MY DAY IN TRAFFIC COURT:

My appearance in traffic court today began with an encounter with two underlings who seemed to share one brain. Left hemisphere was handing out papers for us violators to sign with information about our right to an attorney. I thought I must be in the wrong place because one doesn't usually get an attorney for traffic court, so as the people were grabbing pens and so on, I started to ask Lefty if maybe I was in the wrong place.Excuse me but — "Wait!" She pointed an erect finger at me.After she handed out pens and paper, it was my turn. It's just that I'm here for a traffic ticket. . . "Yea?" Well, it says that I've been informed about my right to have an attorney; I don't really understand. . . "Hold on," again with the excited finger. She indicated a bench for me to sit on. I sat on it. after a few minutes, I was called over by the sister sphere.

Sister told me that I could get an attorney but I had to sign the paper . . . Well what I was concerned about. . . "Just a minute," she was terse. "It's our policy for you to sign now. You can make arrangements for a lawyer . . ." I must have looked like I was about to say something, "Let me finish!" I didn't say anything. "You have to go ahead and sign it now." I told her that she must be used to speaking to very angry people. "It's our policy," she responded.

I told her I had no problem signing the paper, but If the court was going to appoint an attorney for me, then I was going to wait to be represented. She seemed to relax only after I signed the paper. By the way, to say 'it's just our policy' is the last refuge of the moron, I wanted to say. The prosecutor called me over after a while and I spoke with her. She was a nice young woman whom I had actually known some years ago. I explained my confusion. She said that,that clause should not have been on that paper. I pleaded "no contest with a statement." Then I sat down and wrote some haikus.

What follows is the statement and some of the haikus:

Haiku #1

Stood in a poor line

Bureaucratic snaps conveyed

my message poorly.

Haiku #2

Made to sit and wait

This month the money is gone

Can't pay Sallie Mae.

Haiku #3 "On recognizing Old Friends in the Court Room."

I've known her for years

once we watched the sun come up

she thought I forgot.

Haiku #4: "Upon Rising."

Next to an ex-con

sincerely made my statement

Portly judge listened.

...My Statement:

"First, I have no hard feelings against the policeman who ticketed me; he was as nice as a person who tickets you can be.

Judge, in a municipality that was half-way enlightened, the need for revenue would generate progressive taxes that would be both share and predictable. As it is, penalties levied against citizens in the form of traffic fines represent on of the most regressive forms of indirect taxation imaginable. These have the effect of penalizing the poor in our community dis proportionally. A person of limited means can expect to pay 100 percent of his traffic fine in necessary funds, not discretionary. (In my case, my student loans may be late this month.) It is the regressive nature that makes the proliferation of traffic and speeding tickets in the way that they are proportioned, the amount of the penalty, and the impact that they have on poor families, regressive, and, in my opinion, immoral. Having said this, I leave it to your honor."

in progress.

There are those aphorisms which are entertained by people with such regularity that their truths are often assumed to be absolute; for instance, the well-known expressions that an old dog cannot be taught a new trick, that a single bird in one’s possession should be valued above multiple fowl in a bush, and that the buoyancy of cream will assure its rise to the top, by displacement of the crap beneath it. But perhaps the most troublesome of all idioms is the one that instructs a person that there is no value to be gained in judging a book by its cover—a thinking person will certainly know that quite the contrary is often the case: there is, In fact, much to be learned by looking at things such as a book’s overall condition, its marginal notes, and the objects its readers have left inside of it.

Those who write in the margins make a sort of contribution to the text. It is clear that whatever one contributes in this way is limited. It is added not to an edition, but to a single copy. In view of its limited readership, one may ask what the point is to all this. Of course over time ancient marginal notes have been known to enter into later copies of a text. This was especially true before the advent to mass printing. Sometimes these additions are blended so completely that they appear to have been part of the original text itself. It is then left to later readers to uncover them as elements of addition. For example, when Erasmus consulted the oldest of the then existing sources, he came to the understanding that the phrase, “father, son, and holy ghost,” was not in the original text of the Book of John. That is, its presence in that book antedated the Councils of Nicaea and Chalcedon, where early Christians hammered out the Trinitarian model out in an attempt to reconcile their belief in Christ’s divinity and their belief in monotheism. This was, by the way, an issue over which early Christians slaughtered and persecuted each other in droves before arriving at a consensus. There are of course other examples of influential marginalia, but its lasting value is perhaps its exclusivity.

In this way I write to a person who will not respond and who may now be long dead. This is a one-way correspondence that I maintain with the man who wrote these original side comments, some 43 years ago. Perhaps in some years’ time another person will come along and answer mine. But what does all this scribbling add to a book? These layers of thought, over time, are imbued with their own tone and take on something like their own life: one intimate reader communicates with another: two people who for a time loved the same book (the very same) reach out to each other over the years, the centuries and share an insightful comment or rude pun. I for one find this incredibly charming. Such is the beauty of marginalia, an art which is now all but lost, though its spirit may live on in the form of internet message boards, as well as in the prose of the public restroom wall.

