Driving to Jacksonville– A Short Story
We started out from the dormitory where my mother, my sister, and I had been living. There was a gate and the car backed up to the gate, a big old Nash that had a dull bluish-gray sheen. The trunk was full, but is was big and we didn’t have much stuff. There were a couple of boxes in the back seat that my father threw in at the last minute.
My father and I got in to the car, my mother and my sister waved goodbye to us, and we drove off. We got on the highway right away, and we were driving along as it got dark and my father concentrated on the road.
I said, “Why are we going alone without my mother and my sister?”
He said, “Because we got a divorce and now you’re going with me and your sister is going with your mother. I’m going to get this great new job in Jacksonville, and we’ll have a house to live in, and a new school you can go to.”
I said, “It must be your fault you got divorced.”
He said, “No, your mother asked for a divorce from me.”
I made myself as small as I could in the passenger side of the car. I tried to hide in the corner of that big seat. I was crying, I know, but I don’t remember that. I cry easily, sometimes even at the doctor’s office. It’s embarrassing, but I can’t help it.
First we drove to Colby, Kansas, 210 miles as the crow flies from Denver, but at a steady 50 miles an hour, it would take over four hours to get there. It actually took five, and our gas tank was almost empty when we got to Colby. I was tired and sleepy, but I stayed awake for most of the time. I got out and walked around while my father filled up the tank. I don’t know how long it took to do it; five minutes. The attendant checked the oil and wiped the windshield with his rag.
The attendant looked at me and then at my father as he handed him the money for the tankful of gas: ten dollars. He went inside to get the change. My father put a nickel in the Coke machine and got a Coke to drink on the way.
After a few minutes, we drove on into the night. I began to get really sleepy, and the warmth coming from the heater vents under the dashboard made me drift into a fitful slumber.
We lived in a house with a staircase, and we drove in a car. I looked out the car window and saw the telephone wires over the street. I must have been about four years old, and we lived in Oakland. Later, we were living in Hawaii. We lived in a two story house and Miss Ogasawara lived upstairs.
There was a hurricane. The day before the hurricane I went to the hospital to have my tonsils out. I felt as if I were falling. After I woke up, my mother insisted on taking me home immediately.
The next day, the hurricane came. My sister and I crouched under the kitchen table. We were looking out the window; we saw the garage flip over and crash to the ground behind the cars.
My father climbed up on the dining room table and chopped a hole in the ceiling with an axe. Water came pouring down from upstairs; the windows were broken and letting the rain in. Miss Ogasawara wasn’t home. The eye of the hurricane came, and all of us were evacuated to the school. This was a big brick building with special glass that looked as if it had chicken wire molded into it. We sat out the rest of the hurricane in the safety of the school.
After the hurricane was over, we went home and found the tree next to the house hadn’t fallen on the house, but to the side. We cleaned up and lived as before. The dragonflies floated over the field again, eating flies.
One day, I was playing with my saw and my hammer. They were steel, and had wood handles. I left them on the ground when I was finished playing. The next day, I came back, and they were all rusted. My father told me, “you see, this is what happens if you don’t take care of your things; you have to pick them up and put them away when you’re done with them, or they won’t last.”
There is a photograph of three of us, my sister, my self, and a neighbor child sitting in front of the house playing with what looks like a tin pot.
After stopping in Colby, KS, we turn southeast with the highway and travel hundreds of lonely miles late at night. Our headlights show the road ahead. There are cars coming, their white lights growing then turning to red and fading away. There is the light from the dashboard, showing the speedometer and faintly outlining my father’s face. He drives impassively, calmly, without want or passion.
I am asleep. I see the lights but I don’t hear the sound of the engine. There is grief lining my face. There is nothing to see except the swishing of the lights that show through my closed eyelids like ghosts rushing through walls and across rooftops. Lost, I float with the ghosts into unconsciousness.
I was four when we moved to Hawaii, and six when we went back to California. We flew to San Francisco, and my mother, my sister, and I moved in with my mother’s mother. I don’t know where my father was at that time; I didn’t know that my parents had already gotten a divorce before they left Hawaii.
My mother argued a lot with her mother. One night someone upstairs was making noise and my grandmother started banging on the ceiling with a broom. She was angry, at the upstairs neighbors and at my mother.
Outside her house were pink and yellow sticky flowers with thick green leaves. My grandmother told me these were chrysanthemums.
We moved to Davis, where my mother enrolled in the University of California, Davis for graduate school. I learned how to ride a bicycle in Davis. My mother put me on the bicycle and I rode straight; I couldn’t turn. I rode across the parking lot and into the middle of an outdoors basketball game but I couldn’t turn aside.
We moved to Denver and there I started seeing a lot more of my father. Apparently he had been working and going to school at the University of Denver the entire time. My mother, my sister, and I first lived in a nice brick house which had a basement bedroom where my sister and I stayed. At Christmas I got an Erector set, and my mother made stuffed animals for us.
My mother stitched a large number of stuffed animals; my sister arranged them all on her bed so that there was just room for her to lie down surrounded by stuffed animals. We clung together, uncertain about the future and what would happen to our parents.
There is a monotonous series of towns that we drive through in the deep night-time: Hayes, Salina, Junction City. Kansas City is always another hundred and fifty miles away. Darkness envelops us; all we can see is the pavement ahead of us, dim in the headlights. Buildings and trees are mere shadows on the side of the road. We travel in a dim tunnel, flooded grey.
One day my father told me that we were going to move to a new place, that it would be good for me. I had already had a number of tests of intelligence and creativity, part of his thesis for his doctorate in psychology. He was studying at the University of Denver to get his PhD in psychology. He said that because he was getting a doctorate, he would be able to take this really good job in Jacksonville.
I only found out years later that my father had told my mother that he had gone to a judge to change their child custody agreement. He said that he had gotten custody of me and left my sister with my mother. He said the judge had ordered him to pay child support to my mother for my sister. That was part of his motivation for taking me with him when he moved to Jacksonville.
The part about going to a judge was all a lie; he had never gone to a judge, but he felt that telling her that would make it easier for her to comply with what he thought was right.
He felt that my mother wouldn’t raise me right and that I would be intellectually stunted if he left me with her. My mother told me that I didn’t have to memorize the multiplication tables, that I was too smart for that, and I should be studying other things. In fact, I finally did learn to memorize the multiplication tables and it took just a few minutes of study. After memorizing the tables, I was able to do all those things, multiplication and division, in my head, and that made things a lot easier.
It is early morning. The sky is just beginning to turn grey. We run out of gas a mile from town. My father sets off into town, carrying a gas can. I am left by myself in the silent car, starting to get cold. Time passes, and I am restless, no longer sleepy. I feel abandoned.
Finally, my father returns with the full gas can. The sky is blue all over and the sun is about to appear on the eastern horizon. He pours gas from the can into the filler neck of the car. He gets in and turns the key; the engine turns over but doesn’t catch. He stops, then tries again. This time the engine catches and comes to life.
As a faculty member, my father was allotted housing, a first floor apartment in a house owned by the college, across the street from the library. The second floor was occupied by a language laboratory, where students listened to taped lessons in their chosen language.
The first thing I noticed when I lay down in bed was that the sounds from the language laboratory could be heard through the ventilator shafts, which were large and made of sheet metal. Even at night, it seemed, I could hear people talking in French, Spanish, German, Russian, or unintelligibly in some unknown language.
