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You’d Think I Crumble . . . That’s Me in the Corner

A decade or so ago I went to Israel on an unusual junket—all expenses paid to study terrorism from an Israeli perspective. My reactions were all over the map.

As a kid, “shekels” was a slang term for money, but now I was buying chewing gum with that decidedly non-biblical currency. Back then I had often looked at the pictures and maps in my Thomas Nelson Revised Standard Version Bible during the boring parts of church, but only when I went to Israel, did I realize how small the country is.  (Bethlehem is but six miles from Jerusalem.) More than once on the trip, I was told that Israel is about the same size as New Jersey. (Is there any other way that New Jersey is like the Holy Land?)

Of course, especially on this trip, there were constant reminders of terrorism—the disco across from our Tel Aviv hotel where partygoers were bombed waiting to enter; the Gaza checkpoint where soldiers had been killed; the meeting with the man disfigured by an incendiary device tossed into his car. These reminders of terrorism made it hard to remember that someone in Israel is more likely to be killed in a car accident than by a terrorist and that per capita more people are killed by guns in America than by terrorists in Israel even though guns are everywhere in Israel. Soldiers carrying guns are a common sight. (My favorite—a soldier in sandals carrying a gun slung over one shoulder and the biggest, reddest purse I’d ever seen balancing on her other side.)

One image of Israel: security, security, security. Searches to get into the hotel; lengthy interrogations and more to get into the Knesset. Sometimes I did wonder about the efficacy of these measures. The first time I went to a restaurant the guard controlling admission did a cursory search. The second time, he simply said, “Have you got a gun?” I said no and was nodded in. Would a terrorist tell him he had a gun? By the third day at the hotel, our group was generally waved around the security check point. Does that mean a terrorist committed to staying at the hotel for at least three days could then avoid security? Or is it that I and the rest of the group did not look Palestinian?

My northern European looks did not stop El Al from subjecting me to rigorous scrutiny. Going I was pulled aside from the other passengers, interrogated, and my suitcase thoroughly, I say thoroughly, inspected. Returning it happened again, but then I had a touch of turista, and the experience seemed to take even longer. I did get on the plane even though I had fudged the truth. On the day of departure, it was market time near the hotel. I went to poke around and ended up buying some gifts of Dead Sea mud and some bee products. I did not give much mind to these casual purchases until I was asked at the airport whether my items came from the stall in the market, or whether the seller had gone into the back to get the facial mask and pollen rejuvenator. Sick I may have been, but the mind quickly decided the right answer for getting on board—I picked them off the shelf, handed them to the proprietor, and then paid for them. Everything was in my sight.  But as soon as I said that I was not absolutely sure that I really knew how the transaction went. Wanting to get home, I did not voice this little doubt. I was a bit a nervous on most of the return flight.

We were exposed to many intriguing people—terrorism experts in academic institutions; drone pilots; agents who were incredible marksmen and, as indicated by a film of an actual incident, could snatch a suspected terrorist off the street, throw him in a van, and drive off in a matter of seconds. Perhaps most striking was the professional interrogator for one of the intelligence agencies. He entered the room, and his bearing, his aura was such that I would have told him anything he asked me. He maintained that a professional interrogator almost never needed to use physical force, implying that Americans did not have professional interrogators, but he also went on to discuss whether shaking a subject should be considered torture.

I also saw more usual tourist sights—the cars haphazardly parked; the Tel Aviv waterfront;  Caesarea being set for a beautiful evening, seaside wedding reception; the I-would-not-believe-it-if-I-had-not-seen-it rest stop in homage to the King, not David or Solomon, but Elvis Presley.

We spent a few hours touring Jerusalem. Our guide for the day impressed me when, for reasons no longer remembered, he talked about the obverse of a coin. Note, not the obverse side of a coin, which would have been incorrect. I was unsure if I had ever heard a native English speaker use “obverse,” and my admiration increased when I found out he was certified to give tours in many languages in addition to English. He took us in and out of many religious places, and of course, it was important to remember whether the place was Jewish, Catholic, Orthodox, Coptic, or Muslim in order to put a hat on or take it off. I think the Upper Room was pointed out, but then another place was said to be perhaps the site of the Last Supper. Mary’s burial place was there, but, then again, a location in Turkey is venerated as the place where her Assumption took place, and of course, it is not clear to Assumption believers whether she actually died. (And I think that some believe she died in India.)

