Better Angels

In Tennessee, it's not all bigots trying to keep Muslims out of their towns with bizarrely abusive lawsuits. In Cordova, Tennessee (that's not far from Memphis), a Christian church is allowing a startup Muslim community to use its facilities for worship until it can get its mosque built. The church put up a big sign saying "Welcome to the neighborhood." The pastor explains it thus: "What would Jesus do if He were us? He would welcome the neighbor." Damn right he would have.

Likewise, in Egypt, many Muslims have reacted with horror with attacks by terrorists on Christian worshipers. So some of them formed a human shield around their Christian neighbors going to celebrate Christmas Eve services.* This is as clear a message as I can think of -- if you nutjobs think you're doing Allah's work by killing Christians, you're not, and we Muslims will not allow you to pretend that you're only killing infidels. Take your Koran seriously, especially the prohibition against murder.

I am frequently critical of religion for being used as a justification for acts of outright evil. But these are selfless, challenging, and truly moral behaviors. They are done by people of good intent, good faith, and strong religious convictions, taking the best and most noble dictates of their religions truly to heart. They lead their respective coreligionists by sterling example. These people deserve to be recognized and praised; I offer that praise and appreciation here freely, and with a glad heart.


* Christmas for Coptic Christians does not take place at the same time as it is for Orthodox or Occidental Christians because the Coptic church never adopted the Gregorian calendar.

Murfreesboro Will Soon Have A New Mosque

I wrote a while back expressing moderate embarrassment at the bigoted attempts of a lawyer in Tennessee to stop a mosque from being built in the charming city Murfreesboro. Much as I (and quite a lot of other people, it's not like I was going very far out on a limb) had predicted, he has failed, and construction of the mosque will proceed. Recall that I found particularly off-putting was the decision of plaintiff's counsel Joe Brandon to question the County Mayor about whether he put a whip on the wall of his house as a warning to his wife and later beat her with it. Now, I can also call Mr. Brandon out for losing composure in the face of an adverse verdict:

Brandon had his hands on his face and at times was bent over the desk as the judge read his ruling. Afterward he briskly walked out of the courtroom without speaking to reporters.

Way to keep your poker face, Joe. Here's what you do when you lose a high-profile case: stand up and take your adverse ruling like a grownup with as neutral an expression on your face as you can muster, tell the reporters that you're disappointed and will confer with your clients about whether or not they will exercise their rights to appeal but no decision has been made yet, and slink off into the sweet goodnight from which hopefully you can derive more clients in the future to keep your personal injury, criminal defense, and family law practice viable. Oh, and good luck finding appellate issues on this one, dude; the Chancellor gave you all the rope you asked for.

All of us who litigate for a living have to learn the lesson of picking and choosing your cases carefully. Joe Brandon has, maybe, learned that lesson in a very public way. Who knows, maybe he's gained a political following for fighting the good fight even if he lost and one day he'll be a Rutherford County Commissioner or something like that. But the law wasn't on his side here and he allowed his personal distaste for Islam to blind him to that fact. One wonders if he had any friends who took him aside and told him that he was headed down a bad path and counseled him not to go forward. Or if he listened to them.

One Bad Tennessee Apple

One of the things that is most aggravating to me in court is when the judicial officer presiding over a hearing relinquishes control of proceedings to one of the parties – and when that party then uses that latitude from the bench to go off on rants about irrelevant matters which will not materially affect the outcome of the issues to be resolved. For a famous example of this, consider how the defense attorneys abused Judge Lance Ito like he was an inexperienced substitute teacher in the O.J. Simpson murder trial.

That’s apparently what is going on in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, where there is a trial going on in Chancery Court (what we in California would call a Superior Court hearing non-probate civil matters) concerning the building of a mosque at the hands of one Joe Brandon Jr., a member of the Tennessee State Bar who represents a group of plaintiffs who want to stop construction of the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro, which would include a mosque:

Plaintiffs who oppose the mosque want a temporary restraining order to block construction on the site. They claim county officials violated state law by failing to provide adequate notice of the meeting where the site plan was approved.But many of Brandon's questions had nothing to do with procedural issues, and he repeatedly drew objections from lawyers for the county.
"Do you want to know about a direct connection between the Islamic Center and Sharia law, a.k.a. terrorism?" Brandon asked Farley.

[¶]

At one point during questioning, Brandon began asking whether Farley supported hanging up a whip in his house as a warning to his wife and then beating her with it.
Farley protested that he would never beat his wife.
County attorney Jim Cope objected to the question, saying, "This is a circus."

I’d have to agree with Cope. The defense argument here is that Rutherford County did not issue permits for the construction of the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro with proper notice to the public of the meeting in which those permits were issued. The same argument would apply to the construction of any building. What will or will not go on in that building, whether that be worship of a supernatural entity (whether real or imagined is particularly irrelevant), the consumption of alcohol, the exhibition of educational motion pictures, or topless dancing, really doesn’t have anything to do with whether the county went through the proper notice procedures before issuing permits.

I'm not sure what remedy Brandon could be asking for -- to retract the permits and make the Islamic Center re-apply for them? That might delay construction for a few weeks, but would hardly prevent the mosque from being built at the end of the day. This business with the whips and equating Sharia with terrorism has no ascertainable relationship with whether public notices were promulgated in the correct manner and at the correct time. A motion to exclude evidence (sometimes called a motion in limine) would be in order here.

But for some reason, Chancellor Robert Corlew is not restraining Mr. Brandon, despite acknowledging in response to an objection by the County’s attorney that “Brandon had not established any proof, in four days of testimony dragging over three weeks, that local Muslims were in any way a threat,” and he allowed the plaintiff’s lawyer to continue with that line of questioning even after that point was made. So Mr. Brandon went on to claim that a Muslim man in the area “has an Arabic phrase over his front door that the attorney referred to as ‘the battle cry for jihad.’” It turns out to be the phrase “Allahu Akbar,” which means “God is Great,” and to effectively slander the County Mayor with claims of financial impropriety on the flimsiest of accusations and no apparent evidence to substantiate them.

I say “for some reason,” but in fact I strongly suspect I know what that reason is. Chancellor Corlew has already made up his mind that he is going to rule against the plaintiffs and in favor of Rutherford County. That will allow the mosque to get built. By not restraining the plaintiff’s lawyer, and overruling any objections to questions made by him, Chancellor Corlew is starving the plaintiffs of any issues to raise on appeal. Although it ought to be abundantly clear by this point that the absence of evidence, logic, or even good taste is not going to restrain either Mr. Brandon or (apparently) his clients.

It’s unfortunate, though, that presumptively good people looking to engage in a lawful religious activity, about which there is no evidence whatsoever that they are harmful, malicious, or in any way not assets to their community, as well as the public officials who made functionally ministerial decisions to allow these American citizens to go forward with their lawful plans, should have to be raked over the coals like this. It gives the legal profession a bad name. It makes Murfreesboro, Tennessee look like an enclave of bigots because people will remember the antics of Mr. Brandon rather than the more tolerant and appropriate conduct of the governmental officials and residents of the area being raked over the coals.

