Let's Get Tough on Crime: It Always Works

I don't know who your favorite police chief is, but mine is Joe Arpaio, the toughest sheriff in America, by his own description.  

Well, actually, my favorite police is Howard Colvin, the Baltimore police captain who established a zone in Baltimore where drugs could be freely bought and sold, but, as I have to keep reminding myself, Colvin is not a real police, just a character on the Wire. He should be a real police, but that's another story.

So, by default, among actual, real police, Sheriff Arpaio has to take the prize. He is so tough he has a tank of his own, which he uses, I'm sure, effectively, to crack down on the drug trade, prostitution, burglary, muggings and murders.  

He doesn't just jail miscreants, he humiliates them. Those arrested, awaiting trial, are apt to find themselves marching down Arizona streets wearing nothing more than pink underwear. If, at trial, they are acquitted, presumably, they can keep the underwear, which is said to be of high quality.

This is not, for reasons known only to Sheriff Arpaio and the Supreme Court, not cruel and unusual punishment, prior to conviction. It's better than strip searching, but actually, it is used after the strip search.

I recently spoke with the mayor of a Southern city about the reasons for declines in the murder rate in his and other cities. This mayor was a former defense attorney, and he believes the "broken windows" tact of policing accounts for some of the decline.  This doctrine is a variation of the "take care of the pennies and the dollars will take care of themselves."  If you arrest people for looking funny at the police, or for walking while Black, then you will decrease major crime acts. 

My own father always insisted the reason for falling crime was the aging population. Most violent crime is committed by stupid (i.e. young) people.  The authors of Freakonomics had a version of this: They claimed the fall in crime could be traced to the legalization of abortion, which meant a lot of kids who were never wanted were never born and were not roaming the streets killing people.  Either way, it had to do with simply making the population which tends to be violent shrink in size. 

Of course, we all know the real reason for the falling violent crime rate: Tanks and Humvees. Give the police the means to do shock and awe in our towns and cities and those violent criminals take to their heels and get out of Dodge. Where they go, we can only imagine, but it must be very violent there.

President Obama, of course, as usual is clueless about all this, which is why he is denying local police departments the tanks and aircraft carriers they so urgently need. 

If there is a spike in violent crime, we'll know who to blame and he lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and his name rhymes, significantly, with "Osama."

Refugees

Somalian Women

Not Good Husband Material 

Some of us recall the stories our grandparents told about why they left wherever they came from, be it Ireland or Russia  or wherever, when we hear stories about new immigrants in the United States or when we see stories about boats packed with Africans going down in the Mediterranean.  For us, there is a sort of built in sympathy, or a bias in favor of those trying to move from a bad place to someplace better or simply to anywhere else. 

Apart from African slaves brought against their will to America, some Canadians, and the "Native Americans" who may have trekked across the the Bering Straight following herds, almost all the rest of our ancestors crossed the oceans or the rivers because they were running from something bad. 

We now have refugees from Somalia in Manchester, New Hampshire.  As war or chaos grips a country, those who can will go from an area of badness to one of less badness, just as water will cross an osmotic membrane from an area of dilution to an area of concentration. It's a law of nature.  Some people in possession of deranged brains, Congressman Louie Gohmert comes to mind, but there are many like him, will tell you the appearance of these unfortunates among us is something alarming and threatening, a plague, an upsetting of a vital balance.  But these are minds which live in a constant state of alarm.  Any change is a pestilence, for them.

More generous souls will listen to the newcomers and often be moved to try to help, to the extent they can.

One of my neighbors has been traveling from her home in Hampton to Manchester to teach a Somalian woman to write and how to sign her name. The Somalian has recently learned to read and that opened up a new world to her and my neighbor was stunned to think what that must be like, to learn to read as an adult, how life would never be the same. This Somalian, being a woman in a Muslim country, was never allowed to go to school. But now, in the United States, she has learned to read. 

