It is always moving when the audience stands before the opera begins and sings the national anthem. My patriotism overflows when the movie is paused at the two-thirds mark to allow us to sing “God Bless America.” And it is thrilling that every outdoor bluegrass concert I have attended starts with an adrenalin-boosting flyover by Air Force jets.

Of course these things don’t happen, but why not when such performances and displays are routine occurrences at sporting events?  Why is it that nationalism is a part of baseball, football, and NASCAR, but not “cultural” performances? Is it thought that operagoers differ in patriotic fervor from a Minnesota Vikings crowd? If the cultural audience cares less about our country, isn’t that all the more reason to have “The Star Spangled Banner” before Lohengrin in hopes of increasing national identity? And if the opera audience is already patriotic, surely they would want to sing the national anthem.

I have never researched the history of the national anthem at sporting events, but a law professor of mine, Harry Kalven, a devoted Chicago Cubs fan even during the decades when you had to be a bit meshugganah to be a Cubs follower, said that it started during World War II. That seems likely, and I guess that once a patriotic ritual starts, it seems unpatriotic for it to end. Thus, we continue to hear the Anthem before the first pitch and now at every sporting event.  (In the trivia question department: How many times did Pat Pieper hear “The Star Spangled Banner”? How many of those days did the Cubbies lose? I don’t know the answer to either question, other than to say, many, many, many times.)

The national anthem may have been played at sporting events since WWII, but its performance style has changed. Once we had only straightforward renditions that zipped right along. For example, for years “The Star Spangled Banner” was performed by Robert Merrill at Yankee Stadium—sometimes live and sometimes on a recording (occasionally nowadays a Merrill recording is still used). It clocked in at under two minutes. Now we regularly have versions that seem to be in a contest to see how slowly and with what added emotion the anthem can be sung. Soulful interpretations of the song have been traced back to a particular moment—Marvin Gaye’s rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner” at the 1983 NBA All-Star Game. Since then we have had many take-your-time idiosyncratic versions of it. (Gaye’s version was over two-and-a-half minutes long.) For me, however, it really started with Jose Feliciano at the fifth game of the 1968 World Series. I thought his version was moving and made me hear the song anew, but to many it was offensive because this dark-skinned, blind guy had the nerve to sing it with a fresh insight and in a non-standard style.

Feliciano’s version did not inspire copycats, however, because his career was damaged by it. For incomprehensible reasons, his rendition got him labeled unpatriotic and disrespectful, and many radio stations refused to play any of his songs after that. (Question for your history discussion: Is there more division and hate in the country now, or was there more in 1968?) Feliciano’s version, while slower than Merrill’s, was faster than Gaye’s at a little over two minutes. (A joke my father told me which was not stale back then.  A Latino boy new to the United States made his way to the stadium for a game. The only seat he could get was in the distant centerfield bleachers under the American flag. He knew no one and was feeling lonely, but he felt welcomed when everyone before the game began, stood, looked at him, and sang, “Jose, can you see?”) What was shocking, outrageous in 1968 is accepted or at least tolerated today, and now we have all these “modern” arrangements of our patriotic hymn. (What does it mean about the connection between patriotism and sporting events that you can place bets on how long the national anthem will take at the Super Bowl? Perhaps to the surprise of many, the under has won the majority of times in the last ten years.)

And now at baseball games we get “God Bless America.” This started in the aftermath of 9/11. I went with the daughter to a Yankee game not too much after the attacks, and that was the first time I heard it, in the recorded performance by Kate Smith, during the seventh inning. (I wonder how many there recognized her voice. You have to be my age to remember her fifteen-minute TV show.) That made perfect sense then, as did the delay of a different ball game that autumn to hear a speech by President Bush. And, as I said, once started, it is hard to stop a patriotic ritual.

I probably object more than most to “God Bless America.” Baseball games drag on long enough without the song, which does hamper the between-inning routines of the game. Of course, they could get rid of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” which comes right after the patriotic song, but since I go to the park for baseball rituals, I want to hear “Root, root, root for the home team.” (Never, never, never get rid of “Cotton-Eyed Joe,” which plays at a different time in the game. Love it.) Perhaps I would object less if I did not find “God Bless America” so insipid. The best I can say is that it is a step up from the Kars for Kids song, but not much. (Have you ever wondered why the Kars for Kids folks don’t tell us what the money is for?) As a kid, well before I understood its left-wing political implications, I thought “This Land Is Your Land” was a much better song (still do), and I would be happier if at least some of the time, it were to be performed in the seventh inning. (Kudos to the Baltimore Orioles.)

