April 2017 Archives

Dear America,

Aaron Hernandez, the former star tight end of the New England Patriots NFL football team, was found hanging in his cell yesterday, and shortly thereafter, he was pronounced dead.  Hernandez was serving a sentence of life without possibility of parole for a murder of which he was convicted, and reports from prison officials are that he had written the phrase "John 3:16" across his forehead before hanging himself with his bed sheets.  That verse promises eternal life to all those who believe in Jesus Christ.  That last fact is significant because it suggests that Hernandez was a person of faith, and that in itself begs the questions of what kind of a man he was in reality, and how he got that way.  Hernandez had a multi-million dollar contract to play football professionally, and he had a daughter, whose mother he was engaged to marry, as well.  What would make a man with so much do something as odious as commit murder?

I was, at one time, a college administrator, and in that capacity, I became the campus judicial officer.  Our school had a national champion athletics department that won at least three national titles just in the eight years I was there.  Those championship teams also provided some of the fodder for my judicial activities.  What I noticed then, and what I have noticed both before and since, is the sense of entitlement that seems to be imbued in athletes starting from the first signs of superlative potential.  Their menial sins are forgiven as a matter of course, and the concept of consequences for acts committed quickly falls by the wayside.  There have been stories of prodigies falling--not just athletes, but actors and actresses, politicians and even superior students--for as long as I can remember going back to Marvin Barnes, Fatty Arbuckle, Leopold and Loeb and even Donald Trump, whose business practices have always been dubious, and who knows how many others.  But today, sports seems to produce most of the misguided celebrities who go astray, and it is a national trait that produces them.  We are obsessed with competition, and winning...at any cost...justifies allowing these young people to wallow in a kind of impunity that convinces them that they are above the law.  I would argue that Aaron Hernandez's final words were scrawled on his forehead in a last attempt to redeem himself in the eyes of others, death being the only refuge from his misdeeds that he could find.  In the end, Hernandez seems to have recognized that the fault was not in his stars, but in himself, to paraphrase Shakespeare, but in reality, he was destined to be what he became.  He did have a history of misbehavior, like many other successful amateur athletes, and though the fact that his misconduct culminated in a murder makes him nearly unique, the that led him to the crime started when he grew to be bigger than the other boys and discovered that he could catch a football and knock other boys down.  The adults around him not only extolled his prowess, they cultivated in him, albeit unintentionally, a belief that he could not be touched because no matter what he did as a boy and later as a young man, he never paid a significant price.  It was a lesson learned from repetition, more of the lack of reaction to malfeasance than because of the deeds he committed themselves.

My point is that our culture has become one of vicarious success.  We live through our sports heroes and other celebrities, and we therefore forgive them everything...even the unforgivable.  And by doing so, we ensure the destruction of some of them.  When they fall, we think of their condign punishments as just deserts and never consider the fact that we taught them to do what they do by rewarding them for doing so.  It is a trend not unique to this country; soccer, for one sport, produces its own bad boys world over.  But we hold ourselves out as exceptional.  What that suggests is that we are obliged to deal with this problem first, loudly and effectively for the benefit of the world around us both here and abroad, and perhaps, we should start with our athletes...when they first play in little league or pee-wee football.

This problem belongs to all of us.  When we pay exorbitant sums to go to professional ball games, we reinforce the notion that a superior athlete has a value that justifies a disproportionate price for the rest of us to pay so that we can enjoy his prowess vicariously.  We drop everything to watch and listen to them on television and in movies, on CD's and DVD's, even elect them president, and then we wonder why they can't seem to get their lives together.  We are the reason why as much as they are.  

