A couple of years ago, I witnessed an altercation in a Rite-Aid between two large women over the question of which one had been first in line to the cash register. As often happens in these impromptu urban contretemps, there were no preliminary remarks or introductory material. Rather, my first inkling there was any problem at all was a 110-decibel blast, issued by the party of the first part, the shock wave from which knocked me half a fathom leeward. “WHAT’S YOUR FUCKING HURRY, BITCH?” she inquired.
Then the situation deteriorated.
They didn’t know each other, and they were both young and strongly built. There never seemed to be any danger the pair would actually grapple, but they stood about fifteen feet apart, arms akimbo, and discussed their differences, loudly and firmly, at considerable length. It was surprising, to me at least, that they were able to maintain their level of invective and their volume for as long as they did. The cashiers and the other customers and I were dumbstruck. We watched silently, our heads turning from one to the other as if at a tennis match.
The original dispute, precedence at the register, was quickly abandoned as the pair moved on to more pressing issues: the shoes they were wearing, their respective hairstyles, the likelihood that the other had unsightly hair sprouting from her nipples, whether they were paying for their purchases with earned money or welfare benefits, and the nature of the odor emanating from the other’s feminine area. It was very educational. It was a tour-de-force, in fact. I have been in many bars and locker rooms and other male enclaves, and while I will freely admit that men can be crude, there are certain things we will not say about even the most loathsome woman. There in Rite-Aid, on a sunny Tuesday afternoon, I learned that women recognize no such limits.
One was white and one was black, and while this in itself did not create any particular friction, the beautiful multicultural diversity of it all led to a colloquy where all of us learned that each of the combatants lived with a black man. This realization framed what became the ultimate issue in the debate: to wit, whether white women or black women were better equipped to satisfy black men sexually. Jaws dropped in the peanut gallery as we listened to the ladies express their strongly-held views on the subject. While I won’t describe for you the activities that each of them felt was essential (and which a woman of the other color was incapable of providing), I will say this: “being there emotionally” was not one of the activities mentioned. They were talking about other stuff.
And then the party of the first part showed other stuff. Lifting her tee-shirt and cupping her breasts in her hands, she screamed, “AND WHAT ABOUT THESE? YOU CAN’T SHOW YOUR MAN TITTIES LIKE THESE, CAN YOU, BITCH?” And lowering her shirt, she stomped out of the store. Triumphant, I guess.
* I‘ve told this story at parties, and it’s certainly good for a few laughs, but the truth is that I find this kind of behavior vulgar rather than amusing, and I don’t much like the amount of vulgarity I see around me. I don’t listen to Howard Stern and I don’t think there is anything cute about Paris Hilton. I also don’t like movies where angelic, grandmotherly women say bad words for comedic reasons. South Park annoys me. And it makes me sad when I hear kids in junior high school swearing, in loud voices, on a bus or a train. I can be a fuddy-duddy about such things.
There is more of this than there used to be. Now, I know that every generation says the younger generation is going to hell, but I’m not really talking about the younger generation, I’m talking about my own. Certainly, the crudeness has trickled down to kids today, but it started with my peers. All this comes from baby boomers.
This is not an original observation, of course. You can fill a library with everything that has been written about the cultural changes in the 60’s and 70’s and whether they were caused by the JFK assassination or Woodstock or the invention of birth control pills or the spread of nuclear weapons or the international communist conspiracy or Nixon or the Beatles or twenty other things. I don’t know. I don’t have a theory on that. I just know it happened. Something changed. And I don’t think it was altogether a good thing.
I am not simply talking about vulgarity in the public square. That is only the most obvious manifestation of what happened, which was that our shared idea of what constitutes a “good person” changed. At one time, there was only one generally accepted definition. A good person was truthful, respectful of others, loyal to God and family and country, self-reliant and optimistic. All of these virtues are derived from the Bible, of course, but they were not religious values so much as American values, and they developed because it’s simply not possible to separate the American experience from its Judeo-Christian roots.
There are many places in America where these qualities continue to define what is thought of as goodness, and there are many parents who are dedicated to instilling them in their children. What has changed is there is now an alternate definition that dominates the public sphere and our educational system, and it comes directly from the “Me Generation.” Behavior that once would be viewed as disgraceful is excused (or even praised) as being “honest.”
Spouting a string of expletives at a store clerk? “Hey, I gotta be me. I was PISSED!” Flipping off another driver? “Well, I HAD to. That’s how I really felt.” Expressing what one is feeling, or doing what one is tempted to do, is always defensible because it is deemed real and authentic. The real sin, for those in this alternate moral universe, lies in espousing traditional values and then falling short of one’s ideals. This is called (for no apparent reason) “hypocrisy.” So it is that a Republican like Mark Foley can be pilloried for sending flirtatious emails while his successor (Tim Mahoney) is excused for multiple incidents of adultery, sexual harassment, payment of hush money, etc.
But there is more to being a good person under this alternate definition. In addition, a good person is one who believes and promotes certain positions on an array of social issues. Global warming is the result of human activity, gay people should be allowed to marry each other, smoking is wrong, affirmative action is the right thing to do, men and women are exactly the same except for anatomy, abortion is always a woman’s choice, etc. There are many more. These are not political views or scientific conclusions, they are moral absolutes. To those who have rejected our traditional values and adopted the Me Generation ethos, you are a good person if you believe all these things. If you don’t, you’re not simply wrong, you’re evil. (Note: I speak here from personal experience.)
My son was taught this new morality in the public schools he attended, and to his credit, it only persuaded him that most adults are fools. But most kids subjected to this type of indoctrination simply accept it, just as previous generations accepted the values of truthfulness, respect for others, loyalty, and so on. In college, where the stakes are higher, the situation is worse. At universities large and small across this country, students are routinely disciplined for speech protected by the First Amendment if that speech questions affirmative action policies or offends feminist sensibilities. (Browse www.thefire.org for a while if you have any doubts about this aspect of academia.) Lawrence Summers was fired as President of Harvard University solely for suggesting (gently) that differences in scientific achievement between men and women might have something to do with how their brains work. Such wicked thoughts may no longer be spoken in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
And this new ethical system is not an addition to the traditional rules; it is a substitute. What used to be thought of as virtues are gone, or at least are regarded as deeply suspect. Every year Tex was in public school, he was given “contracts” by his teachers that he was required to sign. In these, he typically agreed to “respect the property of others,” “refrain from foul language,” “not cheat on tests or plagiarize material for papers,” and a long list of other rules. When I went to school, the very idea that a student would have to agree to such things would have been preposterous. These were simply the minimum requirements of civilized behavior, and we all knew what would happen if you swore at a teacher or cheated on a test. Students broke the rules, of course, but no one questioned their underlying ethical basis. Now, however, for teachers and principals, there is a sense that moral condemnation for behavior is wrong, and that passing judgment on another’s actions can never be justified. We’re all flawed, of course, so who are we to demand adherence to some arbitrary code of proper behavior? Perhaps Johnny has a disability of some kind. Or maybe his cultural heritage is such that certain expectations are unfair.
Students get the message, or the lack of one. Over the past few years, there has been much in the news about file-sharing, piracy of copyrighted music, movies and the like. If you talk to an 18-year-old about this, as I have, you are likely to find he does not understand there could be any moral issue involved. “It’s there on the internet, so I take it.” The idea it can be viewed as theft is met not with disagreement, but with a blank stare. “But it’s just a big corporation,” is another explanation, shifting the focus to the identity of the victim (“big corporations are evil” is another moral absolute), and away from any responsibility for one’s actions. The belief that big corporations are evil makes you a good person, and once you’re a good person, it doesn’t matter what you do.
For their baby boomer parents too, the rules have changed, and to illustrate this, I’ll give one example. A recent study found that when parents are asked whether they would rather their child were caught smoking a cigarette or cheating on a test, a large majority of them answer they would rather their child be caught cheating. Perhaps you would agree with them, and that’s fine. My point here is simply that American morality has changed. When I was a teenager, my parents and every parent I knew would have answered this question differently. Today, smoking is a serious moral lapse, but bearing false witness would be called merely a “behavioral issue.”
All of which brings us to the American presidency, which used to be held by men whose personal lives were probably never beyond reproach, but who respected the office and at least tried to project the image of rectitude and honesty that was expected of them. And when they failed, they were held to account. When Nixon lied, it mattered. When Jimmy Carter waffled in the face of an aggressive bunny rabbit, he was mocked. Reagan, no matter what you thought of his politics, was a courtly gent in public, and his foes gave him credit for it. Even Lyndon Johnson, a very coarse and unsophisticated man, did his best to project himself as a Southern gentleman.
And then came Bill Clinton, our first Boomer president, and none of that old, tired morality was relevant anymore. When he lied, it didn’t matter. Investigating women he had harassed or toyed with, and then releasing disparaging information about them to the press---well, that didn’t matter either. That was simply his personal behavior, and according to Boomer morality, it is wrong to judge someone on that basis. That’s the old morality, you see. That’s what the bible-thumpers do. The only thing that matters is whether he believes the right things, and like all libertines, Clinton was a staunch supporter of abortion-on-demand, so he was OK. And thus it was that NOW and other feminists rallied to his support, even as foreign political cartoonists depicted him strutting pantless, waggling his penis at cheering crowds, with discarded women littering the street in his wake.
I found this disturbing. I disapproved, and it had nothing to do with Clinton’s politics. That was a separate issue. And now we are faced with the possibility that Barack Obama, a far nastier, far cruder man, will be elected president. And again his personal behavior won’t matter, because Obama believes all the “right things.”
No one in the media has connected the dots on Obama’s personality (or on anything else about him, for that matter), so that’s what I’m going to do. This is my November 2nd pre-election special report for all my friends and relatives who are planning to vote for Obama on Tuesday. I want you to reconsider.
*For me, the first red flag was the bizarre announcement of his choice for vice president. A text message to his supporters at 3 A.M.? “Why?” asked the dimmer reporters who didn’t get the nasty little joke behind it. This was a 3 A.M. phone call that Hillary would NOT receive. Get it? Pretty clever, huh? It was a smarmy little shot at the woman who fought him tooth-and-nail (but fairly) throughout the primaries, and whom he had come to hate for her failure to concede defeat. Like all of Obama’s meanest digs, it was completely unnecessary and completely deniable. “A shot at Hillary? Who, me?” And as always, there is a wink and a nod to the other smart kids in the class.
There are women who will not vote for Obama because of his treatment of Hillary (or rather, his campaign’s treatment---it’s never Obama himself). And while I am not a Hillary fan or terribly sympathetic to feminist sensibilities, the misogyny on display has been of the crudest possible nature. For months, Hillary endured the “Bros Before Hos” crowd, heckling her in state after state. No one claims that Obama organized this activity, but neither did he condemn it. Always, he can disclaim responsibility, but his campaign set a tone where this sort of insulting behavior was acceptable. You may have seen the YouTube video (it’s easy to find) where Obama pauses on stage after making a reference to Hillary, and thoughtfully (with a deadpan expression) scratches his temple with his middle finger. Watch it, and you will remember that kid who sat in the last row in seventh grade and did the same thing, with his head turned slightly so the teacher couldn’t see.
More recently, Sarah Palin was confronted at a rally in Philadelphia by four protesters in tee-shirts proclaiming “SARAH PALIN IS A CUNT.” Again, Barack Obama did not print the shirts, but his reaction to this type of nastiness throughout the campaign suggests he thinks it’s kind of cute.
His “lipstick on a pig” remark also fits the pattern---completely deniable (“Who, me?”), but understood perfectly by everyone on both sides of the aisle. Just as “old” means McCain, “Messiah” means Obama, and “hair plugs” means Biden, “lipstick” means Palin. And everyone knows it. On websites hawking Palin tee-shirts and bumper stickers and such, fully a third of the items make some reference to lipstick. In terms of the campaign, she “owns” the word. Personally, I don’t want a president, regardless of his politics, who will publicly call a woman a pig. Even Bill Clinton wouldn’t do that. He always had his surrogates do it.
And speaking of Bill, his speech at the Democratic Convention made it clear that for Obama, it’s never enough to win, it’s also essential to humiliate those who opposed you. We all know that some bad blood had developed between Bill Clinton and Barack Obama during the primaries, and that was in everyone’s mind as the moment approached for Bill’s speech. He had to deliver one, of course, because he’s a Democratic president, but what kind of speech would it be?
If you saw it, I think you will agree it was a classic Clinton performance---folksy, generous and funny. There was no hint of the bickering that had dogged their relationship. At one point he even compared Barack Obama to himself, and this is the greatest compliment a narcissist like Clinton can pay to another person. He held nothing back in his praise for Obama and the campaign he had waged.
And then the speech ended, to a standing ovation and unrestrained celebration in the hall, and as Clinton left the stage, the Obama campaign, which had orchestrated every detail of the convention, cranked up Robert Palmer singing “Addicted To Love.” See ya, Bill. Thanks for the speech. Sucker.
Our presidents are not saints, and some can probably be said to have crawled to the top over the mangled remains of their vanquished foes. So if Barack Obama is just a misogynist and a vindictive SOB with a 12-year-old sense of humor, well, maybe he’s not the worst human being we’ve ever considered putting in the White House. Maybe, one could argue, this is sometimes what our political system produces.
But it’s worse than that. There’s also George Obama, his half-brother, who lives in a six-by-nine-foot shack in Nairobi, Kenya on a few hundred dollars a year. George is mentioned in “Dreams From My Father,” and Barack is well aware of his situation. On his grand tour of Kenya almost two years ago, Barack saw George, spoke with him for a few minutes, and then moved on to the next photo op. Apparently, they have had no contact since. George lives alone, struggling to survive, and dreams of learning to repair cars at a technical school, but the course costs about three hundred dollars, a sum he could never hope to raise. Barack Obama, of course, is a multi-millionaire.
Reading about George, I found myself wondering what I would do if I had a half-brother in George Obama’s situation. I am not a rich man, but it would take almost nothing to help this desperately poor man in a significant, even life-changing, way.
What would you do? Suppose you were separated as children and you didn’t really know the guy, but he was your blood and you could lift him out of squalor and give him a chance, at a cost you would never even notice. Wouldn’t you find some way to send him a few bucks? Wouldn’t you try to help? Wouldn’t you do something? Of course you would. Any decent human being would. But Barack Obama does not.
So yes, there’s the middle finger scratching the temple and there are the childish jokes and there’s the sickening joy he takes in revenge, and these are bad things, but they are not the worst thing about Barack Obama. The worst thing is that he has not lifted a finger to help George Obama when it would cost him nothing to do so. Barack is cold. Barack is ice. There is nothing inside of him.
Copyright 2008 Michael Kubacki
November 2, 2008
Friday, October 31, 2008
Thursday, March 20, 2008
THE DEMOCRATIC PROCESS
Back when there were two sets of primaries, I would sometimes ask my Democratic pals whether they wished sometimes that their candidates would argue with each other about matters of substance, since the contrast between the primaries, Republican and Democrat, was so stark.
On the Republican side, you had pro-life candidates and pro-choice, pro-war and anti-war, pro-Israel and pro-Arab. You had global warming alarmists and global warming skeptics. You had a governor (Romney) who had set up a state-run healthcare system and you had others who wanted the government completely out of the health business. You had Fair-taxers, flat-taxers, no-taxers and John McCain. You had guys who wanted a border fence with snarling dogs and guys who wanted to give them all drivers licenses and margaritas.
On the other side, they never seemed able to muster much of an argument about anything. National health care? Mandatory! Raise taxes? Of course! Lose the war? Absolutely! There were nuances, I suppose (some of which may have been lost on me), but there was no real disagreement in any of their stated positions on major issues and there have never been any debates about policy.
And once in a while, one of my Democratic pals would agree that it might be better, or at least more interesting, if one of their candidates would propose a different idea about abortion or affirmative action or gay marriage or taxes or terrorism or something. More common, however, was the view that the uniformity of opinion among Democrats was actually a wonderful thing. We're united, you see. We don't have to argue about these things. We all agree on what the country needs.
Of course, one can't help but wonder what Joe Lieberman or Zell Miller thinks of this supposed unity, and I also have a feeling I could find a Democrat or two who might have some reservations about tax increases or abortion or banning guns. But whether you call it a glorious unity or suppression of dissent, the absence of policy disputes created a problem far more serious than boring debates. It created a situation where the only basis on which Democrats can pick a candidate is identity politics.
And that is what has happened to the Democratic race, which has become a death spiral of race and gender and ethnic groupings in which neither side has the juice to kill off the other. Hillary's supporters are determined, and Obama's minions are not backing down either. And since the only disagreements between the two have been purely superficial ("I'm for change!" "No, I'm for real change!"), there is no rational basis on which a Hillary supporter can be persuaded to switch to Obama, or vice versa.
It's an argument no one can win because there has never been an argument. All that's ever happened is a sorting out of skin colors and private parts and income levels and religions. And it continues. You there, you with the dark complexion---over here, please. And you with the vagina and the sub-75K income---this way. Bitter union members with guns? Step over here. And you Jewish folks---sorry we have to ask, but are you the sort of Jews who go to temple every week or are you the kind who eat cheeseburgers on Yom Kippur? Because if you're the first kind, we're going to put you in Hillary's stack, but if you're the second, you go to Obama.
For those of us who think it's morally wrong to judge people on the basis of their skin color or their gonads, the spectacle is somewhat disgusting.
Still, somebody has to win, and it looks like it will be Obama, though how and when this will occur is still anybody's guess. His black/leftie/academic mojo seems a shade more potent than her female/union/take-your-vitamins brand. Also, of course, should he be denied, the spectre of rampaging black Democrats outside the convention in Denver is genuinely chilling. By contrast, when Hillary is finally dragged from the stage, any vision involving legions of outraged Geraldine Ferraros laying waste to a Starbucks is more difficult to conjure.
And so they slog on, slowly, toward Obama's seemingly inevitable nomination. And this inevitability too is a product of the straightjacket of race and gender and ethnicity in which the Democratic Party has voluntarily encased itself. Obama's candidacy has never been based in a political vision (since all the other candidates had the same vision), but rather on who he is and, by extension, who his supporters are. This means that ditching him now, even though his vulnerabilities in November have become apparent, would be more than a political disappointment for his minions, it would be a personal affront. It would be---RACISM!!! And we can't have that sort of thing in the Democratic Party, can we?
So it is, in this most Democratic of all election years, that the party is poised to nominate one of the very few Democrats who is capable of losing to the blathering mess that is John McCain. With six months left in this most supernatural of presidential elections, I don't presume to know the result. But looking at the map, it's hard to fathom where Obama is going to find 270 electoral votes.
Start with West Virginia, where Obama was shellacked in the recent primary. The last Democratic president who lost West Virginia in the general election was named Woodrow Wilson. It's almost impossible for a Democrat to be elected president without West Virginia, and Obama can't win there.
And the West Virginia problem is bigger than West Virginia, of course. Bitter, gun-totin', church-goin' Democrats can also be found in abundance in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan and Kentucky, all of which Obama lost and all of which are critical to a Democratic victory. (Kentucky loved Bill Clinton, by the way; they hate Obama.)
