My anti-gun views became modified when I bought a home in the Poconos a dozen years after I had moved on from being a public defender. A building 110 years old like this Pennsylvania house always needs work and remodeling, and this brought local plumbers, stone masons, electricians, roofers, painters, and floor refinishers into the house. They were hardworking and did good jobs. I respected them. I almost always talked with them. I liked them, and invariably they were devoted hunters. I learned not to expect any work on the house to get done on the opening day of the various hunting seasons. Many of them depended on hunting to supply a goodly proportion of the protein for their families, and in an area where wages have mostly been stagnant, a good hunting season made a difference in the family finances. These were responsible citizens who enjoyed and, to an extent, depended on their guns, and it was hard for me to think how a government that would not seem tyrannical could take their rifles and shotguns away.

Furthermore, the Pennsylvania house is located in a spot with too many deer. As a kid, it was a thrill to see a deer on a country drive because the deer population had not expanded as it has now in many parts of the country. The habitat good for deer has widened, and their predators have all but disappeared. I now see deer regularly. That seems nice, but too many deer are destructive. Of course, they regularly destroy gardens, but their huge numbers also eliminate the undergrowth in wooded areas, changing, not for the better, the life cycle of forests. The increased number of deer has helped with to spread Lyme disease, a problem of increasing proportions in many part of the country. And with larger deer herds, diseases among the deer have increased. For all these reason, I have come to conclude that it is right to increase the, as euphemism has it, harvest of the deer. That can be done in a number of ways, but a sensible way involves hunters and guns.

I began to think, “Leave rifles alone, but find ways to regulate and limit handguns.” It was handguns that had done all that horrific damage I had seen in my criminal defense days, and little hunting is done with a handgun. I tried this theory out on a young man in Pennsylvania who was moving furniture for us. He was a hunter (of course), and he politely assented that perhaps there could be more controls on handguns than rifles, but I could tell that his agreement was merely a form of politeness. He owned at least one handgun, and there was no way he was going to part with it, and certainly he felt that there should be no restrictions on him if he wanted to buy another. He knew the problems of handguns in the cities, but that was someone else’s problem. Long before Trump, I could see how his response indicated the divide in this country along city, suburban, and rural lines. He believed that he had right not only to a rifle and a shotgun, but also to a handgun. Cities were almost as foreign to him as another country, and he should not have to give up his rights to improve cities. And I thought, “Who is to say he’s wrong? How many people in the cities would be willing to give up what they see as a right to make rural lives better?”

Simon’s Bronx Primitive and Delmar’s Bad Girl illustrated the prevalence of abortions in the first decades of the twentieth century. Perhaps illegal abortions decreased after the 1920s, but that is unknowable. I knew a couple women who had abortions before they were legal in this country. These were what most would see as ordinary women. Only because I was close to them did I find out about the illegal terminations of their pregnancies. I can assume that of the many older women I have known less well, some, maybe many, also had illegal abortions.

If the abortion rate dropped from Kate Simon’s youth, it is not because laws against abortion had more effect, or that sex drives changed, or that women came to follow church proscriptions more faithfully, but primarily because of the increase in the availability and knowledge of birth control that occurred in the twentieth century. Margaret Sanger’s movement was in its infancy when Simon’s mother had abortions and when Delmar wrote, and the spread of birth control was hard work that took years to have any widespread effect. Four decades after Simon and Delmar, there was still often limited discussion of birth control. In a senior class when I was in high school, for example, ten percent of the girls got pregnant, or at least ten percent were known to have gotten pregnant. Of course, the odds are high that others got pregnant without its becoming public knowledge and had abortions.

Sanger had to overcome not only the reticence to talk about sex that prevented education about birth control, practices kept contraception as much out of sight as possible. Condoms were hidden away in the drug store, and the pharmacist had to be asked for them, an embarrassing and deterring encounter for many. But Sanger and her followers also had to fight laws that actually prohibited birth control.

Many states at one time proscribed birth control, but by 1960, only a couple still had such laws, including Connecticut which made illegal “any drug, medicinal article, or instrument for the purpose of preventing contraception.” The law applied to the married and the unmarried, and we should remember such laws when we hear complaints about how our present government has gotten too big. What could be more big brotherish than to regulate what married couples can do in their bedroom (or on their kitchen table or their washing machine)? I wonder how many people who complain about the intrusiveness of government even know that government once prohibited the use of birth control.

The United States Supreme Court, in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), found the Connecticut law to be unconstitutional as a violation of “marital privacy.” The decision was controversial because nothing in the Constitution explicitly protects privacy, and the seven justices who voted to invalidate the law relied on different constitutional provisions to find this privacy right. Even so, the right to access birth control was extended to non-married couples by the Supreme Court in 1972 in Eisenstadt v. Baird.

