The pros often say there is no such thing as writer’s block, there is only laziness. I think that may depend on how one experiences, or defines, the state of consciousness required for writing. For me, it varies, often depending on the context. Back when I wrote regularly for publication, what I mainly required was a topic, a word count, and a deadline, and I believed I could produce just about anything on time. That belief may or may not have been justified, but it worked pretty well most of the time, for the kind of stuff I was expected or contracted to write.

Under deadline, I don’t recall ever being blocked. Often, I would wait until some siege of particularly inclement weather (snow or heat) to wall myself up and produce produce produce. Chicago can be trusted to come up with such onslaughts often enough to keep the writer at work. Sometimes, I would use a long weekend for the same purpose. But working against the clock really helped a lot.

These days, when nobody is waiting on my production to fill space or meet some third-party obligation, it’s harder for me to get going. The boys in the basement are too busy playing video games to communicate with me. When they bother, often, it’s to complain about the brand of beer I’m stocking.

Sometimes, the problem is that I feel as if I’ve already said it all, at least about some particular subjects. Newt Gingrich, for instance. Back when he was just a twinkle in the eye of his Georgia congressional district (which my brother was living in at the time), I thought he was a flake, but a smart flake. I still do. Since then, he has made his bones as a serial wife-dumper and contributed significantly to my opinion of the GOP as a large closet rather than a big tent. He has joined the collection of people I would cross the street to avoid shaking hands with (along with Clarence Thomas, but that’s another story.) (People with whom I would cross the street to avoid shaking hands? See Churchill’s “the kind of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put.”) But mostly, I think I said it all in the 1990s.

Same goes for The Bell Curve, which is now enjoying revived discussion in the Atlantic by two of my favorite writers, Coates and Sullivan. I taught a course using it, and Plato’s Republic, and Stephen Jay Gould’s Mismeasure of Man, back in the 1990s, and essentially summarized the course for a review in a small newspaper around the same time. What more could I possibly say? See for yourself (http://dissociatedpress.blogspot.com/search?q=Bell+Curve) If they’d just give me some frakkin’ new material, maybe I could think of something new to say about it.

Okay, what about the GOP primary? Is Romney “inevitable”? Maybe. Maybe even in the general election, since it looks as if both sides might actually allow him to govern if he gets elected. Not sure any other candidate, on either side, meets that qualification. That may be all the voters want, these days. Chances are, they would even accept a third-party candidate if he seemed likely to meet that bar. Cain is comic relief; although it bothers me that some commenters see the stories about his affair as being all the more damaging because it allegedly lasted 13 years. I think 13 years is a plus. It indicates that Cain is capable of focused affection, unlike the afore-mentioned Newt, or Rudy Giuliani, who actually managed to cheat on his wife, his official mistress, and his girlfriend within the same short span of months. Maybe that’s just the cynical perspective of a divorce lawyer. But dammit, it’s all old news.

Okay, how about: which is worse, or better, the Tea Party, or Occupy Wherever? (A recent client of mine actually got busted with Occupy Salt Lake City, a mind-boggling concept.) That’s relatively new news, right? I think they draw their passions from the same cultural spring. They’re not quite as easy to tell apart as anarchists (dionysian) versus libertarians (apollonian.) They both have a very healthy dose of localism. And they both have a large dose of dionysian energy and not a helluva lot of apollonian intellect behind them. But they are both, in fact, slightly differing ways of saying “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any more.” Which dates back to Network, in 1976. And which in turn, I think, is a loose translation of “je m’en fichisme,” a French phrase which the New Yorker dates back to 1917 or thereabouts, but which I first encountered in the late 1950s, and which apparently has stuck in my memory because I was studying high school French at the time, and got a kick out of learning a French phrase that the good sisters undoubtedly were never going to teach me.

How about sexual child abuse among college football coaches? Nothing new there, except that none of them are vowed to celibacy, and some of them may even be Protestant. The scandal seems to have erupted on a slow news day and then taken on a life of its own.

Okay, breaking news—our Chicago public radio station has just announced that tonight it is “pre-empting the world” ! How’s that for nerve? Actually, it just means we don’t get to listen to the BBC world news program tonight, because the head of the Chicago public school system is coming on live to answer questions in the same time slot. Not a bad idea, but not exactly world-shaking (or even world-pre-empting) either. Maybe I’m the one with a case of je m’en fichisme.

Or maybe my real problem is that the boys in the basement, kind of like a newborn baby, sleep when I’m awake and available to write, and start jumping around when I’m getting ready for bed. Stephen King, never having been pregnant, seems not to notice the similarity.

Today, our former governor got sentenced to 14 years for corruption. His predecessor, I think, got six and a half years on similar charges. Two of their predecessors also did time, and another one was indicted but acquitted. More not-very-new-news. From now on, maybe I should plan to start writing sheer fantasy of various fictional and nonfictional varieties, just to keep the boys in the basement awake when I have time to write.

Oh, and one more bit of not-very-new-news: Kathleen Sebelius has overruled the FDA and chosen not to make the “morning after” pill more readily available. No doubt the Obama administration is choosing its battles carefully these days. But it bothers me that the religiously-affiliated lobbies that have worked so assiduously to make access to contraception more difficult have not uttered Word One about the evils of prescribing Viagra for unmarried males. So much for a consistent sexual ethic which is not to be viewed as anti-woman.

In the meantime:

Raisin Consciousness

Physicists say that time

Is what keeps everything from happening at once.

But holidays

Are what keeps everything from feeling as if it’s happening at once.

Holidays are like the raisins in rice pudding.

Without them, it turns into a glutinous untextured mass.

The raisins add texture,

And sometimes, sweetness.

A good holiday to you all. Peace and light,

The Wired Family

I’ll start with the religious version of this phenomenon, which I used as a Rosh HaShanah discussion last year under the title The Abrahamic Split. Some bibliographical and linguistic notes: Rabbi Michael Lerner is the author of Jewish Renewal. “Milhemet Mitzvah” is, in traditional Jewish thinking, a war which is commanded by the Holy One, as opposed to wars which are either optional or forbidden. The only one of these that everybody seems to agree on was the conquest of the land of Canaan by the Israelites on their way out of Egypt, the subject matter of the second through fifth books of the Bible. “Midrash” is how the various scholars explain what the biblical characters did between the installments of the text. What Woody Allen does at the end of this discussion is also midrash. Maimonides was a twelfth-century rabbi, scholar, philosopher, and physician, whose views of scripture often seem to come out of left field. So here it is. Next posting will be the political angle.

Over recent decades, we have become conscious of a double voice in the Jewish tradition, a voice on one hand of “love your neighbor as yourself” (Deuteronomy 6:5), and on the other of “remember Amalek” (Deuteronomy 25:17.) Those of us who follow political and religious controversies are all too aware that this double voice is duplicated in Islam ([Qur’an, Sura 2:256] “There shall be no compulsion in religion…. [Sura 18:29] Proclaim: “This is the truth from your Lord,” then whoever wills let him believe, and whoever wills let him disbelieve”, and on the other side [Sura 47.4] “When you encounter the unbelievers, Strike off their heads. Until you have made a wide slaughter among them…” Similarly, Christians can quote the Gospel of Matthew: ” Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous” (Matthew 5: 44-45) Or they can call down the wrath of Heaven in the form of Crusades, new and old. Before the Crusades, after all, was the Jihad. And before the Jihad was the Milchemet Mitzvah. After a while, some of us find the lazy way out. We decide that the Holy Blessed One was speaking only in the words of love and mercy. We who hear that voice, among all the Abrahamic faiths, can talk to each other. But we need pay no attention to those, in all three faiths, who hear the voice of cruelty and revenge. Rabbi Michael Lerner, in Jewish Renewal, even suggests that that voice is not the voice of God at all.

But the Tradition is not comfortable with that view either. We do not discard one of the divine voices in the Torah because it is cruel, or cast doubt on its reality because it was “only” a prophetic vision, nor because the Holy One was only joking. All of those are tempting, and we are honest with ourselves about the temptation. But in the end we side with the Sanhedrin, as it ruled between the strictness of the rabbinic school of Shammai and the humility and humanity of the school of Hillel: Elu v’elu divrei elohim hayyim—These and those are both the words of the Living God—but the law—our law, because we are only human–must follow the merciful school of Hillel.

CynThesis

To keep from swallowing it, I spat the ice cube back into the glass and stared at him. “That’s certainly the strangest offer I’ve had in a long time.”

He handed me a leaflet, English on one side, Yiddish on the other. “Meeting of Holocaust survivors,” it said. “July 3-8.” So much for my Fourth of July weekend in the Indiana Dunes. “Free, you said?” It had taken a while for the magic word to make its way from hearing to consciousness.

“Free, Malkeleh. My doctor and your grandmother won’t let me out of Chicago any more–some nonsense about my heart the doctor keeps saying. So if I can’t go, at least you can. Maybe get a story for that socialist rag you edit. Or even to sell to a real magazine.” He was always trying to bait me into a political argument.

Today it was too hot to rise to the bait. Besides, he was right–a story from a Holocaust survivors’ convention probably could be free-lanced for some fairly decent money. To hell with the Dunes. They’d still be there on Labor Day. “All right, Grandpa, I’ll go.”

He grinned broadly. “Wonderful. Here are your tickets and registration.” I stared down, dumbfounded, at the envelope he handed me. “I knew you wouldn’t turn down a free shot at a story.”

I sighed. Sometimes Grandpa was too much for me. “Now, look, Malkeleh,” he went on. “There’s one thing I need you to do when you get there. It shouldn’t take much time, and then you can do whatever you want. But promise me you’ll do this. There could also be another story in it. Okay?”

