If At First You Don't Succeed, Failure May Be Your Style. Quentin Crisp

My friend Randall (who hereinafter will be referred to as R. to protect his anonymity) called with a topic. When are we failures in life? His wife tells him he is a failure and he is past 60 with the kid grown and gone, so there is not much time to turn things around at this point.

R. disputes her conclusion. He sees his life as largely a success and his wife sees it as largely (or completely and totally) a failure. A loss. Not really worth having been lived.

I for one would be willing to declare R. a success on the basis of being a successful father alone. This was Jackie O's definition and she was rich and famous. So R. can accept this definition if he wants. His wife won't, but I'll give it to him. For that matter, it would be easy to make an argument for R. He was elected a member of his city counsel and had many successful law suits that mattered at least to his clients. Somehow, though, I don't think these would weigh much in the wifely judgment day.

I have further assured R. that in my experience, all husbands are sooner or later failures, completely and utterly. I further assured him that Kathy is always asking me, "If you're so smart, why aren't we rich." She throws out the decade that has passed without a vacation. She notes my car always looks like a wreck. My clothes are terrible. My dog is fat and has gas. She grumbles about the 32 inch waist I had when we were married that keeps swinging between 40 and 50 inches. Despite my soaring success in life (as I see it), she is sure I have failed and failed her as well. "I'm worried about my future," she cries.

And it is the same with all of our friends. I mentioned our mutual friends, all of whom are now about sixty and failures in the eyes of their wives. Some have actually saved money, have a nice house, annuities and 401 K plans, but their wives are still wrecks about the declining income and the likelihood of destitution. None of this seemed to comfort R.

Anyway, it is now incumbent upon me to redefine success and failure in such a way that R. and I and all of our friends (who have lived so long and have so little to show for it) are not failures.

Oddly, I don't remember much comment about the subject of failure from philosophers or novelists or poets in my decades of aimless and unproductive reading.

However, I do think when we read a translation of Aristotle and his definition of "happiness," this is something we would now call "success." My hope is that Aristotle can bail out R. and me and all others similarly situated. If we can claim to be a success by Aristotelian standards, this would largely negate being a failure when we are weighed in the wifely balance.

The word we translate as happiness is eudaimonia which breaks down, eu, "good" and daimonia, "spirit." By extension, it refers to good fortune or what we might usually call "success."

Happiness for moderns is subjective. You can take a pill or have whiskey and become happy. For Aristotle, a child could never be happy, because not enough life had been lived. Aristotle grappled with the concept of not calling anyone happy until his death and believed that the life of happiness could be negated even after death. If someone based his life on a project that was merely and illusion and false, this may not be learned until later. The happy life would be erased retroactively even if the dead was oblivious to the failure. If the dead man's son turns out to be a murderer, he will not have been happy.

Even for moderns, these things could be said about success. The apparently successful man might be safely in the grave when his children or his life's work goes on to prove he was a terrible failure.

First what I "remember" Aristotle said, but cannot find. Happiness (hereinafter called success) is achieved with good birth, good health, good land, good children and some other things like good horses.

These things are achieved by practicing the virtues. Political virtue is highly ranked. R. served as a counsel member for the poor area of town and worked to help them get the city services of the richer parts of town. Aristotle would give him high marks for this. I'd say a B or maybe an A-.

Aristotle would also judge success on how money is handled. He ranked liberality and magnificence high. Magnificence is something like giving a park to the city. I doubt R. was able to do much of this, but he always ranked high in liberality. He gave political contributions and attended the arts and bought lunches. Aristotle would probably at least give him a C+. Now this is the sticking point and where his wife probably fails him. In fact, a failure here for most wives seems to outweigh all the other grades. It is heavily weighted in the wifely report card.

Aristotle put a lot of stock in honor as well. I think he was talking about war or other sacrifice. R. probably wouldn't get much there.

Aristotle wanted a balance between ambitions and lack of ambition. R. may have fallen a little heavy in the lack of ambition category. OK, only a D, but it isn't failure.

On the anger/good temper grade, after overcoming a childhood inability to lose at ping pong, he would score very high on the good temper grade. Pushing an A, I would say.

Aristotle also graded success on friendliness, truthfulness and good-wit. R. really should get better than average on all of these. Especially on friendliness and good-wit. I don't know if Aristotle graded on a curve or not, but surely R. should get B's or better.

So, on Aristotle's success report card, I think R. would probably be a success.

