The Death of Whitey Bulger

I never thought I would be upset to see Whitey Bulger die. But somehow that happened. Because Bulger's death, like Bulger's life, promoted organized crime.

I'm seeing a lot of the usual nonsense about the man, filled with praise he never deserved, from people who should know better. I blogged about the Whitey myth, and the way he the press builds him up into a folk hero, back when he was first arrested:

Bulger is the last Irish-American mob leader who's likely to control even a slice of the underworld in a major American city. He is ethnically similar to many of the journalists and editors covering him, and they obviously love writing about him. He's the last gangster who looks like Jimmy Cagney, so even very good coverage of him gets tinged with sympathy and sentimentality that Bulger has never come close to deserving. It's a nostalgia trip. Reporters call Bulger "colorful," but it's only because he's so very pale.

But I'm also seeing various tough-guy iterations of "he had it coming." But Whitey Bulger died because the Mafia (the Italian-American Mafia, which still persists in the Northeast) orchestrated a revenge killing inside a high-security federal prison.

The Mafia being able to murder snitches in a federal prison is a very, very bad thing. Don't celebrate that because you didn't like that particular snitch. I loathed and despised Bulger, but I'm not happy about La Cosa Nostra having an 89-year-old man beaten to death in his cell.

Bulger was killed because he crossed the Patriarca crime family, the New England mob, and therefore by extension their godless Genovese-Family patrons in New York. And to hell with Whitey, but to hell with those guys even more.

Those of who've still bought into the whole colorful-gangster bullshit about Whitey are invited to check out my post here. Those of you whooping it up over his brutal death (some of whom are the same people), just remember: Whitey Bulger died to make other criminals safer from punishment. Safer to rob you and safer to kill you. Pardon me if I don't applaud.

cross-posted from, and all comments welcome at Dagblog

Bill Weld Goes Rogue

So, William F. Weld, former Republican governor of Massachusetts, is running for Vice-President on the Libertarian ticket. That's a ridiculous thing, but it's a ridiculous year, and I'm less interested in this trivial fringe campaign than in what it says that Weld, who was once seen as a real comer in national politics, would even bother with this.

Now, let's get one thing out of the way: Weld has a very old connection to Hillary Clinton. They worked together as lawyers for the House Judiciary Committee during Watergate. Later, Bill Clinton appointed Weld to be US Ambassador to Mexico, an appointment sabotaged by Weld's fellow Republican Jesse Helms. (This after Weld had already resigned his governorship, so some real intraparty payback. Did I mention that Weld got his start in politics going after Nixon?)

So a conspiracy-minded type might see Weld's move as an attempt to help Clinton. Which, you know, it is. The whole goal here is to leach a few votes from Trump in the general election. But, like most conspiracy theories, it doesn't really make sense when you do a cost benefit analysis. Weld could probably help Clinton more by defecting to the Democrats outright, or by starting some Republicans Against Trump group. And there's no clear way for Clinton to pay Weld back after she wins. If Senate Republicans were willing to sabotage a Weld appointment in 1997, the 2017 Senate Republicans aren't about to welcome a new Weld nomination with open arms. So there's no payoff here. Weld has nothing to gain.

So why is someone like William Weld,  who has all the money and accomplishment he could possibly need, doing this? I think the answer is that the Republican Party, in his current incarnation, has orphaned him. William Weld has become a man without a party. He has nothing left to lose.

This is striking because Weld is as Old Republican Establishment as it comes. He's from a very old, very rich Boston family. The Welds aren't the kind of family who have a building at Harvard named after them. They're the kind of family that has two buildings at Harvard named after them. And that's a pretty short list. Weld is descended from a hero of the Massachusetts Indian wars, and from an important Union general from the Civil War. He's descended, on his mother's side, from a signer of the Declaration of Independence. (The F. in his name is from that ancestor, William Floyd.) When I say the Welds are Republican Establishment, I mean that some of the Welds were there when the Republican Party was established.

Oh, and Weld spent a quarter-century married to a Roosevelt. Teddy's side family, not Franklin's. These people are not Democrats.

Now that guy -- that guy! -- is running as a third-party spoiler to derail the Republican nominee. Something fundamental has changed.

There hasn't been a place for Weld's brand of socially-liberal, economically-conservative Republicanism in the party for a while now. (I've always suspected that Weld's version of Utopia would be the most inclusive and broad-minded country club imaginable.) Remember, Weld's ambassadorship got torpedoed by a hard-right race-baiter who'd started his career as a Democrat. Northern moderates and liberals have been squeezed out. (This is why former Republican Lincoln Chafee briefly ran for the Democratic nomination this year, like former Republican Jim Webb. Today's GOP has no room for Northern guys named "Lincoln.") But Weld is clearly not going to defect to the Democrats. Being Republican is part of, well, his DNA. He's got nowhere else to go. So now he's on the street making (extremely polite and wittily self-deprecating) trouble.

