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No Public Defender Need Apply . . . (concluded)

          Republicans have attacked judicial nominees for having been public defenders, that is, for having defended poor people charged with crimes. These critics may be trying to raise a soft-on-crime banner, but they aren’t pledging fealty to the Constitution when they do so. These “conservatives” do not seem to know an important decision made by our Founders about defense counsel and our fundamental rights.

          You might take it for granted that those accused of crimes can have a lawyer to aid with their defense and assume that that right goes back to time immemorial, but when our country was formed, English law did not permit a defense counsel in criminal cases. It was not just that English law did not provide a lawyer for a person who could not hire one. Instead, those charged with felonies, even those facing execution, were forbidden from having an attorney.

          Our founders rejected those English restrictions. The Sixth Amendment to the Constitution, which followed state constitutions that had already granted the right, guaranteed the right to a defense lawyer in criminal cases: “In all criminal prosecutions,” it states, “the accused shall enjoy the right . . . to have the assistance of counsel for his defence.”

          This was not some abstract right for the founders for they acted as those lawyers to defend unpopular clients charged with crimes. For example, there was this one future president….

          On March 5, 1770, while British soldiers were occupying Boston, a dispute erupted at the Custom House. The soldiers, led by Captain Thomas Preston, opened fire. Three Bostonians were instantly killed, and two others died soon afterwards. The event became known as the Boston Massacre.

          The soldiers were tried for murder in two separate trials. Captain Preston was prosecuted first, and the rest of the soldiers jointly tried later. With the defendants claiming self-defense as justification, Preston and five of the other soldiers were acquitted by juries, while two others were convicted only of manslaughter. 

          The lead counsel for the reviled defendants was John Adams—yes, that same John Adams who was our first vice-president and our second president. His defense did not stand in the way of these later political successes even if today some Republican senators would try to use his  advocacy to prevent him from serving in the federal government. Adams, however, was proud of his action. Three years after the trials, as the drums of the Revolution beat ever louder, Adams wrote that a “Judgment of Death against those Soldiers would have been as foul a Stain upon this Country as the Executions of the Quakers or Witches, anciently.” The right to defense counsel that existed in Massachusetts had helped prevent that blot.

          John Adams was not the only lawyer of the founding generation to act as a defense counsel for the unpopular. Gulielma Sands lived in a New York City boarding house run by her cousin and her cousin’s husband, Catherine and Elias Ring. On December 22, 1799, Sands left that house never to return. On January 2, 1800, her body was fished out of the Manhattan Well. Newspapers flooded the town with rumors suggesting that fellow boarder, Levi Weeks, had killed her.

          Public titillation ran high and only a fraction of those seeking to attend the subsequent trial of Weeks got into the crowded courtroom. The case seemed simple but damning for Weeks. The prosecution maintained that he and Sands had become intimate. He had promised to marry her. People in the boardinghouse thought that the two had left the house together on December 22 for their marriage. Weeks returned later that evening, however, and claimed not to have been with her. A few days later, a boy found Sands’s muff in the Manhattan Well, and on January 2 her body was recovered. Doctors said that she had been strangled before being thrown into the well, and Weeks had intimated that her body was there before that fact was publicly known.

          The defense attorneys brilliantly shredded every part of the prosecution case, and Weeks was acquitted by a jury after five minutes of deliberations despite the publicity against him. The acquittal, however, did not return his standing in New York. He remained despised as a seducer and murderer and soon left for Mississippi.

          While the accused did not recover his reputation, the defense of this unpopular person did not tarnish his lawyers. People may have had many negative thoughts today and back then about Aaron Burr, soon to be vice-president, and Alexander Hamilton, but none stem from their defense of Levi Weeks. (Although they were political enemies, Burr and Hamilton appeared in the same courtroom, sometimes on the same side as in the Weeks trial and sometimes as opponents, during nearly every important legal case in New York City after the Revolution.) A third lawyer, Brockholst Livingston, joined them at the defense table. His participation did not stop Thomas Jefferson from nominating him to the Supreme Court, where he served for seventeen years. (Don’t take all your history from musicals. Hamilton refers to the Weeks trial, but has it set at an incorrect time.)

          The founders guaranteed a right to counsel. The founders acted as defense counsel. Today they would be attacked for this.

          Conservatives, however, attack public defenders for another reason. Those defenders do not just represent those accused of crimes. They represent the poor, the outcast, the powerless, and that also makes the defenders dangerous to Republican senators who apparently think that only those who have served the rich and powerful should be in the government, and that is especially true for the Supreme Court.

