Police and Their Guns

Oh, yes, clearly a visible threat to two officers

Watching the video of two Baton Rouge policemen shooting Alton Sterling to death, while he was pinned helplessly on his back I had to think of the professor of criminology they had on The News Hour tonight, who warned us that the investigation of this act is still on going, that we still do not know what preceded the actions shown on this video and I could only think: Like that could even matter. 

FBI investigators should, no doubt, approach their investigation to the event with an open mind, whatever that is, given the video footage, but you don't need 4 years of college, or a law degree or a degree in criminology to know what you see before your eyes. I don't care if the man had shouted "I've got a bomb!" or "I'm going to kill you!" There is enough on the video to show he was tackled to his back and laid out on the ground and with two sizable (white) cops in total control of him and one reaches for his own gun, draws it from the holster and shoots Sterling in cold blood. 

Thugs with a Badge?

There are two videos of this event easily viewable on the internet and in one you can hear a woman sobbing, "They shot him!"  The astonishment in her voice crosses all racial and class barriers. It speaks volumes. She had seen enough to know this was an unexpected outcome.

One would think this video would be the only piece of evidence you'd need to present to a jury of peers. Just play it two or three times and say, "I rest my case."

We are witnessing cold blooded murder by at least one policeman, who should be in jail.

But this is not an isolated event. We have been told for years, at least since the O.J. Simpson trial white police commit wanton acts in Black communities but now we are in the video age and we can see what our fellow Black citizens have seen, and it simply cannot be denied. For Mr. Sterling, justice can be served if his murderer is quickly brought to trial, convicted and sent to prison for life.

But when we think of Mr. Sterling as one example of a larger problem, then we are talking about formulating rules for a larger problem. I would think we now have enough evidence of a pervasive enough problem we should think anew about how to respond to the problem of armed police who behave badly often enough to consider police a threat to public safety. 

Dead for selling CD's 

The problem is clearly not police training, or not enough sensitivity training. The problem, I would hazard a guess is in the nature of the sort of person who wants to be a policeman, to carry a gun and shoot it. 

We do we arm police?  Presumably, there are two reasons: 1/ So they can protect themselves against murderous thugs they are trying to arrest 2/ So they can protect others.  

Unarmed and Usually Unharmed

In England Bobbies are not armed and somehow very few are ever killed. Of course, this may have changed as England has become more diverse.  But, if the internet is correct, English police, when they need armed assistance call in their equivalent of the SWAT team. America is not England, but  as I understand it what the Bobbies do is  surround the miscreant  and overwhelm with numbers or box him in.  England also invested in lots of public cameras so felons could be identified and tracked down later.  

I'd like to see the statistics--and police departments are all about statistics now--which demonstrate that policemen fired their weapons and saved their own lives or the lives of innocent citizens more often than they fired their weapons and killed the innocent.

When statistics regarding ambulances were analyzed, decades ago, it turned out more people were killed by speeding ambulances than were saved by those ambulances and after that ambulances were forbidden to speed through crowded streets, and death rates for both innocent bystanders and passengers declined.

Of course, if we disarmed American policemen, likely a lot of men who would want to be police would no longer want that line of work. I would have to say: Good riddance.

Knucklehead's Guide to the 2016 Election

"Hamilton," the musical got me thinking about what a truly patriotic vote would mean this election.

Hamilton was a man of great energy, likely pretty manic (or bipolar, as we would call him today) with a certain disdain for the hoi polloi, born of his early exposure to the seamy side of humanity in Barbados; growing up poor and desperate he had no romantic illusions about what the underclasses are like. Like Franklin, Burr and Lafayette, he was a man of avid sexual appetites, and would win no prizes from the pulpit regarding his "character."

Jefferson, his rival and political enemy, apart from his curious attachment to slavery, Sally Hemings etc, was more the man of "character" with whom voters could identify as an icon of virtue, a renaissance man, architect, writer, philosopher, theologian. John F. Kennedy put it succinctly, looking out over a dining room filled with Nobel prize laureates in the White House, he said,

 " I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered at the White House - with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone."