Of course, it was a serious crime in the antebellum South to teach a slave to read. Slave society knew, instinctively, reading was a genuine emancipation, and much as slave society told itself (and everyone else, ) these slaves were sub human, dim witted, child like, the slavers knew reading would be more dangerous than almost anything than a gun in the possession of slaves.

A urologist gave a presentation at a conference about her work in Africa--may have been Somalia--concerning urinary incontinence in women.  In this African culture, girls are married at age 9  impregnated as soon as they reach puberty, at age 11 to 12, when their pelvises were not wide enough to deliver a baby and the delivery so traumatizes their urethra's, they are left incontinent forevermore. This meant they have a constant stream of urine running down their legs to their feet, causing infections of their feet, not to mention an odor which led to ostracism.  The urologist perfected a simple operation to repair the damage and give a life back to some of the lucky few she could reach and treat. 

Of course, the urologist was not treating the basic pathology--a culture in which 9 year old girls are married off, used for sex  and impregnated as soon as they start ovulating.

My New Hampshire friend cannot fix the basic pathology, which is fomented across the sea,  which, in some ways, still afflicts her Somalian friend, but this Granite Stater is doing what she can, and that's where a better world begins. 

It is left to the rest of us to take the bigger steps in behalf of those refugees who reach us. We cannot solve the problems where they start--in Africa, but we can stanch the wounds of those who reach our tent.

The Crazy Factor

Don't Forget to Pack Your Gun

Gail Collins recently offered a salient insight into American politics: There has always been and likely always will be a significant crazy factor among the men and women who offer themselves and their beliefs for "public service." So every Congress, every state legislature has some really certifiable members, but the rest of the group simply ignores and tolerates them. The problem becomes when the critical mass of crazy gets big enough to actually change the direction of the legislative process.

She was commenting on the current kerfuffle in Texas about the plans of the United States Army for war games in Texas, Utah and other arid states where there is desert which might resemble places the Army may find itself fighting soon.   But the Republican lunatic fringe (now more than a fringe) saw more nefarious things afoot--like the North Koreans, who always see war games as a prelude to actual war, they saw these "exercises" as transparent ruses for an actual invasion by Obamamen aimed at stripping Texans of their guns, liberty and maybe even part of the plan to unleash those Hispanic Muslims who have been dying to charge across the Rio Grande and rape white Christian women, who Texas has plenty of, and which we all know have been tempting those H.M.'s for some time now. 

Says Obama is Hitler Redux 

Sees Hispanic Muslim Rapists Massing on the Southern Border

If Democracy is designed to represent "The People" then it will represent the crazy members of society as well as the sane. 

But this has also meant Adolph Hitler was elected with a majority vote, not because people did not know what he thought--he had written Mein Kampf and made no secret of his beliefs.  Somehow though, when a politician says something really, really crazy many of the people who vote for him may say, "Well, that's just hyperbole. He's just making a point." 

The other issue is who has the time and the inclination to seek political power: For many Congressmen a seat in the House of Representatives with the nearly $200,000 pay package is the best paying job by several orders of magnitude they can ever hope to get. This is not true for the state of New Hampshire, which virtually does not pay its state legislators, so one might ask, who would sign up for that job?

Really? Just Look at the Man

Retired, unemployable or simply crazy people with a lot of time on their hands perhaps. 

We have a Hampton rep who claims that building a motorway along the abandoned railroad path from Hamton to Portsmouth,  rather than a bicycle path, would be a greener option;he argues  a roadway would improve air quality more than a bicycle path. That would be Fred Rice. 

Clean Air/Build Roads

We have Warren Groen, who looks at grade school kids trying to get the Red Tail Hawk named a state bird and he links that to killing babies at Planned Parenthood clinics.  

Vicious Birds Remind Him of Abortions

We have a group, or maybe it qualifies as a movement, called the Free Staters who want to move enough lunatics to New Hampshire to establish a libertarian utopia where every child will carry a gun and no government will exert its will to restrain the energies of The People. 