Posted on by rjonakait

No Public Defenders Need Apply for the Supreme Court

          Joe Biden has nominated Ketanji Brown Jackson to be a Supreme Court Justice. And this is where we now are on judicial nominees: Republicans know they will oppose her nomination, so they are now looking for reasons to justify that opposition. Lucky for them she was a public defender because now they can vilify her as being lax on crime.

          Other Biden judicial nominees who were public defenders have been asked by Senators Tom Cotton, Josh Hawley, and Ted Cruz questions that boil down to, “How could you represent such scum?” Public defenders are not surprised by this question at social gatherings from people who do not fully grasp our legal system. On the other hand, Cotton, Hawley, and Cruz have degrees from some of the country’s finest law schools. The all clerked for federal judges, two of them for Supreme Court justices. You might expect them to understand American justice and recognize the importance of defense lawyers in that system, but their comments only reveal either their ignorance or their disingenuousness.

          The Senators, however, are selective in their disdain for lawyers who represent criminals or those accused of crimes. When I taught, some students would tell me that they could never represent organized crime. My response was, “I guess you are not going into corporate law then.” I was only being semi-flip. Although corporate crime has seldom been a high prosecutorial priority, many corporations have defended themselves in our criminal justice system. For example, to avoid criminal prosecution in 2015, General Motors paid a $900 million fine for hiding a fatal ignition switch defect responsible for 174 deaths. (How often has a public defender had a client linked to 174 deaths?) As a result of charges filed in 1996, Archer Daniels Midland pleaded guilty to criminal antitrust violations for fixing prices and paid a fine of $100 million. In 2013, Halliburton pleaded guilty to charges stemming from an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico that killed eleven people. In 2021, United Airlines paid over $49 million to resolve criminal charges and civil claims on postal service contracts.

          You can play a little parlor game: Put into a search engine the name of a corporation and “criminal” or “felony” conviction and see how many hits you get. You can go further and put in the name of a major financial institution together with “fraud” and see what comes up. You might learn that investment firms paid over $20 billion to settle fraud claims from the sale of mortgage-backed securities in 2005 to 2007, behavior that might have been criminally prosecuted.

          In other words, if you know a corporate attorney, there is a good chance that you know somebody who works for, and presumably gets well paid by, a criminal. But there is little chance that you would hear those lawyers derided by Republican senators because of their clients.

          True conservatives who are concerned about checking governmental power and overreach should, of course, be thanking, not denigrating, public defenders. The government has the power to criminally investigate and punish people. Right wingers screech about this power only when other right wingers are caught up in our criminal justice system, but true conservatives should be concerned with the appropriateness of this authority all the time. Since defenders provide a check on governmental power and overreach, they should be celebrated by those who claim conservative credentials.

          I am not surprised when “conservatives” pandering for partisan gain do not uphold conservative principles, but I still found some recent comments by the Republican National Committee noteworthy. A news story reported that the RNC “in a background paper on her nomination for the high court referred to Judge Jackson’s ‘advocacy for these terrorists’ [imprisoned at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay] as ‘going beyond just giving them a competent defense.’” If an attorney for the government at Guantanamo were a judicial nominee, I doubt the RNC would label the lawyer an advocate for torture even though it has been established that detainees were tortured. More startling, however, is that conservatives are trying to vilify Jackson for going beyond competence in her job. They apparently don’t want people who do their jobs too well on the Supreme Court. Mediocrity is good enough.

          And while I assume the Senators Cruz, Cotton, and Hawley have proclaimed that they want Supreme Court justices who are “originalists,” these conservatives would appear to be ignorant of the importance placed on defense advocacy by the founders of the country. Our Constitution expressly rejected English law and guaranteed a right to counsel because of the important role defense attorneys had for preserving American freedom.

(continued March 23)

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The Humanitarian War: An Oxymoron?

.

          A few postings back, I asked readers to compare and contrast the Russian invasion of Ukraine with America’s 2003 invasion of Iraq. Some who responded saw nothing to compare. For them, Russia was evil and the U.S. good. Others took a diametrically different stance and saw the two events as fundamentally the same since both were based on lies, or–as those more generous towards America put it–on premises that should have been known to be false.           From a smart, learned, and thought-provoking friend, however, I got a more detailed and nuanced response about the two invasions in which he listed more than a few similarities and differences that I had not thought about.

