Katherine Addison's Blog, page 31

letter to Senator Johnson sent earlier this week (before Trump threatened N. Korea)

Dear Senator Johnson:

I am writing to ask you to persuade your Republican colleagues to abandon efforts to repeal the ACA. While I whole-heartedly believe that the American healthcare system needs to be reformed, repealing the ACA is not the way to begin. The ACA is not failing, is not in a death spiral, and would in fact be more and more successful if President Trump and Republican legislators would stop sabotaging it.

I am writing to ask you to reach out to your Democratic colleagues. I am writing to ask you to work on a reform process for the ACA that is built on bipartisan cooperation and includes committee work, public hearings, and the full, correct parliamentary procedure for Senate legislation.

There are so many other issues I am angry and/or frightened about, like President Trump's ban on transgender service people, the utter disgrace Jeff Sessions is making of the office of Attorney General, and this new and horrible attack on the rights of people in nursing homes, but I feel defeated by my prior knowledge that you are not interested in my concerns. I am writing anyway because it is something I can do in defense of my ideals and my country, unlike all the many things I can't.

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playing the piano is exactly like rock climbing

So this year, after a gap of twenty-five years, I started taking piano lessons again, focusing--because I'm an adult and get to choose for myself--on ragtime. There's a bunch of stuff around this decision that does not need to be explored at this juncture, because what I want to talk about is one of the biggest fucking paradigm shifts I've ever experienced.

I learned piano very much in the traditional you-learn-pieces-and-perform-them-at-recitals-and-they-get-progressively-harder mode (also traditional is the nice Lutheran lady teaching piano in her living room), and one of the reasons I started again was that I could work with somebody who went to UW-Madison for music--somebody, in other words, who's been exposed to the theoretical underpinnings not just of music, but of teaching.

Dude rocks my fucking world, I tell you what.

Partly, this is because I'm an adult and I've been exposed to the theoretical underpinnings of teaching (I always know when a teacher is using a particular pedagogical technique on me--which interestingly doesn't always make it less effective). I learn differently now and with a different understanding of what "learning" is. This is the place where Csikszentmihalyi has been extremely helpful to me, because I can recognize how a successful learning engagement works. ("Learning experience" would be a better phrase, but it already has connotations that are really kind of the opposite of what I mean.) And the pressure to learn pieces for recitals is mercifully off, which helps, too. But partly it's because this guy approaches music completely differently, bottom up instead of top down.

But the thing that has changed my relationship with my piano is something my teacher said (and I can't for the life of me remember what it was) that made me understand--quite literally for the first time in my life--that fingerings aren't arbitrary and they aren't just put in music so that teachers can judge whether students are obeying them or not. Here's where playing the piano is exactly like rock climbing:

The notes in the score are like the hand, finger, foot, and toe holds used to set a route in a climbing gym. You work the fingerings out yourself, the same way that a climber works out her own solution to how to get to the top of the wall using the holds available. And he said, "This music is for playing." A weirdass chord progression or run is like a difficult sequence in a route; it's a game, a puzzle that a musician who's been dead for 100 years set for all the pianists who came after him to solve. You work out the fingerings (4-5-3-5 WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK) so that you don't hang yourself out to dry, the same way that a climber works out her holds so that when she has only her right hand free, the next hold isn't three feet to her left. When you make a mistake, you laugh and pick yourself back up and go up the wall again, because it isn't a pass/fail test. It's a game. You have a sense of glee that you share with the route setter about solving this incredibly intricate puzzle almost--in a weird way--together.

What that means is, (1) playing piano, which I have always loved, is now infused with a sense of fun that it truly has never had; (2) I know what I'm learning--not just "music" but the route up the wall, the game that underlies the performance; (3) when I'm fumbling through a new chunk of music, I know why I'm fumbling. It's not because I'm stupid or the music is stupid; it's because my brain is trying to process so much new information that it gets overwhelmed. That's why I miss easy chords and consistently play that damn C-sharp when the piece is written in G. Because THAT'S WHAT THE LEARNING PROCESS LOOKS LIKE.

But honest to god the idea of music as a game being played between composer and performer, and not a game like tennis, but a game like riddling--riddle set and riddle answered--is a seismic paradigm shift for me. Everything looks different now.

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today's letter to Senator Johnson, tigers edition

Dear Senator Johnson:

Thank you for speaking out against Senator McConnell's methodology, which looks suspiciously more like tyranny than democracy. I hope that you will publicly refuse to vote to repeal the ACA with nothing lined up to take its place. McConnell's plan is catastrophic and could only be put forward by someone who neither knows nor cares anything about the healthcare needs of his constituents. I am strongly in favor of bipartisan reform for the ACA, and I hope that you will reach out to your Democratic colleagues to make that happen.

