WordPlay - Populism, Problems, and Solutions

Seven Racial Anecdotes

I dealt with race and racism pretty much constantly between 1972 and 2007, with greater or lesser wisdom. At any rate, here are some stories. Make of them what you will.

1. The Twofer. Sometime in the mid 70's, when I was public defendering and doing motions, one of our female deputies came into my office, mad as hell. Her client had been Black. She'd done jury selection in the conventional way, getting the conventional responses, and the case had gone forward without incident. But after the verdict (guilty), several of the jurors approached her. It seems that the moment deliberations had begun, one of the jurors who'd done a butter-wouldn't-melt-in-my-mouth number uring voir dire had sat down and said, first thing, "Only a stupid n----r would be dumb enough to have a dumb b----h for a lawyer." Crass racism and sexism in one sentence. A twofer.

My colleague and friend, who was in fact an awfully good lawyer and went on to a distinguished career as a Superior Court judge, was incensed, as was I. The reason was not just the prejudice, but the lying about it during the selection process. Recall that the jury panel is sworn, and these answers are given under oath.

But what happened in the jury room after that, is what was interesting. The other 11 jurors were infuriated. The initial reaction was to walk straight back into the courtroom and announce a 'not guilty' verdict. Unfortunately for my colleague and the defendant, cooler heads prevailed. They decided, despite the presence of one a------e that they were duty bound to examine the evidence, which is almost never good for a public defender's case. Worse than that, this was what we used to call a 'sit through', meaning that there was no defense, that in the face of overwhelming evidence, the defendant was demanding a trial out of sheer orneriness. He wasn't particularly dumb, but he was sociopathic. The deliberations went on without any input from the racist, who was apparently too intimidated to say another word. But it did result in a guilty verdict. The jurors then informed defense counsel, so that the offender could be properly disciplined.

Which he wasn't. The administration of the PD's office in those days was incredibly timid. My colleague and I wanted the matter referred to the DA for possible perjury prosecution, or the trial judge for contempt proceedings. You just don't lie during voir dire. But the higher ups wanted nothing to do with that. We could have run a new trial motion as there is some conduct in the jury room so egregious that it's not protected by the veil of secrecy. But my colleague really didn't want to do that. Despite the glaring misconduct, the verdict was a fair one, and the trial judge (though pretty upset by the juror) not disposed to grant a new trial. So it died aborning.

The point of the story isn't the creep at its center. These we will always have with us. It's the other 11 jurors.

2. The Wrong Man. The second story occurred about the same time. I had a friend, a really good trial lawyer, who was a Black Southerner. He took racial issues as seriously as you'd expect – he was one of the first in his town to ride the public transit in his town after it was integrated, in the Rosa Parks era (though my recollection is he was Georgian, not Alabaman.) One day he came back to the office in a state half-way between tears and laughter. He was defending a White guy, an inmate who for some reason had not been dressed out. (Maybe the defendant refused – it happened.) He was in the middle of jury selection, when a female juror, answering one of the standard questions, politely said she should not sit on this jury because she was prejudiced against Black defendants.

“I'm the lawyer,” my friend says. “I'm obviously the lawyer. The judge had introduced me to the jury. For God's sake, I'm sitting there in a three piece suit and a power tie.” (He was always well-dressed.) “My guy is beside me in an orange jump suit, with the 'SANTA CLARA COUNTY' printed on it. And she can't see beyond the race!” As I said, it was laugh or cry.

This did not require any major lawyering, as the juror was promptly informed of the error, turned about a thousand shades of red, and was excused. The trial went forward – another case in which the double damned jury decided the case on the evidence, and defendant and defense counsel were condemned to woe and misery.

A few days later, we were post morteming the trial. My friend referred to the incident and wondered whether he'd made a mistake in not fighting to keep the juror. What, you are saying, had he lost his mind? Not at all. What he was thinking is that the juror had actually said she was prejudiced against Black criminals. But this particular defendant was White. So she wasn't going to be prejudiced against him – that is, once she had figured out who the defendant actually was. She was honest enough to admit it out loud (unlike the SOB in story one.) And she'd made such a damn fool of herself that she might just have bent over backwards to be fair. Such was his speculative thinking, anyway. Public defendering legal practice has only one operative principle – will it work? We'll never know because it is out of the question to keep such a juror. But it is typical of the way racial issues play out. Mostly you try to maneuver around or neutralize them. On occasion you try to exploit them.

3. The Upper Class. The worst expression of racial prejudice I ran into in those years did not occur in a formal setting. I was out at a Stanford football practice in late December of 1977, watching Bill Walsh get the Cardinal ready for the Sun Bowl. A nice enough older guy came up, about the same age I am now, and we chatted enthusiastically about Darrin Nelson, James Lofton, other Stanford stars of the day, and the general high spirits of the team. The Crime of the Century that year (sic) was the Chowchilla kidnapping, in which a trio of armed guys had waylaid a school bus and buried it (and forty kids) underground. The perpetrators turned out to be a trio of disaffected rich kids from wealthy families up in the San Mateo-Hillsborough area. The crime actually occurred in 1976, but the perpetrators had only recently been sentenced (to LWOP, subsequently reduced to life.) The subject did not come up until my new friend asked what I did for a living. It turned out that he knew one of the wealthy families and was emotionally invested in the sentencing He leaned forward.

“Tell me,” he said, nudging me, with a conspiratorial glint in his eye, “would these kids have been sentenced so harshly if they were Black?” I think he expected me to confirm his belief that they'd have received some sort of wrist slap if they hadn't been white and rich.

I tried my best to be polite, but I must have reacted because I was absolutely dumbfounded, at the monumentality of this delusional thinking. Then I told him the truth as I saw it, that when you hijack a school bus and bury 40 children, you have transcended race, class, gender, and even planetary origin. You are going to get clobbered, no matter who or what you are, because you just hit the top of the charts. I also said that the criminal justice system is far more race neutral than non-participants realize, but it sure as hell isn't class neutral. It strongly favors upper class defendants, and particularly White upper class defendants. He looked at me with his own version of incredulity, then waved his hand in contempt, turned his back, and walked away. I had been dismissed, as One of Those, along with any other input that didn't meet his preconceptions.

Wow, I thought. What goes on in Hillsborough? There is such a thing as a limousine conservative (if not reactionary), completely divorced from reality.

4. Unlikely Hero*. I've asterisked this because it's probably the most important one. We have to jump 12 years ahead in time, to 1990, when I rejoined the civil service as a prosecutor. The first case I tried was a routine petty theft in Los Gatos, inconsequential, batting practice, so to speak. But it took some really unusual twists and I have never forgotten it.

The theft had occurred at an upscale bar, at a late hour. The place was a watering hole for the younger people, partiers, and specialized in exotic, pretty stiff drinks. The defendant, a young woman, had pocketed another girl's purse, then left. When the victim noticed it was gone, her boyfriend chased after the culprit, found her, made her come back to the bar, and the missing purse and some personal items were inside the defendant's purse. An ice cold case, and a good starter for me, though I wondered why it was being tried at all. (It turned out to be a vanity trial, at the insistence of the defendant's mother.)

It had been 13 years since I'd tried a criminal case. I had forgotten so much I had to approach the bench and ask the trial judge which side of the courtroom to stand on. (His face was a real picture.) The defense attorney was well known, and competent, but based on this experience and subsequent, grossly overrated. We picked a jury in nothing flat. One of the members of the panel was THE Chief Probation Officer of Santa Clara County, the guy responsible for all probation and sentencing services. You'd expect this type, who has to be a law-and-order guy, would be the first one taken off the jury by the defense. But the defense unaccountably left him on. I knew something was up and wondered what.

I found out with the second witness. (This was a 'cite-and-release' case, meaning the cop had written a citation and released the defendant, meaning there was next to nothing in the way of police reports.) The first witness was the victim, who turned out to be a youthful and extremely attractive young woman, aged 21, the sort who could easily excite jealousy or envy all on her own. Her testimony was non-controversial. The second witness was the boyfriend, who had retrieved the stolen purse. As it happened, he was Black. and in his mid 30's.

It's good trial procedure to raise issues of this type with the jury during voir dire, as I have indicated above, to eliminate anyone with a problem with that sort of thing. But I hadn't known this fact, and the defense had laid low. So this aspect of the case came as a complete surprise to this mostly-Caucasian, a-little-Asian jury.

The plot thickened. After the boyfriend had told his story easily and naturally, the defense cross-examined. The boyfriend had an unusual surname, one defense counsel recognized as that of a family, most of whose members had been in trouble with the law. He asked if that were the young man's family. Yes, it was. Stretching good faith to the limit, and maybe beyond, he asked the witness if he had been convicted of a felony. Yes, he had, twice for cocaine possession and once for . . . theft. Then came a series of questions implying that for reasons of his own, he had secreted the purse and produced it to make some sort of impression with the pretty victim. For a lot of evidentiary reasons too detailed to relate, the suggestion was absurd, but raw meat for anyone with a racial agenda looking for an excuse.

And let me throw one last log on the fire. There was a significant age difference between the girl and the guy – not enough to be obscene, but enough to raise an eyebrow. She was just out of her teens. He was in his mid 30's. Forget race for a second - if you know any families who would be thrilled with their young daughters keeping company with much older men with a criminal record at sophisticated bars, let me know. Because I sure don't know any.

