Posted on by rjonakait

The Assimilation of the Scum of Southern Europe

Stump speeches, social media, and ads by politicians announce without supporting evidence that countries including Venezuela and some in Africa are emptying their prisons and mental hospitals and sending the inmates over our southern border into the United States. Of course, rapists and other criminals, the same sources maintain, have been coming over that border for years. On the other hand, these migrants must not be full-time criminals because they take jobs away from Americans, especially “Black jobs.” And these border crashers fuel our fentanyl crisis.

This makes little sense. People don’t cross deserts and evade armed U.S. agents and circumvent walls to commit random rapes and murders, and I have not seen evidence that illegal aliens have come to rob banks or pursue the kinds of crimes done at the likes of Goldman Sachs. They have come as laborers expecting to do hard menial work. They hope to send money back to their families. They want to stay out of trouble so as not to be jailed or deported. Not surprisingly, study after study has concluded that the undocumented commit serious crimes at a lesser rate than American citizens and that documented aliens commit those crimes at a much lesser rate than our citizenry.

If the undocumented come to work, then it seems to follow that they must be taking jobs from Americans. On the other hand, the undocumented are not in a position to negotiate for higher pay or better working conditions, and it is often said that these immigrants do the jobs that Americans won’t take. Of course, if you believe in the law of supply and demand and free enterprise, Americans should take the jobs if pay and working conditions are improved sufficiently. At some price point–$25 per hour or perhaps $40 per hour–American citizens should be willing to pick lettuce, and perhaps even kale, slaughter chickens, plant bushes, and hang drywall. If all the undocumented are deported, as one presidential candidate vows, we will have to change our immigration laws to let workers back in legally or the costs of many goods and services will increase.

And “securing” the border is unlikely to significantly affect the flow of fentanyl into this country. Many people may successfully cross our southern border illegally, but many get stopped. If those apprehended had been carrying significant amounts of fentanyl, this information would have been trumpeted so loudly on Fox News and the New York Post that it would not have escaped our attention. And yet, the apprehension of those drug couriers has not made much news. Perhaps, just perhaps, that is because not much fentanyl enters the country that way. Imagine that you were importing fentanyl into this country. Would you have it come in via backpacks carried by those crossing the border illegally? The apprehension rate for the undocumented has gone from 50% ten years ago to 70% in 2021. In other words, the odds are strong that even if the carrier makes it to the border, the drugs will not make it into the country. And then, of course, you have to find a good way to offload those drugs from the mule, which can be an iffy business.

Meanwhile, many, many vehicles cross the southern border legally. Fentanyl does not take up much space. There are many ways to hide the drug in vehicles. And it is easy to arrange for delivery once the drug-laden car or truck or plane makes it into the U.S.

Border patrol officials maintain that 90% of the fentanyl that enters from Mexico comes in at legal crossings. Furthermore, most apprehended couriers are American citizens, which, of course, makes sense. If you were running the drug smuggling operation, wouldn’t you think that a Mexican or Honduran would be more likely stopped and searched at the border than an American citizen? “Securing” the border, if that means stopping illegal crossings, will do little to change our fentanyl crisis. And, of course, as long as there is a demand for the product, those laws of supply and demand mean someone will find a way to bring the opioid into the country.

If you continue to maintain that the “Biden/Harris border policies” are a major cause of the overdoses, consider this fact: The fentanyl deaths doubled during the Trump years, and the rate of increase since then has lessened. If Biden is to be blamed, then more blame should be heaped on his predecessor.

The widespread hysteria over undocumented immigrants, however, does not seem to be about all of the undocumented. We mostly fear those brown people who cross the southern border. There are many others, often of the lighter persuasions, who are living in this country without proper authorization. They have often come legally, as students or tourists, for example, and stayed in the United States instead of returning to their homeland at the proper time. I have met such people from Ukraine, Germany, Belgium, Poland, and, of course, Ireland. Aristide R. Zolberg, in his book, A Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America (2008), states that while the notion of “illegal immigrants” may evoke images of Mexicans and Central Americans, many Irish working in construction and child care—perhaps as many as 100,000—are here illegally. When we were looking for nannies to help with our newly-arrived child, we were advised to advertise in the Irish Echo, and to do so in such a way as to indicate we would not be asking to see a green card. Years later, I asked our contractor, who had assimilated so well as to lose almost all his brogue, when he came to the country. He gave a date. I smiled and jokingly asked, but when did you come legally? The spouse shouted that I couldn’t ask such a thing. Sean only smiled and gave a time several years later. (No matter how well you can sing “Come Out Ye Black and Tans” or know the music of The Pogues or praise Jimmy Ferguson, don’t go into a Bronx bar filled with ruddy faces and start talking about immigration or citizenship.)