I nodded, resigned, and took out my notebook. He went on, “At all these conventions, they have a bulletin board or something, where people can try to find other people they knew in the camps or before, or at least find out what happened to them. There is someone I want you to find, a man by the name of Heschel Josefson. He may also go by the name of Tolya Baumann. I knew him in Auschwitz in ’44. Probably he isn’t even alive now–he was an old man then. If he is still alive, that would go a long way to prove what he told me then. But anyway, somebody else may remember him, and I would want to know that too. Somebody may know where he is now, if he is still alive. I want to know anything you can find out about him, anything.”

“And if I do see him?”

“Then tell him who you are, remind him that I met him in Auschwitz in ’44, in the carpentry section. He may not remember me. If he does, ask him whether the story he told me then was true. If he doesn’t,” he thought a moment,” Well, you are supposed to be a journalist. Interview him. Get everything out of him that you can. Everything.”

“But what am I supposed to be looking for? What did he tell you in Auschwitz in ’44?”

He shook his head, firmly. “If he will tell you, fine. If I tell you, you will think it is only an old man’s craziness. The whole point of sending you–the reason I would have gone myself if I could–was to find out if it is. You must hear it from him or not at all. If you do find him, and if he tells you, I want you to promise you will call me and tell me, whenever it is, day or night, right away. All right?”

I had ready visions of how Grandma would respond to a 2 AM call. “Only if you promise Grandma will let me talk to you whenever I call, day or night.”

He nodded firmly. “For this, even your grandmother will bend a little. I will see to it.”

I got up and kissed him on the cheek. “Thanks, Grandpa. If I do get a story out of this, I’ll give you credit somewhere, I promise.”

And that was how, a month later, I found myself walking into a reception hall at a small Catholic college (of all places) in southern New Jersey, to don a name tag that said, in English “My name is Molly Berman” and in Yiddish “Mein name ist Malkah Berman.” At the front of each room were a clock, a crucifix, and a No Smoking sign. It became readily apparent that no one at this gathering would pay any attention to any of them. As soon as I dumped my bag in my assigned room, I went to what these people called the Communication Center, to post a notice, in Yiddish and English, for Heschel Josefson, aka Tolya Baumann, last seen in the carpentry section of Auschwitz in 1944, or anyone who knew him. Then I stopped at a desk full of bright lights and whirring disks, where a motherly-looking woman was typing things into a computer, and gave her the same information. There was a bit more whirring, and then she looked up from the screen. “He’s not registered, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything. We expect a lot of walk-in registrations at the last minute. If he does come in, your message will be waiting for him.”

The program, as it turned out, was divided into three parts–some general speakers, mostly historians of various kinds, and two sets of workshops, one for survivors and one for the children and grandchildren of survivors. I marked off the things most likely to generate a good story on all three lists–I could use my press credentials to get into the survivors’ workshops if necessary.

My first marked item was a speech by a historian on revisionist views of the Holocaust–recent reinterpretations, included purported “debunkings”–from outside the Jewish community. He went through the usual stuff about Arthur Butz and the Canadian lawsuit, and the Neo-Nazis. “The other set of interesting revisionist developments is religious,” he went on. “A whole body of fundamentalist Christian thinking is starting to emerge, to the effect that, oh yes, we are perfectly willing to grant that the Holocaust happened, but what really matters is why it happened. And why it happened, my friends, according to these people, is that we continue to adhere to our foolishly obstinate rejection of their messiah. It used to be enough for just one of us to be condemned to eternal wandering. Then it was all of us, to live as a conquered, despised, and scattered people. Now the stakes have gone up again–six millions dead for theological wrong-headedness. Including, of course, large numbers of baptized Christians of Jewish extraction, at least one of whom is now a candidate for canonization by the Roman Catholic church, which should cast some doubt on the logic of this neo-fundamentalist argument. They are very vague about the next eschatological escalation, but no doubt it could involve exploding a nuclear device in Israel.

“There was a comedian a few years ago, whose name I do not remember. His routine also is fairly dim in my mind now, except that it was based on the thesis that, sometimes when you think all the people in your life are characters in the movie in your head, you discover you have wandered into someone else’s movie, with disastrous results. These neo-fundamentalists have cast us in their movie, without bothering to ask us first. What frightens me is that we may be called upon to do our own stunts!”

I spent the next day going to lectures and panels, and in between, interviewing some delightful women who gave me recipes and household hints from the old country. That evening, on my way back to my room, I saw a note on the bulletin board, neatly folded with my name on the outside. Inside, in neatly printed Yiddish, it said, “If you want to talk to Heschel Josefson, meet me at dinner by the soup kettle. If you want to talk to me afterward, bring a bottle of slivovitz. Not Israeli.” I spent the next half hour finding out from the lady at the computer where to find slivovitz and what kind to buy if not what she called the Israeli rotgut. I picked up a bottle of the highly recommended Czech version (apparently the problem was that the really decent plum brandy had come from Yugoslavia until the recent unpleasantnesses had ruined the business) and waited at the soup kettle. I was about to give up, when a leathery old man with very little hair stopped, looked down at the bottle, and said, “Good, the Czechs make the only decent stuff these days. I am Heschel Josefson. Or I was in 1944. Today, I call myself Emmanuel Bauman. “

“Malkah Berman. Hillel Berman’s granddaughter. He wants to know if you remember him from Auschwitz in 1944.”

He did. We talked about the camps, how he had survived and escaped, how my grandfather had done the same. We had dinner, and then went up to his room with the bottle and a couple of glasses purloined from the cafeteria. He sat back on the bed with his drink. I sat in a chair by his desk, nursing one glass of the remarkably powerful brandy through the whole evening, while he finished the rest of the bottle.

He spoke mostly in Yiddish, a very Germanic, almost courtly version of the language, and every now and then slipped into Hebrew, or English, and then back again. I will not try to reproduce it.

“I remember telling your grandfather a part of this story. We never had time to finish the conversation. If he wants to know the rest of it, now that there is time, I will be glad to oblige. Yes, you may turn on the tape recorder if you wish.

“This is now 1992. I was in Auschwitz in 1944. I was in London in 1962. I was in Kishinev in 1905, and then moved to Berlin. I moved to Vienna in 1925. I was in various places in Russia and Poland during the 19th century. I do not grow older. I do not get sick, thank heaven. I do not sleep very much. This gives me a great deal of time to read.”

I was skeptical, but willing to keep listening. “How do you make a living?” I asked. “Or are you retired?”

He chuckled briefly. “To get a pension, one has to have documents. For a while during the 1940s, I was a competent forger, but I prefer not to forge my own documents. I need very little to live on, and I can earn it doing odd jobs. I am still a sofer—I can write Torah scrolls and mezuzahs and ketubahs. I can do carpentry, but only small things, no heavy lifting. I make a few dollars these days as shammes—in English I think they say sexton—of a shul. I come in every morning to open the shul, clean up after services, things like that.

“Do you want to know where I have been for the last two thousand years, or where it all started?”

The last two thousand years. Was I in the middle of a Mel Brooks routine? Well, Grandpa had paid my way here to listen to this story. I was prepared to listen. “Where did you leave off when you were telling my grandfather? Do you remember?”

He filled his glass again. “I think I was working my way backward, and I had gotten as far as the Chmielniczki pogroms. Do you wish me to continue that way, or begin at the beginning?”

“Begin at the beginning, I think. If we have time, we can fill in the gaps later.”

“Very well, then. I was born in Nazareth. Back then, it was the back country. People there were poor, uneducated, the Romans were sucking the life out of the place. My father was a working man, a carpenter. My brothers were fishermen, except for my oldest brother Yakov, who also worked in the shop. We learned to read the Torah, learned our father’s trade, went to the synagogue to pray and study. And every now and then, we’d get to hear the rabbis arguing with each other, talking about how ordinary people could live by the Torah. We got to hear arguments between Bet Hillel and Bet Shammai. I was fascinated. I became—what do they call it now? —a groupie. Whenever I could get away from the shop, I went around with the rabbis from Bet Hillel. My father was not happy about it. Said it was bad for business. But my mother and my wife accepted it. Some of my friends and cousins and brothers starting going around with me, too. I wasn’t the only one like that, of course. In those days, a lot of young men were hanging out with the rabbis. It was the only way people as poor as we were could see beyond the poverty and the work and the struggle.

“When I was 30, my father died. My brother Yakov took over the shop and took care of our mother. For the first time, I felt free to do what I had worked for all my life, to be a rabbi, a preacher. I had what you would call a shtick, a routine. I told stories. Some of them were funny, some of them were kind of pointed. A lot of them were about people we all knew. That got people interested. Then they would listen to the d’var torah—connecting torah to people’s real lives. Mostly I followed Bet Hillel. Hillel always seemed like more of a mensch, he understood how hard life could be for poor people and he didn’t want to make it any harder.

“The first couple of years, I stayed in the back country, just walking around from place to place. My friends and a lot of my cousins and brothers came with me. My mother and my wife and some of the other women we knew traveled with us a lot of the time too, once they realized it was the only way they would ever get to see their menfolk. It wasn’t easy, but living at home was hard too. We felt as if we were doing something that mattered, not just trying to stay alive another day.

“The third year, we decided to go to Jerusalem. Going for the big time, you know?”

“’If I can make it here, I’ll make it anywhere’?” I sang softly.

“Exactly. Like coming off the road and going to Broadway. We went up at Succot—you know, the harvest festival in the fall, when everyone was commanded to go to Jerusalem if they could. It was exciting, noisy, crowded, for us greenhorns it was a little frightening. You know what they do now in shul at succot—everybody marching around waving branches and singing ‘Hoshia-na’? Back then, they did it in the streets. For a week, the city was one big parade. When we first came into the city, a couple of my younger cousins—just kids, never been away from home before—thought all the celebrating was to welcome us to the city. We teased them about that for a long time.