More of his comments may be explored over the coming weeks, but one of them made me think about how extraordinary our Iraq invasion was. He wrote that while Russia invaded a bordering state for purposes of territorial expansion (or, at least, for creating a “neutral” buffer), the U.S. invasion did not contemplate a territorial expansion. However, my friend continued, protections of oil supplies may have been one (unstated) consideration for our actions.

          This is a difference between the two, and I have been grappling with whether this is an important distinction. In invading a neighboring state, Russia’s action is similar to many previous conflicts. Most wars I could think of started out at least as a border conflict. The boundary is in dispute or, as my friend suggests for Russia, one country wishes to increase its size by taking land next door or sometimes is acting to remove what it sees as an unfriendly neighboring government.

          On the other hand, the examples of one country leapfrogging thousands of miles to invade another nation were comparatively few. The World Wars started out with conflicts among neighboring countries. Others, such as the Falklands/Malvinas war was over disputed sovereignty of distant lands. Other long-distance conflicts were justified as defense of colonies. Some sought to spread religion—often Christianity, the religion of peace—while extracting riches, such as Spain in the Americas. Our Iraqi invasion, unless its goal really was just to control oil, was different.

          The stated reason was a humanitarian one. Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction—biological, chemical, and soon, we said, nuclear; history indicated that he was willing to use such weapons; and so he needed to be stopped, even though he was not a threat to the invaders, i.e., us. (Not even faintly credible evidence was presented that Iraq threatened the United States.) Instead, Hussein needed to be stopped because he was a danger to peoples and lands other than the United States. Our action was not in self-defense; we were only seeking good for others. Let’s all sing: What a comfort to be sure, that our motives were so pure.* We were going to war, we said, only with the most magnanimous of motives.** Oh, and besides, we were going to bring Jeffersonian democracy to what had been a dictatorial regime.

          However, the words of Francis Bacon come to mind: “A just fear of an imminent danger, though there be no blow given, is a lawful cause of war.” Although Russia claims that Ukraine is a threat to itself and to the Russian minority in Ukraine, only deluded people can believe that Russia has a just fear of those possibilities. Those “reasons” are only pretexts.

          Although we supposedly had “humanitarian” reasons for attacking Iraq, a country thousands of miles away posing no threat to us, they could only be good grounds, Bacon might say, if the United States had just fears that Iraq posed an imminent threat to its neighbors. However, we know that this was not true; Iraq did not pose such a threat. Unfortunately, U.S. leaders were acting something like Putin has: They first decided to invade Iraq and subsequently looked for justifications for that decision. If the Iraq war was not based on bald-faced lies as Putin’s invasion has been, it was based on the conjectures of fools who could not acknowledge the lack of evidence for the military action.***

          My friend has concluded that it is hard to justify an invasion of a sovereign state for any purpose other than self-defense or, perhaps, an internationally recognized humanitarian threat. That said, he continues, bad as the invasion of Iraq was understood to be at the time (and understood now to be even worse), the Russian invasion of Ukraine reflects a far greater violation of accepted norms and poses far greater dangers to world safety than our Iraqi actions.

          I agree that the Russian invasion of Ukraine poses a greater global danger than our invasion of Iraq, but that is because of the fear that Putin might use nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons. If, however, Russia continues to use only conventional weapons, is the Russian action a greater danger to the world than our Iraq invasion was? We are seeing death, destruction, and millions of frightened refugees resulting from the Ukrainian invasion, but of course, that was also true of our action. The number of deaths resulting from our invasion and occupation vary widely. Nevertheless, Iraq Body Count, an organization that carefully sought confirmation of reported deaths, concluded that over 160,000 people died from the Iraq invasion with over two-thirds of them civilians. Other sources report much higher numbers: 600,000, 460,000, and 1,033,000 deaths. Refugee numbers also vary, but many sources have concluded that 2 to 3 million Iraqis became refugees because of the war.

          Moreover, the Iraqi invasion helped foster terrorism in places outside of Iraq. Shortly after the invasion of Iraq, I had occasion to meet with officials who had been in Israeli intelligence services. They were mystified by our action. They said that Iraq was not a state sponsor of terrorism in the Mideast. But Iran was. They said that an invasion of Iraq was sure to increase the influence of Iran in the Mideast, and this would be detrimental to Christians and certain Muslims in the region as well as a threat to Israel. They were right. Furthermore, while ISIS was formed before 2003, it came to prominence and gained strength soon after our invasion of Iraq, and it continued to flourish in the chaotic milieu that our military adventure helped to create. The Ukraine invasion has caused deaths and an extraordinary number of refugees, but I doubt that it will spawn international terrorism anywhere near the extent that our Iraq invasion has.