In the long run, this is going to be trivial. The Johnson/Weld ticket is not going into the history books as a game-changer. But it is a reminder that in turbulent times, the upheaval doesn't move in a single direction. The chaos takes many forms, in contradictory ways. It isn't that Trump gets to upend one of the major political parties and everybody else carries on as normal. Today a talented and loyal son of the Republican Party, a man whose Republican roots go back before Lincoln's election, has become an agent of electoral anarchy. We're living in weird times. And even the pros are getting weird.

cross-posted from (and all comments welcome at) Dagblog

A Tale of Two Newspapers

Everyone's talking about Jeff Bezos buying The Washington Post. But it's also been a dramatic week for two newspapers close to my heart in different ways: The Boston Globe and The Cleveland Plain Dealer. Two days ago, The Globe, like the WaPo, was sold to an individual billionaire with a high profile. Today the Plain Dealer, which has not been sold, stopped delivering the newspaper. It will still be printed every morning, but it will only be delivered three days a week. Nearly one third of its reporters were laid off on Wednesday. It's not the first round of buyouts or layoffs at the PD, and it's not the second either. The newsroom is now down to about a third of what it was in the 1990s.

The Plain Dealer will be "digital-first" from now on. On the first day of this bold step into the future, naturally, the electronic version of the newspaper crashed. Digital-first means you try to log into the website first, and when that doesn't work you go out and see if the drugstore will sell you an actial copy of the paper. But hey, you get what you pay for, right? And the web side of the business is strictly non-union.

Now, plenty of people will tell you that this is an inevitable consequence of our modern age. The newspaper has to die, because the internet demands it! Also, video killed the radio star, which is why you no longer own a radio. But apparently, it's not inevitable everywhere. The Boston Globe got sold to John Henry, the principal owner of the Boston Red Sox, for a Filene's-bargain-basement price of $70 million, even when other bidders offered more. Henry isn't talking layoffs. Boston is going to stay a two-newspaper town, and the premier newspaper is going to keep competing hard.

(Anyone who thinks that Henry bought the newspaper to get more or nicer coverage for the Red Sox, by the way, has no idea how the Boston sports media works. The Red Sox are not going to get more attention from Henry's Globe, because it is literally impossible for the Red Sox to get any more attention than they already do. And the coverage is not going to get nicer or softer, because the readers won't read that. The gold standard for Boston sports coverage remains a complex brew of idolatry and hostility. Boston baseball reporters don't play softball.)

Starting today, Cleveland is a less-than-one-newspaper city, with a Plain Dealer that is somewhat less than a newspaper. And that brings Cleveland one step closer to becoming something less than a city. It is part of a great city's death. Boston, a city that has thrived in the information age, will keep the major newspaper that a major city needs to function and thrive. The New York Times seems to have deliberately sold The Globe to an owner whose other enterprises are tied to Boston's civic health, and who seems motivated to protect the city's basic ecosystem. That's a choice on the Times Company's part. And the way Henry eventually runs his newspaper (or Jeff Bezos runs his) is a choice, just as the Newhouse family's decision to gut The Plain Dealer was a choice.

There's more than one route to profitability here. John Henry is not stupid with money. But he might have to be content with a lower direct return. A good newspaper in the internet age is only modestly profitable. A gutted newspaper is more profitable for a while, as long as you keep cutting costs faster than you lose revenue, but that's not a sustainable business model. That is selling copper wiring from abandoned houses.

Cleveland is a city being slowly run to death by economic rationalists whose business model adds up to sheer madness. It illustrates American business's suicidal focus on cost containment, with everyone trying to run the leanest operation in a city suffering economic famine. It is cheaper to lay off workers, and so stores no longer have enough consumers. The stores scale back, and their suppliers go hungry. It no longer "makes sense" to run a department store downtown. It no longer "makes sense" to run a daily newspaper.  And then you are trying to attract new enterprises to a city you have to leave to find a Macy's, trying to recruit employees to a city where you can't get a newspaper delivered on Monday or Tuesday. It makes no sense.

Cleveland is a city of assets whose value has been allowed to decline, and assets whose value is ignored. It is a city of grand buildings left unrenovated and unoccupied, because no one chooses to value them. It is a city where a great newspaper is allowed to become a part-time enterprise, because no one chooses to see its value. And little by little it has become a place torn down by its owners, stripped down to be sold for parts by people who do not live there, who do not need or wish for the city to thrive. The car that could be rebuilt is sold for scrap metal. The business that could be made profitable is closed.

Don't cry for the Washington Post. There are worse things than being bought. The worst thing that happened to The Plain Dealer was its out-of-town owners keeping it.

cross-posted from Dagblog

Boston and the End of the War on Terror

cross-posted from Dagblog

Five weeks after a terrorist attack on Boston, President Obama has declared that the War on Terror, "like all wars, must end."  If I had told you a year ago that he would make such a speech a month and a half after a high-profile terrorist attack on a major American city, neither you nor I would have believed me. But the lessons of Boston drive home the wisdom of the President's decision. It showed us that a terrorist attack is meant to be lived through and that Americans are ready to live through one. And it showed us an excellent civilian response to a terrorist attack paired with a decidedly mixed paramilitary response.

