John McCain's Concesssion

    As with William F. Buckley, I’ve never agreed much with the politics of Sen. John McCain of Arizona.  Indeed, I believe he placed the conservative movement and the Republican Party on a slippery slope when he chose Sarah Palin as his running mate in 1968.  But I nonetheless respect him as a person and (unlike Donald Trump) I admire the manner in which he handled his capture and imprisonment during the Viet Nam War.

    While McCain can from time to time be as uncooperative and obstructionist as the next Senate Republican, as Evan Thomas pointed out in the New York Times (10/23/16), “as a defeated presidential candidate in 2008 he showed grace and respect for democracy.”  Late on election night that year, McCain made this statement:

    “This campaign was and will remain the great honor of my life, and my heart is filled with nothing but gratitude for the experience and to the American people for giving me a fair hearing before deciding that Senator Obama and my old friend Joe Biden should have the honor of leading us for the next four years.”

    Think we’re likely to hear anything remotely resembling those sentiments on the evening of November 8, 2016?

      

William F. Buckley, Jr.

    Remember Bill Buckley — the conservative inquisitor par excellence?  Remember how he sparred with liberals on Firing Line, his TV program for 33 years (over 1,400 episodes).  But remember also how he did so firmly and cogently, but always respectfully, rarely if ever insulting or trashing his guests.

    Richard Brookhiser, a later editor of National Review, the conservative bi-monthly founded by Buckley, said that Firing Line “was the grandfather of today’s cage fight media—but its descendants are illegitimate.  Buckley hosted and roasted guests fo the left (and right) to find out what they thought.”

    Indeed.  In a recent book on Buckley, Open to Debate: How William F. Buckley Put Liberal America on The Firing Line, Heather Hendershot writes:

        "In short, Buckley came to realize that one could have very interesting conversations, and even become very good friends with, people whose belief systems were very different from one’s own.  This kind of personal realization was not strictly necessary for a political pundit, a conservative movement organizer, an editor of a journal of opinion, or a nationally syndicated right-wing columnist.  You could, theoretically, perform all of these rolls from within an isolated bubble filled only with your own ideological compatriots.  But a willingness to engage generously with political opponents would make you a better host of a public affairs TV show.  Of course, Buckley did not need to be friends with all of his liberal and left-wing TV guests, but it would have been boring if he had simply attacked and disdained them.  He succeeded on his program Firing Line for more than thirty years  because he was open to guests, open to their differences, open to debate."

    Not too many Buckleys around today, are there?  Personally, I’m a liberal and rarely agreed with Buckley politically.  But my sense of nostalgia is great.  I wish he were still with us.

There's More To Do

Two days after the nomination of Hillary Clinton as the Democratic candidate for president, the Traverse City Record-Eagle printed an editorial published in The Detroit News lauding that accomplishment and the advances of women generally in politics and business.  Clinton’s victory “shattered the glass ceiling” of male domination of candidates for president, said the editorial, and constituted “an accomplishment American women in the 20th century could only dream of.”  So far, so good.

But then the editors turned to the subject of women in lower levels of politics, specifically women elected to seats in state legislatures.  That number “has skyrocketed since the 1980s,” they said, “growing from just a couple of hundred nationwide to 1,812 in 2016.”  That in itself is true, but before we suffer a shoulder separation patting ourselves on the back, we should note the fact that this year there are 7,383 seats in state legislatures around the country and that the 1,812 filled by women amount to only 24.6% of the total.  Moreover, women occupy only 20.9% of the seats in the Michigan legislature (31 of 148), the state thus ranking a puny 34th among the 50 states.

As far as I know, women comprise somewhere around 50% of the total population of both the United States and the State of Michigan.  There’s more to do.

The Somme, A Hundred Years Later

July 1 of this year marked the one-hundredth anniversary of the start of the Battle of the Somme in World War I, one of the most horrific military engagements in the history of man.  The occasion caused me to retrieve from my bookshelf Peter Hart’s definitive history, The Somme: The Darkest Hour on the Western Front (2008).  In the preface, Hart makes this statement:

    The political imperatives of defending the bloated empire, the endemic racism and all-embracing casual assumption of moral superiority of the age, the overwhelming reliance on blunt threats ro achieve what might have been achieved by subtle diplomacy—these were all part of the British heritage in 1914.

Ring any bells?  That was Britain a hundred years ago.  Think United States today. 

Sound Familiar?

    Sam Tanenhaus is an American historian, biographer, and journalist who writes often for The New York Times and the New York Review of Books.  His biographies include those on Louis Armstrong, Whittaker Chambers, and William F. Buckley, Jr., which he’s currently working on.  He has received both a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize for his work.

    In a recent essay in the Book Review section of the Times, Tanenhaus asks “if there is a useful precedent for this most unpredictable of election seasons.”  He rejects references to 1978 when the Republicans had to settle their differences at a divided convention, and to the riotous, violent Democratic convention in Chicago in 1968.  Instead, he turns to 1936, the year Franklin Delano Roosevelt was lining up to run for his second term, a year when populist demagogues were also in evidence in American politics.

    In 1936, Tanenbaum writes, “the country was lifting itself out of the Great Depression, helped by the policies of Franklin Roosevelt, but the climb back to prosperity was long and slow, and a mood of populist unrest began to steal across the land.”  He then cites to the description of the period offered by the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.:

        The followers of the demagogues mostly came from the old lower-middle classes, now in an unprecedented state of frustration and fear, menaced by humiliation, dispossession, and poverty.  They came from provincial and traditionally nonpolitical groups in the population, jolted from apathy into near-hysteria by the shock of economic collapse.  They came, in the main, from the ranks of the self-employed, who, as farmers or shopkeepers or artisans, felt threatened by organized economic power, whether from above, as in banks and large corporations, or from below, as in trade unions.  To a considerable degree, they came form the evangelical denominations; years of Bible reading and fundamentalist revivalism had accustomed them to millennial solutions.  They were mostly men and women of native-born old-immigrant (Anglo-Saxon and German) stock; if [Father Charles] Coughlin’s [right-wing] Irish Catholic supporters seemed an exception, the exception was more apparent than real, for the Irish were beginning to see themselves as part of the old immigration rather than the new.  In sum, they seemed to represent Old America in resentful revolt against both contemporary politics and contemporary economics.

Sound familiar?


References:

Sam Tanenhaus, “What  Do This Season’s Political Books Tell Us About the Election?”, New York Times, Book Review Section (June 16, 2016).

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., The Politics of Upheaval 69 (Houghton-Mifflin 1960).

We Have Been Warned

     Anne Applebaum  is a well-regarded journalist and author.  She studied at Oxford and the London School of Economics, married a former Foreign Minister of Poland, and is an expert on Eastern Europe and Russia.  She wrote about her view that Britain’s decision to leave the European Union is a warning to America in her bi-weekly foreign affairs column in The Washington Post three days after the British referendum.  Here, in part, is what she said.  Pay attention.

        I do realize that it’s facile to talk about the impact on a U.S. election that is still many months away, that it’s too simple to say ”first Brexist, then Donald Trump.”  But there is a way in which this election has to be seen, at the very least, as a possible harbinger of the future.  This [British] referendum campaign, as I wrote a few days ago, was not fought on the issues that are normally central to British elections.  Identity politics trumped economics; arguments about “independence” and “sovereignty” defeated arguments about British influence and importance.  The advice of one-trusted institutions was ignored.  Elected leaders were swept aside.  If that kind of transformation can take place in the U.K., then it can happen in the United States, too.  We have been warned.

Applebaum’s right.  We have been warned.

Norway Anyone?