(Murfreesboro, Tennessee is, in fact, a perfectly charming and pleasant southern town, which has become an exurb of Nashville and is home to a rather large public university and a site of great historical significance. Back during my time in Tennessee, professional endeavors took me to Murfreesboro on a few occasions, and I never found anything objectionable about any of the people I met there, or any of the lawyers or judges I saw or spoke with while in the city. Indeed, one Murfreesboro lawyer went out of his way to give me advice and guidance for establishing myself as an attorney after I had recently moved there. I have pretty much only good things to say about Murfreesboro based on my admittedly limited experiences there.)

If you think, as I do, that by engaging in these antics Joe Brandon has cast the legal profession and the State of Tennessee into otherwise-undeserved disrepute, maybe you ought to share that opinion with him. His toll-free telephone number is (866) 662-3884. By all means be firm and direct, but also please bear in mind that you should express yourself peacefully and politely.

Pay To Spray

When we lived in Tennessee, one of the more jarring cultural differences I found was being presented with a bill for emergency services. Paramedics, firefighters, and the like are certainly not free and if we ever used them I fully expected to be billed for their services. But having to sign up for a subscription to an ambulance and paramedic service was foreign to my existence from California. Here, such things are simply provided to anyone who asks for them, and the bill is presented after the fact.

The system is not perfect. One of my clients is an EMT who works for the largest of the various ambulance companies here. She confirms what I had already been led to believe, which is that there are those people who make emergency calls for ambulances when what they're really looking for is transportation to a routine, maybe necessary but not emergent, medical appointment.

This is quite expensive. Therefore, only the very poorest of people do it, since they won't be paying anything anyway.

If this seems like an abuse of the system, well, it is, but for the most part the rest of us shrug it off because, well, what are you going to do? Everyone knows the high cost of medical services is because of all those damn lawyers filing medical malpractice lawsuits. It has nothing to do with poor people who use emergency ambulance services like taxis.

Getting back to Tennessee. We signed up for and subscribed to the emergency services district, believing that if we ever needed the services (the Gods forbid) we would want to have subscribed and we'd be in a world of hurt without them. The $75 per year or whatever the subscription fee was seemed like peanuts compared to having to drive, wounded or only partially conscious, to a hospital. What was galling, though, was learning that our medical insurance and homeowners' insurance did not pay for this fee and it was an additional expense.

So what is looking like the Outrage Of The Week in development is a Tennessee emergency situation. A homeowner in a rural area did not pay the annual subscription fee to the emergency services district and therefore opted out. Saved himself $75 a year and hey, times are tough, so you skimp on things. Sure enough, his home caught fire. And the firefighters drove out -- not in response to his calls for help but rather those of his rate-paying neighbor, who feared that the fire would spread and harm his insured house -- and watched the house burn down, ignoring the homeowner's offer to pay the entire cost of saving his. So now the homeowner has learned a terrible, expensive, and deeply painful lesson about what insurers call "moral risk."

Now, this looks awful for the libertarian purist. The guy said he offered to pay the firefighters their full expense for saving the property; they were already there and ready to go in case the fire spread out to the insured neighbor's home. So why not go ahead and take his money? While there are a bunch of reasons one might suggest, bear in mind for all of them that the homeowner probably didn't really have the money. After all, this is a guy who chose to not spend $75 or $100 or whatever it was on subscribing to the service in the first place. Desperate people will say pretty much anything to escape the pressure of their desperate circumstances and while I'm not passing moral judgment on that, I do think it's reasonable to not place a lot of trust in a promise made by a person whose house is literally burning down in front of his eyes.

Saving the home would have to have been done as an act of charity by the fire department. One is never obliged to give to charity; that is the definition of "charity," after all. An insurer is not obligated, and in fact would be foolish and doing a disservice to its regular policyholders, to take a premium on a policy at the very time that a loss was occurring.

There is the point that before voluntary subscriptions were available, the fire department simply didn't service this area. A worthwhile point, but none of these economic arguments sweetens the taste of firefighters watching a house burn down.

At some point, we just have to say that a public service has an obligation to serve the public, financial arrangements be damned.

Which is not to say that the homeowner shouldn't pay for the service. Or that the fire department, which is normally paid for by these sorts of subscriptions, should lack an effective remedy for its ability to recoup those costs from a non-subscriber. After all, I'm assuming that despite his (no doubt sincere) promises to pay, he simply won't have the thousands of dollars that this sort of service would cost available.

The real issue is a poverty of remedies in the law. It appears that the way the law was set up, either you paid and got firefighting services, or you didn't and your house burns. I suggest that there should be a third way to go, one that requires and enforces a full-cost payment by the non-subscriber -- enforceable by a priority lien on the property, which is forecloseable within 90 days if mutually-acceptable payment arrangements are not made and confirmed in writing.

The homeowner gets the service and a chance to get back up on his feet, the firefighting company gets paid. Now, if it goes to a foreclosure, the bank gets screwed, a little bit, because the emergency services lien would take priority over the mortgage in disbursements from a foreclosure sale, but this would only be a few thousand dollars and the bank can probably live with that, especially if the house is upside down and the bank is going to wind up taking title on a full credit bid anyway. And the 90-day period allows the homeowner to make new financial arrangements, take a second job if he can, make claims on other insurance if it's available, raise money from charity or family, or as a last-ditch measure, sell and recoup what he can from the sale. If worse comes to worse and the foreclosure has to go through, then yes, that homeowner is now homeless -- which he would have been anyway had his house burned to the ground so while it's cruel to note it, in fact he's not that much worse off than he would have been anyway.

To the rational actor with the ability to pay a subscription fee, advance payment is obviously far preferable to having to deal with a short-period emergency services property lien.

Or, of course, you could simply have a public firefighting service, paid for from property or sales or income taxes, and which recoups its costs as best it can from the properties it saves. That seems to work well here in California. But given that firefighting services must be provided on a volunteer rather than tax-supported basis for particular areas (particularly rural ones), then the automatic priority lien seems to be a good third option that avoids both the moral hazard of rewarding free riders, and the moral inequity of making people suffer.

More On The Mosque Two Blocks From Ground Zero

I've heard and read a lot of arguments about why it's in bad taste for a mosque to be built right on top of two blocks away from Ground Zero, and about how it would be hurtful to the survivors of the people killed on that day if the mosque is built -- even if we distinguish between the Sufis who want to build the mosque and the Sunnis who made the attack happen, because the Sufis and the Sunnis have common religious beliefs.

I've heard and read some arguments to the effect that if a mosque is built right on top of two blocks away from Ground Zero, the Muslims will have "won," it would be a "statement" that Sharia law is coming to America, or it demonstrates "weakness" by America.

I've heard and read a lot of arguments about why it's going to set interfaith relationships back for years if a mosque is built right on top of two blocks away from Ground Zero.  I've heard and read claims that mosques can be built elsewhere than right on top of two blocks away from Ground Zero, although I notice that people are trying to stop mosques from being built in places like Murfreesboro, Tennessee; Temecula, California; and Sheboygan, Wisconsin, too -- and these are not places well-known to have been the sites of conflict between Islam and the United States.

