.  Data were compiled about school history, parents’ socioeconomic statuses, neighborhoods, curricula, school facilities and teacher qualifications.  He fully expected the study to document that the quality of the schools would correlate strongly with the academic performance of the students.  What he found to his surprise was that teacher credentials, the newness and facilities of the schools, public money spent per student and the curricula were not critical to improving the learning of the students.  What consistently correlated with student performance was family background.  Not to say that great teachers and schools don’t make a profound difference in the lives of some individual children, because they do, but across wide populations, these do not consistently correlate with over all academic achievement.  Innate academic ability, family situations and family support do.

The Title 1 program of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 spent and continues to spend billions of dollars each year to upgrade schools attended by children of low income families.  Numerous studies were done to track Title 1 results.  Irrespective of the fond expectations of those gathering these data, no significant effect in any analysis from the 1970s forward has demonstrated improvement in the academic achievement of students in the schools aided by this program.  The most recent comprehensive study in 2001 by the Department of Education  (Dr. Murray’s book was published in 2008) showed that from 1986 to 1999 (the period of the study), the gap between high poverty and low poverty schools actually widened.

Finally, there is the No Child Left Behind programs, passed with strong bipartisan support in January of 2002 and championed by strange bedfellows George W. Bush and Ted Kennedy.  Everyone involved had the best of intentions.  Despite deep changes in the country’s NCLB educational system and a firestorm around “teaching to the test”, the results have been inconclusive at best.  After nearly ten years of effort, math scores for fourth graders at the 25^th percentile (lowest 25% of tested academic ability) have risen three points; eight graders fell two points and seniors fell one point. The effective change in reading scores at all levels for the 25^th, 10^th, 50^th and even the 75^th percentile was zero.

There is far, far too much to cover in a blog.  I strongly recommend reading Dr. Murray’s book. I can’t even begin to discuss the deleterious effects of teachers unions and bloated school department administrations. Dr. Murray’s book emphasizes four main positions:

• Abilities vary.
• Half of the children are below average.
• Too many people are going to college (especially four year liberal arts colleges).
• America’s future depends on how we educate the academically gifted.

Educational romanticism, which is sacrosanct today, keeps as dogma that all but intellectually disabled children are capable of greatly improving academic performance, if held to high standards by good schools and tough tests.  While this view is lovely to contemplate, common sense and almost all developed data show it to be untrue.   A false premise condemns good teachers fighting the battle every day and cruelly sets unattainable expectations for many, while neglecting in some cases those who would most benefit.  Job specific technical training beyond high school needs to be strengthened and encouraged.  The exceptional teachers persevering in their frustrating jobs should be recognized for the heroes and heroines they are.

“It really bugs me that someone will tell me, after twenty years of being educated, how I’m supposed to think.”  Clarence Thomas

Alone in the crowd

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal featured Alain de Botton’s new book “Religion for Atheists: A Non Believers Guide to the Uses of Religion”, which is to be published in March.  His writing is crisp; his observations about the alienation in our culture are astute.  Unfortunately, he attributes the missing sense of community, still found in religious groups, to the lack of the familiarity of rites and formulae, and, of course, utterly misses the point.

“Insofar as modern society ever promises us access to a community, it is one centered on the worship of professional success.  We sense that we are brushing up against its gates when the first question we are asked at a party is, ‘What do you do?’, our answer to which will determine whether we are warmly welcomed or conclusively abandoned.

Religions seem to know a great deal about our loneliness.  Even if we believe very little about what they tell us… we can nonetheless admire their understanding of what separates us from strangers… and prevent(s) us from building connections with others.”

Botton especially values the “genius” of the Catholic Mass.  The congregation, according to him, draws together dissimilar people from all layers of society.  Within the rituals, music and rote of the Mass, they are comfortable with one another; they know when to sit and when to stand and when to kneel.  The words of the prayers are known to all.  In fact even if one finds oneself among complete strangers speaking a foreign tongue, a Catholic can still participate in the Mass with ease – can still easily fit in and feel at home. The setting of the church, the composition of the attendees, who are not usually of the same race, profession, educational or income levels, yet share a “commitment to certain values”, all contribute to the connections of community.  These “values” include acceptance irrespective of class or success.

