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Freediving for Medicine

“He’s very good-looking.” That is what the spouse said about Jose V. after she became his Ph.D. mentor, but she said it many other times as well. He was accomplished and ambitious. He was in a joint M.D./Ph.D. program. In addition, he was a ballroom dance instructor.

After obtaining his doctorate, he went to Harvard for a couple of post-doctoral fellowships, but then the spouse lost track of him. That is until Jose recently contacted her. He said that he was in Manhattan regularly and would like to take the spouse out to lunch. (Telling me about the invitation, she mentioned that he was good-looking.)

The spouse responded that she was partial to diners (true) and that Jose should find one near where he was staying. He replied several days later that all the nearby diners were booked (surely an untruth) and that he wished to treat the spouse to lunch at a Central Park South restaurant, one of the city’s most expensive. Sharing this news with me, the spouse mentioned that Jose was good-looking.

The spouse refrained from ordering one of the $70 entrees and had oysters, a salad, and a glass of Sancerre, continually wondering who ate at such a place. The conversation quickly turned to the catching-up stage. The spouse’s end was short since Jose knew that she had retired and quickly learned that the spouse had the same husband, child, and house.

Jose, however, had a fair amount to report. He had lived in many places and traveled much. He was married but was now separated from his wife who was back home in Colombia, the birthplace of both of them. Jose now is a practicing neurologist who fills in regularly at hospitals in North Carolina. It means that he has to be in NC for only a few days out of the month. He didn’t want to live in NC, so he lives in New York City for most of the time.

The spouse said that because she had not heard from Jose in a while and because she knew that he had taken up freediving (deep diving without scuba gear), she had assumed he had died in a diving accident. He conceded that freediving was more dangerous than ballroom dancing (which he no longer did), but averred that freediving was not as dangerous as people thought. He stated that only one professional freediver had ever died. Besides, he said, freediving was relaxing, blissful even. One’s heart rate declined (as low as five beats per minute), and one felt, well, free.

My ten minutes of internet research later found that that death statistic was not entirely correct. A website for “wild water sports” said there had been only one recorded death in over 80,000 competitive freedives globally. That site went on to say that there have been more deaths in running, cycling, and scuba diving than in competitive freediving, but I thought that this information left out some important context. My guess is that the number of people running, cycling, and scuba diving is much higher than it is for freediving and without per capita data the comparisons were meaningless.

However, the site also indicated that from 2004 to 2017, there was an average of fifty-one freediving deaths per year and some of these were professional divers in noncompetitive activities. Perhaps done properly, the sport is not overly dangerous, but it certainly has its risks.

Jose, however, was not treating his freediving as merely a hobby separate from his medical practice. Instead, he was convinced of a connection between them. He told the spouse that the cluster of symptoms surrounding the death of a freediver were the same as those accompanying seizure activity which he, as a neurologist, had encountered regularly in the clinic. Moreover, Jose’s prior research activities had made him something of an expert on the sympathetic nervous system. In short, he was uniquely situated to make this comparison. The symptoms included a spike in white blood cells, and increases in surfactant and something else I don’t remember. As a result, he was eager to develop a diagnostic kit that would predict seizure activity. But he no longer was active in research, and besides, he didn’t know how to create or market any kind of assay.

When I heard that Jose wanted to develop some sort of medical kit, I immediately thought that that explained the lunch. He was looking for an investment or loan or gift from the spouse. She assured me, however, after mentioning how good-looking Jose is, that I was wrong. She said that Jose is not looking to become rich; he only wanted to have his insight confirmed as true and made useful.

The lunch, however, revealed that Jose and the spouse had more in common than their scientific collaborations. Jose said that he is susceptible to seasickness, and this has affected his freediving. He has to find diving locations where he does not have to take a boat to get to them. The spouse encountered something similar. She did not grow up scuba diving, but, being a good swimmer, she thought she would enjoy it and became certified as an adult. However, she got seasick going out to diving sites and gave it up.

Jose, however, apparently knows every freediving place in the world that is within feet of the shoreline. He also has dived in cenotes that are scattered throughout Yucatan. Cenotes form when porous limestone naturally collapses, and groundwater fills the sinkholes. It often results in caves partially filled with water that invites scuba-diving spelunkers. In some, the water is very deep and beckons freedivers like Jose. Most who visit a cenote, however, stay on the surface of the water, as the spouse, the NBP and I had done only a couple of weeks before the spouse’s lunch. But our trip, including the cenote swimming, is a story for another day. (By the way, when the spouse came back from the lunch and when she told friends about it a few days later, she did not refrain from mentioning that Jose is still rather good-looking.)