    There’s an article in the current issue of The New York Review of Books [March 5, 2015] entitled “Norway: The Two Faces of Extremism” by Hugh Eakin, a senior editor of the NYRB.  The article deals with Norway’s manner of dealing with the enhanced threat of Islamist extremism that is plaguing all of Europe right now, with the unusual background twist occasioned by the country’s most devastating act of terrorism in its history which occurred in the summer of 2011 involving the massacre of 69 people, many of them children, at a summer camp on a small Norwegian island.  The twist comes into focus when we learn (or remember) that the terrorist, a Norwegian right-wing extremist, was not a Islamic jihadist at all, but an avowed enemy of Islam, upset because of the country’s “multiculturalism” and lax immigration laws.

    Notwithstanding these terrible events and the prospect of further terrorism in Norway and elsewhere from whatever source, the author of the article gives a brief description of what Norway’s all about.  It’s that which I thought you might find of interest:

    By almost any conventional measure, Norway is a blissful anomaly. According to the International Monetary Fund, the country’s GDP per capita is now more than $100,000—more than Qatar’s and second only to tiny Luxembourg’s; remarkably for an oil country, it also has low income inequality, thanks to a highly redistributive tax system. Norway is the most democratic country in the world, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit’s measure of sixty different political criteria, and it outperforms any other nation on measures of gender equality. Along with [Erna] Solberg, the current prime minister, many of the most important cabinet members are women, including the ministers of finance, defense, trade, environment, and social inclusion.

    Nor does the country suffer from the urban malaise that plagues many of its neighbors. Its small population occupies one of the largest countries in Europe, and its uncrowded cities are known for their clean water and air. Despite vast oil resources, Norway gets 99 percent of its electricity from hydropower and produces so little waste that, along with Sweden, it has begun importing garbage from other countries to fuel its incinerators. Almost every child is educated through the public education system. Norwegian prisons are considered models of enlightened rehabilitation. And on measures of “social trust”—the degree to which people say they trust others and their governments—Norway routinely ranks first or second in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Since 2008, the tax returns of every citizen have been published in a searchable online database.

The point of this is:  Norway Anyone?

Military Sex: The Few, The Proud, The Deplorable

Our local paper recently carried a syndicated preview of "Lauren," a three-part dramatic series forthcoming on YouTube which focuses on sexual assaults of women in the military. The article contained a couple of alarming statistics: it appears that the Defense Department has estimated that nearly 3,200 sexual assaults were reported in the military last year and, what’s more, 86 percent of sexual assaults of women each year go unreported.

What are the implications of these statistics?

Well, for starters, we can conclude that the 3,200 assaults actually reported in 2011 were just 14 percent of the total — which means that there were a total of 22,850 sexual assaults of women in the military that year. This, in turn, translates to about 1,900 a month, or 63 a day.

There were a reported total 214,100 women in the U.S. armed services last year. Assuming that none of them was assaulted more than once, it means that 10.7 percent of all military women were assaulted that year. If 2011 is a representative year, in other words, more than one in 10 military women are sexually assaulted each year.

In 2010, the year of the last census, there were a total of 143,300,000 women over the age of 12 living in the United States. That year there were an estimated 207,750 sexual assaults, reported and unreported, committed against that population (one every 2.5 minutes); again assuming that none was attacked more than once, about .15 percent of all women were victims of sexual assault. These figures, monstrously high as they are, pale into comparison with military figures for, statistically, military women are over 70 times more likely to be sexually assaulted than civilian women.

As I see it, these numbers give rise to two glaring implications. First, the U.S. military is a terribly violent and dysfunctional organization when it comes to the treatment of women and to sexual behavior within its own ranks. It’s not surprising that sexual offenses against women soldiers are notoriously inadequately investigated and prosecuted for, if they were, we’d probably have to pull out of Afghanistan just to raise the manpower.

And second, why would any woman even remotely consider joining the military? Why?

USA! USA! Let's Hear It For Patriotism!

The National Football League held its two conference championship playoff games in January, the winners of which played in the Super Bowl two weeks later. One of the games was between the New England Patriots and the Baltimore Ravens. It was an excellent game, won by the Patriots in the final seconds following a failed field goal by the Ravens that would have tied the game and sent it into overtime.

Before the game there was the obligatory over-produced, flamboyant singing of the National Anthem. This time it was sung by Steven Tyler who regaled a large New England crowd and a huge national television audience with an absolutely terrible rendition. (As one post-game critic put it, "If he’d been auditioning for ‘American Idol,’ he wouldn’t have made the cut.") Anyway, as Tyler was winding down, there was a "fly-over," not of the usual three or four jet fighter planes, but a single unmarked, dark, mysterious, very large, what seemed to me like, cargo plane. But whatever it was, no question, the thing was big. As the plane lumbered off into the overcast sky, the camera panned to a close-up of the face of Tom Brady, the Patriot’s all-pro quarterback, as he looked skyward, and then to the team’s monster star tight end, Rob Gronkowski, who could be seen mouthing the word, "Wow."

Right. Wow. But there’s not much news in that, is there? Patriotism, military prowess, and sports, particularly violent sports, all coming together for a glorified patriotic celebration in the middle of one of America’s favorite pastimes, professional football, is nothing new. (And what did you say is the nickname of the New England team again?) It’s been true for years. It’s just one of many of the constant reminders that we live in a warrior culture, that we are a warrior nation. And I’m not referring to "warrior" in the good, archetypal sense.

I was reminded of our obsession with patriotism earlier that Sunday upon reading a feature article in the Traverse City Record-Eagle. The Record-Eagle, if you’re not familiar with it, is a pretty fair newspaper for a small town but, like everyone else in this part of the Midwest, it too is enamored with patriotism and everything military, real or imagined. For example, at the mere drop of the hat it will run a long, front-page spread about what I call "war nostalgia." You can always count on it on Memorial Day, the Fourth of July, Veterans Day, and Labor Day, but also on days commemorating Pearl Harbor, the Battle of the Bulge, the Normandy invasion, as well as the Civil War, World War I, the Viet Nam War, and our current wars. And I’ve left some out. Really. Think of a way to ennoble a war, a battle, or a military skirmish of whatever kind, and the Record-Eagle will be there.

The article of which I speak was comprised of several short items, the first of which was entitled, "Grateful Citizens Salute Army Veteran." Here it is in its entirety (the name of the subject of the article is changed):

"John Doe, of Traverse City, wears his Army hat everywhere. He’s a veteran of World War II, serving in Hiroshima and Nagasaki from 1945 to 1947. He had it on in Glen’s on East Eighth Street before Christmas when a young girl thanked him for his service. He finished his shopping, only to have the cashier tell him his groceries were already paid for. Later he went to Applebee’s with his wife and a neighbor. They all ordered shrimp dinners ($9 each) and coffee, and a fellow diner paid the bill."

"I’m proud of serving our country," Doe said. "And I guess others are grateful, too."

Being a contrarian, my reaction to this story is that I feel very sorry for Mr. Doe. Imagine, wearing your Army hat everywhere 65 years after the war ended. Not only is that sad in itself but, according to the story, Mr. Doe didn’t even serve during the fighting part of the war. You either remember or know from the history books that we dropped a couple of rather dreadful bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9 of 1945, that the Japanese surrendered on August 15, and that we didn’t enter mainland Japan in any numbers until September. At that point, the Japanese people were thoroughly beaten, annihilated really. There wasn’t any more fighting, certainly not in Japan. Which is to say, the war was over before Mr. Doe began his military service.

