Author: Marty Aussenberg

Well, it’s about time! I wondered what it would take for Cairo-like demonstrations to break out on this side of the pond, and now, thanks to the folks in Madison, Wisconsin, we know the answer: it’s the same as anywhere else , autocracy. The newly-elected Republican-cum-tea-party governor of that state mistook his election as a mandate to engage in another of the right-wing’s battles with the middle class by targeting one of the Republicans’ favorite bogeymen, labor unions, threatening to unilaterally terminate the rights of 175,000 state workers to collectively bargain (a right, by the way, the union movement originated in—-you guessed it—-Wisconsin). He even borrowed a page from the Middle Eastern despots’ playbook by threatening to call out the National Guard to quell any protests.

But, unlike the rest of the socio-economic class in this country who are under attack by conservatives but who have seemingly decided to shuffle off to the slaughter house in sheep-like obeisance to their oligarch, corporatist overlords, these feisty laborers have intoned Peter Finch’s famous movie line, telling their bully governor that they’re mad as hell and they’re not going to take it any more. Now, how about the rest of us?

Americans are notoriously complacent. Ever noticed how, in so many other countries, in a matter of hours after something unpopular happens, tens of thousands are marching in the street, with banners and signs already made decrying the latest outrage du jour? In this country—not so much. Even though we have a rich history of public protest, dating from the original (and still the only authentic) tea party demonstrations during our colonial period, our impossibly high threshold for “taking it to the streets” (hat tip: Doobie Brothers) has all but eliminated public demonstration as a legitimate form of protest. The last time we had mass demonstrations in this country of an equivalent magnitude to what we’ve seen in the Middle East was during the Vietnam war, and that was primarily because many of the demonstrators were at risk of becoming involuntary cannon fodder. There’s nothing like being told you’re going to carry a rifle in a far-flung rice paddy against your will to put you in protest mode.

Sure, Americans have lost trillions in their pension and retirement accounts as a result of the crimes committed by Wall Street investment banks, for which no one will ever be held to account, and sure, millions of Americans have lost their homes as a result of fraudulent loans and foreclosures, for which no one will ever be held to account, and sure, the U.S. has even greater income inequality than many middle eastern countries (including Tunisia and Egypt), members of the middle class: get over it. Pay your taxes, even if the super-rich pay far less, proportionately, than you do, and STFU. Write a blog, or maybe even an opinion column for your local alternative paper, but whatever you do, don’t put your bodies on the line, en masse, to express your disaffection or to demand your grievances be addressed and remedied. That would be so third-world.

Labor unions, of course, make a convenient target for the tea-and-no-sympathy crowd. It’s much easier to blame public employee unions for the fiscal problems most states find themselves in than it is to take responsibility for policies that have caused those problems. In Wisconsin’s case, this means the governor can bash unions as scapegoats for a budget deficit that he himself caused by a series of corporate tax reductions he promoted immediately following his election. Republicans hate labor unions, almost as much as they hate people of color, not just because they’re a check on corporate power the GOP worships so slavishly, but also because they (unions and people of color) are strong enclaves of Democratic electoral support. So, while it’s perfectly OK for the Wisconsin governor to water himself at the trough of corporate power brokers, the Koch brothers (the same ones who’ve funded the whole tea party “movement” and who also paid to have counter-demonstrators bused to Madison), labor unions must be thwarted, at any cost.

The anti-union mantra is a familiar one here in the South, where the majority of “right-to-work” states are located. Unions are vilified here, perhaps as a remnant of a slavery-induced mentality that workers should be grateful, and even servile, to their employer/masters. Right here in River City the hostility towards public employee unions in particular was graphically displayed in the dustup that followed the garbage workers’ failure to report for work during a particularly cold stretch of weather. And, other than WalMart, FedEx is perhaps the most successful corporation in the country when it comes to resisting unionization, so much so that it’s managed to get traditionally pro-union Democrats to push its anti-union agenda in Congress.

Maybe the demonstrations in Wisconsin are a function of the fact that, unlike the rest of the country, the demonstrators were already organized, and maybe the public employee unions in Wisconsin are the ones who are really promoting the “don’t tread on me” ethos the tea party disingenuously mouths as a subterfuge for its real, pro-corporatist, agenda, but either way, we can all learn something from their resistance efforts (and, indeed, from the demonstrations in the Middle East that preceded them as well), namely that there’s something to be said not only for being mad as hell and not wanting to take it anymore, but in storming the barricades to do something about it.

The recent tragedy in Tuscon has, once again, catapulted the issue of our gun-besotted culture into the headlines. Much attention has been paid by the media particularly to the seemingly counterintuitive phenomenon that the murders of six innocents by a deranged shooter has spurred a dramatic surge in gun sales in its wake.

All kinds of normally peace-loving people are now apparently not just taking up arms, but announcing itas well.

Surprisingly, the same thing happened following the Virginia Tech massacre, proving, I suppose, that violence begets violence (or at least fear of it).

I myself, a hoplophobe and gun control advocate my whole life, fell victim to this mentality when I got a carry permit and started strapping a Glock (a .40 caliber—-no puny 9 millimeter for me) on my hip immediately after September 11, 2001. I stopped doing that, though, when I realized paranoia and a delusional belief that carrying a gun made me safer were major motivating factors in my decision to carry. I will say, though (and this may partially explain the gun mania) that nothing gives you a more perverse sense of awe-inspiring power than knowing you can, if you have to (and without even getting dirty in the process), take another human being’s life. If anything, though, that’s a good reason to heighten the requirements for gun ownership.