 And yet, had I to vote for a President, I would, with the perspective of time and history, have voted for Hamilton over Jefferson.  While it is true, Jefferson had the vision and wisdom to buy the Louisiana Purchase from France, thus assuring America would become the continental colossus it became, he did so in an act of uncharacteristic executive over reach,  which Hamilton would have approved. Jefferson did not consult Congress or become too concerned about proper channels, or  advice and consent. He simply acted as an executive, or some might say, as a king.

But Jefferson's idea of what the United States should become was a nation of upright farmers, free from the heavy hand of government, tilling the land, as he did, or as his slaves did for him, while Hamilton saw clearly the critical role of finance, the need for a national bank.  

The Continental army, which had suffered as no other American Army has since, was in revolt, marched on Congress because they had not been paid for a year and faced debtors' prison as soon as they were discharged and their anger so so great Congress had to flee Philadelphia for Annapolis and there could be no fixed national capital because the Congress could not raise funds to pay the army and so became, literally, a fly by night institution.

Hamilton saw the need for a central, federal government, a permanent army and a permanent Congress and a permanent capital, none of which Jefferson, in his proto libertarian mode of thought necessary.

John Adams, an upright citizen if there ever was one, loathed Hamilton and decried his inclination for intrigue and back room dealings and in some cases apparent duplicity.  But without Hamilton, the nation would have sunk beneath the waves of insolvency and much as you might hate this early version of a Wall Street oligarch, we needed him and his system of finance. Curiously, Hamilton did not enrich himself personally, but his system allowed others to grow rich and allowed the country to achieve real power and stability through sound finances.

So, had Hamilton actually ever run directly against Jefferson, I would have voted for Hamilton, because I would have known, whatever my misgivings about his inclination for "intrigue" and political wheeling dealing, he was the best choice for the country.  

When you look at the choice between Ms. Clinton, with her cozy relationship with Wall Street, her $225,000 "talks" to the capitalists, you might see a Hamilton like figure and you may find it difficult to vote for her.  

Donald Trump has been called a unique and original figure, but he is not unique or even original.  Rush Limbaugh, had he run for President, would be in about the same place as the Donald is today. They are cut from the same cloth, but, of course, comparing Donald to Rush is like comparing the choir boy to the archbisoph.

What is really disturbing about Trump is not Trump but the Trump Chumps, who scream their lungs out at his rallies, the knuckleheads and skin heads in the mosh pit. Are these just anomalous mutants or do they actually form only the most visible elements of a multitude?  This is what elections are all about.

One can only hope even the knucklehead, when he returns home, will be capable of flipping on the youtue of Hillary in the last couple of hours of her Benghazi testimony and you can see, whatever you think of her, she knows her stuff.  You can well imagine her analyzing the problems presented a President cooly.  She is a woman who can manage a strain. She made those noxious, ignorant, blustering Republican members of the House Oversight committee look like amateurs, which, of course, they were.

Thinking of the Donald confronted with Putin moving into Ukraine or maybe Poland, or ISIS moving into an alliance with the Taliban in Afghanistan, you can only imagine what the Donald would do.

In the end, one would hope, once they've had their fun at the rally, the knuckleheads will calm down and cast a vote for the good of their country.

Beyond the Math Myth: Workforce Planning

Nobody here got at chance to take the SAT exam

Andrew Hacker once remarked he wasn't sure the storm he stirred up about the misuses of math and math testing--as it has become a coin of the realm--is something he would have chosen as his top priority, but the ramifications of his simple, honest, clinical observations in his book, "The Math Myth"  created a shock wave that has been more powerful than anything he could have predicted. 

It is as if he were Oppenheimer, looking through the observation hole,  as the first atomic bomb goes off in the desert and he says, "Oh, my God, what have we unleashed?"

So it is with the whole mythology of math, that "math is the language of science and technology" and so every student who wishes to graduate high school or enter college and certainly every student who wishes to distinguish himself by going to an elite college has to be conversant in that language, and not just a single language but it is as if he has to be good at Greek, Latin, French, not just English.  Math is, says one of the educators he quotes, now used the way Latin once was--to discourage and eliminate smart people who simply don't have the patience or talent for it. There was a time anyone who wanted to be a physician had to excel at Latin. 

