Not a Potted Plant

It’s late 2001, I’m on my second date with Jane Grummett. It was a very promising meeting and start, but something seems a little bit off. On paper, though, she is the perfect girlfriend. Maybe more, at some point down the line. But something is a bit off. I ignore it. We can talk for hours.

It’s 2006. Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney is signing into law the Massachusetts Health Care Insurance Reform Law. I don’t know what to think about the plan in particular, but I’m excited about a Republican, somewhere, talking about health care reform and trying to find a market-friendly way to go about it.

He and I got off on the wrong foot. He seemed to go out of his way to slam my home town, thousands of miles away from the state he governs. And there was something so very… Mormon… about him. Living in Mormonland, that was not a plus. I realized that both of those objections were frivolous. I decided I would keep an eye on Governor Romney. There were rumors he wanted to run for president.

It’s New Years Eve 2001. Jane and I are together. I guess. If you can call it that. The lingering suspicions I’d previous harbored had been confirmed. And identified.

It was apparent from the start that she was more into me than I was in to her. Lord knew why. To compensate for this disparity, she kept trying to make herself up into something more… conspicuous… than she was. She’d tell me stories about herself that strained credibility, for instance. And the more I get to know her, the less I am feeling that I really know her.

It’s late 2007. I am on the Romney bandwagon. A pragmatic, solution-oriented man that is willing to see the political terrain for what it is and go for there. More stable than McCain. More likely to be able to win the primary.

There’s a story in the paper, though, that gives me pause. He donated money to Paul Tsongas and endorsed him. That didn’t bother me. What bothered me was the response he gave when questioned about it. He suggested that his support for Tsongas was based on the fact that Bush could beat him.

New Years 2002. You know, we all wear figurative makeup at the beginning of a relationship. We try to dress in ways that will elicit a positive response. If we’re smart.

But there is a difference between that and putting on clown makeup and a clown suit to implore the other to say PAY ATTENTION TO MEEEEEEE. Jane is wearing a clown suit. It was getting more and more obvious every time I saw her.

A week before I met her parents. We got along well. They told me some of those embarrassing stories that make people not want their significant others to meet their parents. I found them positively endearing. Reminding me of the glimpses I saw in her at the outset.

Now those glimpses are hidden underneath a clown suit.

Late 2007. There are a million ways that Romney could have handled the Tsongas situation. He could have said that Tsongas was the best Democratic alternative to Bush. He could have said Clinton was who he really feared and voted accordingly. He could have said that the Democratic Party was starting to look appealing but they’d lost their way.

I didn’t expect the truth, necessarily. I did want something that didn’t completely and utterly insult my intelligence. But that was what I got. I started looking for a new candidate. And with each passing month, I grew to dislike Romney more and more.

Early 2002. I dumped the girl in the clown suit. Perhaps the best breakup I ever maneuvered, convincingly indicating that I valued her as a person but that we weren’t right for one another in just a few sentences. I’m still proud of it.

Early 2009. Barack Obama is being sworn in as the 44th President of the United States. I genuinely hope he does a good job. I start looking back at Romney and think to myself that, ironically, he might have actually been a tougher candidate than McCain was, all polling to the contrary. The economic meltdown could really have played to Romney’s strengths the way it did McCain’s weaknesses. Maybe I will come around to Romney by 2012.

Summer 2002. I’m back on the dating market, at least tentatively. Evangeline, the girl I had already been leaning towards when I dumped Jane, had done what she always did. Eva was infuriating. Maddening. Irresponsible. But unmistakably, unquestionaly, genuine. And there she was, genuinely breaking my heart again.

I think about Jane. Wondering what she was up to. Thinking that I was making too much of the clown suit when, in so many other ways, we were a good match.

It’s 2011. Romney is running for president again. I look at the other candidates, and full-circle I am a Romney man again. Rick Perry? Are you kidding me?! If it’s Romney-Perry, I decide I will put a Romney bumper sticker on my car. It’s the first time I have ever seriously considered doing so.

