Shock of Not-Woodeness

Call me surprised.

I happened to see former Secretary of State Condolezza Rice today. She spoke to a group of about 200 people, of which I was a part.

Here’s how she did.

She spoke for about 45 minutes – a tightly organized and logical talk – about world affairs. She didn’t use the teleprompter (I checked.). She spoke from a single 5″X7″ card. She never repeated herself. She used many specific anecdotes and statistics to support her points. Her talk had an easy-to-follow and organized thread throughout. She dealt with complex issues. She brought together numerous pieces into a unified set of themes and connected them directly to the audience.

Following her prepared remarks, she answered none-too-easy questions from a truly international crowd (people from Venezuela, Nigeria, Kazakhstan, Angola, South Africa and India, among others) with obvious facility and knowledge of the specific countries and regions. She tied together her answers and the general themes of her talk.

I was completely impressed. Completely. And, trust me, I am not an easy person to impress.

And she also laughed good-naturedly. She seemed relaxed, yet in complete command. She joked at her own expense (and the joke was even funny).

In short, Rice was nothing like the wooden, overly-studied, fussy image I’d had of her during her State Department days.

What is it, I wondered, that makes our leaders behave so unnaturally, so stilted, so artificially in public. Can they possibly suspect we want them to act in that way?

In any event, today’s performance made me wish this Rice (not the Rice we saw during the Bush, Jr. administration) would run for higher office. We deserve a leader this engaged, this smart and, yes, this human.

Free Market? Sure, I’m Game.

Finding a national consensus on matters like drug use, abortion and gun control is clearly a fool’s errand. Because we are, as a nation, so diverse and divided on matters of religious beliefs, ethical foundations and personal priorities, we will never – NEVER – come to a stable, lasting, nationwide accord on these issues.

Let’s start with drugs. Several states have decriminalized or even legalized marijuana use. Marijuana use was recently made legal in Washington and Colorado. Its use is not a criminal offense in more than a dozen other states. Others haven’t changed the legal status of marijuana and aren’t likely to.

The government of North Dakota recently passed anti-abortion laws that are considered to be the most restrictive of personal choice in the nation. New Jersey, along with states like Oregon and Nevada, has no active ban on the right of the mother to terminate pregnancy.  There are a number of workplaces (including hospitals) and schools affiliated with, for example, the Roman Catholic Church, which objects to contraception as sinful. Therefore, some of these church-affiliated institutions object to offering contraception as a part of employee or student health insurance. There are plenty of other employers and schools that have no issue whatsoever with offering contraception as a part of employee or student health coverage.

Guns control is an extremely emotional and divisive issue in the United States. This was demonstrated clearly last week when the Senate considered unsuccessfully a moderate proposal to nationally standardize required pre-sale background checks for firearms. Unrestricted private firearm ownership is considered nearly sacred by some of my fellow citizens but considered purely evil by others. In Alaska and Arizona, for example, gun ownership, and even carrying guns in public, is virtually unchecked. It is much more difficult to obtain a firearm in, say Connecticut or California, and nearly impossible to get permission to carry a firearm in public.

Now, we could all spend, like, forever trying to align on the ‘right’ approach to these policies but, in truth, we never will. Even if we rely on the courts to settle the ‘right’ approaches, they will not be settled permanently.

So, instead, let me propose something completely different – a solution driven entirely by free market principles. And it might look something like this.

The federal government tracks and posts accurate conditions reports on each state, listing up-to-date laws governing behavior on these ‘values’ issues. We, as consumers, decide where to live, go to school buy products, etc. based on those particular issues that matter to us.

If we want to smoke marijuana legally, we move to Washington or Colorado.

If we want to own the choices regarding our reproductive health, we don’t live in North Dakota or go to Notre Dame or St. Mary’s Hospital.

If we want to legally carry a firearm to the shopping mall, there’s always Arizona.