My current favorite is Kyle Tasker, who once dropped one of his two guns on the floor during a hearing. He was not disturbed, because he had the other gun secured, in case anyone was thinking of acting on the opportunity.  He also opposed his own bill about mental health on the grounds that "crazy people ought to know they face consequences."  Mr. Tasker, far as I can tell does not actually fit into the "Crazy" box. He just sounds like it. He fits snugly in the "stupid" box.  Who actually voted for this yo-yo?

Mr. Tasker Doing the People's Work

Over time, the crazies just seem to wash up in one place and collect, and fertilize each other and eventually who knows what will grow in that miasma?

In Concord, we are approaching the time when the lunatics will be running the asylum.

What Renny Saw

If ever there was a voice in the wilderness, it has to be Renny Cushing. The only Democratic representative among many Seacoast towns, he spoke recently at a meeting of local Democrats, detailing the prevarications, depredations and other slimy moves by New Hamsphire Republican state representatives as they raid stable parts of the state budget and systematically eviscerate the workings of good government. 

Funding for higher education, lower education, any program which might benefit the dispossessed or disadvantaged has been gutted. Basically, everything of any importance to running the state, providing services for its citizens has been stricken. Only the cigarette tax survives unscathed--no raising that because it is thought to attract Massachusetts smokers across the border. New Hampshire aims to export lung cancer to its neighbors.

It has finally dawned on Renny the primary motivating idea of the Republicans in Concord is that government is bad, and if they defund the government, it will stop the government from working and when that happens people will say, "Government is bad. Government is dysfunctional. Let's get rid of government."

The Republicans have a solid point: When Republicans are in charge of government, government is BAD.

It is the old story of the person who murders both his parents and then asks the judge for leniency on the grounds he is now an orphan.

I'm not sure I can spell it, but I can recognized it when I see it: "Chutzpah." 

Elizabeth Warren: The Real Deal

 I will vote for the Democratic nominee for President in 2016. If that is Hillary Clinton, I will go into that voting booth and place a black mark in the space next to her name and I will carry that ballot to the man behind the scanner machine and I will have done my patriotic duty to try to save the country from whomever the Republicans are running--knowing that candidate could be the Messiah himself, but if he's a Republican he will bring with him an army of frothing self styled Patriots who believe government is the problem and the Constitution means a gun in every home and waistband. 

 But if the Democratic nominee is Elizabeth Warren I will feel the way I once did about casting a vote for Barack Obama--I will be smiling.

Despite all the candidates' books and the TV interviews and New Yorker profiles (see the New Yorker piece on Ms. Warren 5/4/15) and opinions from pundits, the plain fact is we can never really know these people who live in the public eye.  They all keep significant parts of themselves private and they must.

 But we can know something of their history, that history they will each try to control and shape for us. 

And Elizabeth Warren, whatever else may be true, had a tough road through life, where Hillary had a privileged road. Hillary had to work very hard and she had to fight, but those battles were like the sweaty and bruising battles of the high school wrestler--intense but controlled. Nobody dies in those battles. Nobody goes broke. For Ms. Warren, there was always the threat of a real abyss, bankruptcy, divorce, indigence. 

She has been accused of being a bit of a drama queen. But I have to say, a  little feel for drama is not a bad thing in a woman. Oh, yes, I'm being sexist. Why is it okay to have a little drama in a woman, but not in a man?

Because women are trained to restrain expressions of emotion, especially in the setting of work and career, but when that becomes a governing principle of behavior, it does more than simply eviscerate their public presentation of self, it does something to their internal mechanisms.  I would offer Hillary Clinton as an example of what this sort of emphasis on control does. 

I cannot claim to know Ms. Clinton personally, but the few "inside" stories I know from people who knew her at Yale Law School and from people who had to deal with her at various events, consistently portray a woman whose main emotional drive is toward opprobrium  and control as opposed to sympathy and real passion.