How then, should he (and I and all others similarly situated) comfort ourselves on having failed on the wife report card? I say we look to true successes in life like Socrates, Tolstoy, Gandhi. If the biographers are correct, their wives would have given them failing grades as well.

There is nothing that fails like success. -- G.K. Chesterton

Another of my big dozen books is Tolstoy's War and Peace. There are several books that have been watershed events that changed my world view. I read War and Peace when I was in my mid-forties. By most measures of success in life, it is fortunate I did not read it earlier. On the other hand, had I read and understood and applied Tolstoy's lessons when I was in my twenties, I could have avoided a couple of decades of hollow pursuits, meaningless losses and empty victories.

The immediate impact of reading the book was wrecking my view of history; Tolstoy destroys the Great Man approach to history. I was not completely sold on Great Man histories, even before Tolstoy. I had read enough economic determinism to figure economics was the real driving force. But I did think the big names must have made some difference.

Tolstoy showed that Napoleon, regardless of what he thought he was leading, was just the guy stuck in the front of the mass movement of people from West to East. If anyone had any control of a battle or political victory, it was some guy in a trench who was deciding whether or not to fight or run. The heroes at the top, regardless of what they thought, were not controlling events.

Reading Tolstoy was a full summer's effort. I had to stop and read a biography of Napoleon and a history of the Napoleonic wars to follow the story. I had trouble following name changes and family relationships and military ranks, so circling back in the book took me a while.

Whether or not it is "The World's Greatest Novel," I don't know. I am still haunted by certain scenes. A death at battle. The burning of Moscow. I also read some of the critic's surveys. Harold Bloom, for instance, in The Western Canon, features the short story Hadji Murad. Bloom basically took the approach, "That Tolstoy is an unmatched writer, but if you read his essays on law, religion and politics, he's just a nut." (I can't find the quote, but this is the impression I got). Many other critics seemed to take a similar view of Tolstoy's later work.

The approach is much like what you see written about Ezra Pound--good poet, but insane and a fascist traitor.

After I finally worked my way through War and Peace, I could not get enough of Tolstoy. I still rank Resurrection by Tolstoy as my favorite novel. It is about the legal system, a murder case, prison and the interaction between classes, so it harmonizes well with experiences in my life. Tolstoy wrote a version of the gospels, The Gospel in Brief, that I preferred to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. He wrote essays on government, politics, war and religion such as The Kingdom of God is Within You that word for word persuaded me that I should change the way I lived life. I decided not to run for County Chairman (or anything else) again, I quit trying to get rich and began to try to get broke, and within a couple of years I quit filing lawsuits and started representing indigent criminal defendants (this greatly facilitated the prior goal).

Kathy was surprisingly accepting of all of this weirdness.

As the years have past, I have had to back off (at least for now) on some of the Tolstoyan lifestyle to sort of a Tolstoy Light. I found I was too middle class to suffer so much. It was a pain trying to live without a house, so the bank and I have been buying another one. I got tired of the long hours. And I kept getting rid of more money than I had to give, not so much out of generosity, but out of not really knowing how much money I had.

After I became powerless and broke, as you might imagine, I got a whole new set of friends. Not a lot of the old ones stuck around, but the ones who did were keepers. Another change was I was able to quit spending time with people I didn't like. I have to lie a lot less, even to Kathy. A don't take Prozac anymore. I don't have to worry about how to invest the 401K plans or keeping up with a beach house, a Hummer, a Rolex or a swimming pool. That junk is fortunately all gone. I sleep through the night. I am willing to get out of bed in the morning.

Some book!

"The law serves of nought else in these days but for to do wrong."

A lawyer I knew blew his brains out this week. He was the founder of a successful firm based in several Texas cities.

Another lawyer I worked with took an overdose of heroin about three years ago. He had been barred by the judges from helping with indigent cases in Denton County.

I picked up a rifle from another lawyer-friend about the same time after he called me and said he was afraid he would use it on himself.

A Court of Appeals Judge in Austin killed who had been a successful plaintiff's lawyer killed himself a few years back.

An Hidalgo County judge killed himself.

I know it isn't just lawyers who commit suicide, but we seem to have more than our fair share.

I have tried to look up the statistics, but apparently death rates are not kept by profession well enough to figure it out. The dentist, police officer urban legend cannot be proved one way or another.

We do know the statistics on race and gender: Non-Hispanic Caucasian males are the big losers. A non-Hispanic Caucasian is 2.5 times more likely to kill himself than an Hispanic or African-American male.

Maybe that is because Anglo males tend to be dentists, police officers and trial lawyers.

