Eric The Blue

The Nienstedt investigation

Last September, in this editorial, National Catholic Reporter called on the Archdiocese of the Twin Cities to disclose the results of a local law firm's investigation of its archbishop, John Nienstedt, who is suspected of having "inappropriate" sexual relations with adult men.  I think that is a fair way to characterize the suspicions.  Nienstedt, in his denials, has stated that the allegations against him do not concern minors, or lay people, or behavior that violates any criminal laws.  It therefore seems reasonable to conclude that he has pursued consensual frolics with men who, like him, have taken a vow of chastity.  All these guys should've been hanging with me when I was in early middle age.  I could've shown them how to keep their promise.  Hang out in coffee shops with your nose in a book.  Go to the movies late at night by yourself.  Watch a lot of sports on tv in your apartment.  Go golfing with your friends, old married heterosexual fellows.  It is possible to avoid interactions, let alone intercourse, with the subset of people who might be willing.

Anyway, the Archdiocese isn't listening. Four more months have now passed and we still don't know what the law firm found.  As the editorial points out, the investigation was paid for with archdiocesan money contributed by local Catholic parishioners, so it seems that they should see the fruit of what they bankrolled.  Was the investigation conducted so that only other church officials would be up to date on the archbishop's sex life?  Another thing that seems reasonable to assume is that we'd know what the investigation had found if it had found nothing.

Jennifer Haselberger, the former archdiocesan lawyer who resigned in disgust, has a theory.  Plenty of people in the local Catholic community, some well placed, understand that Nienstedt is a disgrace.  They want him gone, but of course he regards them in the same way he regards the editorialists at National Catholic Reporter.  The idea of the investigation was to augment their quiet calls for his resignation with some upturned dirt.  The problem is that the investigators, a couple of litigators at a firm specializing in white-collar criminal defense, over-performed at what lawyers call "discovery."  In other words, Haselberger thinks the results of the investigation likely go well beyond being embarrassing in a tidy, useful sort of way.  In her career as a whistle-blower, she hasn't yet been shown to be wrong about anything.

SOTU

Though I don't think much of him, I had to feel sorry for John Boehner last night, sitting there behind Obama and therefore always on camera, looking all orange and ornery, like he hadn't had a satisfactory bowel movement since the Bush administration.  Maybe he just needed a cigarette.  What has gone wrong in the ten weeks since he and his party were on top of the world?  The official Republican response by the new junior senator from Iowa--yikes:

Hi! I'm Joni! I grew up in a small town in Iowa!  When it rained, my mom tied little plastic baggies around my one good pair of shoes!  That's what all the moms did!  Obamacare, the EPA, and the Department of Education have to go!

I'm guessing she was around half through her corn pone recitation when my wife, trying to elevate the discourse piping into our living room, switched to "The Big-Titted Solipsists of Orange County."  Thinking on the question of who speaks for the Republicans, I was reminded of a snippet from one of the Sunday shows I was watching recently.  The gas bags were gassing about Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney, the buzz around will-they-or-won't-they, and the Republican mouthpiece expressed the opinion that "it's time to turn the page, and talking about Bush and Romney isn't turning the page."  True, but would it really help their cause if the talk was about--Marco Rubio?  Rand Paul?  Ted Cruz? 

Mentioning Rubio reminds me of the debacle following upon him being tapped to respond to an Obama State of the Union.  It's always said that it's the president's night and that the opposition's spokesperson has an impossible task.  That's what they say about refereeing football games, too, after referees have just manifestly blown it.  I don't think it's true, anyway.  Here is Jim Webb, Democrat of Virginia and a prospective (albeit second-tier) candidate for the Democratic nomination for president in 2016, responding to a SOTU of Bush the Younger:

 

This is not a man determined to provide Jon Stewart with material.

The Lay of the Land

I'm coming toward the conclusion to The Lay of the Land, the third installment in Richard Ford's Frank Bascombe chronicle.  In her New York Times review, Michiko Kakutani wrote:

This novel showcases many of Mr. Ford’s gifts: his ability to capture the nubby, variegated texture of ordinary life; his unerring ear for how ordinary people talk; his talent for conjuring up subsidiary characters with a handful of brilliant brushstrokes. But it is a padded, static production, far more overstuffed with unnecessary asides and digressions than its predecessors. Nearly every minute of these three days in Frank’s life is chronicled in this nearly 500-page volume, which means that the reader has to hear about every time he needs to visit the men’s room, every time he gets in his car, every time he has a phone conversation.

