Amber Waves of Asparagus

When I was growing up in up-State New York, it always seemed odd to me that Thanksgiving Day came at the end of November. Why so late? I wondered. By that time we had been having snow for a couple of months and were looking forward to the maple syrup harvest. Why didn’t we celebrate in mid-September, before the snow got too deep?

The best I could do in trying to understand this strange timing was to consider that there were probably southern states that had to be accommodated. No doubt it took longer to grow tobacco and cotton and stuff like that -- not that you ever put that kind of thing on the table! -- so we just had to wait.

What I have come to understand in recent years, however, is that it’s odd timing for another reason: “Harvest” is not an end of the summer event anyway. Here it is the first of July and I have already harvested asparagus, lettuce, spinach, broccoli, mustard greens, green peas, sugar pod peas, and gooseberries. Next week there’ll be blueberries and the week after that there’ll be beans. And on it goes.

Harvest is an on-going event and it starts even before I’ve finished planting. The Jewish liturgical year has always had several harvest festivals beginning with Pentecost in late May or early June. If you stop to think about it, we have several ourselves most places outside the big cities. How may places have a strawberry festival at the end of June or a blueberry festival in July or a corn roast in August? Maybe they do a potato festival in Maine and Idaho and an artichoke festival in California. I’m sure you can add to the list.

So here’s a proposal: let’s downgrade Thanksgiving Day to “Pumpkin Festival” and make it just one of a long list of harvest festivals instead of the whole thing. It would be much better for us anyway to spread the feasting out a bit and diversify the menu. Write your Congressperson! Here’s a nonpartisan cause to bring us together and put a whole new list of holidays on the calendar.

Burn This Book?

I like to write, but the thought of writing an eight volume history of the United States, each volume well over a thousand pages, is more than somewhat daunting. So I stand in awe of Page Smith, who pulled it off - sort of. I’ve been working may way through Volume Four, The Nation Comes of Age, McGraw Hill, 1981, which takes us from about 1820 to 1860 as background for my biography of James W. C. Pennington and I am troubled by the thought of a highschool student somewhere using it as a source. Error free it is not.

I would give the editor high marks for catching typos. I noted only one in 1200 pages: “moral terror” is usually spelled “mortal.” But more attention to opacity would have been helpful. Dense prose in a book already too heavy to hold is a real problem. For example, tell me what the word “inefficiency” is doing in this sentence: “All that was archaic, foolish, and arrogant in English life was being demonstrated in the inefficiency and criminal waste of life occasioned by the siege.” Did the siege cause inefficiency and, if so, how, or was the waste of life inefficient?

But let’s get down to facts. In a history book of some 1200 pages covering everything from western exploration to New England transcendentalists, facts are important. One might reasonably expect a few errors but when the errors in the field one knows are egregious, one wonders whether it is possible to trust anything the author says elsewhere.

Example: I happen to know a lot about James W. C. Pennington, who is discussed briefly on page 642. He was not, as stated there, a cousin of Henry Garnet or even related to him. He did not “join Garnet, Brown, Douglass, and others on the lecture circuit,” and he was not, when he married Frederick Douglass and his fiancé a “Presbyterian minister.” It is also not true that “he was not allowed to speak at Yale College.” He was not allowed to register as a student at Yale or to speak while auditing classes, but that is rather different. All that in one brief paragraph.

Example 2: I don’t know much about Washington Allston Washington but I have seen copies of his painting entitled “Belshazzar’s Feast” now in the Boston Athenaeum. Smith tells us on page 923 (who is still noticing by page 923?), “The subject was, of course, the biblical story of Daniel and the children condemned to the fiery furnace and the mysterious writing on the wall, ‘mene, mene, tekel.’” That is somewhat like telling us that Rembrandt’s “Descent from the Cross” has as it’s subject the Biblical story of Jesus and the Sermon on the Mount and the words, “Father, forgive them for they know.”

Example 3: It took me several days and a trip to New Haven to understand what was wrong with Smith's reference to James Gordon Bennett as editor of the New York Tribune. The problem is that Bennett was editor of the New York Herald and Horace Greeley was editor of the New York Tribune. Such errors are expensive. It costs me $75 by IRS car expense standards to do the round trip to New Haven. Smith owes me!

Example 4: One can be excused for not being well informed about James W. C. Pennington and maybe even the Book of Daniel, but is it possible for any educated person to refer to the Book of Common Prayer as “written in the reign of King John?” (Page 513) After that it would not be surprising to find a reference to “Robert E. Lee’s Gettysburg Address!”

Now what should a responsible citizen do on encountering such stupefying errors in a borrowed book? Burn it? But it isn’t my book. Return the book to the library for use by others– making me co-responsible? Mark up the pages with exclamation points and corrections? Tacky. Write to McGraw Hill to suggest they issue a “product safety alert?” Or should I just hope that maybe no one else will ever read it? I would appreciate advice.