It’s a little later in Summer 2002, and by chance I run into Jane. I light up. Happenstance perfection. She tells me to give her a call. I do. Within a half an hour, I can smell the clown makeup over the phone line. I keep thinking that if I could just get beyond that, there is a person that it would be worthwhile to really get to know. If she would give me a better idea of who she is when she gets exhausted from the game and the real stuff starts. I’m pretty sure I would like her. I think.

It’s January of 2012. I know that Romney is doing what he believes he has to in order to win the nomination. I wonder the extent to which he can walk it back to the center when he gets the nomination. As president, I am pretty sure he will not be who he is pretending to be at the moment. I actually expect him to be a president at least somewhat to my liking, once out of the GOP hothouse. I think.

Today, the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed an injunction against Oklahoma’s anti-Sharia law. I guest-blogged about this issue more than a year ago on the front page, even before I was anointed a sub-Ordinary Gentleman, and followed up on it later, musing that enjoining the certification of the state constitutional amendment was potentially a source of some tension. I make a preliminary post today — I was busy at work when I saw the story — and I include the text of that post as a postscript here. But this is the analysis I promised after I’d read the case. Continue Reading →

I was leaving Mormonland when Huntsman was getting his bearings as governor of Utah, so truth be told I did not really formulate much of an opinion of him. I did see later that he was working on trying to loosen up Utah’s anti-alcohol laws. I put that in the plus column. By and large, Huntsman seemed to be cut from the Business First, Religion Second mold that is not actually that uncommon among Utah statewide pols. The problem, for me, is that he is a Huntsman. Huntsman is one of those names you see a lot in Mormonland, like Shumway or Andrus or Young. Without knowing the history, I suspect that it involved a predecessor with a large number of wives. I knew a number of Huntsmans. I tended… not to like them. At all. The name became synonymous in my mind with Mormon Male Entitlement Syndrome. So when he first expressed interest in the presidency, I was not quick to hop on.

When he accepted the ambassadorship, I figured that was that. The offer struck me as a shrewd move on Obama’s part. Huntsman was qualified. He was apparently willing. For Jon Huntsman’s part, I figured that was simply his way of cashing out. He would take the ambassadorship, make all sorts of connections, then cash in on them when he got back. It seemed very much like a Huntsman thing to do. So I was surprised when he resigned to run against his boss and especially when he started taking swipes at China (so much for those connections). The more I learned about him, the less of a Huntsman he really was.

Despite potentially burning the China bridge, and quitting a nice ambassadorship to run for the presidency, I didn’t and still don’t understand exactly what he was doing. It’s one thing to differentiate yourself from the party whose ticket you’re running on, but he was going out of his way to bash his party. He was running with a gameplan doomed to failure. Now people are saying that 2016 was the goal all along. Maybe so, but I am actually skeptical of the soundness of the plan. He will be six years out of office, sitting on an ambassadorship appointment by The Enemy and a single term as the governor of a relatively low-population state that couldn’t be more different than the country as a whole. His biography isn’t bad, but it’s not going to get better.

A part of me wonders if there is some sort of blood feud between the Huntsmans and Romneys. Everything about Huntsman’s campaign seems to be to kneecap Mitt. Which makes sense, because as much as I question his odds in 2016, I think if the losing Republican nominee is a Mormon one-term governor with business experience who lacks credibility among the conservatives, they might not be inclined to go with another even if they do step back from the ledge.

Anyhow, slowly but surely he has been backing his way up to the top of list of my preferred candidates. Despite the fact that he’s considerably more conservative than I am. I view the presidency as one part competence and one part sail-setting. He may be conservative, but he’s not a warrior. That’s a real plus for me right now, in the current environment. I was actually considering putting a bumper sticker on my car, but inexplicably his website doesn’t have any of the printable sort (Gary Johnson’s does). I briefly considered putting this one on my car, but that would not win me friends here in Red America (county went 63% for McCain, 72% for Bush). So my tradition of never putting political bumper stickers on my car remains intact.

So, I hope that the good folks in New Hampshire give Huntsman a chance.

Even if he is a Huntsman.

