Hitting on the Academy

A reader asked why I failed to write any significant commentary on the Oscar nominations announced yesterday. She insinuated that perhaps I was miffed at LOTR's sweep of 11 nominations. Of course the answer is no. One can't really get miffed at the Academy; after all, they are doing what they're doing to members of their own gang, and the rest of us, unscathed, watch for the sheer entertainment of it all.

I must also admit that I never saw LOTR. One could say that I have an aversion to battles that take place somewhere in "middle earth", and so I view no movies that promise long sequences of fictionalized but nonetheless realistic gore. True, one friend of a friend used the same excuse for avoiding the film "Monster." He said he refused to pay money to see movies where a serial killer takes out human life, one by one. Though I agree that the entertainment value of that is pretty low, at least in the case of serial killers, I feel a social responsibility to occasionally witness what we, as a society, have allowed to grow and fester. I do not believe that there is anything on middle earth that deserves my attention in the same way.

Still, I agree with another reader that doting on an obscure Czech film when the rest of the world is commenting on Diane Keaton is a bit pretentious, and so I will return to my rightful place and say my two words. And the two words are, in fact, about Diane Keaton (hereafter DK): her gloves. When I commented on the gloves she wore to the Globes, someone noted that it is rumored that she has a germ thing. Meaning the gloves are always there as a result of a compulsive aversion to germs. DK has recently denied this, but when you deny rumors of this nature, one suspects there to be a grain of possible truth wedged in there somewhere.

Being human and therefore cruel, the glove thing made me snicker, though in kind deference to DK's mental health issues, I did not immediately rush to post this piece of news on the blog. But today I read in the Times something that made me believe that DK may not be so off the track. It's one of those instances where the rest of us are mindlessly destroying ourselves while the object of our ridicule stands protected. The article is all about the prevalence of germs, and it blatantly states that THE CLEANER YOU ARE,THE MORE GERMS THERE'LL BE IN YOUR KITCHEN!! It goes on to stereotype somewhat, and throw out the possibility that bachelor-slobs actually have a better, germ-free environment with their stacked dishes in the sink and unwiped counter tops, than do we, the compulsive neurotic counter-cleaners.

So hats off to you, DK, for being so visionary, if not altogether my favorite acting personality. If you win an Oscar, wave the gloved hand with pride.

If the times are a changin’, can’t they change already?

The topic for yesterday’s lecture in Family Law was same-sex marriage. I had only 1 hr. 20 min., and I barely managed to lay out the most recent developments that have taken place in the law, ones that may be crucial in setting the course for a legal acceptance or rejection of gay unions. Supreme Court decisions, state Supreme Court decisions, federal acts, state-level legislative efforts – there is a monstrously huge load of material out there these days.

Ten years ago, the same topic (legal context of same-sex unions) could have been be treated in 15 minutes.

Nonetheless, as we know, the bottom line hasn’t changed. For all the legislative and judicial activity, same-sex couples could not then and cannot now obtain a marriage license, never mind having it recognized in sister states. Massachusetts better do something before my next semester so that I can finally end with a better punch line. Otherwise I’ll have to spill over into another class period (each period is only 1 hr 20 min) and still conclude without any definitive answers.

If they gave you money, would you leave?

There is a story in the paper today about the relocation program underway in Siberia, where the Russian government pays residents of cities north of the Arctic Circle to pack their belongings and move south (apparently it’s too expensive to support cities where things basically stay frozen year-round). You’d think that with the constant agony of frost bite and the dreary months of severe light deprivation, most would catch the first plane out (there are no rail or road connections from there to the rest of Russia). But no: in one city (Norilsk), out of 20,000 eligible for the relocation program, only 48 have agreed to go.