So anyone with a racist bent who wanted to characterize this as Innocent White Girl Corrupted by Sophisticated Black Con had all the ammunition he or she would need. All of this hit the jury completely cold. Had I known the boyfriend had a criminal record, or his age, the jury would have been alerted to that, too. But the case hadn't been prepped at all by the regularly assigned deputy, and I'd taken it on about an hour's notice. So all of this was coming to the jury as a total surprise.

The witness answered all this beautifully, admitting the convictions, but denying without any fuss that he'd had anything to do with the theft. He had a good job at that time of his life, and said straightforwardly that his convictions were way, way behind him, ancient history. But all the ingredients for anyone with a racial bias were there. He was a convicted thief, and he had handled the stolen property. Anyone who had a racial bias he or she wanted to express could claim to have a reasonable doubt, with no one the wiser. It would not have been in good faith, but who could say him or her nay?

So I was a mite worried when the jury went out. As it happened, however, they were back in an hour with a guilty verdict, which is about all the time the relevant evidence in this absolute no-brainer of a case justified. Afterwards, a few of them hung around. I was mightily curious about how these totally unexpected developments had hit them. What I learned was that – to a man and woman – they had been . . . . utterly outraged by the impeachment of the boyfriend on felony convictions. They all regarded that tactic as completely below the belt. (The Chief Probation Officer was one of the most vehement.) None of them had snapped at the racial bait even for a second. This is only one case, circa 1990, but it has stayed with me – because I think it's paradigmatic.

I have no doubt that in an unscreened panel of even that small size, you had more than one who had deeply negative feelings about interracial couples, particularly Black men and white women. There's a lot of that out there, then, now, and always. But there wasn't one of them that was sufficiently distracted by however they felt to lose sight of the facts of the case, or fail to judge the individuals as individuals rather than racial stereotypes. THAT, to me, is the ultimate bottom line – not the racial feelings, one way or other, but the ability to bring the individual into focus as another unique human being, As with the 11 jury members in the first story, whatever racial notions this jury may have had stayed firmly in the background.

And this is true for just about every jury I have ever been involved with. More on these matters anon.

5. The Little Boys in the Photograph. During the 1990's, Santa Clara County high tech companies were hit by a really obnoxious pattern crime. On a given day when a large shipment of pricey components was expected, gunmen in ski masks would take over the loading dock, seize the shipment, and drive off with it. Scary stuff. We came to learn this was a rainbow coalition crime – basically, the intelligence as to when the shipment was due was obtained from delinquent gamblers, nearly always Asian, paying off a debt, leaked to someone who organized the robbery. The actual perpetrators were either Vietnamese locals, or occasionally Crips who came up from Los Angeles for that purpose. The goods moved very rapidly out of state or down to Los Angeles. For a while, these were extremely successful crimes. There were a few dozen instances.

The one I am going to tell you about was a variant of this m.o. A Fed-Ex driver delivering a huge shipment of goods (valued in the high six, low seven, figures) was carjacked by three African-Americans. He was forced out of the cab with at gunpoint, on to a busy expressway (fortunately uninjured). The perpetrators then took off for parts unknown.

Which is where the scheme became unglued. The perps thought they'd picked a vacant lot out of eyesight, but in fact an office worker severally stories up and a couple of blocks away looked out his window, and saw three Black males moving cartoned boxes as fast as they could out of a Fed-Ex truck, into a rental van. This looked pretty suspicious, so he phoned the police. But before any oficers could arrive, the men and the van were gone. These were very efficient operations.

The SJPD sergeant who was on the case was really good. He knew the pattern of the crime cold. Telling his wife he was going to be late for dinner, he drove down the freeway to the major exit to the I-5 Interstate, and waited. Sure enough, about 45 minutes later, along comes the rental van (matching plates) and three African Americans with matching descriptions. He calls for fill from the California Highway Patrol, a little convoy is formed, and they make a major league bust along the road, undoubtedly drawing curses from every commuter on his way home that night.

My assignment was high tech, so this was my case, even though this sort of street crime was a long way from the trade secret theft I'd signed on for. The ringleader of the group absolutely refused to deal the case, so we got ready for trial. This was preceded by a motion to suppress evidence, on the ground that the SJPD sergeant lacked probable cause to make a stop. If your mouth has dropped open in wonderment at the apparent lack of merit here, you're right. The motion was a complete non-starter. However, the defendant had retained an eager young newly minted attorney, brimming with hubris and political correctness, who absolutely believed in it.

I went over to review the evidence with the sergeant. We'd taken pictures of the stolen components and returned them to the company (price degradation was a real issue), but we'd never been over the personal items seized from the defendant that night. There might be something there that helped the case. We opened the driver's wallet. There, right under the defendant's driver's license, was a portrait photo of two of the handsomest young Black boys you ever saw, faces gleaming, smiles broad – maybe 7 and 9, about that age, I think they may have been in parochial school uniforms, but I don't remember clearly. It was absolutely crushing to see that picture and know what was coming at that family - because this was a multi-million dollar theft, with a car jacking, a gun, and heavy, HEAVY duty time.

The hard boiled sergeant slammed his hand on the table hard enough to startle me. 'God damn it,' he said.

'Not your fault,' I answered.

'I need some time,' he said, and left me for a while. Right that second I do believe he was regretting he'd ever made the bust, despite the brilliant police work. I thought of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Carousel, which turns on a crime committed by the hero to raise money for his unborn daughter. I wondered if that's why the guy had gotten involved in the scheme. The sergeant returned. He knew and I knew, that there was no way you can write off a crime of this magnitude, no matter how nice a school photo. We said no more about it.

A week or so later, we had the suppression hearing. I put on the People's case as I've written it up here. The young defense attorney (a white guy, by the way) got up and rose to his full height. He waxed indignant. “Sergeant,” he said, “isn't it true that the only reason you stopped that van was because the driver and passengers were Black?”

“No,” my guy answered quietly and professionally.

“Isn't it true that you are prejudiced against African-Americans?” he continued, a little pontifically.

“No,” the sergeant answered, without emotion, and rightly so. Enduring random, groundless slander is part of the job description. It went on for a while in that manner. I looked over at the defense side, where a fair number of friends and relatives had come up for the hearing. They were all nodding in sad, solemn agreement. Their loved one was the victim of a racist police officer. (I don't for one second think that exemplifies the African-American community reaction to a stop of this sort. Anyone without a bias recognizes the difference between a random stop and one on specific descriptions, which this one was. This was a personal and familial reaction, a rationalization, actually, to which I am somewhat sympathetic, to the devastation this arrest and prosecution was going to wreak.)

The defendant did go to trial, went down hard, and ended up with 15 years. I'd bet money that on the yard he blamed the racist cop and the racist judge who let him get away with blatant racial profiling.

But I see it a little differently.

(N.B. This one I novelized a little bit, for dramatic effect. But the gist of it, including the officer's reaction to the photograph, is accurate.)

6. The Engineer with the Sunglasses. Jury issues have occurred frequently in this brief reminiscence, first because it is where you see the community in action, second, because it is the area where biases of all types at the trial attorney level are apt to appear. Every trial attorney I have ever met, including yours truly, wants a jury of people just like himself. My ideal jury would be 12 of me - not just white men in later middle age, but actual clones. I'd know how they think, what arguments they like, what doesn't work – it would be wonderful.

Unfortunately, that's not the law. As it happened, I came to enjoy the challenge of rainbow juries, to such an extent that I developed a mild reputation for eccentricity in my willingness to accept just about anyone. I am going to close with two stories about jury selection.

The last major case I did, in 2002, was about as serious a case of Internet stalking as it is possible to imagine. Everyone in the case was Indian (from India). The defendant, a rejected suitor, had stalked and harassed his former girlfriend and her husband over a ten year period in both California and Michigan, spray painting their house in the dead of night, cutting car brake lines, etc. He'd been to prison once, in Michigan, but the incompetence of the parole authorities there had allowed him to get away with a series of harassments afterward. Finally, he moved to Santa Clara County, from whence he sent a 300 word, hair-raising, email (anonymous, naturally) threatening death by fire, castration, etc. The case cost a lot to try, but it was pretty important we get a conviction. I thought the danger to the young couple was growing, as this guy came more and more to believe in his immunity from detection. He was also becoming angrier.

Jury selection went normally. The juror I am going to talk about was a young, Black male in his late 20's, with a good job as a technologist in a local company. Race was no issue, but he bothered me a little. His answers on voir dire were so laconic that they stopped just short of sullen. Also, he was unmarried, which always worried me with a female victim, as you may have some misogyny kicking around some place. But the job was good, he was otherwise well socialized, and my thought was that – if he did have an attitude – that at the worst he'd be passive.

The next day, when opening arguments began, all sorts of big time warning lights began to go off. He showed up in sunglasses – which no one wears to court – and similar odd dress. But most of all, throughout the morning, he was showing off body language that stopped just short of contempt – swiveling away, from the court, turning his back on counsel, etc. I'm a little concerned that this description is inadequate, but the reader is going to have to trust me – I've done well over a hundred jury trials – and this was really unusual behavior. Every move this guy made seemed calculated to be an FU to the court and the proceeding.