I know I will never persuade you that you are wrong about the effect of the free market, but, because I choose to believe that you are acting in good faith, I have to--in good faith--try again:

The problem with the free market is that it erodes ethics. Free-market capitalism says that ethics are irrelevant--if they're not actually a liability, making you less able to compete. This is why it is crucial that the government regulate corporations. The government doesn't need to worry about corporations making money. They'll take care of that part themselves. The government needs to ensure that they don't run roughshod over employees and consumers in the process. Deregulating everything and trusting to the free market to solve the problem is like opening all the cages and trusting the tigers to solve the food supply problem. Corporations, like tigers, will solve the problem for themselves. We need the government to make sure the problem is solved for everyone.

This is why we need government. This is why government should never be run on the corporate model. It is not a corporation, and if it is to succeed in providing justice for all citizens, it cannot be a corporation. It has to be the balance to the corporations, to keep their untrammeled free market competition from literally poisoning everything they touch. In the past fifty years, America has proved repeatedly that deregulation is not the answer. Deregulation only and always makes things worse, because--hey, wait for it--our country is not a corporation. Treating it like one merely destroys it.

This is why ethics are not something that can be discarded. Because without ethics, you get the Trump administration, and I have to tell you that, no matter how it looks from where you are, from where I am, all I see are tigers.


There's also email to Governor Walker about why isn't he one of the governors speaking out against ACA repeal?

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Today's letter to Senator Johnson, smug Republican apparatchiks edition

Dear Senator Johnson:

For most of this week, I've been too angry to write a letter. I'm angry at Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan and Steve Daines and all the rest of the smug Republican apparatchiks who think scoring points against Barack Obama is more important than the lives of tens of millions (if not hundreds of millions) of their constituents. I'm angry at the way the GOP is trying to bully the Congressional Budget Office into giving their healthcare bill a better score. And I'm afraid, Senator Johnson, that means that I'm angry at you.

Your weaseling around to try to make the CBO score "better" infuriates me. First because you're trying to change the rules of the game (to use Senator Daines' extremely unfortunate metaphor) so that you can reach the goalposts your party has moved with your actions this year. Second because, while l6 million people uninsured may be fewer than 22 million people uninsured, it is not BETTER.

I wish I thought I had any hope of making you understand that.

It appalls me that you have any say in the governing of our country. (You're not alone in that. I'm equally appalled that Paul Ryan has any say in the governing of our country. Not to mention Donald J. Trump.) It makes me cringe to think that when I say, "I live in Wisconsin," people will now immediately associate that with the guy who argued that 16 million people uninsured was a meaningful improvement over 22 million people uninsured. And it infuriates me that you, my elected representative to the United States Senate, demonstrably and out of your own mouth care not a single iota about my welfare, or the welfare of 99% of your other constituents.

We both know you won't read this letter. Honestly, that is the least of my disappointments in you.

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today's emails

Senate Republicans have sent the BCRA back to the CBO.

1. To Senator Ron Johnson:

Dear Senator Johnson:

You and I disagree fundamentally on what's wrong with the BCRA. This is only to be expected, given your belief in the power of the private sector, whereas my experience of being an American citizen for the past 42 years is that privatization and deregulation ALWAYS MAKES THINGS WORSE. *ALWAYS.* And your horrifying analogy between health insurance and car insurance gives me no confidence that you will ever understand my point of view.

However, I appreciate that you disagree with the BCRA, and I appreciate that you are willing to say so publicly. Please, even if we disagree on why it's wrong, continue to oppose the BCRA. The democratic process and democratic government only work with public and honest debate, NONE OF WHICH THE BCRA HAS HAD. Please vote against it. Please insist on public hearings.

Thank you.

2. To Senator Tammy Baldwin:

Dear Senator Baldwin:

Thank you for your opposition to the BCRA. This bill *TERRIFIES* me, both on my own behalf and on the behalf of my family and beloved friends. The BCRA threatens my ability to afford the health care I need to manage a number of "pre-existing conditions," including major depressive disorder, restless legs syndrome, and chronic migraines. Without management, these conditions will destroy my ability to be productive, and they will make my life a daily misery. I promise I am not exaggerating. My friends who are self-employed artists, who were only able to pursue their dreams because of the ACA, are now facing the loss of the health insurance (i.e., the access to affordable and sufficient care) they, too, desperately need.

Please continue to speak out against this cruel bill. Please continue to fight it.

Thank you.

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UBC: Roughead, Glengarry's Way

Glengarry's Way, and Other Studies by William Roughead

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I am extremely fond of William Roughead, and my rating of this book--fair warning--reflects that. This is a collection of ten essays on Scottish crime and Scottish trials, courts, lawyers, and judges, focusing mainly on the eighteenth and nineteenth century. None of them are crimes or trials you will ever have heard of, unless you are a devotee of Sir Walter Scott, and I read purely for the pleasure of Roughead's voice and personality--and incidentally a great deal of information about Edinburgh and the history of the Scottish legal system, neither of which I know anything about.