The key lesson of the Boston bombings is clear: the best way to prepare for a possible terrorist attack is to build six or eight world-class hospitals in your city. Start in the 19th century if you can.

I'm phrasing that as a joke, but much of Boston's resiliency and quick response was built on the city's superb medical infrastructure. Every victim who was alive when a first responder reached them got to a hospital. Every victim who got to a hospital lived. That is simply remarkable. The city's medical personnel held the death count to the absolute minimum. That does not diminish the senselessness of those three deaths, or the grievous wounds that many survivors suffered. But the city's doctors and nurses prevented a fourth or fifth or sixth senseless death, and I am grateful to them for that.

Some of Boston's success at coping with the attack comes from specific post-September-11 training. Boston's emergency responders had drilled for this scenario, and all of the hospital trauma centers had some doctors who had served in Iraq or Afghanistan and had experience treating the kinds of severely traumatic injuries that they saw on April 15. You can only give the police and EMTs special training after you've built organizations strong enough to carry out the training. First responders did a superb and intelligent job in triaging the wounded, spreading them out between the six nearby trauma centers. But that could only happen because the first responders had the luxury of six top-tier trauma centers within a three-mile radius. There aren't many spots on the planet with that luxury; the attack happened at the heart of a medical epicenter.

And you can't build a Tier One trauma center in any hospital. You need an institution and a staff that can support it. Boston could only dedicate such impressive resources to crisis medicine and emergency response because of the profound depth in the city's overall medical resources. Boston was ready to tend its wounded on that terrible day because Boston works on tending the wounded every day.

Boston's response to the Marathon bombings, its ability to absorb the body blow and respond effectively, was built on its peacetime strengths. It was a victory of the open society. On the other hand, the paramilitary response to the bombing suspects once they were identified, the manhunt and the city-wide lockdown, showed that we've already reached the point of diminishing returns. Getting tougher, giving the police heavier weapons or more military training, is not going to help; we're already at the point where those things are beginning to offset their own benefits.

I certainly can't fault the various police forces engaged in the manhunt for their caution; the bombers had already murdered a police officer, and they'd thrown IEDs at others. They had no choice but to assume that Dzokhar Tsarnaev had a gun and at least one more bomb. But the daylong lockdown, which paralyzed a major urban area and temporarily stopped its economy dead, was at least partly counterproductive. The lockdown itself helped hide Tsarnaev. He was found almost immediately after the lockdown ended, by one of the neighbors who'd been locked down. The militarized search took all the civilian eyes off the street. As soon as those eyes were back, the fugitive was easy to find.

After every attack, there are calls to get "tougher." But there's no tougher to get at this point without undermining ourselves. We're already at the point where the "toughness" is starting to hurt as much as it helps. Sending more cops with more body armor wasn't going to speed up that search. If they'd called in the National Guard, the bomber would probably still be hiding in that boat now.

And that's basically where we are as a country with the larger situation. Bringing more muscle than we've already brought to the War on Terror isn't going to get us better results. In fact, we've hit the point where more muscle and more security restrictions are going to bring us slightly worse results, while continuing to drain our resources.

There have also been calls to "toughen" immigration, because the bombers were immigrants, and there will be a new minor rule change designed to hassle foreign students between terms. That is not going to meaningfully cut back on terrorism, though it will play into the terrorists' argument that we're a country hostile to foreigners.

Of course, the people screaming about tougher immigration rules are ignoring the immigrants who played important positive roles during the Boston events. The terrorists were actually located because the hostage they took in a car-jacking, a Chinese national, was able to escape them and was quick-thinking enough to help the police track the terrorists with his cell phone. I don't see how keeping that guy out of the country would have made things better.

Nor can any reasonable person believe that those world-class hospitals that saved so many victims' lives on the day of the bombing are run by exclusively American-born doctors and medical staff. A world-class research hospital, by its nature, attracts talent from across the world. Some of the people saving lives in those six trauma units were immigrants. I'm pretty glad those people were here.

We're not going to be make our country safer by keeping foreign medical students out of the country. We can only make ourselves a little less safe by doing that, becoming a country with less young medical talent. We're not going to make ourselves safer by making it even more of a hassle to fly; we can only weaken ourselves a little by discouraging foreign talent and foreign business from coming. Closing our society down doesn't make it safer from terrorist attacks. It only weakens our power to weather those attacks.

Terrorism will never go away. It only takes a few disgruntled people willing to murder strangers. And we will always need to invest some resources in stopping terrorism and repairing the damage. But the question is how we allocate those investments. Some anti-terrorism spending goes toward things that have no other use in themselves, such as the x-ray machines in the airport, and that function as a drag on the overall economy, such as making airline travel more difficult and complicated. Frankly, most obvious military and security measures fall into these categories. On the other hand, spending money on things like hospitals improve the country's effective security while improving the general economy. Build excellent hospitals, with some extra money for things like trauma response, and you make the city better while also making it less likely that people in that city are killed by terrorists. Investments that protect us against terrorism and its effects while also strengthening our open society are apure gain. Spending on fortifying the country always involves some dead loss; spending on strengthening the public commons makes us safer while benefiting us in other ways. There will always have to be some straight-up security measures that will function as sheer cost; those costs are hedges against risk. But those measures can never diminish risk to zero, and at a certain point they start to cost far more than they save. On the other hand, money spent on building our country, rather than walling it in, is a secure investment in every sense.