Now, the other side of market solutions is, states and employers and schools must be required to fully disclose their positions on these ‘values’ issues. Notre Dame University, for example, must have a statement in its marketing materials (alongside the intensely-focused cello player and the touchdown-scoring halfback) that says:

Dear Prospective Student:

This university is affiliated with the Roman Catholic Church, which considers contraception a sin. Therefore, our student health service does not and will not offer contraceptive services.

With that information fully disclosed, high school seniors can intelligently choose colleges that best align with their personal beliefs and priorities. Anticipate needing or wanting contraceptive services as part of student health? Notre Dame isn’t for you; go somewhere else.

I can imagine signs at state borders as well:

Welcome to Arizona.

We allow pretty much anyone to buy and carry a gun here.

Enjoy your stay.

If you don’t like being around a lot of people with firearms, you can always vacation in Massachusetts.

This is, of course, not a realistic proposal, for two major reasons.

First, when push comes to shove, institutions (states, businesses, colleges) are loathe to disclose their positions openly if it costs them money, tourists, students, or employees. Notre Dame is unlikely to tell promising high school seniors with non-Catholic values they should just look elsewhere. North Dakota doesn’t want to lose new businesses because of its position on abortion. And Arizona would literally starve to death if tourists stopped going to the Grand Canyon or baseball’s Spring Training because of its gun laws.

And second, so-called ‘values’ conservatives say they like the unfettered free market and personal liberty and all that, but what they really want is to force their agenda down the throats of everyone else. They don’t want Colorado to become a stoner’s paradise, not because they themselves don’t want to live in such a place, but because, according to their own personal values, marijuana is evil and no American should be allowed to partake.

So, for now, we’ll live with this endlessly boring political and judicial wrestle over ‘values’ issues, when what we really should do is just start erecting the new state border signs:

Welcome to Washington.

Flame on!

In a Nutshell

My dad’s been gone over twenty years but I’ve been thinking a lot about him lately. In part, I suppose, it’s because I just heard the news that Haig’s, the Armenian/Mediterranean/Middle Eastern deli my dad used to love, is closing for good.

I knew my dad well, I thought, but there were things he never talked about, or spoke of only rarely and never in detail. His experience in World War 2 was just one example of that. I didn’t come to learn the details of his war experiences until I wrote the Department of Defense after he’d already died. He never shared much, preferring to stay in the happier and more comfortable present, I assume.

Sometimes, I’d get my best insight into him via other people.

Since he grew up in roughly the same neighborhood I did, we’d often run into his boyhood pals. The easy, back-slapping friendliness of cops, firemen, bus drivers and teachers (My high school chemistry teacher, Merton Jones, had been my dad’s classmate.) showed me a lot about both what kind of kid he was and what kind of man he’d become.

I’ll never forget going into the neighborhood dry cleaner one time to pick up a load of his dress shirts. Once my identity and familial connections were established, the Korean lady who owned the place told me my dad wasn’t like other American men. Out of the blue. Just like that. I guess my face reflected the fact that I hadn’t known exactly how to take her comment. She leaned in and told me in a half-whisper she meant my dad, unlike her other customers, had humility.

Then there was Haig’s.

As Greeks, we found the smells of Haig’s completely irresistible – as if walking into my Yia Yia’s pantry and opening all the jars of spices and herbs at one time. Big blocks of fresh halvah sat in the case, along with buckets of olives, even the black wrinkly, oil-cured kind that are impossible to find in American stores (or at least they were, before the Bay Area’s slow-food revolution). Taramosalata. Un-dyed pistachios.

My dad and I went in together one time and he started up a conversation with old-man Haig himself. It might have started with talk about food (I can’t remember now.) but it soon covered every single important thing in both their lives. Not just what they found important at that moment, but every single important event in their lives. No, that’s too limiting. They covered every important thing about their backgrounds, their families, their particular histories, world history. By the time we left, Haig and my dad might as well have been lifelong friends.

It was a quintessentially dad moment.

And every time I’ve gone by Haig’s in the intervening years, I think of that day because, really, it was my dad in a nutshell.

Another Sad Goodbye

We’d stopped in front of College Hall at the statue of Benjamin Franklin to take a quick picture of our daughter, who’s thinking of applying to study at Philadelphia’s University of Pennsylvania.

