A PIECE OF MY MIND

 

Jerry Harkins

 

 

 

Every day, millions of citizens sit down to write nasty letters to corporate executives,  newspaper editors, politicians and religious leaders, all of whom have more important things to do than to read the pathetic musings of disgruntled, uninformed constituents.  These are called “crackpot letters” because they cannot be answered with the truth for any number of reasons.  For example, the truth often creates a legal liability resulting in a multiyear vacation at the expense of the state.  Or it may give offense resulting in public shaming or involve trafficking in trade secrets which may result in a visit from uneducated knuckle-draggers.  Of course, it may simply be nobody’s damn business.  Truth is a highly overrated virtue yet these letters must be answered.

 

In days of yore, the brightest, most bushy-tailed IBM recruits were assigned as Administrative Assistants to Tom Watson's office specifically to gain high level experience by answering what they routinely referred to as "fuck you" letters.  It was assumed –– correctly –– that anyone who was dissatisfied with any of IBM's products, services or policies was a knave, a fool or worse and could not be persuaded by logic, evidence or reasoning.  Thus, the response had to be polite, solicitous and sympathetic without, however, admitting liability or costing IBM additional money or bother.  A further requirement was that the response had to be as close as humanly possible to The Standard Answer, a collection of sentences and phrases drafted by the Legal Department and designed to fit almost any problem.  After all, answering crackpot letters would otherwise have been prohibitively time-consuming and expensive.  Finally, it was widely known that the young man who could find an answer to the most difficult letters had his dossier flagged as a fast tracker.  Here is an almost perfect generic IBM response to a generic complaint:

 

Mr. Watson has received your letter of the 9th and asked me to reply in his absence.  IBM takes customer service very seriously, so he was distressed to learn of your recent experience.  He wants to assure you personally that steps will be taken to prevent the recurrence of even the most minor faults in this area.  He also asked me to reiterate how highly he values the relationship IBM has enjoyed with you and looks forward to a renewed sense of partnership between us.

 

Note that, except for the date of complainant’s letter, every single word, phrase and sentence is straight out of The Standard Answer.  The writer did not spend much time, if any, actually reading the complaint.  A quick scan was sufficient.  The genius of this letter is its use of the actual date of the incoming missive, the magic word personally and the flattering phrase sense of partnership.  It leaves the reader with a feeling of completion but also a vague sense of guilt for causing distress to such a busy executive as Mr. W.  The customer easily reads between the lines that heads are going to roll and so is satisfied.  He can tell his wife, his mistress and his golfing buddies that not even IBM can fuck around with him.  You can almost hear him, “Yeah, as Tom said to me, ‘Fred, you know how hard it is to find decent people.’”  Listeners would assume this observation was made at the Nineteenth Hole after Fred and Tom had played a bracing round of golf.

 

Of course, it is rare that a satisfactory reply can be made without some minimal  reference to the specific complaint of the writer.  This does not have to be a major burden even if it does mean actually reading the complaint.  Here is an example taken from historical archives:

 

Dear Mr. Job:

 

God has received your letter of the 9th and has asked me to reply in his absence.  As you know, we take justice and mercy very seriously up here so he was quite distressed to learn of your dissatisfaction with some of his recent decisions.  He wants to assure you personally that steps will be taken to restore any 

property you may have lost, to include cattle and sheep, through inadvertent actions on his part.  You understand, of course, that even God cannot restore your old family after such an extended period of time.  If his review concludes that your family was destroyed unfairly, he will provide you with a new, improved model wife and children at no cost to you.  He wants to assure you that he greatly values the relationship he has enjoyed with you and all the Uzians and looks forward to a renewed sense of worship within your community.

 

The score for this letter is 73.5% and, as you can see, by substituting the word Sodomites for Uzians, the same letter could have been sent to Lot.  There are some nice touches here including the exculpatory phrase inadvertent actions.  Again, you see that marvelous word personally.  Of necessity, partnership must be sacrificed but relationship is almost as good.  Note that the writer says that God will provide a new family at no cost to you.  It must have been tempting to add except for shipping and handling but the decision was that that might have been perceived as tacky.  You may think it was unnecessary to forego the added revenue but your balance sheet is probably not as impressive as God’s.  The stick in this letter is the call for a renewed sense of worship but it is so delicate that even the most sensitive complainant would be hard pressed to take more than mild umbrage.  Nit pickers will point out that the complaint required the admission that there is something that God cannot do but, overall, this is a very solid effort.

 

There is, of course, no escaping the reality that many crackpot letters require a more adversarial reply.  The rules still apply, although in a somewhat watered down form.  Avoid the truth.  Admit nothing.  Never lose a viable customer even if retaining him involves more stick than carrot.  And remember, subtlety is your most valuable tool in gaining closure.  Among our collection in the Hall of Fame is this superb example:

 

Your recent letter to Don Vincenzo “Mad Dog” Gigante regarding your unfortunate kneecapping incident has been forwarded to me for reply.  As I am sure you know, the Don is discommoded at present and is likely to remain so for the next 10 to 15 years.  He has, however, taken an active personal interest in your situation.  While he wishes you a full and speedy recovery, he is mildly taken aback by your suggestion that violence was not called for.  “Is it possible,” he asked me, “that the father of my godson does not realize the extent of his folly?  Or that his actions required me to illustrate that folly to other members of my family?”  Of course I reassured him on both these concerns (which, needless to say, puts my knees on the line for you).  I also told him how grateful you are that your crown jewels were spared, and he asked me to convey his best wishes to your lovely wife.

 

With due allowance for the fact that the writer did not have the advantages of a liberal arts education, it must be admitted that the letter contains an elegant balance of concern for a valued employee with just the right touch of putting the fear of God into his thick head.  It is not always possible to respond with such warmth.  For example:

 

Dear Dr. Lewinsky:

 

Your recent letter to former President Clinton has been referred to this desk for reply.  Please be advised that the Secret Service takes an active interest in all letters containing references to attorneys, press representatives and the like.  After scanning them for biological and chemical agents, the Service routinely undertakes a full psychological profile of the sender and conducts an in-depth investigation of his or her personal, financial and sexual histories.  This is being brought to your attention because you may have forgotten that in this age of email and wireless communications, your privacy may not be as private as it once was.  The President asked this office to convey his fondest regards to you, Mrs. Lewinsky and your friend, the well endowed Ms. LaRue.