However, whatever we do to secure our southern border and whatever we do to remove the undocumented from the country, we will continue to have “foreigners” among us. The classic Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopedia Brittanica of 1911 stated what is still a truism: “Migration in general may be described as a natural function of social development. It has taken place at all times and in the greatest variety of circumstances. It has been tribal, national, class and individual. Its causes have been political, economic, religious, or mere love of adventure.” As long as conditions are harsh in other lands and America beacons as a better place to live, some will find a way to enter this country. (For the history of our copy of the EB, see the posts of August 1 and 3, 2022, Rule Encyclopedia Brittanica—Eleventh Edition.)

And just as assuredly, a portion of our populace will see danger from this migration. If you have an Italian ancestor, or a friend or relative does, or perhaps if you just like pizza, pasta, or a latte (Italian, meaning you paid too much for the coffee)–that is, just about everyone–and you are concerned about immigration now, you should reflect on some of our history.

(concluded October 1)

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Snippets

For almost four years, conservative news sources told me about the deficiencies of the Biden administration. Apparently, however, the government has changed because now they tell me about the failure of the Biden-Harris administration. Meanwhile, they tell me about the supposed glories of the Trump administration. Poor Mike Pence.

The news last week reported on a space walk by the first civilian. It is always gratifying to learn about the new experiences afforded billionaires.

Most summers we hang an American flag between the upper windows of our summer place. It is the burial flag of the spouse’s uncle and namesake. He was an Army pilot who crashed and was killed in the waning months of World War II. This year the spouse thought we should not display the flag because people might think that we were Trump supporters. I insisted we put it out. I said that I did not want to cede this symbol of American liberties and equality to those who claim patriotism but too often seek to obstruct the freedoms and aspirations that the flag stands for.

I was outstanding at trivia. No longer, for several reasons. Many of the questions are rooted in the last twenty or thirty years, and much of this knowledge I never learned. This makes me feel old. Furthermore, many of trivial things I once learned, I have now forgotten. This makes me feel old. And often I have an answer on the tip of my tongue that I can no longer get out in time. This makes me feel old. Even so, recently I have frequently watched Jeopardy!, and I test myself in a new way. I will watch it on Channel 6 at 7 PM. Then the very same episode is on Channel 8 at 7:30. I watch it again and am proud whenever I can remember an answer from a half hour earlier.

All U.S. presidents since Andrew Johnson have had a pet. Except for Donald Trump. Rumor has it that he has eaten all his cats and dogs.

“The greatest of all faults is to be conscious of none.” Thomas Carlyle.

I feel privileged to have seen James Earl Jones on the stage, including in Othello and Fences. He was amazing. Rest in peace.

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A King is Up a Tree

Proverbs 17:12: “Let a man meet a she-bear robbed of her cubs, rather than a fool in his folly.”

I spend much of the summer in a place of 300 homes, often pretentiously called “cottages,” with a golf course, tennis courts, a swimming pool and other sports facilities. The community is surrounded by thousands of acres of woodlands, and as a result residents often see wildlife. Seeing a deer as a kid in rural Wisconsin was a thrill because it was still a rare sight. Nowadays, of course, Bambis and their mothers are common in many communities, including mine.

Twenty years ago, deer were still skittish. A human sound, a voice, a door closing, a car on gravel, usually had the deer bolting into wood cover. Now the deer just raise their heads with brazen looks and seemingly say, “You don’t want me to eat your plants? What are you going to do about it?” I see deer frequently and seldom pay much attention to them, except when I think they might run across the road that I am driving or when fawns are playing near the porch where I am reading or when they run after being startled. A deer in flight leaping over a fallen log is still a beautiful sight. The deer I see, however, are almost always does and fawns. The infrequent sighting of an antlered buck still gets my attention.

I see woodchucks often, usually on the golf course. They bring a smile with their distinctive chubby bodies and waddle. They move slowly but then quickly disappear into a hole.

Wild turkeys also draw attention. Often there are just two or three of them, but on occasion, a flock of a dozen or more are going someplace, but I have no idea where. They never seem in a hurry. Can they fly?

Foxes seem to have increased. I believe I saw only one in my first decade in the community, but now, while sightings are not an everyday occurrence, they are more common.

I don’t pay much attention to birds, except for hawks and eagles, who I will watch soar for as long as possible. Always magnificent.