And, of course, there may be many different types of intelligence. While some psychologist think "intelligence" is a single trait, others, like Howard Gardner think there are multiple types of intelligence and someone may have much of one type and little of another. 

Autistic people and  idiot savants may be extreme examples of people who have astonishing capacities and baffling deficits. Gardner described eight types of intelligence which might cluster in an individual but in some people only a few are highly developed: bodily intelligence (dancers); linguistic, musical, mathematical (or logical, if...then); naturalistic (sensitivity to the natural world); spatial (knowing where you are, where you came from and how to get back, from a fixed point); interpersonal (sensing how others are reacting and what they are thinking, something some autistic kids may lack); intrapersonal (understanding one's own emotions and thoughts.) 

She had the right stuff for her job

One needs only read the book by Frans de Waal, "Are We Smart Enough to Know How Intelligent Animals Are?" to understand the nuances and breadth of what intelligence is, not just in human beings but across species.

Because we hope to match people to work they can be successful doing, the whole notion of intelligence is critical to tooling up our economy for maximal success and efficiency and it is critical to the individual as he or she starts down a path toward a career or the lack of one.  This used to be called, "Manpower" when most jobs were held by men and women stayed home, but now it's called "Human Resources."  It's one of the determinants of whether or not the United States will be able to compete in the global marketplace.  Can you get enough people to be competent in enough areas where competence is needed to successfully make automobiles, airplanes, software, create financial systems, create health care systems? 

He had the right stuff for his job

What Hacker points out, almost in passing, in The Math Myth is that the policy makers in the United States, in government and in education and in industry and in the professions have been rank amateurs when it comes to the whole discipline of "manpower."   We have all bought into the idea of the importance of "STEM" education, science, technology, engineering and math without ever stopping to actually analyze whether STEM education is as important as its advocates claim.  In 2014, 19.5 milion American adults had scientific or engineering degrees, but only 5.4 million (28%) were working in STEM fields. There simply were not enough jobs for all the techno heavy graduates we had trained. And the rewards of those jobs were oversold.  Engineers, it is true start at high salaries out of college but those high starting salaries never increase and 10 years later, many of those engineers are working in jobs which have nothing to do with engineering or technology. To increase their salaries or to advance in their careers most engineers have to shift to management, a whole new skill set for which they have not been trained and for which they  may have no special talents. 

Of course, the PhD in philosophy who drives a cab and the law school graduate who sells real estate has become a cliche, but the fact is the mismatch between what schools are training students for and what they can become is widely known.  Hacker tells of a community college which started training students to be software engineers or welders or whatever because a local industrial giant complained they could not find workers to fill all the jobs they had, but once they had started graduating classes with hundreds of appropriately trained graduates, the company decided to fold up its tent to to relocate overseas.

Machinists never out of work 

Committing yourself to two or four or ten years of education is always a bet, always a gamble, and the more narrow your preparation the greater the gamble. Sometimes the gamble pays off. My friend who went through four years of college, four years of medical school, a year of internship and a year of residency decided he would devote himself to mastering a single technology: colonoscopy. It took him six months to get proficient and about a year to really master it. For thirty years that technology remained essentially unchanged, and he was able to buy a large coop on the upper West Side and a house in the Hamptons all because he bet on colonoscopy as a cash cow. Had some new technololgy come along which proved superior, he would have been out of luck.

Another friend trained to be a surgeon and had a good 20 years using techniques it took him 5 years to master, but then laparoscopic surgery arrived, with demands for a whole new set of intelligences--laparoscopic surgery is more like playing a video game and touch, spacial relationships are no longer so important as being able to handle the joy stick. Those surgeons who had been trained in the old "open" techniques became obsolete over the course of 5 years as the new technology supplanted the old. Their bets were good for 20 years but many of them could not afford to retire when they found themselves put out to pasture. 