If you like this sort of thing, as Abraham Lincoln said, this is the sort of thing you'll like.



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UBC: Jesse, Murder & its motives

Murder & its motives by F. Tennyson Jesse

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This book is extremely dated, with its talk of "moral imbeciles" and its somewhat naive belief that the motives for murder can be neatly separated in 6 categories (gain, revenge, elimination, jealousy, lust for killing, and conviction--she does admit there can be overlap). Jesse is a clear precursor of modern profilers, attempting to figure out what kind of person commits murder and what motivates them, even if her attempts seem clumsy now. And she provides excellent true crime writing. She writes clear and vivid narratives of the crimes of her subjects: William Palmer; Constance Kent; a dreadful pair of siblings, Aime and Aimee de Querangal; Mary Eleanor Pearcy; Thomas Neill Cream; and Felice Orsini, who tried and failed to assassinate Napoleon III. She conveys the horror of murder better than most of the true crime writers I've read, particularly in the chapter on Mrs. Pearcy.



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UBC: Lefebure, Murder on the Home Front

Murder on the Home Front: A True Story of Morgues, Murderers, and Mysteries During the London Blitz by Molly Lefebure

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Molly Lefebure was a remarkable woman. I just wish she'd let it show.

I'm giving Murder on the Home Front four stars for its value as a primary source about living in London during World War II. Lefebure captures vividly what it felt like to go through the Blitz, and about the sheer hell of carrying on with daily life in a city that was being destroyed around your ears. She's an excellent, engaging writer with occasional startlingly poetic turns of phrase.

But her persona. Oh dear god I wanted to drown her in a bucket. She is chipper and cozy, and she presents herself as a person with barely two thoughts to scrape together in her head, which a glance at her biography shows is manifestly untrue. And while she's being chipper and cozy in the foreground, her job, as secretary to Keith Simpson, would be fascinating if she'd let us see it.

She is not a true crime writer. She doesn't have the knack (and there is definitely a knack to it), and her focus is always just slightly off-center--or, conversely, my focus is slightly off-center. Despite the fabulous opening line: The murdered baby had been found in a small suitcase.: this is much more about living in London during World War II and happening to have an unusual job, replete with "characters" to provide anecdotes, than it is about, say, the practice of forensic pathology between 1941 and 1946. It is very decidedly a memoir.

So, fascinating book, just not quite in the way I wanted it to be.



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UBC: Badal, In the Wake of the Butcher

In the Wake of the Butcher: Cleveland's Torso Murders by James Jessen Badal

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

[There is apparently a revised and updated edition of this book, which I will be keeping an eye out for.]

This was a much better book than Torso: The Story of Eliot Ness and the Search for a Psychopathic Killer. Badal is a good writer, he's done extensive primary research, and he's not trying to argue an indefensible thesis. He lays the baffling story of the Cleveland Torso Murders (as baffling in their way as The Thames Torso Murders) out clearly and with careful attention both to maintaining narrative and to exploring the sheer weirdness both of the murders and of the (exonerated) suspects.

Ironically, because Badal has a better command of his material, he does a better job of smoothing out the homophobia and racism that Nickel's more awkward book left on display. (The classism is still there. There's nothing you can do about the classism in this story.) And Badal's hero in this book is very clearly Peter Merylo, the Cleveland detective who became obsessed with the Butcher, but who was never able to catch him (and not coincidentally, whose daughter gave Badal open access to the previously untapped wealth of primary material of her father's papers). So Badal is pro-Cleveland police (as opposed to the Cuyahoga County Sheriff's Office, which behaved disgracefully and which Badal ignores as much as possible). Badal does not talk about racism. And it's telling that his only apparent interest in questions of sexual identity and homophobia is to defend Edward Andrassy from the widespread accusations of being homosexual--instead of taking the stance I would have preferred to see, of pointing out that there's nothing wrong with non-heterosexual preferences, and what does it say about the detectives, the press, and the researchers that they treat it as "deviancy"?

And, to finish out my round of caveats, Badal is very distinctly an apologist for Eliot Ness, always looking for the best interpretation of his actions. He says about the disastrous mistake of the shantytown raid in August 1938:

Whether his actions in the final weeks of August were the knee jerk responses of a man desperately in need of results or the appropriate, well-planned measures of an accomplished professional seems to be a matter of personal interpretation, not to say prejudice. In either case, there remains something both wonderfully heroic and perhaps sadly anachronistic in the image of the onetime G-man standing resolutely in Kingsbury Run, ax handle in hand, overseeing his men on their methodical march of destruction through the shantytown.
(150)

. . . "wonderfully heroic"? In what alternate universe is there anything even remotely heroic about this ill-thought-out piece of security theater? In his desperate attempt to be seen to be doing something (even though in cold reality there was nothing he or anyone else could do), Ness chose this midnight raid, persecuting the destitute, homeless, and innocent men living in Kingsbury Run. That's not heroic. And it is totally Eliot Ness' just desserts that it backfired spectacularly, creating a PR debacle that his career never recovered from.

