Month: December 2005

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The Last of Tookie

Stayed up much later than I should have last night to catch the press conference of the platoon of reporters and “reporters” who had witnessed the Tookie Williams execution. I started out listening on KCBS, the Bay Area’s “all news” AM radio outlet, but the way they broke in and out of the press conference for ads and traffic reports was absurd. So I went out and turned on CNN, which carried the whole conference live as part of its overnight (in the United States) national news show.

A couple of thorough writeups both of the execution — from Adam Housley of Fox News — and of the press conference — from a California blogger called Ordinary Everyday Christian — appeared much earlier today. I include Housley’s despite its term-report tone and his laughable statement during the press conference that he believed Williams was trying to intimidate the media contingent during the proceedings. (It was interesting to hear the San Quentin warden’s reaction when he was asked about this later: He dismissed the suggestion, saying something like, “If you’re not familiar with prison there are lots of things that are intimidating.”)

Just one note on the vaunted “we give both sides” neutrality our news establishment likes to pat itself on the back for: The coverage of the Williams execution was a great example of how firmly and absolutely the media assumes the judgments of officialdom represent all they need to know to be certain of the truth.

In the Williams case, a court found him guilty and he lost appeal after appeal on a variety of grounds; throughout, Williams maintained he was innocent (OK, as “The Shawshank Redemption” noted, the rarest man in prison is one who admits guilt). One of the big strikes against Williams — the biggest, if you read Schwarzenegger’s clemency decision — was that he showed no remorse for the killings for which he was convicted. Williams responded that he couldn’t express remorse for crimes he didn’t commit.

How did reporters resolve this paradox? Just the way the governor did, by observing that the case had been tried and litigated to a fare-thee-well and the question of guilt had been resolved. Stories would typically mention Williams’s claim of innocence; most would omit any discussion, however brief, of what the claim was based on. Stories would invariably mention that Williams hadn’t apologized for the murders; most would add statements from victims’ families, police or prosecutors that the failure to own up showed Williams’s “redemption” as an anti-gang crusader was phony. The net impression was that Williams was an unregenerate killer.

And you know, maybe he was. But I wouldn’t be convinced by the press accounts of the crimes that sent him to death row in the first place. For all the attention the case has gotten, I don’t recall any systematic effort to go back and look at how Williams was convicted, much less focus on aspects of the prosecution that would raise an issue on “Law & Order” if not in the real world. Just one example: The principal witness against Williams in the murder of 7-Eleven clerk Albert Owens was a career violent felon granted immunity to testify; he alone claimed to have witnessed the shooting; he later returned to his native Canada, killed a man during a robbery, then lied about it under oath before confessing.

That by itself proves nothing about Tookie Williams’s guilt or innocence. But it’s enough to shake my certainty about what I really know about a case that has been for the most part written, delivered, read, and received in the most cursory shorthand.

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‘The Highest Attribute of Man’

In — what? — 20 minutes or so, we’ll put another convict to death at San Quentin (and yes, I’m against the death penalty for all the reasons opponents usually give). The case and our governor’s refusal to really consider clemency, much less grant it, made me think about Clarence Darrow’s hours-long summation in the 1924 Nathan Leopold-Richard Loeb case in Chicago. Darrow’s clients had pleaded guilty to killing a 14-year-old boy for no other reason than that they wanted to commit “the perfect crime” and conduct an “experiment in sensation.” The only issue for the judge to decide was whether the killers would be hanged or sentenced to life in prison. Darrow concluded:

Your Honor stands between the past and the future. You may hang these boys; you may hang them by the neck until they are dead. But in doing it you will turn your face toward the past. In doing it you are making it harder for every other boy who in ignorance and darkness must grope his way through the mazes which only childhood knows. In doing it you will make it harder for unborn children. You may save them and make it easier for every child that sometime may stand where these boys stand. You will make it easier for every human being with an aspiration and a vision and a hope and a fate. I am pleading for the future; I am pleading for a time when hatred and cruelty will not control the hearts of men. When we can learn by reason and judgment and understanding and faith that all life is worth saving, and that mercy is the highest attribute of man.

I feel that I should apologize for the length of time I have taken. This case may not be as important as I think it is, and I am sure I do not need to tell this court, or to tell my friends that I would fight just as hard for the poor as for the rich. If I should succeed, my greatest reward and my greatest hope will be that for the countless unfortunates who must tread the same road in blind childhood that these poor boys have trod—that I have done something to help human understanding, to temper justice with mercy, to overcome hate with love.

I was reading last night of the aspiration of the old Persian poet, Omar Khayyam. It appealed to me as the highest that I can vision. I wish it was in my heart, and I wish it was in the hearts of all.

So I be written in the Book of Love,

I do not care about that Book above.

Erase my name or write it as you will,

So I be written in the Book of Love.

What a quaint sentiment, viewed from an age in which our only real public faith seems to be in what we might achieve by force and coercion. (Leopold and Loeb got life sentences (plus 99 years each for kidnapping their victim). Later, Loeb was killed in prison; Leopold was eventually paroled.)