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Snippets

I frequent a library that has moved into a new building in my neighborhood. It is in fact one of the oldest lending libraries in New York City. Although it has modern novels (the library is now called The Center for Fiction and does not house non-fiction), I become intrigued by older books when I browse the open stacks. Often there will be a series by an author whom I have never heard of, and I wonder whether I should have. Today while looking for a classic mystery, The Detective by Roderick Thorp, I saw eight or ten shelved books that immediately struck me as from another era. The author listed on their spines, or in this case I perhaps should say authoress, was Mrs. Belloc Lowndes. I never heard of her. My three minutes of internet research after I got home revealed that her younger brother was Hilaire Belloc, whose name I had seen before but is another person I have never read. She was born in London in 1868 and died in 1947. During those 79 years, she published more than forty novels and also biographies, memoirs, and plays. Most of the novels were mysteries, which, according to one source, are “well-plotted.” Several of her books were made into movies including her most popular book, published in 1912, The Lodger, based on Jack the Ripper. That book was also made into an opera after she died. Has anyone read a book by this author? Should I? If I go back to the library to take out one of the three dozen of her books it has, I will have to remember the library’s shelving system. Belloc was not the first name of the author. She wrote as Mrs. Marie Belloc Lowndes. Doesn’t that mean that the book should be shelved in the B’s?  I did happen on a book by Mario Vargas Llosa, and it was in the V’s. But Belloc Lowndes’s books were placed in the L’s.

Ron DeSantis says he wants the United States to be like Florida. He doesn’t mention that Florida’s homicide rate is higher than New York City’s.

The Wisconsin woman with a second home in Yucatan volunteered at a Mexican library, which functioned as a daycare center after the grade school finished its day. Suzette, laden with pictures of Whitefish Bay in January, was off to explain snow to the kids. I wondered how that could be done with those who had never experienced any temperature below forty-seven degrees.

Before packing for a trip, I try on pants and shorts I plan to bring. I have learned that the closet where I store them often shrinks them. However, on my last trip I did not try on my swimming trunks before leaving. I found that the back of the dresser where they had been pushed had sprung them out.

The spouse, to my amazement, brought shoes she had not broken in on our recent trip. Soon we were all looking without success for corn pads for her sore toes. The spouse decided there were none in Yucatan because the locals all wore flip flops, which she cannot wear.

A good thing about alligators: Sometimes, but not often enough, they eat little, yapping dogs.

Have you ever wondered how much dogs contribute to pollution, food shortages, and global warming? They do, of course.

I hope that you have someone in your life who makes you feel like sunshine on a cloudy day.

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A Scopes Trial in Florida

I recently read Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion by Edward J. Larson,which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1998. Most of us know about the 1925 prosecution of John Scopes from the cartoonish but compelling 1960 movie Inherit the Wind. Of course, real life was more complicated than the drama, but the basic premise was correct: John Scopes was prosecuted for violating a Tennessee state law that prohibited the teaching of evolution in public schools. The trial depicted huge personalities important in American history. The movie had Spencer Tracy in the thinly-veiled Clarence Darrow role and the oft-underappreciated Frederic March as the William Jennings Bryan surrogate. (Tracy was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and March forty miles away in Racine, three years apart. I have wondered if on the Inherit set they swapped reminiscences of boyhood romps on Lake Michigan beaches.) And in a daring bit of casting, Gene Kelly had the role of the acerbic journalist H.L. Mencken, who wrote commentary about the trial.

The movie seemingly portrays the triumph of rationality over the cramped world of closed-minded fundamental religion — the triumph of modernity over myth. However, the movie, based on the 1956 play, was aimed at McCarthyism more than fundamentalism just as The Crucible by Arthur Miller is not really about the Salem witch trials. (The opening cast of Broadway’s Inherit the Wind starred Ed Begley, Paul Muni, and a young Tony Randall as Mencken. It ran for over two years, and, of course, has been a staple of high schools and summer stock ever since.) Perhaps it was telling that one of the screenwriters for the Inherit film used a fictitious name for the credits because he had been blacklisted.  

Although William Jennings Bryan is portrayed in Inherit primarily as a religious buffoon, Summer for the Gods shows that he tried, given the populist he was, to cast the issue as one of democracy. He, and others, maintained that the people — speaking through their legislatures — had the right to control what was taught in the schools which they had created and funded.

The issues presented by the Scopes trial remain timely, most notably in Florida. Now, however, the issues are about more than science and religion. Religion may hover just below the surface, but Florida is raising again two of the most interwoven strands that have recurred throughout American history, sex and race.

