Posted on by rjonakait

First Sentences

“Clarence Darrow, the famous labor lawyer from Chicago, had stood tall in the public’s eye for almost two decades, and even those who didn’t much like him respected his vigorous defense of what seemed to be hopeless cases.” Brenda Wineapple, Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial that Riveted a Nation.

“Wise guests wake early at the Royal Karnak Palace Hotel.” Christopher Bollen, Havoc.

“Picture the biggest tree you’ve ever seen, laid on its side and sliced lengthways into boards no thicker than expensive steaks.” Callum Robinson, Ingrained: The Making of a Craftsman.

“A wise man once said that next to losing its mother, there is nothing more healthy for a child than to lose its father.”  Halldór Laxness, The Fish Can Sing.

“History, as the cliché goes, is written by the winners, but this is a history of the losers: candidates who lost their elections, movements that bubbled up and fizzled out, protests that exploded and dissipated, writers who toiled at the margins of American life, figures who became briefly famous or infamous and then were forgotten.” John Ganz, When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s.

“In the next town over, a man had killed his family.” Paul Murray, The Bee Sting.

“As ice gathered several inches thick on the Hudson River and the mercury plummeted below freezing, Hortense Odlum stepped from her chauffeured car onto the Fifth Avenue sidewalk.” Julie Satow, When Women Ran Fifth Avenue: Glamour and Power at the Dawn of American Fashion.

“In a moment of panic, we decided to look for a home.” Ayşegül Savaş, The Anthropologists.

“The First Federal Congress was the most momentous in American history.” Fergus M. Bordewich, The First Congress: How James Madison, George Washington, and a Group of Extraordinary Men Invented the Government.

“Terry Tice liked killing people.” John Banville, April in Spain.

“Comrades, In the summer of 2022, I returned to Howard University to teach writing.” Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message.

“Rotating about the earth in their spacecraft they are so together, and so alone, that their thoughts, their internal mythologies, at times convene.” Samantha Harvey, Orbital.

“He stands offstage unseen before seen by millions—oh, sweet polarities!—consolidating adrenaline into twinkling brio.” Bill Zehme with Mike Thomas, Carson The Magnificent.

Posted on by rjonakait

Books 2024

Two years ago, I wrote about my reading habits, which include listing all the books I have read in a year. (See “My Book List” of January 2 and 4, 2023.) I continue to keep such a list; it’s a good thing I keep it because I remember few of the books I finish. What I wrote previously still applies: “I do wonder why I read. I read few books closely. I remember well only a few of the books I finish. I do get some fodder for this blog from my reading. It produces the ‘First Sentences’ I occasionally post. Sometimes the reading gives me an idea for a post or a quotation to use. But I don’t read as if I am researching for the blog or anything else. I read because I read.” Henry Grabar’s Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World typifies much about my reading. I remember that the book has a lot of fascinating information and insights, but I can’t now tell you what they are. As I read over this year’s list, however, I realize that a few still stick in my mind. These include:

Bob Dylan’s The Philosophy of Modern Song. Dylan’s musings about popular songs are often surprising and set me in search of many he wrote about. Thank you, YouTube.

Patrick Bringley’s All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me. Bringley left his job with the New Yorker after the untimely death of his brother and became a guard for ten years at the Met. He writes movingly about grief and art.

Rupert Holmes’s Murder Your Employer: McMasters Guide to Homicide. A clever book. I would say it was Harry Potter-ish, but since I have not read any of the Harry Potter books, I’m guessing.

Vanessa Walters’s The Nigerwife, a striking mystery with a setting that opened a new world to me.

Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017. This is essential reading for making any sense out of the Mideast. It was the selection of two different book groups I attended.

Chris Van Tulleken’s Ultra-Processed People: The Science Behind Food that Isn’t Food. This convinced me that I should not eat ultra-processed foods. And someday perhaps I won’t.

Abraham Riesman, RingMaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America. Is Trump’s best friend really Vince McMahon?

A.J. Jacobs, The Year of Living Constitutionally: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Constitution’s Original Meaning. Amusing and insightful about our founding document and how we now often mistakenly regard it.

Walter R. Brooks, Freddy and the Perilous Adventure (illustrated by Kurt Wiese). I still enjoy the sly wit of Freddy the Pig books.

Christopher Morley, Parnassus on Wheels. An old-fashioned delight from the beginning of the twentieth century.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message. Coates always makes me think and makes me check my assumptions.

Percival Everett’s James. At times this retelling of Huckleberry Finn took my breath away.

Posted on by rjonakait

Fund the Police . . . And Others, Too (concluded)

When police actions go bad, we shout, “Reform the police.” “Defund the police.” But we should be looking at ourselves. We proclaim that we are the richest and most powerful country in the world, but we the people refuse to spend the money to make things better. We are more concerned with taxes than with the public welfare. It isn’t just on the police; it is also on us.

We should have police reforms. We should have better screening of those who become an officer. We should have a national database of problem cops who sometimes now go from one police force to another without information available about their past performance. We should have better training for the police especially on how to restrain potentially violent people. We need better discipline of the police. We need a reconsideration of qualified immunity. But many of these steps require funding, and we don’t want to provide it.

A seemingly simple reform would be to require body cams. Studies have shown police behave better if they know they are being videoed, but these cameras also help the police. Charges of abuse were lodged against an officer in a small Pennsylvania department recently, but he was wearing a body cam, and the video of the incident exonerated him. Both the police and the general public have a stake in police body cams.

At the police forum I recently attended, a police chief said that he welcomed body cams, but he pointed out that not only does it take money to get the equipment, it takes a computer technician to maintain, store, and review the results. The police chief did not have money for a technician to maintain his current computer equipment. He certainly had no money in his budget for the support needed for body cams even if he had money to obtain the cameras themselves. I repeat; that shortfall is on us, not on the police.

But something more is on us. Ta-Nehisi Coates writes a letter to his son in Between the World and Me and says, “But you are a black boy, and you must be responsible for your body in a way that other boys cannot know. Indeed, you must be responsible for the worst actions of other black bodies, which, somehow, will always be assigned to you. And you must be responsible for the bodies of the powerful—the policeman who cracks you with a nightstick will quickly find his excuse in your furtive moments.”

Coates is speaking to a sad reality. We are too often unable to fully see blacks as individuals; instead we see them as a member of group. The tendency then is to assume that the worst actions of one of them applies to all of them. This gets ingrained in the subconscious, including the subconscious of police officers. A split skull and much worse too often results.

We do something similar to the police. Although there are thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of interactions between the police and the rest of us each day, we see on the news, the internet, and social media the worst actions by individual officers; we don’t see the professional, useful, helpful encounters. We make all police officers responsible for those racist, brutal, incompetent police behaviors committed by some of them. And so we tend to lump all police together — the good ones and the bad ones. And the natural reaction is for police officers to hunker down in their tribe and separate themselves from the rest of us. This only exacerbates the problem.

The police may need to change attitudes and practices, but we also need to change our attitudes towards the police. We can’t just view police officers as the evil “other.” Recently I taught a seminar at an Ivy League university entitled “Race, Poverty, and Criminal Justice.” Not surprisingly in a course with that title, almost all of the liberal-minded students were anti-police. They would speak at length – and with too little data — of how bad the police and police departments are. I asked if any of them would consider becoming a police officer. They had looks of horror as if we were inside a chainsaw-massacre-movie. They not only could not imagine being an officer, they could not even imagine that a “normal” person would want to be one. The police were completely “other.”

That is a problem for all of us.