 

There is nothing in this letter that could be construed as an explicit threat but the use of the third person “this desk” establishes the required storm warning tone.  The casual mention of several kinds of “in-depth investigations” is worthy of the finest Italian hand.  The reference to “Ms. LaRue” immediately after the reference to Mrs. Lewinsky is an earnest regarding the suggestion contained in the preceding sentence.  Note that the writer does not claim to be a member of the Secret Service, nor does he identify exactly what “this desk” represents.

 

Many complaints are handwritten and, whether printed or cursive, are indecipherable.  No problem! Remember, it is not necessary that you actually read these letters, much less reply with an intelligent and relevant answer.  Merely make some assumptions about the age and intelligence of the writer as did this masterful young assistant:

 

Dear Sir or Madam,

 

Senator Clinton has read your recent email protesting against various of her positions.  She was truly surprised to note such an impressive  vocabulary in a 9-year old, and she has taken steps to have your contribution published in The Congressional Record, a copy of which will be mailed to your proud parents and to your local newspaper.  I apologize for all the “expletives deleteds” but the Record insists on adhering to an almost Victorian standard of family values.

 

The day you begin your assignment, you should obtain a copy of the Manual of Reply Letters published by the IRS and written by an obscure but highly experienced Assistant Deputy Commissioner.  This naturally requires Top Secret clearance but it can be revealed that it was developed with the assistance of the IBM Marketing Department.  Illicit copies are easy to obtain because the Manual has been widely distributed within the bureaucracy.  Simply inquire at your local office of the Bureau of Labor Statistics or the Forest Service depending on your location.  The masterpiece of this collection is:

 

To Taxpayer 000-00-000:

 

No.

 

Sincerely,

OX4372,

Asst Reg Dir, SecXR40

 

cc:  Terminal Resolutions Agency

 

The “OX4372” signature line was hand-signed in red ink to add a personal touch.  Another way to do this is to add a note of levity:

 

Dear Taxpayer:

 

I almost regret the necessity of informing you that you cannot deduct the $5,000 you paid for Ms. LaRue’s necklace.  However, all our agents got a really good belly laugh out of your request.  We must, of course, report your purchase to our colleagues in your state tax bureau but we will probably not inform Mrs. Taxpayer of your indiscretion.

 

We hope these suggestions will prove helpful.  However, pease note:

 

The advice contained in this essay is not guaranteed and the writer assumes no responsibility for any adverse experience the reader encounters as a result of it use.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

TORTURE BY TWEET 

Jerry Harkins

  “The principle that there is a presumption of innocence in favor of the accused is the undoubted law, axiomatic and elementary, and its enforcement lies at the foundation of the administration of our criminal law.”

                                                                   ––Coffin v. United States, 156 U.S. 432 (1895).  

  

Let me begin with a confession:  I like Andrew Cuomo.  A bit rough around the edges, maybe, but he gets good things done.  Among other things, he has done a better job of managing the covid pandemic than anybody else I can think of.  He is the least ideological politician we have and, while he does fib occasionally, he is the most truthful and most transparent disciple of Niccolo Machiavelli currently working.  Which is to say he’s a realist, a pragmatist and an empiricist.  Unlike his father, he will never be elevated to the sainthood.  Rather, he is the all-American boy, collecting and restoring muscle cars and riding Harley-Davidson hogs.  What’s not to like?

For some reason, however, not everyone agrees with my assessment.  Throughout his career, he has inspired an undercurrent of dislike, distrust and outright hostility.  I think it’s his style.  He is aggressive, dismissive and demanding.  He does not suffer fools lightly.  Recently, he has encountered a tsunami of criticism from all sides of the political spectrum.  The talking heads and pundits are jumping all over him.  A bipartisan group of legislators are crying (in one case, literally) for his scalp.  Among other things, he is being accused of sexual misbehavior in a classic case of she-said-he-said.  Several women have accused him of making them “uncomfortable.”  One says he kissed her on the lips, another that he touched her arm. One claimed he asked her for a date, or at least she felt that was what he was doing.  If true, these offenses were offensive but perhaps not in the same class as Harvey Weinstein or Jeffrey Epstein.

Let there be no doubt that women in our society are often the victims of disgusting male behavior.  Misogyny is and always has been prevalent and prominent in human society.  Charles Darwin to the contrary notwithstanding, there does not seem to be any selective advantage our species can derive from it.  Yet it is not a mystery.  Men derive much of their self-regard from their imagined sexual prowess but women are in a position to judge the reality of that prowess. In other words, there is a significant source of anxiety built into the male-female relationship.  There is also a power differential that serves to alleviate that anxiety and, of course, that works in favor of the male.  Much of what Cuomo’s accusers are complaining about seems to derive from the macho perception of him, an image he cultivates.  But sexual abuse at the level they describe does not account for all the current antipathy.

Take, for example, the case of the Honorable Ron Kim, the representative of the 40^th Assembly District in the state legislature.  Mr. Kim was one of the first Democrats to call for Cuomo’s resignation on the grounds that he ordered hospitals to discharge certain elderly covid patients back to the nursing homes they had been living in.  He basically admitted it, explaining that there was a critical shortage of hospital beds needed for sicker patients.  It’s complicated and it was a difficult decision but Honorable Kim takes it as evidence of mass murder.  Kim seems to be making a name for himself as Jack the giant killer.