The state, however, maintains that what is doing is not about religion, sex, or race; It is about protecting children. It is about who determines when children should be exposed to certain topics. It is about who determines the content of classes.

Indeed, a basic question about our public school is who controls the education? School boards, parents, state government, teachers, other educators, experts? There is no easy answer.

Few doubt that government sets at least broad requirements. And usually, educators determine how those requirements are to be satisfied. Perhaps a school board or the state legislature determines that a high school student must pass algebra to graduate. We would be surprised if that state agency developed a syllabus for the required course. Instead, the educators determine how the course is to be taught.

However, when issues of religion, sex, or race are present in a course, sometimes, as with Florida now and Tennessee in 1925, the government wants to control the course’s content. The state may say that the majority of people want them to control such content. However, since this happens primarily with issues of religion, sex, or race, and not with other topics, this is not really about majority or even parental control; if it were, the state would control content on all topics. No. It is only about religion, sex, or race.

Florida, however, is not merely mimicking 1925 Tennessee. It is going beyond the Volunteer State. Tennessee did not extend its meddling beyond the public high schools. It apparently assumed that its college students were rational enough, mature enough, and educated enough to be able to think for themselves. They did not require protection from whatever the state legislature thought pernicious. Ron DeSantis’s Florida, however, has taken this a step further. The Sunshine State’s governor does not believe that its college students are smart, educated, or mature enough to be able to come to their own decisions on these matters. DeSantis is seeking to control the content of university education as well as that in the lower schools.

Indeed, Florida has not stopped there. It seeks to mandate what can occur in corporate programs. This, of course, turns “conservatism” on its head. Promotion of free enterprise and minimal government regulation is a core tenet of conservatism. We should not be all that surprised that concerns about sex, race, and religion intrude into public education, for that has happened many times in our history. But it is a brave new world when the state decides to control corporate training in these matters.

Of course, we should be concerned about what is taught in our schools. However, as we consider who should determine curricular content, it is worth reflecting on what Curtis Wilkie reports in When Evil Lived in Laurel: The “White Knights” and the Murder of Vernon Dahmer. “In the middle of the twentieth century,” writes Wilkie, “any Mississippi schoolchild who achieved an eighth-grade education had been exposed to a state history textbook [Mississippi through Four Centuries] that told of the glories of the Klan.” In discussing Reconstruction, the textbook acknowledged that the Ku Klux Klan whipped and even killed Blacks “who had been giving trouble in a community. . . . The organization helped the South at a difficult time.”

However, now, a hundred years after the Scopes trial, I can imagine a prosecution of a Florida teacher who teaches the fact that on a per capita basis Florida had the most lynchings in this country.

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Snippets

Tennessee has criminalized drag shows that might be seen by children. I am relieved. This will stop a major danger to our society that I had not known existed. On the other hand, will the vigilant Tennessee guardians stop there? Will Chattanooga women continue to be able to wear pants on the street and perhaps even button-down shirts? But if they are concerned about kids encountering cross-dressers accompanied by sexual innuendoes, they should be concerned about what streams or is broadcast into homes. Even if it makes best-ever lists, Some Like It Hot should never be watched by parents with their offspring. Any parent that allows such a thing should get solitary confinement. Go watch the last two minutes of it. That final line by Joe E. Brown, “Nobody’s perfect,” surely must have corrupted many. Preventing children from watching Some Like It Hot would return Tennessee to its good old days of 1960, which seems to be the goal of the anti-drag legislation. When the movie came out, Memphis did not allow children to see it. (Kansas, ah Kansas, actually banned it for people of all ages.)

Does anyone still serve wheatgrass? I am happy that I have not seen it for a while.

His father had been imprisoned in Poland as part of the Solidarity movement. When he was released from jail and granted an amnesty, the father was given a choice of countries where he and his family could immigrate. He chose the United States and was settled in Boise, Idaho. The son felt at sea, he told me; The language, the culture, the TV shows. But that changed when he was able to understand and appreciate the opening sequence of the sitcom Night Court, which he still admires. He lit up at the name Harry Anderson, but I forgot to ask him whether he likes Mel Tormé.

Only once in my life have I met a person who was in a low dudgeon.

He met her in Berlin on his junior year abroad. She was Romanian. She complained that while she knew a lot about the United States, he knew almost nothing about her country. I told him that when I was his age, I knew a girl from Brazil, and I felt bad that while she knew a lot about America, I knew very little about Brazil. But, I continued, I realized that people from all over the world learn about America from their studies, the news, and popular culture, and there is no way I can learn as much about every other country in the world. I doubt, I said, that my Brazilian friend knew any more about Romania than you did, and that your Romanian friend knew no more about Brazil than I did. I concluded to him, however, if you want to get laid, you have to at least pretend you are interested in her country. His eyes twinkled. He told me that he had gone home that night and read every article he could find on Wikipedia about Romania. He then gave a satisfied smile.