There is a hierarchy of noteworthiness among this wildlife. Almost never does one mention a deer to a companion except as a warning. And the same is almost always true for woodchucks. Wild turkeys occasionally get a comment. Foxes generally do, but they often disappear before they are spotted by a friend. Hawks and eagles circling in the sky generally draw remarks that often spread beyond the immediate circle. If a person sees a bald eagle while sitting on a restaurant patio, he will often tell not only his tablemates but also those seated at other tables. A hooting barrred owl also gets some attention. But none of these animals triggers a neighborhood network. Only a bear does that.

That is what happened the other night at dinnertime. My cell phone rang. A few moments later the spouse’s rang. And a few moments later, the still-existing landline rang. Picking up, our neighbors told us that a bear was up a tree across the street. Of course, we went to look. There, joined by other neighbors, we see her (we assumed) indistinctly silhouetted against the night sky about twenty-five feet above the ground. She barely moved for minutes but then stretched upwards on the tree trunk looking more than six feet tall. I saw that my garbage can, placed by the road for the next day’s pickup, was on its side. It had not been ripped apart but opened with the kitchen garbage bag gone. We looked, we chatted, we laughed, we told stories, and the bear stayed in the tree. We finally decided that we should all leave so that the bear might come down and go about its business.

A bear sighting is the most exciting one among us cottagers, and when it happens, stories circulate in the community. For me, all my infrequent bear sightings—the one in the distant field, the one on the back porch, the one peering in the front window, the one with two cubs–are memorable, and I can give you details of every time I have seen one. There are many animals around here, but the bear is king.

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Snippets

A well-known fact: Inflation was low while Trump was president. A lesser-known fact: Inflation was lower while Obama was president.

A wise person said: “He uses statistics as a drunken man uses a lamppost—for support rather than illumination.”

We are selling the house we have lived in for forty-seven years. We will pay a capital gains tax because the house has appreciated considerably in monetary value. That has me thinking about yet another tax advantage for those who have always had money. Imagine two people buying the same house for the same price. They improve the house in exactly the same way. They sell the house for the same price. They will both have to pay a capital gains tax on the amount they sold the house for minus the house’s base. That base will primarily consist of the price they paid for the property plus the capital they have put into the house. But one of them only had barely enough money to carry the house while he owned it so he did the work himself for every improvement. The other owner was always well-to-do and hired other people to make the improvements. The first owner’s sweat equity does not count as a capital expenditure for the capital gains tax. The other owner’s payment to construction companies and the like is a capital expenditure. Thus, when selling, the rich guy has a higher base for his house and pays a lower capital gains tax than the other person.

Political ads and stories predominantly on conservative outlets highlight murders and assaults committed by “illegal aliens.” Of course, such crimes happen and can be horrific. However, numerous studies have shown that illegal immigrants commit murder at a lower rate than native-born Americans and that legal immigrants are convicted of murder at much lower rates than the native born or illegals. You want a safer country? Deport those who were born here.

I wrote a few posts ago that I face-planted myself on a golf course and how I responded facetiously when I was asked about the noticeable face discolorations. I said that I needed more replies. Some more possibilities: “I forgot how strong the spouse is.” “Do you want my version or the truth?” “In today’s world, it is never too early to get ready for Halloween.” “I did not know that golf was a blood sport.”

Among the unwanted consequences of the face-planting is that people tell me about their falls. I only say something about my mishap if I am asked what happened. Otherwise I keep it to myself. Many, however, who have, like me, literally fallen on their faces, figuratively fall on their faces when they hit the five-minute self-involved narration point, having felt, for reasons not apparent to me, compelled to share their face-plant experience with me and anyone else who is listening. 

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If It’s Close, It’s an Out

The baseball season is closing in on its home stretch. (Mixed sports metaphors.) The baseball season is always long with much boredom and some excitement. (Shohei is oh-mazing; Judge is airing them out; and Skenes may be a new pitching phenom.) Perhaps this should get me to reminisce about my baseball career, but that was mediocre (a generous assessment) and ended with high school. (However, I did hit a walk-off home run in my first organized game. I was twelve. I never matched that highlight. Cue Springsteen and “Glory Days.”) Instead, for some reason I am thinking about my professional baseball career, for during summers of my high school years, I umpired games for which I got paid.

My town did not have the official Little League youth baseball, but it had its own version run by the Recreation Department. It had divisions by age—nine and ten, eleven and twelve, up to eighteen.