And then there's Florida, another critical state, which Obama lost handily in a record-turnout, perfectly fair primary that doesn't count. Jewish voters are deeply suspicious of a guy with links to Farrakhan (via Rev. Wright). Obama's desire to sit down for a chin-wag with Raoul Castro is not a popular position in Florida either.
In a general election, Obama is virtually certain to win New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, D.C., Illinois, Washington, Oregon, California and Hawaii. That's 157 of the 270 he needs. Kerry also won Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, New Hampshire, Vermont, Delaware, Maryland and Maine, and many of these are likely to remain in the Democratic column. But Kerry lost. Not only must Obama retain all the states Kerry won (and places like Pennsylvania and Michigan won't be easy), he must expand the base elsewhere. As more is learned about his background, however, the trend seems to be heading in the opposite direction.
But Obama may recover. And McCain can blow it (as he, at times, seems determined to do). I have little faith in election predictions at this point, including my own. My point is that the politicizing of group identity is cancer for our democracy, and it's been a cancer for the Democratic Party. It's the sort of factionalism the founding fathers did everything in their power to prevent, and the Democratic Party is a troubling example of how far this destructive process has gone. When months of primaries and televised "debates" are designed solely to divvy up the electorate into manageable little demographic cells and sort them into camps, what is left of the democratic process where free citizens weigh the arguments of the candidates on the issues of the day? Where are the hard questions from the peanut gallery? Where are the hecklers? Where is the point-counterpoint of finely-honed rhetoric and argument?
There used to be Democrats who favored a strong national defense. There used to be Democrats who had doubts about abortion. Believe it or not, there used to be Democrats who thought cutting taxes was sometimes a good idea. They tended to lose their arguments with other Democrats, but they existed, and they created a playing field on which important political questions could be discussed. And now they're gone, lost in the obsession with race and gender and class and religion and ethnicity, lost in the enraged cries of racism and sexism. This is not a healthy development, either for the Democratic Party or for America.
Copyright 2008 Michael Kubacki
On the Republican side, you had pro-life candidates and pro-choice, pro-war and anti-war, pro-Israel and pro-Arab. You had global warming alarmists and global warming skeptics. You had a governor (Romney) who had set up a state-run healthcare system and you had others who wanted the government completely out of the health business. You had Fair-taxers, flat-taxers, no-taxers and John McCain. You had guys who wanted a border fence with snarling dogs and guys who wanted to give them all drivers licenses and margaritas.
On the other side, they never seemed able to muster much of an argument about anything. National health care? Mandatory! Raise taxes? Of course! Lose the war? Absolutely! There were nuances, I suppose (some of which may have been lost on me), but there was no real disagreement in any of their stated positions on major issues and there have never been any debates about policy.
And once in a while, one of my Democratic pals would agree that it might be better, or at least more interesting, if one of their candidates would propose a different idea about abortion or affirmative action or gay marriage or taxes or terrorism or something. More common, however, was the view that the uniformity of opinion among Democrats was actually a wonderful thing. We're united, you see. We don't have to argue about these things. We all agree on what the country needs.
Of course, one can't help but wonder what Joe Lieberman or Zell Miller thinks of this supposed unity, and I also have a feeling I could find a Democrat or two who might have some reservations about tax increases or abortion or banning guns. But whether you call it a glorious unity or suppression of dissent, the absence of policy disputes created a problem far more serious than boring debates. It created a situation where the only basis on which Democrats can pick a candidate is identity politics.
And that is what has happened to the Democratic race, which has become a death spiral of race and gender and ethnic groupings in which neither side has the juice to kill off the other. Hillary's supporters are determined, and Obama's minions are not backing down either. And since the only disagreements between the two have been purely superficial ("I'm for change!" "No, I'm for real change!"), there is no rational basis on which a Hillary supporter can be persuaded to switch to Obama, or vice versa.
It's an argument no one can win because there has never been an argument. All that's ever happened is a sorting out of skin colors and private parts and income levels and religions. And it continues. You there, you with the dark complexion---over here, please. And you with the vagina and the sub-75K income---this way. Bitter union members with guns? Step over here. And you Jewish folks---sorry we have to ask, but are you the sort of Jews who go to temple every week or are you the kind who eat cheeseburgers on Yom Kippur? Because if you're the first kind, we're going to put you in Hillary's stack, but if you're the second, you go to Obama.
For those of us who think it's morally wrong to judge people on the basis of their skin color or their gonads, the spectacle is somewhat disgusting.
Still, somebody has to win, and it looks like it will be Obama, though how and when this will occur is still anybody's guess. His black/leftie/academic mojo seems a shade more potent than her female/union/take-your-vitamins brand. Also, of course, should he be denied, the spectre of rampaging black Democrats outside the convention in Denver is genuinely chilling. By contrast, when Hillary is finally dragged from the stage, any vision involving legions of outraged Geraldine Ferraros laying waste to a Starbucks is more difficult to conjure.
And so they slog on, slowly, toward Obama's seemingly inevitable nomination. And this inevitability too is a product of the straightjacket of race and gender and ethnicity in which the Democratic Party has voluntarily encased itself. Obama's candidacy has never been based in a political vision (since all the other candidates had the same vision), but rather on who he is and, by extension, who his supporters are. This means that ditching him now, even though his vulnerabilities in November have become apparent, would be more than a political disappointment for his minions, it would be a personal affront. It would be---RACISM!!! And we can't have that sort of thing in the Democratic Party, can we?
So it is, in this most Democratic of all election years, that the party is poised to nominate one of the very few Democrats who is capable of losing to the blathering mess that is John McCain. With six months left in this most supernatural of presidential elections, I don't presume to know the result. But looking at the map, it's hard to fathom where Obama is going to find 270 electoral votes.
Start with West Virginia, where Obama was shellacked in the recent primary. The last Democratic president who lost West Virginia in the general election was named Woodrow Wilson. It's almost impossible for a Democrat to be elected president without West Virginia, and Obama can't win there.
And the West Virginia problem is bigger than West Virginia, of course. Bitter, gun-totin', church-goin' Democrats can also be found in abundance in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan and Kentucky, all of which Obama lost and all of which are critical to a Democratic victory. (Kentucky loved Bill Clinton, by the way; they hate Obama.)
And then there's Florida, another critical state, which Obama lost handily in a record-turnout, perfectly fair primary that doesn't count. Jewish voters are deeply suspicious of a guy with links to Farrakhan (via Rev. Wright). Obama's desire to sit down for a chin-wag with Raoul Castro is not a popular position in Florida either.
In a general election, Obama is virtually certain to win New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, D.C., Illinois, Washington, Oregon, California and Hawaii. That's 157 of the 270 he needs. Kerry also won Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, New Hampshire, Vermont, Delaware, Maryland and Maine, and many of these are likely to remain in the Democratic column. But Kerry lost. Not only must Obama retain all the states Kerry won (and places like Pennsylvania and Michigan won't be easy), he must expand the base elsewhere. As more is learned about his background, however, the trend seems to be heading in the opposite direction.
But Obama may recover. And McCain can blow it (as he, at times, seems determined to do). I have little faith in election predictions at this point, including my own. My point is that the politicizing of group identity is cancer for our democracy, and it's been a cancer for the Democratic Party. It's the sort of factionalism the founding fathers did everything in their power to prevent, and the Democratic Party is a troubling example of how far this destructive process has gone. When months of primaries and televised "debates" are designed solely to divvy up the electorate into manageable little demographic cells and sort them into camps, what is left of the democratic process where free citizens weigh the arguments of the candidates on the issues of the day? Where are the hard questions from the peanut gallery? Where are the hecklers? Where is the point-counterpoint of finely-honed rhetoric and argument?
There used to be Democrats who favored a strong national defense. There used to be Democrats who had doubts about abortion. Believe it or not, there used to be Democrats who thought cutting taxes was sometimes a good idea. They tended to lose their arguments with other Democrats, but they existed, and they created a playing field on which important political questions could be discussed. And now they're gone, lost in the obsession with race and gender and class and religion and ethnicity, lost in the enraged cries of racism and sexism. This is not a healthy development, either for the Democratic Party or for America.
Copyright 2008 Michael Kubacki
Sunday, May 6, 2007
VIRGINIA TECH AND THE MASSACRE
Masterman, where my son goes to school, is a tall and narrow building, five stories high. During the day, all traffic is funneled through one set of doors on the first floor. There are other exits, but they are all on the ground floor, and they could all be easily locked in a minute or so. The entire building is surrounded by concrete, so don’t even think about jumping out a second-story window.
The chief security officer is an elderly gentleman who mumbles. His only weapon is a nightstick he carries on his belt. At 150 pounds or so, he is smaller than some of the students.
His assistant is a middle-aged woman who moves a bit faster than he does, and weighs quite a bit more. A cursory glance at her physique reveals no hint of muscle tone. She appears to be completely unarmed.
For the past six years, every time I have walked through the doors at Masterman, the thought has struck me: this place is a potential slaughterhouse. A single armed maniac, with a little planning and determination, could easily lock down the entire building and, in the space of a few minutes, make us all forget Cho Seung-Hui.
Columbine, Trolley Square, Nickel Mines School, various post offices, and now Virginia Tech---every one of these places was a “gun-free zone.” Every mass killing in recent American history has occurred in a gun-free zone. Before 9-11, airplanes were gun-free zones. That, at least, has changed.
Masterman, of course, is a gun-free zone. On a typical school day, there are over a thousand children and adults in that building, and they would be completely helpless against a murderer. Such a person is not necessarily stupid, or irrational---to them, a gun-free zone is a victim-rich environment where they can go about their business undisturbed. In that sense, a gun-free zone like Masterman acts as a focal point for their fantasies. You never hear about a mass shooting at a gun show or an NRA convention, do you?
I am somewhat bitter about this.
On other occasions, I have written about some of the left-wing foolishness one must come to expect from a public school in Philadelphia. AIDS, we learn, was invented by the US government in order to kill people of color. The only thing white men ever did in America was enslave blacks, oppress women, intern the Japanese, abuse the disabled and beat up homosexuals. Students are taught to cherish their group identity and any attendant sense of victimhood. Etcetera.
That stuff annoys me because of its totalitarian nature. No dissenting voices are permitted. I am a distinct minority, but I am not the only parent who disapproves of their moral and political indoctrination, so the sheer unfairness of it bugs me.
Its effectiveness, however, is doubtful. For Tex, for example, all it does is sharpen his appreciation for how irrational and mean-spirited the extreme left can be. And he is not the only one. I know there are other students who react to the attempts to indoctrinate them by heading in the opposite direction. Teen rebellion being what it is, there will always be those who won’t knuckle under to the party line.
But though Tex and others will survive the indoctrination, keeping him for hours each day in a potential slaughterhouse is another matter. This particular manifestation of fluffy-headed left-wing bias makes me angry because it creates a real physical danger to my son and hundreds of other children. And for what? Because the school administrators think guns are icky? Because guns are “dangerous?” Well, maybe that’s why you need somebody who knows how to use one when a lunatic wants to kill children! No one is suggesting that 12-year-olds carry guns in their backpacks, but what possible reason can there be for the security guards to be helpless? What about the principal? What about the history teacher who was a marine for twenty years? Why can’t he keep a piece in a locked drawer?
Most people view political correctness as quaint, or silly. It’s not. It’s dangerous. Some of the students at Virginia Tech are dead because their campus was a gun-free zone.
Copyright 2007 Michael Kubacki
The chief security officer is an elderly gentleman who mumbles. His only weapon is a nightstick he carries on his belt. At 150 pounds or so, he is smaller than some of the students.
His assistant is a middle-aged woman who moves a bit faster than he does, and weighs quite a bit more. A cursory glance at her physique reveals no hint of muscle tone. She appears to be completely unarmed.
For the past six years, every time I have walked through the doors at Masterman, the thought has struck me: this place is a potential slaughterhouse. A single armed maniac, with a little planning and determination, could easily lock down the entire building and, in the space of a few minutes, make us all forget Cho Seung-Hui.
Columbine, Trolley Square, Nickel Mines School, various post offices, and now Virginia Tech---every one of these places was a “gun-free zone.” Every mass killing in recent American history has occurred in a gun-free zone. Before 9-11, airplanes were gun-free zones. That, at least, has changed.
Masterman, of course, is a gun-free zone. On a typical school day, there are over a thousand children and adults in that building, and they would be completely helpless against a murderer. Such a person is not necessarily stupid, or irrational---to them, a gun-free zone is a victim-rich environment where they can go about their business undisturbed. In that sense, a gun-free zone like Masterman acts as a focal point for their fantasies. You never hear about a mass shooting at a gun show or an NRA convention, do you?
I am somewhat bitter about this.
On other occasions, I have written about some of the left-wing foolishness one must come to expect from a public school in Philadelphia. AIDS, we learn, was invented by the US government in order to kill people of color. The only thing white men ever did in America was enslave blacks, oppress women, intern the Japanese, abuse the disabled and beat up homosexuals. Students are taught to cherish their group identity and any attendant sense of victimhood. Etcetera.
That stuff annoys me because of its totalitarian nature. No dissenting voices are permitted. I am a distinct minority, but I am not the only parent who disapproves of their moral and political indoctrination, so the sheer unfairness of it bugs me.
Its effectiveness, however, is doubtful. For Tex, for example, all it does is sharpen his appreciation for how irrational and mean-spirited the extreme left can be. And he is not the only one. I know there are other students who react to the attempts to indoctrinate them by heading in the opposite direction. Teen rebellion being what it is, there will always be those who won’t knuckle under to the party line.
But though Tex and others will survive the indoctrination, keeping him for hours each day in a potential slaughterhouse is another matter. This particular manifestation of fluffy-headed left-wing bias makes me angry because it creates a real physical danger to my son and hundreds of other children. And for what? Because the school administrators think guns are icky? Because guns are “dangerous?” Well, maybe that’s why you need somebody who knows how to use one when a lunatic wants to kill children! No one is suggesting that 12-year-olds carry guns in their backpacks, but what possible reason can there be for the security guards to be helpless? What about the principal? What about the history teacher who was a marine for twenty years? Why can’t he keep a piece in a locked drawer?
Most people view political correctness as quaint, or silly. It’s not. It’s dangerous. Some of the students at Virginia Tech are dead because their campus was a gun-free zone.
Copyright 2007 Michael Kubacki
Thursday, March 8, 2007
MY FATHER’S WAR STORY
As wars go, my father’s WWII was not the worst. He spent almost all of his time in North Africa and Italy (rather than, say, Iwo Jima), he didn’t kill anybody, and though he was shot at and bombed, he never felt he came seriously close to getting seriously hurt. In addition, as he pointed out more than once, the army was superior to his childhood in this respect: in the army, he always got his chow.
When Italy fell to the Allies in 1944, my old man was there, and he spent the rest of the war in the pacification of a place where a substantial portion of the citizenry was not averse to being pacified. While the de-nazification of Germany took about ten years, the de-fascistification of Italy took about ten minutes. Still, there was work to be done in getting the Germans out of Italy, and Captain Kubacki had to do some of it.
In 1945, when the Germans in Italy had (mostly) been defeated, my father was given a jeep, a lieutenant, two heavily-armed MPs, a strongbox full of money, and a long list of people’s names along with the towns and villages in which these people lived. As the American army had worked its way through the Italian countryside, cleaning out German strongholds, it had taken what it needed from the farmers and townspeople along the way, in each case promising to return with payment at some point in the indefinite (and uncertain) future. It is fair to assume that these promises, to a people who had dealt with the ravages of invading armies for the previous five thousand years or so, were met with a certain skepticism.
Captain Kubacki and his crew would drive into town unannounced, and the Captain would set off to find the mayor or some other nabob, to whom he would explain his mission. “We’re here to pay your people,” my father would say, in his imperfect Italian, “for the sheep and mules and tomatoes and gasoline the American army took last year. Please call everyone together so we can get started.”
The initial response to this, typically, was, “You want to do WHAT?”
Sleepy little Italian towns being what they are, however, people had already started peeking around corners to find out what the Americans were up to, and with entertainment in short supply at the time, there would soon be a crowd gathered in the town square with my father, the lieutenant, the MPs and the strongbox at the center of it. At which point, my father would unfurl his list and call out the first name.
“Vincenzo Massimo!”
All eyes would turn to Vincenzo, who was suddenly on the spot, and with a shrug of the shoulders and a puzzled look, he would approach.
“A mule,” my father would say. The lieutenant would count out some appropriate number of lire and hand the cash to Vincente, who would look at it, hold it up to the sun, wave it in the air for the crowd to see, and return to his pals, who would examine the notes intently.
Meanwhile, Captain Kubacki was calling out the next name: “Luigi Grieco!”
According to my father, the same scenario, with few variations, played out in town after town. In a few minutes, a table would be brought to the square, with comfortable chairs for the captain and the lieutenant. Shortly, a plate of olives would appear on the table, perhaps with a bit of bread and cheese. A few minutes later, a flagon of wine would materialize, along with a young lady whose job it was to ensure the officers’ glasses were never empty. As the soldiers worked their way down to the end of the list for that day, a fiddle or a guitar would be heard somewhere in the distance, and this was a sign that the party was beginning in earnest.
For two months, as their caravan progressed through the countryside, the most difficult part of the job was getting out of town, since it was impossible to accept all the hospitality that was offered. These were people who had nothing, of course, but who invariably insisted on providing my father’s squad with the best beds, the best food, and the best wines.
It’s an irresistible story, and I heard him tell it many times. It’s a war story and an anti-war story at the same time, as well as a tale of American patriotism and values. His favorite aspect of it, the part he seemed to savor in the telling, was the surprise and confusion that greeted their arrival and the realization the American army had actually returned. They were honoring a commitment that literally no one had expected them to honor. Unlike the dozens (or hundreds) of invaders who had come through Italy over the centuries, the Americans were there to make everything right, and pay for what they had taken.
Copyright 2007 Michael Kubacki
When Italy fell to the Allies in 1944, my old man was there, and he spent the rest of the war in the pacification of a place where a substantial portion of the citizenry was not averse to being pacified. While the de-nazification of Germany took about ten years, the de-fascistification of Italy took about ten minutes. Still, there was work to be done in getting the Germans out of Italy, and Captain Kubacki had to do some of it.
In 1945, when the Germans in Italy had (mostly) been defeated, my father was given a jeep, a lieutenant, two heavily-armed MPs, a strongbox full of money, and a long list of people’s names along with the towns and villages in which these people lived. As the American army had worked its way through the Italian countryside, cleaning out German strongholds, it had taken what it needed from the farmers and townspeople along the way, in each case promising to return with payment at some point in the indefinite (and uncertain) future. It is fair to assume that these promises, to a people who had dealt with the ravages of invading armies for the previous five thousand years or so, were met with a certain skepticism.
