Taking the Pulse of the Nation: Polling Foibles

Stepping outside the Constitutional Convention  Benjamin Franklin was confronted by a woman who asked  what sort of government the delegates had chosen for the new American nation. "A Republic," Franklin replied. "If you can keep it."

Franklin knew, although we sometimes forget, we do not have a democracy; we have a republic. The public votes for representatives but the public does not vote on every issue. (Except, sometimes, in New Hampshire.)

How could we?  From treaties about nuclear armaments and nuclear test bans to the complexities of health care legislation, to knotty problems like the line between abortion and infanticide to whether or not we should build the Keystone pipeline, to immigration rules to the trade agreement with the far East, to questions about restrictions on guns, the public is either insufficiently informed, insufficiently attentive or simply confused.

Senators and Congressmen, TV pundits--David Brooks and Mark Shields come to mind--all rely heavily on polls when they say, "Eighty two percent of the American public believe..." 

But, as Clif Zukin points out in today's New York Times, polling ain't what it used to be. As recent votes in Britain and Israel demonstrated, polling predictions of close races turned out to be blow outs instead, and none of the polls predicted the Republican sweep in the midterms here in the USA. And this is just election polling; opinion polling may be even more inaccurate.

But polls are all we've got when a Senator Ted Cruz claims Americans believe this or that--we can say, "Well, that's what you'd like to believe." If he can cite  a poll, some number he can quote, well then he speaks the Truth.

But two big shifts have wreaked havoc on what can be determined by polling:  1. A new resistance on the part of citizens to respond to polls.  2. Cell phones.

Gone are the days when pollsters went door to door; the telephone offered a convenient, less labor intensive, inexpensive way to grab someone and ask questions.  The advent of answering machines and then caller ID made that more difficult--who wants to stop watching the Patriots to answer a call from Gallup or Pew? And then came cell phones, which magnified the problem, because you could no longer know where a person lived by the area code (making predicting elections more problematic) and people don't answer cell phones the way they once answered landlines, so even opinion polling is fraught with problems. 

I took a course in college once about the science of surveying, the way you can use probability and statistics to make small numbers, thousands, speak for millions.  And one thing I learned is not only is the method of reaching people important--the techniques by which random samples are kept random, but the phrasing of questions can turn answers one hundred and eighty degrees.

So one can only sympathize with the elected representative who is trying to vote the way he thinks his voters want him to vote. How can he know what his constituents want?  Do they even know what they want? No wonder the Congress listens to lobbyists: They may not be unbiased, but at least they offer clarity.

In "West Wing" a Senator who was defeated in an election in which his support for a nuclear test ban treaty became a major issue decides to vote against the treaty in a lame duck session. He tells the President, who desperately wants the treaty passed, that as a Senator he has rarely been as sure what his constituents wanted as he was now about the test ban treaty. The Senator thought it was an essential treaty, essential to keep rogue states from getting the bomb--but in good conscience he had to vote the way his constituents had voted.  

Of course, you might ask: how did he know that one issue is what led to his defeat? How can you know when an election is a referendum on a given question?  Exit polls maybe? But can we trust them if we don't know who they selected and how and what the phrasing of the question was?

On the other hand, having suffered through the "warrant" voting in small town New Hampshire, where you are handed a ballot twenty pages long stuffed with questions like whether Mrs. Jones should be allowed to plant tulips on the far side, the town side, of the sidewalk and whether teachers should get a raise and whether the firehouse should get an addition, you realize this is no way to run a government. Somebody has to be paying attention and making informed decisions, some elected someone.

I have a friend who actually goes to the day long town meetings where these ballot questions are discussed. She is a rare and exemplary citizen, the exception who proves the rule. 

Mr. Franklin with his favorite bird

On the other hand, when you say, "Just do what makes sense to you," to an elected official, you get Fred Rice trying to build a bypass road around downtown Hampton because he thinks it's a good way to fight smog.