If this sudden outpouring of accusation were football, you would call it “piling on” and it would draw a penalty of fifteen yards and an automatic first down.  Without making any judgment about the validity of the claims, the sudden emergence of so many different criticisms is bound to raise the antennas of conspiracy theorists.  That, of course, is highly unlikely.  We are witnessing not anything organized and choreographed.  No one is blatantly lying.  Rather, it seems to be a natural process that has evolved in the age of social media, a process in which molehills are converted into mountains at warp speed.  The claims have to escalate if they are to keep the story alive in the real media.  One thing is certain: there will be more accusations about more matters as the story unfolds and they will get progressively more graphic.  On March 25, 2021, the New York Times ran a front page story based on anonymous sources saying that Cuomo had illegally arranged covid tests for members of his family at the outset of the pandemic.  This was not news because the Governor had announced it himself at a news conference a few days after the tests were done.  At the time, he was desperately trying to arrange testing for everyone and he figured his 89-year old mother would make a good selling point.  A week later, again on the front page, it accused him of “…pitching a book proposal that would center on his image as a hero of the pandemic” and asking his secretary for help in said pitching.  Heinous!

Just possibly, Andrew Cuomo is toast.  After four years of Trumpism, it may be difficult to recall that the left can be just as doggedly stupid as the right.  It seems neither side ever learns anything from reality.  The Democrats seem to have forgotten their fiasco in driving Al Franken out of the U.S. Senate.  And virtually all the pols actually liked Al who also stood accused, a la Cuomo, of making women uncomfortable.  First, it was one woman talking about an unwanted kiss she had received eleven years before.  Soon it was seven women with similar complaints and eventually nine came forward.  Franken was forced to resign a breathtaking twenty-one days after the first allegation.  Senator Schumer engineered the ouster apparently telling Franken there was no time for due process.  Franken later said, “The idea that anybody who accuses someone of something is always right—that's not the case. That isn't reality.”  Apparently, Al has forgotten Napoleon’s instruction to the pigs in George Orwell’s Animal Farm.  Asked how to tell friends from enemies, he says it’s easy:  “Four legs good, two legs bad.”

Schumer’s idea that due process was untimely is truly extraordinary in an America that constantly brags about being a nation of laws.  In the modern era, we have become a nation whose politics are more like a bull fight than a deliberative process.  El Toro has no chance of surviving the afternoon.  Before the sun goes down, he is going to be tortured to death.  That’s what the customers are paying for, cheering for.  Ole!  Even if he sometimes slays his torturer, even if the spectators applaud his courage, his own death is fore-ordained.  The fiercer he acts, the more they will applaud both his courage and his death.  It is all an act.  As Ernest Hemingway wrote, “All supposed exterior signs of danger that a bull gives, such as pawing the ground, threatening with his horns, or bellowing are forms of bluffing.”  Now this is a metaphor and, like all metaphors, it limps.  But not before we note that the matador, while hardly a hero, is almost always a decent, God-fearing family man, an Everyman acting in a monster-slaying scripted role that leaves no room for improvisation.  Bull fighting and sex abuse scandals are both forms of the medieval morality play.

 

If you doubt this, you can go back and read the coverage of past sex abuse scandals.  All but the most monstrous look alike.  The same headlines, the same vocabulary, the same development of the story line, the same presumption of guilt, the same innocence of the victims.  Only the names have changed.  Then compare the sex abuse coverage to the mass murder coverage which has its own set piece architecture.  You are bound to hear all the usual claptrap about thoughts-and-prayers, guns-don’t-kill-people and the need for common sense gun control.  Whether its sex abuse or mass murder, what the reader gets is tragedy reduced to melodrama.  The tragedy is, first, the anguish of the victims but it is also the rush to judgment and the formulaic attention paid to an important issue in our society.  If Napoleon were advising today’s thought leaders, he might borrow from the Red Queen.  “Off with his head!  Sentence first, trial later.”  

 

The cause of all this is the phenomenon of social media.  Platforms like Facebook, Twitter and their competitors provide an extreme version of freedom of expression.  Not only do they let you shout pretty much whatever comes into your head, they magnify your impact by reaching a vast audience instantaneously.  With billions of users, there are sure to be millions of believers.  Never before has communication spread so rapidly and so immediately after it has been sparked. Never before has the content of communication been spread without a moment’s pause for consideration of its believability.  In the new information environment, an untested assertion will be accepted as truth first by the credulous among us and soon by many others.  The life cycle of any assertion is predictable.  Once loose on the internet, it is certain to be picked up by the conventional media which gives it gravitas and credibility.  

 

You remember Virginia O’Hanlon’s father who told her, “If you see it in The Sun, it’s so.”  On September 21, 1897, that newspaper replied to her inquiry by writing, “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.”  The most famous editorial in journalistic history was a lie told to an 8-year old child.  At least, it was a harmless –– perhaps a charming –– lie.  Less charming are the political lies we have come to know in the social media.  These give life to the guidelines for the of Big Brother’s Ministry of Truth:  Make your lie big enough and repeat it often enough.  All lies, of course, corrupt the truth and degrade the idea of self-government.  By normalizing a culture of untruth, they stain even the most righteous of causes.

 

There is a class of problems that have no technical solution.  Women must be heard with respect and the value of free expression must be protected.  At the same time, we must not lose the assumption of innocence.  There may come a time when such balances are easier to strike but, at the moment, it seems that something precious will have to give ground.

 

Subsequently

 Two months after this essay was published, the New York State Attorney General released her report on the allegations against the Governor.  They were damning and called on him to resign or be impeached.  In this, the report was endorsed by virtually all Democrats from President Biden on down.  We will now witness the state spending millions of dollars to impeach and convict him.  A waste of time and money:  they have long since announced his guilt.  It would have cheaper to hand him over to Pontius Pilate.  Oh, yes, one more thing:  the Attorney General under whose aegis the report was produced later announced her own candidacy for Governor.  I trust no one was surprised.

Still later, like Al Franken, Cuomo resigned while protesting his innocence, his brother got fired for saying nice things about him and the pols tried unsuccessfully to prevent him from publishing his memoirs.  Almost lost in all the excitement, was the withdrawal of Attorney General Letitia "Tish" James from the race for Governor.  As always, Albany remained inscrutable.