This, of course, is nothing compared to what happens at the Super Bowl. I was only paying partial attention to the run-up to that game as I was preparing dinner for the wife and the daughter (I am a modern guy), but I heard portions of what seemed like a five minute narration by Johnny Cash about the flag, and there was a trio singing, I think, “America the Beautiful,” and then a sprightly version of the national anthem, followed by the flyover when military jets fly in close formation low over the stadium just as the national anthem ends.

I have no idea when the flyover ritual started. I am always amazed by it. How can the timing be so precise? My most memorable flyover was combined with another patriotic display, the flight of Challenger. This Challenger is a bald eagle, and I have seen him in action a number of times at Yankee Stadium. My memory is that the bird was originally released outside the stadium during the national anthem and would fly to the pitcher’s mound or home plate where he would land on his handler’s wrist. As time went on, Challenger would be released from right in front of the center field fence for his flight to the infield. It is magnificent seeing an eagle fly in the wild, and I always found Challenger’s flight nearly as thrilling. The last time I saw him (I say “him,” but I don’t know if the eagle is male or female), however, was different. It was a playoff or World Series game because the rosters of both teams had been announced and were lined up on the first and third baselines. Challenger was flying in from the outfield as the National Anthem was concluding, and then the flyover came. This time the planes flew really low. I was in the fourth row of the upper deck, and my knees buckled a bit from the vibrations. (How do the residents of the Bronx respond to this patriotic display? Many must not know it’s coming, and perhaps think New York City is under attack again.) Challenger was not prepared for this. He had been about to land on his handler’s wrist, but the jets seemed to almost knock him out of the air. It was as if he hit an air pocket, and he dropped like a stone for ten feet. He then seemed disoriented. He flew around the lower deck and returned to the playing field where he had Derek Jeter and other players ducking out of his way. He did not land on his handler. He finally just settled on the infield grass and appeared very sad and discombobulated. His handler had to walk over and collect him.

Is there truly a connection between such patriotic rituals and the sports events that follow? This question brings back a memory of Rocky Graziano, who won and lost the middleweight championship within a year during the heyday of boxing. After retiring he wrote an autobiography, Somebody Up There Likes Me, which appealed to my schoolboy fantasies and was made into a successful movie starring Paul Newman. Later, he did the talk show circuit regularly telling amusing stories in heavy Brooklynese. On one of them he said that he hated “The Star Spangled Banner.” Merv Griffiin or Mike Douglas or whoever looked at him incredulously and said, “Why?” Graziano replied quite logically, “I knew that whenever the national anthem was over, someone was going to try to knock me unconscious.”

(Continued from last post.)

Leaks can cause harm, but we also need to understand that secrecy also damages the country in a number of ways. One of those is that secrecy leads to claims of conspiracy. If we have classified information about the Roswell incident, an almost inevitable result will be assertions about UFOs and aliens. If everything is not disclosed about the investigation into JFK’s death, conspiratorial claims about the assassination proliferate. You might think you are above that kind of thing, but what was your response when you found out that Jared Kushner, during the Presidential campaign, had a secret meeting with the Russians? Doesn’t at least part of you think something nefarious must have gone on?

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

Government secrecy, in a subtle and insidious way, tends to corrupt the holder of the secrets. The official with a secret feels powerful. The secret becomes a form of currency, a coin that can be held for ego purposes—I know more than you do—even if information should be exchanged, or spent to enhance the prestige of the leaker or to gain an advantage in an internal government dispute.

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

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

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

And, of course, we can never really trust a leak. Not only does the leaker have some sort of motive for disclosing the particular information and for not disclosing something more, there is a natural inclination to make his own additions to the leaked material. Or at least this is a normal impulse if Seneca is right when he said, “Nobody will keep the thing he hears to himself and nobody will repeat just what he hears and no more.”

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

But if we are really going to look for the source of leaks that government officials often maintain we must do, we should remember what John F. Kennedy said, “The Ship of State is the only ship that leaks from the top.”

The President demands Investigations into governmental leaks. The Attorney-General and other officials say, or sometimes leak, that they are investigating leaks. The statements, however, use one broad term—“leaks”—to cover all sorts of releases informing the public about its government. The government officials railing against the disclosure seem to imply that all leaks are an existential threat to the country.

Is that right? Do all leaks harm national security? Should we really put into one basket a leak about clashes among White House advisors, a leak of our President’s conversation with his counterpart from Mexico, and a leak about troop movements during wartime? If you follow the news, in your lifetime you have learned about leaked information thousands, probably many, many thousands of times. Think back. How many of them have actually harmed the United States? Quick, name me ten. How about five?