“As a result, we may start to feel that we could work a little less feverishly, because we see that the respect and security we hope to gain through our careers is already available to us in a warm and impressive community that imposes no worldly requirements on us for its welcome.”

How the Church succeeds in his purview presents a formulaic means of implementing “community” among the lonely, disaffected individuals that everywhere inhabit our population. He does regret the loss of the Agape Meal (Love Feast) of early Christian communities that transformed into the Eucharist of current practice, but still holds that there is some value in what remains.  It is good to know that an atheist has some better ideas to improve the liturgy.

He suggests a secular alternative to worship could be concocted and offered to all.  A “Temple to Perspective” would set the stage, complete with a “to scale” timeline monument to lift our eyes to the stars and put into perspective our tiny presence in geological and astronomical terms.

Temple to Relationships

His solution would include meals in an uplifting set-aside space, but meals with rules and rituals, such that the participants feel welcome, get to know each other in non judgmental ways and follow set patterns of conversation that do not judge others – sort of speed dating with memorized lines and without sex or wine.  Sterile, bleak and contrived come to mind.  From G.K. Chesterton: “When men cease to believe in God, they do not believe in nothing; they believe in anything.”

Personally, I’d prefer the bustling atmosphere of sidewalk tables outside a Federal Hill restaurant (Mediterraneo?) on a summer evening, perhaps bumping into Buddy Cianci, our personable and felonious ex-Mayor making his rounds.

St. Augustine wrote, “Therefore do not understand in order to believe, but believe in order to understand.”  Mr. Botton’s perceptions about the existential loneliness, not just of modern man, but of man without God are entirely accurate.  The point that he misses is the whole one.  Such presumably willful and obstinate spiritual blindness in such an intelligent brain is a great sadness.  He wants the faith but resists with impressive agility the Author of it.  What faith filled Catholics and others hold in common are not merely “shared values” or acceptance of others, although those attributes are valuable, but a deep, personal faith and relationship with their God.  Not superstitious whistling past the graveyard dreams as assumed by those who do not believe, but the intimate relationship of creature and Creator that cannot be imagined or understood by those who have not experienced it and are close minded even to the search.

From St. Augustine’s Confessions

Fecisti nos ad te et inquietum est cor nostrum donec requiescat in te.

You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.

Our American culture is replete with rifts both significant and trivial: rich vs. poor; equal opportunity vs. equal results; liberal vs. conservative; government as a solution vs. government as an obstacle; Patriots vs. Giants; pro life vs. pro abortion or pro assisted suicide; traditional one man one woman marriage vs. all manner of gay and sad alternates; Tea Party vs. Occupy Wall Street; Red Sox vs. Yankees; Bud Light vs. microbreweries.

Charles Murray, the libertarian political scientist and author, recently published his new book, “Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960-2010”.  He limited his research to the white population and his employment statistics to pre 2008 to mitigate the variances due to race and recession.  The results are striking.  He proposes that the political divide (Tea Party) and economic split (OWS), while divisive, are far from the worst of our deepening separations.  His conclusion is that the accelerating values gap between the upper middle class and the working class is debilitating and threatens to end American culture as we have defined it for 250 years.  Some of it is economic, but most damaging are the cultural differences.

Some definitions will clarify the argument.  Dr. Murray studied in depth Belmont, a white affluent suburb of Boston, and Fishtown, a white working class neighborhood in Philadelphia.  His classifications are calibrated by education and employment.  Most of the people in the Belmont group had at least bachelor’s degrees and worked as doctors, lawyers, business owners, managers and academics.  In the Fishtown group, most had high school educations or less and worked in clerical, retail or blue collar jobs requiring little training.