 

 

 

THE BIG BANG:  A PROGRESS REPORT

 

Jerry Harkins

 

 

 

Since 1961, almost 2% of Americans or more than six and a half million people have reported being abducted by space aliens.  And those are just the abductees who returned to tell the tale.  These folks are entitled to believe any damn thing they want but they’re wrong about visitors from outer space.  The laws of probability state that an event whose probability is sufficiently small will not occur, and the laws of physics state that the probability of their reports being accurate are just that, indistinguishable from zero. The observable universe is a sphere with an apparent radius of 45.7 billion light years.  A light year is approximately 5.9 trillion miles which means the observable universe has a diameter of approximately 576 X 1021 miles.  Which is:

 

576,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles[1]

 

and the volume of the sphere is 4 X 1026  or

 

400,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 cubic miles.

 

It –– the Universe –– appears to be approximately 13.8 billion years old and contains at least 2 trillion galaxies, including our own Milky Way which is a pancake-shaped cluster of at least 100 billion stars and has a diameter of approximately 100,000 light years.  One of those stars is our Sun.

 

It seems almost certain that we are not alone, that there is other life out there and some of it is probably older and more advanced than we are.[2]  If so, it is bound by the same laws of physics and chemistry as we are.  For example, in the observable universe, gravity is gravity everywhere and 299,792,458 meters per second is the absolute speed limit.[3]  Proxima Centauri is the nearest star to our Sun.  If it nurtured life on a planet like ours, it would take light 4.243 years to travel between them.  Living beings could not travel at the speed of light.  It is estimated that it would take humans some 2700 generations or 54,000 years to made the trip.  More advanced travelers might do better but, if they were at all like us, they would burn up or disintegrate at much higher speeds long before they reached New York.

 

Extraterrestrial life would also be bound by similar but not necessarily identical laws of biology.  Instead of being carbon-based, it could be structured around silicon or, perhaps, germanium which is rarer on earth than either carbon or silicon.  But all known living organisms are carbon-based, rely on water as a solvent and replicate through the mechanism of DNA and RNA.  Given evolution’s penchant for diversity and experimentation, why this is so is an interesting but seemingly unanswerable question.

 

The unimaginably large numbers cited thus far are analogous to the unimaginably small numbers of particle physics.  Together, they support an insight of J.B.S. Haldane, the British polymath, who wrote, “…my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.”[4]  Nearly a century after he wrote that essay, it seems even queerer.  For example, it is now widely accepted that in the beginning, all matter and all energy were compressed into a tiny space, like an infinitesimal black hole containing an infinity of everything.  This “singularity” exploded and the matter and energy released have been expanding ever since at an accelerating rate.

 

Many American believe all this is heresy because it seems to contradict what the Bible says about the creation.  It is certainly a different story.  The familiar King James Version of Genesis and many other English translations start with the statement that, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”  That, however, is subtly different from the oldest Hebrew versions we have.  A better translation would be, “In the beginning of God's preparing the heavens and the earth, the earth had existed waste and void.”  This implies that the earth already existed but it was a wasteland and had no life on it.  God “prepared” it for life by first creating light in the form of the Sun and separating the light from the dark by giving the earth spin on its axis and rotation around the Sun.  Thus, the biblical “beginning” was not the beginning of matter and energy but rather of God’s project on earth.  The Bible is silent on the question of what God was preparing “the heavens” for.

 

It is probably true that most scientists do not believe in God and that most Americans do but that is not an issue here.  We now know that our universe came about by an explosive event called the Big Bang and that the earth was one of the results.  Empirical evidence in the form of cosmic microwave background radiation was discovered in 1964 by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson of Bell Laboratories and confirmed by Robert Dicke of Princeton University.   Many physicists think the cause of the explosion was the heat generated by virtually infinite pressure but that too is not an issue here.  What is important is that we now know how the creation of the universe unfolded starting about one-trillionth of a second after the Big Bang.  We are close to knowing exactly when and how Planet Earth coalesced and we can explain the origin of the naturally-occurring and synthetic elements.  We are closing in on how the first living creatures evolved from the earth’s chemistry and, most controversially, how we ourselves evolved from those first creatures.

 

The early history of the universe has been a major question from the earliest days of our own appearance on the scene and has yielded itself only grudgingly to our inquiries. Mistakes were made.  Most famously, James Ussher, Anglican Archbishop and Primate of Ireland, calculated what he thought was the precise date of creation based mainly on biblical genealogy.  He was, of course, dealing with the creation of the earth and he claimed the first day was October 22, 4004 B.C.  The time was evening.  Ussher was not a fool.  His work was one of high scholarship.  Its methodology was endorsed by none less than Isaac Newton and was widely accepted for two hundred years.  It’s just that in 1650, neither he nor anyone else knew what fossils were.  Or radioactive decay or the expansion of the universe never mind its rate of expansion.  They had no hint that the earth and the universe were so old that six thousand years was no time at all.  It had been only forty-one years since Johannes Kepler had published his finding that the planetary orbits are not circular but elliptical and eighteen years since the Inquisition had tried Galileo for the heresy of reporting that those orbits existed in the first place.

 

Ussher’s spectacular error serves as a warning to contemporary science:  bear in mind that the scientists of the twenty-second century will look back on the errors we are making today.  Still, it is all but certain that visitations from intelligent space aliens will still be in the realm of science fiction.  We may then know there is life out there, perhaps even intelligent life, but any encounter with it will be via some as yet unimaginable form of Zoom.

 

Nevertheless, in 2020, the National UFO Reporting Center, a non-profit data compiler founded in 1974, received reports of 7,267 “sightings” in the United States, a substantial increase over 2018 and 2019 attributed to the pandemic shutdowns.  Some of these were serious observations reported by reliable witnesses including several from airline and air force pilots.  Most of these were readily resolved but a few remain speculative.  The data do not reveal whether any of these reports were from the six million people who claim to have been abducted, leaving us to wonder why there are so many more abductions than sightings.  In any event, an unknown number of these reports are pure fabrication and others are matters of true belief.