Later when I was really upset, after we had been in Jacksonville for a few months, I started thinking about how I could get back to Denver. I knew it was eight hundred miles, but I thought, “If I start walking now, maybe someone will pick me up and take me along.” I thought of all the cold and snow on the way, but I was so upset I just wanted to get up and start walking back to Denver.
I got sick and had a fever, and I wanted to see my mother, but she couldn’t come. I felt really small, like a bug on the bedspread, and everything was as big as mountains. I walked and walked along the spread, and I was still in the same place. Then everything reversed and I felt vertiginous as the scale seemed to slide back into place.
I was on the bed, covered with a sheet and a blanket, and my head was on the pillow. I felt normal again, but I didn’t know what day it was. It seemed as if it were 1968.
We drive on, through Kansas and to Kansas City. We cross the Kansas River, and we are in Missouri. Most of Kansas City is in Missouri, but there is no time for sightseeing. We drive straight through the city, stopping to fill up again with gasoline.
The Nash Ambassador has an integrated heating and ventilation unit that was innovative for its time. There is no air conditioner; this option cost $345 and was optional, although Nash was first to offer an integrated front-end air conditioning system in 1954, the year of my birth.
Now, I am eight years old and it is 1962. According to Wikipedia, on September 12, President Kennedy makes a speech in which he “ reaffirms that the U.S. will put a man on the moon by the end of the decade.” On August 27, Mariner I is launched. I don’t know what day it is, just that school has already started and I am two days late.
I sleep through much of the trip, although my dreams are troubled. I imagine that there are many serious problems ahead of me, and I only want to stay here, alone, in this traveling space, never stopping, never arriving.
I wanted to get a cat, but my father said no, you can’t have a cat. He decided I should have a dog, as that was a more manly type of pet. We went to a farm outside of town and he got me a puppy, a beagle. We tried to keep him in the house, but he couldn’t be paper-trained. Nothing would induce him to poop in the right place.
One day the dog pooped on the floor right in front of the front door. My father came in from class and stepped right into it, almost slipping on it. That was the last of the dog. My father gave the dog to our neighbors across the alley, who kept the dog tied up in the back yard.
I wanted a monkey, but the man at the pet store said that they were nasty and would bite you. He seemed to know what he was talking about. He suggested hamsters
My father got me two hamsters, a boy and a girl, and I played with them a little bit. Sometimes they got out of their cages and I had to go looking for them under the sofa.
One day I was playing outside by the stoop, a concrete projection from the side of the house by the kitchen door. A small gray mouse was darting in and out of a hole in the base of the stoop. I spent some time watching the hole and the mouse’s movements.
The first mouse I caught died almost immediately. I think that I hurt it when I was catching it. The second mouse survived and appeared well. It was in fact small and grey, with tiny whiskers sticking out of his face behind his nose. I decided that the mouse was a he, although I had no way of knowing.
I only knew from what the man at the pet store said, not from personal observation, that my two hamsters were a boy and a girl. So the sex of the mouse was indeterminate.
I introduced the mouse to my hamsters. That is, I showed them to each other at a distance of a couple of feet. I was not sure, but I thought I saw a tiny black flea flying from the mouse to the hamsters. Or maybe it was my imagination. The next day, all three were dead. I don’t know whether I imagined the flea then or afterwards.
After Kansas City, we are driving in full daylight. We travel through interminable canyons of tall, tasseled corn. The road hums as the wheels caress it.
Next stop is Columbia, 120 miles east of Kansas City. I don’t know it now, but a couple of years from now my mother and sister will be living here and I will fly down from Springfield in a DC-3 to make my first air trip. It seems that I am only just begun on a long road trip, by plane, train, and automobile, even by foot, from San Francisco to here, with a few stops on the way.
Before we drove to Jacksonville, my father began dating a woman that he met in his psychology class (he was a student instructor, already having his master’s degree.) He had already been divorced from my mother and moved to another city, so he didn’t think there would be any conflict with her any more.
After he got the job in Jacksonville, he proposed marriage to her (although he had already made sure of her by taking her to bed.) She was very taken with him and accepted.
During the Christmas vacation, they got married while I stayed with my mother and sister. My mother was crying and I didn’t know what had gone wrong, but much later I realized that she was crying because she still loved him and didn’t want him to get married again. She couldn’t live with him because of the arguments so she had asked for a divorce; but she couldn’t avoid him completely, depending on him for money, for one thing. After the divorce, she only asked for child support for myself and my sister. Even so, it was hard on him.
We drove back to Jacksonville, the three of us, after Christmas. I had met Vicki, my new stepmother, before, and I had thought she was very nice; in fact, I preferred her over the other girl that my father had suggested to me for a new mother. I’m not sure, but I think he was pleased with my choice because he preferred Vicki too.
Many years later, Vicki told me that Ted had laid down some rules for her to follow. She told me that he had said that she should never touch me, not even a hug or a kiss. I was to be kept in the dark as much as possible with regards to her and she was to stay fully dressed whenever she was around me.
Nonetheless, Vicki and I developed a close friendship and we played word games and other little amusements. I don’t remember exactly what we did but I learned to communicate with her and she was very affectionate.
When we got back to Jacksonville after Vicki and my father had gotten married, we opened the front door to find the apartment completely filled with steam and water all over the floor. The pipes in the bathroom had frozen and burst, and there was a natural ice sculpture with icicles hanging from the ceiling. Apparently the heat had been left off while we were gone and it got so cold that the water in the pipes froze. When it thawed, the pipes that had broken open started spurting water everywhere.
When I went to school, I found that classes had already started, and I was a few days behind. Everyone stared at me. I was not surprised to see a few black faces in the class, although I had never seen a Negro before. My father had told me that there would be black people here and explained that they were exactly the same as everyone else except that their skin color was darker.
He told me to treat everyone the same. I didn’t understand at first what he meant, but later I realized that not everyone thinks the same way. I ignored what other children said and treated all of them the same. The black people that I came into contact with seemed to appreciate that and were friendly.
I got into trouble one day when I passed a note to Stuart Freiburg that had a naughty word in it, “shit” or something like that. The teacher sent me home with a note and I had to explain it to my father.
He said that there are several words that people don’t want to have heard in public, and it was just a social convention. He said that I should not use those words with other people, but when I was grown up, it wouldn’t matter so much.
At first, I thought my father was an evil bastard, even though he seemed to know everything and could worm anything out of me; but after several years I began to question his judgement. The place where he succeeded the most was in making me get good grades.
He paid me, for example, ten cents for every “outstanding”; if I got a “satisfactory” I got nothing. If I got a “needs improvement” then I lost ten cents. We got report cards every six weeks and there were some thirty or forty marks on each card. There was a chance I could get as much as three dollars on a single report card.
After he instituted this system, my grades picked up rapidly. Within six months, I was making two dollars or more on every report card.
My best friend in grade school was Lynn Ruby, a short, slight kid, with dark hair; we hung out together because he appreciated my wit and we were both ostracized by the main kids at school.
I was bullied mercilessly, starting in second grade in Denver, and only getting worse year by year into junior high school, when I finally became very tall and popular with the girls. Then the teasing finally stopped.
One of my first antagonists was Stuart Freiburg, the son of a physics professor. He was also a friend, as witnessed by the fact that we were caught passing notes to each other in class. We would hang out on the playground together or sometimes get into fights.