We passed stations of the cross and the crucifixion and burial places. I wondered how people could be so sure that these were the right locations and why there was no marker for the doorway where the Wandering Jew refused aid. Perhaps these doubts about authenticity led me to blasphemous thoughts. I was told to plunge my arm through a hole so that I could feel the rock on which the True Cross stood. As I did, my mind returned to the sixth grade Halloween parties where, blindfolded, we put our hands into bowls of grapes and spaghetti and told we were feeling eyeballs and guts. Of course, many of these now revered sites were “authenticated” centuries after the events by, I believe, Constantine’s mother, who also collected many relics, perhaps the relics that Mark Twain later saw, and amusingly wrote about, in his travels to the Continent and the Holy Land. Even if they are in the places where the events happened, I wondered why they are regarded as holy sites. If a religion is universal, then no place could be more sacred than another.

But the most striking part of the Jerusalem trip was its beginning and end. Before we entered, the obverse-coin guide brought us to a place that overlooked Jerusalem. He pointed out things in the old city; where Bethlehem was and is; the Palestinian-controlled territory; the wall marking the boundary (although Israelis called it a fence, not a wall); and the mural-painted wall (this was called a wall) behind us, which prevented Palestinians down below from shooting into Israeli apartments up above.

Our location was a parking lot, and a nearby food van was, like many other Israeli places, playing old American rock and roll. The third song I noticed was Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive. I almost laughed at the remarkable fortuity. I know that the song is about a woman’s strength in rejecting a lover who walked out, but what better chorus could there be as I looked out over Israel and Jerusalem than I WILL SURVIVE.

During this trip because of the sensitive places we often visited—military and intelligence facilities—we were accompanied by heavily armed, young men, and in Jerusalem I fell into step with such an escort. A few moments later, some men rounded a corner shouting and elbowing others aside. I asked the escort, born and raised in Israel, what that was about, and he replied, “Just some Arabs showing off.” He and I exited the old city together, and I was visually assaulted by a row of tacky tourist shops. American rock and roll came from them, too, and the first song I heard outside the old city was R.E.M.’s Losing My Religion. I smiled and said to the escort, “That doesn’t seem right for Jerusalem.” He stopped, paused a beat, and thoughtfully said, “I think that is the only way.”

Is that right? Can there only be peace if we lose our religion?

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Snippets

I have a book in my hand. It seems permanent, not so much the physical object, but the content. And, of course, to some extent that is true. I have read books that were published a century, two centuries ago, but most books, even well-received ones, are quickly forgotten. Whenever I get a book out of the library, I look at the return dates stamped in the book. Most of the older ones have not been checked out in years. A physical book may still be on somebody’s shelves, but does it really exist if it is not read?

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  limps off the field. 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?

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

A friend who is an architect was showing me the wonderful additions he had recently done to his house. I asked, “Are you through?” He replied, “An architect never says it is done because then it can be judged.”

Was the philosopher (or was it a comedian?) right when he said, “If you want to prepare your child for real life, give her a Where’s Waldo book without any Waldos.”

Why is it when you sleep fitfully all night that you are sound asleep when it is time to get up?

A play idea for the Beckett or Sartre in you: Imagine that redwoods are sentient and can communicate. Setting: A redwood grove with three or four trees. What would be the conversations over the thousand years that the redwoods were next to each other unable to be alone or find other company? And then what happens when one of the trees finally dies?

You are Jewish if your mother is Jewish, I am told. But what if your mother converts to Judaism after you were born?

The person I took to be a conservative was railing against the big government program of food stamps. Her clinching argument was that someone she knew should have been on food stamps but did not qualify.

What did couples differ over before they could argue about how best to load a dishwasher?

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What Me, Prejudiced

Let me give you some facts. Then form your image.