“We had a place to stay. Nothing fancy, but one of the men who sometimes came to learn with us had a place in the city and didn’t use it much. And then I started teaching on the Temple steps. A lot of rabbis did that, and people who had the time just came around and learned from whoever was there. Kind of like Washington Square, or Hyde Park or the Agora, you know? We got some tough audiences, but it was exciting. Sometimes somebody from Bet Shammai, or one of the priestly clique, or even somebody who wasn’t Jewish at all, would come around and heckle, or ask trick questions to try to make the rabbi look stupid. It was a great free show for the locals. The Romans didn’t like it, but mostly they left it alone, because closing it down would just have left a lot of angry young men walking around with nothing to do.

“Most of the time, my friends and I managed to stay out of trouble, for the first couple of months. Then things started getting tense. I got into a fight with a money-changer.” He stopped, thought a minute. “This needs explanation. People went into the Temple mostly to make sacrifices, and mostly they didn’t bring their own animals to sacrifice, because they were coming from a distance, and the animal could die on the way, or anyway get sick and skinny and ugly, and you wouldn’t want to sacrifice something like that. So instead you’d sell your animal—or whatever you sold for a living—and bring the money to Jerusalem. But the money was Roman money. It had Caesar’s image on it—” he spat, decorously, “And that made it treyf. You couldn’t bring it into the Temple. You had to either buy your animal outside, from the dealers there, or exchange your Roman money for Temple money and take that inside to buy an animal. Sometimes you got a better deal buying the animal outside, sometimes it was cheaper inside. But always, you got cheated. The moneychangers and the livestock dealers both overcharged because they knew people couldn’t go anywhere else. Like popcorn at a movie, you know?

“Anyway, this time, I saw an old woman going up the steps. She had a couple of pigeons in a cage. They looked pretty mangy, but they were obviously all she could afford, and she had brought them at least halfway across town. And one of those gonifs got in her way and tried to tell her she couldn’t bring her own birds in, she had to sell her birds and then buy Temple birds—and of course, lose money on both ends of the deal. Anyway, she had every right to bring her own birds; the guy was just being a schmuck. And this went on for a while. In those days I was young and hotheaded and strong and stupid. Finally I couldn’t stop myself, I just grabbed the gonif and threw him down the steps. That started a brawl between my friends and the priestly gonifs—couple of black eyes, my brother Yehuda’s nose got broken, and this friend of ours–his name was Shimon but we called him Rocky, a big dumb guy—knocked a couple of Temple guards unconscious. Oy, we were young and stupid then!

“After that, the Romans started watching us. Then some heckler, who I still think might have been a provocateur from the priests, showed me a Roman coin and asked if it was permitted to pay tribute to Caesar. I couldn’t even figure out who this schmuck was being paid by—I could say ‘yes’ and start a riot, or say ‘no’ and get arrested. So I just stared at the coin until finally the answer came to me. I asked him, ‘whose face is on this coin?’ ‘Caesar’s,’ the heckler said. ‘Well, you can’t use it in the Temple, right? So you can’t use it to pay one of those gonifs in the Temple, but you can use it to pay the gonifs in the Presidium. Or you can quit using cash at all—go off the books and let the gonifs make their money off somebody else.’ I think, after that, I was a marked man.

“Pesach was coming up, and the soldiers were everywhere. Three or four men couldn’t walk down the street together without being followed, or stopped, or searched. They called us things—the words they used, a lady shouldn’t hear, and our women had to hear it all the time. They grabbed at the women, roughed up the men for no reason, just to make sure we knew who was the boss. They want to prevent a riot during the holiday, they said. What did they expect, treating us like that?

“I think some Roman spy maybe infiltrated my chevra. I will never know for sure. We got together on the first night of Pesach, for the meal. It wasn’t quite like the seders today, but it was a big, important meal. We were nervous. I think we all had a feeling something bad might happen. We drank a lot of wine, and sang until late at night. When we went outside, we decided to walk for a while to clear our heads. My little brother Yehuda went down the street the other way from the rest of us, to take care of our tzedakah. There was a beggar down there that we always took care of when we could. On the way, Yehuda told Rocky later, he heard a couple of priestly thugs talking about the Romans arresting me.

“He ran back to warn me, but he was scared to death he might be too late. When he finally caught up with us, he shouted ‘Yoshi, Yoshi, thank heaven you’re still safe,’ and hugged me, from relief. And the Romans, who had been following us, moved in and arrested me. I think they couldn’t tell which one of us was me until then. Probably they thought we all looked like. Most of us probably did look alike, we were all related. But Yehuda blamed himself. By the time I came back, he was dead. They found him in a field with his guts cut open. We never found out how it happened, but I think if he hadn’t blamed himself, he would have been more careful.” He sighed.

“The soldiers were a brutal bunch with a nasty sense of humor. They took me back to the guardhouse first, and beat me up pretty badly. Then they whipped me. That was pretty much standard procedure, really bad. Then one of the officers came in and said, ‘Hey, guys, you know what this—‘ I won’t use the word, Malkeleh—‘you know what he’s here for? He says he’s a king, that’s what.”

“Did you really say that?” I asked.

He shook his head, disgusted. “No, of course not. I said the Holy Blessed One was our king, our only king. And once I said the Holy Blessed One who is our king is also our father, so that makes us royalty too, and we should never let the Romans make us feel like garbage. But they took that to mean I was claiming to be a king. So they got an old dead branch of leaves, tied it into a circle and put it on my head, threw a rag around my shoulders, and put a broom in my hands, and took turns bowing down and saying ‘All hail, your majesty.’ When they got tired of that, they started a really rough game of blindman’s buff. That went on until I was brought in for what they called a trial. It wasn’t what people today would call due process. Some man I’d never seen before said I claimed that Caesar wasn’t our king, that I was a king. Which was more or less true, even though I had tried to stay out of politics because my mother worried so much. Well, she was right. They gave me the usual sentence, crucifixion, and dragged me out.

“Let me tell you about crucifixion. It was a horrible way to die. It was very public, very visibly horrible. That was why the Romans used it, to make an impression that could last a couple of generations and keep the locals terrorized and quiet. They crucified people in very public places. Sometimes, you couldn’t go out for a walk in any city without seeing somebody nailed up. They crucified a lot of people. Men and women and sometimes even children. There was no single way to do it. They just used whatever was handy and did whatever they felt like doing, as long as it involved hanging somebody up on something, causing a lot of pain, and eventually killing him. They were great improvisers, the Romans.” He spat again.

“I was already weak and in a lot of pain. I was at the same time resigned to dying and very frightened of dying this particular way. I was praying like I had never prayed before. I knew that I wasn’t any better or more worthy or more important than any of the hundreds of other Jews who had been crucified for the Sanctification of the Name. So mostly I prayed for my friends and my brothers and cousins, and my wife and my mother, that they would be safe once I was gone, and that they could go on without me. I prayed for all of us—the Jewish people—that we would be delivered from the Romans someday. And, knowing what my rabbis had taught, I tried to pray the Romans, and the priestly gonifs, would repent and stop oppressing us.

“The particular way they crucified me was they nailed my feet to the post and then tied my arms to the cross-piece, which was on a level with my head. So if I didn’t stand up to my full height, I couldn’t breathe. But standing hurt, because of the nails.

“Usually, if they thought you weren’t dying fast enough to finish up before the end of their shift, they’d come along a couple of hours later and break your legs so you couldn’t stand, and then you’d suffocate. But I never got to that point. My mother, who was a very resourceful woman, knew some of the women in the Chevra Kadishah, the charitable society that tried to help prisoners. One of the things they did was come by the crucifixions when the soldiers weren’t paying much attention, and give the prisoners a special drink, from a sponge on a stick. The drink had some kind of anesthetic in it. What it was, I don’t know, maybe an opiate. The prisoner would lose consciousness, or at least not feel much pain. My mother knew some people with money—some of them learned with me—and she got enough together to get the women to give me an extra strong dose. I don’t know if they meant it to kill me, which would have been a real mitzvah, or just to make me look dead. They must have bribed the soldiers to look the other way, and the next thing the Romans knew, I was apparently dead. To make sure, they jabbed a spear into my side. It must have caught on a rib, because it did not bleed, so they figured that dead men do not bleed, so I must be dead, and they took me down.

“Another one of my mother’s rich friends had his own private mausoleum, in a garden behind his house, in a very exclusive part of the city. They took me there—they told me all this later, I do not remember any of it. The next thing I remember was lying on a stone shelf in a quiet cool dark place, and my wife sitting beside me, dripping water into my mouth.

“I stayed there for three days. By that time, the festival was pretty much over and the soldiers had gone back to their garrisons. I was smuggled back to Nazareth in a wagon full of carpets, and spent the next few weeks getting my strength back.

“After that, I lived a very quiet life. I went back to the carpentry shop, went to synagogue every week, but never taught again. My mother died, and then my wife. We never had any children. She had miscarriages and stillbirths, one after another. I think from what I have read since then it may have been an RH factor incompatibility. I couldn’t persuade her to stop trying, even though I told her again and again that she was worth more to me than ten sons. The last stillbirth killed her.” He wiped his eyes.

“The Romans got more and more oppressive. Finally we were at war again. Some of the people who had followed me were living in Jerusalem, but I had a very bad feeling and I sent them a message to leave. Some of them did. The city was besieged and sacked, and the Temple—“ he stopped, took a deep breath, then went on, “You know that part of the story. I was in Nazareth, but we heard as soon as it happened. I wanted to die. We all did, even people who had never seen the Temple. Just knowing it was there had meant we were still living in God’s world, only now it was gone, and where did that mean we were? I was seventy years old then, and ready to die.