While taking into account the admonition about “lies, damn lies and statistics”, some must be included in this discussion for it to make sense.  Dr. Murray’s evidence is convincing.  Both upper and lower classes have been affected by the cultural tsunami of the last fifty years, but the mores and habits of the working class have been even more drastically altered, thus increasing the gap.  In 1960, the average annual family income in inflation adjusted current dollars for the elite ‘zip codes’ was $84,000; today in relative terms it is $163,000.  During the same time period, married families in the elite group dropped from 94% to 83%; among our working class married households has fallen from 84% to 48%.   Children raised by single parents have risen from 1% to 6% among the Belmont families, and from 6% to 65% among those with a high school education or less.  Regular practice of religion went from 71% to 60% in the upper middle class, and from 62% to 41% in the working class.  Controlling for the recession, the gap between upper and working class industriousness (dropping out of the jobs market and working less than 40 hours) has also grown demonstrably.

The distressing reality is that the cultural commonality among the elites and the workers has fallen apart.  “The centre cannot hold.”  Elites live in enclaves increasingly isolated from the common folk.  They eat different food, take care of their bodies differently, watch different entertainment, go to different schools, take different vacations and share less and less with fellow citizens of lesser means.  While there has always been a gap, as Alexis de Tocqueville noted about American culture in the 1830’s, “The more opulent citizens take great care not to stand aloof from the people.  On the contrary, they constantly keep on easy terms with the lower classes: They listen to them, they speak to them every day.”  For most that is no longer the reality of our daily lives.

Forty years ago or less, the population of America understood each other better, embracing a common civic culture and “shared experiences of daily life and shared assumptions about (core) American values involving marriage, honesty, hard work and religion.”  As we grow farther apart, communicating on a meaningful level becomes ever more problematic.  We talk at and around each other, not with each other.

The good news for Dr. Murray is that there is a burgeoning recognition  of the new American Great Divide as a grievous problem.   He suggests that the remedy is not amenable to government mandates or educational curricula; the cure is one family at a time, one person at a time and is the responsibility of each of us and all of us: to simply, make the effort to know one another better across the cultural divide.

One of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books was “The Long Winter”.  The life threatening challenges to Charles Wilder’s family were terrifying.  Our family sometimes wrapped in blankets just reading aloud about the cold and weeklong prairie blizzards.  Charles tied a rope from the door of their cabin to the barn. Each day he fed and milked their cow.  During the seemingly endless, howling storms, he would take a lantern, keep his hand on the rope and do his barn chores.  The rope protected him from losing his way in the storm; the blizzards were so intense that a dead reckoning error of just a few degrees would strand him, hopelessly unable to find his way back – a fatal mistake; he wouldn’t be found until the spring thaw.

Our lesson in that is this:  hold on to the rope.  Each family, each person.  Hold on to the rope.

Listening moves us closer, it helps us become more whole, more healthy, more holy. Not listening creates fragmentation, and fragmentation is the root of all suffering.
Margaret J. Wheatley

One of the more attractive and hopeful aspects of the human personality is our capacity for wonder, curiosity and the joy of the “Eureka” moment discovering the solution to seemingly insurmountable, vexing challenges.  A story from the past week brought this marvel to mind.

Public Broadcasting’s NOVA series ran a program about Hugh Hunt, a Cambridge University engineering professor, and his inquiry into an early WWII bombing raid by Great Britain that temporarily shut down the heartland of the Third Reich’s war equipment industry in the Ruhr Valley.  In 1942 with the war against Hitler in grave danger a British engineer, Barnes Wallis, convinced the Royal Air Force that he could breach the immense Möhne and Eder dams, which would flood coal mines and deprive the steel plants of necessary water and hydroelectric power to disrupt the production of tanks, planes and munitions for the German war machine.  Fearsome anti aircraft emplacements and the inaccuracy of bombs of the early war (only 10% hit within 5 miles of their targets) thus far had kept the dams safe.  To prevent air dropped torpedoes from reaching the dams, large, steel submarine nets were installed below the waterline across the huge lakes.  Wallis designed the famous “bouncing bombs”, code named “Upkeep”, which could skip across the water and sink adjacent to the dams, detonating after they dropped thirty feet below the surface. Delivery necessitated low level, risky flying.