The couple is in their sixties. They are retired. By dress and bearing, they are above middle class, but it is hard to tell how far above. He is a long time representative in the state legislature. Maybe even had been Speaker of the House. In South Dakota. He made his living as a lawyer. Not in for whatever passes for a metropolis out there, but in Spearfish, which, the woman maintains, has a population of 12,000. In the western part of state, near Wyoming. She was in education. Asked if she had been a school teacher, she was quick to say, “And principal.”

From these facts, what assumptions would you make about them? I had a friend who was raised in a Dakota, but for the life of me, I don’t remember which one. Is there really a difference? I do remember him telling me that some Dakota relative of his raised turkeys. When he was about the size of the birds, nasty creatures he assured me, they scared him mightily, and he would sprint through the yard to get to the safety of the farmhouse. This couple, however, was definitely from that lower Dakota and did not raise turkeys.

The images, or shall we say the prejudices, I might have had from this information would, however, have to have been not so much tempered as shattered by additional factors. I was in my local bar in December a few years having a beer and potato fritters when this couple sat down next to me at the bar. I was quite confident from their look that they were not from the neighborhood, but they seemed perfectly relaxed as they ordered a beer, a glass of wine, and a pretzel. The bartender said something, and they replied, “South Dakota,” and that brought me into the conversation.

When asked what they were doing in a neighborhood bar in not the trendiest part of Brooklyn, they gave a multi-part answer. Most of their retired friends from South Dakota were Arizona snowbirds; they wanted something different. The couple had moved to a garden apartment in an Upper Westside townhouse and now sought to do something in New York every day. They were in my area to go to the Irondale, a non-traditional theater carved from a reclaimed Sunday School auditorium connected to a historic church. They were going to see the Nutcracker Rouge, which was described as a “Baroque Burlesque Confection.” I knew little about it except that it was quite raunchy. I don’t know about you, but my stereotypes of a small-town South Dakota lawyer/politician and principal did not include retirement to Manhattan much less attending a nearly naked Nutcracker in an obscure performance space in Brooklyn. I try to think of myself as open, but sometimes when I am surprised by somebody, I realize how much baggage I unconsciously carry in making quick assumptions about others.

And what would be your images when you hear of Spearfish, South Dakota? I certainly was not surprised that some later, quick research disclosed that it was over 90% white, but I was surprised by its climate. I jumped to the conclusion that it would be bitterly cold for the winter; in fact, the high temperatures average near forty degrees in January and February. Spearfish, however, is known more for some unusual weather. On the morning of January 22, 1943, the temperature was minus four Fahrenheit. A Chinook wind blew and within two minutes, the temperature was a plus 45 degrees Fahrenheit. That two-minute temperature swing is the world record. Hey, what world records does your town hold? The woman, Katie, told me that the temperature continued to rise into the fifties that morning. Then the warm wind dissipated, and the temperatures dropped to below zero in the next half hour. This plunge, a bit more gradual but greater than the earlier rise, was still so rapid that windows cracked.

The South Dakota couple, Jim I think his name was, was interesting, charming, and amusing. Right after they left, I felt as if I had made a mistake. I should have gotten their contact information so that I could have invited them to dinner. And perhaps see if I would find other prejudices of mine I was not aware of.

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Could That Be the Famous Writer?

When I picked up the tickets, I heard the ticket seller say that the play was sold out. I had made my purchase online from a discount source, as I almost always do, and that site enjoined buyers to pick up tickets early. This time I had, and I went outside to seek a quick bite to eat.  The theater doors had not yet opened, and a ticket-line monitor was trying to herd the early arrivals into an orderly procession. Someone behind me spoke, and I heard “Jonathan.” I assumed he was giving his name to the TLM in case tickets were not picked up or returned. I was about to continue my quest for a sandwich (later found at Pret), when I heard, “Jonathan and the last name is F-O-E-R.” I turned around and saw a man, not that tall, with scruffy facial hair. A striking woman behind him saw my movement and smiled a bit, but my attention went to the TLM, who had stopped writing on a pad to ask, “Like the writer?” Almost as if embarrassed, he silently replied with a small head movement.