Once my father apparently got angry over the fights I had with Stuart. He was having problems with Stuart’s father in faculty meetings. My father offered me five dollars to break Stuart’s nose.
I punched him but I only broke his glasses. My father gave me a dollar for that.
Between Columbia and St.Louis, there are rolling hills and forests. The last light of day is fading in the west as we reach the suburbs, cutting north of St. Louis, passing through St. Peters, St. Charles, Hazelwood, and Florissant; we pass across the Mississippi River on a giant bridge into darkness that is Illinois.
Comment of the Day
Paul
Berkeley 2 hours ago
The government of China, like modern China itself, is a sham. The leaders of that nation’s communist party will do anything- be it correct, incorrect, or plain dumb– to try to keep the economic growth ball rolling because they know that the only thing that keeps them in power is growth. There is no other legitimacy to their leadership. The growth that has occurred over the past 20-25 years was the easy part– low hanging fruit in an era of globalization that favored low-cost manufactured goods, accompanied by historically low shipping rates and near zero interest rates for millions of consumers that wanted such goods. But now that the easy work is history, the leadership doesn’t know what to do next; its clumsiness in attempting to fix the stock market last summer is one indication, and its response over the past week to market volatility is a re-run of that behavior. Who knows what will come next, but one thing is sure: the party leadership is struggling and the odds are that they will fail. Why? The best solution is one they simply cannot abide: abandon their micro-control of the economy and their attempt to micro-control the behavior of the citizens of China. Until this happens, the globalized economy that we have today will suffer many more such episodes of incompetence from the fraudulent leadership of China.
…the majority of people struggling with bills are insured. Of the people in the survey reporting difficulty with their medical bills, 34 percent lacked health insurance, 39 percent had insurance through work, 14 percent were covered through public programs and 7 percent had purchased their own health plans.
One reason, many experts said, is a gradual shift in the norms about the generosity of health insurance. In recent years, health plans have come with growing deductibles and narrowing networks of providers, provisions devised to lower the cost of premiums. Those features have made health insurance accessible to a larger share of the population, but may also be leaving more insured Americans vulnerable.
via Even Insured Can Face Crushing Medical Debt, Study Finds – The New York Times.
The article claims that patients with Medicare are better protected from crushing medical bills and it is true that bills are smaller. People with Medicare, however, have less money in the first place, and even a small deductible or copay can cause financial strain.
The article also notes that the US has the highest health care costs of any nation in the world, typically double the cost of comparable countries. People in other European countries, for example, rarely face bankruptcy from medical bills although this is common in the US.
An article in the New Yorker describes the effect that the sugar lobby has had on Jeb Bush’s governance in Florida. Gigantic lobbying by the sugar industry, a major phosphorus polluter in the Everglades, caused Bush to legislate a change in the laws governing cleanup of the wetlands. The sugar cane growers dump their effluent water into the wetlands, and this causes high levels of phosphorus to stimulate algae growth. The laws, passed in 1994, state that the wetlands should be cleaned up in two stages, but when it came time in 2003 to implement the second phase, the sugar industry started lobbying Bush and the Republican party generally, and the second stage was indefinitely delayed.
The article states that, since 1998, the sugar industry has given over twenty-one million dollars to political candidates in Florida’s elections. This figure was obtained from the National Institute on Money in State Politics. This amount of money is trivial to an industry that has a revenue of over nine billion dollars a year. By spending this money on lobbying, the industry is able to avoid pollution controls that would cost them considerably more, perhaps a hundred million dollars a year.
Clearly, powerful industries and people control politics and cast their influence over whomever they chose to appear at the ballot box. No candidate could avoid their grasp, for hundreds of millions and billions of dollars are at stake. Through its influence, the sugar industry gets tax breaks, price supports, and exemption from pollution regulations. There is no limit to the extent to which private interests will go to obtain the influence they seek.
There is a distinct feeling of “deja vu” about North Korea’s announcement and claim that they have successfully tested a “hydrogen bomb.” The North Koreans have been trying to develop nuclear weapons and delivery systems (missiles) for many years and they have had a few successes. Agreements that we made with them to stop development in exchange for financial and logistical help have not been honored on either side. However, the Clinton administration’s approach to the problem was far more productive than the actions of the Bush boys.
In 1994, there was a crisis in relations between North Korea and the United States. President Clinton plausibly threatened to attack North Korea over its announced intention to begin reprocessing spent fuel rods from its shuttered nuclear reactor. Reprocessing would have allowed the North Koreans to extract plutonium, which is an essential raw material for nuclear weapons as an alternative to uranium. The North Korean leader, Kim Il Sung, threatened to take the reprocessing step as part of its long-term plan to develop an atomic bomb.
In response to Kim’s announcement, Clinton had the Pentagon send an advance team of 250 specialist soldiers to South Korea to manage a buildup of bombers, jet fighters, Bradley fighting vehicles, Apache helicopters, Patriot anti-missile missiles, and fifty thousand troops. This strategic move convinced Kim Il Sung that Clinton really intended to attack, or at least to mount a strike against the nuclear fuel reprocessing facility which they had already built, if the North proceeded with reprocessing and repudiation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT.)
At the same time, Clinton sent former President Jimmy Carter to North Korea on an ostensibly private mission to negotiate with Kim. Carter created a deal which went far beyond what Clinton had asked for, but it was merely an agreement and thus did not need to be ratified by the Senate as a real treaty would have. Under the deal, Kim undertook to lock up his spent fuel rods and place them under international supervision; the South Koreans agreed to build two light-water reactors in the North, and the US agreed to supply North Korea with large quantities of fuel oil (desperately needed in a country already on the edge of famine.) The US also agreed to say that it would not attack the North.
This agreement was not honored. The South Koreans did not build the light-water reactors, and the US ended its supply of fuel oil. Financial assistance for construction and the delivery of oil was not forthcoming from the Senate, nor from the South Koreans. The North Koreans secretly started to supply Pakistan with missile technology in exchange for Pakistani uranium centrifuges. Nonetheless, negotiations began between the US and North Korea. A framework deal was hammered out, but it was too late to accomplish anything during Clinton’s presidency. Clinton spent his last months as President unsuccessfully trying to work out a peace deal between the Israelis and the Palestinians.
When Bush became President, he named General Colin Powell as his Secretary of State. His policy stance, however, was in contradiction to Powell’s inclinations. Bush was aligned more closely with his National Security Adviser, Condoleeza Rice, who took a conservative, “principled” stance. At the same time, there were new leaders in both North and South Korea. Kim Il Sung died and was replaced by his son, Kim Jong-Il; Kim Dae Jung was democratically elected as President of South Korea. Kim Dae Jung had run on a platform of improved relations with the North, but his desire to negotiate with the other Kim was stymied by Bush’s new “no negotiation” stance.
Bush and his cronies claimed that negotiating with North Korea (or any other power he claimed was illegitimate, or in his words, “evil”) was rewarding them for bad behavior. At the same time, he had his hands full with preparations for attacking Iraq. It is ironic that Bush attacked Iraq for supposedly having “weapons of mass destruction” (which Saddam Hussein had already destroyed in the settlement after the first gulf war), while at the same time doing nothing to a country that really did have the capability to produce nuclear weapons.
There was no viable response to the North Korean threat other than negotiation because the US had no intelligence information about the North and little capability for invading them. They were too close to a powerful ally– China. So the Bush administration, aside from a trivial threatening gesture without substance, ignored the threats that Kim made and made his own insincere counter-threats.