I got the job by passing a test but not one that measured the ability to call a baseball game with any accuracy. Instead, it was like a school exam, except this one was on the rules of baseball. I went off to Joe Hauser’s, the local sporting goods store. (Hauser, known as Unser Joe, had his own amazing baseball career. You can check it out.) I bought a baseball rules book and read it a few times. I was good at tests and was confident, especially because I had been tipped off to the trick question that appeared every year. It asked what the proper call was if a line drive hit the pitching rubber and bounced back into foul territory between third and home without touching anyone. Of course, the correct answer is “Foul ball!” (Every semi-literate baseball fan knows that the distance from the pitching rubber to home plate is sixty feet six inches, but most do not know whether that is to the front or back of home plate. Even fewer know where the measurement is to the front or back or center of the pitching rubber.) Not everyone who took the exam on a spring evening (all boys, of course; I don’t know what would have happened if a girl had showed up to be an umpire) was a diligent student, but I was, and I easily got one of the open umpire slots.

In every job I have had, I have learned things. With that first job, I may have learned something about discipline and responsibility, and so on. But I certainly learned in detail about baseball rules. I also learned a few tips about umpiring, but I can’t imagine how. We had no mentoring about calling balls and strikes or about baserunners. Maybe I read it somewhere; maybe somebody who had umpired for a while told me that it was easy to determine when a pitched ball was too high: Crouch down until your eyes are level with the top of the strike zone. Of course, any pitch above that was a ball. Balls thrown near knee height were much harder to call.

In those days there were separate crews of umpires for the National and American Leagues. In the days before the American League adopted the designated hitter, the game in both leagues was supposed to be the same. Even so, the umpires did some things differently. They wore different protective gear and also positioned themselves differently. The American Leaguers stood squarely behind the catcher and looked over his head. The National Leaguers looked over the catcher’s shoulder. My favorite team was in the National League so I adopted the shoulder position.

I thought that I knew how to call balls and strikes, but I quickly learned that calling the bases was not as simple as I may have assumed. I was the only umpire in games with nine- and ten-year olds or for eleven- and twelve-year olds. I had to make all the calls at home plate and at other bases as well. When there was going to be a play at first base, I would jog out to a place between the pitcher and the base. Most often the call was obvious, but soon I learned the limits of human eyesight. If the call was close, I could watch when the feet were on the bag or I could watch when the first baseman caught the ball. I could not do both. Then, somehow, I learned that umpiring was not just seeing but also listening. Major league umpires at first base watched the feet but listened to hear the ball being caught. If the sound preceded the sight of the runner’s foot on the bag, he quickly looked up to see whether the ball was secure or being bobbled.

Tag plays presented their own problems. Sometimes it was hard to be in the correct position to make the call. (In the majors, if there is a runner on first, the second base umpire moves from the outfield to the infield to best observe a likely tag play. That infield position leads to the possibility of umpire interference, which seldom happens, but is almost never understood by the fans when it does.) Even if I was in the correct position, it was sometimes difficult to tell whether the fielder swiped the runner with the ball. Even if that was clear, a similar problem could occur at first base. The tag was often on the rump or back or shoulder of the runner, and it could be difficult sometimes to tell whether the foot got to the base before or after the tag. I didn’t need to make a hard call often. For the under twelves, runners could not leave the base until the ball was pitched. There were few attempted steals unless the ball got away from the catcher, and then the call was usually obvious. Outfield throws were often wild or looping leading to an easy call, but the few close plays could be important to the game. I never learned how to deal effectively with making a bad call. Once when I umpired an all-star game, I stuck out my right hand for a strike on a pitch that was way too high. I knew my mistake instantly, but I had no guidance on what I should do and let the call stand. To this day I feel sort of bad about it.

There was another situation that I felt unsure about: when, if ever, to throw a kid out of the game. Thankfully, this seldom occurred. The ten-and-unders were mostly unformed in the personality department and almost never presented a problem. The eleven- and twelve-year-olds, however, were on their way to being human beings. Many were quick-witted or wiseasses, filled with jokes to throw at me, curious about the world (mostly that meant trying to find out what high school was like and whether it was true you might get attracted to girls). So there came a time when one young player swore at me. I asked him what he had said to give him a chance to back away or apologize for the expletive. He repeated it (whatever it was), and I tossed him from the game. That made me uncomfortable. Was I wrong?

On the other hand, I don’t remember ever getting the indicator wrong. This is a little plastic thingamabob placed in the left hand. Mine had three holes and three wheels. Turning the wheels made different numbers appear in the holes to indicate balls, strikes, and outs. (Fancier ones also had an innings opening.) With my indicator, I at least always had the count right.