Actually, since I think it’s a little strange for a guy to wear his Army hat 65 years after the fact, I would have felt a little squeamish even had Mr. Doe been in combat on Guadalcanal, Tinian Island, Iwo Jima, or Okinawa, or had fought aboard one of our ships or planes in the Battle of Midway, the Coral Sea, or the Philippine Sea. But, fortunately for him, he just missed those engagements. In Japan in the fall of 1945, the real danger was becoming infected by the radiation left by the bombs we’d dropped. The role of the military at that time was not fighting a war but doing police and administrative work, the work of post-war occupation; this is not to say that it was unimportant but that it was less like fighting a war than it was like working a job. At the time, those military jobs weren’t any more dangerous than the ones held down by the fathers of some of my friends back in Indiana in the Gary steel mills.

But yes, I am grateful in a way that Mr. Doe was there to do whatever he did in Japan. I would have felt a lot better, however, had he not worn the hat the other day and, upon being asked about his WWII experience, he had said something like: "Me? I really didn’t do much. Heck, I got there when it was all over. If you want to express your gratitude, express it to the guys who were in combat on Guadalcanal, Tinian Island, Iwo Jima, or Okinawa, or on a ship or a plane in the Battle of Midway, the Coral Sea, or the Philippine Sea." Had he done that, I would have been a little less uncomfortable celebrating his military service.

The point is that, in an era of unending American exceptionalism, unusual, excessive forms of patriotism are not only accepted, but honored.

Why? Why the hell do we do that?

Lessons for Gentlemen

Gentlemen:

There were two items of interest in my local paper recently (and, yes, they really were in the paper). Each of them provides gentlemen such as us with a lesson from which we can all learn.

1st Item

The Sheriff of Box Elder County, Utah, reported that a duck-hunter, who had climbed out of a boat and was attempting to move some decoys, was shot in the butt by his dog. The man had laid his gun down in the boat and his dog stepped on it. The gun went off and the man was hit with 27 pellets of birdshot in the backside from 10 feet. The Sheriff said that the man, who was treated at a local hospital, would have suffered more serious injuries had he not been wearing waders.

Lesson: When duck hunting, gentlemen, don’t trust your dog with a gun.

2nd Item

A woman was arrested in Otsego County, Michigan, who allegedly attacked her husband after she found him watching a movie that featured nude women. The report said that the woman became upset with her husband’s “viewing choice” and, after first striking him in the groin, went to the kitchen and grabbed a knife and threatened to cut off his genitals. This prompted the husband to call 9-1-1, which he did after his wife first took the phone and threw it at him. The woman was arrested for aggravated assault, domestic violence and phone tampering, and was jailed.

Lesson: When watching porn, gentlemen, don’t trust your wife with a butcher knife.

We're the Greatest!

News Item: "The Obama administration is moving ahead with the sale of nearly $11 billion worth of arms and training for the Iraqi military despite concerns that Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki is moving to consolidate authority, create a one-party Shiite-dominated state and abandon the American-backed power-sharing government. The military aid, including advanced fighter jets and battle tanks, is meant to help the Iraqi government protect its borders and rebuild a military that before the 1992 Persian Gulf war was one of the largest in the world; it was disbanded in 2003 after the United States invasion." [New York Times, front page (December 29, 2011)]

With this infusion of hardware, the Iraqi military will be just as it was before the Iraq War. Just like it never happened. Right?

Whatever. In any event, the regular U.S. military is leaving Iraq (sort of) and winding down in Afghanistan (maybe), but our good old military-industrial complex keeps right on hummin’ along.

Aren't we the greatest!

The Poor Get Poorer, and The Rich Get Dumber

According to Forbes Magazine, Bernie Ecclestone’s fortune is now somewhere around $4.2 billion, up $200 million over last year. He is the fourth wealthiest Britisher alive. He’s also the CEO of Formula One Management (the world’s leading motor sport business), and has owned all or a portion of the company and its predecessors for 40 years. From what I can tell, Bernie is considered a formidable capitalist, a tough, smart businessman, with emphasis on “tough” and “smart.” (On the other hand, when asked about Danica Patrick’s entry into automobile racing as a driver, Bernie quipped, “she should be dressed in white, like all other domestic appliances.” Not smart, Bernie. Not even dumb. Stupid.) Bernie is now 77 years old and recently divorced from his Serbian wife of 25 years, Slavica Radic Ecclestone. Savica is (still) a gorgeous former Armani model 28 years younger than Bernie and about foot taller (Bernie is 5-3). Bernie and Slavica had two children together, Tamara (27) and Petra (22).

Petra Ecclestone, who has “long platinum locks and a Barbie doll figure,” is best known for her “anti-recessionista tendencies“ — which, I’ve learned, have to do with “dealing with the recession but living life to the fullest.” You get the picture. She collects Hermès Birkin bags, favors fur, Alaïa frocks and lives in a $90-million manor in the Chelsea area of London. Petra has had a lot going on lately: she was recently married, just purchased a home in Los Angeles, and is about to embark on a business career in women’s fashions (a previous venture into men’s fashions went bust).

Petra was married in August to James Stunt, her boyfriend of four years, known as “an entrepreneur and a reputed party boy.” Petra managed to spend $5 million on the wedding, the venue for which was a 15th-century Italian castle. The highlights of the event included: a $130,000 Vera Wang wedding gown, performances by Eric Clapton and Alicia Keys, and white roses from France. Petra views herself a “teetotaler,” a “homebody,” as well as a “businesswoman” (“my full-time job isn’t just blowing my parents’ money”). Nonetheless, Petra was recently seen with her friend Paris Hilton at the trendy, ultra-expensive Beacher’s Madhouse, a nightclub in Hollywood, where the New York Post reported that one evening last April Mr. Stunt spent $200,000 on Cristal (an ultra-expensive vintage champagne recently associated with rap and hip-hop culture) for their friends. So much for staying home and hanging around the house.

Even so, Petra has managed to maintain a pretty low profile in the States — until recently, when she purchased a place to live in Los Angeles for her and her husband. (They’ll spend their time alternating between LA and London.) She hit upon a mansion in the Holmby Hills section of Brentwood, a virtual palace originally designed and built by television producer Aaron Spelling and his wife Candy, and which ever since has been referred to as “Spelling Manor” or “Candyland.” Spelling, a formidable capitalist in his own right (the producer of a slew of exceptionally popular television programs, and eventually the owner of a large number of entertainment production and distribution companies) had purchased the property in 1988, demolished the existing mansion previously owned by Bing Crosby, and constructed in its place what was and still is the largest private home in Los Angeles County. Its amenities include: 57,000 square feet of living space, 123 rooms, an entire floor of closets, a kitchen in which “you can cook for two or 800,” a screening room, a gym, a bowling alley, four gift-wrapping rooms, a flower-cutting room, a beauty salon and barber shop, the usual tennis courts and swimming pool, plus four two-car garages, 16 carports and a parking lot for 100 vehicles.

At the time it was built, the architecture critic for the Los Angeles Times called it one of the region’s worst projects of the 1980s and “a sad commentary on the distorted values that have taken the architectural form of monster mansions at a time when tens of thousands of persons are homeless.”

Nonetheless, when placed on the market in 2009 the asking price was $156 million, making it the most expensive private residence in the country. Petra, however, explained that she paid “kind of half-price,” which made it “a great investment at the end of the day.” (She reportedly borrowed the purchase price from her mother.) Happy with the purchase, Petra described it as “homey and livable.” (As for the price, Petra must have taken a lesson from her father who, in 2004, sold one of his London residences in Kensington Palace Gardens for over $92 million, at the time making it the most expensive house ever sold. Bernie, however, never lived in the place. Which, of course, if you’re rich, makes it an especially cool transaction.)

Her wedding behind her and the deed in the vault, Petra recently sat back and agreed to an interview. When asked why a 22-year old woman and her husband would want to live alone in such decadence, she mentioned that she had her five miniature dogs to consider: “It’s important for them to be able to have space.”

