Posted on by rjonakait

Stitching a New Nine this Time

President Biden has put together a commission to examine the size of the Supreme Court. A bill was introduced in Congress to expand the Supreme Court from nine to thirteen justices. In response, a Republican congressman said the Democrats’ plan is to do as much harm to “our democracy” as possible. I wondered about his definition of democracy for, while the Supreme Court is an important American institution, it is one of our least democratic features.

The Supreme Court, of course, is not an elected body; the Justices are neither voted in nor answerable to “the people.” Since Justices may sit for thirty or more years, they make decisions for decades after the officials who appointed and confirmed them have left office. This can also be long after many  Americans were even eligible to vote for the president and senators who appointed and confirmed them. The Supreme Court is not a democratic body. Indeed, in finding validly enacted laws unconstitutional, it is often acting anti-democratically.

Furthermore, many do not see the Supreme Court as a neutral, thoughtful legal body, but a political one. Such a notion finds traction any time a presidential candidate pledges to appoint Justices not just for their legal acumen or wisdom but also for their perceived views. We know that the backgrounds of possible Supreme Court nominees are analyzed to foretell their ruling on important issues.

If the Court was to be expanded, Biden would be expected by many to nominate people who would rule in a “liberal” fashion, which means that the Republicans will oppose any expansion of the Supreme Court. Unless changes are made to the anti-democratic filibuster rules, a larger Supreme Court is unlikely. Even so, that should not end considerations for reforming the process even if a larger Court resulted. The Supreme Court is an important institution but not a perfect one, and perhaps it can be made even better. What is clear, however, is that a change in its size and the timing of who will be on the Court will not destroy or harm democracy.

The Constitution does not define the number of Supreme Court Justices. It merely says: “The judicial Power of the United States shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish.” Although the Constitution never expressly gives it the authority, Congress sets the size, which has varied from its original six until after the Civil War when it was set at nine, where it has stayed since. That number has seemed sacrosanct since FDR’s failed attempt to expand the Court in 1937.

The Court had found many pieces of New Deal legislation unconstitutional. As Jeff Shesol reports in Supreme Power: Franklin Roosevelt vs. the Supreme Court (2010), the Supreme Court between 1933 and 1936 overturned congressional acts at ten times the historic rate often using long neglected doctrines and breathing new life into obscure clauses of the Constitution to do so. Roosevelt then sought an expansion of the Court. Although Roosevelt gave varying nonpolitical reasons for his plan (What a shock! A politician being disingenuous!), the assumption was that he wanted more Justices so that he could appoint sympathetic people, who would uphold legislation passed by Congress and signed by the president. Or as one might put it, accept democratically enacted laws.

Roosevelt’s proposal was soundly defeated after much rhetoric about his threat to our constitutional government. While FDR’s plan failed by a resounding vote, ultimately he was the winner, and the Supreme Court and conservatives the losers. Here’s why. Soon after the proposal to enlarge the Court was presented, the Court began to uphold New Deal legislation with logic that seemed inconsistent with its previous holdings. To many the Court seemed to be bending to political winds, and the perception of it as a partisan institution increased. The proposal to enlarge the Supreme Court did not put Roosevelt in a good light. However, it also put the Court in a­ bad a light when its questionable constitutional interpretations became recognized as being the overreach of biased judges reacting to legislation they did not favor.

Any suggestion since then to expand the Court has met with outcries that our constitutional way of life will be overthrown. Adding Justices only seems to be a partisan power play and not something that could improve justice, the Court, or the perception of the Court. Something like this passage from an email I have just received from a conservative institution will be repeated many times:

Political elites on the radical Left have officially taken the first step in their plot to overthrow the U.S. Supreme Court. With the Biden Administration’s recent announcement of their new Supreme Court “reform” commission, there’s no mistaking it any longer: the extreme Left set its sights on permanently turning our independent judiciary into a tool of raw political power. And now taking it even further, Democrats have filed a bill to add 4 seats to the U.S. Supreme Court. Let’s call it what it is: a coup.

Liberals, on the other hand, have seen the Republican denial of the Merrick Garland nomination and the subsequent approval of Amy Coney Barrett as exercises of raw political power. These moves are seen not as a coup, but as a means of transforming the judiciary into a more partisan institution. A Democratic congressional candidate in the last election, when asked about court packing, said what many others think:

Sure, let’s talk about packing the court. Let’s talk about how Republicans have won the popular vote only 1 of last 7 Presidential elections but have nominated 14 of last 19 SCOTUS picks. Let’s talk about how Mitch McConnell denied President Obama’s appointments of 110 Federal judges, and a SCOTUS appointment. Those 110 appointments were then appointed by President Trump with conservative judges, and the SCOTUS pick denied to Obama was given to Trump. And now, going back on their own rule to not appoint SCOTUS justices in an election year, the GOP wants to appoint a justice in an election year. You can’t accuse Democrats of a hypothetical event that never happened while ignoring the actual court packing done by Republicans.

It seems inevitable that those holding this latter view want to use present Democratic political power to balance the partisan Republican actions. Our country is harmed the more that Supreme Court rulings are seen not as neutral constitutional and statutory rulings but as merely the imposition of personal, political, and increasingly religious views of the judges and those who placed them on the bench. An expanded Court might bring us a more balanced Court now, but ultimately, just as the Republicans have damaged the Supreme Court by their actions, the Democrats may do the same in the name of balance. The functioning of our constitutional government is harmed if we all believe as Roy Cohn did when he said, “I don’t want to know what the law is, I want to know who the judge is.” The Republican actions foster that feeling, and actions to counterbalance them by expanding the Court can do the same.

We can’t remove politics from Supreme Court decisions. On some level, all government decisions are political, and the Court is not immune. Writing about a famous case, legal scholar Fred Rodell said, “Both the plaudits and the deference, like the decision itself, and like every significant Supreme Court decision since, were and are rooted in politics, not in law. This only the ignorant would deny and only the naïve deplore.” This may be so, but that does not mean that we should just throw up our hands and accept an overly partisan Court. Instead, in examining proposals for reforming the Supreme Court, we should be seeking ways to make it look, and perhaps be, less politically partisan and more politically neutral.

Many reforms have been proposed including adding Justices now, which, of course, will be seen as and would be a partisan move even if it is warranted by Republican actions. Expansion would apparently be a one-shot deal, but of course, Republicans would be urged to do something comparable when they have the opportunity.

Other proposals, however, offer institutional changes in the timing of Supreme Court nominations that, even though they would lead to a larger body, could make the Court appear, and perhaps be, less partisan. I have not studied them all, but one has intrigued me. But now my embarrassment. I know that I read this proposal, or one much like it, somewhere. It was online, and I did not save it. I have looked for it, but so far have not found it again. I apologize for not giving proper credit, which I hope to correct.

The core of this unique proposal is that each president gets to appoint a Supreme Court Justice every two years, say on the July 1 after the presidential term begins. Presidents would make another appointment every two years thereafter. Of course, since Justices can sit on the Supreme Court until death or resignation, the Court could have an increasing number of judges, which could become unwieldy. Instead, in this scenario nine Justices would be picked at random from all the Supreme Court judges to decide a case. Many courts already operate this way. Intermediate appellate courts, such as the federal Courts of Appeals, have panels of three judges deciding a case but have more than that number sitting on that court. From the panoply of judges, the requisite number are selected to resolve a case. For example, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals has thirteen fully active judges, but normally only three decide a case. The court can, therefore, take on more cases and decide them more quickly. Similarly, a Supreme Court that had more than nine judges could consider more cases than it does now. If, for example, the Supreme Court had fourteen justices and nine decided each case, then the Court should be able to accept for review fifty percent more cases than it does now. Fewer Court of Appeals decisions, which are sometimes inconsistent from circuit to circuit, would stand as the final result in a litigation. This could give more certainty, uniformity, and finality to the law.

This would also dampen lawyerly gamesmanship. Deadlines are in place to seek Supreme Court review. If they are not met, the lower court decision becomes final. If a party has been ordered to pay $1million or to serve a twenty-year sentence, the money must be paid or the imprisonment served if the petition for Supreme Court review is not timely filed. The party cannot wait for a change in Court Justices hoping that they will receive a more favorable chance in front of a newly-constituted Supreme Court.

Unlike individuals, some institutions are able to wait for Supreme Court review until the time seems propitious. For example, assume the government has lost a tax case concerning some new scheme to avoid taxes. Government attorneys may believe that if they get Supreme Court review, they will lose the case before an existing Supreme Court thereby allowing a precedent being set that allows the scheme to be used by other taxpayers indefinitely. Instead, the government may decide not to seek review in hopes that the makeup of a future Court may be more amenable to its contentions. It may be better for the government to let that individual taxpayer keep the contested moneys to avoid a bad precedent and instead seek review with some other future taxpayer when the Court makeup is different. The government can take the longer view than an individual litigant.

Other institutional groups also try to time Supreme Court review. These institutions represent a cause more than an individual client. Prime examples are the NAACP or the ACLU, but they have been joined by a host of conservative organizations. These advocacy groups often seek review only on issues when they assess the Supreme Court lineup as favorable to their position. We can expect to see that gamesmanship being played repeatedly in the coming years. With Barrett’s ascension to the Court, conservative legal organization see a solid majority favoring certain kinds of religious claims, Second Amendment expansion, and claims limiting or perhaps eliminating the right to abortion, and they will seek to get Supreme Court review of cases containing such issues.

Such gamesmanship only furthers the notion that it is not truly the Constitution or the law that determines an issue, but the personal predilections of the Justices. The intrinsic merits of a legal argument may stay the same, but the likelihood of an outcome can vary depending on the timing of Supreme Court review.

That lawyerly calculus would change, however, if the nine Justices who heard a case were drawn from a larger pool, and the attorneys seeking review did not know who those nine would be. The addition of a single Justice to the Court would not be the momentous event it now often is. I don’t know for certain what result this would have on Supreme Court decisions and the perceptions of those decisions, but perhaps there would be more focus on the issues and less on the judges.

I also saw another option if we had a new Justice every two years, and we had a Supreme Court larger than nine. It is the one I find most interesting.

