She Speaks With Authority

I have avoided spending one minute reading any story during the past few weeks about the JonBenet Ramsey case. Then Dorothy Rabinowitz wrote one. Dorothy is the courageous lady who has brought to light the absurd convictions of sex offenders in Washington state and in our own Commonweath’s well-tarnished courts. Key points:

A star television lineup of forensic specialists, lawyers and similar advisers in high-profile cases added their doubts that John Karr could have committed the crime. All told, a tale whose wild improbabilities were obvious--one that seemed to violate the laws of time, space and reason itself--had been, with few exceptions, roundly rejected. A pity--or so some witnessing this bracing display of skepticism must have thought--that so little of that showed itself when Americans by the score were prosecuted, convicted and carted off to do 40 or 60 years, or life in prison, on the basis of child sex abuse testimony far more obviously at odds with reality than anything in John Karr's own bizarre confession…

It was impossible, during the last weeks of the John Karr drama, not to be reminded of the bitterness of this saga--the books written, the libel suits filed and, not least, the unsolved murder. Impossible not to be reminded, too, of what the prosperous and influential Ramseys could achieve, by way of legal protection. Impossible to imagine, either, any one of those scores of accused citizens of modest means, facing investigations of child abuse filed by ambitious prosecutors, doing what the Ramseys could do--namely, refuse to meet with police and submit to questioning other than on their own terms.

It is possible no one will ever know who killed JonBenet Ramsey. We can know, with certainty, as that case among others has proved, how much legal protection enough money can buy.

An Inconvenient Dissent

Kudos for Alex Beam's column today on a harrassed dissident scientist at MIT. I missed it.

The scientist, professor of meterology Richard Lindzen, is harrassed because he dissents from leftist orthodoxy with respect to the causes of global warming. (Hat Tip: Insta)

There Must be a Cloud Here Somewhere!

Whenever a Globe writer is surrounded by a silver lining, he struggles desperately to find a cloud. A fine example is a story on the back page of today’s Boston Globe. It reports on statistics released Monday by the US Census Bureau.

Here are the statistical rankings reported by the story for Massachusetts compared with other states :

• Median household income 5^th
• Male income 3^rd
• Female income 5^th
• Gender income equality 13^th
• Overall poverty rate 39^th
• “Deep poverty” rate 42^nd

Yet the headline of the story is ‘Poverty extends its grasp in the affluent Bay State’. The tone of the story is relentlessly gloomy and the first sentence is:

Massachusetts households had a median income of $57,184 last year, remaining the nation's fifth highest earners, but the state faces discouraging trends in its poverty levels, according to federal data released yesterday.

Excuse me, but I refuse to be discouraged by these statistics or by their ‘trend’. Perhaps the reporter who wrote this story should be sentenced to a 1-year educational sabbatical in a state that ranks near the bottom of these same income statistics.

Thanks to NewsBusters.org

I do not read Globe editorials unless I need a free substitute for syrup of Ipecac. But Newsbusters read today’s Globe editorial on immigration. The logic behind the Globe’s editorial is as elusive as ever. Newsbusters summarizes it well:

Great way to discourage illegal immigration - raise the pay of people who manage to sneak into the country.

You can bet that aspect of their solution is never considered within the Globe editorial cloister.

BTW this Globe’s editorial refers to the immigration situation in Hazelton, PA, a story which the Globe has never covered itself but did reprint an LA Times story, prompting this post.

Undertheorized

It’s the August doldrums on the Boston Globe Op Ed page, and to try to stir up a little excitement today’s paper devotes 3 Op Ed columns and an editorial to the 1^st anniversary of Hurricane Katrina (“It’s Bush’s fault!”). The silliest Op Ed piece is by one Margaret Morganroth Gullette, whose byline states that she is:

a resident scholar at the Women's Studies Research Center at Brandeis University and a contributor to the book ‘There Is No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster: Race, Class, and Hurricane Katrina.’

Her Op Ed column reports:

Ageism, the bias against midlife and older people, comes in many forms, from indifference to aversion to hostility to gerontophobia. Inattention and ignorance -- simple failures to recognize the particular risks to senior citizens -- can compound the potential harm during a crisis. Ageism contributed to those terrible deaths in imaginable and unknown ways. With global warming producing more frequent hurricanes and heat waves that are especially deadly to the elderly, we must learn the lessons of Katrina.

Yes indeed. Not just Katrina, either, lady. Have you noticed that the Grim Reaper has the nasty habit of picking on old folks far out of proportion to their share in the population? Something should be done about it! Why hasn’t George Bush even mentioned this?