So now, her dogs squared away and happily ensconced in Candyland, Petra will just have to make a go of her new venture into the fashion business, won’t she? (Or will she?)

Hey, is this capitalist system we’ve got something special, or what?

God and the Survivor - The Prayer Dilemma

Over the September 11 weekend, Terry Gross interviewed several New York City firemen who had been involved in the rescue of persons caught in the Twin Towers ten years ago. This is not the kind of program, or interview, that I would ordinarily listen to, anticipating that it would be either another occasion for patriotic flag-waving or a mawkish, self-serving tale of personal heroism. But, as it turned out, the stories of the firemen I heard were not even close to either of my narrow, prejudiced expectations.

An interview that particularly impressed me was that of Deputy Chief Jay Jonas of the New York Fire Department. A captain on 9/11, Jonas led his men up the stairs of the North Tower in an attempt to rescue people. Upon reaching the 27th floor they heard a huge roar; to get some sense of what was happening, he and one of his men left the stairway, entered the nearby floor area and went to the widows on the north and south sides of the building; there they discovered that the South Tower had collapsed. Jonas immediately directed his men to retrace their steps and get out of the building as soon as possible. Not all of the men heard his report that the other tower had collapse, so some of them were perplexed and a little irritated; after all, they hadn’t rescued anyone and they had just trudged up 27 floors with 100 pounds of equipment on their backs.

Part way down the stairway, they found Josephine Harris, who could barely walk. She was crying, and urged the firemen to go on without her. Knowing that rescuing her would slow them down and increase the chance that all die in the collapse, Jonas nonetheless decided to take her with them.

When they got to the fourth floor, the North Tower, the one from which they were trying to escape, began to collapse. (The towers were designed to fall in a catastrophic event, not like a falling tree, but in pancake fashion, floor upon floor.) Because the top of the tower where the collapse began was 1,300 feet above them (about a quarter of a mile), Jonas and his men at first could only discern a slight noise and a slight rumble. The noise, the vibration and the debris grew louder and more severe as each floor collapsed on the floor below it. Because of the tremendous force of the vibrations as the collapse proceeded, one of his men was eventually thrown two floors down the stairwell. But when the collapse reached the fifth floor, one floor above them, it suddenly stopped. There was so much debris below, there was no place for the bottom floors to collapse to. Jonas found himself trapped between the ground and the fifth floor with 12 firefighters, one port authority officer and Josephine Harris.

A short time later, a sliver of bright sunlight fell into the space in which they were trapped. It was then that Jonas realized that, standing in the stairwell near the fifth floor, he was actually standing on what had become the top of the North Tower, which had suddenly opened to the sky above. He would later realize that everyone above the fifth floor and everyone below the fourth floor had been killed. Eventually, however, Jonas, all his men, and Josephine Harris, were able to get out of the building alive.

This story was recounted by Chief Jonas in an articulate, clear, almost matter-of-fact manner, without much discernable emotion. He had a deep, resonant Irish voice, with a certain masculine vibrato to it, and he was warm and easy to listen to. But what struck me was his humility. That, too, was evident in his voice. Jonas’ humility was not prefaced upon a belief that God had bestowed some exceptional grace on him. He didn’t go on and on about how God looked down and saved him, his men, and Josephine Harris. Chief Jonas, whatever his personal religious or spiritual orientation, didn’t go there.

Here’s what he said (from the transcript):

TERRY GROSS: You say . . . that you don't like it when people say to you: You survived because God was with you. Why don't you like it when people say that?

CHIEF JONAS: Well, first of all it's a little pompous to say that you are a miracle, you know. But second of all, by them saying that God was with me that day you're also kind of saying that God was not with them that day, and that's certainly not the case.

You know, I think of the one radio transmission between Chief Pete Hayden and Captain Paddy Brown. Chief Hayden is talking to him as we're coming down the stairs and I'm hearing this over the radio. Pete Hayden is calling Captain Paddy Brown on the radio. He says Command Post to Ladder 3, get out of the building. Get out of the building. And Paddy Brown gets on the radio and he says I refuse the order, which is unbelievable, you know, that somebody would say that. He says I refuse the order. I'm up here on the 44th floor and I've got too many burnt people with me. I'm not leaving them. You know, it still sends shivers up my spine hearing that. And...

GROSS: I take it he did not survive.

JONAS: No. Paddy Brown, all the men from Ladder 3 and all the people that they were treating all died in the collapse.

One of the several things that really impressed me in this statement is that Chief Jonas implicitly expressed, if you will, a valuable insight into the meaning, and the theology, of prayer.

Years ago, I was taught as a young Catholic seminarian that there are four basic kinds of prayer: petition, contrition, thanksgiving, and adoration. They’re stated here in ascending order of inherent virtue; that is, petition, by which the person praying asks for something, is at the bottom of the list, while adoration, which has no object other than the love of God, is at the top.

Unlike prayers of penance and praise, prayers of petition and thanksgiving have a built-in problem. When we pray to God “for something,” we often, though not always, through no fault of our own, are asking God to favor us in a way that will result in his disfavoring someone else. Similarly, when our prayer is one of thanksgiving, it often entails expressing gratitude for some benefit or advantage that someone else did not receive, again often through no fault of our own.

While this view of prayer may seem blasphemous to some, to me it’s simply a reflection of sheer existential reality. It is obvious, there for all to see. Nonetheless, those who pray for favors of one kind or another surely believe their prayers will be efficacious; that is, that they will make a difference, otherwise they wouldn't pray that way. This doesn’t necessarily mean that by petitioning God for some specific outcome they are asking God to “change his mind.” But if they’re not asking him to alter the course of events to coincide with the prayer, according to one well-known Catholic theologian, they are acting on the belief that “God sees everything in an eternal ‘instant,’ and that he has already factored in our prayer in determining and guiding the course of our human and personal histories.” [Fr. Richard P. McBrien, Catholicism (Harper Collins 1994)] Either way, they believe that their prayer did, in fact (i.e., in reality), have an effect — even if their prayer wasn’t “granted.”

That said, I don’t know if there are any theologians who share my outlook, but I do know one author and humorist: Mark Twain (no theologian, he). My outlook is much the same as that Twain hit on a century ago in his famous “The War Prayer,” written during the Philippine-American War (1899-1902). Of prayer, he wrote:

God’s servant and yours has prayed his prayer. Has he paused and taken thought? Is it one prayer? No, it is two — one uttered, the other not. Both have reached the ear of Him Who heareth all supplications, the spoken and the unspoken. Ponder this — keep it in mind. If you would beseech a blessing upon yourself, beware! lest without intent you invoke a curse upon a neighbor at the same time. If you pray for the blessing of rain upon your crop which needs it, by that act you are possibly praying for a curse upon some neighbor’s crop which may not need rain and can be injured by it.

Good examples of what I mean here abound in competitive sports. Ubiquitous in professional and college sports — football, basketball, hockey, tennis, to name a few — are the celebratory prayers offered by players after achieving some objective: scoring a touchdown, hitting a three-point shot, scoring a shot on goal, or winning a set. The players make the sign of the cross, point skyward toward god in the heavens, or go down on bended knee in prayerful submission.

But what are these athletes really saying?

It seems to me that what they’re saying goes something like this: “Thank you, God, for permitting me to intercept the opposing quarterback’s off-balance wobbly pass, for allowing my teammates to smash block into the turf those trying to tackle me, and for letting me give a stunning straight-arm into the face of the last opposing player, thus helping me run unscathed into the end zone for the touchdown.” In other words, thank you for favoring me and not my opposition, which perhaps, on paper anyway, should have won the game. The point is that, in sports there are winners and there are losers, and if God has set up a big-time win for my team, he has necessarily set up a big-time loss for the other guys.