Not good. The judge was an old friend but also old school. Like all good judges, he didn't care about the verdict, but he did care that we get a functioning jury. He was not at all on my page about jury inclusion, and had wondered before about some of my choices (though they'd always worked out.) This time he thought I'd goofed big time. I was quite worried he was right, as we had a lot riding on the case. So I did something I'd never had to do before, and checked the juror out – not on the criminal databases, but on Google and elsewhere. (This was 2002.)

Surprise, surprise – he turned out to be a graduate of an extremely prestigious technological University (MIT, if I recall correctly), and not just a good citizen, but an exemplary one. He'd won a couple of awards for his involvement in boys clubs and inner city youth organizations. He looked a lot different in the Internet pictures than he did scowling in the courtroom.

This did not end the issue – you can be a great person, and still have attitudes about the criminal justice system that disqualify you from jury service. But it did end any thought of doing more. All we had was a guy doing a great impersonation of Supremely Disaffected Young Black with Attitude – and we were going to have to assume that all that good citizenship was what defined him, not the courtroom demeanor. I told the judge I was going take my chances and let the matter go. I got the predictable disgusted look.

The case ultimately went to jury, with very solid evidence. In a relatively short time, we had the verdict we wanted. (Complete success, which is rare in my business, for the harassment stopped completely and the couple has been at peace ever since. I gave a version of a Godfather speech to the defendant at sentencing - 'if a meteor should chance to strike them . . . ' It must have sunk in.) The case had been interesting, and a few of the jurors lingered. Alas, the juror who had concerned me was not one of them. But I was curious how he'd acted during deliberations. As it turned out, fairly predictably – he'd been polite but distant, very quiet. At one point, he'd courteously corrected someone's misunderstanding of IP protocols, then remarked that the evidence in the case was overwhelming. He'd voted guilty on every ballot, which was what the weight of the evidence justified.

So . . . . an ideal juror. But I have always wondered what was bothering him during the presentation of the case. Something clearly was.

7. The Pear-Shaped Curve. I didn't fare so well in the last of these stories. The defendant was an executive with a major high tech company, and he was African-American (actually from the Caribbean). He was accused of embezzling some slightly out-of-date circuit boards which were, however, still current and serialized. The boards were discovered when his confederate was arrested, another African-American who belonged to the same congregation, an evangelical church in South Alameda County. The two had been observed moving something from the trunk of one car to another shortly before. So this was a pretty solid case.

The juror I am going to describe was the only African-American juror on the panel. He was in his late 30's, and a clerk at some company or other. Asked about biases towards the criminal justice system in general, he volunteered that he thought it was biased against African-Americans and that he'd been stopped a couple of times by cops that he thought were not justified. He said this with a mildly challenging, in-your-face, manner.

The challenging manner would be reason enough to toss him, but I was full of myself by that time, and decided to keep him. First, he'd been open about it, which to me meant he could be reasoned with. Second, he'd talked about disliking the police, but this was not a police-driven case – the core of the proof was corporate records. Third, both the defendant and the principal witness were African-American, so the case wasn't going to present like one lonely Black soul against the Man. Finally, I'd read more than a little about jury behavior, and knew that 11-1 hangs were extremely rare. (The recent trial of Barry Bonds had one count that hung on that division, but there were other counts with larger minorities, from which the lone holdout doubtless drew strength.)

Two other factors should have caused me to toss him, though. The first was entirely subjective. I didn't like him. (I'd been unable to connect with the juror in the last story, but I didn't get any impression at the time of jury selection that he was hostile, only distant.) The second I am setting forth in the interest of telling it like it is. The juror was another unmarried male, this in his late thirties, and fat to a point just short of morbidly obese – not from any easily recognizable glandular difficulty, but likely from years of overeating. Either factor by itself likely doesn't matter all that much, but together it adds up to a real possibility that the individual is isolated socially, a loner, not someone who's going to join the social consensus required in jury deliberations all that easily. So in addition to my loose dislike, there was the real possibility he was a social misfit, quite apart from any racial factor. That should have been enough.

I don't know how this strikes the reader, but in selecting a jury you have maybe five minutes to size some one up and make the best decision you can. A lot of this decision making takes place by default in a jungle of first impressions – most of which storm warnings I ignored in this case. Whatever the reasons, this decision turned out wrong, wrong, wrong. Even on the first day, my witnesses began reporting that he was rolling his eyes and making faces at them. This went on throughout the trial. The case went to jury without any evidentiary problems, and the jury got to 11-1 within a couple of hours. The lone holdout was you-know-who. The others pressured him for reasons, which is what's supposed to happen. He gave them reasons for a while, but had them blown out of the water by the other jurors. Finally he said he didn't believe the defendant was guilty, he wasn't going to vote guilty, and he wasn't going to discuss reasons anymore.

That's where it ended, hung jury, two days later. As the jury left, the holdout turned and gave me this long, smug look. Well, I guess I showed you. I don't know what exactly he thought he'd shown – cases in which the outcome is not related to any rational construction of the evidence are simply dismal generators of cynicism. They don't do anyone any good. His gesture had cost the County somewhere between one and two hundred thousand dollars, based on what it cost to keep a courtroom open for a day. Plus I had to go back to the Neanderthals in the office and admit, that while I still was going to keep selecting juries my way, they did have a point. The next day, I got two calls from infuriated jurors who felt their time had been wasted, and wondered what could be done about it. (Nothing.)

I don't know what the holdout juror thought his point was. But I am sure it made his next Double Whopper go down a bit more easily. (A little bitterness there).

The subsequent history of this case took some curious twists, which also bear on the racism – or lack thereof – in this society. But I'd like to make a couple of comments about the unanimity requirement in jury verdicts before I do. I love the jury system. Believe it or not, I think both the white racist in the first story, and the Black racist in the last, probably belong on the jury, and it probably does society some good to leave them there. The guy in the first story likely thought he was going to get a lot of approval and support for his crudity. He ended up in the corner with a dunce cap on (figuratively speaking), worrying about whether a judge was going to toss him in jail. That couldn't possibly have done him any harm. The Black racist wasn't so roughly treated, but he did spend a couple of days being berated by sensible, exasperated people. It had to have some effect. Again, not bad.

The problem is not that people like this have a voice, which they maybe should, but that the system gives them a veto, which they definitely should not have. My own thought is that changing the verdict requirement to 11-1 or 10-2 , which is Constitutionally permissible, would remove the necessity for trial lawyers to select 'perfect' juries, relieve the stress, and probably lead to more diverse and interesting panels. It would certainly make trial lawyers more willing to follow the law, which many at present do not. End of digression.

The case was retried, and I thought it would be pretty easy. Retrials usually are. Not so. To the amazement of myself and the trial judge, on identical evidence, the second jury acquitted the defendant as rapidly as the first had been ready to convict. I was amazed at first, but then I understood.

The defendant had testified at the first trial, and had not done well. He'd come across as pompous, arrogant, hypocritical, and without any easy answers to a lot of hard questions. At the second trial, more sensible advice had prevailed and he kept silent. The testimony from the first trial had been read to the jury, of course, but without the defendant in the flesh, sweating, writhing, and pontificating, it lacked the crackling dramatic force it had the first time. In its absence, the jury had gone straight to the other salient point in the case – the striking difference between the defendant (who in addition to being a ranking executive in his company, was a deacon in his church and had led a clean, blameless life to that point) and his confederate (who had a telephone book for a record.) Never mind that the inventory records showed beyond any possible doubt that Mr. Clean had indeed filched circuit boards from his employer and provided them to the Telephone Book. There was no way this hury were going to take him down on the word of the People's star witness. One juror told me afterward they hadn't even discussed the inventory records, which were indisputable proof of guilt.

At the time, I was more than a little nettled, as the defendant should not have been acquitted on this record. Over time, with the competitive juices subsiding, I've come around to the jury's way of thinking, One thing that had bothered me from the beginning was that there was no take out for the defendant. There was no evidence he'd ever received anything of value in exchange for the stolen boards. I expected to find it somewhere along the way, but in two trials it never turned up. His testimony was that his relationship with Telephone Book was only for the purpose of providing counsel (of the type a lay deacon in a church gives), which there is no doubt Telephone Book desperately needed. He also denied he had ever given the guy the stolen boards. He was lying through his teeth about that latter aspect of the matter, but it became more and more plausible that he'd provided them in some sort of misguided reclamation project. That didn't make him any less a thief as a matter of law, but it did mean that he was not 'in the life', so to speak – a thief, but a rather unusual one. Query whether destroying this guy's professional reputation over what was really a rather trivial theft might not have done more social harm than good. That was the way the jury saw it, anyway, and I am not so sure it wasn't right.

For those of you keeping racial score, the jury in the second case was almost entirely White. (Maybe there was an Asian or two, but no African Americans. None had been called on the random draw for that particular panel.) The defendant and his counsel were both African American. Everyone on the prosecution side (except for the confederate) was White. The judge was White, as was the prosecutor (me). None of this racial census meant a damn thing to the jury in its almost instant vindication of the defendant. This was in the 2003-2004 time frame, something like that.

I commented to someone once that if I did have to suffer a detriment in the form of potential prejudice as the defendant in a criminal prosecution, I would far rather be an upper-class Black than a dirt-poor white. This is the case I had in mind when I wrote that.

