Humor Now

A writer on Facebook thinks that jokes about the abortion controversy are outside of good taste and untethered to reasonable restraint.

Maybe she should lighten up.

Yes, sometimes things happen that are too serious to joke about.  Even The Daily Show went on hiatus after 9/11.  There is a time for everything, and the time is not always for making jokes.

But censure of humor sometimes has nothing to do with time and taste.  Often, it has to do with hostility to the point of view expressed humorously.  A person who despises a joke about the abortion controversy might – might – think hilarious a photo-shopped picture of President Obama as a bone-in-the-nose witch doctor.  So when somebody criticizes something that I smiled at, I don’t necessarily put on my shame face.

Timing and taste are important.  They are also subjective.  One person might be ready to see humor in something earlier than another.

So a German tourist couple was strangled in Bolivia and their bodies were returned to Germany.  Before they left for their exotic vacation, they probably expected to return and be surrounded by friends eager to find out about their adventure in the Third World.  And, in fact, when they returned to Germany, their friends did gather around them.

That is an irony best unmentioned at grave-side.  But as a comment on the irony and unpredictability of life, ghoulish as it is, it might be worth mentioning at another occasion.  And, certainly, a hard knot of grief might be massaged after the funeral by mourners trading light-hearted stories about their dead friends.

Another example.  I am dismayed by Fox News.  I am dismayed by incidents like their coverage of a D.C. rally featuring Sarah Palin.  Fox News showed a teeming crowd on the Washington Mall.  But the teeming crowd was from a different, better-attended rally.  You could tell that by looking at the foliage on the trees in the background.  (As pointed out by The Daily Show.)  And Fox’s coverage of the public-worker protesters in Wisconsin featured an unruly man shoving another man – with palm trees in the background.

I find these examples emblematic of Fox News.

Now, when he was on the air, Keith Olbermann blasted Fox News with indignation.  That indignation made Fox News seem big and dangerous.  Which they are, because they effectively masquerade as a news organization, and they are zealously followed.  But they are really an American version of The People’s Daily, a Chinese newspaper that I read for lack of a better option while I lived China.  So good on Keith Olbermann.

But good on The Daily Show for cutting Fox down to size by showing how their slavishness to conservative ideology makes them ridiculously manipulate “news”.

Is it really necessary to defend humor?  It’s not hard to do.

Humor is inherently creative.  It can shake us out of customary mental paths.  That can lead to good approaches to problems.  I talked with my brother about a brief written by an opposing lawyer.  The judge had requested briefing on an issue.  The opposing lawyer made a weak attempt to address the issue, then wrote an attack on our motives and characters.  I remarked, “If the law and the facts are against you, change the subject.”  It was a little bit of humor in lieu of angst.  It’s going into my reply brief.

Humor diverts.  Unhappiness comes; humor can make it a little lighter.   In law school, I had a happy apartment-sharing arrangement with two women.  While one of them, a beautiful, charming woman, was on vacation, she sent me a letter.  The letter asked me to move out.  My sorrow at being asked to move out was leavened because I could see humor in the contrast between the message and my initial joy of getting the letter.  Later, I shared this with the letter-writer, and we laughed.

But is there a difference in stolen laughs over little things and humor about the wider, dangerous world?  There is no question that the world is a very serious place right now.  Ours is a world of threats and menace.  Our material comfort is at risk and, I believe, we cannot take for granted the continuation of democracy in America.  Just to say two things.

In serious times, humor is an act of courage.  Fritz Gerlich wrote a satiric article in a Munich newspaper about eugenics-crazed Adolph Hitler.  He asked, “Does Hitler have Mongolian blood?”  That was courageous.  Gerlich was murdered in Dachau.

Sometimes humor is optimism. Persian king Xerxes sent word to Spartan king Leonidas that Persia’s arrows unleashed against the Spartans would “blot out the sun”.   Leonidas replied, “So much the better, we will fight in the shade.”

Sometimes humor is resignation, or hoping for the best in a bad situation.  We can’t do anything about the evil in the world, so we might as well grin and bear it.  If humor helps us to grin and bear it, fine.  So, in “Fiddler on the Roof”, the rabbi says, “A blessing for the Tsar? Of course! May God bless and keep the Tsar... far away from us!”