My thoughts ping ponged. Should I say how impressive I had found Everything is Illuminated and that friend Judy thought it was one of the best things she had ever read?  Would I have to pretend I had read Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (which I did later read)? Should I try for a brief conversation and ask if he was working on anything? (Since this incident, he has published another book.) Should I offer him my one ticket and then ask that striking woman, from whom I averted my eyes because I did not want to stare, for a drink?  If I said anything, was I really trying to give him a compliment or just trying to show off that I was literate enough to have read him?

With these thoughts ricocheting, I walked away. I have felt that we unique-in-our-way-but-ordinary-people should not intrude on celebrities. Some of this feeling comes from decades ago when I attended a Liza Minnelli concert, and whispers in the audience said that Jackie Onassis was there. I looked down from my first-row balcony seat, and yup, she was right below. At intermission, what seemed like half the audience walked towards the stage in the aisle where she sat, turned around, and walked back in order to see her. She sat in her seat, composed, ignored the parade, and talked to her companion. I thought how hard it could be for a celebrity to do what the rest of us can take for granted, and I vowed not to be such a gawker.

I have, however, found myself nodding. At the intermission of another play which I don’t remember, I saw the actor who a long time ago did the ads where he dared you to knock a battery off his shoulder.  Our eyes met.  I nodded.  He nodded back.  He was standing alone, and I did wonder if he, like I, had come alone. When I saw Sam Waterston walking west on West 23rd Street as I walked east, I again nodded, and he nodded back. Once before, I almost broke my nod policy. Shortly before a performance of the Flying Karamazov Brothers (I am a sucker for juggled chainsaws), I was at a urinal, when Jerry Orbach appeared at the adjacent spot. I wanted to say how much I had enjoyed his performance in 42nd Street on Broadway and that I hoped besides Law and Order he would do more song and dance roles. Few were better than he, but he and I only exchanged nods. And, of course, in New York, there have been other celebrity sightings, but almost always with no external reaction from me.

I have wondered if celebrities have advice for how us non-celebrities should react when we see them. Do they want to be acknowledged in some way? How? Or do they want to be ignored? What is the celebrity’s reaction if a stranger wants to engage in conversation or give words of praise? Or take a picture? I heard Paul McCartney in a TV interview (my closest encounter with him was being in the same baseball stadium with him) say that he would not take a selfie with strangers, but he would talk with them.

Of course, I am sure that different celebrities have different reactions to us ordinary folk, but are there some sort of general rules? Perhaps the source of the fame matters? I assume that well-known actors are approached often and this can be wearing, but is that true for writers whose faces may not have been imprinted on us?  I certainly would not have known that the man behind me had written a book that I admire if I had not heard him give his name.  I did feel more of an urge to say something to him than I have had to the actors I have passed. Perhaps that is because I expect that a well-regarded author would have interesting things to say while I am not sure that that holds true for other celebrities.

What would you have done if you were standing next to Jonathan Safran Foer?  And would your answer change if, as I am 80 percent sure, his companion was Michelle Williams?

But if anyone knows him, tell Jonathan that he looks much too young to be such a distinguished author. And I truly have admired his writing. Also tell his brother Joshua that I found his memory book fascinating. (I wish I could remember that book’s title.)

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First Sentences

 “When I was six, my father gave me a bright-red scorebook that opened my heart to the game of baseball.” Doris Kearns Goodwin, Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir.

“Would you rather love the more, and suffer the more; or love the less, and suffer the less?” Julian Barnes, The Only Story.

“On September 25, 1988, the writing finally stopped.” Matthew M. Briones, Jim and Jap Crow: A Cultural History of 1940s Interracial America.

 “Stan Carlisle stood well back from the entrance of the canvas enclosure, under the blaze of a naked light bulb, and watched the geek.” William Lindsay Gresham, Nightmare Alley.

 “The first Harlemites didn’t quite know what to make of the strange object that sailed up the river in the late summer of 1609.” Jonathan Gill, Harlem: The Four Hundred Year History from Dutch Village to Capital of Black America.

“In 1945 our parents went away and left us in the care of two men who may have been criminals.” Michael Ondaatje, Warlight.