The issue of gun violence and whether or not guns should be subject to more control than they currently are, is one of those subjects whose discussion always generates more heat than light. I include abortion and capital punishment in the same category. If you have a contrary opinion, there is no point trying to have an intelligent debate with anyone who opposes abortion, favors capital punishment or believes guns are a solution to violence rather than a cause of it.

Fortunately, guns haven’t reached the point of becoming any organized religion’s sacrament (though some gun owners are every bit as zealous in their beliefs as the most rabid of religious fundamentalists), the way opposition to abortion has, but for its acolytes the fact that the right to gun ownership is guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, and sanctified by the Supreme Court, is almost as good as if it had been handed down from Mt. Sinai or the subject of a papal encyclical.

The sturm und drang over gun control, and the similar intransigence of its opponents to that of some of the antagonists in the battles over the other issues I mentioned previously, made me realize, once again, how different our attitude towards life and death is in this country. Ultimately, we don’t value life nearly as much as other countries do (and, with no apologies to anti-abortion zealots, whose arguments are driven by the dominance of religious dogma over science, I do not include abortion as a sanctity of life—-other than the mother’s—-issue).

This ethos manifests itself in a variety of ways, not the least of which is an attitude that it’s acceptable for people who don’t have health care to die prematurely, which they do.

We’re also still one of the few civilized countries in the world that executes convicted criminals, in spite of what we know about flaws in the criminal justice system and how often those convictions are unjust.

Death is a political (with both a small and a capital “p”) issue in this country. So, some kinds of death are more acceptable than others. It is far more worrisome to the powers-that-be in Washington that there may be radical Muslims lying in wait to kill us than that there are mental defectives like Jared Loughner buying guns, and the still-available high-capacity magazines for them, who actually do kill us.

And so, while the death toll from terrorism in this country in the years since September 11, 2001 continues to remain the one that was inflicted on that date, the death toll from gun violence during that same period is literally hundreds of times greater. And, while we continue to spend trillions of dollars on two wars, a contingent of Keystone Kops at airport security checkpoints and innumerable measures to deal with potential deaths from terrorism, we spend a pittance, comparatively, on research to cure diseases that inflict actual deaths by the tens of thousands every year on our countrymen.

But, of course, the same thing that drives our “war on terrorism” is what drives the gun trade: profits. Which is why gun makers maintain their unholy alliance with the NRA. They rely on the NRA to gin up gun-owning (and buying) fervor, and the NRA relies on them to fund its lobbying juggernaut. It has become an article of faith that any legislator who even hints s/he favors increased gun control risks being targeted (sorry) for electoral defeat by the NRA, which rarely misses its target. The NRA knows how to put its money where its mouth is, which is why gun control has become an untouchable political issue, and probably won’t go anywhere this time either.

In spite of creditable studies which show that guns do not make us safer, there continue to be zealots (no matter how thoroughly discredited) who insist the opposite is true.

Guns seem to be the only life-threatening instrumentalities that defy the regulatory and corrective after-effects of a disaster involving their use. Imagine airlines, for example, trying (much less being able) to thwart the preventive measures the FAA invariably imposes in the aftermath of deadly plane crashes, or auto manufacturers or food and drug or baby crib (and so on) manufacturers thumbing their noses at safety recalls after deaths caused by their products. The public wouldn’t stand for it.

So, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that the anti-gun-control forces seem, once again, poised to defeat any attempt to stiffen gun lawsfollowing the Tuscon tragedy, just as they have after every prior gun-facilitated mass murder. After all, a constitutional right exercised to line the pockets of a multi-billion dollar industry trumps human life, doesn’t it? I wonder what the Pope would have to say about that.

Well, the results of the all-important Christmas buying frenzy are in, and guess what—-yup, they weren’t what everyone predicted they’d be back when every media outlet, including The Flyer, was touting what a great holiday shopping season this one was in the process of being. Wow, what a surprise!

The excuse this time? Weather. Hmm, where have I heard that before? Christmas takes place in the winter when weather is a problem somewhere (and frequently many somewheres) every year. Using weather as an excuse for a disappointing Christmas shopping season is almost as cliched as using “spending more time with family”as an excuse for prematurely leaving a job. Every year we’re treated to an onslaught of bright-eyed, bushy-tailed stories about how brisk sales look in anticipation of Christmas, and every year (or at least for as long as I can remember), the results are worse than the rosy projections that preceded them. When will we learn? It’s almost like Charlie Brown believing, one more time, that Lucy won’t snatch the ball away when he tries to kick it.

Retailers obviously believe that telling folks how crowded the stores are, and therefore how many people are going into debt to pay for Christmas, will stimulate sales, and media outlets certainly have a one-hand-washes-the-other interest in promoting their advertisers’ success, even at the expense of the truth. Year after year, we can expect to be bombarded by TV news reports from one mall or another suggesting shopping emporia are as crowded as ant farms, not to mention the de rigeur reports on the day after Thanksgiving of nincompoops lining up at 4 A.M. to get into some “big box” store or other. But does that mean we either have to believe their bullshit or let it influence our behavior? The real question is, does this appeal to the herd mentality work, and the answer increasingly appears to be, no (which is also, coincidentally, the answer to the question “will anything about these bogus projections change next year?”).

