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First Car. First Day in Court (continued).

 

My first car, bought to get me from my inexpensive neighborhood to my Chicago law school, had some problems. The inside handle on the driver’s side did not work. I would have to lower the window and open the door from the outside to get out. It did not have a radio. I bought a small transistor radio and propped it on the dashboard so I could listen to the great Larry Lujack. That soon got stolen, and I learned to hide the radio when I parked the car. The heat could not be turned off, which was a considerable defect in a sweltering Chicago summer. It did not have a gas gauge. It had a reserve tank. A lever needed to be turned when the car was filled up and then flipped back. When the main gas tank emptied, the lever would be flipped back for more gas. The first time I drove the car, I ran out of gas, but nothing happened when I engaged the reserve tank. It had not been filled. I coasted to a stop in some not entirely safe place and trudged to a filling station for a can of gas. I learned to note the mileage when I filled up so that I could determine when I needed gas. The car was underpowered. On the highway, it was pedal to the metal, but even so, that VW could not make seventy. To pass a truck on the interstate that was going a few miles an hour slower, I would have to channel my NASCAR and get as close to the semi as possible to draft it, and then pull sharply to the left to slingshot myself around it. Scary, but, hey, I was young. The girlfriend—soon to be the spouse—did not appreciate the skill and derring-do of the maneuver. I learned that the road surfaces in Wisconsin and Illinois must have had slightly different compositions, because the car went a tad faster in Wisconsin. When the temperatures hovered near zero, as they often did in those Chicago winters, the car might not start, but if I could get the car rolling down even the slightest of hills or from pushing, I could pop the clutch, and the car would spring (an exaggeration) to life.

The car, however, had positive qualities. The steering and brakes worked, and it took me to many parts of Chicago I would not have otherwise experienced. I loved that car.

But it had one other flaw: It did not have a front bumper. This seemed unimportant. It had no effect on my driving. The steering was not affected. The brakes were not affected. But one day driving in perhaps a part of Chicago that was the farthest away from the university campus and my apartment, I was pulled over by a police officer. I had not been speeding. I didn’t think that I had run a light or a stop sign. I lowered my window, and the officer did that slow walk over to my car. (Are they taught not to walk quickly to a car they pulled over? Is this done to increase the pulled-over driver’s tension? Does that tension serve a purpose or do the cops just like increasing the driver’s concern? Is it merely a little power play?) “Your car does not have a front bumper,” the uniformed man said. He imparted this wisdom as if the fender must have just fallen off and I had not notice or that I had not otherwise been aware that in the bumper department the car was deficient to the tune of one. I said, “Yes.” He said, “You are driving an unsafe vehicle,” pronouncing that last word in three distinct syllables with the last one sounding like ‘kill’. I had run my course of snappy comebacks and was quiet for a bit but finally responded, “I wasn’t aware that made it unsafe.” This was the truth; I had never before contemplated this particular issue. I waited; he pondered. He broke the silence. “I am just giving you a warning. Get it fixed.” I thanked him. He walked more quickly back to his vehicle and drove off.

I didn’t know where to get a bumper for an old VW or who would attach it. I did figure that it would probably cost more than the car was worth–money I did not have. By then I had driven the car for more than half a year all over Chicago. The car, no doubt, had been seen by many police officers who apparently had not considered it a death-dealing or maiming missile. I had only been in the Chicago neighborhood where I had been stopped by happenstance. I determined that it would be easy to avoid it in the future where that one cop was stationed. So, I did; I stayed out of it.

I continued to drive it to school and many other parts of Chicago, Illinois, and Wisconsin without a problem. Then months later I saw the bubble light of a cop car behind me in the university neighborhood, and I pull over. Wondering what I had done wrong, I looked at the rear view mirror to see a cop slowly, slowly approaching me. It was the same friggin’ one who stopped me before! He immediately said, “I see you didn’t get it fixed. You’re getting a ticket for an unsafe vehicle.” And he immediately wrote it out.

(Concluded on October 22)

Related Post:

https://ameliasdad.blog/?s=Hillbilly+Chicago

 

 

Posted on by rjonakait

First Car. First Day in Court.

My first car led to my first day in court. I loved that car. I had different emotions about that court appearance.