I also learned that it paid to get to work early. There were four fields where I umpired, and gear—masks and chest protectors–for four umpires. I needed a mask that could accommodate my glasses, but the other guys, who could see unaided, were good about letting me have the one that worked for me. The chest protectors also were not all the same, and sometimes this mattered. The spectrum of physical development of twelve-year-old boys is broad. Some of them are close to adulthood, and these big guys often were the pitchers. These kids played on a softball diamond, and the ball hurled from forty-six feet arrived at the plate with remarkable rapidity. This was not just the batter’s problem; remember, I umpired standing behind home plate. Often the pitcher’s skill far outshone the catcher’s, and I could not be sure that the pitches would not hit me. If I knew it was going to be one of those days, I got to the park extra early to snatch up the only blowup chest protector, which best absorbed the thump of a thrown ball. Even so, I still could leave with a bruise or two.

I quickly learned that I hated umpiring nine- and ten-year-olds. This was in the old days, so this was not T-ball or a game in which an adult tossed underhanded to a batter. No. There was a pitcher and a batter, and the pitcher invariably could not pitch and the batter invariably could not hit. And if a ball miraculously got into play, the fielders could neither catch nor throw. These young ones could not play the game. Period. This was also the time before the mercy rule, which allowed a game to be called if one team got really far ahead. Thus, the games could be interminable. Every time I umpired one of these games, I felt as though the hourglass sand was endlessly replenished. On these days, I woke up hoping to hear a downpour that meant the game would be cancelled. You can gauge how much I hated this by the fact that I did not get paid if the game was not played. The loss of money was worth not having to umpire these endless games. When I did umpire the ten and unders, though, I did not cheat in my calls. Nevertheless, if the pitched ball could be a ball or strike, it was a strike. If the runner could have been safe or out, he was out. It seemed important to move this endless game towards a conclusion.

At the time I felt that there was a bigger life lesson here: If it’s close, it’s a strike. If it’s close, it’s an out. But now, almost seven decades later, I still don’t know what that lesson is.

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The Planted Face

“Everything is funny as long as it is happening to someone else.” Will Rogers.

My ball was thirty yards from the cup, but it had a steep uphill, sidehill lie. I hit my pitch—not surprisingly for me, not very well. I turned to return to the golf cart five yards away, but my foot caught the uphill grass. I knew instantly that I was about to plant my face on the downhill turf without being able to break the fall.

Tony, my playing partner, came over to assist me, but I got up more easily than I expected. I took stock. My nose was not broken. Blood was not gushing from the nostrils, as I had expected. I apparently had landed on the bottom of my forehead, not the middle of my face. My glasses had slightly gouged the space between my eyebrows and pushed hard into my cheeks right below my eyes. No blood poured off me but seeped from the gouged place and from a cut on my lip, but overall, I did not feel terrible. No major aches and pains. We continued on with our nine holes with me dabbing at the oozing blood with a golf towel that by happenstance had been freshly laundered.

I bailed on my usual lunch with Tony after golf and headed home. The spouse looked up from her reading as I stepped on the porch, and after explanations, she swung into nursing mode. Band-Aids, gauze, and adhesive tape were applied. She went to CVS to get more supplies, and I got additional medical attention. I looked in the mirror and so much had been applied to my face, I looked like Hannibal Lecter. Eventually, the seeping blood stopped.

The next day I carefully removed the dressings and decided not all had to be reapplied. I went to the mirror to assess. No pretty boy looks were in attendance. I had that gouge between the eyebrows. My nose was discolored and even more bulbous than usual, as if I had lifted it from W.C. Fields. I had a cut lip and a black and blue mark bruise on my chin. Most noticeable, however, were two black eyes with a significant mouse below the left one as if I had been hit with a heavyweight hook in the second round. There was no way to hide my racoon face except with a ski mask, which was not seasonally appropriate.

People were going to ask what happened. When that first happened, I said, “Don’t ask, but you should see her.” Then I tried, “The Pennsylvania barmaids are really fierce.” And then, “Next time I will give Tony the three-and-a-half-foot putt.” (I am convinced that three-and-a-half is funnier than three-foot or four-foot, but I don’t know why.) However, I am on blood thinners, and I will have the discolorations for a long time. I will be needing some more snappy come-backs.

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Snippets

The nurse watched me walk the fifteen steps from my bed to the bathroom. My first few were shaky, but they got better. I was superb getting back to the bed. I said, “So I don’t need you to go to the bathroom.” She responded, “But I would prefer that you call me.” I said, “Do you know how many women have said that to me?”