I do have a sense that litigators are more likely suicides than office practitioners. Real estate lawyers and will writers seem to all die in their 90's--of boredom. I used to cut out and send a copy of the obituaries from the Texas Bar Journal to my friend Leo. I would tabulate the average age of death for trial lawyers, 53, and office practitioners, 93. Leo soon quit trying cases and has been aging very slowly in mind-numbing mediation work. He looks great.

What about the law practice would make life so unbearable that we cannot go on?

Tolstoy's short story One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich nails it. Many lawyers live a life worse than useless --this is a terrible burden to bear.

Many of us are trapped into work that, as its day-to-day work, beats down poor people. One of the speakers at the conference this weekend gave a stock justification of the law: it keeps us from taking our disputes to the streets.

I wish I could credit the law for this. My hard thirty-plus years in the law lead me to believe the purpose of the law is to make sure people who have the lion's share of the bounty in this land keep it and people who don't have any, don't get much away from them.

Criminal law hammers the poor. Civil law, to the extent it involves the poor, hammers the poor. There is an area of law euphemistically called civil litigation that is mostly big corporations suing each other and with this the poor only get hurt if they get in the way.

For a very brief period in the law in the United States there was an effort to help the poor. Workers' Compensation laws, products liability laws had a brief period when the poor could get a little redress. Criminal law took a brief run at protecting the rights of the poor. But the system has "righted" itself. The pesky poor people have been beaten back into their hovels.

Lawyers who once could make an honest living without savaging the poor have now had to move on. It is hard to find work these days that does not tear out the lining of the stomach.

Shakespeare's Henry VI, part 2 is often misquoted, either to attack or defend lawyers when Dick the Butcher says, "First thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers."

In Shakespeare's play, Jack Cade replies:

Nay, that I mean to do. Is not this a lamentable
thing, that of the skin of an innocent lamb should
be made parchment? that parchment, being scribbled
o'er, should undo a man? Some say the bee stings:
but I say, 'tis the bee's wax; for I did but seal
once to a thing, and I was never mine own man
since.

In life, he had reasons for his grievances against the law. He was the leader of about 5,000 Kentish peasants who briefly claimed London. They issued a manifesto called the The Complaint of the Poor Commons of Kent. One of the items of complaint:

The law serves of nought else in these days but for to do wrong, for nothing is spread almost but false matters by color of the law for reward, dread and favor and so no remedy is had in the Court of Equity in any way.

Jack Cade and his men were offered a pardon, betrayed, and the government stuck his head on a pike on London Bridge. Yep, he was right about the law all along.

If Shakespeare was correct in his description of Cade that he wanted to kill all the lawyers, then Cade was mistaken in believing this would help. Lawyers are seldom murdered by parties in lawsuits. We are fungible commodities. Kill one lawyer and you only get another.

But he was not mistaken in believing the law was the enemy of the poor. And it is becoming so again in these United States.

So Jack Cade won't kill us, but unless we can find a way to put a little service to humanity in our calling, many of us will perform the chore ourselves.

Politics, noun. A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage." —Ambrose Bierce

I am thinking this blog should adopt the policy of Homeland Security of posting warning colors, red, orange, whatever, to give a generally heightened sense of anxiety with no means of remedy. Red could be, "I am about to grind out another half-baked idea that struck me in the wee hours of the morning, so I'll probably change my mind about this later." Orange is, "This is going to be an insufferable load of bombastic drivel (my mind inexplicably moves into that mode sometimes) and in the unlikely event that I ever read it again myself, I'll be embarrassed." That sort of thing.

Anyway, this should be sort of a blend of red and orange, (is that where we get burnt orange?) which should be its own category that is even worse: I am going to talk about local politics....again.

This is in essence a guide to responding to local candidates. They should also be ranked with warning colors:

1. Judges and prosecutors are red and the higher the office, the more alarming the shade of red should be. Sheriffs are usually red, depending on the nature of your work.

2. Legislative offices such as State Rep, Senate, school board, TSC board, Port Authority are orange and the higher the office the scarier the orange.

3. Risible candidate posts. These are the ones either with no power or no responsibility. My old job of County Chairman comes to mind. I am not that great at describing colors. I hear words of color that do not conjure up any image at all--mauve, taupe. This warning color would be sort of like the flesh of a cadaver.

The orange offices can move to red if you actually want something such as a contract to tow cars or collect taxes.

The red offices can move to orange if you never commit any crimes and do not practice law.

The cadaver-colored offices move to red if you want to run for something, yourself.