Retailers and the media outlets who serve as their handmaidens need to consider the possibility that stories like these have achieved “boy who cried wolf” status, and come up with something else. Maybe a campaign based on fear instead of ebullience would work better. Look at how well it works to make us believe that unless we allow some stranger at the airport to grope us, we’re going to die in a fiery plane crash.

Maybe something like “research has shown that people who don’t spend at least $1,000 on Christmas shopping are ten times likelier to die prematurely than those who do.” Who cares if that’s false. Most advertising is anyway, and it’s not like some ivory tower scientist is likely to chime in that such a study hasn’t been subjected to rigorous peer review. Of course, a crappy economy, 10% unemployment and an epidemic of foreclosures will trump cockeyed optimism every time. I just wish retailers would stop using these phony feel-good projections as a way of manipulating us into joining the Christmas feeding frenzy. But, it could be worse: subliminal messaging could make a comeback instead.

In a related sign of the times, every year when the new Yellow Pages phone directories come out, I do my own macro-economic analysis of them. I count the number of pages, and the number of listings in two particular categories I consider to be bellwethers, and compare them to the prior year. Since the new Yellow Pages directory has just come out, I thought I’d share some of what it reveals. First, the overall number of pages has dramatically declined this year, more than in any prior year of my unscientific survey.

That’s not a promising development, in my not-so-humble opinion. In addition to being an effect of the economic downturn, it may also be a symptom of population loss, or it could be a function of the fact that ad dollars are being shifted to non-traditional media, especially since our 24/7 electronically-obsessed culture threatens to make printed phone directories extinct. If that happens, one side-effect will be the extinction of alphabetization as a necessary life skill, joining multiplication tables and longhand division in the scrap heap of things it turns out we didn’t need to learn in elementary school. Of course, I’m the wrong person to bemoan this kind of modernization; I still hate it that crappy solar-powered calculators displaced the noble and elegant slide rule. Alas, trusty K & E Deci-Lon slide rule, I knew thee well.

The good news, though, is that the two categories of ads/listings I most like to monitor, the canaries in the mine of self-aggrandizement if you will, attorneys and churches, have also declined. Attorney ads mortify me, maybe because I still live in the deluded belief that the practice of law is a dignified profession. But, when one local law firm can sponsor a TV ad that takes ambulance chasing to the new level of having its spokeslawyers arrive at the scene of an accident in a helicopter before the victims’ bodies have even been extricated from the wreckage, I guess I should be permanently disabused of that delusion.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised by the tactics lawyers use to get a competitive leg up in the dog-eat-dog legal world when, as it turns out, law schools, long one of the cash cows of the educational system, are apparently willing to do anything they have to to perpetuate the myth that a legal education is a guaranteed ticket to the brass ring. It seems appropriate, then, that there are fewer attorney ads in the Yellow Pages this year than last. That is a tectonic shift, especially since this is the first year, in my experience, that’s happened, and should make a lot of lawyer bashers happy.

In a related development, there are roughly half as many churches listed in the Yellow Pages this year than last. I haven’t figured out how to account for that, though. Is it further proof of what Fox News types call the attack on religion, or a reflection of the fact that atheism has become
increasingly popular, even if it doesn’t yet have its own Yellow Pages listing. Whatever the reason, is there anyone who doesn’t believe there are too many churches in this town, and not enough to show for it? It’s not like, thanks to churches, poverty in Memphis is on the verge of being eradicated.

I remember how disheartened I was when I first came to Memphis to find out there were more pages of the directory devoted to churches than to lawyers. Maybe that was because, in many denominations, it’s much easier to become a preacher than it is to become a lawyer. I have yet to understand the contradiction between the high number of churches and the high divorce, child pregnancy and crime rates we suffer from. I guess repression still isn’t selling very well, even though religion is one of the products that benefits the most from a campaign of fear. Oh well, if being threatened with eternal damnation isn’t enough to turn folks into believers, maybe, with the right ad campaign, it can be enough to turn them into shoppers.

Joining the pantheon of famous people doing infamous things because they can (e.g., Bill Clinton’s explanation for the Lewinsky episode), we learned, over the Christmas holiday weekend, that Hugh Hefner had become engaged to his latest girlfriend , Crystal Harris (a/k/a Miss December 2009). Hef, the titular (sorry, I couldn’t resist) head of the Playboy empire, and ever the roué (a word that was probably coined to describe him), thus continues his reputation for lechery, choosing a 24-year-old to be his latest wife (surprisingly, only his third), at the ripe old age of 84.

You have to wonder, though: what could the guy be thinking? I mean, is he not the classic case of someone who doesn’t need to buy the cow when he gets the milk for free? This is a guy who, at various times, has had a whole dairy at his disposal. Why, in heaven’s name would he need to get married? Please tell us it’s not because he’s planning to have another family, the first new addition to which he might, if he’s lucky, survive long enough to see graduate from kindergarten. And, it’s not like he’s a great prospect either. On the faithfulness scale, he ranks somewhere between Wilt Chamberlain and Tiger Woods. Nor is it likely his bride-to-be has tapped the mother lode. I can only imagine how air tight their pre-nup is going to be.