Ms. Warren opposed Timothy Geithner and other candidates for posts in Mr. Obama's government because they were creatures of Wall Street, beholden and in love with the Wall Street power brokers to whom they knew they would one day return. Ms. Clinton simply made deals with Wall Street types because she represented Wall Street as a US Senator and she knew she needed to trade favors with the powerful.
I cannot know, but I would guess the stridency which Warren Buffett sees in Ms. Warren comes from the anger for someone who has seen the bad stuff which rolls downhill to all the under privileged in this country and that's what fuels her resentment and willingness to do battle. 

It is hard to imagine there was a time in the not distant past when most people and pundits believed bankruptcy happened to people who deserved it, who went bankrupt through profligacy and heedlessness. But Ms. Warren had an inkling this was not true: She thought people might get into trouble because of illness and loss of health insurance and loss of jobs owing to illness. Ms. Warren did the grunt work to show this  true and the prevailing notion that people who go bankrupt are feckless and deserve it is commonly wrong.Ms. Warren did her years of research, did the academic thing. The questions she asked came from somewhere, from her own experience, clawing her way toward financial security. 

Ms. Clinton fought her battles in safer arenas. She learned to clamp down on her inner feelings, I am guessing, to the point those feelings got snuffed out before they could take fire. 

Here's a really dumb tidbit full of possibly spurious imagery, likely signifying nothing, but I can't get past it: Friends who live in her neighborhood in Cambridge see Ms. Warren walking her dog there.  She still walks her own dog, her own self. I cannot somehow imagine Hillary does that. In my imagining of Hillary, she would have some intern doing that. Hillary would pose for publicity photos with the dog, not walk the dog. I know that is unfair. How politicians treat dogs should not become a test of character.  Hitler loved his dog. (Of course, his dog was a German Shepard who had worked chasing down inmates at concentration camps.)  But, any way, the dog walking thing brings to mind the image of one woman connected to the ordinary pleasures in life and another who is planning her next move. 

Ms. Warren still knows how to feel things. Call her a drama queen. I can respond to that. 

Let's Just Ignore the 14th Amendment

Defending America Against the 14th Amendment

Amendment XIV

Section 1.

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
--United States Constitution, 14th Amendment

"The question of whether our forefathers meant for birthright citizenship in all circumstances to be the law of the land is far from settled," Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) said at the hearing. "In any event, we must still determine if it is the right policy for America today."

Steve King (R-Iowa) was the most adamant that it was not the right policy. He questioned what would happen "to the demographics of America if this policy is not reversed," and implied that Democrats may support birthright citizenship because they want to win elections.

--Huffington Post

One thing about the 14th Amendment, among all the amendments, it has a ringing clarity. You're born in in the United States, even if you were just passing through on a horse from Mexico on your way to Canada, you are a natural born citizen of the USA.

Republicans, every last one of them, take their responsibility to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States very seriously. They begin almost every discussion with an affirmation that whatever they are about to say, it's all part of their ardent desire to defend the Constitution against  frontal attacks or  back stabbing assaults launched by Democrats, or, as they say, "That DemocRAT" party.

But for some Republicans, it's a case of we are for the Constitution, except when we are not,  which is when that Constitution would drive this country in the direction of the wrong "demographics" which is to say, not white, not Christian, and you know what we are talking about--all those Hispanic Muslims massing on our Southern border trying to swim the Rio Grande and rape our white, Christian women. 

I've just got to get Texas Senator Louie Gohmert on the phone and hear what he thinks about this.  You remember Louie. When those kids were flooding across the border it was he who stood up for American womanhood.

“And they’ve committed at least 7,695 sexual assaults,” Gohmert insisted. “You want to talk about a war on women? This administration will not defend the women of America from criminal aliens! By the thousands, and hundreds of thousands!”

Actually, it may be a good idea for American women to practice an escape route North. The Canadians are not rapists, ordinarily. And, in any case, they tend to be, well: White.  I think we ought to practice evacuation from Hampton, say along Route 89 to that lake and north from there. 