          What is happening in Ukraine is both a tragedy and frightening because the conflict could spread and/or escalate. Our Iraq invasion may not have produced the same fear of escalation, nuclear or otherwise, but it was also a tragedy.

————————————————————————————————–

*In Man of La Mancha two women who will benefit if Don Quixote is locked up in a nuthouse, sing that they desire that result only because they are after his best interests. The Padre sings:

They’re only thinking of him.

They’re only thinking of him.

How saintly is their plaintive plea.

They’re only thinking of him.

What a comfort to be sure,

that their motives are so pure.

As they go thinking and worrying about him.

** Margaret MacMillan notes in War: How Conflict Shaped Us (2020) that humanitarian interventions such as our Iraq invasion “raise questions about who decides what is just and suspicions about the motives and goals of the intervening powers. Critics have argued that Western powers are simply cloaking their deeply-rooted imperialistic attitudes to the rest of the world in the fashionable new language. ‘Hypocrisy,’ as the Duc de La Rochefoucauld remarked, ‘is a tribute vice pays to virtue.’”

*** Before we launched our invasion of Iraq, I saw a TV interview of a congressional leader who had just emerged from an intelligence briefing. The congressman said that the briefing had given him an “intuition” that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. He had just met with intelligence officials and had nothing more than an “intuition”?! That told me that the intelligence agencies did not have solid information showing Iraq had those weapons. Nevertheless, that congressman voted for the war. He had made up his mind to support the invasion and was only looking for grounds to justify it. I am sure that he was viewed as a “good” man, but he voted for death because he had an intuition.

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Snippets

A show on a weather channel is titled, “Why Planes Crash.” The answer should always be the same: Gravity.

The label boldly stated, This Product Has Not Been Tested on Animals. Does that indicate that it has been tested on humans or that it has not been tested at all?

The headline on a news feed said, “Most Satisfying Veggie Sandwiches.” I know that the answer always is, The One I Give to Someone Else.

The spouse does not like I Love Lucy because episodes are often based on some silly, farfetched mistake or disguise that should have been easily recognized. The spouse, however, goes to Shakespeare whose plays often feature some silly, farfetched mistake or disguise that should have been easily recognized.

According to a footnote in The Piltdown Forgery by J.S. Weiner, Science Service, (a Washington, D.C. publication) reported in June 1954 that “when the Piltdown hoax was exposed at the meeting of the Geological Society of London in November 1953, it precipitated a violent discussion. . . . The meeting soon broke up into a series of fish-fights (sic). The fracas resulted in the expulsion of several members.” I began to wonder. Was there a buffet table with a selection of fish? Poached salmon does not seem to be a good weapon but a whole haddock might be. Did anyone run to the kitchen to get an uncooked cod that might have done serious damage when it was whacked across the cheek of an opponent? Was anyone in formal dress or wearing a monocle? Were there any marvelous mustaches the ended up with flakes of fillets in them? Perhaps there was a woman or two. Did they participate or suffer collateral damage? I conjured up images that should have been in a Marx Brothers movie or a Three Stooges short, but, of course, I realized that this was probably only a delightful typo. (But still a surprising one, since I was reading the fiftieth anniversary issue that contained a new introduction and afterword.) My delight was also dashed because the author of the book was one of the authoritative exposers of the fraud at the November 1953 meeting, and he stated that “it will be as well to deny categorically” the Science Service report. “There was in fact no general discussion and no disturbance of any kind at any of the meetings at which Piltdown was discussed.” Damn.

I am fascinated by the fact that China, although stretching about 3,000 miles from east to west, has only one official time zone. Solar noon is the point in the day when the sun is highest in the sky, and solar noon in Beijing is about noon on the official Chinese clocks. Beijing is in the eastern part of China. In the western part of China, solar noon can be as much as three hours later than the clock reading, which also means that sun rises and sets three hours later than it does in Beijing.

I also wonder if there are palindromes in Chinese. Also: Do geese see God? Was he able ere he saw Elba?

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I Get a Kick Out of . . . Coats

(Guest Post from the Spouse)

I get no kick from sports cars.  

Riding at all in a car that’s too small, well,  

Neither do I much like boats.  

But I get a kick out of … COATS.  

With apologies to Mr. Porter, it has recently crossed my mind that during my lifetime I have coveted neither diamonds nor fancy cars but have always loved coats (well, and dinnerware — dishes and glassware and cutlery — but that’s for another day).  