Rte 1 Hampton Falls headed to Hampton

The Theatrics of Politics and Every Day Life

If only real life were like "West Wing"...

One of the great pleasures of fiction is you get to see the scenes you would like to see in real life play out.  President Bartlet (of New Hampshire, no less) confronts a talk show radio host at a White House reception for talk radio stars. It is one of those occasions he is supposed to be sucking up to all the Rush Limbaughs and Sean Hannity's of the world, and he starts off with the stuff his staff has written for him to say, about the importance of talk radio, the great responsibility these radio heads have in shaping public discourse,  but he is distracted by one woman, and he cannot continue with his prepared remarks. She is a fetching blonde and at first you think he's just attracted to her, but then you realize he knows her and he's listened to her show and he slides into his remarks about what he's heard her say on her show:

JENNA JACOBS
I have a Ph.D. in English Literature.

BARTLET
I'm asking, 'cause on your show, people call in for advice and you go by
the name of
Dr. Jacobs on your show. And I didn't know if maybe your listeners were
confused by that,
and assumed you had advanced training in Psychology, Theology, or health care.

JENNA JACOBS
I don't believe they are confused, no sir.

BARTLET
Good. I like your show. I like how you call homosexuality an abomination.

JENNA JACOBS
I don't say homosexuality is an abomination, Mr. President. The Bible does.

BARTLET
Yes, it does. Leviticus.

JENNA JACOBS
18:22

BARTLET
Chapter and verse. I wanted to ask you a couple of questions while I had
you here.

I'm interested in selling my youngest daughter into slavery as sanctioned
in Exodus 21:7.
(small chuckles from the guests) She's a Georgetown sophomore, speaks fluent
Italian, and always clears the table when it was her turn. What would a good price for
her be? While thinking about that, can I ask another? My Chief of Staff, LeoO McGarry,
insists on working on the Sabbath, Exodus 35:2, clearly says he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself or is it okay to call the police? Here's one that's really important, 'cause we've got a lot of sports fans in this town. Touching the skin of a dead pig makes us unclean, Leviticus 11:7. If they promise to wear gloves, can the Washington Redskins still play football? Can Notre Dame? Can West Point? Does the whole town
really have to be together to stone my brother, John, for planting different crops side by
side? Can I burn my mother in a small family gathering for wearing garments made from two
different threads?

It's one of those moments we (i.e., all right thinking liberals) would just love to see, but never will, except as Aaron Sorkin can deliver them. 

And then, there's the Ann Coulter look alike, the right wing lawyer spokesman for the right, who loathes President Barlet and all who sail with him, until she gets to see them in action, and then she is won over, at least she is convinced they are not demons from hell, just well meaning, if misguided.  She arrives at a restaurant to meet two conservative friends after a day at the Bartlet White House, where she has gone to decline the offer of a job in the White House counsel's office as a lawyer, but she has seen the staff in action and seen their commitment and passion to what they do. Her unctuous, conservative friend, Bruce asks her about the people there.

BRUCE
Did you meet anyone there who isn't worthless?

AINSLEY
[quietly] Don't say that.

BRUCE
Did you meet anyone there who has any-?

AINSLEY
[more firmly] I said don't say that. Say they're smug and superior, say
their approach
to public policy makes you want to tear your hair out. Say they like high
taxes and
spending your money. Say they want to take your guns and open your borders,
but don't
call them worthless. At least don't do it in front of me.

Bruce and Harriet exchange a look.

AINSLEY
The people that I have met have been extraordinarily qualified, their intent
is good.
Their commitment is true, they are righteous, and they are patriots.
[after a moment, with tears in her eyes] And I'm their lawyer.

From Season Two, the West Wing

The fact is, people and life are not like this.  In the real world, you might think of eviscerating the right wing talk show host, but you would not bring yourself to creating such an uncomfortable scene, and in the real world, no right wing zealot who has spent years cultivating a hate and contempt for liberals would be able to see into their souls and respect them. 

But it's pretty to think it.

