Morning Thoughts: March 2, 2018

Believe it or not, I was once interviewed by the FBI. I had only peripheral knowledge of the matter, but it scared me sh …, pretty bad. So naturally I sought the advice of my dear friend and legal consultant Argumento de Minimus, the Harvard-Bred Lawyer. We often jogged together and had time available to jabber.

I love attorneys ‘cause they pay you well if you testify as an “expert” for them and they see that you get paid. They’ve also kept me from saying a lot of stupid things over the years—not all, but a lot.  If you haven’t noticed, though, attorneys aren’t exactly generous about giving away secrets of their profession. My friend’s advice, therefore was limited.

“Don’t lie,” he said. “It’s five years in prison if you lie to them.”

He elaborated a bit more on lies in general and the Feds’ lack of gradation, moderation, or humor concerning them. The thing I remember is that the only time he used the word “white” was when he assured me they would prosecute men of my race as quickly as they would those of others. "Don't fib, ad lib, or mess in your crib," he said, using one of the bedrock legal principles he had learned at Cambridge.

Of course I followed his advice. Argumento wasn’t only an attorney, he was a reserve Major in Military Intelligence. He even drew summer duty at the Pentagon. If he said “Don’t lie,” as numb as it may have made my tongue to comply, I told the truth.

Turned out, the agent was a super-nice chap. I told the truth. He thanked me and confirmed that I only reinforced what they already knew. We gossiped a bit, and he was about to leave without learning much.

Except for one little thing, and he perked up when I “dropped a dime” with that tidbit. Oh dear, was he happy. And, I found that Pierre Choderlos de Laclos was correct when he wrote, "La vengeance est un plat qui se mange froide." In fact, I served mine with a frigid glass of Chardonnay and some chilled wedges of “Bite-me Brie.” I still smile at the memory.

But that was a long time ago, in a paradigm far away.

I have to assume that Argumento was correct, and the five-year standard still applies.

If it does, the term “March Madness,” is going to take on a whole new meaning. My fellow Americans, what say, let’s put the wine in the fridge?

It just says, "From H."
Quick, before it gets warm.

Sailing To Oblivium: September 6, 2017

It now appears that the much of the anti-immigrant stench floating about today wafts from the still smoldering “science” of eugenics. Sad.

What is eugenics? It is nothing less that the attempt to improve a human population by controlled breeding to increase the occurrence of desirable heritable characteristics. Developed largely by Francis Galton as a method of improving the human race, it fell into disfavor only after the perversion of its doctrines by the Nazis.

Then along came Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, reminding us that, as William Faulkner famously said, in Requiem For A Nun, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Odd that it took one Southerner to frame the obscenity of another. Regard the complete falsehoods— Slate Magazine called them “nativist lies” in fact—Sessions used to justify ending DACA yesterday, remembering that a first step toward the open practice of eugenics could be the dehumanizing of target “unfits:”

“The effect of this unilateral executive amnesty (DACA), among other things, contributed to a surge of unaccompanied minors on the southern border that yielded terrible humanitarian consequences. It also denied jobs to hundreds of thousands of Americans by allowing those same jobs to go to illegal aliens.”

Does that perhaps, vaguely suggest a kinship to The Eternal Jew?

Few Americans know that our country flirted, in a most serious way, with eugenics in the first decades of the 20^th Century. Click here for a detailed accounting. Posters announcing that “Only Healthy Seed must be sown” flourished and a belief spread that society must seek out the unfit and prevent them from propagating.

The most famous case, one involving a woman named Carrie Buck, created one of the most odious legal observations in American history. The speaker was a Civil War veteran, and otherwise revered jurist, Oliver Wendell Holmes. Carrie Buck was considered to be “feeble-minded” because her mother and grandmother were considered to be. In summation of a decision justifying her forced (and secret) sterilization, Holmes, then a Supreme Court justice, wrote:

“…if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. . . . Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

Too late, it became clear that Carrie possessed normal intelligence. An outstanding account or the sad affair, written by the late biologist Stephen J. Gould can be found by clicking here.

America turned away from eugenics, or so we thought, after Adolph Hitler and the Nazis embraced and employed it to rid the “master race” of the unfits.

 Will it plague us again? One hopes not, but current trend toward the deporting of, denying entry to, and incarcerating people of color evokes the ominous sound of hobnailed boots along the winding road of history.

After she married and couldn't have children

Carrie Buck, of normal intelligence,

discovered she had been sterilized

as a youth for assumed imbecility

Growing Up Southern: August 4,

Did I ever tell you how I got my first real job? Would you believe I did it solely on merit? Good.