When North Korea baldly admitted that they were acquiring centrifuges from Pakistan to convert their uranium to the fissionable form, U-235, there was nothing Bush could do about it other than negotiate. He had already ruled out negotiating with Kim Jong-Il, in fact, he openly stated that he “loathed” Kim. Thus, the North Koreans were free to do whatever they wished. Economic sanctions, even at their most stringent, could not bring the North Koreans to heel because Kim Jong-Il didn’t care if his people starved; he only cared about his own diet, which was more than adequate.
The North Koreans expected the US to behave as it had in 1994: openly threaten an attack, but quietly negotiate behind the scenes. The Bush administration made a weak, obviously token threat to attack (this was just after Congress had authorized an attack on Iraq), but failed to do anything about actually negotiating because of its “principles.” The North Koreans approached Bill Richardson, formerly US ambassador under Clinton, but the Bush people, wanting to preserve “moral clarity”, ignored their overtures.
Months later, Bush ordered several attack planes, B1’s, and B-52’s to our air base in Guam, in range of North Korea, but there was no accompanying Army or Navy preparations and no indications that Bush seriously planned to show readiness for an attack. At the same time, the Army was leading an all-out invasion of Iraq and Bush was incapable of leading a war on two fronts. No attempts to negotiate were made, and in April 2003, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld advised Bush to take a policy of “regime change” towards North Korea. No actual preparations for creating a “regime change” were made other than trying to organize an economic quarantine.
Despite the economic sanctions, the North Koreans have continued their work on atomic weapons and missile delivery systems. The most recent announcement from North Korea, that they have successfully tested a “hydrogen” bomb, is almost certainly bombast, but it shows that they have not been frightened away or economically damaged enough to stop development of the very weapons that we destroyed Iraq over.
The weapon that North Korea tested a few days ago was estimated to be only 6 kilotons in yield, far less than the 15 kilotons that the Hiroshima bomb produced. It is extremely unlikely that they tested, even unsuccessfully, a true “hydrogen” bomb because the yield was so small, no larger than the previous tests. It is possible that the claim refers to a tritium-boosted fission device, but even such a device should have had greater yield.
The conclusion that I make is that the Bush administration’s failures in Iraq are equaled by their failure in North Korea. In the first case, we invaded and took over a country on the excuse that they were hiding the components of “weapons of mass destruction” which turned out to be false. In the aftermath of the invasion, we created a failing state and killed hundreds of thousands (no-one is certain just how many) of civilians, a seed-bed for Sunni extremism and the Islamic State. In North Korea, by refusing to followup on the Clinton initiatives and failing to make a credible threat to attack combined with a negotiating offer, we have allowed a ruthless, truly evil state to continue its path of destruction.
Here is an article from the Washington Monthly written by Fred Kaplan in 2004 that details how the Bush and Clinton approaches differed.
There is little that the Obama administration can do about this situation, as the North Koreans have the initiative and Obama’s representatives can’t even get to the negotiating table without making some very embarrassing concessions. The North Koreans have demanded that the US agree to promise not to attack them as a precondition for re-starting negotiations. US policy for many years has been to refuse to promise “no first use” of nuclear weapons; in this, we differ from every other nuclear-capable country in the world.
Saudi Arabia is known for its brutality in carrying out capital punishment, and the murder of Sheik Nimr al-Nimr was no exception. He was only one of forty-nine victims the other day, a high count even for the Saudis. He was said to be guilty of “sedition” in calling for the overthrow of the Saudi royal family. He was more guilty of being a pious and sectarian Shiite cleric, and was an old man unable to harm anybody. Nonetheless, the Saudis found it necessary to commit this act which has divided the Middle East even further. Since the execution, there was a protest in Tehran which resulted in the storming of the Saudi embassy despite the presence of Iranian police, who made numerous arrests. The Saudi government has given the Iranian envoy forty-eight hours to leave the country. There has been no new troop mobilization or any sign that war is imminent, but there also has been no let-up in the civil war in Syria or the war between the Islamic State and the Iraqi and Kurdish governments. A state of war in fact exists; it merely has not been given a name because there are so many named conflicts already.
The only possible escalation would be a direct attack on Iranian territory by a Saudi-flagged armed force. This would be unlikely and redundant. Neither country is capable of sustaining a fully equipped invasion. Saudi Arabia has a large area of territory which is populated by a Shiite majority, centered on Dhahran on the east coast. The large oil fields in this eastern part of the country also correlate with the Shiite population, and there is a risk of rebellion in this area. The Saudi’s response to dissent has always been harsh, and this execution has only made it more so. The friction between Shiite and Sunni threatens to cause even more bloodshed: bombings and massacres, individual suicide attacks and institutional discrimination more vicious than before.
The Saudi execution was one of the most provocative things you could possibly do to a Shiite Muslim. These religious devotees are more than usually sensitive to begin with. They are the same type of people who would murder a man for drawing a picture (any picture, not just a satirical picture) of the Prophet Muhammad. Whether this act was calculated to cause a negative reaction is hard to say, but it could hardly be more provocative if it was designed that way.
There is no credible institutional response to this violence other than expressions of dismay. We as a nation cannot change the behavior of the Saudis or the Iranians. At the same time, it is inappropriate to support the governments that engage in this behavior. We have treated the Iranians to a prolonged negotiation that may lead to improved relations between the US and Iran. We cannot treat the Saudis as friends without taking some action to express our dismay at the murder of Shiek Nimr al-Nimr and forty-eight others for political dissent. Under our laws, this type of punishment is not permitted and we should tell the Saudis that we don’t consider their behavior to be the sort of thing that civilized countries do.
Perhaps we have continued to support the Saudis through their war in Yemen, in which they have killed thousands of civilians in air attacks, because we, like the Saudis, are a more than normally violent people, and we appreciate the position they find themselves in with regards to more civilized countries like Belgium and Denmark. We are, after all, one of the most violent countries in the world, and we possess more firearms per capita than any other country in the world.
Here’s a story from the New York Times blog (that was shut down) back in 2012 about the arrest of Sheik al-Nimr.
Driving to Jacksonville Third Draft
Driving to Jacksonville
At first I thought my father was a fountainhead of wisdom, but later I came to accept that he was behind the times. Lucky for me that men’s fashions run in cycles almost like women’s fashions. Wait a while, and your clothes will be stylish again. I have several outfits of my father’s that fit me well and look good. Only the shoes are too small.
One
I was eight years old in 1962 when my father (Theodore) drove me (Conrad) to Jacksonville, Illinois from Denver, Colorado. We were living in Denver then. It was me, my sister (Cathy), and my mother (Greta); my parents were separated. My sister and I didn’t know that our parents were actually divorced.
My father came back from a trip, with presents for me and my sister. My father was dating a woman named Vicki, who would soon become my stepmother.
By this time, he had me living with him part of the time at his bachelor apartment with a closed-in porch that I slept in. One day, he threw out some old magazines, Playboys, and left a pile of them on the stoop. I came in, saw the magazines, and sat down to start reading them.
He noticed that I was reading them, but he didn’t say anything, just let me keep on reading. I didn’t understand at that time what it was all about, or why there were so many pictures of naked women (with their pubic areas discreetly obscured.) I wasn’t interested, but just kept the magazine in mind for later use.
