One man out of our 300 million population has brought this on us

A few days ago I posted a commentary entitled I s Cheney the crazy uncle in the attic? I have since come across the following bit by Hendrik Hertzberg in the 1/29/07 issue of The New Yorker. I think it sums up the sad situation that we, as a nation, are now in.

The day after the address, Vice-President Cheney—in an instantly notorious CNN interview in which he dismissed talk of blunders as “hogwash”—said, “The critics have not suggested a policy.” That is hogwash.
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is in its fourth week of hearing such suggestions. The Iraq Study Group has a plan. Senator Joseph Biden and Leslie Gelb have a plan. The Center for American Progress has a plan. But what all their plans have in common is that they recognize that what remains is the search for the least bad of a bad bunch of options. Implicitly, they recognize that Bush’s policy—and, therefore, Bush—is a failure. And so, rather than looking for a policy that might be within our means and might mitigate the disaster, Bush is betting all his chips—all our chips—on the only choice that allows him the fantasy that in the end people will say: Bush was right. He is sending twenty thousand because twenty thousand is all he has. Next to nothing in the way of ground forces remains for other contingencies. His Presidency and his “legacy” are in ruins anyway, so he imagines he has nothing to lose. If only that were true of the rest of us.

I have long felt that tying down a major part of our military forces—not to mention the loss of life, the many wounded, and the draining of our financial resources--in this horribly mismanaged adventure in Iraq has left us with virtually no resources available to face off enemies that we may have to be fighting in any future unavoidable confrontation.

It is tragic that one individual—yes, just one man out of over 300 million of our population, our president, George Bush--is primarily responsible for bringing our nation to this demeaning condition.

Is Cheney the crazy uncle in the attic?

There is reason to think that Vice President Dick Cheney has drifted away from the Bush party line on Iraq and is wandering somewhere out in Dreamland. One can draw that conclusion from his remarks in an interview with Wolf Blitzer of CNN on 1/24/07, the day after Bush’s State of the Union address to Congress. In his earlier televised address to the nation--in which he told of the "surge" of troops he plans to send into Iraq--Bush admitted that “mistakes have been made” (note the passive “have been made”), for which he has to be held ultimately accountable.

Notwithstanding Bush’s belated, grudging recognition of the disastrous situation in Iraq, Cheney says:

The reality on the ground is, we’ve made major progress…there’s been a lot of success.

In response to Blitzer’s comment “…some of your good Republican friends in the Senate and the House are now seriously questioning your credibility, because of the blunders and the failures.”

Cheney responded:

Wolf, Wolf, I simply don’t accept the premise of your question. I just think its hogwash.

Referring to these comments by Cheney, David Brooks, the New York Times columnist, called him “delusional” (on the Jim Lehrer News Hour on PBS on 1/26/07). It should be noted that Brooks is no “left wing liberal” but is usually around Center or a bit to the right of it.

Or an alternative conclusion about Cheney’s role might be that it is a clever ploy by the Bush administration (perhaps concocted by Karl Rove) to have him (Cheney) out there saying things that Bush would like to say, but knows that he would look even worse if he did so.

The minimum wage: then and now

Currently, a bill has been passed in the U.S. House of Representatives to increase, in three steps over 26 months, the minimum wage from its present $5.15 per hour to $7.25, and now is before the Senate.

The minimum wage is a floor for all workers in the USA; however, some states have even higher minimums. But it was not always so. In the summer of 1942, when I was in my teens, I worked for the Army Corps of Engineers on a labor crew clearing land of brush and small trees on which an army camp (Camp Butner) was being built in North Carolina, 15 miles from my hometown. (I fibbed about my age to get the job; the time was only seven months after we went to war following the attack on Pearl Harbor, and there was a big rush to get military installations built, so no one seemed to be very fussy about the age of needed workers.) The Federal minimum wage was then 40 cents per hour (with time-and-a-half over 40 hours a week), so, if I worked a full six-day week of 48 hours, I got $20.80 (before tax withholding). I couldn’t always get in 48 hours of work because of rain interruptions.