It was like this. I had just, by more or less mutual agreement, ended my relationship with the United States Navy. Oh, that’s not true. They wanted me to stay in. Even promised to send me to OCS. But, I was free, white, and over 21, so I wanted more.

Don’t forget about the “white” part.

I intended to go back to San Francisco. That’s where I had begun my four years of a hate-love relationship with the world of John Paul Jones. When I stopped off in my home town of Pine Bluff, Arkansas, though, my mother begged me to stick around and see if I might find employment. “You’ve been gone away from us long enough,” she said.

Here’s hoping you understand a thing or two about Southern boys and their mamas.

So, I looked around. I never expected to find anything. The draft-dodgers already had all the good jobs, and, like a carnival ride turning upside down, public sentiment had reversed itself in its attitude toward honorable discharges. Potential employers sort of looked at me as if to say, “You were too dumb to think of a way out of the draft?”

I was packing to head West when my mother told me that one of my favorite cousins ran the sanitation department at City Hall and knew everyone in the county. I went up and talked to him. Turns out he knew somebody who knew somebody in Little Rock who might know somebody.

I went to Little Rock, and within a few minutes was talking to two young men who had just started an urban planning consulting firm. They agreed to hire me if I would work for pretty much minimum wage at first. Gosh, that was an area I had hoped to get into, and I had no expenses. Why not? I found out later that one of the motivating factors in my getting hired was because they mistakenly thought I was related to the somebody my cousin knew and they were working on a big contract with his department. They kept me on anyway.

Within five years, I was a partner in the firm, all this success due to my merit. Oh, a little bit of it was due to the fact that I was a white male of European descent. Why, any young African-American man with my credentials could have walked in and received the same deal.

Maybe not. I’d been with the firm about a year when I referred a secretarial applicant to one of the partners. A friend introduced her to me. She was a highly skilled worker with glowing recommendations and an immaculate appearance. She even fit the “cute and perky” part, which was a, more or less, universal requirement for secretarial work in those days. But, I neglected to mention her race. I barely kept my job because of that one small sin of omission.

I’ve been thinking for two days, and that is the only time in 46 years that my job was imperiled because a human being was offered a bit of human decency and a chance at success in life.

I got my first job more because
of this beloved cousin than
my uniform or good looks.
(That's me on the left).

Sailing To Oblivion: June 17, 2017

We teach it in public administration classes. “Where you stand depends on where you sit.” We see it a lot lately.

Whether it’s the sexual assault trial of Bill Cosby, the comedian and actor, or the investigation of our presidential administration, there is a temptation to view events from our particular sitting spot. It is the sort of thing that can send social media into an uncontrollable frenzy. It can even lead to mayhem and violence. It is what I think of as I experience what appears to be another tack into the sea of disbelief, as we sail to Oblivion on June 17, 2017.

Where we stand depends on where we sit. That would be “Miles Law,” named after the Truman-era bureaucrat who coined the phrase.

We saw it as a symptom of our patriarchal society recently. While Trey Gowdy and his minions had freedom to unleash whatever fury they chose on Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, somehow the tender sensibilities of current Attorney General Jeff Sessions had to be protected from the tough questioning of Senator Kamala Harris, Democrat of California.

One can only imagine the sort of slobbering venom that hate media would have produced had Secretary Clinton said, “you make me nervous.” Men do tend to get a free ride in our society, many times because strong women do exactly that—make them nervous. Like Ginger Rogers, who matched every dance move of Fred Astaire, only backwards and in high heels, we men expect our sisters, in this travail of life, to accomplish more, with less acknowledgement, while maintaining a soft and compliant smile. Like plantation owners in the old movies felt about their slaves, we are sure that, in their hearts, they love us.

No wonder they—the strong women of America—regard us men as complete idiots. They don’t have to run around yelling “lock him up, lock him up.” They know that, given enough time, he’ll lock himself up.” Or that’s surely how it looks from where they sit. So many times, the truth lies not in the smile but in what is hidden behind the smile. Miles Law is in operation. It’s just that we have no inkling of where they are mentally sitting.

Meanwhile, from where the men reside, that hegemonic position espoused since the writing of the Holy Bible, it seems only natural to be treated as superior, protected from harsh judgement, given a leg up in our endeavor and always given the benefit of the doubt. It’s the way the Universe was formed. It’s the way things are. Justice carries men along like a mighty river carrying a boat. It is only natural

Or is it? There is another actor in this drama: time. And one can’t think of the inexorable role of this particular actor without recalling the famous ending of Fern Hill, perhaps the most famous Dylan Thomas poem,

“Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,

Time held me green and dying

Though I sang in my chains like the sea.”

You want me to be quiet where?