Less than the Least

Obama and his underlings have emphasized, rightly, that federal spending designed to pump up the economy should do more than that: spending should rebuild needed infrastructure, invest in cleaner energy, and the like, so that money spent now would yield economic returns years later.

There is one kind of spending that would do just that: federal aid for local police. The number of urban police officers per unit population held steady through the 1970s and 1980s, while urban violence steadily rose. In the 1990s, that number rose 17%, and violent crime fell sharply. In this decade, nearly half of the gains of the 1990s have been wiped out during this decade--and that was true before the collapse of the credit markets this past fall and the broader recession that is now taking hold. Urban violence is rising again. If the federal government doesn't subsidize police spending, we will see more cuts in local police budgets, and probably more crime.

Police spending has another large benefit: over time, it reduces prison spending. Take a look at this graph--the blue curve is annual change in the number of urban police officers per unit population with a one-year delay; the green curve measures annual change in the number of prison inmates per unit population. The inverse relationship between the two curves is hard to miss:

Less crime, fewer prisoners, and more cops is a rare policy trifecta. This is an opportunity not to be missed.

Apologies for the long silence:  my chemo ended just before Thanksgiving, but the six weeks since them has been rougher than I'd expected:  I'm still pretty tired and a little queasy all the time, and have been struggling to fight off an infection.  All of which has left me feeling a little down.  It's as if something inside me didn't permit depression to take hold in the midst of chemo and cancer surgeries.  Now that I have a little breathing space, the story is different.

Dealing with cancer is a little like raising kids.  Parents figure out how to handle a two-year-old at about the time the child turns four--at least I did; I was always behind the curve.  So too here.  By the time my last round of chemo was ending, I knew how to do chemo.  I haven't yet gotten the hang of this stage of the process, when I'm trying to put one foot in front of the other with an hourglass staring at me.  But plenty of people have made this adjustment (and much harder ones) before, and I'm sure I will do so too.

            After poet and Yale professor Elizabeth Alexander was announced as the inaugural poet, fellow poet Paul Muldoon was quoted as saying he was confident the choice was due to literary merit.  I hope there was a twinkle in his eye when he said this.  Literary merit surely was one consideration, but one doesn't have to be a cynic to suspect it wasn't the only one. 

Inaugural poets, like other inaugural speakers, have always been chosen for symbolic reasons as well.  John F. Kennedy's choice of Robert Frost as the first inaugural poet was the closest to entirely merit based.  When John F. Kennedy chose him, Frost was something like our national poet.  He was beloved, had carefully tended his reputation as the people's poet, and was widely (though sometimes grudgingly) admired by other poets.  (The closest poet to this status today is probably Billy Collins, but he does not have Frost's status among fellow poets and does not seem quite so all- American).  Although Frost was an obvious pick, he also symbolized the old fashioned (implicitly Protestant) traditions of rural America, a constituency Kennedy wanted to reach.  Bill Clinton's choice of Maya Angelou in 1993 reinforced his sympathy for minorities, and 1997 Miller Williams represented homespun Arkansas wisdom--Clinton as a man of the people. 

A key attraction of Alexander to Obama, it seems to me, is that her poetry is intensely race conscious, but in a way that is less hostile to mainstream American culture and less anchored in grievance than the work of many of the best known black poets of the past generation.  She is, in a sense, a bridge between that past and post racial politicians like Obama himself.  (More on this, hopefully, in a follow up post on Alexander's poems once I've read more of it).

Continue reading "Inaugural Poets--Skeel" »

The New York Times noted in a small article this morning that President-elect Obama has invited Rick Warren to give the invocation at his inauguration, and called this an "olive branch" to evangelicals. Two thoughts on the choice.