If every two years the president could nominate a new person to the Supreme Court Justice, the Court could have more than nine Justices. Instead of having the entire group decide all cases, which could be unwieldy, or instead of drawing nine from all the Justices, there is another intriguing possibility. The nine most recently appointed Justices would regularly render the Supreme Court decisions. The displaced Justices would move to a reserve status. That judge would be available whenever one of the regular nine was unavailable for whatever reason such as illness or a conflict of interest. If one of the regular nine died or resigned, the last regularly sitting justice would become one of the regular nine again until another Justice was appointed at the scheduled time.

An obvious question arises. Would this violate the constitutional provision that federal judges have life tenure? (The Constitution actually says judges “shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour.”) I don’t think so. Judges who were appointed more than eighteen years ago and moved to the new reserve status would still hold office. Chief Justice Roberts in his nomination hearing said that he planned to judge like an umpire calling balls and strikes without his personal values affecting his decisions. Let’s stay with the baseball analogy. Nine players take the field, but the other players on the roster are available to come into the game if needed. The players on the field are in the major leagues, but those in the bullpen or in the dugout (I wanted to say “on the bench.” Ha. Ha.) are major leaguers and are on the team, too. With this proposal, the nine Judges actively sitting on the bench (Oxymoron? Actively sitting?) are Supreme Court Justices, but those back in chambers waiting to be called upon would also be Supreme Court Justices, and they can stay in that office during good behavior.

With this proposal, judges would regularly decide cases for eighteen years. That eighteen-year period has advantages. Among other things, it would move the Court to the practice that it has had for most of its history. Before 1959, the average length of tenure on the Supreme Court was thirteen or fourteen years. Since 1959, it has been about twenty-five years. Current Justices have served longer. Clarence Thomas has been serving for twenty-nine years and Stephen Breyer for twenty-six. Chief Justice Roberts and Samuel Alito have been on the Court for fifteen years while the other Justices have been sitting for shorter periods.

That eighteen-year period could also lead to an expanded pool of people to be considered for a nomination. Wanting to leave as long a legacy on the Supreme Court as possible, presidents today are not likely to appoint someone who is sixty or older. God forbid, that person might be on the Court for a mere twenty years! Find someone who is younger and expect a tenure of thirty or more years. Thus, Amy Coney Barrett, the last person appointed to the Supreme Court, went on the bench when she was forty-eight and her two immediate predecessors on the Court, Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch, were fifty-three and forty-nine, respectively. Fifty-five is the oldest age at which any of the present Supreme Court Justices was appointed, and Clarence Thomas was only forty-three. Knowing, however, that the most active period of judging will be “only” eighteen years, a president can consider a wider range of age and experience for a nominee.

Giving every president an appointment every two years may also reduce the partisanship of the Supreme Court and certainly should reduce the perception of partisanship. Currently it is mere chance that determines how many, if any, nominations the chief executive will have. Some presidents have a greater opportunity to pack the court with ideological bedfellows than others. With this reform all presidents would be treated equally. The appointments might be just as partisan as now, but the partisanship is more likely to be balanced and in sync with “the people” as we elect presidents.

The partisan games we have just witnessed during which the Senate denied a consideration of Merrick Garland but forced through the confirmation of Barrett would end. Such maneuvers that strengthen the notion that the Court is not a neutral body might end. Similarly, the present situation calling for the resignation of Justice Breyer so that “our side” can appoint a younger person, which also tends to treat the Court as just another partisan body, should disappear.

This reform should not put be into place immediately. Of course, Republicans would oppose it if it gave Biden two appointments in the next four years. Instead, it should start after the next presidential election with the newly-elected president getting his/her first appointment on July 1, 2025, and one every two years thereafter. Perhaps this might even lead to a more information-driven presidential campaign with candidates, knowing they will have two and only two nominations, revealing to the electorate who those candidates might be.

I am sure there are downsides to this proposal, but would it really be bad to treat all presidents equally? And why is it bad if unelected Justices decided cases for “only” eighteen years when most Justices before 1960 did not serve that long?

Posted on by rjonakait

Stitching a New Nine this Time (concluded)

If every two years the president could nominate a new person to the Supreme Court Justice, the Court could have more than nine Justices. Instead of having the entire group decide all cases, which could be unwieldy, or instead of drawing nine from all the Justices, there is another intriguing possibility. The nine most recently appointed Justices would regularly render the Supreme Court decisions. The displaced Justices would move to a reserve status. That judge would be available whenever one of the regular nine was unavailable for whatever reason such as illness or a conflict of interest. If one of the regular nine died or resigned, the last regularly sitting justice would become one of the regular nine again until another Justice was appointed at the scheduled time.

An obvious question arises. Would this violate the constitutional provision that federal judges have life tenure? (The Constitution actually says judges “shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour.”) I don’t think so. Judges who were appointed more than eighteen years ago and moved to the new reserve status would still hold office. Chief Justice Roberts in his nomination hearing said that he planned to judge like an umpire calling balls and strikes without his personal values affecting his decisions. Let’s stay with the baseball analogy. Nine players take the field, but the other players on the roster are available to come into the game if needed. The players on the field are in the major leagues, but those in the bullpen or in the dugout (I wanted to say “on the bench.” Ha. Ha.) are major leaguers and are on the team, too. With this proposal, the nine Judges actively sitting on the bench (Oxymoron? Actively sitting?) are Supreme Court Justices, but those back in chambers waiting to be called upon would also be Supreme Court Justices, and they can stay in that office during good behavior.

With this proposal, judges would regularly decide cases for eighteen years. That eighteen-year period has advantages. Among other things, it would move the Court to the practice that it has had for most of its history. Before 1959, the average length of tenure on the Supreme Court was thirteen or fourteen years. Since 1959, it has been about twenty-five years. Current Justices have served longer. Clarence Thomas has been serving for twenty-nine years and Stephen Breyer for twenty-six. Chief Justice Roberts and Samuel Alito have been on the Court for fifteen years while the other Justices have been sitting for shorter periods.

That eighteen-year period could also lead to an expanded pool of people to be considered for a nomination. Wanting to leave as long a legacy on the Supreme Court as possible, presidents today are not likely to appoint someone who is sixty or older. God forbid, that person might be on the Court for a mere twenty years! Find someone who is younger and expect a tenure of thirty or more years. Thus, Amy Coney Barrett, the last person appointed to the Supreme Court, went on the bench when she was forty-eight and her two immediate predecessors on the Court, Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch, were fifty-three and forty-nine, respectively. Fifty-five is the oldest age at which any of the present Supreme Court Justices was appointed, and Clarence Thomas was only forty-three. Knowing, however, that the most active period of judging will be “only” eighteen years, a president can consider a wider range of age and experience for a nominee.

Giving every president an appointment every two years may also reduce the partisanship of the Supreme Court and certainly should reduce the perception of partisanship. Currently it is mere chance that determines how many, if any, nominations the chief executive will have. Some presidents have a greater opportunity to pack the court with ideological bedfellows than others. With this reform all presidents would be treated equally. The appointments might be just as partisan as now, but the partisanship is more likely to be balanced and in sync with “the people” as we elect presidents.

The partisan games we have just witnessed during which the Senate denied a consideration of Merrick Garland but forced through the confirmation of Barrett would end. Such maneuvers that strengthen the notion that the Court is not a neutral body might end. Similarly, the present situation calling for the resignation of Justice Breyer so that “our side” can appoint a younger person, which also tends to treat the Court as just another partisan body, should disappear.

This reform should not put be into place immediately. Of course, Republicans would oppose it if it gave Biden two appointments in the next four years. Instead, it should start after the next presidential election with the newly-elected president getting his/her first appointment on July 1, 2025, and one every two years thereafter. Perhaps this might even lead to a more information-driven presidential campaign with candidates, knowing they will have two and only two nominations, revealing to the electorate who those candidates might be.

I am sure there are downsides to this proposal, but would it really be bad to treat all presidents equally? And why is it bad if unelected Justices decided cases for “only” eighteen years when most Justices before 1960 did not serve that long?

(This essay will be posted in order on Monday May 3)

Posted on by rjonakait

Stitching a New Nine this Time

We can’t remove politics from Supreme Court decisions. On some level, all government decisions are political, and the Court is not immune. Writing about a famous case, legal scholar Fred Rodell said, “Both the plaudits and the deference, like the decision itself, and like every significant Supreme Court decision since, were and are rooted in politics, not in law. This only the ignorant would deny and only the naïve deplore.” This may be so, but that does not mean that we should just throw up our hands and accept an overly partisan Court. Instead, in examining proposals for reforming the Supreme Court, we should be seeking ways to make it look, and perhaps be, less politically partisan and more politically neutral.

Many reforms have been proposed including adding Justices now, which, of course, will be seen as and would be a partisan move even if it is warranted by Republican actions. Expansion would apparently be a one-shot deal, but of course, Republicans would be urged to do something comparable when they have the opportunity.

Other proposals, however, offer institutional changes in the timing of Supreme Court nominations that, even though they would lead to a larger body, could make the Court appear, and perhaps be, less partisan. I have not studied them all, but one has intrigued me. But now my embarrassment. I know that I read this proposal, or one much like it, somewhere. It was online, and I did not save it. I have looked for it, but so far have not found it again. I apologize for not giving proper credit, which I hope to correct.

The core of this unique proposal is that each president gets to appoint a Supreme Court Justice every two years, say on the July 1 after the presidential term begins. Presidents would make another appointment every two years thereafter. Of course, since Justices can sit on the Supreme Court until death or resignation, the Court could have an increasing number of judges, which could become unwieldy. Instead, in this scenario nine Justices would be picked at random from all the Supreme Court judges to decide a case. Many courts already operate this way. Intermediate appellate courts, such as the federal Courts of Appeals, have panels of three judges deciding a case but have more than that number sitting on that court. From the panoply of judges, the requisite number are selected to resolve a case. For example, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals has thirteen fully active judges, but normally only three decide a case. The court can, therefore, take on more cases and decide them more quickly. Similarly, a Supreme Court that had more than nine judges could consider more cases than it does now. If, for example, the Supreme Court had fourteen justices and nine decided each case, then the Court should be able to accept for review fifty percent more cases than it does now. Fewer Court of Appeals decisions, which are sometimes inconsistent from circuit to circuit, would stand as the final result in a litigation. This could give more certainty, uniformity, and finality to the law.

