tisiwoota

TO MY TWENTIES

How lucky that I ran into you
When everything was possible
For my legs and arms, and with hope in my heart
And so happy to see any woman
O woman! O my twentieth year!
Basking in you, you
Oasis from both growing and decay
Fantastic unheard of nine- or ten-year oasis
A palm tree, hey! And then another
And another (and water!)
I’m still very impressed by you. Whither,
Midst falling decades, have you gone? Oh in what lucky fellow,
Unsure of himself, upset, and unemployable
For the moment in any case, do you live now?
From my window I drop a nickel
By mistake. With
You I race down to get it
But I find there on
The street instead, a good friend,
X—- N——, who says to me
Kenneth do you have a minute?
And I say yes! I am in my twenties!
I have plenty of time! In you I marry,
In you I first go to France; I make my best friends
In you, and a few enemies. I
Write a lot and am living all the time
And thinking about living. I loved to frequent you
After my teens and before my thirties.
You three together in a bar
I always preferred you because you were midmost
Most lustrous apparently strongest
Although now that I look back on you
What part have you played?
You never, ever, were stingy.
What you gave me you gave whole
But as for telling
Me how best to use it
You weren’t a genius at that.
Twenties, my soul
Is yours for the asking
You know that, if you ever come back.

This article was featured on 3qd a while back, but I’ve only gotten around to reading it just now. And it’s very, very powerful:

On the morning of april 5, 1968, a Friday, Steven Armstrong stepped into Jane Elliott’s third-grade classroom in Riceville, Iowa. “Hey, Mrs. Elliott,” Steven yelled as he slung his books on his desk.

“They shot that King yesterday. Why’d they shoot that King?”

All 28 children found their desks, and Elliott said she had something special for them to do, to begin to understand the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. the day before. “How do you think it would feel to be a Negro boy or girl?” she asked the children, who were white. “It would be hard to know, wouldn’t it, unless we actually experienced discrimination ourselves. Would you like to find out?”

…That spring morning 37 years ago, the blue-eyed children were set apart from the children with brown or green eyes. Elliott pulled out green construction paper armbands and asked each of the blue-eyed kids to wear one. “The brown-eyed people are the better people in this room,” Elliott
began. “They are cleaner and they are smarter.”

…On Monday, Elliott reversed the exercise, and the brown-eyed kids were told how shifty, dumb and lazy theywere. Later, it would occur to Elliott that the blueys were much less nasty than the brown-eyed kids had been, perhaps because the blue-eyed kids had felt the sting of being ostracized and didn’t want to inflict it on their former tormentors.

…Hundreds of viewers [of the Tonight Show] wrote letters saying Elliott’s work appalled them. “How dare you try this cruel experiment out on white children,” one said. “Black children grow up accustomed to such behavior, but white children, there’s no way they could possibly understand it. It’s cruel to white children and will cause them great psychological damage.”

We forget so easily what the world was like– and even more easily, how similar in ways it still is (until something happens to remind us).

Complete text of the Roberts hearing can be found here.

Fascinating– I recommend skimming through if you can get a chance. This guy is clearly his own thinker. It will be interesting to see what he will do once he can afford to be less cagey (but notice how brilliant his caginess is– spot-on evasion with grace).

*~*~*

This excerpt, I think, is the key to who Roberts is. And I love it.

LEAHY: You’ve also said [Justice Jackson, FDR’s attorney general, who was a proponent of expansive executive powers] was one of the justices you admire the most.

ROBERTS: He is, for a number of reasons. And what’s significant about that aspect of his career is here’s someone whose job it was to promote and defend an expansive view of executive powers as attorney general, which he did very effectively. And then as he went on the court, as you can tell from his decision in Youngstown, he took an entirely different view of a lot of issues; in one famous case even disagreeing with one of his own prior opinions. He wrote a long opinion about how he can’t believe he once held those views. I think it’s very important…

*~*~*

More highlights:

HATCH: …I just would like to ask you this question: Some of the philosophies he discussed were whether a judge should be an originalist, a strict constructionist, a fundamentalist, perfectionist, a majoritarian or minimalist — which of those categories do you fit in?