“That was when I had the dream. I think it was a dream. It might have been a vision, maybe a hallucination. All I know is that I saw myself in the carpentry shop, but not as it was now, the way it had been when my father was alive and working there. I could smell the wood dust and hear the saw and see the sun coming in the window and feel its heat. Then the sun got brighter and brighter, until all I could see was the light. I heard a voice. First it sounded like my father, but then it became deeper and more intense until it made everything vibrate around me and swallowed me up. It said, ‘What you see now, happening to your people, is only the beginning. Because of you, your people will be hunted and exiled and murdered again and again, for as long as the damage you have done persists.’ I was completely farblondget, confused. ‘What damage have I done?’ I said. And then I saw myself, standing in front of a crowd years and years before, and I was telling them, as I had told them then, ‘I and the Father are one. Who sees me sees the Father.’ What I meant was, I am a human being made in the image of the Holy Blessed One. My face—and yours, and every other human face—is all we can ever see of the Holy Blessed One, and it is all we need to see.

“Then I was seeing a whole sequence of visions. People bowing down to pictures and statues of a young crucified man and praying. Jews being tortured and murdered and synagogues being burnt, and always on the banners of those doing the burning and torturing the picture of this same crucified man. And I realized that it was meant to be my picture.

“The voice said, ‘Until your people are free from the danger and the damage you have brought upon them, you will live and see the consequences of your own actions.’

“I was about seventy then. I have never grown any older since then. I have never been ill. I am quite sure that if an anvil fell on my head, or my bed burned while I slept in it, I would die. But otherwise, I am cursed to live a very long time.”

“And to wander?” I asked. “When did the vision say that?”

“It did not need to say that, Malkeleh. The wandering goes with the long life. If I stay in one place more than about twenty years, without aging or dying, people get suspicious. Being burned at the stake would kill me, too. So I move on, and change my name. I have used maybe ten or twelve different names. For a while I called myself Ahasuerus, but nobody could spell it. But yes, the wandering is a curse, because it has always taken me to wherever Jews are being tormented and murdered in a particular generation. Some generations, things are peaceful everywhere, and I can live out my twenty years quietly. But I know that if any horror is happening to our people, I will be there to witness it. For a while I tried to second-guess the curse, to move to a place where Jews were living in honor and safety. ”

“Like Spain in the 14th century?”

“Exactly. Or Germany after Kishinev. That was how I came to be in the camps where I met your grandfather. I do remember him. He was a tough young man with a good heart. I hope he is well now.”

“If he were well, he would be here instead of me. But he is comfortable, and I will tell him you remember. I think he did not want to die wondering.”

“Do you intend to publish this story, now that you have it? And if you do, will it be a news story?” He smiled, mischievously,

I shook my head. “You know better than that, Mr. Josefson. If this finds its way into print, it will be fiction or perhaps even fantasy, like all the other stories about you.” The bottle was empty. “How close are you to moving on again?”

“Probably another year or two. I have no idea what name I will use, or where I will go this time, or how I will make a place for myself there. Would you like me to get in touch with you when I decide?”

At first, like any writer about to lose an interesting source, I was about to say yes. Then I stopped and thought about it. My skin began to crawl. “No, Mr. Josefson, no thank you. But it has been a pleasure and an honor to talk to you. Good night.” I picked up the bottle and the glasses and took them back to the kitchen. On my way back to my own room, to call my grandfather, I passed the bulletin board, where a notice of tomorrow’s lectures was posted. One of them was titled, “Where will the next Auschwitz be?”

Jane Grey

Admittedly, the post-householder age is not what it used to be. There’s a lot more of it. When Prussian Chancellor Bismarck, back in the 1880s, introduced government-funded old age pensions, he set them up to begin at age 65—because by that age, the average German citizen was dead. Today, Social Security coverage would have to begin at 80 to accomplish the same goals. And most of us are still in pretty good health until shortly before death. The average American spends half of his total lifetime medical expenditure in the last six months of life. For the 14.5 or so years before that, most of us are in pretty good shape.

So here we are, we older Americans, with 14.5 years of able-bodied life ahead of us, free of workplace obligations, educated by experience to know which way the wind is blowing without the aid of a meteorologist, and, often, more economically secure than we have ever been before. “The last of life for which the first was made,” as Robert Browning presciently called it. We are the natural revolutionary cadre. We can no longer leave it to the college kids, who are overworked and economically terrorized, desperate to build a future they cannot imagine. We have the security. We have the education and experience. Above all, we have the time.

What we don’t have is a romance of revolution. The Arab Spring is rooted in societies where the median age is 30 or under—pretty much like “the ‘60s” in the US and Europe. In 1966, Time Magazine named the youth of the ‘60s its “Person of the Year.” We still think of revolution as the task of youth. That’s a luxury our country as a whole can no longer afford. The median age of the American population is now close to 40. And everybody under 60 or thereabouts is expected to be either working for pay, or trying to find work. We geezers and crones are the only people allowed to do anything else useful with our time, and even availed of the necessities of life while we do it.

My brief perusal of the coverage of Occupy Wall Street in New York and its parallel protests in other cities tells me the media see the protesters as “students” and “youth.” I’m a bit skeptical of this depiction. Back in The Day, I spent a fair amount of time in protests and rallies myself. I was at the time an English teacher, respectably married, and generally went to such events wearing skirt, blouse, and jacket, hose and shoes. Most of the people I hung out with were similarly employed and attired. But we never showed up in the coverage. Had there been one single long-haired scraggly hippie among us, he was, invariably, the one who would turn up on the evening news. So if the media want to define this round of protests as completely youth-oriented, mere facts won’t stop them. And if the Raging Grannies and the Gray Panthers and our other age-mates happen to be turning out in respectable numbers, we will probably be operating under cover of media-generated ignorance for at least the first year or two, and that may be just as well. Invisibility is a useful tool and an excellent weapon. Let’s hold off on public Dodder-Ins for a while yet.

In the meantime, I have just managed to get some assistance with taking care of Mr. Wired, so I will be able to spend more time practicing law and getting to Shabbat services. This is going to be an interesting year. Peace and light to you all.

Red Emma

But now we’re hearing a lot about the professional ethics of journalism, in the context of Jose Antonio Vargas, a respected reporter whose “coming out” as an undocumented alien was recently published in the NYT magazine. His parents sent him here when he was 12 years old; he was raised in California by his grandparents. He didn’t know he was illegal until he was 16, and used fake documents to survive after that. He published his story to contribute to the current debate about immigration. But in the course of doing that, he has raised some issues in a heretofore mostly dormant debate about journalistic ethics.

First, let’s talk about the basic ethical issues. “Vargas has been living a lie at least since he was 16. What does that do to his credibility, including his credibility as a journalist? How can we believe anything he says?” people are asking. Not unlike the people who asked how anybody could believe anything Bill Clinton said after he lied about having sex with Ms. Lewinsky. Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, as the Romans said. The Romans were pretty good liars themselves, probably including whoever coined that adage. (Not to be confused with my father, a strong believer in the professional ethics of his profession, accounting, who once told me “Schlock in uno, schlock in omnibus,” by which he meant that somebody who screws around with IRS is probably also violating OSHA, the Clean Air Act, the child labor laws, and the Ten Commandments. Which my own professional experience finds quite credible.)

“Living a lie.” Until recently, most homosexuals lived a lie, too. Before them, during the McCarthy era, many American leftists lived a lie. And before them, back into the earliest beginnings of recorded history, so did adulterers. At various times, the religiously heterodox have had to live as liars, in the face of the Inquisition or similar organizations. During the American Revolution, many patriotic colonials, on both sides, “lived a lie.” Possibly including many of our now-revered founding fathers. I doubt that we have become any more honest since then. What has changed are the penalties for homosexuality, leftist politics, unpopular religious and political beliefs, and adultery. At one time or another, all of them have been capital offenses. More recently, they have been grounds for being deprived of employability, social respect, love, friendship, and companionship. Whoever formulated these penalties probably wasn’t hoping to be able to eliminate homosexuality, adultery, wrong-headed religions, or leftist political thinking. They just wanted to make sure that anybody who engaged in them had to lie about it. Which made such people vulnerable to all kinds of blackmail, some of it quite lucrative for people “in the know.”

For an adolescent who has just discovered that his presence in the country he has lived in for most of his conscious life is illegal, the issues are more complicated. What should the kid have done? Turned himself in at the nearest INS office (as it was then designated)? I have no idea what its functionaries would have done, back then. Probably the local migra was as clueless as Vargas himself. They might just have sent him back to his grandparents, rather than deal with all the paperwork. Or they might have locked him up and sent him back to his native country (the Philippines, I think) without a word to his grandparents or anyone else who knew where he had been living. Either way, I have real trouble believing he had any ethical obligation to submit himself to the dubious attentions of INS or any other government agency.

But at some point, apparently, he did make a deliberate choice to remain in the US, go to college, and adopt a profession without first attempting to regularize his situation. I am willing to accept for the sake of argument the proposition that that particular profession required special attention to truthfulness, although you may imagine my skepticism. I am not willing to accept that the professional journalist is obliged as such to be more open about his personal life and circumstances than any of the rest of us. I assume that the profession includes as many adulterers, tax cheats, and guys who tell girls they meet in bars that they will call them in the morning, as any other occupation. I don’t recall hearing any of these nefarious propensities being punished or even deplored any more among journalists than among cops, trash collectors, bartenders, or janitors. I don’t recall any article in the Columbia Review of Journalism advocating that they should be. Am I missing something?

Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus is nonsense. We all know this. Every one of us has situationally relative standards of truthfulness. Most of us will lie about trivia, and about the details of our own personal lives and those of our near and dear. Some of us will embellish our resumes, and most of us in positions of responsibility in the business world will embellish the prospects of applicants for employment (“this job requires some typing, but you won’t just be a clerk…”) and virtually all of us will inflate our esteem for people we have just met. But we all know the difference between the level of veracity prevalent among ordinary reasonable persons and what we are likely to hear from real liars. We also know the difference between deliberate knowing falsehood and mere “reckless disregard” for the truthfulness of a particular statement (the difference, let us say, between Oliver North and Michelle Bachman.)