Here are some of my problems with participating in local races at all:

1. Most of the time it doesn't matter who gets elected because no individual is stronger than the institutional structure of the office he holds. People ask, "Is he a good sheriff?" "Is he a good DA?" Even if the candidate is far more honest and less vindictive than the norm, this is hard to answer. It is like asking, "Is he a good flood victim?" "Is he a good junk yard dog?" Even though the office holder may face the job with integrity and courage, the nature of the job always ultimately beats the good person into a bloody stub of compromises and ugly deeds.

2. It is dangerous to oppose red zone incumbents. Only if they are really horrible can this even be considered. (I know the firebrands among you will view this as gutless). Even if you are certain an incumbent will lose, you usually must still support him, because even after he has been defeated he sits on the bench or in the DA's office or in the sheriff's office for another nine months.

3. I am not sure it is moral. I quit voting entirely during my Tolstoy period. (This period lingers with me, but in a weaker form). Matthew VII, 1, again.

When I spend a lot of energy in electoral politics I begin to get the type of foreboding described by Poe's Masque of the Red Death. As you may recall, the prince (or lord or king, some high muckety-muck) brought a thousand of the beautiful people into a great ballroom to hide from the plague that was killing off the poor in his regime. The plague comes in disguised in a fancy mask and everyone dies.

The striking thing to me about this story is not the morality play of mistreating the poor. It is the jarring, teeth-grinding contrast between the gaiety of the party and the dread engendered from the nasty future we know is inevitable. It is not that I don't enjoy the party of electoral politics (at least as a spectator sport), it is that there is a plague going on among the poor and it won't leave the privileged alone for long:

And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revellers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.

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.

Three Things No District Attorney Should Do, But That All District Attorneys Will Always Do, For All The Wrong Reasons

Before we begin, and in hopes of establishing some meager credentials, let's drag one of my skeletons out of the closet for all of the paraclete to see.

(Paraclete here is used in the obsolete form, second definition in the OED2, meaning advocate or intercessor. It is not meant so broadly as to mean all lawyers, oh no, readers true, most lawyers are not paraclete, but satans; Satans, not meaning the Devil, but in the etymological sense of 'adversary' with allusion to Matt. xvi 23. Nor is it so narrow as to include only criminal defense lawyers, but would include other "advocates" and "comforters" such as Tolstoy, Gandhi and Jimmy Odabashian, and Gail Hanson, that is those who advocate and comfort without setting foot in the courtroom. It is not capitalized so as not to mistake it with the Holy Spirit on this Good Friday. Nor is the form changed for the plural, because I cannot find a single usage in which it has been changed for the plural. I find reference to "paracletes" as the plural, but I am unwilling to be the first to actually use that ugly form.

Roughly stated, "paraclete," here means defense attorneys and preachers for accused criminals and '"satan," here means prosecutors. This is not intended as an insult, but just an etymological inevitability. Please do not be offended dear, dear friends in the various offices of prosecution; I am not responsible for penning the Gospels.

While I am digressing may I say, on this Good Friday, that Dorothy Day who is, or should be a saint, uses the word "precarity." In 1952 writing for the Catholic Worker Movement:

"True poverty is rare," a saintly priest writes to us from Martinique. "Nowadays communities are good, I am sure, but they are mistaken about poverty. They accept, admit on principle, poverty, but everything must be good and strong, buildings must be fireproof, Precarity is rejected everywhere, and precarity is an essential element of poverty. That has been forgotten. Here we want precarity in everything except the church. (...) Precarity enables us to help very much the poor. When a community is always building, and enlarging, and embellishing, which is good in itself, there is nothing left over for the poor. We have no right to do this as long as there are slums and breadlines somewhere.

No one else seems to use it and OED2 does not describe the word, so much more elegant than the awkward "precariousness."

In summary, "paraclete" should mean , when we do our jobs, defense lawyers, "satans" means prosecutors, and "precarity" is my Good Friday prayer.

I add "precarity" because all good things come in groups of three.

Please pardon me, Uncle Toby.)

Now for the skeleton: I ran for District Attorney in Denton County in 1976. The shame of it. Fortunately, I lost.

Nonetheless, about the things I am about to say, I know of what I speak.

