Is Diversity a Virtue?

 

Of course, any discussion of "diversity" has to begin with an understanding of what you mean by it.

Starship Enterprise: Making Diversity Work

"Diversity/Equity/Inclusion" banners flew over college campuses coast to coast and, as I walked by them I thought, "Well, not a bad idea," without thinking more about it.

You will not replace us

To my mind, "diversity" meant faces of different races in a college class. That did not mean a diversity of experience, as all those faces belonged to kids who were raised in the same upper class neighborhoods, went to the same schools and spoke in the same rhythms and used the same language. If you were speaking on the phone to a Black classmate, you would never know he was Black, until the advent of FACETIME.

diversity

But as my good friend, and longtime sage mentor pointed out, when she thinks of Diversity she thinks of her sister, who just got laid off from a high tech firm, one of two in her division, both of them women, the only women in that division, while younger, less competent men were kept on. Diversity in the workplace to her meant seeing women and hearing from women in that workplace.

4 women in a Residency program 

Thinking back to the transformation I saw in hospitals, the advent of more women physicians made a huge difference in the atmosphere among the interns and residents, where women were often referred to as cunts or sluts or "the town tunnel." Women insisted that if they were suffering from the flu, with a temperature of 103, coughing, they be allowed to remain at home and they insisted that during flu season, the on call schedule be designed to allow for that, which never occurred to me, as I had gone to work with that fever, likely spreading flu to my patients and coworkers. It was the macho thing to do.

Not that women weren't tough enough to do that: Speaking with an ER doctor, a woman, I noticed her red eyes and nose, her coughing, and her pockets stuffed with Kleenex, and I asked her why she wasn't home and she laughed and said, "During flu season all the folks who work in the ER are sicker than ninety percent of the patients we are seeing: If we stayed home, the ER would close down."

But Diversity goes well beyond gender and race. There is a transgender, male to female working at our town library, who is well over six feet tall, purple hair and flowing dresses. The library is the main hang out for middle school students, age 11 to 14, who gather there while their working parents are still at work, and these students glance at this unusual library employee with hardly a hitch--she is just another town character, alongside several other oddities.  That is probably a good thing--tolerance for the abnormal inculcated in the kids of a small New Hampshire town.

But, back in 1966, I well recall a student asking the professor in an English class if we could interrupt the scheduled topic to discuss the protests advocating for admitting 12% of the next class as people of color.  I made myself unpopular by asking why we should do that. If we were all supposed to be there because of some sort of merit, why were we abandoning the idea of meritocracy for the sake of injecting a certain number of students into the student body simply to achieve a mix of non white faces in the crowd?

The professor asked me what I thought consisted of merit.

I said, well, we had been told it was SAT scores, and grades.

And he asked about the kids who were admitted with lower SAT's because they were good football players, or those with lower grade point averages who came from the Pacific Northwest or the Southwest or the South, because the college liked to think of itself as a "national" university.

Southern Opinion and Perspective

Well, I replied, you might say the different perspective and values those kids brought to the college might be considered a merit, but he asked whether I could tell a kid was from Seattle talking to him about any topic, because his perspective was so different, and I had to admit everyone on campus, no matter where they were from seemed pretty alike, except for the kids from the deep South, and so "geographic distribution" didn't seem to affect the college experience much.

Unanimity of Opinion, Save One

White people and, more recently Asian Americans have argued that setting aside places for Blacks meant those places were lost to them and they had clearly been displaced from places at Harvard to allow Blacks to occupy those places.  In this, they shared the perspective of those marching at Charlottesville, White men chanting, "You will not replace us."

White Anglo Saxon Protestants saw themselves displaced from medical schools and Ivy League colleges when those institutions divested themselves of quotas against Jews.

Asian Americans with high test scores and high GPA's found they were rejected on the grounds of not being "positive personalities" i.e., not being likeable, kind, generous, widely respected.  That is, they were rejected for being competitive grinds, grade grubbers, i.e. they were rejected for playing the game, ruthlessly, by the rules, and not as some sort of gentlemen. 

If you are going to define merit as high grades, high scores but then you change that when you discover you are facing a class of 100% Asians, what do you do? Do you accept that? Or do you change the rules, and assign points to exclude those who are successful playing to win?

4 women in a class of 90, by quota rule

And that brings us to the basic problem of how do you define merit? Do we even know what qualities, talents, potentialities are required to make the best workers?