This was part of my desensitization to pornography and other shocking things. My father didn’t know it at the time, but he was making the pornography uninteresting to me by not reacting to my reading it. Maybe he did realize that not reacting was the best way to deal with it.
I found out right away when I started staying with him that he had some amazing books. There were books on all kinds of forbidden subjects, especially sex, and many science fiction paperbacks. I already enjoyed reading, and this variety of subjects was even more interesting.
Another day, he stacked some milk cartons (at that time, they were made of waxed cardboard), crushing them and putting several crushed cartons inside another one. Then he set them on the sidewalk and lit them. They burned, slowly, for an hour, as the wax melted and contributed to the fire..
I watched a few television programs while I was staying with my father. He let me watch “Rocky and Bullwinkle” but most cartoons were not acceptable to him. One night, the movie version of “Moby Dick” was shown on television, and my father helped me to stay awake so I could watch it and remember the plot.
He had an old Nash automobile; it ran and got us where we wanted to go. The Nash was last produced in 1957; I don’t know what year myfather’s car was, but it had to have been at least five years old or more in 1962. Here is a picture of a 1946 Nash four-door sedan from Wikipedia:
Nash_4-Door_Sedan_2
The three of us, mother, me, and my sister, were living in the student apartments, a group of three-story dormitory-like buildings of brick with basement common rooms. Our apartment had two bedrooms and my sister and I slept in one, on a bunk bed. My mother slept in the other bedroom.
The kitchen had a window that looked out over the yard between the buildings. During that time, I had many friends among the children who lived there while their parents were studying at the university. We played hide and seek, even at night, and met in the common rooms.
Two
One day I was playing with matches in the window well of a basement common room. There were bushes around the window well so it was hard to see in. I wanted to strike a match and see what it looked like. The ground in the window well was wet and slippery, and I pitched over backwards onto the glass. I hit the glass with the back of my head, broke the glass, and cut myself in the occipital area of my head.
I stumbled out of the window well, ignoring the broken window behind me. My first concern was that my brains would fall out. Crying and screaming, I ran to the nearest first floor apartment and banged on the door. Blood was pouring out of the back of my head onto my shirt. The lady who answered must have been shocked, by her expression, and she helped me to my parents.
They took me to a hospital, and the doctor put thirteen stitches on the back of my head. My father took me home in his friend’s sports car after that; I think it was a Triumph TR-3. I stayed with my father more at his apartment. Here is a picture of a Triumph TR-3A, the most popular TR-3 model:
220px-Triumph_TR3A
Three
Later, we spent the summer in a resort town called Crystal Lake, up in the mountains above Denver. It had a lake that was eight hundred feet deep, with freezing water. I fished there for the first time that I can remember, and caught some little rainbow trout that they made me throw back. I had a little sailboat that I puttered around the marina with. We would go swimming, but that involved a ten- to fifteen-second dip with an immediate bound out of the water, which must have been about forty degrees Fahrenheit.
My father came to visit, driving his friend’s Triumph. I loved riding in that car; you could reach out from the passenger seat and touch the road while the car was in motion. There was a deep tunnel under the dashboard where I put my feet and legs, and I could scrunch down inside there and not be seen from outside with the top up.
At first, my mother and I stayed with some well-to-do friends that had a boy my age; I just remember that he was terribly spoiled and his mother cut the crusts off the bread she served him in his sandwiches.
One day, the other boy and I got to looking at a collection of pennies that he had. There were about five hundred pennies in a little tackle box. We looked at an ad in a magazine that said pennies more than so many years old were worth “up to” so much money. We interpreted it to mean “every” such penny was worth so much and proceeded to comb through his collection. We found a lot of old pennies but they turned out to be worthless.
My mother, my sister, and I moved to a small summer cabin in the town of Crystal Lake. It was primitive, with a real “ice box” and a propane stove and a fireplace. It only had two rooms and an outhouse.
My parents were separated; I didn’t know what was going on, and they didn’t explain it to me. I knew that they had been arguing a lot, but that seemed to have stopped after they were separated.
That fall we drove to Jacksonville.
Four
We had been living in Hawaii; I was four when we moved there, and six when we went back to California. We flew to San Francisco, and my mother, my sister, and I moved in with my mother’s mother. I didn’t know where my father was at that time. My mother argued a lot with her mother.
We moved to Davis, where my mother enrolled in the University of California, Davis for graduate school, I think. It’s possible that we just stayed in an apartment in Davis. I learned how to ride a bicycle in Davis, but other than that nothing happened. I still didn’t know where my father was; I only saw him once in a while
One day, I was riding my bicycle when I accidentally steered through a group of older boys playing basketball on an outdoor court. I was paralyzed; I couldn’t stop, slow down, or turn, and I just went right through the group of kids on the basketball court without hitting any of them, although they were angry with me at the time.
It was very quiet in Davis. I learned to eat malted milk tablets, which I don’t think are made any more. My sister and I lived there for a few months with my mother; I don’t remember going to school there.
We moved to Denver, and that was where I started seeing a lot more of my father and really going to school. Apparently he had been working and going to school at the University of Denver the entire time.
I started in first grade, but halfway through the year, the teachers switched me to second grade. I didn’t remember, but I had a number of psychometric tests, as well as intelligence tests and so on. My father included me as a subject in a research project that he was doing. The project mainly involved just describing individual gifted children. At that time there was really no clue as to what was going on in a gifted child’s brain.
When I moved up to third grade, I began to find the schoolwork boring. I wanted to find some short-cut so I could move up, but none ever came. I continued to be one year ahead of the other kids.
My mother, my sister, and I first lived in a nice brick house which had a basement. I was able to walk to school from there. It was also close to the Denver University campus.
My mother stitched a large number of stuffed animals while we were living in that house; my sister arranged them all on her bed so that there was just room for her to lie down surrounded by stuffed animals.
Five
One day my father told me that we were going to move to a new place, that it would be good for me. I had already had a number of tests of intelligence and creativity, part of his thesis for his doctorate in psychology. He was studying at the University of Denver to get his PhD in psychology, and his thesis was a research study of gifted children. He told me that because he was getting a doctorate, he would be able to take this really good job in Jacksonville.
It was only when we were in his car, the Nash, that I started asking questions about my sister and my mother. He told me that he and my mother had gotten a divorce, and that Cathy was going with her and I was going with him. I told him I didn’t like the fact that he had gotten a divorce. He said to me, “She was the one who asked for a divorce. It wasn’t my idea.”
I sat in the corner of the big front seat and the heavy door of the car. I squeezed myself in as far as I could and started crying. I didn’t make much noise.
The road to Jacksonville was dark; there was no moon, and the headlights and tail-lights of passing cars, white in front of us and red behind us. Not driving, being a passenger, just looking out the side window, I could see nothing in the darkness.
We ran out of gas a mile before reaching a town.
Alone, huddled in the big front seat under a coat, I waited patiently…
I only found out years later that my father had told my mother that he had gone to a judge and had gotten custody of me and left my sister in my mother’s custody. He said the judge had ordered him to pay child support to my mother for my sister. That was part of his motivation for taking me with him when he moved to Jacksonville.
The part about going to a judge was all a lie; he had never gone to a judge, but he felt that telling her that would make it easier for her to comply with what he thought was right.
He also felt that my mother wouldn’t raise me right and that I would be intellectually stunted if he left me with her.
I said I wanted to see my mother and my sister again and my father said that they would come and visit us. I didn’t like it but there was nothing I could do.
