Siesta

Thank goodness I got my nap in today. I haven't always managed to get a daily nap, but those periods of overly ambitious co-counsel or judges are part of the wastelands of my life, looking back. The productive periods, the joyful periods, the sane periods have all included the afternoon nap.

My Grandpa Casebier climbed down from his tractor and took a nap every day. Grandma Casebier called him lazy for the sixty-plus years he did so.

In the early 80's, I tried a workers' compensation case in front of an elderly judge who broke each day at noon. Now it is true the "two day trial" lasted a week, but I still think the quality of justice was higher than usual. My opposing counsel was not rested; he complained all week and drove an hour back to his office to work the rest of the day. I took a nap and a swim and read over the work for the next day. I recommend this approach to the judiciary; most of the rest of the week after a two day trial is needed for recovery anyway.

I love nap stories. When George McGovern called LBJ to ask Johnson for advice in his campaign for the presidency after McGovern won the democratic nomination, Johnson told him to take nap in his pajama's every day.

I was discussing naps with Dan Boyd today. (We once were young enough we talked about girls, then politics, then law and now naps-are these the passages in life?). Dan relates John Kenneth Galbraith nap stories. Galbraith who died at 97 took daily naps, even during busy periods such as when he was John Kennedy' ambassador to India. President Lyndon Johnson called Galbraith during a nap and Galbreath's housekeeper refused to interrupt his nap.

So do naps help you live longer? I don't know, but I like this quote:

The recent study following nearly 24,000 people for on average 6 years found that those who regularly took midday naps were nearly 40% less likely to die from heart disease than non-nappers. Researchers suggested siestas might protect the heart by reducing stress hormones levels. They found "people who took at least three naps per week lasting 30 minutes or longer had a 37% reduced risk of death from heart disease than their non-napping counterparts. Those subjects who occasionally took short naps lasting less than half an hour had a 12% lower risk than people who never napped... The results suggest that taking naps might be
just as important to protecting the heart as other measures, he says, including eating right and taking cholesterol-lowering drugs... http://ajpendo.physiology.org/cgi/content/full/292/1/E253

My friend Paul, the Lebanese Arabic Scholar, regularly slips away for his naps. He seems to me one of the saner guys in either courthouse.

Apparently there is some contrary evidence. Retirees who sleep a lot during the day don't seem to do very well.

But over all, nappers appear to be more productive, healthier, happier and longer lived than non-nappers. Of course there is a difference between causation and correlation. It may be that people who are productive and happy, give themselves a break and take a nap. It may be that those who work in the meat packing plants and field labor and other hazardous jobs don't get a chance to nap.

What is the downside to spending all that time napping? I hear plenty of anecdotes about super-achievers who slept three hours a night for a lifetime and used every waking hour to do things like cure cancer, write the great American novel or win the Nobel Peace Prize. Maybe so.

My sense, though, is that no normal lifespan is really long enough to accomplish much. Certainly, not without extraordinary skills (I may have some, but they have not yet surfaced in the first 57 years). So, barring the tyranny of man or circumstance, I'll be napping every day at about 3 pm.

Thoughts about dying and death

When I told Kathy I was going to write about dying and death today, she gave one of her caustic comments about me opining on another subject about which I know nothing. On the contrary, Kathy, this is the only subject to which I have the same access as all other mortals.

Montaigne (the Granddaddy of All Bloggers, GOAB) makes this point in his Of Practice. We can gain a proficiency through practice in all other human tasks, "But for dying, which is the greatest task we have to perform, practice cannot help us. A man can, by habit and experience, fortify himself against pain, shame, indigence, and such other accidents; but as for death, we can try it only once: we are all apprentices when we come to it."

Montaigne then describes an incident in which he was knocked off his horse by a bigger horse and rider. "It is the only swoon I have experienced to this day," he relates. He didn't think the experience of being close to death, at first, was that bad: "It seemed to me that my life was hanging only by the tip of my lips; I closed my eyes in order, it seemed to me, to help push it out, and took pleasure in growing languid and letting myself go. It was an idea that was only floating on the surface of my soul, as delicate and feeble as all the rest, but in truth not only free from distress but mingled with that sweet feeling that people have who let themselves slide into sleep."

Later he started throwing up clots of blood. And then after two or three hours he began to feel himself caught up in the pains, he says, "...my limbs being all battered and bruised by my fall; and I felt so bad two or three nights after that I thought I was going to die all over again, but by a more painful death; and I still feel the effect of the shock of that collision."

Montaigne in another essay, Judging the death of others, says being dead is not what troubles us, but dying. He quotes (someone completely unknown to me) Epicharmus: "It is not death, but dying, that I fear.