So, does this announcement deserve an “attaboy” or an “ick?” Frankly, I’m torn between repulsion and jealousy. What can you say about a man marrying a woman who’s 60 years his junior? It verges on something that ought to be illegal, don’t you think, almost a form of pedophilia. Well, at least it’s not as eww-inspiring as the 63 year difference between the 23-year-old Anna Nicole Smith (coincidentally, a Hef protégée) and her barely sentient 89-year-old oil tycoon husband, the aftermath of which is still wending its way through the judicial system.

But, of course, Hef must be judged by a different standard. Although in some ways he’s a relic of a bygone era (some might even say an anachronism), his honored place in the history of our culture is assured, in part precisely because of his iconoclastic disdain for conventional mores. We owe much to him for his largely successful crusade against the prudishness that characterized the U.S. in the early part of the last century, and spawned the kind of suppression we saw right here in River City with the likes of Lloyd Binford and his Memphis Censor Board.

Hef is less well known for his equally praiseworthy role in resisting Jim Crow laws, opening his clubs to mixed racial patronage in places where that was explicitly forbidden, or giving black performers exposure on his pre-civil rights TV show, “Playboy After Dark”. In addition to resisting the sexual repression of the 50’s and 60’s, he did something else that will forever endear him to me: he featured my all-time favorite sex symbol (NSFW), Marilyn Monroe, in the first issue of his magazine. Were it not for that, we might never have gotten to see her in what has to be the most provocative costume ever worn in a film, the one she wore in the seduction scene on the yacht (with Tony Curtis) in “Some Like It Hot” (which apparently got the film banned in Kansas City).

It’s cruelly ironic, but also a tribute to his foresight, that Hef’s success at loosening the bonds of an overly restrictive attitude towards sexual material was itself largely responsible for presaging the decline of the magazine he founded, which may be why he oversaw Playboy’s diversification into other ventures. Playboy magazine reached the height of its popularity in the 70’s, and has declined, at least in circulation, ever since. Who needs Playboy for titillation (sorry), whose boldest venture into prurient exhibitionism was its revelation of a glimpse of pubic hair in 1968, when (I’m told) the internet now makes all manner of full-on pornography available, 24/7, at the touch of a mouse. No longer need men riffle furtively through “skin” magazines at the news stand, or have “girlie” mags delivered by mail in plain brown wrappers when every imaginable form of aberrant sexual behavior, and many unimaginable ones, are so readily available, essentially gratis.

And yet, in spite of constantly being on the verge of irrelevance, Hef has always managed to evade his own obsolescence by repeatedly reinventing himself. He remains the object of curiosity, as demonstrated by the international attention to this latest development in his personal life, but also enough so that he is a central character in a current TV “reality” show ostensibly devoted to the lives of his girlfriends, yet revolving substantially in his penumbra. And let’s not forget that this is the guy who, way before things like “pajamas media,” invented the idea you could be a corporate magnate while clad in bed clothes.

I owe a personal debt of gratitude to Hef. He and I go way back, you see. His magazine (or at least one of the photos in it), which I obviously looked at primarily for the articles, facilitated my epiphany as a pubescent teen that the male organ served more than one function. Later in life, I had occasion to meet him in my official, governmental capacity. I remember being disappointed not only by his diminutive (5′ 9″) stature and the vulgar stretch limo in which he and his entourage pulled up to my building, but also by the floozie who accompanied him, not playmate material by a longshot. One thing I did not do, however, on that occasion was thank him for helping me to (ahem) come of age.

Something very rare occurred in Washington, D.C. this past week, and it passed substantially under the radar because of the media’s obsession du jour which, this time, was leaks by geeks (not to mention bonanzas for billionaires). No, I don’t mean Republicans decided to stop screwing the American public—-hey, I said very rare, not inconceivable.

What I mean is that a federal official, one of very few (other than presidents) who can be constitutionally removed from office only by impeachment, was, in fact, removed from office by impeachment. This was the first time that’s happened in over twenty years, and in the entire history of the republic, going back to 1789, only the eighth, and was a very significant milestone for our constitutional system proving, as sunshine patriots love to say, that our system works. The problem they overlook in saying that is that, in this respect, our system doesn’t work often enough.

The official who was removed was a federal judge,G. Thomas Porteous, Jr., who, until last week, was a judge in the Eastern District of Louisiana. He was found guilty of a laundry list of offenses.

Federal district judges (not magistrates, bankruptcy judges, or administrative law judges), you see, are given lifetime tenure, or at least for as long as they exhibit “good behavior,” and, like presidents, can only be removed from office by the impeachment process, meaning presentment of articles of impeachment by the House of Representatives, and trial on those charges by the U.S. Senate, for “high crimes and misdemeanors.” You remember that phrase, don’t you? In a president’s case it means getting a BJ in the Oval Office, while for everyone else it apparently means murdering Mother Teresa in front of thirty bishops.

To put the rarity of this event even further in context, there are 2.6 million federal civilian employees, including district judges, in the federal government (and that doesn’t count an additional 3 million military employees), and of that huge number, the only 875 who are given life tenure are—-you guessed it—-federal judges, from the district/trial level all the way up to the Supreme Court. That means that of the thousands of federal judges who have served in that capacity in the last 220 years (one web site reckons the number as being in the 3,000 range, though I think it’s closer to twice that, given the average tenure of a federal judge), only eight have been removed from that office because of their conduct or behavior.

In addition to those eight, there have been 13 who have been impeached by the House, but, for one reason or another (acquittal or voluntary resignation—-if you can call resigning in the face of an impeachment trial “voluntary”) weren’t removed by the Senate.