Doctors, to take just one example, need very different talents, depending on the specialty: What you want in a neurologist is light years away from what you need in a cardiac surgeon, and the pediatrician is almost a different species from the orthopedist.  

And the fact is, you do not need to be good at solving differential calculus equations to be a good endocrinologist or urologist, and your grades in organic chemistry are probably not predictive of your ability to do abdominal surgery. 

We are simply not very good as identifying talent for most fields--in this musicians are much better than any group. The audition behind a screen for the New York symphony is the purest form of meritocracy there is in human resources, but it is duplicated almost nowhere else, not even in selecting professional athletes. (Read "Moneyball.")

Sometimes, forcing institutions to look for other traits is not such a bad thing. When I was young, small fast athletes were cut from the football team, as coaches knew that only the biggest, strongest boys made good football players, at least as those coaches designed their playbooks. If your offense consisted of running the ball up the middle and had no passing attack, then you didn't need small fast guys who could catch a ball 40 years downfield. That was until, in the 21st century, driven by the big bucks that reward winning in the NFL, small, quick, elusive and, above all, fast athletes proved to be invaluable scoring machines and now you see a lot of diversity of body type on the NFL gridirons in the huddles of every team.

What is Merit?

Personally, I would like to see Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Stanford announce that they will admit 1/3 of their classes based on just grades and test scores, and 1/3 based on some special talent (oboe playing, computer skills, kicking field goals, equestrian prowess) and 1/3 by lottery. 

Of course, that would deflate the myth that simply being admitted to Harvard means you are a certified genius, but it would likely benefit Harvard and the rest of the country.

For certain arenas, diversity is clearly a dangerous and counterproductive consideration: being a good surgeon, a competent engineer or an airplane pilot, musician, doctor should have no diversity requirement. Admissions to schools training these folks should  be color blind, sex blind, blind to everything but the attributes which make for good performance.

If that means that the next class of Harvard medical school is 100% Asian females, so be it. 

But I doubt that would actually happen. 

Mr. Trump and his White Supremacists fans are loathsome, but that does not mean they are always wrong about everything, and the attack on diversity is (often secretly) applauded by a wide range of Americans and is broadly popular, I am guessing, just based on what I hear in the office, and around town.

DELIBERATIONS IN HAMPTON: KILLING SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE

 

Last night, Wednesday, February 5, 2025, the Deliberative Session (DS) considering the warrant article which awards taxpayer funds to a religious school (Sacred Heart) was debated.

For the first time in town history, since this warrant article was introduced likely as long as 30 years ago, the Budget Committee and the School Board both voted to not recommend to the town voters that they vote for taxpayer funds for the religious school. This all happened before the DS, and some of the speakers are reacting to this. The vote which counts is the vote by Hampton citizens going to the polls to vote yes or no, in March. The DS is supposed to be the town hall meeting where people meet to inform, persuade and come to an understanding.

The primary and fundamental argument against this funding of Sacred Heart is it violates the First Amendment article--the article nullifies the separation of church and state.

Hampton's practice of local nullification of the First Amendment is particularly pure. In other cases which have come before the Supreme Court in Washington, there were always extenuating circumstances: In one case, Everson, the town had extended school bus service to all students but refused to bus kids to a Catholic school, and the Court ruled you cannot withhold funds you offer to all, on the basis of religious exception. Ditto for playground repair: If you undertake to re-asphalt all town school playgrounds, you have do the Catholic school playgrounds, too. And in Maine, kids who wanted to go to a religious school had no practical non religious school as an option. 

But in Hampton, there is a public school next door to the Catholic school and there are plenty of empty seats in public schools available to students who choose to attend the Catholic schools. What Hampton does is to simply provide a slush fund, and whenever the Catholic school wants to buy a new computer, it presents the check to the treasurer of the school board who pays the invoice. In the past, it was always claimed these checks paid for only "non religious" items, but it turns out the treasurer pays for things which could, and likely do, serve religious functions.

This particular pork barrel boondoggle can happen in this town because the local church has a voting block which can propose a warrant article and mobilize three thousand congregants to vote for it, no matter what the First Amendment says.

At the end of the comments, Bob Ladd, who voted for the article as member of the Budget Committee cited a principle of "Mutual Aide" as a justification for the community paying for Sacred Heart's computers. He noted that the fire department does not refuse to go to extinguish fires at the Catholic school, or at churches and this principle applies to cover funding the church school. 