“Two of the most monstrous regimes in human history came to power in the twentieth century, and both were predicated upon the violation and despoiling of truth, upon the knowledge that cynicism and weariness and fear can make people susceptible to lies and false promises of leaders bent on unconditional power.” Michiko Kakutani, The Death of Truth.

“There was an Indian head, the head of an Indian, the drawing of a headdressed, long-haired Indian depicted, drawn by an unknown artist in 1939, broadcast until the late 1970s to American TVs everywhere after all the shows ran out.” Tommy Orange, There There.

“Even in Los Angeles, where there is no shortage of remarkable hairdos, Harry Peak attracted attention.” Susan Orlean, The Library Book.

“Marsh is not swamp.” Delia Owens, Where the Crawdads Sing.

“I’m standing on the red railway car that sits abandoned next to the barn.” Tara Westover, Educated.

“A christening shawl decorated with periwinkle and yellowed asparagus fern hung in the window of our stone house for two years.” Wioletta Greg (translated from the Polish by Eliza Marciniak), Swallowing Mercury.

“The first time I looked into the face of opioid addiction, it was of a heavily made-up woman in her late fifties at a food bank in eastern Kentucky.” Chris McGreal, American Overdose: The Opioid Tragedy in Three Acts.

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“For Example” is not Proof. Yiddish Proverb (concluded)

Law school prides itself on teaching critical thinking, and to some extent it does, but it tends to limit that goal to the examination of texts and words and how to use those materials to make arguments. Law, however, is filled with empirical propositions and suppositions, and legal education does almost nothing to teach a better understanding of thinking about them.

For example, in a famous nineteenth-century case, a barrel fell out of a window and hit someone. The court said that we can assume if you are hit by a falling barrel, it must be because of negligence, and since the defendant controlled the barrel, he was liable. That a falling barrel means negligence is, of course, an empirical proposition. It seemed intuitively right to that long-ago judge, but also to me and my students. But I asked the students, if we are not to act on intuition alone, what would we need to know about falling barrels to make the determination that negligence is the likely cause of the plunge. I would only get blank looks from the students who were eager to opine on many other topics.  They did not have a clue about how to begin to think about the question even though a problem following the judicial opinion in the casebook suggested an approach. 

It said something like this: Assume that one in a thousand barrels is negligently secured and that nine out of ten negligently secured barrels fall.  Assume that one in a hundred non-negligently secured barrels falls. What are the chances that a falling barrel is the result of negligence?

Most of the students assumed that the problem was beyond their abilities even though a solution to the hypothetical was in the book they were using. The problem requires no great mathematical ability—no knowledge of standard deviations or t-tests–only some critical thinking. However, because numbers were involved, these college graduates could not think it through. Their minds simply shut off.

But the problem is not just with those students. I have written some articles about forensic science and scientific evidence that have received attention. When the Supreme Court handed down a decision about scientific evidence, I was invited several times to address lawyers and judges about that case and other aspects of scientific evidence. I usually opened my talk by saying that in my experience lawyers and judges were a reasonably bright, educated group of people who became lawyers partly because they were afraid of math and science. I almost always got a nervous chuckle of recognition. (I said something similar to scientists, usually forensic scientists. Scientists are often people who have been taught to use a technique, but not how to think. This was especially true for the forensic scientists, but that line was only met with outrage.) 

I told the lawyers, judges, and students that they could not simply turn off their minds when numbers appear or science is mentioned. Instead, they must be able to think critically about empirical propositions, something that was within their ability. Empirical propositions often require, or should require, the collection and analysis of data. That will mean numbers. That will mean that one needs to understand some basics about good and bad data collection and how to think about those data.

Few I addressed seemed to believe that they could do that and that is a failure of our education.  I am not suggesting that mastery of advanced mathematical or scientific concepts is necessary.  Instead, we all should learn that intuitions about empirical propositions are often wrong and learn basic methods of examining data and how such data can be interpreted.  A good liberal education may encompass much today, but it often does not include this. Learning about the basics of probabilities and statistics is a step on that road.

However, something even more important must be absorbed. We seek certitude, but we must learn to be humble with our certainties and learn to question them. Antoinette Deshoulieres, the French poet, was correct when she said, “Seeking to know is only too often learning to doubt.”