This shouldn't come as a surprise. I suppose people don’t like giving up on their communities. Maybe they come to feel a sense of pride for managing life in a dump. And they sing songs and write poems about their squalid, colorless, polluted towns, so that people listening elsewhere begin to think that maybe they should go visit that special little piece of heaven. On a cross-country road trip in the 60s, I made my parents detour to Gary, Indiana because I had just seen the Music Man (“there is just one place, that can light my face..”).

Perhaps we, as a nation with the greatest mobility factor in the world (I just made that up, but I’m sure it’s true), cannot fully appreciate how people elsewhere might be rooted to their landscape. If they gave us money here, in the States --enough money to make it worth our while, most of us WOULD move. One could probably empty out all of Wisconsin within a year for the right price. North Dakota? Less than 6 months. True, in Norilsk the government is not dishing out enough cash to whet the appetite. But still, out of the targeted 20,000, I bet at least 15,000 kind of like the place.

Move over, NYT?

Bloggers (me included) are too quick to link to stories in the New York Times. I mean, it’s a good paper for what it is, but let’s give some local coverage a chance. For instance, how can you not love a headline (Madison Capital Times) that reads today: “Washington Wimps! Four-inch Snow Panics D.C.; Wisconsinites shrug.” [Though given our own paltry 2.2 inches yesterday and the enormous headaches it produced, I think we should reserve our shrug for another time.]

Sometimes, though, our paper gets a little carried away. Take Doug Moe’s column today: the gist of it is that we should just not follow all that advice from newspapers and magazines on how to live our lives. Never mind that if we followed his advice not to follow advice, we’d be caught up in a logical fallacy nightmare where no matter what path you take you wind up in hell.
But say you did decide to get in step behind Doug. Just read this:

“Hey, you. Yeah, you. Reading the newspaper. You are fat, drunk and lazy, and what are you going to do about it?”

What I want to do is go back to the NYT, but let me persevere [words in square brackets belong to me]:

“There has in recent years been a slow but relentless effort to get everyone to live life as if it were one long, and do I mean long, self-improvement course. Straighten up! Eat your vegetables! [I knew Kucinich the vegan didn’t have a chance.] Make sure your fourth-grader speaks three languages! [“the world wants to communicate with us? Let them speak American!”] Don’t smoke! [Watch it, Moe] Save the whales and the rainforest and when you’re done, the ozone layer! [Maybe we should slash and burn and have whale sushi for desert.] Who’s behind this effort? Regulators, bureaucrats [bureaucrats??], various do-gooder groups and individuals.”

Okay, I can’t go any further. I know Doug Moe is well-intentioned and humor is REALLY hard to churn out on a daily basis, but today, I think I’ll just put this aside and pick up the NYT. Oh no. NYT. Maureen Dowd (see post, January 25). Never mind.

There’s hope for late bloomers

Predictable that the Oscar nominations may be, they still bring about surprises, sometimes of a pleasant sort. For instance, I was ENORMOUSLY gratified to read that the Czech film “Zelary" received a nomination for Best Foreign Film. Not because it is filmed in one of the most beautiful regions of Europe – the Beskidy Mountains (these are actually POLISH mountains that sort of spill over into regions of the former Czechoslovakia). Not because it is a sad love story set during World War II. Not because it has the simplicity of a slow-moving film (at least in the first half) that meanders through the daily life of Eliska, the resistance nurse that hides from the Nazis by marrying a villager whose life she saved. Not because the name of the main character is sort of the same as my sister’s.

Why then? Why cheer for this film? Because it is based on a story written by Kveta Legatova.

Don’t know Kveta? No surprise. She was a school teacher, living and working in the Czech countryside. And then she decided to write fiction. At the age of 80 (she is now 84), she published her first book of short stories (the collection is called “Zelary”). The publishing house had such great faith in her that they ran a first print of a meager 400 copies. I did not know you could print such small numbers and still expect to recover costs!

Her book took off, she wrote another (the movie is based on the second one), and she is regarded now among the Czechs as a meteoric success. The film was nominated for the Oscar category by the Czech Republic, but I don’t know that anyone expected it to be picked up for the final cut. Kveta Legatova already received the State Literary Prize (the country’s highest honor) for her book. It would be cool to see “Zelary” land an Oscar.