So Badal has his biases. As social history of Cleveland during the Kingsbury Run murders, this is not great. But as true crime, in terms of talking about the murders and the investigation--these poor detectives who have no conceptual framework for the Butcher and only the most primitive forensic science to help them, doing the best they can with the methodology they have--it is very good. He is very careful in talking about the victims, only two or maybe three of whom were ever identified, out of twelve or possibly thirteen--and that's the conservative estimate--not just lumping them together as unidentified transients, but remembering that each of them was a human being. And I feel like I came away from this book with a stronger sense of both the murders and the men who investigated them.

So, flawed but well worth reading.



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UBC: Wambaugh, Fire Lover

Fire Lover: A True Story by Joseph Wambaugh

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Unlike most post-WWII American true crime writers, Joseph Wambaugh has a prose style. It's a breeze, Chandleresque, tough-guy style: he uses slang, obscenities, metaphors for crying out loud. As an example, here's a paragraph about Ted Bundy:

All death-penalty lawyers remembered the time when America's most notorious violent serial offender, Ted Bundy, had wanted to do some life-and-death trading. After he'd had such a great time representing himself at his trial, giving interviews and fielding marriage proposals, it all had stopped. When he was just days away from his appointment with the Florida electric chair, he offered to locate his victims' bodies if the governor of Florida would commute his death sentence to life without parole. But the authorities told him, in effect, Too late, Ted. You got a date with Ol' Sparky, and Satan is waiting for his number-one draft pick.
(259-60)

So Wambaugh is an unfailingly entertaining writer, and he does a good job of conveying the black humor of law enforcement (not surprisingly, since he was a detective sergeant for the LAPD). He's maybe the only writer I've encountered who can show that humor well enough for a reader to share it. (Rule tries, occasionally, but it always falls flat and awkward.) And he's very good at tracking what he calls the balkanization of American law enforcement--the way that neighboring jurisdictions see themselves as being in competition rather than cooperation and sneer at each other like rival high schools. And he's absolutely willing to wade in and call people out on their mistakes and bad judgment. His heroes in this book are two firefighter/arson investigators: Marvin Casey, who had this serial arson case solved in 1987, four years and scores, if not hundreds, of fires before John Orr was finally arrested in 1991, but couldn't get anyone to listen to him because he was accusing an arson investigator (and because the fingerprint examiner made an indefensible blunder), and Steve Patterson who insisted in the face of cynical, condescending derision from cops that a cold case victim deserved to have them expend their precious time trying to solve her murder.

I appreciate Wambaugh's humor and his chutzpah. But everything has the defects of its virtues, and Wambaugh can get grating. I found this particularly true during the lengthy coverage of Orr's lengthy trials (more than 200 pages, so basically half the book) as Wambaugh caromed from patronizing the jury(/ies) to making catty comments about the prosecutors to taking potshots at the defense lawyers (and always just a little contemptuous of John Orr--and on that I'm in agreement with him). He is capable of respect for his subjects, but he doles it out sparingly: the fingerprint expert who cowboys up and admits his egregious mistake under oath in open court, and the people who testified in the penalty phase of John Orr's trial for murder about the loss of their loved ones in the Ole's Home Center fire in 1984 (that's the fire I've tagged this book with, because it is--astonishingly--the only time John Orr's fires actually succeeded in killing anyone).

John Orr is considered one of the worst--if not the worst (the other contender being Thomas Sweatt)--serial arsonists of the twentieth century. One of the ATF agents who investigated him thinks that Orr set more than 2,000 fires between 1984 and 1991. Orr used his training in arson investigation to commit arson, and he used his credentials as a deeply respected arson investigator to cover for his crimes. John Orr, first on the scene? Well, that's just how dedicated he is to his job. His novel/memoir, Points of Origin (Orr claims it's fact-based fiction; prosecutors claim it's a very thinly veiled record of his crimes) and his attempts to publish it make it clear just how willing Orr was to trade on his arson to get what he wanted. I'm with Joseph Wambaugh; this man deserves nothing but contempt. The more you point to his dedication as an arson investigator and the number of cases his solved and the number of investigators he trained, the worse his crimes look. As usual I'm conflicted about the death penalty, but I'm certainly glad that Orr got life without parole. He is not a person who either deserves or can be trusted with freedom.



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