But again, time and place are all-important.  Winston Churchill didn’t start his “blood, toil, tears, and sweat” speech by warming up Parliament with a humorous anecdote.  Nor did Abraham Lincoln crack wise in the Gettysburg Address.  But Winston Churchill had a keen wit, and Abraham Lincoln was a genius teller of humorous stories.  Time and place.

So, to the woman who tolerates no jokes about the abortion controversy: you’re entitled to your opinion.  Bless you.  Who knows, maybe you’re right.  If I do the Long Fall after Divine Judgment, maybe it will be because, in my time on Earth, I wasn't serious enough.  That might be.

But I think that the salient sins that will eject me from eternal joy will have a bigger bore than jokes I’ve told or secret smiles at shocking quips.  And if the world is a waiting room for eternal compression, I won’t change it into the backstage for eternal expansion by never cracking a smile.  Nor will anyone, I think.

And if there’s humor in Hell, I’m sure I won’t enjoy it.  So on Earth, let me laugh.

Unstoppable Death

My friend Robert is dead.

He was younger than me. It was cancer.

As I thought of Robert today, my mind drifted to old movie monsters. They were slow moving -- almost laughably so. But even so, they were scary in their time. They were slow, but they didn’t sleep. They never rested.

Like death itself. When we're young, death is easy to outrun, if we’re even aware of it lurking somewhere out there. It can’t catch up to us when we're young. It can’t catch us unless we fall. It can’t catch us unless we succumb to some unexpected catastrophe that takes away our power to run away from it.

Like Robert -- Robert, on his death bed, unable to arise, unable to run away. In his wasted weakness, he couldn't fend off death, couldn't outrun it.  The slow-moving monster got past his doctors, got past his family, got past his guardian angels, and it took him.

It made him dead like itself.

Based on our knowledge of the arc of life, we know that one day, like Robert, we also will be in a state of mortal helplessness. We slow down. We tire. We know we need sleep. We begin to know the danger of that slow-moving monster that doesn’t sleep – that monster with it’s fatal persistence.

Science places barriers between us and the monster. So does wealth, health, and nutrition. But that dogged monster overcomes all barriers sooner or later.

And it can’t be killed. Because how do you kill death?

It starts its unstoppable journey to find us as soon as we possess life. It might start from far away, or from nearby. It might have many miles to travel before it finds us, or few. But whether many miles or few, the meeting must come.

It must come, and we know it must come, but we usually don't think about it.  Until we do.  Until it takes a friend or a relative.  Then we might resolve to eat healthier, exercise more, or visit the doctor for a checkup. We do these things hoping to put more miles between us and our tireless pursuer.

The last time I saw Robert, we were in a grocery store. It wasn’t that long ago, but it was before he knew he was sick. I was at the end of the checkout line, and he came from behind and bumped me, hard. In fun. I turned to see who bumped me. When I saw it was him, I smiled, put my arm around his shoulders, and said, "You don’t know how close you came to going unconscious."

Robert leaves a son and a daughter entering adulthood, and a wife.

Top ten reasons why an adult has to accompany a child into an R-rated movie.

10. To make sure the child doesn’t sneak into a G-rated movie.

9. It’s a form of public shaming for the adult.

8. So they can both be embarrassed.

7. To increase ticket sales.

6. To encourage quality "together time".

5. Because it’s cheaper than a brothel.

4. It’s the Motion Picture Association of America’s gift to pedophiles.

3. So the adult can explain the finer points of what they saw to the child.

2. So the child can explain the finer points of what they saw to the adult.

1. Because after the cow is out of the barn, it’s not too late to close the barn door.

Dumped!

She was an attractive Latina lawyer, my age. She was fit, smart, and religious.  I was dating her.

Was.

She broke up with me by e-mail.

In the e-mail, she talked about her life. She talked about her struggles and what she had to overcome. And she concluded that I was not as tough as she was. And that was unacceptable to her.

I acknowledged her wishes and wished her "good luck".