I've heard and read some discussion about why the imam who would preside at the mosque to be built right on top of two blocks away from Ground Zero has said some questionable things about Islam and America, and about 9/11 (he's also said some rather commendable things that seems worthy of support).  I've also heard and read a lot of speculation and fear about where the money to build a mosque right on top of two blocks away from Ground Zero is going to come from.

But what I haven't read or heard, anywhere, is an argument about how, consistent with the United States Constitution, any of the above matters one tiny little bit.  The legal issue is: "Can the City, County, or State of New York, or the United States of America, prohibit the building of a mosque at this site?"  The closest thing I can get to an anti-mosque advocate addressing this issue is something like this comment:

I also find myself getting annoyed with pundits on the Libertarian right who are sanctimoniously hiding behind an absolute freedom of religion argument and refusing to acknowledge any other concerns or factors, sometimes to the point of accusing those of us opposed to the mosque of being bigots or knee-jerk Islamophobes. They also ignore the nature of Islam and what the mosque symbolizes: not just a place of worship, but also the dominance and superiority of Islam and sharia law. In a place where thousands were murdered in Islam’s name, that is unacceptable, and it is not protected by the 1st amendment.

Maybe this commenter isn't a bigot or a knee-jerk Islamophobe. Now, there are plenty of bigots and knee-jerk Islamophobes out there objecting to the building of mosques (whether they be in Manhattan or Murfreesboro or Sheboygan or Temecula) but let's apply the principle of charity here and look only at the argument made, not make unfounded presumptions about the motivation of the person making the argument.  (My doing so requires that the arguer cease using words like "sanctimonious" to describe those who, like me, claim the contrary result, by the way.) 

The substantive claim is that Islam is subversive to American values and law ("the nature of Islam," "what the mosque symbolizes: .... the dominance and superiority of Islam and sharia law").  This is a viewpoint-specific restriction on a First Amendment freedom -- either of free speech or free exercise.  So the rule is, and can only be, "Would you also restrict Christianity in this way?"  Obviously not.  Now, one might ask, what Christians have engaged in acts of unprovoked mass terrorism, and are there any churches of the same religion as the terrorists located near the site of their terrible attack?  After all, we wouldn't let, for instance, the LDS church build a site commemorating a brutal attack by Mormons on Native Americans, coincidentally also occurring on September 11, would we? 

America is full of sites of people motivated by religion who have done terrible things, and we don't blame their coreligionists for the bad things people have done while claiming to act in the name of God, and if they God they were acting in the name of happens to be the Christian God, well, the religion itself seems to get a pass, where Islam does not.  And lest we claim that "Islam is a violent, cruel religion," and back that up with citations from the Koran, let us not forget that the Christian Bible, too, has many cruel, violent passages -- maybe more, depending on how you count them.

The question is not whether we as a people like Christianity or Islam more.  The question is, can the City, County, or State of New York, or the United States of America, prohibit the building of a mosque at this particular site?  The answer is "no."  The Constitutional case is simple, open-and-shut, with the inevitable and predictable conclusion being that we have no choice but to allow and tolerate the mosque at this location.

Nothing I have said here would prohibit someone who thinks a mosque at this location would be a bad idea from engaging in peace protest outside the mosque once it is built, or its construction site while it is being built.  Nothing I have said here would prohibit someone who thinks a mosque at this location would be a bad idea from boycotting businesses owned by people who patronize the mosque, from refusing to work on the construction of the building, or encouraging people to refuse to work on the construction of the building.  Nothing I have said here would prohibit someone who thinks a mosque at this location would be a bad idea from trying to raise money of their own to buy the site (if the owners are willing to sell) or a site near it so as to build something they think would be more appropriate. 

Finally, nothing I have said here would prohibit someone who thinks a mosque at this location would be a bad idea from trying to persuade the owners of the site to go about pursuing their goals in a different way or at a different location.  Because nothing I have heard or read anywhere seems to be addressed to the owners of the property.  It has all been addressed to the general public or to some level of the government.  What we're talking about here is the First Amendment.  The First Amendment gives everyone the power to try and persuade each other of the correctness of their point of view, and the government has to keep its hands off that sort of persuasion.  What bugs me most is the appeal -- either explicit or implicit -- to use the power of the government to stop American citizens from peacefully using their own property as they see fit.

Unfair Documentaries Are Still Unfair Even When I Agree With Them

If you were to watch this video without a critical mind, you'd probably wind up feeling outraged.

But as someone who has had his own thoughts and beliefs tested by countless documentaries and other media productions, and who later in life had a chance to see and even help make other kinds of media and presentations intended to persuade, I've got a little bit of familiarity with some of the tricks of the trade. So although the slant of the video favors a viewpoint I adhere to, I still find what is presented here slimy and dishonest. Not to defend the creationists in the video, but it is fairly clear to me that they are being presented in an unfair light.

First of all, the choice of Dayton, Tennessee as the locus for the filming is obviously a hardly random choice. In the opening segments of the clip, the narrator makes reference to Dayton's past, obviously talking about the Scopes Monkey Trial. The good people of Dayton were amazed that their stunt trial left them the laughingstocks of America, that they were portrayed as superstitious, backwards, and ignorant hillbillies because they were opposed to the teaching of evolution. Not only is that a true bit of history, but one which the teacher -- whose southern accent is thick and who is stereotypically obese -- seems to be quite conscious of.

One thing we don't know is how many science teachers there are at the high school in Dayton, Tennessee. Perhaps there is more than one and this one was picked by the producers for not only his attitude (the politically correct one for his area) but also for his physical appearance, which plays in to Eastern Seaboard and West Coast stereotypes about what people in the South are like. Being a West Coaster who lived in Tennessee -- not all that far from Dayton, and who made court appearances in Dayton at the Rhea County Court -- and who has carried around a few more pounds than he really ought to be carrying in both California and Tennessee, I'm somewhat sensitive to the subject. Yes, there are obese Southerners. There are obese New Yorkers and Californians, too. Plenty of them. Being fat doesn't mean you're stupid or ignorant. It means you're fat, and in our thin-centric society and with the biological pressures inherent in being human, that's punishment enough.

Nor is there any real reason to believe that the teacher is stupid or uneducated. He isn't shown teaching evolution; he is shown leading a classroom discussion of it. Now, it is probably true that he can't broach the subject without causing a discussion, and that's a real issue that the documentary should point out. And it's probably also true and fair game to point out that his students resist this knowledge, knowledge which he himself finds conflicts with his religious beliefs. So maybe it's even fair game to say that the teacher finds his religious beliefs at odds with the law and his own education, and we see him breaking the law (as it is portrayed) to reconcile that. Okay, that's fair game too.

But so what? It's not like his students don't know that the brand of Christianity popular in their area is at odds with evolution and has been since Darwin's time. It would defy belief to suggest that the students come in to his class tabula rasa and don't bring up creationism on their own. And when they do, the teacher would be doing a disservice to his students to not address the topic. Moreover, he has the personal freedom to worship as he chooses and believe as he chooses on his own time, and the academic freedom as part of his freedom of expression to teach the assigned subject matter in the way he thinks is best. What the state can do is tell him what to teach. There is no evidence in the clip that he did not lecture on or assign relevant and factually correct reading on the subject of evolution.