An impeachment rate of .04%, and a removal rate of .02%, is an amazing statistic, if you think about it, especially considering the high standards federal judges are expected to maintain, and the many temptations to stray from the straight and narrow their powerful position offers them (temptations Judge Porteous obviously couldn’t resist). It beats the law of average, by a long shot. Popes would probably have a higher impeachment rate, if they could be impeached. Have so few federal judges been impeached and/or removed because, as a group, they have maintained such a high standard of integrity, or is it because the bar for their removal has been set so impossibly high?

The founding fathers made federal judges lifetime appointees supposedly to remove them from the influences of politics and public pressure, and yet we’ve learned that being appointed by the leader of one of the two major political parties and confirmed in a frequently brutal political process (did I hear someone say “Borked?”) by the Senate, and having your salary (which, unlike other federal employees, is constitutionally prohibited from being reduced) be set and adjusted by that same body, doesn’t exactly assure imperviousness to political influence. If nothing else did so, the Supreme Court’s decision in Bush v. Gore taught us that.

Indeed, studies of the federal judiciary have concluded that the party affiliation of the president who appoints them is often predictive of how federal judges will decide particular cases, something most followers of decisions by the federal judiciary in controversial cases have always known. Justices Roberts, Scalia, Thomas and Alito have proven that too, haven’t they?

In general, judges at the trial level, both state and federal (state more so than federal, given the more common kinds of cases the state court system handles), have more sheer, raw power over our day-to-day lives than virtually any other public official. Neophyte police officers may be the most powerful official of all, since they can, even if only temporarily, impair your freedom of movement, and have the ability to kill people, legally. But they can’t cause all of your money or property to be seized, as a judge can, sentence you to be removed from society for vast lengths of time, or even have you snuffed.

What goes along with power in our society, though, or at least is supposed to, is accountability. There are, of course, notable exceptions (George Bush and Dick Cheney, for authorizing torture, immediately come to mind), and it is generally recognized that the ultimate accountability for fucking up at work is the loss of their job. For many governmental officials this happens at the ballot box, and for others in the ordinary course of their employment. But not so for federal judges.

Impeachment, as it turns out, is not the only source of accountability for these judges. There is, in fact, a disciplinary procedure for them that is short of that rarified procedure. Under a somewhat recent federal statute, complaints may be made to the chief judge of the federal circuit in which the allegedly offending judge sits. Ask John Q. Public, though, what a federal circuit is and your answer is more likely to be an electrical device than a judicial subdivision.

The rest of the process is somewhat obscure and convoluted. The rules governing the procedure to file a complaint — good luck finding them — can vary from circuit to circuit, and many would be difficult for the average aggrieved layman to follow even if s/he could find them. They involve such byzantine-sounding administrative bodies as judicial councils, special committees, and something called the Judicial Conference.

Arcane as this federal judicial disciplinary process is, three features of it come shining through: first, unlike state courts and most other professions or occupations, federal judges are self-policing (except, of course, for impeachment); second, the disciplinary process, from start to finish, is hidden from the public (accountability, good; transparency, bad), and third, precious few of the complaints ever result in any discipline, and if they do, thanks to the secrecy of the proceedings, almost no one ever hears about it. More than one legal commentator has bemoaned the inadequacy of judicial discipline at the federal level.

Don’t get me wrong: I have the utmost respect for federal judges, and have had the privilege of practicing before many distinguished ones all over the country, including one of the most famous in his day, “Maximum John” Sirica, who took on President Nixon in a well-known episode of the Watergate drama. Some of my best friends have even been federal judges. For instance, my boss when I worked for the federal government, Stanley Sporkin, went on to a distinguished career on the federal bench, coincidentally, the same one as Judge Sirica sat on.

One of my all-time favorites was Robert McRae, the now-deceased, curmudgeonly judge who is most famous for desegregating the Memphis city schools in 1972, for whom I have great affection in spite of the fact that he was fond of asking lawyers (including this one, when they made what he thought was a ridiculous legal argument, what law school they had gone to.

I’m grateful for the federal judicial system. It is one of the most comprehensive, well-developed, readily-available sources of jurisprudence we have in this country, and believe me, as someone who’s spent many an hour in law libraries leafing through dusty tomes trying to find good, albeit occasionally ancient, Tennessee law, I appreciate that aspect of the federal system. Its judges, appointed and confirmed as they are by a rigorous, even if sometimes too political, process (but one that, still and all, is far preferable to the election of judges by a more-often-than-not totally uninformed electorate), represent some of the finest examples of their discipline. They are not, however, infallible.

The story is told about the figure in a black robe, carrying a gavel, who breaks into the front of an interminable line at the pearly gates. One standee in the line asks another, “who was that,” to which the reply is, “oh, that’s God; he likes to pretend he’s a federal judge once in a while.” Ask any lawyer who has practiced regularly in federal court, and they’ll tell you they’ve seen federal judges run amok (none in this judicial district, of course), just as judges in any venue are capable of doing, so it is a matter of concern to many that mere mortals who are given so much power, and for so long, are held to so little in the way of accountability. I’ve even heard federal judges themselves rue the absence of accountability in their rarified bailiwick, suggesting that it impairs their credibility.