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

But let’s talk about “official” secrets and the elaborate classification industry that keeps them hidden. The first reaction by many to the disclosure of classified information is that it is shameful, criminal, harmful, and unpatriotic, but we, especially those of us who proclaim to be conservative, should have another response to the classification industry. A generation ago, a commission studying government secrecy gave a perspective, which while true, is seldom considered. The commission stated, “Secrecy is a form of government regulation. Americans are familiar with the tendency to overregulate in other areas. What is different with secrecy is that the public cannot know the extent or the content of the regulation.”

If we saw every government secret as a regulation, if we saw the classification industry as a giant government bureaucracy, we might question secrecy more. Is it really possible that so much must be classified?  According to an annual report from the Information Security Oversight Office of the National Archives and Records Administration, over 55 million items were classified—mandated to be kept confidential–in whole or in part in Fiscal Year 2016 alone. If you believe that the federal government overregulates in other areas, surely you should think it also does so in the secrecy business. Commissions studying our classification regime have time and again found rampant overclassification, with some of the studies concluding that 50% to 90% of what is classified could safely be released. Perhaps the most striking fact about overclassification is that while we hear concerns about the disclosure of classified information, students of the classification industry have reported that they know of no instance when a government official has been disciplined for classifying information that should have been public.

Our most famous leak may have been of the Pentagon Papers. The government went into hyper-crisis mode. It tried to upend the First Amendment and suppress the Papers’ publication. It brought criminal charges against those who brought them into the public light. It, in essence, said that if ever a leak harmed national security and put the country into danger, this was it. After all we were then fighting the Vietnam War. Later, however, President Nixon’s Solicitor General confessed that the Papers were an example of “massive overclassification.”  The Papers’ were analyses of documents that had been written years before the Papers publication and posed “no trace of a threat to the national security.”

We do, however, pay a lot for this bureaucratic secrecy system. The Information Security Oversight Office estimates that the federal government spent over $16 billion on our classification system. But, wait. There’s more. The ISOO estimates that private industry spent an additional $1.27 billion because many defense contractors and other industries are part of the wide ranging secrecy business. (Why isn’t this regulatory, expensive bureaucracy a target of conservatives?)

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

Because so much is labeled secret and because human nature apparently abhors secrecy, it is not surprising that classified information finds a way to escape. Now add to that that about 4.5 million people have access to classified information, it is hardly surprising that there are leaks of classified information. Indeed it is surprising that there are not more. And since so much of the information is needlessly labeled secret, it should not be surprising that even leaks of classified information will often not harm national security.

We should be concerned about disclosures that are harmful, but talking about the harm from leaks is not the right starting point. A foundation of a free and open society is that information about the government and its doings should be free and open. Openness should be the norm; secrecy should be the rare exception. If we are in a free and open society, we should expect information to be public. We should be regularly challenging governmental secrecy. That does not mean that the government cannot have information kept from the public, but there should be exceptional reasons for doing so, and we should be regularly examining whether the reasons given for hiding information are truly exceptional.

“As the captain of the Yale swimming team stood besides the pool, still dripping after his laps, and listened to Bob Moses, the team’s second-best freestyler, he didn’t know what shocked him more—the suggestion or the fact that it was Moses who was making it.” Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York.

“Jose Palacios, his oldest servant, found him floating naked with his eyes open in the purifying waters of his bath and thought he had drowned.” Gabriel Garcia Marquez, The General in His Labyrinth.

“Not long after they heard the first clink of iron, the boys and girls in the cornfield would have been able to smell the grownups’ bodies, perhaps even before they saw the double line coming around the bend.” Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism.

“For the heart, life is simple: it beats for as long as it can.” Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle: Book 1.

“People’s lives—their real lives, as opposed to their simple physical existences—begin at different times.” Stephen King, The Dark Half.

“From far-northwest Greenland to the southernmost tip of Patagonia, people hail the new moon—a time for singing and praying, eating and drinking.” Daniel J. Boorstin, The Discoverers: A History of Man’s Search to Know his World and Himself.

“All parents keep secrets from their children.” Scott Turow, Ordinary Heroes.

“Among the most rewarding traits of perennials is the fact that they come up unprompted year after year to offer the garden masses and highlight of color in uninterrupted but ever-changing patterns from April to November.” James Underwood Crockett, Perennials.

“Not everybody knows how I killed old Phillip Mathers, smashing his jaw in with my spade; but first it is better to speak of my friendship with Divney because it was he who first knocked old Mathers down by giving him a great blow in the neck with a special bicycle-pump which he manufactured himself out of a  hollow iron bar.” Flann O’Brien, The Third Policeman.

