Eric The Blue

Brain drain

"Brain drain" usually refers to the way in which poor countries tend to lose their ablest citizens, who take their talents somewhere that can offer a better future--the United States, for example.  The countries they leave behind are less able to address their problems, because the people who would be  best at addressing  them have left. 

But we have our own version of the syndrome.  Many of the very smartest Americans give their energy to causes that have zero, or negative, social value.   The Wall Streeters who pooled and securitized mortgage loans, or who borrowed heavily in order to invest as much as possible in mortgage-backed securities, or who persuaded their friends from Harvard and Yale to give these funds the top rating, are all worthy examples.  The criminal courts are full of poor people and the civil ones are crowded with litigants fighting about the value of their estranged spouse's business interests, or whether they can or can't go across the sideyard of the neighboring mansion to get their yacht to Lake Minnetonka.  Et cetera.  They must be really smart, else how could they have gotten the money to pay for all the billable hours that graduates of elite law schools are devoting to their trivial problems? 

There is a vast professional services industry, centered on finance and law, that exists to serve the special needs of the rich.  The people  who work in it qualify as the best and brightest and are  rich themselves--or soon will be, if they don't have any really bad habits.  Meanwhile, the country has real problems that get hardly any attention. Because they don't affect rich people.

The vaunted free market does a poor job of matching the best problem-solvers to the most pressing problems.

Books of the Bible: Deuteronomy

Deutero-nomy: Greek for "second law," which is suggestive of redundancy and therefore unpromising, the reading experience having been dull enough the first time around. With Israel encamped in Moab, poised to attack Canaan from the east, we are treated to a retrospective from a source, D (for "Deuteronomist"), that isn't a lot more entertaining than P.  The battle stories are coming, but first, the rules and regulations, again.

The conceit is Moses's farewell.  In three long discourses, he addresses his people and reminds them of their recent history before they embark on a venture--holy war in Canaan--on which he will not accompany them. The main theological theme of the book may strike a general reader as crude and oversimple.  It's baldly stated several times, including at 28:1:

"And if you obey the voice of the Lord your God, being careful to do all his commandments which I command you this day, the Lord your God will set you high above all the nations of the earth.  And all these blessings shall come upon you and overtake you, if you obey the voice of the Lord your God."

The predictable corollary, concerning how disobedience will result in calamitous misfortune, is by no means abjured.  In our time, manifest religious hucksters are sometimes criticized for putting forward a rewards-and-punishment theology that is said to be "unbiblical."  But the notion that the healthy and wealthy are enjoying God's favor, while the impoverished sick must have done something to deserve their misery, qualifies as "Deuteronomic" and is therefore biblical. 

This motif of a rewards theology is sufficiently prominent in Deuteronomy to have caused embarrassed commentators to discover mitigating circumstances.  One of these is worth mentioning since it sheds light on the book as a whole.  Just a wee bit of biblical literacy tempts one into thinking of the Pentateuch as a unified whole set off from the rest of the Old Testament.  It has, after all, its own names--"Pentateuch," "Torah," "Five Books of Moses"--and is the  subject of sections  with titles like "Introduction to the Pentateuch" in study Bibles.  It should follow that Deuteronomy functions as a  conclusion to the Pentateuch, a view that is neatly confirmed by the way in which it ends with the death of Moses, its leading character. 

Scholars, however, attribute to the D source much of the historical material that follows the Pentateuch, especially in the books of Judges and Kings.  Since the D tradition is more recent than either J or E, it seems we have in Deuteronomy, not the conclusion to the Pentateuch, but the opening of an ambitious historical work that covers, not the forty days of Moses's fifth book, but time stretching from Egyptian bondage to national power under King David and onward toward exile in the sixth century B.C.  This history is deeply concerned about the fate of the Mosaic faith, established among wandering nomads in the wilderness, after  Israel attains prosperous nationhood in a new land.  The Deuteronomist's interpretation of history involves a repeating cycle that goes like this.  Obedience to God's commandments is the cause of prosperity and good fortune, which is the cause of apostasy, which is the cause of affliction, which is the cause of repentance, which is the cause of prosperity and good fortune. 

The rewards for obedience, and tribulations for straying, that the reader of the book of Deuteronomy may find rather too tidy is actually a miniature version of a sweeping historical process described by the Deuteronomist.  I don't understand, however, why this should make anyone less skeptical about the tidiness.  It's true that, when things are going well in this tradition, there is an unattractive sheen of national and religious triumphalism that then gets rubbed out when the inevitable catastrophe chastens the celebrants.  But making the story less repugnant doesn't make it more believable.