And most of us also know that society will cut some slack for the reformed sinner, or liar, who eventually comes clean, if only to encourage others to do the same. It’s sound social and moral policy. Some of us even realize that the immigration policy of the United States is more openly subject to the application of clout (in the form of private acts of Congress) than almost any other area of our government, and that Vargas, given his professional eminence, is very likely to benefit from such clout and be safely legalized by the time ICE (as it is now known) gets around to dealing with him. It would be nice if more of us were also aware that being in the United States illegally is not the same kind of violation as, say, mother-stabbing or father-raping, and should not subject those who commit it to the full penalties of outlawry in the original sense of the word. Enough already, let’s concentrate on real lying and real crime, especially among those who have had the benefit of being born in the USA.

Red Emma

What I mostly did, at least during August, was get my right hip replaced. The old model had been stiff, painful, and a damn nuisance, for somewhere between five and eight years. Eventually, it forced me to the routine use of a cane, which (impelled by vanity) I put off for as long as I could. I bought one that was cheap but reasonably good-looking, but when it started looking beat up, I was faced with the choice between buying a really nice but rather expensive one that would serve as a fashion statement rather than a mere mobility aid, and getting the underlying problem fixed. All my friends who had had replacements told me the latter was absolutely the way to go. Well, so far, I think they were right, and I should have had it done at least five years back.

It was more complicated for me than it would have been for most of my friends, because Mr. Wired is, as I think I have mentioned, disabled and bed-bound. For more background on this issue, google “family caregivers”, which will send you to, among other places, the National Family Caregiver Alliance. They do good advocacy and education, and will tell you lots of what you will almost certainly need to know at some point in your life, unless you are an unmarried orphan only child in superb health, who has a written guarantee from Destiny of dropping dead at the age of 90 from One-Hoss Shay Syndrome.

When the operation was over, I spent two or three days in the hospital before being sent on to rehab. The situation was complicated by the fact that my surgeon, whom I regularly met with in downtown Chicago, actually had his main office, and did all of his surgery, out in the far suburbs, in what columnist Bob Greene used to call the Land Beyond O’Hare. So when the hospital people brought me a list of rehab facilities, all of them were also in the far boonies. I picked the one my surgeon seemed to prefer, which turned out to be a good choice. And then I signed myself into it for rehab, and Mr. Wired for respite care.

What is respite care? you may ask. The earliest reference I can find in a cursory search dates to 1979. I shudder to think of how people managed before then. When a disabled person is cared for by a family member, the family member sometimes has to spend time doing other things. Like earning a living, or getting health care herself. So somebody else may have to fill in for the family member, temporarily. These days, that somebody else is often provided by the community or by various charitable agencies. That’s respite care. Sorry about the 6th-grade locutions here, but many politicians and other eminent thinkers have trouble grasping this concept, probably because they really don’t understand that family care and housework are real work, which takes time and energy and thereby makes that time and energy unavailable for other things. For the family to accept respite care from the community or various charitable institutions does not constitute free-loading or “dependency.” On the contrary, it is the only alternative to total dependency (or, of course, death.). But I digress.

My rehab is covered by Medicare, which has managed to figure out that there is no point in getting a hip replaced if one must then immediately go back to mopping floors or running marathons until it breaks again. But Mr. Wired’s respite care isn’t. At least, not so far as I have been able to figure out. Some of it, I covered out of the family budget, thereby postponing payment of other necessary expenses. Some of it was covered by the two congregations I belong to, bless them. Some of it was written off by the rehab people, bless them.

Anyway, the two of us booked into a very decent mid-level facility (name available on request), in a shared room, where the staff viewed us as “cute” and “adorable” because we have been married for 46 years and still want to room together. The staff did everything for Mr. Wired that I had previously done, and provided me with intensive physical and occupational therapy. It was kind of like a cross between Club Med and West Point. It even felt kind of like a second honeymoon. Three therapy sessions a day, for three-plus weeks, until I was able to get around on my own on a walker or cane, and go home for more therapy at home and outpatient.

The rehab facility, which is also a nursing home and does a bunch of other stuff for somewhat different populations, is fascinatingly stratified. At the top are the administrators. Then come the doctors, the physician’s assistants, the advanced practice nurses, the RNs, and the therapists, in roughly that order. After them are the CNAs (who used to be LPNs, orderlies, and nursing assistants, I think—correct me if I’m wrong, docs), and then the housekeeping people. One learns very quickly never to ask any of these people to do something normally done on a lower level, except in emergencies and with profound apologies. They are, however, surprisingly nice about doing lower-level duties in a pinch if the patient behaves well. (I have heard that this is not necessarily true in other facilities.) At the top of this great chain of being is the facility dog, Gus, who is beloved by all and accountable to none.

Therapy is provided by two kinds of people: physical therapists and occupational therapists. Physical therapists are almost all female, young, and very good-looking. I don’t know if there is some appearance requirement for the training or it just works out that way, and haven’t had time to ask anybody yet. They are very strict about making sure the patient does all the work required but doesn’t transgress any of the Sacred Precautions. (For hip replacement, the Precautions are: no bending at the waist/hip tighter than 90 degrees, no crossing the legs, and no turning the toes inward. I assume there are other precautions for other kinds of problems.) My friends who have undergone intensive p.t. characterize the therapists as Florence Nightingale meets Drill Sergeant.

Occupational therapists are a broader mix of age, gender, and appearance. They need to know what the patient’s Outside World is like, so as to devise solutions to real-world problems. Florence Nightingale meets McGyver. (A friend of mine who was an o.t. some years ago had to perform her miracles for, I kid you not, a paraplegic pimp. She could not bring herself to explain the details.) I love Occupational Therapists. They are tremendously ingenious. They have figured out how I can do most of what I had been doing for Mr. Wired, and for the Wired Cat, without transgressing any of the Precautions.

Of course, real life is different from fantasy, dreams, hallucinations, and planning, because it can surprise you. There are always things the patient turns out to need to do that never occurred to her or even to Florence N. McGyver during therapy. For me, most of those things are on the floor, or in large bags. Dirt, trash, and laundry. Fortunately, for those things, the city’s Department of Aging provides us with a homemaker for at least the next four weeks. She, and the visiting nurse, both turned up last Friday to get organized. Which was kind of breathtaking for me, but I think will work out okay.

Life is also complicated by the fact that the Wired car isn’t working. Its exhaust system barely avoided dropping onto the pavement the last day I drove it before going to surgery. I figured that having it off the road for a month would give our mechanic time to get it taken care of. For some reason, it hasn’t. My surgeon says I’m okay to drive now, except when under the influence of painkillers, but it doesn’t matter, because the car isn’t. Maybe it’ll be done this coming week? Who knows?

But meanwhile, back at rehab—on my last day, we had to work out getting the two of us home. For me, it would have been no big deal. Mr.Wired, who can’t stand or sit for long, has to travel by ambulance. Medicare doesn’t cover this except for emergency or medical appointments. They paid part of the cost of getting him to the facility, but the necessity of eventually getting him back seems to have slipped their collective mind. Our first thought was to dose him up with painkillers so he could travel in a wheelchair by Medi-Car with me. But that plan broke down on the issue of getting him back into our apartment, which is on the first (European-style, thirteen steps up) floor, with no elevator. Medi-Car drivers (citing, of course, liability issues) don’t carry people upstairs. Only ambulance drivers do that. And the ambulance, from the boonies back into Chicago, would cost $500 per person, plus $5 per mile. Our next thought was getting the Medi-Car to take us to a site in Chicago, such as the local hospital where we get most of our care, and then get picked up there by an ambulance. The hospital (citing, guess what?, liability issues) vetoed that. Finally the social service people at the rehab place talked the ambulance into taking us all the way home for a mere $500 flat fee. (It’s amazing how reasonable that can be made to sound, compared to the original $1300. This is worthy of a separate post on how “reasonable” and “outrageous” get defined. I’ll write it someday if nobody else gets around to it by then.)

Ultimately, we not only got home in reasonably good shape, but the next day, I got to court for a final hearing on a federal case that has gone on for eleven years. In ensuing posts, I intend to cover communications technology in rehab—use of the iPhone, satellite TV, and some of the books our friends brought us to while away the time. Anyway, it’s good to be home and to have a keyboard. And thanks to Our Leader for not expecting me to do full-length posts on iPhone with my thumbs.

Also, since this is the beginning of the Jewish month of Elul, in which we tie up our moral loose ends before the New Year and the Day of Atonement, I ask forgiveness of all of you guys for anything I may have done to offend y’all, and I forgive any of you who may have offended me. Peace and light.

CynThesis

Well, never mind that constitutional law expert Lawrence Tribe says “Caylee’s Law” would probably not pass constitutional muster, as it seems not to further any properly authorized federal purpose. The public’s problems with Caylee’s case are pretty much the same problems they had with the OJ trial, and the Susan Smith trial, and a whole bunch of others in between. Specifically:

1) The public saw a completely different narrative of the crime than the jury did. The trial narrative the jury saw was flattened out by the exclusion of all kinds of evidence that was fair game for the media outside the courtroom—stuff that one side or the other or the judge on his own motion excluded as irrelevant, prejudicial, or just plain boneheaded, but that the public absorbed in order to formulate its understanding of what really happened. Having formed that narrative, the public either can’t understand that the jury saw an entirely different set of facts, or is also outraged that the jury didn’t get to see and hear what the rest of us did.

2) The public, like Aristotle, believes that character is destiny. It is mere commonsense to believe that bad things are done by bad people. Proving that a defendant was a bad person is sufficient to convict her of a bad act. And, moreover, even if she didn’t exactly commit that particular bad act, we are better off if she gets locked up so she can’t commit her inevitable next bad act in our community.