It was settled, then. All had access to birth control, and many, most, nearly all of us thought that was good. Pleasure and passion and love can increase because of birth control.  Stable, non-abusive families are more likely with birth control. Abortion decreases with birth control. But we now live in a new age that once again will make birth-control availability more difficult.

The present administration has announced changes to the health-care rules to make getting contraception more difficult. Under Obama, the Affordable Care Act made birth control a regular benefit of health insurance without any co-pay. In 2014, however, the Supreme Court in the Hobby Lobby case ruled that a “closely held corporation” could be exempt from the health care contraception mandate on religious grounds. The proposal now extends that exemption to both for-profit and non-profit entities and to all companies including publicly held ones, not just closely held ones. In addition, the exemption would extend beyond religious beliefs to sincerely held “moral convictions.”

That corporations could have religious beliefs came as a surprise to me. I did not know that if you make it to heaven, you might see Shell Oil, Amazon, and Morgan Stanley ringing the Father. I certainly was not aware of Jesus preaching in any boardrooms. I wondered how the religious beliefs of a corporation are determined. Will the shareholders be polled? Would we count the votes by individuals or by the number of shares held? If by shares, as must be done for other corporate purposes, the rich person’s religious views will count for more than the less affluent shareholder’s. What if I have religious views or moral convictions for or against contraception but I am in the minority; aren’t my religious beliefs or moral convictions then violated?

And what are the non-religious moral convictions about birth control? I have enough difficulty understanding the religious beliefs about contraception. I don’t pretend that I can recall every word of the Bible, but I don’t remember any mention of IUDs, the pill, condoms, or even latex. Did anything even like our notions of contraception exist back in biblical times?

On top of this, a person who has spoken out against not only abortion but also against contraception has been appointed to the position in the Department of Health and Human Services’ Title X program which oversees family planning funding for poor Americans. Add to this the attacks on Planned Parenthood. Remember that federal money cannot be used for abortions so that a federal defunding of Planned Parenthood will have little effect on those procedures, but it will affect the availability of contraception. (And, of course, the latest healthcare bill was put forward without a single woman on the drafting group.)

We are on a dangerous path. Many states and the federal government have put such onerous restrictions on abortion that, although a constitutional right, it is not in fact available for many women. That is a step back to Delmar and Simon’s time of knitting needles and goop to be prayerfully drunk. And now we will make obtaining birth control more difficult with the result being that many women, generally poor women, will not have contraception. I suppose the good news is that we will be giving a new generation of novelists and memoirists like Delmar and Simon something to write about.

I know many families with only one, two, or three kids. Perhaps it is because in this age many couples have finally learned what previous generations did not, to use the rhythm method successfully. Or perhaps it is because passion or tenderness or intimacy dies out with modern couples as it did not a hundred years ago. But I am guessing that the prime reason is that these couples use birth control. They have found that birth control makes their lives, their relationships, their families better. Birth control should be available to all in our society.

[“Gun Confusion,” Parts I and II of which were posted on Oct. 4 and Oct. 6, will resume on Oct. 13. “Gun Confusion” is being interrupted for a reprise of this essay which once again is especially timely.]

Bad Girl by Viña Delmar was a bestseller in 1928. My copy is from its fifteenth printing that year. (Sales were probably not hurt when the novel was banned in Boston.) In the novel, Dot is a working-class, New York City woman who does the unthinkable and has premarital sex. She gets pregnant and marries her lover. She fears childbirth, about which she knows little, and the book has a frank discussion of her attempts to terminate the pregnancy.

Even though it is against the law, she gets a concoction from a pharmacist. Although she takes it “religiously,” it fails to work. Dot then turns to a more upper-class friend, Maude, who urges Dot not to have the baby and tells her that only an operation, not any medicine, will work. Dot asks whether the operation hurts, and Maude says it does “the first time, because most girls are crazy enough to try it without ether.” With the anesthetic, however, “you don’t feel a damn thing.” The friend gives Dot an address and tells her not to pay more than fifty dollars, an enormous sum to Dot. Maude states that the hospitals are open to the woman giving birth, but not to the one who doesn’t want a baby. “High prices, fresh doctors. It’s a man’s world, Dot. To the woman who knows her place they will give their charity, but the woman who wants to keep her body from pain and her mind from worry is an object of contempt.” Dot, not having fifty dollars, goes for a preliminary visit to the doctor, who determines she is pregnant, molests her, charges her five dollars, settles for the only two dollars she has, and tells her to make an appointment soon because she is in the second month.