When Caesar was asked what death he found most desirable, he answered (again according to GOAB), "The least premeditated and the quickest." And Pliny, "A quick death is the supreme good fortune of human life."

I have thought that an easy death for me would be by drowning. I once suggested to Kathy that if I fall into senility, she take me to the beach, point out to sea, and tell me to swim to an island paradise. (She wanted to know if it would work right then.)

When I described this plan as an easy death to Brownsville Blogger Stan Raines, he gave me a book of poems he had written, There's More to Blues Than Meets the Eye. One of his poems, The Sea, begins:

When I have reached sufficient age
And experience has filled me up
And the world has drained me dry
I will heed god's call and take me to the sea.

It might be a far worse death than Stan or I imagine, but I had an experience when I was in college that makes me think it might not be the worst of all. I, then, fancied myself the greatest of under-water swimmers. I could take several deep breaths and swim from a lakeside restaurant in Lake Travis to a ski ramp near the other side of the lake. Though, we never did, there was some discussion of taking bets on the matter.

Once, in a pool, with my friends Dan Boyd and Stephen McNally present, I was going to put on a demonstration. I was going to swim laps in the pool far beyond anyone's expectations and to universal amazement and admiration. I did. However, at some point I stopped swimming and began to sink. The only thing I remember was Stephen pulling me out and telling me that my competitive spirit was in conflict with the likelihood I would enjoy a long life.

That wasn't so bad. I lost consciousness and it may have been I would have been unaware of the dying part and gone straight to the death. I'm glad it didn't happen then, and I don't want it to happen any time soon, but, Lord, may I be blessed with an easy way out.

Sherwin B. Nuland is a favorite writer of mine on death. One way to judge a book is to look at the index. If it quotes Montaigne, it's a keeper. Nuland, a surgeon from Yale, in his book How we Die, quotes Montaigne twice. (He also quotes Tolstoy, Shakespeare and Laurence Sterne. What a guy.)

Lawyers don't have to see much death, but some of us must hear many very good descriptions of death. Nuland, on the other hand wrote about death after seeing it at close hand over a long career. He says he would like to have a death without suffering, but the overwhelming odds are against it: "Like most people, I will probably suffer with the physical and emotional distress that accompany many mortal illnesses, and like most people I will probably compound the the pained uncertainty of my last months by the further agony of indecision--to continue or to give in, to be treated aggressively or to be comforted, to struggle for the possibility of more time or to call it a day and a life--these are the two sides of the mirror into which we look when afflicted by those illnesses that have the power to kill."

So I will be most likely trapped as well. Stretching out the agony with the hope of recovery or at least a little more time.

Nuland reminds us of the words Shakespeare gives to Julius Caesar:

Of all the wonders that I have yet heard,
It seems to most strange that men should fear;
Seeing that death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come.

Let the people take heart and hope everywhere, for the cross is bending, the midnight is passing and joy cometh with the morning. Eugene V. Debs

To the tune of Mammy's little baby loves shortnin':

"Rush," says the boss
"Work like as hoss
I'll take the profit
and you take the loss

I've got the brains
I've got the dough
The Lord himself
Decreed it so."

Mammy's little baby loves union union
Mammy's little baby loves union shop,

etc.


Someday, we will look back on employment in the same way we now look back on slavery. In fact, the term "wage slavery" is not a metaphor. It is a form of slavery that should be abolished. It is not usually as cruel as slavery slavery, but it can be.

This is simple statement of the premise: Everyone should get the full value of his labor. To get any less is theft. To get anymore is theft.

Capital is withheld wages. If a company accumulates capital it means wages have been withheld from those who earned them. Unless these wages go to benefit the labor that produced them, then they have been stolen from the rightful owners.

I know this all sounds dry, and preachy and Marxist.

(May I first say, I am not a Marxist. First, I cannot be an "-ist" for anyone I cannot read and rarely have I found a German author whose work I am able to read. I cannot be a Hegelian either. Or a Kantian or a Heideggerian. All these books sit on my shelf and my son has read them and he recommends them, but it is not likely to happen.

Next, to the extent I can understand the issues, in the great battle between Karl Marx and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, I stand with Proudhon. (Maybe this is just because the French write better.) Proudhon rejected collective ownership in favor of a plan in which the individual worker had ownership and he believed that social revolution could be achieved peacefully.

Also, I have never been the member of any organization that saw the teaching of Marx as an organizing force. I did try to get into the Navy Judge Advocates General Corps once which is publicly owned and operated, but I don't know if they talk about Marx or not, because I didn't get in.

So, unless you are just feeling grumpy, there is no need to call me a Marxist. Also, there is some risk I might begin to imagine that I have read Marx.