The most appalling thing is that the very institutions which were designed to foster analysis and dispassionate inquire, the academic institutions, colleges and universities failed at that core, essential mission when it came to embracing STEM and the math myth and whole variety of untested beliefs.  Directors of admission accepted the SAT exam as the only measure of "intelligence" and drew a line at a math score of 690  and verbal of 700. This simplified their job of winnowing down applications of 16,000 to a single college. But, of course, it also meant they eliminated a lot of gifted students who were simply not gifted in the SAT math score of 690 department.  There is a scene in the Bible where a general realizes he can only cross the river with half the soldiers he has gathered there, so he says, choose all the soldiers who are drinking from the water with cupped hands and leave behind all those lying face down drinking.  An arbitrary device for separating people. The SAT is just as arbitrary. 

People often point to the fact that both Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg got into Harvard as proof that however flawed the admission process is, it can at least identify special talent.  Of course, the fact is those two were very gifted in math in the way which allowed for high math SAT scores and which allowed them to ace calculus, to solve polynomial equations and to code software.  But the rest of the class who were not quite as gifted did not go on to found Microsoft or Facebook. What of them?  Did Lin-Manuel Miranda, who read the same biography of Hamilton millions of others had read but was able to conceive of rendering that story as a Hip Hop musical, did his math SAT exceed 690? And if it had, was that part of his intelligence important to what really made him successful?  

And of course for every Bill Gates, we can think of those folks who were culled out because of a math score below 690, who clearly belonged at an elite college. In high school, I dated a girl who clearly was one of the most articulate, insightful, verbal people in my class. Her intelligence was nuanced, considered, analytical and she was very funny.  She was in the "advanced placement" courses and everyone from those classes applied to the Ivy League and Stanford and Amherst and Swarthmore and schools like that. To everyone's astonishment the best school she got into was Carnegie Tech. She had something to prove, and she transferred to Barnard, graduated Columbia Law and went on to a stellar career and made more money than, I would hazard a guess, 505 of the 520 people in our graduating class. In fact, she may well have made more money than the total of the 505 below her. 

You can say, well, so the system worked. It was the "Girl Named Sue" thing--she had something to prove. I would say, the system failed to identify talent and she was only the most extreme example.

Looking at exceptional cases and trying to make manpower policy based on those is a fool's errand. When it comes to large numbers of people, we need to look at the numbers Professor Hacker looks at which clearly must mean that we are in fact training way too many engineers for our economy to absorb and we may well be selecting the wrong people for the jobs they are being shunted into.

The former chief of Radiology at one of the nations most elite medical schools was, every year, faced with the prospect of choosing from among 400 applicants the 10 residents in radiology he would train.  Those 400 came from the 20 most famous brand name medical schools. Most of them were the sorts who never had less than an "A" since kindergarten and who had high SATs and high test scores in medical school. He could have almost put all the names in a hat and blindfolded chosen any of them because there was so little difference among these "perfect" applicants.

But then, one year, somehow, a different sort of applicant slipped in. He had played linebacker at North Carolina State in college and he was Black.  When he started, first year, he was probably number 9 or 10 in the class, with respect to his knowledge of anatomy and pathology. But he was very coach-able. When he got something wrong, as all new residents do, he learned from his mistake. He was almost pleased to be corrected. "Oh, yeah. Right. I got that now." When his perfect classmates got something wrong, they fell apart. They were not accustomed to failure in any academic pursuit. Every month the big Black linebacker got better and by the end of the residency he was among the top 3.  

So, did the chief of radiology go out looking for new prospects from among Division One football players? No.  He could not bring himself to make that leap. The linebacker might be the exceptional case. There was simply not enough data to know what to do. 

But it is cases like this which can or should cause academic institutions to do studies to develop new metrics to think anew about what they are doing.  To date, none of the American universities has done anything of the sort. What they care about is the US News and World Report rankings. Careers rise and fall on this commercial product, which nobody in academia effectively questions. There is a hurdle to jump over and nobody asks: Why? 