That might not have been much of a response. But she had just virtually called me a wimp. If I had written a sensitive, nurturing response, she would have accused me of lactating.

So it’s over.

Fine.

She didn’t have to tell me why she was breaking up. "I want to break up" is a fully sufficient reason. In my experience, women act like men can sue them if they don’t have a good reason for ending the relationship.

But in my experience, most men would rather not know. Because let’s face it, most women can come up with a pretty good reason. And that doesn’t build the guy’s self esteem.

But at the same time, if she didn’t say why, I would have been curious.

Still, I take the reason with a measure of skepticism.

That’s because of my philosophy of dating. I believe that some relationships are inherently hardy. Others are inherently weak. Only time reveals whether you’re relationship is hardy or weak. A hardy relationship will survive or thrive in circumstances that would drive the partners in a weak relationship apart.

In truth, I used to torture myself after break-ups. I used to say, "If I had only said (thus-and-such)!" Or "If only I hadn’t said (whatever)!"

But that was a long time ago, and I don’t torture myself that way any more. Because now I believe that when a relationship works out, or doesn’t, it has to do with who the people are on a deep level. The you-said-that stuff, or the you-are-thus-and-such stuff – these are just surface observations that might hint at the deep reasons why the relationship did or did not work. Or they might not.

If anything irritated me about the heave-ho, it was her attitude – sweet in its way – that she knew that I was going to be crushed by this. In fact, I liked her, and I was pursuing her for a reason, but I was not crushed.

After passing through many years, I have a certain fatalism about relationships. I use baby turtles as a metaphor. When I was young, I saw a National Geographic episode about sea turtles. The mother turtle lays her eggs in the sand. Predators eat some before they hatch, or they get stepped on by humans or animals. Of the baby sea turtles that hatch, some are eaten by predators on their way to the sea. In the sea, there are many more predators. Few sea turtles survive to adulthood.

To me, relationships are like baby sea turtles. It’s remarkable when one matures to adulthood. It’s un-remarkable when one doesn’t.

That attitude is consolation when a relationship doesn't work out. Also, for consolation, nothing beats sour grapes.

One of her stand-out qualities is her strict morality. Before the break-up, I saw her strict morality as a tonic from the disintegration of morality in the larger society. Her uprightness was admirably against the tide of a society that increasingly has bad values or no values at all. But after the break-up, I started to think, "If she were any more ‘principled’, she would wear a burqa."

Even with such consolations, I was not unaffected by the break-up. I got her e-mail this morning. All day, I was more irritated about things than I otherwise would be. So she hit a raw nerve.
    
But raw nerves heal. I think things are more tragic to young people, because they are not inured to disappointment. But we survivors of five-or-so decades know disappointment. Sometimes we even know tragedy. Over time, I have suffered great shocks. Compared to them, a break-up is a small thing. Life’s disappointments and shocks put every new unhappiness into perspective.

And compared to all of the tragedy in the world, this is very modest suffering. Thousands of people in Northeast Japan would swap misfortunes with me in a nanosecond.

So, I’m OK with her choice. Not happy, but OK.  I wish her well. And tomorrow is another day.

Suicide and Storm

In October 2002 the Angels were playing in the World Series, and the D.C. Snipers were taking lives, and I was trying to end my life.

I tried to end my life in my usual way: by starvation.

I had booked a flight to Germany and told my brother and law partner that I was going on vacation. Between booking and departure, I decided to die. The timing was favorable: by the time anybody wondered where I was, my track would be obscure.

I packed on the day that I was supposed to leave for Germany. I packed a small tent, a sleeping bag, a gas lantern, fuel, water bottles, iodine pills, a Bible, Don Quixote, a radio, extra batteries, and many cartons of cigarettes.

Then I took a cab toward Forest Falls. I didn’t take my own car, because I didn’t want my parked car to proclaim my nearness. I had the cab driver pull over before we got to the town.

Along the road to Forest Falls, a stream runs behind trees and brush. I hiked along a little-traveled trail next to the stream until I found a flat space large enough to pitch my tent in. The stream ran between my camp and the trail.