Do Police Prevent Crime? Do They Do More Good Than Harm?

"You know the worst thing about these statistics? They ruined this job."
--Major Howard Colvin, Baltimore City Police, Western District, "The Wire."

The New York Times today ran two separate pieces which made me think, "Oh, how far we've come."  In September, 2011, New York City police, along with fireman, were hailed by  the New York Times  as selfless heroes for their bravery, self sacrifice and clear concern for the citizens of New York City, whom they clearly tried to serve and protect on that day of horrors. 

But today there was one article about Mayor DeBlasio's efforts to reign in the "stop and frisk" tactics of the NYPD running side by side with a memoir by Gregory Orr, a white guy from New York who was savagely beaten in  several gauntlets  organized by Mississippi police to vent their hatred for civil rights demonstrators. 

In 2011, before DeBlasio took office, an astonishing 13 stop and frisks occurred every minute of every day for a year in New York City.  Can you imagine what that statistic translated into on the streets of Bed Sty in Brooklyn or in the South Bronx? Within two years of taking office, that rate was down to less than one a minute, every day of the year. 

One wonders about those statistics. Do the police actually enter into their computers each encounter? What if they don't? Who would know? But let's take the numbers as a rough index of their activity. First, we understand this activity is not typically seen along the streets of the Upper East Side or Upper West Side, or in Manhattan in general, or Staten Island, but likely in the poorer sections of the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens. And the color of the people who live there tends to be darker than where searches are not done. And I would bet more males are frisked than females. And more younger males than older. So, for the most part, young, non white (Hispanic or Black) young men are selected as likely suspects and what does that do the life, the daily experience and the mind of young Black males?  If you wanted to condition someone into resentment, distrust and paranoia, could you think of a more effective tool?

Which is not to say frisks turn otherwise decent citizens into criminals. The police will say most crime is committed by exactly the profile of those they suspect and frisk. 

But freedom is dependent not on what the most advantaged in our society experience, but on what the most disadvantaged are subjected to.  If freedom of speech means we have to tolerate speech and ideas we find repugnant, does freedom in general not mean we tolerate those we may distrust? And who is the "we" who have to tolerate?  One might say white cops distrust young Black males and that is the scene occurring 13 times a minute. Is that really true? Or were Black cops frisking Black males in these places? Would it make a difference to know that?

Mayor DeBlasio's critics accused him of: 1/ Undermining and demonizing police  2/ Putting the public's safety at risk.  The first accusation has to do with the mayor's mindset and what might be going through his mind and cannot be judged.  But there might be some way of examining statistics to see if dialing down the number of stop and frisks resulted in miscreants keeping their guns and knives and using them to wreck havoc upon the citizens of New York. The easiest, most simplistic number to cite is the murder rate in NYC, which actually fell slightly during the year the stop and frisk tactics got dialed back.

But, of course, as any devotee of "The Wire" knows, police can have almost no effect against those who murder in the cities. The reasons murders are done have to do with impulsive behavior by young males (mostly) or because of the business of the drug trade, and neither of these groups are at all influenced by police, the existence of the death penalty or whether or not a mayor or President is "soft" or "hard" on crime. 

Whether or not a murder, once it has happened, gets solved does relate to the money and effort expended by the police force, but that is after the fact, and likely little solace to the victims. 

There are all sorts of studies investigating the effect of policing on crime, on whether "broken windows" policing makes neighborhoods safer.  Mostly, right wingers tend to believe studies which suggest tough cops laying the heavy wood on unruly minorities keep the dangerous elements under control and left wingers tend to believe they do no such thing.  Law and order vs civil rights.

I've known plenty of cops, mostly New York City cops. They tended to be either from families of cops, mostly Irish, or they tended to be explosive, edgy people who liked to carry guns and beat up people.  The cops I knew hung out in the Emergency Room. They tried to pick up the nurses. Nurses married cops in those days. Like doctors, cops saw the raw side of life and they saw people at their worst.  I can't imagine the cops I knew much enjoying stopping and frisking citizens. Of course, these cops were from the 21st precinct in Manhattan, which covered the Upper East Side, so maybe they were different from the guys who wound up in Brooklyn's tough Bed Sty area. 