There is evidence that this teaching didn't take. Notice how the one student refused to even acknowledge evolution as a "theory" and said that it hadn't been "proved." This goes to a misunderstanding of what "theories" and "proof" are, and indicates a lack of critical thought in that she did not seem to think creationism needed to be "proved" in the same light in order to be a place where she could rest, intellectually. Notice also the acceptance of the "irreducible complexity" argument of intelligent design advocates, although there seems to be no evidence that the public school teacher had taught this theory to his students.

Then, there is the last student, who asks about racial groups within the human species. We should remember that he is a student and not a teacher; he is learning and hasn't yet mastered his material. He is also young enough to not yet have a complete comprehension of just how offensive his remarks really are, so we need to take that into account. So I would suggest you filter those dimensions of his remarks accordingly. What is odd is that he hasn't thought through that it's quite probably the case that white people evolved from black people, not the other way around, and white people and black people can have children together. These indicate a failure to understand ideas about evolution.

What we don't see and can't know are the contents hours of film and audio left on the cutting room floor. We get dozens of seconds of film from probably hours of class time captured on film; we get dozens of seconds of statements made by the teacher out of what is likely at least an hour of an interview. We don't get questions asked to the teacher during those interviews; we don't get remarks made by the filmmakers during the process that may have prompted the students to say things they might not have on their own.

Yes, at the end of the day, the students and teacher really said these things. Yes, there is what seems to be a reflexive resistance to the concept of evolution, one which is probably a roughly accurate depiction of reality. But the producers and editors of the film have nearly limitless discretion in framing their subject, in picking and choosing their evidence and placing it out of context if need be, and of gathering only the material they wish they like in order to make the point they want to make.

I think evolution should not get short shrift in high school classrooms, even in Dayton, Tennessee. I think students should be given a fair presentation of what evolution is. I'm not convinced that has not happened here, despite the best efforts of the producers of this biased documentary to convince me otherwise. At most, I might think that the teacher is a little bit half-hearted about teaching it since he doesn't believe in it himself. At the end of the day, the students who learn this material can only be charged with demonstrating that they've learned what they've been taught -- not that they agree with it.

The problem is not that kids prefer their comforting religion to cold science. The problem is that science is being taught in a cold, half-hearted, unconvincing way.

The Sixty Second Patriot #7

Alvin C. York was born in 1887 to a very poor family in Tennessee.  His father died when Alvin was 24 years old, and Alvin had to help his mother raise eight of his younger brothers and sisters.  He was drafted into the Army at age 29 and fought in World War I.  Alvin didn't want to go to Europe and fight, but eventually, he decided that he had to answer the country's call to duty along with everyone else.

On October 8, 1918, Alvin's squad of seventeen men had to find a route to a railroad line in France that the Germans were using to supply their troops.  To get there, they had to cross a valley and the Germans had defended it with machine-gun nests and over two hundred troops.  Half the soldiers were killed by the German troops, leaving Corporal Alvin York in charge.

He stormed the German machine guns head-on.  Imagine what it's like to run directly at a machine gun that an enemy soldier is firing at you.  But Alvin got to the nest, only to find eight Germans coming at him with bayonets, long knives at the end of their rifles.  He kept on fighting until he ran out of ammunition, and then the Germans surrendered.  He took 132 prisoners and opened up the rail line for the U.S. and its allies.

When Alvin came home after the war he got married and had five children.  He founded a school for young farm boys in Tennessee, and a movie was made of his life.  He tried to enlist for combat duty again in World War II even though he was 55 years old, but the Army said he was too old and would more do good for the country helping recruit younger soldiers.  He lived to be 75 years old and is one of America's greatest war heroes.


The Sixty-Second Patriot series of posts is intended to provide teachers who are required to engage in patriotic exercises with truthful, age-appropriate, meaningful, educationally-rich, non-controversial, secular alternatives to rote recital of the Pledge of Allegiance, as well as brief meditations on American history, civics, and values accessible to all people. Suggestions and contributions to this series from Readers are welcome.

Depressing Reality

The cover story from this month's Atlantic is deeply depressing.  And, I can tell you from my (comparatively) brief experience with unemployment, based on a very real psychological phenomenon.

Back after The Wife and I moved to Tennessee and discovered that what we'd thought was the promise of a good job was actually nothing but hospitality, it took a long time for me to find new work.  Not having productive work and not contributing much to the household led me to sink into a pretty deep funk, from which I had difficulty summoning the energy and hope to go out and take the necessary pro-active steps to get out from underneath our problems. 

And it took a toll on my marriage; The Wife and I had many more conflicts, and much more serious conflicts, than we had at any other point in our relationship either before or since.  We managed to stay together and get through our tough time, and now hopefully we have the roughest waters behind us.  At least, now I can have the optimism to seriously think such a thing even if the realist within me knows that there are no guarantees about anything important in this life other than that it will eventually end.  After many years together, I've never felt closer or more in love with my wife than I am now and I'm certain that both of us having productive careers and a sufficient level of material comfort is a factor in that.  But I remember what it was like when things went unexpectedly bad and how frustrating it was to feel like we were powerless to change them, so when I read in the Atlantic that prolonged unemployment can cause significant and lasting effects on family dynamics, it doesn't take much convincing at all to tell me that this is something real.

I'm also reminded of an old discussion from a few years ago at the firm.  One of the attorneys had read that there is a seventy to eighty year "long cycle" in economics, which the author of the book thought was approaching its end.  The end of the previous long cycle was the Great Depression beginning in 1929, and before it, the Crash of 1873, which led to a six-year depression and a wobbly economy for a twenty-five years after that, and the long cycle that at the time was thought to be coming to an end would have started a few years afterwards.  I sure hope we aren't re-creating 1873.  Re-creating 1929 would be bad enough.

Now, the bit in the Atlantic about how unemployment depresses one's future earning arc may be true for most but unless you're on a Biglaw career track, attorney incomes often rise and fall according to a set of rhythms within which simple employment longevity is often not a significant factor.  But that's more important in terms of setting long-term fiscal policy for the government than anything else; the marketplace will take care of consumers getting things like food and insurance even if incomes do not rise as much as they have for the previous generation.

What I'm saying is that it's right to take a close look at the social effects of extended periods of unemployment.  They're real and they will change our society whether we like it or not.

The War On The War On Christmas Strikes At Some Old Stomping Grounds

Locals pronounce the name Maryville, a Tennessee city very near The Estate At Louisville and an exurb of Knoxville,* "Muhrr-vull."  The big news:  a local citizen was concerned that the city's annual holiday celebration, which included a reading of several chapters from the Gospel of Luke, violated principles of separation of church and state.

INTERLUDE:  Since I tiresomely draw this protest every time I use that phrase, here it is AGAIN:  it is true that the Constitution does not use the exact words "separation of church and state."  Neither does it use the word "democracy" or any variant thereof.  The absence of that word doesn't mean the Constitution isn't about democracy. Of course it is.  When you read the document intending to understand it, that's not a big leap to make because the concept is readily apparent.  Same thing for reading the First Amendment and concluding that the Framers wanted to separate church and state.  So yes, it's in there, and no, there aren't explicit words to that effect.  You have to read, interpret, and comprehend and I'm not going to do that work for you here.  We now return to your regularly scheduled discussion of the War on the War on Christmas.