Dot and her husband Eddie cannot talk freely with each other about what they are feeling. Eddie thinks that a pregnancy termination would be murder, but he also thinks a man “would have a hell of a nerve” to tell a woman to have a baby. “What right had a man to say what she should do?”

Dot talks with other friends. Edna says a woman has the baby whether she wants it or not. “Abortion” is never uttered. Instead, in different from the way we use the term now, it is referred to as “birth control.” Thus, Dot “was not anxious to debate the pro and con of birth control” with Edna, and Edna to herself was trying to figure out, “Who was the birth-control advocate, Eddie or Dot?”

Edna urges Eddie to oppose the abortion, but he replies, “It’s her business.” Edna then indicates that “nine-tenths” of young married women are ignorant about both childbirth and abortion. She states that there are only a half-dozen New York City doctors who do abortions without serious complications such as blood poisoning. For a birth, Edna maintains, a woman can find a good doctor, but “the other way you’ve got a guy who couldn’t make a living the way other doctors do. . . , and in case you have religion, you’ve sinned against it.”

Finally, Dot decides. “After all, it was her body that was to be the battle-field. She had been wrong. It was her place to do what she pleased, not to stand by and wait for Eddie to pass judgment.” The thought of the horrid abortionist was repulsive, and she feels happy and peaceful as she announces that she will have the baby.

Kate Simon’s memoir Bronx Primitive: Portraits in a Childhood, like Bad Girl, also describes working-class, 1920s New York, although Simon is narrating from the viewpoint of a young girl. She and her family were then living in a Bronx neighborhood largely inhabited by immigrant Jews and Italians, and she was struggling to understand the world she was encountering, including the visits of Dr. James. He was seldom seen by the kids because he came when school was in session. No explanation was given for the appearance of this tall, fair “American” in a neighborhood of short, dark “foreigners.” However, Simon noticed, the mothers he visited, who were fine in the morning, were in bed when school let out.

Years later Simon’s medical relatives told her that Dr. James had had a prestigious and lucrative medical practice and came from the prosperous New England family that produced the writers and intellectuals William and Henry. After his children were raised, Dr. James dedicated himself to poor immigrant women who had “no sex information, no birth-control clinics, nothing but knitting needles, hat pins, lengths of wire, the drinking of noxious mixtures while they sat in scalding baths to prevent the birth of yet another child. Some of these women died of infections, and often when these procedures did not work, the women went to term and then let the infant die of exposure or suffocation.“

To prevent such suicides and murders, Dr. James went from one immigrant neighborhood to another, performing abortions. Often charging nothing but never more than a dollar or two, James performed thousands of the procedures. All the adults knew what he did, and according to Simon, so did the police and the Board of Health who generally let him be. Periodically, however, when there was some change in officialdom, he was arrested. He wouldn’t post bail but contacted colleagues. Doctors then thronged the courthouse where “they pleaded, they argued, they shouted, they accused the police and the court of ignorance and inhumanity,” and each time Dr. James was released.

James was a skillful and careful practitioner and would not perform an abortion if it would be too dangerous. Simon had a much younger sister, and when Kate was an adult, her mother told Simon that the sister was unwanted. James, however, would not perform an abortion because Simon’s mother already had had too many and another would be hazardous. Shortly before she died, Simon’s mother told Kate that she had had thirteen abortions (as well as three children) and that other women in the neighborhood had had even more. Why do you think, the mother continued, that the Italian women urged to have large families by the Catholic Church had only two or three kids? “Certainly it wasn’t the abstinence of Italian husbands, no more controlled than Jewish husbands. It was the work of the blessed hands of that wonderful old goy.”

Bad Girl and Bronx Primitive indicate that abortion was prevalent in this country a hundred years ago, as were willful infant deaths. (We tend not to think about infanticide, but the concern in our colonial days over it were so great the special evidentiary and other rules were applied when a mother reported a stillbirth or that a baby died shortly after being born.) One of the reasons for the number of abortions was ignorance about sex. In Bad Girls, Dot’s husband has no idea why she is making monthly marks on their calendar.  In our colonial history, and beyond, men, at least, believed that a woman could only get pregnant if she had an orgasm and that a woman could only have an orgasm if the intercourse were consensual. Thus, a raped woman could not get pregnant. Surely this ignorance led to abortions. But abortions and infanticides also occurred because of lack or knowledge of birth control in our modern sense of that term so that the only meaningful “birth control” available then was abortion.