This would also dampen lawyerly gamesmanship. Deadlines are in place to seek Supreme Court review. If they are not met, the lower court decision becomes final. If a party has been ordered to pay $1million or to serve a twenty-year sentence, the money must be paid or the imprisonment served if the petition for Supreme Court review is not timely filed. The party cannot wait for a change in Court Justices hoping that they will receive a more favorable chance in front of a newly-constituted Supreme Court.

Unlike individuals, some institutions are able to wait for Supreme Court review until the time seems propitious. For example, assume the government has lost a tax case concerning some new scheme to avoid taxes. Government attorneys may believe that if they get Supreme Court review, they will lose the case before an existing Supreme Court thereby allowing a precedent being set that allows the scheme to be used by other taxpayers indefinitely. Instead, the government may decide not to seek review in hopes that the makeup of a future Court may be more amenable to its contentions. It may be better for the government to let that individual taxpayer keep the contested moneys to avoid a bad precedent and instead seek review with some other future taxpayer when the Court makeup is different. The government can take the longer view than an individual litigant.

Other institutional groups also try to time Supreme Court review. These institutions represent a cause more than an individual client. Prime examples are the NAACP or the ACLU, but they have been joined by a host of conservative organizations. These advocacy groups often seek review only on issues when they assess the Supreme Court lineup as favorable to their position. We can expect to see that gamesmanship being played repeatedly in the coming years. With Barrett’s ascension to the Court, conservative legal organization see a solid majority favoring certain kinds of religious claims, Second Amendment expansion, and claims limiting or perhaps eliminating the right to abortion, and they will seek to get Supreme Court review of cases containing such issues.

Such gamesmanship only furthers the notion that it is not truly the Constitution or the law that determines an issue, but the personal predilections of the Justices. The intrinsic merits of a legal argument may stay the same, but the likelihood of an outcome can vary depending on the timing of Supreme Court review.

That lawyerly calculus would change, however, if the nine Justices who heard a case were drawn from a larger pool, and the attorneys seeking review did not know who those nine would be. The addition of a single Justice to the Court would not be the momentous event it now often is. I don’t know for certain what result this would have on Supreme Court decisions and the perceptions of those decisions, but perhaps there would be more focus on the issues and less on the judges.

I also saw another option if we had a new Justice every two years, and we had a Supreme Court larger than nine. It is the one I find most interesting.

(Concluded April 30)

Posted on by rjonakait

Stitching a New Nine this Time

President Biden has put together a commission to examine the size of the Supreme Court. A bill was introduced in Congress to expand the Supreme Court from nine to thirteen justices. In response, a Republican congressman said the Democrats’ plan is to do as much harm to “our democracy” as possible. I wondered about his definition of democracy for, while the Supreme Court is an important American institution, it is one of our least democratic features.

The Supreme Court, of course, is not an elected body; the Justices are neither voted in nor answerable to “the people.” Since Justices may sit for thirty or more years, they make decisions for decades after the officials who appointed and confirmed them have left office. This can also be long after many  Americans were even eligible to vote for the president and senators who appointed and confirmed them. The Supreme Court is not a democratic body. Indeed, in finding validly enacted laws unconstitutional, it is often acting anti-democratically.

Furthermore, many do not see the Supreme Court as a neutral, thoughtful legal body, but a political one. Such a notion finds traction any time a presidential candidate pledges to appoint Justices not just for their legal acumen or wisdom but also for their perceived views. We know that the backgrounds of possible Supreme Court nominees are analyzed to foretell their ruling on important issues.

If the Court was to be expanded, Biden would be expected by many to nominate people who would rule in a “liberal” fashion, which means that the Republicans will oppose any expansion of the Supreme Court. Unless changes are made to the anti-democratic filibuster rules, a larger Supreme Court is unlikely. Even so, that should not end considerations for reforming the process even if a larger Court resulted. The Supreme Court is an important institution but not a perfect one, and perhaps it can be made even better. What is clear, however, is that a change in its size and the timing of who will be on the Court will not destroy or harm democracy.

The Constitution does not define the number of Supreme Court Justices. It merely says: “The judicial Power of the United States shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish.” Although the Constitution never expressly gives it the authority, Congress sets the size, which has varied from its original six until after the Civil War when it was set at nine, where it has stayed since. That number has seemed sacrosanct since FDR’s failed attempt to expand the Court in 1937.

The Court had found many pieces of New Deal legislation unconstitutional. As Jeff Shesol reports in Supreme Power: Franklin Roosevelt vs. the Supreme Court (2010), the Supreme Court between 1933 and 1936 overturned congressional acts at ten times the historic rate often using long neglected doctrines and breathing new life into obscure clauses of the Constitution to do so. Roosevelt then sought an expansion of the Court. Although Roosevelt gave varying nonpolitical reasons for his plan (What a shock! A politician being disingenuous!), the assumption was that he wanted more Justices so that he could appoint sympathetic people, who would uphold legislation passed by Congress and signed by the president. Or as one might put it, accept democratically enacted laws.

Roosevelt’s proposal was soundly defeated after much rhetoric about his threat to our constitutional government. While FDR’s plan failed by a resounding vote, ultimately he was the winner, and the Supreme Court and conservatives the losers. Here’s why. Soon after the proposal to enlarge the Court was presented, the Court began to uphold New Deal legislation with logic that seemed inconsistent with its previous holdings. To many the Court seemed to be bending to political winds, and the perception of it as a partisan institution increased. The proposal to enlarge the Supreme Court did not put Roosevelt in a good light. However, it also put the Court in a­ bad a light when its questionable constitutional interpretations became recognized as being the overreach of biased judges reacting to legislation they did not favor.

Any suggestion since then to expand the Court has met with outcries that our constitutional way of life will be overthrown. Adding Justices only seems to be a partisan power play and not something that could improve justice, the Court, or the perception of the Court. Something like this passage from an email I have just received from a conservative institution will be repeated many times:

Political elites on the radical Left have officially taken the first step in their plot to overthrow the U.S. Supreme Court. With the Biden Administration’s recent announcement of their new Supreme Court “reform” commission, there’s no mistaking it any longer: the extreme Left set its sights on permanently turning our independent judiciary into a tool of raw political power. And now taking it even further, Democrats have filed a bill to add 4 seats to the U.S. Supreme Court. Let’s call it what it is: a coup.

Liberals, on the other hand, have seen the Republican denial of the Merrick Garland nomination and the subsequent approval of Amy Coney Barrett as exercises of raw political power. These moves are seen not as a coup, but as a means of transforming the judiciary into a more partisan institution. A Democratic congressional candidate in the last election, when asked about court packing, said what many others think:

Sure, let’s talk about packing the court. Let’s talk about how Republicans have won the popular vote only 1 of last 7 Presidential elections but have nominated 14 of last 19 SCOTUS picks. Let’s talk about how Mitch McConnell denied President Obama’s appointments of 110 Federal judges, and a SCOTUS appointment. Those 110 appointments were then appointed by President Trump with conservative judges, and the SCOTUS pick denied to Obama was given to Trump. And now, going back on their own rule to not appoint SCOTUS justices in an election year, the GOP wants to appoint a justice in an election year. You can’t accuse Democrats of a hypothetical event that never happened while ignoring the actual court packing done by Republicans.

It seems inevitable that those holding this latter view want to use present Democratic political power to balance the partisan Republican actions. Our country is harmed the more that Supreme Court rulings are seen not as neutral constitutional and statutory rulings but as merely the imposition of personal, political, and increasingly religious views of the judges and those who placed them on the bench. An expanded Court might bring us a more balanced Court now, but ultimately, just as the Republicans have damaged the Supreme Court by their actions, the Democrats may do the same in the name of balance. The functioning of our constitutional government is harmed if we all believe as Roy Cohn did when he said, “I don’t want to know what the law is, I want to know who the judge is.” The Republican actions foster that feeling, and actions to counterbalance them by expanding the Court can do the same.

(continued April 28)

Posted on by rjonakait · 2 Comments

Beware of “Expert” Legal Commentary–A Lesson From the Chauvin Trial

          I watched little of the Derek Chauvin trial for murdering George Floyd, but I saw the verdict as it was announced and some of the subsequent commentary during the rest of the day. A great deal has been said about the trial, and I don’t mean to add to it here. Instead, I wish to comment on some of that commentary that followed the trial. Because I was a professor of criminal law, I had often been asked by reporters and producers for various news organizations to comment on criminal and jury trial matters, so I have opinions about how those commentaries should go.  

          An aside: I apparently did not attain lasting fame from my televised commentaries. This sad state of affairs was hammered home to me recently when a friend and I were having a beer at my local bar. It was the first time I had been back since the beginning of the Covid crisis. The owner came over to welcome me, and my friend Tony remarked on the establishment’s name. “DSK. Wasn’t that the French official who was charged with crimes?” “Yes,” I said, “I got a lot of calls from French media about that case.” Instead of being impressed with my fame or expertise, my friend said, “Why were they calling you?” In spite of this, our friendship endures. (I have written about some of my media experiences on this blog including Search Results for “”Meet the Press”” – AJ’s Dad (ajsdad.blog) and Search Results for “”Your Skin is Showing”” – AJ’s Dad (ajsdad.blog)

          In those past days, I had developed a few standards for my commentaries. The first was that I would not comment on the likely outcome of an ongoing trial or the correctness of a verdict unless I had watched all of the trial. From my own experience as a trial attorney, I knew that a jury would have been presented more evidence than a casual observer who had only seen or read excerpts of the trial.

          My other standard was that I would not comment about what I did not know. I knew New York criminal law and procedure. I knew the Supreme Court decisions that pertained to criminal law and procedure. I knew the practices in New York City courts. I knew the general history and practices of American jury trials, and if I could be helpful, I would tell a reporter about the things I knew. But I seldom knew in detail the law and practices of other states and localities, and I would not pretend that I did. If the news organizations wanted comments on Minnesota law or a particular Minnesota trial, I would tell them I was not their guy.

          In watching what were billed as expert legal commentators after the Chauvin verdict, I became aware how bad many of them are. I was especially concerned by those who appeared to have been regulars talking about the trial. I would have expected these attorneys to have boned up on the issues that were sure to arise. All too often, however, my expectations were disappointed, and uninformed statements were made. I could give a number of examples, but I will stick to one.