So in response, the city officials asked the city attorney, who said, "Nope, if you do a sectarian religious activity at a state-sanctioned event, you're violating the Constitution."  (This, by the way, is a correct statement of law.)  Therefore, the City of Muhrrvull cancelled the Bible reading portion of its annual lighting of the "Holiday" tree.  I have to put "Holiday" in quotes because, come on, everyone knows what "holiday" we're talking about.

Therefore, a brave soul took it unto himself to do the annual reading from the Gospel of Luke as a private citizen, and about 20 local citizens gathered, listened, and applauded when he was done.  Perhaps more interesting is the headnote appearing before the version of the story that I did not see when I first read the story yesterday:

Editor's note: Samuel David Duck is an employee of the E.W. Scripps Co. who works in the News Sentinel building, a fact that was unknown to the freelance writer of the story. Duck also is a candidate for governor running on a "One Nation Under God" platform.

So we're not exactly dealing with your run-of-the-mill Christian here -- we're dealing with both a newspaper employee and a guy who is running as a minor candidate for Governor.  A guy who has an axe to grind and an incentive to make waves.  Which makes me take his opening statement to the Knoxnews with a handful of salt:  Mr. Duck said it was "terrifying to stand and go against the courts" and read the Bible in a public park following the tree-lighting ceremony.

Well, it shouldn't have been.  Mr. Duck violated no law.  He did what he did as a private citizen and, now that I know he's running for Governor under a "One Nation Under God" platform, possibly as an act of political speech.  A private citizen can read the Bible out loud in a park if he wants to.  No law prohibits that and in fact the First Amendment protects it.  Mr. Duck was perfectly within his rights to do what he did and I, for one, would be quick to argue in his defense if some idiotic governmental official tried to stop him.

The important distinction is that Mr. Duck did not disrupt the non-religious, officially-sponsored parts of the ceremony.  The City of Muhrrvull can have holiday tree-lighting ceremonies all it wants to, as long as the Baby Jeebus isn't mentioned as part of the government-sponsored activities.  In fact, I don't think that the City Mayor would have been out of line to say at the end of the secular ceremonies, "I know there are a lot of Christians here and there will be a private Bible reading over by the Veteran's Memorial in ten minutes for those who wish to participate."  I draw the line at the Bible reading being part of the official proceedings.

This atheist is quick to point out that Mr. Duck is to be celebrated for his exercise of the free speech and free exercise rights of all American citizens. And this lawyer is also quick to praise the City of Maryville, Tennessee, for respecting the Constitution.

* I can't write the words "exurb of Knoxville" without cracking a grin. Knoxville isn't big enough to have suburbs, much less exurbs.

Weekend Weirdness, Volume III

We begin with a lamb jumping on a bed.  Very cute, but it comes to a strange ending.

Then, I found a delightful children's book about interspecies telepathy, and the inevitable conquest of our planet by alien retroviruses.  It's fun for the whole family!

Look out, bullies.  It's Abe Lincoln, come to kick your asses with his mad wrestling skillz.


Rama?

See what can happen when those fascist zoning restrictions are lifted?  Sometimes I miss Tennessee...

This sort of thing was freaky during the campaign and it isn't any better now.  And this isn't particularly helpful, either.

The correct answer to this question is "Because ice cream has no bones."  Come on, what's the matter with you wiki-using people; do I have to do all the work around here?

Ta da!  From the dustbin of failed political slogans, I give you:  "Spinach is spinach."

In the movies, dinosaurs have a rather limited vocabulary.

I have no idea how I stumbled across Charlize Theron.  But I'm glad I did.

Viewpoint Censorship

Back in the 1990's, there was a kid in Minnesota who, quite obnoxiously, put together a cross from broken chair legs, and burned it on the front lawn of an African-American family in St. Paul. He was charged with violating a local hate speech ordinance:

Whoever places on public or private property, a symbol, object, appellation, characterization or graffiti, including, but not limited to, a burning cross or Nazi swastika, which one knows or has reasonable grounds to know arouses anger, alarm or resentment in others on the basis of race, color, creed, religion or gender commits disorderly conduct and shall be guilty of a misdemeanor.

A nice sentiment on the part of the city of St. Paul -- burning crosses, swastikas, and the like are utterly obnoxious and lack socially redeeming value. They are also, unfortunately, expressions of an opinion and therefore protected by the First Amendment. It's easy to want to punish someone who has done something like this, because it's so morally obnoxious. And the speech in question here was assumed to be unprotected by the First Amendment. But letting your conscience be your guide in a particular case can sometimes lead to the creation of a rule that works greater harm than that which you wish to prevent.

Which is why the Supreme Court specifically noted that laws which engage in "viewpoint discrimination" violate the First Amendment, even if the speech in question is itself unprotected. The City of St. Paul did not outlaw expressions of racial solidarity and harmony, and therefore could not criminalize expressions of racial discord. This particular law was justified only on the basis of the City's revulsion at the content of the speech itself, which is why it violated the Constitution. "Let there be no mistake about our belief that burning a cross in someone's front yard is reprehensible. But St. Paul has sufficient means at its disposal to prevent such behavior without adding the First Amendment to the fire," the Court concluded.

Justice Antonin Scalia wrote that opinion, by the way. He seems to have a more pro-government position on the goings-on at Guantanamo Bay than he did in evaluating the hate speech law in St. Paul.

So with that in mind, let's take a look at this principle in another context. Back in my old stomping grounds in Knoxville, the schools have taken it upon themselves to ban certain websites but not others. Just as a sample, the website of PFLAG -- Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays -- is blocked. PFLAG's site is completely safe for work. So too is the blocked website of the Human Rights Campaign, which urges political action such as adoption of same-sex marriage laws and sponsors gay pride parades.* But, a child using a Knox County public school computer can access websites providing testimonials about men who used Christianity to overcome their attraction to other men, and to the political advocacy website of the Traditional Values Coalition. From the article, a quote by one of the complaining parties, a librarian employed by the school district:

What tends to be discussed is, ‘Isn’t this just keyword blocking?’ Sometimes that is the reason very innocuous things will get blocked. But in this circumstance, in looking at the sites that were blocked and the sites that were not blocked, the keyword question seemed to fly out the window. You had sites like Human Rights Campaign, which is approved by the National Education Association, and GLSEN, being blocked. Both have a clear line into the media, and the legislative issues. These are all things students need access to. [¶] What’s not being blocked are sites that contain the words ‘gay’ and ‘homosexual’ and ‘lesbian’ but are advocating, for example, that people change their sexual orientation.

So what's happening here is that if it's a "gay-friendly" website, it gets blocked, but if it's a "Christian-friendly" website, it doesn't.

Now, I see a flaw in the reporting. The investigative reporter who searched for banned websites indicated that the Human Rights Commission's website was banned. The Human Rights Commission is different than the Human Rights Campaign. Tennessee's Human Rights Commission is an agency of the state government of Tennessee and it is the state-level equivalent of the EEOC in that state. Contrary to the report in the Knoxville MetroPulse, the Tennessee Human Rights Commission's website does not appear to be blocked at Knox County public schools.