I have many identities. One of them is as a catless parent.

My Amish amigo Amos at the greenmarket works as part of a construction crew with other people from his church. I asked if there was music while they hammered and sawed. He said, as I knew, they had no radio. The only music came when one of them sang. In reply to my question, he said the songs were always religious, but Amos said that he knew a lot of country songs. He hears them when is driven to the market or the construction site by an “English” driver. The drivers can play the radio and apparently country music predominates. I said that an Amish can’t sing country songs since they are all about how I got drunk last night and my woman left me. Amos smiled. His sister Sadie laughed.

He says that his crowd numbers were huge, larger not only than hers, but larger than those of MLK, Jr. An obsession over size, size, size. Soon I expect him to whip it out of his pants and proclaim, “It is larger than hers.”

“When he lies, he speaks according to his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies.” John 8:44.

Was it the Paris Olympic or the Paris Olympics?

Why is it called water polo. It does not have to be played right-handed like polo. It does not use anything like mallets. Unlike polo, it has a goalie. Unlike polo, it has something like a penalty box. Would water soccer or water hockey have been a better name?

My life would not have been unfulfilled if I had never had pimiento cheese. [The spouse disagrees.]

According to Chris van Tulleken in Ultra-Processed People: The Science Behind Food that Isn’t Food, near the end of World War II, “the average U-boat crewman lived for only sixty days from boarding the ship.”

Pennsylvania has a close Senate race. The incumbent has run ads stating that the challenger invested in a Chinese company that makes fentanyl, implying that this has affected the state’s fentanyl problem. As the factcheckers often say, the ad lacks context. The challenger did invest in the company, but that pharmaceutical corporation makes fentanyl legally. Perhaps part of its output gets diverted to the illegal market, but if so, the incumbent’s ad does not present any information to support such a claim. The challenger has responded by saying that he never invested in Chinese pharma making illegal fentanyl. True, but he then goes on to imply that the real cause of the fentanyl problem is the southern border. This, too, lacks context. He presents no information that major amounts of fentanyl get into this country via illegal border crossings instead of legal ones. It also ignores that death from synthetic opioids soared while Trump was president. There were 19,500 such deaths in 2016, the year before he became president. That increased to 28,659 in 2017, 31,525 in 2018, 36,603 in 2019, and 56,894 in 2020.

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First Sentences

“In my defense, it was not my intent to write this book.” Naomi Klein, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World.

“Before Mazer invented himself as Mazer, he was Samson Mazer, and before he was Samson Mazer, he was Samson Masur—a change of two letters that transformed him from a nice, ostensibly Jewish boy to a Professional Builder of Worlds—and for most of his youth, he was Sam, S.A.M. on the hall of fame of his grandfather’s Donkey Kong machine, but mostly Sam.” Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow.

“Millions of people have formulated the wish, often unexpressed, that the lessons learnt from the philosophy of Gamesmanship should be extended to include the simple problems of everyday life.” Stephen Potter, Lifemanship: Some Notes on Lifemanship with a Summary of Recent Research in Gamesmanship.

“Some years ago, there was a boomlet of books about how the Greeks or the Jews or the Scots ‘saved’ or ‘invented’ the world.” Fareed Zakaria, Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present.

“My name is Serena Frome (rhymes with plume) and almost forty years ago I was sent on a secret mission for the British Security Service.” Ian McEwan, Sweet Tooth.

“It was the start of a very important year—1776—and James Cook had become a very important figure, a celebrity, a champion, a hero.” Hampton Sides, The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain Cook.

“On our wedding day I was forty-six, she was eighteen.” George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo.

“The first weekend of my 80 per cent [ultra-processed food] diet was one of those freakish autumn days when summer briefly returns.” Chris v. Tulleken, Ultra-Processed People: The Science Behind Food that Isn’t Food.

“There were children, and then there were the children of Indians, because the merciless savage inhabitants of these American lands did not make children but nits, and nits make lice, or so it was said by the man who meant to make a massacre feel like killing bugs at Sand Creek, when 700 drunken men came at dawn with cannons, and then again four years later almost to the day the same way at the Washita River, where afterward, seven hundred Indian horses were rounded up and shot in the head.” Tommy Orange, Wandering Stars

“The reedy and excitable twenty-six-year-old recent Harvard Graduate, full of anticipation, was motoring out to an open field in Potsdam, Germany, to attend a Nazi youth rally.” Rachel Maddow, Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism.