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

All of this nostalgic puling about the exercise of the pretentiously named "nuclear option" eliminating the filibuster on Supreme Court nominees is nothing but the hand-wringing of a bunch of modern Hamiltonians who think they are not just politicians, but special guardians of the democracy.  It is nothing but hogwash.  This filibuster that Democrats, especially Democrats, see as emblematic of senatorial comity and sage deliberation has never been used as far as I can ascertain...not even when Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas were being considered.  Further, there has never been a case in which a president has put a nominee before The Senate for consideration for whom The Senate never took a vote except when the nominee was withdrawn or was withdrawn and then confirmed for the higher office of Chief Justice...except one: Merrick Garland.  And the Republicans did that.  There has also never been a filibuster of a Supreme Court nominee even though there have been nominees confirmed with less than 60 votes, the number required to end a filibuster.  Both Alito--a doctrinaire conservative more intractable than Scalia was--and Thomas--also a doctrinaire conservative, but such a "deep thinker" that the number of questions he has asked from the bench could be counted on one hand...one finger if I recall correctly--were confirmed by less than sixty votes, and it is certain that the Democrats didn't want either of them on the Supreme Court for life.  Yet, though both men theoretically could have been filibustered to prevent their ascensions to The Court, neither was, and thus, the exercise of repealing the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees begs the question without addressing it.  The question is this: what good is the right to filibuster a nominee if it never gets used, and who gives a damn if it goes the way of all things.  To date, only the Republicans have used any procedural tactic of any kind to prevent a nominee from getting a vote, and they did it with Merrick Garland, President Obama's last nominee.  In effect then, the only use of what could be compared to a filibuster was exercised by the Republicans, and their denial that that was what it was is a hollow prevarication.  So, since only the Republicans are willing to stoop to that level, that is the level of preventing a nominee from ever being considered by the full Senate, the Democrats have nothing to lose by doing away with the filibuster, which they never had the audacity to use.

The talk about the woefulness of the loss of the filibuster is based on the premise that its existence has fostered moderation in the nominating process on the theory that presidents take into consideration the erstwhile fact that the minority party could block the nomination by preventing a vote using the filibuster provision of Senate rules.  But that didn't stop George W. Bush from nominating Samuel Alito, and it didn't stop George H.W. Bush from nominating Clarence Thomas, and the Democrats did nothing about either nomination even though the filibuster was available to them.  In short, the filibuster wasn't the "big stick" that today's senators want to believe it was.  It's been a paper tiger, if you'll excuse the mixed metaphor, all along.  Good riddance.  Now, every Senator has to cast his vote in the open, and that means that they all have to take the nominees they put on the big bench as part of their legacies.  That's the deterrent to making dogmatic partisan decisions.  Those decisions will be recognized...and used politically by opponents.  That's a threat that matters.

Since the filibuster couldn't be used to keep Alito and Thomas off The Court, it wasn't useful for anything at all.  Thus, my only objection to the end of the filibuster on Supreme Court nominees is that it didn't go far enough.  There should be no filibuster for legislation either.  If The Senate is an apt institution in a democratic government, the majority should always rule, and the voters, knowing that they will have to live with the decisions of the individuals as well as the party they vote for, may then exercise the kind of discretion that a democracy demands of its citizens: prudence, foresight, egalitarianism, secular humanism and probity.  So far, consideration of those qualities has been woefully lacking in too many instances to enumerate.  Without the filibuster on legislation, we as a people might do better, and thus be better.

It's time that some of the conceit of Senators be called what it is.  The Senate is not that bastion of mature collegiality that its members want the rest of us to believe it is.  It is as petty, mean spirited and self-serving as the House of Representatives is.  That conceit was spawned by the recently resurrected colonial hero, Alexander Hamilton, in papers numbered 62 and 63 of The Federalist.  In those documents, Hamilton ( it could have been James Madison as far as historians can tell, but they sound more like Hamilton to me) justified the fact that Senators would be chosen by state legislatures rather than the electorate at large because those legislators would be imbued with substance and standing in the community by dint of their maturity and accomplishments, and therefore would have better judgment than the masses.  In other words, wealthy landowners would choose senators, not the rabble.  So The Senate was always intended to be inculcated with the paternalism that wealthy men, and men in particular, know best.  As to the filibuster, they have finally demonstrated that at least in that regard, that may be for the best.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