Conclusions: I call myself a Populist, which has drawn the occasional jeer, but I really am, and it goes down to the roots. Beneath the astounding diversity of cultures in this wondrous Nation lies an even more amazing commonality of values, once you scrape down to the root. I am fully aware that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution did not repeal human nature. Fools and idiots like the ones in the first and seventh story we will always have with us. Nor will we ever escape completely the weight of history. Race, gender, and religious traditions claim us like a hand from the grave on the ankle.

But I do think that we have created the most open, tolerant society in history, given due allowance for the constraints of human reality. It is also my belief, based on my experience, that the vast majority of American citizens are able to judge individuals as individuals, regardless of whatever racial stereotyping they may have brought to the party. That's really the crux, the point in human interaction where racism either holds sway, or breaks down. These days, more often than not, it breaks down. That's the moral of the 4th anecdote.

Some Notes On The Play 'Othello'

Shakespeare's play 'Othello' is fascinating. For a long time, I had problems with the play. In the Chamber Scene at the end, when Othello smothers Desdemona, he cat-and-mouses her, bullies her, for a while. It's not pleasant. Also, Othello's gullibility is hard to endure, even though he shares that trait with just about every other character in the play (including Desdemona).  

Then, now over 30 years ago, I chanced to see Ronald Colman's movie 'A Double Life', for which he won the Academy Award in 1947, playing an actor so consumed by the roles he plays that he takes on those character traits. The character is cast as Othello, and ends up smothering a very young, very nubile Shelley Winters. The lines from the Chamber Scene haunt him, and occur several times in the movie - and I began to realize how powerful they really are. This happens a lot with Shakespeare - stuff that looks good on paper takes on even more resonance when spoken or dramatized. 

Othello enters Desdemona's bedchamber, dark, illuminated only by the swinging lamp he  carries. He's in an almost psychotic calm, imbued with the delusional belief the murder he's about to commit is required justice, completely unhinged by Iago's machinations. He is still deeply in love, but convinced the woman he loves is evil. He gazes down at her and contemplates the act of murder, with reference to the lamp he carries, whispering so as not to wake her, with genuine awe at the enormity of the act of taking life: 

Put out the light, and then [looking down at his sleeping wife] put out the light:
If I quench thee, thou flaming minister,
I can again thy former light restore,
Should I repent me: but once put out thy light,
Thou cunning'st pattern of excelling nature,
I know not where is that Promethean heat
That can thy light relume. When I have pluck'd the rose,
I cannot give it vital growth again. . .

Wow. The whole scene is imbued with language of this kind of intensity and lyricism, which does not make it any more pleasant to watch. But it does mean there is something there. So I decided to look deeply it. The more I became familiar with the play, the more fascinating it became. It also speaks with authority to the present age, through the mouth of one single character. But more of that anon. 

Let's talk about it.

(1) Race. Of course that's an issue these days. But let me put this in Shakespearean perspective,. Shakespeare wrote the play in 1604, three years before the Jamestown colony was founded. There was Portugese and Spanish slavery in the New World, but I am not sure that the importation of African slaves had begun yet. In any case, it was not an element of English culture. The root cause of the tragedy in Shakespeare's conception isn't the diverse racial background of Othello and Desdemona, but their near unfamiliarity with each other. Race figures into the action only as one more element of mutual ignorance. Othello is 40 or so, maybe a little older, having spent nearly all his years as a soldier, a mercenary in the field. Desdemona is 20 or so, maybe younger, a nobleman's daughter, and completely unfamiliar with soldiery, She's a virgin (of course), and he might as well be. Whatever experience he's had with women is limited to camp followers. They are deeply in love, but they don't know all that much about each other - not enough for either of them to have enough trust and knowledge to ask the questions that might save them. That's the fatal flaw Iago exploits. No one in the play comments negatively on Othello's Moorish background, except Iago, who is obviously a special case.  

That's not to say that the play doesn't have a memorable place in the history of racism and bigotry in Anglo-American culture. It surely does. But the place occurs in the performance history of the play, not in Big Bill's initial conception. Indications in the text is that he meant Othello not simply to be African, but an extremely dark African. I've always thought that the ideal 'look' for the character would be Lawrence Taylor, the former Giants linebacker, who was a huge man, very physical, very handsome, and very, very dark.  

But as time went on, British audiences became more and more soured on that conception. Othello in performance (always by English actors in blackface at that time) became lighter and lighter. By mid-Victorian times, Othello had become Italian for all practical purposes. Samuel Coleridge, the 'Ancient Mariner' author, and a first rate Shakespearean critic in most instances, disgraced himself by attributing the 'Blackness' of Shakespeare's conception to his ignorance of the actual state of Africans. He was not alone. Only in this century has a return to the original reading of the text occurred - and although I'll stick with my opinion that we live in a large post-racial society, it still unsettles audiences. 

2. Desdemona. Very quickly, because the play is not about her. She is too often played as a patsy, but she is actually a typical Shakespearean heroine, alert, intelligent, very feminine, and committed to being Othello's wife. She'd fit right in to one of his comedies. (BTW, you won't read it in most ciritcs, but it is striking that in almost every one of his plays the heroine is smarter than the hero, the one conspicuous exception being Hamlet. 'Othello' is in that pattern). She gets into trouble, not because she's passive, but because she finds Othello's increasingly difficult behavior impossible to understand in terms of what little she knows of him.  

3. Othello. Everyone agrees the role is the most challenging role in all Shakespeare, which is really saying something. Lawrence Olivier, who failed spectacularly in the part in the mid 60's, made up a joke, to the effect that Shakespeare and Burbage were out drinking one night. Burbage in his cups boasted that Shakespeare could not write a role that he, Burbage, could not play. Big Bill thought to himself, I'll show you, went home and wrote Othello.

The role is near impossible. At the beginning, Othello is stately, composed, so formidable that he can still a nightbrawl in his nightshirt simply by his presence alone ('Keep up your bright swords or the dew will rust them' - a famous line - meaning you guys aren't going to be using your weapons for any purpose, so put them away. He's dressed at most in nightshirt - this is his wedding night - and unarmed. But his stateliness is so powerful he can end a riot simply by speaking.) Under Iago's influence, he loses all composure and dignity, collapsing in an epileptic fit at the end of Act IV, then restoring himself to the psychotic calm mentioned above. At the end, he reverts to a measure of his former self, in the manner of a musical recapitulation, and commits suicide in a dignified, though hardly heroic, manner.

The saving grace for the actor taking on the role is that Othello's language in all his various states is unvaryingly magnificent. His composure might fail; his poetic imagination never does. Hamlet may be Shakespeare's character philosopher, but Othello is his poet. I've always liked one line, which I quote for people who think Shakespeare is played by guys in ruffled collars and black tights. Othello is spying on the man Cassio has tricked him into believing is his rival, and says, in a fury:

Oh, I see that nose of yours, but not that dog I shall throw it too!

Not bad. But for all of Othello's poetry and corrupted nobility of character, the reason why the play is a masterpiece, and why it has so much to say to contemporary society is . .

4. Iago. One of Big Bill's greatest creations. Absolutely rational, completely cold-blooded, without a neurotic bone in his body, and stone cold, uninhibitedly evil. He has no real motive for engineering the catastrophe - Coleridge, in much better form with him than Othello, describes his actions as stemming from 'motiveless malignity', a wonderful phrase and absolutely descriptive. He does give explanations from time to time - he's been passed over for promotion, he thinks Othello may have seduced his wife - but the critics are unanimous in seeing these as lipservice, i.e., they are not themes in the play and he drops them without comment as the action moves on. In this case, the critics are right. Iago acts solely out of a fascination with his own malice.

In theory, he hates Othello. But he goes out of his way to see to it that Desdemona, who has never done him any harm and who likes and trusts him, goes to her death. He could easily spare her, as Othello by the end of Act IV has so badly compromised himself as to make his fall from grace inevitable. But Iago does not spare anyone, Instead, he goads the murder forward.

OTHELLO: Get me some poison, Iago; this night: I'll not
expostulate with her, lest her body and beauty
unprovide my mind again: this night, Iago.

IAGO: Do it not with poison, strangle her in her bed, even the bed she hath contaminated

(As he speaks, Iago knows perfectly well that Desdemona has never 'contaminated' any bed.) 

He's no mastermind, He's clearly improvising at times. He has no conscience of any kind - he also steals, lies without shame, and manipulates the murder of others. The only advantage he has over the other characters is that he is unrelentingly and unapologetically negative. Staged badly, which is the rule, he comes across as a witty villain in a crude melodrama. Staged properly, and the audience should hate him at the end. All he ever does is negate and destroy.

Iago is, in short, the quintessential sociopath, the first of his kind in English literature, and even now, likely the purest. He's the great grandfather of Goethe's Mephistopheles, the 'spirit that always denies'. That's Iago - he negates everything. It's only if the play is poorly presented that his endless, sterile cynicism sounds like wit. He is Shakespeare's rejoinder to all those sentimentalists who believe that some sort of mental illness must afflict serial killers, the Columbine shooters, the 9-11 terrorists. Nope - it is possible to do those things out of a morbid fascination in your power to accomplish those acts, if you are indifferent to human consequences - and Iago is, as are the others.