Reflections

What do you think about when you get stuck for two hours in a parked car in the middle of a snowstorm, unable to move, because every attempt to do so will slide you within millimeters of the car next to you? In my case:
1. University of Arizona has a perfectly fine law school and sociology department. If they call, I say yes.
2. If dog sledding is such a cool hobby in Wisconsin, can't they harness a few mutts and bring them around to pull innocent drivers like me out of trouble?
3. If Wisconsin is so full of tall, Nordic, hulky men, why can’t they for once be in the right place at the right time?
4. If I survive, I will immediately rewrite the post doubting the validity of the study that excluded Madison from the list of congenial places to live in [perhaps the survival thing was an over-dramatization: the parking lot where I was stuck was a mere block away from State Street, our main drag].
5. If we needed brute force to pull vehicles forward, why didn’t we just stay with the horse and carriage thing instead of creating unnecessary dependence on foreign oil?
I have to admit that eventually two very nice (if not hulky nor Nordic) men did come to my rescue. They lifted the end of the car that was spinning out of control, tut-tuting at my imbecile attempts at traction (a handful of pebbles and the branches of a desecrated nearby taxus brevifolia shrub), and positioned me in the proper direction. I was so grateful I didn't even tell them who to vote for in the forthcoming election. Probably they'll pick the tall guy, like everyone else.

Erratum

Yesterday I mentioned in the blog that Streep had stated that “steroids in baseball” is not a burning issue before the nation. She appears to wrong, and I, who agreed with her, must, therefore, be wrong as well. I stand corrected by a constituent from Cheshire CT (Is there something going on in Cheshire that maybe Streep and I don't quite have a pulse on?).

IN GOD THEY TRUST

Another reader suggestion for the list of possibly trivial (meaning – what do these have to do with governing?) presidential imperatives (post, January 23): a candidate for presidential office must have religious faith. Well, okay, I’ll add it as point number 7, but only if we qualify it: a candidate must “profess” adherence to some religious beliefs. Because, in truth, what do we know about their beliefs? It’s not like height, i.e. objectively identifiable (though not so easy in the case of Berlusconi, but let’s not go there now). And historically, isn’t it the case that Lincoln actually did not profess an affiliation to any religious faith? And that Andrew Johnson not only did not claim a religious affiliation, but in fact, never espoused anything that sounded like religion?

As to our Democrats-on-the-run, well, we do know that Dean CLAIMS he had a religious wedding, but since his wife is Jewish (the children were raised in the Jewish faith) and he says he is Christian, it appears that they were actually married before a judge. He does state that he felt it to be a religious ceremony and that religion is an internal, private things and so he can dang well call it religious if he feels like it. Sounds like a stretch, but it does meet the criterion of “professes religious faith,” even though the New Republic called him “one of the most secular candidates to run for president in modern history.”

And the others? I’ve never seen such a mixed up patchwork of religious affiliations. Gen. Wesley Clark says his father was Jewish, though he himself is a Methodist turned Baptist turned Catholic who attends a Presbyterian church. The Star Telegram says of Edwards: “Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina turned to the Bible after his 16-year-old son, Wade, died in a car accident. But Edwards has been uncomfortable talking about this, saying it's a private family matter.” Lieberman is an Orthdox Jew, the Rev. Al Sharpton is a Pentecostal minister, though he does not have a fixed parish. As for Kerry? According to NPR-- Senator John Kerry is Catholic, though he recently discovered that his paternal grandparents were Jewish. Kerry's grandfather was born Fritz Kohn in Austria in 1873. He changed his name in 1902, converted to Catholicism, and moved to Boston, where he married a woman who had also converted from Judaism to Catholicism. And Kucinich? We needn't bother -- he's too short (see post below), he wont win.