I was in law school in Chicago. Part of the reason I was in law school there was because I had wanted to live in a big city. I had grown up in a small Wisconsin town and gone to a New Jersey college that seemed, and in many ways was, isolated from the world. Even so, that college had been good for me. My high school education had been adequate at best, and the college presented, through its professors, courses, and classmates, new intellectual frontiers. I learned much there, including that I could more than hold myself with the “best.” In our self-congratulatory way, all of us at the college–students, faculty and administrators–placed ourselves in that “best” category. We were the elite.

The school also exposed me to new social settings. My town had only public high schools, but now I encountered a prep school culture. My father was a janitor, and almost all my classmates came from higher, often much higher, economic circumstances. I learned not to be intimidated by money and social standing.

After a while, however, the conformity and the political and societal apathy the place generated began to weigh on me. There was a bigger world. I spent quite a few college weekends taking the bus into New York and walking its streets, which, to me in those days, meant the streets of Manhattan. I felt drawn to the bustle and energy and was convinced that I needed to experience big city life. Law school presented that opportunity.

My classmates who had their choice of law schools overwhelmingly opted for the one in what I thought was in another isolated spot. I did not want to be in New Haven, but I thought Boston would be ok. Even though I had become fascinated with New York, almost no one, if they had other choices, opted for what was then the law school there, and I, too, fell into that category. The feeling about Chicago was even stronger, not because the law school did not have prestige, but because it was in Chicago. While I admit that I had absorbed some East Coast snobbery, I did not fear the Midwest. After all, I had grown up there.

After the admission letters arrived, twenty-one of us could choose between New Haven and Boston. Nineteen picked Connecticut; one chose Massachusetts. I was the only one who picked Illinois.

Money was the deciding factor. Chicago was certainly a city, and in those days, I also put Boston in that category. But I wasn’t going to law school just to get out of small-town life. I actually did want to become a lawyer. However, I knew that I was not going to be the kind of lawyer who would make much money (some predictions turn out to be true). I was going to be the kind of lawyer who fought for civil liberties and civil rights, for the downtrodden, against “the man,” be that corporations or the government.

I did not have the resources to pay for law school. I needed financial aid. The new Haven and Chicago schools offered respectable aid packages, and I thought that along with part-time work, I could manage. The Boston school, however, dangled a package that was half scholarship and half loan. If I matriculated there, by graduation I would have what a sizeable debt. I did not want loan payments to be a determinant of what kind of legal position I would have to take upon graduation. So off I went to Chicago with its scholarship offer. I wrote to the other schools explaining the reasons for my Chicago choice, hoping they would up their antes. New Haven responded with a gracious congratulatory note. Boston wrote, in effect, that it did not have to buy students and that it was not unhappy to see me go elsewhere.

I started to experience Chicago. It was scary and exhilarating and had many places to explore and experience. All of that excited me; I belonged in a big city. At first, I lived in the university neighborhood, but while it was in the city, it did not truly feel part of the city. It was its own enclave, and I wanted more of the real Chicago. Besides the apartment was terrible. I found a cheap apartment (no central heat) several miles west of the campus in one of Chicago’s many ethnic neighborhoods—this one was primarily Polish-American. But now I needed a car to get to my classes. I went to used car lots and found a VW beetle. The odometer said something like 50,000 miles, but that I am sure was misleading. Either it meant 150,000 or it had been turned back. The dealership did not seem high on the integrity scale. The spare tire, which was in the car when I first saw it, had disappeared when I bought it, which I only discovered some time later. It cost $300, which I did not have, but the brother lent me money.

(continued on Oct.19)

Related Post:

https://ameliasdad.blog/?s=Hillbilly+Chicago

Posted on by rjonakait

Snippets

Supposedly when Margot Asquith met Jean Harlow, Harlow kept pronouncing all the letters in Margot.  In exasperation, Asquith finally said, “The ‘t’ in Margot is silent just like the ‘t’ in Harlow.”

“That night I discovered the improbable pleasure of contemplating the body of a sleeping woman without the urgencies of desire or the obstacles of desire.” Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Memories of My Melancholy Whores.

The ad for a New York City restaurant said: “Farm to table Greek food.” I had some questions.