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“For Example” is not Proof. Yiddish Proverb (continued)

The anti-vaccination movement not only indicates the power of anti-government feelings, but also important aspects of human thinking in general. We don’t like to live with uncertainties and the unknown. We want answers. My child has autism, and I want to know why. What caused it? For many, “we don’t know” is not acceptable, and they seek some sort of answer. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe said, “Mysteries are not necessarily miracles.” But for bad things, we look beyond miracles and often settle on conspiracies. Autism had to be caused by something, and the vaccine is blamed. We will make up an answer if no answer is available.

Misinformation that has taken root is hard to eradicate. Once we believe something, we want to continue to hang on to the belief. Instances of this are legion, and all of us can cite particulars. This trait permeates all strata of society. For example, a recent article by Gina Kolata, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/01/health/medical-myths-doctors.html, reports that nearly 400 routine medical “practices were flatly contradicted by studies published in leading journals.” An example: Ginkgo biloba is widely promoted as a memory aid, but a large study published in 2008 “definitively showed the supplement is useless for this purpose. Yet Gingko still pulls in $249 million in sales.” In spite of the scientific research, the gingko biloba myth lives. What T. H. Huxley said about science, indicating how it advances, should be a benchmark for all of society: “The great tragedy of science—the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.” But all too often facts do not win out over what we believe.

Moreover, misinformation can easily take root because our instinctive reactions to empirical propositions are often wrong and because our education often does not do enough to train us to think more clearly about empirical propositions. The ground-breaking work of psychologists and economists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky shows that human judgment and decision-making are frequently flawed in predictable ways. Of course, many people know of their studies, but they should be even more widely known than they are. Their research applies not merely to some academic or specialized field, but to all of us as we make judgments about the world in all aspects of our lives. Kahneman and Tversky’s seminal book written with Paul Slovic in 1982, Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases is not only readable but also fun as is Kahneman’s 2011 Thinking, Fast and Slow. Critical thinking should be part of our basic education, and the wit, wisdom, and research of Kahneman and Tversky should be included.

Critical thinking would also be advanced by the increased teaching of probabilities and statistics in our schools. This thought stems from my own high school math education, which had what might be considered the usual geometry, trigonometry, and algebra. These all helped my thinking, and while I have probably used that geometry more than I realize, I am like many others who say trig and algebra haven’t cropped up much in their adult lives. But I also took a course that had units that included calculus, set theory, and probability and statistics. As I look back, I realize that probability and statistics has been most important to my thinking through the years.

As most of us do, I encounter news of polls and medical and scientific studies, and their meaningfulness requires some understanding of probabilities and statistics as well as does much of the sports information I absorb. But most important was that P & S taught me important things about critical thinking in general, and it taught me to recognize my own and others’ sloppy thinking when we make factual assertions.

Even before reading Kahneman and Tversky, I had realized how bad intuitions, including mine, were about empirical propositions and that something more objective than gut feelings were needed. Probabilities and statistics helped me realize, for example, that a temporal sequence does not necessarily mean a cause and effect and that correlation and causation are separate concepts. Nevertheless, we all too easily fail to recognize our flawed causational judgments. A case in point: Just because autism is diagnosed after the MMR vaccine is given does not establish that the vaccine causes measles.

I learned from probability and statistics that comparisons are often needed to advance empirical knowledge but devising and assembling adequate control groups can be a tricky business. And we need to have some understanding of the statistics used to make the comparisons.

However, many of us who have not been deeply trained in science and math simply throw up our hands when we encounter either and fall back on some shortcut to determine what we decide to believe. My law school teaching showed me that time and again.

(concluded July 26)

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“For Example” is not Proof. Yiddish Proverb

We have had an outbreak of measles even though a vaccine had seemingly eliminated this childhood disease. A lot of people don’t have their children vaccinated, putting their offspring and other people’s babies, who are not normally vaccinated in the first year of their lives, at risk for the disease.