Things We Did Not Learn About the Marathon Bombings

Let's recap the things that did not happen on the sorry day that the Boston Marathon was bombed:

Five unexploded bombs were not discovered nearby. No unexploded bombs were discovered nearby.

The government did not shut down cell-phone service as a precaution to prevent more detonations. The cell phone system around Copley Square simply became massively overloaded, so that calls could not get through (but texts, which take much less bandwidth, could).

The police did not arrest anyone or identify any suspects.

Twelve victims did not die.

Neither of the bombs exploded inside the Copley Fairmont Hotel.

The 8-year-old girl in the photo that went around the internet was not killed; the 8-year-old victim was a boy.

And, much as I would like it to be true, the story about marathoners running across the finish line and continuing running to the hospital to donate blood cannot be true. The police closed down the finish-line area (i.e., the crime scene), and directed runners elsewhere. I'm sure some runners did donate blood, but the inspiring version of this story, where they finish the race and don't even break stride, is not true.

All of the above things that did not happen were widely reported and widely repeated, especially on the 24-hour news. If you watched the news for the first 24 hours, you were likely to "learn" at least some of these things that are not true. On the other hand, you would not learn much of anything accurate during the first 24 hours, because no one actually knew anything. The crime scene had not been properly searched yet. There had not been time for investigators to study photos and videos to look for the bomber.

So what did you gain if you watched cable news for the first 24 hours after the terrorist attack? Less than nothing. You "learned" more false information than you were given real information. What 24-hour coverage covers is the 24 hours before anyone knows anything. And watching the news during those 24 hours actually leaves you more ignorant than if you simply waited for the next day's paper.

Forty-eight hours later,  long after there was any such excuse, CNN and AP were trumpeting that a suspect had been arrested, and was on his way to arraignment at Boston's federal courthouse. A few hours later, they had to retract that story. They didn't just report that an arrest was imminent. They reported that the non-existent arrest had already happened.

Cable news obviously does a terrible job supplying information about the real world. But supplying viewers with information is not cable news's real job. The 24-hour news channels, no matter their partisan leanings, exist to insulate viewers from the emotional experience of not knowing. 24-hour news is for people who, like small children or Politico columnists, simply cannot wait.

What cable news offers is not information but protection from feelings of uncertainty. The emphasis is not on discovering the truth, but banishing the discomfort of being uncertain what the truth is. It will fill 24 hours with confidently reported gossip, speculation, and rumor in order to distract a viewer from any truths that remain unknown, and most of all from the truth that the viewer does not know. It is an emotional substitute for knowledge. That any actual information occasionally mixes into the news flow is just an accident of necessity.

The anxiety that cable news addresses, the discomfort with uncertainty, is the opposite of curiosity. Curiosity embraces uncertainty as a necessary first step to more knowledge. Curiosity is driven by the joy of discovery but also by the pleasure of groping toward that discovery, the pleasure of not knowing yet. (When the curious eventually answer a question, they become curious about a new question.) But cable news teaches that not knowing yet is intolerable. Having unanswered questions is intolerable. Not being sure of one's position is unbearable. So it promotes pseudo-knowledge, a set of cliches and talking points and reflexive attitudes that substitute for actually knowing something. That pseudo-knowledge does not help you understand the questions better. It labels questions officially answered, so you can stop thinking about them.

And conspiracy theories, which began to proliferate as soon as the bombings entered public awareness, are simply a more elaborate effort to close off the experience of the real world, to block out any sense of uncertainty and any possibility of surprise. Conspiracy theorists, whether American right-wingers or Egyptian Islamists, began denouncing the bombings as a fraud designed to frame people who share their ideologies because the conspiracy theorists think that the bombings likely were carried out by someone who shares their ideologies. (If a right-winger says that right-wingers are about to be framed, it's because on some level he thinks that right wingers did this. Likewise the Muslim Brotherhood spokesman who claimed that it's all a conspiracy to defame Muslims actually thinks the bombers are Muslims.) But more importantly, conspiracy theorists are trying to fend off, well in advance, any piece of evidence that might interfere with their theories. The point of a conspiracy theory is to make the facts fit the theory, not the theory fit the facts, so you'd better get a head start on inconvenient pieces of reality. The point is never to change your mind. An old joke says that "a paranoid is never surprised." That's the point of paranoia: to ward off the discomfort of discovering and learning, the intolerable intellectual adventure of not knowing something, the tormenting possibility of change and growth. Some people will go to any lengths not to learn anything new. For those who need an easier path, there is always CNN.

cross-posted from Dagblog

Marathon Day

Boston is my home, my beloved city, although I have not lived there for many years. And Patriot's Day, the Monday of the Boston Marathon, is the proudest day in a proud city's year. We open our city to all, and hold one of the world's greatest sporting events, the oldest annual marathon on the globe. We hold that race in public streets and fill the sidewalks to cheer. It is Boston's day to celebrate the many things that make it Boston.