Because of recent movies and documentaries, clips are being played of the most famous passage from President John F. Kennedy’s Let’s-Go-Mooning Speech: “We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.” Memorable. Inspirational. But piffle. No country, no one, should choose to do something because it is hard. Building a perpetual motion machine is hard. Turning lead into gold is hard. Hopping on one foot for twenty-four straight hours is hard. Their difficulty is not a reason to commit to attempting them. The easiness of doing something is also not a reason to do or not to do it. The starting point should not be the difficulty or ease of a project. The starting point should be whether the goal is worth the effort.

I sporadically post First Sentences. For whatever the reason, these are sentences that attract me. My standard is that it be the first sentence, and not more, of the introduction or the initial chapter of a book I am reading or one that I have read that is on my shelves. I don’t do research and find books that I have read but no longer have. If any such opening passages have intrigued you, please feel free to send them to me through the contact link so that I can post them.

A hurricane pummels a state rife with conservative politicians. These are the officeholders who, when running for office, label opponents as devoted to tax-and-spend, who decry Washington, who almost weep over Big Government. But in the aftermath of the storm they beseech Washington for tax dollars to be spent on them by big government agencies. Hypocrisy never seems to occur to them. Irony is beyond them.

The academic paper’s “basic premise appears to be that if you are truly stupid you not only do things stupidly but are in all likelihood too stupid to realize how stupidly you are doing them.” Bill Bryson, The Road to Little Dribbling: Adventures of an American in Britain.

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What Trump Revolution? (Concluded)

The real takeaway from the 2016 election is not that Trump did so well, but that Clinton did so poorly. Even with more voters in 2016 than 2012, Clinton got slightly fewer votes than Obama—65,853,516 to 65,899,660—with a big drop in the percentage of the ballots. Obama got a majority of the vote, 51.6 percent, while Clinton got 48.18 percent. Trump did not get a higher percentage than Romney four years earlier, but Clinton got significantly less than Obama. Wasn’t the revolution not so much for Trump as against Clinton?

Perhaps the real revolution in 2016 was not for Trump but in favor of third parties. Obama and Romney together got 98.8 percent of the vote. Clinton and Trump together got 94.3 percent. The combined Libertarian and Green vote increased by over 300 percent. That third-party total went from 1.7 million in 2012 to 5.9 million in 2016.

Much has been made of states that Obama won, but whose electoral votes went to Trump and swung the election to him. Let’s look more closely at three of them: Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.

Trump did significantly better than Romney had done in Pennsylvania. Trump got 2,912,941 votes while Romney got 2,619,583. This increase had two components. About 376,000 more ballots were cast in 2016 than in 2012, but in addition Trump did better percentagewise. He got 48.8 percent (Clinton got 47.6 percent) while Romney got 46.8 percent (Obama got 52.0 percent) of the Pennsylvania vote. This would indicate some sort of Trump Revolution, but, if so, it was a limited one. It did not reach a majority. But notice something else. Trump and Clinton together garnered 96.4 percent of the total ballots, while in 2012, the major candidates received 98.8 percent. The third parties nearly trebled their votes in the four years, from 69,000 to 192,000. Their share went from 1.3 percent in 2012 to 3.6 in 2016. Trump won the Pennsylvania plurality by 70,000 votes while the third-party votes increased by much more than that. If Pennsylvania indicated a Trump Revolution, it also indicated a Third-Party Revolution, a move to third parties that allowed Trump to get the plurality and Pennsylvania’s electoral votes. Remember Stacey who could not vote for Trump, but distrusted Clinton so she voted Green? We don’t know how she would have voted if there had been a different Democratic candidate, but did Trump really carry Pennsylvania because of a Trump Revolution or because Clinton, whatever the reasons, was not a good candidate and a sizeable number of voters went to third parties as a result?

The Michigan turnout did not increase in 2016 as much as the Pennsylvania vote did—65,000 more ballots were cast than in 2012. Trump, however, did get 265,00 more votes than Romney and garnered 47.3 percent of the total compared to Romney’s 44.6. But again “others” made the difference. In 2012, only 1.4 percent of the ballots were not cast for the major parties, while in 2016 it was 5.2 percent, with the totals increasing from 65,000 to 250,000. Trump’s plurality (again not a majority) was a mere 10,000 votes. The move to third parties again allowed him to win a plurality and get all of Michigan’s electoral votes.

