Isaac Laquedem

Happy New Year!

Today we greet a year that's new,
Yet still have Covid's spread to plague us.
The dread constricts our throat and vagus
That next is 2020-II.
The year ended sadly. Betty White
Declined a century and said "Good night."
For eighty years she had a fine
sharp timing for her exit line.
We saw a ship obstruct Suez
And block a hundred others from
The docks and markets. They'd not come
In time to bring our Christmas prez.
For presents, do you want a gun?
And do you dream of more than one?
Indulge yourself this Yuletide!  Plan
On Christmas with the Boebert clan.
In January D.C. made
A violent kind of tourist trade.
The House would like to know who tried
To organize Congressicide.
And birds are talking, those who knew
Who wanted them to sing "coup, coup."
But last year's news was not all poor
Despite the rising viral load;
The nation resolutely showed
A failed leader to the door.
He'll win no medals, pins, or plaudits
Fighting off some taxing audits.
No blooms for him, though I conjec-
Ture soon a Garland around his neck.
To Joe Biden now I wish the best
At cleaning what TFG messed.
And to my friends, both far and near,
Good fortune for the coming year --
May it be yours! Let's celebrate
That we are not obituate.

The Laquedem Plan to make the Senate the envy of its peers

Elie Mystal, writing in the November 29 issue of The Nation, argues that it's time to abolish the United States Senate, describing the Senate as "the place where the popular will goes to die.  The Senate's primary function is to do nothing, then congratulate itself for its restraint."  Mr. Mystal views the Senate, possibly correctly, as continuing to serve its antebellum role "of propping up white power today," and he notes that the Black population of New York City is larger than the entire population of North Dakota and South Dakota combined, yet the residents of the Dakotas get four senators and the Blacks of New York City get perhaps a 10% say in selecting two senators.

The Senate originated in a reasonable idea, which is that one of the two houses of Congress should be insulated from the passions of the moment, both by having six-year terms and by being only indirectly selected by the people.  (State legislators picked senators until the election of 1914, after the Seventeenth Amendment was ratified.)  The Senate may have been "the world's greatest deliberative body" when Henry Clay and Daniel Webster debated on its floor, and possibly still, more than a century later, when Ernest Gruening of Alaska and Wayne Morse of Oregon gave up their Senatorial careers to vote against the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964.  Today the quality of Senatorial discussion only rarely approaches that of a good college debate contest, and consistently falls short of that of the Oxford Union.

What, then, is to be done with the Senate?  Mr. Mystal says that we should abolish it altogether, and replace it with "a democratic institution of government," in essence, a smaller version of the House of Representatives, allocated among the states by population, and perhaps still chosen with longer terms.  I'd like to suggest that we do the opposite.  Put plainly, I propose that we return the Senate to its historical roots as a chamber of stable and stately privilege, in the hope that it will return to its intended function of serving as a proper deliberative body that can moderate, but not stop altogether, the will of the people.

The United States designed its bicameral Congress on the model of Parliament, in which the House of Commons comprised a multitude elected, more or less directly, by constituencies across the nation.  The members of the House of Lords were hereditary members of the peerage, the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, and an assortment of other high clerics of the Church of England.  Various reforms have set the number of church officials at 24, limited the number of hereditary peers to 92, and allowed the monarch to create life peers with the right to sit and vote in the House of Lords, without the right descending to their children.  Quite a bit of pomp still attends the House of Lords, even if most of the 750 or so hereditary peers of the United Kingdom no longer have the right to attend and vote, sharing only the right to choose the 92 peers who will sit in the House of Lords.

That leaves about 660 hereditary peers who don't have anything to keep them occupied from the end of the fall grouse season until Royal Ascot the following June.  Here, then, is the Laquedem Plan to improve the United States senate.  Each state may elect two of the underemployed peers to be its representatives in the New and Improved United States Senate.  The lucky peers will receive a reasonable salary, a travel allowance, and a wardrobe allowance. 