But isn’t this the prototype for all prayers of petition and thanksgiving?

The answer, I think, is yes. It is illustrated by the parody of a prayer for soldiers as they go into battle, probably the most frequently quoted lines in "The War Prayer." Similar to athletic competition at least in this respect, war is (or used to be anyway) a one side wins/one side loses undertaking, and, as Mark Twain makes dramatically clear, prayer is thereby rendered problematic. While we might like to think a prayer for the safety and well-being of a soldier is good, kind, and compassionate — not to mention patriotic, Twain saw it in all its stripped-down horrific unpleasantness, and made it part of a forceful argument that both the Christian religion and humanism are incompatible with war.

The War Prayer begins with a brief supplication for the soldiers on our side:

O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle — be Thou near them! With them — in spirit — we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe.

Then this, what that really means to the enemy combatants and non-combatants stated in the stark terms of what actually happens in war:

O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of the summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it — for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protect their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet!

I have a close friend, a former fundamentalist and (later) Methodist minister, who told me that lately he has become uneasy about saying grace before and after meals. Assume for the moment, he says, that the world’s food supply is finite and, as a practical matter, that at present it’s not only finite but inadequate to feed the entire world population; or, if that’s not accurate factually, that those with more than enough food simply don’t distribute their surplus effectively to those in need. In all of these scenarios, my friend feels that the clear implication of thanking god for the food we eat is to also thank him for not giving it to someone less fortunate — i.e., someone starving. He’s very much aware that today one-third of the world’s population is properly fed, one-third is under-fed, and one-third is starving. Why should he fall in the properly fed group, he wonders, as opposed to the group that is under-fed or starving? And just how can he presume to thank God for putting him in the first group rather than the last? In today’s world, only so many people can get enough food, you know. For my friend, this is a very real religious and moral dilemma.

This is precisely the dilemma Chief Jonas did not permit himself to fall into. If the fact that he survived the collapse of the North Tower was a miracle, was he to presume that his friend Captain Paddy Brown and all the others — firefighters, policemen, office workers — who didn’t make it not worthy of such a miracle? If he labeled it a miracle, he wondered, wouldn’t he have been saying just that? Wouldn’t he have been saying that he was the preferred firefighter that day? Chief Jonas had the humility to know that he was not, in fact or in spirit, or in any other way, shape or form, that day or any other day, a person preferred by God over everyone else. He just knew that.

I do not, of course, know whether Chief Jonas was or is now a “man of prayer,” as they say. That’s his business, not mine. Indeed, the way in which he approached the dilemma may be, for him, a way of praying; and then again, it may not. That, too, is his business. But I do think that if he is a man of prayer, his approach to prayer and his relationship to his God is a cut more salutary and a lot more mature, if you will, than that of most of us.

For me, however, no longer a man of prayer in the traditional religious sense, I am more than content to admire Chief Jonas, first for his courage, and then for his humility. For me personally, I don’t believe he was preferred by God, but I do feel he is inspiring as a human being.

Nice Gun You've Got There, Sir

War requires no motivation, but appears to be ingrained in human nature and is even valued as something noble.

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)
Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch (1795)

To declare war “normal” does not eliminate the pathologies of behavior, the enormities of devastation, the unbearable pain suffered in bodies and souls. Nor does the idea that war is normal justify it. . . . Though “war is normal” shocks our morality and wounds our idealism, it stands solidly as a statement of fact.

James Hillman (1926- )
A Terrible Love of War (2004)

Late in the afternoon on Saturday, May 21, I watched the Preakness Stakes on TV. As you know, the Preakness is the second of three horse races comprising the Triple Crown. It follows the Kentucky Derby by two weeks and precedes the Belmont Stakes by three. It takes place at the Pimlico Race Course in Baltimore. This year marked the 136th running of the Preakness, and it paid the winner a million dollars.

In it’s inimitable manner, each year the television networks turn the Preakness (and the Kentucky Derby and the Belmont Stakes) into a super-spectacle, the coverage beginning two or three hours before the start of the race. Every conceivable aspect of preparation is the subject of some kind of reporting, from the last workout and final bath of the favored horses to locker room interviews of the leading jockeys as they’re dressing for the race. The coverage goes on and on and on.

Everyone in the crowd of over a hundred thousand seems to enjoy the color, the exuberant atmosphere, and the sheer excitement of this esteemed race — not to mention the drinks, single malt scotch for the well-to-do, bottomless mugs of beer for the blue-collared infielders. On this warm spring afternoon, most of the folks in the wealthy seats are dressed to the hilt: the men in blue blazers or cream-colored suits and yellow ties and many of the women showing cleavage and sporting large colorful, cumbersome hats. The thoroughbred horses are some of the most beautiful animals on the face of the earth. The Preakness is a big deal for horse lovers and sports fans of all stripes, even those like me who don’t know a thing about horses or horse racing, but who nevertheless like to watch the horses and the jockeys and every year try to take in each of the three Triple Crown races.

About 30 minutes before the start of the race, Bob Costas, NBC’s premier sportscaster, stands on a dais where the winning owner will soon receive the coveted Woodlawn Vase (pronounced correctly, "Vase" rhymes with “blahs”) and where the winning horse will be draped with the traditional blanket of Black-Eyed Susans, Maryland’s state flower. Costas says something important about the race, but I’ve forgotten what it was. Later, when the time would come for presenting the Vase and the flowers, the dais would be crowded with owners, family members, the jockey, sportswriters, the Governor of Maryland, and Bob Costas. At this point, however, Bob Costas stands there by himself.

Or almost by himself. For behind him at the rear of the dais, the only other person present, is a soldier standing at rigid attention, his presence ignored by Costas. The solder’s resplendent dark blue uniform is adorned with medals and multi-colored ribbons that cover most of the left side of his chest. He also wears white gloves and a military hat with a polished black visor. I think I spotted a paratroopers’ badge pinned somewhere among his medals, but I can’t be sure. He is a handsome, African-American man. He remains stolidly expressionless and never moves a muscle. He never looks anywhere but straight ahead. In his right gloved hand, he is holding the top part of a gun, a rifle of some kind, the base of which rests on the floor of the dais. Mounted on the gun, directly in front of his chest, is a long silver-colored, shiny, bayonet. It gleams in the bright Maryland sunshine.

Taking this in, I paused and, forgetting Bob Costas, said to myself: “O.K. What’s wrong with this picture? What the hell is a guy with a gun and a bayonet doing smack in the middle of a frigging horse race?”

Well, I thought, you can bet he isn’t there to protect anyone, certainly not Bob Costas. And he isn’t there to protect any particular thing, not even the Woodlawn Vase. They have security people to do things like that, guys in plain dark suits and sunglasses, guys that aren’t exactly known for walking around carrying rifles with fixed bayonets. He is there, I concluded, as a symbol, as a slick and subtle reminder that we Americans are warriors, that we’re a nation of warriors.

Oh, my. A warrior nation? Yep, that's right. Think about it. We Americans have a non-stop torrid love affair with war. We can hardly do without it; we are the military-industrial complex par excellence. It's become so commonplace that we don't realize it, but the fact is that we’ve been at war continuously for the past 70 years and we don’t show signs of stopping. As the Indian writer Arundhati Roy noted soon after we invaded Iraq: “Since the Second World War, the United States has been at war with or has attacked, among other countries, Korea, Guatemala, Cuba, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Grenada, Libya, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Panama, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Yugoslavia, and Afghanistan.” [Arundhati Roy, War Talk (Cambridge 2003)].