Not surprisingly, the legal “experts” were asked about sentencing. Many of the commentators pronounced that the maximum penalties for each of the three convicted crimes which were forty, twenty-five, and ten years’ imprisonment. This was informative. They had done this much homework. Many then suggested that Chauvin could be sentenced consecutively so that he actually faced seventy-five years. I wondered if that could be right. Such sentences seemed to me to violate the Constitution.

Without getting into the technicalities, the Supreme Court has concluded that the Double Jeopardy clause forbids consecutive sentences to the top count when the other charges are “lesser included offenses” to the most serious conviction. So, for example, let’s say that stealing $1000 or over is grand larceny and carries a penalty of ten years. Let’s also assume that stealing less than $1000 is petty larceny and carries a one-year penalty. However, if I steal $1000, I have committed not only grand larceny but have also committed a petty larceny. Could I be sentenced to one year for that offense and have it run consecutively to my ten-year grand larceny sentence, thus making me serve 11 years? Without going through all of the reasoning, the Supreme Court has said no, because the petty larceny is, in this scenario, a “lesser included offense.” That is basic law which anyone claiming to be an expert on criminal law should know. Many, probably most, jurisdictions avoid this issue by telling jurors to first consider the grand larceny charge and if they convict on that not to consider the petty larceny. In these states, I would only be convicted of grand larceny.

          Chauvin, however, was convicted on three charges. Not having followed the legal issues in the case, I did not know if two of the charges were lesser included crimes to the greater one. I expected, however, that a legal commentator going on the air after the verdict expecting to be asked about sentencing would have known whether the convictions were for greater and lesser offenses and told us that if so, there could not be consecutive sentences. None did that. At a minimum, I would have expected the legal commentators to explain the constitutional limitation on consecutive sentences. None that I saw did that. Instead, I got the impression that they did not know the relevant Supreme Court decisions.

          Also relevant is that fact that many jurisdictions have limitations on consecutive sentences. When I regularly practiced criminal law, New York had put a cap on how high the consecutive sentences could go. If a defendant was convicted of three separate charges each with a potential twenty-five-year sentence, consecutive sentences would not lead to a seventy-five year sentence but to whatever the cap number was. When the legal experts told me that Chauvin could get consecutive sentences, I wondered if they knew whether Minnesota had similar restrictions on consecutive sentences. None told me whether that were so. If they had known, I am sure they would have shown off their knowledge.

          However, knowledgeable Minnesota attorneys posted the relevant state statute on a discussion group for criminal law professors, even retired ones like me. Minnesota law, as it turns out, forbids consecutive sentences in Chauvin’s situation. These truly expert lawyers explained that Minnesota does not follow the usual practice and asks the jury to render a verdict on each charge even if they have convicted on the top charge and the other charges are lesser included offenses. I learned in a clear and concise manner the law on this issue relevant to Chauvin. I also learned, sadly, that not knowing the law does not prevent some TV “experts” from talking when they do not know what they are talking about.

          This is hardly the most important misinformation presented on cable networks. However people who heard he could get up to seventy-five years and are pleased with that possibility and do not learn that such a sentence is impossible, may feel that an injustice has been committed when Chauvin gets a much lesser sentence. For me when legal commentators make ignorant statements about the law, my respect for the legal profession takes a hit. My takeaway for you is that even when a supposed expert legal commentator says something, take what you hear with a grain of salt.

          And if you care, those knowledgeable Minnesota attorneys report that prisoners must serve two-thirds of their sentences in jail and then are usually released to supervised release for the rest of their sentence.

Posted on by rjonakait

Where Have All the Writers Gone?

          Good writing is good writing is good writing. Or at least we might think that, but perhaps not really. I have enjoyed a certain writer at one stage of my life but not at another. Of course, sometimes a book was too hard when I was young, but I later saw greatness in it. Moby Dick and The Scarlet Letter fall into that category. Assigned in high school, they were both dreary chores and probably unfinished ones. Decades later I tried again and realized why they were classics. They are great books.

          Sometimes my appreciation for a book has depended not on the quality or difficulty of a book or a writer, but on my own life cycles. Dickens is not hard to understand, but I hated and then avoided reading him when young. Then, because the spouse had to read it for a Victorian literature class she was taking, I picked up Pickwick Papers, and its laugh-out-loud funniness got me to go to his other books. Each summer for two decades when I had more time for novels, I eagerly read one of his books. I placed Dickens as the second greatest or most important writer in English after Shakespeare. Then, perhaps fifteen years later, I sought to reread Bleak House, a book I had regarded as marvelous. I couldn’t do it. This did not make me think that I had misjudged Dickens or the book but only convinced me that I was at a different stage in my reading life and Dickens did not now fit into it. I once read, for example, that you should read Thomas Wolfe (Look Homeward, Angel, that Thomas Wolfe) in your youth or you won’t be able to read him at all. So far, I have not read him, and youth is far behind me.

          Sometimes I recognize that a book must be great but does not suit me. I have read War and Peace three times (you are entitled to think that I must be crazy) and I have never understood its touted excellence. I accept the world’s opinion that it is great, but not for me. Some books I have tried to reread and wondered why they were ever considered good. For example, I plunged into Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms recently and thought that it was amateurish and simply awful.

But what I have been thinking about recently are those writers who were considered good or important and clearly had an impact on “letters” but who fell out of favor while other comparable writers continue to be read. Sometimes such writers “disappear” for a while and then seem to reemerge. Dreiser, Dos Passos, and Wilkie Collins may fall into such a waxing and waning category. Others, perhaps George Gissing and John P. Marquand, just ebb.

          So my game for you: Name the ten, or twenty-five, or even fifty best or most important American writers of the twentieth century. Did your list include the writers who won all of these: a Pulitzer Prize for fiction, a National Book Award for a different novel, and two Pulitzers for drama? It’s a trick question. There is only one who won them all, but your list probably did not include him: Thornton Wilder. We overlook him even though many of my generation read the Pulitzer-Prize-winning The Bridge of San Luis Rey, an innovative, powerful work. And many of us have seen or read or even acted in his innovative, powerful play that won a Pulitzer: Our Town. On the other hand, I have never seen his other Pulitzer-Prize winning play, The Skin of our Teeth, although I would have liked to have seen the original Broadway cast of it, which starred Frederic March and Tallulah Bankhead. Some years back, I found that the Barrett Friendly Library had a copy Wilder’s The Eighth Day, which won the National Book Award four decades after Bridge won the Pulitzer. It is very good, and that made me wonder why he wasn’t read more these days. Even so, I did not seek out more of his output or reread Bridge, and perhaps it is telling that I could not recently remember the title of The Eighth Day nor could I tell you a lick about it other than I remember it is a good book. These thoughts came back when I plucked Theophilus North, Wilder’s last novel, published when he was 76, out of a leave-one-take-one book kiosk. I enjoyed reading it and read more about Wilder, an astonishing man. In addition to the Pulitzers and the National Book Award, he was awarded the Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Letters and the Presidential Medal for Freedom. He knew many languages and his translation of Ibsen’s A Doll House was running on Broadway when Our Town opened. He wrote The Matchmaker, which had a long Broadway run, and its adapted version, Hello, Dolly, played even longer. He wrote a famous screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock, and his friends included both Sigmund Freud and Gertrude Stein. And with all of these accomplishments few of us would think to place him on our list of great American writers.

          Theophilus North is set in 1926 and reads as if it is a slightly fictionalized segment of the author’s life. In the summer of 1926, Theophilus, our narrator, a graduate of Yale, has left his teaching job at a prestigious prep school in New Jersey (Wilder had taught at Lawrenceville and graduated from Yale) and heads off to Newport, Rhode Island, near where Theophilus (and Wilder) had been stationed in World War I. Importing archeological ideas from ancient Troy, North tells us his theory of nine cities of Newport—early settlers, seaport, playground for the rich, local workers, and so on. North spends the summer teaching tennis to and tutoring youngsters and reading to the elderly. Each chapter is a short story, with some of the same characters popping up in many of them. Each story has a similar structure. A problem or a mystery crops up, which Theophilus resolves. Although those helped are grateful, he always rejects pay or any hint of future consideration. The book explores the various posited Newport cities but does not have any central plot or moral or theme. Each chapter could stand on its own. This made for satisfactory, episodic reading. A chapter a day is the way I approached it.

          As I was reading, I kept thinking that Theophilus North reminded me of something else that I read, but at first could not place it. It was not the dissection of a time or place as in Updike’s Rabbit novels. It was not the intertwined short stories of Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin. It was not his contemporary or semi-contemporary authors writing about American themes, like O’Hara, Bellow, or DeLillo. Instead I realized it reminded me of another episodic book that I am currently reading: The Second Rumpole Omnibus by John Mortimer, a collection containing three Rumpole books that had been separately published. Each Rumpole book consists of short stories, but, as with Theophilus North, characters recur and incidents from one story are referred to in another. The Rumpole stories are similar to Theohilus not only because of the first-person narration, butalso because at the beginning of each story a problem or mystery is presented and by the end the situation is neatly resolved by the narrator. Both North and Rumpole, the well-worn barrister, have pockets of erudition;­­ North has a vast knowledge of literature and languages and Rumpole knows bloodstains, Wordsworth, and judges. But given the choice, I would take Rumpole over North. Wilder has created a character that seems too good to be true, while one can imagine Rumpole existing because, although an idealist, he is flawed. North is a prig; Horace Rumpole has self-deprecatory humor and a wife who at least slightly terrifies him. I would like to have a glass or three of Chateau Fleet Street at Pomeroy’s with Rumpole because I might not only enjoy the conversation, but I also might learn something more about human nature. I can’t imagine having a drink with North unless I wanted to learn more about him.

          And while I am in awe of all that Thornton Wilder accomplished, I am also in awe of all that John Mortimer has done.

Posted on by rjonakait

Snippets

I was surprised to read in the New Yorker the phrase “from whence.” I was surprised to read in the New York Times the word “snuck.”

 Old joke: He: “I never mince words.” She: “You should; it makes them easier to eat later on.”