Nobody, that is except Andrew Hacker. 

The Past Isn't Even Past: Foyle's Next War

Inspector Foyle (Michael Kitchen)

As far as I know, Emily Nussbaum has not yet reviewed "Foyle's War"  but now, with a new season available on Netflix, I feel compelled  to note the return, at least until Emily can get around to doing it justice as I cannot.

The fact is, such notice cannot wait, as Foyle is one of the best things on TV, especially now that House of Cards and Game of Thrones have run their course. 

Foyle's War began with the unpromising premise of following a dour detective on the English home front during World War II, when all the action was happening at the front, and Foyle was left behind, a country inspector detective chasing down killers and thieves when wholesale killing and thievery which dwarfed anything Foyle could uncover, was happening just across the Channel.  But Foyle turned out to be irresistible and when the war ended, he took off to America to pursue an American politician and murderer who happened to murder someone on Foyle's beat and Foyle was not about to forget.

Back in England now, with the war just over, the cars and politics are all very much 1945, but the issues are America, 2016, with the second episode centering on a secret British government unit which tortures people in pursuit of the cold war with Stalin.  The enemy now is the Soviet Union. Recruited by Mi-5, the British CIA, as soon as he steps off the boat from America, Foyle points out to the woman who is determined to recruit him that Mi-5 spurned his application during the war, but gradually he is drawn in and cannot resist the cases presented as puzzles for him to solve.  And he is reunited with Samantha Wainright, (Honeysuckle Weeks)  his former driver during the war, who eventually winds up working in Mi-5 and, of course, becomes the Watson to his Holmes, although, she is much more useful and important to the solutions of his cases than Watson ever was. 

As always, there are several plot lines with intersect and weave in and out, among them in this second episode, the post war election which threw Churchill out of office and swept in Members of Parliament like Samantha's husband, who wants to establish a universal health service, and his arguments sound very much like Bernie Sanders. If only people could realize how much a National Health could change their lives...

The discussion which closes the episode is so typically Foyle, as he quietly presses his boss about the wisdom, morality and practicality of trying to obtain information by torture in a free country.

Honeysuckle Weeks: What a Great Name

By the end of every episode, I am determined to be more like Foyle: taciturn, capable of sympathetic listening, non committal. It's against my nature:  I recognized the type.  In "Hamilton" Burr tells Hamilton to "smile more, talk less."  Hamilton is voluble, opinionated, wears his beliefs and emotions on his sleeve, where Burr says as little as possible.  Hamilton asks Burr what he stands for, how he cannot take a stand when so many important issues are pressing in. And I recognize, I'm not like Burr. I'm like Hamilton, undisciplined, too quick to expostulate.  Burr, Foyle, are not spontaneous. They are calculating.  But in Burr's case there's a moral vacuity; in Foyle, he is just holding his fire until he can get off his best shot.

But, unlike Burr, who infuriates Hamilton for remaining silent when he ought to take a stand--qui tacit consentit--(Silence implies consent), Foyle's silences and minimal responses speak volumes and you know, by the end of every episode, he will confront the villain and use his quiet observations to unravel and reveal.

It's also nice that a sixty something, balding guy who is agile and active enough to get around, but certainly not capable of chasing down a bad guy or a space invader can hold your attention over the course of an hour. 

This is a masterful piece of work, this Foyle, a historical piece only in form--but what they are really talking about is today. 

The Math Myth: Andrew Hacker and the Poisoning of Meritocracy by Idiocy

Andrew Hacker is a national treasure.

He focuses on the sort of injustices and dysfunction which shape and misshape American life and if we only took his advice, life for a huge proportion of Americans would be far better, and  the success of American industry, professions and culture would be several orders of magnitude greater.

But, alas, he is now 87 years old, so nobody's listening and nothing he says matters any more. As Bill Clinton once observed, the great thing about not being President (until his wife became a candidate) is he could say anything he believed without having to parse his phrases to not offend; the trouble is, nobody listened any more.

Hacker has written about income inequality, the waste of female talent and American racial divides and about how colleges have gone off the rail and failed their students and their country.