Captain Kubacki and his crew would drive into town unannounced, and the Captain would set off to find the mayor or some other nabob, to whom he would explain his mission. “We’re here to pay your people,” my father would say, in his imperfect Italian, “for the sheep and mules and tomatoes and gasoline the American army took last year. Please call everyone together so we can get started.”
The initial response to this, typically, was, “You want to do WHAT?”
Sleepy little Italian towns being what they are, however, people had already started peeking around corners to find out what the Americans were up to, and with entertainment in short supply at the time, there would soon be a crowd gathered in the town square with my father, the lieutenant, the MPs and the strongbox at the center of it. At which point, my father would unfurl his list and call out the first name.
“Vincenzo Massimo!”
All eyes would turn to Vincenzo, who was suddenly on the spot, and with a shrug of the shoulders and a puzzled look, he would approach.
“A mule,” my father would say. The lieutenant would count out some appropriate number of lire and hand the cash to Vincente, who would look at it, hold it up to the sun, wave it in the air for the crowd to see, and return to his pals, who would examine the notes intently.
Meanwhile, Captain Kubacki was calling out the next name: “Luigi Grieco!”
According to my father, the same scenario, with few variations, played out in town after town. In a few minutes, a table would be brought to the square, with comfortable chairs for the captain and the lieutenant. Shortly, a plate of olives would appear on the table, perhaps with a bit of bread and cheese. A few minutes later, a flagon of wine would materialize, along with a young lady whose job it was to ensure the officers’ glasses were never empty. As the soldiers worked their way down to the end of the list for that day, a fiddle or a guitar would be heard somewhere in the distance, and this was a sign that the party was beginning in earnest.
For two months, as their caravan progressed through the countryside, the most difficult part of the job was getting out of town, since it was impossible to accept all the hospitality that was offered. These were people who had nothing, of course, but who invariably insisted on providing my father’s squad with the best beds, the best food, and the best wines.
It’s an irresistible story, and I heard him tell it many times. It’s a war story and an anti-war story at the same time, as well as a tale of American patriotism and values. His favorite aspect of it, the part he seemed to savor in the telling, was the surprise and confusion that greeted their arrival and the realization the American army had actually returned. They were honoring a commitment that literally no one had expected them to honor. Unlike the dozens (or hundreds) of invaders who had come through Italy over the centuries, the Americans were there to make everything right, and pay for what they had taken.
Copyright 2007 Michael Kubacki
Friday, October 6, 2006
IN PRAISE OF HATE SPEECH; The Cartoon War and the Heckler’s Veto
A couple years ago, I was sitting on the beach at Rehoboth, talking to a lawyer friend about a First Amendment case he was handling, and apropos of our conversation, I said, “Thank God we live in a country where it’s not a crime to call somebody a nigger.”
He thought about that, and looked at me funny.
“C’mon, Bob,” I said. “Would you want to live in a place where it was illegal to stand in the courtyard at City Hall and yell ‘The first thing we have to do is kill all the Jews.’”
He didn’t answer. He was thinking, as he sometimes does. Then, as luck would have it, a very healthy 20-year-old girl in an abbreviated bathing costume strolled past on her way to the surf, and he seemed to lose interest in my question. My attention may have wandered as well. By the time we were through examining the evidence, my First Amendment question had been forgotten.
But it’s an important question, especially in light of the war breaking out over the Muhammed cartoons. Should it be a crime to use the word “nigger,” or demand that Jews be killed? In other words, should “hate speech” be protected by the First Amendment?
Most Americans understand that the First Amendment makes us different from the rest of the world, even from other democracies with traditions of free speech and freedom of the press. One obvious difference is that free speech in America is rooted in our constitution, which trumps all other law. The British Parliament could pass a law tomorrow that would put all newspapers under government control. If the US Congress did such a thing, however, the law would be nullified as unconstitutional by the first (and every subsequent) federal judge to review it.
Nationalizing the press is an extreme example, of course, and there is no chance the British Parliament is going to do it. In a democracy lacking an overarching body of law like the First Amendment, however, the boundaries of free speech are always subject to political fashion and the whim of the legislature. And in fact, elected bodies in other countries regularly nibble away at speech rights in ways our constitution and our Supreme Court do not permit. Free speech law, as outlined by our courts over the last two hundred years, is marked by bright lines that neither Congress nor the states can cross. One of these bright lines of particular significance to hate speech laws (and the Danish cartoon war), is the “heckler’s veto,” a legal doctrine unique to the United States.
In the case of Terminiello v. Chicago, in 1949, a lecturer was arrested for a breach of the peace when an angry crowd gathered outside the auditorium where he was speaking. The trial judge told the jury that under a Chicago ordinance, it could convict the speaker if he had engaged in speech that “stirs the public to anger, invites dispute, brings about a condition of unrest or creates a disturbance….” On review, the US Supreme Court reversed the conviction and ruled the ordinance unconstitutional. Speech is protected, the Court wrote, BECAUSE “it induces a condition of unrest, creates dissatisfaction with conditions as they are, or even stirs people to anger.”
Speech may legally be restricted for many reasons. You can’t hold an anti-war rally on Broad Street on January 1, when the mummers are parading, because that would be an “unreasonable time and place.” Some speech content (i.e., kiddie porn, national security secrets) is not only unprotected, it is actually criminal. Under Terminiello, however, the only reason speech rights may not be limited is that the speech will offend people, or even enrage them. To limit offensive speech because it offends is to give the heckler a veto over speech that annoys him. In fact, it encourages the heckler to become violent and breach the peace, because then the speaker will be punished. The rule of Terminiello is that we punish the violent heckler, but we do not punish the speaker.
The reasoning of the Terminiello case is that once you start banning speech because it offends, eventually you grant control of all discourse to the most sensitive, irrational and violent elements in society. Opening this door creates a “slippery slope” to repression. Though you begin by punishing nazis and racists, you move swiftly to jailing artists like Andres Serrano (“Piss Christ”) and newspaper editors who publish Muhammed cartoons. Ultimately, you lock up the guy who says, “Ya know, women can do a lot of things, but I still think the best firefighters are men.”
Though Terminiello is settled law (a “super-precedent,” as Arlen Specter would say), the rule of the “heckler’s veto” is not universally loved or respected, and there are plenty of folks who would ban what they view as “hate speech” if they could get away with it.
In the last twenty-five years, over 90% of colleges and universities in the United States have enacted speech codes or sexual harassment codes that ban “offensive” speech or speech that “demeans, provokes or subordinates” any person. A private university like Harvard or Bob Jones may legally do such a thing, but a public university like Temple or Penn State or Michigan is legally viewed as an arm of the government and is subject to the First Amendment.
When a student runs afoul of these rules with speech deemed “offensive” or “harassing” by college administrators, litigation often ensues. Currently, there are lawsuits all over the country. In fact, there is now a non-profit organization, the Foundation For Individual Rights In Education (“FIRE”), that provides legal assistance to students or faculty members who are punished for constitutionally-protected speech. FIRE never loses these cases.
Dozens of examples, including those that don’t reach the litigation stage, can be found at FIRE’s website, www.thefire.org. Here are a few:
***Cal-Poly, 2002. Student Steven Hinkle posted a flier in the campus Multicultural Center advertising a College-Republican-sponsored speech by Mason Weaver, author of It’s OK To Leave The Plantation. The flier displayed only the title of the book, the time and place of the event, and a picture of the author, an African-American. After some black students objected the poster was offensive, Hinkle, following a seven-hour hearing before the Cal-Poly Judicial Affairs Office, was ordered to write letters of apology to the offended students or face “severe penalties.”
***Central Michigan U, 2001. In October 2001, an administrator ordered a number of students to remove various patriotic displays (American flags, eagles, etc.) from their dormitory because the displays were offensive.
***Holy Cross, 2001. In October 2001, the chairman of the sociology department ordered a secretary’s American flag display removed from the office. The flag was in memory of her friend Todd Beamer, who fought and died on United flight 93 over Pennsylvania on 9-11.
***San Diego State, 2001. In September 2001, Zewdalem Kebede witnessed a group of Saudi Arabian students loudly expressing their delight at the success of the terrorist attacks. Kebede spoke to them in Arabic, condemning their opinions and bad taste. When the students complained, Kebede was subjected to a disciplinary hearing and issued a formal “letter of admonishment” in which he was told to avoid similar confrontations or face “severe disciplinary measures.”
***William Patterson U, 2005. Jihad Daniel, a Muslim student and employee of the college, received a mass email from Professor Arlene Scala promoting a showing of a film described as “a lesbian relationship story.” He replied privately to the professor, asking that he not be sent any mail about “Connie and Sally” or “Adam and Steve” because his religion viewed these relationships as “perversions.” Mr. Daniel received an official letter of reprimand in his employment file noting his violation of sexual harassment regulations.
***U of New Hampshire, 2004. Timothy Garneau posted fliers in the elevators of his dormitory suggesting that women could lose the “freshman 15” (weight gained the first year of college) by taking the stairs. Charged with “acts of dishonesty, violation of affirmative action policy and harassment,” Garneau was expelled from student housing, given disciplinary probation, required to meet with a psychological counselor and write a 3000-word essay about it, and further required to submit a letter of apology to the student newspaper.
***U of Cal-Irvine, 2004. Members of the College Republicans staged an Affirmative Action Bake Sale to dramatize the unfairness of affirmative action programs. Prices for donuts were based on the race and sex of the consumer, with white males paying a dollar, Hispanics 75 cents, and blacks 50 cents. A spirited discussion ensued, until the Dean of Students stopped the sale, claiming it violated student regulations on discrimination. College Republican groups have set up these sales at universities around the country, and were also shut down at Illinois State and SMU. At DePaul, the students were charged with violating the school’s harassment policy.
Another tactic used by college administrations to silence views they dislike is to allow, or even encourage, radical students to do the silencing by means of vandalism, theft, or other violence. At the University of Colorado, for example, an affirmative action bake sale ended when, with campus police in attendance, counter-demonstrators were permitted to rip down signs and overturn tables, without opposition or consequences.
In 2005, at Washington State University, student playwright Chris Lee produced his play, “Passion Of The Musical,” and advertised it widely as “offensive or inflammatory to all audiences.” During one performance, a group of forty protesters repeatedly stood up, shouted they were offended, and threatened audience members and the cast. When Lee finally stopped the play and asked campus security to remove the protesters, they refused his request. Evidence later surfaced that the Washington State Office For Campus Involvement had bought forty tickets for the protesters with university funds and had helped organize the disruption.
A common tactic for radical students is to steal the entire press run of a student newspaper containing “offensive” (i.e., politically conservative) material. Typically, the thieves are never punished. In fact, the theft is sometimes defended by administrators and professors as itself being an exercise of free speech. Again, these incidents are found across the country at a wide variety of institutions. A few that garnered significant press coverage were at Berkeley, UNC-Wilmington, U Mass, Loyola Marymount, Boston College, Morehead State, and Oregon State. FIRE has received reports on hundreds of such events.
It may be tempting to attribute these cases to a few ignorant zealots who happen to be college administrators, but in fact, they happen regularly across the country, in small schools and large, in red states and blue. Also, even when the light is shone on the suppression of speech at an institution supposedly dedicated to intellectual freedom, schools rarely back down. They litigate. They fight these complaints, spending many thousands on lawyers and thousands more on settlements and judgments. But even after they lose, the speech codes remain.
Illegal speech codes grew out of a misreading of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, federal laws that prohibit real harassment in the workplace and on campus. Because of this misunderstanding, and because of their own political views, the people who run our universities came to believe they were permitted, or even required, to regulate offensive speech. While it seems unlikely anyone could still believe this, the speech codes are now in place and there is strong support for them on most campuses.
University speech codes illustrate the “slippery slope” in full regalia. Federal laws designed to prevent the most severe, persistent, frightening sort of harassment (the equivalent of “stalking” under state laws), have morphed into an Orwellian system of oppression.
Thus, expressing one’s religious view that homosexuality is immoral becomes a hate crime. Poking fun at affirmative action policies results in disciplinary hearings and punishment. American flags get ripped from dormitory walls a month after 9-11. Once the door is opened to the notion that speech can be banned because someone is offended by it, no speech is safe. All variety of commentary becomes subject to the heckler’s veto.
American universities will eventually get the message that their speech codes are illegal, but in nations without a First Amendment (i.e., everywhere else), and without a Terminiello case, there is no particular reason to tolerate speech the majority deems hateful. And since, as a matter of practical politics, there is no organized constituency in favor of the most offensive speech, it is often banned.
In 1998, an Ontario man was convicted of a hate crime for distributing pamphlets about Islam. The offending pamphlet (truthfully) listed atrocities committed in the name of Allah, and urged the reader to be careful in dealing with Canadian Muslims.
More recent Canadian law has criminalized the public disapproval of homosexuality. In 2001, Hugh Owens placed an ad in the Saskatoon Star Phoenix in which a drawing of two males holding hands was overlaid with a red circle and a diagonal bar. The ad also referenced (but did not quote) four Bible passages that condemn homosexuality. Mr. Owens and the newspaper were fined $4500 under the Saskatchewan Human Rights Code, and the ruling was upheld by the Queen’s Bench, where a Justice Barclay wrote that “the advertisement can objectively be seen as exposing homosexuals to hatred or ridicule.” And under Canadian law, that’s all that matters. In another recent case from Ontario (not a speech case), a printer (a Christian) was fined $5000 for refusing a job printing letterhead for a gay advocacy group.
Hate speech laws are also found throughout Europe.
Shortly after Muslims carried out bomb attacks in London in 2005, a German man printed up toilet paper with the word “Koran” on every sheet, then sent the rolls to TV stations and mosques. He was given a one-year prison sentence, which will be followed by 300 hours of community service. I
In an odd English case, the Mayor of London was brought before the Adjudication Panel For England over a heated exchange he had with a reporter for the Evening Standard, a paper the Mayor despises. The Mayor asked the reporter (a Jew) if he had been a German war criminal and compared him to a concentration camp guard. The result was a four-week suspension for the Mayor, who will also have to pay legal fees of $175,000.
In Sweden, the Rev. Aake Green was sentenced to a month in prison for a sermon denouncing homosexuality as “a cancer on society.” After a yearlong appeal, the conviction was overturned and the pastor remains free, but the prosecution has announced plans for a further appeal, which will include a demand for a longer sentence.
Though the Rev. Green may escape punishment for his remarks from the pulpit, the effect of such laws on speech was apparent in his post-appeal statement to the press. “I’ll go on preaching as usual but I won’t be dedicating so much time to this issue,” he said. (This “chilling effect,” under US law, is why even an unsuccessful attempt to censor speech, or a rarely-enforced speech code, is actionable. On February 22, 2006, the Alliance Defense Fund filed a lawsuit against Penn State over its speech code in which the plaintiff is a student who has never been disciplined by the university for his speech, though others have been.)
The most widespread hate-speech laws are those banning public display of nazi symbols or denial of the holocaust. There are ten such countries in Europe (France, Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Romania, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Lithuania and Poland.) In addition, there are other countries (e.g., Canada and the U.K.) that do not explicitly ban holocaust denial, but do so under broader laws against inciting racial hatred.
On February 20, 2006, a British historian named David Irving was sentenced to three years in prison by an Austrian court for denying the holocaust in a 1989 publication (in England). The prosecutor is appealing the sentence as too lenient since the 1992 Austrian law provides for a sentence of up to ten years.
There is solid support for hate speech laws, of various kinds, across Europe. In fact, the EU bureaucracy is currently engaged in writing regulations to ban various forms of offensive speech on the internet. It is against this backdrop that the Danish cartoon war erupted.
The protests began with boycotts of Danish dairy products in Arabian countries and quickly progressed to riots, embassy-burning and blood in the streets. As the violence escalated, there were repeated demands that the government of Denmark, and other countries, apologize. And some government officials did, but not the Prime Minister of Denmark. Anders Fogh Rasmussen, though noting that burning a Koran would be a crime in Denmark, claimed the Danish government could do nothing about the cartoons because it did not control the press. In other words, the Danish government had nothing to do with it, so how could they apologize?
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Hitler-wannabe who is now President of Iran, in one of his more rational moments, hit the nail squarely on the noggin: “How can the insulting of the prophet of Muslims worldwide be justified within the framework of press freedom, but investigating the fairy tale holocaust is not?”
And he’s got a point, doesn’t he? In Europe, they’re trying to keep skinheads off the internet, they fine the elected mayor of a great city because he insults a reporter, they lock up a historian because he denied the holocaust in a different country three years before a law was passed saying you can’t deny the holocaust, and they want to put a preacher in jail for quoting Leviticus on Sunday morning. SO WHAT ABOUT US? WE’RE PISSED TOO! WHAT ABOUT OUR DAMN PROPHET??? Now, suddenly, you’re claiming there’s some free speech principle involved? Since when did YOU ever bother about free speech?
The Muslims are correct this time. There is no reasonable basis upon which Denmark or any other European country can stand on principle, because they recognize no such principle. If speech is offensive, it is banned, and speakers go to jail. Putting aside the issue of how much of the rioting is actually government-sponsored, there’s no question that Muslims are genuinely annoyed by the graphic depiction, especially in a negative light, of their prophet, so why aren’t the cartoonists eating out of tin cups? If some kid at Duesseldorf U. put a swastika in his dorm window, the Germans would treat him like Sherman treated Georgia. Once you begin banning offensive speech, you’re going to encounter some sensitive people (like Muslims), and you will have to accommodate them. When you allow the heckler a veto, you may be unpleasantly surprised by how many hecklers there are and how easily they are offended.
Europe’s failure to protect hate speech left an opening for the growing Muslim population there to exploit, and this particular battle in the culture war was over before it started, with Western freedom exposed as an illusion. European governments and journalists had no idea how to respond because they weren’t sure what they believed in, so many governments and newspapers apologized to the Muslim world. What newspaper now will publish words or pictures (even truthful ones) that will enrage the Muslim population? Those that do not censor themselves can expect no protection from the law; in fact, they may themselves be arrested for offending the rabble.
Apart from the freedom that disappears when a people fail to understand the importance of protecting hate speech, the cartoon war illustrates another danger of permitting the heckler a veto. As the Terminiello court pointed out, the peril for society is that the loudest and most violent hecklers will rule.
It may seem polite or civilized or politically-correct to ban speech that may offend one group or another, but this impulse is extremely shortsighted. What happens when groups of “victims” disagree over what speech is offensive? What will happen in Europe, for example, when an imam calls for the silencing of gay advocacy groups because their views are an affront to Allah? Homosexuals are executed in some Muslim countries; what happens when the faithful demand the same in Europe? It is one thing to lock up an elderly small-town Swedish pastor for condemning homosexuality, but would the Europeans do the same to a Muslim preacher who said far worse? An Iranian university just held an academic conference on the “myth” of the holocaust. Suppose someone decided to launch such an event in France?
When conflicts like this arise, the only method of resolving it will be to accede to the wishes of those who are most offended (i.e., the loudest). Since there is no principle involved other than a “right” not to have one’s (subjective) feelings wounded, those with the strongest feelings should prevail. And can anyone doubt that the winners of the rage-fest will be followers of Islam?