How do used books get to where they are? My Brooklyn neighborhood has a couple of those leave-a-book-take-a-book birdhouse-looking structures, and I have begun utilizing them to cut down the books on my shelves. My intention is to deposit two or three volumes and to take one. Sometimes I take two or three, but never more than I brought. My net exchange has slightly decreased the burdens on my bookcases. Two weeks back I picked up a hardcover copy of Wild Fire by Ann Cleeves. The front cover has a picture of a stone, spartan structure with the roof missing settled in a stark landscape. The publisher has placed an emblem that proclaims, “Now the Hit TV Series Shetland.” I admire that series, and I grabbed the book. The book also contained stickers that the book came from the Hagen Ranch Road Branch of the Palm Beach County Library System in Delray Beach, Florida. This was not surprising. I have seen many used books that were apparently originally owned by libraries. (I was a bit surprised, however, that the book had been let go by the library when I saw the book was copyrighted in 2018. Expendable library books are usually much older.) Often books get into private hands through library sales, but this volume also had a sticker: “Ollies: Their Price $19.99; Our Price $3.99.” (The price listed on the dust jacket is $26.99.) Ollies, I later learned, is a chain of stores that sells remaindered goods, and I was surprised that I did not know of it before because I am devoted to remaindering stores. I found that Ollies had outlets near Delray Beach.) I liked Wild Fire very much, but I also am curious about how the copy I read got to a tiny kiosk in front of a rowhouse on Adelphi Street, Brooklyn, New York. Is it a story worth knowing?

The sign in the establishment: “Courteous and efficient self-service.”

 The man pointed at my chest and laughingly asked, “Is that true?” My tee read: “BEST. DAD. EVER.” I said, “It might be true if I didn’t have to buy the shirt for myself.”

“You probably wouldn’t worry about what people think of you if you knew how seldom they do.” Olin Miller

Sometimes when I am feeling a bit depressed, I cheer myself up by remembering I can go to Costco.

“He who is sorrowful can force himself to smile, but he who is glad cannot weep.” Selma Lagerlof.

“Some men have acted courage who had it not; but no man can act wit.” Marquis of Halifax.

Posted on by rjonakait

Swimming with the Manatees (in its entirety)

          Several weeks had passed since we had received the two shots. Winter seemed longer than usual since this Covid one had not been broken up with a trip, so I agreed when the spouse said, “Let’s go somewhere.” We, of course, wanted some place warm and not too crowded. The spouse is enamored with “old Florida,” places that look like the towns she remembers from her youth – big trees, Spanish moss, water of some kind. Each of us came across an internet article that listed the “ten best small towns in Florida.” Both thought Crystal River might suit the bill, even though neither of us had ever heard of it before. That is not especially surprising for me, but the spouse has lived in many places in Florida and has visited relatives in even more—Gainesville, Leesburg, Lakeland, Tampa, St. Petersburg, Ft. Lauderdale, Coral Gables, Coconut Grove, Boca Raton, Sarasota, Bradenton, Vero Beach, Sebring, Marathon, Punta Gorda. You get the idea.

The spouse had one major concern. Crystal River is eighty miles north of Tampa in an area that the Florida PR people now bill as the Nature Coast, and she wondered whether it would be warm enough in late March for her to go swimming, which was an essential requisite for the trip. Internet research convinced her that while it was not guaranteed, the odds were that temperatures would be high enough to Australian crawl about. And then two other discoveries clinched the deal. An apparently nice resort within our budget had an available room, and Crystal River offered manatees. We read that the waters around Crystal River had many freshwater springs where the water bubbled up at a constant 72 degrees, that manatees collected at these spots, and that one could go swimming amongst those mammoth creatures. This seemed to be a real come-on for her. Me…not so much. Nevertheless, the spouse did her magic and booked us into the Plantation at Crystal River for a week and got us convenient flights and a car.

          The trip going was uneventful as was the return journey. We drove from Tampa International up to the Plantation (no one seemed the least embarrassed by this name that carries unfortunate echoes of more than just the gracious Old South of mint juleps, which were not on offer at the resort) in our Alamo Altima (a better car than we own) in the late afternoon. A rather ornate and large fountain graced the front of the entrance, but it was under repair. By the end of our stay, however, it had been put back together and delighted with water-spraying manatees and onlooking putti. We were disappointed that it did not have lights on it at night, but during the day, it was quite a sight.

          The resort had a collection of buildings, none taller than two stories, which had it fitting nicely into Crystal River, for the town is a low-rise place. One of the many reasons Crystal River felt different from other places in Florida is that there were no high-rise buildings. We had a first floor “room with a water view”; the water being a canal. The Crystal River area is punctuated with bays, streams, and protected marshes and wetlands that have access to the Gulf but are nine miles from the shore. But, as elsewhere in Florida, there are canals. This canal was about thirty yards from our backdoor (yes, we had a backdoor opening onto a miniscule patio) and featured a steady stream of boats, mostly pontoons and kayaks. Almost all the waters around Crystal River are no-wake zones, so the boats were blissfully quiet.

          We spent many happy hours sitting outside this door, which overlooked a croquet court. I learned that many people have no idea how to play that game, but they seem to have a good time trying. Two horseshoe pits were wedged between the court and the canal. A flawed beach volleyball court was off to our right. The flaw was not in the court itself, but in its placement. We saw many people hitting a ball over the net, but sooner or later, the ball would inevitably escape into the canal. Most often the players could retrieve it, but we also saw people walking along the canal frantically, but unsuccessfully, trying to retrieve a floating ball. Perhaps a collection of Plantation balls ends up on a Honduras beach. To the left of us was a shuffleboard court, and beyond that was the swimming pool, a hot tub, and a Tiki bar. A popular route from guest rooms to the well-utilized pool went outside our door, and each day we gave greeting to a large sampling of our fellow guests.

          On an early morning walk on our first day, I saw a trailer with “Royal Order of Jesters” on its side, and later that day I saw a goodly collection of men on the path and at the pool with “Jesters” on their shirts. On the second day, I asked a man about the Jesters. He explained that they are a subset of the Shriners, which are, of course, a subset of the Freemasons. Each year, Jesters from the Southeast come to the Plantation to initiate new members, and a mild form of hazing was going on. The initiates had to wear jester costumes and wait on the established members. To the spouse’s chagrin, some smoked cigars…at the pool(!). (The smoke smelled good to me.) Much laughter came from the group, but although they were drinking, no one was drunk, not at least in the late afternoon. However, I can’t swear that that remained true at night when the Jesters hung around a meeting room at one edge of the resort far from our room.

          Seeing the Jester logos, I was reminded how many people (out of proportion they are men) are attracted to organizations that have elements of secrecy, rituals, and initiations, and wonder why I don’t fall into this group. Instead, I am simultaneously amused and repulsed by them. I felt that in particular when the spouse reported the snippets of a conversation of three Jesters she overheard at the pool one morning. The men seemed to be planning next year’s initiations. She heard: “Can you see flashing lights through a hood?” “We can put plastic on the floor. Is syrup too sticky? We could use flour instead.” “We could use colored water. The audience won’t be able to tell what it is.” “We need to decide on costumes. How about transvestites? Yeah, they can be ladyboys.” Hmmm.

          Another conversation, however, reminded me that organizations with these sorts of initiation rites can serve more purposes than providing some sort of unappealing (to me) male comraderie. I asked a man sporting a Jester logo how long after becoming a Mason it took him to decide to become a Shriner and then a Jester. He immediately corrected me. “Freemason,” he said, but continued by saying that when he was a young man, he accompanied his then father-in-law who took ice across a lake to a camp. He learned then that the camp was for what he described as “Shriner kids”—children with disabilities or under treatment for serious illnesses. He told me that he realized he wanted to be part of a group that sought to help these kids, and the Shriners did that through their hospitals and programs. He told me that he had not decided to become a Shriner after joining the Freemasons but became a Freemason in order to become a Shriner.

          In my usual life, I don’t intersect with Freemasons or Shriners often, and I don’t believe I have ever met a Jester before. Thomas Fuller said, “Travel makes a wise man better but a fool worse.” Of course, I would like to think I fall under that first heading, but perhaps my status really is somewhere between those two categories. Even so, I would like to think that my conversations with these men at the resort made me a bit more understanding of a part of society from which I am normally separated.

          The resort had another group of guests outside my usual social realm, and my observations of them definitely challenged some of my preconceptions and prejudices and perhaps made me a bit wiser.

On our first morning in Crystal River, Florida, we went to breakfast at the Biscuit Barn, a small diner open from six in the morning to two in the afternoon, and, not surprisingly, known for its biscuits (they were delicious!). A line of what seemed to be only a few tourists and mostly locals was waiting outside, and after giving our name inside, we joined those waiting in a (very) sunny spot a few feet from parking spaces. Vehicles came and went but few cars. The correct way to come, apparently, was in one of those four-door pickup trucks that seem huge to those of us who do not own one. We saw these pickups at this diner and other restaurants, in the resort parking lot, at the supermarket, and on the roads. They were ubiquitous, but their utility was not clear. (In my Citrus County week, I did not see one Prius. However, I did see some hybrid pickups.) Citrus County, unlike some parts of Florida, is not saturated with cattle ranches, and in spite of the area’s name, we saw no orange, grapefruit, or lemon groves where those vehicles would have a utilitarian use. Indeed, I never saw anything being transported in any of the truck beds. Since the median family income in Citrus County is well below the national and statewide figures and the trucks are pricey, they must put a strain on the budgets of many who drive them in Crystal River. I expected to see a lot of Trump and Confederate flag bumper and window stickers on the trucks, but few of the vehicles had them. The trucks were almost all shiny and pristine, and apparently their drivers wanted to keep them that way.

An aside: The relatively low county income may explain the wide variety of dollar stores we saw. This was great because the spouse and I love dollar stores. We seldom pass one up, and we went into one a couple times during our Crystal River stay.

Every visible person in the Biscuit Barn was white. That was not surprising. Citrus County has about a two percent Black and a two percent Hispanic population, with a smattering of Asians. Patrons wore Trump caps, and many of the items in the restaurant indicated that we were in deeply conservative country. I was not surprised to learn that 70% of the Citrus County vote in the last election went to Trump. Florida does not have a mask mandate, and only a minority of the diner’s customers wore one. I could not tell if one of those who did was being ironic. He had on a close-fitting face covering that said, “Trump 2020.” I wondered if whoever made them had registered a profit.