I purified stream water with the iodine pills. Since I planned to die, it might seem strange that I bothered to purify the water. But I was particular of my mode of death. And I wanted to die in relative comfort. In my last days, I didn’t want the agonies of giardia.

I passed the time. I smoked. I had calculated how long it would take to die, and I rationed my cigarettes to last to the end. At first, I smoked one cigarette every waking half hour. Then I started to think that I would outlive my estimate. So I cut back to one cigarette per hour. Between cigarettes, I checked my watch often to see when I could smoke my next cigarette.

I remember reading Don Quixote. I don’t remember reading the Bible. That’s not to say that I didn’t read it.

I listened to the World Series on the radio. I would miss parts of the games, because the radio’s reception wasn’t 100%. I was glad that the Angels won.

Death was proximate, but I wasn’t done with the worries of the world. A client’s legal brief was due in the Court of Appeal. One day, I hiked a mile or so to a Christian retreat center that I knew about, and I used their pay phone to call my brother to tell him who he should hire to write the brief. I recall making more than one trip to the retreat center to make calls. I don’t remember what the other calls were about. The walk to the retreat center was steep, and I knew that in time I would no longer have the strength to make the walk.

One day a young woman and her large dog came by my camp. The dog approached me, the woman didn’t. I petted the dog for a while, then they left.

I was calm while I waited to die. I was starving to death because I chose to starve to death. I knew that my strength would dwindle and then I would starve to death because I could not walk to safety. I accepted that.

Then the rain came. It was a huge storm. I stayed inside my tent, except to replenish my water and to urinate. The stream between my camp and the trail grew wider, deeper, and swifter. After a time, I saw that it was going to overwhelm my camp, so I tried to climb to higher ground. But my camp was hemmed in by thick bushes. I later found out they were poison oak.

The water rose. I foresaw death by being swept away in the flood, tumbling in the icy water until my head smashed into a rock. That wasn’t what I had planned, or wanted. I was reconciled to death by starvation, but not by the violence of a swift, cold flood.

So I made a decision. I knew that if I waited, I wouldn’t be able to enter the deepening, racing water without being swept away. I abandoned my camp and strained through the water to the trail. I made my way back to a picnic area and shivered. I had been in the camp for 26 days.

I walked to the road and called 9-1-1 on a emergency roadside phone. I told the operator who I was, and where I was. Deputy sheriffs came. As I sat in the back of a patrol car, the deputy asked me where I had camped, because he had looked and couldn’t find me. This stirred two reactions in me: astonishment that he knew that I was in the area (the trips to the retreat center must have tipped somebody off); and amazement at how lackadaisical his effort to find me had been. I was not all that hard to find if you knew that I was in the area.

I was taken to the county mental ward. It was unpleasant. They gave me a turkey sandwich that was so dry and tasteless that, even though I had not eaten in 26 days, I could not eat it. I was in a large room for hours with other involuntary detainees, while we waited to be screened for admission to the ward.

Two security guards controlled the room. They stood at a lectern in the middle of the room, channel surfing the TV. They shouted at the detainees. Without consulting professionals, they put people into solitary confinement. One young man wouldn’t stay in his chair. He slid out of his chair and lay on the floor in front of it – a crazy guy acting crazy, but not violent and not dangerous. The security guards confined him.

One of the detainees was a former client of mine. He was seriously schizophrenic. When his father was alive, his father took care of him. But his father had died, and he was alone in the world.

But I was afraid that he would see me and want to talk. When he was off his meds, he would babble. Listening to him, you could recognize words in his speech, and you could recognize that his sentences had grammatical structure, but you couldn’t make sense of what he was saying. If you tried to listen to him, he exhausted you mentally with no actual communication to reward the effort. So I sank down in my cushioned chair and covered my face as best I could with my hands. He didn’t see me among the twenty-some other detainees. When he fell asleep, I relaxed.

In time I was screened. I quickly told the screener that I had private insurance. I was eager to leave the county ward for the relative comfort of a private institution.

A privately-run treatment center sent an attractive, nice-seeming woman to collect me. On the way to her car, we left the county lock-up and walked to the front of the building and the glass door. It was still raining hard.