Which makes sense if my suspicion about the real policy at play here is correct. Tennessee state law, like Federal law, does not extend anti-discrimination protection to homosexuals. From my experience practicing employment law in the Volunteer State, this agency is entirely useless in terms of actually doing anything to prevent or combat discrimination; it never actually investigated a single charge I ever filed with it and in my experience never took action on a single complaint brought before it by any of my colleagues. It usually passed along the charges I sent to it to the EEOC, which itself was not all that activist in that state. And since it doesn't do anything to protect or vindicate gays as a matter of law, there is no chance that a child using a school computer could go to the Human Rights Commission's website and learn that gay people actually have rights of some kind. So there is no reason for the hidden censor to ban a website like that.

Despite the mistake in the reporting, students and faculty at Knox County schools can access the James Dobson website but not the gay rights website. In other words, Knox County computers will only give you one side of the larger debate. The practice appears to me to be utterly indefensible and motivated by not only bigotry towards homosexuals but open hostility to the idea that homosexuals might have rights. And unsurprisingly, a friendliness to the idea that Christianity offers a "solution" to the "problem" of being gay.

It's one thing to filter out porn, which a school computer ought to do. But we're not talking about a porn filter. Someone has decided to not let kids, especially high school kids who are already aware that there are such things as gay people, even do research on what the different sides of an issue are to, for instance, prepare for a debate class or a social studies report. This, alone, indicates the fundamental weakness of the "traditional values" position embodied by this policy -- as I pointed out a while back, "Censors and bullies do not appear to be advocating good policies, because they rely on something other than the strength of their arguments to get their way." You can't tell me that's not what's going on here, because it is.

It is a shame that Knox County schools have become captured by intellectual bullies this way. Although I am critical of the ACLU for a lot of things, I hope they succeed in this case.


* Ironically, the Human Rights Campaign is also urging adoption of hate crimes laws, which are themselves at least suspect under R.A.V. v. St. Paul. The Human Rights Campaign ought not to advocate laws that are of questionable Constitutional water, no matter how well-motivated they are. But, a look at the Traditional Values Coalition's website reveals that they do not argue that the laws should be stopped because they are unconstitutional, but rather on some argument that they are somehow hostile to "traditional morality" such as that embodied in Christianity, so no one gets to be the good guy here.

Environmental Disaster In Roane County

The Tennessee Valley Authority is the country's largest utility -- it generates electricity, regulates the Tennessee River, and is a huge employer. It also just got a huge black eye and gave a huge black eye to "clean coal."

Of course there is not and never was any such thing as "clean coal." Coal is a fossilized hydrocarbon which contains a variety of metals and organic compounds leached into the rock while it was forming over the course of aeons of subterranean pressure. It very commonly contains various kinds of sulfur and arsenic compounds, which are released into the air when the coal is burned. "Clean coal" is a way of burning the coal which generally leaves the contaminants in the ash and sludge left over after burning or occasionally in filters or scrubbers in the smokestacks. The TVA, the world's largest handler of "clean coal," handles this by mixing the ash with river water and letting it settle into sludge in the bottom of artificial ponds before draining the water into tributary rivers of the Tennessee.

Well, that process suffered a serious setback today in Harriman, a small city in Roane County, not all that far from where The Wife and I used to live, and not far from where my folks are moving away from The Estate At Louisville to seek better opportunities for themselves. The dam holding back these artificial ponds burst today and 2.6 million cubic yards of the sludge dumped out on the valley below, swamping the houses of the people unfortuante enough to have lived downstream from the ponds and to have relied on the assurances of the TVA that they were safe. Check out this video from the Nashville Tennessean:

Yuck! That one house is astonishing -- it's one of those nice big estate houses on the big farms that people own out in the country there. Now, it's buried up to the roof of the porch -- which on the downslope side of the house is probably something like fifteen to twenty feet from the ground -- in heavy metal-rich coal sludge. But the image of this flood of sludge, making its way all the way to the river and the drinking water of hundreds of thousands of Tennesseans, Georgians, and Alabamans -- is horrific. I hope they clean it up soon, but all indications are that this is the result of struggling and struggling will continue.

The Difference, Explained

A friend from Tennessee asked in an online forum:

If someone could articulate the distinction between the two parties, I would love to know. It would be lovely to have a major party that I could believe in. Also, it would do wonders to reduce my anxieties about the two!

My response:

Democrats: Expand the role of government in paying for health care. (Impliedly) Less military spending. FCC concentrates its efforts on increasing racial diversity in public television programming. Moderate danger of party being taken over by crypto-socialists intent on nationalizing most major industries. Mostly favor abortion rights and oppose international free trade agreements (exceptions exist for both issues). Justices appointed to Supreme Court like Steven Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. "Vero Possumus."

Republicans: Do not expand the role of government in paying for health care. More, or at least current levels of, military spending. FCC concentrates its efforts on protecting us from unathorized exposure of nipples. Moderate danger of party being taken over by crytpo-theocrats intent on using the government to regulate consensual sex acts. Mostly would restrict abortion rights and favor international free trade agreements (exceptions exist for both issues). Justices appointed to Supreme Court like like John Roberts and Samuel Alito. "Country first."

Both: Rejigger tax code to make it "more fair for all Americans in these tough times," but somehow your taxes will increase. Lip service paid to balancing budget but deficit nevertheless will increase. Greater Federal funding to local schools and "radical" education reform package will fail to reverse continuing decline in education levels. Periodic overt references to Protestant Christianity and use of "faith-based initiatives" to use public money to subsidize religious institutions. No clue about reforming or protecting Social Security. No substantial definition of "success in Iraq" and withdrawl of most but not all troops from Iraq by 2011 after proclaiming "victory." Some pandering to the "immunization causes autism" crowd. "Under God" stays in Pledge of Allegiance.

Which about sums it up, I think.

And The First Interviewee Is From...

Turns out the Flat Earth Society hasn't gone away. It's gone global.

Well, that might be a bad choice of words.

Still, you notice the first guy they quote (emphasis added):

"People are definitely prejudiced against flat-Earthers," Tennessee-based computer scientist and society member John Davis tells the BBC. "Many use the term 'flat-Earther' as a term of abuse, and with connotations that imply blind faith, ignorance or even anti-intellectualism."

Gee. You don't say. Well, I'm kind of glad they're out of my neck of the woods now.

Well That Was Fun

About an hour ago, there was a 5.4 magnitude earthquake near Diamond Bar. I was out to lunch with a couple attorneys from the firm and felt the ground shake and noticed the light fixtures in the restaraunt swinging. One light bulb fell onto an empty table. Nothing else of significance here. I'm interested in learning about whether The Wife experienced it, too; some people even at the restaraunt claimed to simply not notice it at all. She's not experienced any of the other earthquakes of significance before in California, either; in fact, I think the biggest seismic event she ever felt was a less than three-point jolt in Tennessee that was centered less than a mile from The Estate At Louisville; that one felt like a truck had backed into the building. Today's was a classic earthquake, with a swaying, rolling motion that lasted about twenty seconds. If she didn't experience it, she'll be disappointed.