Later when I was really upset, after we had been in Jacksonville for a few months, I started thinking about how I could get back to Denver. I knew it was eight hundred miles, but I thought, “If I start walking now, maybe someone will pick me up and take me along.” I thought of all the cold and snow on the way, but I was so upset I just wanted to get up and start walking back to Denver.
I got sick and had a fever, and I wanted to see my mother, but she couldn’t come. I felt really small, like a bug on the bedspread, and everything was as big as mountains. I walked and walked along the spread, and I was still in the same place. Then everything reversed and I felt vertiginous as the scale seemed to slide back in place.
The dawn light was already full on us when he came trudging slowly back. After cranking the starter for a while, the engine fired again, and we set off into town to the gas station for a fill. I slept for a while.
There was a group of stars in the sky that I recognized. It was called Orion, the hunter. There are three stars together that make up its belt; these everyone can see. These stars turned about in the southeastern sky.
Alone, I would face a group of peers, my age and older, that I knew nothing about; and I would have to prove myself, in the fourth-grade sense of the word, to these strangers. I didn’t know what I would do; it scared me to have to meet so many people by myself
I wasn’t exposed to any sports training as a child, at least not at first. My mother tried to teach me baseball with a bat made from a tree branch. Later on, she sent me to a judo class and this turned out best for me.
My father didn’t participate in sports. He never played catch with me, nor any other game. He still thought it was important that I should play sports, particularly basketball when I started growing extremely tall. I didn’t go to basketball until eighth grade. So I was behind the other kids in athletic development, despite my great height.
It was only much later that I learned the truth from a man I met on the Internet. He informed me that he had seen me play when I was in high school, and that I had a natural talent for basketball. He said that I could have become at least a strong college player. He told me that I had “what it takes”: height, coordination, and drive. The only thing that held me up was a poor interaction with my high school basketball coach.
It got cold in the early morning; my father fiddled with the heater controls but no warm air came through the vents. This was unusual because the Nash was known for its advanced cabin heating system. This car was old, and some of its features were degrading. I put on a sweater that my mother had sent with us; this made me feel warmer right away.
My mother told me that I didn’t have to memorize the multiplication tables, that I was too smart for that, and I should be studying other things. In fact, I finally did learn to memorize the multiplication tables and it took just a few minutes of study, well worth the time. Now, after memorizing the tables, I was able to do all those things, multiplication and division, in my head.
I also had terrible penmanship, and when I started doing math problems, the numbers would wander all over the page. Vicki worked with me to straighten up the numbers into columns so that the mathematics problems would be easier to understand; without the straight columns, it was difficult to do multiplication and division problems on paper (this was before calculators replaced doing these things with a pencil and paper.)
We finally reached Jacksonville after driving straight for eight hundred miles, stopping only for gas. As a faculty member, my father was allotted housing, a first floor apartment in a three story building; the second floor was occupied by a language laboratory, where students listened to taped lessons in their chosen language.
Six
The first thing I noticed when I lay down in bed was that the sounds from the language laboratory could be heard through the ventilator shafts, which were commodious and made of sheet metal. Even at night, it seemed, I could hear people talking in French, Spanish, German, Russian, or unintelligibly in some unknown language.
When I went to school, I found that classes had already started, and I was a few days behind. Everyone stared at me. I was not surprised to see a few black faces in the class, although I had never seen a Negro before. My father had told me that there would be black people here and explained that they were exactly the same as everyone else except that their skin color was darker. As a result of his talking to me, I developed a positive attitude towards black people, seeing them as being unfairly beaten down by whites with status.
He told me to treat everyone the same. I didn’t understand at first what he meant, but later I realized that not everyone thinks the same way. I liked the black people I met, given my father’s admonition, and in the fashion of the day, they would cautiously agree to accept me.
6a.
I wanted to get a cat, but my father said no, you can’t have a cat. I began to think much later that he didn’t want me to have a cat because he was afraid it would make me gay.
My father said, we’ll get you a dog, so we went to a farm outside of town and we got a beagle puppy. We tried to keep him in the house, but he couldn’t be paper-trained. Nothing would induce him to poop in the right place.
One day the dog pooped on the floor right in front of the front door. My father came in from class and stepped right into it, almost slipping on it. That was the last of the dog. My father gave her to our neighbors across the alley, who kept it tied up in the back yard.
Our neighbors were what some people would call “poor white trash.” I played with the boy who was my age. There were other children both older and younger than I. We went to the same school. Franklin Elementary School. After grade school, I didn’t see the boy who was my age anymore.
6b.
Before we drove to Jacksonville, my father began dating a woman that he met at his school (he was going for a PhD.) They were both in the same class at Denver University. She was several years his junior; she was perhaps 21, and he was almost 35.
He was also dating anothe woman that he met at school, but I did not know her as well. My father expected me to make a decision as to which one he should marry. Whether he would take my advice or not, I do not know(although I suspect he would have used his influence to change my decision if it was not to his liking.)
After he got the job in Jacksonville, he proposed marriage to her (although he had already made sure of her by taking her to bed.) She was very taken with him and accepted.
Her most important function, to him, was that she was an expert typist. She had been clocked at over a hundred words a minute on an IBM Selectric. She typed his entire PhD thesis on that IBM Selectric, and she actually wrote most of it as well.
I learned to type on that same IBM Selectric, and I soon became a typing whiz. I loved the look of the rotating ball that held the letters that it typed. I learned to touch type, which saves time over the hunt-and-peck system. Later I learned to type on a manual typewriter, and I used Vicki’s portable even into college.
The IBM Selectric’s ball was fancy, but the daisy wheel typing system was more efficient: it was faster, simpler, and more reliable. The daisy wheel caught on a few years later and wiped the IBM Selectric from the market.
6c.
During the Christmas vacation, Vicki and my father got married while I stayed with my mother and sister. My mother was crying and I didn’t know what had gone wrong, but much later I realized that she was crying because she still loved him and didn’t want him to get married again.
She couldn’t live with him because of the arguments so she had asked for a divorce; but she couldn’t avoid him completely, depending on him for money, among other things. After the divorce, she only asked for child support for myself and my sister. Even so, it was hard on him.
6c.
We drove back to Jacksonville, the three of us, after Christmas. I had met Vicki, my new stepmother, before, and I had thought she was very nice; in fact, I preferred her over the other girl that my father had suggested to me for a new mother. I’m not sure, but I think he was pleased with my choice because he preferred Vicki too.
When we got back to Jacksonville, we opened the front door to find the rooms completely filled with steam and water all over the floor. The pipes in the bathroom had frozen and burst, and there was a natural ice sculpture in the bathroom with icicles hanging from the ceiling. Apparently the heat had been left off while we were gone and it got so cold that the water in the pipes froze. When it thawed, the pipes that had broken open started spurting water everywhere.
We stayed at a motel for a couple of days until the college maintenance staff had cleaned up our apartment.
6d.
Many years later, Vicki told me that Ted had laid down some rules for her to follow. She told me that he had said that she should never touch me, not even a hug or a kiss. I was to be kept in the dark as much as possible with regards to her and she was to stay fully dressed whenever she was around me. I never saw that she was particularly good-looking, but some of my friends when I was in junior high school told me that, to them, she looked really beautiful.
Nonetheless, Vicki and I developed a close friendship and we played word games and other little amusements. I don’t remember exactly what we did. It was like playing with codes or ciphers and Vicki read from books.