Rhode Island, Connecticut, Virginia, Wyoming, Delaware, Massachusetts, Maryland, Vermont, South Dakota, South Carolina, New Hampshire, Maine, New Jersey, Alaska, New York, Alabama, North Carolina, Florida, Pennsylvania, Hawaii, Georgia, Texas, Colorado, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Washington, Oregon, New Mexico, Nebraska, West Virginia, Kansas, Minnesota, Tennessee, Arizona, Michigan, Idaho, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Ohio, California, Missouri, Kentucky, North Dakota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, Utah, Indiana, and last, Nevada.

Rhode Island is at a little over 2.5%. Nevada at just under .3%. The numbers from this list are from 2000, so may have changed. In 1990, the top ten went: Rhode Island, Connecticut, Wyoming, Virginia, Massachusetts, Delaware, Maryland, South Dakota, Vermont, and New Hampshire. So there is a little jockeying around, but it seems mostly consistent.

In a conversation about obesity and body chemicals, James Hanley observes:

Guilty as charged. Yep, I’m that reductionist. That doesn’t mean every problem we face needs a pharmaceutical solution, since lifestyle changes can also affect the proportions of particular chemicals in our body, but I do think that “free will” is just an illusion caused by those chemicals combining in our brains in particular ways.

I know that’s not a popular view, but I’ve never heard a compelling material explanation for true free will, and I’m a pretty hard-core materialist.

I am curious how James squares this with his libertarianism. Not that I don’t think it can be squared, mind you, but this is of particular interest to me because I am not unsympathetic to this view point and it was one of the levers in my mind that pushed me away from libertarianism.

My nascent libertarianism was founded on the belief of responsibility for the decisions that we make. If our decisions, and our judgment, are so subject to chemicals that are outside of our control, that changes things quite a bit. The weakness in libertarianism was the degree to which some people had environmental advantages over others even without government interference. Throw in chemical advantages, and it becomes extraordinarily hard to justify a system that rewards people based in good part on not only the family we are born into, but also our hardware and chemical wiring. It’s one thing to suggest that poor people need to hit the books and exhibit better judgments. It’s another to say that they were born with character traits that made education less appealing and likely to be less successful than for someone else. And it’s another thing to say “exhibit better judgment” when things like impulse control, strength-of-desire, and so on are subservient to our hardwiring.

Jakadrian Turner was 14 years old in November of 2010 when, despondent over her parents’ divorce and the recent death of her grandfather, she ran away from her home in Dallas, Texas. Somehow, she made her way to Houston, where she was arrested on suspicion of theft, and gave a fake name to the police.

Only she was fantastically unlucky in her choice of fake names.

Continue Reading →

The first part is here. There was a lot more to the post that must not have gotten saved or something. Maybe I eliminated it because it wasn’t central to my point (if I had one), but I do think it adds color.

There is an “alternative” school in Callie. A military school, actually, in close to the literal sense. It’s run in conjunction with the local national guard. It’s for the real hard cases from all around the state. I’ve never actually seen the campus, but I do see the kids marching around town in a “TEN-HUT!” sort of way. The Callie Academy is for the really hard cases. From bits and pieces I here, that’s where kids go before they get kicked out of the system entirely. My wife sees a lot of them as patients. She says that they are actually uniformly polite with the “yes ma’am” and “no ma’am” and among the most respectful patients she has. Instead of being accompanied by a parent, they’re accompanied by instructors (looking over their shoulders, I imagine, and causing the exceptional behavior).

This couldn’t be any more different than Redstone’s Alternative school. That’s where it really is approached more as a holding tank. I’ve frankly never seen anything like it. A fifteen year old pregnant girl in the hallway drops a pack of cigarettes and a teacher says “Hey, Molly, you dropped your cigarettes!” She picked them up and was on her way (yes, this actually happened). My own cigarettes never leave the car and aren’t even supposed to be there. There is no time I pull into the school and there aren’t a handful of kids smoking cigarettes at the grocery store across the street. I go to another corner of said grocery store, just so that I am not actually smoking with the students.