 More recently, he has written about the ways the teaching and, more importantly, the testing of mathematics has injured large numbers of worthy individuals and injured this enterprise we call the United States of America.

Essentially, what Hacker is saying is obvious to anyone who has trudged through the American education industry, especially at the "elite" levels:  Most of what we teach as "math" is ridiculous, irrelevant and harmful to students and society. It is as if we decided everyone should learn to swim, but instead of simply asking students to demonstrate this ability by plunging in and swimming twenty five yards, we require everyone to do butterfly, backstroke, breast stroke and freestyle in times which would make Mark Spitz proud. 

This insipid approach has wrecked the essential idea of "meritocracy" in America.

Reading "The Math Myth"  brought back floods of memories of outrage.  Whenever I remember this stuff, I tell myself, sure this is all stupid and unjust but it's not like the people I'm talking about and their inane beliefs are like the guards at Auschwitz, assigning people to either the work squads or the gas chambers--the math Nazis are not evil, simply foolish.

Just a few snippets of memory:  When my son was struggling with calculus as a freshman in college, his dreams of going to medical school looked imperiled and I spoke with a Dean at Vanderbilt about allowing him to take a less high powered calculus course and the dean told me high level calculus was required for pre meds because "math is the basis of science, the language of science."  Here is this dean, a sociologist telling me, a physician what I knew was bunk--the last time I used calculus was on my calculus final exam. Lucky for my son, he persisted and though he never mastered calculus, he got into a fine medical school and became a vascular surgeon.

Listening to a high power Washington lawyer talk to the President of the Board of Trustees of Sidwell Friends School, a private school in Washington, D.C., I was floored to hear him say, "Well, of course, the problem at Boston Latin"--where the lawyer had gone to school--"was they eliminated the calculus requirement and standards went straight downhill from there." And the Sidwell man smiled knowingly, nodded in agreement.  

I've heard colleagues claim calculus is an important requirement for medical school--they were good at it--and I've asked them to cite a single instance when calculus was necessary or even helpful to them in their medical careers and none could, except to say that well in some articles in the medical literature the concept of the area under the curve came up. But of course, you can learn that concept in 30 seconds--you don't need to be solving quadratic equations.

When I was in college, I put off taking calculus until I was a senior and I went to see the Dean who might wave that requirement for me--it was required for my major (biology) and I pointed out I had already taking all the courses for which calculus was a prerequisite, somehow slipping through the net which was designed to bar students not having calculus to take those courses, and I had got mostly A's in all those courses. "Well," he murmured, you'll need calculus in some of your more advanced science courses.  But, of course, I had only two science courses left to take and neither histology  nor comparative anatomy had even a remote math content.  The Dean, who was also the Dean of Admissions, reached in his file and pulled up my folder, from when I had applied to the college from high school and scanning over it, he found my SAT scores in math and he yelped: "How did you ever get in here?"

"I don't really know, " I said. "But you know, I haven't done all that badly."

Actually, I had done better than 97% of all the students at the college, and majored in science, without taking much math, which was, as we were told, the basis for science.  That did not give him pause to wonder about his own ideas of how to judge applicants or predict success or to reconsider the measurements he was using.  "Moneyball" had not yet been written and he was still judging applicants by the test which Michael Lewis might call, "Looking good in jeans."

Hacker does not think math is irrelevant. This is not sour grapes from a man who is mathematically challenged.  He is a graduate of Amherst, Oxford and Princeton and uses numbers for much of his scholarly work. What he is talking about has been called "numeracy" or practical math.  

A builder who made a fortune building shopping malls once told me, "I was never much of a student. Couldn't graduate high school because I couldn't pass the state math tests. But I could always add and subtract. That's all I really needed." The man amassed a fortune several times greater than most of the academics who spurned him, and numbers were a big part of what he did--estimates of cost and profit.