Anyway, there is still a lot that's repugnant.  Plowing through Deuteronomy is a lot like plowing through Leviticus and Numbers, which is to say, you are occasionally jarred awake by lurid passages that are, or ought to be, more of an embarrassment than all the emphasis on rewards.  There are few  constraints imposed upon those about to wage "holy war" against the inhabitants of Canaan:

"When you draw near to a city to fight against it, offer terms of peace to it.  And if its answer to you is peace and it opens to you, then all the people who are found in it shall do forced labor for you and shall serve you. . . .  Thus you shall do to all the cities which are very far from you, which are not cities of the nations here.  But in the cities of these peoples that the Lord your God gives you for an inheritance, you shall save alive nothing that breathes, but you shall utterly destroy them, the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites, as the Lord your God has commanded. . ."

American Christians would probably be more familiar with such a passage if it occurred in the Koran.  Cruel and unusual punishments persist:

"If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son, who will not obey the voice of his father or the voice of is mother, and, though they chastise him, will not give heed to them, then his father and his mother shall take hold of him and bring him out to the elders of his city at the gate of the place where he lives, and they shall say to the elders of his city, 'This our son is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton and a drunkard.' Then all the men of the city shall stone him to death with stones; so you shall purge the evil from your midst; and all Israel shall hear, and fear."

Concerning this passage, the editor of The Oxford Annotated Bible helpfully observes that "the law is severe."  I had to read the following several times:

"You shall have a place outside the camp and you shall go out to it; and you shall have a stick with your weapons; and when you sit down outside, you shall dig a hole with it, and turn back and cover up your excrement.  Because the Lord your God walks in the midst of your camp, to save you and to give up your enemies before you, therefore your camp must be holy, that he may not see anything indecent among you, and turn away from you."

An irreverent comedian could have some fun.  What?  God did not want to be reminded that his chosen people were the kind who? . . . you know.  Then, pantomime. 

It seems it shouldn't be so hard to persuade people that we are separated from these texts by a great gulch of time and culture and that it's sort of childish to regard the whole shooting match as an inspired transcript from God.

The archbishop talks to the press

With the  help of an archdiocesan handler, Archbishop John Nienstedt attempts, in the above interview, to parry a pretty tough line of questioning from a Twin Cities television reporter.  It's obvious he had some talking points prepared for the first question, concerning whether or not he should resign, but as the interview wears on . . . well, you can judge for yourself.  Two things that seem particularly striking to me:

1. The archbishop is unable to make anything resembling a coherent case against same-sex marriage.  He says that sex is for marriage, that marriage is for heterosexuals, and that therefore homosexuals must be chaste.  The reporter, who is gay, asks: "But why should I have to live the life of a priest?"  The response involves redrawing the circle of illogic.  It is so, because it is what the church teaches.  If it is indeed  "what the church teaches," it seems there should be some underlying reasons, but, if there are, they must be beyond the archbishop's ken.  The reporter seems surprised that Nienstedt doesn't have a better answer.  "Anything you'd like to clarify?" he asks.  Time for another circle.

2. The question about whether Jennifer Hasselberger wouldn't be a good candidate for serving as the archdiocesan "point person" on clergy misconduct is close to a taunt.  "She certainly seems to know where the files are!" chortles the reporter.  Nienstedt, looking wan, agrees that she does.  The video raises, however indirectly, the question of the role of women in the church.  On a couple of occasions, when Nienstedt is floundering badly, his handler, a woman, interrupts to throw him a lifeline.  It isn't apparent that, were the roles reversed, she would have needed, or could have received, any help from him. 

But, of course, the roles can't be reversed.  She doesn't look enough like Jesus.

***********************************************************************************************************************

As long as I'm pasting in videos, here's Robin Williams on the same general topic.  His laugh line--"it's not just a sin, it's a felony"--reminds us that the church could learn some things from the dreaded secularists who work for the government in law enforcement. 