I mean, really. A gun and a bayonet at a horse race?

"Alternatives to Waterboarding"

On Thursday, May 12, the Traverse City Record-Eagle ran a political cartoon on its editorial page as it does most every day. The cartoon, entitled “Alternatives to Waterboarding,” depicts a hooded person bound to a chair being interrogated by two military-type men, apparently American soldiers. The two interrogators are positioned on either side of the prisoner, one sitting and one standing. A single light bulb, hanging from a cord above the prisoner, illuminates the prisoner and one of the interrogators; the other stands in the shadows. The standing interrogator holds a hand puppet in the shape of a small rabbit or bunny with long ears and a funny face.

The sitting interrogator says this to the prisoner: “OK Muhammad — If you don’t tell us about the next terrorist plot I’ll instruct Mr. Bunny to zubber your tummy.” The cartoon was created by Brian Fairrington and apparently syndicated by Dayrl Cagle’s Political Cartoon Index. It may be viewed at: http://www.cagle.com/politicalcartoons-/PCcartoons-/fairrington.asp.

After thinking about the cartoon and discussing it with some friends, I wrote Mr. Fairrington the following email message on Monday, May 16:

Mr. Fairrington -

Your cartoon, "Alternatives to Waterboarding" appeared in the Traverse City Record-Eagle on Thursday, May 12. Perhaps there's an irony we missed, but my friends and I were appalled at the message you appeared to communicate. For one thing, the cartoon is racially and religiously offensive, and for another it exalts torture.

Did we miss something? If not, your cartoon conveys about as stupid a message as we can imagine.

Steve Morse

Later that day, I received the following reply from Mr. Fairrington:

OK, so you disagree with the premise of the cartoon. However, I fail to see how the cartoon is "racially and religiously offensive.." Can you explain this?

Soon after that, I replied to Mr. Fairrington as follows:

It's racially and religiously offensive because it uses a captive named "Muhammad" as a stereotypical terrorist. Muhammad is the founder of the religion of Islam and is considered by Muslims to be a messenger and prophet of God, on the one hand, and the name "Muhammad" is very common in the Islamic and Arab Middle East and throughout the world, on the other.

Yes, I do disagree with your premise that torture is just fine. — "I'll tell Mr. Bunny to zubber your tummy?" Whew.

I heard nothing further from Mr. Fairrington.

Had Mr. Fairrington inquired regarding the cartoon’s potential for irony, I would have replied that had it been so intended, the irony would have been in the depiction of the two interrogators as complete idiots (fat, big noses, shaved heads, etc.). They could easily be said to fit “Abu Gharib”-types — dopey, domineering, and morally depraved. The message, then, would have been that anyone who considers waterboarding anything other than a form of torture and talks of “zubber[ing] your tummy” as a legitimate alternative interrogation technique is indeed stupid.

But there was no irony. As Mr. Fairrington revealed, there was nothing ironical about his depiction of the interrogators. It was intended to say just what it appeared to say. It was straightforward and, well, according to him, accurate. Apparently he intended to portray American interrogators as torturers (and stupid ones at that), to compare waterboarding to playing with bathtub toys, and to depict persons with names like "Muhammad" as stereotypical terrorists.

All of which, of course, is nonsense. As for stereotypes, they're just that, nothing more; and often as not, they're wrong. The writer-comedian Lance Crouther once said: "There's a stereotype that black people are lazy. I don't know if that's true, but I know that a lot of white people went all the way to Africa to get out of doing work."

So Much for the News Today, April 29, 2011

The Business Section of the Record-Eagle today carried three main stories. First, Exxon’s profits in the first quarter of 2011 are up 69 percent, by nearly $11 billion. The nation’s second largest oil company, Chevron Corporation, is expected to announce a 25 percent increase in profits to $5.69 billion for the same period. The article also noted that the price of a gallon of gas is now above $4 in eight states and the District of Columbia. Second, Chrysler is set to repay $7.5 billion in bailout money received from the U.S. and Canadian governments. The payments will be made from a refinancing arrangement involving new bank loans and a bond sale that will take place later this year. Finally, Dow Chemical has reported a first quarter increase of 34 percent in net income over last year on revenue that increased 10 percent to $14.73 billion during the first three months of the year.

In Michigan news, after “an hour of spirited debate,” the Michigan House of Representatives voted to slash business taxes by $1.7 billion over the next two years “while shifting the burden to seniors, children and the poor.” “Instead of paying about $2 billion annually into the state’s general fund,” the article continued, “businesses would pay about $300 million. Only about a third of businesses would pay the corporate income tax. Businesses would continue to pay property taxes.” The vote was 56-53 along party lines, although six Republicans voted against it. (All three Republican representatives from our general area voted for it.) The bill, pushed by Governor Snyder, now goes to the GOP-led Senate.

Meanwhile, on the front page, the Record-Eagle reported that the Grand Traverse Board of Commissioners changed their minds and voted to reverse an earlier decision to yank 22 parking meters from in front of the Government Center. A week before the meters had been ordered removed on the motion of Commissioner Dick Thomas after he had been ticketed for a parking violation.

Our legislators at work for us. Right?

Not.

High School Drug Sweeps: Legal? A Good Idea?

On November 18 at the Library in Traverse City, the ACLU of Northwest Michigan presented a lecture on the “school-to-prison pipeline.” The speaker was Mark Fancher, a staff attorney and director of the ACLU of Michigan Racial Justice Work Group which in 2009 issued a report entitled, “Reclaiming Michigan’s Throwaway Kids: Students Trapped in the School-to-Prison Pipeline.”

After the lecture, I was approached by a parent of a student at Traverse City Central High School on a related subject. I was asked if I had heard about the “drug sweep” that had taken place at the school the day before. I had not. The man said that though his daughter had not been “busted,” he wondered whether such a sweep, conducted with drug-sniffing dogs, was legal.

Reading about it in the paper the following morning, I guessed that this parent’s question might be one on the mind of many other parents, students, and interested members of the community. Here is the answer.

Searches of students by school officials on school property are governed, like all searches, by the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. That Amendment does not prohibit all searches, only those that are “unreasonable.” An illegal search occurs “when an expectation of privacy that society is prepared to consider reasonable is infringed.” The starting point, of course, is that there must be what the courts consider to be an actual “search.”

The current state of the law is that a dog sniff of an inanimate object is not a “search” under the Fourth Amendment. For example, the Supreme Court has held that the use of a trained canine to sniff unattended luggage is not a search. It is different, however, when dogs are used to sniff a person’s body, mainly because the level of intrusiveness is greater (as everyone knows, dogs often sniff parts of the body that cause personal embarrassment, and some persons have an irrational fear of dogs). Moreover, people naturally consider their own bodies to be private — private to them — and they feel that expectation of privacy should be respected by others, most certainly by government authorities (including police and school officials).

Many “drug sweeps” conducted in school buildings are thus permissible under the Constitution because they are conducted by drug-sniffing dogs of school lockers, previously detached backpacks, and cars parked in school parking lots, and not of a student’s person. With respect to student lockers, courts have generally held that they belong to the school and therefore students do not have a legitimate expectation of privacy for items stored in them. And with respect to backpacks, students cannot be ordered to remove them from their person in order that the dogs can sniff them; that would violate their Fourth Amendment rights.

That’s a general statement of the law: the drug sweep at Central High School was probably legal. But was it a good idea?