In Wisconsin, 128,000 fewer ballots were cast in 2016 than four years earlier, and Trump got only 1,500 more votes than Romney. That doesn’t indicate a Trump Revolution as much as a lack of enthusiasm for both major candidates. However, Trump did win the plurality at 47.9 percent compared to Romney’s losing percentage at 45.9. Trump’s margin was 27,000 votes, and again the third parties swung the state. In 2012, they got 28,000 votes and 0.9 percent of the total. In 2016, third parties garnered 137,000 votes accounting for 5.4%.

What does this indicate? Was there a Trump Revolution that has changed the electoral landscape? Trump took these three key states, but he did not get a majority in any of them. In other words, the majority actually voted against Trump. In each of them, he won because Clinton performed poorly as much as Trump performed well. As a result, the third parties surged tipping each state to Trump.

What does this mean for the future? Is there an enduring Trump Revolution that has shifted the electoral patterns? Perhaps the first thing to note is that, of course, he did not get the majority of the vote in the country. He did not even get the plurality. What is seldom noted is that the percentage he did get was not better than what Romney got four years earlier. This certainly is not a revolution.

In some key states, however, he did do better than Romney, but even so, he did not get a majority in them, and third parties surged. Of course, the best guarantee of his winning such states the next time is to get more than 50 percent of the vote. At least so far, however, polls do not indicate that this is likely. Trump’s favorability ratings consistently hover just above 40 percent, and while he does much to appeal to what is called his base, he is not attracting voters outside that base.

If his support continues at less than 50 percent, Trump has to pray (although I doubt he does) that the third-party surge will continue on into the next presidential election, so he can win electoral votes with only pluralities. The real question, then, for the future is not whether there has been a Trump Revolution, but whether there has been a Third-Party Revolution. That seems unlikely. Wasn’t the increase in third-party votes in 2016 just the result, a circumstance unlikely to repeat itself?

 

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What Trump Revolution? (continued)

Many of the analyses of why Trump won are based on the premise that the 2016 election produced an enduring, seismic shift in the electorate.  An anecdote in Eliza Griswold’s book should make us rethink whether there truly was such a Trump Revolution. Amity and Prosperity is the story of a rural family in southwestern Pennsylvania and the problems they face when fracking starts nearby. Stacey, the main character, “didn’t buy the Trump craze” in 2016. Although she had had troubles with the EPA, she thought it should exist. She doubted that fracking could save Appalachia. Trump, to her, was just another pandering politician. On the other hand, she did not like Hillary Clinton either. She thought that Clinton was corrupt and no better on fracking than Trump. Stacey voted for the Green Party candidate, Jill Stein.

So, did Trump actually attract a new crop of voters to the Republican candidate? The answer seems to be yes. Many counties, like Stacey’s, swung from Obama in 2012 to Trump four years later. But perhaps many of the new Republican voters were not swinging to Trump as much as they were swinging away from Clinton. It turns out that for large swathes of previously Democratic voters she was not an attractive candidate. Some of those voters stayed home; some voted for Trump; and some voted for a third-party candidate. Why the antipathy for Clinton? Many reasons have been given. Some of her supporters claim that it was because she is a woman. Perhaps that was part of it. I once said to a friend who wanted to sit out the election because he liked neither major candidate, “Assess how you feel about Bill Clinton. Is your assessment of Hillary Clinton lower? If so, why? Her policies are similar to his and she has had more experience than he had when he ran for President. How much of the lower assessment is merely because she is a woman?” He pondered and just replied that for whatever the reason, he was not as enthusiastic about her as he had been for Bill. (He did end up voting for Hillary because he came to believe it was most to stop the Donald.)

I was not an enthusiastic supporter of hers, and I hope her gender was not the reason. I would like to think my lack of enthusiasm had good reasons, but I am not sure that another phenomenon did not affect me as well as many others. Hillary Clinton has been regularly attacked by the right wing for a long time, at least since her husband ran for the presidency a quarter-century ago. Few modern public figures have been vilified as much and for as long as she has been. This drumbeat of castigation surely affected many, and I wondered if I were truly immune. As Pierre Augustin Caron de Beumarchais has been quoted as saying, “Villify! Villify! Some of it will always stick.”

No matter whether those who distrusted Clinton had good reasons or not, many in 2016 found they could not vote for her, and at least some of them voted for Trump. If, however, these Trump votes were not as much affirmative votes for him as votes against Clinton, they don’t seem to herald an enduring Trump Revolution.