First, as the article suggests, the pick confirms that Rick Warren is the new Billy Graham- the obvious choice for this kind of honor. The contrast between the Warren and Graham as leading public evangelicals is striking. With a couple of exceptions, Graham resolutely avoided social issues, whereas Warren has made them a centerpiece of his ministry. This is dramatic testimony, it seems to me, of the extent to which some of the emphases of evangelicalism are changing. In some respects, Warren has less in common with Graham than with the early twentieth century evangelicals (such as John R. Mott of the YMCA and Student Volunteer Movement) who treated social issues and evangelism as inextricably intertwined.

Warren's prominence does not necessarily mean, however- and this is the second point- that evangelicals will be an important part of the Obama era. Evangelical political influence may well have peaked. Evangelicals played surprisingly little role in the election- and not because Obama made significant inroads; although he won a higher percentage of young evangelical votes than John Kerry in 2004, the overall percentages were nearly the same, with McCain winning well over 70%.

I suspect the most noteworthy development in Protestant Christianity in an Obama era may be at least a temporary reversal of the decades of decline in mainline Protestantism in America. Although Obama hobnobs with a few prominent evangelicals, and his first memoir prominently featured a conversion story, his instincts seem much more in line with mainline Protestantism than with evangelicalism. The frequent comparisons to Lincoln and Roosevelt are fully consistent with this- and Obama also seems to me to have some similarities to the young Woodrow Wilson. In historical terms, Obama is a Progressive, not a Populist, and this may bode well for the mainline Protestant denominations that are the Progressives' principal religious heirs.

One of the most exciting contemporary poets is the Polish poet Adam Zagajewski. I review "Eternal Enemies," his new book of poems, here. But don't take my word for it. Next time you're in a bookstore, skim through a few of the poems in "Eternal Enemies." Even if you've vowed never to read a book of poems, he may be the kind of poet who will make you change your mind, or at least make a small exception to the vow.

Here's the first poem, "Star" (set in Krakow, where Zagajewski lived during his college years), which establishes the tone of the book:

I returned to you years later,
gray and lovely city,
unchanging city
buried in the waters of the past.

I'm no longer the student
of philosophy, poetry, and curiosity,
I'm not the young poet who wrote
too many lines

and wandered in the maze
of narrow streets and illusions.
The sovereign of clocks and shadows has touched my brow with his hand,

but still I'm guided by
a star by brightness
and only brightness
can undo or save me.

            A few weeks ago, I was struck by a line in Abraham Kuyper's "Lectures on Calvinism" (1898), one of the great (and accessible!) modern Protestant works on politics and law.   In a world without sin, Kuyper wrote, "every rule and ordinance and law would drop away, even as all control and assertion of the power of the magistrate would disappear."  Heaven, he suggests, is no place for law or lawyers.

            We lawyers come in for a lot of abuse, much of it justified, but I'm not so sure our work will disappear in heaven.  The conclusion that law and thus lawyers will be unnecessary seems to assume that in heaven we will be all seeing and all knowing, and all complexity will simply disappear.  I'm not sure where that assumption comes from; it doesn't seem especially consistent with the hints of heaven, with all its richness and diversity, that we get in the Bible.  The absence of sin doesn't necessarily mean the absence of complexity, and where there is complexity law and lawyers seem to have a role to play.

            I don't think it's entirely coincidental that the Holy Spirit is described in the Bible as an advocate and a counselor, both distinctively lawyerly roles.  The lawyers in heaven will be much better lawyers, but I suspect they will still be dispensing legal advice.

            I'd be curious as to whether others agree.

According to news reports, Timothy Geithner, chair of the Federal Reserve Bank in New York, will be the new Treasury Secretary--not Larry Summers. Perhaps Hillary Clinton and Summers in the top two slots was one ex-Clinton official too many: as if George W. Bush had picked Colin Powell and Nicholas Brady, rather than Powell and Paul O'Neill. (Come to think of it, that would have been an improvement.) If so, I fear Obama chose the wrong one.