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December 11: Last Light

Briones_1

The usual late afternoon/early evening ride: Spent the rest of the day on — well, not much. Hit the road around 3, crossed the hills, and rode a steeply rolling road to the east. After 20 miles, I turned around and rode back; the main alternate return route from where I was has some high-speed traffic on it, and the sun was getting ready to set. This is from one of the high points along Bear Creek Road (click for a larger image): The Berkeley Hills are in the distance, an arm of Briones Reservoir, one of the big local holding basins for water piped down from the Sierra Nevada, is to the lower left.

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String Players Gone Bad

A read-out-loud-worthy piece in The New York Times’s arts section today (Kate actually did read the whole thing aloud) on the legal problems besetting three members of a string quartet who tried to get rid of the fourth (and, it turns out, very litigious) member:

The feud pits the cellist, violist and second violinist against the first violinist, whom they ousted from the quartet in early 2000. He sued and won a $611,000 judgment, sending the other three to bankruptcy court.

Now, after nearly six years of legal battling, what may be the last chapter is playing out in a Virginia courthouse. A bankruptcy trustee is seeking to liquidate the assets of the violist and the cellist, a married couple. They face the loss of their house, car, snowblower, lawn mower, bank accounts and, most painfully, their instruments. Another trustee is seeking control of the second violinist’s instrument.

“I’ve never imagined something like this before,” said Clyde Shaw, the cellist. “It’s just the judicial system gone awry. It’s a horrible, horrible thing. Our instruments are our voices, our souls.”

The story’s especially good because it actually gives you some understanding, if not sympathy, for the reasons the guy who was getting kicked out felt compelled to sue.

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Cargo

From a TV station in San Diego, a report on a local family shocked to discover that the body of their 21-year-old son, killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq last month, was being shipped home via air freight on a commercial flight.

“When someone dies in combat, they need to give them due respect they deserve for (the) sacrifice they made,” said John Holley.

John and Stacey Holley, who were both in the Army, made some calls, and with the help of U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer, Matthew was greeted with honor and respect.

“Our familiarity with military protocol and things of that sort allowed us to kind of put our foot down — we’re not sure other parents have that same knowledge,” said Stacey Holley.

It’s worth watching the video the station posted with its Web story for the editorial tone. San Diego’s an old military town and mostly pretty reliably Republican. It’s not good news when the locals start calling the Republican-led Pentagon for treating their dead kids like just another overnight shipment.

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The Wreck of Old No. 11

As I write, Thom is on an Amtrak train back home from Oregon for his holiday break. The train, the Coast Starlight, arrived in Eugene early yesterday evening from Seattle, already two and a half hours late. Amtrak’s “schedule” says the southbound Starlight should arrive in Emeryville, just down the track from Berkeley, at 8:10 in the morning. We’re several hours past that. Where’s the train? Still more than a hundred miles away, laboring down the valley somewhere north of Sacramento. Amtrak’s website says the train is now due in at 2:08 p.m., 5 hours and 58 minutes late. That’s a fantasy, since the run got to its last stop 6 hours and 46 minutes overdue.

I don’t mean to beat up on Amtrak (aka the quasi-private National Railroad Passenger Corporation). It’s not news that its long-distance trains can’t keep to a schedule. The Department of Transportation’s fiscal 2004 summary of Amtrak’s performance shows the Coast Starlight makes it to the end of the run when the schedule says it will 22.3 percent of the time. The figure for the Sunset Limited, which operates between Los Angeles and Orlando, is 4.3 percent (4.3 percent! Riding an on-time run on that train would be like winning the lottery). Only the shorter routes, like the Capitols in California, the Hiawathas (Chicago-Milwaukee) and the fast intercity runs on the East Coast have on-time rates higher than 70 percent.

Amtrak doesn’t really try to hide this. Its website cautions that if you’re booking a trip on the Coast Starlight or California Zephyr (Chicago-Emeryville) you might want to “plan for the possibility of delays due to freight traffic, track work “or other operating conditions.” This points to a widely cited Amtrak problem: that it’s treated as a second-class service by the companies that actually own the rails it uses. At the same time, though, Amtrak persists in describing rail travel as a wonder not to be missed. The timetable for the Coast Starlight urges you to “discover one of Amtrak’s most awe-inspiring travel experiences.” Of course, there’s more than one way you can read that.

Another well-known part of the Amtrak story is its perennial deep deficit. The Department of Transportation offers a statistic on each line’s loss per passenger. Generally (and predictably), the shorter, more heavily traveled routes — the ones mentioned above that tend to be on schedule sometimes — show the smallest per-passenger loss. The longer the trip, the bigger the loss and necessary public subsidy. Not that there’s anything wrong with transportation subsidies — we wouldn’t have roads, airports or seaports without them. But if you’re underwriting a $466 per passenger loss (the fiscal 2004 figure for the Sunset Limited; the number for the Coast Starlight is $152), you expect to get a little something in return; a meaningful estimate of when the trains arrive and depart would be a start.