 Belief is not merely a matter of intelligence but is influenced in varying degrees by what people want to believe, what their authority figures tell them to believe, what they perceive is the consensus within their social milieu and what they have been taught in school.  They are also affected by a desire to do, say and think what large groups of people are doing, saying and thinking.  It is a phenomenon recognized by neurologists and often referred to as “Monkey see, monkey do.”  It has been advanced as an explanation of mob behavior, religious ecstasy and other group activities where it serves to promote group identity and cohesion.  It may also help to explain why there are so many people who believe in propositions that cannot be true.  UFO’s are not visitors from outer space.  The earth is not flat.  No one dies, goes to heaven, meets God and is then resuscitated.  Of current interest, vaccines are not a plot to turn us into robots.

Belief, no matter how strong, in the absence of evidence is not fact.  It can be many things, good or bad, true or false, sincere or hypocritical, logical or absurd but, by itself, it cannot be called a fact.  And a fact is not an eternal verity.  Today’s facts are vulnerable to new evidence or reinterpreted old evidence.  It was once perfectly reasonable to assume as fact the observation that the Sun revolves around the earth.  After all, it seems to rise in the east every day and set in the west.  As King Solomon tells us, “The sun rises and the sun sets, and hurries back to where it rises.”  But the evidence of our senses –– and our common sense –– mislead us.  Galileo proved it decisively and his finding has subsequently been supported by an overwhelming abundance of confirming evidence and a complete lack of evidence to the contrary.  The probability that it will someday be repudiated is negligible.  On the other hand it has been and will continue to be modified to account for new observations.  

There are not many facts as fully supported as heliocentricity but one of them is evolution.  There can be no reasonable doubt that Darwin’s basic thesis is correct even if it has been amplified and modified a great deal since 1859.  Ohm’s Law which describes the relationships between electrical current, voltage and the resistance they act on is a scientific fact even though it has several important exceptions.  It is certain that dinosaurs roamed the earth for roughly 179 million years beginning in the early Triassic Period even though the fossil evidence is fragmentary.  It is also certain that the Pythagorean Theorem is correct.  The square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides.  Always.  There are hundreds of ways of proving it and there are no exceptions.  But the certainty of the theorem is not the same as the certainty of the dinosaurs.  The former is based on rigorous mathematical proofs while the latter is an inference drawn from all the evidence that has ever been found.

 Victor Hugo famously wrote, “There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come.”  Perhaps, but more powerful still is a powerful idea whose time has passed but is still believed.  Such ideas rob their believers of the intellectual independence, individuality and curiosity that are their birthright.  They accomplish this by disguising gullibility as being privy to secret knowledge. Others may see through Saint Paul’s glass darkly or from the vantage of Plato’s cave.  It has always been such.  Today it is only more dangerous.

Notes

 

[1] Many contemporary cosmologists believe the universe is "flat" or, more precisely, pancake-shaped.  The singularity, however, must have been spherical and, if the Big Bang was an explosive event, the early universe would have been shaped the same way.  The questions are when did the sphere flatten and what force overcame the expansive force of the explosion?

We also do not know what, if anything, may lie beyond the “observable universe” because information has not had enough time to get from beyond more than 13.8 billion years.  A good bet might be “more of the same” which would imply that the universe is older than we think.  Of course, “nothing” might be an even better bet even if "nothing" is hard to define.  One idea gaining increasing interest is that our universe is only one of many such entities which may or may not be accessible to each other.  This, of course, is at the frontier of scientific thought but if is true, all bets are off when it comes to the laws of science, including those of probability, applying throughout a multiverse.

 

[2] It took the first life form about ten billion years to appear on earth and that was about three and a half billion years ago.  The genus Homo of which we are members arose in Africa between two and three million years ago.  Our species, Homo sapiens, also arose in Africa approximately 300,000 years ago and is today the only surviving member of the genus Homo.  Given two trillion galaxies and 13.8 billion years, it would be surprising if life has appeared only on the third planet of a single star in a relatively small galaxy.

 

[3] Another problem with a phrase like the “observable universe” is that vast parts of our universe are not yet observable and are therefore called “dark.”  Dark matter is thought to constitute 85% of the total mass of the universe and dark energy to constitute 69% of the total energy.  In other words, we know little about the majority of everything except that we’re almost sure it’s there.  And then there’s the problem that the laws of the observable universe do not apply to the atom and its constituents, the subatomic particles.  That’s the world of quantum physics and is best left to the quantum physicists.  They often refer to its laws as “quantum weirdness.”  Among them is the belief that, under certain circumstances, subatomic particles can move instantaneously without regard to distance.

 

[4] Possible Worlds and Other Essays, Chatto and Windus, London, 1927, p. 286.  Haldane was a Reader in Biochemistry at Cambridge University and one of the first to propose a synthesis of Darwinian evolution and Mendelian genetics.

Subsequently

 

 As this essay was being posted, a report compiled by the Director of National Intelligence and the Secretary of Defense was being prepared for imminent publication.  It is said to contain all the information the government has collected on unexplained arial phenomena (i.e., UFO's) but is not expected to alter current scientific opinion regarding extraterrestrial life.  The New York Times reported on June 3, 2021 that, while the origin of some sightings remain unknown, there is no evidence any of them involve alien beings.  Because certain parts of the report will still be classified, it will not satisfy many of the true believers.

 

 

 

 

AN ELEGY FOR COLLECTIVE BARGAINING

Jerry Harkins

With all their faults, trade-unions have done more for humanity than any other organization of men that ever existed. They have done more for decency, for honesty, for education, for the betterment of the race, for the developing of character in man, than any other association of men.

                                                                                                ––Clarence Darrow

 

 

 

Throughout history, the movers and shakers of this world have fiercely opposed labor unions and everything they have tried to do to make life better for working men and women.  In America, anti-unionism has been a dogma of Republican faith ever since Theodore Roosevelt left office.  Democrats were better but not by much until the administration of Teddy’s fifth cousin, Franklin D. Roosevelt.  FDR came to the presidency thinking that decent regulation would make unions unnecessary but he was quickly disabused of this by Senator Robert F. Wagner.  The Wagner Act of 1935 was regarded as labor’s bill of rights and it remained so until the Republicans gained majorities in Congress and passed the Taft Hartley Act of 1947 over President Truman's veto.  Truman called it the Save Labor Act and it set off a long, slow decline in the influence of unions that has persisted to the present day.  

