Isaac Laquedem

Happy birthday, Professor Lehrer

Today is the 95th birthday of Tom Lehrer, who rose to fame as a singer and satirical songwriter in 1953, performed and toured for about 15 years, and then returned to academia.  Some of his songs are fossils of their era (we know what became of Hubert, and Wernher von Braun did in fact study Chinese).  Others that he wrote for the events of the 1950s and 1960s are painfully apposite to the fears of the present day, including the one linked here.  Happy birthday, sir!

 

An ode to Alex Jones's recent court losses

It was a solemn rite as e’er
Was seen by mortal man.
The celebrants, the people there,
Were all Republican.

Ed Rollins bent his grizzled head,
And Ari Fleischer too,
And one⁠—’twas Tucker, someone said,
Though no one clearly knew.

I saw the priest, white-robed and tall
Of strictly right-wing views
He was the pious man men call
To cast blessings on Fox News.

Ah, ’twas a high and holy rite
As anyone could swear.
“What does it mean?” I asked a wight
Who knelt apart in prayer.

“A mass for the repose,” he said,
“Of Alex Jones's ⁠—“What,
Is Alex Jones now dead?
’Tis sad, ’tis sad, God wot!”

“A mass”⁠—repeated he, and rose
To go and kneel among
The worshipers⁠—“for the repose
Of Alex Jones's tongue.”

-- Ambrose Bierce, brought up to date

Dinner with Robespierre, and others

You may have heard these two observations of America:

I do not know if the people of the United States would vote for superior men if they ran for office, but there can be no doubt that such men do not run.

            And

The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.

Those are not quotations of today.  They come from the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859), who traveled around the United States in the 1830s and compiled his observations into the famous book, “Democracy in America,” published in 1835, which we all were supposed to have read in high school. 

To understand de Tocqueville, consider where he came from.  He was born only 12 years after the Reign of Terror.  The French revolution was not the stuff of history but an event that still echoed.

The French revolutionaries of 1789 liked to think that they were inspired by the American revolution of 1776.  There’s an important difference in what happened after each Revolution.  After a short-lived weak confederation, the 13 states organized a new federal government, and our basic government structure has stayed the same since.

Not so the French.  They went from the revolution of 1789 to the republic and the reign of terror of 1792, had a civil war and a counterrevolution, were displaced by Napoleon in 1799, restored the monarchy in 1814, pushed out Napoleon, got him back, pushed him out again, and got the king back – all in less than 50 years.

One of the classic "what if" questions is "If you could invite anyone in history to a dinner party, who would you ask?"

For one of my historical dinner parties I would invite the people who set de Tocqueville on his way.  The first is the person who brought about the end of the French monarchy, Maximilien Robespierre (1758-1794).

Robespierre was a young lawyer, barely 30 when he led the French Convention to abolish the monarchy and not yet 35 when he persuaded the Convention to execute Louis XVI in January 1793.  He had a vision of the ideal Republic.  He prepared the very liberal constitution of 1793, but never implemented it.  He led the French toward his goal – until they saw that he was ordering the deaths of anyone who stood in his way.  Seeing their own danger, the Convention organized against him.  In July 1794 he left France the same way that King Louis had departed, head first.

Imagine that you could hear de Tocqueville interview Robespierre.  If Robespierre could rewrite history, would he have pushed Louis XVI to the guillotine?  Would he have executed hundreds of his political enemies?   Or would he listen to de Tocqueville’s recounting of American success and understand that he could have brought about the same result for France?

Every case has two sides.  If we dine with Robespierre, we will invite Louis XVI.  You may know him for marrying Marie Antoinette and how they met their end.  There’s much more to his story.

Louis XVI succeeded his father in 1775.  Louis began his reign as a reformer.  He tried to abolish serfdom.  He tried to get rid of the land tax and the labor tax.  He tried to foster religious tolerance.  On the spectrum of French kings he was a liberal and a reformer.  He supported the American revolution, but the resulting national debt combined with bad grain harvests led to the lower and middle classes becoming as unhappy with him as the aristocracy had been.  He made all sides angry.

He could not stave off the French revolution in 1789, he was arrested and deposed in 1792, and he went to the guillotine in January 1793.

We can imagine De Tocqueville, after a glass or two of a fine Bordeaux, encouraging Louis and Robespierre to argue about whether Louis could have avoided the revolution and execution.  Would Louis have gone into exile to save the lives of himself and his family?  Or would he, like a sea captain, “go down with the ship”?

I’d invite a fourth person to join us, one you’ve likely never heard of other than as the namesake of a station on the Paris Metro.  His name is Chretien Guillaume de Lamoignon de Malesherbes (1721-1794).  Why him?

The French Convention included many lawyers.  Malesherbes was one of them.  Malesherbes offered to defend Louis XVI at his trial, knowing that by defending the unpopular king he was risking his own life as a very visible royalist.  He was right - fifteen months after Louis XVI went to the guillotine, Malesherbes died the same way, together with his daughter, his granddaughter, and their husbands.  Did Malesherbes regret dying for his belief in the principle that every accused person is entitled to a defense?

I wouldn't pose the question myself, but I'd encourage Alexis de Tocqueville to ask Malesherbes, as I expect he would; de Tocqueville was his great-grandson.

A song for Rudy Giuliani and his pardon list

John Eastman, a retired law professor, told the January 6 Special Committee that he had e-mailed Rudy Giuliani shortly after the January 6 insurrection, writing "I've decided that I should be on the pardon list, if that is still in the works."  He joins the ranks of 29 Congresspeople (only one so far has been outed) who requested pardons in the last days of the Trump administration. 

Who kept the pardon list?  Mr. Giuliani, who was President Trump's personal attorney at the time?  Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law and backstage gatekeeper?  Or someone else inside the White House?  Whoever it is, it deserves a bit of verse.  This one's to the tune of "I've Got a Little List" from Gilbert & Sullivan's operetta "The Mikado":

 

If someday it should happen that a pardon must be sold,

I‘ve got a little list, I’ve got a little list

Of conspirators and plotters whose misfortunes are now told,

And who all want on my list, who all want on my list.

There’s the crazy law professor who thinks Pence can pick the Prez,

And the Congressmen and women who repeat what Eastman says,

“Ordinary tourists” who invade the House’s floor,

The folks who take them up and down the stairs the day before,

Promoters of the Big Lie – well, I’m sure you get the gist,

They all want on my list, they all want on my list.

 

Footnote for fans of Professor Eastman:  His Wikipedia entry ends with this intriguing note:

Other

On January 7, 2021, Eastman edited this Wikipedia article to portray his post-election role in a more favorable light. His editing was reverted due to conflict-of-interest rules of Wikipedia, and on January 9 he appealed on the article's talk page, where some changes were approved but others were denied.^[118]

An old Boomer's "delete" button

Last week former president Donald Trump denied the claim of reporter Maggie Haberman that he had flushed documents down a White House toilet.  Ms. Haberman makes the claim in her forthcoming book, Confidence Man, according to a report from Axios.

Mr. Trump is famous for not using e-mail and avoiding computers, both of which have more modern means of deleting unwanted information - hence the thought that inspired today's caption.

This is the CAPTCHA that I'd like to see

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