Of course, this is a false analogy: we do not ask accident victims whether they are Catholic before putting them into an ambulance, or rescuing them from a riptide at the beach. The offering of life saving services does not violate the proscription for the government not to establish a church. We are not, after all building  a church or a school by rescuing it from fire, but we are protecting that structure, and other nearby structures, from destruction as a measure of public health and safety.

A better example might have been government funds used to support a church soup kitchen: Government cannot do everything, but when a church steps in as a helper in meeting a need, where the government has opted not to develop a program, partnering with that effort may not violate church and state and the establishment clause.

The other argument Mr. Ladd presented was that making a fuss about this warrant article or voting against it exacerbates divisions in the town, which left Mad Dog wondering: does that not apply to the Church, which pushes this warrant article every year over increasingly rancorous objections?  Does this $50K really matter much to the Sacred Heart School which is funded by the archdiocese of Manchester? 

Mr. Ladd demonstrated his lack of ability to abstract with a final comment about Texas Governor Anne Richards.  The sole  speaker who opposed the warrant article and who spoke in favor of separation of church and state, had told a story to illustrate how personally difficult and wrenching having to embrace the separation of church and state can be: Governor Richards had to tear down a nativity scene which was built on government grounds, outside her office, when the Court ruled that violated church and state, and she expostulated, "Damn! It's a crying shame! I really hate doing it! Because, in Austin, at the Capitol, this is the only time of year when we can ever gather together, in one place, all at the same time, three wise men."

This elicited laughter, even among the audience which was stacked with congregation members from the Catholic Church. 

Mr. Ladd, apparently unwilling to allow the opposition to have the last laugh said, "Well, but Governor Richards also said of George W. Bush that he was born on third base and thought he hit a triple!"

Which set Mad Dog's head spinning, as he tried to fathom what that had to do with anything being discussed that night about the warrant article.

That the audience had laughed with the citizen who opposed the warrant article apparently hit a nerve with its supporters. The principal of Sacred Heart began her remarks by saying she stood to speak "not to take a mocking tone" as "others who have spoken" that night had taken. Laughter, apparently, is a threat and not to be tolerated.

Another respondent, Patrick S., began with a sneer at "our constitutional lawyer" to say that just because someone says something is unconstitutional doesn't mean it actually is unconstitutional, and there are lots of examples of government giving money to religious institutions, not that he bothered to cite any. 

But anyway, Mr. S. asserted, we in Hampton are only "mere mortals" and the justices of the Supreme Court know a lot more about it, and decide cases with a lot less emotion than the constitutional lawyer who had spoken that night had shown. Best to leave the Constitution to the real experts: a naked appeal to closing down your mind. Just have faith in the experts down in Washington, D.C., the justices on the Supreme Court of the United States.  That argument about the funding of a religious school violating the First Amendment is "dead," Mr. S. concluded with what can only be described as a smirk.

In Mad Dog's brain danced the refrain from Dylan's song: "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows."

Mad Dog briefly considered leaping up to the microphone to say, "As was said earlier, the Constitution was not written for lawyers, but for the Common Man. You don't need 3 years in law school to know when government funds a church, that violates the First Amendment, if you have ever had a middle school Civics course, at least in a reasonably competent public school, or failing that, you can draw conclusions if you know how to read." 

But then he asked himself: "Who are you trying to persuade here? Who are you talking to? What do you gain by ridiculing a man like Patrick S? "

In that room, the wind was blowing, had always blown, for the Church. Hundreds of people file in every year, and not more than a dozen are not members of the Church.

 

Watching the video of this 90 minute session, Mad Dog understood why discussion of topics like this is unlikely to ever change anyone's opinions. People sat in the audience tapping away on their cell phones and applauded the proponents of giving taxpayer money to Sacred Heart, no matter how inarticulate or incoherent the speaker. 

Scanning the faces of a crowd sometimes tells you more than all the focus groups, all the telephone polls, all the pundits writing in the New York Times can possibly tell you. 

Mississippi Cop on Trial for Murder of Negro

The possibility of deliberation, persuasion seems remote in this mob. One wonders if it is ever a possibility. Can you see the United States Senate shifting from one position to another after a vigorous debate, where the reasoning of one Senator actually changed the mind of another? 