Also, it is not really accurate to call me a socialist, either. I am not a fan of collective ownership in most cases, although I would like to see a socialized bank, hospital and insurance company competing with privately owned ones. If we had these things, I would probably use them. However, I think we need privately owned houses to live in. I think everyone should have one. (This is an evolving opinion. I tried going without any property for a while during my Tolstoy period, but it was very inconvenient).

Don't under-estimate the quality of government work. Government prisons are far better than private prisons. The U.S. Army is first rate, I hear, and far better than the private mercenary corporations, at least as far as I can tell from news reports. The best criminal defense law firm in town are the Federal Public Defenders. If I ever get in trouble, I'll admit how broke I am (Kathy wants me to keep this secret), so they will represent me.

I am pretty socialistic in the sense that I would like to see a Year of Jubilee (hit the link in the title)and international equalization of all wealth, but this is more religious than economic. I have read biographies of Eugene V. Debs and if I had been around in 1912 or 1916 or 1920, I would have voted for him. Debs was a socialist, but I don't think I really am. We named our spare bedroom after Debs.

Fighting Bob La Follette was both a Republican and a Progressive and looks to me a lot like a socialist. If he were running this time around, I would vote for him and cast my first Republican vote. This is regardless of the office. Also, I would vote for the Vermont Independent Socialist, Bernie Sanders.

My friend, Dan Boyd, suggests I am an anarcho-syndicalist. I like the title. From the web, it appears anarcho-syndicalists also call themselves libertarian socialists, I guess as opposed to authoritarian socialists or libertarian economic oppressors. Brownsville, though, appears to have not anarcho-syndicalist clubs or political parties. I don't know much about the Rotarians or the Kiwanians or the Knights of Columbus. These may all be anarcho-syndicalists, but I am deterred by the funny hats. I read the Autobiography of Big Bill Haywood one of the founders of the Wobblies. I am a fan. We named our kitchen after Haywood.

I am still a Democrat. You can be these other things and still be a Democrat. In fact as Bill Clinton is now trying to prove again, as George Wallace showed before, you can be a racist and be a Democrat. You can also be these things and be a Republican, or at least once upon a time you could. The racism is easy for a Republican, as David Duke recently demonstrated and Woodrow Wilson earlier established. Teddy Roosevelt was a Republican and by his last race he was at least a progressive. Fighting Bob La Follette was both a Republican and a Progressive and looks to me a lot like a socialist.

My friend and tax man, Bill Fulcher, is both a Democrat and statewide treasure of the socialists. Where but Brownsville can you find a socialist tax man? I also have a socialist barber. God, I love this town.

The problem with me being a Democrat, though, is I am usually angry with most Democrats who grab office and, also, given a chance, I sue them a lot.

Another problem: I have strong doubts that voting matters at all. As my son Austin argues, "If voting made a difference, it would be illegal." That is probably right. I quit voting for a while because I worried about Matthew vii, 1 and thought maybe Jesus was instructing us not to vote in the Sermon on the Mount. It makes sense and that is how the Jehovah's Witnesses and the Mennonites interpret it. Fan, again. I have never met a Witness or a Mennonite I did not like, but no rooms have been named after them.

My greatest concern is that voting in a non-democratic format such as plebiscites for Napoleon or Hitler or in the Electoral College or in the Democratic Super-delegate system uses up energy that could be more effectively directed to something important. Like writing in a blog, for instance.

My two favorite magazines are the Economist and the Socialist Worker. The Economist is an English, capitalist magazine and the Socialist Worker is an American (and obviously socialist) magazine. Both promote a economic interpretation of history and the world. In fact, they are very similar, except for the last paragraphs of the articles. The Economist describes a world in which money governs everything and that's OK. The Socialist Workers describe a world in which money governs everything and that's not OK. Anyway, I think both are more trustworthy for predictions of political races and economic trends than those confused magazines such as Nation, Texas Observer and National Review (yes, I read that one on-line) that think ideas are more important than money in predicting social behavior. (OK, OK, I may also occasionally read People, but it doesn't count here).

Treat all of this as a long digression, Uncle Toby. People often ask me why I don't run for office. The tirade above should put that to rest. I don't expect anyone to care what my politics are. I just throw it in to anticipate questions about where this labor opinion comes from and because I very much enjoy talking about myself.

Now, where does this opinion come from?

1. I have been an employer, and not a very good one.
2. I have been an employee and it was a bad fit.
3. I tried to start a coop and we never got off the ground, because it lost more money than it made--tens of thousands of dollars more.

I have tested the limits of the employer-employee relationships off and on since I got fired from my job as a paperboy for trying to organize a union.

These issues also include some skeletons that I must toss out of the closet. Bear with me, readers true. Sorting all of this out may be as hard as all of that time I have done in therapy.