I’ve always loved trains, or at least the idea of trains, and have taken a few long trips starting with my first visit to California from Illinois in 1973. The appeal to me of traveling by rail is pretty much the one Amtrak is trying to sell: You get to see the country close up instead of blasting over it in an aluminum tube. But it’s one thing to support a service that’s basically necessary, or if not necessary, more or less efficient; it’s another to pay for something that’s essentially broken and doesn’t appear to have any prospect for getting better the way things are being run now.

So something’s got to change: Do whatever needs to be done and pay whatever needs to be paid to improve service and make it reliable (fat chance; Amtrak has only grudging support from Congress). Or stop pretending you run the long-distance trains on a schedule: just tell passengers you’re pretty sure you can get them where they’re going eventually and to enjoy the scenery. Or let private operators take the lines and see if there’s any way they can both provide service and make them pay, or at least lose less. Or just let the trains go and shove everyone on to buses and planes.

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Oakland Street Palms

Oaklandpalms

An Oakland landmark: A long line of palms running north along 9th Avenue from East 24th Street (I’ve never felt totally comfortable in cities that let numbered streets cross). I have no idea who planted the trees, when, or why exactly, since you don’t see many palms planted along residential streets. Since 9th Avenue is near the top of a ridge, you can see the trees for miles. Took the picture Friday on my way back to Berkeley from running an errand out to Kate’s school.

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God Shed His Grace on Us …

I haven’t been watching the news real carefully the last few days, and I didn’t see or read about Harold Pinter’s Nobel address (accepting the prize in literature) until I stumbled across it on Today in Iraq this morning. The speech is part about artistic process and the search for truth, but mostly about the United States and its influence in the world for the last 60 years. “Bitter” hardly begins to describe it; “enraged” might be more on the mark — though all the more effective for being controlled.

An excerpt:

The United States supported and in many cases engendered every right wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War. I refer to Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, and, of course, Chile. The horror the United States inflicted upon Chile in 1973 can never be purged and can never be forgiven.

Hundreds of thousands of deaths took place throughout these countries. Did they take place? And are they in all cases attributable to US foreign policy? The answer is yes they did take place and they are attributable to American foreign policy. But you wouldn’t know it.

It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.

I put to you that the United States is without doubt the greatest show on the road. Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless it may be but it is also very clever. As a salesman it is out on its own and its most saleable commodity is self love. It’s a winner. Listen to all American presidents on television say the words, ‘the American people’, as in the sentence, ‘I say to the American people it is time to pray and to defend the rights of the American people and I ask the American people to trust their president in the action he is about to take on behalf of the American people.’

Full text and video on the Nobel site.

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A Cure for Incivility

It’s hard to remember, or believe, that one of the things Bush promised when the Supreme Court finally elected him president oh so many years ago was to bring civility back to our national political culture. It was the usual sham Bush promise and it was forgotten long before Vice President Cheney told Senator Patrick Leahy to go f**k himself last year.

I’m thinking of the whole civility issue because it comes up in Doris Kearns Goodwin’s new book on Lincoln’s presidency, “Team of Rivals.” She relates how Edward Bates, who like Lincoln was a dark horse candidate for the Republican nomination in 1860, had gotten into a dispute with a fellow congressman while serving in the House in 1828. Things got personal enough that Bates challenged his opponent to a duel; the challenge prompted an apology, and the matter went no further.

Goodwin quotes one of Bates’s friends, Charles Gibson, about the beneficial effects of the code of dueling on polite political discourse:

” ‘The code preserrved a dignity, justice and decorum that have since been lost. to the great detriment of the professions, the public, and the government. The present generation will think me barbarous but I believe that some lives lost in protecting the tone of the bar and the press, on which the Republic so largely depends, are well spent.’ ”

Interesting to contemplate: You have to wonder who among the current generation of TV pundits might survive the bloodletting if dueling were the fashion nowadays; and of course the folks you’d be seeing on the air at this point would be a mix of the timid, the utterly polite, and the best shooters and fencers.

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Blog Paralysis

Now and then, I just lose the thread. Why am I doing this again?

Yes, some reasons are close to the surface: There’s a certain amount of fun in it. It’s satisfying to have my small but faithful audience. I tell myself that there’s a certain value to the practice in it: putting the words together, thinking a little about what’s going on out there outside the room, finding ways to distill what I stumble across into a coherent couple of paragraphs.

Yet sometimes that all seems pretty insubstantial. On one level, the world is full of people holding forth on the state of the world and everything happening in it. I don’t kid myself: There’s not much new I have to add to the general deliberations. On another level, any work benefits from a sense of purpose or direction. That’s what is occasionally lacking for me here, and is lackinng now: That sense of north and south, up, down, forwards, and backwards.

Of course, there’s a larger context for this: figuring out what the next step in my work life is. My journalism career has undergone a major change if it’s not in fact over. So what’s the next act: Well, maybe getting my B.A. so I can teach history to the hungry minds in a community college class somewhere — a natural place, maybe, for all that stuff kicking around in my head.