Arthrimetic is very useful and some simple algebra is very handy.  Personally, I struggled with alegebra as a 12 year old but when I turned 13, it seemed obvious and very simple. Algebra teachers often nod knowingly when I mention this and say, "Yes, some kids just need another year for their neurons to mature."  And geometry was the one course I actually loved. Proofs were such fun and so satisfying. But that doesn't mean I'd require every student to do high level algebra or geometry to graduate high school. A requirement ought to reflect what is essential, a basic competency.  Not every swimmer has to be Mark Spitz.

As we have required polynomial equations and imaginary numbers to be a test for any kid who wants to call himself a high school graduate, as we have set the bar for admissions to elite colleges by asking absurdly inappropriate questions on the SAT exams, we have not just done an injustice to individuals, we have lost valuable talent for our nation.

I have a nephew who got calculus and all sorts of math quite easily. He was a bit of a wild man in high school, but clearly quite bright and eventually, after he came to terms with his own behavioral problems, he met a girl who could give the average Hollywood starlet fits in a beauty contest, and he decided he'd better be able to show her he had a promising future and he became an accountant. Not just an accountant but he passed all 5 parts of the CPA exam on the first try, a pretty impressive,  although not unprecedented,  feat. He now works for one of the big three accounting firms.  He can do higher math and his math skills, at least some of his math skills may be relevant to his career. He is Mark Spitz in the accounting waters. 

But not every student at his college should have had to show they could do math the way he can. There are lots of talents and lots of different sorts of intelligence in the world. 

By requiring higher math of everyone, we have been simply foolish. We would not require every recruit for the football team to run 100 yards in under 10 seconds--we would lose the vital offensive and defensive linemen you need for a successful team. But we make that mistake in selecting our team for the freshman class at Harvard and Amherst. 

When we see the seething mass of resentment among the crowds at a Donald Trump rally, we see the results of our longstanding and widespread use of absurd requirements which have denied a basic credential, a high school diploma to millions. These people know they are not stupid, but they've been labeled that way through a rigged, corrupt and essentially idiotic system, which may not be evil but which has played a huge role in engendering a sense of distrust and outrage among all those injured by it.

This Idea We Call America

America, President Obama has famously said, is an idea. 

But what exactly that idea is is open to discussion.

For Donald Trump and the current crop of nativists, America is a white, Christian country which they want back again. This is, of course, an argument which depends on a short memory and narrow perspective. In this view, "we were here first" means we put down our stake and claimed the land and anyone coming by after that is an intruder, an invasive species.

Of course, human beings probably arrived on the North American continent during the stone age, migrating from Africa, across Asia and down into what we now think of as America. From the point of view of "native Americans," they were here first, so they have claim and everyone else is an intruder.  But of course, those "native" Americans are no more native than those who arrived on the east coast centuries later. 

Those native Americans did not arise here out of some pre human hominids but immigrated like every other group who followed them. They simply arrived before other human beings.  Those native Americans were nomads, following herds, mostly buffalo, and they did not even have a concept of owning land, or fences or borders any more than seafaring men thought of owning the oceans. The sea faring explorers might plant a flag on an island, but the water was not something men could own. 

Once the English colonists arrived, they brought deeds to various chunks of land from the King of England across the ocean, which meant no more to the Indians already living in those lands than these pieces of parchment meant to the wildlife, the deer or moose or birds living on these chunks of geography.

But once Europeans set up fences and forts and ports, other Europeans arriving by boat had to play by their rules and places like Ellis Island became portals to life among the civilized in America.

Of course, for several centuries there was another portal of entry: the slave ships, which brought the only population to our shores who did not want to be here in the first place. For the slaves, America was probably their idea of the fifth circle of Hell.

But, for the most part, the claim to belonging in America has had to do with the idea of I was here first or I own this land or this river and if you want to live here, you have to deal with me. 

Thus, we have the idea of borders and Mr. Trump's wall.

We also have now the idea of the gated community.