These days, it appears that religion is a must to take the South, so okay, number 7 on my list goes to professing religious faith.

Napoleon wouldn't make it in America

A reader from a small town (possibly a town of disenfranchised small people), commented that my list of presidential imperatives (post, January 23) is woefully incomplete. The following is missing: the candidate must also be tall. I have to confess that I have never paid much attention to the size of candidates for office, or of political leaders in general, maybe because I have never been invited to dinner at the White House (see same post) and so I view them from the perspective of the screen, where all people look like they are of average height.

My (perhaps inadequate) research, however, reveals that my reader is right. First, consider the height of the following successful people in general:

SHAQUILLE O'NEAL, NBA star: 7 feet, 1 inch 4
JIM GOODNIGHT, SAS founder: 6 feet, 5 inches
JOHN WAYNE, actor: 6 feet, 4 inches
TIGER WOODS, golf star: 6 feet, 2 inches
DAVID LETTERMAN, TV host: 6 feet, 2 inches
PRINCE WILLIAM, royal heir: 6 feet, 2 inches
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: between 5'11" and 6', depending on who's reporting
MAYA ANGELOU, poet: 6 feet
NICOLE KIDMAN, actress: 5 feet, 10 inches
DIANE SAWYER, newswoman: 5 feet, 9 inches

Now let's take it into the political domain. A UNC research study on the importance of height reaches the following conclusion:

"not since 1896 have U.S. citizens elected a president whose height was below average (William McKinley, who, at 5 feet 7 inches tall, was ridiculed in the press as 'little boy.')"

So, my astute reader is correct. "Must be tall" joins the list of vital (if trivial) imperatives. And, let me throw out another little piece of research: since the time of modern vote counting (flawed as it may be), only ONE candidate actually won the electoral college even though he was shorter than his opponent: Jimmy Carter took the seat from Ford, even though he was a piddly 5'9" and Ford was 6'1" . (I do understand that G.W. Bush at 5'11" was a tad shorter than Gore at 6'1", but the key word here is "won")

As for the Democratic hopefuls, if you're placing bets on who will carry it, here are the crucial numbers (and therein lies the answer as to how on earth Kerry leapfrogged over Dean in Iowa), straight from the Hill:

At the head of the pack is the gargantuan John Kerry, who stands in at about 6'4" (presumably including the hair). Going down the line is Dick Gephardt at 6'1", then John Edwards at about 6' even. Al Sharpton measures up at about 5'11", Wesley Clark 5'11", Howard Dean about 5'9", Joe Lieberman 5'8", Dennis Kucinich 5'7" and, finally, Carol Moseley Braun at, we'll say, 5'4".

Goats and Lawyers and Meryl Streep

Which story tugs at the heart more? The goat that paid for a girl’s education, or the lawyer who befriended a lonely, dying man? A small percentage in need who get a break, from good lawyers, good goats. From the point of view of political priorities, what do you concentrate your efforts on? Creating fewer in need or more who’ll help? The answer seems obvious, though the current political thinking appears to hold the opposite position.

Moments ago, Meryl Streep said on the Golden Globes (I am WIRED!) that the two biggest problems in America are NOT gay marriage and steroids in sports. It’s not the first time that she is right.

Don’t be fooled: the stuff isn’t any good

A good review is usually a good sign that a book has merit. Unless the review is in the NYT: This from a recent statement by Erlanger:

"To be honest, there's so much s---," the new leader of the daily arts section observes. "Most of the things we praise aren't very good."

Changes are about to take place at the NYT Book Review (see link). For one thing, we shouldn’t count on more reviews of fiction. There isn’t enough of a polemic in reviewing fiction. Making up good things to say about authors and their not-so-good books just isn’t very sexy.

Maureen, I’m going to stop reading you if you don’t cut it out.