“In the early 1980s, two physicists at Arizona State University wanted to know whether a typical introductory physics course, with its traditional emphasis on Newton’s laws of motion, changed the way students thought about motion.” Ken Bain, What the Best College Teachers Do.

“Death is my beat.” Michael Connelly, The Poet.

Our house has two front entrances. A stoop goes from the sidewalk up ten steps to a magnificent double set of ten-foot walnut doors. To the left of the stoop a wrought-iron, four-foot fence with a gate encloses an area three steps down from the sidewalk. This area is where we New York row-house people keep the trash containers.

When we first moved into this house, sanitation workers would enter this area and take and empty the garbage cans, leaving them on the sidewalk to be collected by the owners or custodians. Then one day, although the rest of the block had the trash removed, we did not.  And then it happened again and again.

I finally waited for the telltale sound of the sanitation truck, headed to the street, and approached the driver. I asked, “How come you haven’t been picking up my garbage?” He replied, “Our rules are that we are not supposed to go down three steps to get the cans.” I said, “But you get all the other containers on the street from in front of the houses.” Looking at me as if it were self-evident, he noted, “The other houses have at most two steps!” (My later reconnoitering showed that he was right.) I pleaded, “What am I supposed to do?” With a tone that indicated that that was not really his problem, he announced, “I guess you will have to put the cans at the curb on collection day.”

The pick-ups often come early in the morning, and I started putting the cans out the night before. I was embarrassed by this. The block was hardly pristine, but we were the only house with garbage cans waiting on the sidewalk. I wondered if the neighbors thought we were bringing down the quality of our street, and I wanted to tell everyone why we had no choice in doing this, but, then again, this was Brooklyn, and I only knew a smattering of those neighbors.

The cans awaiting collection were especially unsightly because they were not covered. Once again, this was Brooklyn, and it is a well known fact of life here that garbage can covers in  this borough tend to disappear if they are in reach of those passing by. (Many owners then chained the covers to the fences in the recessed areas in front of the houses.) Indeed, one of the mysteries of urban life is what happens to all those covers. I can’t imagine a use for all that go missing.

I got into the routine of putting the cans on the curb on the appropriate evenings. It irked me, but I lived with it until the day a piece of paper was attached to the front door–a sanitation violation because of uncovered cans on the sidewalk with garbage in them. The violation carried a fine.

I was now in the land of Catch-22. If I didn’t put the cans out, I would not have a garbage pickup. If I did, the tops would disappear, and I would get a fine.

The sanitation violation carried a notice of a hearing if one was desired. The hearing time was during working hours and on a date that I could not make, so the spouse, who then had a more flexible schedule, went. When our violation was called, the hearing officer looked at our distinctive name on the records, and then asked the spouse whether she knew me. She replied that she was married to me, and officer indicated that he knew me from my work at the Legal Aid Society, but if it was ok with her, he would still hear the case. She assented and explained the situation, but the officer said that there was nothing he could do and the fine would have to be paid. Then, when the hearing was over, he subtly waved her forward and leaned over and explained to her how New York works. He said, I kid you not, “Just pay the sanitation workers a ‘gratuity,’ and they will pick up your garbage.” He was careful not to utter “bribe.”

The next collection day I waited for that telltale sound of the coming trucks and approached the driver, who was a different one from my last encounter. I explained our predicament, and I heard the driver tell the other workers in what I regarded as a false tone, “Can you imagine? They get a violation if they leave the cans at the curb!” This was new territory for me. I did not know what was the appropriate amount, but I took out some bills hoping it was enough but not way too much and started to hand it to him. Apprehension flashed across his face while he said that I could not hand him money like that. Then it dawned on this yokel what he meant. I sprinted back to the house, put the money in the folds of a newspaper, rushed back, and handed him The New York Times for his reading pleasure.

This solved the problem. Our cans, like those of our neighbors, got picked up in front of the house until some time later when in labor negotiations the sanitation workers got a raise in exchange for reducing the number of workers in each crew. After that, everyone on our block had to put the receptacles at the curb, and miraculously, no one then got a sanitation violation for uncovered garbage cans on the street.

The spouse likes to lead book groups. She works very hard at it. She reads the book two or three times. I often read the book that will be discussed, too, and she will bounce her ideas that she might raise with the group off me. I have never participated in one of her book discussions. We have decided that my presence would make her too nervous, but I am confident that she does an excellent job.

Some find it surprising that she is so good at it. After all, she was a scientist—a research neuroimmunologist–and those who are not familiar with science, which includes all too many of us, often think scientists are generally isolated in a tiny world of esoterica.