An older gentleman walking by said to me in a distinctive Greek accent, “So, is she the candidate?”  The face was more than a bit older, but I recognized the voice at once. It was Tony Tomazinis, a Penn professor of city planning I remembered from my time there, way back in the 1980s.

We talked and laughed for a few minutes and I asked about one of his colleagues, my mentor, Seymour Mandelbaum. “He passed away last week,” he said, eyes downcast. Unsure I’d actually heard what I thought I did, I stuttered and choked through an “Excuse me?” Yes, he said, Seymour had died suddenly. The department was distraught.

We shared some memories and said our goodbyes and Tony walked on.

Seymour was a great human being – a wise person, a deep thinker, a brave writer. He was also a kind and gentle soul. He was at ease with himself and others, funny, warm, kind, challenging.

Had I visited Penn a year earlier, or even a month, I might well have stopped by to see Seymour, a professor and mentor who’d made a substantial contribution to my life. I hope he knew what he’d meant to me, for I likely never told him directly – a boneheaded mistake I now regret deeply and, for Seymour’s memory if nothing else, hope never to repeat.

My Take on the Oscars

What did I think of last night’s Oscar telecast? Worst I’ve ever seen. Boring, self-indulgent crap. Clear to me the film industry has lost its sense of self and its own history, lost connection to its audience.

Some lowlights:

1. The host: Is misogyny funny if it’s used ironically? Homophobia? Sexism? Seth McFarlane failed. Not #fail. Not #epicfail. Actually failed, and the academy failed by hiring him to do what he did; after all, his approach couldn’t have been a surprise.

2. Quentin Tarantino: A tiresome man who makes derivative movies mistaken by dullards for genius. I have given about 6 hours of my life to the viewing of Tarantino films, to my permanent loss. No more. Peace out, Quentin, you pompous ass.

3. Musical tributes: Chicago was a poorly made movie released 10 years ago. It should be left to die. All due respect to Shirley Bassey, who is an absolute wonder, the songs are not the best thing about Bond movies. Barbra Streisand makes me gag.  Kristen Chenoweth doesn’t hold my interest. This idea for the show theme was borne of avarice and desperation.

4. In memoriam: Some actual film giants died in the past year. Ernest Borgnine got about 2 seconds of screen time. Andy Griffith wasn’t shown at all. Why? To make time for world-class egotist Barbra Streisand singing Marvin Hamlisch’s drippiest all-time song. Gag.

Overall impressions? Yeah, that’s right, Jennifer. You’ve got it right.

Charles Barkley Got a Crush On Me

He came to an NBA champion Philadelphia Seventy-Sixers team as a wild-playing rookie from Auburn. He was thick, big and broad, a little undisciplined, never able to control his weight.

In his final year playing professional basketball, his team’s media guide listed him at 252 pounds but, as a rookie, he seemed closer to 350. His face was round and childlike. He was, for want of a better word, pudgy. It looked like he hadn’t yet quite lost his babyfat.

Next to the sleek, controlled and experienced pros he played with on the Sixers (e.g., Dr. J, Maurice Cheeks), he looked like a puppy who hadn’t grown into his paws.

One night during Barkley’s rookie season, thanks to the person I was dating at the time, I enjoyed the game from courtside seats. It was amazing to see these athletes play the game from that close; there’s nothing like proximity to make the game come alive.

I remember one play in particular.

I was speaking to the person next to me when I saw her eyes open very wide and she said the word “God” almost inaudibly. I looked to the court just in time to see the huge and growing form of Charles Barkley flying at me in pursuit of a loose ball. In my memory, it looked something like this, only moving way faster:

No time to move.

The next thing I knew – literally, the very next thing – he slammed into me at full speed, driving me into the court and destroying the chair I was seated in. And when I say destroyed, I mean collapsed it pancake-flat.