3) The Anthony trial certainly did a good job of proving that Casey was, if not a bad person, at least a serious wack job. So, apparently, are most of the members of her family. (BTW, who was Caylee’s father? Apparently we don’t know. If we are to believe, as Casey’s attorney tells us, that Casey was a victim of incest, is that somehow connected to the paternity issue? And why was nobody else in the family speaking to Casey’s brother? Could he have been the child’s father?) The jury may have found the oddities of Casey and her family grounds for mitigation of responsibility. The public, however, seems to think they are, if anything, factors in aggravation. Crazy people scare us. Lawyers may think that proving a defendant too wacked-out to be responsible for his crime means he should be released. The rest of us think that a defendant who is that wacked-out is too dangerous to be out on the streets. A middle position, that such a person should be locked up for appropriate treatment, is hard to sell, because most of us know just how difficult it is to get somebody hospitalized for mental illness for long enough to treat it adequately. As a result, the two largest mental health facilities in the country now are the Cook County Jail and the Los Angeles County Jail.

4) It seems most likely that the jury simply found the evidence insufficient to convict Casey of anything but lying to the police. Ever since the OJ trial, we have been hearing jeremiads about how demanding juries are getting, demanding not merely absence of reasonable doubt, but an airtight case, in order to convict. The case against her was largely circumstantial, and just about every element of the prosecution’s evidence was susceptible to explanations other than Casey’s guilt.

5) It would be interesting to run a study, over the last 40 years or so, of how judges and juries treat mothers charged with killing their children, as opposed to fathers charged with the same offense. OJ, unfortunately, was not an infanticide case, so the gallows humor with which the public followed it doesn’t necessarily prove anything, as compared with their attitude toward Casey, or Susan Smith, or even Andrea Yates. But it is easy to suspect that the double standard cuts especially hard against women in these cases.

6) Which, for some reason, brings to my mind Sir Walter Scott’s novel, The Heart of Midlothian, which turns on a Scottish law against infanticide, passed in 1690: “Any woman who shall conceal her being with child during the whole time of her pregnancy, and shall not call for, or make use of, help in the birth, is to be reputed the murderer, if the child be found dead or missing.” Sir Walter, BTW, had training in the law, and bases the novel on an actual occurrence in his day (early 19th century.) His account admittedly stretches credulity, by demonstrating that a woman could be guilty of the conduct described in the Act and still bear no responsibility for the death of the child, and indeed, that the child might ultimately turn out not to have died at all. Which is pretty much the kind of argument Casey’s attorney made, and the jury accepted, though the public didn’t.

7) But I guess what I find most disturbing was the reaction of the crowd outside the Orlando courthouse when the verdict was announced. Two generations earlier, it would have been the makings of a lynch mob. The crowd was demanding “justice for Caylee,” as if that poor child were not far beyond whatever human justice could offer, and now in the hands of the Ultimate Mercy. The prosecution kept claiming to “represent the victim,” which I believe is a serious mistake in prosecution philosophy. The victim, or some family member, is free to file a civil case against the putative criminal who victimized her, and to receive whatever justice is available in monetary terms. In increasing numbers of criminal cases, civil justice is also being pursued, and that is all to the good. But the goal of a criminal case is not justice for the victim. It is justice, and safety, for the community, which is who the prosecution is really supposed to represent. The damage to the victim, and even to her family, can never be made to “unhappen.” No amount of punishment of the victimizer will accomplish that. If we cannot accept that in some way the Holy One will someday wipe away all tears from our eyes, we have to live with the injustice and hurt that the criminal has done to the victim and to all of us.

The footage of the actual trial raises a couple of interesting questions:

a) Illinois is one of the few states that still forbids televising most court proceedings, on the usual grounds that the camera will bring out the ham in all the participants. I find those arguments unpersuasive. In the first place, with or without cameras, trial lawyers are hams. It is part of their job description. In the second place, most people, whether professionals or merely parties and spectators, get used to the camera enough to mostly forget about it, very quickly. And the Founding Fathers believed very strongly in public trials (as public as the technology of the 18th century could make them, anyway) for very good reasons. We need to know what our justice system is doing in our name, for our presumed benefit, and on our money. Seeing it at work should not be a privilege reserved for professional spectators such as journalists, or dedicated amateurs such as retiree law buffs.

b) And finally, the law says that the jury is entitled, or even required, to take into account, as evidence side by side with smoking guns and weeping witnesses, the demeanor of the defendant. I watched Casey go from grave to stone-faced to laughing to crying and round about again, and I wondered what conclusion the jury was drawing from her demeanor. I have heard people say that a defendant “looks guilty” for smiling, or not smiling; for showing emotion, or not; for responding with visible anger to being bad-mouthed by the prosecution and its witnesses, or not. If you get a chance, watch Meryl Streep’s performance in “A Cry in the Night” (drawn from a true incident, also about a mother accused of killing her child) and how much dislike she draws from the public for her apparent lack of emotion. But hysterics can have the same result. The problem, so far as I can tell, is that we have no idea how an innocent person behaves. Maybe this is because we really don’t believe in innocence, at least in the context of a criminal court. If the defendant is charged with Aggravated Mopery, or whatever, that generally goes pretty far to convince us she is guilty. The fact that the Anthony jury managed to transcend this presumption speaks astoundingly well for them. Maybe there’s hope for us after all.

CynThesis

It has become fashionable to conclude from this factual situation that the market economy is not only natural to the human personality and society, but a Good Thing, as Cellar and Yeatman (authors of 1066 and All That) would say. In fact, that is a wholly separate question.

Virtually every religious tradition recognizes that human nature is flawed. Many of the things that are natural to the human being are Bad Things. The depth and reparability of the flaw may be defined differently in different theologies, but even the most optimistic—that of Rousseau, for instance—cannot escape the reality that this fundamentally good, free being has somehow managed to produce a society everywhere that puts people in chains. Even those who have defined our world as the best possible do not necessarily believe it is good. So why do we so optimistically list the market economy among the good things humanity has invented (like indoor plumbing and the smallpox vaccine) rather than the obviously bad things (like war and torture) or even the dubious achievements (like the beeper, the boom box, and the singing commercial)?

I suspect the answer is that the people most interested in encouraging the acceptance of the market economy as a Good Thing are those who profit from it the most—who can also, by definition, afford the biggest PR budget. They can even afford to disguise a large portion of that budget as subsidies to academic and managerial research.

From the point of view of, you should pardon the expression, the Judeo-Christian tradition, the undiluted market economy is nothing short of an abomination. One of the central premises of that tradition is the ultimate importance of every human being, made in the divine image and likeness. The market economy takes the position that everything is either a commodity, with a market value, or worthless. The market value of a person is defined by what s/he owns or by what s/he can produce for other people. Those people who own nothing and can produce nothing (because they are too young, too old, too sick, or lacking any marketable skills) are worthless. The undiluted market economy, as adumbrated by Ayn Rand, for instance, has no room for them. The minute such an economy feels any strain of scarcity—in a war, for instance—it will dispose of them, or at any rate do nothing to keep them alive. A pure market economy whose members feel affluent at the moment may continue to support these “useless mouths”, either from force of habit or sentimentality or most likely from the diluting influence of some non-market theology, whether it be what we normally recognize as religious, or one of the more secular theologies of socialism or communism. But we define that generosity as a luxury, a failure in our otherwise clear-headed realism.

However, our society (like almost every society on the face of the earth) still likes to think of itself as being based on non-market religious or quasi-religious values. Like just about every other society, except some of the socialist- and communist-related ones, it is not willing to recognize its religious tradition as being anti-market, even in part. It is not willing to recognize even the possibility of conflict between its supposed moral foundations and its economic system, much less to try to explicate a right relationship between the two.

That’s a relatively new problem. In the Middle Ages, all the major Christian theologians had something to say about the right conduct of economic affairs. So, by the way did the eminent Muslim theologians of the same period. So did the rabbis who compiled the Talmud, and their successors who commented on it until fairly recently. We now consider that kind of discussion fundamentally illegitimate, or at any rate pointless. Marx and Lenin are largely responsible for this problem. “Scientific socialism” means that economic systems no longer require moral underpinnings, any more than the law of gravity does. What the followers of Marx and Lenin seem to have missed is that the scientific laws of economics (whatever they may be) can be misused by bad people just as the law of gravity was misused by the people who dropped Jan Masaryk out the window. And science has no argument to offer against this misuse.

In fact, whether Marx and Lenin were conscious of it or not, the “scientific socialism” they formulated was a theology, a statement of how things ought to be rather than how they are. By refusing to recognize that reality, they undermined of their own ideas, and the legitimacy of any moral critique of the natural behavior of human beings and human societies.

We need to take up that hallowed task again, from the point of view of the tradition with which I am most familiar, the Jewish tradition. Since our society still pays lip service to the “Old Testament” as part and parcel of the Christian tradition to which it also pays lip service, must of this analysis is at least consistent with the official values of the larger society.

So let’s begin with Genesis I, 27: “in the image of God He created them…” The creation narrative has always been interpreted in the Jewish tradition to point to the infinite significance of every human life. One of the reasons God began the creation of the human race with a single couple, we are told, is to emphasize that saving a single life is equivalent to saving the whole world. The rabbis tell us that we are all descended from Adam so that we cannot tell each other “my ancestors were greater than yours.”