On the other hand, much reporting indicates that many previous Obama voters were affirmatively attracted to Trump and that is what made for the Trump Revolt. The implication is that something historic was going on, but that assumption should be questioned. Doesn’t something similar happen every time the White House changes parties? When Kennedy succeeded Eisenhower, at least some Ike voters did not vote for the 1960 Republican candidate. Similar electoral movements have occurred when Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama were elected president. Was the Trump election really different?

We also know (although he may not want to believe it) that Trump did not even get the plurality of the vote. Whatever the revolution, it was not a majority one. And even if it is true that he attracted many voters that had not before voted Republican, we should also realize that he drove away many voters who could have been expected to vote Republican.

Compare 2012 and 2016 election results. (Different sources do not always give the same nationwide vote totals, but, for consistency, I am using figures from the Federal Election Commission website.) In 2012, Mitt Romney got 60,932,152 votes. Four years later, Trump received 62,984,825. Trump got two million more votes than Romney but that does not mean that he made great inroads into previously Democratic voters.          Instead, about 7.5 million more people voted in 2016 than 2012. With more voters as the country’s population increased, it is not surprising that Trump got more votes than Romney. More interesting than the vote totals for Romney and Trump is the percentage of the vote for each. Romney received 47.21 percent of the nationwide ballots, while Trump got 46.09 percent. In other words, there was no dramatic swing to him compared to the previous election. Analyses I have seen expend a good deal of effort dissecting the voters Trump attracted; they also ought to equally examine the voters Trump drove away. For example, The Great Revolt: Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics mentions that “Trump’s margin was weaker than Romney’s in 86 of the 100 most educated counties—a fact that held true regardless of the jurisdiction’s normal partisan leanings.” But the authors set out only to interview voters in some swing states who shifted from Obama to Trump when there were at least as many voters who swung away from him. If that first group constitutes some new populist coalition, how should we label the at-least-as-significant second group?

(concluded October 12)

Posted on by rjonakait

What Trump Revolution?

 

Trump won. People were shocked. Analyses followed. I have had conversations, heard talks, looked at websites, read newspapers and magazine articles that seek to explain how we got our President. I have also read books that shed varying degrees of light on 2016, including Eliza Griswold, Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America; Jennifer Haigh, Heat and Light; Salena Zito and Brad Todd, The Great Revolt: Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics: Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land; Amy Goldstein, Janesville: An American Story: and J.D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy.

All these books have merit. They indicate that there was not one, simple answer as to how it happened, but all point to a white working-class economic insecurity that was a major force. For some, this got tied up with a racial resentment that included hostility to legal and illegal immigrants. Some felt that “Washington” had intruded too much into their lives and had made the country worse.

One author suggests that strong roots of the surprise victory go back to the Vietnam War. The contention is that many from the Rust Belt and Appalachia who believed in America and its leaders went off to war forty years ago. They were not welcomed back as heroes, but, instead, were shunned by the country that had sent them off. They left with expectations of lives of increasing prosperity, which the factories and mines had given previous generations, but returned to an industrial economy in decline. The coastal elites and Washington did not seem to care about them or their increasing economic plight until Trump came along. I thought there might be merit in this analysis, and if so, perhaps it should be extended to our more recent Mideast wars. How can you not feel disillusionment if you suffered the privations and horrors of Afghanistan and Iraq and returned to parts of America in decline with the powerful indifferent to those declines?

Zito and Todd’s book presents a different insight. The authors interviewed voters in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Iowa who voted for Obama in 2012 and for Trump four years later. One of those interviewees referred to the Trump converts as “this interesting group of people who placed him in the White House because a variety of different people wanted to be part of something larger than themselves. It means it makes me more important, it makes the individual more important, believing that they are contributing directly or indirectly to whatever they are doing.” And when I look at the audiences at a Trump rally, including the ones after he was elected, the audience gives the impression of not being merely a collection of individuals, but as being a component of a movement that transcends the individuals.

I was reminded of a book I read decades ago, The Romance of American Communism by Vivian Gornick. She interviewed Americans who had subscribed to communism in the 1930s and stayed with the Party until 1956. I was struck by what seemed to be a religious-like fervor in many who must have been atheists. They did not expect that communism’s promises would be fulfilled in their lifetime but still enthusiastically supported the cause because they were part of movement bigger than themselves and hoping to bring about a better world after they were gone. One of them said, “It was life, the only life I ever knew, and it was alive. Intense, absorbing, filled with a kind of comradeship I never again expect to know. . . . We literally felt we were making history.”