A few days later we went to Grannie’s, a restaurant similar to the Biscuit Barn, for lunch. As we waited to be seated (another line), a customer at the counter who had rotated his seat to face the booths behind him was holding forth: “In my experience [he did not elaborate on that experience and I could not tell whether his listeners in the booth, who seemed to be listening attentively, even knew him], Biden is sick, very sick. They are injecting him with steroids, probably in the thigh, but soon that won’t work any longer. Biden is a socialist, but he is not liked by other socialists on twitter and stuff like that. An Asian will take over after Biden, someone born in Asia. But Biden is beholden to the Russians. The socialists will disregard the Constitution and not leave after four years, just like Pol Pot. Remember him? When socialists take over, they will disappear all sorts of people, including all the gays.” Some of the customers, including a man wearing a “Trump 2024: The Sequel” cap, gave express words of assent, but no one challenged or differed with the counter-sitting crackpot. His rant, given as far as I could tell without a hint of irony, continued as we were seated out of earshot at the other end of the diner.

In some significant ways this “lecture” was different from similar ones I have heard. First of all, he didn’t mention Trump or any other nut-job conservative. While he railed against “socialists,” and while he made comments about “Asians” and “Russians,” his was neither the usual diatribe against “illegals” nor, using racial code words, about Blacks or Jews.

The ranter may have overlooked including Blacks and Jews in his tirade since few from those communities reside in Citrus County (see above). In our driving about, we saw many varieties of Protestant churches — Baptist, Pentecostal, Church of Christ, and Methodist. There was even an Episcopal church that described itself as Anglican. Roman Catholic Churches were not abundant, but there were one or two. On the other hand, we never saw a synagogue. While I did see a sign for a Bahai institution, not surprisingly, there was not a hint of a mosque.

The rant quieted as the man ate his lunch, so we settled down to ordering. Although we had lunch at Grannie’s and breakfast at the Biscuit Barn, our meals had strong similarities. We were not eating food prepared in a chain restaurant, such is IHOP, Denny’s, or Applebees. The food may not have been distinctive enough to attract Guy Fieri, but neither place had cookie-cutter food. In both places, the prices were cheap, and copious helpings were served. I got biscuits and gravy at the Biscuit Barn. Something covering the entire plate and three or four inches high came out of the kitchen. People at the next table, who had had one of the largest pancakes I had ever seen, asked if I was going to eat what had been served. I responded that my cardiologist, for whom I was paying his children’s college tuition, was hoping I would. Grannie’s had several lunch specials that tempted me. I asked a server which she preferred between two choices. She drily replied, “I don’t know. I don’t eat chicken livers.” However, I do and got them, and they came with two sides. Enough food was served to feed three people, and I carted out enough chicken livers for a lunch with leftovers the next day. The biscuit and gravy cost $4.99; the chicken livers were $6.99.

I invariably chose fried okra as one of the sides. The spouse proudly proclaims her southern heritage at the merest provocation and will then lapse easily into a southern drawl. Even though I know her family’s Alabama roots, I have been somewhat dubious of the strength of her ties since she adamantly avoids okra. We were in the Seafood Seller & Cafe our first night out. I ordered blackened Mahi-mahi, although I remember when that fish in Florida was labeled dolphin or dolphinfish. Apparently, someone in the fishing industry decided that selling this species would be easier if the Hawaiian moniker was used and servers did not have to explain, “No, not that kind of dolphin.” (Which are you more likely to order: Chilean sea bass or Patagonian toothfish?) Our dinner came with the standard two sides. I chose fried okra as one of mine. The fish was perfectly cooked with a delicious rub. The okra was as lightly breaded as any version I had ever had and perfectly fried. With some insistence on my part, the spouse tried the southern vegetable and pronounced it not just good but delicious. At other restaurant meals we also got fried okra, and while that first night’s may have been the best, the spouse liked all but one, which she criticized for “tasting too much like okra.”

Inexpensive, large quantities, and fried food is a recipe for being overweight. At the resort where we were staying, we found that many guests, both men and women, were grossly overweight. Too many smoked or vaped, and many were blanketed in tattoos. I presumed that few held down a job that required a college degree. I do not know where these tattooed tubbies came from, but I assumed it was reasonably nearby because they blended well into the Crystal River milieu.

So, without consciously thinking about it, I found myself judging these people by their appearance, assuming that they were somewhat ignorant folks who didn’t take care of themselves or their families. One day, however, I realized that I needed to reassess those assumptions. Most of the adults at the resort were part of a wholesome nuclear family. A mother and father were routinely accompanied by two, three, or four children. One white couple had what appeared to be four children – two of them black. I had been looking down on these people, but then I realized that I had heard no unpleasantness between any couple. The kids were uniformly well-behaved as they laughed and splashed in the pool or played volleyball and shuffleboard. Parents patiently tried to teach kids how to use an unfamiliar croquet mallet. Parents did not find it necessary to yell at children to keep them in line, and siblings regularly looked out for each other. I heard no child cry. My biases about the way they looked presumed a bad family life, but my observations had proven me wrong. And I felt a bit wiser, for I am always a bit wiser whenever I recognize and adjust my prejudices.

I live in a bubble. I was reminded of that again on our trip to Crystal River, Florida. We were enticed there by the possibility of swimming with manatees, but while in Citrus County we also set off to kayak on the Rainbow River. We did not kayak. I was not sure how my poor ol’ damaged and robotic knees would do in a kayak, so the outfitter’s proprietor suggested that we use a canoe with a kayak paddle.

          We had a great couple of hours. We were driven upstream in a decrepit ex-school bus that still bore signs telling students to be silent when approaching a railroad crossing. A couple of the outfitter’s men got us comfortably into the canoe and pushed us out into the stream, which flowed gently. We could paddle, but even when we did not, we drifted softly towards our landing place four miles away. We did not exactly feel like explorers, but the weather was nice, the river beautiful, and we were in a canoe in country not traversed by us before.

Rainbow River is spring-fed and crystal clear. We could see straight through eight or ten feet to the bottom. Strict rules are in place to keep the river pristine. Nothing disposable can be brought onto the river, or as one restriction put it, every container had to be something that could be put into a dishwasher. The strictures were working. We did not see one can or baggie or any other trash on or in the river.

The river is a “no-wake” zone, and the few power boats were compliant. We got close to birds and turtles. The stream was lined with many interesting-looking houses. This was the one place in Citrus County where I did fantasize about buying property. (The spouse spoke to a man at the river’s edge to compliment him on his house with a wrap-around porch. He thanked her and said that the only thing wrong with it is that he had to clear the seaweed that collected around the pilings of his dock. I asked how long he had lived there. He replied, “Twenty years.” I indicated that that was not all that long, and he laughed and said that at his age—he looked younger than me—it was “a blink of an eye.” His pleasantness made the thought of moving nearby even more desirable.) We saw kids playing in the water and the always-enticing rope swing that went out over the water. Peaceful.

          After two hours or so, we pulled into the outfitter company’s landing place. The owner was there. And here began the realization of my bubbledom. He helped us out of the canoe, and while doing so indicated that he had lived in many places in Florida and elsewhere. It was because he was an army brat. His father was now retired and living in Key West. A bit later, as I waited for the spouse to complete some ablutions, one of the young members of the outfitter’s staff said to me, “Did you like the trip, sir?” I indicated that I had, and he asked, “Did the kayak paddles work out, sir?” After I answered, he said, “Mention us on Tripadvisor, sir.” I said, “Which branch of the services was your Dad in?” He asked, “How did you know that?” “All the ‘sirs’” I said. “Oh,” he said, “that was drilled into me at an early age.” I asked about the places that he had lived, and he said, “Not many. My father retired shortly after I was born and became a corrections officer.” He named several incarceration facilities that meant nothing to me, but I did think to myself that there was something oxymoronic about a Sunshine State prison.

          I then realized that I don’t often speak to children of the military. I have friends and relatives, mostly my age, who have been in the military, but they did not make a career out of it. They put in their two, three, or four years and got on with their lives. I have lived in small-town Wisconsin, Brooklyn, and Northeast Pennsylvania, places where the military has little presence. Of course, in some areas of the country and in some social strata, the military and the ex-military are ever-present and an important part of the society and the local economies. I know that these military people have had different experiences from me and others in my circles. I am also aware that they comprise a large chunk of this country, but I seldom interact with them or their children. Without that intercourse, it is easy for me to assume that I know what their attitudes and outlooks will be. For example, I told the young man whose father had become a corrections officer that I had done some work as a Florida public defender. I said that I was not very familiar with the Florida prisons but that I had worked on a capital case where the jury had voted for death, but the judge had overruled the jury. He replied, “Bummer.” This response fit my preconceptions of the son of a military man who went on to become a corrections officer. A couple other interactions on the Florida trip, however, showed me that my snap judgments might not always be right.

           An adult brother and sister were with their mother on the swim-with-the-manatees boat. The man, Jim, told me that his “partner was in the Navy.” He and the partner had been together for fifteen years and been married for three. They got hitched when the partner was stationed in North Carolina and soon after single-sex marriage became legal there. I asked if they had had to hide their relationship from the Navy when the two first got together. Jim said that they hadn’t, and the partner’s coworkers had been accepting of their relationship.

Jim and his partner were currently living apart. The partner was stationed in Virginia while Jim was living in Birmingham, but in six months, the Navy partner was going to get a new post in Tampa, and Jim was going to move to Florida to join him. I said, with a smile, that sometimes it was good to be apart, and Jim laughed. He said that he was neat while his partner could not go from the couch to the bathroom “without leaving a trail.”

          I asked Jim what he was going to do in Tampa. He had few worries about finding a job. He was a bartender, he said, and experienced bartenders could always find work. Later in the trip, he said that he was comfortable in the water because his mother had been a bartender at a beachfront place in Florida, and he had grown up swimming in the Gulf. His husband was going to retire in two years, after twenty-three years of service, when he would get his next promotion. I asked what the partner was then going to do, and Jim replied that he was going to do the same kind of work as a civilian that he did in the Navy. I asked if the civilians got paid more, and Jim, to my surprise, told me that his partner now made $110,000 and would get $80,000 as a civilian but, of course, the partner would also then be getting a Navy pension.