The Peaceable Kingdom

Sometimes we take the wildlife in these parts for granted. Sometimes it gets our attention. Lately it’s had my attention. Consider:

Two or three days ago I picked up some dead branches of honeysuckle that I had cut weeks before and that were impeding my mowing. A small creature ran out and into the nearby wooded area. I couldn’t quite identify it: larger perhaps than a chipmunk but smaller than a squirrel and brown in color. I got back on the mower and headed into the newly cleared high grass area and suddenly three or four more of the creatures took flight also. Baby rabbits: Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail, and Peter. I assume Peter was the first to be startled. Like Mr MacGregor, I am not entirely pleased to learn that there are rabbits on the property. I think they will have trouble accessing my garden but I will be ready with my hoe if they show up.

Bluebirds have nested in a box in the garden and there was a scarlet tanager on the deck yesterday. A pair of cardinals come by fairly often and the hummingbirds are back.

Yesterday morning, I set out for church about ten after nine and hadn’t gone far when a deer leaped across the road. Half a mile further on a red tailed hawk swooped low over the car. Not far beyond, another deer ran across the road. (Twice recently I have startled young fawns so small that when they ran into the high grass beside the road they disappeared.) Continuing on a few miles I was interested to see a pair of great blue herons fly low across the road. Before I reached my destination, I also saw a pair of human beings out looking at their garden. I drove nineteen miles and saw only the two humans.

This morning as we were making the bed I saw what I thought at first was a dog going past below the bedroom window. It was a black bear. It walked on by and disappeared across the road.

All this brought to mind the remark one of the children made many years ago when we came back from Japan by way of Russia after three years in the middle of Tokyo. We arrived at last in a Rectory in Shropshire where we would spend a month and the children looked out the window to see sheep grazing in a meadow and cows in the distance. One of them said, “Are we in a zoo?”

It’s a relevant question these days.

Edward Hicks: The Peaceable Kingdom

He Dropped the Ball

The wisdom of Yogi Berra – “It ain’t over till it’s over” – took on new and dreadful meaning last Friday (oddly Friday the 12th, not the 13th) when Luis Castillo settled under a high pop-up to the infield, shaded to his left six or eight feet, and let the descending ball bounce off the heel of his glove and fall to the ground.

Let me set the stage. This has been a less than optimal season for the New York Metropolitans. At the moment the disabled list has claimed their lead off hitter and shortstop, their cleanup hitter and first baseman, their number three and four starting pitchers, and their number two reliever. For extended times earlier in the season they have been without their starting catcher and right fielder as well. Nevertheless, the schedule is made up and the games must be played. So the first baseman has never played that position before? There’s always on the job training.

These are not the circumstances under which one would most like to take on the New York Yankees. Less than optimal also is the fact that the Yankees new playground in the Bronx features a jet stream that carries baseballs into the stands at regular intervals. The Mets have very few long ball hitters.

Nevertheless (I said that before but this was a nevertheless event) here we were in the ninth inning, two out, the Mets, improbably ahead 8-7,and the Mets ace reliever on the mound, a man who had converted fifteen consecutive save situations to victories since the start of the season. He had gotten two outs but had given up a single to Derek Jeter who then stole second. When the count to Texeira, leading the league in home runs, reached three and one, Francisco Rodriguez decided to walk him, putting the winning run on base (those of us who remember the 1947 World Series know this is not a smart thing to do), and take on Alex Rodriguez (no relation), one of the best hitters in the game but a man notorious for failing in critical situations - such as this.

True to form, A. Rodriguez popped up and it seemed that F. Rodriguez had done it again. It seemed. But repeated reruns of the tape show the same thing happening every time. The ball hit Castillo’s mitt and bounced out.

Now your average base runner under these circumstances would, of course, be off with the crack of the bat but not exerting himself since the game was, for all practical, purposes over. There are, however, impractical purposes and Texeira, running hard from first with the winning run, could see the third base coach signaling frantically for him to keep going. He slid into home plate, looked up, and said, “What happened?”

What happened was that Castillo picked up the ball and fired to second base. No Yankee runners being in the vicinity, the shortstop threw home – much too late. The game was over and there was no joy in Long Island where the citizens were staring at their screen with mouths open and hands clutched to heads.

Ads for the New York lottery say again and again, “Hey, you never know.” The next day, a demoralized Mets team took the field behind a pitcher who hadn’t started a major league game in three years and impressed very few on that occasion. Needless to say, the Mets won 6-2 in routine fashion.

The Price of Democracy

The New York Times today has an article about the life expectancy of Russian investigative reporters. All too many get ambushed and killed with the result that Russians seldom get to hear about corruption in high places.

Our society is creating the same problem but differently. When I handed the clerk five dollars for today’s paper, she said, “It’s six dollars.” I said, “It was five dollars last week.” She said, “It went up on Monday.”

We are killing reporters more politely: the price of a paper goes up and sets in train a series of consequences. I have to ask myself how much I want a Sunday paper. What s the cost/benefit ratio?