“Some years ago there was in the city of York a society of magicians.” Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell.

“When writing about the deep ocean, the first question that arises is: What is it? At what point does the ocean become the deep ocean?” Susan Casey, The Underworld: Journeys to the Depths of the Ocean.

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It’s No State’s Secret: Lessons for the Federal Government

Comments and decisions are often made about what is essential, valuable, or desirable for the functioning of our national government without reference to important laboratories—our state governments. The states are structured much like the federal government with three branches of government, but there are often significant differences between state and federal operations. Those distinctions can shed light on the merits of federal structures.

For example, in this presidential season we can expect comments about the usefulness of the electoral college with assertions that it is essential to our freedoms. Such discussions should consider the states. None of them has adopted anything like an electoral college. Instead, all choose their governors by the direct vote of the electorate.

Another example: The United States Supreme Court bestowed presidents with immunity from criminal prosecutions. The decision rests on assertions that such immunity is necessary so that presidents can properly carry out their executive functions. The opinions do not mention that many governors throughout our history have been criminally prosecuted. The Court did not discuss how, if at all, such prosecutions influenced the effective functioning of state governments.

But what has most recently triggered my thinking about state governments is President Biden’s proposal to enact term limits for Supreme Court justices. According to news reports, Biden is proposing that each president will be able to appoint a justice to the Supreme Court every two years. After eighteen years of service, a justice would go on “senior” status and hear a case only if one of the nine active justices could not sit on it for some reason.

I can’t imagine that Biden’s proposal has a snowball’s chance of being enacted, but it has still produced an outcry. For example, an e-mail I recently received says, “These so-called court ‘reforms’ include ending life tenure for Supreme Court justices and a binding code of ethics for the justices that would be overseen by Congress. President Biden’s plan is a thinly veiled political scheme to intimidate and control the U.S. Supreme Court justices. This would threaten an independent judiciary and the rule of law.”

We could parse that passage but instead this is a time when we should look at state governments to calculate the dangers to an independent judiciary of an eighteen-year term. States, too, want their high court to be unbiased, but almost all states have rejected the federal model.

Rhode Island is the only state to grant life tenure to its Supreme Court justices. Two other jurisdictions allow service until the justice reaches seventy. In the other states, the justices have limited terms, which often are quite short compared to how long many of our federal justices now serve. New York has the longest term at fourteen years. Eleven states have ten-year terms. The rest have fewer than ten-year terms with fifteen states limiting justices to six years.

At least from what the states overwhelmingly indicate, life tenure for justices is not necessary for a good judiciary. Indeed, the clear rejection of that life term seems to indicate that the states have concluded that life tenure is bad for good government.

Posted on by rjonakait

Tommy Orange and Richard Henry Pratt

Tommy Orange places Richard Henry Pratt in the backstory to his novel Wandering Stars, a sequel to his award-winning There There about American Indians in Oakland, California.

The nonfictional Pratt had been a soldier who fought for the North in the Civil War and then served in the West pursuing, fighting, and negotiating with Indians. He was the primary force behind the famous Carlisle Indian school, whose philosophy influenced many other Indian schools established by the federal government. Pratt believed that Indians were deserving of a place in American society and that racial differences were not innate but the product of environmental factors. He believed that Indians could–and should–integrate into mainstream white society, but here was the catch: He thought this was possible only if the Indians abandoned their tribal communities and culture.

Pratt’s theories required a school away from the native lands. The Carlisle Barracks were an old twenty-seven-acre army installation. They had been damaged in the Civil War and then abandoned. Pratt talked the Army into allowing him to set up the school in the sixteen buildings that needed renovations. Almost immediately, Pratt constructed a seven-foot fence around the property as both a screen against sightseers—the townsfolk were curious about the young Indians—and to control the students.

The school separated both boy and girl students from their language. They were to speak only English. Uttering a native language was punished, and students from the same tribes were scattered among separate dormitories to break up tribal culture.

The students were also separated from their names, partly because the white teachers could not pronounce Indian names, but also to remove another aspect of their Indianness. As Sally Jenkins put it in The Real All Americans: The Team that Changed a Game, a People, a Nation (2007), when they had new, Americanized names, another “piece of their Indian selves had been taken away.”

The males were separated from their hair and that, too, separated them from their heritage. Jenkins reports that braids were a symbol of maturity for Lakotas, who only cut their hair when in deep mourning.

And they were separated from their traditional clothing, often colorful and distinctive. Instead, they all had to dress in drab uniforms, and the students became “an indistinguishable gray mass with no discernible outward differences.”