My first “necessary” coat was in graduate school. It was Chicago, after all, and one needs a warm coat in Chicago, but warmth was only a secondary consideration. In the late 60’s, surplus army/navy stores were all the rage (at least for poor graduate students), and I desperately “needed” a Navy pea coat. It was a navy blue (duh), double-breasted, heavy wool jacket with broad lapels and large buttons with a navy anchor etched into them. You can buy one today at L.L. Bean for $279. Mine cost around $15. I also had to have the pants to go with. They were navy blue (duh), heavy wool trousers with wide bell bottoms and, instead of a zipper fly, the classic rectangular array of navy buttons. The pants probably cost $10. It was a smashing outfit, if I do say so myself. I must have had a hat, but who cared about hats?!? 

I married, moved to New York, and got a job as a secretary at a publishing house on 59th Street off Lexington Avenue. My husband was in graduate school, and I was a secretary. We were lucky to make the rent. My coat at the time was a navy blue (duh), nondescript cloth coat (think Pat Nixon) – longer than the pea coat, but lined and warm enough. I had that coat for a long time…long enough that the polyester lining started to fray. New coat? No way. New lining? Okay. And so it lasted until the cloth itself started to fray.  

Sometime during those years I also acquired a beautiful springtime coat. I bought it in a thrift shop in San Rafael, California, when visiting my sister. Long, flowing, sky-blue (duh) light wool, with no buttons, zippers or belts. Very stylish.  

Back in New York and on my way to work every day I would come up the stairs of the Lexington Ave. subway to be met by the windows at Bloomingdale’s (“like no other store in the world,” they said). I was making $135/week, so Bloomingdale’s was not exactly within my budget.  

But, of course, I wanted a new coat from Bloomingdale’s. 

When my husband started a paying job and the rent was no longer at issue, it was time for me to get a new coat…at Bloomingdale’s. This was perhaps the most generous gift my husband ever gave me: a long black wool coat with the most luxurious gray fox collar ever to be had on earth. The coat cost $200! It was mine, and I looked smashing in it, if I do say so myself. The hat was a $9 black beret. That Christmas I got black leather gloves. I never loved any other coat as much as I loved that coat. 

But I had always really in my heart of hearts wanted a fur coat – a mink coat – not a mink jacket — a mink coat. My husband thought me shallow for wanting such a status symbol, but I couldn’t help it. So, when, after six years of graduate school and another six as a post-doctoral fellow, I finally got a paying job as an assistant professor, I went hunting for a mink coat with my husband’s reluctant acceptance of my deep superficiality. What I learned is that there are mink coats and mink coats. There are mink coats that cost $1000 and there are mink coats that cost $15,000, and the latter are, in fact, nicer than the former. During my search, I became secretly disappointed that I was not going to be able to buy one of those really gorgeous mink coats, but I bought one that I could afford, and thought it wonderful. It was, indeed, a lovely, classic brown coat (matched my hair) with shoulder pads (stylish at the time), and I looked smashing in it, if I do say so myself. 

Mink coats were not for everyday going to work, so I moved on to other coats: one was down-filled with a beautiful fox collar, and when down-filled coats went (briefly) out of style, a blond wool one with the most gorgeous fox collar ever to be had on earth, and yes, I looked smashing in them, if I do say so myself.  

After some years, fur became de trop and shoulder pads went out of style, so I had the mink coat re-styled. Since its restyling some twenty years ago, I think I’ve worn it once.  

Somewhere along the way, my enthusiasm for coats faded. Maybe it was the disappointment in the restyling of my mink, or perhaps it was after the moths decimated my sky-blue spring coat and my blond wool one, too. As I became more matronly, my desire for pizzazz seemed to be replaced by a need for functional comfort. My go-to coat became an all-weather coat from Land’s End with a hood. Boring, but functional. 

But then…two years ago my child, the NBP, found – yes, found! – the most amazing jacket. It’s designed for a man, but uni-gender is all the rage, and who cares anyway? Salt and pepper wool with features — wonderful features: a zippered pocket on its front, a zip-in lining with a zippered front giving it a kind of internal vest. She wanted it for herself, but it’s slightly too big for him, and my lovely child has ceded it to me. I do look smashing in it, if I do say so myself. Now if I could only find some black bell bottoms… 

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Snippets

Have you wondered how many of those North American truck drivers protesting the vaccine have used uppers bought in a restroom in a stop alongside the highway?

Sometimes I see it spelled “Zelenskyy” (the only double y I can think of) and sometimes “Zelensky.” I assume that has something to do with translating from the Cyrillic alphabet, but I have no idea what it is.