America, however, is different. America is better. Here, at least some people understand that if we want any freedom at all, we must accept the possibility we will sometimes be offended by other people’s exercise of it. It’s our law. It’s our tradition. “F*** em if they can’t take a joke” might as well be written in the Constitution. Several years ago, Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ” was displayed in a public museum. The sculpture, a statue of Jesus immersed in a plastic case filled with the artist’s own urine, was deeply upsetting to many (perhaps most) people in this very Christian nation, but I remember no one calling for the suppression of this work. The only issue, discussed endlessly on TV and radio and in editorials, was whether artists like Mr. Serrano should receive public funding. Ban Muhammed cartoons? Ban offensive speech? Give me a break. Americans (outside of academia) don’t know how to think like that.
As Europe descends into oppression, we can be thankful that free speech, especially hate speech, survives here. America is still a place where you can say any damn thing you please. Maybe you’ll get punched in the nose for it, and maybe you should get punched in the nose for it, but you won’t get arrested. Or silenced.
Copyright 2006 Michael Kubacki
He thought about that, and looked at me funny.
“C’mon, Bob,” I said. “Would you want to live in a place where it was illegal to stand in the courtyard at City Hall and yell ‘The first thing we have to do is kill all the Jews.’”
He didn’t answer. He was thinking, as he sometimes does. Then, as luck would have it, a very healthy 20-year-old girl in an abbreviated bathing costume strolled past on her way to the surf, and he seemed to lose interest in my question. My attention may have wandered as well. By the time we were through examining the evidence, my First Amendment question had been forgotten.
But it’s an important question, especially in light of the war breaking out over the Muhammed cartoons. Should it be a crime to use the word “nigger,” or demand that Jews be killed? In other words, should “hate speech” be protected by the First Amendment?
Most Americans understand that the First Amendment makes us different from the rest of the world, even from other democracies with traditions of free speech and freedom of the press. One obvious difference is that free speech in America is rooted in our constitution, which trumps all other law. The British Parliament could pass a law tomorrow that would put all newspapers under government control. If the US Congress did such a thing, however, the law would be nullified as unconstitutional by the first (and every subsequent) federal judge to review it.
Nationalizing the press is an extreme example, of course, and there is no chance the British Parliament is going to do it. In a democracy lacking an overarching body of law like the First Amendment, however, the boundaries of free speech are always subject to political fashion and the whim of the legislature. And in fact, elected bodies in other countries regularly nibble away at speech rights in ways our constitution and our Supreme Court do not permit. Free speech law, as outlined by our courts over the last two hundred years, is marked by bright lines that neither Congress nor the states can cross. One of these bright lines of particular significance to hate speech laws (and the Danish cartoon war), is the “heckler’s veto,” a legal doctrine unique to the United States.
In the case of Terminiello v. Chicago, in 1949, a lecturer was arrested for a breach of the peace when an angry crowd gathered outside the auditorium where he was speaking. The trial judge told the jury that under a Chicago ordinance, it could convict the speaker if he had engaged in speech that “stirs the public to anger, invites dispute, brings about a condition of unrest or creates a disturbance….” On review, the US Supreme Court reversed the conviction and ruled the ordinance unconstitutional. Speech is protected, the Court wrote, BECAUSE “it induces a condition of unrest, creates dissatisfaction with conditions as they are, or even stirs people to anger.”
Speech may legally be restricted for many reasons. You can’t hold an anti-war rally on Broad Street on January 1, when the mummers are parading, because that would be an “unreasonable time and place.” Some speech content (i.e., kiddie porn, national security secrets) is not only unprotected, it is actually criminal. Under Terminiello, however, the only reason speech rights may not be limited is that the speech will offend people, or even enrage them. To limit offensive speech because it offends is to give the heckler a veto over speech that annoys him. In fact, it encourages the heckler to become violent and breach the peace, because then the speaker will be punished. The rule of Terminiello is that we punish the violent heckler, but we do not punish the speaker.
The reasoning of the Terminiello case is that once you start banning speech because it offends, eventually you grant control of all discourse to the most sensitive, irrational and violent elements in society. Opening this door creates a “slippery slope” to repression. Though you begin by punishing nazis and racists, you move swiftly to jailing artists like Andres Serrano (“Piss Christ”) and newspaper editors who publish Muhammed cartoons. Ultimately, you lock up the guy who says, “Ya know, women can do a lot of things, but I still think the best firefighters are men.”
Though Terminiello is settled law (a “super-precedent,” as Arlen Specter would say), the rule of the “heckler’s veto” is not universally loved or respected, and there are plenty of folks who would ban what they view as “hate speech” if they could get away with it.
In the last twenty-five years, over 90% of colleges and universities in the United States have enacted speech codes or sexual harassment codes that ban “offensive” speech or speech that “demeans, provokes or subordinates” any person. A private university like Harvard or Bob Jones may legally do such a thing, but a public university like Temple or Penn State or Michigan is legally viewed as an arm of the government and is subject to the First Amendment.
When a student runs afoul of these rules with speech deemed “offensive” or “harassing” by college administrators, litigation often ensues. Currently, there are lawsuits all over the country. In fact, there is now a non-profit organization, the Foundation For Individual Rights In Education (“FIRE”), that provides legal assistance to students or faculty members who are punished for constitutionally-protected speech. FIRE never loses these cases.
Dozens of examples, including those that don’t reach the litigation stage, can be found at FIRE’s website, www.thefire.org. Here are a few:
***Cal-Poly, 2002. Student Steven Hinkle posted a flier in the campus Multicultural Center advertising a College-Republican-sponsored speech by Mason Weaver, author of It’s OK To Leave The Plantation. The flier displayed only the title of the book, the time and place of the event, and a picture of the author, an African-American. After some black students objected the poster was offensive, Hinkle, following a seven-hour hearing before the Cal-Poly Judicial Affairs Office, was ordered to write letters of apology to the offended students or face “severe penalties.”
***Central Michigan U, 2001. In October 2001, an administrator ordered a number of students to remove various patriotic displays (American flags, eagles, etc.) from their dormitory because the displays were offensive.
***Holy Cross, 2001. In October 2001, the chairman of the sociology department ordered a secretary’s American flag display removed from the office. The flag was in memory of her friend Todd Beamer, who fought and died on United flight 93 over Pennsylvania on 9-11.
***San Diego State, 2001. In September 2001, Zewdalem Kebede witnessed a group of Saudi Arabian students loudly expressing their delight at the success of the terrorist attacks. Kebede spoke to them in Arabic, condemning their opinions and bad taste. When the students complained, Kebede was subjected to a disciplinary hearing and issued a formal “letter of admonishment” in which he was told to avoid similar confrontations or face “severe disciplinary measures.”
***William Patterson U, 2005. Jihad Daniel, a Muslim student and employee of the college, received a mass email from Professor Arlene Scala promoting a showing of a film described as “a lesbian relationship story.” He replied privately to the professor, asking that he not be sent any mail about “Connie and Sally” or “Adam and Steve” because his religion viewed these relationships as “perversions.” Mr. Daniel received an official letter of reprimand in his employment file noting his violation of sexual harassment regulations.
***U of New Hampshire, 2004. Timothy Garneau posted fliers in the elevators of his dormitory suggesting that women could lose the “freshman 15” (weight gained the first year of college) by taking the stairs. Charged with “acts of dishonesty, violation of affirmative action policy and harassment,” Garneau was expelled from student housing, given disciplinary probation, required to meet with a psychological counselor and write a 3000-word essay about it, and further required to submit a letter of apology to the student newspaper.
***U of Cal-Irvine, 2004. Members of the College Republicans staged an Affirmative Action Bake Sale to dramatize the unfairness of affirmative action programs. Prices for donuts were based on the race and sex of the consumer, with white males paying a dollar, Hispanics 75 cents, and blacks 50 cents. A spirited discussion ensued, until the Dean of Students stopped the sale, claiming it violated student regulations on discrimination. College Republican groups have set up these sales at universities around the country, and were also shut down at Illinois State and SMU. At DePaul, the students were charged with violating the school’s harassment policy.
Another tactic used by college administrations to silence views they dislike is to allow, or even encourage, radical students to do the silencing by means of vandalism, theft, or other violence. At the University of Colorado, for example, an affirmative action bake sale ended when, with campus police in attendance, counter-demonstrators were permitted to rip down signs and overturn tables, without opposition or consequences.
In 2005, at Washington State University, student playwright Chris Lee produced his play, “Passion Of The Musical,” and advertised it widely as “offensive or inflammatory to all audiences.” During one performance, a group of forty protesters repeatedly stood up, shouted they were offended, and threatened audience members and the cast. When Lee finally stopped the play and asked campus security to remove the protesters, they refused his request. Evidence later surfaced that the Washington State Office For Campus Involvement had bought forty tickets for the protesters with university funds and had helped organize the disruption.
A common tactic for radical students is to steal the entire press run of a student newspaper containing “offensive” (i.e., politically conservative) material. Typically, the thieves are never punished. In fact, the theft is sometimes defended by administrators and professors as itself being an exercise of free speech. Again, these incidents are found across the country at a wide variety of institutions. A few that garnered significant press coverage were at Berkeley, UNC-Wilmington, U Mass, Loyola Marymount, Boston College, Morehead State, and Oregon State. FIRE has received reports on hundreds of such events.
It may be tempting to attribute these cases to a few ignorant zealots who happen to be college administrators, but in fact, they happen regularly across the country, in small schools and large, in red states and blue. Also, even when the light is shone on the suppression of speech at an institution supposedly dedicated to intellectual freedom, schools rarely back down. They litigate. They fight these complaints, spending many thousands on lawyers and thousands more on settlements and judgments. But even after they lose, the speech codes remain.
Illegal speech codes grew out of a misreading of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, federal laws that prohibit real harassment in the workplace and on campus. Because of this misunderstanding, and because of their own political views, the people who run our universities came to believe they were permitted, or even required, to regulate offensive speech. While it seems unlikely anyone could still believe this, the speech codes are now in place and there is strong support for them on most campuses.
University speech codes illustrate the “slippery slope” in full regalia. Federal laws designed to prevent the most severe, persistent, frightening sort of harassment (the equivalent of “stalking” under state laws), have morphed into an Orwellian system of oppression.
Thus, expressing one’s religious view that homosexuality is immoral becomes a hate crime. Poking fun at affirmative action policies results in disciplinary hearings and punishment. American flags get ripped from dormitory walls a month after 9-11. Once the door is opened to the notion that speech can be banned because someone is offended by it, no speech is safe. All variety of commentary becomes subject to the heckler’s veto.
American universities will eventually get the message that their speech codes are illegal, but in nations without a First Amendment (i.e., everywhere else), and without a Terminiello case, there is no particular reason to tolerate speech the majority deems hateful. And since, as a matter of practical politics, there is no organized constituency in favor of the most offensive speech, it is often banned.
In 1998, an Ontario man was convicted of a hate crime for distributing pamphlets about Islam. The offending pamphlet (truthfully) listed atrocities committed in the name of Allah, and urged the reader to be careful in dealing with Canadian Muslims.
More recent Canadian law has criminalized the public disapproval of homosexuality. In 2001, Hugh Owens placed an ad in the Saskatoon Star Phoenix in which a drawing of two males holding hands was overlaid with a red circle and a diagonal bar. The ad also referenced (but did not quote) four Bible passages that condemn homosexuality. Mr. Owens and the newspaper were fined $4500 under the Saskatchewan Human Rights Code, and the ruling was upheld by the Queen’s Bench, where a Justice Barclay wrote that “the advertisement can objectively be seen as exposing homosexuals to hatred or ridicule.” And under Canadian law, that’s all that matters. In another recent case from Ontario (not a speech case), a printer (a Christian) was fined $5000 for refusing a job printing letterhead for a gay advocacy group.
Hate speech laws are also found throughout Europe.
Shortly after Muslims carried out bomb attacks in London in 2005, a German man printed up toilet paper with the word “Koran” on every sheet, then sent the rolls to TV stations and mosques. He was given a one-year prison sentence, which will be followed by 300 hours of community service. I
In an odd English case, the Mayor of London was brought before the Adjudication Panel For England over a heated exchange he had with a reporter for the Evening Standard, a paper the Mayor despises. The Mayor asked the reporter (a Jew) if he had been a German war criminal and compared him to a concentration camp guard. The result was a four-week suspension for the Mayor, who will also have to pay legal fees of $175,000.
In Sweden, the Rev. Aake Green was sentenced to a month in prison for a sermon denouncing homosexuality as “a cancer on society.” After a yearlong appeal, the conviction was overturned and the pastor remains free, but the prosecution has announced plans for a further appeal, which will include a demand for a longer sentence.
Though the Rev. Green may escape punishment for his remarks from the pulpit, the effect of such laws on speech was apparent in his post-appeal statement to the press. “I’ll go on preaching as usual but I won’t be dedicating so much time to this issue,” he said. (This “chilling effect,” under US law, is why even an unsuccessful attempt to censor speech, or a rarely-enforced speech code, is actionable. On February 22, 2006, the Alliance Defense Fund filed a lawsuit against Penn State over its speech code in which the plaintiff is a student who has never been disciplined by the university for his speech, though others have been.)
The most widespread hate-speech laws are those banning public display of nazi symbols or denial of the holocaust. There are ten such countries in Europe (France, Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Romania, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Lithuania and Poland.) In addition, there are other countries (e.g., Canada and the U.K.) that do not explicitly ban holocaust denial, but do so under broader laws against inciting racial hatred.
On February 20, 2006, a British historian named David Irving was sentenced to three years in prison by an Austrian court for denying the holocaust in a 1989 publication (in England). The prosecutor is appealing the sentence as too lenient since the 1992 Austrian law provides for a sentence of up to ten years.
There is solid support for hate speech laws, of various kinds, across Europe. In fact, the EU bureaucracy is currently engaged in writing regulations to ban various forms of offensive speech on the internet. It is against this backdrop that the Danish cartoon war erupted.
The protests began with boycotts of Danish dairy products in Arabian countries and quickly progressed to riots, embassy-burning and blood in the streets. As the violence escalated, there were repeated demands that the government of Denmark, and other countries, apologize. And some government officials did, but not the Prime Minister of Denmark. Anders Fogh Rasmussen, though noting that burning a Koran would be a crime in Denmark, claimed the Danish government could do nothing about the cartoons because it did not control the press. In other words, the Danish government had nothing to do with it, so how could they apologize?
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Hitler-wannabe who is now President of Iran, in one of his more rational moments, hit the nail squarely on the noggin: “How can the insulting of the prophet of Muslims worldwide be justified within the framework of press freedom, but investigating the fairy tale holocaust is not?”
And he’s got a point, doesn’t he? In Europe, they’re trying to keep skinheads off the internet, they fine the elected mayor of a great city because he insults a reporter, they lock up a historian because he denied the holocaust in a different country three years before a law was passed saying you can’t deny the holocaust, and they want to put a preacher in jail for quoting Leviticus on Sunday morning. SO WHAT ABOUT US? WE’RE PISSED TOO! WHAT ABOUT OUR DAMN PROPHET??? Now, suddenly, you’re claiming there’s some free speech principle involved? Since when did YOU ever bother about free speech?
The Muslims are correct this time. There is no reasonable basis upon which Denmark or any other European country can stand on principle, because they recognize no such principle. If speech is offensive, it is banned, and speakers go to jail. Putting aside the issue of how much of the rioting is actually government-sponsored, there’s no question that Muslims are genuinely annoyed by the graphic depiction, especially in a negative light, of their prophet, so why aren’t the cartoonists eating out of tin cups? If some kid at Duesseldorf U. put a swastika in his dorm window, the Germans would treat him like Sherman treated Georgia. Once you begin banning offensive speech, you’re going to encounter some sensitive people (like Muslims), and you will have to accommodate them. When you allow the heckler a veto, you may be unpleasantly surprised by how many hecklers there are and how easily they are offended.
Europe’s failure to protect hate speech left an opening for the growing Muslim population there to exploit, and this particular battle in the culture war was over before it started, with Western freedom exposed as an illusion. European governments and journalists had no idea how to respond because they weren’t sure what they believed in, so many governments and newspapers apologized to the Muslim world. What newspaper now will publish words or pictures (even truthful ones) that will enrage the Muslim population? Those that do not censor themselves can expect no protection from the law; in fact, they may themselves be arrested for offending the rabble.
Apart from the freedom that disappears when a people fail to understand the importance of protecting hate speech, the cartoon war illustrates another danger of permitting the heckler a veto. As the Terminiello court pointed out, the peril for society is that the loudest and most violent hecklers will rule.
It may seem polite or civilized or politically-correct to ban speech that may offend one group or another, but this impulse is extremely shortsighted. What happens when groups of “victims” disagree over what speech is offensive? What will happen in Europe, for example, when an imam calls for the silencing of gay advocacy groups because their views are an affront to Allah? Homosexuals are executed in some Muslim countries; what happens when the faithful demand the same in Europe? It is one thing to lock up an elderly small-town Swedish pastor for condemning homosexuality, but would the Europeans do the same to a Muslim preacher who said far worse? An Iranian university just held an academic conference on the “myth” of the holocaust. Suppose someone decided to launch such an event in France?
When conflicts like this arise, the only method of resolving it will be to accede to the wishes of those who are most offended (i.e., the loudest). Since there is no principle involved other than a “right” not to have one’s (subjective) feelings wounded, those with the strongest feelings should prevail. And can anyone doubt that the winners of the rage-fest will be followers of Islam?
America, however, is different. America is better. Here, at least some people understand that if we want any freedom at all, we must accept the possibility we will sometimes be offended by other people’s exercise of it. It’s our law. It’s our tradition. “F*** em if they can’t take a joke” might as well be written in the Constitution. Several years ago, Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ” was displayed in a public museum. The sculpture, a statue of Jesus immersed in a plastic case filled with the artist’s own urine, was deeply upsetting to many (perhaps most) people in this very Christian nation, but I remember no one calling for the suppression of this work. The only issue, discussed endlessly on TV and radio and in editorials, was whether artists like Mr. Serrano should receive public funding. Ban Muhammed cartoons? Ban offensive speech? Give me a break. Americans (outside of academia) don’t know how to think like that.
As Europe descends into oppression, we can be thankful that free speech, especially hate speech, survives here. America is still a place where you can say any damn thing you please. Maybe you’ll get punched in the nose for it, and maybe you should get punched in the nose for it, but you won’t get arrested. Or silenced.
Copyright 2006 Michael Kubacki
Wednesday, October 4, 2006
A MATTER OF ETHICS
I was in the car a few Sundays ago, looking for a football game on the radio, and I happened upon one of those call-in medical shows that fill out the right-wing radio schedule when Rush and Sean and Michael and Laura are all hunkered down somewhere with a box of cigars, a case of single-malt scotch and a 57-inch plasma TV tuned to the NFL package.