As an instance of Ford's "talent for conjuring up subsidiary characters with a handful of brilliant brushstrokes," I put forward the following one-sentence "conjuring" of a character--an ex of Frank's friend Wade--who never appears on stage:

Lynette was Wade's wife number two, a tiny Texas termagant and Catholic crackpot who left him to enter a Maryknoll residence in Bucks County, where she became a Christian analyst auditing the troubled life stories of others like herself, until she had an embolism, assigned her benefits to the nuns and croaked.

I'm not wholly unsympathetic to Kakutani's view, but I suspect that, if asked whether this side flight or that one or another or another or this one or that in this long sprawl of a book should have been trimmed, I'd have a hard time voting to cut almost any particular passage.  Certainly Ms Maryknoll has to stay.  Someone has observed that in books about baseball no one ever hits a foul ball.  Frank fouls some off, but I guess I like seeing those swings as well.

The paranoid style

On Sunday, I caught some of the morning political TV talk while the girls were upstairs playing "Kids."  Nothing but big statements and exclamation points related to the recent events in France. 

The phrase "conservative temperament" formerly referred to something recognizable in public life.  We'd be counselled by "conservatives" to "get a grip" and not jump into the sea on account of The Most Recent Big Thing That Happened.  Those days are gone.  Today, the "conservatives" are the frothing  gesticulators, and the whole country is soaking in the spittle. 

A clash of civilizations!

We must invade Iraq!

If Obama is president for another week, we shall all die of Ebola!

It's gotten so bad that George Will, who once cultivated a public persona made mostly of cool disdain for his intellectual inferiors (a demographic whose members, voting as a bloc, could elect a Democrat president), has thrown in with the shouting rabble.  He's sure that climate science is bunk and that Ebola can be spread by airborne particles, such as are emitted in a sneeze. 

Yes, and twice two would be five if you said so loud enough! Our president has been criticized for having a temperature that runs cool but I think his opponents make that look like a highly desirable trait.

Marcia Angell on "Being Mortal"

In a mostly favorable review of Atul Gawande's Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End, Marcia Angell criticizes the author for not taking a stand on the questions of physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia.  Her own position is clear.  She has for a long time argued in favor of laws, such as exist in Oregon and a few other states, allowing doctors to write prescriptions for lethal, orally-ingested medications that would enable terminally ill people to end their lives.  The death earlier this year of her husband, Arnold Relman, who like her taught at Harvard Medical School and (again like her) formerly edited The New England Journal of Medicine, of metastatic melanoma, caused her to come out in favor of euthanasia for patients who, "in the agonal stage of dying," become too ill to take the oral medication themselves.

I haven't read Gawande's book, but I recently heard him talk about these issues on NPR, and he does indeed seem to be conflicted.  Angell criticizes him pretty aggressively:

Why, moreover, does Gawande simply assert that the one in thirty-five assisted deaths in the Netherlands are too many?  Given the prevalence of terrible deaths from cancer, as Gawande describes so well in his book, why is it not the right number?  In Oregon, the number is one in five hundred deaths.  Is that the right number?  The problem, it seems to me, is the dreadful disease, not the number of patients who choose to bring about an inevitable death a little sooner.

One detects in even so short a passage what Angell likes about the book.  Gawande puts before the reader the grim facts about what the end of life is like for a lot of people.  Though Angell doesn't explicity say so, I think she thinks that more people would come around to her view if they knew what she knows about the end stage of some of the diseases that are relatively common causes of death in our country. 

Speaking as one with no special expertise, it seems to me grotesque that people in the pink of health should declaim against permitting people who are desperately ill from ending their lives.  I mean, whose life is it?  I think a more defensible opinion would hold that, while I doubt I would ever choose to end my own life, I don't really know but that in miserable and hopeless circumstances I might change my mind, and anyway, other people should be free to make their own choices.  The usual sort of arguments you hear on the other side are not very persuasive.  If the comparatively enlightened approach adopted in the Netherlands had brought on dystopian horrors, I think we'd hear more about it.  Angell points out that the Center to Advance Palliative Care recently gave Oregon, which has for thirteen years now permitted physician-assisted suicide, a straight A in their state-by-state report.  It's not as if permitting suicide is functioning as a substitute for the best pain management care available. 

The roster of states that permit physician-assisted suicide is interesting:  Vermont, Montana, New Mexico, Washington, and Oregon.  All but Montana are blue; all but Vermont are in the West, where there are comparatively few Protestant fundamentalists and the Catholic Church has less influence than in, say, Angell's native Massachusetts, which in 2012 narrowly rejected a ballot initiative that would have made it the sixth state to allow assisted dying.  Since Gawande, a surgeon at Massachusetts General, says that he'd support a law like Oregon's "if given the opportunity," Angell wishes he'd divulge how he voted.

Her husband, apparently as tireless as she till about 90, gave this interesting interview a few months before his death.