Hearing the news about Ukrainian nuclear power plants, I recalled a book I read last summer, Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster (2019) by Adam Higginbotham. He wrote that the demand for electricity is expected to double by 2050 and that coal, even though burning it leads to climate change, remains the world’s most widely used source of energy for the generation of electricity. Furthermore, particulates from the fossil fuels electricity plants kill 13,000 people a year in the U.S., and 3,000,000 people in the world die each year from air pollution from fossil fuel plants. Higginbotham points out that nuclear electric plants emit no carbon dioxide and have been a safer electricity generation source than anything else including wind turbines, and new nuclear designs may even be safer.

At this time of the year, the sports channels prattle about what college teams will be the number one seeds in the NCAA basketball tournament. I wonder how much it matters if a school is slotted first or second. A number one seed plays the sixteenth seed in the first round while the second seed plays the fifteenth seed. Are there any statistics on how much difference this makes? And if all goes to form, no matter who is seeded first or second, the number one and two seeds will play each other on a neutral court. 

I just watched Drive My Car. The movie is long and slow-moving and marvelous. It has depth and layers; one of them is that Uncle Vanya is intertwined throughout it. While watching the movie, I thought back to the three or four productions of that Chekhov play I have seen, and I realized that I remembered little of the play. I can’t summarize Uncle Vanya or its characters, but that is not unusual. I retain little of the art I see, hear, or read. I do, however, remember aspects of the first Uncle Vanya I saw fifty years ago, a legendary production. It was directed by Mike Nichols, and Nicol Williamson and George C. Scott had the two lead roles, Uncle Vanya and Astrov. Americans may have mostly forgotten Williamson, but he was called a genius actor by many who saw him. I then knew of Scott primarily from film roles, but of course he first came to fame with Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival. The cast also included Lillian Gish, Bernard Hughes, Conrad Bain, and Julie Christie. The production was at the Circle in the Square Theater, which has a thrust stage with most seats, including mine, only a few feet from the actors. And gosh and golly, I do remember how lovely Julie Christie was in her lacy morning dress as she stood a few feet away from me. As beautiful as she was, she could not match the presence and fire of Williamson and Scott. But while those facts and images came back to me while watching Drive My Car, the themes and language of Uncle Vanya did not.

But you don’t have to know that play to appreciate the genius of Drive My Car.

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The Snippets of Death

While I was having a heart event, I thought that I was being whisked down a long, dark tunnel. I could do nothing to prevent my movement. Finally, I saw a blue light at the end of the darkness. It started to pulse, and I felt myself being pulled even quicker through the tunnel towards the pulsation. But as I started to glide into that abyss, I heard a voice shout, “No!  No!  That’s New Jersey.” I returned to the living.

Ancient cultures always seemed to have many more memorials to death than to birth. Discuss.

“You can live through anything except death.” Svetlana Alexievich, Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets.

“The soul will fly home of its accord, but shipping a coffin is pretty expensive.” Svetlana Alexievich, Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets.

“An autopsy later revealed that she had died of plaid.” Ian Frazier, Cranial Fracking.

“To die for an idea is to place a pretty high price upon conjectures.” Anatole France, The Revolt of the Angels.

“The man who leaves money to charity in his will is only giving away what no longer belongs to him.” Voltaire.

“Make sure to send a lazy man for the Angel of Death.” Yiddish Proverb.

“All I desire for my own burial is not be buried alive.” Earl of Chesterfield.

“Eagles may soar, but weasels don’t get sucked into jet engines.” Steve Wright.

“How many of those dead animals you see on the highway are suicides?” Dennis Miller.

“My uncle Pat reads the paid obituaries in the paper every day. He can’t understand how people always die in alphabetical order.” Hal Roach.

When I die, I want to go like my grandfather . . . in his sleep. Not screaming like the passengers in his car. Old joke.

“It’s a sad fact that 50 percent of marriages in this country end in divorce. But, hey, the other half end in death. You could be one of the lucky ones!” Richard Jeni.

Hear about the Newfie who was killed while ice fishing? Got run over by the Zamboni!

“You can’t take it with you. You never see a U-Haul following a hearse.” Ellen Glasgow.

When Bob Hope was dying at the age of 100, his wife asked if he wanted to be buried or cremated. He thought for a while and said, “Surprise me.” (Thanks to SN.)

“If the rich could hire other people to die for them, the poor could make a wonderful living.” Yiddish proverb.