Yesterday, Donald Trump tweeted a question.  He wanted to know if Hillary Clinton had ever apologized for getting the questions to be asked in one of their debates in advance.  That question is actually encouraging in the sense that it seems to connote a limit as to President Trump's ability to act like a disgruntled adolescent.  He is running out of outrageous snipes to send out to the world, and that means that we may be on the eve of a day in which there will be no news of Trump.  It also suggests that he may soon get bored with being president and just shuffle off to Mar-a-Lago to play golf for the next four years and leave governance to those who at least understand that it is significant for more than just their immediate households.  But perhaps more important is what this tweet says about the Trumpster.

He has somehow controlled the conversation for the past six months even though most Americans dislike him and wish he would just shut up.  The vapid pettiness of what he tweets would disgrace most adults if they were confronted with it, but not Donald.  And the reason is--and this tweet proves it--he is just a petulant child and what he wants is attention...more than anything else, he wants attention.  He doesn't really care about the country or its people.  He probably doesn't even care about his businesses and his money except for the fact that he seems to like gaudy luxury.  I doubt that he even cares about his wives and children.  His entire life is just a plea: "Look at me!"  After all, the campaign is over and despite Trump's efforts to keep the controversy over it alive, it has waned in the public consciousness.  No one cares about Hillary's emails anymore, and certainly, no one cares about the fact that some Democrat operative informed her that certain questions would be asked in a debate, among other reasons because it probably didn't matter.  Clinton prepared for the debates; Trump didn't.  It would have been news if the questions had been leaked to Trump and he had actually prepared to answer them, but that never happened as is obvious from his performance.  The issue was dead on arrival and its twice as dead now, so why bring it up.  The answer is that at 7:00 a.m.--notably hours after his tweets usually hit Twitter--that was the best thing he could think of.  He went back to what was not much more than a faux issue then because he couldn't think of anything else to say to get his ration of publicity that day.  Donald Trump is a publicity hound, and now he is finding out that when you have something important to do, it isn't easy to come up with some quip to rifle off every morning.  He just doesn't have enough time to think about things that are stupid and petty anymore, so the best he can come up with is a six month old reprise of a previous stupid and petty idea.  Donald Trump is running out of tweets, and that's good news for all of us.

Even the people who like him--there must be six or seven left...after all he's got all those children and a current wife that would add up to that even if there's no one else--there is a smoldering disdain for this  childish behavior, and more important still is the fact that he is embarrassing us as a nation.  Every week there is another foreign dignitary, president, dictator or fellow panjandrum who insinuates that Trump is a worry on the world stage because he seems so shallow and unstable.  And consider the fact that when he wants to send an emissary to one of them, he sends a 36 year old real estate "tycoon" who inherited his wealth and significance just like Trump did.  And what other qualifications does Jared Kushner have?  Well, there's nepotism--he is after all married to the only one of Trump's children who seems to even look like she ever had a meaningful idea.  And then there's the fact that he is ostensibly a liberal Democrat...or at least he purportedly used to be.  And of course he must be well seasoned.  He is after all thirty-six.  Imagine how the Prime Minister of Iraq must have felt when his secretary came in and told him that there was some kid from America in the outer office waiting to see him, and then he found out that the kid was sent by the President of the United States.  Trump apparently thinks of Kushner as the equal of world leaders.  How must those world leaders feel about that, and why doesn't Donald Trump care?

If this last tweet is an indicator, Trump is going to have to do a little more thinking if he wants to stay on the front page, and that suggests that he is going to have to start engaging with more people than just Steve Bannon and his kids...maybe even play a little less golf.  Maybe then he'll get it.  He needs to be taken seriously.  He's The President, not the Pillsbury dough boy, no matter what he looks like. 

Your friend,

Mike