ROBERTS: Like most people, I resist the labels. I have told people, when pressed, that I prefer to be known as a modest judge.

ROBERTS: …Part of that modesty has to do with being open to the considered views of your colleagues on the bench. I would say that’s one of the things I’ve learned the most in the past two years on the Court of Appeals: how valuable it is to function in a collegial way with your colleagues on the bench; other judges being open to your views; you being open to theirs.

They, after all, are in the same position you’re in. They’ve read the same briefs. They’ve heard the same arguments. They’ve looked at the same cases.

If they’re seeing things in a very different way, you need to be open to that and try to take another look at your view and make sure that you’re on solid ground. Now, I think that general approach results in a modest approach to judging which is good for the legal system as a whole.

[…]

HATCH: …But am I correct in interpreting that you are probably eclectic, that you would take whatever is the correct way of judging out of each one of those provisions? There may be truths in each one of those positions, and none of them absolutely creates an absolute way of judging.

ROBERTS: Well, I have said I do not have an overarching judicial philosophy that I bring to every case. And I think that’s true.

HATCH: OK.

ROBERTS: I tend to look at the cases from the bottom up rather than the top down. And I think all good judges focus a lot on the facts. We talk about the law, and that’s a great interest for all of us. But I think most cases turn on the facts, so you do have to know those. You have to know the record.

(more…)

LA Times:
Local Charities Fear a Drop in Their Fundraising

Already there are signs that the unprecedented generosity directed at victims of Hurricane Katrina is having an effect on nonprofit groups that rely on private donations to survive.

In Riverside County, several staffers at the Red Cross chapter were recently let go because funding had been steeply declining.

A lavish fundraiser for a cultural arts center set to take place at a Simi Valley horse ranch Sept. 18 was canceled due to poor ticket sales.

And officials at the United Way of Greater Los Angeles are worried that the focus on Katrina could hurt corporate and individual giving just as their biggest fundraising push of the year gets underway.

“It’s important that people realize that the nonprofits that are here are providing resources for a critical safety net that would not otherwise be there,” said Elise Buik, the group’s president and chief executive. “We have 90,000 homeless right here in Los Angeles County.”

In my Contracts reading just now, a good line by Judge C.J. Cardozo (New York Court of Appeals, 1927):

“The half truths of one generation tend at times to perpetuate themselves in the law as the whole truth of another, when constant repetition brings it about that qualifications, taken once for granted, are disregarded or forgotten”

As it happened, the first lunch seminar for students admitted to the joint degree program was on the same day as the first Constitutional Law class.

In the former, we discussed the ethics of gene patenting,* and how the United States, unlike Europe, does not provide for objection to patents on the grounds of “public morality”.

In the latter, we discussed Congress’ use of the interstate commerce clause to justify a federal law against medical marijuana.

Until this accidental juxtaposition, I’d never thought to compare these issues. But how interesting, that in one case our legal system should be so leery of taking moral concerns into account, yet in the other is perfectly willing– indeed, eager– to stretch legal concepts quite far** in order to regulate morality.

*~*~*

* Specifically, we met with the author of the study addressed in this article– which I now remember having read when it came out (It’s always a treat to have the chance to get a fuller perspective on people and issues in the media). And thanks to this experience, I’ve now been pointed to a letter in Science in which the authors refute one of the common criticisms that appears at the end of the Economist’s account. ((Basically, the authors were well-aware of the USPTO-guideline change that occurred in 1999; and assert that therefore the genre of patents they chose to analyze did not include any of the problematic kind that led to the policy alteration))

** The ground for invoking the Interstate Commerce Clause is that patients growing medical marijuana for their own use MIGHT sell it to persons in other states. Might? Methinks there must be some situation out there, involving permitted use of controlled substances, where application of a standard of _mere possibility_ of misuse to justify Congress stepping in to ban the activity would be clearly absurd and unthinkable. (Research on diseases that could conceivably be used by terrorists? I’m not immediately coming up with an equivalent involving the activities of private individuals…)