China is the traditional gift for a twentieth anniversary, and I am told that platinum is the more modern thing for that commemoration. But the first seems ironic and the second inappropriate for acknowledging that it was two score years ago that we invaded Iraq. What?! You aren’t celebrating that event? Don’t you remember? We accomplished our mission (or so we said). Surely you must feel more secure and safer because of our actions. And don’t you delight in the spread of democracy that we achieved?

A couple from Alberta, Canada, and a man from Wisconsin I met on a recent trip to southern climes fit the snowbird cliché. They talked about the freezing temperatures back home as they sat around the sunlit pool. While I try to avoid trite discussions about the weather, that does not mean that I do not look at the Brooklyn weather when I am in a tropical setting. And this time I was more than a little irritated that it was unseasonably warm and dry — springlike, in fact — in New York City while I was out of town.

The woman from Alberta said that she had been to New York City for one day and had been amazed by the number of people. I did not know how to respond and simply smiled.

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Sweet Home Ashland, Alabama (concluded)

Ashland, Alabama, where the spouse’s grandmother lived, felt like the South for many reasons. One was its number of churches. There were a lot, but I am used to that. Wherever I am in Brooklyn, I am almost always within three or four blocks of a church, but in Ashland, as far as I could tell, they were all Protestant ones, and probably more than half were some sort of Baptist or Methodist. I don’t remember seeing a Catholic church, and the nearest synagogue was a county or two away. Mom’s house was literally surrounded by churches. Out her front door and across the street was her Southern Baptist church. (Mom was clearly pleased that I, although not a Southern Baptist, was raised in the Baptist tradition. (See post of June 22, 2020.)) Out her side door and across the street was the Methodist Church.

One Sunday when we were visiting Ashland, that Methodist Church was welcoming its new pastor. The spouse and I were out and about that afternoon and cutting through the Methodist parking lot on our way to somewhere when we realized we had been spotted by the new minister and his wife. The couple looked like a caricature out of certain kind of movie. Neither seemed old enough to drive. Both were thin, and I expected to see acne on him as he approached with what appeared to be a brave smile. His white shirt might have had some cotton in it, but it was too big and gapped at the neck. His suit was also too big and looked as if it had been bought two days before from the southern equivalent of whatever was two steps down from Robert Hall. And if the tie was not a clip-on, it sure fooled me. The wife was tiny and retiring, but also had a brave smile fixed in place. They looked like a newlywed couple dedicated to the new path on which they had embarked. As he approached, he started to introduce himself, but we interrupted saying with big smiles, “We are from out of town. You don’t need to spend time with us.” It was as if a wave passed over them both, and in an instant they looked more relaxed but also incredibly tired. They thanked us and told us that he had performed his first service as the new pastor and had been meeting people all day. After a few moments of pleasantries, we parted. I had wanted to tell them, “You look like you need a drink.” But this was neither the right town nor the right couple for such a suggestion.

Perhaps we would have chatted with the new couple in town longer if their church had been Mom’s church, but on Sundays Mom headed out her front door. I only remember one time that the spouse and I went with her to the Baptist church across the street. The spouse’s sister and her husband were also in Ashland at the time. The brother-in-law is Jewish, although not religious, but he looked quite nervous as we all got ready for the morning service. I told him to relax, no one was going to know about his religious heritage, explaining that probably they all thought Jews had horns, and they would not see them on his head. I added, however, that perhaps his quite luxurious head of hair was hiding them and perhaps I ought to give him a trim first. He did not see the humor in my tremendously clever wit.

I remember little of that service, not the sermon or the Bible readings, but I do remember the hymns, or really the introduction to them. As we got to the point where we were to rise and rejoice in song, the minister announced that the usual choir director was away and was being replaced by “Shotgun Miller.” I was only half paying attention and was not sure that I had heard it correctly, but “Shotgun” just seemed to hang in the air. What looked like a solid Ashland citizen stood up and led us in song. At the second hymn, the minister merely said, “Shotgun,” and I could not help smiling. At the third hymn, when he said, “Shotgun,” I had to restrain myself from chuckling out loud, and I thought to myself, “Are they just messing with this northern boy, bringing out the clichés, and giving a good show?” But I knew they weren’t.