The Mississippi cops depicted in Mr. Orr's article were clearly just sadists and haters.  They were more criminal than cop, sanctioned and empowered by a vicious apartheid state; they were the soul mates of Hitler's SS and concentration camp guards. 

What we have now, I suspect, is the pendulum swinging back from a public perception of cops as heroes to cops as brutes.  I doubt the average White person looks at a cop and sees Gestapo, but I can't say what the young Black male sees. 

I don't know any Hampton cops. Not particularly eager to make their acquaintance. 

The question we always have to ask ourselves, when we hire cops and put them into place: Do we really need them? Will they do more harm than good?

Resort towns are particularly vexed by this problem.  People who can afford to live in resort towns tend to be somewhat more affluent than inner city populations, but that doesn't mean they don't need police now and then.  

The question is, do they need a jail or a policeman with an attack rifle?  Are we fielding a police force looking for work, like Arlo Guthrie's police in "Alice's Restaurant?" Or, are we hiring people who can be trained and expected to behave as if force is a last resort, to serve and protect?

I'm just hoping more citizens will reach for their smart phones and start the video rolling when the police swing into action. That would be good for everyone. 

Be Thankful For Small Favors: New Hampshire Is Not Texas

Just when you get frustrated about some lunatic New Hampshire state Representative who believes SMOG is the major threat to Hampton, New Hampshire (sort of like the Dr. Stranglove character, Base Commander, Jack D. Ripper, who thought fluoridated water was the greatest threat to America), you have to get some perspective when you see real life in McKinley, Texas on youtube. However bizarre things may seem in New Hampshire, we do not hold a candle to Texas. 

Really, we have to be grateful to be living in a time when every citizen has a video camera and all the spin and fluff and obfuscation by which police cover up what they actually do in the wild can be quickly exposed.

So much can be seen on youtube which could never be understood in conventional newspaper reports and the limits of print media and of news media can be seen in bold relief when you see the unedited events, the raw data as it were, on you tube. 

There is also a very useful posting with a narrator, Cenk Yugar, of "The Young Turks," who makes no pretense of being non judgmental, but who gives an unusually complete account of what happened.  He does not need to comment on the nature of the white adult women who apparently initiated the altercation at the swimming pool where the episode began. Once you get a look at those white women, no  more need be said. 

The short summary is a Black teenager invited some Black friends to what appears to be a neighborhood pool for a party and white adults using the pool objected to Blacks using the same water. They hurled insults at the Black adolescents, telling them to go back to their Section 8 (welfare) housing where they belonged. (No matter, the Black kids were just as affluent as their white antagonists and in fact, most of them lived in the same neighborhood.) It was just raw racism, which, given the fact this is Texas is not surprising. And once you look at the women who started things by  slapping the adolescents, you do not need a whole lot more explanation. They look like candidates for some of those postings called, "Shoppers At Walmart" which document the extent of American grotesque.

But the best part is when the police arrive and you can see the star of the show, a policeman named Eric Casebolt, is not the sharpest blade in the drawer.  He throws an apparently innocent Black teenage girl in a bathing suit to the ground, pulls his gun and the Black males around her sensibly retreat.  No attempt to discern the facts is made. It is clear for Officer Casebolt the Blacks are guilty of Bathing while Black, Breathing while Black and  Speaking while Black. 

It's all there, bare, unvarnished and very real.

Fred Rice, it turns out, is small potatoes. 