No District Attorney should do the following:

1. Prosecute food stamp fraud.
2. Prosecute hot checks.
3. Prosecute dope cases.

1. Food Stamp Fraud. Food stamp fraud is the worst. It always jails a welfare mom who is struggling to hold things together. It puts her in jail. The kids go hungry. She loses her job at Whataburger. If she happened to have a house at a nickel down and umpteen dollars a month on a contract for deed, she loses that. When she gets out, her life is a shambles, her children are at risk and she can't dig out. Instead of just taking the overpayment out of her future stamps. The Texas Department of Human Racehorses (or whatever euphemism they use these days) sends it over to the DA for prosecution.

Instead of telling TDHR to go back to the hell from whence they came, DA's offices love these cases. Why? a. They are easy to prove because TDHR extorts a confession on the false promise of future food stamps. b. The accused is always too broke to hire a lawyer. c. TDHR gives a kickback of $500 for each case.

2. Hot checks. This is a poverty crime. Merchants should verify the checks before they accept them. Hot check courtrooms are filled with the poor and not criminals. DA offices and the majesty of the law should not be a collection agency for sloppy merchants. Most people who write hot checks are not really guilty of theft, as they are charged, but with not balancing their check books, but they cannot afford the defense and the public defenders don't have the time to defend them.

But DA's love these cases. Why? Merchants like them and they are more likely to contribute to a campaign than poor people are. Also, DA's get to print up those nifty signs so all the merchants can stick them in their windows that say, "We prosecute hot checks!" with the campaign logo on the bottom.

Another skeleton: I printed one of those signs when I ran for DA in 1976. I hope by now they are all clogging up solid waste deposits so no one will ever see one again. The shame of it.

3. Dope cases. They corrupt the police forces (and sheriff's office as we saw a few years back). The feds have more resources and can do it better. If the case is too small for the feds, it's not worth handling. They clog up the courts. Many of the people accused are not criminals or even particularly anti-social.

Why do DAs handle them? Forfeiture money and property is a lot of fun. Anyone want a Escalade with tinted windows? The photo opportunities to claim that a zillion dollars have been taken off the street with pictures, yes, just like Tony Montana, with a mountain of dope, money and guns, is just too exciting.

What should a DA prosecute? Murder. Rape. Robbery. Assault. Burglary. The rest are civil matters.

Think how the backlog of cases, overcrowded jails, beleaguered jailers, overworked prosecutors, harried judges, exhausted probation officers, nervous bailiffs, nearsighted clerks and frazzled public defenders would be helped by this change. Also think about how many poor and harmless people you would let out of jail.

God Bless the Second Amendment

Happiness is a Warm Gun www.ebsqart.com/Art/45/26709/HappinessisaWarm).

Shoot Shoot. Bang Bang.

Guns. Of course I love them. A while back my daughter Halley and I went and saw Brownsville's gunman Chuck Fredieu. He took us through his course and reminded me how to shoot without knocking off the top of my thumb. It was a father-daughter kind of thing. I helped Halley buy a shiny new pistol just in time for the new laws allowing us to carry a pistol in the car. It gives you a warm and fuzzy feeling doesn't it?

Now, yes I love guns, but I am not a good shot and rarely have fantasies of murder or self protection or suicide or even shooting critters or winning a target shooting competition (this one, yes, sometimes). I think I love guns like I love cameras and bicycles, even though I am not much of a photographer and I am not likely to actually ride a bicycle. They are pretty and the heft feels good.

It's not a man thing either. Halley loves her guns as much as I do. I have caught her pointing and clicking and reading Pistol Shooting Basics when she thought no one was watching. I love that girl.

Now the shrinks, over the years, have discussed "cognitive dissonance" with me and I think some of it creeps in here. The Ahimsa Shooters Club. Pistol Packin' Pacifists. Gun lovers against the war.

On the one hand those fond childhood memories of my grandfather leading a squirrel, my grandmother with the brass knucks and the blackjack in her purse, my dad blowing out a car window with a shotgun blast. On the other hand, all of that Gandhi, Tolstoy, Zinn and Chomsky.

I like the story about the single pistol in the Warsaw Ghetto keeping out the Nazis. I like all of those news reports about the little old lady who blows away the robber.

But.... I do believe the advocates of nonviolence win the argument. In particular, may I recommend:

Bailie, Gil (1995). Violence Unveiled: Humanity at the Crossroads. Introduction by René Girard. New York: Crossroad. ISBN 0824516451

and three volumes by Walter Wink, The Powers Trilogy:

* Naming the Powers: The Language of Power in the New Testament, Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984. ISBN 0-8006-1786-X
* Unmasking the Powers: The Invisible Forces That Determine Human Existence, Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986. ISBN 0-8006-1902-1
* Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992. ISBN 0-8006-2646-X