I shouldn’t mock Mom’s church, however. She was a wonderful person—warm, caring, amusing, charming, tolerant, accepting. She seemed at peace, and part of the reason for that was her religion. When I think on some of the bad aspects of religion, I think of the spouse’s grandmother and what her religion and her church gave to her. From her, I know that for some people religion is meaningful and life-supporting.

I don’t want to seem as if I am mocking Ashland, the South, or small-town life in general. Mom lived until she was 97, and at least in the last twenty years of that time, she resided about half the year with the spouse’s mother in Florida and the rest of the time by herself in Ashland until her final illness, which was short. She could live by herself in her house because she was not really alone. Every day people from the town would look in on her, make sure that she was all right, and ask if she needed some lemons from the grocery or aspirin from the pharmacy. Many people cared about her enough to make efforts on her behalf in ways that I do not expect will happen for me in Brooklyn. She could remain where she wanted to be in a place that held memories.

The visits to Ashland, however, did not make me want to give up my big city life. On the first day of our first visit to Ashland, the spouse and I were heading off to the town square. Without thinking Mom said, “Now y’all be careful. It’s Saturday. It’s market day. There’s a lot of traffic.” And then she stopped and smiled and said, “But you live in New York,” and laughed at herself.

After seeing the courthouse, we wandered around the square and went into a few shops. In each and every one, an owner or clerk said, “You aren’t from around here. Who are you visiting?” We would answer and explain our relationship to Ms. Herren. They would ask where we were from. Each one of them would comment on how far away, how big, and how foreign New York seemed, but how much they liked seeing it on the Today show. And when we were leaving, all of them said, “You all have a blessed day” or “You give Ms. Herren my best.” By the fourth or fifth exit, I started muttering expletives when I got to the sidewalk. Their sweetness, their niceness was getting under my skin. I knew I was a Big City boy. I was longing for some of New York City’s curt anonymity.

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Sweet Home Ashland, Alabama

The spouse and I differ on the route we took on my first trip to Ashland, the tiny town in Alabama where the spouse’s grandmother, “Mom,” lived and where the spouse spent childhood summers. (See post by spouse on January 15, 2021.) I thought we had driven through the Midwest visiting friends in Columbus, Ohio, and Peoria, Illinois, and then headed south. The spouse remembers heading south first down the eastern seaboard and heading west after camping in Georgia, on what we refer to as the “demented locals” experience, but that is another story. Part of the reason our memories don’t coincide is that we went to Ashland several times and did not always take the same route.

 Similarly, I can’t say on what trip certain impressions and experiences occurred, but on each and every trip to Ashland, I felt that I was in the South, capital S. Before going to Alabama, I had only been south of Washington, D.C., to Miami, and while that felt different from what I had experienced in Illinois and Wisconsin, it was not The South that had resonated in my mind. Ashland, however, was in that region I had read about in William Faulkner, Carson McCullers, and Eudora Welty. It was the South I had seen on television when watching scenes of Selma and Greensboro. It was the South of broadcast televangelists.

Ashland physically fit my image of a small southern town. Its population was about 2,000, and I gather that it remains about that size. There was a town square, and a courthouse was at the center of that square, and that courthouse itself was a square. When I first went there, after going up a few steps to an entrance, I had to step over a dog sleeping in the sun on the landing outside the door, and I had to walk past a Dr. Pepper machine to get in. I almost laughed. I thought maybe the southerners were laying on the clichés to play with this northern boy. I took a picture of the courthouse because it looked just like an old southern courthouse ought to look. I enlarged and framed the picture, and for a long time it hung at the top of the steps in my house, but somehow I have lost it.

I think of that building as the courthouse, but it was probably more than that. Ashland is the county seat, and no doubt the structure held county offices in addition to courtrooms and judicial chambers. The jurisdiction is Clay County, and I was struck driving into town by the red clay landscape. For a moment I wondered if that gave the county its name, but then I put Clay and Ashland together and realized that the county was named after Henry Clay and the town after his Kentucky home, Ashland. But if there is a memorial to that early American leader in Ashland, Alabama, I never saw it.

I never saw a memorial either to the town’s most famous native son, Hugo Black, the Supreme Court Justice. Born just outside of town, Black was raised in Ashland and had his first law office on the town square before moving to Birmingham. But at least during his lifetime, Ashland did not want to claim the justice. Hugo Black wrote Court decision after Court decision upholding civil liberties and equal rights and most important to many Alabamans is that Black was on the Supreme Court that ordered the desegregation of public schools and other public facilities. The spouse’s grandmother told us years after Brown v. Board of Education that Hugo Black on a visit to Alabama picked a flight that had a layover in Birmingham so that he could see his son who lived and practiced law there. The son got word to his father, “Don’t even get off the plane; it will be too dangerous for you.” (A famous KKK leader of the 1920s and 1930s was born in Ashland, but as far as I know, there is no memorial to him either.)