The final masterstroke in his characterization comes at the very end of the play. Othello, the truth revealed, unwilling now even to speak to the man he trusted without question, and now completely ruined, addresses one of the onlookers:

OTHELLO: Will you, I pray, demand that demi-devil
Why he hath thus ensnared my soul and body?

Now, this was a playwright who could characterize anyone from, page boy to king, whore to empress, and often in a few short syllables. He could have given a speech to Iago. Instead . . . .

IAGO: Demand me nothing: what you know, you know:
From this time forth I never will speak word.

And that's all. No explanations. No protestations of righteousness.  No Lady Macbeth sleepwalking qualms of conscience. Nothing - the final negation, so to speak. As noted, Iago is the ultimate sociopath. I did what I did. As to you civilized fools who would ask me to account . . . . no. Nothing.   

This is the essence of pure malice. Ir sneers at you even when discovered. The explanations, the exuses, the apologetics you expect from persons within human norms . . .  ain't never gonna happen. That is possibly the most frustrating aspect of dealing with major crime. To this day, I don't think any writer has displayed it so well.  

It is the lesson drawn from this play that make me cynical about religious and political motives for abominable acts. Atta may discuss Islam, but ultimately he acts out of a fascination with flying a plane into a building. Nothing more. The Columbine kids, like Iago, gave the same ip service to motives for the deeds. But ultimately it was attraction to the power of a mass murderer that drew them in.That's all. There is nothing more to say. Iago, in saying nothing, has said it all. 

5. Performance.  Very frustrating - the play is super difficult. The Lawrence Fishburne/Kenneth Branagh movie is particularly unfortunate. Olivier's try in 1965 is embarrassing, as is Orson Wells truncated movie. There is a really good DVD with Willard White (an opera singer most noted for 'Porgy and Bess') as Othello, Ian Mckellen as Iago, and Imogen Stubbs nearly perfect as Desdemona - the balance is almost right. That's obtainable from Amazon.

But my own favorite is an audio recording of a performance with Chiewel Etiofor as Othello, Ewan McGregor as Iago, and a pretty good cast otherwise. Etiofor is perfect. McGregor has been criticized, but he is first rate, too in my opinion. You can find it on Audible.com if so minded. There are ludicrous objections that the play is abridged, but the evidence is compelling that Shakespeare expected his texts to be adapted in performance.

The Great Beast

  I call my politics Populist. Forty years of working with juries, the American public at its best, will do that to you. I trust popular will, popular judgments, popular values. That makes me unpopular, because populism itself isn’t very popular. But so be it.

The populism I’m talking about originated with Abraham Lincoln, who built the building on the foundation of the Declaration of Independence. It swept out of the Mid and Far West in the second half of the Nineteenth Century, with an insistence on fair play, tolerance, the rough equality of all men (sic), and a deeply rooted suspicion of every form of privilege or social status. There really wasn’t much more to it inb essence than that, though, God knows, the political flowerings of those simple roots are varied and complex. Though it was undeniably racist and sexist at the start, the transformative power of mass media changed those primitive attitudes decisively a long time ago.. These days, it has progressed to a universalism so far beyond the pronouncements of the intelligentsia that the elite can’t (or won’t) comprehend how far advanced it is. In terms of racism, or sexism, ot this-ism, or that-ism, it doesn’t have attitudes anymore. The issues have disappeared. These days, it literally doesn’t give a damn. There are a great many public intellectuals in the US who refuse to come to terms with that.

Populism is not a system of thought, just a loose collection of values, a respect for openmess, tolerance, sympathy and so on. Many of the attitudes that emerge are completely, enchantingly inconsistent with each other, and who cares? Thus, for example, the Great Beast believes that society should treat everyone the same, but give due respect to the individuality of everyone. Put those two sentiments side by side, and think about itfor the second. The government should take care of basic needs of everyone, but should not intrude on anyone’s life. That’s also an interesting pair of concepts to twin.

In short, we are not talking about consistencies, foolish or not. We are talking (to repeat) about a loose collation of values, which no one has ever tried to organize into a formal philosophy because every one knows it can’t be done. So a self-professed Populist has to live without the comfort ofany system of thought and a basic acceptance of some of the most cornpone formulations imaginable. Thus, Aunt Eller in Hammerstein’s Oklahoma sings an anthem:

I’d like to teach you all a little sayin’ ,
And learn the words by heart,
the way you should, I’m not claimin’ to be better than anybody else -
But I’ll be damned it I ain’t just as good!

Or Frank Capra’s Jefferson Smith on the floor of the Senate:

Because I wouldn't give you two cents for all your fancy rules if, behind them, they didn't have a little bit of plain, ordinary, everyday kindness and a - a little lookin' out for the other fella, too...

Pretty homey stuff. Nothing that you can reformulate as a premise of some coherent. Comprehensive Theory of Everything. Yet it swept out of the Western United States in the late 19th Century, overwhelmed the crude monopolies of the day, confronted and defeated the decadent repugnant, European nationalism of the 19th Century, transformed the crude laissez-faire capitalism of the day into socially responsible institutions with which we are all familiar now, and crushed the twin Hegelian monsters of National Socialism and Communism in turn. It’s populism, which its insistence on the social equality of all human beings - ‘I’ll be damned if I ain’t just as good!’ - that has eradicated racism and sexism in the West, and not any pronouncements of the United States Supreme Court or the European Union.

At the end of the day, adherence to Populism as a political philosophy comes down to two central tenets - (1) a belief in the essential benevolence of the mass of human beings, and (2) a belief that popular judgments are essentially sound (or at least much sounder than judgments made by the various elitist alternatives). My playful term for the American public is the Great Beast - possessed of no intelligence, but infinite wisdom. It never knows why it’s going, or where it’s going, but it’s almost always gets to the right place. ‘Almost’, because nothing human is infallible. But if history had followed the advice of the New York Times editorial board, or Wall Street Journal, or the faculty of Harvard University, we’d all be broke, or speaking Russian, or what not. The Great Beast knew better. It didn’t know why it knew, but it did.

Alas, nothing in any meaningful blog can be all sweetness and light. I do intend in future posts to take up some specific causes, and without any promise of charity.

(a) The major issue facing the United States is class and the division of wealth, not race or gender. It’s serious, but it’s a problem, and only a problem, not a crisis. We can do something about it short of revolution. My own solution is a switch of the basic annual tax base from income to wealth, coupled with a truly substantial estate tax. I’m going to make any number of posts on the net wealth tax, from the ultra theoretical to the issues of actual administration. I’m something of a voice in the wilderness here, but the topic is critical, the issues present a fascinating intellectual game, and . . . someone has to start the ball rolling, and it might as well be this blog.

(b) Second, I’m going to devote considerable time to the uses of Big Information as a tool to solve, or at least better, some of the social problems we do face. I am very, very tired of playing defense to the likes of Edward Snowden, Ron Wyden, and a host of other cynical Luddites who have deliberately reversed the polarity of the new information world. Its potential for social good is far greater than otherwise, but you would never know that from the public dialog of the last few years. Every new technology can do social harm or good, depending on how it’s used. But you don’t stop building airports because an airplane can be used to drop bombs as well as fly passengers. But that effectively - not building airports - is what a sizable fraction of people who should know better are advising. That’s absurd.

(c ) Finally, and most controversially, I believe the racial tropes with which most Americans grew up have outlived their usefulness. That opinion flies completely in the face of the conventional wisdom most of us grew up with, particularly we Baby Boomers. But any critical look at the culture shows that to be the truth. I by no means assert that the United States has resolved the issue of race. But these days it shows its face in the form of the toxic sociological mess left behind, first articulated by Daniel Moynihan in the 60’s and observed these days by such journalists as Jill Leovy in ‘Ghettoside'. I also do not mean that mainstream society does not have a moral obligation to address those problems, because I think it does. To that extent I believe in reparations.

But it also means I have no patience with the entrenched personalities in the MSM who insist that a pervasive institutional racism still exists in the United States. That’s absolute nonsense, and belied by just about every statistic and cultural observation available (not the least of which is that few if any of the spokespersons has experienced any racial barrier of any kind in their own lives). That would be simply an interesting factoid, except that the same clique has managed to obscure the REAL needs both of poor African-Americans and others, and promote a racial divisiveness that does no one any good and is also wildly out of date. But more of that anon.

So let’s get on with it. First up is immigration and terrorism. The Great Beast in my view is always sympathetic to refugees. But neither does it want to be terrorized. It never had to be ‘either-or’. There are solutions.

The Tale of the Photon's Journey; or The Relative Beliefs of a Committed Non-Believer

 

There was a young lady of Bright,

Who traveled much faster than light,

She went out one day,

In a Relative way,

And returned home the previous night.

Nobody does metaphysics these days, but at the risk of losing all personal credibility, that's exactly what I'm about to do.  Not only that, but I have to begin with a word of warning - right smack dab in the middle of the piece, when I quote a little scripture, the wary reader might suspect he or she's been mousetrapped into a little religious come on. Not at all so, as I'll explain when we get there. So bear with me at that point. The ultimate purpose is to demonstrate how much in common the metaphysical implictions of modern physics have with all the ancient stuff. 