The spouse was not always a scientist. While she took some science courses in college, she majored in English. She then went on to get a master’s in English at the University of Chicago. We came to New York, and she kicked around some publishing houses. She found her advancement there hampered by being a “girl,” but she also realized that she had always really wanted to be a biologist. Working part-time, she went to New York’s City College to get science credits, including organic chemistry, that she needed to get into graduate school. She then was accepted into Cornell Medical School, where she got a Ph.D.

The road to being a scientist is a long one—graduate school, and then years of a post-doctoral fellowship, and finally, if one is lucky, a lab of one’s own, which she got and ran until she recently retired. But during all that time, she continued to read detective stories, classic literature, bestsellers, history. She is not alone. Her best scientific friend also reads.

I don’t find this surprising. Of course, many scientists such as C.P. Snow, Richard Feynmann, Lewis Thomas, and E.O. Wilson have been outstanding writers. (Freud wrote some interesting books, but only under the most generous definition can he be labeled a “scientist.”) While those extraordinary scientist-writers just might be regarded as exceptional, there is actually a systemic connection between good writers and good scientists.

Successful scientists are curious about the world. They want to understand nature and the universe and set out to explore the unknown. A relative once said to me that the spouse and I led such safe, ordinary, unadventurous lives. I, not surprisingly bristled, and wanted to lash back with all the James Bondish things in my life (if I could have thought of any), but mostly I was offended on behalf of the spouse. I replied, “She is a scientist, and she goes off to work each day trying to see and understand things that have never been seen or understood before with no guarantee that that will happen. Few things could be more adventuresome or daring than that!”

Research scientists are always seeking what has not been found before, and they do it with a wonder about the world. On some level, every scientist I know thinks nature is marvelous and feels a certain glee when something new is discovered about it.

The good writer also sets out to find what has not been found before, but in the writer’s case, it is a phrase, a sentence, a paragraph, a character, or a story. The writer, too, has to have a wonder about the world and observe it and learn from it. He or she must be able to see and remember what the rest of us cannot. They are part of the intelligent people that Blaise Pascal  described: “The more intelligent a man is, the more originality he discovers in men. Ordinary people see no difference between men.” The good writer often sees distinctions and distinctiveness where others all see the same, not only in other people, but in many facets of the world. The good writer can describe or explain what many of us fail to see. As a result, our world expands. The scientist, who also seeks a greater understanding of the world, I think, can especially appreciate what a good writer has done.

Of course, the truths articulated by the scientist and the good writer are not the same. Perhaps this is too often a one-way street; while the scientist can understand the fresh insights or observations of the good writer, the scientist’s findings are often not understood outside the scientific community. But in their seeking of the previously unknown, both the good scientist and the good writer add to an understanding of the world.  As Tracy Kidder and Richard Todd say in Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction, “If you can trace the neural pathways of criminality, do you know more about criminals than Dostoyevsky knows? No, you know something different.”

We should not be surprised that scientists appreciate good literature and insightful history, or at least I am not surprised that the spouse does. You can ask her about microglia and the like, but if you want to think more deeply about The Gentleman from Moscow, The Sound and The Fury, or The Children Act, she has some questions for you.

The second song the DJ played was “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction.” Is that appropriate for a wedding reception?

I was on a park bench. Off to my left a man was ranting. Police were around the apparently mentally ill person dealing with him patiently. On the next park bench to my right were people who begged in the park and seemed to know the ranter. One of the them looked at the police, saw a blonde woman, and said, “Look at her. She doesn’t look like a cop. Why did she become a cop? She should have been, uh, uh, uh, a chemist, or something.”

I hope it was for a law firm, but it did not say so. The billboard read: “Medical malpractice is all we do.”

I went to a butterfly release. It was a fundraiser for a county Women’s Resources Center that aids abused women. (It is shocking how many women this center aids each year.) For every $15 given to the center, the donor got to release a butterfly. I had never thought about how butterflies might get released. They come from the grower in an insulated container with an icepack. The cold, but not freezing temperature, keeps the butterflies—monarchs in this case—dormant. Each butterfly is individually wrapped in a triangular envelope. The envelopes are taken out of the container to allow the butterflies to warm up and become more active. At the appointed time, a flap on the envelop is opened and the butterfly comes out. In our case, since it was cool evening, they needed some coaxing to start flying.

I think it was a typo. The New York City Department of Transportation sent me an email about upcoming street closures. It said that various thoroughfares around Central Park would be closed “for the Susan G. Komen Race for the Curve.”

I watched some men’s doubles at the U.S. Open. I knew nothing about any of the players, but the men on one team were identically dressed in black shirts and shorts with skulls as decorations. The players sported tattoos, infrequently seen on professional tennis players. I expected them to play heavy metal on the changeovers. They were trying to look as if they were the bad boys of tennis. The image was undercut, however, when they lost in straight sets of the first round.