The wisdom of lifetime appointments for federal judges has come under increasing attack in our politically divisive environment, with diatribes, both from the right and the left, about “judicial activism,” “legislating from the bench,” and the like, which is frequently the reaction from whichever side of the political spectrum takes more umbrage at a ruling. I don’t favor tinkering with the Constitution, for any reason, so I wouldn’t want to see lifetime tenure eliminated. I wouldn’t mind it, though, if in the next 220 years impeachment of federal judges wasn’t quite as rare as it’s been in the last 220.

Some things happened this past week that reminded me how far we have yet to go in this country to have the best health care system money can buy.

One of our guests at Thanksgiving told a story of a relative’s recent experience at the hands of that system. It seems she was hospitalized for pains that ended up being gall stones, but in the process of diagnosis and treatment, she contracted an infection (an alarmingly common occurrence in hospitals) and had to receive IV medication.

In a classic case of the cure being worse than the disease, an improperly inserted IV line caused a blood clot that migrated to her brain, which caused her to have a stroke (something, amazingly enough, the hospital even admitted, maybe because the victim is one of its management employees). The story reminded me of how frequently we hear about injuries, or even death, in hospitals as a result of “complications.” Only the health care system could categorize death as a complication.

This story came on the heels of the publication (under-reported, as always) of the results of a multi-year study of the rate at which patients are harmed by medical care.

The study, published the day after Thanksgiving in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, though reported in the national media, wasn’t even reported in our fair city since it was apparently of less concern than what was happening at airline checkpoints.

It confirmed what an expose of medical mistakes, ten years ago, revealed about how frequently medical care kills us, and less than a week after the government issued its own report regarding Medicare patients which showed that “adverse events” contribute over $4 billion to the cost of health care and to the deaths of 180,000 patients a year.

I had to read that number twice to make sure my eyesight wasn’t deceiving me. That’s like losing the population of Knoxville or Salt Lake City, every year!

People, people: our health care system is killing us at an alarming rate, and everyone’s worried about being felt up by a stranger at the airport? Where’s the outrage? Can you imagine what would happen if airplane accidents, or for that matter even terrorism, killed as many people as medical care does? Airline executives would be in jail and who knows how many more wars we would be launching.

You’re far more likely to die in the place you go to avoid (or at least prolong) that fate than you are from exploding shoes or underwear, but guess which one gets more attention?

I’ve been an avid observer of the pass the health care industry seems to get from our society for so many of its failings (and no, I don’t handle malpractice cases in my law practice). We have one of the most expensive health care systems in the world, so you’d think we’d also have one of the best to go along with that. After all, you get what you pay for, right?

Well, it turns out that by any standard, we’re not getting what we pay for because the quality of medical care in this country is substantially below most other industrialized countries, on any of a number of criteria.

So, now that the Republicans and tea party whackadoodles are in power in Washington and so many state capitals, what can we expect from them to make health care safer? Why, of course, an attempt to repeal one of the biggest single advancements in health care in this country in 50 years (what they dismissively call “Obamacare”), and their perennial drum beat for “tort reform,” because everyone knows it’s not doctors and hospitals that are killing us by the tens of thousands, it’s malpractice suits.

For conservatives, there is no problem, whether it’s a broken financial system or a broken health care system, that can’t be effectively dealt with by denying it exists, or better yet, by preventing anything effective from being done about it. All I can say is, do your best to stay well, my friends, because as a society, we’re about to get a lot sicker.

If the battle over health care “reform” this past year has taught us anything, it’s that Republicans are much better at getting their people to toe the “party line” than Democrats are. Democrats are like a bunch of feral cats, wary of any kind of discipline, who aren’t as interested in loyalty to their party’s principles as they are in preserving their own turf. As result, just like cats, they’re hard to herd. Just look at what happened in both the House and Senate with several Democrats telling their party to go fuck itself on healthcare reform. Democrats are a headstrong lot. Will Rogers immortalized that when he famously said he wasn’t a member of any organized political party, he was a Democrat.

Republicans, on the other hand are a lot more like sheep; they fall into line behind their leaders, whether that be Rush Limbaugh or John Boehner, and are always dependably “on message” when it comes to spewing the party line. As I listen to the likes of Marsha (“Tennessee Barbie”) Blackburn or Eric (“Stray Bullet”) Cantor, it makes me wonder whether the Republicans have figured out how to transmit subliminal messages to their members, or perhaps have implanted a chip in them that makes them robotically mouth their party’s talking points. In any event, their pliability makes them, obviously, much easier to herd than the Democrats.

Republicans have no equivalent to the Democrats’ “blue dogs.” With Arlen Specter’s recent attempt to seek asylum from the Democrats, the term “moderate Republican” has become an oxymoron. They certainly have no equivalent to someone like Joe Lieberman. The closest anyone’s come to Joe’s attempted self-immolation by actively campaigning against his party’s nominee for the presidency in 2008, is Zell Miller (surprise, surprise—-also a Democrat), the whacko who supported George Bush over John Kerry in 2004. Who can forget when Miller challenged Chris Matthews, the MSNBC blowhard, to a duel, a challenge Matthews probably deserved, but one that Miller’s party probably would have preferred not be on national television. Neither Miller nor Lieberman suffered any punishment or retribution from their own party for their arguably treasonous acts. Lieberman even got to keep his committee chairmanship, for chrissakes. Democrats are so nice, aren’t they?