The hero of this story is an ordinary photon, an element of a light-wave originating somewhere near Alpha Centauri, the star nearest to the solar system, four light years away. The lightwave and the photon make their way to earth and to someone's retina. As we measure time,the journey took approximately 4.3 years - for Alpha Centauri is 4.3 light-years away, and our photon travels at the speed of light. 

But it is here that our tale really begins - because, though the photon has experienced an event, a change in location, it has not experienced any change in time. It has traveled at the speed of light, which - as established by the theory of relativity - is the speed of time. Although mortal fools may count up to four plus years, the photon has moved from Alpha Centauri to earth instantaneously. 

But 'instantaneous' is not the right word. It is a time-burdened word, which means it cannot by definition apply. What is striking here is how inapplicable all time-burdened language is this photon's experience (which is why I'd like those theoretical physicists among my small readership group who'd like to discuss the science here, to lay off for a second, for my point is a more general one about language.)  There is indisputably an event - the photon 'was' there and 'now' it is here - but sequential words do not apply when there has been in fact no sequence. Wanna say that the photon was simultaneously at Alpha Centauri and on earth? Be my guest, but 'simultaneous' has no more validity than 'now' and 'then'. It means an indentity of time frames, wnen in fact no time frame exists. The notion of 'the same' is no more relevant than 'before' or 'after' - the photon does not experience time, period, close quote. Yet it is almost impossible to describe the photon's journey in flesh and blood language without time concepts. Wasn't the photon at Alpha Centauri before it came to earth? Is this sequence of events not indisputable? Not only is it not indisputable, the sequence doesn't exist at ll. Curious, and somewhat frustrating.  

 But we are only getting warmed up. Let's extend the thought experiment. Let us consider a universe that consists of nothing but photons and other similar energies - where every being moves at the speed of light. Time does not exist in such a cosmos. Events do. Photons journey to and fro, here and there, from this point to that. But all of this takes place in an infinite stillness. No clocks tick, no sequence exists. (It is of more than passing interest that there is a similarity to Christian notions of eternity here, for that realm too is time-less, i..e, not simply an endless expanse of time, but beyond time altogether, infinite in a wholly different way. Dante's saints spin in endless gyres in light and music in his Paradiso, but - though they move - time does not. A curious analogy.)

It is only when matter becomes an element of this alabaster universe that time begins. Only when the photon takes on mass does it fall off from timeless eternity, into time. Only then do decay, change, mortality, death, become elements of reality. This is not mysticism, but in accord with the theory of relativity. In some algebraic variants, Relativity seems to indicate that the world as we experience it recedes into time at the speed of light. If the only entities that existed were light and energy, time would not exist. Only when the purity of energy 'decays' into matter does the time that we experience as mortal beings comes into existence. What a falling off is there!  

It is time now for our digression into scripture. Your patience is requested. Here is John 1:1-5, and then the first verses of the Gospel According to John, followed by John 1:14

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men.And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not . . .

And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we saw His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth.

 After pausing for just a moment to savor the breathtaking beauty of this King James prose, let us move to the point - translating the above into basic photon-ese:

In the beginning [in eternity, before time began] there was the Word [Logos, the disembodied Idea, was the only thing that existed] and the Word was with God [the Idea was in the realm of eternity] and the Word was God [God is the ultimate Idea]. All things were made by him [the Ideal is the source of all creation] and without him was not anything made that was made [the material universe is not the source of creation, but shaped by the Ideal, which is the sole creative source]. In him was life and the life was the light of man.[Life - energy - derives from the eternal Ideal. Note the association with light.] And the light shineth in the darkness and the darkness comprehended it not.[The first statement with which our photon might take issue. It is also the first expression of Christian dogma.This is, after all, a Gospel.]

And the Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us . . .  [The photon would identify completely with thiis sentiment. That's exactly how it came to experience time, by being associated with material. Similarly in the Scripture - the eternal Ideal can only experience time, and mortality, by taking on the trappings of mortality, by becoming flesh. This is of course a statement of core Christian theology as well].

I don't intend to push this analogy to the breaking point. The genius writer of these passages was not a physicist, but a neo-Platonist. The eternal realm he conceived was populated by concepts, Platonic forms and ideals, not the raw energy of relativistic physics. Twenty centuries of mathematical quantification and relentless philosophical reductionism have passed between that day and this. The photon's view of the universe is infinitely more detailed and sophisticated.  

But the central metaphor is the same. If one were to describe the implications of modern physics with this philosopher, the notion of light itself as the stuff of eternity, time only beginning with the decay into materiality, he might not agree with you. (He might even regard you as a heretic, so be careful.) But he would nod his head with understanding. The notion that time originates by the descent of the eternal into materiality would be completely consistent with his own concept. That deeply based intuition is one thing that has not changed in twenty centuries. 

So where does all this lead? To the corny notions that the ancients anticipated modern physics? Surely not, as much as you sentimentalists may have been hoping so. But, as much as their intuition about time may have identical roots, those guys were words men, searching for ultimate truth in language and ideas. The methods and logic of physicists are a universe away.

No, my conclusions and target are a little different. There have been a number of conscientious attempts by modern physicists to extend physics theory to metaphysics. I am thinking of works like Weinberg's The First Three Minutes: A Modern View Of The Origin Of The Universe  and various books by Roger Penrose. These are metaphysical systems grounded on a mathematical and quantitative theory that is way, way beyond my pay grade. Yet it is my sense that they suffer from the same basic flaw that bedevils all rational approaches to systematic metaphysics, the paradoxes that lie at the base of human perceptions of time and space. We perceive them both as finite and infinite at one and the same - er, time - as Kant demonstrated unarguably at about the time of the French Revolution. Even brilliant theoretical physicists will find it a tad difficult to construct a solid system of thought on the base of an unresolvable contradiction. 

What would scare me if I were Weinberg, Penrose, or others of that ilk, is how quick and easy the translation of scripture into photon-ese actually is. It would cause my skin to crawl with the uneasy thought that the metaphysical speculation I'm doing is only a hyper-sophisticated mathematical dance around the same ol, same ol' core mysteries. (I am not talking of the application of the math to empirical data, but its use as metaphysical tools). The reductionist attacks of skeptical philosophers on the traditional Aristotelian/Thomistic -Christian metaphysics in the last three centuries have been so successful, so overwhelming, that  it is easy to forget how much intellectual work, how much hard thought, went into their creation. But ultimately they were revealed to rely systematic conceptual confusion, camouflaging some core tautologies at base. I think that the same reduction (albeit with infinitely more difficulty) could be accomplished with respect to quantitative physics as applied to metaphysical problems - that ultimately the same core tautologies, mathematically expressed, lies beneath all the subtlety. At the base, it turns out 1 = 1, world without end, amen - to the same raucous laughter the Thomists have had to endure. 

So has it always been. There is a sense in which all metaphysical speculation, all religious yearning, begins at the same point, with musings about the irreducible mystery of time. But the mystery is irreducible, as most people sense, and Kant demonstrated conclusively. The central riddle of human existence is why - how - flesh and blood creatures, confined in space and with numbered days, can conceive of an endless line of numbers, wonder about eternal time, dream dreams of an imperishable self (soul) - how creatures hopelessly mired in finitude can contemplate infinity. 

But with this description of the source of religious awe, we come to the end of rational exploration. The beginning and the end are one and the same.  None of metaphysical systems, be they the mighty cathedrals of Thomas or the ice palaces of theoretical physicians, rest on any rational foundation. The language of infinity, of what lies beyond what can be seen and touched, is the language of faith, not reason. 

I do not mean to belittle religiosity with this observation - quite the contrary. The gaze into the infinite abyss is the wellspring of religious awe, and that is no small matter. In fact, it is ultimately important. The majority of Westerners these days are atheists, in my opinion, either professing or practicing (meaning they might as well be professing). That's likely a good thing, considering how outworn most of the major faiths are and how disputed their contribution to the progress of civilization - at least at this time and place. But it is one thing to discard the empty shells of these beliefs, quite another to forget the impulse that sparked them into existence, the sense of infinity in the midst of finitude. Lose that, and we have lost perhaps the quintessential definition of humanity. Not good.

Meanwhile, the tale of the photon's journey is over, and so is this piece. It's possible to describe the photon's experience of time (or eternity) conceptually, but not perceptually. How odd, really, that is - that we begin counting one, two, three, and measuring the drop of an apple, and end with a theory of the world which jeers at the perceptual base with which it began.

But that's photons for you. Smug, enigmatic little thingies, ain't they?

"Talk" - A Poem by Yevgeni Yevtushenko

read the poem quoted below in Time or some such when I was 14. I think Yevtushenko was on the cover. The poem isn't very good even in Russian, and the translation is a disaster.

But the concept has stayed with me my whole life. God, what I wouldn't give for a little integrity, not even honesty, just the attempt at honesty, from any of the myriad public personalities, pundits, politicians, etc. But these days image is everything, as the long ago commercial put it, which may be a good mantra for a tennis player but is a lousy motto for a statesman.

At any rate, here is the poem, written in the first years of the Kruschev thaw:

Talk

You're a brave man, they tell me.
I'm not.
Courage has never been my quality.
Only I thought it disproportionate
so to degrade myself as others did.
No foundations trembled. My voice
no more than laughed at pompous falsity;
I did no more than write, never denounced,
I left out nothing I had thought about,
defended who deserved it, put a brand
on the untalented, the ersatz writers
(doing what anyhow had to be done).
And now they press to tell me that I'm brave.
How sharply our children will be ashamed
taking at last their vengeance for these horrors
remembering how in so strange a time
common integrity could look like courage.