Normally, a medical show would hold my attention for exactly the length of time it would take me to recognize it was a medical show and hit the dial. I disapprove of these things under the best of circumstances, but on a Sunday afternoon in the Fall, I find it positively frightening to discover there are people (Americans!) who would rather talk about ginkgo and bowel movements than watch Peyton Manning dissect the Seahawks’ secondary. The shock of this realization invariably makes me wonder, briefly, whether al-Qaeda might someday win.
But at the moment I tuned in, as luck would have it, the “doctor” was not talking about ginkgo or bowel movements. He wasn’t even talking about cholesterol. Instead, he was launching into a problem in medical ethics.
And here it is.
A married couple goes to a doctor’s office to inquire about their fertility problems. The doctor examines each of them, administers some tests, and tells them to return on Thursday for the results. As they are leaving, the wife says, “Thanks, doctor. This is very important to us. We’ve been trying to have another child for seven years now.”
Before the second appointment, the doctor learns the husband is sterile. There is no other conclusion. It is a congenital condition, and while it might be corrected with surgery, the husband is not the father of their seven-year-old child.
Thursday comes. You’re the doctor. What do you tell the couple?
There’s no right answer, of course. Or rather, there is a right answer, but considerable disagreement about what it is. All us mortals can do is argue about it, and it turns out to be a great question to argue about. I brought it up, over the pie and cheesecake and coffee, at our Thanksgiving dinner, and the discussion went on for quite a while. One thing I can report at the outset is that even those with positions on the two extremes---1) tell the hard truth or 2) lie like a dog---tend not to get adamant about it. Almost everyone, it seems, can see the other side of the coin.
While you are considering your answer, and before I tell you mine, let me specify one rule: you can’t duck the question. One guy (a lawyer, of course), said the solution was to call the ethics board at the AMA and get a ruling. OK, I said, then the question is: what answer should they give you? Another guy (a doctor) avoided the question by claiming there was no such thing as medical certainty, and thus, nothing he might tell the couple could be characterized as “true” or “false.” In a nutshell, he was arguing it was impossible for him to lie when he was offering a medical opinion. (A convenient position for a doctor, n’est-ce pas?) He never did give me an answer.
The hypothetical is designed to engage our view of right and wrong---that’s the purpose of it. Don’t fight it.
On one extreme is the view of the doctor on the radio show. He said he would sit the couple down and tell them the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. This was his obligation as a doctor, he said. The couple came to him seeking a medical opinion and he would betray his oath if he were less than completely frank, no matter the consequences. As a policy matter, he noted that with DNA and genetic testing for diseases, this sort of issue was arising with increasing frequency, and it was essential to have an ironclad rule for the situation. Doctors could not be expected to “play God” with their patients, he suggested.
It’s a reasoned point of view, and I can see why a doctor, in particular, would feel that way. Among my unscientific sample, however, this is an extreme and unusual position. Only two people thought “the truth” trumped everything, and one of them was the lawyer whose first impulse was to duck the question.
The most common response, the middle road, is: “Well, he has to tell them the truth, right?” Then there is a pause of five or ten seconds. Then the person says, “Well, maybe I wouldn’t do that, exactly.” Following this, any number of creative lies emerge:
• “He’s been riding his bike too much.”
• “Maybe I check his medical records for the last seven years, and whatever happened to him is the reason he’s sterile."
• “I tell the wife the truth and ask her what she wants me to tell him.”
• “I tell them their first child was close to a miracle and he needs surgery to have another.”
My own view is at the other extreme---it would never occur to me to tell them the truth. I’m not sure what lie I would tell, but if I were a doctor, I’m sure I could invent something convincing, and I would. I would do so in spite of whatever ethical rules I learned in medical school and whatever legal liability I would be risking. I would falsify lab reports, if necessary. I would probably continue to lie even if they got a second opinion from another doctor and accused me of lying to them. I would tell them the second doctor was wrong, and subtly suggest he was well known to the police. Only when faced with threats of violence from the husband and service of a subpoena would I admit the truth.
Certainly, the truth is important, in an abstract sort of way. And yes, there is a contractual obligation on the doctor’s part to provide the service he has been engaged to perform. To see no further than these (perfectly legitimate) concerns, however, is to reduce the doctor’s role to that of the guy who sells you a new set of radial tires. A professional has an obligation to go a bit further, partly because he is in possession of specialized knowledge and the client is not. The client may not know what facts are important. He may not even know what the problem is. That’s why a professional has to acquaint himself with the entire picture, and has to use his judgment in identifying the problem and then deciding how to solve it.
How much further? Well, I admit my answer pushes professional responsibility to its limits, but once you acknowledge that the obligation to a patient or client extends further than that of the tire-monger, aren’t you forced to consider the interests of the seven-year-old child you have never met? And if, as a professional, you take that first little step toward an expanded view of your obligation---well, personally, I quickly come to the conclusion that the kid’s interests are the only ones that matter.
Morally, he trumps everybody. I’m an outsider here, but the one thing I know is that the kid is a completely innocent party. To my way of thinking, if that kid isn’t asking what happened nine months before he was born, I’m not going to tell him. I’m not going to tell anybody. And the kid isn’t asking. Why should he? He has a Momma and a Dada, and they all live together, and love each other, and whatever happened ninety-three months ago is ancient history.
It’s apparently ancient history to the husband and wife too, by the way. Remember---I’m just their doctor. I have no particular interest, professional or otherwise, in what happened way back when. All I see is a married couple that wants to have another kid. Maybe the husband had suspicions. If so, they’re gone now. The wife knew there was a possibility, but after seven years, she has persuaded herself her husband was the father. Maybe it was a two-week fling. Maybe it was a drunken Christmas party. Maybe, in her mind, it “didn’t matter.” What do I care? I’m only concerned with the kid, and what good can come to that seven-year-old by me telling the truth?
I have presented this argument to “truth-tellers” and have received the following response: “But it might be good for them to learn the truth. Maybe they will finally deal with the underlying issues in their relationship. Maybe they will reach a new understanding and a new level of partnership and love.”
“Yes,” I respond cordially. “And maybe monkeys will fly out of my butt.”
Speaking simply as a guy, qua guy, knowledge of a wife’s infidelity and a husband’s non-paternity is not going to catapult anybody to a new level of partnership and love. I don’t even know a guy who is that “evolved,” though I know some who probably think they are. A few guys would kill. More would divorce. About the best outcome would be a long series of therapy sessions and hot tubs and long, meaningful chats and crap like that. Meanwhile, the kid (remember the kid???) is wondering what the hell is wrong with his Momma and Dada. In my limited experience, kids don’t want Momma and Dada to have long, meaningful chats and deal with the underlying issues in their relationship. They prefer it when their parents are sitting on the patio drinking beer and talking about Britney Spears and Hillary Clinton. Kids want Momma to make cookies sometimes, and they want Dada to take them to a ballgame and buy them a hotdog and tell them a stupid joke. Kids HATE underlying issues. Nobody hates underlying issues more than kids do. Not even me.
What is interesting about this problem is that all of us can sympathize with the doctor. He is simply doing his job to the best of his ability, and suddenly he is confronted with a moral and ethical dilemma. He did not choose to be placed in the position he finds himself. Nobody would. Nevertheless, there it is. He holds the fate of this family in his hands and he has to decide what to do. He can consult other doctors or call the AMA Ethics Board or ask his priest, but the final decision is his. He’s stuck with it.
What engages us is that we are all placed in this position from time to time, typically when we least expect it. Moral issues are part of the human condition, as much as we may try to avoid them. But it’s not really an answer, is it, to “call the Ethics Board” or dismiss the issue with some bromide about “the truth” or “medical certainty” or “playing God.” Not that “the truth” is a concept without value, but why should it triumph here, in this situation, with this family? As my criminal law professor used to say, “Justify your answer!” Perhaps it can be justified, but if the parents get divorced and the kid starts selling dope on the corner, you will need a better answer for yourself than, “Well, that’s what the Ethics Board told me to do,” or “In medical school, they told us not to play God.” Because you were playing God. You were put in a position where you were forced to play God. You just made the wrong decision because you wanted to pretend you weren’t making a decision at all. This is the worst possible strategy when faced with a moral dilemma.
One way to approach these questions is to ask yourself, “If I choose Option A, and there are terrible consequences, can I still defend my decision?” Then ask yourself the same question about Option B. In this case, the first question becomes, “If I tell the truth and the family disintegrates, will I still feel I did the right thing?” Then ask, “If I lie, and I face discipline for an ethical violation (or get a punch in the nose), will I still believe my lie was justified?”
I remain curious about this question. If you disagree with me (and most people do), send me an email and tell me what you think.
Copyright 2006 Michael Kubacki
Normally, a medical show would hold my attention for exactly the length of time it would take me to recognize it was a medical show and hit the dial. I disapprove of these things under the best of circumstances, but on a Sunday afternoon in the Fall, I find it positively frightening to discover there are people (Americans!) who would rather talk about ginkgo and bowel movements than watch Peyton Manning dissect the Seahawks’ secondary. The shock of this realization invariably makes me wonder, briefly, whether al-Qaeda might someday win.
But at the moment I tuned in, as luck would have it, the “doctor” was not talking about ginkgo or bowel movements. He wasn’t even talking about cholesterol. Instead, he was launching into a problem in medical ethics.
And here it is.
A married couple goes to a doctor’s office to inquire about their fertility problems. The doctor examines each of them, administers some tests, and tells them to return on Thursday for the results. As they are leaving, the wife says, “Thanks, doctor. This is very important to us. We’ve been trying to have another child for seven years now.”
Before the second appointment, the doctor learns the husband is sterile. There is no other conclusion. It is a congenital condition, and while it might be corrected with surgery, the husband is not the father of their seven-year-old child.
Thursday comes. You’re the doctor. What do you tell the couple?
There’s no right answer, of course. Or rather, there is a right answer, but considerable disagreement about what it is. All us mortals can do is argue about it, and it turns out to be a great question to argue about. I brought it up, over the pie and cheesecake and coffee, at our Thanksgiving dinner, and the discussion went on for quite a while. One thing I can report at the outset is that even those with positions on the two extremes---1) tell the hard truth or 2) lie like a dog---tend not to get adamant about it. Almost everyone, it seems, can see the other side of the coin.
While you are considering your answer, and before I tell you mine, let me specify one rule: you can’t duck the question. One guy (a lawyer, of course), said the solution was to call the ethics board at the AMA and get a ruling. OK, I said, then the question is: what answer should they give you? Another guy (a doctor) avoided the question by claiming there was no such thing as medical certainty, and thus, nothing he might tell the couple could be characterized as “true” or “false.” In a nutshell, he was arguing it was impossible for him to lie when he was offering a medical opinion. (A convenient position for a doctor, n’est-ce pas?) He never did give me an answer.
The hypothetical is designed to engage our view of right and wrong---that’s the purpose of it. Don’t fight it.
On one extreme is the view of the doctor on the radio show. He said he would sit the couple down and tell them the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. This was his obligation as a doctor, he said. The couple came to him seeking a medical opinion and he would betray his oath if he were less than completely frank, no matter the consequences. As a policy matter, he noted that with DNA and genetic testing for diseases, this sort of issue was arising with increasing frequency, and it was essential to have an ironclad rule for the situation. Doctors could not be expected to “play God” with their patients, he suggested.
It’s a reasoned point of view, and I can see why a doctor, in particular, would feel that way. Among my unscientific sample, however, this is an extreme and unusual position. Only two people thought “the truth” trumped everything, and one of them was the lawyer whose first impulse was to duck the question.
The most common response, the middle road, is: “Well, he has to tell them the truth, right?” Then there is a pause of five or ten seconds. Then the person says, “Well, maybe I wouldn’t do that, exactly.” Following this, any number of creative lies emerge:
• “He’s been riding his bike too much.”
• “Maybe I check his medical records for the last seven years, and whatever happened to him is the reason he’s sterile."
• “I tell the wife the truth and ask her what she wants me to tell him.”
• “I tell them their first child was close to a miracle and he needs surgery to have another.”
My own view is at the other extreme---it would never occur to me to tell them the truth. I’m not sure what lie I would tell, but if I were a doctor, I’m sure I could invent something convincing, and I would. I would do so in spite of whatever ethical rules I learned in medical school and whatever legal liability I would be risking. I would falsify lab reports, if necessary. I would probably continue to lie even if they got a second opinion from another doctor and accused me of lying to them. I would tell them the second doctor was wrong, and subtly suggest he was well known to the police. Only when faced with threats of violence from the husband and service of a subpoena would I admit the truth.
Certainly, the truth is important, in an abstract sort of way. And yes, there is a contractual obligation on the doctor’s part to provide the service he has been engaged to perform. To see no further than these (perfectly legitimate) concerns, however, is to reduce the doctor’s role to that of the guy who sells you a new set of radial tires. A professional has an obligation to go a bit further, partly because he is in possession of specialized knowledge and the client is not. The client may not know what facts are important. He may not even know what the problem is. That’s why a professional has to acquaint himself with the entire picture, and has to use his judgment in identifying the problem and then deciding how to solve it.
How much further? Well, I admit my answer pushes professional responsibility to its limits, but once you acknowledge that the obligation to a patient or client extends further than that of the tire-monger, aren’t you forced to consider the interests of the seven-year-old child you have never met? And if, as a professional, you take that first little step toward an expanded view of your obligation---well, personally, I quickly come to the conclusion that the kid’s interests are the only ones that matter.
Morally, he trumps everybody. I’m an outsider here, but the one thing I know is that the kid is a completely innocent party. To my way of thinking, if that kid isn’t asking what happened nine months before he was born, I’m not going to tell him. I’m not going to tell anybody. And the kid isn’t asking. Why should he? He has a Momma and a Dada, and they all live together, and love each other, and whatever happened ninety-three months ago is ancient history.
It’s apparently ancient history to the husband and wife too, by the way. Remember---I’m just their doctor. I have no particular interest, professional or otherwise, in what happened way back when. All I see is a married couple that wants to have another kid. Maybe the husband had suspicions. If so, they’re gone now. The wife knew there was a possibility, but after seven years, she has persuaded herself her husband was the father. Maybe it was a two-week fling. Maybe it was a drunken Christmas party. Maybe, in her mind, it “didn’t matter.” What do I care? I’m only concerned with the kid, and what good can come to that seven-year-old by me telling the truth?
I have presented this argument to “truth-tellers” and have received the following response: “But it might be good for them to learn the truth. Maybe they will finally deal with the underlying issues in their relationship. Maybe they will reach a new understanding and a new level of partnership and love.”
“Yes,” I respond cordially. “And maybe monkeys will fly out of my butt.”
Speaking simply as a guy, qua guy, knowledge of a wife’s infidelity and a husband’s non-paternity is not going to catapult anybody to a new level of partnership and love. I don’t even know a guy who is that “evolved,” though I know some who probably think they are. A few guys would kill. More would divorce. About the best outcome would be a long series of therapy sessions and hot tubs and long, meaningful chats and crap like that. Meanwhile, the kid (remember the kid???) is wondering what the hell is wrong with his Momma and Dada. In my limited experience, kids don’t want Momma and Dada to have long, meaningful chats and deal with the underlying issues in their relationship. They prefer it when their parents are sitting on the patio drinking beer and talking about Britney Spears and Hillary Clinton. Kids want Momma to make cookies sometimes, and they want Dada to take them to a ballgame and buy them a hotdog and tell them a stupid joke. Kids HATE underlying issues. Nobody hates underlying issues more than kids do. Not even me.
What is interesting about this problem is that all of us can sympathize with the doctor. He is simply doing his job to the best of his ability, and suddenly he is confronted with a moral and ethical dilemma. He did not choose to be placed in the position he finds himself. Nobody would. Nevertheless, there it is. He holds the fate of this family in his hands and he has to decide what to do. He can consult other doctors or call the AMA Ethics Board or ask his priest, but the final decision is his. He’s stuck with it.
What engages us is that we are all placed in this position from time to time, typically when we least expect it. Moral issues are part of the human condition, as much as we may try to avoid them. But it’s not really an answer, is it, to “call the Ethics Board” or dismiss the issue with some bromide about “the truth” or “medical certainty” or “playing God.” Not that “the truth” is a concept without value, but why should it triumph here, in this situation, with this family? As my criminal law professor used to say, “Justify your answer!” Perhaps it can be justified, but if the parents get divorced and the kid starts selling dope on the corner, you will need a better answer for yourself than, “Well, that’s what the Ethics Board told me to do,” or “In medical school, they told us not to play God.” Because you were playing God. You were put in a position where you were forced to play God. You just made the wrong decision because you wanted to pretend you weren’t making a decision at all. This is the worst possible strategy when faced with a moral dilemma.
One way to approach these questions is to ask yourself, “If I choose Option A, and there are terrible consequences, can I still defend my decision?” Then ask yourself the same question about Option B. In this case, the first question becomes, “If I tell the truth and the family disintegrates, will I still feel I did the right thing?” Then ask, “If I lie, and I face discipline for an ethical violation (or get a punch in the nose), will I still believe my lie was justified?”
I remain curious about this question. If you disagree with me (and most people do), send me an email and tell me what you think.
Copyright 2006 Michael Kubacki
Wednesday, July 26, 2006
MY FAVORITE ARGUMENT FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
Dear Joe---
Please understand I am not trying to convert you from your atheistic ways, but our conversation the other day made me realize I don’t get a chance to talk about the existence of God as much as I’d like to. People I mention it to on the subway just don’t seem that interested.
For me, creation remains the central mystery. Where did all the stuff come from? All the galaxies and chemicals and atoms---all the stuff that went into the big bang---where did it come from? Your answer, I think, was that it just appeared, or that it was always there, somehow.
This idea runs counter to everything you and I and everybody else in the history of the world have ever observed. Causes and effects are everywhere---nothing comes out of nothing. And yet, you think that at the very beginning, at the very first moment, it did. There was no particular reason for it. It just happened. At the very start, there was matter, or a creative event, or a coming into existence, or something, and then this magical process ceased forever as we were thrown into a universe of cause and effect. Why? How? And if you don’t know, can you at least point to SOMETHING that would justify your faith in this scenario?
My problem with it is that I cannot make the leap of faith you find so comfortable and certain. The idea of an effect without a cause is not only alien to my experience, I can’t even conceive of such a thing. I don’t know how to start thinking about it. In other words, it’s not that I have “faith” and you don’t. It’s impossible for a human being with a mind not to have “faith,” because there is no natural process that explains creation. You have faith too, but it’s in a process I find so outlandish and weird and irrational that I can’t imagine it.
While your theory contradicts our knowledge of the physical world, positing the existence of God contradicts nothing. My God is the Creator. Everything in the universe I am familiar with has a cause, and He is the first cause. That’s the definition of God. There can be no proof, in any scientific fashion, of His existence, but He fits. He makes sense.
I would add that I can find hints of God’s existence in my own observations, and in wisdom that has come down through the centuries, and in the Bible. It’s possible that all us believers are just kidding ourselves, of course, but your alternative offers nothing---no evidence, no hints, no explanation. In addition, we must believe that everything we see and understand is false.