Apparently that 40 cents applied only to Federal workers (and possibly to large companies engaged in interstate commerce). So, when I went back to high school in the fall, I went to work in a J. C. Penney store, afternoons after school and on Saturdays, at 25 cents per hour; I later got a raise to 30 cents.

During the intervening years from that 25 cents an-hour job in 1942 to 2003 (my final year of doing part-time consulting work after I retired from full-time work in 1992) I did better: my hourly rate went to $115, a 45,900% increase, in nominal dollars, over the 25 cents.

Youthful deaths

Reading American Bloomsbury by Susan Cheever, an interesting account of life of the literati (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorn, Bronson Alcott, Margaret Fuller, and others) in Concord, Mass. during the 19th Century, brings to my mind the frequent deaths of young people during that era. The great majority of those deaths would probably have been avoided by today’s medical care.

Cheever tells that Ralph Waldo Emerson--the noted essayist, orator, and author--born in Boston in 1803, was the third of six boys born to his parents. Only he and a mentally handicapped brother survived past age 30: two died in childhood and two others died before age 30. Emerson himself knew early death when his first wife, Ellen Tucker, who was 18 when he married her, died of consumption two years later. Later, he married Lydia (Lidian) Jackson, who bore three children, one of whom, Waldo, died of scarlet fever at age 5.

Giuseppe Verdi—the world-renowned opera composer (La Traviata, Rigoletto, Aida, Il Trovatore, Nabucco, and many others)—born in Italy in 1813, lost the first of his children at age 17months in 1838 and the second a year later at 16 months; both deaths were from unknown causes. His wife, Margherita, then died a year later of encephalitis, at age 27. However, Verdi himself lived to the ripe age of 87, dying in 2001. (Following his first wife’s death, he lived for many years with, and later married, the Italian soprano Giuseppina Strepponi.)

Early deaths were also in my father’s family—of six children born to his parents, three died (during the years 1879-91) at ages ranging from 12 months to 7 years. His father died in 1897, at age 61, from pleurisy, an infection relating to the lungs. I had the same thing a few years ago—the symptoms of which were a pain in the ribs area—which was easily cleared up by an antibiotic.

However, not all families during the 19th Century were so unfortunate. My mother, who was born in 1885 and lived to age 87, was one of fourteen children born to her parents, only one of whom died at an early age.

Three Cheers for Charles Dickens

I have just finished watching an episode of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, a re-run of the series done several years ago by Masterpiece Theater on public television. Masterpiece Theater has done other Dickens novels that I can recall, among them David Copperfield and Martin Chuzzlewit. All were beautifully done. While Masterpiece Theater also deserves credit for presentations of modern fiction—I recall The Rector’s Wife, several years ago, as an excellent example—some of its nineteenth-century works, other than those of Dickens, I have found a bit trying.

However, I find the Dickens presentations by Masterpiece Theater entrancing: the framing of the 500-plus pages of the novels into a TV production, the casting of the multitude of characters in the novels, the filming of 19th Century London, the occasional music. When watching them, I am taken back to the days when I was around eight to ten years old and played a card game “The Game of Authors” with two of my uncles. The cards had suits of different American and British 19th Century authors, the object being, by discarding and drawing, to build four of a suit. That way, I became familiar with Dickens, Sir Walter Scott, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Makepeace Thackeray, and many others.

Among all the crap that TV offers, it is delightful to find an occasional jewel like the Masterpiece Theater productions of the Dickens novels.

Mycroft goes to court

One of my pastimes is attending criminal trials in courtrooms around the world. Although not a lawyer, I get my kicks from reading (fictional) murder mysteries and following (real-life) criminal trials in the media and sometimes in-person in the courtroom.

I have attended criminal trials in the following places.