 

 

The Willingham case

In 2004, Texas executed Cameron Todd Willingham after he was convicted of a triple murder.  According to the state, Willingham deliberately started a house fire in which his three young children died of smoke inhalation just before Christmas in 1991.  There were two main strands to the prosecution's case:  fire investigators who testified the blaze was arson, and a jailhouse informant who testified that Willingham told him he had done it.  The forensic evidence was always dubious and, in the years following the execution, has been further discredited by advances in fire science.  More recently, the Innocence Project has shown that the testimony of the informant amounted to perjury suborned by the prosecutor, John H. Jackson.   It appears a virtual certainty that Willingham wasn't guilty of the crime for which he was executed.

Jailhouse informants are so unreliable that in some venues their testimony is not allowed in court, a practice that might have saved Willingham's life.  The recent disclosures of the Innocence Project are distressing, even sickening.  The informant, Johnny Webb, was in prison for bank rolling his drug habit with robberies.  He now says he was approached by Jackson about testifying against Willilngham.  Jackson would help him get out of jail and would arrange for ongoing cash assistance from a rich rancher of his acquaintance, Charles Pearce, who is now dead.  The Innocence Project has uncovered letters and other documents that corroborate this arrangement.  Asked about the latest revelations, the formerly combative Jackson, who was elected to a judgeship a few years after the Willingham case, has declined to comment.  The more that comes to light, the more it appears that the crimes in this case were committed by the prosecuting attorney.  He didn't have a drug habit to feed, but he did have a resume to build. 

When "human fallibility" is cited as a reason for opposing the death penalty, the concept is too narrowly  construed.  Yes, individual jurors can exercise faulty judgment.  But the entire justice system is a human invention administered by human beings who are subject to all the familiar shortcomings of our kind.  Something of the same might be said about human society in general.  One of the sorriest aspects of the Willingham case concerns the likelihood that he died because Webb was not in a position to resist Jackson's come-on.  According to Webb:

"He [Jackson] says, 'Your story doesn't have to match exactly,' Webb continued.  "He says, 'I want you to just say he put fires in the corners.  I need you to be able to say that so we can convict him, otherwise we're going to have a murderer running our streets.'"

Webb told Jackson he hoped to turn his life around and become an underwater welder.  That could be arranged, Jackson assured him, according to Webb.  In the taped interviews, Webb recalled, "He says, 'Look, we can get Chuck [Pearce] to help you with anything you need.  He's already there to help you.'"

"He [Jackson] had me believing 100 percent this dude was guilty--that's why I testified," Webb said.  The perks--they was willing to do anything to help me.  No one has ever done that, so why wouldn't I help them?"

Johnny Webb was a nobody, and no one had ever taken an interest in him--lifted a finger to help him in any way--until an ambitious district attorney wanted to convict another nobody in a high-profile, capital case. 

Just walk

With millions of Americans still underwater on their mortgages, I wonder why more people don't just walk away from them.  Maybe some do, but many more are working their butts off to make the payments on a house that, if sold, would fetch possibly four-fifths of what's owed.  In Minnesota, where there is a 6-month "redemption period" after the foreclosure sale (assuming the house isn't vacant), you could save a full year's rent money before being evicted.  You get a new place that rents for less than the mortgage payment had been.  The bank or its successor in interest gets the underwater view.  What's not to like?

The answer to this question, according to Scott Johnson of the wing-nut Power Line blog, has to do with Socrates, who just before swallowing the poison instructed his friend Crito to pay to Asclepius the rooster he (Socrates) owed him.  But perhaps Socrates felt more bound by a debt to a friend than he would have to a lender who expects to profit by immediately selling the mortgage to Wall Street, where it will be "pooled" and "securitized" and sold to investors who of course hope to profit even more.

Usually the right-wing worships The Free Market.  The idea is that everyone acting in accord with their private interest results in a paradise here on earth.  If that were true, it would follow that borrowers should walk away from upside down home mortgages.  The lender traded the loan amount for a security interest in the property.  But it turns out that the security to which the lender agreed was inadequate.  The property is worth only a fraction of the amount advanced.  The borrower should exercise her prerogative to allow the lender to take the remedy prescribed by law while she moves on.  Every circumstance is different but the decision about whether to walk or not seems to me like it's often easy. 

I guess there is a kind of moral taint associated with "not paying your bills."  Johnson, who is a lawyer and executive at TCF Bank, tries to make the most of that.  It just shows, however, the degree to which the culture has been taken over by corporate interests. The attitude of the big banks is, "We'll do what's best for our bottom line.  And you should do what's best for our bottom line, too.  And, if it doesn't work out for us, you bail us out." Talk about moral taint!

That the general population seems happy to play along at this game is striking.