At a recent dinner party, a guest mispronounced a word. Other people at the table, either out of ignorance or out of politeness, pronounced the word in the same wrong way. I avoided using the word. What should one do in such a circumstance?

“Shish kebab. Sugarloaf. Sheboygan. Whenever life called for foul language, Aughenbaugh broke into a reserve of quaint Midwestern euphemisms.” Michael Chabon, Moonglow.

A once magnificent hotel had become decrepit and was torn down. I and others were touring the grounds to see if they could be turned into a park. A flagpole had been left standing. Two of my colleagues were looking up and commented that the donated flag was too small for the height of the pole. They were right. It reminded me of the President when he holds his hands up.

“Wasn’t history supposed to end in 1991?” David Greene, Midnight in Siberia: A Train Journey into the Heart of Russia.

“Some notable sight was drawing the passengers, both men and women, to the windows, and therefore I rose and crossed the car to see what it was.”  Owen Wister, The Virginian.

“My wife and I were both born without whatever brain part it is that enables people to decorate their homes.”  Dave Barry, Dave Barry’s Bad Habits: A 100% Fact-free Book.

“In planning your wedding, remember that this is above all a sacred and personal occasion.” Jordan Marsh, Wedding Embassy Yearbook.

“Down to the last day, even the last hour now, I’m an old man, lonely and unloved, sick and hurting and tired of living.” John Grisham, The Testament.

“To write is to talk to strangers.” Tracy Kidder & Richard Todd, Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction.

“The day my wife left me she gave me a list of what I was.” Chang-Rae Lee, Native Speaker.

“We were never born to read.” Maryanne Wolf, Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain.

“He knew that it was wrong, and that he was going to get caught.”  Scott Turow, Personal Injuries.

“Two hours before my mother killed herself, I noticed she had put on makeup.” Betty Rollins, Last Wish.

“Standing before the kitchen sink and regarding the bright brass faucets that gleamed so far away, each with a bead of water at its nose, slowly swelling, falling, David again became aware that this world had been created without thought of him.” Henry Roth, Call It Sleep.

“I was in the washtub naked.” Akira Kurosawa, Something Like an Autobiography.

“America, said Horace, the office temp, was a run-down and demented pimp.” Sam Lipsyte, The Ask.

“About 17,000 years ago a great sheet of ice one thousand feet thick covering eastern North America from the Canadian Arctic all the way to Staten Island began to melt and retreat.”  City of New York Parks & Recreation, New York City Trees: A Field Guide for the Metropolitan Area.

“Fame requires every kind of excess.”  Don DeLillo, Great Jones Street.

Immediately after 9/11, the political and policy discussions centered on security. We needed a larger military, more intelligence, more monitoring of potentially dangerous people, stricter border controls. We needed to kill bin Laden. We needed to wipeout al Qaeda. These thoughts were understandable even if many of the actual responses were not justified or wasteful or downright wrong.

We had little discussion, however, of what should have been evident from 9/11—the importance of a strong, efficient, creative government in the non-militaristic areas, but I witnessed that firsthand. My office on September 11, 2001, was eight blocks from the Twin Towers. I had driven to work at around eight to prepare for a class later in the morning. I took a break to go to the bank and heard the first plane go over my head. I heard the crash and saw the hole on the upper floors of the Tower. Mesmerized, I realized that I was watching people dying.  After completing my bank errand, I decided that I wanted to see what the Tower looked like from the other side. As I got two blocks from the World Trade Center, the second plane hit the far side of the other Tower and flames shot out in my direction. I walked back to my office. I called the spouse to tell her I was ok, but the call got cut off when the first Tower fell. I decided it was time to get out of lower Manhattan.

I had driven to work. My usual routes home to Brooklyn were over the Brooklyn or Manhattan Bridges, but I knew they were closed. Picking up and dropping off people along the way, I drove to the next bridge over the East River. I was in line to cross the Williamsburg Bridge, with but two cars in front of me to get on the span, when traffic officials signaled that the structure was now closed. I went to the next crossing; got in line; and had it close just in front of me. And the next. There was no way to drive to Brooklyn. I turned around and headed south. I parked my car on a Chinatown street and walked with hordes of others over the Manhattan Bridge roadway to Brooklyn. (The mind can operate on curious levels. Although I had driven over that span many times, I found myself thinking in the midst of the horror and shock of that day about the only other time I had crossed it on foot. In those days, no pedestrian walkway on the Manhattan Bridge was open, but I once ran a “Courthouse to Courthouse” race. It started by the Manhattan federal courts, went over the Manhattan Bridge, which had been closed to vehicles for the event, wound around on local streets to a Brooklyn courthouse, and then reversed course to Manhattan. It was not a long race, but a tough one, all uphill or downhill. Now, I reflected, it was not an organized run of a few hundred, but a solemn trudge by the tens of thousands, as if we were extras in a Biblical epic, except this was all too real.)