USA
Oxford, NC
Granville County, NC
Durham, NC
Baltimore County, MD
Baltimore City, MD
Baltimore City, MD (Federal Courthouse)
New York City
New York City (Federal courthouse)
York, PA

Canada
Montreal, Quebec
St. Johns, Newfoundland

Europe
London, England (Old Bailey)
Paris, France
Laon, France
Madrid, Spain
Rhodes, Greece
Aylesbury, England
Edinburgh, Scotland
Reykjavik, Iceland (civil court only)

Caribbean
Fort-de-France, Martinique, French West Indies
Pointe-a-Pitre, Guadeloupe, French West Indies
Roseau, Dominica, West Indies
Port-of-Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, West Indies
Willemstad, Curaçao, West Indies

South America
Cayenne, French Guiana
Buenos Aires, Argentina
Santiago, Chile
La Paz, Bolivia

Some of those places I have visited only once, others several or many times. Following are some recollections of my visits.

New York City (Federal court): In 1949, I visited the jury trial of eleven top leaders of the American Communist Party before Judge Harold Medina on charges of conspiring to violently overthrow the United States government. They were all found guilty and sentenced to prison by Judge Medina.

Old Bailey, London: During my many visits there, the ones that stick in my mind are:

In 1954, the crew of a Polish freighter had mutinied and taken the ship into British waters—six or eight of the leaders of the crew were on trial for mutiny. This event, which occurred during the height of the Cold War, gained worldwide public attention (it was covered by Time magazine, among other media). Sir Hartley Shawcross was the presiding judge at the non-jury trial (Sir Hartley had been a prosecutor in the Nuremberg trial of Nazi war criminals and had also been prosecutor in several British high-profile trials of the 1940’s and 1950’s).

There were interpreters of Polish to assist the defendants during the trial. My recollection is that the defendants were acquitted on the grounds of lack of jurisdiction by British courts in the matter.

In 1989, the trial of several men (six or eight, I believe) who were charged with savagely beating to death a boy in his early teens. The details of the crime testified to by police and other witnesses were gruesome.

The following year, 1990, the high-profile trial of a scientist for General Electric in Britain who was charged with violation of the Government Secrets Act by conveying certain classified information to agents of a foreign government.

In 2004, the trial of about six young Asian men (Pakistanis, I believe) for the killing of another Asian man in a robbery that turned into murder.

Not having followed the last three trials to their conclusion, I don’t know their outcome.

St. Johns, Newfoundland, Canada: The trial that my wife and attended in 1994 was of a pimp who was recruiting underage girls for prostitution. Several years later, I saw a film which told the supposedly true story of a Catholic home for boys in which some of the priests sexually abused the boys. Years later, the priests were brought to trial, at which some of the boys (now men) testified against them. The filming of that trial was in the very same courtroom which we had visited.

Cayenne, French Guiana: There, in 2002, I walked right into the courtroom carrying a tote bag. There was no security to check me out; I could have easily been carrying a weapon in the bag. Yet, when about a dozen men were brought in for arraignment, all handcuffed together, there almost 20 cops in the room. No one to stop me (or anyone else) from entering the courtroom with a weapon, but 20 cops to guard 12 handcuffed men. Ah yes, the French have their own inscrutable ways--I learned that when I worked for an American-based imternational oil company in what, at the time (1953-54), was French West Africa.

Before the court proceeding began, I had an interesting conversation with the gendarmerie captain in charge of the court security. Among other things, he explained something I had observed all over France (metropolitan and overseas) and had long wondered about: the difference between the Police Nationale (who have that patch on their sleeves and wear particular headgear) and the gendarmes (who wear the Foreign Legion type caps). Essentially, according to him, the Police are just that: members of a national police force; the gendarmes, on the other hand, are part of the French army. In actual practice, they share law enforcement duties.