Continued from last post

For a long time after my teenage years, I did not fire a gun, but as an adult I dealt with guns and saw some of their effects all too frequently. I was a public defender in New York City during what many might call the bad old days. New York City had stricter gun laws than most places which made it illegal, except in a few special circumstances, to carry or even own a handgun. I represented taxi cab drivers and bodega clerks charged with illegally possessing a handgun. I represented teenagers whose need for a gun might seem less obvious but, when I asked why they had a gun, gave the same reply as the others: “For protection.” (I recently met a woman in rural Mountainhome, PA., who carried a gun in her purse “for protection.” I found this a curious answer. For almost all of the last fifty years, I have lived in what are called “high crime neighborhoods,” and the spouse, the daughter, and I have all been the victim of crimes. I, for example, have been robbed at knifepoint twice, and the spouse has been robbed, too. I have been assaulted on the subway, and so has the daughter. I never have thought that if had been carrying a gun, I would have been “protected” from these crimes. Thus, by the time I saw the knife in the robber’s hand, it would have been too late to retrieve a gun from my pocket. If I started to try to pull out a gun, would the robber have run away? Maybe. If I had tried to pull out a gun, would I have got stabbed. Maybe.)

I also represented and saw in court many charged with the use of guns in the commission of other crimes—robberies, rapes, assaults, murder.  I heard the heart-wrenching testimony of a young woman forced to disrobe at gunpoint; the grandmother commanded to yield her purse and did so when the robber opened his coat and displayed a gun in his waistband; the child who described the argument between his parents and testified that the mother reached into a kitchen drawer, pulled out a gun, and shot his father; a father, weeping uncontrollably, testifying about identifying, at the morgue, his son, who had been killed by a gunshot after a brief midsummer argument on a Brooklyn stoop.

Like you, I had seen many acts of gun violence portrayed on the screen, many of them chilling and gut-wrenching, but this was real life, and I began to think more about the various survivors of gun violence, something that was then seldom depicted in popular culture. PTSD was just coming into the common parlance (ask me about defending Vietnam veterans), but surely those I had seen no doubt had a long-lasting effects from what guns had helped put them through. I thought about this a lot when representing a young man who, at gunpoint, had committed a degrading sexual assault on a woman and an assault on her boyfriend. My client had never been in trouble before. He had been a good high school student and a track star who had gained a scholarship to an Illinois college. He had taken care of a CEO’s children, and that executive was willing to go to bat for him. The crime was disturbing, and so was the client’s reaction to it. When discussing it, he showed no remorse, but he also showed no other emotion. His affect was completely flat. It was as if he had drifted into another world. “How would you feel if this had happened to your mother? Your sister?” In a monotone: “I guess I would not like that.”  I kept probing and found that his father had left the family when the client was three or four. A bit later he had a stepfather, and a very good one. The stepfather attended the school performances and helped with homework. He took the boy to church. He introduced him to track and attended the meets. It was a close family until the boy was twelve and the birth father broke into the home and shot the stepfather in front of the boy, who was found, blood-soaked and hugging the stepfather’s body. Learning this, I could only wonder if an act of gun violence had begot later gun violence.

These experiences made me anti-gun.

I was on my stomach with elbows propped on the ground. I could maintain the right height, or I guess “elevation” is the correct word, but I could not hold the sights steady. They moved slowly and laterally over the target. I decided that the best I could do was judge the rapidity of the movement and fire right before the bull’s-eye was in the sights. I was on the firing range at a Boy Scout camp, although I think I was only a Cub Scout, and it was the first time I had shot a real gun—it was a rifle and I assume a .22. We had received some sort of instruction, but I had learned long before from countless western and war movies and TV shows—don’t pull the trigger; squeeze it. The targets were collected, and I was eager to see how I had done.  I had scored well—very well. (Unlike in archery, where I sucked.) This was fun.

In my first and only week at a sleepaway camp, I went back to the rifle range whenever I could. I was quite pleased with my marksmanship as were the instructors. Toward the end of the week I went again to the range. This time I went wearing shoes but no socks. In those days, apparently, no respectable human being went sockless. The instructor was shocked at my cavalier dismissal of the conventional attire and said, “No one is allowed here unless they are wearing socks.” I disregarded the grammatical lapse, but I did feel anger. What did socks have to do with firing a rifle safely? I could not see the connection, and although only twelve, my emerging anti-authoritarian streak was fueled. Further, although we had been given many rules at our time at camp, this was not one of them. This guy was just making it up on spot. (Of course, maybe, there had never before been a need for such a rule since everyone else wore socks to the range.) I don’t remember whether I put socks on, but I did not go back to the range. This experience added to my doubts about my suitability for scouting and soon I left the organization. You might also say that I was ahead of my time in being offended by senseless regulations.