Tonight the news is asking who did this and what they want. Of course, there are no answers to those questions yet. 24-hour news only fills the anxious time before anyone knows anything real, and makes those hours more anxious. But what the bombers want, what any bombers want, is not important. What matters is what they want to take away from us. Why they attacked does not matter, because their beliefs cannot justify this deed. What they attacked does matter, because that is what we have to keep them from taking away.

The Marathon is a celebration of athletic excellence and discipline, of course. And it has become a symbol of human willpower overcoming adversity. No one can watch the Hoyts run their race without understanding that this is about the will to face challenges and overcome them. But the Marathon was deliberately symbolic from the first. The race began in 1897, the year after the first modern Olympic Games revived the marathon as a sporting event. The Greek Revival spirit of the event resonated with Boston's vision of itself as the Athens of America, our country's university city, heir to classical learning and values. More importantly, the legacy of the ancient Greeks was bound up, as it was for the Founding Fathers, with democracy itself; celebrating an intellectual link to the ancient Athenians (in the most grueling physical way possible) inevitably means celebrating a tradition of democracy. It's not for nothing that Boston runs the Marathon on Patriot's Day, which celebrates the anniversary of Lexington and Concord. In some way that never gets spoken outright, the Marathon is a celebration of American democracy in the city that birthed the Revolution.

But the Marathon is also a game of peace, founded in the wake of the Olympic movement for many of the same reasons. It is a reenactment of the Greeks' peaceful competitions. The Boston Marathon has lived up to that Olympic ideal, drawing athletes from around the globe. Inevitably, the running of the Marathon is a celebration of the openness, the public freedom, that make a great city great (and in truth make it a city in the first place). It requires a city open to visitors from around the world. It requires a city where half a million people can gather and cheer in the streets. Holding the marathon at all celebrates the essence of urban civilization: a civic space shared by multitudes of strangers, living together in peace.

This is what the bombers want to destroy: democratic values. A dedication to shared history. Resolution in the face of adversity. Peace. International cooperation. Public space and public institutions free for all. A city of open streets and open minds.

Terrorism wants to convince us that we cannot afford these things. It works to tell us that such things are luxuries for the naive. But these are exactly the things that we must not give up, because we cannot do without them. Because these are the things terrorists fear most of all.

Boston is a city and not a fortress. The last attempt to turn it into a fort, shortly after Lexington and Concord, was an abject failure. Terrorists hate cities, hate places where people can walk the streets, can meet and talk in peace, because terrorists fear civilization itself.

cross-posted from Dagblog

Opening Day Farewell

Today is Opening Day for most of Major League Baseball, including my beloved Red Sox. For most baseball fans, the experience of falling in love with the game is inextricably bound up with their relationship to the men in their family, to the father or uncle who took them to games and played catch with them in the yard. But my love of baseball grows out of my love for a woman: my aunt Ann, who was laid to rest this week. Today is the first time I have been in Boston for Opening Day since I left New England fifteen years ago. And today is my first Opening Day without Ann. I had expected her to have another, and another. I was not prepared for this day to come without her.

Ann had no children. She was a sister in a Catholic order, what most people would call a nun. (Technically nuns are something different, and since they live cloistered away from the secular world you've probably never met one. The "nuns" you meet in the everyday world, running schools and hospitals and charities, are technically known as sisters. They do God's work in the most practical and literal way, as genuine work. Ann was one of them.)

As her oldest nephews, my brother and I were the closest things she had to sons. When we were still small, she began taking us to Red Sox games for our birthdays, which meant weekend stays with her in Boston, once fairly early in the season and once near the end. (I would like to officially thank my brother for having a birthday that tends to fall in the middle of pennant races.) We saw some great and dramatic baseball together. We were in the bleachers when the 1986 team clinched the American League East and their ride to the playoffs; I have a framed photo in my office that Ann took that day from the stands, with Oil Can Boyd on the mound in full windup, a few pitches before he ended the game and jumped up and down for joy, like a child. We also saw some profoundly undramatic baseball together over the years. A lot of September games have nothing at stake but the player's professionalism and self-respect; over time, I came to view those games as the most revealing, in certain ways: the games played for the highest stakes of all. And, truth be told, you can see a game any time over the summer when not much goes on, and the actual suspense is over by the fourth inning. We saw those games with Ann, too, and watched every pitch. Leaving early was never even mentioned. When you start a thing, you finish it, and when you love a team (or a person), the love is  not conditional.