Durham, NC: In 2003, the trial of Michael Peterson for the murder of his wife. I first heard about the case when Katie Couric (then the co-anchor of the NBC morning show) talked to a Court TV reporter about it—due to several of its bizarre aspects, Couric commented that it sounded like an Agatha Christie whodunit.

Michael and Kathleen Peterson were a well-to-do couple, in their fifties, living in Durham. In December 2001 Kathleen was found dead at the bottom of a stairway in their upscale home, apparently having fallen down it; however, Michael was charged with murder based on the allegation that he had, first, bludgeoned her and the pushed her down the steps.

There were several attention-drawing aspects of the case which brought about continuing coverage of the trial by Court TV and the national media.

--The body of a female acquaintance of Michael Peterson who had died in a similar (falling down the steps) accident some years before was exhumed from its grave, with the result that a pathologist report stated that the cause of death was the result of having been struck on the head with a blunt instrument.

--The bi-sexual characteristic of Michael’s nature came to light when a male escort testified at the trial—over the strong objection of defense counsel—that Michael had contacted him for a “date” (which never actually took place).

--The extended family of the Petersons was violently divided: Michael’s adult son by a previous marriage and the two young adult daughters who had been adopted by Michael and Kathleen—and who were the biological daughters of the first woman to die falling down the steps—sat on one side of the courtroom and strongly supported Michael. On the other side of the courtroom sat Kathleen’s twenty-something daughter by a previous marriage and her father (Kathleen’s former husband), who were equally strongly opposed to Michael.

--The well-known forensic scientist Henry Lee (famous for his testimony in the O.J trial) testified.

Another noteworthy aspect was that the presiding judge was Orlando Hudson, a black man--something that would have been unimaginable in North Carolina forty or more years previously. I thought that the judge handled the case admirably.

The trial began in June and lasted until October 2003. Before going down to attend the trial, I read about it in the Durham Herald Sun and phoned that paper’s reporter to ask if, because of its notoriety, it would be difficult to get into the courtroom—to which he answered no. So, the first day that I attended, in mid-July, I made the reporter’s acquaintance and we had lunch together each day that I attended. I got a lot of interesting background on the case from him.

Back home, I followed the trial on Court TV and other media. I had all along guessed that the result would be like the OJ case: guilty but acquitted. I was very surprised when, on October 10, 2003, the jury returned a guilty verdict and Michael Peterson was sentenced right then by Judge Hudson to life without parole.

La Paz, Bolivia: I attended a court session there in May 2005. In addition to the three judges that are usual in non-Anglo Saxon courtrooms, there were two others identified by placards in front of them as being from other government departments.

In a highway robbery case, a police officer was called to testify. The chief judge asked the officer if he believed in God, to which he responded yes; next he was asked if he was Catholic, to which he again responded yes. At that point the judge read an oath—during which everyone stood up, the court officials and the audience; when the officer accepted the oath, everyone sat back down. The same procedure was repeated when a witness was called to testify.

Rhodes, Greece: When my wife and I were on a cruise of the Greek islands in 1997, I wandered around Rhodes on my own when I saw, among a block of government buildings, an open door with a crowd of people milling about inside and outside the building. I wandered in (again, like French Guiana, no security to stop me) and found a court in session. There were very animated exchanges between court officials and the man and woman in the dock and, also, between the judges themselves (of whom there were five or six).

Knowing virtually no Greek, I had no idea what the court procedure was all about. However, I asked a group of cops outside if any spoke English (I had learned how to ask that in Greek), to which one young officer said he did, whereupon I asked him what the charges against the defendant were. When he shrugged that he didn’t know the English term, I gave him my English-Greek dictionary and he pointed to the Greek word that translated to “theft/embezzlement.”

Later, as I was walking back to the ship, I saw at a fruit stand a man whom I had seen in the courtroom, whom I took to be a prosecutor. When I discovered that he spoke some English, I asked him what the trial was all about, to which he said with a heavy accent, “Much money.”