Love,
Joe
Copyright 2006 Michael Kubacki
Please understand I am not trying to convert you from your atheistic ways, but our conversation the other day made me realize I don’t get a chance to talk about the existence of God as much as I’d like to. People I mention it to on the subway just don’t seem that interested.
For me, creation remains the central mystery. Where did all the stuff come from? All the galaxies and chemicals and atoms---all the stuff that went into the big bang---where did it come from? Your answer, I think, was that it just appeared, or that it was always there, somehow.
This idea runs counter to everything you and I and everybody else in the history of the world have ever observed. Causes and effects are everywhere---nothing comes out of nothing. And yet, you think that at the very beginning, at the very first moment, it did. There was no particular reason for it. It just happened. At the very start, there was matter, or a creative event, or a coming into existence, or something, and then this magical process ceased forever as we were thrown into a universe of cause and effect. Why? How? And if you don’t know, can you at least point to SOMETHING that would justify your faith in this scenario?
My problem with it is that I cannot make the leap of faith you find so comfortable and certain. The idea of an effect without a cause is not only alien to my experience, I can’t even conceive of such a thing. I don’t know how to start thinking about it. In other words, it’s not that I have “faith” and you don’t. It’s impossible for a human being with a mind not to have “faith,” because there is no natural process that explains creation. You have faith too, but it’s in a process I find so outlandish and weird and irrational that I can’t imagine it.
While your theory contradicts our knowledge of the physical world, positing the existence of God contradicts nothing. My God is the Creator. Everything in the universe I am familiar with has a cause, and He is the first cause. That’s the definition of God. There can be no proof, in any scientific fashion, of His existence, but He fits. He makes sense.
I would add that I can find hints of God’s existence in my own observations, and in wisdom that has come down through the centuries, and in the Bible. It’s possible that all us believers are just kidding ourselves, of course, but your alternative offers nothing---no evidence, no hints, no explanation. In addition, we must believe that everything we see and understand is false.
Love,
Joe
Copyright 2006 Michael Kubacki
Friday, June 30, 2006
LETTERS TO THE DAILY NEWS
Like all life-long cranks, I am an inveterate reader of letters to the editor. It’s often the only way we cranks can communicate with one another, since many of us live in institutions, relatives’ garages, 1979 VW vans, or other places that lack regular mail service or internet access. Also, since most of us are subject to a number of restraining orders, many lines of communication used routinely by our fellow citizens (e.g., stalking) are closed to us by law. But we can usually scrape together a piece of paper, a crayon, an envelope, and a first-class stamp.
There are three daily newspapers in Philly---the Inquirer, the Bulletin, and the Daily News---but for cranks, there is only one. The Inquirer fancies itself as the local version of the New York Times, and thus only publishes letters from executives (lesbians preferred) at non-profit organizations who believe polar bears should be designated an endangered species. The Bulletin is both more suburban and more conservative, but is also crank-unfriendly. A typical letter in the Bulletin runs 3000 words and concerns a five-year dispute in the Montgomery County Register of Wills Office among a County Commissioner, a buxom civil service clerk, two lawyers and a retired judge who was once married to one of the lawyers.
But then there’s the Daily News, which not only publishes letters from cranks but actually seems to prefer them. The DN not only publishes more letters than the other two papers, but on many days does not publish a single letter from someone you would be comfortable sitting next to on a bus.
Here is a collection of my favorites:
It was the day after the Phillies won 11-10.
My phone was ringing so I answered it. Wow, it was one of my sons, who I hadn’t heard from in about five years. He said he wanted to pay me a visit.
I said sorry, but I’ll be watching TV every night for a while, but if it’s raining, you could stop over. (Click.) Oh, well.
There’s a question I’ve been trying to find an answer to for quite some time.
The total mass of our planet seems to be steadily decreasing. For millions of years, the earth’s mass stayed relatively the same. Land masses shifted, glaciers formed and melted, but our total weight stayed the same. But with the Industrial Revolution came our dependence on fossil fuel.
The oil and coal we have extracted from the earth does not replenish itself and has, to some extent, changed the mass of our planet.
If we steadily keep draining billions of tons of oil and coal from the planet, could we change the orbit of our planet, move closer to the sun---and be incinerated?
The IRS’s confusion of Abigail Roberts (aka Charlotte Kuheuna) with Hawaiian heiress Abigail Kinoiki Kekaulike Kawananakoa is quite understandable, and reminds me of a similar confusion of my own.
After all, I still can’t tell the difference between Kam Fong and Chin Ho, and Zulu, as Kono.
The Daily News has been awash with items regarding the 370-and-counting murder in Philly alone. If Darwinism is true, who cares? Aren’t these murderers proving his theory, survival of the fittest?
How about the three foster sisters on the front page? If their parents weren’t strong enough to raise them, then they aren’t genetically equipped either.
Religiously and politically, the recent tsunami in south Asia is one more proof that the gods of Christianity, Judaism, Islam and Buddhism are not as pro-life as believed.
The total loss of human life in this calamity may soon equal the number killed, to date, by American military action in Iraq. These counts do not include fetuses or non-human life.
“I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, and all other gods, indivisible with liberty and justice for all races, colors and every other nation in the world.”
In Massachusetts and San Francisco, you have men kissing men, women kissing women, right on TV.
Where are the decent families? Don’t leave the Catholic Church out---so many young men had their lives shattered. So don’t make Janet Jackson a scapegoat.
I have only one question: Is there an East Philadelphia? And where exactly is it located? I’ve heard of North Philadelphia, South Philadelphia and West Philadelphia, but never East Philadelphia.
I’ve asked and the answer is always the same---there is no East Philadelphia.
I simply refuse to believe this and hope I’m correct.
I am so sick of these people who are counting their carbs! Ever hear of moderation?
The other day at a small work party, the girl who is dedicated to this South Beach diet was the one wielding the knife cutting the cake!
Is it me?
The Democratic Party wants to increase taxes the wrong way.
Instead of small increases every year, why not just have a 100 percent income tax? All of our money can be placed in one big pot and we can receive vouchers for food, clothing, toilet paper, etc.
We may have to wait in lines sometimes, but so what? It will all be for the greater good. And why own a home? We could all live in government-subsidized apartments. Wouldn’t that be so much nicer?
And to top it all off, this would virtually eliminate crime.
If we are all equal, why would somebody want to rob or steal?
I don’t know about anybody else, but I think it’s a great idea!
In our modern world of “the good foul,” drawing blood from your opponent is never apparently punished as significantly as the victim has suffered.
This allows bladder tumors like Ann Coulter to suppurate over the public, much to their eventual reward.
So much of our public discourse has come to accept this moral metastasis that conservatives now complain when liberals use less than pristine language to reply to this downpour of pus and urine.
The news reports state that Mount St. Helens is about to erupt because it is at a Level 3.
Tom Ridge came up with this five-colored method of telling us how close we are to a possible terrorist attack.
All these hurricanes are being rated as to strength based on wind speed from 1 to 5.
These supposed simple rating methods are getting too difficult for me to understand.
Why can’t they just tell me how “screwed” we will be?
As Phils fans remember Tug McGraw, another ex-Phil’s passing might have slipped by over the holidays and in the shadow of Reggie White.
Johnnie Oates, a catcher in the early ‘70s, also succumbed to brain cancer, just as Tug and pitcher Ken Brett did two months before McGraw. Throw in Vuke, and that’s four former Phils of the ‘70s era who have had brain cancer.
Considering that the odds in a normal environment of contracting brain cancer is about 1 in 8,000 and that there were only a couple of hundred Phillies who competed during that era, should a question be raised concerning possible public health risks from the Vet facility?
I’d start with the Astro Turf. According to the U.S. Patent Office, Astro Turf is composed of many ingredients, one of which is polyvinyl chloride, a plastic that when exposed to temperatures of 86 degrees or more breaks down into a dioxin.
If inhaled on a consistent basis, and if you have a susceptibility factor, it could eventually lead to angiosarcoma in the brain or liver. Throw in a stadium where this heavier-than-air byproduct has no place to travel, and this might be an item to examine.
And it’s not just here where this has occurred. Two names come easily to mind: Stargell and Bonds, who called Pittsburgh and St. Louis, their homes. These cities, along with Cincinnati, had fields of Astro Turf.
At the very least, Major League Baseball and the Players Association have an obligation to make former players aware of the possible health risks that may be ahead for them.
Your Op/Ed page STINKS. If you print this rant, please put stinks in capital letters, like I just did.
First, I read about a woman who complains bitterly about her quarter-life crisis. Nothing seems to work for her. She had a kid but her life is boring. So what does she do? She writes to the Daily News, the editor prints it, and now she feels better…OK?
A few weeks ago, a lawyer writes how miserable her life is, and that it’s better living without a man in her life, and her bitching letter pays off.
If you want to cry the blues, the best place to shed your tears is on the Op/Ed page of the Daily News. Believe me, the editor is in need of a psychiatrist for printing this junk.
And I should have my own head examined for even writing to you.
There are three daily newspapers in Philly---the Inquirer, the Bulletin, and the Daily News---but for cranks, there is only one. The Inquirer fancies itself as the local version of the New York Times, and thus only publishes letters from executives (lesbians preferred) at non-profit organizations who believe polar bears should be designated an endangered species. The Bulletin is both more suburban and more conservative, but is also crank-unfriendly. A typical letter in the Bulletin runs 3000 words and concerns a five-year dispute in the Montgomery County Register of Wills Office among a County Commissioner, a buxom civil service clerk, two lawyers and a retired judge who was once married to one of the lawyers.
But then there’s the Daily News, which not only publishes letters from cranks but actually seems to prefer them. The DN not only publishes more letters than the other two papers, but on many days does not publish a single letter from someone you would be comfortable sitting next to on a bus.
Here is a collection of my favorites:
It was the day after the Phillies won 11-10.
My phone was ringing so I answered it. Wow, it was one of my sons, who I hadn’t heard from in about five years. He said he wanted to pay me a visit.
I said sorry, but I’ll be watching TV every night for a while, but if it’s raining, you could stop over. (Click.) Oh, well.
Jim Bresnan, Richboro
*
There’s a question I’ve been trying to find an answer to for quite some time.
The total mass of our planet seems to be steadily decreasing. For millions of years, the earth’s mass stayed relatively the same. Land masses shifted, glaciers formed and melted, but our total weight stayed the same. But with the Industrial Revolution came our dependence on fossil fuel.
The oil and coal we have extracted from the earth does not replenish itself and has, to some extent, changed the mass of our planet.
If we steadily keep draining billions of tons of oil and coal from the planet, could we change the orbit of our planet, move closer to the sun---and be incinerated?
Albert D. Lancelotti Sr., Philadelphia
*
The IRS’s confusion of Abigail Roberts (aka Charlotte Kuheuna) with Hawaiian heiress Abigail Kinoiki Kekaulike Kawananakoa is quite understandable, and reminds me of a similar confusion of my own.
After all, I still can’t tell the difference between Kam Fong and Chin Ho, and Zulu, as Kono.
Stuart Caesar, Philadelphia
*
The Daily News has been awash with items regarding the 370-and-counting murder in Philly alone. If Darwinism is true, who cares? Aren’t these murderers proving his theory, survival of the fittest?
How about the three foster sisters on the front page? If their parents weren’t strong enough to raise them, then they aren’t genetically equipped either.
Tom Dietrick, Philadelphia
*
Religiously and politically, the recent tsunami in south Asia is one more proof that the gods of Christianity, Judaism, Islam and Buddhism are not as pro-life as believed.
The total loss of human life in this calamity may soon equal the number killed, to date, by American military action in Iraq. These counts do not include fetuses or non-human life.
Henry T. Stokes, Philadelphia
*
“I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, and all other gods, indivisible with liberty and justice for all races, colors and every other nation in the world.”
Paul Rash, Philadelphia
*
In Massachusetts and San Francisco, you have men kissing men, women kissing women, right on TV.
Where are the decent families? Don’t leave the Catholic Church out---so many young men had their lives shattered. So don’t make Janet Jackson a scapegoat.
Moses Cook, Philadelphia
*
I have only one question: Is there an East Philadelphia? And where exactly is it located? I’ve heard of North Philadelphia, South Philadelphia and West Philadelphia, but never East Philadelphia.
I’ve asked and the answer is always the same---there is no East Philadelphia.
I simply refuse to believe this and hope I’m correct.
Rodney Madison, Houtzdale (Pa.) State Prison
*
I am so sick of these people who are counting their carbs! Ever hear of moderation?
The other day at a small work party, the girl who is dedicated to this South Beach diet was the one wielding the knife cutting the cake!
Is it me?
Anne Mendenhall, Willow Grove
*
The Democratic Party wants to increase taxes the wrong way.
Instead of small increases every year, why not just have a 100 percent income tax? All of our money can be placed in one big pot and we can receive vouchers for food, clothing, toilet paper, etc.
We may have to wait in lines sometimes, but so what? It will all be for the greater good. And why own a home? We could all live in government-subsidized apartments. Wouldn’t that be so much nicer?
And to top it all off, this would virtually eliminate crime.
If we are all equal, why would somebody want to rob or steal?
I don’t know about anybody else, but I think it’s a great idea!
William Lattanzio, Spring City Pa.
*
In our modern world of “the good foul,” drawing blood from your opponent is never apparently punished as significantly as the victim has suffered.
This allows bladder tumors like Ann Coulter to suppurate over the public, much to their eventual reward.
So much of our public discourse has come to accept this moral metastasis that conservatives now complain when liberals use less than pristine language to reply to this downpour of pus and urine.
Ben Burrows, Elkins Park
*
The news reports state that Mount St. Helens is about to erupt because it is at a Level 3.
Tom Ridge came up with this five-colored method of telling us how close we are to a possible terrorist attack.
All these hurricanes are being rated as to strength based on wind speed from 1 to 5.
These supposed simple rating methods are getting too difficult for me to understand.
Why can’t they just tell me how “screwed” we will be?
Mayer Krain, Philadelphia
*
As Phils fans remember Tug McGraw, another ex-Phil’s passing might have slipped by over the holidays and in the shadow of Reggie White.
Johnnie Oates, a catcher in the early ‘70s, also succumbed to brain cancer, just as Tug and pitcher Ken Brett did two months before McGraw. Throw in Vuke, and that’s four former Phils of the ‘70s era who have had brain cancer.
Considering that the odds in a normal environment of contracting brain cancer is about 1 in 8,000 and that there were only a couple of hundred Phillies who competed during that era, should a question be raised concerning possible public health risks from the Vet facility?
I’d start with the Astro Turf. According to the U.S. Patent Office, Astro Turf is composed of many ingredients, one of which is polyvinyl chloride, a plastic that when exposed to temperatures of 86 degrees or more breaks down into a dioxin.
If inhaled on a consistent basis, and if you have a susceptibility factor, it could eventually lead to angiosarcoma in the brain or liver. Throw in a stadium where this heavier-than-air byproduct has no place to travel, and this might be an item to examine.
And it’s not just here where this has occurred. Two names come easily to mind: Stargell and Bonds, who called Pittsburgh and St. Louis, their homes. These cities, along with Cincinnati, had fields of Astro Turf.
At the very least, Major League Baseball and the Players Association have an obligation to make former players aware of the possible health risks that may be ahead for them.
Chip Maylie, Marlton, N.J.
*
Your Op/Ed page STINKS. If you print this rant, please put stinks in capital letters, like I just did.
First, I read about a woman who complains bitterly about her quarter-life crisis. Nothing seems to work for her. She had a kid but her life is boring. So what does she do? She writes to the Daily News, the editor prints it, and now she feels better…OK?
A few weeks ago, a lawyer writes how miserable her life is, and that it’s better living without a man in her life, and her bitching letter pays off.
If you want to cry the blues, the best place to shed your tears is on the Op/Ed page of the Daily News. Believe me, the editor is in need of a psychiatrist for printing this junk.
And I should have my own head examined for even writing to you.
Ed Galing, Hatboro
Wednesday, May 3, 2006
ADVICE TO MY SON TEX
*** Never participate in a drinking contest of any kind, not even of water.
*** After chopping jalapenos, wash your hands with soap and water before touching your penis.
*** Aside from your parents, nobody really cares whether you are educated. Most of the world, including almost all of your teachers, wants you to be stupid. If you want an education, you will have to fight for it.
*** Blondes cannot be expected to take out the trash.
*** Someday you will be attracted to a girl who wants a diamond ring, a large wedding with a horse-drawn carriage, and wedding presents from William-Sonoma. Do not, under any circumstances, marry this girl.
*** Never bet the favorite. If you don’t like the underdog, pass.
*** Throughout your life, maintain some friendships with people who are either much older or much younger than you are.
***In no-limit Texas hold-em, never go all in with an ace-queen unsuited.
*** Ignore doom-sayers. They are always wrong, and they are generally only in it for the money. Salt and sugar and fat are not bad for you, and cell phones won’t give you brain cancer. “Global Warming” is 1% science and 99% hype. If you ever have any doubts about this, remember how most of us died from Global Cooling in the 1970’s, and the rest of us perished in the Y2K disaster.
*** Nobody ever really gets away with anything.
*** If you know what you want to do with your life when you’re 18, fine. Otherwise, politely ignore advice that you find a career or settle down. No one in your family ever amounted to anything before the age of thirty.
*** You will be happier with girls whose eating habits are no stranger than your own.
***In war, America is 23 – 1. When you are faced with a battle against superior forces, in school or in life, ask yourself: “What would the Vietcong do?”
*** Where money is concerned, focus your attention on the upside, and ignore risk. A single $10,000 score pays for a lot of $100 losses. In the long run, this strategy is much safer than trying to grind it out. The grinders get wiped out too, and they never have a chance to earn a truly interesting sum of money.
*** You can either have cats or nice furniture. You can’t have both.
*** In my 20’s, I had a nasty apartment in a bad neighborhood, and I was burglarized several times. I’m not suggesting you live in such a place, but it did teach me not to get attached to material things, and this has turned out to be a valuable lesson.
*** A gentleman pays his gambling debts before he pays his mortgage, his electric bill, or his lawyer.
*** All of us are confronted every day with the choice of good or evil. The real danger lies in pretending you don’t know the difference.
Copyright 2004 Michael Kubacki
*** After chopping jalapenos, wash your hands with soap and water before touching your penis.
*** Aside from your parents, nobody really cares whether you are educated. Most of the world, including almost all of your teachers, wants you to be stupid. If you want an education, you will have to fight for it.
*** Blondes cannot be expected to take out the trash.
*** Someday you will be attracted to a girl who wants a diamond ring, a large wedding with a horse-drawn carriage, and wedding presents from William-Sonoma. Do not, under any circumstances, marry this girl.
*** Never bet the favorite. If you don’t like the underdog, pass.
*** Throughout your life, maintain some friendships with people who are either much older or much younger than you are.
***In no-limit Texas hold-em, never go all in with an ace-queen unsuited.
*** Ignore doom-sayers. They are always wrong, and they are generally only in it for the money. Salt and sugar and fat are not bad for you, and cell phones won’t give you brain cancer. “Global Warming” is 1% science and 99% hype. If you ever have any doubts about this, remember how most of us died from Global Cooling in the 1970’s, and the rest of us perished in the Y2K disaster.