If a Republican, on the other hand, strays too far from his party’s ideology (and I’m just talking about straying, not freaking out, like by endorsing the opposing party’s candidate), one way or another, he feels the party’s wrath. Neither Republicans nor their ideological icons brook anything that even remotely resembles criticism. Remember how abjectly several Republicans apologized after they had the temerity to utter critical remarks about their titular leader, Rush Limbaugh? No sir, no Republican can criticize his party, or its idols, and expect to get away with it.

So, what happened to reliably conservative commentator David Frum after the health care bill was signed into law was no surprise. Frum, the former speech writer for Bush II, had the balls to suggest that the Republicans had made a fundamental mistake in their “just say no” approach to health care. He received a lot of media exposure for saying that the Waterloo Republicans hoped health care reform would be for Obama would end up being their own epitaph. Frum’s punishment for this seditious act was swift and unequivocal: he was unceremoniously dumped from his position with the right-wing think tank, the American Enterprise Institute.

Now, David Frum has achieved (and deserves) a modicum of sainthood in conservative circles. He did, after all, put words in George Bush’s mouth (most notably, the famously inane ones, “axis of evil”), and that was no mean feat, considering how badly Bush mangled many of those words. Telling George Bush what to say must have been like telling Prince Mongo what to wear. Frum was such an iconic conservative, he was even on the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, the fertile crescent of conservatism, and yet, so total was his excommunication as a result of his spasm of disloyalty that even that publication saw fit to call him “the media’s go-to basher of fellow Republicans.” Republicans are so mean, aren’t they? Oh well, I’m sure he can find a sinecure with some liberal media outlet as its token pundit, like David Brooks or Ross Douthat at the New York Times, or Charles Krauthammer at the Washington Post. I mean, after all, look at all the liberal commentators Fox “News” or the Washington Times have, right?

Frum’s downfall is a familiar fate for Republicans who don’t fall into line. Paul O’Neill, Bush’s first treasury secretary, suffered a
similar consequence by dint of his disloyalty, as did General Eric Shinseki for differing with Bush about the Iraq war. The Republicans still haven’t forgiven Florida Governor Charlie Crist for his show of affection for Obama. And now, Tennessee’s very own Bob Corker is in danger of suffering the consequences for criticizing his own party’s handling of the financial regulatory reform law now working its way through Congress, and indicating he might support it in spite of his party’s slavish obedience to the financial services industry. Now, that’d be a corker, wouldn’t it?
‘
The moral of the story? For Republicans, it’s if you have any ideas of your own, dummy up about them,’ and for Democrats it’s ‘you can learn a lot from dummies.’

HE’S B-A-A-A-CK!

You know how bugs are irresistibly attracted to light? I admit: I’m the same way when it comes to Tiger Woods. So, when he turned on his light bulb this week by announcing that he was coming back to the golfing scene, and no less than at that grandiose event, “The Masters” (don’t you just love it when one of the many fat old white men who run the event intones that name—-in his finest “Joe-ja” accent—-during the broadcast?), I couldn’t help myself—-I had to go towards the light.

Obviously, I’m not alone: every media outlet, from the Wall Street Journal to the Hindustan Times, flogged the story on their online front page. Hey, who cares about stories that have foregone conclusions, like health care “reform” (hint: follow the money), when we can watch the soap opera Tiger Woods has become and wonder about its ending.

Tiger’s story, thus far, has been taken from Greek mythology. Is Tiger Dionysus (a/k/a Bacchus, the inventor of orgies), or maybe Oedipus (did you see the way he hugged his mother after his “press conference”)? And, will he return, triumphal, to his throne atop the professional golf world, like Achilles (did I hear someone say “heel”) returning from the Trojan (something else, like discretion, Tiger has no use for) War, or will he, like Icarus, fall to earth having flown too high, a victim of his own hubris (itself, a concept of ancient Greek origin). His subjects await, with baited breath.

Will he stage a successful comeback in Augusta, or will he, like he did at Turnberry, implode yet again? Of course, we now know why he faltered so dramatically at the British Open last year: he had, shall we say, too many irons in the fire (and not enough on the links). It’s hard (so to speak) to keep track of getting the ball in the hole on the golf course when you’ve got who knows how many skanks back at the hotel waiting for you to do something similar with them.

We’re about to see whether Tiger’s lengthy sojourn at a sex rehab clinic in Hattiesburg (I suspect a few weeks in Hattiesburg will make you swear off of more than just indiscriminate sex) had an effect on anything besides his obsession with cheap women. My bet is, unless Elin has figured out a way of adapting a chastity belt to Tiger’s gonads, or convinced him that her clubhead speed has significantly increased since the first time she used one of his “rescue” clubs to rescue him from his delusion that she didn’t know about his indiscretions, sooner or later Tiger will prowl again.

I’m intrigued both by the similarities, and the differences, between Tiger and another fallen golfing idol, John Daly. The major difference between them, of the many, is that Daly has both a sense of humor and of irony about himself, and about his rise and fall in the world of professional golf, whereas Tiger, by all outward appearances, has neither. Both of them are, in some ways, tragic characters, but Daley at least realizes it.

It has been said of Daly that he owes his popularity to being perceived as the “every man” of golf, someone whose foibles and excesses endear him to his followers, not because they suffer from the same, or even similar, impairments (though some do), but because they see in him the imperfection and vulnerability we all suffer from. This is something we could never say about Tiger.