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

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Lenape Land on 42nd Street

I saw This Space Between Us last week, a funny, touching, and thought-provoking play written by Peter Gil-Sheridan and performed by a strong ensemble of six. The play was presented by the Keen Company, one of the many theater organizations in New York City.

As I have written about before, I read and save Playbills. Search Results for “playbill” – AJ’s Dad (ajsdad.blog) This one had a multi-page insert that briefly told me about the Keen Company and more extensively about the foundations and individuals who have given money to it, how I could donate to the Company, and how the audience could promote the play. All this was ordinary stuff, the usual kind of information in a Playbill.

What was different, however, was a paragraph headed Land Acknowledgement, which told me that I was “in New York City, which is the traditional land of the Lenape people. Keen Company recognizes the long history of the territory we occupy, and its significance for the indigenous peoples who lived and continue to live and work here. We pay our respects and gratitude to the Elders, both past and present, for their stewardship of this region.”

I did not completely understand this. What did stewardship of this region entail? Was this stewardship ongoing? Was it a reference to a particular plot of ground that encompassed 42nd Street between 9th and 10th Avenues where the theater is? Or did it refer to the time when the Lenape lived as a people on lands in the Northeast?

So what was the point to this wokeness? Lenape were forced from their lands in the Northeast almost two centuries ago and even earlier for Manhattan. Driven further and further west, they are now largely in five different tribes located in Oklahoma, Wisconsin, and Ontario. Does this paragraph in a Playbill insert for an off-Broadway production make the Lenape living far from New York City feel better?

I also wondered if the paragraph fit with what is supposed to be the mission of the theater company and the theme of the play that I saw. The Playbill stated that “Keen Company is an award-winning Off-Broadway theatre creating story-driven work that champions identification and connection. In intimate productions of plays and musicals, the company tells stories about the decisive moments that change us.” Did that paragraph about the Lenape champion identification and connection and was it about a decisive moment that changes us? If so, I did not see it. I did not feel any more decisively connected with the Lenape after reading Land Acknowledgement than I had been before.

And This Space Between Us made me question the paragraph further. In the play, Ted, a vegan, corrects the political incorrectness of others and is fond of saying, “You can’t just talk the talk, you must walk the walk.” Jamie, Ted’s partner, announces that he wants to walk the walk and is leaving his high paid legal job to work for an NGO that tries to better lives in Eritrea. At the core of this amusing and touching play is walking the walk and how mere talk accomplishes little. I could not see how the smug Lenape paragraph truly advanced anything. It seemed simply to talk the talk.

The Keen Company could have tried to get its audience to take a step or two. It at least could have told us that there is a Lenape Center in New York and urged us to visit and support it. We might have been told that the Brooklyn Public Library has been holding programs featuring some Lenape people whose ancestors were forced to Oklahoma and Wisconsin. And the paragraph might have said that there is an exhibition about the Lenape curated by Lenape at a branch of the Brooklyn Public Library.

Instead, we got only that the Keen Company paid their respects and gratitude to non-defined Elders, and I thought, as I do about many politically correct statements, that it is not expected or even meant to accomplish anything other than to make the speakers or writers feel better about themselves.

This Space Between Us, however, is worth seeing.

Posted on by rjonakait

Compare and Contrast Assignment

          Today’s post is different. It is a request or an assignment for thoughts, facts, and opinions that would help me with my thinking. Here is the assignment: Compare and contrast the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine with the 2003 American invasion of Iraq. Send me what you come up with, and perhaps I can turn the results into a meaningful essay.

Posted on by rjonakait

Partisan Hacks, Comprised of

Before the ink was dry on her nomination to the Supreme Court, right-wing news articles and fundraising emails attacked Ketanji Brown Jackson. One said that she had “taken radical, liberal positions throughout her career” without giving even a hint as to what those positions were. A different writer labeled her “a politician in robes.”

The writings did not contain a glimpse of irony or even the slightest acknowledgement that only recently conservative Supreme Court Justices have themselves been criticized as partisans. This criticism came as a result of issuing opinions with scanty or no reasoning that followed their own political predilections and that of their patrons; allowing unconstitutional laws to be enforced; and bending judicial norms to hear cases that have political overtones.

The conservative justices had to know that their actions would look political and produce vehement criticisms, but you might expect them to simply ignore the critics. When I was a baseball umpire, I expected disagreement with some of my calls. I knew that I should not umpire if I could not handle criticism. If you take a judgeship, you should not be surprised by criticism. And if anyone should feel secure from critics, it would be an insular band of people who have both power and life tenure.