My first assignment had a kid take a cell phone call during class. The principal walked in. I’d told him to get off, but he waved me off saying he’d be done in a minute. The principal actually walked in at that point. I thought I was going to be in trouble, but he didn’t care. During PE, some kids who were ditching class came in and joined in the fun. I told the principal, who sent one kid back but let the rest stick around.

The odd thing about it is that the kids actually aren’t all that bad. They are mostly completely indifferent. They can’t really be bothered to challenge authority. Or maybe they just already won. When I had them for PE, I was left a note that they needed to play volleyball or basketball. Instead, they chose to play dodgeball. I told them that I would let the regular coach know that they said it was okay and they shrugged it off. They were pretty brutal with one another with volleyballs being thrown at heads from a few feet away. Never a complaint, though. Compare this to dodgeball in the grade school where all of my time is consumed comforting some kid that’s crying. (I’ve come to the conclusion that the bans on dodgeball have little to do with kids actually getting hurt – they’re really quite resilient – but rather a lot more to do with how annoying and time-consuming it is for teachers.)

They’re also oddly – and refreshingly, in some ways – self-directed. Fewer actual fights and feuds than in regular school. Everyone seems to know the hierarchy and acts accordingly. The weaker kids seem to be perceived as a waste of the stronger kids’ time.

I don’t know what the difference is between these kids and the ones who get sent to the military school. I suspect that the latter are considerably further down the misbehavior path. I also think it depends on what the parents consent to (a lot won’t consent to their kid being sent across the state). It’s kind of funny that the system has given up on one set of bad kids, but is going the extra mile with what I suspect are a worse set of kids.

I consider a lot of public education to be a mere holding tank, but this was the first school I had ever been to that seemed to simply accept its role as such. I don’t really know how I feel about that. It seems honest, but also depressing. And I do wonder what is going to happen to these kids when they are allowed to leave the system. And if the results are actually any worse than in a regular classroom. One of the worst assignments I ever had was a remedial class at the middle school. I don’t know what separated those kids from the ones shipped off to the alternative school. But lordy, lordy, were they worse-behaved. It just seemed to bring out the worst in them. A constant tug-of-war with struggle and rebellion.

So maybe, in the end, maybe this is the lesser of evils. Or maybe it’s just easier. It’s hard to say.

Except when referring to padded cells, when people talk about “rubber rooms” they are as likely as not talking about the New York education system’s reassignment centers, where teachers accused of misconduct bide their time until the district determines what to do with them.

I thought about that when I was confronted with a different sort of educational holding cell: alternative schools.

The school district I grew up in had an alternative school. It was a godsend. It took all (well, most) of the people that were disrupting everything in the regular classrooms and getting them the heck out of the way. I never labored under the illusion that they were getting much an education over there. I didn’t really care, though, because they weren’t getting an education where they were and at least this way they weren’t preventing anybody else from doing so. My perspective changed a little bit when I discovered that a friend of mine (a couple grades back) was sent to one. I never knew what for. I never asked. But he was a bright kid. I sort of gave him my sympathies as politely as I could (“That must have been tough” or something like that), but he actually shrugged it off. I hadn’t realized what a hellish place I thought it to be.

I have a couple of times been given an assignment to Redstone’s alternative school. It isn’t a hellish place. It helps, I suppose, that the school is comparatively underpopulated. When filling in for a social studies teacher for a half-day, I had all of six students over three periods assigned to the class. Only two showed up at all. My second assignment (another half-day) there was for PE. I thought that would be awful, but it wasn’t, really. Thirty kids over two periods. They self-organized and did their own thing.

The reason my only two assignments there have been half-days is that it seems largely staffed by coaches. So they miss half-days when they have some competition halfway across the state. While there are always exceptions, it was my experience that coaches tend to be the least… engaged… of classroom teachers.

Continued…

I want to get this 2012 prediction out there today, because the Iowa caucuses will take place tonight. Mitt Romney will be the Republican Party’s nominee for President. He and Jon Huntsman are the only serious choices left in the race, and the Republicans will go through — indeed, are currently going through — what the Democrats did in 2004: brief, passionate flirtations with energetic, emotional candidates, and then sobering up and picking a grownup.

As is my custom, I review herein my predictions from the start of 2011. Continue Reading →