Admittedly, the Republicans had a lot of help from the unions themselves.  Drunk with their new-found powers, some of them became little more than racketeering organizations in open partnership with organized crime.[1]  A few made the transition from the socialism of the 1930’s to the Communism of the 1950’s and some began to treat their members in the same brutal way as the laissez faire plutocrats of the Gilded Age.  Still others engaged in senseless strikes that threatened economic chaos and seriously disrupted the public.  It was catnip to the politicians.  The young Robert F. Kennedy went on Jack Parr’s Tonight Show in 1957 and let loose on the corrupt Teamsters Union, saying, “Unless something is done, this country is not going to be controlled by the people but is going to be controlled by Johnny Dio and Jimmy Hoffa and Tony ‘Ducks’ Corallo.”  It was far from the mark but true enough to feed the anti-union sentiment building in the country.  The movie On the Waterfront finished the job.  It was very largely a true story.  Political institutions responded ideologically, using the issue of corruption as a cudgel to destroy all unions everywhere instead of focusing on the problem at hand.  They were successful.  Union membership declined steadily from 29.6% of the workforce in 1953 to 10.3% in 2019.  Had it not been for the surprising growth of unions representing public workers and professionals, the decline might have been much worse.

The decline of union power has contributed mightily to the host of the problems confronting America today.  Just to mention a few:  the stagnation of the incomes of the working and middle classes, a massive exodus of good jobs to low wage countries, the instability of the job market, the high cost of medical care, gaping income inequality and the poisonous  political divisions that have resulted from all of these.

 The founding fathers of the United States were brilliant and decent men, almost all members of the gentry.  They were well bred, well educated, well married and propertied products of Enlightenment thinking who created a nation of, by and for people like themselves.  Most were self-sufficient farmers of one sort or another.  Their moral and social sensibilities, advanced as they were for their time, were nevertheless blind to some moral standards we see as obvious.  Many bought and sold human beings as slaves.  The laborers who built the Erie Canal were not slaves but were mostly poor Irish immigrants and were thought of as literally “of no account.”  Anyone who was reduced to selling his labor for wages was thought to be inferior which, in most jurisdictions, excluded one from the right to vote.  Eighty-seven years later, Abraham Lincoln declared the second American Revolution when, at Gettysburg, he proclaimed that the phrase “all men are created equal” was to be taken literally.  His vision is still a work in progress.

 The rise of laborers to middle class respectability is a fascinating story of bloody wars, social adaptation and theological controversy.  It began in the last decade of the nineteenth century and was heralded by two events.  In 1891, Pope Leo XIII published his encyclical Rerum Novarum which is largely a defense of capitalism against the socialistic challenges which had been increasing since 1848.  But it also promoted the dignity of labor and laborers and the right of workers to bargain collectively and to earn wages sufficient to provide a healthy and secure family life.  The year before, the Sherman Antitrust Act had set out to curb the power of the large corporations but, almost always, it was enforced only against the emerging labor unions.  It too endorsed the dignity of labor and the right of workers to organize and campaign for higher wages and better working conditions.  This novel idea was reinforced by the enactment of the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914 which read in part, “… the labor of a human being is not a commodity or article of commerce” and provided that labor organizations were exempt from antitrust laws and had the right to carry out their legitimate objectives.  Finally, the Wagner Act guaranteed the right of workers in the private sector to organize unions, engage in collective bargaining and take collective action, including strikes, to promote their objectives.

 The Republican Party fiercely opposed every provision of the Wagner Act and its subsequent amendments and, when in power, it enacted a wide range of anti-union laws and regulations culminating in the devastating Taft-Hartley Act of 1947.  Among its provisions, Taft-Hartley allows states to pass so-called Right to Work laws.  It gave the government the ability to break strikes by declaring 80-day cooling off periods, outlawed organizational picketing, prohibited secondary boycotts, banned strikes by federal workers, restricted political contributions by unions, outlawed pension and welfare funds not jointly controlled by management, authorized employer interference in organizing, denied "economic" strikers the right to vote in representation elections while allowing replacement workers (“scabs”) to do so, allowed management to fire workers for some types of union activity, opened union treasuries to increased scrutiny, and required union officers to sign affidavits that they were not Communists. Most damaging were the Right to Work Law provisions.  Twenty-eight states have enacted such laws, twenty-six “red” states and two “swing” states. 

A large majority of Americans, currently about 65%, approve of unions but the antipathy of politicians has continued to the present day.  In June of 2020, Eugene Scalia,  Secretary of Labor in the Trump Cabinet of Curiosities, tried to issue a bizarre rule prohibiting private employee pension plans from considering the environmental, social and governance records of companies in making investment decisions.  This in spite of experience showing that such factors are important determinants of corporate performance.

Nor have unions fared much better in the courts.  True, the most threatening challenges of  conservatives have not always prevailed.  The Supreme Court has generally followed the precedent it established in 1958 when it unanimously held, “It is beyond debate that freedom to engage in association for the advancement of beliefs and ideas is an inseparable aspect of the "liberty" assured by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which embraces freedom of speech” (NAACP v. Alabama, 357 U.S. 499).  Still, it has consistently chipped away at union bargaining power.  In 2018, for example, it issued a 5-4 decision overturning its own precedent by declaring that the agency shop violates the first amendment rights of public employees.  (An agency shop is one in which membership in a duly elected union is not required to get or keep a job but non-members are charged fees for the services they receive. Prohibiting such fees, of course, encourages workers not to join unions.)