He pushed off my chest to get up and back into the game. A Spectrum employee came over to pull the chair off the floor and place a new one in the now-vacated space. I, of course, was still prone, only slowly regaining awareness. My friend helped me up and into the new chair and after a few minutes another Spectrum employee came over to give me a towel to wipe myself down (it had taken me a few minutes to realize just how wet I was). That was it.

I’ll never forget being full-out flattened by him but, to this day, Charles Barkley has never said a word.

Big-Time College Sports: Time to Kill or Be Killed

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It was a running joke my uncle the priest came to tell his parishioners every Super Bowl Sunday, especially during those years the hometown 49ers were so often represented in the NFL’s championship game. “I will work quickly and end early today,” he’d quip, “so you can get to the worship of America’s real national religion, football.”

And, as is the case for all good humor, his foundation wasn’t that far from the truth. Professional sport has become a well-loved and financially well-supported industry in this country. But even as big money can, God knows, create good entertainment, it also has the potential to twist and corrupt. If you’ve been paying attention to either news or sports recently, that can’t be any kind of surprise at all.

Potential corruption of pros by professional-scale money is one thing – we’d almost expect there to be some toxic spillover in for-profit entertainment enterprises – but the effects of big-time sports money on amateur sport is something else again. The money that’s come to American colleges and universities from running sports entertainment businesses has had seriously pernicious effects on what are still (nominally, at least) institutions of higher learning.

Here’s a table showing the top 20 sports revenue-producing institutions of higher learning, as of 2008. [Note how many of the top 20 are public and, therefore, publicly-funded institutions.] This is serious dough. Just to get some sense of this scale, the top performers on this list make about as much in revenue as tech-sector stand-outs like Pandora and LinkedIn.

Rank	Team	Total Revenue
1	Alabama	123,769,841
2	Texas	120,288,370
3	Ohio State	115,737,022
4	Florida	106,607,895
5	Tennessee	101,806,196
6	Michigan	99,027,105
7	Oklahoma State	98,874,092
8	Wisconsin	95,118,124
9	Texas A&M	92,476,146
10	Penn State	91,570,233
11	Auburn	89,311,824
12	Georgia	85,554,395
13	LSU	85,018,205
14	Notre Dame	83,352,439
15	Kansas	82,976,047
16	Iowa	81,515,865
17	Michigan	81,390,686
18	Oklahoma	77,098,008
19	Stanford	76,661,466
20	USC	76,409,919

[Source: ESPN, 2008]

This kind of money drives distorting behaviors. And to protect this revenue stream, significant measures are often taken. As just one example, the University of Maryland recently paid $2 million to buy out the contract of its football coach (then carrying a losing win-loss record), then hire a new coach for an annual salary of an additional $2 million. In outlining his rationale for making these moves, the university’s president, Wallace Loh, asserted his belief that, “intercollegiate athletics is an integral part of the college educational experience and not only commercialized mass entertainment.” [Source: Forbes]

In 2010, the 44 public universities with teams in the 5 most established athletic conferences (e.g., PAC-12, Big Ten) paid their head football coaches an average salary of over $2 million, well above the average salary of anyone else on campus [Source: Wall Street Journal], much less those who actually deliver on schools’ educational mission, the faculty.

Investment in big-time athletics might pay off for their host institutions financially, but data show the academic returns are mixed. At one time, student-athletes (the very name sounds anachronistic today) participated in revenue-producing and spirit-building athletics in exchange for the promise of a college degree. As big-time sports programs rake in the cash, and many athletes have come to focus almost exclusively on athletics and bail out of college early to join their sports’ professional ranks, that notion is being re-examined.

In fact, there is a large gap between the academic achievement levels of student-athletes and their non-athletic counterparts at many schools. So, in reality, where is the benefit promised players? This calls into question whether schools running big-time sports programs are unfairly and handsomely benefitting from labor that is essentially free, and many have called for student-athletes to be paid. The schools with the largest difference in graduation rates between athletes (football players, in this case) and non-athletes, including, in the top position, to my shame, one of my beloved alma maters, are listed in the table, below.