Or as George Orwell wrote in 1984: “Alone—free—the human being is always defeated. It must be so, because every human being is doomed to die, which is the greatest of all failures. But if he can make complete, utter submission, if he can escape from his identity, if he can merge himself in the Party so that he is the Party, then he is all-powerful and immortal.”

People want to feel that they are part of something bigger than themselves. They feel power being part of a movement. They feel important being in the vanguard of a new history. People have felt that from Trump; they feel that they are transforming America. Reagan gave that transformative feeling, and so did Obama to many. Hillary Clinton may have given a comparable feeling to some, but that movement feeling was smaller than it was for Trump and for Obama. By allying yourself with Trump, you hoped to become part of something more important than yourself.

 

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First Sentences

“Physicist Leonardo Vetra smelled burning flesh, and he knew it was his own.” Dan Brown, Angels & Demons.

“The blood is still rolling off my flak jacket from the hole in my shoulder and there are bullets cracking into the sand all around me.” Ron Kovic, Born on the Fourth of July.

“In eighteenth-century France there lived a man who was one of the most gifted and abominable personages in an era that knew no lack of gifted and abominable personages.” Patrick Suskind, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer.

“By the time Edwin Rist stepped off the train onto the platform at Tring, forty miles north of London, it was already quite late.” Kirk Wallace Johnson, The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century.

“Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin.” A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh.

“Elizabeth Anne Holmes knew she wanted to be a successful entrepreneur from a young age.” John Carreyrou, Bad Blood: Secret and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup.

“Whenever my mother talks to me, she begins the conversation as if we were already in the middle of an argument.” Amy Tan, The Kitchen God’s Wife.

“A free society can exist only when public spirit is balanced by an equal inclination of men to mind their own business.” Edward A. Shils, The Torment of Secrecy: The Background and Consequences of American Security Policies.

“When you work in the glove department at Neiman’s, you are selling things that nobody buys anymore.” Steve Martin, Shopgirl.

“On a humid Monday night in the summer of 1965, after finding an eight-dollar hotel room in the then economically friendly city of San Francisco, I lugged my banjo and black, hard-shell prop case ten sweaty blocks uphill to the Coffee and Confusion, where I had signed up to play for free.” Steve Martin, Born Standing Up.

“I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice—not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother’s death, but because he is the reason I believe in God.” John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany.

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Liar, Liar, You Can’t Tell a Liar

[This post is drawn from The American Jury System by Randolph N. Jonakait]

She said. He denied. Many people heard the testimonies. Many decided that one or the other was lying without thinking much about how they reached their conclusions. Most of us filtered what we saw and heard through existing beliefs, biases, and prejudices and that, of course, affected our credibility assessments of Dr. Ford and Judge Kavanaugh. However,many, maybe most of us, feel we are good at spotting liars from subtle cues—awkward posture, a bead of sweat on the upper lip, hesitations in speech, the tone of voice, the movement of hands, the shifting of eyes. If that is what most of us feel, most of us are wrong.

Studies of the determination of lies from nonverbal behavior have found that people correctly spot a lie from 54 to 57 percent of the time, barely above the random guessing level of 50 percent. We are not good at this, and I was not surprised to hear the conclusions drawn that Kavanaugh’s evident anger indicated he was lying and also that Kavanaugh’s anger meant he was telling the truth.

One reason that liars are not easily detected by nonverbal behavior is that most people are proficient liars. This is in part because we get so much practice. One study had participants keep a diary for a week of conversations that lasted for at least ten minutes and record the lies they told during these exchanges. The study revealed “that lying is a daily event. On average, people lied almost twice a day or in one quarter of the ten-minute interactions. Of all the people they interacted with during the week, they lied to 34%.” Perhaps because people lie so often “there is no typical non-verbal behavior which is associated with deception. That is, not all liars show the same behavior in the same situation, and behaviors will differ across deceptive situations. . . . The complicated relationship between non-verbal behavior and deception makes it very difficult or even impossible to draw firm conclusions about deception solely on the basis of someone’s behavior.” The problems of correctly detecting deception are compounded by the fact that lying is easier and consequently harder to detect when the liar has had time to plan the lie—like for testimony at a congressional hearing.