*** Nobody ever really gets away with anything.
*** If you know what you want to do with your life when you’re 18, fine. Otherwise, politely ignore advice that you find a career or settle down. No one in your family ever amounted to anything before the age of thirty.
*** You will be happier with girls whose eating habits are no stranger than your own.
***In war, America is 23 – 1. When you are faced with a battle against superior forces, in school or in life, ask yourself: “What would the Vietcong do?”
*** Where money is concerned, focus your attention on the upside, and ignore risk. A single $10,000 score pays for a lot of $100 losses. In the long run, this strategy is much safer than trying to grind it out. The grinders get wiped out too, and they never have a chance to earn a truly interesting sum of money.
*** You can either have cats or nice furniture. You can’t have both.
*** In my 20’s, I had a nasty apartment in a bad neighborhood, and I was burglarized several times. I’m not suggesting you live in such a place, but it did teach me not to get attached to material things, and this has turned out to be a valuable lesson.
*** A gentleman pays his gambling debts before he pays his mortgage, his electric bill, or his lawyer.
*** All of us are confronted every day with the choice of good or evil. The real danger lies in pretending you don’t know the difference.
Copyright 2004 Michael Kubacki
Tuesday, February 14, 2006
LETTER TO THE PRINCIPAL
To the Principal:
My son Tex is in 11th grade at Masterman, and every September, he brings home two or three “contracts” similar to the enclosed Academic Integrity Policy. He and I both have to sign them. We agree to respect the dignity and personal property of others. We agree he will do his homework. We agree he will bring his textbook to class. For all I know, we may have agreed to mow your lawn, since neither he nor I read them anymore. I grumbled a bit at first, but I never wrote a letter to the principal before. At Tex’s request, I just signed these contracts and forgot about them. He did not want to be the kid with the crazy father.
Now, with this Academic Integrity Policy, the stakes have apparently been raised. Tex was told he would receive a detention unless he signs on the dotted line and “agrees” not to cheat, not to plagiarize, etc., etc., etc. Enough, already. It’s time for me to break my silence.
So here’s my question: why? What is the purpose of this continuing program of forced “agreements”? Throughout my life, I have had rules laid out for me by parents, teachers, nuns, coaches, bus drivers, trash men, camp counselors, employers and wives, and NOBODY demanded I sign a contract about them. In fact, nobody cared what I thought of them. They were simply the rules, and if you broke them, sanctions were imposed. You got kicked off the bus. Somebody hit you. Your trash didn’t get collected. Your wife wouldn’t talk to you. Whatever.
I live in the freest country on earth, and long may I wave. I am not oppressed. But freedom, and civilization itself, depends on the existence of tacit, semi-formalized authoritarian arrangements of rules and sanctions, and a universal understanding that we all have to submit to these arrangements or all hell will break loose. None of this has anything to do with laws, or “contracts.”
Masterman High School is the best school in the Philadelphia area in terms of all the usual measures---test scores, college admissions, etc. And every student at Masterman got there because they had excellent marks in lower grades and aced a competitive admissions test. Here’s the point: THERE IS NOT A STUDENT IN THE ENTIRE SCHOOL WHO DOES NOT KNOW HOW SCHOOL OPERATES. They know what a teacher is, they know what a rule is, and they know what happens when a rule is broken. Yes, they’re teenagers, and they’re not entirely civilized, but they’re not wildebeests wandering the Serengetti either. The fundamentals of the organization of society were implanted in them a dozen years ago. Forcing them to sign an agreement to do their homework can have no possible effect on the likelihood they will actually do their homework, can it? The only possible effect I can see of such an agreement is that it will nourish the innate teenage anti-authoritarian impulse and provide further evidence (as if they need it) for the proposition that all adults are idiots.
I mention Masterman, with its high standards, to highlight the absurdity of this contract craze. But would the analysis be any different at other schools? No matter how dopey a student is, or inattentive, or even violent, he knows what rules are and what teachers are. A student will break rules out of rebelliousness, or indifference, or perhaps because a teacher shoved the rules in front of him and demanded a signature and he’ll be damned if he’s going to bend over for some fascist, but not because he doesn’t understand he’s supposed to obey them. The social dynamic of the “me-teacher, you-student” relationship is not terribly complex. Every kid understands it on his first day of school, if not before.
In fact, if you could find a student who did not understand the basics of school/rules/sanctions, wouldn’t it be your job as a teacher or administrator to help that child understand how the world works? And how the world works doesn’t have anything to do with contracts, does it? I mean, when somebody sits down next to you on the subway, do you hand them a contract under which they agree not to annoy you for the duration of your journey? Do you present your loonier colleagues with contracts demanding they not falsely accuse you of hideous crimes? Of course not. Living in peace with one another requires all of us to give the other guy the benefit of the assumption he is not a sociopath. We accord every stranger a modicum of respect, at least until that respect is abused. It’s called manners. And that, of course, is another problem with presenting contracts to your students. It’s rude. It’s insulting. When you do it, YOU become the wildebeest in the classroom. And you are teaching students to behave in a fashion that really has no place in a civilized society.
Even you don’t take these contracts seriously, I’ll wager. Suppose a student refused to sign. Would you flunk him? I’m guessing you would tell him, “Well, these are my rules and you’ll have to abide by them whether you sign or not.” So why not simply state your rules and cut out the middleman?
Or suppose a student hands back your contract, and you do not notice it is unsigned. Further suppose that the next day, he cheats on a test. “Aha!” he says. “But I never signed the contract.” If you don’t punish him, you’ve let a cheater escape. But if you do hold him responsible for his behavior, aren’t you admitting the “contract” was a pointless exercise to begin with?
Are you beginning to see how the use of these contracts actually reduces the authority of teachers in the classroom?
Or suppose a student attempts to negotiate the terms of the contract with you. I have often thought of doing this---presenting a counterproposal to the teacher---simply as a means of highlighting the absurdity of it all:
I, Tex’s teacher, agree to
1) brush my teeth regularly;
2) refrain from drinking alcohol after 9:00pm on a school night;
3) not appear tired or listless the morning after the Eagles play on Monday Night Football;
4) stifle the urge to lecture upon, or even mention: a) the horrors of No Child Left Behind, b) my recent colonoscopy, or c) my soon-to-be-ex-spouse’s unreasonable demands in our property settlement.
I don’t know how this fad got started. A Ph.D thesis at some Ed School, perhaps? What is obvious, however, is that it has spread, like e. coli on a week-old Big Mac, largely because no one involved in education has ever spent twenty seconds thinking about it. That is what I am urging you to do.
Are there really any benefits that accrue from making everybody sign these things? I would argue that no benefits can be demonstrated. On the other side, what is the harm? The point of this letter is that there is a real downside to the practice (other than the waste of time it entails). If part of the role of schools is the socialization of our children, then teaching them through forced assent is simply wrong because that’s not the way our society operates. In addition, I suggest that these contracts make educators look like fools, and totalitarian fools at that, since there is no escaping the stink of the loyalty oath that surrounds them.
Copyright 2006 Michael Kubacki
My son Tex is in 11th grade at Masterman, and every September, he brings home two or three “contracts” similar to the enclosed Academic Integrity Policy. He and I both have to sign them. We agree to respect the dignity and personal property of others. We agree he will do his homework. We agree he will bring his textbook to class. For all I know, we may have agreed to mow your lawn, since neither he nor I read them anymore. I grumbled a bit at first, but I never wrote a letter to the principal before. At Tex’s request, I just signed these contracts and forgot about them. He did not want to be the kid with the crazy father.
Now, with this Academic Integrity Policy, the stakes have apparently been raised. Tex was told he would receive a detention unless he signs on the dotted line and “agrees” not to cheat, not to plagiarize, etc., etc., etc. Enough, already. It’s time for me to break my silence.
So here’s my question: why? What is the purpose of this continuing program of forced “agreements”? Throughout my life, I have had rules laid out for me by parents, teachers, nuns, coaches, bus drivers, trash men, camp counselors, employers and wives, and NOBODY demanded I sign a contract about them. In fact, nobody cared what I thought of them. They were simply the rules, and if you broke them, sanctions were imposed. You got kicked off the bus. Somebody hit you. Your trash didn’t get collected. Your wife wouldn’t talk to you. Whatever.
I live in the freest country on earth, and long may I wave. I am not oppressed. But freedom, and civilization itself, depends on the existence of tacit, semi-formalized authoritarian arrangements of rules and sanctions, and a universal understanding that we all have to submit to these arrangements or all hell will break loose. None of this has anything to do with laws, or “contracts.”
Masterman High School is the best school in the Philadelphia area in terms of all the usual measures---test scores, college admissions, etc. And every student at Masterman got there because they had excellent marks in lower grades and aced a competitive admissions test. Here’s the point: THERE IS NOT A STUDENT IN THE ENTIRE SCHOOL WHO DOES NOT KNOW HOW SCHOOL OPERATES. They know what a teacher is, they know what a rule is, and they know what happens when a rule is broken. Yes, they’re teenagers, and they’re not entirely civilized, but they’re not wildebeests wandering the Serengetti either. The fundamentals of the organization of society were implanted in them a dozen years ago. Forcing them to sign an agreement to do their homework can have no possible effect on the likelihood they will actually do their homework, can it? The only possible effect I can see of such an agreement is that it will nourish the innate teenage anti-authoritarian impulse and provide further evidence (as if they need it) for the proposition that all adults are idiots.
I mention Masterman, with its high standards, to highlight the absurdity of this contract craze. But would the analysis be any different at other schools? No matter how dopey a student is, or inattentive, or even violent, he knows what rules are and what teachers are. A student will break rules out of rebelliousness, or indifference, or perhaps because a teacher shoved the rules in front of him and demanded a signature and he’ll be damned if he’s going to bend over for some fascist, but not because he doesn’t understand he’s supposed to obey them. The social dynamic of the “me-teacher, you-student” relationship is not terribly complex. Every kid understands it on his first day of school, if not before.
In fact, if you could find a student who did not understand the basics of school/rules/sanctions, wouldn’t it be your job as a teacher or administrator to help that child understand how the world works? And how the world works doesn’t have anything to do with contracts, does it? I mean, when somebody sits down next to you on the subway, do you hand them a contract under which they agree not to annoy you for the duration of your journey? Do you present your loonier colleagues with contracts demanding they not falsely accuse you of hideous crimes? Of course not. Living in peace with one another requires all of us to give the other guy the benefit of the assumption he is not a sociopath. We accord every stranger a modicum of respect, at least until that respect is abused. It’s called manners. And that, of course, is another problem with presenting contracts to your students. It’s rude. It’s insulting. When you do it, YOU become the wildebeest in the classroom. And you are teaching students to behave in a fashion that really has no place in a civilized society.
Even you don’t take these contracts seriously, I’ll wager. Suppose a student refused to sign. Would you flunk him? I’m guessing you would tell him, “Well, these are my rules and you’ll have to abide by them whether you sign or not.” So why not simply state your rules and cut out the middleman?
Or suppose a student hands back your contract, and you do not notice it is unsigned. Further suppose that the next day, he cheats on a test. “Aha!” he says. “But I never signed the contract.” If you don’t punish him, you’ve let a cheater escape. But if you do hold him responsible for his behavior, aren’t you admitting the “contract” was a pointless exercise to begin with?
Are you beginning to see how the use of these contracts actually reduces the authority of teachers in the classroom?
Or suppose a student attempts to negotiate the terms of the contract with you. I have often thought of doing this---presenting a counterproposal to the teacher---simply as a means of highlighting the absurdity of it all:
I, Tex’s teacher, agree to
1) brush my teeth regularly;
2) refrain from drinking alcohol after 9:00pm on a school night;
3) not appear tired or listless the morning after the Eagles play on Monday Night Football;
4) stifle the urge to lecture upon, or even mention: a) the horrors of No Child Left Behind, b) my recent colonoscopy, or c) my soon-to-be-ex-spouse’s unreasonable demands in our property settlement.
I don’t know how this fad got started. A Ph.D thesis at some Ed School, perhaps? What is obvious, however, is that it has spread, like e. coli on a week-old Big Mac, largely because no one involved in education has ever spent twenty seconds thinking about it. That is what I am urging you to do.
Are there really any benefits that accrue from making everybody sign these things? I would argue that no benefits can be demonstrated. On the other side, what is the harm? The point of this letter is that there is a real downside to the practice (other than the waste of time it entails). If part of the role of schools is the socialization of our children, then teaching them through forced assent is simply wrong because that’s not the way our society operates. In addition, I suggest that these contracts make educators look like fools, and totalitarian fools at that, since there is no escaping the stink of the loyalty oath that surrounds them.
Copyright 2006 Michael Kubacki
Wednesday, December 28, 2005
2006 NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTIONS
I, Michael Kubacki, hereby resolve to:
1) Be more tolerant and accepting of people from different ethnic groups, and not just the good ethnic groups, but the stupid, dirty ones as well.
2) Drive just a little bit faster wherever I go, and use the time saved to watch internet pornography.
3) Remember to turn up my cell phone ring when I go to the movies so I don’t miss any important calls.
4) Take some of the money I’ve been putting away for Tex’s college and start buying better beer.
5) Put on a few pounds. Instead of that green salad I usually put next to my macaroni and cheese, why not a baked potato? Six minutes in the microwave!
6) Give up my study of the Bible and watch more TV instead.
7) Stop being so shy in spreading the good news about our wonderful President Bush to all my friends.
8) Remember to say “Native Americans” instead of “Woo-woo Indians.”
9) Be more sensitive, caring and understanding toward my fellow man, but always be sure to get the other guy before he gets me.
Copyright 2005 Michael Kubacki
1) Be more tolerant and accepting of people from different ethnic groups, and not just the good ethnic groups, but the stupid, dirty ones as well.
2) Drive just a little bit faster wherever I go, and use the time saved to watch internet pornography.
3) Remember to turn up my cell phone ring when I go to the movies so I don’t miss any important calls.
4) Take some of the money I’ve been putting away for Tex’s college and start buying better beer.
5) Put on a few pounds. Instead of that green salad I usually put next to my macaroni and cheese, why not a baked potato? Six minutes in the microwave!
6) Give up my study of the Bible and watch more TV instead.
7) Stop being so shy in spreading the good news about our wonderful President Bush to all my friends.
8) Remember to say “Native Americans” instead of “Woo-woo Indians.”
9) Be more sensitive, caring and understanding toward my fellow man, but always be sure to get the other guy before he gets me.
Copyright 2005 Michael Kubacki
Thursday, September 22, 2005
ARCHIE BUNKER AIR
Does anyone feel safe on an airplane these days? It’s been, after all, more than three years since the horrors of 9-11, and flying still supplies endless fodder for dark humor. We have all learned the resigned shrug of the helpless as we step on an airplane.
Everyone has a story. The two-hour wait for security. Take off your shoes. Take off your belt. Step over here, Madam, I need to feel your bodacious ta-tas. Why are they giving that eight-year-old a workout, and ignoring the six Arab guys who are half-pretending not to know each other? And don’t sit next to the only guy in a suit on the flight to Orlando. He’s the air marshal; he’s the first one they’ll kill, to get his weapon. And oops---thank God they missed this Swiss army knife I forgot I had---but wait, what else did they miss?
The procedures themselves are always changing, but it never gets any better, does it? Well, really, how can it? Name a government bureaucracy that does. Do the public schools get better? Does Medicare get more efficient? How about Amtrak?
Some years ago, during one of the periodic national debates on why it took five years and $500 million to get a new drug through the FDA (it’s now eight years and $800 million), Milton Friedman commented that calling for “reform” of the FDA is like saying you like cats, but you want one that barks. The flaws of a bureaucracy, in other words, are embedded in its very nature.
In particular, the incentives for a bureaucrat are different from those of an entrepreneur who, in order to survive, must satisfy his customers with efficiency and low prices. A bureaucrat, on the other hand, derives prestige from the size of his staff and his budget, so there is little motivation for efficiency. The bigger the agency, the more important the bureaucrat. Further, his customers are actually “end-users,” a term the computing world has invented to describe consumers who are stuck with a product because they have no market power in the transaction. Parents and children are end-users of public schools. Geezers are end-users of Medicare-regulated healthcare. As we all have learned, an end-user is pretty much the last thing you want to be in this world. Political prisoners generally have a lot more fun.
And when we go to the airport, we’re all end-users of airport security, aren’t we? I mean, there’s no choice. Whether it’s Delta, or USAir or Southwest, we all get the same one-size-fits-all, take-off-your-shoes, make-a-joke-and-you’re-off-to-Gitmo, expensive, annoying, inefficient security system. And then we get on the plane and spend the flight watching the creepy 20-year-old male Egyptian in seat 8C who strolled unmolested through security but who, if he were spotted at a Bush rally, would immediately be surrounded by seventeen Mormon commandos.
No matter what you may think about the evils of the profit motive and the lack of imagination in the corporate world, they couldn’t possibly be as ham-fisted and brain-dead as the feds, could they? In fact, freed from the constraints of political correctness and union politics and the civil service, YOU could come up with a better, safer, cheaper system. I know I could, and I don’t have much doubt that every commercial air carrier would as well. And you, the consumer, would vote with your dollars on the security system you prefer.
If airline security were left entirely to the airlines, several innovations would appear almost immediately.
First, since there would no longer be any federal scrutiny of security procedures, carriers would need to assure customers that airplanes are, in fact, safe. (Not that the feds do this, of course, but the airlines would have to.) So in short order, there would be an industry group or an independent testing company that would test security systems and report the results publicly. Think Underwriters Laboratory, the people who test electrical equipment of all sorts and put their “UL” sticker on the ones that pass. For airlines, there would be a similar company that would try to sneak fake weapons onto planes and fake bombs into suitcases, and all of us would find out whether they succeeded.
Second, there would be an industry-wide “Trusted Traveler” program, under which any passenger could choose to submit himself to a series of interviews, background checks and a polygraph test. Once approved, a Trusted Traveler would sail through a special line at any airport and be spared all security-related delay. There would be a charge to the passenger for the screening process, but it could be reasonable because the program would actually save the airlines a ton of cash. Every business traveler in the country would sign up for the program. It would be a status symbol. And half the people now doing “security” because they can’t find a job as a bartender would have to polish up their mai-tai-making skills.
The third thing that privatization would accomplish immediately is that it would permit carriers to discriminate among those flights that require extensive security checks and those that do not.
For example, consider the 7:30 AM Monday trip from Scranton to Harrisburg. Every week, there are six people on this airplane, and they are always the same people. Even when a newcomer shows up, it’s somebody that four of the passengers can vouch for, and when I say “vouch for,” what I mean is something along the lines of “I went to elementary school with Joe---he’s OK,” or “Sally’s my sister-in-law,” or “The guy baptized my kid---give him a freaking break.” No security whatsoever is needed on these flights, and there are hundreds of them every day. Why waste metal detectors on these people? Because it’s “fair?”