But as revealing as marginalia is, it may be that the objects that one leaves in a book can perhaps be just as interesting. What people leave to mark their places in a book can vary from church flyers and newspaper clippings to bills and doctors’ orders.

A Syruppy Savior

She waitressed by where the pies are fingered,
then stopped and looked upon a greasy wall,
in the midst of noon-day clatter, lingered.
Remembering a dry Homecoming fall

'I was young, 'she thought; 'I was young . . . and all.'
Within the goop she saw the face of Christ,
the holy lord, next to the bathroom stall.
Others saw it, but Leigh denied it thrice:
"Oh yea, more work for me, that's really nice!"

Then cripples were healed by the stock room door.
With cheerful scowls she cut them all a slice.
The poor felt loved and wept upon the floor.
Church folk came in droves; ne'er found a place to sit;
'Great', she thought. 'Church folk never tip for shit.'

DIRTY BOOTS

In the distance a zepplin floated above the London sky. It carried several bombs that would after a fashion drop like eggs from its belly to deliver terror, and a few deaths, to the sleeping city. The nighttime attacks were becoming a nuisance to the British, a public relations nightmare, but little more. But as of yet the search lights had not caught sight of it. Presently, a single, seeking beam panned the sky.

Bellow, Baggett felt he was being watched. From the museum down to the the old Chelsea slum, he felt that he was being oppressed by some unknown gaze. That the gaze was scanning him, putting him into categories, was inescapable. That it was so stealthy as to avoid his cone of sight, so nimble as to make no sound, so crafty that he felt, himself, a target, was unthinkable. But yet, several times he had quickly turned around expecting to, bracing himself for,—a foe? This was indeed bad business; he would tell the Chinaman in the morning, he decided . . . in the morning, after this one last time. He was too important for this kind of errand. The thought of it made him ill. He approached the building and began to climb the staircase. He saw a cat eating a rodent on the steps, and he pulled a small rock out of his pocket and threw it at the tom. Two other cats whom he had not seen darted from under the stairwell and flew off in opposite directions, but the original tom was unaffected. He feasted hungrily upon the kill. Baggett reached back into his pocket for a bigger rock.

Up above, the lighted beam continuing to probe the night hit finally upon a target, the German Navy Zepplin L-35. Two additional beams quickly transfixed themselves to the ship and after a few moments flares began to follow their trajectory toward the hulking German blimp.

With apparent indifference the cat continued eat. He was the color of earth. Baggett's second rock was ignored, though is it was close to hitting the animal's head. Baggett pulled out his very large revolver and aimed it at the recalcitrant cat. Baggett closed one eye, twisted up his face; but at the very last moment he decided against the noise this tactic would generate. Just then the first of the explosions blasted through the London night, and he felt no longer any compunction to use his weapon. He aimed the gun at Mister Boots.

The dimise of the public intellectual.

Who now writes for the educated reader? Twenty years ago Russell Jacoby asked this question and warned of the dangers of the the missing generation of intellectuals who had influence in the public mind. The fact that in 1987 there seemed to be an absence of public intellectuals, compared to the previous century or so, inspired him to write The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe. Jacoby noticed that by the late 1980s a new generation (the youth of the 60s) had not penetrated the public mind in the way that Vidal, Mailer, and others had in the late forties and early fifties, and he tried to find out why. Now, twenty years later, while Vidal and Mailer—perhaps the last of the breed—continue to be recycled and we are seeing an interesting trend and a new answer to the question posed 20 years ago by Jacoby.

But in 1987 the atmosphere was a bit different. Jacoby believed that the sixties, youth had been co-opted by academia, whose structural conditions had the effect of modifying the content of their output in such a way that it was of little interest to the general public: those who had once written for the educated public, were now writing for fellow academicians; by changing the target audience, the power of the new generation of intellectuals to affect the public mind was reduced.

I would argue also that its substance was now left to be filtered though the lens of the polemicists who had, by the early 1990s, replaced them in the public sphere—more about this in a moment.

As in the physics of a closed system, heat is drawn from the thing . . . the energy they devoted to the radical causes of the 1960s was transferred to the university system.

While he did not totally discount the contribution of journalists et. al., he believed that content, too, was modified by the institutional presence of "deadlines, space, [and] money" (Jacoby 13) seemed to alter any meaningful contributions they might produce. In references to Noam Chomsky's "Propaganda Model," one might also add the modifying effect of the advertisers in a private media setting. All of this served to change the public discourse and to make the environment less friendly to the public intellectual.

Twenty years later, the question is again asked, who now writes for the educated reader? Not surprisingly it is the person who communicates primarily through electronic means, who does not require his audience to read at all; he is a radio star, a television "talking head." It is this entity that has taken the place in public debates that was once the pervue of the public intellectual.

Flag Desecration

This is illegal:

Executive Order. US Code Section 7(b) "The flag should not be draped over the hood, top, sides, or back of a vehicle or of a railroad train or a boat. When the flag is displayed on a motorcar, the staff shall be fixed firmly to the chassis or clamped to the right fender." 4USC7
AND. . .
i) The flag should never be used for advertising purposes in any manner whatsoever. . . .(j) No part of the flag should ever be used as a costume or athletic uniform." 4USC8

. . .One may sign it, salute it, or burn it; but it may be that the only difference is what is in his mind.