 

Republicans and the business community have not been the only forces opposed to unions but the combination of political power and money they represent has proven decisive more often than not.  Moreover, wage stagnation since the early 1970’s has made major strikes unsustainable for many workers

 

Clarence Darrow died in 1938 and so did not live to see the labor scandals of the post-war era.  His view that unions have done more for humanity than any other institution is a romantic exaggeration but not, perhaps, by as wide a margin as people think.  Collective bargaining has benefitted all workers, unionized or not, by establishing standards for wages, benefits and conditions of employment.  When unemployment is low and there are shortages of skilled and semi-skilled workers, non-unionized employees benefit from the floor unions are able to negotiate.  When times are hard, unionized workers have more protections than their non-unionized peers and any protection the latter do enjoy are almost always the result of union competition.

 

As the American economy continues to undergo the vast changes wrought by digitalization and the global economy, it is crucial that the interests of workers are represented at the decision-making tables in a meaningful way.  This means robust collective bargaining.  The alternative is to widen the economic and social disparities currently bedeviling our society.  

 

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Note

 

[1] There is no doubt that corruption was widespread in American unions, especially in the 36 years between the end of World War II and the ill-advised and ill-fated strike by the Air Traffic Controllers in 1981.  Much of it involved collusion between elected union leaders and the Mafia which sought and gained control over the management of a handful of union pension funds.  By far, the most reputational damage came about as the result of Jimmy Hoffa’s reign in the Teamsters’ Union.  But three things should be noted about this.  First, Hoffa did an excellent job for his members both financially and otherwise.  They undoubtedly would have been happy to give him the Presidency of the union for life.  Second, whatever else one thinks of him, he was a dedicated and active Republican and a major contributor to the party.  Sentenced to thirteen years in prison, he served five years until the sentence was commuted by President Nixon in 1971.  Third, there have been many labor leaders who were also civic leaders, among them David Dubinsky of the Ladies’ Garment Workers, Walter Reuther of the Automobile Workers, John Sweeney of the Service Employees and Albert Shanker of the United Federation of Teachers.

Subsequent Events

The day after this essay was posted, the House of Representatives passed the Protecting the Right to Organize Act (PRO) to protect and enhance collective bargaining.  Most importantly, it would virtually eliminate the Taft-Hartley provision allowing states to enact Right to Work laws.  PRO would be the first union-friendly legislation since 1947 but it has no chance of passage by the Senate where Republicans are certain to block it by threatening a filibuster.  The Republican position was summarized by Representative Virginia Foxx of North Carolina who said the bill, "...is a radical, backward-looking legislation which will diminish the rights of workers and employers while harming the economy and providing a political gift to labor unions and their special interests."

Two weeks later, the Senate confirmed the nomination of Mayor Marty Walsh of Boston to be Secretary of Labor in President Biden's cabinet.  The vote was a bipartisan 68-29.  This marks the first time in more than 40 years that a former labor leader will head the Labor Department but it probably does not mean that the Republican crusade is over.

On April 9, 2021, Amazon warehouse workers in Alabama voted overwhelmingly against joining a union.  However this is interpreted, their rejection suggests that unions generally have an uphill battle in front of them,

 

 

 

AMERICA IN INTENSIVE CARE

 

Jerry Harkins

 

 

 

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when America started into decline.  It may have been in 1973 when the Arab oil embargo signaled the end of post-war prosperity and ushered in a decade of hyperinflation, skyrocketing interest rates, simultaneous stagflation and a bear market that persisted for nine years.  It may have been in 1981 when IBM introduced its first personal computer igniting both the information revolution and the global economy.  The computer created enormous benefits but also exposed millions of workers, especially office workers, to “redundancy.”  Or maybe it happened in 1994 when Newt Gingrich led chanting white-shirted Republicans marching down Pennsylvania Avenue waving copies of their “Contract with America” and presaging the emergence of the Tea Party and the Trump Party.  But make no mistake about it:  flawed as it has always been, the world’s most important and successful experiment with democracy has been on a downward spiral for more than a generation, maybe for two.

 

There have been moments of hope, notably the end of the cold war in 1989 and the resilience of the economy in the face of the existential threat of the Great Recession of 2008.  We have continued to make incremental progress in civil rights, women’s rights and human rights.  More encouraging than any of these, however, was the rejection of Donald Trump and his replacement by Joe Biden in 2020.  Election Day 2020 may have been a decisive hinge of history.

 

Decisive, of course, represents a hopeful interpretation of what happened.  Biden won by a margin of 7,059,840 votes or a hair more than 4.5% of the votes cast.  Not a landslide but not close either.  Hopeful, but also frightening in the sense that a Biden presidency may be our last best hope to save the American dream and the American experiment from disintegration and disaster.  The damage done by Republican mendacity, hypocrisy, self-dealing, obstructionism and just plain stupidity has been monumental.

 

A large majority of the 74 million Americans who voted for Trump were the principal victims of America’s decline and the failures of our civic, religious and corporate institutions.  They had legitimate grievances with the status quo and were willing to risk throwing out the baby with the bathwater.  They nearly did.  Had the coronavirus not happened or had it been managed with a modicum of intelligence, we would now be confronting four more years of unbearable tragedy.  Still, as Winston Churchill said of the victory at El Alamein, the Biden victory “…is not the end.  It is not even the beginning of the end, but it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

 

The agenda facing us is daunting and overcoming the pandemic is the easy part.  In spite of the Republican politicians, scientists have produced promising vaccines and treatments.  We may lose some hundreds of thousands more Americans but the end is on the horizon.  We will be better prepared next time and we can hope that no future President will propose injecting ourselves with Clorox to kill the virus.  The residual challenge is to restore the economy and it too may turn out to be less difficult than experts now worry.  Not easy but manageable.  One of the virtues of American capitalism is its resiliency.  And there is a silver cloud if we can turn the pandemic into an opportunity to address longstanding problems in the economy, some of which have been exacerbated by the lockdowns.  Among these are income inequality, the changing demographics of an aging population, increasing pressures on the vital small business sector and structural changes in the labor market brought about by the continuing march of automation and artificial intelligence.[1]  These and many other issues are complex and controversial.  They interact with and affect each other and, more importantly, challenge the foundations of our entire social order and economic framework.