Not a great threat, I know. But the trivialization game (post on January 23) continues on the op-ed page today:

..some reporters thought that thrust into her first national television interview, Judy Dean seemed as fragile as Laura in "The Glass Menagerie." At moments on ABC, the couple seemed so far from mainstream American life and so disconnected from each other's careers, they were like characters who had walked into the wrong play.
.. I found Judy Dean, gussied up with unfamiliar lipstick and blush, charming. She seemed as antithetical as possible to the notion of a first lady — and that ain't all bad. I'm not sure I believed her assertion that her high-spirited husband doesn't ever blow his top at home. And it still seems strange that she is so oblivious to the major moments of his campaign: She told Diane Sawyer that she had not seen The Scream the night it happened, which means [nc: here we go again…] she wasn't watching his big speech on election night in Iowa.

I’ll take trivial if it’s laugh-out-loud funny, or part of a blog or something. But in an NYT article that describes the new Dean as a pathetically “declawed, de-clenched, de-Deaned Dean,” Dowd’s jibe at the Deans, the couple, makes her appear to be sharpening her own fangs on yesterday’s pumpkin pie.

Another Sunday: More Family Trivia

My grandmother (1901 – 1994) was the most apolitical person I know. My grandfather (1886 – 1973) was completely immersed in politics. She baked during the night shift and in retirement, made pierogi and nalesniki (blintzes). He organized labor groups, built community centers, and championed organic farming. Did they get along and find the middle ground? Hardly. Poor for the better part of their lives and certainly at the time of their courtship, they may well have qualified for Bush’s aid for marriage counseling. Not that they should have married to begin with. But they were destined to do so: he needed a wife, she needed a husband. They never divorced, but in later years sometimes they lived apart, sometimes together. Their lives defied compartmentalization or labeling. They lived in Poland, then in the US, then after the War, in Poland again. They were unique, as are other partnerships and marital units. Poverty sparked tension; later, a modestly comfortable retirement (it was a fluke, too complicated to explain here) eased the tension considerably. She continued to focus on feeding successive generations of the family, he on his community work. It worked. Sort of. Is there a lesson here?

Call it a liberal incarnation of trickle-down economics: self-sufficiency leads to healthier marriage/partnership, not the other way around. If the marriage mobile dispenses jobs with a decent living wage, I’ll jump on its bandwagon.

New uses for old words

Our limited capacity to invent or imagine or absorb new words often leads us to describe newly emergent circumstances with borrowed words and phrases. Spam is a good example of this (first adopted for trashy emails because someone remembered the Monty Python skit about the real product , appearing in an irritating manner every few seconds and at every juncture).

Listening to NPR’s descriptions of problems with the Mars Rover yesterday gave me a few helpful terms to throw around when my computer isn’t cooperating. For instance, the Rover was described as hiccupping data – taking it in, spitting it out over and over again. Faced with a new kind of computer puzzler and inspired by this very apt description, I wrote a message to tech support about a weblog visitor whose Hungarian domain was hiccupping uncontrollably in and out this site. And today I heard, again on NPR, that the Rover was behaving like a stubborn adolescent. There have been many moments when I have wanted to send smart and sassy Eudora or temperamental Internet Explorer to their room and take away the car keys for the evening. You tell them to do something and they shut down on you and sulk.

Maybe these descriptors will catch on.

Title: A New World Order; Author: G.W.Bush

The essay on the half dozen recent books denouncing Bush’s foreign policy (NYT Sunday Book Review) is brutally honest. We live in a time and place where the new world order has been revolutionized by a cowboy with a mission and with little experience in world affairs and where a growing number of people look at the Bush America with revulsion and dread.

Consider this excerpt from the essay:

Bush's views, Daalder and Lindsay say, came to rest on two fundamental pillars. ''The first was that in a dangerous world the best -- if not the only -- way to ensure America's security was to shed the constraints imposed by friends, allies and international institutions.'' The second was that America ''should aggressively go abroad searching for monsters to destroy.'' Never mind whether Saddam Hussein -- or Yasir Arafat, Iran, Syria or North Korea -- had anything to do with the fall of the twin towers: they were the global evil America was ordained to destroy.