Think of the improvements!  With its members dressed in fur-trimmed capes and robes, the Senate will be more telegenic than ever.  The State of the Union will truly be a television spectacle.  Unhappy witnesses before Congressional committees can truthfully say that they don't understand the legislators' questions, if only because of the thick accents that our new Senators will bring with them.  And as our Senators will never need to run for re-election, once elected they will be beyond the influence of the campaign contributions of lobbyists.

The catch?  Once elected, our imported peers will have a lifetime job, terminable only by death, impeachment, or resignation.  Choose well, voters of the Dakotas, for you're going to be living with your four choices for decades.  As for Oregon?  We could do no better than to elect as our new Senator the actor Tim Bentinck, who beyond his many notable acting roles also holds a fitting hereditary title: he is the 12th Earl of Portland.

The Laquedem Plan for the second presidential debate: Scrabble

The debate between President Trump and Vice President Biden earlier this week told us nothing new about the candidates.  The president criticized Mr. Biden for not proposing any specific plans for his term in office, and then talked over him whenever he started to give specifics.  Mr. Biden was more restrained, but eventually gave up trying to address Mr. Trump's disconnected thoughts and spoke directly (and effectively) to the American people.

A second debate in the same format won't tell us anything new or interesting about the candidates.  Let's admit that we are tuning in mainly to watch for gaffes and blunders, with the same morbid attraction that we have for seeing tightrope walkers and trapeze artists put themselves in danger. 

If Messrs. Trump and Biden are going to meet again to do battle, it should be in a novel format.  Hence the Laquedem Plan to Rework the Second Presidential Debate.

Let them play three games of Scrabble on national television.

Let us see how they interact over a game board, what words they choose, how becomingly they achieve victory, and how gracefully they accept defeat.  Let us read what we can into their choice of words, their game strategies, their use of bonus squares, and their inventiveness with J, Q, X, and Z.  Do they open up new territory on the board with long words that leap to the borders?  Or do they play conservatively and defensively, filling squares in ones and twos?   Do they challenge each other's words? 

It's said that you can learn a lot about a man's character by playing golf with him.  Let's bring the character test to the table.

Game on!

Jane Ace tells off a hospital that asked for a gift

On March 9 the Wall Street Journal published this article by Alexandra Samuel about feedback fatigue, describing how "in their eagerness to deliver a better customer experience" by incessantly asking for reviews and evaluations, "companies have created a new kind of bad customer experience: feedback fatigue."  Ms. Samuel cites two studies that discovered that customers don't like the surveys.  "Repeated surveys," she wrote, "may make customers reluctant to return."  She described a 2014 study as showing that "over-surveying by different organizations leads to exhaustion with all the requests for feedback."  

The article brought to mind one fine example of a business being less than careful with its customer outreach, way back in 1974.  The particular business was a New York City hospital, and it sent this letter to a former patient, Jane Ace.  I've shortened it a bit:

December 6, 1974

Dear Mrs. Ace:

As a recent patient you have seen how our hospital serves its community by providing a full range of medical services, offering a high level of nursing service together with physical amenities, enabling the hospital to treat the patient as a person, rather than a number.  We are appealing to former patients like yourself to contribute to the hospital's Capital Improvement Fund . . .

[Signed by the president of the hospital]

Mrs. Ace and her husband Goodman Ace were well-known radio personalities, and he was a veteran humorist.  He felt that the letter wasn't appropriate, and wrote the following response, which has stuck with me since I first read it in 1975:

December 8, 1974

Dear Sir:

As a former patient I did notice your high-level nursing service together with its other amenities, and I would dearly like to contribute to your hospital fund.  But, you see, on November 11 I died in your hospital.  Maybe we can get together later.

Sincerely, Jane Ace

 

If this were 1872, the Democratic party's leadership would . . .

The efforts of the Democratic party leadership, abetted by elements of the eastern press, to promote billionaire Michael Bloomberg as the man who can defeat Bernie Sanders for the Democratic nomination and then go on to expel self-identified billionaire Donald Trump from the White House in the November election made me imagine that, if 150 years ago Daniel Drew (image credit) had connived his way into the Oval Office, the party leadership would have recruited Jay Gould to run for the office, not just to oust Drew but to prevent an actual reformer from winning.