Fred Rice's Alternative Universe

Mad Dog continues to marvel at the functionality of representative democracy. Tonight he attended a meeting called by the Rockingham County planner who has labored for over 5 years trying to get a dedicated bicycle path built from Portsmouth through Hampton all the way past Seabrook to the Massachusetts line. Many communities have accomplished this sort of "Rails to Trails"  project, which allows people, in particular children with their parents, to  bicycle along a bicycle friendly surface with no automobiles around to threaten imminent death to any seven year old who swerves off the path.  Washington, DC has a particularly well developed bike path, far from incursions the maddening automobile, a sanctuary for families on bicycles, and wherever the trail wends its way,  it is filled with parents and children like some latter day village square. Wherever they build it, the people come, on bicycles, spending quality time together. 

But that is not the vision of the representative to the New Hampshire House of Representatives from Hampton, the Hon. Fred Rice, whose mission it is, Mad Dog divines, to protect Hampton from the threat of SMOG.

Downton Hampton, NH As Mr. Rice Sees It

What has apparently eluded Mad Dog is that cars come to idle at the intersection of Rte 1 and Rte 27 and a line of traffic can build up at busy hours, sometimes as many as eight cars long! All those idling engines befoul the air and create a health hazard for the women and children of Hampton.  They are breathing in particulate matter, right there in front of the Old Salt.

Mr. Rice explains there is no way to widen the road there into four lanes, two north, two south, but if the abandoned railroad bed can be purchased as part of the bicycle path Rails to Trails plan, the bypass road be built along that portion which runs through Hampton from  Rte 27, behind the Old Salt clear up to Rte 1 at the bridge to North Hampton, and the problem of Hampton air pollution could be solved, because those cars would not have to idle but could fly along, not polluting the air one bit! Moving automobiles, everyone knows, are even cleaner than bicycles.

Hampton as Mad Dog Sees It

Of course building a road along this stretch of what the planners hoped would be the bicycle path would mean the bicyclists would have to "share the road" with their motorized brethren, but surely this is not too great a sacrifice to ask for clean air. 

Mr. Rice with his Soul Mate

Mad Dog was able to ask Mr. Rice if Mad Dog had understood him correctly: Mr. Rice was proposing to place a motorway smack in the middle of the route of the bicycle trail, cutting off North Hampton from Seabrook with the sound of motors and the smell of tail pipe exhaust along the Hampton stretch of "greenway."  The chairman of the committee intervened to separate Mad Dog from Mr. Rice before Mad Dog could fire off the salvo he so yearned to voice: "Fred, in the over 300 years since Hampton was founded has there ever been one, single day of smog in Hampton, New Hampshire? In what alternative universe are you living?"

Mr. Rice did address the unspoken questions: "Studies are ongoing."

The Dog was dragged off, frothing and growling,  and Mr. Rice excused himself from the meeting. 

Hampton As It Ought to Be

This is the way representative democracy works. Mr. Rice gets elected to represent the citizens of Hampton and he spends a lot of time going to meetings and driving to Concord, where he pursues the things he thinks are important, like smog and air pollution in Hampton and the need for four lane highways through downtown. Meanwhile, most of those citizens he represents are blissfully unaware what his priorities are, what he is hoping to achieve for them. Oh, the apathy! Oh, the indifference to that insidious threat to the quality of life in Hampton, ozone run a muck. 

Some believe we should just humor Mr. Rice, and he will go away.  But Mr. Rice has a history with that intersection of Route One and Route 27.  Rumor has it there was an opportunity to bury all those unsightly power lines which make that intersection look like a power plant, but Mr. Rice scuttled that effort. Aesthetics weren't worth the cost.
And a bathroom, even a port o' potty, for Plaice Cove--Mr. Rice drew the line. He is all about containing costs. 

But smog prevention, now that is worth every penny. 

Flibanserin: Female Libido--Even the Score Fights to Win

J.S. Sergeant Egyptian Girl 

Here's a story which made it above the fold in today's New York Times: "FDA Panel Backs 'Viagra for Women.'"

"The move was immediately hailed by some women's organizations as a step toward sexual equality by, in effect, giving women their counterpart to Viagra, the widely prescribed drug for male erectile dysfunction."