Schmemann (an editor at the IHT), the author of the essay, correctly, I think, perceives that liberals absolutely cannot stomach this zealot. He writes:

It is inevitable that a foreign policy couched in biblical symbols, eschewing subtleties and advanced by Texans, oil-men, neocons and industrialists would be insufferable to liberals, doves, internationalists and New Englanders (conversely, remember what Bill Clinton did to conservatives). One suspects that even the senior George Bush occasionally looks out from his crag at Kennebunkport on the policies of his firstborn with some misgiving. Still, it is difficult to explain the level of loathing that the junior Bush and his government have achieved among otherwise rational liberals. The assaults in these books range widely in theme and quality, and Bush's defenders are likely, with some justification, to dismiss the more strident writers as congenitally allergic to any manifestation of American power. But the urgency with which they sound the alarm requires attention. History is too clear on what unconstrained power can lead to.

In the last paragraph, Schmemann uses the words of one of the authors to deliver the final, devastating condemnation:

Though I have lived abroad for many years and regard myself as hardened to anti-Americanism, I confess I was taken aback to have my country depicted, page after page, book after book, as a dangerous empire in its last throes, as a failure of democracy, as militaristic, violent, hegemonic, evil, callous, arrogant, imperial and cruel. Daalder and Lindsay may be constrained by an American sense of respect for the White House, but they too proclaim Bush's foreign policy fundamentally wrong. It is not only Bush's ''imperious style,'' they write; ''The deeper problem was that the fundamental premise of the Bush revolution -- that America's security rested on an America unbound -- was mistaken.'' The more moving judgment comes from Soros, a Jew from Hungary who lived through both German and Soviet occupation: ''This is not the America I chose as my home.''

For future reference, I do not know where Berlusconi’s daughter is.

My impeccable technological acumen [a joke, for sure] allows me to find that I’ve had some visitors to this blog who needed to locate sites that made reference to the whereabouts of Prime Minister Berlusconi’s daughter. It is true that at least twice I’ve made reference to Berlusconi, and several times, in other posts, I’ve alluded to having daughters. But for the record: I did not even fully remember knowing that Berlusconi had a daughter, and I have no idea where she is. Questions that come to mind:

1. Is someone tracking her down for cruel reasons? Is it an internet stalker of the kind I wrote about on January 16?

2. Is an Italian elementary school English class, learning how to say mother father son daughter, perhaps writing English compositions on Berlusconi and his family? With little Marianna or Giuseppe cheating a little by pulling stuff off the internet?

3. Or, is it someone looking for very specific information, wading through a million Google sites to find what they need? Research can be a frustrating activity and I apologize for being one of those irrelevant sites. [Of course, this post alone will ensure that anyone searching for Berlusconi’s daughter in the future is going to come right back to the Other Side of the Ocean. Sorry once again.]

Can this marriage be saved?

Relax, in the case of the Deans, the answer is yes. Just goes to show, Bush is on the ball with this one: save marriage counseling for the poor. The rich will find a way.

Grooming the Perfect Candidate

Why did I make light of Berlusconi (post January 16, see also NYT today) and the Italians’ obsession with their Prime Minister’s appearance? Surely they can tell us to examine our own back yard. In full remorse, I will now give my complete attention to creating a list of 5 imperatives for a Presidential candidate in the US. I am, unfortunately, almost completely serious. To gain sizable support, a candidate for highest office here must do the following:

1. He (at the outset I may as well say it – the candidate must be a he; therefore, any attempt at gender neutrality in this list would be pointless) must never ever do anything that Leno or Letterman will be able to imitate in a physically exaggerated way, leading the nation to be convulsed with laughter at night, and dead serious in disliking the candidate for it the next morning. [Just to make my own position clear: I do not understand why lack of enthusiasm or an over abundance of enthusiasm in a political speech of ANY candidate should be a defining moment in a race; I don’t get it, I’ll never get it, so please don’t try to explain it to me yet again; many have attempted to justify the plummeting support for Dean “after the scream”, all have failed. I saw the damning speech, it made no impression one way or another, call me politically stunted, I just don’t get it.]