Difference in Graduation Rates Between Football Players and All Students Major Programs
	Football Players	All Students	Difference
California	54%	90%	-36%
UCLA	59%	90%	-31%
USC	61%	87%	-26%
Virginia	68%	93%	-25%
Georgia Tech	55%	79%	-24%
Texas	57%	79%	-22%
Maryland	59%	81%	-22%
BYU	57%	78%	-21%
Texas A&M	59%	79%	-20%
Michigan	71%	89%	-18%
Clemson	62%	78%	-16%
Oklahoma	48%	63%	-15%
Florida St.	56%	71%	-15%
North Carolina St.	56%	71%	-15%
Wisconsin	66%	81%	-15%

Duke University economist (and a former teacher of mine) Charles Clotfelter, wrote a book about the conundrum this kind of imbalance presents to America’s colleges. Unsurprisingly, he finds deep unease. Derek Bok, former president of Harvard, thinks sports an expensive side-show for schools: “Educational institutions have absolutely no business operating farm systems for the benefit of the National Football League and the National Basketball Association.” James Duderstadt, the University of Michigan’s former president agrees: “Big-time college athletics has little to do with the nature or objectives of the contemporary university. Instead, it is a commercial venture, aimed primarily at providing public entertainment.”

Educational institutions running big-time sports programs bear great risks. They reap potentially huge revenues from their programs that reward activities not part of their core educational purpose. Priorities are skewed. While academic programs starve, state-of-the-art athletic facilities are built and coaches wallow in cash. Other than coaches, the main beneficiaries of these sports programs are professional football and basketball leagues, who harvest generation after generation of athletes trained and polished at mostly public expense. Furthermore, these schools benefit from the free labor of their students, who are not allowed to accept income and, increasingly, do not even benefit academically from their work.

A well-known and successful college basketball coach talked about his program’s essential independence from his host institution (not to mention his own obvious disdain for academic authority): “We’re not even really part of the school anymore, anyway…you think the chancellor is going to tell me what to do?” [Source: New York Times]

In the long run, this is an unsustainable situation. Colleges must get out of the big-time sports entertainment business if they are to keep alive any hope of fulfilling their educational missions. In the end, these enterprises are not worthy of the institutions these programs still (nominally) represent.

The Story of Boy and a Ship

Long ago and far away…

On a windy day, the young man stood at the far downhill edge of his family’s farm, looking out at the broad and blue water of the gulf.  He had chores to do, as he did every day, of course, but there was a glorious white ship passing and the boy could not tear his gaze from it no matter that piles of cuttings clogged the fields and hungry animals went waiting.

The ship’s long, narrow bow sliced the water and launched churning waves to its sides. A red and blue insignia decorated the stack, now belching dark grey smoke. A colorful foreign flag spanked and cracked from the stern. The young man had watched many ships go by while avoiding the real work of the farm, but never had he seen any this graceful, this beautiful. And on the deck, he saw an officer standing proud, erect, focused on the place ahead where he would soon dock his vessel. The officer’s coat had rows of shining gold buttons, shining gold braid on the sleeves and shining gold emblems on the lapels.  

The young farmboy was completely transfixed.

About to burst with excitement, he could no longer bear to stand still for another second on that drably brown farm, not with that beautiful ship gliding by. Just looking at it made his heart ready to explode. There was no stopping his feelings and there was now no stopping him. He dropped his hoe and ran, following the ship’s path.

It might have been hours, for all he knew, that he ran to reach the ship, now safely tied to the dock and, unlike the boy himself, at rest. He might rightly have expected the still ship to have lost some of its beauty, its majesty. But, if anything, being so close made it seem all the grander still than it had cutting through the deep blue water of the gulf.

The boy’s eyes were afire, his mouth agape.

The ship’s captain, leaning on an impossibly high rail, noticed the boy watching him and doffed his cap with a smile. At some level, the man must have known the boy was hooked. And, in his defense, it was quite common practice to recruit young sailors this way. So, he waved the boy onto the ship and into the start of a new life.