-- Yevgeny Yevtushenko

Groucho Olbermann

The Big Store (1941) is not vintage Marx Brothers stuff. By that time, the lads had been in the MGM stable for six years. The once zany nihilists had become old routiniers. Nevertheless, it contains one classic verbal gag that I have had cause to quote again and again over the years.

Grouch is applying (never mind why) for the position of floorwalker at the Big Store – a sort of Macy's/Gimbels place – to the manager, the perpetually exasperated Douglas Dumbrille. The room is crowded with onlookers. The manager puts a test question to Groucho:

*

Manager: A woman has fainted on the fourth floor. What do you do?

Groucho (after brief pause): What color is. her hair?

Manager (in amazement): What color is her hair? What difference does that make?

Groucho (turning to the onlookers): There you go. A woman has fainted on the fourth floor, and he says [weary sigh] 'what difference does that make?'

*

You wouldn't think a rhetorical trick this transparent would work on any audience. You'd be wrong. It is worked constantly, on audiences of all types, in a variety of forms. The latest and greatest practitioner of this verbal sleight of hand is Keith Olbermann of MSNBC. Last fall, Sarah Palin in the midst of her campaign, poked fun at the wastefulness of doing fruit fly research in Paris. France, that could presumably be done just as easily in the United States. The project had been noted as classic pork barrel stuff by a number of tax payer organizations. But that evening, there was Olbermann, in his most pontifical voice and face, so pontifical that it is almost meta-papal, backgrounded by a display of notable projects involving fruit flies, denouncing Palin as an anti-science Luddite. Even though there was no face to face encounter between Grou -er, Olberman – and Sarah Palin, I'll translate it into Marxese.

*

Olbermann: So identify some of these pork-barrel boondoggles you're against.

Palin: Well, going to Paris to do ordinary research for one.

Olbermann: Name the research.

Palin (amazed): Experimentation with fruit flies, I believe.

Olbermann (turning to the MSNBC audience): There you go. I ask her to name wasteful projects and she says [weary sigh] 'experimentation with fruit flies'.

*

It's the same device as Groucho's, but not nearly as funny. Maybe that's because Groucho's is a joke, and Olberman's is a con.

If this was merely a sidenote to the recently concluded campaign, it could be relegated to history with no further ado. But Olbermann is still very much with us, and now beating the drums nightly about the treatment of detainees back in 2002-2003. I don't watch these shows, any of them, of any political stripe. The spectacle of the preacher preaching to the converted doesn't do much for me, no matter who the preacher, who the congregation, or what the scripture. But my friends who do watch Olbermann are having a tough time extracting hard facts from the discussion. The rather limited CIA interrogations seem to be associated with the much larger number of field interrogations done in Iraq and Afghanistan which is in turn conflated with the prisoner abuse in Abu Gharib, which weren't interrogations at all. The more you watch Olberman, the less you understand and the more indignant you become, which I suspect is not a coincidence.

(I should say something about the substantive issue before ending this. Back in 2001-2003, I was more than a little scandalized by the open discussion and public acceptance of harsh interrogation techniques of suspected terrorists. I was particularly infuriated by Alan Dershowitz's suggestion of a torture warrant, which was appalling. There is no question that we as a society have got to decide how to deal with these issues in future. The shock of 9/11 sent us reeling into areas in which we would rather not be. John McCain's opinion on the subject seems to me the correct one, and decisive.

However, there is also no question in my mind that these practices were fully aired, subject to much public discussion, disclosed to Congress, etc. It is rather despicable hypocrisy in my view to hide under your desk for six years, tacitly endorse the tactics of the day, then emerge with your finger pointed when you feel safe. If Olbermann can produce any statement in condemnation or denunciation of the CIA in the 2002-4 time frame, I stand corrected. But as I recall he was making funny noises on Fox Sports at the time.)

So there you have the exposure of the Groucho-tactics used rather openly by Keith Olbermann. The difference is that Groucho Marx made himself a legend playing comic and inartful con men. Olbermann is the real thing, and quite artful. Groucho's act was very funny. Olbermann's isn't funny at all.

Superficially Wise (But Actually Foolish) Sayings of Smart People (A Contest)

    A long time ambition of mine, which is being fulfilled in this writing, has been to conduct a competition to identify sayings, aphorisms if you will, that are often quoted, APPARENTLY expressions of great wisdom, that - when they are in depth and critically, reveal themselves to be utter nonsense or worse. The object is to take a hard look at REAL conventional wisdom - principles that most of us actually believe reflect wisdom, as opposed to attitudes and expressions to which we give lip service for the sake of getting along.

    Some tough rules apply here - because this is not an exercise in ridicule. The point is to identify the sayings at which we all nod sagely that don't hold up on second thought. So the rules have to be hard.

    1. No quotes from identified idiots or villains, e.g., bring your tired old game from Adolph Hitler or Mikail Bakunin into the key, and it'll be slapped back in your face. Rejection city, baby. Quotes from respected sources only - the more respectable, the better.

    2. No predictions. For one thing, predictions that have been proven disastrously wrong have no value as hard intellectual currency these days. We all know ther's no such thing as an unsinkable ship. For another, even the best and brightest go wrong in fortune telling. It's too easy.

    3. No obviously stupid sayings Hiqh quality counterfeit wisdom is the name of the game, stuff that can pass as coin of the realm unless it is bitten really, REALLY, hard.

    The contest is open to anyone with a candidate. (Sorry, there are no prizes.) But obviously I have some candidates of my own. I'll lead off with one of them to get the ball rolling in the right (I hope) direction. My first choice -

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
- George Santayana

    Something of a surprise? I'd be surprised if it were not. This aphorism (or innumerable variants thereof) of Santayana's is endlessly re-quoted, always with approval. It seems to state a principle of elemental, axiomatic wisdom. But in my (actually rather humble, in this instance) opinion there is some really dubious stuff here, relative to the notion of history as science and history itself.

    As to the first, the premise that history repeats itself in any meaningful sense is extremely suspect. The more I learn about some historical event, the more I am struck by the accidental aspects of it, particularly the importance of personality. Discuss the macro-economic factors behind the American Revolution till the cows come home - the importance of the personalities of the Founding Fathers, particularly Washington, are critical to the shape of the contours of the event. As time moves on, the contours become everything.

    How can the larger signficance of the Civil War be separated from the personalities of Lincoln, Grant, and Robert E. Lee? What happens if a man wi the courage and wisdom of Joshua Chamberlain is not at the end of the line at Liltle Round Top at Gettysburg? In the same way, the Russian Revolution cannot possibly take the form it does absent the personality of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, a.k.a. Lenin?

    If events of this magnitude devolve endlessly into details, and ever more profound detail, in what meaningful sense can patterns be deduced from them? I know that the thought causes Hegelian and Marxist scholars to weep buckets, but I don't believe there is any pattern at all to historical movements. The study of history is of supreme value, but as the best and most useful study of human nature, nothing more.

    Which leads to the second point. Even if the past did have lessons for the present, how could they possibly be applied? Let me wax lyrical and borrow a metaphor from Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine - the characters in their Pulitzer Prize winning show 'Sundays in the Park with George'. I do believe that our perception of contemporary events can be deemed 'pointillist'. We are ourselves figures on the canvas, both participating in and observing the events of our time. We perceive huge arrays of data points, but too sprawling and unwieldy to be interpreted with any precision (unless we want to bring in our value judgments and decide that some are more important than others.) No one can distinguish for certain between a fad, a trend, or an irrelevant incident. It is a certain distance develops between the canvas and the observer, that these points form themselves into shapes, patterns, colors - and even then, undercut by the effect of random detail, as noted above.

    So even if solid lessons could be developed from history, deciding how and to what they apply is impossible - a matter of sheer hit and miss intuition. So what wisdom is there, really, in Santayana's aphorism? Not much.

    So this famous quote turns out to be a non-starter. As far as the science of history, there is no area of human study in which God - and the Devil - dwell more completely in the details - so completely that it makes any pretense of 'science' an illusion. (I'd apologize to all those Marxists and Hegelians, but they deserve all the misery they get.)

    In the sense in which Santayana uses the term 'history'. not only does history not repeat itself. It doesn't even happen the first time.

[This post first appeared on The American Thinker, in slightly different form, on February 28th.]

Beyond Religion: Spirituality in the New Millennium

    Someone who posts (as I did) an appreciation of a movie like 'Henry Poole', grounded in a fairly conventional Catholic background, runs the risk of being mistaken as conventionally religious or even a religious fundamentalist. But I'm not at all. What I do have is an appreciation for faith in all its infinite variety. It seems to me that faith in this day and age has become infinitely more difficult, an infinitely more courageous undertaking, than skepticism.