The lack of ability to detect lies extends across the board. It is not correlated with gender or age. Men are not more skilled than women; older people are not superior to younger ones. A person’s confidence in being able to spot liars does not correlate with the ability to do so. Lie detecting ability does not correlate with experience in interviewing or with professions involving the detecting of deception. A summary of studies involving federal law enforcement personnel, federal polygraphers, and police found that most fell in the range of 45 to 60 percent accuracy in lie detection, with an average accuracy rate of 54 percent. In other words, they do no better than the rest of us in detecting lies from nonverbal behavior. The major difference is that the police are, unjustifiably, more confident than the general public in their assessments.

Trial judges, who often must assess the credibility of witnesses, are no different. Studies have shown that judges are like “ordinary” people in this regard. A research summary states, “Trial court judges . . . demonstrated little more skill at picking out prevaricators than a pipe fitter or a bus driver pulled from the street.”

One of the reasons we are not good lie-catchers is our frequent failure to receive feedback that facilitates learning. A leading researcher maintains that people fail to obtain “adequate information as to whether their truth/lie judgments are either right or wrong.” If we don’t learn whether our assessments are correct, we have no way to improve our lie-detecting performance.

Just watching and listening to testimony is not a good way to determine what is truthful. If we want the truth, we need more than our gut instincts about who has testified truthfully. If a child is thought to have had cookies before dinner, a parent really wanting the facts does more than listen to the kid. The parent peers into the cookie jar to see if anything is missing and looks for tell-tale signs of melted chocolate chips. If a plane crashes, investigators seeking the causes go to the crash site to inspect; they question witnesses; they seek out and examine cockpit and control tower voice and data recorders; and so on. You want the truth, collect information. Investigate. Ask more questions based on the gained knowledge.

Think about the great movie, My Cousin Vinny. The witnesses have painted a stark picture of the two youts’ guilt, but finally, Vinny investigates. He learns of dirty windows and obscuring trees and bushes and now can ask informed questions casting doubt on what witnesses were positive about. He learns about cooking times of real and instant grits and establishes that the time frame presented by a witness cannot be correct. Vinny only becomes a lawyer when he learns that meaningful questions that might lead to the truth can only happen after investigation.

If you want the truth about the event, don’t just judge what she said and he denied. Collect all the information you can about the event. Then it is time to ask informed questions based upon what has been learned. Use common sense and your life’s experiences about how people behave, but also listen to what others have learned about behaviors, such as of sexual assault victims and teenage drinkers. Now examine all the pieces of information to see how they do or don’t fit together. Is one version of the event more coherent, consistent, plausible, and complete than another? Only then is it time to judge.

Ask Cousin Vinny. If you want truth, first have a thorough investigation.

Posted on by rjonakait

The DSK Bar–Danish Edition

The woman came into the DSK bar looking as if she were trying to find someone. She sat on a stool next to me. I returned to my book, but she soon asked me if I knew the bar’s owner. I pointed her out. The woman, whose name I no longer remember but I’ll call Brigitte, went over to the owner and after a short conversation, left. A few weeks later, I learned that Brigitte had been hired as the bar’s manager. 

Over the next month or so, I found out that she was married to a Frenchman who cooked in a restaurant a couple miles away. She, however, had been born and raised in Denmark. I asked if she was aware of the book The Year of Living Danishly by Helen Russell, which I had recently read. She was not but asked me about it.  

I told her that Russell, who is English and had edited a British magazine, moved to Denmark when her husband got a job with, what else, the Lego Company. Russell had seen surveys that placed Denmark at the top of lists with the happiest populace. She set out to figure out why because she learned quickly that there were some reasons not to be happy about in her new home. It has a harsh climate and high taxes. (When a Britisher complains that somewhere else has an unpleasant climate, you can be damn sure that the weather is not an attraction.) Russell soon realized, however, that the Danish had learned to cope with and accept the weather. They also did not bitch much about the taxes because the country used them to provide excellent health care, education, childcare, and other social services. In addition, partly because of the tax structure, extremes in wealth were much less than in England. Riches were seldom flaunted, and few people seemed to think they would be happier if they only had a few more euros. Russell thought that this led to more contentment throughout Danish society than what she observed in Great Britain. 