From there, we can look at the Book of Deuteronomy, with its extensive social legislation. It makes two main social policy points: 1) no property is permanent. Slaves are to be liberated every seven years. The Jubilee, every fifty years, requires the return of land to its original owner and the forgiveness of debts. What we call ownership is more of a long-term lease from the real Owner of everything—God. And 2) several classes of people are under special divine protection: the widow, the orphan, the stranger, the poor, and the Levite. What they have in common is that they do not—cannot—own land, which, in an agrarian society is the only link to the means of production. Lacking that link, they are given instead certainly divinely-legislated rights: in the case of Levites, to tithes and sacrifices; in the case of the widow, the orphan, the stranger, and the poor, tithes, gleaning, and the leftovers of the olive and grape harvests, as well as the right to be paid before sundown on the day their work is performed. Arguably, this was the first affirmative action legislation. The author recognizes that it is not natural for human beings or human societies to grant these rights to their least fortunate, most “worthless” members. So the book drives its legislation home with dire threats of the penalties for disobedience—military defeat, exile, drought, famine, plague and disorder.

This theme recurs among most of the major prophets—Isaiah, Jeremiah, Micah, Amos. They inveigh against “doing what comes naturally”, whether the lawless behavior in question is sexual, culinary, juridical, or economic. The whole point of being the Jewish people is not “doing what comes naturally” in any of these areas. That is our side of the Covenant. The Other side is that, if we violate our obligations, we will suffer exile and destruction—but eventually (after we clean up our act) we will be forgiven and restored.

The Jewish tradition has its own way of talking about “doing what comes naturally.” We call it the Yetzer ha-Rah, the evil impulse. Some Christian theologians equate it with original sin. But the rabbis are a lot more pragmatic. “If it were not for the evil impulse,” we are told, “No one would ever get married, produce children, do business, or build a house.” In short, “doing what comes naturally” is essential to individual and collective human existence. “Natural” economic behavior—the market economy—is one of the essential things the evil impulse enables us to do. But the evil impulse has to be carefully controlled, by the Yetzer ha-Tov, the good impulse, and the divine commandments. Including, of course, the commandments protecting poor and powerless people.

In short, the impulses that power the market economy are no worse than sexual libido, but they are also no better. The market economy does an efficient job of creating and distributing wealth among the people who can afford to participate in it. It does a terrible job of providing for people who can’t afford to participate. Which is fine, as long as we have some other way to provide for such people. As long as we do not make claims for the market economy beyond its real competence.

Today’s discussion of welfare revolves around the words “work” and “responsibility.” They are the shibboleths of both sides. Nowhere in the rhetoric of either side do we hear words like, “the widow, the orphan, and the stranger,” still less any intimation that people in these categories have a divinely-legislated right to our support. Nowhere do we see any recognition, on either side, that some people—the very young, the very old, the disabled, the unskilled—cannot reasonably be expected to work or bear responsibility for their own support, and nonetheless have a right to live and therefore a right to our support. We have allowed the market to dictate not only our economy but our morality. We would be better off deriving our morality from Newtonian physics (which tells us that what goes around comes around) or the kindergarten code (take turns, clean up your own mess, don’t hit), the game of checkers (as enunciated by the Baal Shem Tov—make one move at a time, always move ahead rather than backward, but when you get to the final rank, you can make any move you want), or even the sign the Chicago Transit Authority used to post at the back door of buses: “Wait for light, then push.” The market economy is driven by the flaws in our nature. To make a livable society, we must place that economy under the limits set by our better natures and the commandments.

CynTbesis

I have a client who now resides in a nursing home and is in the early-to-middle phases of dementia. She is also a sci-fi fan, so whenever I clean out my bookshelves, I take the proceeds to her. I am discovering that, while that improves the quality of my life, it doesn’t necessary change hers all that much. Because one of the few so-far-unheralded upsides of dementia, at least in its early phases, in that you get what I have always wanted—multiple opportunities to read the same book for the first time.

Among the books I have especially wanted multiple shots at in this way are John Brunner’s line of speculative novels: Stand on Zanzibar (1968), Jagged Orbit (1970), The Sheep Look Up (1972), and The Shockwave Rider (1975.) And I spent a fair amount of time wishing there was somebody around right now who writes that kind of stuff, preferably in batches rather than an occasional one-off like Orson Scott Card’s Empire and Hidden Empire (okay, that makes them a two-off, I guess.) I think I’ve found one—John Barnes, author of Mother of Storms, Directive 51, and The Man Who Pulled Down the Sky.. Unlike Brunner and Card, he does dabble in the Irwin Allen school of writing (one damn disaster after another), but in the process he takes a serious look at the trajectories of current social, technological, economic, and political phenomena. Consider this a recommendation.

CynThesis
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The Unknowing God

For a period that lapped over into my college years, the existentialists told us that the human race is engaged in a frantic effort to become god. As I think about it these days, I am increasingly convinced that many of us already are god, and we are failing to notice it (and falling down on the job) to a dangerous extent. Me, for instance. Most of my days I spend working, on the phone, on the computer, at the office, in court, at home running around finding things (and of course losing things and not realizing it till later), shopping, and so on. If in the middle of all this, I sit down and call the Wired Cat, and she comes over to me, sits down at my feet, and reaches out her front paw to pat my leg, to which I respond by reaching down to rub her head between her ears and down to her neck, for her this is a religious experience. Her divinity has taken time out from managing the universe to communicate with, relate to, and pleasure her. Sometimes, like most divinities, I do things she really doesn’t like, such as taking her to the vet. She seems to accept this as good for her in some way that I understand and she doesn’t. She’s lucky enough to have a divinity who doesn’t do any of the awful things to her that one hears about on Animal Planet (Mr. Wired is an Animal Cops junkie and a hard-core groupie of Anne-Marie Lucas.) But if it did, she’d probably accept that too, as most domestic animals seem to. The ones who have been too utterly traumatized retreat into the animal counterpart of atheism—the feral life. (Atheism is not actually the right word—I am not the first to wonder if there is a word for somebody who believes in the Holy One but just doesn’t like H* very much.)

And of course, to our children, and to most of the children we come into extended contact with (as teachers, for instance, and maybe as pediatric health professionals), we are also god. (Note the lower-case initial, used—as Grace Slick explained when she named her kid “god”—so we won’t get stuck-up about it.) So far as the kids can tell, we (especially parents but adults in general to a considerable extent) run the universe, and occasionally take time out from doing that to interact with the kids, for better and for worse.

The Bible actually plays with this idea. For instance there are two or three references to judges as gods. (One suspects some of the human authors of these passages spent some time on the bench themselves—certainly ordinary human judges have always tended to see themselves as some kind of deity.) Moses is told that he is going to be “in the place of G-d” to Pharaoh, and that his smoother-talking brother Aaron will be his “prophet.”

And there is a story about a rabbi (Hasidic, I think) who, upon being told that somebody he knew was an atheist, said something like “Well, that’s good. It means that if he sees somebody who is poor or in trouble, he won’t just say ‘G-d will help him,’ he’ll get up and actually do something for the guy.” Even professionally religious people may have a kind thought for people who, not believing in a divinity, feel obliged to fill in for H*.

Which, if you accept the hard-core deterministic schema of the behavior of all non-human entities, means that human beings and their actions are the only preserve of free will in the universe, and thus also the only rational place for the divine to operate, by inspiration and impulse. Many rational religious people have trouble believing that the Holy One has ever made the sun stand still or water run uphill, but will accept a divine push toward extraordinarily decent human behavior—in other words, that we are not exactly in the hands of G-d, sometimes we are the hands of G-d.

Jane Grey
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War is the End, part II

Does anybody else remember the study that told us we could have won the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people by giving $10,000.00 to every man, woman, and child in that country, and still have spent less than the $686 billion we actually spent on the war? (Another sourcing problem, obviously.) Anyway, Cecil Adams, of “The Straight Dope” has heard from a history scholar who says the North could have bought and freed all the slaves in the then-US for something like $72 billion in present-day dollars, which was also considerably less than the overall cost of the Civil War, especially if you reckon costs and damages on both sides, which of course all ultimately came out of US GNP. This once more tells us that wars are almost never “about” their official causes and purposes, which could almost always be implemented a lot more cheaply, easily, and with less violence. War itself, or some so far unknown concomitant of war, makes it an irreplaceable element of human polity.

Red Emma

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Life Among the Condonauts

I just opened a mysterious envelope from a fellow resident of our condominium building, to discover that, as a member of the condo association, the Wired Household is being sued by another member of the association and by our really heroically estimable janitor, for the alleged misconduct of the erstwhile chair of the association, our upstairs neighbor. This is a peculiarity of condo law-—in order to obtain a remedy for some misbehavior by condo association officers, you have to sue the association, even if you are a member of it. Which means that you are, in a sense, suing yourself. You are certainly costing yourself money. All the costs of defending the suit come out of the pockets of the residents. We could even wind up paying the costs of the other side. This damn thing has got to be mediated, ASAP.

I am the only attorney I know who lives in a condo (for 31 years now) and has never served on the board. I really want to keep it that way. Lawyers are easy marks for pleas of communal obligation. But condo boards are a time sink. I just sent a frantic email to the plaintiffs asking them to please consider mediation. Yikes!

CynThesis

I have actually benefited from affirmative action on two different counts–as a woman, and as a Hispanic. Every now and then that gives me a slight edge on the competition. That doesn’t bother me particularly. I’ve been discriminated against as a woman more times than I can remember (or, probably, than I have ever known) beginning at least with my first permanent job, which I obtained only by giving the right answer to the employment agency’s question about what method of birth control I used. (For those too young to remember that era, the right answer was not “none of your damn business.” It was “the Pill.”) On another job, I was sexually harassed before there was even a word for it, much less a cause of action. So I figure any benefit I get from the double x chromosome is just a matter of restitution.

I have also been discriminated against, I’m pretty sure, for being Jewish. This, of course, gets me no affirmative action points, but that kind of makes up for the fact that I do get points for being a Hispanic (both my parents were born in Cuba, and my family is essentially bicultural) even though I have never been discriminated against for that fact. (As a matter of fact, since I am a natural blonde and speak English without an accent, nobody knows I am Hispanic unless I choose to tell them, and I normally do that only where I will get extra points for it. Which is generally in jobs where my ability to speak Spanish really is a plus.) And most recently, I have probably been discriminated against for my age, which is illegal, but for which I get no affirmative action points. So I will take those points where I can get them, without embarrassment and without feeling that my competence is in any way in question.