Up until recently, the thought that the words “imperfect” or “vulnerable” could be uttered in the same story, much less sentence, about Tiger was unthinkable. And there, of course, is where Tiger’s redemption lays (if we’re speaking of his peccadilloes) or lies (if we’re speaking of golf), in the eyes of his many acolytes. Jesus won’t help him (sorry, Brit Hume), and neither will that master of deception he’s reportedly hired to help him restore his reputation, Ari Fleischer (which is like someone hiring Jeffrey Dahmer to advise them on their diet). Ari, being who he is, and who he’s worked for, obviously played a role in Tiger’s decision to lie when he told the world, barely over three weeks ago, that he “just didn’t know when that day [returning to golf] would be.”

Of course he knew he was going to play in The Masters when he said that. Can anyone seriously doubt that? Gee, thanks, Ari, for at least being consistent.

So, while playing golf like he used to may go part of the way to restoring his image (and I’m still not discounting the prospect of disquieting—-to Tiger—-albeit soto voce, snickers and catcalls from the Masters galleries), until he makes us believe that he understands he’s both imperfect and vulnerable, and stops trying to BS us, like he did with that snickering-up-his-sleeve, born-again, mea-sorta-culpa he tried to run down on us a few weeks ago, he will continue to be seen as damaged goods in the eyes of anyone, including fans and sponsors, who recognizes the difference between contrition and hubris.

Tiger Woods’ appearance before TV cameras to chant his mea culpa was, you must admit, more than a bit bizarre. Here was one of the most recognized faces in the world, one of the most successful athletes (and brands) in the world, one of the most admired, followed, emulated, praised, glorified, extolled human beings in the world doing the one thing nothing in his life up until that moment had readied him for: looking (much less being) humble. I’m sorry, but to my ears, the phonograph needle made an ugly scratching noise while that record was being played.

Nothing about Tiger, not his upbringing by a father who made him believe he was destined for one-of-a-kind greatness, not a sport that made him believe it didn’t matter how often he threw a tantrum (or a club) on the golf course, not a sports media that apparently knew, but refused to report, that the public persona of the man and his behavior behind closed doors were two very different things, and not a fan base that made him believe he was “da man” or that every time he hit the ball it was destined to go “in the hole,” could have ever been conducive to convincing Tiger to consume the large slice of humble pie his handlers finally convinced him to eat in front of the world on Friday.

None of the clubs in Tiger’s bag of tricks is labeled shame or contrition, so is it any wonder he seemed so uncomfortable during his “forgive-me-for-I-have-sinned” spiel that he had to read from a prepared script, or that in spite of the obviously painstaking preparations that preceded the carefully staged event, he still managed to mangle that reading?

If sincerity is measured in pained expressions, halting speech or well-timed, piercing glances into a TV camera, then yes, Tiger passed the sincerity test. But then again, every actor who is coached to deliver lines and communicate by body language that he is someone other than the person delivering those lines must pass the same sincerity test. That doesn’t mean we don’t recognize the actor is playing a role, rather than actually experiencing a transformative moment. Unlike an actor playing a role, we didn’t have to suspend disbelief while listening to one of the world’s cockiest personalities try to come across as self-deprecating, but it certainly would have helped.

And No, I, for one, don’t believe that Tiger’s hasty turkey-night retreat in his SUV, at 2:30 AM, shoeless, and insentient enough to require his wife to turn a “rescue” club into a double entendre wasn’t the result of, shall we say, domestic intemperance, if not outright violence, immediately beforehand. Suffice it to say, there will be no Academy Award nomination forthcoming for best performance by a philandering superstar in a humiliating role for this going-through-the-motions appearance.

As for his plea for privacy, and the claim by many that his behavior is a matter strictly between him and his wife, my response is, nothing Tiger has done in his life since his father first finagled his two-year-old phenom’s appearance on a national TV show, has been private, so why should anything since then be? You can’t make yourself into the richest athlete of all time by creating an image of yourself, on the golf course or in the media, expect people to buy what you make all that money trying to sell them, and then claim that anything you do that gives the lie to that image isn’t a legitimate object of public scrutiny, and yes, even scorn.

Tiger’s demeanor at his coming-out event was as phony and contrived as was the staging he engineered to convince us otherwise. Did any of us really expect one of the hand-chosen people who played the role of audience at this event to blurt out (a la the State of the Union speech incident), “You lie,” during his prolonged apologia, or to hold up a sign (a la the PETA incident during the recent Westminster Kennel Club dog show) that read “faithful husbands rule?” I couldn’t help but wonder how much money Tiger was responsible for putting in those folks’ pockets. Suffice it to say, they were bought and paid for.

And so, too, were the shills who played the role of “journalists,” who, contrary to everything journalism is supposed to stand for, prostituted themselves by capitulating to Tiger’s refusal to answer questions just so they could say they had been there.

Tiger’s image-repair tour has now touched all the familiar bases. Apologize, enter rehab (not necessarily in that order) and, most importantly, claim to be born again. Just like every guy who gets caught with his hand in the cookie jar (or his you-know-what in the you-know-where), Tiger’s declared rediscovery of Buddhism would probably be the least believable of all his efforts at redemption, were it not for the convenient fact that one of the tenets of Buddhism, unlike the religion touted by some as a pre-requisite for his redemption (eat your heart out, Britt Hume), is reincarnation. Sadly, though, for Tiger, the reincarnation he needs, namely a rebirth of respect and regard for him as something more than just a remarkable golfer, isn’t likely to be the rebirth he gets.