If being a resident scholar on Ageism at a Brandeis Women’s Studies Research Center sounds like a job free from heavy lifting (of any kind!), the lady’s website will explain her research agenda in more detail.

Age Studies, named only in 1993, is undertheorized. Its practitioners need a heightened sense of unity, to sharpen debate. Theorists who are not utilizing age might ask what epistemic firewalls--to use a term of Margaret Urban Walker's--impede them. How old is their implied subject? Does she ever age? Noticing that diverse theorists are youthfully busy "double-crossing" and "defying" phallogocentrism , causing "trouble," being "unruly," "messing up" margins and center, can we spot another reason why they do not confer on "older" women, despite their being multiply Othered, either transgressive chic or compelling abjectness?

Physics is undertheorized, too. But that fact doesn’t bother most universities today nearly as much as academic horrors such as undertheorization in the field of Age Studies. I believe the lady means to paraphrase Admiral Farragut: “Damn the phallogogentric epistemic firewalls: full speed ahead!

Her term 'underthorized' reminds me of the title (and subject) of one of Robert Frost's later poems:

Etherealizing

A theory if you hold it hard enough
And long enough gets rated as a creed:
Such as that flesh is something we can slough
So that the mind can be entirely freed.
Then when the arms and legs have atrophied,
And brain is all that's left of mortal stuff,
We can lie on the beach with the seaweed
And take our daily tide baths smooth and rough.
There once we lay as blobs of jellyfish
At evolution's opposite extreme.
But now as blobs of brain we'll lie and dream,
With only one vestigial creature wish:
Oh, may the tide be soon enough at high
To keep our abstract verse from being dry.

~ Robert Frost

One other thing: One institution that has been most friendly to mid-life and old foks is the tenure-track faculty in academia. The histogram above shows the age distribution of faculty at a large midwestern university in 1986 and again 1996. So while friendly to aging 1960s radicals, younger PhDs might reasonably find the present academy to be a "hostile environment".

"We'll Always Have Paris!"

Boston blogger/professor Richard Landes has been stuck in Paris for weeks while getting ready for his testimony in a French trial beginning September 14 on the Al Durah affair. Weeks and weeks in Paris getting ready! A dirty job, but somebody has to do it (and where was I standing when that tasty assignment was handed out?).

It just occurred to me that the recent Mideast war featured so much staged and Photoshopped news photography that the unmasking of these media charades has set the scene perfectly for a trial on Al Durah. Anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists should take note.

Readers without a clue about the above are invited to see this post at LGF about the Reuters photos, EU Referendum’s report on the “Qana” incident, and Zombietime’s chronology of the Lebanese ambulance story, which prominently features our own Boston Globe.

Besides brushing up on Al Durah, Richard should be trolling www.google.fr and YouTube to find out how the defendant in the trial and his employer (reporter Charles Enderlin and France2 TV) have covered these more recent media non-events.

A Native American Idyll

A Reuters story in today’s Boston Globe celebrates archeological findings showing that Aztecs resisted the Spanish conquest of their land.

Resistance indeed! The article, in the exuberance of this discovery, glosses over some of the practices of their resistance which do not mesh with today’s rose-colored view of an idyllic Native American culture. Snippets:

Skeletons found at an unearthed site in Mexico show that Aztecs captured, ritually sacrificed, and ate parts of several hundred people traveling with invading Spanish forces in 1520.

Skulls and bones from the Tecuaque archeological site near Mexico City show that about 550 victims had their hearts ripped out by Aztec priests in ritual offerings. Many were dismembered or had their bones boiled or scraped clean, scientists say…

After their capture, the prisoners were kept in cages for months while Aztec priests selected a few each day at dawn, held them down on a sacrificial slab, cut out their hearts, and offered them up to various Aztec gods…“It was a continuous sacrifice over six months. While the prisoners were listening to their companions being sacrificed, the next ones were being selected,” [archeologist Enrique] Martinez said, standing in his lab amid boxes of bones, some of young children.

Contemplate the fate of those people for a moment and recall that some were children. Isn’t it strange that our ‘progressive’ culture is so quick to condemn the behavior and attitudes of 16^th century Conquistadors as archaic and unsuited to our own enlightened 21^st century, while at the same time is so hesitant to pass judgment or even speak of Native American practices such as these that were far more barbaric?

Dumpster Diving

It is vacation time, and that shows in today’s Boston Globe, which is a strong sedative unless you are a devotee of the JonBenet Ramsey case.