          His sister and mother listened to our conversation, and it was clear that they were completely accepting of Jim and his marriage. I saw that the mother had tattooed on her foot, “Love never fails.” I made a lame joke about the truth of this saying, and she said that she liked the whole passage, which she said came from one of the Corinthians. I did not recognize it, and I assumed that either the slenderness of my biblical knowledge or the increasing fallibility of my memory had let me down. When I checked on the passage after returning to Brooklyn, however, I felt better. “Love never fails” comes from I Corinthians 8, which is part of the famous Corinthian “love” chapter, but in the Bible I was given by my parents to me more than a blink of an eye ago on my tenth birthday (and which the spouse has recently rebound because it was falling apart), the passage is translated slightly differently: “Love never ends.”

          When I saw the mother’s tattoo, I wanted to ask her about her religious beliefs and about her reaction to the conservatives who now insist that their constitutional religious liberty allows them to discriminate against her son and his husband, but I decided that a boat trip whose purpose was to go swimming with manatees was not exactly the right time for such a discussion. (I do have SOME sense of decorum.) On the other hand, until I talked by happenstance with Jim, my assumptions were that gay people still had difficulties being in the military. (When I told the NBP about this encounter, they laughed at my naïvete: “Dad, it’s the Navy!”) And I would have assumed that it was the Navy spouse who was the neat one.

          Another encounter also taught me to question my unconscious assumptions about military people. The spouse and I had just come from lunch at a funky little tea house with a slight feel of Californian New Age-ism (it was a tea house, after all). On the way to our rental car, we stopped to look at the many decals and stickers on the back of an SUV in the parking lot. A woman behind me said, “It’s like a library.” I soon learned that the attractive woman who owned the SUV was a retired army veteran of over twenty years’ service; her car did sport a veteran’s decal. I saw other ones consistent with my assumptions about a former military person: “Support Your Local Police” and “Protect our Flag.” Others, however, did not necessarily fit my preconceptions of what I might read on a veteran’s car: “Don’t Abuse Animals.” And I would not have assumed that the car belonged to a twenty-year armed services veteran if all I had seen was the decal that indicated the owner was a Sierra Club member. I should learn by now that people are not always so easy to type.

          I had seen them before in other Florida places. The one I saw from a few feet above was cruising the byways of a marina. Tapered at the front with a squashed-in face and tapered in the back with one fin that propelled it soundlessly, the manatee had a girth that would have required holding hands with several others to encircle it. It was huge, but maybe because it moved slowly and seemingly effortlessly, it seemed loveable, huggable. Crystal River, Florida, however, offered more than the opportunity of standing on a dock and looking down at one; it promised the chance to swim with manatees.

Crystal River is dotted with companies that offer the manatee experience. The spouse had booked us with one in advance over the internet, which was fortunate since many of the time slots were already filled. Eight or ten of us adventurers congregated in a little building a few blocks from the water’s edge at the appointed time for an introductory lecture and film about manatees and how to behave in the water with them, lessons that continued on the boat from the boat captain John and the in-water guide Shelley.

          The half-ton mammals had once nearly disappeared from the Florida habitat. The full-grown ones have few natural predators in the sea, but humans have harvested them for food and run over them with their motor boats. Now, thankfully, Florida is working to preserve them, and their numbers are increasing.

In spite of their blubbery appearance, the half-ton animals have little fat. Instead, their digestive system is large and takes up a large part of their body cavity. The animals eat up to 15% of their weight each day, feeding on sea grasses and other vegetation on the bottom of coastal waters and brackish streams. Manatees do not see well, and they generally move slowly. As a result, they do not easily get out of the way of fast-moving boats. It is too common to see a manatee back scarred by a boat propeller.

We were cautioned not to attempt to touch one, but that we could put out a hand and a manatee might swim up and touch it. We also were cautioned not to stir up sediment on the bay’s bottom so that the water’s visibility would be as good as possible.

Without layers of fat, manatees are not well insulated. They physically deteriorate in water below sixty-eight degrees Fahrenheit. The streams and bays of Crystal River have many springs whose waters flow at a constant seventy-two degrees throughout the year, and the manatees are drawn to these life-affirming springs when other nearby waters are colder. We were there in March, which was the end of the Crystal River manatee season because the Gulf and inland waters were warming up. We were told that we would no doubt see a few of the creatures, but in cooler months dozens or more would congregate in one of the fresh-water springs that surround the bay.

After our introductory lessons, we were all handed a wetsuit and shooed off to dressing rooms. After getting into swimming gear, which was hard when zippers were in back, we, feeling a bit conspicuous in our new attire, trundled into a van for a short ride to a dock where we clambered onto a pontoon boat. As we slowly (“no wake zone”) went out into the bay, we did that tourist thing of announcing where we were from. I don’t remember all the travelers, just the bartender and his sister and mother, a mother and two high school girls from a small town in northern Wisconsin, and surprisingly, a sixtyish couple from… Hawaii. She explained why they were vacationing in Florida—perhaps relatives. It did seem odd. When the spouse or I announced that we were from Brooklyn, we both felt that the captain tensed, became hostile and a bit snide about New York City. But charm (the spouse), wit (both of us), and self-deprecatory humor (me) won him over so he treated us just as if we were normal tourists from, for example, one of the Greenvilles.

Shelley and John told us that manatees swimming near the surface made a distinctive swirl that could be spotted on the water. Okay, if you say so. They could discern this a whole lot better than the rest of us, but they would direct our gaze, and we could pretend to see a few of the animals as they surfaced. Finally the engine was cut and an anchor was gently placed in the water. Our guides had spotted a several manatees nearby. We were to quietly get out of the boat with mask, snorkel and supporting float (“the noodle”) and arrange ourselves on the noodle in a “dead man’s float,” so as not to disturb the creatures nearby. Here is where I confess my ineptitude. It turns out I can’t negotiate breathing with a snorkel. Had I continued trying, it was clear that I was going to drown. So I mostly stood quietly in the water (it was quite shallow), and one manatee swam soundlessly past my leg. The spouse assumed the dead man’s position easily but couldn’t seem to find a beast. Shelley, however, took her by the hand and brought her to several of them, including a mother and calf. The spouse held out her hand as instructed, and, after a questioning look to Shelley, touched one. She said it felt like an elephant. After seeing the manatees, the guides took us to two springs where the water bubbled up through the sand from some subterranean source creating crystalline pools so clear that you could see twenty feet to the bottom. After our adventures, we went back to the dock and then to change back into our civvies. I was happy to have seen a manatee a few feet from me, but mostly I was embarrassed by my ineptitude. The spouse, on the other hand, who had been unsure whether she wanted to do this adventure, was high from the experience. I was pleased at her smile and her happy babbling about the manatees as we went back to the hotel.

Stacia, a server in the resort’s restaurant, was named after her grandmother, who lived in New Jersey but was born in Poland. The grandmother married a Native American of the Leni Lenape nation. Their son, Stacia’s father, was, thus, half Polish and half Indian. He married a woman who Stacia said “was Italian on both sides,” and thus Stacia is a quarter Polish and a quarter Native American and half Italian. Her maiden name, Grover, reflected little of this heritage. Instead, she said that other kids made fun of her name because of that Muppet. “Kids are cruel,” she said almost under her breath. Stacia’s now married, and her last name is O’Connell. This makes her son . . . an American, completely American.

          “It’s as tall as the Empire State Building.” “It’s as big as a football field.” These are familiar phrases for describing something large, but in a Florida parking lot a man used a phrase to describe a capacity I had not heard before. He was pointing to the space in an SUV and told two other men, “There is enough space in there for three dead people.”

          At a nearby table at the Biscuit Barn in Homosassa, Florida, a woman at the next table was explaining to her breakfast companion, “It was in Minnesota.” Her husband quietly muttered something to her, and she said, “It was in Minnesota or Montana. Montana. One of those states.” Provincial New Yorkers are not alone in knowing little of American geography of places that do not have a saltwater coastline.

          The guest came up to the front desk and without preface explained to the clerk that he knew of a remedy for cancer, apparently any kind of cancer. It was a medicine or an herb that could be obtained online. He continued, “A woman was about to die of breast cancer. She took it and went home from the hospital cured in two weeks. Do you know anyone who has cancer?” Hesitantly, the clerk mentioned his mother, and the guest urged the clerk to get his mother this cancer cure. The guest’s parting salutation included calling the clerk, “Brother.”

          As we were sitting outside our room near a path for guests to the pool, the spouse nudged me and whispered, “Look, a book.” A guest was carrying a book. After four days at the resort, this was the first time either of us had seen anyone besides ourselves with any reading material. In fact, I realized, I had seen few people staring at a phone. We were not in a center of reading. The resort seemed to have known its guests. Many hotels have some place for guests to exchange books. I asked a clerk if there were such a place in the Plantation at Crystal River, and I received a look of bewilderment. No books were on sale in the gift shop. On my last morning I was following my routine at the resort: I got a cup of coffee in my travel mug and looked for a place to read for a while. Every other day I went outside—to tables overlooking the golf course, a bench near the dock where fisherman departed for the day, a chair by the pool—but it was raining, and I wandered into an unoccupied room adjacent to the dining room. I had finally found the hotel’s “library.” On built-in shelves, thirteen Reader’s Digest condensed books were artfully arranged on the ends of four shelves. Stacked in the middle of one shelf were three legal books containing the reports of court decisions from the southeast United States. None of the books looked as if it had been touched since its placement.

          We were in search of a book because the spouse had finished the Michael Connelly she was reading and was looking for something for the rest of our stay and the homeward journey. We went to the internet and were not surprised to learn that there was nothing other than a Christian bookstore in Crystal River. I said, “Let’s go to a CVS or Walgreens. They’ll have a rack of paperbacks.” We went to the more convenient CVS and inquired. The clerk with a bit of regret in her voice said, “They [left undefined] don’t give us as many as they used to.” She led us to a paltry selection of books. Luckily the spouse spotted one by Elizabeth George, which the spouse, saying it was not one of the author’s best, read. The internet also revealed a used bookstore further into Florida’s interior. When the spouse and I learn of a used bookstore on a trip, it warrants a field trip. We found it in a rundown, strangely-zoned neighborhood mixing residential homes and what appeared to be former residences now used as doctors’ offices and other businesses. The bookstore had a For Sale sign on its unkempt lawn, but, while not well organized, the store had used books of all sorts spilling off its many shelves. The owner said she had 35,000 volumes! We browsed for a half hour and bought a half dozen books which made our luggage going home needlessly heavy.