Be prepared, that's my motto.

Baltimore: When Fiction is More Real than the News. The Wire Instructs

Inner Harbor, Baltimore, Maryland 

Okay, you knew it was coming.  Baltimore is burning. How do we understand it? This is not what you had in New York or Missouri--the mayor in Baltimore is Black  and the police in Baltimore are predominantly Black. 
NPR interviewed local citizens and they all said the hatred of the police has nothing to do with race. They said, in their own way, the cops are seen not as people who protect and serve but as men who harass and abuse. and David Simon, who did the most thorough and insightful study ever done of an American city, "The Wire," says the troubles stem not from race but from the "Drug War," which has given full license to any Baltimore cop to do anything he wants, and a lot of those cops have, to put it mildly, a "mean streak," or, to put it more bluntly, they became cops because they are sadists and wanted a free hand to abuse people. 
           Police are now driven by "statistics" and what that means is the old cop who walked a beat on a street and stop to chat with people in his neighborhood, who could then go back to his friends in the neighborhood when someone got shot and expect to be told by his local friends what actually happened--that cop no longer exists. The cops out there now do not walk among the citizens--they drive by in their cars with the windows up, with the computer going and they have to write a certain number of summons a day and that means they have to dream up some crimes and pin those on locals. 
          They do not stop and chat; they stop and frisk.
          Police careers are now built on statistics not community relations. As Howard Colvin, the quintessential good cop, says, "These statistics, these numbers, they just ruined this job."
          They ruined more than that.

Street Cred

Anyone who watched all five seasons of "The Wire" knows exactly what is happening in Baltimore right now and why and understands all the forces and dynamics of psychology, personality, anthropology and sociology driving the otherwise incomprehensible scenes you see on the nightly news. 

You can also see what fools the news media types are, as they hardly bother to ask the people on the other end of the microphones actual questions, but simply state their own, ignorant assumptions about what the story ought to be rather than what it is.  The evening news: the clueless instructing the uncomprehending.

They are asking the wrong questions of the wrong people. 

One of the most satisfying things about great literature--which "The Wire clearly" is--it allows you to look at the world and  see through the tangled woof of fact to the truth, to see a scene in a way which you could not possibly have seen it before the experience of assimilating that literature.  So, you read Animal Farm and you can never hear a Communist say, "all Workers are equal" without hearing in the back of your mind, "all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others."   Watching the police, the mayor, the governor, the deacons, all the institutional representatives speaking into the microphones before the cameras now  and you've seen and heard all this before, courtesy of David Simon and company and you know what it all really means. 

In one great scene, from the 5th Season, you are watching a City Hall press conference on TV in the offices of the Baltimore Sun and as the Mayor says something like, "We are first and foremost concerned about public safety, about protecting neighborhoods and ensuring the safety of all our great city's wonderful citizens," and an editor in the group narrates the subrosa, true translation, "We are first and foremost concerned about how this riot affects my job security and we wish to Hell we could beat these scumbags into a bloody pulp and dump their bodies where they'll never be found."

So, we are seeing played out in Baltimore exactly what David Simon showed us must happen, given the dysfunctional  institutions and the misapprehensions of elected officials and the alienation of private citizens. 

When you have children growing up without parents, or worse, with parents who prey on their own children to support their own dissolute lives, you've got Baltimore dystopia. You are watching some completely clueless white reporter giving you his  understanding of why these people are acting they way they are acting and predictably, he is simply making the story up as he goes along. 

 Many people have tried to watch "The Wire" but could simply not keep watching. It is pretty depressing and although it is one of the funniest series ever to appear on TV, the humor is very dark.  Truman Capote tried to write a "non fiction novel," In Cold Blood . David Simon succeeded in accomplishing that goal--using the freedom fiction affords, he gave us a clearer picture of the real world of Baltimore than any non fiction work has ever done. 

 Some Jeremiads are prophecy:It was all there, if only more people had listened.