Alternate headline: Secretary of State doesn't know where Ukraine is, asks NPR reporter to help

I think it's a plausible explanation of this odd story, unless Secretary Pompeo is better at geopolitics than Secretary DeVos is at education.  In the unlikely event that Mr. Pompeo reads this blog, here's a clue:

 

 

 

The 2020 election: The Laquedem Plan To Grant Victory to Both Candidates

Three years of Donald Trump as our president have demonstrated that he enjoys the pomp of the presidency, doesn't want to work very hard, and has only a few fixed political principles.  (He might express those principles as "Taxes are bad!  Twitter is good!  Immigrants I'm not married to are bad!")  We as Americans are conflicted: we berate our presidents (not just Mr. Trump) when they too readily enjoy the perquisites of the office, and we don't like it when they're too fancy, but we also complain when they aren't fancy enough for our taste.

America needs a different president.  What, then, shall we do with the current one?  In 2016 we tried to show our preference for the other candidate by giving her 3,000,000 more votes, but Mr. Trump won anyway.  I suggest that we take advantage of his tastes and two recent events to provide victory to both President Trump and whomever the Democrats may nominate, while at the same  time bolstering the American economy and giving the gossip magazines a ready source of Kardashian-free material.  The two recent events are that Henry, Duke of Sussex, commonly (and no longer royally) known as Prince Harry, and his wife will live in Canada much of the year, and that the prince celebrated his 35th birthday on September 15, 2019.  Constitutional scholars will see where I'm going.

To accomplish the Laquedem Plan, we will need to enact one statute and make one revision to the constitution.  The statutory change is to create a ceremonial position (call it "Pooh-Bah"), to be filled by appointment from among those persons who are either past presidents of the United States or descended from a king or queen who at one time ruled over a portion of what is now the United States, meaning that the Pooh-Bah could be a member of the royal house of Great Britain, the Netherlands, Sweden, Spain, France, and Hawaii.  The constitutional change is to allow the Pooh-Bah to grant lifetime titles of nobility to persons who have held federal elective office on the condition that the ennobled recipients give up their right to hold any further elective office.

Prince Harry is available and looking for a job.  Imagine him as Pooh-Bah.  He has had years of training for a post that he's unlikely to ever fill in his own country.  He'll be local.  He's photogenic and popular.  His wife can act.  He's the ideal candidate.

What will Pooh-Bah Harry do?  I suggest that he starts by granting a title to Donald Trump.  "Earl of Jersey" is already taken, and "Earl of New Jersey" sounds parvenu.  I propose "Baron Trump of Florida" as being fitting.  There would be no duties and he could golf as much as he wishes.  The appointment would come with a coat of arms suitable to be mounted over a hotel entrance, and would even include a Chinese trademark registration.  He can have all the pomp and flattery that any nobleman would wish.  In the meantime the rest of the country can get back to business under the direction of a president better suited to do the actual work of governing.

Equal time for the defense: "Hang In There, Mr. President" (1974)

Richard Nixon inspired not just whimsical songs about the Watergate scandal that brought his presidency to an end, but also songs to rally his supporters.  Henry Tobias wrote this one, which Bernie Knee recorded with accordionist and polka king Frank Yankovic (1915-1998) and his orchestra.  The author wasn't afraid to use the i-word in the lyric:

You've got courage so just reach 'em (Fight! Fight! Fight!)

Let them holler 'Let's impeach him!"  They're wrong, you're right!

It's hard to imagine how the current administration would publicize a song in support of President Trump, as it no longer holds press conferences.  His lawyer Rudy Giuliani could sing it on his behalf, but he's shown a facility for getting his lines wrong.

An unexpected surprise at MOD Pizza

CNN accidentally makes a point about child-rearing

I can't be the only one who noticed the coincidence in CNN's story about the mother of Osama bin Laden being followed by, well, the story that it was followed by.