In mid-afternoon, a news report stated that some East River bridges were again open. I walked from home to the Manhattan Bridge where one bus stood to ferry passengers over the river. I got to my car and quickly doubted the accuracy of the news report since I kept finding bridges closed. About to give up again, I found I could cross the Tri-Borough Bridge into Queens, which, of course, abuts Brooklyn, but then I found my usual way home from that Bridge was closed. Normally I would merge off the Bridge on to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, but traffic officials were blocking the entrance to the expressway. An officer told me that I would have to take local streets.  In those days I prided myself on knowing my way around much of New York City, but Queens was my weak link. I literally drove in circles, seeing one particular building at least three times. Finally, I came upon an intersection that I was familiar with because it was one I sometimes passed when I took the daughter to tennis on Roosevelt Island and now knew a route home.

In my wanderings, which were less than twelve hours after the first attack, I passed many entrances to elevated roadways. Every one of them was blocked, I presume out of security concerns, by government officials.  I can’t imagine how many such entrances there are in New York City. I thought what an amazing logistical feat it was to have guarded every one of them in such short order. It took a good government, a strong government, a large government (which in New York City was largely a unionized government) to accomplish this. We pay a lot of taxes in New York, but it seemed more than worth it on the night of 9/11.

Of course, this was one of the many feats, and one of the more minor ones, that New York City quickly accomplished in response to the attack. When I had gone to my car, I could see that Manhattan south of Canal Street had been effectively cordoned off—once again, a tremendous logistical feat. And in the coming days, I would learn about the efforts and coordination of emergency medical personnel and school guards and sanitation workers and firefighters and housing officials and welfare workers and much more. Volunteers stepped forward as New Yorkers pulled together, but New York would not have recovered as well as it did without the effective performance at all levels of government. And this was not the work of bureaucratic drudges. The situation required new coordination among different government branches. It required creativity. It required dedicated service.

Mayor Rudy Giuliani got lots of praise because New York performed so well after 9/11. He deserved praise, but a salient fact was overlooked.  The City government as a whole performed marvelously. Plans had been drawn for emergencies, and they went into effect. And what put them into effect was Big Government. Liberals and conservatives both praised Rudy, but the importance of all level of governments should also have been stressed. Would other cities where the mantra is against government have performed as well? We, luckily, do not know, but a story that should have come out of that tragedy was not just the performance of Giuliani, but how important a strong, dedicated, and creative government can be. If that strong, dedicated, and creative government had not been there, Giuliani would not have been effective and not have been a hero. In those unusual times when New York City was generally admired (Do you remember that accurate Onion headline: “Rest of Country Temporarily Feels Deep Affection for New York”?), besides the discussions about security, lessons should have been preached about the worth of the kind of government conservatives rail against. Reagan’s anti-government rhetoric was not heard in those days. It had been proven false.

Conservatives contend that the “mainstream media” is liberal. That may be so, but even if true, liberals, even if they have a message, don’t know how to sell it. Quick, give me a liberal aphorism or quote that helps set the political agenda today. Compare whatever you remember with these: “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” “Government’s first duty is to protect the people, not run their lives.” “Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.” “The best minds are not in government. If any were, business would steal them away.” “The problem is not that people are taxed too little, the problem is that government spends too much.” “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’”

These are all the words of Ronald Reagan, and his rhetoric not only still resonates, it is often the starting point for any political policy discussion. The discussion does not start with the thought that government does good things or that taxation can lead to a better society. Instead, it starts with the premise that government is dangerous. Government is too big. Government is inept. Government is incompetent. Taxes are bad. Taxation is too high. Regulations destroy jobs. Reagan was so influential because he re-shaped the political dialog.  Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson in their book  American Amnesia: How the War on Government Led Us to Forget What Made America Prosper point out that Eisenhower, in his 1953 State of the Union address, referred to government about forty times, almost all of them favorably. Bill Clinton’s State of the Union address in 1993, after Reagan, was almost the same length as Ike’s, but mentioned the government only about twenty times, almost always negatively.