We did not have guns in our house growing up. Guns in those days meant hunting, and my father did not hunt. He did fish and took the family to local lakes. We used casting rods, and I still remember the thrill of a strike and the landing of what I was assured was a very large smallmouth bass. But no hunting, although this was Wisconsin, and, of course, many people went hunting for geese and ducks and deer. In autumn, I would often see a buck tied to the hood of a car as it was driven to the butcher. Deer were killed not just for the thrill of the hunt, but also to be eaten. I found the sight of the dead deer simultaneously disgusting and exhilarating, and I sometimes benefited from the deer-killing. A destination for hunters was the butcher shop attached to the grocery store where my mother clerked. The butchers turned the scraps of the deer meat into summer sausage. The butchers could not legally sell any of the hunters’ kill, but they would often give some of the venison sausage to my mother, and I would happily eat it.

I am certain that many of my friends had guns in their houses, but this was not a topic of conversation. No one bragged about their arsenal or insisted they were safer because of the firearms stashed in the basement or closet. No one owned guns as status symbols. It was just accepted that if someone in the family was a hunter, there were rifles or shotguns in the house.

One of these friends was Greg, and during a high school summer, he suggested that he, Steve, and I go out shooting. Although I had not held a rifle since my scouting days, I agreed. We went to a farm outside of town that must have been owned by a relative of Greg’s and, like cowboys in a movie, we set up bottles and cans on fence posts. Being a timid, adolescent boy, I was worried about embarrassing myself and let the others shoot first. The first targets were easy, and we moved further and further away. Finally, I felt like I could hardly see the bottle on the post. Greg and Steve missed. I took aim with the one gun we had and as the “Schlitz” I could not read but knew was there wandered in and out of the sights, I again timed my waverings as well as I could, squeezed the trigger, and saw the bottle explode.

I did not gloat. (Never have in my entire life. I swear.) But certainly my face and body showed a certain satisfaction. Greg got angry. It was his gun. He was the shooter. He had to be better at this than Steve or I. Greg fumed and pointed up at a reasonably distant tree. “If you are so good, hit that bird up there.” This was a rifle, not a shotgun, and I thought, “No way.” But I aimed and fired. The bird fell in pieces to the ground, and I felt sick to my stomach. I had senselessly killed something because of a dare, and I never wanted to shoot a gun again.

(To be continued.)

As a result of Hurricane Irma, a Florida nursing home lost power to its cooling system, and eight of the home’s residents died. A few days later, Florida Gov. Rick Scott announced a new rule that nursing homes and assisted-living facilities must have generators to maintain reasonable temperatures for four days if power fails. Apparently at least some of the time, a conservative like Scott, feels that governmental regulation is a good thing, even if the regulation imposes a cost on private industry. Now, Governor Scott, can we talk about global warming?

Often when a football player injures one leg, people from the sideline help him to stand up, and the player then puts his arm around one of those helpers and the player limps off. The helping person is often, not surprisingly, much smaller than the player, and the player often can’t put much weight on the helper, and the two often have trouble syncing their walk. Instead, the teams ought to keep canes on the sidelines. The player would be able to get off the field better with a cane than with his arm around another. But I guess the cane would undercut the image of manly youthfulness, or is it youthful manliness?

A tall, young man sat down next to me on the subway. He was cradling a basketball with large letters inked onto it. I asked, “Are you any good?” When he got over his surprise that someone was speaking to him, he stated, “I’m ok.” “Are you being modest?” After a pause, “Yes, I am being humble. I play professionally.” He went on to say that he had played in Colombia, Europe, and next year in Toronto. I asked if he still had the hope of playing in the U.S., and he said, “The dream is still alive, but if I don’t make it, I am earning a good living now and enjoying life.”

On a different subway ride, the man next to me home was reading Tropic of Cancer.  I wanted to say something to him, but I couldn’t figure what.

Liberals have gotten one rhetorical label correct when they called them “Dreamers.”

Remember when President Trump was standing during the national anthem was his arms at his sides, and Melania whispered in his ear apparently saying that he should put his hand over his heart, which he then did?

Yet another doomsday, end-of-the world prediction has circulated recently. How many such predictions have been made in the last century or two?  In your lifetime? How many of them have been accurate?

Reading Al Franken’s latest book, Giant of the Senate, I realized that it was better being a satirist before becoming a politician than being a joke after being elected.

She saw the brace on my left wrist and asked if I had had carpal tunnel surgery. I said that it was just a sprain, but I thought that she had asked was nice. Until she went on at length about her carpal tunnel surgery. (But now I am going to have carpal tunnel surgery on my right wrist. Would you like to hear about in some detail?)

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.