On the night of May 16, 1943 a 617 RAF Squadron of 19 Lancaster bombers attacked the dams with the “Upkeep” bombs suspended beneath their fuselages. The concussive wave from their explosives, magnified by the weight of the water above them, blew out large sections of the dams and flooded the valleys.  In addition to damaging the mines and power plants, 25 bridges were washed out.  Eight bombers and fifty three members of the “Dam Busters” squadron did not survive the raid, but their success was one of the most significant of the war.

In 2011, Hugh Hunt was intrigued by how Wallis managed to skip what looked like oil drums across the water.  Most of the 1940’s notes were lost in local floods in 1960, and no one had been able to duplicate Barnes Wallis’s achievement since.  After months of meticulous research, Hunt was ready to test his theories at a remote lake in Canada.  He assembled a team that included a dam engineer and contractor to build a 30’ high model of the original dam.  They poured hundreds of concrete 2’ x 2’ x 4’ blocks that interlocked like Lego blocks, overcoming numerous design, soil type and topography problems.  First they cut a deep channel from the lake then built the dam in the middle of it.  Once it was completed, the last barrier of soil separating the channel from the lake was dug out, filling the channel behind the dam. It took six intense weeks to complete.

Two weeks of field testing in the lake required Arnie Schreder, a bush pilot with thirty years of experience, to fly his two engine WWII vintage DC-4 over 200 MPH only 50 feet above the water to achieve the necessary angle and speed of entry for the barrel.  Flying that low put the plane at risk of being damaged or even broken up by the impact splash when the barrel hit the lake.  Experiments with cement filled barrels had proven that a backspin of over 700 RPM was necessary to make them skip.  In Wallis’s version, an engine had been fitted to the bomb release mechanism under the plane to achieve the necessary spin.  Hugh Hunt devised a low budget solution that required spinning up the barrel with a large commercial drill to 1,600 RPM on the ground, and then releasing it over the lake before it slowed below 700.

At the last minute, tests proved their commercial drop mechanism designed for forest fire fighting was inadequate for the task, putting the barrel into the water at an angle, instead of the perfect parallel it required.  Two days before the crucial final drop, Hunt rented a local machine shop to alter the arms on the mount, personally cutting and welding into the night.  The day before the critical drop, Jim Bellevance, the dam contractor, stopped the leaks and finished the dam.  As each difficult hurdle was cleared, the team celebrated with shouts and hugs all around.

On the day of the final test, explosives were lowered into the water adjacent to the dam. The Canadian government’s toleration of this motley team of scientists, flyers and builders did not extend to letting them fly over sovereign territory with live bombs.  Hugh Hunt’s promise to Arnie Schreder was that if he could manage to skip the 300 pound barrel five times down the lake, into the channel and against the dam, Hunt would detonate the charge beneath it.  The crew pulled back to a safe distance and tensely watched the dénouement of a year’s planning and effort.  Arnie flew tight on the right line and low.  The barrel released perfectly and bounced hard five times and into the top of the dam.  When the dam blew, Hunt danced like a child, hugged one of his engineers and pumped his fist into the air.  No one watching could see scientists as detached and undemonstrative.

I was reminded of my 3 year old granddaughter, Gianna.  She will spend a half hour painstakingly building a Lego structure with windows, towers, bridges, cars, stairs and doors. Her intense focus is a marvel.  When it is finally finished to her satisfaction, she will look at us and her creation with great satisfaction, then delight in smashing it to oblivion.  Absolute delight.  Exultation.  The joy of simply being human.

Fair is what we see, Fairer what we have perceived, Fairest what is still in veil.

Blessed Nicolas Steno.  Father of modern geology with significant contributions to anatomy and paleontology as well.  Danish Bishop. Born January 11, 1638. Beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1988.