Which is not to say we should give up on democracy, but it suggests that the orator, the man who might persuade, may be an extinct species. Barack Obama may have changed minds, but not about issues like separation of church and state. He could change minds about how people saw him, by being erudite, articulate and non threatening. But he could not persuade anyone on issues, which is why he said some people cling to their guns and their religion and there was no changing them.

People come to the Deliberative Sessions with their minds made up. As Lincoln once remarked, you can show up with twelve angels blowing horns and you would not change anyone's mind on certain topics.

If you are interested enough to sit through the DS, here it is, unedited. Heaven help you. (Tip: you really should scan forward to minute 39 or even 42, as the first 40 minutes are mostly people chatting, like those dead zones on CNN Congressional hearings.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDaSwqFUzQ0

BEING THERE: WHEN LIFE IMITATES ART

 

In 1979 a movie starring Peter Sellers called "Being There," was released. 

It was about a simple minded gardener who has spent his whole life sequestered in a rich man's mansion, tending to flowers and shrubs. 

Eventually, he is ejected from this gilded world and wanders the streets in the elegant clothes he had retrieved from the attic of his employer, gets hit by a limousine owned by a rich woman, who brings him to her own mansion, where he is taken in and cared for by a doctor and the rich couple who live there.

Eventually, he is introduced to the President of the United States--this is Washington, DC, after all--where his homilies about how each plant has its season, and about how you must water the seeds for them to gain root and grow, are apprehended by his rapt listeners in the White House, on TV talk shows as extended parables and metaphors. 

He is hailed as a guru, a very wise man with an expansive visionary intellect.

And now we have a man, raised in a hermetically sealed world of rich boys, now occupying the White House, speaking in simple phrases: We will make Gaza wonderful.  We will make it such a wonderful place, like a new Riviera. And it will be settled by "world people."

Of course, in the movie, the maid who raised and cared for the gardener before he wandered off, knew he was simple minded--"rice pudding between the ears"--and the scene of her watching his interview on TV, as the people on TV listen in rapt attention to the talk about knowing when to sow and when to reap, and the maid is saying, "That boy is barely able to feed himself."

And now we have our very own Chauncey Gardiner in the White House, telling us about his plan for the Gazza strip, which he says America will own and renovate.

Going back to day one with Trump, we have been told to not take him literally, but to take him seriously. Once he became President, we had to take what he says seriously, until now. It just isn't possible any more to take him seriously as he shouts out whatever thought reaches his mouth, unfiltered by brain. It's okay for TV hosts to speculate and fantasize about solutions, about untested, uncalculated plans, but not for the President.  Until now, whenever a President said he wanted to steer the ship of state in a direction, people said, "Okay, now what do we have to do?" But with Trump, we now say, "Oh, wait a minute. He'll forget all about it and he'll move on."

It's like dealing with a child: just wait until he stops wailing he wants a pony and a motorcycle so he can ride down to Disneyworld, because you know he'll move on, if you just wait a minute.

And everyone from the Speaker of the House, to Republican senators and FOXNEWS stars, are nodding along, exhilarated by the idea of their leader thinking outside the box.

 Way outside the box, like in a nursing home for dementia care. 

INJECT GAZZA WITH BLEACH!

 Talk about thinking outside the box!

Talk about a disrupter!

Wowser! Mr. Trump is on a roll!

Looking out over that wasteland which has been bombed to smithereens by the IDF, Mr. Trump comes up with the terrific idea of just moving all those Palestinians out to Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, all those countries which have refused to allow the Palestinians to cross there borders with a tenacity which would put the US Border Patrol to shame. And then, he can move in with the bulldozers and build a whole new resort where Gazza used to be!

His best idea since injecting bleach to cure COVID, which those closed minded elite scientists never took seriously, that hidebound Tony Fauci!

It's not an entirely original idea, if I'm not mistaken. Michael Chabon, in a novel called "The Yiddish Policeman's Union," wrote about an alternative history in which the Jews who survived the Holocaust were moved not to Israel and the Middle East, but to Alaska, where they were welcomed because, you know, there was nobody else living there.

Gazza Riviera

But that was fiction.

Now we are talking about a non fictional President with a big idea!

All we need to do is to plow under all that rubble and to build a 25 mile resort strip and make it the Riviera of the Middle East, with casinos and beaches and condos!

And for rainy days, there are already those miles of underground tunnels.