I look forward to reading, someday, the backstory behind what now looks like the inevitable Hillary Clinton appointment. It astonishes me that Obama stood up to pressure to name Clinton as his running mate, at a time when the election might have turned on his choice--and then turned around and offered her his top cabinet slot. All the reasons why the VP slot didn't go to her would seem to apply to the Secretary of State position as well--plus one more: A Vice President pretty much can't resign even if he or she is out of sorts with the Administration, but a Secretary of State can. Cyrus Vance did, and Colin Powell probably thought about it. Think that gives Clinton some leverage over her ostensible boss? I bet so, and I bet she thinks so too. This turn of events seems strange, and not reassuring. I'd be a lot happier if it were Richard Holbrooke and Summers rather than Clinton and Geithner. I hope the financial markets and our allies abroad disagree. . .

It would be an exaggerated piece of name-dropping to say that I know Larry Summers.  I'm one of thousands of people who've had contact with him over the years.  For me, that contact consists of two hour-long conversations with him that just included the two of us, a half-dozen more that included another half-dozen people each, plus a steady diet of the speeches that one sees university presidents give.  More than all that, I watched him govern a mostly ungovernable university.  Think running the Treasury Department during a world-wide recession is a tough job?  Come to Cambridge and try running Harvard:  not administering it while raising gobs of money and telling all your faculty bosses (that's how the real lines of authority work here) how wonderful we are, but actually running the place, bending it to your will as the best managers do.  Treasury is a piece of cake by comparison.

The conventional wisdom is that Summers' presidency of Harvard was a failure.  It isn't so.  Undergraduate education is better than it was when he took office, because he made it important--which it wasn't before, and isn't at most research universities.  Some of the weaker units at the university--the Law School was one of them--are also better than when he took office, because he refused to settle for mediocrity and pushed them to do better.  (And, in the Law School, because he hired a great Dean, Elena Kagan, who understood his agenda and had the judgment and political skills to make it her own.)  Best of all by my lights, he pushed against the Ivy League admissions culture that has made America's best private universities what they were generations ago:  finishing schools for the children of America's upper class.  Talented kids from the bottom half of the income spectrum have a shot at going to school here because Larry Summers believed in giving them that shot.  Good for him.

For all those reasons and several more besides, I loved working for Summers; it made me proud to be an academic, and proud to teach at Harvard.  And the guy did a terrific job at Treasury in the waning days of the Clinton Administration.  But those aren't the reasons I'm hoping to see him in soon-to-be President Obama's cabinet.  Two other reasons matter vastly more.

Continue reading "For Larry Summers--Stuntz" »

On Wednesday of this week, I had my last chemo session--at least for awhile and maybe for good.  I'm not quite done--I'll carry around a pump with a drug called (believe it or not) 5-FU until tomorrow afternoon.  Cancer treatment isn't usually funny, but that name cracks me up.  Anyway, once I'm unhooked, I'll be finished with chemo until the cancer returns, and perhaps even then.  The odds that I'll survive another five years or longer are about 30% now, which is very good indeed for a patient with stage 4 gastrointestinal cancer.  Even if I'm on the wrong side of those odds, my chances of living at least another couple of years are significantly better than they were several months ago.  All of which is very good news, for which I'm very grateful.  God is good, even--especially--in hard times.

That good news means my life is about to change.  Save for three weeks in June, the past nine months have been spent having surgery, recovering from surgery, or having weekly chemo sessions (plus a couple of days of the amusingly named drug every other week).  Those chemo sessions and the days between them have been rough--either because that's the nature of the relevant drugs or because I'm unusually susceptible to the side effects.  Maybe a little of both.  Nausea and fatigue have been more or less constant.  Along the way, I've suffered skin rashes, mouth pain, some bleeding in fingers and toes, various other irritating conditions that are too gross to describe, and--worst of all--increasing stupidity.  I so, so look forward to recovering the more-or-less normal use of my body, not to mention a functional brain.

It's hardly surprising that the prospect of finishing cancer treatment--again, at least for the time being--is very pleasant indeed; I can't type the phrase without smiling.  What surprises me is that, in some ways, the prospect is also a little sad.

Continue reading "Chemo's End, Cancer's Closet--Stuntz" »