Tilting at Windmills
Peters, Charles
TILTING AT WINDMILLS 4 4RAY KENO" urges the headline on a direct mail brochure sent to households in New York by the state lottery. The brochure contains a coupon that gives the bearer the...
...It is their standard length of around 750 words...
...classroom and never returned...
...But they were wrong in opposing aid to the South Vietnamese, in not opposing the class bias of the draft that meant the poor and the lower middle class did the dying, and in leaving behind so many of the South Vietnamese whom our government had led to rely on us...
...Jesse Jackson is my third name...
...Bathroom on the back porch...
...Wen Paul Simon withdrew from the campaign, he said something that I wish Dukakis and Bush understood: "Americans instinctively know that we are one nation, one family, and when anyone in that family hurts, all of us eventually hurt...
...The educated elite, which avoided service in Vietnam, apparently does not want its children to know what happened there...
...A teen-age mother who never really had a chance...
...When you get one of those glossy annual reports from a corporation, do you read it or toss it in the wastebasket...
...Compared to the immense outpouring of articles and books about Vietnam, journalists and scholars have barely touched this far greater tragedy...
...A year later Bill Moyers wrote an article for The New York Times Magazine saying how wonderful it was that the Army was giving opportunity to blacks...
...Had to stand by an open stove to get heat...
...And you've not earned the right to do less than your best...
...The State of Minnesota has finally decided to halt this insane practice...
...Just as I wish that Bush and Dukakis understood Paul Simon's point about the need to appeal to the best in people, I wish they shared Jesse Jackson's ability to communicate on a direct human level...
...It seems clear that the primary purpose of these annual reports is the ego enhancement of corporate executives...
...Could we have done anything to stop him...
...Once she complied with his demands, the husband repeatedly raped his wife...
...An example is the report some years back that Ginger Rogers's shoes were so tight during the filming of one of her dances with Fred Astaire that her feet bled...
...Sensible judges in other jurisdictions have their own equivalent of the Minnesota guidelines, but many other judges are either too tender to the violent or too tough on the nonviolent...
...Those behemoths are two to three times more likely to be in crashes than other heavy trucks...
...Marshall's house...
...And then finally a father who cared...
...One would think these questions would command the attention of many of the best minds just as similar issues have done in the case of the Third Reich...
...People don't feel safer, and the only measurable impact of this doubling of the prison population has been an extraordinary increase in the amount of money we're paying for punishment...
...The self-deception involved was enormous...
...So when the Washington Star folded in 1981, I began to scrutinize the Post's box score performance...
...He could reprint the late box scores in all the following days' editions...
...The husband, despite this blatant brutality, cannot be charged with rape and has had to be indicted on lesser charges...
...But it's foolish to waste a cell on a first offender, who, in my experience as a lawyer, was, assuming he was not violent, the best bet for successful probation...
...Consider these words he recently spoke to a group of black students in North Carolina: "I was born of a teenage mother...
...Marshall's house and bring over the leftovers from Mrs...
...Now one state has acted to limit the working hours for interns and residents and five other state legislatures are considering such action...
...But every op-ed writer has to act like that is his natural length for every piece...
...Today the same kind of selfdeception is going on about military service, which the elite continues to avoid...
...Sometimes our thoughts come out as one sentence or one paragraph, sometimes as 10,000 words...
...Law" is one factor, as Gerald Velman, the dean of the law school at Santa Clara University explained last month in the Los Angeles Times: "I watched an episode the other night where Arnie Becker [the show's smoothtalking divorce lawyer] has this gorgeous actress dump $5,000 into his lap and unzip her jump suit...
...Because he lives in Maryland, which is one of 15 states that have laws precluding a husband being charged with rape unless the couple is divorced...
...More often it is padding that expands what would naturally be a sentence or a paragraph into the standard-sized serving of what thereby becomes 99 percent pure mush...
...A recent example was a column by Thomas Boswell on the 30-day suspension A. Bartlett Giamatti handed Pete Rose of the Cincinnati Reds for shoving an umpire...
...The tendency to be careless about this seems to increase as a newspaper achieves monopoly status...
...Boswell argued that Giamatti was wrong, but his article did not contain key facts that supported his case, facts that were available from the wire services and that showed the umpire in question had displayed prejudice toward the Reds...
...The real reason is that not counting them keeps the official dropout rate down and spares the administrators embarrassment, which you must realize by now is the primary goal of public administration in America today...
...I never earned the right to do less than my best...
...Conscientious sports editors make sure that if the box score is missed today it will be repeated tomorrow in the editions that do not carry it...
...Why has the gratifying downward trend been reversed...
...What do they do all day is the question that comes to mind, especially when we read of a 16-year-old student who walked out of his Washington, D.C...
...Perhaps they can finally attain an unthreatened sanity in thinking about it if the rest of us grant them the partial absolution they deserve...