One outbreak has been in orthodox Jewish communities where parents cite religious beliefs for the lack of vaccinations. I do not know what these religious beliefs are, but I don’t think measles or vaccines are mentioned in the Hebrew Bible. Other parents claim a non-religious personal belief for the failure to vaccinate. Many of these people believe the canard that the measles vaccine causes autism.

This belief can be traced to Andrew Wakefield, then a gastroenterologist, who published a paper in the prestigious British medical journal Lancet in 1998, linking the MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) vaccine to autism in eight children. A dozen years later, a British medical agency found Wakefield had committed professional misconduct and revoked his medical license, and Lancet retracted his study.

Almost a dozen studies since Wakefield’s paper have examined the connection between the vaccine and autism. None found a link. The latest and largest study was of 657,461 Danish children between 1999 and 2010. It, too, found that the vaccine did not cause autism, but it noted that autism often appears at about twelve months, the time when the vaccine is first given, leading to the unwarranted conclusion that the vaccine and autism are connected.

The United States National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, a no-fault system started in 1988, covers claims related to fifteen childhood vaccines and seasonal flu shots. That program’s data show that during the last dozen years, over 126 million doses of measles vaccine have been delivered, but only 284 people have lodged claims with NVICP about harm from it. A mere143 claims were found to be meritorious.

The vaccine does not cause autism, and other harms from the vaccine are exceedingly rare. On the other hand, measles itself is much more dangerous than the vaccine. Hundreds of people die from measles each year around the world. Before the vaccine in 1963, 3 to 4 million people were annually infected in the U.S. with the measles causing 400 to 500 annual deaths. About one in four who get measles are hospitalized, and one to two out of a thousand are likely to die. Why, then, do parents put their children, and other children, at risk of measles?

Part of the reason is a mistrust of government and other “official” institutions. I saw that in strange way in the recent college class I taught when the measles vaccine was discussed. A student said that it was only natural that people were leery of vaccinations and referred to Osama bin Laden and the polio vaccine. I looked up some old news articles that indicated that our CIA had used a hepatitis B vaccination campaign to help locate the al Qaeda leader by seeing if the DNA of vaccinated people in a certain compound were his relatives, and this CIA initiative had added fuel to a Pakistani movement against the polio vaccine. I did not understand this story’s relevance to the measles vaccine. I am not aware of the anti-vax people in the U.S. citing the hunt for bin Laden as a reason for not vaccinating their children, but the comment, while not entirely correct in its details, conveyed a suspicion of governments that has prevented vaccinations. On the other hand, such suspicion does not undercut the fact that the measles, polio, and hepatitis B vaccines work, and that their benefits far outweigh any harms. The real takeaway from the bin Laden story is that Pakistan is now facing a polio outbreak because parents have an irrational fear of the vaccine.

(continued July 24)

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Snippets

I thought that Ross Perot, who recently died and is now largely forgotten, looked like Howdy Doody, but Howdy had a more engaging more personality. And sometimes I lie awake at night listening for that “giant sucking sound.”

If the 2016 election brought increased sales for Brave New World and 1984, will the arrest of Jeffrey Epstein do the same for the marvelous and deeply disturbing Lolita? Or for The Real Lolita: The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel that Scandalized the World by Sarah Weinman that chronicles the abduction of a young girl, an episode that mirrors and may have influenced Nabokov’s book?

I am Donald J. Trump.

I never admit a slump.

My cheeks are pink, my hair is sleek,

Of my brain, thou shalt not speak.

The handyman had come to look at a small project. I was wearing an anti-Trump shirt. He said that he liked it. I replied that I was careful where I wore it. He said that I should be because people got so angry nowadays. I realized that he had not absorbed all the writing on the shirt when he said that Trump had been sent from God. He had only limited times to do the job this week because of church obligations and volunteer work at a Christian radio station. He was an evangelical. And he was black.

I don’t understand many things. For example, I don’t understand many Americans’ fascination with British royalty.

A reason that I am not a conservative: I do not believe that wealth equates with moral worth.