Flibanserin 

"The controversial campaign by some women's groups to win federal approval was waged under the banner Even the Score, which accused the FDA of gender bias because it had approved Viagra and other drugs to help men have sex while leaving leaving women without options."

"Susan Scanlan, chairwoman of the Even the Score coalition, hailed the vote, saying in a statement, 'Today we write a new chapter in the fight for equity in sexual health.'"

Oh, we wrote a new chapter, but I'm not sure it was the chapter Ms. Scanlan describes.

Let us examine the many ways in which wrong has ascended here.

1. The FDA is supposed to function to protect the public health by approving drugs which have met two criteria: 1. They are safe.  2. They are effective. 
The study of 5,000 women in which half got a placebo and half got flibanserin and were then interviewed about how many satisfying sexual encounters they had had during the month was unconvincing on many levels. It is not like you can actually do a blood test and generate a number for the effect of a drug on libido. Many women will report their sexual appetite increases with a martini or two, and that can be convincing testimony, but with drugs we like to measure something beyond recall and testimony. The difference between the two groups was barely one additional night of good sex and there could have been many reasons for that. The placebo group increased their sexual encounters almost as much as the treatment group and that ought to tell us something.

2. The fact the FDA has not approved a drug to improve libido in women who have low libido does not mean the FDA doesn't care about low libido in women; it means nobody in the drug industry, at the FDA, in medicine, in endocrinology or gynecology, in the whole wide world really understands female libido. 
Males are pretty simple: give them enough testosterone and they are looking for action. 
Give women testosterone, or estrogen or any hormone you care to mention and nothing happens. 
We simply do not understand the basic physiology of female libido or the pathophysiology of it's absence.  
So, if women who lack libido were left without options, it was not because of indifference or wrong doing by the FDA.  It was because science has not provided options. The failing, you see, is not a failing of the FDA. Got that? Is that really so difficult?

Flibanserin may act on neurotransmitters, may accentuate the dopamine and dampen the serotonin but nobody really understands if or how these transmitters work in female sexual libido.  
A similar outcry arose in the early days of HIV, when activists cried out the reason there was no cure was nobody cared about gay men dying. That was untrue. The reason there was no cure was the doctors didn't know what to do. Spending more money did not solve the problem; science eventually did. Sometimes money cannot buy insight.  The response of non scientists in Congress to a problem like AIDS or almost anything scientific they don't understand is to vote for more spending, but that's because they are ignorant Congressmen.

3. Flibanserin, even if it were effective at increasing female libido would not be a female Viagra. Viagra and its fellow travelers do not increase male libido. Viagra improves erections. To have good erections you need working blood vessels, working nerves and adequate levels of testosterone. Viagra takes care of the blood flow.  Testosterone is what usually drives libido in males and there is no such agent for driving libido in women.

4. Libido is one thing, but having enjoyable sex is another. Libido is the first step down the road. We understand even less about what drives female libido in chemical terms than we understand about what allows women to achieve orgasm. 

5. Voting for approval of a drug aimed at a problem which vexes women is not the same thing as actually solving that problem, if the drug is ineffective, which, may be flibanserin's problem.  
One of the doctors who voted for approval explained: "The unmet need seems to be so strong that even for a drug with rather modest benefit, I think approving the product ...seems to be the right step at this point." 
Which is to say, "We were taking a lot of heat to approve something, anything, so we caved to political pressure, even though the public health service and the FDA is not supposed to cave to political pressure. We are supposed to do the right thing."

6. People who earn their salaries by winning fights in the halls of Congress or the FDA were able to make this decision not a consideration of the science but a test of intentions and "a fight for equity in sexual health."

The fact is, I wish we had an effective pill for low libido in females. 
I wish we had an effective pill for baldness and for obesity and for breast cancer and for lung cancer and for melanoma and for diabetes and for a whole lot of problems for which we do not have cures or even effective management. 

But you cannot vote a cure for medical problems. You cannot win a fight against inequity in sexual health if there is no science to help you.  Parsing uplifting phrases does not help in medicine. 