We stopped getting a daily paper when we moved away from the city. Nobody will bring us a paper and we aren’t motivated to go get one. But on Sunday we’re out early and the Sunday paper is a pleasant custom. Weekdays, I can read the paper on line. It’s faster because I don’t have to turn pages and glaze past the ads. It’s cleaner because there’s no newsprint to rub off on my fingers. And it costs me nothing. I could do the same on Sunday and a 20% price increase is highly motivating.

But if I don’t pay for a paper, who will pay the reporters? And if the Times can’t pay for investigative reporting, how different will our society be from Russia?

Shaping the Shapers II

Let’s think some more about the appointment of a justice for the Supreme Court.

There has been endless commentary about Judge Sotomayor’s remark about an elderly Latina woman reaching a better decision than an elderly Anglo man. The conservative viewpoint seems to be, as remarked in my previous post, that the law is the law and all one need do is read and apply it.

In that case, why do we need justices? Wouldn’t a well-programmed computer be able to search, balance out, and apply past precedents and provide a decision without all the messy uncertainty of human ratiocination?

Or, if we insist in having human beings, why would we not do as they do in many other walks of life: check for the most distinguished resumes, look for the highest marks on a standard test, and hire the winner? Why did Ronald Reagan find a woman to appoint and why did the first George Bush appoint an African American? (I know that George I said Justice Thomas was the best qualified candidate regardless of race, but did anyone believe that?)

But if life experience makes a difference–and in the real world, who doubts it–let me refer again to the impact of one’s religious affiliation. Does the way we worship affect the way we think and act? If not, why do we worship?

Consider, then, the impact of attending weekly or more often at services in which one human being (or,alternatively, a Book) is cited as infallible authority as opposed to the impact of services at which human ignorance and fallibility are contrasted with the Mystery beyond knowing. Shouldn’t that make a difference? And might it not be relevant to ask someone nominated to any court: “How much allowance do you think it appropriate to make for the human element in the various institutions of our society? Do you hold the Constitution or any human institution to be an infallible guide? And if not, how do you use your limited reason to apply our fallible institutions to the human situations you will consider?”

What Shapes the Shapers? I

It’s remarkable how the issues we care about change. Less than fifty years ago, it was a huge issue that John F. Kennedy was a Roman Catholic. If Sonia Sotomayor’s appointment to the Supreme Court is confirmed, six of the nine justices will be Roman Catholic. And no one seems to think it matters.

Now, hear me out. The question I would raise is not about church affiliation or church doctrine as such but about ways of thinking about law.

I note that the five Roman Catholics presently on the court are the conservatives and that four of the five had extensive education in Roman Catholic schools (as did Sonia Sotomayor). The one Roman Catholic whose education was in public schools is Anthony Kennedy, the least conservative of the five.

Now the Roman Catholic Church is a church shaped by law. It has an extensive body of canon law to govern its life. It has courts in place to interpret and apply that law. That body of law is based in turn on a legal tradition that goes back to the Roman Empire. That law is taught in Roman Catholic schools. Does that, I wonder, help shape a certain legal mind in the students?

The United States also has an extensive legal tradition but there are two clearly different ways of interpreting our laws and they are at issue in the court at the moment. The conservatives see the law as fixed and unchanging while the liberals see law as a living tradition.

In the twelfth century these two views of the law came into conflict and the first way emerged triumphant. Harold Berman called it a legal “revolution.” The Germanic pattern that had been dominant, especially in northern Europe, was overwhelmed by the Roman pattern of law that has been dominant ever since.

The Germanic folklaw was something very different from the formal logical structure of Roman law. Berman describes it as less an objective code than “an expression of the unconscious mind of the people, a product of their ‘common conscience.’ It was in that respect like art, like myth, like language itself.” It was in other words a living law which reflected community values and was not derived from the written language of legal texts. It was vague and perhaps impractical for a more modern world, but it was also creative and suited to human needs.

The one tradition may have superseded the other but it has never entirely disappeared. We experience it, in fact, almost daily. You are not likely to be arrested for driving 35 miles an hour in a 30 mile speed zone or 70 when the sign says 65. If Antonin Scalia were on duty, we might be; but not if the officer is Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Likewise, there is no law that prohibits me from remaining seated when the national anthem is played at a baseball game, but I will incur community disapproval by doing so and will usually conform to community values. Likewise, most men wore hats when I was growing up because everyone else did; few do now because few do. Community norms change and our behavior changes.

The Constitution of the United States outlaws “cruel and unusual” punishment. It was usual to hang a man for theft in the early days of our country; it no longer is. Some churches teach a pattern of living based on a more flexible view of the law and others a less flexible view. When Jesus said, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath,” he was expressing a view of law that was flexible and compassionate. The Roman Church has traditionally taught a view of the law that was less flexible and had less room for change.

I would like to think that one or two senators might understand the western legal tradition well enough to engage in a dialog on the subject with Sonia Sotomayor. We know where Antonin Scaia stands on the issue and we know what has generally been taught in Roman Catholic Schools. “Judge Sotomayor, where do you stand on these matters?”
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Berman, Harold J., Law and Revolution: the Formation of the Western Legal Tradition. Harvard University Press, 1983.