...When you're out driving and one of those giant doubletrailer trucks looms in your rearview mirror, do you feel a trifle apprehensive...
...And it is doubtless true that many of the facts we learn are instructive even when they are unpleasant...
...Simon's failure to stand up to some liberal special interest groups may make this sound like hypocritical rhetoric, but I am convinced that it is potentially true and that the next president to attain greatness will do so in part at least because he assumes it is true...
...While a few government jobs are undercompensated and some are miserable for other reasons, the AP story states the general truth—that most jobs in the federal government pay well and are widely sought after, with many more applicants than openings...
...Aid may not have staved off the North's victory, but it was the least we could have done considering that the hole the South was in was one that we had been encouraging them to dig for more than a decade...
...Yet publicly owned American companies spent $5.1 billion to produce these documents last year, when the essential information in them could have been transmitted for a tenth of that amount...
...But I was confident this would change with the newly expanded sports section...
...I, for example, failed to oppose the reduction of aid to the South Vietnamese in 1973-75...
...One of our readers, Roger Rubin, reports that in one four-day period in April, five boxes were missed and that five more were omitted in just one weekend later in the month...
...Law school enrollment, which had been dropping steadily over the past few years, is now on the rise again...
...Had to hang clothes on nail...
...Some violent criminals—those, for example, who harmed someone they loved in a fit of passion and feel such remorse that they will never hurt anyone else—do merit tenderness...
...I really do understand...
...The New York limes recently reported that while college courses on Vietnam have exploded in recent years and are now given in hundreds of schools across the country, the top universities are conspicuously not part of the trend...
...I do understand...
...Did we in any way contribute to Pol Pot's rise to power...
...A recent study suggests that one way to keep kids in school—or more precisely to get them to school on time and to improve their academic performance—is for the school to give them a good breakfast each morning...
...But how can we justify the state trying to lure people who have never gambled into what is certain to become an addiction for a good many of them...
...Far too often we send the wrong people to jail...
...Why are they wasting all this money when cost-cutting is so important to making us competitive...
...Some of them may be hopeless cases, but that's not why the bureaucracy ignores their existence...
...Nonviolent criminals who pose no danger to society overcrowd cells that should be used to keep the violent away from the rest of us...
...If lawyers rank as my pet peeve, doctors don't come far behind...
...You don't like to dwell on memories like that...
...According to The Washington Times, "No school officials called his home...
...There may be a rational argument for the proposition that, since some people are going to gamble anyway, the state should be able to gain revenue from the practice...
...TILTING AT WINDMILLS 4 4RAY KENO" urges the headline on a direct mail brochure sent to households in New York by the state lottery...
...When medical trainees are forced to work up to 120 hours a week so that the senior physician can take it easy, it breeds in them the self-pity that justifies the greed that has become the hallmark of American medicine...
...But on the whole, the Minnesota guidelines are wise and the failure of other states to follow them is not only causing unjust sentences but also costing us a lot of money without giving us the protection prison is supposed to provide society...
...I understand...
...All this seems absurdly clear to me now, but such was not always the case as I lived through it...
...Parents did not have health insurance...
...Speaking of op-ed pages, there is another vice that has become characteristic of them...
...The District's public schools simply ignore students who quit school after not having made it to the tenth grade by the time they are 16...
...Before we take leave of the Post's sports section, I should deal with its other principal sin...
...He moves me as none of the other candidates have...
...I understand...
...The brochure contains a coupon that gives the bearer the right to play "for just 106—that's a 901 saving off the regular game price...
...On rare occasions they may actually weigh in at 750 words...
...I've previously noted in these pages the proliferation of administrators in the public schools...
...When night games are played in California, the box scores are not available until about 2 a.m., too late for most editions of eastern newspapers...
...I'm adopted...
...Wallpaper used for windbreaker not decoration...
...These kids who have failed and fallen behind can leave and no one cares...
...and some nonviolent criminals—like Boesky or the Watergate gang who have committed massive fraud or betrayed a public trust—deserve the toughest sentences possible...
...And the people most likely to die in these crashes are in cars hit by the trucks...
...Born in a three-room house...
...Slop jar by the bed...
...Speaking of the military, Senator Carl Levin recently asked Donn Starry, a retired general and an expert on armor: "If we went to war, our bullets and missiles would bounce off Soviet tanks...
...The result of this particular disclosure for me has been that whenever I see what I used to consider one of those magical AstaireRogers dance sequences, instead of being carried away with the beauty and the delight of it all, I sit there wondering if this is the scene where Ginger's feet were killing her...
...If the nonviolent offender repeats, he too can be sent to prison...
...The husband," according to The Washington Times, "is accused of beating and choking his wife with his hands and threatening to kill her before he ordered her to undress...
...As the Catholics and Kennedy demonstrated in 1960, the southerners and Carter in 1976, and perhaps the Greeks and Dukakis will this year, a group that has been the victim of prejudice can elect one of its members president when the prejudice against the group declines to the point where its negative impact is exceeded by the positive effect of the enthusiasm of the group that sees itself vindicated by his—or her—victory...