My ears perked up when I heard that the podcast Planet Money was reporting from where I grew up, Sheboygan, Wisconsin. The story focused on how employees in a time of strong employment were gaining power. To illustrate its point, it discussed Kohler Company, which the podcast said was in Sheboygan, and interviewed one of its workers. I wanted to correct the report. As a native of Sheboygan, I never would have said that Kohler is in Sheboygan. It’s in the village of Kohler, which is in Sheboygan County, but not Sheboygan. Sheboygan and Kohler are separate places. The studio reporter asked the man in the field where the Kohler employee might go if the workers’ demands were not met by the company. He replied, “They could go to Sargento Cheese or Johnsonville Brats.” The studio guy sounded amazed, asking, “They are all in Sheboygan?” This Sheboygan native rebelled at the affirmative reply. Sargento is in Plymouth and Johnsonville Brats is in, hold your hat, Johnsonville. Both near Sheboygan, but not in Sheboygan. But then the field reporter said with a hint of smile in his voice something I had not known from my years there, “Sheboygan is a feast for the senses.” Even so, I am not planning a move back.

Posted on by rjonakait

Confessions of a Sometime Public Defender–The Question (concluded)

          I could know I was defending the guilty, not merely assume it, only if the clients told me they were guilty. That only happened a few times, and I felt no moral qualms even in those situations. For example, Mary was a hooker on Brooklyn’s Coney Island Avenue–not the high-rent avenue then for anyone, and certainly not for a prostitute. She would do just about anything for a bit of food and some drugs. An undercover cop approached her and asked if she knew where he could make a big drug buy. She didn’t, but she asked what was in it for her if she could find out. He said $50. This was the equivalent of five or ten tricks for her.

She located where to get the drugs, and when the undercover returned, she took him to a seller in Harlem. She left after pocketing five tens. The cop made the buy, and Mary was arrested for aiding the sale. She told me this. She was guilty. She was not offered a plea bargain. We went to trial.

If convicted, the sentencing law required that she get a life sentence with at least a fifteen to twenty-five year minimum. That meant that she would have to serve whatever minimum a sentencing judge imposed before she would be eligible for parole, and, of course, she could be imprisoned until she died. I did not think such punishment just. She did something illegal, but a person such as she, who was barely surviving, could hardly turn down $50, and for that $50, offered to her by the police, she would get a life sentence. She was convicted. She got life as was required. And I felt that it was an injustice. If, by some miracle, I had gotten an acquittal, I would have rejoiced.

          I did think about the consequences of one acquittal, however. I represented a man, Ron, on the illegal possession of a gun. He told me a story that had some plausibility but was not likely to be true. The trial went surprisingly well. From the evidence, I began to believe that he might be innocent, and to my surprise, he was acquitted.

A few months later he called me. He was in jail again. He was charged with rape. I wondered what I had done. Had my acquittal gotten a woman raped? He wanted me to represent him, but his case had not been assigned to me, and I said no. Later the attorney who represented him on that new charge told me that it was as phony a rape case as any he had ever seen. Ron was acquitted of the rape charge, too. He was apparently innocent.

This sequence bothered me. Most often after an acquittal, I had no further contact with the defendant. Ron’s situation made me wonder if I had the moral luxury of feeling good about an acquittal simply because normally I did know whether the person I had helped free went on to do bad things. Would I have more doubts about what I did if I always found out what happened after a client was acquitted?

On the other hand, Ron made me think that for one of the few times I had abandoned my defender ethic. I had brushed him off instead of defending him again because I did not want to confront the possibility that he had committed a rape for which I perhaps should have felt a responsibility.

          Almost always, however, I could do the work and do it without moral qualms. I learned that the trial system works better than many believe. Attorneys want to believe that their skills and tactics make adifference. Once in a while the attorney does have a huge effect, but generally the attorney, at best, can only be a little bit better than the evidence presented at trial. My experience and my scholarly work convince me that almost always the verdict follows the evidence. If there is strong evidence that a person is guilty, almost always a guilty verdict follows.

          But the real reason I could do the work is that even though I respect police work, I also fear the power the police have. The same for prosecutors and judges. That fear allowed me to be a defender. The poor and the outcast need someone to stand up for them against a powerful government and its representatives.

(To be continued sporadically)

Related Post: May 29, 2019.