 

The success of the so-called American Dream is based largely on the commitment of successive waves of immigrants to a better future for their children and grandchildren.  This, however, becomes less tenable when economic pressures constrict the prospects of every age cohort.  At present, the young are burdened with the decline of traditional career-establishing employment opportunities and, for many, crushing debt from college loans.  The middle aged often share the same educational debts while simultaneously having to assist their parents.  The elderly are faced with the high cost of medical care and inadequate retirement savings.[2]  Since 1970, the total U.S. annual expenditures for health care increased from about $70 billion to about $3.6 trillion.  In 2019, only about half of all families had any retirement savings and they had an average of $255,130, mostly in real estate, and a median of only $65,000.

 

Solving these problems will require major social adjustments not the least of which is decreasing the average age of retirement in order to create better employment opportunities for younger generations, especially those in what should be the family-forming years.  At the moment, workers are postponing retirement as long as possible because they rightly fear a reduction in income. Meanwhile, the government is trying to increase the retirement age by manipulating the Social Security eligibility age.  The idea is to “save” Social Security from bankruptcy resulting from the aging population demographics.  This is a real problem but it is subsidiary to the broader economic squeeze affecting every age cohort.  To solve that, the retirement age should be reduced to no more than 55 years and, perhaps, 50.  This would require creating programs to train workers for retirement careers outside the mainstream job market.  It might also necessitate requiring workers to maintain a retirement financial plan similar to the health insurance mandate of Obamacare that was upheld by the Supreme Court in 2012.[3]  Finally, it might require employers to contribute to such a plan.  As controversial as all this is, the fact remains that the American workforce is going to decline in the coming decades regardless of what policies the government adopts or fails to adopt.  Meanwhile, the population will continue to increase.  The Biden team is correct in projecting a growth in the number of family-friendly[4] jobs if we pursue such things as alternative energy and infrastructure repair but these will be more than offset by overall declines brought about by automation.

 

The important point to deal with is that all these problems are highly complex.  There are no easy solutions that derive from any ideology and no methodology that will not involve trial and error.  In other words, the problems are not amenable to politics as currently practiced and there is no appetite for making significant changes.  For example, one of the first principles of democratic governance is the idea of the equal value of every vote and every voter.  If we truly believe in equality, then our Electoral College is a patently undemocratic institution.  Five times the presidential candidate with the most votes lost the election.[5]  It would take a constitutional amendment to institute majority rule which would require the approval of three-fourths of the states.  But 31 states, more than 60%, benefit from the current system.

 

It is likely that Plato had just such “paradoxes” in mind when he proposed that the ideal state should be governed by a “philosopher-king.”  Plato was writing about a man (women could not vote in Athens) who was literally a “lover of knowledge” who lived simply and promoted justice.[6]  But when you think of great political leaders, there are probably no philosophers on your list.  Rather you think of such as the Roman Emperor Charlemagne, the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, the American President Abraham Lincoln and the Lakota Sioux war leader Crazy Horse.[7]  But the challenges such men faced tended to be readily definable and the solutions, while difficult, were also both limited and obvious.  Such is not the case in America today.

 

Before we can successfully address any of the major problems we face today, it will be necessary to effectuate a prodigious shift in in the public attitudes that have given rise to ideological conflict.  We need to restore an American social contract that is shared by a large majority of citizens, including a consensus that extremism must not be allowed to cripple government.  Unlike almost all other nations, America is not united by a common ethnicity or religion or history.  Rather, from the beginning, its people have demonstrated a unique commitment to the future, a belief that life could and would be better for one’s children and grandchildren.  Until recently, this was true enough for enough families to serve as the motive force of the boast engraved on every dollar bill, Novus Ordo Seclorum, the new order of the ages.  America was indeed perceived as the Land of Opportunity by many Americans and others.  Today, that perception is rare and, without it, we are little more than a mob.

 

We cannot rehabilitate a nation in which millions of people are convinced that the recent election was stolen from Donald Trump, millions reject the covid vaccine, millions are certain that people of color are inferior, immigrants are criminals and poor people are welfare cheats.  At their root, these are all symptoms of a loss of faith and empathy which are, in turn, among the least common denominators of civility. If there is a silver lining to the current pandemic, it is the lesson that each of us relies on all of us.  Advancing this idea until it becomes the paramount feature of our social contract is the sine qua non to solving the challenges confronting us and to restoring the promise of America.

 

 

 

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[1] A good example of these pressures is the dilemma brought about by the need of restaurants to offer delivery service during the pandemic.  Restaurants are low margin businesses and most cannot afford to build their own delivery services.  Enter a new, high tech industry that delivers for many such restaurants using gig workers but charges the restaurants up to 30% of each check.  The high end establishments that can afford this cannot risk the deterioration of their meals during transportation through rain, snow, sleet and city traffic.  For others, the promise is a slower death.

 

[2] Since 1970, the total U.S. expenditures for health care have increased from about $70 billion to about $3.6 trillion.  In 2018, they accounted for about 15% of the average household budget.

 

[3] National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, 567 U.S. 519.  This was a 5-4 decision and is currently being reconsidered by the court.  Most observers believe the law will survive although the mandate might not.

 

[4] “Family-friendly jobs” is a term of art encapsulating the belief that workers are entitled to certain rights including safe working conditions, freedom of assembly and compensation sufficient to provide a decent standard of living for themselves and their families.  It was enunciated as a moral right in Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum of 1890 and as a legal principle by the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914.  It is a cornerstone of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations in 1948.

 

[5]  In each case, the loser was the democratic candidate, most recently Al gore in 2000 and Hillary Clinton in 2016.

 

[6] In the history of philosophy, there have been many who might meet Plato’s criteria but none that come easily to mind who would also make good rulers.  As Winston Churchill said, “…democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others that have been tried.  Of course, he also said, “The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.”

 

[7] It may be disconcerting to note that all four of these leaders were skilled military strategists but the truth is that all of them were also profoundly spiritual souls, highly cultured, progressive, innovative and charismatic.