He couldn’t have known, when he climbed up the gangplank onto the beautiful white boat, that war was coming to his country, even to his family’s little dirt farm. He couldn’t have known that his family would, fearful of the coming waves of the war’s death, disperse to the four winds. A generation hence, the families started by he and his brothers would find themselves at the farthest reaches of the earth – South Africa, Ecuador, Australia and America.

He came to see places he’d never heard of – Africa, South America, India, the many islands of the south Pacific, and the magical ports of the Orient. He met people of excitingly unfamiliar customs and appearance. He worked on many ships – for he didn’t last long on the beautiful white ship that had initially seduced him into the life of a sailor – that carried the men and material that would come to win wars and build mighty empires.

He, as they say with high spirits in the context of swashbuckling fiction, sailed the seven seas. He must, in literal truth, have sailed around the world a hundred times by the time of his death. But he never spoke to his family again, or saw them or the beautiful farm that had fed and nurtured him throughout his young life.

That connection, or re-connection, was left to subsequent generations.

A Clown; A Very Sad Little Clown

I’ve heard people ask recently, as the purposefully-engineered fiscal cliff “crisis” has passed and the debt ceiling farce begins, what’s happened to the GOP’s “intellectual budget heavyweight,” Paul Ryan? He should be more visible; he really should. After all, since our Congress has become a circus, we ought to have clowns.

How this little boy, whose intellectual development seems to have stopped sometime soon after high school, became known for his gravity and heft is beyond me. Sometime in his late teens, he was introduced to the writings of Ayn Rand and has since become a true and evangelical believer in Rand’s philosophy. He apparently makes his staff read her novels and often quotes passages he finds particularly inspirational, especially John Galt’s  interminable (and childish) close to Atlas Shrugged. I won’t quote it here (Trust me, I’m doing you a great service.) but it’s precisely the type of big speech an adolescent might become completely taken with but, with luck and real life experience, would soon enough outgrow.

In last year’s vice presidential debate, Joe Biden had the honesty (if, perhaps, bad manners) to laugh out loud at Ryan’s juvenile posturing. In truth, Ryan isn’t the kind of clown you laugh at. He’s the kind you pity, then escort offstage – preferably, as soon as possible, before he does any real harm.

My Case Against the NRA

This is not a critique of gun owners. I know a great many people who own firearms. Without exception, they know their weapons and how to care for and use them, and are quite serious about safety.

Nor is this a statement about gun control, nor a discussion about the limits of the 2nd Amendment to the US Constitution. I have previously written at length about both. You can read three previous posts about guns here, here and here.

This post is strictly about the National Rifle Association (NRA), its methods and indefensible positions on matters of public policy.

Here are some of the association’s most venal policy initiatives:

1. In 1994, the NRA opposed legislation to outlaw teflon-coated bullets, called “cop-killers,” because they are specifically designed to penetrate the body armor commonly worn by police.

2. Starting in about 2007, the NRA wrote and pushed for the adoption of legislation in several states that forced the owners of businesses and land to allow their employees and others to carry firearms onto their private property, even if they expressly denied their permission to do so.

3. In 2010, the NRA supported allowing people on the federal government’s terrorist watch list to buy firearms and asserted that preventing them from doing so would infringe on their 2nd Amendment rights.

4. In 2010, and over the strong objections of the nation’s law enforcement community, the NRA introduced federal legislation (through one of their more dependable toads, Rep. Todd Tihart of Kansas) that severely restricted the information the public was allowed to see about the sources of firearms (i.e., the identities of specific dealers) used in crimes.

5. The NRA has consistently opposed requiring background checks on the sale of every firearm in the US, using the back-door mechanism of so-called “private” gun sales (e.g., at gun shows).

6. The recent position of the NRA’s executive director, expressed mere days after another mass murder of innocents, namely putting armed guards in every American public school, is atrocious for its stupidity and cluelessness as well as its venality.

It’s completely clear that the NRA acts as the political agent of death merchants (i.e., arms manufacturers), not to secure and protect the rights of individual gun owners. How my smart, responsible, gun-owning friends can continue to support with their dues the NRA’s filthy work in consistent opposition to public safety is beyond me.