If I Were King

On Sunday, wing nut Republican candidate for governor of New York Carl Paladino, side by side with sort-of Hassidic rabbi Yechezkel Roth, made a speech to Orthodox Jewish leaders. Among other things, he said, “I just think my children and your children would be much better off and much more successful getting married and raising a family, and I don’t want them to be brainwashed into thinking that homosexuality is an equally valid and successful option — it isn’t.” Cameras were rolling, it’s on YouTube.

Note that the rabbi in question is not exactly a big deal, his synagogue has roughly two dozen members. That’s even fewer than the fundamentalist Florida fruitcake that made waves with plans to burn a Qur’an last month.

Well, Carl, homosexuality is not an option, it’s a fact. It’s valid in the same way as gravity is, and absent interference from outsiders with no legitimate role in the question, it’s successful.

It’s also a straw man here, nobody has any intention of brainwashing anyone regarding homosexuality. You’re straight? Fine. Nobody is asking you to have sex with a person of the same sex. Nobody even wants you to watch.

And your children aren’t going to choose to be homosexual because there are homosexuals in the classroom or homosexual couples living on your street. (Your legitimate children probably already have established their sexual orientation.) Nobody chooses to be a homosexual. It’s exactly the same as for heterosexuals, you and I didn’t choose that either. (Maybe I shouldn’t speak for you. I know I didn’t choose to be straight, and I’ve never heard of anyone who chose to be straight or gay. At some point we all become aware of our sexuality but we don’t choose it.) You don’t get to take credit for choosing to be straight.

There are options — choices to make — regarding sexuality. Promiscuity is a bad choice. Abusing positions of power for sexual conquests is a bad choice. Fidelity to marital vows is a good choice. You could, for example, take credit for being monogamous and faithful. That’s hypothetical, of course. You could have, if you had been monogamous and faithful. Having sex with an employee is an abuse of your position of personal power. I hope you are providing well for your former employee and the daughter you conceived.

If I Were King, my commitment to freedom of speech would allow Paladino to say the same silly things. Subjects like that could lead to great savings, a court jester would not be needed.

Last week (20 September) the New York Times reported that GMAC was suspending foreclosure actions after it was revealed that those responsible for preparing affidavits for the court filings had been signing affidavits at a rate incompatible with a review any more detailed than making sure there was an amount due and a borrower’s name on them. Actually, they announced that they would be suspending foreclosures in the 23 states in which foreclosures take place in a courtroom. That seemed odd.

Yesterday the Times reported that JPMorgan Chase was following suit. Strangely enough, Morgan unit is also only suspending foreclosures in 23 states. This is wrong. Given that it is almost certain that it is in those 23 states, where defendants and their counsel have a venue for challenging the lenders’ paperwork, that the problems were the fewest, smallest, and most subject to being found out.

Two national lenders have now both decided to carry on with their suspect actions against homeowners in the states where they have the best chance of getting away with it, and taking a second look at the paperwork in the states where they might get caught at something underhanded. If I Were King, or a governor of one of the other 27 states, I would order that all foreclosures be vacated that had not yet led to new owners paying for the repossessed properties, and that no new filings would be allowed from these vendors until they had submitted plans for preventing recurrence. I would also instruct my investigators to survey the courts to see if other banks that have not yet admitted to the problem needed to be dealt with in the same way.

Congress is turning its attention to abuses by credit card issuers (i.e., banks) and taking steps to reign in the most egregious of these. Most notably, Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) drafted H.R. 627, the Credit Cardholders Bill of Rights Act of 2009 with an effective date of twelve months after enactment or 30 June 2010. Apparently the Federal Reserve Board needs five months to draft rules to implement the act, which should take any reasonable group of people an afternoon – even if the group included attorneys. And the banks claim that they need time to make changes to their systems.  Stuff and nonsense! If I Were King, I’d allow 30 days, becuase I’d be a very generous and lenient monarch.

I’d allow certain exceptions, of course. Any card issuer could be granted additional time to comply if their IT staff (and here I’m talking about programmers, not the suits who wouldn’t know a variable from an array or define “third normal form”) would come to the throne room and explain why they couldn’t have these changes coded by the weekend.

We don’t write many letters these days. We don’t want to spend the time writing them, we don’t want to spend the time reading them, and we certainly don’t want to wait for them to be carried physically to distant places. We want it short, and we want it now. The era of Twitter.

I’ve recently been immersed in a project involving letters, about 700 of them. Obviously artifacts of another era. Specifically, they were written during the Great Depression. A man named James Linsley, a street-car operator at Minneapolis, Minnesota, longed to return to farming, and wanted his son to learn the ways of the farmer. With his wife Martha, he bought a small farm at Nevis, Minnesota, but there was no way to give up his paycheck. So in the summer of 1932, Martha and their two children, John and Ruth, decamped for Nevis, while James stayed in town.

It didn’t work. Two years later they had lost the farm and all were back in the city. But while they were giving it their best shot, the letters flew back and forth. On some days, all three of the Nevis group wrote to James, and James sometimes wrote to all three of them on the same day as well.

Many years later, when little Ruth was in her 80s, she bought a manual typewriter and transcribed the text of all the letters, and wrote a charming narrative about the experience. The letters are full of marvelous details about, both letters and narrative present a close-up look at life in that time and place.

Ruth’s daughter took the typescript to a friend of mine to be converted to text, and started editing the files. I was hired to build a website. I’m pretty proud of it right now, and when all the navigation is finished in a few days, I’ll be unbearable. Fifteen of the forty chapters are now up, along with about 170 of the letters. The DearDaddy.com home page is up, but if you want to dig into the content now you’ll need this link to the Our Story page.

Now that we are in the hardest economic times since the Linsley’s tried their hands at farming three quarters of a century ago, there may be some value in taking a look at those letters. Just don’t expect it to be as quick as digesting the 140 characters of a tweet.

Larkin roused me from sleep a few minutes ago, demanding that I get up because the “house across the way” was on fire. She had already called 911. In a daze, I went to an east window and didn’t see anything, then went to another room and looked to the north. I flung open the window and just stared. Less than a hundred yards away, eating at a fir tree, was an incredible tower of blackly orange flame against the night, with the occasional explosion.

We’ve been here only three months and don’t know who lives there. Lived there, certainly noone lives there now. We joined a few neighbors in less than complete dress on the cold and misty street. By the time any of us were out there, it was beyond anything that any of us could do, we’d have to wait for the firetrucks. But I don’t have much hope that much of anything was saved, when I first saw it there was clearly no way to save the building, and not much chance of saving anyone or anything left inside.

One of the neighbors said it was a shop or a barn, and that the house next door was on fire too. The angry tower of flame I first saw, and the taste of the smoke that filled the street outside, suggested oil and tires, but I have no real idea. I just know that there was nothing a regular homeowner could have done. No garden hose was going to slow this down. Incredible power was at work as we huddled on the edge of the activity, unable to see or change what was happening, stunned. Awful, staring through the darkness into the gates of hell.

Maybe a quarter hour later, the flames are gone, the billows rising from the site are the white of steam. The night is lit by halogen floods and the flashing red lights from the firetrucks that ring the block. Those who know what to do in the face of such conflagration are mopping things up.

If I Were King, I would have been just as powerless.

(Another gem rescued by the WayBack Machine, originally filed on 31 October 2004)