We did get a pet, or rather two pets, in the form of a hamster boy and a hamster girl who lived together in a cage with a running wheel. They lived together for several months, but there was no sign of anything but brotherly love between the two.
Sometimes the hamsters would get out of their cages. They usually headed for the couch and stayed under the couch to avoid being stepped on. They were easy to catch when they were spotted, as they didn’t fear us.
One day, I caught a gray mouse under the concrete stoop behind the kitchen, outside of the house. He was uninjured. I had previously caught a mouse this way, but accidentally killed him in the process. This mouse survived.
I brought the wild mouse into the house and showed it to my hamsters. I could have sworn that a tiny black object flew from the mouse to the hamsters. The next morning, all three were dead.
Vicki consoled me after this loss and found a sturdier pet: the gerbils that the psychology lab was using in its experiments, as a variation on using rats all the time. Vicki served as a substitute for both my mother and my sister, and she managed to fill the job well after some practice. We raised the gerbil in a glass cage because its strong jaws and teeth could gnaw through almost anything.
In the laboratory, the gerbils formed a colony in a huge container half full of sand. They built tunnels into the sand and designated some for food storage, others for escape. They came out at night, so we used night vision equipment to watch them on the surface.
The MacMurray College Psychology Laboratory was in a position to publish a number of ground-breaking papers on the behavior of gerbils. My father was on the staff of the psychology department, as was my stepmother.
Vicki had continued to take postgraduate courses and had passed an examination on her German fluency for reading scholarly papers written in German. She eventually got a PhD in psychology, and her specialty was statistics.
Seven
I couldn’t seem to fit in at school. The teachers liked me, but the other kids didn’t. Soon the kids were teasing me in the schoolyard. One of the worst kids was Stuart Freiburg.
I got into trouble one day when I passed a note to Stuart that had a naughty word in it, “shit” or something like that. The teacher sent me home with a note and I had to explain to my father.
He said that there are several words that people don’t want to have heard in public, and it was just a social convention. He said that I should not use those words with other people, but when I was grown up, it wouldn’t matter so much.
I didn’t like some of the things he told me, and I began to think of him as a tyrant when he refused to let me watch television at all, or limited my viewing
The place where he succeeded the most was in making me get good grades. He paid me, for example, ten cents for every “outstanding”; if I got a “satisfactory” I got nothing. If I got a “needs improvement” then I lost ten cents. We got report cards every six weeks and there were some thirty or forty marks on each card. There was a chance I could get as much as three dollars on a single report card.
After he instituted this system, my grades picked up rapidly. Within six months, I was making two dollars or more on every report card.
My best friend when I was in fourth through eighth grade was Lynn Ruby. He was also ostracized by some of the other students. I was teased just for being different, but I stood up for myself and fought back whenever I was attacked. A few times I was ganged up upon by several other kids, but that happened rarely.
Lynn and I did a lot together. One of the last times I visited his house, he had a set of drums that he was playing on and we talked about starting a band. I even wrote a few lyrics, like “She’s as cold as a Frigid-Aire.” Later on, he started a band and played at night, being so tired during the day that he fell asleep in class. He told me later that he had been suspected of using drugs but he was really just tired from late-night jam sessions.
Lynn and I had a nemesis: Stuart Freiburg. He had some strange ideas. One day he chased both of us home from school. I escaped but he caught up with Lynn. Lynn told me that Stuart didn’t want to beat us up, he just wanted to be friends with us.
I did talk to Stuart, and even exchanged notes with him in class.
Stuart was very confused. His father was a member of the college faculty, a physics professor. My father and his father didn’t get along, and would have arguments in faculty meetings. My father offered me money to punch Stuart in the face.
Every time Stuart started fighting with me, I would try to punch him in the face. I broke his glasses, and my father gave me a dollar. He said he would give me five dollars if I broke his nose. That was a fortune for me at the time, but I couldn’t hit him that hard.
Later on, Stuart did become involved with “drugs”– he used LSD a number of times and was hospitalized for two weeks because of it. He became a shoplifter and did a number of other things; I can imagine what he might have done but didn’t have any contact with him after I graduated from high school.
These comments refer to an article in the NYT disclosing a prima facie illegal tactic by debt collecting companies: preventing class action suits against them for taking people’s money by lawsuit without allowing them anything other than arbitration. The article can be found here. The comments section provides further intelligence on the subject, giving more than I could ever come up with. The most popular comments follow:
Sequel of Boston on Dec. 22:
This is so blatant a violation of the 5th, 6th, and 7th Amendments. We need a federal law to prevent private debt collectors from seizing bank assets or placing liens on property without proof of hand-delivered service to the target. It should also disallow any suit unless the collector waives the right to invoke arbitration or mediation clauses against the target.
1045 Recommend
Winthropo Muchacho of Durham NC:
I don’t understand why Mr. Cain’s lawyer brought a class action to help recover the $4,500 stolen from him by Midland if he were never served with the law suit. Any judgment obtained on “sewer service” is a nullity and void in any state of the union. And I certainly don’t understand why he would have to arbitrate the fact he was never served and for recovery of the garnished money instead of addressing it in the original suit filed by Midland.
A motion to vacate the judgment based on lack of service of process would be filed in the original proceeding Midland brought. This would avoid any issues of arbitration given that a plaintiff/debt collector filing suit in court could not be heard to say that any defenses to the suit must be arbitrated like insufficient service or the debt being uncollectable because of the statute of limitations.
In Mr. Cain’s case, having never been served, in most jurisdictions he could still a file a motion to vacate the judgment because the judgment under such circumstances is void. Also he could file a motion in the proceeding against him for Midland to disgorge the garnished monies.
He would also have a suit that lies in tort against Midland for conversion of his property under the hallowed common law concept that a thief takes no title to the property he has stolen. Any suit in tort can cover not only monetary damages but non monetary as well for things like pain and emotional distress.
If I were Mr. Cain I’d get another lawyer.
460 Recommend
Kevin of NY, NY:
A Constitutional amendment is direly needed that will establish a short list of inalienable rights that no contract can nullify. One of these would be the right to due process, regardless of the written terms of the “agreed upon” contract. The fact is, most corporate contracts with consumers today are contracts of adhesion and contain unconscionable terms and conditions—clauses and provisions that clearly violate the spirit of a free and fair exchange. The great consolidation of our vital goods and services into mega-corporations, combined with increasingly devious legal tactics and the general decline of business ethics since the 1970’s has made such an amendment necessary to defend the population against tyranny and oppression. The founders imagined such threats would come from governmental abuse, foreign states or militant insurgencies, but in fact they are coming from the world of business. I implore the voters of this country to make this a key issue in the upcoming election debates. We, as a people, are entitled to certain inalienable rights…
652 Recommend
Sheldon Bunin of Jackson Heights, NY:
The arbitration clause is a bilateral contract between the debtor and creditor. It is consiable [sic] that when the creditor sells the debt and saves arbitration costs that the arbitration provision benefits the new creditor who seeks to collect that debt. The question is why if there are defenses to payment that the new creditor should receive the debt as an asset free of those defenses and why a collection agency should receive an asset free of defenses without consideration to the debtor.
We need legislation. First outlawing mandatary arbitration clauses without the right to opt out. Second we need statute of limitation on the enforcement of debt by arbitration by the debtor and once a transfer is made all defenses to payment are preserved to be litigated the the courts with jurisdiction.