    All religious experience develops from central phenomenon - the collision of beings finite in time and space, blobs of mud whose fleeting consciousness is numbered from the moment it comes to exist, with infinity. Kant expressed the concept in language of marvelous economical clarity. He said there were two things that made him marvel - the starry skies above [i.e., external infinity, space without limit, time without limit, a number line that never ends) and the moral law within [i.e., internal infinity, the sense of imperishable self, independent of particular identity.] I wrote my own version of this, not nearly as elegant, and will now be so ingratious and egotistical as to quote myself (from the novel Thursday's Child, written under the name Josephine Wurtenbaugh)     

        “Just what are these fundamental mysteries?” she said.
    He shrugged, and spoke now without any hesitation: “What you'd think. What
human beings are, why they are. Why intelligence is. Time – always changing, but
always now. Self distinct from identity – somehow you know you'd still be you, even
if you were someone else. You know some things are right, and some are wrong; it
doesn't matter whether they're useful to you or not, and you know that, but you don't
know why. Dreams about the measureless when everything you experience is
measurable – infinity arising out of finitude. Quantity and quality, wholes and sums,
that they correlate randomly, we talked about that. That such things can be, black
holes in rationality itself, mirrors of the ones in the sky.”

    This sense, of an infinitely at once immediately present and beyond reach, permeates the whole of human experience. It is the raw material of all spiritual experience. Conventional religions attempt to map that sense raw sense onto a set of symbols that can be shared by a community or culture. If they are effective - that is, appeal at both conscious and subliminal level to that sense of the infinite - they become universal. This in essence describes the origin of all the major religions. To state the obvious, a set of symbols that potent are obviously subject to being misused for political purposes, hijacked politically, misused by priests, emperors, commissars - power seekers of all description. Occasionally, someone writes a book braying about this transparent reality, and ignoring (often deliberately) the reason why they became powerful in the first place.

    It is my own view that we live in a pre-religious age. I think all the conventional religions of pre-history began dying150 years ago. Arnold writes of 'an outworn creed', Nietzsche more dramatically proclaims that God is dead. But God is not dead. The sense of infinity that bedevils (sic) all human activity is as alive as it ever was. All that has happened is that the iconography (sorry) with which we used to describe it is no longer effective. A new set of symbols awaits birth. The Great Beast slouches towards Bethlehem again. Such is my belief, anyway.

    Attached for download is a short story I wrote, a variety of what might be called 'preternatural fiction' - science that does not exist just yet. I call it 'The Old Soul' for reasons that will be immediately  apparent to anyone familiar with contemporary speculation about reincarnation. It is an interesting (at least to me) speculation about a natural explanation for the phenomenon of deja vu and visions of other lives. Click on the marked link in this paragraph to download.

    The blog for Thursday's Child is also linked in the right column, if you liked the snippet I quoted.

   

Obama and JFK: or, Running on the Bloody Flag

    (1) I turned 14 the summer JFK was nominated for President. I remember the excitement well. Whatever the shortcomings his biographers have enlarged upon since, he had a flair and a genuine charm.  The  nomination was still slightly contested as I recall, and my devout Catholic family watched in genuine suspense until he was confirmed as nominee. Even the choice of vice-president was discussed and dramatic. It was a much more innocent time.

    JFK was the junior Senator from Massachusetts. He was the first minority President, it is useful to recall. There was a huge buzz in the Catholic population as a result, and he got a disproportionate amount of Catholic votes. Critics assailed him as all style and no substance, a pretty boy riding a wave of celebrity and glitz to the White House. His political connections were dubious, being related to the Boston political machine of Curley and 'Honey' Fitgerald, from whence he derived his middle name.

    Is any of this starting to sound familiar?

    (2) I call myself a Populist, and I mean it. That to me means not merely accepting as a general rule the the superiority of broad public judgments over narrow elites, but also the basic good will and good faith of individual persons. I am waiting for someone in public life to draw attention to the fact that there has been no major shift in public policy or policy direction in the last four years. The Democrats seize control of both houses of Congress, the Presidential rating slips to an all time low, the main stream media finds a new scandal weekly - and nothing of substance changes.

    I have a friend who is a True Believer. He is frustrated beyond all endurance. The candidates he supported won, running on the platform in which he believes. He gets dunning letters from the Party, which are articulate with the resentment he shares, and he sends them money. Nothing happens. . He expected the US to be withdrawn from Iraq about 60 days after the last Congress to be seated, the Patriot Act to be repealed, communications companies to be sued, etc., etc. He is convinced a combination of slimy cowardliness and sinister Republican machinations - perhaps even on of those Taylor Caldwell master conspiracies - has combined to prevent the necessary changes

    "Has it occurred to you," I asked him, "that maybe the problem is that what you believe is nonsense? That when the men and women you vote for get to Congress and actually sink their hands into the nitty-gritty of what's going on in the world, that they come around to enacting (and reenacting) these laws?  And these appeals to your sense of outrage because they know damn well it is misplaced, but they want your votes and money?"

    This thought shocked him, and he rejected it immediately. He prefers conspiracy theories. We remain friends, though.

    (3) For forty years after the Civil War, Republican politicians ran on what came to be known as 'the bloody flag', the Republican investiture in the Civil War. Real issues were secondary. The thought has occurred to me that Democratic politicians having been doing that, at least in the last three elections - running on a platform of 60's rhetoric that is as long outdated as the Civil War was a century ago, but that their constituency, mired in arrogance and self-righteousness, continues to gobble up like trained seals. Baby Boomers (of which I am on the leading edge) are not famous for rigorous self-criticism.

    (4) Obama's style, like JFK's, and later Ronald Reagan, does not preclude considerable shrewdness and practicality. To me, the last eight years have put a footprint on the times that is so huge and heavy that the policy choices of the next Presidency are going to be foreordained. There are (1) the continued challenge of Islamic fundamentalism, that Bush met with great determination, (2) the need for energy independence (the present administration has done something but not enough), and (3) maintaining economic stability with the pressure the Baby Boom demographics are going to put on social services (nothing). 

     I trust Obama to deal with all these issues sensibly. Not to mince words, I think he is running on that 60's version of the bloody flag. I believe he will adopt sensible and prudent policies - as noted, the tenor of the times is going to limit alternatives, far more than the Clinton Administration in the 90's. What I am also hoping is that Obama's style can make the solutions palatable and even popular to his following. The United States and the world have real problems - it is no solution to them to conclude that It Is All Bush's Fault, which is pretty much the level of thought (or reflex reaction) to which the Left has sunk to.

     It would be wonderful to have a President who is truly popular both in this country and abroad.

Cultural Transformation

    One of the posters I respect most on the small discussion board I normally frequent, made the interesting point that, while victory is possible in a military conflict, cultural transformation is not. With all due respect, the point does not reflect recent history. For the discussion as to whether a culture can be transformed was a matter of huge world-wide deabte not so long ago.

    You might remember both cultures. One of them wore spiky helmets, goose stepped through Europe, and started two World Wars within three decades. The other invented ritual disembowelment as a form of suicide, preferred the most hideous death to the most honorable surrender, and for the first four decades of the last cerntury attributed divinity to a mortal man. If anyone had suggested in 1935 that either of these relentlessly authoritarian, militaristic cultures would be transformed into functional democracces within two decades, the Paul Krugmans of the day (Walter Lippman) would have laughed them to scorn.  Yet between 1945 and 1955, that is exactly what happened. It happened despite the existence of the Cold War, and the relentless slander of Soviet propaganda that sounded as loudly as an off-key brass band in those years.

      In my opinion, there were two reasons for this. Military victory was not one of them - plenty of nations have triumphed militarily and adminstered the vanquished people in such a way that it reinforced all of their cultural idosyncracies. Although it is not the Fourth of July, I am going to rhapsodize a bit. I think the first reason is that all of that Declaration of Independence stuff this nation was found upon actually does apply in real life. The vast majority of flesh and blood human beings could care less about the Holy See of Rome, the Caliphate, the worker's paradise, or the Master Race. What matters to them is whether they can live their lives in decent security and advance their own interests in a basic manner - pursue happiness, in a phrase. They gravitate naturally towards instituitions that make that possible. The US occupation in Germany and Japan made the creation of that institutions - i.e., in Joyce's phrase, waking up from the nightmare of history - possible.

    The second reason is that the American military is fully accultured. That is, American soldiers do not behave imperially, because this is not in fact an imperial society. It has no racial center. It has no territorial imperatives. It is resented by every power elite in the world because the social infrastructure is not based (in theory) on elites. That resentment is rationalized in endless sophistry, but the resentment is always has that base.

     It was not until 1949 that some French historian noted that both the major Hegelian movements (Communism and Naziism) were at base the same authoritarian, anti-populist movement, and both deserved the label 'fascist'. Another fact once common knowledge  that has been forgotten is how dangerous in practice these movements actually are. The core Nazi and Bolshevik cadres were small, and numerically overwhelmed. But they were ruthless and unsocialized (wives and children, at least as major influences and motives, are conspicuous in their absence) and prevailed. The weight of numbers does not equate to political force when force of arms is involved.

    The 'cultural transformation' of Iraq is to my way of thinking no less achievable then Germany and Japan. All it means is the creation of institutions that actually reflect popular will. The notion that the Iraqi people are condemned to endless civil war and sectarian battle is at base a crude racial slander.. The elements obstructing the formation of such institution are fascists - not revolutionaries, or freedom fighters, but the same sort of violent elitists as the ones Europeans became familiar with at such wearisome length in the last century.