Inside the door, an old man stood looking out. He was homeless. He had feigned being a danger to himself to get out of the rain, to get a few free meals. It’s an old ruse. His ruse had been discovered, and he had been ejected from bedlam. He looked out at the watery maelstrom, unable to make himself walk into it.

What we Think when we Love Health-Care Reform, or Hate It.

Ken Karst, my constitutional-law professor, said there are only two principles of constitutional law. The first one is "Oh come on!" The second one is "Oh no you don’t!" Alright, I think his tongue was in his cheek.

But I think of Professor Karst when I think of the battle in the courts about health-care reform. There’s a lot of hullabaloo about constitutional originalism, and the Commerce Clause. Federal judges who have issued decisions on health-care reform are divided. I think it comes down to "Oh come on" versus "Oh no you don’t".

And let me go further. I think that, in the health-care-reform debate, a judge chooses "Oh come on" versus "Oh no you don’t" according to his or her relative affinity to two other principles.

Those principles are love-your-neighbor and social Darwinism.

I’ll explain that, but first let’s look at the issue that’s getting batted back and forth in federal courts. It’s the same issue that pundits argue about on television, and that people debate about on Facebook.

When people complain about the health-care reform (and if they haven’t drunk the death-panels Kool-Aid) they complain about the mandate to buy insurance. They complain that government has no right to make people buy health insurance.

The unpopular health-insurance mandate is necessary to carry out the most popular part of health-insurance reform: ensuring coverage for people with pre-existing conditions. A young woman growing up might have a weak heart. But she can’t stay on her parents’ health plan forever, and she won’t be able to get her own health insurance with her weak heart. Insurance companies ruthlessly screen out prospective customers who actually need health care. Health-care consumers are expensive. Healthy people are profitable for health-insurance companies. So, under current practice, health insurance is sold only to the healthy.

To combat the plight of this woman with the weak heart, and countless persons like her, the new law won’t let health-insurance companies deny coverage because of pre-existing conditions.

But, standing alone, that’s a prescription for abuse. Because if you could get health insurance any time you wanted it, even if you waited until you were sick, then nobody would buy it when they were healthy. Only sick people would buy insurance. And because everybody in the system was sick, it would be hugely expensive – not really "insurance" at all.

So the insurance mandate is necessary to keep people from gaming the system. It keeps health-insurance affordable and available to people with pre-existing conditions.

To be clear: without the insurance mandate, you can’t fairly require health-insurance companies to take in people with pre-existing conditions. It wouldn’t work.

So the insurance mandate is necessary so that people with pre-existing conditions can get health insurance.

Now, you can take two approaches to this. You can say, "The government has no right to make me buy health insurance." And, basically, that casts adrift people with pre-existing conditions. "That’s not my problem", you say. Fair enough. Lots of people agree with you. But let’s call that what it is: social Darwinism. Every man for himself. The smart and strong and rich and healthy survive. The weaklings – for example, the woman with the weak heart – they die. "And good riddance" you might say.

Here’s the opposite approach. You might not like to buy health insurance. But you do a lot of things only because you live in a cooperative society. You stop at red lights, even if you’re in a hurry. You contribute to the common defense and to infrastructure when you pay taxes, even though you might want to buy a big-screen TV instead. You serve on jury duty, even though you might be busy at work. You do these things because the benefits of living in a cooperative society outweigh the benefits of doing your own thing in an every-man-for-himself "society".

Politics is largely occupied with calibrating the balance between cooperative society and every-man-for-himself. This calibration is fundamental to the health-insurance-reform debate.

Even though you might not want health insurance, you get value for your money. It provides a good service that you might need. And by agreeing to take on this unwanted benefit, you are ensuring that people with preexisting conditions can have affordable health care. You are saving lives. You are loving your neighbor.

So: social Darwinism versus love-your-neighbor.

Some will say: This is an oversimplification. I answer: You’re right. But I think it’s a useful oversimplification. I think it approaches truth. I think that a social-Darwinist every-man-for-himself philosophy swirls in the psyche of every opponent of health-care reform.