...If you do, you are only being sensible, according to a recent study by the Insurance Institute of America...
...I really do understand...
...The result is sometimes articles that are too tightly condensed...
...That's correct," Starry replied...
...I'm sure there's a whole generation saying, 'Oh, wow, I want to be a lawyer...
...There are two solutions to this...
...I remember in 1965 calling William Gorham, one of Robert McNamara's whiz-kids, to protest the inequities of the draft and being told that I was wrong and that the draft was completely fair...
...The wife, in fear for her life, jumped out of the moving vehicle, resulting in injuries that kept her hospitalized for nine days...
...I would bet that 90 percent of the recipients are tossers...
...Charles Peters...
...Consider what I told you in last month's issue in the item on how few of the Marines who died in the Beirut bombing were from the upper class and then know that David S. Armor, a deputy assistant secretary of defense, has just assured Insight magazine "that those who claim the voluntary system's drawn disproportionately from the lower rungs of society are wrong" The most incredible aspect of the Indochinese story is how little concern we have shown over the Khmer Rouge's massacre of millions of Cambodians...
...It also causes sometimes lethal errors by young doctors whose brains are numbed by fatigue...
...As Dr...
...I understand...
...Could not eat turkey at 3 o'clock on Thanksgiving Day because Mama was preparing someone else's turkey at 3. We had to play football to entertain ourselves and then about 6 she would come from Mrs...
...For those of you who are not baseball fans, let me explain the meaning of the test...
...The Post's sports editor excuses this shoddiness on the basis that the different editions are not delivered to the same group of subscribers each morning, and that therefore he does not know who saw which box scores...
...For the affluent young men who evaded service while the blacks and the farmers and factory workers did the dying, the memories must be much harder to contemplate...
...Such, alas, has not been the case...
...The papers are so full of stories about the underpaid civil service that most people must have been astonished by a recent report from the Associated Press about one job at the Department of Agriculture that had attracted 41 applicants...
...This is dismaying for those of us who feel that more lawyers are not exactly what this society needs...
...Where can we get the money for such a program...
...Too many of us were prone to self-righteous moralizing and practically everyone I know was badly wrong at one time or another...
...Several months ago full-page ads proclaimed a major expansion of The Washington Post's sports section...
...While two of them in particular write extremely well, they often seem to think that writing well is enough and that they have no obligation to assemble fresh facts to give substance to their style...
...My best guess is that we will have a woman or a black—or maybe both—as president before the end of this century...
...Seventy-five percent of them offer no courses at all on Vietnam .. .. The war obviously remains a hot subject for the members of the liberal elite who lived through it...
...This would be welcomed not only by baseball fans but by dance, music, and theater lovers, who frequently find that a review missing in the edition they receive one day is not run in the one they get the next day so they never see the review...
...Barry Krisberg, the president of the National Conference on Crime and Delinquency recently told "60 Minutes": "We've doubled the number of people in prisons...
...It was, as it turned out, an opportunity to die...
...I was delighted by the prospect, assuming that at long last the Post would pass my Night Baseball Box Score Test...
...The reason is the puffery about, and the man-of-destiny photographs of, the CEO and other top officials...
...That's easy—we just fire all those administrators who do nothing but write memos and attend conferences...
...But there are some revelations that I think do absolutely no good...
...It was miserable...
...And when you do your best, no mountain is too high, no valley is too low, no ocean is too wide...
...I understand...
...It came up with sentencing guidelines that tell judges to send murderers, armed robbers, rapists, and muggers to prison but to give probation or a combination of local jail and probation to first offenders convicted of nonviolent crimes like car theft, forgery, or possession of marijuana...
...We live, of course, in the age of the expose...
...The crime rate has not gone down...
...Its columnists often provide us with examples of the New Journalism run amok...
...All of this is of little importance as applied to the sports section, but the Writer-Writer, who is too much of a hot-shot to do the reporting that is the essence of his craft, can be found in other more important parts of the paper, most notably the op-ed page, where he is often joined by the Thinker-Thinker, who also feels above reporting...
...They were right to oppose the involvement of American troops, and they deserve great credit for that opposition...
...But I am happy to report that in their case there is some sign that at last something is being done about the intern and resident slavery that has long been one of the more bizarre customs in American hospitals...
...One sometimes suspects that the people at the Post not only feel above running wire service stories, they also feel above reading them...
...After the attack, the husband began driving around with his wife in the car...
...There really is a yearning across this good land for leadership that appeals to the noble in us rather than to the greed in us...
...The trouble with this length is that it defies the way the human brain works...
...Alternatively, he could ask Donald Graham to spend the money to make sure subscribers receive the same editions each day and that scores missed in any one edition are always printed in it the next day...
Vol. 20 • June 1988 • No. 5