Violence in Knoxville

No struggles here. Just tragedy. Yesterday, an apparently deranged gunman entered the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church in Knoxville and opened fire. He killed two people and wounded several others. The UU Church is one of many beautiful old churches in a row along Kingston Pike, one of the main thoroughfares of the city, just west of the University and Alcoa Highway (one of the two ways to get from the city to where my parents live, south of the river).

The killer's derangement seems to have been a combination of too much inflammatory right-wing agitprop and frustration at Knoxville's notoriously bad job market. The fact that he was a right-winger is not, itself, enough to have classified him as dangerous and there seems to have been little indication that whatever dislike of political liberals he had, it would turn bloody. But the fact that he was a right-winger does seem to have had an impact on his choice of victims. It could be that people just plain figured out "This dude's kinda weird," and nobody would hire him.

Some members of Rationalists of East Tennessee who The Wife and I knew back when we lived there were also members of the UU church. It's a good fit -- the UU church does not particularly demand belief in divinity so much as challenge its members to share fellowship and community and to do good works and to be moral people. Many UU members identify their religious beliefs as being "spiritual." So these are friends of friends who have died. And the guy could have easily targeted RET itself, because those godless atheists are also all a bunch of godless liberals (actually, as I recall, RET had a good mix of people of many different political stripes and debate was -- and still is -- lively on a variety of issues of the day).

I've little doubt that the authorities will throw the book at the guy. Shooting people in a church. That's going to fly like a lead balloon with an East Tennessee jury.

A closing thought, from a UU hymnal:

Spirit of Life, come unto me.
Sing in my heart all the stirrings of compassion.
Blow in the wind, rise in the sea;
Move in the hand, giving life the shape of justice.
Roots hold me close; wings set me free;
Spirit of Life, come to me, come to me.

As And For An Affirmative Defense, Defendant Would Show That It's God's Fault

Oh, I'm all over this one. A Sevier County, Tennessee man is suing his church because he says the Holy Spirit knocked him over during a service, which resulted in him falling over and cracking his head open. He's had two expensive and painful surgeries and still feels pain from it.

Among the other rather obvious defenses to the lawsuit is the doctrine of intervening and superseding causation -- in other words, the Holy Spirit knocked him over, which was, after all, what the man wanted to happen. The injury was, therefore, an Act of God -- literally -- and not the church's fault.

Ah, the plaintiff will rebut. But the church exists to invoke God and indeed has a history of invoking the Holy Spirit its parishioners. Other parishioners have been in-visited by the Holy Spirit before and given up control of their bodies to the Spirit, so the church knew what could have happened and therefore should have taken appropriate precautions. Like providing padding. Or, I don't know, helmets.

The church will almost certainly defend itself, however, by invoking the doctrine of comparative negligence. Tennessee has a modified comparative negligence rule, meaning that if the defendant was not 50% or more responsible for his injuries, the plaintiff recovers nothing. The question then becomes what the church could have done to prevent this injury. As a practical matter, the answer is obviously nothing. You can't pad the floors of a church on the off chance that someone might be in-visited by the Holy Spirit even if you're invoking that very entity.

The utter silliness and unnecessary nature of the event underlying the injury is apparent to me. But then again, I'm not a charismatic Christian who thinks the Holy Spirit exerts physical force, makes people speak in tongues, or otherwise interferes in day-to-day human activity. If I were a Christian who believed in supernatural entities, I would have to wonder how this man could tell that it was the Holy Spirit that moved him to injury and not an evil demon -- and if it was the latter, how such a demon could have got in to the church in the first place, unless the church was really engaged in devil-worship -- but by now you see how astonishingly silly this entire exercise has become.

There is, of course, no such thing as the Holy Spirit. No supernatural force knocked this man over. He fell. The man was dancing or cavorting or doing whatever he was doing to "act Christian" and impress his friends there. It got out of hand, he lost his balance, he fell, he got badly hurt. It's his own damn fault. The only thing the church is guilty of is encouraging that sort of behavior -- but a rational, intelligent person would not have fallen for it.

Here, then, is proof that religion really does hurt people.

The Burst Bubble Isn't Enough

One of the reasons that The Wife and I wanted to move to Tennessee was the possibility of buying our own home. Tennessee didn't work out for a variety of reasons, but when you consider what the real estate market looked like back when we did it, you may have a better feel for why we tried our luck out there.

In today's Fish Wrapper, is yet another report on how far housing prices have fallen because of the downtrun in the real estate market. Real estate agents jumping out of windows and things like that. But of particular interest are the pictures of foreclosed houses -- with reports of how much they were bought for, and how much the banks are trying to sell them for.

Illustrative of the kind of market The Wife and I were facing back in 2005 is this gem in north Redondo Beach. "Gem" is not exactly the right word, on further review. But this is pretty typical of what you can get in the area that we were living in. In most parts of Redondo, you get a two-on-a-lot or sometimes even a three-on-a-lot house. You share a common wall with the other house on the lot. Zillow describes it as a 2,290 square foot residence, which is about right for the area (the other house on the lot will be of similar size), with four bedrooms and three bathrooms. The Fish Wrapper adds from the listing: "...sunny south facing private yard. Open floor-plan, hardwood floors, granite counters and tumbled travertine tile on both floors." It was built in 2005 and sold, new, for $929,000.

That's not a misprint, Tennesseans. Nine hundred and twenty-nine thousand dollars. It probably sold at an auction or after a bidding war; we were aware of a similar house near the home we rented (a slightly less desirable area than the one advertised in the Fish Wrapper) that began its bidding war in early 2005 at $800,000 -- and we later learned that the buyer paid cash for it. To share a lot and a common wall with your next-door neighbor. A thirty-year mortgage at the prime rate prevailing at the time would have produced monthly payments of about $5,600.00 a month -- which doesn't count any points or property taxes or anything else. Hell, the bank is still looking for $829,000 for this house today.

The Wife and I weren't making anything close to the kind of money needed to buy a house at those prices. So that's why we left to find somewhere that we could afford to buy. With housing prices in Tennessee being an eighth of what the bubble was at that time, it made the place look mighty attractive. Of course, the job I thought I had lined up fell through and it took a hell of a long time before I was able to get another one, so that made things a challenge even then.

Some of the houses in the Fish Wrapper's feature have lost even more of their height-of-the-bubble value. This house in Redondo Beach seems to have "only" fallen off 10% from its peak price. But it's still way, way, way out of reach of nearly any income-earning family. Which is one reason why we're glad to be where we are; the house we bought was still uncomfortably expensive but we were able to get the kind of house we wanted, in the kind of neighborhood we wanted, for a price that we can afford.

How is anyone in the city supposed to get started? If you don't have a huge helping hand from family wealth -- not just a loan of a ten thousand or so from your parents to help buy the house but I mean hundreds of thousands of dollars to make as a down payment -- then the mortgage payments are going to simply slaughter you.

I'm told that one should spend between a third to 40% of after-tax monthly income on housing payments. So if you took a zero-down loan on this house in Redondo Beach, and assume you had the best possible interest rate you can hope for, your base payment for a thirty-year loan would be five thousand dollars ($5,000) a month. Maybe you don't have credit quite as good as Senator Chris Dodd. So maybe you have to add a basis point or two. You certainly will have to add in closing costs like escrow fees, title insurance, and broker commissions. And there's property taxes to pay, too. Your monthly payment will wind up being something like $6,100 a month. That works out to needing nearly three hundred thousand dollars a year of pre-tax income to be able to make that payment.