Even Christians. Especially Christians. I’m not sentimental or naive about church-goers. The parable of the tares and the wheat (Matthew 13:24-43), to me, doesn’t just speak to the difference between two people sitting next to each other at the counter of a café. It’s also about two people sitting next to each other on the pew of a church. Here’s how far I go: it’s even about two ideas reposing in the mind of a Christian.

Examine your mind. See if there isn’t some social Darwinism every-man-for-himself in there. If there is, decide if you want it there. When I examine myself, I find it. In my best on-Earth-as-it-is-in-Heaven way, I try to correct it. Imperfectly. Very imperfectly. But then, on my better days, I’m pretty unimpressed with my own morality. On my better days.

If you oppose health-care reform, decide if you really think that your freedom not to buy health insurance is more important to you than the health of somebody who can’t get insurance because of a pre-existing condition.

It’s your money, but it’s his or her life.

Liberals and Conservatives Can Agree about Re-Funding Mental-Health Treatment

A friend of mine, John Engle,  wrote:

Jon,

I'd like you to bring up a subject on your blog or page if you could sometime. I rarely discuss politics, especially with friends, and with my "hit and miss" internet time, I wouldn't have time to moderate or reply much to this thread. My subject is this: around 20 or 25 years ago the federal government in cahoots with the state governments started and completed the elimination of state mental institutions. These institutions housed (and protected the public from) the criminally insane, and cared for those who were not mentally capable of caring for themselves (or their children). While there were abuses, I believe they served a very important purpose. I also think that eliminating the abuses instead of the institutions would have been much smarter and more practical.

The reasons for the closings vary but at the top of the list it would seem that it was a cost cutting measure, combined with the politically correct thinking of not wanting anyone to feel bad because they were labelled as mentally ill/ crazy/ insane.

My purpose for bringing this up stems from the Tuscon shooting. The guy (from a layman's standpoint) is clearly insane. Nobody in his right mind would do such a thing. From a legal standpoint it was obviously pre-meditated so the sanity question would be a weak defense. Would the system have caught this guy? Probably not, but maybe. I would be very interested to hear your perspective from an attorney's standpoint, and from a liberal one too. I personally am a conservative so I assume our opinions would differ. I would also like to hear the opinions of those who follow your posts and blog.

Hope all is well with you Jon, enjoy the Ca weather while we freeze here. Also say hello to Pete for me next time you talk.

Take Care

John

Conservatives and liberals can agree about the importance of funding for mental-health treatment.  I might not know that concern for people's self-esteem was a factor in closing treatment centers, but I don't doubt that that was an issue for some people.  Otherwise, I completely agree with John.

I agree completely, but I cannot forebear adding a cautionary note.  There was a time years ago that I witnessed mental-health involuntary-commitment hearings.  People who know me will understand.

There was one hearing that stood out.  The woman stood accused of taking items that belonged to her husband that she said were Satanic, piling them on her lawn, and setting them on fire.  That's why the police took her into custody.  The psychiatrist said that this was "religious ideation", and therefore showed mental illness.  The judge committed her to a mental hostpital.

Now, what she did was the kind of thing that churches like Vineyard might have endorsed.  If her husband in fact did have Satanic  property, then what she did was encouraged by Acts 19:19:

A number who had practiced sorcery brought their scrolls together and burned them publicly. When they calculated the value of the scrolls, the total came to fifty thousand drachmas.

So that case has left me with an uneasy feeling that the system could be abused.  Maybe it's cases like this that John had in mind when he spoke of "abuses".

But that is one case.  It's really only frightening if it became common to commit people for "religious ideation".   And if that happens, the particular mechanism of oppression won't matter: we're hammered.

In the meantime, we must re-fund mental health treatment.  I got treatment only because I had private health insurance.  Until that was discovered, the screener who examined me after I was seized was not interested in putting me in a clinic bed.  If I had been returned to the streets, my bones would now be spread in some obscure ditch somewhere in Southern California.  But that was me.  Many people now are un-insured.  And could be dangerous.

So, thank you John, for raising this issue.