It would be easy to say that Ann taught me about baseball as a metaphor for life, and so on, but she didn't, and it's a cliche, and Roger Angell has already said all that better than I ever will. And anyway baseball isn't much more of a metaphor for life than any other part of life is, and in some ways it's a less of one. (Life, for example, involves women. And men over forty. And doing your job when it rains.) What I learned about life on those trips I learned getting to and from the games. Ann was an adult, and lived in the city, and being with her I saw what adulthood and city life were like. She could not only find her way around Boston, but find a place to park. She could keep two kids under ten interested and occupied for two and a half days. She was the most streetwise person to ever set a good moral example for anyone, and she set a good moral example to most. Being around her taught me how to be an adult, and made me want to be kinder. When I graduated from college, it seemed natural to start my first adult job in the Boston Church: Ann's version of Boston, and Ann's version of the Church. The Catholicism that the sisters lived was, and is, the face of the Church that I found most comfortable and appealing. Reporting to a sister as my first boss made all the sense in the world.

And for all of the Hall-of-Famers we watched play, all of the dramatic hits and big games, my best memories are of sitting in the stands with Ann and my brother when nothing much was going on, sitting in Fenway and being together. I'd give a lot to sit with Ann through nine dull innings today.

Is baseball a metaphor for life? Is opening day a metaphor for spring and rebirth and new beginnings? Maybe. Sure. But when you come right down to it, baseball is an excuse to sit outdoors with someone you love. If it were nothing else but that, it would be enough.

Rest in peace, Ann.

The Romney Paradox (and the Crybaby Bishops)

cross-posted from Dagblog

Mitt Romney used to be Governor of Massachusetts, a commonwealth which has at various times been A) the closest thing to a theocracy America has ever had and B) the poster child for tolerant secular liberalism. Many vocal religious conservatives now insist that the tolerant secular liberalism is an infringement on their religious liberty, and that they can only fully exercise their religion when the state actively endorses and promotes their religious values for them.

Back in the early days of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, of course, the government did actively promote religious values, and the official magistrates were under the indirect supervision of the ministers. (Massachusetts was never such a theocracy that the ministers were directly in control, but the religious leaders could make and break the politicians; they weren't officeholders, but they were political bosses). This is the closest resemblance that any historical fact bears to the Christian Nation narrative popular with today's religious right.

Here's the thing, though: none of the people currently demanding a Christian Nation would have been able to exercise their religion under that system. Virtually without exception, today's right-wing religious activists belong to denominations that were banned in colonial Massachusetts (or would have been, had they been founded in time). Mitt Romney, likewise, would not have been allowed to practice his faith or even to remain in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

The Massachusetts authorities in the 17th century were given to expelling members of dissident religious groups, such as the Baptists, with an instructive public whipping to hasten them on their way. They executed people for the crime of being Quakers. (Those executions led the English government to tyrannically curtail Massachusetts' religious freedom by forbidding the colonists to hang people for being a different flavor of Protestant Christian.) After the King outlawed religious executions, the God-fearing colonists had to content themselves with whippings, expulsions, and breaking into to private homes to see if anyone was holding a Quaker service inside.

Baptists were outlaws; the Pentecostalists and other later evangelical denominations would surely have been outlawed too. Practicing Catholicism was out of the question; Massachusetts Puritans looked on the Catholic Church as a diabolic organization headed by the Anti-Christ. The Catholics didn't enjoy religious toleration in England, let alone Puritan New England, and as late as the 1830s a mob burned down a convent in greater Boston, because it was full of, you know, nuns.

And as for being a Mormon, if there had been any Mormons yet, forget it. Groups that got driven out of 19th-century Illinois wouldn't have stood a chance in theocratic Boston. If Mitt Romney had shown up in the Massachusetts Bay Colony he would have been immediately thrown in jail, publicly flogged, and (if he caught a few bad breaks) hanged. In fact, every single Republican candidate for the presidential nomination, including Herman Cain and Tim Pawlenty, belongs to a church that would have been criminalized in early colonial Boston.

On the other hand, "Godless" liberal Massachusetts, that terrible threat to religious freedom, has treated Mitt Romney remarkably well. Not only did he get two degrees from Harvard (whose Puritan founders would have never admitted anyone of his faith), and he was actually elected to John Winthrop's old job as Governor! (We're still trying to harness the original colonists spinning in their graves to make green electricity.) He didn't do any of that on a wave of religious support from his fellow Mormons, of whom Massachusetts has approximately none. He did it with the votes of people who don't believe in his religion and have no particular sympathy for it, even some people who view Mormonism as slightly crazy. Those voters disagree with Romney's personal religious choices, but respected his right to make them and did not penalize him for them. Tolerant liberal values gave Mitt Romney the maximum freedom to practice his faith.

The people of Massachusetts did expect Romney to live up to the traditional separation-of-church-and-state deal, in which the elected magistrate represents the interests of the whole commonwealth and not his private religious convictions. If Mormon Governor Romney felt that, as a Latter-Day Saint, he had to close down all of the state's bars, liquor stores, and coffee shops, he wouldn't have been Governor Romney for even a week. In fact, Romney signed the repeal of the old Puritan-inspired Blue Law against selling alcohol on Sundays. He acted on behalf of the voters who had delegated him his authority, rather than using that authority to express his own religious concerns or impose them upon the public.