Perhaps the biggest surprise for Russell and her husband was the many fewer hours the Danes worked compared to the English. The Danes had a lot of days off for holidays and national celebrations and were provided with extensive vacation time. In addition, the Danish work day is short. Her husband came home from work much earlier every day than he had in England. Danish life was not simply work, eat, and sleep. The Danes had time for other activities, which they did in abundance. They did them, however, in a different fashion from the way Russell was used to. Danes seldom acted by themselves or just with another person or couple. Instead, they did them in groups. There were clubs for almost everything, from biking to knitting, and the Danes regularly participated in club activities. As a result, Russell realized, the Danes were almost always connected to others.  

Russell, however, was struck by an anomaly. She noted that many studies had found a positive correlation between happiness and religion, but Denmark, which is not very religious, belied that. She was not surprised by the lack of religiosity. She cited studies concluding that the better educated and wealthier the country is the less likely its population believes in a higher being and participates in religious rituals. Russell noted that the USA is an outlier for this correlation—a country that is wealthy and highly educated, but still high in religious practices and beliefs. Russell went on to say, however, that America may have much in common with third world countries. Unlike highly taxed Denmark, the US lacks universal healthcare, has scant job security, and has a flimsy welfare net. Perhaps, she speculated, people are less likely to need a God if they live somewhere that is safe, stable, and prosperous. In other words, those in a secure and prosperous land, living without fear of health and financial disasters, are more likely to be happy than those in a more god-fearing country without universal healthcare, good job security, and a tightly knit welfare net. 

Helen Russell also found that several clichés about Denmark were true. First, there were a lot of candles. Lots and lots of them. (Get your hygge on.) Second, she discovered that its reputation for excellent pastries was well deserved. She mentioned this repeatedly, and it was clear that she had much firsthand (firstmouth?} experience to back up the claim. 

The bar manager listened with interest to Russell’s exposition of Denmark’s strengths. Brigette did not agree. She did not think of Denmark as a place to be happy. Instead, it was a land of enforced conformity that undercut individuality. Brigette had been happy to leave her homeland and had no desire to return. (Yes, she did know who Victor Borge was. I did not ask her about Hamlet.) 

Brigitte did not remain as bar manager for long. I was told that she and her husband moved to France. I hope she is happy.

Posted on by rjonakait

Snippets

I overheard the man say, “I tried to get a haircut today, but all the barbers were closed for Yom Kippur.” I had some questions.

 

I had an interesting dinner conversation about whether parents should distribute money equally to their children or give more to those who have the greatest need. No consensus. What do you think?

 

Years ago a man at my door told me that he was collecting signatures so that one of the communist parties could get on the ballot. I signed it thinking that people should have the chance to vote communist if they want to. That was democracy. But I have wondered if my action placed me on an FBI or other national security watch list. I have thought of filing a Freedom of Information Act request to see what the FBI has recorded about me, but then I wondered about how I would feel if they had no such entries. I might feel as if my life had been wasted.

 

“There are grounds for suspecting, in other words, that there exists a secret constitution, whose first article runs: The security of power is based on the insecurity of the citizens.” Leonardo Sciascia, Death and the Knight (translated from the Italian by Joseph Farrell.)

 

I am not proud that in scanning the obituaries I feel some satisfaction when I find that a vegan has died of cancer.

 

Even though I am told that meditation can have wonderful effects, I don’t do it. I am afraid that it might give me inner peace.

 

“So, a little morphine, a good sweat, and a bowel movement—the cure for everything that ails you.” Charles Frazier, Varina.

 

At the performance, Temesgen Zeleke played the Ethiopian krar lyre. An interesting instrument, but who knew? His bio said that he “performs regularly with Ethiojazz legend Mulatu Astatke.” Who knew that?

 

A half dozen baseball scouts were sitting nearby at a Staten Island Yankees baseball game. Most were young; some looked as if they might have been in high school last May. I was not surprised when I saw one put his retainers in.

 

At a New York Yankees game, the message board proclaimed, “Susan G, I married you because you are a Yankee fan.” Is that romantic? He married not for her eyes or thoughtfulness or sexiness or love. It would be much more meaningful if he married her even though she was a Yankee fan.