What we have now is corporate overreach which cannot be tolerate[d].
352 Recommend
DMany of NY:
Here’s the rub. As an attorney with an extensive collection background I can tell you that each and everyone of these cases the Times cited are winnable by the Defendant IF they went into arbitration (after the Court ruled against them in the court system). Arbitration provides for attorney fees and costs to be reimbursed to the prevailing party. The problem is it’s hard to find an attorney that will take a case up front for these “small potato” case. There are no punitive damages allowed in arbitration and the filing fee alone for an arbitration can cost upwards of $1000.00 (or more). (I love the “it’s cheaper than a court” argument). Plus arbitration is paperwork intensive, both parties have to select an arbitrator from an approved list, submit their choices, agree to scheduling, submit documentation, etc.. Bottom line is that 99.9% of these folks can’t pay the arbitration fee and the attorney fees, if they could they wouldn’t be in this situation. So, although they could win and recover their money on the backend,(including filing and attorney fees) having to pay on the front end is cost prohibitive and that’s what these companies know and what they are counting on. It’s easier for them to take the money and wait for the consumer to come after them knowing that in almost all situations they won’t and more importantly, can’t.
909 Recommend
Ben on Dec. 22:
I am a lawyer, and I have handled consumer-debt cases pro bono. I can promise you the arbitration issue is just the tip of the iceberg. As bad as it is, arbitration just goes to the *forum*. It doesn’t have anything to do with the merits of the suits these debt collectors bring. And I can promise you that an enormous number of these suits are meritless. I have seen debt collectors try to pass off affidavits authenticating one set of documents as if they related to another set of documents from a different case. The truth is, 90% of the defendants just never show up, and they don’t know what to say even if they do. A decent lawyer can win a lot of these cases. There just aren’t many lawyers around who will take them on.
629 Recommend
Nat Colley of Minnesota:
Is the problem here the debt collector’s tactics, or the judges’ refusal to interpret and apply the law in a just and equitable fashion? If the plaintiff’s case is lacking fundamental documentation, it should not mean he/she gets an automatic win if the defendant doesn’t show up. The judge still has an independent duty to make sure the plaintiff meets the minimum legal prerequisites for relief. If that were not true, I could file a fake claim against then NYT, and when you don’t show up – because I never served you with process despite lying to the court and saying I did – I could bankrupt this paper tomorrow. But we all know that wouldn’t happen, because no judge would let it happen. They would ask questions, questions they obviously aren’t asking and don’t care about in these cases with poor, unsophisticated defendants. After all, plaintiffs are big companies with high priced lawyers, and all they’re trying to do is make these deadbeats accountable, right?
368 Recommend
As always, the NYT comments are a rich vein of sense, nonsense, wisdom, and sometimes silliness. Perhaps the $15 a month subscription fee scares away most of the trolls.
Finally, Joe N of Detroit:
The scariest thing about this article is that I would have no idea of the existence of such behavior without this type of reporting. That this is left to newspapers to expose, with the newspaper business model in the precarious state that it is at the moment, should leave everyone feeling very insecure.
806 Recommend
But wait! There’s one more, the second most popular comment but not one “recommended” by the NYT editorial staff:
Romaine Johnson of Dallas, TX:
This is what political decay looks like. When the rule of law no longer applies equitably and instead becomes just another bludgeon that rent-seeking elites use to extract as much wealth as they can from the masses.
CTE and the NFL: More Obstruction
In my post on chronic traumatic encephalopathy and the National Football League, I neglected to mention that the NFL is still practicing its obstruction despite making moves that publicly appear to be supporting research on the diagnosis of CTE.
This article in Outside the Lines from December 22 tells how the NFL has exerted control against the National Institutes of Health (NIH) over its “unrestricted” $30 million grant to the NIH for CTE research. The NFL has refused to fund a study that will be conducted by Dr. Robert Stern of Boston University (BU).
The NFL has failed to show any transparency over this restriction of an “unrestricted” grant but it is clear that they have an animus against Dr. Stern, perhaps because of his prior actions.
For example, Dr. Stern filed a 61-page objection to the proposed settlement of the player’s suit against the NFL over CTE in October 2014. More painfully, his conversations with a star player, Chris Borland, settled Mr. Borland’s decision to retire after his rookie year. Mr. Borland stated that he feared that he might already have brain damage and he did not wish to make matters worse. Dr. Stern could not tell Mr. Borland that he did not already have brain damage.
The study will continue with NIH money that doesn’t come from the NFL, and it is a very important study, because it will attempt to find a way to diagnose CTE in living patients. The NFL’s behavior in directing its funding away from a pivotal study is easy to diagnose as avoidance, especially given its prior bad behavior and attempts to silence the original doctor who started the furor over CTE.
Since President Obama’s speech to/about the Middle East it has become more apparent than ever that both the Palestinians and the Israelis are insincere about negotiating their differences.
Netanyahu has publicly rejected any moves that might negotiate away some of the land won in the 1973 war, pretending that Obama’s offer represents a return all the way to the borders that existed from 1949 to 1967 (an admittedly indefensible dumbbell-shaped territory). Abbas continues to ignore Israel’s need for existential security by winking at Hamas while it continues its call for the obliteration of Israel.
On the Palestinian side, Hamas still refuses to recognize the “right of Israel to exist” and produces propaganda picturing the Israelis as inhuman devils. The propaganda incites Arabs to senseless violence against Jewish people. On the Israeli side, the government continues to expand Jewish settlements within areas that are nominally Palestinian, and oppresses its Arab citizens as well as the people under occupation. The behavior of the Israeli government merely confirms Arab feelings that they are considered less than human.
Since Arafat walked away from negotiations under Clinton’s auspices, neither side has taken honest steps to reduce tensions. More than ten years have passed since any real negotiation has taken place. It is clear that the Israeli strategy has been to temporize while settling more and more Zionists on previously Palestinian lands. The Palestinian strategy has been one of mindless, frequently violent opposition to all things Israeli combined with attempts to achieve nominal statehood by joining the United Nations.
There seems to be no leverage available to force either side to negotiate. When will the belligerents relent? The cost in human lives and suffering has been enormous on both sides, and it is inexcusable to allow the current situation to continue. We should condemn the positions of both sides in the strongest terms. We should demand the immediate and permanent suspension of Israeli settlement expansion and the public acknowledgement by all Palestinian organizations of Israel’s right to exist within mutually agreed secure borders. Propagandizing on both sides must stop; in particular, the absurd and hateful propaganda put out by Palestinian organizations and Arab outlets is obscene and unacceptable. Only then can honest negotiations proceed.
If reasonable demands are ignored, then it is time for economic pressure. Surely the threat of suspension of foreign aid to Israel if it refuses to desist from expansionism, combined with the offer of aid to Palestinians in return for pledges of nonviolence must have some effect. If there is no response to economic pressure, then at least we will no longer be in the hypocritical position of supporting an oppressive Israeli regime and failing to support nonviolent Palestinian aspirations to universal human rights.
This post was first drafted May 22, 2011…
Reviewed December 22, 2015…
I have reviewed this post repeatedly and have chickened out every time. It is now time to publish it, regardless of the cost. Remember, I am not Jewish nor Arab, nor am I a typical know-nothing American. I love both Israelis and Palestinians, but I feel their governments are letting their people down. December 28, 2015 2:09 PM
Conrad Theodore Seitz 