Was this a limitation of his religious freedom? No. It was a recognition that an elected leader is a representative of the public. If Romney had insisted that his freedom of religion entitled him to use his office to promote his specific values, he would have been barred from that office, because under that system no reasonable voter would ever choose to empower any candidate whose religion differed from their own. If we all agree that the President of the United States will keep his religious practice separate from his public duties, then anyone can be President. But if we considered the President of the United States free to use the powers of office to promote his or her own faith, then no one who doesn't share my particular faith, or yours, would be acceptable to me or to you. We can have, say, a Quaker president (like Nixon), because we know that the president won't simply disband the armed forces to keep with his Quaker faith. If Nixon had undergone a (spectacularly unlikely) crisis of conscience and decided that he had to be true to his religious upbringing he had to abolish the army and navy, he would have been impeached faster than he could resign.

Today's religious right complain about the separation of church and state as a hindrance to their religious freedom. Most recently, some Catholic bishops have complained that they can now longer receive taxpayer funding for adoption-placement services that exclude gay couples from adopting. They are free to run a Catholic adoption agency, and free to turn away gay couples if they choose, on the principle that children are better off orphans than raised by two men or two women. What they view as "government-backed persecution" is that the taxpayer will no longer underwrite this. Apparently, the bishops feel the government is obligated to fund an adoption service that deliberately limits the pool of adoptive parents, rather than giving its money to adoption services that accept more potential parents and therefore place more kids. “In the name of tolerance, we’re not being tolerated,” one of the bishops has told the New York Times, which reports that these bishops fear "an escalating campaign by the government to trample on their religious freedom."

To those bishops, I can only say: get over it. If you feel that it is important to keep orphans from being adopted by gay couples, and want to run a heterosexual-only adoption service, you can do it with donations from like-minded donors. You're not being "persecuted" because the government won't fund it for you. Taxpayers don't want their money spent to keep orphans from being adopted. Keeping orphans from being adopted because your religion currently teaches certain ideas about gayness is also not a public benefit. And as far as intolerance for the Catholic faith goes: baby, if this feels like persecution to you, you have clearly arrived. Nobody's set fire to a nunnery in this town for a long, long time.

Today's religious right defines "freedom of religion" as the freedom to use public resources, and public authority, in order to further the goals of their own specific religion. But almost without exception, the groups who feel "persecuted" by the government's religious neutrality are the groups who would never have been tolerated in the United States under the kind of arrangement they're currently agitating for. The Catholics, evangelicals, and Latter-Day Saints, for example are all traditionally disfavored religious groups who have only managed to thrive in this country because the Establishment Clause defends their religious freedom through tolerant neutrality. Their attacks on "tolerance" and "liberalism" as a kind of persecution is an attack on the very things that have shielded them from persecution in this country. It's like watching people trying to tear the roof off their own house. They might succeed in leading this country into a new period of deep religious intolerance. What they won't succeed in doing is escaping that intolerance themselves. It wouldn't just be the people that the religious right dislikes who would become targets if they ever got their way. And God forbid that they ever do.

The Last White Gangster

cross-posted from Dagblog

The FBI has caught Whitey Bulger, after a mere sixteen years. The arrest made national news because of the FBI's well-earned embarrassment and because of the mythology around Bulger. As a crime boss, Bulger was not nationally significant. He was a formidable gang leader with firm control over one slice of Boston's organized crime, but it was only a slice. He was the scariest gang leader in Boston, but not necessarily the biggest or richest. You'll hear a lot in the papers about what a criminal genius he is, and he really is smarter than any hoodlum should get, but what it's really about is this: Jimmy Bulger is the Last Great White Gangster.

Bulger is the last Irish-American mob leader who's likely to control even a slice of the underworld in a major American city. He is ethnically similar to many of the journalists and editors covering him, and they obviously love writing about him. He's the last gangster who looks like Jimmy Cagney, so even very good coverage of him gets tinged with sympathy and sentimentality that Bulger has never come close to deserving. It's a nostalgia trip. Reporters call Bulger "colorful," but it's only because he's so very pale.

Some of the Bulger myth is based on fact. He corrupted cops and FBI agents, who helped him murder and helped him escape. His brother was President of the Massachusetts State Senate for eighteen years, with Jimmy a notorious criminal the whole time. He is the primary model for Nicholson's character in The Departed, although even that bleak movie pulled its punches about Bulger's depravity and Boston's corruption. He did inform on the Boston Mafia, enabling the FBI to tape one of the Mafia's hokey (but, surprisingly, real) initiation ceremonies. And some people in South Boston, where Whitey did his crimes, did and do talk about him as a Robin Hood figure. But all of that was possible because Bulger was, well, Whitey. The open political connections, the wrongheaded sympathy from cops and deluded loyalty from the neighborhood all come down to ethnic solidarity and Boston's shameful history of race relations. Race isn't the whole story. It's only forty or sixty percent. But it's the forty-to-sixty percent that the media will leave out, and the part that explains all the rest.