The spouse, however, noted some racial changes since her childhood days. We spotted a Black state trooper, Blacks at the public swimming pool, and a Black man in a spirited tennis game against a white opponent. The spouse said these sightings would not have occurred in the Clay County of her youth.

Signs of the old South, however, still lingered. Looking out the window early one morning, I saw a wagon being pulled by a mule as a Black man was going to tend fields. I felt as if I had seen this scene before in a picture from the South of the 1920s or 1930s. And then there was the time that we stopped to get gas at a one-pump station and waited for someone to come to fill the tank. I had only seen Stepin Fetchit’s shuffle in the movies, but now I saw it for myself as it seemed to take five minutes for an old Black man to make it from the building to our Dodge Dart twenty feet away. I understood the walk’s origins, but I wanted to shout, “You don’t have to do that. We are white, but we aren’t from here.” However, some remnants of the old South benefited us. The wife’s metal leg brace had cracked, and we asked the gas station attendant if he knew of a welder and explained the problem. He immediately said that the blacksmith could help and told us where the smithy was. We went there, and the man in an old, old shop did a creditable repair, not charging us much money.

Ashland was also different from other places I had known. This was hammered home when we were driving into the town with the spouse’s mother in the back seat (why we had the mother-in-law with us remains a mystery to me). She commanded, with an uncharacteristic urgency, that we pull over to a small store. It was the last place to get alcohol before arriving in Ashland. Clay County was dry.

(concluded Feb. 17)

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Snippets

The bride and groom were having their pictures taken outside the Plaza Hotel while the rest of the wedding party stood in clumps twenty-five yards away. The bridesmaids were cold in their ankle-length, bare-shouldered gowns. The dresses were all black. I wondered whether black was now the fashionable choice for bridesmaids.

I was given that hearing test where a device inserted in the ear emits pitches at different strengths and frequencies. When I was through raising my hand, the medical assistant said, “You have good hearing.” I said, “That’s not always what my wife says.” The assistant laughed. Spotting a ring, I asked, “Does your husband think your hearing is good?” She laughed again and said, “When I get home my hearing gets worse.”

When the annual physical was concluded, I was pleased when the doctor said, “You are in good shape.” Then after a pause, he added the disconcerting qualifier: “For a person your age.”

Nathan was going into university teaching and asked the difference between teaching undergraduate and graduate students. I said, “You expect undergrads to know nothing. With grad students, you are always surprised that they know nothing.”

I know that smell is good part of what we consider taste. But why is it that sushi tastes better when eaten with chopsticks rather than a fork?

I went to a production at the Public Theatre and thought of what Fran Lebowitz said, “Having been unpopular in high school is not cause for book publication.” Having what you think was an “interesting” or “troubled” or “unusual” upbringing does not mean that you can write a good play about it.

Waiting in a slow-moving line at a smoked fish place, the dog with the person in front of me came over to me. As always, I put the back of my hand in front of the dog’s nose. After sniffing the dog stood still. The owner said, “He wants you to scratch his head.” I wondered if this was the owner’s first dog or if she thought that in my long life I had never encountered a dog before.

In the bookstore, I extended the back of my hand to a dog and started scratching behind his ears. He jumped up on me in a friendly, doggy way. I said, “You’re easy.” The owner smiled and said, “He is that way with everyone.” I joked, “You could at least pretend that I am special.” Without missing a beat she said, “I have never seen him doing that before. He must really like you.”

She mistook the spouse for someone else. We were sitting on a bench at the confluence of several streets. She told us her name was Louise, but added it was really Phylis Louise. She was from South Carolina but had left when she was seventeen. She was last back there in 1996 and had found that her little crossroads town had changed. She said that she was 84 but that she was unsure of her birthday. The midwife said October 8 while her mother had said November 8. Her father could not read but when he was finally allowed to vote, he quickly placed an X and registered as a Democrat. Louise said, “They say that South Carolina is red, but not all of it.” 

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We Got the Secret (concluded)

Leaks of classified information can cause harm, but we also need to understand that too much secrecy can damage the country. Secrecy leads to claims of conspiracy that cause distrust of the government. If everything is not disclosed about the investigation into JFK’s death, conspiratorial claims about the assassination proliferate.

And once information has been kept from the public, simply disclosing it does not cure the conspiratorial problem. If the government claims that every bit of stuff about the Roswell incident has now been disclosed, many will not trust that pronouncement. If officials hid something once, why should I trust that they are not hiding something now? Secrecy leads to a distrust of government, and the country is harmed when the government is not trusted.