The very nature of the school itself, however, separated the students from a fundamental aspect of their heritage. Indian tribes had varied cultural differences, Jacqueline Fear-Segal reports in White Man’s Club: Schools, Race, and the Struggle of Indian Acculturation (2007), but in no Indian community was education a discrete endeavor conducted in a separate institution or by “teachers.” Education was woven into everyday patterns of living and took place informally in daily interactions.

The school took an undeniable personal toll on students: it erased their personal histories, sundered families, and obliterated their languages, faiths, and traditions. The goal was not to kill a people, but even so, the goal was to wipe out the Native Americans and replace them with something else.

 The school taught subjects whose successful completion was supposed to be equal to an eighth-grade education, but the students were also taught trades and agriculture. To further this training, the Carlisle school had an “outing” program where students were sent to work and board with local families. Students were thus to be introduced to American society and taught to be wage earners. As with much at the Carlisle Indian school, the outing program had mixed consequences. Many of the white families treated the students well, and lifelong bonds were often formed. Other families, however, merely saw a source of low-wage labor.

The influence of the Carlisle school began to wane in the early twentieth century for two reasons. First, sentiment against off-reservation schools began to build. Moreover, Richard Henry Pratt, who apparently found it difficult to act diplomatically with his superiors in Washington, was removed as head of the school in 1904. He was followed by administrators with little ability. The school was finally shuttered in August 1918 and converted to a hospital for wounded soldiers returning from World War I.

The school’s legacy is mixed. Many who passed through its gates praised it; many condemned it. Although the students were encouraged to remain in the East after leaving the school, the vast majority returned to the reservations, many of whom went back “to the blanket.” Jenkins suggests that as an educational school, Carlisle was not a success. Of the 8500 students who passed through Carlisle, only 741 received degrees. However, many others also went on to graduate from public school, which Pratt counted as successes. From its inception, Pratt thought that the school should only be temporary and wanted Indians integrated into white society and enrolled in public schools. Jenkins, however, also concludes that the Carlisle Indian Industrial School was successful as a training institution: “[T]he federal Indian agencies were full of Carlisle graduates working as teachers, clerks, interpreters, police, lawyers, blacksmiths, farmers, bakers, and tailors.”

Overall, however, the Indian school movement has increasingly been seen as a well-meant mistake. Jenkins says,  “Like so many other federal experiments regarding the Indians, what in 1879 was seen as a creative solution had come to seem wrongheaded. Humanitarians argued that removing children from their homes was cruel and counterproductive. Still others believed that Carlisle created false expectations and that it ill-equipped students for the grim realities of life back home. The school took an undeniable personal toll on students: it razed their personal histories, sundered families, and obliterated their languages, faiths, and traditions.”

The obliteration of language, clothing, hair styles, and other cultural hallmarks may have made sense when the goal was to integrate American Indians into the economy and culture of European-Americans, but the policies went beyond that goal. Not just Pratt, but European descendants more generally, seemed almost personally and morally offended by communal practices of indigenous peoples who believed that land could not be owned by individuals. For them, the land was shared by all. European-Americans, however, believed that freedom and a sound economy depended on private property. Thus, Troy Senik writes in A Man of Iron: The Turbulent Life and Improbable Presidency of Grover Cleveland that Cleveland did not seek to eliminate Indians. He believed in assimilation by which he meant education and speaking. But most important, Cleveland felt, the collective ownership of land by Indians must end.

This antipathy to shared or non-ownership of the land was not simply a product of America’s post-Civil War Gilded Age. Peter Stark in Gallop Toward the Sun: Tecumseh and William Henry Harrison’s Struggle for the Destiny of a Nation says that a chief goal of Harrison’s dealings with Indians on what was then the Illinois frontier was to end collective land ownership. When Pratt taught his students that they must give up communal lands, he was only teaching what government officials had been trying to accomplish for a century and were implementing across the continent. Shared lands on western reservations were broken up into parcels of private ownership. Jenkins notes that the U.S. government did not believe in sharing or communalism; it believed in private property. An Indian needed to be taught out West and at Carlisle “so that he will say ‘I’ instead of ‘We’ and ‘This is mine’ instead of ‘This is ours.’”

Why did the European-Americans have such antipathy to communalism? I don’t know, but I believe it is a thread that runs through much of American history and is not limited to relationships to American Indians. Perhaps someone can point me to good studies on the subject. But I do wonder if our world might not be better if we thought more about this earth in terms of “we” and “ours” instead of “I” and “mine.”