The defender of the Home Land:

West Virginia Children forced to salute with a "stiff" arm. This case went to the Supreme Court in 1942:

"Retiring" an American flag:

The whole issue is a double standard, and what people want to outlaw is what is in the mind of the person who does it. That's what makes the anti-flagburning position all the more indefensible. Most criminals are defined by their actions; the "flag burner" who is the target of ant-flag burning legislation, is defined by what he thinks.

On Bossier City Police and the Thugs of the Cosa Nostra

I've been thinking about Charlie Chan lately. He was my first favorite fictional character. I am a great fan of the old Chan movies. Played by several actors over two decades, this character was best portrayed, in my opinion, by the Swedish actor Warner Oland throughout most of the 1930s. A wise polymath, Chan would interact with the public with a modest respect. Before making a point of order, he would invariably begin with the polite interjection, "Excuse, please—but...." What followed was a hard-hitting, logical, and necessary point. Chan did not waste words.

Yesterday one of my students, a pregnant woman in her twenties, was visited by a Bossier City, La. Police detective named Thomerson. The highlights: She was met in the main (public) reception area by a man of Asian decent who wore a badge and gun. I, and several others, were present in the area. She was told that she was not under arrest, but that she was to come with him to another jurisdiction to answer questions. She was not under arrest, but, he insisted, she had little choice but to come with him. She politely refused, but offered to meet with him after class to speak. He agreed to this but continued to brow-beat and threaten her with arrest if she did not come at the agreed upon time.

After agreeing to meet with her later in the day, he began to publicly emote. He raised his voice and took on the body language of a professional wrestler. He told various people in the vicinity that she was "stalling" him. His tone was aggressive and confrontational. "I do this for a living, I know when I'm being stalled!" The student who was on her way back to class, stopped and turned around.

"I'm w-what?" She asked in apparent confusion. At this point some ten feet away from the officer, and he moved toward her with determination. I was standing between the two of them. He stopped when he got near me and snapped at me, "get out of my face!" Given the fact that he had walked up to me, I felt that this was an un-reasonable demand. In the meantime, the student went back to class while the officer continued to emote.

In her absence he fretted that he was going to "look like an idiot," if she didn't meet him at four o'clock. He asked petulant questions, harangued those of us still present, caused a scene, and then left.

I stood amazed by what had just happened, and I thought about Charlie Chan. Like many Americans I derive at least some of my moral standards from the "movies," and it was from the iconic Asian-Hawaiian detective that I had first learned to respect the cops. Considering the positive signification of Asian policemen in my mind, the experience was particularly jarring. Never had my childhood hero browbeat and intimidated a pregnant woman; never had I seen him stand in a public hallway griping about the motives of a potential witness; and never had the venerable Chan complained that he would look like an idiot if a person of interest didn't show up for questioning.

But if such behavior is unacceptable in an average person, it is beyond contempt in a public servant. This point has a practical as well as moral dimension to it: it is understood by anyone who interacts with a person who is armed with a handgun that there is an unstated, but ever present, power differential. The person with the gun has an enormous amount of influence. That the armed person is a police officer does little to comfort the citizen who must deal with him. A policeman who walks up to a teacher who has only a red pen in his pocket, and tells him to, "Get out of my face!" is not only engaging in appalling behavior, he is also chipping away at the remaining veneer of respect and trust that we all want to have for our constabulary.

The recent decades have shown that law enforcement is not always the highly moral protectors of safety and service that they champion themselves to be. In fact, no longer are the police assumed to be virtuous. Recent examples of police and persecutory criminal activity continue to confirm this unpleasant fact. Several years ago, Alex Kozinski, a conservative judge on the 9th Circuit Appellate Court, stated that the fact of police perjury is, "an open secret long shared by prosecutors, defense attorneys and judges." In Los Angeles last year, the ugly details of the Ramparts precinct drug division became a matter of public record. These details included the theft of drugs by police officers as well as the "planting" of drugs on suspects. In one case, members of the unit planted a gun on a man they had shot and who remains paralyzed by the attack. Similar examples of police misconduct were reported by New York's Mollen Commission which stated, "The practice of police falsification in connection with such arrests is so common in certain precincts that it has spawned its own word: "testilying"
(http://www.constitution.org/lrev/dershowitz_test_981201.htm#N_10_> House of Representatives Judiciary Committee ). University of Florida Law professor, Christopher Slobogin, has recently produced an extensive survey of law enforcement perjury which indicate that such practices are endemic. From a moral point of view, a significant number of law enforcement personnel appear virtually indistinguishable from the thugs of the Cosa Nostra.

When the police help, we like the police. When they bully and bluster, which is too often the case today, we reasonably look for ways to protect ourselves. A policeman's job is hard, and it is supposed to be. In 1958's A Touch of Evil, Charlton Heston famously quipped, "A policeman's job is only easy in a police state." Indeed, unless we wish to pass on to the future a culture of Brown-Shirt authoritarianism, we should resist the idea of the moral exceptionalism of the police.