However, the comments about the Court made some justices feel like paper flowers in the rain.* Ignoring the fact that defensiveness often gives greater credence to the critics, several justices made replies. The most quotable “defense” came from Amy Coney Barrett who announced that the Supreme Court “is not comprised of partisan hacks.” Of course, it would have been even more newsworthy if Barrett had said that the Court was filled with partisan hacks, but, nevertheless, the whine indicated how touchy some members of the Supreme Court are.

Now, if you are looking for self-conscious irony, don’t go to the conservatives on the Supreme Court. Whether or not she is a partisan, she is sitting on the Court because of naked partisan power, and she made her statement in a place that honors a person no one would ever sanely label as nonpartisan, Mitch McConnell. And yes, if she has an ounce of gratitude, she should be indebted to him for his partisanship.

If Barrett, for unfathomable reasons, thought her ex cathedra-like statement would end discussion of the topic, she was undercut by her colleague Justice Samuel Alito. A month or so after Barrett announced the absence of judicial partisanship, Alito made a speech to the Federalist Society, a group not widely known for its even-handed policies. Many sources concluded that this speech was so highly partisan that it should have raised ethical concerns for a judge. However, Supreme Court justices are not bound by the ethical standards set for other judges—disturbing yet true.  So, on the one hand, we have Barrett’s assertion, not supported by any evidence or reasoning, about the lack of partisanship on the Court, and then we have the stark evidence of a partisan speech by a Justice. Chicolini’s classic comeback in Duck Soup comes to mind: “Well, who ya gonna believe, me or your own eyes?”

But maybe, I thought, I was being unfair to Barrett. Perhaps her statement was more limited than I had first believed. Reports say that she is smart and a meticulous judge. She, no doubt, tries to use words precisely. She asserted that the Court “is not comprised of partisan hacks.” I went to H.W. Fowler’s classic A Dictionary of Modern English Usage. In it he discusses the difference between include and comprise: “[T]he distinction seems to be that comprise is appropriate when what is in question is the content of the whole, and include when it is the admission or presence of an item. With include, there is no presumption that all or even most of the components are mentioned; with comprise, the whole of them are understood to be in the list.” With her use of comprise, then, Barrett was only telling me that not all the Supreme Court Justices were partisan hacks. However, she might be signaling–with lawyerly precision–that it includes some. Or perhaps she is conveying that some justices are partisan but not hacks or hacks but not partisan? Alito comes to mind again. Many commentators, citing several examples, say that Alito is a partisan. They almost never label him a hack; instead, they almost always refer to how smart he is.

Of course, I may be giving Barrett too much credit for using words precisely. After all, she did use the phrase comprised of, a definite grammatical no-no. The prickly Fowler believes that the English language might be better off with the banishment of comprise: “This lamentably common use of comprise as a synonym of compose or constitute is a wanton and indefensible weakening of our vocabulary.” Perhaps when it comes to words, Barrett is not a conservative standard bearer. Even if that might be laudable, comprised of is not to be praised, at least according to Benjamin Dreyer who writes about comprise in the immodestly titled Dreyer’s English: “I confess: I can barely remember which is the right way to use this word.” He says that he looks it up each time he is tempted to use it. Dreyer tells us that it is correct to say, “The English alphabet comprises twenty-six letters.” And this, too, is right: “Twenty-six letters compose the English alphabet.” But it is wrong to write, “The English alphabet is comprised of twenty-six letters.” Dreyer writes, “As soon as you’re about to attach ‘of’ to the word ‘comprise,’ raise your hands to the sky and edit yourself.”

Of course, you might tell me to lighten up. Don’t parse her words so closely. C’mon; you get the gist of her meaning. Don’t take her so literally. It’s not a big deal if she was imprecise. But, my friends, she is a Supreme Court justice, and when she writes an opinion, no matter how loose its reasoning, no matter how imprecise it may be, it will have important consequences. Barrett may be making decisions that control us for the next thirty or forty years. And precision should matter for a Justice. As Fred R. Shapiro writes in The Oxford Dictionary of American Legal Quotations, “Law is the intersection of language and power.”

I wonder if Barrett will continue to suggest how nonpartisan the Court is if Ketanji Brown Jackson ascends the Court. Conservatives of all stripes are accusing her (Jackson) of being partisan. What kind of hypocrisy is this? Well, we can rest in the assurance from Barrett that she, at least in her own opinion, is not a political hack. Or can we?

*“Only paper flowers are afraid of the rain.” Konstantin Dankevich.