Bids are going out today, and Trump Towers Inc has the inside track. Elon Musk will be put in charge of the transportation infrastructure, the rubble clearing and the internet for the project. Aw, let's go whole hog, and put him in charge of the building and reconstruction, while we're at it. It will keep him busy and maybe out of Washington.

We can start having focus groups with the Palestinians right now. 

They can choose from architects' plans for their condos.

Middle East Riviera

And just like Mexico paid for our border wall, we can get Saudi Arabia and those other rich Middle Eastern countries to pay for it. Maybe Iran will want in on the deal!

Lebanon, too.

And Syria! Don't forget Syria.

And our 51st State citizens from Toronto and Montreal can book right now to party there with bachlorette parties and winter escapes without a passport because Gazza can be like another Puerto Rico, where you don't need a passport. And if Gitmo gets too crowded with all the illegal aliens we are sending there, we can open up an Annex in Gazza.

Also maybe a good spot for all that spent nuclear fuel we've never figured out what to do with.

Why didn't anyone ever think of this before?

Enemy of the People: Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report

 

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

--First Amendment of the United States Constitution

The most dangerous enemy of truth and freedom is the compact majority. Who are the people who make up the biggest proportion of the population: the intelligent ones or the fools?

--Henrik Ibsen, "Enemy of the People," 1883

How many of you have ever heard of a government publication called "Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports"? 

Show of hands. 

How many of you know where that phrase, "Enemy of the People" comes from?

No, the answer to this one is not, "Donald Trump."

The Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, known in the trade simply as MMR, is a product of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, and also the NIH, and it is a dry and technical pamphlet doctors across the country, particularly infectious disease doctors, use to track trends in infections like influenza, COVID, measles, the whole spectrum of communicable diseases. It is as essential to the medical profession as weather reports are to the airline industry.

Now, Donald Trump has closed the presses for the MMR. We don't talk about Bruno and we don't talk about infectious diseases. 

The MMR is where the first report of a disease without a name at the time, what turned out to be AIDS, surfaced. Of course, during COVID, it became like the daily weather report on the pandemic's raging progress across the country.

Donald Trump clearly grew to resent the MMR because it reported, quietly, persistently and with great determination, the truth about what the virus was doing to America.  If you lived in Iowa or Mississippi or Arizona, you did not walk past those long 18 wheel rigs parked in front of the hospitals, outside Bellevue, Mt. Sinai, or The New York Hospital, which were filling daily with bodies which had overflowed the morgues in those hospitals and were needed simply to receive and haul away the dead.

The New York Hospital E 68th Street

Those images were not widely disseminated.  

But the MMR kept grinding out the numbers, with graphs and tables, and President Trump, who lives in the fantasy world of professional wrestling, could not affect the reality of the pandemic, so this time around, he's killing off the government organs of information dissemination.

Ironically, Mr. Trump called the press, the fake media, "The Enemy of the People."

But that title was from a play by Ibsen in which the town doctor who announced the contamination of the town's water supply was called "The Enemy of the People," because that announcement threatened the town's lucrative trade in a water spa. The economy of the town was threatened, so the doctor became the enemy of the people through his efforts to save the town and spare them from exposure to bacteria and toxins in the water coming from a leather tanning company, also a source of money for the town. The man who sought to save his townsmen with the truth, was seen as and called the enemy.

The New York Hospital 

Of course, Mr. Trump will argue that freedom of speech does not apply to government workers and government publications which should be under the control of the government, which employs the publication's workers, and which pays for the publication. 

Canadian discovers of Insulin

But we all know what is happening here: scientists working for the government insist on telling the truth, even if the truth hurts.

Iron Lung Ward: Polio 1950

That is something which Mr. Trump will never allow.

It would be like saying Hulk Hogan is not a true champion. It would be like saying Ryan Koss did not really beat his opponents. 

It would be like saying injecting bleach into your veins would not kill COVID.

It would be like saying vaccines do not cause autism, that measles vaccines are preferable to measles, that polio vaccines are preferable to paralysis and iron lungs, that AIDS is caused by a virus not by lifestyles, that fluoridation of the water supply might prevent dental cavities, that doctors may know more than the President, that Tony Fauci got us past COVID, not Mr. Trump, that no matter where COVID came from--lab or bat--we should continue to study viruses like COVID in every lab wherever that lab is closest to the source of viruses, and in the field, in bat caves and around the world so we can head off the next pandemic.

Dr. Fauci

It would be like saying truth should be spoken, and progress depends on it.

Some truths are just stubborn things.