In a subtle and insidious way government secrecy also tends to corrupt the holder of the secrets. The official with a secret feels powerful. The secret becomes a form of currency, a coin that can be held for ego or prestige purposes—I know more than you do—even if information should be exchanged.

Hiding information presents another danger. Because access to the information is limited, it cannot be analyzed by all those who might have useful insights about it. Our country has had notable intelligence lapses. Our intelligence agencies, for example, were not aware of the imminent collapse of the Soviet Union or of the Iranian Revolution that overthrew the Shah. We cannot know, but it is possible, that the analyses would have been different had more of the classified information been available to academics, businessmen, NGO representatives, and others who knew or had studied Russia and Iran. Sen. Patrick Moynihan believed that the demise of the Soviet Union could have been forecast if the intelligence agencies had kept less information to themselves. Moynihan also maintained that the United States significantly overspent on military budgets because excessive secrecy allowed intelligence agencies to overestimate Soviet military strength.

There is a related danger. Policy makers who have already decided on a course of action can pick and choose classified information to disclose to support their predetermined path. With other information being withheld as secret, the proposed policy cannot be properly examined or challenged. In other words, Hello, Iraq War!

Another aspect of human nature also comes into play. We assume that information that is secret must be especially valuable. Why else would it be secret? Where secrecy predominates, what is not secret is too easily disregarded or dismissed as unimportant.

And, of course, we can never really trust a leak. First, the leaker has some sort of motive for disclosing only this particular information and nothing more. Moreover, there is a natural inclination to make his own additions to the leaked material. Seneca, noting this aspect of human behavior, said, “Nobody will keep the thing he hears to himself, and nobody will repeat just what he hears and no more.”

We hear about leaks when the complainer wants us to assume that the disclosure has endangered the country. We should challenge that assumption. The dangers should not be accepted merely because someone in government says so. And even though making some government information public can be harmful, we should never lose sight of the fact that secrecy regularly harms our nation. We should start from the position that a culture of secrecy is un-American.

Democracy, the functioning of our economy, and the proper operation of our government depend upon open information. Government secrecy, while sometimes necessary, conflicts with that, and we should be having regular conversations about how our secrecy system works and how well it serves us. We should be asking: Who determines what is secret? How is secrecy determined? What are the procedures for determining when the need for secrecy is no longer necessary, and how well do those procedures work? How often are documents declassified? Under what conditions? How often does the unauthorized disclosure of what the government claims should be secret harm our national security?

Posted on by rjonakait

We Got the Secret

          Here a classified document. There a classified document. Everywhere a classified document. Discussions proliferate as to whether the Trump situation is comparable to the Biden situation, and then there is Pence.

Presumably, information is classified because release of it could damage, or cause serious damage, or cause exceptionally grave damage to national security. With all those classified documents floating around out there, you must be really scared; national security must be in danger. Wait a minute. You mean you have haven’t felt any different? You are no more scared than usual? How can that be?

The first reaction to the disclosure of classified information and perhaps its mishandling is that it is shameful, criminal, harmful, and unpatriotic. Perhaps, however, we should adopt a different perspective on classified information. A generation ago, a commission studying government secrecy offered a viewpoint, which while true, is seldom considered: “Secrecy is a form of government regulation. Americans are familiar with the tendency to overregulate in other areas. What is different with secrecy is that the public cannot know the extent or the content of the regulation.”

If we saw every government secret as a regulation, if we saw the classification industry as a giant government bureaucracy, we might question secrecy more. There is a lot to question. Of course there is no comprehensive index to classified material, but estimates are that over 50 million documents are classified each year. Calculations conclude that one million stacked sheets of standard paper would be over 300 feet high. This stairway surely not to heaven of carefully arranged paper could be over three miles high. And such a stack is created each and every year. This defies imagination, but is true.

If you believe that the federal government overregulates in other areas, surely you should think it also does so in the secrecy business. Commissions studying our classification regime have time and again found rampant overclassification, with some of the studies concluding that 50% to 90% of those classifications are unnecessary. We periodically hear concerns about the disclosure of classified information. By contrast, students of the classification industry have reported that they know of no instance when a government official has been disciplined for classifying information that should have been public.

We pay a lot for this bureaucratic secrecy system. The Information Security Oversight Office of the National Archives and Records Administration has estimated that the federal government spends over $16 billion on our classification system. But, wait. There’s more. The ISOO estimates that private industry also spends more than $1billion because many defense contractors and other industries are part of the wide-ranging secrecy business.