          After we had bid our fond farewell to Crystal River and as we were driving to Tampa to catch the United flight to Newark, we spotted a truck sporting the sign, “Voted #1 Garage Door Company in Citrus County.” We pondered this. How many garage door companies were there in tiny Citrus County? If a company installs or repairs your garage door and does a good job, you probably would not see that company again for years, maybe even a decade or more. What information did those voters have about the present quality of the company? How was this referendum carried out? With these questions burning in our minds, we returned to our Brooklyn home where there are no garage doors.

Posted on by rjonakait · 1 Comment

Swimming with the Manatees (concluded)

The entire “Swimming with the Manatees” will be posted in order on April 16)

Stacia, a server in the resort’s restaurant, was named after her grandmother, who lived in New Jersey but was born in Poland. The grandmother married a Native American of the Leni Lenape nation. Their son, Stacia’s father, was, thus, half Polish and half Indian. He married a woman who Stacia said “was Italian on both sides,” and thus Stacia is a quarter Polish and a quarter Native American and half Italian. Her maiden name, Grover, reflected little of this heritage. Instead, she said that other kids made fun of her name because of that Muppet. “Kids are cruel,” she said almost under her breath. Stacia’s now married, and her last name is O’Connell. This makes her son . . . an American, completely American.

          “It’s as tall as the Empire State Building.” “It’s as big as a football field.” These are familiar phrases for describing something large, but in a Florida parking lot a man used a phrase to describe a capacity I had not heard before. He was pointing to the space in an SUV and told two other men, “There is enough space in there for three dead people.”

          At a nearby table at the Biscuit Barn in Homosassa, Florida, a woman at the next table was explaining to her breakfast companion, “It was in Minnesota.” Her husband quietly muttered something to her, and she said, “It was in Minnesota or Montana. Montana. One of those states.” Provincial New Yorkers are not alone in knowing little of American geography of places that do not have a saltwater coastline.

          The guest came up to the front desk and without preface explained to the clerk that he knew of a remedy for cancer, apparently any kind of cancer. It was a medicine or an herb that could be obtained online. He continued, “A woman was about to die of breast cancer. She took it and went home from the hospital cured in two weeks. Do you know anyone who has cancer?” Hesitantly, the clerk mentioned his mother, and the guest urged the clerk to get his mother this cancer cure. The guest’s parting salutation included calling the clerk, “Brother.”

          As we were sitting outside our room near a path for guests to the pool, the spouse nudged me and whispered, “Look, a book.” A guest was carrying a book. After four days at the resort, this was the first time either of us had seen anyone besides ourselves with any reading material. In fact, I realized, I had seen few people staring at a phone. We were not in a center of reading. The resort seemed to have known its guests. Many hotels have some place for guests to exchange books. I asked a clerk if there were such a place in the Plantation at Crystal River, and I received a look of bewilderment. No books were on sale in the gift shop. On my last morning I was following my routine at the resort: I got a cup of coffee in my travel mug and looked for a place to read for a while. Every other day I went outside—to tables overlooking the golf course, a bench near the dock where fisherman departed for the day, a chair by the pool—but it was raining, and I wandered into an unoccupied room adjacent to the dining room. I had finally found the hotel’s “library.” On built-in shelves, thirteen Reader’s Digest condensed books were artfully arranged on the ends of four shelves. Stacked in the middle of one shelf were three legal books containing the reports of court decisions from the southeast United States. None of the books looked as if it had been touched since its placement.

          We were in search of a book because the spouse had finished the Michael Connelly she was reading and was looking for something for the rest of our stay and the homeward journey. We went to the internet and were not surprised to learn that there was nothing other than a Christian bookstore in Crystal River. I said, “Let’s go to a CVS or Walgreens. They’ll have a rack of paperbacks.” We went to the more convenient CVS and inquired. The clerk with a bit of regret in her voice said, “They [left undefined] don’t give us as many as they used to.” She led us to a paltry selection of books. Luckily the spouse spotted one by Elizabeth George, which the spouse, saying it was not one of the author’s best, read. The internet also revealed a used bookstore further into Florida’s interior. When the spouse and I learn of a used bookstore on a trip, it warrants a field trip. We found it in a rundown, strangely-zoned neighborhood mixing residential homes and what appeared to be former residences now used as doctors’ offices and other businesses. The bookstore had a For Sale sign on its unkempt lawn, but, while not well organized, the store had used books of all sorts spilling off its many shelves. The owner said she had 35,000 volumes! We browsed for a half hour and bought a half dozen books which made our luggage going home needlessly heavy.

          After we had bid our fond farewell to Crystal River and as we were driving to Tampa to catch the United flight to Newark, we spotted a truck sporting the sign, “Voted #1 Garage Door Company in Citrus County.” We pondered this. How many garage door companies were there in tiny Citrus County? If a company installs or repairs your garage door and does a good job, you probably would not see that company again for years, maybe even a decade or more. What information did those voters have about the present quality of the company? How was this referendum carried out? With these questions burning in our minds, we returned to our Brooklyn home where there are no garage doors.

“Swimming with the Manatees” in its entirety will be posted on Friday, April 16.

Posted on by rjonakait

Swimming with the Manatees (continued)

I had seen them before in other Florida places. The one I saw from a few feet above was cruising the byways of a marina. Tapered at the front with a squashed-in face and tapered in the back with one fin that propelled it soundlessly, the manatee had a girth that would have required holding hands with several others to encircle it. It was huge, but maybe because it moved slowly and seemingly effortlessly, it seemed loveable, huggable. Crystal River, Florida, however, offered more than the opportunity of standing on a dock and looking down at one; it promised the chance to swim with manatees.

Crystal River is dotted with companies that offer the manatee experience. The spouse had booked us with one in advance over the internet, which was fortunate since many of the time slots were already filled. Eight or ten of us adventurers congregated in a little building a few blocks from the water’s edge at the appointed time for an introductory lecture and film about manatees and how to behave in the water with them, lessons that continued on the boat from the boat captain John and the in-water guide Shelley.

The half-ton mammals had once nearly disappeared from the Florida habitat. The full-grown ones have few natural predators in the sea, but humans have harvested them for food and run over them with their motor boats. Now, thankfully, Florida is working to preserve them, and their numbers are increasing.

In spite of their blubbery appearance, the half-ton animals have little fat. Instead, their digestive system is large and takes up a large part of their body cavity. The animals eat up to 15% of their weight each day, feeding on sea grasses and other vegetation on the bottom of coastal waters and brackish streams. Manatees do not see well, and they generally move slowly. As a result, they do not easily get out of the way of fast-moving boats. It is too common to see a manatee back scarred by a boat propeller.

We were cautioned not to attempt to touch one, but that we could put out a hand and a manatee might swim up and touch it. We also were cautioned not to stir up sediment on the bay’s bottom so that the water’s visibility would be as good as possible.

Without layers of fat, manatees are not well insulated. They physically deteriorate in water below sixty-eight degrees Fahrenheit. The streams and bays of Crystal River have many springs whose waters flow at a constant seventy-two degrees throughout the year, and the manatees are drawn to these life-affirming springs when other nearby waters are colder. We were there in March, which was the end of the Crystal River manatee season because the Gulf and inland waters were warming up. We were told that we would no doubt see a few of the creatures, but in cooler months dozens or more would congregate in one of the fresh-water springs that surround the bay.

After our introductory lessons, we were all handed a wetsuit and shooed off to dressing rooms. After getting into swimming gear, which was hard when zippers were in back, we, feeling a bit conspicuous in our new attire, trundled into a van for a short ride to a dock where we clambered onto a pontoon boat. As we slowly (“no wake zone”) went out into the bay, we did that tourist thing of announcing where we were from. I don’t remember all the travelers, just the bartender and his sister and mother, a mother and two high school girls from a small town in northern Wisconsin, and surprisingly, a sixtyish couple from… Hawaii. She explained why they were vacationing in Florida—perhaps relatives. It did seem odd. When either the spouse or I announced that we were from Brooklyn, we both felt that the captain tensed, became hostile and a bit snide about New York City. But charm (the spouse), wit (both of us), and self-deprecatory humor (me) won him over so he treated us just as if we were normal tourists from, for example, one of the Greenvilles.

Shelley and John told us that manatees swimming near the surface made a distinctive swirl that could be spotted on the water. Okay, if you say so. They could discern this a whole lot better than the rest of us, but they would direct our gaze, and we could pretend to see a few of the animals as they surfaced. Finally the engine was cut and an anchor was gently placed in the water. Our guides had spotted a number of manatees nearby. We were to quietly get out of the boat with mask, snorkel and supporting float (“the noodle”) and arrange ourselves on the noodle in a “dead man’s float,” so as not to disturb the creatures nearby. Here is where I confess my ineptitude. It turns out I can’t negotiate breathing with a snorkel. Had I continued trying, it was clear that I was going to drown myself. So I mostly stood quietly in the water (it was quite shallow), and one manatee swam soundlessly past my leg. The spouse assumed the dead man’s position easily but couldn’t seem to find a beast. Shelly, however, took her by the hand and brought her to several of them, including a mother and calf. The spouse held out her hand as instructed, and, after a questioning look to Shelly, touched one. She said it felt like an elephant. After seeing the manatees, the guides took us to two springs where the water bubbled up through the sand from some subterranean source creating crystalline pools so clear that you could see twenty feet to the bottom. After our adventures, we went back to the dock and then to change back into our civvies. I was happy to have seen a manatee a few feet from me, but mostly I was embarrassed by my ineptitude. The spouse, on the other hand, who had been unsure whether she wanted to do this adventure, was high from the experience. I was pleased at her smile and her happy babbling about the manatees as we went back to the hotel.

(continued April 14)