The idea of America was clearly quite different for the Plains Indian who followed the buffalo, who claimed no turf and recognized no borders than the idea of Philip Sheridan, who, after the Civil War, went West to slaughter those Indians and to herd them into "reservations."  The idea of America for my grandfather, fleeing violence in Europe, was probably closer to the idea of a refuge.  Later his idea of America probably changed, as he faced the brutality of union busting, club wheeling policemen who were owned by wealthy capitalists.  And that idea is different from Jefferson's idea of a land where the noble farmer could thrive, which was different from Hamilton's idea of a land where merchants and entrepreneurs and financiers  could thrive. 


Most of those who gained power on this continent have embraced the idea of America as having to do with property and ownership. 

Freedom is always claimed as an animating idea of America, but I'm less convinced this has been the central driver of American values more than the idea of property.  Once man's freedom can be another man's bondage, whether it's the slave owner and his slave or the segregationist who wants to be free to repress the Blacks in his own state or the Koch brothers who want to be free to destroy unions so they can freely exploit their workers.

The more I see of Europe or South America or Asia or Africa, the less sure I am that America is really all that different from the rest of the planet.  I suspect I am more like a German living in Berlin today than I am like an American who was living in Virginia in 1776.  What has shaped me most is the time in which I'm living than the place of my ancestry. 

My father claimed he was a "closet patriot." He did not like to advertise his affection for his country. He thought showy patriotism was inevitably phony. He said he paid his taxes in full and on time and that was his version of patriotism. 

And he always said he'd rather live in America than any other country.  Looking around today, I have to agree with him, even if I'm not sure what exactly this thing, this idea, "America" actually is.

Nigel Farage and the Politics of Resentment

Nigel Farage Smug Enough 

Brexit happened for many reasons, but among them is one which is familiar to any American who has tuned into a Trump rally: resentment against an inchoate winner class. 

Nigel Farage, an English member of the European Parliament provided a vivid performance which revealed the monster behind the mask just after the votes were tallied.  Mr. Farage, who went to work in The City, the English version of Wall Street, after high school rather than going off to college, taunted the French, German, Spanish and Italian members, saying that despite their pedigrees and their elite status, none of them had ever had a proper job, or had ever had to meet a payroll or ever actually had taken entrepreneurial risks and so he, Nigel Farage, was actually their superior. And what really galled him, was how they had once  laughed at him, disrespected him years earlier when he spoke of England pulling out of the EU. 

"You laughed at me then," crowed Mr. Farage, "But you're not laughing now!"

You could just seen the shaved headed, tatooed, hunched crowd at a Trump rally raising a cry of exultation, had the Jumbotron been showing Mr. Farage's performance in New Hampshire. 

Mr. Farage has long railed about how the European Union has sneaked a political union into the structure of the EU, distorting and deforming treaties to serve the purposes of bureaucrats who desire a new world order.  I kept expecting him to invoke images of the black helicopters and blue helmeted soldiers who serve the nefarious will of the new world order, crushing the independent souls of sovereign nations like England. 

When England Stood Alone: Wasn't fun then. Won't be now. 

The survivalists of Wyoming and the Dakotas, who imagine they live off the grid,  and who  lay in arsenals of assault rifles in anticipation of the Armageddon which they know will come with those black helicopters and blue helmets, must be playing Mr. Farage on continuous youtube loop.

Stock markets seem to be settling down and now the pundits are saying, actually, Brexit will not shake the foundations of world economies, but rather it will likely affect only England much, and the European Union less. The former England of Great Britain will become less vital and might find itself not so Great, when Scotland and Northern Ireland separate to leave the English and when their restless Welsh cousins grumble about splendid singularity.

Global Warming Victim. Let's not think beyond our borders

Years ago, I traveled to Scotland where  merchants accepted my British pound notes,  but when I crossed the border into England, my Scottish pound notes were spurned as worthless.  I found this evidence of a certain arrogance on the English side. The Scots, then, as now, were open and welcoming,  where the English were not.  That same character flaw has not come home to roost for the English.  

To be sure, there are those in London who do not share the provincialism, who relish the hubub of the Babel of voices in London just as New Yorkers love the diversity of their city. But London is not England, and England not London, anymore than New York is Peoria. 

The English will have to work out their fate for themselves. The rest of us can only wish them well, but they have made their own bed.