The biggest break that the Bulgers ever got was the court order that desegregated the Boston schools by mandating busing in 1974. Back then Whitey was working for a gangster named Howie Winter and his brother Billy was South Boston's state senator. When busing happened, Southie flew into a frothing rage. It took the neighborhood at least twenty-five years to get over it. And while people (including William Bulger) will tell you with a straight face that all the anger wasn't about race (it was really about local control and neighborhood schools and yadda yadda yadda), that's just whitewash. People screamed racial slurs in the streets. They wrote them on public walls. Black people, including kids and unlucky bystanders, got intimidated and physically attacked. (Other Irish-American neighborhoods were also angry, but South Boston and Charleston were the worst, and Southie was ground zero.) Was every last single opponent of busing a dyed-in-the-wool racist? No. But plenty of them voiced the most toxic racism you can imagine, loudly and proudly. Twenty years later, you could still hear some people from those neighborhoods saying vile, hateful things in a matter-of-fact tone. And the fury wasn't even about the quality of white kids' education: South Boston High was a lousy school, at the bottom of the state rankings. What the angry mobs wanted was to make sure their kids went to a failing and dysfunctional school with other white kids.

Billy Bulger became a leader of the anti-busing movement, and it made him. Four years later he was President of the State Senate. Whitey was fighting busing, too, in his own way: the pro-busing Mayor of Boston actually worried at one point that Bulger might have him killed so the anti-busing Deputy Mayor could take his place. If you think of William Bulger as a segregationist Southern governor and his brother as Grand Dragon of the local KKK, you have the basic picture. And the deference they've received from Boston's press and politicians should be seen through that lens; they were the devils that liberals had to deal with, and too many locals had sympathy for.

Cops, including federal cops, liked Jimmy Bulger because he was an Irish neighborhood guy just like many of them were. (His FBI handler was a guy named Connolly who'd grown up in the same Southie housing project.) And the busing crisis turned that garden-variety ethnic bond into something deeper and more tribal as places like Southie and Charleston grew more defensive and aggrieved. Some of those cops felt that their ethnic group was losing ground in the city, and they weren't in any special hurry to see Boston Irish losing power in the underworld. In fact, the FBI was happy to help Whitey expand by undermining Italian mobsters. Whitey got stronger in the 1980s as the Mafia got weaker. The Last White Gangster basically got endangered-species protection.

People were willing to tolerate, even to celebrate, the Bulger brothers because they were a bulwark of Irish political influence that was otherwise in danger of eroding. At least they were Irish, and you couldn't be sure the next guys would be. William Bulger ran an old-school political patronage machine; if you backed him, he could help this or that nephew find a public job. Whitey was an old-school ethnic racketeer. He might have robbed South Boston blind and helped keep it poor, but at least the neighborhood got exploited by one of the tribe.

The "Robin Hood" myth about Whitey is partly the usual dysfunctional ghetto Stockholm Syndrome bullshit, and partly about the belief that Whitey kept African-Americans at bay. People will actually say that Whitey "kept drugs out of the neighborhood." That's not just a lie but a self-delusion. Whitey Bulger kept drugs out of Southie the way that Santa Claus keeps toys out of the living room on Christmas morning: he didn't deliver the packages himself, but everyone who did was acting in his name. The "keeping drugs out of the neighborhood" story demands (or allows) whoever believes it not to notice that Southie was totally full of drugs.

But if you read "keeping out drugs" as "keeping out blacks," it makes a lot of sense. That was the thing about Southie: the kids were on drugs, but all the drug dealers were white. Some people in Southie and Charlestown were willing to fight bitterly for the right to have their own all-white drug traffic and all-white extortion rackets and failing all-white schools where white kids could get a rotten education among their own kind. South Boston's love for Whitey Bulger is about the desire to be abused and exploited by a fellow member of the tribe; you can only have a Last White Gangster if you have a Last White Ghetto for him to rule over.

The Bulger brothers are masters of South Boston's greatest art: playing the victim. Whitey has the balls to complain that the FBI confiscated the $800,000 in his apartment and ask for a court-ordered lawyer. Billy Bulger complains that he was forced to resign as president of the University of Massachusetts in 2003 just because his brother had been a federal fugitive for nine years and Billy admitted having contacted him during that time. (Give Mitt Romney his due for making that happen.) That's the same Billy Bulger who used to complain that anti-busing protestors were being unfairly painted as racists just because they stood around screaming "Nigger!" at teenagers. Whitey's girlfriend, Catherine Grieg, excused his explosive temper by telling the neighbors that he had Alzheimer's, and serious media outlets gullibly repeated that. In fact, Whitey is just a terrible person. If his violent anger is a symptom of Alzheimer's, then Alzheimer's set in while he was in the womb. The Bulger brothers' Southie, the Southie they exploited and preserved, was just the same way: loudly declaring victimhood at the hands of any outsider handy, while reserving the right to do all the actual victimizing themselves. But don't let the martyr act fool you: neither South Boston nor Jimmy Bulger are victims. They're simply hoods.