But if we must descend to the level of the tabloids, today’s Globe offers a more delicious dive. This Bloomberg story on page D4 of the Globe business section discloses that Karen Kozlowski, 2^nd wife of the former Tyco CEO, has filed for divorce. The story has this highly inappropriate (but probably quite accurate) quote from a former Manhattan assistant DA.

“It's no surprise,” said John Moscow, a former Manhattan assistant district attorney who led New York's prosecution of Kozlowski. “The first wife put up the bail money. The first wife clearly had far more faith and confidence in him.”

Such remarks seem to me most inappropriate coming from a prosecutor, even a former prosecutor. Novelists are under no such constraint, however, and the situation brings to my mind this snippet from Tom Wolfe’s A Man in Full:

“Your first wife marries you for better or worse. Your second wife marries you for better.”

The Globe article carries the above picture from the 2^nd Mrs. Kozlowski’s 2001 birthday party in Sardinia – taken at the very moment that epitomizes fin de siècle corporate excess. It’s too bad that Tom Wolfe did not attend this event, featured in video at Kozlowski’s trial. He could have written a whole novel about it.

Actually, he did write a whole novel about it, it but the novel was published 15 years before the event.

Move Along Now

There are 2 articles on immigration in today’s Boston Globe. This seems to happen often. One is an LA Times story about Hazelton, PA, a city which recently passed an ordinance designed to encourage the city’s large number of illegal immigrants to move elsewhere:

On July 14, by a vote of 4 to 1, the city council passed his Illegal Immigration Relief Act, which suspends the license of any business that "employs, retains, aids, or abets" illegal immigrants; it imposes a fine of $1,000 per day on any landlord renting property to an illegal immigrant; and declares that all official city business be written in English only. People wishing to rent apartments in Hazleton will be required to apply for city residency licenses, which will only be granted after establishing citizenship.

The ordinance is now being challenged in court by the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund on the grounds that it infringes on the rights of the Federal government to regulate immigration. What the story does not say is that the executive branch of the Federal government has for years been unwilling to exercise its obligation to enforce existing immigration laws, a well know fact that encourages greater illegal immigration. The social and economic effects of illegal immigration are highly disproportionate, falling mainly on a few regions and communities within the country. Hence reactions like Hazelton’s.

Making the point is the 2^nd immigration story, written by Globe reporters, which reports on new data from the census bureau estimating that Massachusetts’ foreign-born population is rising while its overall population is falling. The story notes that slightly more than half of the immigrant population are non-citizens, which translates into 491,000 foreign-born non-citizens living in Massachusetts. The story also comes with a graphic showing the rise in immigrant population in a few cities (but not containing enough data for anybody to compare these to other cities):

About 14.4 percent of the state's population was foreign-born in 2005, up from about 12.2 percent in 2000, according to the census data. The number rose from 772,983 in 2000 to 891,184 last year, the data showed. About 55 percent of the immigrants in the state last year were not US citizens, though the census did not tabulate how many reside legally on work visas or other documents.

Of course we Bay Staters are far more sophisticated on the matter of absorbing immigrants than those country folk of Hazelton. If our Commonwealth experienced a sudden influx of immigrants from, say, Ireland, the natives would take it all in stride and you would find little animosity displayed toward them after only about 150 years.

Reporting for Duty

James Carroll certainly needed a vacation. A beautiful week spent going to the beach has flushed his mind of the excrement that normally pollutes his columns and replaced it with ocean reveries. Every year or so Carroll leaves his political axe at home and writes a superb column. Today's column is one such. Don’t miss it.

Today's Globe also features this perfect picture of a perfect day for the Falmouth Road Race.

Still Barding Around

Frost's Franconia Farmhouse

Barding Around

Still truant from my Boston Globe review duty, I am now spending 3 days “barding around” the former haunts of Robert Frost. Today in Amherst, Massachusetts and in the poet’s final resting place of Bennington, Vermont.

One sad note on the changing times in American colleges is the fate of the former fraternity houses at Amherst College, which were found to be too intolerably male to continue in existence and have been purged from campus life and converted into extraordinary college dorms. Sad to think of Frost visiting these houses for dinner and after-dinner conversation in another era. Our American culture is wildly intolerant of all-male institutions, regarding them merely as bastions of privilege that must be integrated. Amherst College graduated its first woman in 1976. The fraternities proved intolerable to a coed institution, I guess, and were shut down in 1982.