As Mark Fancher made clear in his talk last week, the “school-to-prison pipeline” is a disorder in our educational system, currently of epidemic proportions, that is the result of a number of factors, one of which is the criminalization of students. Many persons my age and younger went through their entire 12 years of public education without ever experiencing the presence of police officers in the school building; today, that experience is commonplace and, as the ACLU report indicates, the police are often called in to handle what were once considered routine disciplinary matters. As Traverse City police Captain Steve Morgan told the Record-Eagle, “Usually the schools will request [a drug sweep] once or twice a year. We never go unless the school officials request us. We’ve probably been to all the area secondary schools at one time or another.”

But what exactly is the effect on the students, whether or not they are busted? Does it encourage trust and respect between students and teachers, between students and administrators, between young people and the police? What does it feel like when you’re 16 years old to be treated much like a criminal — which is to say, to be ordered around by police officers and to have your locker, your backpack, or your vehicle randomly searched without your permission?

Apart from the anger and resentment it likely caused, was the drug sweep cost effective? At Central High last week there were police officers and police dogs from three counties effecting a lock down, disrupting classes and interfering with other activities — for what? The paper reported that the sweep netted one arrest: one student was charged with possessing about two grams of marijuana. Though the belongings of every student may not have been searched, it still amounted to one arrest in a student body of 1,500. One out of 1,500 (an arrest percentage of 0.067%) is not a particularly good effectiveness indicator, is it? Now I’m not so naive to assume that none of the students at Central High ever uses marijuana, but it’s also clear that the school does not have a widespread, over-the-top drug problem on its hands either. Simply put, it was not a good use of taxpayer money.

Nelson Mandela said: “There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children.” Think about it, administrators, teachers, and parents at Central High School. You can bet the students are.



[Note: The 74-page report of the Racial Justice Work Group of the ACLU of Michigan is available for downloading at www.aclumich.org.]

Department of Hilarious Moments:Maintaining a Sense of Humor in Difficult Times

The well-known and well-respected war correspondent, Dexter Filkins, writing in the New York Times on Tuesday of this past week, reported on the secret talks that have been going on for the last three months between Taliban and Afghan leaders to end the war in Afghanistan. The talks seemed to be showing promise, Filkins wrote, “if only because of the repeated appearance of a certain insurgent leader at one end of the table: Mullah Askhtar Muhammad Mansour, one of the most senior commanders in the Taliban movement.”

Mr. Mansour was considered so critical to the success of the talks that NATO and Afghan officials held three meetings with him, he was flown to Kabul on a NATO aircraft and taken to the presidential palace for an official audience with President Hamid Karzai and, to top it off, he was given “a sizeable sum of money to take part in the talks — and to help persuade him to return.” (The amount is estimated to have been in the low six figures.) Even General Petraeus was on board, commenting favorably on the progress the talks were making with his participation, and Mr. Filkens himself was cautioned not to reveal the presence of Mr. Mansour at the negotiations for security reasons.

Then something strange and unexpected happened. At a recent meeting in Kandahar a man who knew Mr. Mansour personally was brought into the negotiating room and given a seat at the table. What followed probably went something like this:

The NATO official said to the man, “Please present yourself to Mr. Mansour.”

“Fine,” he replied, “but where’s Mr. Mansour?”

“He’s right there. He’s seated across from you.”

“Er, no, sir, he’s not. That’s not Mr. Mansour. I’ve never seen that man before. I don’t know who he is.”

[The reaction of the NATO official has not been released and is considered classified.]

There you have it. As it turned out, Mullalh Askhtar Muhammad Mansour was not really Mullah Askhtar Muhammad Mansour after all.

Dexter Filkins was thus compelled to conclude: “In an episode that could have been lifted from a spy novel, United States and Afghan officials now say the Afghan man was an impostor, and high level discussions conducted with the assistance of NATO appear to have achieved little.”

Well, okay, you say, but what happened to the imposter after his cover was blown? The answer: to complete this military version of the keystone cops, somehow the guy was left unattended and he simply walked back over the border into Pakistan into the mountains from whence he came. Nobody (on our side) knows where he is — or, for that matter, who he is.

After the fact, an unnamed Western diplomat said, “It’s funny but not funny because the consequences are so staggering.”

To the contrary, I know full well that these negotiations were at least thought to have been important stuff, but come on, you all, we have to admit it — this episode in the war in Afghanistan is totally, flat-out hilarious.

Sources: Dexter Filkins, “Taliban Leader in Secret Talks Was an Impostor: Setback in NATO Effort: Man Purporting to Be Insurgents’ No. 2 Got Western Money,” New York Times A1 (November 23, 2010); Maureen Dowd, “The Great Game Imposter,” New York Times A23 (November 24, 2010).

Elect This Man!

I welcomed the news that a man by the name of Jason Gillman is running for the Grand Traverse County Commission. Jason, it appears, is a Republican and “a Tea Party activist.” Recently, he turned his attention to what is known as the state’s “Bridge Card” program which provides food assistance to the poor.

Jason doesn’t like the program. “The shame is the overall mismanagement of the environment that Michigan’s in,” he said. “A little too much government involvement has caused what we’re in.” More specifically, Jason says that “I don’t think folks should be buying soda.”

For the moment, forget that 6,117 residents of Grand Traverse County, Jason’s constituency, depend on the program. Forget that over the past year those enrolled in our five-county area increased by 33%, and that the number enrolled in Leelanau County alone, where I live, increased by 47%. Forget that unemployment rates soared this year in the region (the rate in Grand Traverse County jumped from 11.6% in 2009 to 12.4% this year, and reached 14.9% in Benzie County this summer). Forget that nationally the ranks of the long-term unemployed exploded by over 400% - from 1.3 million in December 2007, when the recession began, to 6.8 million last June. Forget that in 2008-09 median household incomes plummeted in Michigan a whopping 6.9%, which was more than twice the national average of minus 2.9% and greater than any other state. Forget that the co-chairman of Food Rescue of Northwest Michigan said recently that "there doesn't seem to be a limit to the need." Forget that a Kingsley woman told the Record-Eagle that, without the Bridge Card program, “We wouldn’t make it. I wouldn’t be able to feed my kids.” Just forget all that.

Jason’s political and economic ideology provides that the poor should be reduced to and assisted only at a subsistence level, if at all. They shouldn’t have old televisions, worn-out electrical appliances, beat-up cars, decent clothing, or adequate health care. Or, for that matter, enough to eat.

But Jason’s over-the-top really brilliant idea was captured in the following report in Sunday’s Record-Eagle: “Gillman would rather see more people go to work and fewer rely on state assistance.”

You’d think, wouldn’t you, that by now someone else would have thought of that! I mean, really. Like most Tea Partiers, hey, this guy Jason is a frigging genius!

So don’t waste a moment, Grand Traverse County! Get him on board the County Commission! Vote for Jason Gillman!

Out at Home, Out for the Season: The Play that Cost the Tigers the 2010 Division Title

Everyone knows that Jim Leyland is a great baseball manager. He’s managed in over 2,800 games in the major leagues for the Pirates (eleven years), the Marlins (two years), the Rockies (one year), and the Tigers (four-and-a-half years and counting). He’s only the seventh manager in history to win pennants in both the National and American Leagues and a three-time Manager of the Year Award winner. He’s also a very good guy, respected, admired, and well liked by players, owners, and members of the press.

But, you know, even Jim Leyland makes mistakes. He made a fairly big one during a night game with the Toronto Blue Jays on July 24. And Leyland’s veteran third base coach, Gene Lamont, made an even bigger one.

Here’s what happened: Magglio Ordonez, the Tiger’s popular veteran right fielder and the team’s second best hitter, was suffering the effects of a sprained ankle and was unable to play the outfield. But he could still swing the bat and Leyland wanted him in there. At this point in the season, considering the status of the American League Central Division (the Tigers, Twins and the White Sox were in a three-way fight for the lead), every game was important. For several games Magglio had been in the line-up as the designated hitter, and Leyland decided to play him again in that role. This meant, of course, that Magglio would play offense and hit, but he would not play defense where, in his position in right field, he’d have to do a lot of running.