Mere mortals simply don't make that kind of money. Very well-paid professionals do. Senior associates at Biglaw firms (but not newly-minted lawyers). Doctors with high-risk specialties. Mid-level accountants at Big Four firms. Stockbrokers and hedge fund managers. And it helps if both spouses do jobs like that, too. For mere mortals -- including the bulk of the professional class, I might add, meaning doctors who are general practicioners, accountants who prepare tax returns, and the 90% of lawyers who don't have blue enough blood or good enough academic credentials to sell themselves into indentured servitude at law firms like Arrogant, Condescending & Overpriced LLP, well, they're ass-out if they want to buy a house in that kind of a market. They should look at, you know, Claremont. Thousand Oaks. Santa Clarita. Redondo Beach -- that's just out of the question.

Obeying The Law Will Get You Pulled Over In Tennessee

Driving ten miles an hour below the speed limit? That's a perfectly good reason for a police officer to pull you over, at least in the Volunteer State. And then search your car for drugs. Which is what I suspect this opinion was really about.

Only in Tennessee can you get a ticket for obeying the law.

Not Putting Its Best Foot Forward

There is inescapable coverage today of what a bunch of ignorant racist hillbillies voters in West Virginia are. Consider this quote from today's Fish Wrapper:

"I'm going to write in Hillary on the ballot," Jester said outside the IHOP, crushing her half-smoked cigarette. "I want to see a woman in there before I see a . . . " She stopped, and her sister finished the sentence with: "a man of color."

And then there's this delightful thirty-second video, which features a lovely woman named Janet who can't bring herself to vote for Obama because she knows he's a Muslim, and even though he says he's a Christian she just doesn't believe him. The linked article also includes this quote from another lifelong West Virginia Democrat: "I heard that Obama is a Muslim and his wife's an atheist." (Right, because Muslims who care about their religion regularly marry atheists and, as we all know, atheists can't be loyal Americans because they don't say the pledge of allegiance. Actually, we do say it, we just omit the part that got added in later and which doesn't mean anything anyway.) Best of all is this little bit from the WaPo: "He's a half-breed and he's a Muslim. How can you trust that?"

The coverage of racist ignorance getting in the way of the annointing of St. Obama is so overwhelming that a part of me wants to resist and say no! The MSM must have it all wrong, they must be cherry-picking people to feature in their stories because modern America just isn't like that. It's just not that way. It's just that some of these voters aren't putting their best feet forward; they really like HRC better because she's, well, she's a safer choice.

But then again, I lived in Appalachia for two uncomfortable, eye-opening years. What I saw there was three societies, all juxtaposed atop one another. I found the New South quite agreeable because it embraced tolerant social and racial attitudes while still holding on to other political and social values like gun rights, low taxation, valuing education, suspicion of governmental intrusion into peoples' lives, and a variety of other kinds of political and social values with which I have general agreement.

Some of the more religious New Southerners were a little bit sketchy on the whole separation of church and state part of our national heritage, but when pressed, they were willing to concede that an individual's right to privacy was probably more important than their own notions of morality, even in the case of, say, gay sex which they obviously did not approve of but were typically willing to look past. These were both black and white people, and while cross-racial friendships were still uncommon, they were also not unknown. Pretty much all of the educated professionals I met with, the lawyers and accountants and such, fit into this category. But also, a considerable number of people without advanced education had this live-and-let-live attitude, too; for instance, our next-door neighbors in Knoxville were as racially and socially tolerant as you could ask of any American family. Thinking about the blacks who came from this class, they almost all had at least some college, and at least the guys I got to know from being their lawyer, I saw that they had high enough incomes to afford to play golf on their days off, which they loved to do. Seriously, some of them could pretty much only talk golf, golf, golf, all the time when we weren't talking business. And they really wanted me to go out and shoot eighteen with them on the weekends. I found it amusing that these guys would so enthusiastically embrace golf, historically one of the last bastions of racial segregation, although that fact was, for them, a historical footnote that was of little relevance to their lives. As it should have been.

But then there was the Old South, the part of society that the Chamber of Commerce isn't so keen to put front and center of its promotional materials. For these people, white and black do not mix. They pretty much tolerate one another, but only because they are told to, and this does not mitigate the mutual antipathy and distrust that you can sense when they are around one another. Such whites thought nothing of using racial slurs (around other white people; they did not do so when blacks were in the room) and both groups acted as though some degree of geographic separation was a necessity for society to remain peaceful.

I have a hard time understanding how the blacks of this society bought into the idea of de facto segregation as something they were comfortable with despite disliking it. But that was pretty much their attitude. In my interactions with some of them (all professional, none at all social), the attitude seemed to be one of mutual cynicism and distrust -- "You're using me to make money off of my lawsuit and I'm using you because I need a lawyer for my lawsuit to be worth anything at all; all we are is money to one another." I wouldn't be surprised if at least some of them thought that they were better off keeping things insular to their own communities as much as they could depsite the limited economic opportunities that left them. There was certainly a different mood to the parts of the city east of downtown which were mainly black.

These were also the kind of folks that I spoke to who were very proud of how deep their roots were in the local community; a great many had never left East Tennessee (aside from their military service) and at least one person bragged to me once that in his nearly fifty years of life, he had never left Knox County. (As if that was something to be proud of.)

So that's what I found, socially, living in one of the biggest urban centers in Appalachia. Charleston, WV, is probably not all that different from Knoxville, TN; they're similarly-sized cities where professionals of necessity congregate around folks with more rural backgrounds. If anything, Charleston* is a much smaller city than Knoxville at only abuot 50,000 people and only about 300,000 in the metro area; Knoxville's metro area has more than twice as many people as Charleston's.

That suggests to me that there will be fewer "New South" types (but not none) in Charleston and that yes, it will be older-school. Demographically, West Virginia is about 96% white. It's entirely possible that some of these people, adults, may have never seen a real, live black person; their only experience with black people has been watching them on television. This idea absolutely blows my mind but at the same time I have little difficulty believing that it's true. And for such kinds of people, I really don't have a lot of difficulty believing that they say things like the quotes I mentioned at the start of this article -- and meaning them.

So I'm thinking the MSM's reporting from West Virginia may not be as far off the mark as defenders of Appalachia might wish. My own experiences tell me that there are people like that out there. There very likely are a bunch of ignorant racist hillbillies voters in West Virginia, and today, they get to vote, the same as all the rest of us Americans. We can hope that they look past their prejudices and make decisions that are based on facts and rational consideration of the various issues of the day. But that's probably too much to hope for.

You know, democracy would be a great thing if everyone voted the way I think they should. But that would completely defeat the purpose of having a democracy in the first place.


* I enjoyed the line in the Wikipedia entry about Charleston that described a local radio station as "96.1 The Wolf. The station plays mostly Republican country music, but also has a mix of Southern Rock." (Emphasis added.) So now there will be Democrats falling all over themselves to point out that they like country music, too.