2. He must be someone most Americans would enjoy having over for dinner. [Time after time I have this conversation: “why don’t you like him?” I ask. “I don’t know, he’s just not someone I would feel comfortable with; I wouldn’t enjoy having dinner with him” goes the answer. Is this an outgrowth of viewing this country as a land of opportunity? For the record, Americans please take note: 99.999999999999% of you will NEVER HAVE DINNER WITH THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. 99.98 % will never even see him eat on national television.]

3. He must not appear boring [take a look at the comment on why Gebhardt is out, just today in the NYT. It’s so common to hear this: “he’s boring” “he puts me to sleep” “I can’t stay awake when he talks” “I can’t get myself to listen.” Are these statements about the impact of policies promulgated by the future leader of the country or are they statements about a nation that’s sleep deprived? We've known this for years, “entertaining” trumps “political agenda.”]

4. He must have a spouse that we can all rally behind [grumblings about the inadequacies of Dr. Dean, the wife, drive me insane; see post January 15], and a personal life that rises above the collective sins of our own backyards [Clinton, naturally, will always come to mind here].

5. During debates, he must not sigh (Gore), look with piercing eyes (Clark), cry (remember Muskie?),use complicated words that will make Bush look dumb (many). [a legal blogger recently wrote that in the last elections, SNL made Bush out to be stupid but well-meaning, and Gore to be robotic. In fact, the blogger writes, neither are true, Bush having proven himself to be ruthless, vindictive, and cunning. But note how hard it has been to shed our preconceptions, shaped by so little information, and so much irrelevant ...hogwash (see bacon post, January 21).]

Move over, Italians, we’ve perfected the art of political trivialization.

Deciding the fate of others

I spent the afternoon listening to appeals of university nonresidency determinations. One such student missed being a resident (and therefore paying a fraction for the tuition) by just three weeks. Basically you need to live in the state for a full year prior to your studies to be regarded a resident for tuition purposes. This young man had been taking time out in New Zealand, and could not get a frequent flyer ticket back in time (so he says) to give himself the requisite year. How strictly does one follow the letter of the law? Ever? Sometimes, the law relaxes its boundaries to grant equitable relief to someone unfairly victimized by a strict interpretation of a rule. In this case, the student made such an impassioned plea that the appeals committee, me included, was almost in tears. Should that change anything? What if he had been dorky and inarticulate and not so personable?

FAMILIES IN CRISIS

On NPR, we hear/read the report on the Division of Youth and Family Services in NJ – an agency that made headlines when it was discovered last year that it had neglected to check on the welfare of foster children who had been severely malnourished in their foster home. It is also an agency with a stagnant budget and a 31% increase over the last decade in the number of abuse & neglect cases that it must handle. So that, instead of the optimal 15 – 20 cases per social service worker, the average now reaches somewhere around 100.

Imagine: 100 children to look after in the eight hours that you have in each day. One hundred potential crises that require your attention (for instance, a call indicating that a child is being mistreated in a foster home means that you drop everything and pull the kid out and keep her/him safe until miraculously a new home emerges – hence your 99 other cases are on hold until this crisis is resolved….. until the next crisis requiring, for instance, your appearance in court and a filing of a report on a placement that isn’t working because the foster parent wants out…).

One hundred placements that require periodic, vigilant oversight, one hundred children having you as the only person to ensure that they are not further harmed. That also means more than one hundred parents needing your help in directing them to court-ordered programs, or in providing supervision for visits, or in finding affordable housing… One hundred children for you to look after. Can't even think of it: one hundred, under your care.