In the third inning, rookie centerfielder Austin Jackson singled. Magglio walked. At this point, Magglio was no longer a hitter; he’d become a runner. But he was not supposed to run. It wasn’t that he couldn’t run at all, it’s just that he’d have to run on his bum right ankle. The issue before Leyland thus became whether or not to remove Magglio for a pinch-runner. Doing that, of course, would remove him — and his bat — from the lineup for the remainder of the game. Leyland made the decision to leave Magglio in the game.

Next up was the clean-up hitter, Miguel Cabrera, who many regard as the best offensive player in baseball right now and who is a candidate for the coveted Triple Crown (first in batting average, runs batted in, and home runs over an entire season). At the time, Miguel was hitting around .349, had about 24 home runs, about 85 rbi’s and, in addition, led the Major Leagues in doubles with about 32. All of this meant that there was a very good likelihood that Cabrera would put the ball into play and turn Magglio into a baserunner, big time. Nobody seemed to be thinking about it, but Magglio was put in a very vulnerable situation.

And that’s just what happened. Miguel Cabrera lined a double into the gap off the wall in right-center, and Magglio began circling the bases, running as fast as he possibly could. Depending on how far and where the ball is hit, how quickly it is recovered by an outfielder and how quickly and accurately it is relayed by an infielder to the catcher, runners on first often score on a double. But not always; it depends on all those factors. It also depends on the speed of the baserunner. Which depends, in large part, on the condition of his wheels.

Jackson, starting from second base, scored easily. However, it was evident — or should have been — that an attempt by Magglio to score from first on Cabrera’s double would, at the very least, wind up in a close play at home. Nonetheless, as he approached third base, Gene Lamont, coaching at third base, waived Magglio home. As the play continued to develop and the ball was being relayed home, there was no doubt — to the experienced Lamont or anyone else watching — that Magglio would have to slide in order to avoid being tagged out. Lamont’s decision to push Magglio to score on Cabrera’s double — the second coaching decision affecting the play — put Magglio at risk even more than the earlier decision to allow him to run the bases. And if the first decision was questionable, this one was disastrous.

Why was Magglio placed at risk by these decisions? The answer to that is pretty obvious. Magglio was put at risk when he was made a baserunner because he had a sprained ankle, an injury that occurs when the ligaments in the ankle are forced beyond their normal range of motion and are torn. Ligaments are tough, elastic bands of fibrous tissue that connect one bone to another and help stabilize joints, preventing excessive movement. Magglio was at risk because he was put into a position where he would be required to run, and possibly run hard, and where the stability of his ankle would very likely be tested to the max.

Well, we now know how it turned out. Magglio was laboring as he rounded third and headed for home. He did have to slide, which he did, and he was tagged out, about ten feet from home plate — it wasn’t even close. (He shouldn’t have been sent home even had he been in the best of health.) Far more important, however, was that in the process of sliding the cleats on Magglio’s right foot dug slightly into the dirt around home plate resulting in his ankle being again twisted. His ankle ligaments not being sufficient to withstand the trauma and maintain stability of the joint, Magglio suffered a fracture to his already injured right ankle. He will be out of action for six to eight weeks, and will probably not return until after September 1.

After the game, Johnny Damon (who, because of a bad back, also hasn’t been playing recently) told reporters: “I saw his right foot go another direction and I was hoping it was just a sprain, but unfortunately it was more severe. Anytime you lose a guy like that, it’s huge. He’s the No. 3 hitter. He’s that bridge from me to Cabrera, so it’s tough. And the length of time we’re going to lose him — it’s six to eight weeks. So we know that could very well be the [end of his] season.”

And, most likely, it was also the end of the Tigers’ season, the end of their hopes to win a division title this year and to get into post-season play. Leyland couldn’t have known it at the time he let Magglio run the bases, but three innings later Carlos Guillen, the Tiger’s star second baseman, would suffer a right calf strain that would place him on the 15-day disabled list. On the other hand, it was known at the time that Brandon Inge, the able and likeable Tigers’ third baseman, in a game with the Texas Rangers six days earlier had suffered a broken hand after being struck by a pitch. Inge was not expected to return for four-to-six weeks.

Thus, in the course of a week, three of the Tiger’s first seven hitters wound up out of commission for extended periods of time. Moreover, with the trading deadline approaching on July 31, there was no way the damage could be repaired simply by engaging in one or more “rent-a-player”-type trades that have recently become part of the baseball scene. (These trades involve a contending team sending secondary players and/or minor league prospects, often good ones, to other teams for established players who will become free agents at the end of the season. The star players in the trades may only play for the contender until their contracts expire at the end of the season; thus the term “rent-a-player.”)

In a post-game interview, Jim Leyland told reporters that “We’ve got to revamp this whole thing now. I haven’t even talked to [general manager Dave Dombrowski] yet. I have no idea who’s coming up [from the minors to replace Ordonez and Guillen]. I have no idea what we’re doing.”

The Tigers were suddenly in a terrible position, particularly because they’ve relied so heavily this season on rookies — Austin Jackson, Brennan Boesch, Scott Sizemore, Danny Worth, Alex Avila and Robbie Weinhardt. Later on, Dombrowski said that he had no intention of trading away these guys or every other good prospect in the Tiger’s organization for end-of-the-season starters in an effort that would be problematic, at best. Arguably, the Tigers needed another good bat in the lineup to make it to the play-offs even before the injuries occurred, and while you can sometimes fill a spot, or even a couple of spots with prospects-for-veteran type trades, there’s only a slim possibility of repairing the wide-spread damage the Tigers have suffered that way.

On July 30, in the first game of a series in Boston with the Red Sox, Jhonny Peralta, just obtained from Cleveland in a trade, homered twice that night in his first appearance as a Tiger. While the Tigers held on to win, staving off a grand slam home run by David Ortiz in the 9th inning, I noticed that the last three batters for the Tigers were hitting .187, .201, and .210, respectively. This at a time when 31% of the Tigers’ run production was coming from one man, Miguel Cabrera, and when the Tigers had won only 4 of their last 18 games since the All-Star break when they were in first place in the division. (They’re now in a free-fall, 7.0 games behind the White Sox and 6.5 behind the Twins.) With an offensive weakness that profound, the only reason that the Tigers are hanging on to third place is that Kansas City and Cleveland (the other two teams in the Central Division) are playing so poorly. But now it’s virtually impossible that the Tigers will be able win the division this year.

Admittedly, this analysis has the benefit of 20/20 hindsight. Nonetheless, though Leyland’s decision to let Ordonez run ahead of Cabrera was not terrible, it was, I think, a mistake. But hindsight or not, Lamont’s decision to waive him home was surely a mistake and was indeed terrible.

So it was. The decisions regarding how to play Magglio Ordonez on July 24 in the game against the Blue Jays were deadly for the Tigers’ hopes for the post-season this year. Once a contender, they now have a very little chance of passing the Twins and the White Sox, and because of their mediocre record (they’re only playing around .500 for the season) they’re already out of the wild card race.

And those decisions didn’t do Magglio Ordonez much good either. Not only was he enjoying another very good year, but at the time of his injury he was 175 plate appearances of 54 games shy of the vesting option in his contract that would guarantee him $15 million in 2011. As one reporter pointed out, the odds of that happening at this point are somewhere between slim and none.

It’s likely that very few fans realized just how important those decisions were on July 24th — both occurring in a game played two-and-a-half months before the end of the season. But they probably meant the end of a successful season in 2010 for both the Tigers and for Magglio Ordonez.