A lot of this confidential information does not stay confidential. I am hardly the first person to note what we all know: that secrets have a way of getting out; that keeping secrets has never been easy; that secrets are like organisms that find a way to get free. Centuries ago Dr. Samuel Johnson noted: “Secrets are so seldom kept, that it may be with some reason doubted whether a secret has not some volatility by which it escapes, imperceptibly, at the smallest vent, or some power of fermentation, by which it expands itself, so as to burst the heart that will not give it way.”

Because so much is labeled secret, it is not surprising that classified information finds a way to escape. Now if you add to that that about 4.5 million people have access to classified information, it is hardly surprising that there are leaks of classified information. And that it is often mishandled. Indeed, it is surprising that there are not more problems. But the “good” news is that since so much of the information is needlessly labeled secret in the first place, leaks and mishandling of classified information seldom harm national security.

We should be concerned about disclosures that are harmful, but talking about the harm from leaks is not the right starting point. A foundation of a free and open society is that information about the government and its doings should be free and open. Openness should be the norm; secrecy should be the rare exception. If we are in a free and open society, we should expect information to be public. For a proper democracy with accountability, the default position should be governmental openness.

We should be regularly challenging governmental secrecy. That does not mean that the government cannot have information kept from the public, but there should be exceptional reasons for doing so, and we should be regularly examining whether the reasons given for hiding information are truly exceptional. Fifty million documents a year are surely not exceptional enough to warrant secret handling.

The disclosure of confidential matters and the mishandling of classified matters that harm national security should be prevented, but how often has that happened? Should we really put into one basket a leak about clashes among White House advisors, a leak of our president’s conversation with his counterpart from Mexico, and a leak about troop movements during wartime? If you follow the news, in your lifetime you have heard about leaked information thousands, probably many thousands of times. Think back. How many of them have truly harmed the United States? Quick, name ten. How about five?

Many politicians and bureaucrats have an instinctual desire to keep hidden from the public all sorts of information even when it does not contain national security secrets. We should realize that a disclosure that embarrasses a government official is not the same as a disclosure that harms national security. We should be skeptical of why such information is secret.

(Concluded February10)

Posted on by rjonakait

Snippets

Shortly before “The Immortal Jellyfish GirlImmortal Jellyfish Girl

” began, I heard a teenage voice say, “This is going to be s-o-o-o awesome. I just love radical puppetry theater.” I had questions, but even though she was sitting behind, I felt I did not know the sixteen-year-old well enough to ask.

When I heard that Tom Brady was yet again retiring, I thought of a European friend. He lives in Munich but went to college in the United States, where he fell in love with American football. He maintains that it is the greatest team game because for a play to be successful, every team member must perform well. I think that is an exaggeration, but he has a point. One player or even two or three is not sufficient for a good play. And, of course, a team with an offense that performs well may not win if the defense sucks, and so on. Even so, commentators regularly talk about a quarterback’s wins and losses, although they don’t say that about other players. Thus, it gets reported that Brady has won 35 playoff games and seven Super Bowls. But, of course, it was the New England Patriots that won those championships. Brady did not do it by himself. Remember that goal line interception by Malcolm Butler in 2015, Remember the entire New England defense when Atlanta fell apart in 2017.) Perhaps it is ok to say that Brady led the Patriots to the Super Bowl wins, but it denigrates all the many New England players who contributed to the victories to say that Brady won the games.

“Conceit is God’s gift to little men.” Bruce Barton.

“There are always people in whose presence it is unsuitable to be over-modest, they are only too pleased to take you at your word.” Louis Pasteur.

I don’t know what to make of the fact that I find a resemblance between Hunter Biden and Aaron Rodgers.

At the conclusion of a tennis match, the loser packs up equipment and heads to the locker room often giving a wave to the audience as they applaud. The winner might them be interviewed on court. However, after the tournament finals, the loser stays on the court, takes part in the trophy awarding, and is interviewed. They almost always say gracious things, but surely that is a hard and awkward thing to do a few minutes after losing something they wanted so much.

Ashleigh Barty Wilkes Booth Tarkington.

I admit there is much about conservatism that I do not understand. I have heard how conservatives worry that school children are being groomed for sexual behaviors. But then conservatives rant that the M&M cartoon spokescandies are not sexy enough. Is that consistent?

I am saving footage of Senators recently quoting Taylor Swift lyrics in a hearing about Ticketmaster practices. I assure you that it is rare—oh, so rare—but on occasion I do something that is embarrassing. When on those oh-so-rare occasions, it helps me to feel better to see “serious” people doing even more cringeworthy stuff.