By contrast, while I have never been on an 8:00 AM weekday flight from Logan Airport in Boston to LAX, I think that if I ever had to fly that route, I would refuse to get on the plane until every passenger had been given extensive, even lingering, body-cavity searches. There are many such flights---any flight to D.C. or any flight out of Miami or Newark, for example. No rational human being, including Hindus, will now board these flights without a full complement of rosary beads. Post-privatization, these would instantly become the safest airplanes in the country. You might have to report for your flight six hours before departure, but once you got on the plane, you could sleep like a baby.
The possibilities for airline security are limited only by the imagination, a commodity utterly absent in the bureaucratic mind. Many suggestions have been made for improvements in the system, but very few have been tried. I think we could expect some of the following experiments to appear.
1) Naked Air. We’ve all heard this one. Check your clothes at the gate, and they are returned at your destination. Carry-on luggage would we strictly limited as well. Perhaps not the ideal solution for those Minneapolis to Vancouver flights in mid-January.
2) Captains Rule Airlines. Your pilot, assisted by those of the flight crew he trusts, sits at the entrance to the jetway and exercises his unfettered discretion on the question of who flies. Some folks he waves aboard. Others he questions, and if they satisfy him, they too are allowed to fly. Others he rejects. There are no appeals. (This discretionary power of the master of a ship or conveyance dates back at least to the Phoenicians, and was part of English and American common law until it was discarded by aviation bureaucrats a few years ago.)
3) El Al America. Here’s the ad: “Ever flown from Tel Aviv to Milan? Expect the same from us. All our employees are trained by El Al, the safest airline in the world.”
4) Badges? Badges? Oh, Yes, You Need Some Stinkin Badges Airways. Passports are required for all domestic U.S. flights (an Ann Coulter idea). If you hold a foreign passport, it must be submitted 48 hours in advance so it can be authenticated.
5) Rambo Airlines. All members of the crew, including stewardesses, are ex-military, trained in hand-to-hand combat, and heavily armed. Go ahead. Try to take over the plane. Make their day.
And now here’s my idea, and it’s not original. I first heard it thirty years ago from Archie Bunker on “All In The Family.” He was having an argument with his son-in-law, the Meathead, about airplane hijackings, and Archie’s solution was as follows: “When you get on a plane, they give everybody a gun. There’s maybe two or three hijackers at most, and they’re outnumbered. End of problem.”
I laughed at the time. That was the idea. But in the intervening years, I have seen the kernel of truth embedded in the joke. Because…well, why do we fear flying?
It’s because we’re helpless, isn’t it? And not only are we vulnerable, we are aware that every other decent, law-abiding non-terrorist passenger is also vulnerable. Our current system of airline security is 100% effective at disarming people who pose no threat to anyone, so all the bad guys need is one gun, or a few blades, and the rest of the passengers are as good as dead. The presence of air marshals might provide some comfort if they were not so easily identifiable, but at present, they might as well wear signs that say, “KILL ME FIRST.” They actually make airplanes more dangerous because terrorists are spared even the trouble of smuggling a gun aboard. All they have to do is kill the guy in the blue blazer and take his.
A central problem with our air security system, and one that has been completely overlooked, is rooted in the belief that you can make people safer by rendering them powerless to defend themselves. But our federal aviation geniuses did not invent this idea. In fact, it has been tried in many places, and it appears to be one of those notions that cannot be discredited no matter how often or how spectacularly it fails whenever it is implemented.
On April 28, 1996, a lunatic went on a killing spree in Port Arthur, Tasmania. Ten days later, nationwide gun control legislation went into effect in Australia, featuring buybacks, new registration requirements, and confiscation of guns. Though it was already very difficult to own a handgun (legally), the new laws took away hundreds of thousands of rifles and shotguns as well. In a matter of months, the Australian people were effectively disarmed.
In the U.K., the impetus was a mass murder in Dunblane, Scotland, in 1997. By February 1998, possession of a handgun had become a criminal offense throughout the realm.
The results were entirely predictable. While homicides and suicides remained about the same, there were immediate increases in all categories of violent street crime---assaults, sexual assaults, robberies and armed robberies---as criminals faced a victim population that had been rendered, for the bad guys, conveniently helpless. In 2000, a Crime Victim Survey conducted by the Dutch Ministry of Justice determined that, among the seventeen countries they categorize as “industrialized,” the three most dangerous were England, Wales and Australia. Residents of those countries were more likely to be victimized by crime than residents of any other country. The results, at least in the U.K., were confirmed two years later when the UN Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute found that in England, in 2001, 55 crimes had been committed for every 100 residents.
Of particular concern to the citizenry of these countries was a terrifying crime that had been almost unheard of before---the home invasion.
In a place like the U.S., invading a home is something no halfway sane criminal would even consider, because even if the residents are an elderly and infirm couple, there is always a decent chance they keep a loaded .38 under a couch cushion. Unless a criminal can be certain there is no weapon inside, a home invasion is simply too dangerous a proposition. With the guns gone in Australia and England, the home invasion became a much safer play.
And the same dynamic is present in a hijacking. It may be difficult to get in the airplane with a weapon, just as it may be difficult to get in the house, but once you’re in, your victims are helpless and have nowhere to run. You can slaughter them at your leisure, fly the airplane into a building, demand ransom---whatever your agenda, the passengers are the least of your problems.
But on Archie Bunker Air, the passengers are a big problem. They outnumber you, many of them are armed and you don’t know which ones, and if you try to take over the plane, they’ll get desperate.
And OK, I suppose I’m not going to hand every passenger a gun at check-in. But I’m not going to make it too difficult to carry a piece onto an airplane either. Maybe all we require at “The Arch” is a concealed-carry permit, which are now easily obtainable in a number of states. Maybe we even require a one-hour NRA-designed course at a local shooting range. Whatever. Just so long as we make it easy enough that on any random flight of say, a hundred passengers, a dozen or so will be packing.
As Archie himself would say: “End of problem.”
Copyright 2005 Michael Kubacki
Everyone has a story. The two-hour wait for security. Take off your shoes. Take off your belt. Step over here, Madam, I need to feel your bodacious ta-tas. Why are they giving that eight-year-old a workout, and ignoring the six Arab guys who are half-pretending not to know each other? And don’t sit next to the only guy in a suit on the flight to Orlando. He’s the air marshal; he’s the first one they’ll kill, to get his weapon. And oops---thank God they missed this Swiss army knife I forgot I had---but wait, what else did they miss?
The procedures themselves are always changing, but it never gets any better, does it? Well, really, how can it? Name a government bureaucracy that does. Do the public schools get better? Does Medicare get more efficient? How about Amtrak?
Some years ago, during one of the periodic national debates on why it took five years and $500 million to get a new drug through the FDA (it’s now eight years and $800 million), Milton Friedman commented that calling for “reform” of the FDA is like saying you like cats, but you want one that barks. The flaws of a bureaucracy, in other words, are embedded in its very nature.
In particular, the incentives for a bureaucrat are different from those of an entrepreneur who, in order to survive, must satisfy his customers with efficiency and low prices. A bureaucrat, on the other hand, derives prestige from the size of his staff and his budget, so there is little motivation for efficiency. The bigger the agency, the more important the bureaucrat. Further, his customers are actually “end-users,” a term the computing world has invented to describe consumers who are stuck with a product because they have no market power in the transaction. Parents and children are end-users of public schools. Geezers are end-users of Medicare-regulated healthcare. As we all have learned, an end-user is pretty much the last thing you want to be in this world. Political prisoners generally have a lot more fun.
And when we go to the airport, we’re all end-users of airport security, aren’t we? I mean, there’s no choice. Whether it’s Delta, or USAir or Southwest, we all get the same one-size-fits-all, take-off-your-shoes, make-a-joke-and-you’re-off-to-Gitmo, expensive, annoying, inefficient security system. And then we get on the plane and spend the flight watching the creepy 20-year-old male Egyptian in seat 8C who strolled unmolested through security but who, if he were spotted at a Bush rally, would immediately be surrounded by seventeen Mormon commandos.
No matter what you may think about the evils of the profit motive and the lack of imagination in the corporate world, they couldn’t possibly be as ham-fisted and brain-dead as the feds, could they? In fact, freed from the constraints of political correctness and union politics and the civil service, YOU could come up with a better, safer, cheaper system. I know I could, and I don’t have much doubt that every commercial air carrier would as well. And you, the consumer, would vote with your dollars on the security system you prefer.
If airline security were left entirely to the airlines, several innovations would appear almost immediately.
First, since there would no longer be any federal scrutiny of security procedures, carriers would need to assure customers that airplanes are, in fact, safe. (Not that the feds do this, of course, but the airlines would have to.) So in short order, there would be an industry group or an independent testing company that would test security systems and report the results publicly. Think Underwriters Laboratory, the people who test electrical equipment of all sorts and put their “UL” sticker on the ones that pass. For airlines, there would be a similar company that would try to sneak fake weapons onto planes and fake bombs into suitcases, and all of us would find out whether they succeeded.
Second, there would be an industry-wide “Trusted Traveler” program, under which any passenger could choose to submit himself to a series of interviews, background checks and a polygraph test. Once approved, a Trusted Traveler would sail through a special line at any airport and be spared all security-related delay. There would be a charge to the passenger for the screening process, but it could be reasonable because the program would actually save the airlines a ton of cash. Every business traveler in the country would sign up for the program. It would be a status symbol. And half the people now doing “security” because they can’t find a job as a bartender would have to polish up their mai-tai-making skills.
The third thing that privatization would accomplish immediately is that it would permit carriers to discriminate among those flights that require extensive security checks and those that do not.
For example, consider the 7:30 AM Monday trip from Scranton to Harrisburg. Every week, there are six people on this airplane, and they are always the same people. Even when a newcomer shows up, it’s somebody that four of the passengers can vouch for, and when I say “vouch for,” what I mean is something along the lines of “I went to elementary school with Joe---he’s OK,” or “Sally’s my sister-in-law,” or “The guy baptized my kid---give him a freaking break.” No security whatsoever is needed on these flights, and there are hundreds of them every day. Why waste metal detectors on these people? Because it’s “fair?”
By contrast, while I have never been on an 8:00 AM weekday flight from Logan Airport in Boston to LAX, I think that if I ever had to fly that route, I would refuse to get on the plane until every passenger had been given extensive, even lingering, body-cavity searches. There are many such flights---any flight to D.C. or any flight out of Miami or Newark, for example. No rational human being, including Hindus, will now board these flights without a full complement of rosary beads. Post-privatization, these would instantly become the safest airplanes in the country. You might have to report for your flight six hours before departure, but once you got on the plane, you could sleep like a baby.
The possibilities for airline security are limited only by the imagination, a commodity utterly absent in the bureaucratic mind. Many suggestions have been made for improvements in the system, but very few have been tried. I think we could expect some of the following experiments to appear.
1) Naked Air. We’ve all heard this one. Check your clothes at the gate, and they are returned at your destination. Carry-on luggage would we strictly limited as well. Perhaps not the ideal solution for those Minneapolis to Vancouver flights in mid-January.
2) Captains Rule Airlines. Your pilot, assisted by those of the flight crew he trusts, sits at the entrance to the jetway and exercises his unfettered discretion on the question of who flies. Some folks he waves aboard. Others he questions, and if they satisfy him, they too are allowed to fly. Others he rejects. There are no appeals. (This discretionary power of the master of a ship or conveyance dates back at least to the Phoenicians, and was part of English and American common law until it was discarded by aviation bureaucrats a few years ago.)
3) El Al America. Here’s the ad: “Ever flown from Tel Aviv to Milan? Expect the same from us. All our employees are trained by El Al, the safest airline in the world.”
4) Badges? Badges? Oh, Yes, You Need Some Stinkin Badges Airways. Passports are required for all domestic U.S. flights (an Ann Coulter idea). If you hold a foreign passport, it must be submitted 48 hours in advance so it can be authenticated.
5) Rambo Airlines. All members of the crew, including stewardesses, are ex-military, trained in hand-to-hand combat, and heavily armed. Go ahead. Try to take over the plane. Make their day.
And now here’s my idea, and it’s not original. I first heard it thirty years ago from Archie Bunker on “All In The Family.” He was having an argument with his son-in-law, the Meathead, about airplane hijackings, and Archie’s solution was as follows: “When you get on a plane, they give everybody a gun. There’s maybe two or three hijackers at most, and they’re outnumbered. End of problem.”
I laughed at the time. That was the idea. But in the intervening years, I have seen the kernel of truth embedded in the joke. Because…well, why do we fear flying?
It’s because we’re helpless, isn’t it? And not only are we vulnerable, we are aware that every other decent, law-abiding non-terrorist passenger is also vulnerable. Our current system of airline security is 100% effective at disarming people who pose no threat to anyone, so all the bad guys need is one gun, or a few blades, and the rest of the passengers are as good as dead. The presence of air marshals might provide some comfort if they were not so easily identifiable, but at present, they might as well wear signs that say, “KILL ME FIRST.” They actually make airplanes more dangerous because terrorists are spared even the trouble of smuggling a gun aboard. All they have to do is kill the guy in the blue blazer and take his.
A central problem with our air security system, and one that has been completely overlooked, is rooted in the belief that you can make people safer by rendering them powerless to defend themselves. But our federal aviation geniuses did not invent this idea. In fact, it has been tried in many places, and it appears to be one of those notions that cannot be discredited no matter how often or how spectacularly it fails whenever it is implemented.
On April 28, 1996, a lunatic went on a killing spree in Port Arthur, Tasmania. Ten days later, nationwide gun control legislation went into effect in Australia, featuring buybacks, new registration requirements, and confiscation of guns. Though it was already very difficult to own a handgun (legally), the new laws took away hundreds of thousands of rifles and shotguns as well. In a matter of months, the Australian people were effectively disarmed.
In the U.K., the impetus was a mass murder in Dunblane, Scotland, in 1997. By February 1998, possession of a handgun had become a criminal offense throughout the realm.
The results were entirely predictable. While homicides and suicides remained about the same, there were immediate increases in all categories of violent street crime---assaults, sexual assaults, robberies and armed robberies---as criminals faced a victim population that had been rendered, for the bad guys, conveniently helpless. In 2000, a Crime Victim Survey conducted by the Dutch Ministry of Justice determined that, among the seventeen countries they categorize as “industrialized,” the three most dangerous were England, Wales and Australia. Residents of those countries were more likely to be victimized by crime than residents of any other country. The results, at least in the U.K., were confirmed two years later when the UN Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute found that in England, in 2001, 55 crimes had been committed for every 100 residents.
Of particular concern to the citizenry of these countries was a terrifying crime that had been almost unheard of before---the home invasion.
In a place like the U.S., invading a home is something no halfway sane criminal would even consider, because even if the residents are an elderly and infirm couple, there is always a decent chance they keep a loaded .38 under a couch cushion. Unless a criminal can be certain there is no weapon inside, a home invasion is simply too dangerous a proposition. With the guns gone in Australia and England, the home invasion became a much safer play.
And the same dynamic is present in a hijacking. It may be difficult to get in the airplane with a weapon, just as it may be difficult to get in the house, but once you’re in, your victims are helpless and have nowhere to run. You can slaughter them at your leisure, fly the airplane into a building, demand ransom---whatever your agenda, the passengers are the least of your problems.
But on Archie Bunker Air, the passengers are a big problem. They outnumber you, many of them are armed and you don’t know which ones, and if you try to take over the plane, they’ll get desperate.
And OK, I suppose I’m not going to hand every passenger a gun at check-in. But I’m not going to make it too difficult to carry a piece onto an airplane either. Maybe all we require at “The Arch” is a concealed-carry permit, which are now easily obtainable in a number of states. Maybe we even require a one-hour NRA-designed course at a local shooting range. Whatever. Just so long as we make it easy enough that on any random flight of say, a hundred passengers, a dozen or so will be packing.
As Archie himself would say: “End of problem.”
Copyright 2005 Michael Kubacki
Wednesday, August 10, 2005
STUPID BOWLING QUESTIONS
In the summer of 2005, Tex attended a bowling camp at the Thunderbird Lanes in Northeast Philly. At the first meeting, their coach’s opening lecture concluded with this observation:
“Remember. There are no stupid questions about bowling.”
The program consisted of two three-hour sessions each week, for six weeks, and the Thunderbird Lanes are just far enough from our home that it made little sense for me to drop him off, drive home, and then drive back to pick him up. In other words, I spent a lot of time at the Thunderbird Lanes last summer doing sudoku puzzles, drinking beer, watching young bowlers hone their skills, and pondering Coach Don’s words.
Though I am not a professional bowler or a qualified bowling coach, I have decided Coach is wrong on this point. Indeed, I am convinced there are stupid bowling questions. YOU decide. I submit the following for your consideration:
1. What’s the ball for?
2. What are you supposed to put in the little holes?
3. When is the best time to stick your head in the ball-return chute?
4. Is it legal to throw overhand?
5. Some guy told me there’s a federal law that says you can’t talk on a cell phone while you’re bowling. Is that true?
6. Are you allowed to dribble a bowling ball before you shoot? You know, like in basketball?
7. There’s no “I” in “TEAM,” but there is an “I” in “BOWLING TEAM.” So what do you do?
8. Since you get two balls to knock down all the pins, can you roll them both at once?
9. Do pros ever use a lumpy ball? If so, why?
10. Can you choose how many pins there are, or does it have to be a certain number?
11. Is it ever a good idea to throw the ball in the gutter? Like for strategy?
Copyright 2005 Michael Kubacki
“Remember. There are no stupid questions about bowling.”
The program consisted of two three-hour sessions each week, for six weeks, and the Thunderbird Lanes are just far enough from our home that it made little sense for me to drop him off, drive home, and then drive back to pick him up. In other words, I spent a lot of time at the Thunderbird Lanes last summer doing sudoku puzzles, drinking beer, watching young bowlers hone their skills, and pondering Coach Don’s words.
Though I am not a professional bowler or a qualified bowling coach, I have decided Coach is wrong on this point. Indeed, I am convinced there are stupid bowling questions. YOU decide. I submit the following for your consideration:
1. What’s the ball for?
2. What are you supposed to put in the little holes?
3. When is the best time to stick your head in the ball-return chute?
4. Is it legal to throw overhand?
5. Some guy told me there’s a federal law that says you can’t talk on a cell phone while you’re bowling. Is that true?
6. Are you allowed to dribble a bowling ball before you shoot? You know, like in basketball?
7. There’s no “I” in “TEAM,” but there is an “I” in “BOWLING TEAM.” So what do you do?
8. Since you get two balls to knock down all the pins, can you roll them both at once?
9. Do pros ever use a lumpy ball? If so, why?
10. Can you choose how many pins there are, or does it have to be a certain number?
11. Is it ever a good idea to throw the ball in the gutter? Like for strategy?
Copyright 2005 Michael Kubacki
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