I went to a good college and made Dean’s List my last two years. I scored in the 98th percentile on my LSATs. But when I applied to law school, I was admitted to a school in which 45% of my class was female, in the mid-’70s, and rejected by another school which had a far lower percentage of female students in that year. The evidence seems clear; I was almost certainly admitted to the former because of my gender, and rejected by the latter for the same reason. My objective qualifications were equally irrelevant to both schools. Probably all those qualifications got me in the second school was a rejection further along in the process than some of my less-qualified sisters (and my totally-unqualified brothers.)

Realistically, of course, nobody ever challenged my academic competence, or that of any other woman I know who has been accepted into any academic program under an affirmative action program. Even the most neanderthal of male supremacists will grant that women on the average do better in school, except in mathematics and the hard sciences, than men. The reason women have historically been discriminated against in academic admissions is that we are not expected to be able to do much of anything useful with our knowledge and academic credentials after we get them.

So the affirmative action issue really only gets raised, where women are concerned, when one of us is promoted to a position of power, beyond the glass ceiling. Then the innuendoes fly–quotas, sleeping with the boss, the supervisor is a leg man, somebody’s sister, somebody’s daughter, somebody’s wife. Most of us, however, would still rather live with the humiliation of possibly having been promoted because of our gender than with the equally potent and much less remunerative humiliation of not having been promoted for the same reason.

Stephen L. Carter’s misgivings

Which is why I have trouble with people like Stephen L. Carter. His Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby is a thoughtful and well-written book with a good sense of the complexities of inter-ethnic relations in the United States of the 1990s. But I have a few problems with its basic premises. Don’t expect the Establishment to make special standards for you, he tells young African Americans. It’s humiliating that we should think we need that. Meet their standards, beat their standards, and demand to be accepted on their terms. For Blacks and Hispanics, who are popularly expected to be less competent in academic achievement, it may actually be a source of humiliation to be admitted to a respectable school under an affirmative action program because of their ethnicity. However, most of the “affirmative action babies” I know would say that it is no more humiliating than being rejected because of that same ethnicity, and pays a lot better.

Carter’s advice takes the Establishment’s claims of devotion to meritocratic standards at face value. Which gives a lot more credit than it deserves to an Establishment that has never really believed in those standards, and has espoused them only when doing so would serve the purpose of keeping a particular group of outsiders outside.

The reason Carter has not seen this hypocrisy is that he is looking at the experience of only one group of outsiders. If he were to consider that of three others–women, Asians, and Jews–whose ability to meet meritocratic standards has rarely been questioned by anybody, he would discover that the Establishment has never had any difficulty excluding them, or severely limiting their upward mobility, on some other grounds.

The merit system: now you see it, now you don’t

For instance, in the 1930s, Harvard Medical School discovered that, if academic qualifications were to be the only criteria for admission, its entire entering class would be Jewish. Indeed, they would have had to double the size of the entering class to get in more than few token gentiles. So they suddenly discovered that there was more to being a physician than “mere” academic excellence. Arbitrarily, they set a quota of 22% for Jewish applicants, a quota which remained in effect until the ’60s, when, like the Jewish quotas in many other educational institutions, it was replaced with a larger and slightly less transparent quota on students from large cities, especially New York City, under the rubric of “geographical distribution.” Those quotas still exist today in many schools.

The experience of women is in some ways even more blatant. When my classmates and I graduated from college in the early ’60s, we frequently looked for jobs before and between graduate school, in the public sector. We took the civil service exams, scored at or near the top, and were repeatedly beat out for the actual jobs by men who had scored a good deal lower, before using their veterans’ preference points.

When I was at college, in the late ’50s and early ’60s, it was a truism, repeated to us regularly by faculty and admissions honchos, that men scored higher than women on the math section of the SAT, but women scored higher than men on the verbal section. It didn’t, of course, get us much. There were fewer places available for women at good colleges (or any other colleges, actually) than for men, and less scholarship money available for us. So nobody thought much about it. But twenty years later, when the various controversies about the biases of the SAT arose, I was startled to hear everybody, on all sides of the dispute, saying that women scored lower than men on both sections of the SAT. Even the American Association of University Women, in its otherwise beautifully researched study of discrimination against women in education, could only conjecture about what happened, by the end of high school, to the clear lead in reading and verbal skills, that girls have over boys in elementary school. What had happened–a couple of very well-hidden and quickly forgotten news stories revealed–was that in the middle ’60s, ETS changed the verbal section of the SAT, substituting scientific essays for one or two of the fiction selections in the reading comprehension test. Female scores promptly dropped to their “proper” place–visibly below those of their male classmates–and have stayed there ever since.

Asians are the most recent victims of similar policies. Several West Coast schools, most notably the University of California at Berkeley, have experimented with ceilings on the number of Asian students within the last 10 years. A university, the administration proclaims, has the right to put “diversity” above “mere” academic excellence.

In short, the history of other groups of outsiders suggests strongly that if an entire generation of African American young people followed Carter’s advice to meet meritocratic standards and beat them, the Establishment would have no trouble finding some other pretext to exclude all but the most presentable tokens among them from the precincts and perquisites of power–either by changing those standards, or suddenly discovering the greater importance of some other factor.

That does not, of course, invalidate Carter’s advice. It does make one wish Carter were a little more careful about truth in advertising, however. I tend to prefer Malcolm X’s more honest approach, when he advised his followers to read anything they could get their hands on and get all the education they could, even if all it got them was the proud position of best-educated person in the unemployment line.

Was there ever a merit system?

Before the phrase “affirmative action” ever found its way into our vocabulary, the reality of affirmative action was already as American as apple pie. After all, what else is veterans’ preference, if not an affirmative action program for (in the post-World War II era in which it was born) men? What else is seniority, if not an affirmative action program for older workers? I have never known a veteran, or an experienced union man, who was in the least ashamed to have benefited by those affirmative action programs.

Nor should they be. Before the rise of the meritocratic mythology of the ’70s, any American old enough to have held a job at all knew that nobody gets a job solely by virtue of being the most qualified candidate for it. In an economy which has never even aspired to full employment, most available jobs have several well-qualified candidates on hand. Most employment discrimination does not involve hiring an unqualified person in preference to a qualified one, but rather choosing between more-or-less equally qualified candidates on the basis of factors unrelated to the job.

The Jewish Establishment’s position

Many established Jewish community organizations, like many other high-minded, principled opponents of affirmative action, really believe that they are espousing a pure meritocracy as against a system of arbitrary choice. To take that position, they have to presume that, before the 1969 Civil Rights act, all male Jews had the jobs they were entitled to, by reason of their meritocratic qualifications. They also have to presume that all Jews are male, white, anglo, and middle-class and have nothing whatever to gain from affirmative action. They have to, in fact, ignore the experience of considerably more than 53% of the Jewish community. They even have to advocate giving back to the same academic and professional Establishment that subjected Jewish males to explicit, exclusive quotas until the early ’60s, the power to do it again.

Two cheers for affirmative action

Most supporters of affirmative action see it as a lesser evil. But, unlike its opponents, they recognize the realistic alternative as a greater evil. Affirmative action is not a matter of substituting for a pure meritocracy a system of choices among qualified candidates according to standards unrelated to job or scholastic requirements. It is a substitution of one set of arbitrary choices for another.

The alternative to affirmative action in real life is the divinely-ordained and legally-protected right of the employer or supervisor to hire people who remind him [sic] of his best friend, or people who fit his stereotyped image of the “proper” telephone operator or waittress or whatever. We know that most people who get jobs get them for reasons only distantly related to their ability to perform. In fact, the most serious downside of affirmative action, so far as I can tell, is that it denies future generations a really useful index of professional excellence. When I meet a doctor, or a lawyer, or a CPA, who is female or non-white (or better still, both) and who got his or her professional credential before 1970, I know I am dealing with a superlatively qualified professional, because only the best women and non-whites were able to survive the discriminatory professional screening processes in those days. For professional women and non-whites with more recent qualifications, alas, I have to take my chances, just as I would with a white male of any age.

So we sincerely hope that the people into whose hands we put our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor are in fact qualified to do their jobs. But as a practical matter, we know that we are at least as much at risk from incompetents who were hired or promoted for being the boss’s brother, or being tall, or not being Hispanic, or having an officious-sounding British accent, as from those hired or promoted for being female, Black, or Hispanic–quite possibly more, since the latter are usually watched more closely. In fact, these days I am beginning to suspect that American-born doctors can no longer be presumed to be as competent as doctors with foreign accents, since the latter are subjected to much tougher screening standards.

Well, maybe two and a half

We may see ourselves as winners or losers, and we may attribute our situation to other people or to our own deserts. Human beings generally have never had any trouble taking credit for their own good fortune or blaming others for their misfortunes. More recently, “new age” thinking has led many of us to take the rap for our own misfortunes, often in truly preposterous ways (“How have I created this reality?” the cancer patient asks.) But it is difficult for any of us to admit that our good fortune may be the result of some totally unearned “break” from the outside world–being white, for instance, or male. That is the real threat of affirmative action–that it requires us to consider the possibility that (even if, as is likely, we aren’t as well off as we would like to be) we haven’t “earned” even the few goodies we have. For those of us raised in the Jewish tradition, which teaches us that the Land promised to us by the Holy One is ours only on loan, and that we were not chosen to receive it because of any particular merit on our part, that shouldn’t be too much of a leap. It should make us more willing to grant similar unearned goodies to other people. “Use each man according to his deserts,” says Hamlet, “and who should ‘scape whipping?” Or unemployment, as the case may be. Even us, the few, the proud, the overqualified.

Red Emma