Reagan’s rhetorical views of government still drive the political discussion, but his actual policies often undercut conservative ideology. Thus, conservatives continue to maintain that tax cuts will cause a spurt in the economy, and that economic growth will cut the federal deficit and reduce unemployment. Reagan engineered a major tax cut, but the federal deficit and debt ballooned. Reagan then went on to support specific tax increases, on gasoline, for instance, in a failed attempt to lower the debt. Part of the deficit problem, in spite of his aphorisms, was that Reagan did not cut government spending; instead, the size of the federal government increased significantly under his watch.  (And, of course, there was Iran-Contra. Under Reagan, the United States illegally sold arms to Iran and then illegally gave some of the proceeds to rebels in Nicaragua. How did that befriending of Iran work out? And do you remember when Nicaragua was an existential threat to America? And am I the only one who thinks there might be parallels between Reagan administration contacts with Iran and Trump supporters’ contacts with Russia?)

The liberals have lost out on the starting point for what should be an essential discussion: What is the role of government? Hacker and Pierson note that modern discourse often sees government as only a vehicle for wealth redistribution. “But what is missing is an understanding that most of what government does is not about redistribution at all; it is about addressing a wide range of problems that markets alone are ill equipped to tackle.” And while Hacker and Pierson, among others, have attempted to expand the discussion beyond the conservative viewpoint, little has been accomplished. Instead, liberals or anti-conservatives only seem to respond to conservative claims. They don’t seem capable of seizing or molding the debate.

Al Franken, in his latest book, Giant of the Senate, gives an explanation: “Democrats always have a disadvantage in messaging—not because we’re idiots, but because we have complex ideas and, sometimes, a hard time explaining them succinctly. Our bumper stickers always end with ‘continued on next bumper sticker.’” That may be so. It is easier to proclaim that immigrants take jobs, for example, than to discuss that our economy is not a zero-sum game where a job for one is not simply the loss of a job for another; how immigrants help grow the economy by buying goods and services; how immigrants pay payroll and incomes taxes; how, as our birthrate declines, immigration is a force for necessary workforce expansion. Yes, no bumper sticker can do that. (Although not in bumper-sticker form, Senator Franken did a better job in his latest book of explaining the Affordable Care Act than I ever heard President Obama give. For this and other reasons, put Al Franken on your radar for possible Presidential candidates. A good start to see if you want to do that would be to read Giant of the Senate. Parts of it are laugh-out-loud funny, but other portions taught me, at least, things I did not know about how the Senate functions and about the views and abilities of Senator Franken.) But even sloganeering has not been a Democratic strength, the liberals and anti-conservatives don’t seem to be able to seize opportunities to point out that the conservative slogans often don’t hold water.

An opportunity to start a useful discussion comes right now from the hurricanes. As is usual in such a crisis, I heard someone complain to a news reporter about price gouging, but price gouging is simply the fallout from the law of supply and demand. The extraordinary, sudden demand for goods with a limited supply of them gives the seller the opportunity to make extraordinary profits. If you are a conservative who believes in leaving markets unrestrained, you should accept price gouging in an emergency. Interestingly, however, I have never heard any leading conservative who has mouthed platitudes about the importance of not interfering in markets defend price gouging. Instead, what price-gouging could teach is that almost all of us have concerns about our free market system and believe that it should be—oh, that fearful word—regulated some of the time. The debate should be when is that regulation best for the good of our society.

The fight for FEMA funds could also be an opportunity for an examination of conservative shibboleths. In accordance with their call for a smaller government, conservatives should be opposed to FEMA, and some conservative congressmen and think tanks have proposed a more limited FEMA. But when a natural disaster occurs, those in the affected areas tend to think that getting federal money is a right. Although it is never called this, it is seen as an entitlement. Furthermore, it does what conservatives say should not happen: it is a government program that redistributes wealth. This redistribution is not so much from wealthy individuals to those below them on the economic scale, but a redistribution of money to some parts of the country from the country as a whole. Natural disasters and other emergencies do not occur at the same rate throughout the country; some states–Texas, Louisiana, and Florida, for example–are more prone to them than others. A place like Texas takes more funds out of FEMA than it puts in while many other states put more in than they get out. FEMA redistributes wealth by geography.

Another way to look at FEMA, however, is that it is part of a social safety net. People are in need because of an disaster, and we as Americans–and that includes our government–help people in need. As with any aspect of our social net, we should seek to lessen the need for it in the future and seek to make those asking or demanding assistance more responsible for lessening their present and future need, but as long as we are one country, even though fortune and misfortune do not fall equally upon us, we should aid the unfortunate. Let’s start talking about FEMA as welfare, as wealth redistributor, as part of our social net, and tie them into a broader discussion of Americans who might need help from, yes, the government.

But liberals have not been good at changing the focus of policy debates. I have been thinking that since 9/11. (To be continued.)