We have allowed moneylenders in the temple when it comes to allowing Even the Score to  bully the members of an FDA panel into voting through a medication not because it works, but because it satisfies the needs of the board of directors of Even the Score.  Activists simply do not deserve a seat at the table when it comes to medicine. 

Which is not to say we should not sympathize with their cause. When Act Up picketed Building 32 at the National Institutes of Health, the head of the Institute for Allergy and Infectious Disease was Tony Fauci. (He still is head of that institute.) He walked by the pickets, took the elevator up to his office and asked his secretary why anyone would picket a building at the NIH. She told him, "They're picketing you, Dr. Fauci."  He sent for the pickets and brought the whole lot of them into a conference room and asked them what they wanted and what they expected him to do. 
They told him the reason there was no cure for AIDS was nobody cared about patients who got AIDS because it was thought of as a gay disease. 
Fauci replied he had a lot of very good scientists who were working hard on an antiviral agent both on campus at the NIH and spread out across university health centers across the country. He described the units he had set up at the Clinical Center where patients with AIDS were dying in beds attended by nurses and doctors who were risking their lives just starting IV's and doing routine care on those patients. "If you think nobody cares, you've never talked to any of the men or women who come to work every day at the Clinical Center." 
The activists listened and were convinced. They came as angry men and women with a cause; they left Fauci's office understanding anger and passion are not the answers in medicine. They had been educated in the reality of disease and the realities of medical care.

Someone should do the same for Even the Score. 

Stepping Through the Time Portal: You Really Can't Go Home Again

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
--The Great Gatsby

At some point, probably when your own children are beyond schools and into careers and families and other people, your own past seems less important.  Scott Fitzgerald's most famous book was about a man who was ruined by his past, who could never get beyond it, but that was a pathology, a case of arrested development. 

For most people, the past does not constrain them, if they are lucky and healthy.  Deangelo, in "The Wire" reads Gatsby in prison, and immediately understands it, because he has not been able to move beyond his own past--prison, after all, is a place you are mired in the past; you are there because of things you did in the past.

The Times has been carrying obituaries of men in their late 80's and early 90's who were accused of Holocaust related crimes, but despite the determination to Never Forget, the fact is memories are fading, less so for the victims no doubt, than for the perpetrators, who may well have managed to bury and destroy memories of what they did so long ago.

People who struggled to be the winners in the game of elite educational meritocracies often cling to the past--there are those Princeton grads who will only marry other Princeton alums believing that part of the past is so important it ought to be prologue, but they are clearly clinging to a neurosis.

For most healthy people, you go through each phase of life and you take what you can from the experience, then move on, and realize, that is now behind you. That old story about the Yale coach who tells his players before the Harvard-Yale game, "Gentleman, you are about to play Harvard: If you live to be 90, you will never do anything more important than what you are about to do in this game today," was enunciating the conceit of the Old Blues who wanted to inflate the importance of a Yale education, when in fact, it was just four years at college, and for most people only marginally formative and not really life changing. William F. Buckley was particularly pathetic as he injected his Yale pedigree into every conversation to remind his listeners he was an aristocrat and one of the chosen--of course, his own pathology was transparent. 

The emphasis on schools and creating a record which will follow you through life is specious--the fact is, that great school record simply gets you from point A to point B. Once you start that next school, grad school or professional school or once you start that job, you start over, and what came before really doesn't matter much and cannot hurt you or save you.

Some of this desire to connect to the past may be at play as people visit their dead in cemeteries. There is the desire to hold on to what is actually now gone, alive only in memory. But there is no boat bearing us back. When you walk around places which were important to you in the past, it may bring those memories back vividly, but there is also the empty feeling of realizing even though the physical shell of a building may be there, it is no longer alive; that school yard or church or coliseum is just an empty husk, the hollowed out remnant of the living organism.  

We are not, should not be, borne back ceaselessly into the past. We move forward, and the wake remains behind us. The effort to return is the effort to claim something enduring in the face of impermanence.