My Father Was a Straight Man

Mon, 12 Jun 2017 00:00:00 -0400

My dad and George Burns, dancing.

When you cross Houston Street heading south towards the bottom of Manhattan and turn east towards the river and the Williamsburg Bridge, you come to one of New York’s original old neighborhoods: the Lower East Side. If you could listen through the curtain of time to a hundred and twenty years ago, you would hear clusters of voices talking, shouting over other voices, none of them speaking English. You would hear some German, some Russian, but mostly you would hear the sound of Yiddish. You would hear the creaking wheels of wooden pushcarts making their way along crowded streets, vendors selling their hot chickpeas, and schleppers calling out from doorways to entice young men to buy tailored suits to move up in the world.

For the immigrants on the Lower East Side before the turn of the century, this was a golden world where they could adhere to the traditions they followed in the shtetls without fear of the Czar’s horsemen riding through the villages, taking whatever they wanted, and cutting down anyone who protested. This was a world in which, though impoverished, they could be free. Their children would learn English, get jobs, and find money wherever they could. And the world was looking towards a new century in which you could turn on a light with the turning of a knob, hear someone’s voice over a telephone, and maybe even catch a glimpse of a carriage rolling down the street under its own power. A new century was just over the horizon.

For the eldest children in these immigrant households, the imperative was to earn money. Yes, school was important, but the next meal was even more important. There would be time for learning, books could be found, and the rabbinical students would teach whatever children needed to learn for a few coins. But families had to eat, and winters were especially harsh in the unheated tenements along Essex, Hester, and Orchard Streets. Stoves in these apartments were heated by coal. Only the rich had gas, and oil-burning central heating was at least twenty years away.

You could watch the horse-drawn coal carts – later replaced by coal trucks – back up to the coal bins at the apartment buildings where they dumped their coal down chutes into basements and, as they pulled away, left trails of the shiny black nuggets along the ground for gleaners to collect. Most of the gleaners were children, scraping up what they could from the street to stuff their pockets with enough fuel for an evening’s dinner and heat for the night. It was a common practice among the children growing up on the Lower East Side.

The children also had to earn what they could, doing whatever odd jobs they could perform, even if only to get paid in fruit or vegetables. For two of those children growing up in the neighborhood, Nathan Birnbaum and Abraham Kaplan, there was another route: street dancing.

A century before the craze of break dancing hit the streets of New York and Los Angeles, Birnbaum and Kaplan went from bar to bar along the East Side, over to the Bowery, and even north to Canal Street, dancing and singing on the sawdust floors of Irish bars, hoping for a few coins to help their parents pay the rent. “Birnbaum and Kaplan” they billed themselves, “Soft-shoe and a song or two,” as the locals taking a lunchtime break looked up from their sandwiches and beers to to watch a couple of 8-year-olds shuffle from table to table, hands out as they scratched the sawdust on the barroom floors.

Birnbaum and Kaplan? The Irish barkeepers were less than amused. It was the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the Irish had been in New York before the migrations of these Eastern European Jews who barely spoke English, most of them from Russia, driven out of their shtetls at bayonet point by the Czar’s soldiers. With their hair dangling in curls from where their sideburns were supposed to be, their heavy black hats, long costs with fringes hanging from their undergarments, long beards, always holding well-worn books and walking hunched over … who were they? They were tradesmen, tailors, hawkers, maybe a few doctors, but they weren’t Americans.

But their children, born here and roaming the streets of New York, were Americans. This was their country even though they still spoke the language of the old country with their parents and grandparents. They picked up American slang, soon adopted the lilt of a New York accent, and listened to ragtime and jazz, learning the lyrics to popular songs of the day. And they learned to dance, not the dances from the shtetl but the soft shoe and tap dances they saw at the music halls, outside the growing number of burlesque houses, and from other children on the street or in the parks. And for a tip from a passing stranger amused by how a couple of 8-year-olds could sing and dance to the lyrics of the day, Birnbaum and Kaplan became an act.

As they danced their way from bar to bar across the Lower East Side, usually at lunchtime when the patrons had loose change to spend, the barkeeps would become increasingly annoyed. These were a pair of small children performing in a bar only one or two steps ahead of the police, who also stopped in for a mug or two before walking the rest of their beat. And children weren’t allowed in bars unless they were pulling their fathers out to bring them home. One cop with a mad-on seeing a kid dancing on the sawdust floor and holding out a hat for a tip might be just enough to close the place down and put the manager in jail for violating any one of New York State’s child-labor laws, not to mention the fear of seeing children around alcohol. And to make it even worse, these kids, Birnbaum and Kaplan, didn’t even have Irish names. They were the children of the Other; newcomers to the neighborhood.

Brooms were handy cudgels when the dancers became a threat to a bar’s liquor license. As the reputation of Birnbaum and Kaplan spread along lower Manhattan, the barkeeps became less tolerant and soon just the appearance in the doorway of this dancing duo was enough to send an owner reaching for his broom and swinging it wildly in the air, barking at the hooligans and rapscallions to get out.

Birnbaum asked Kaplan one day, after a painful swipe had sent them tumbling into the street, “What if we were Irish?” Would the barkeeps be as angry with two Irish kids as they were with two little yiddels? Maybe it was at that moment, or shortly thereafter, that one of the coal wagons lumbered by. They watched. Time to fill their fathers’ overcoats and follow the wagon’s lift gate to capture whatever coal nuggets they could as the wagon pulled away. It didn’t take them long and soon they were dragging their fathers’ long coats along the ground, pockets stuffed with nuggets until they were more coal than kid. On the side of the wagon was the proprietor’s name: “The Burns Brothers Coal.” And that was how that name stuck to them. As the other children watched Nathan Birnbaum and Abie Kaplan run after the wagon, they shouted after them, “There go the Burns Brothers!”

“We’re the Burns Brothers,” Abie Kaplan said to one of the barkeeps just north of the Lower East Side. “The Burns Brothers,” Nathan Birnbaum echoed. “And we’re here to dance.”

“Just like the coal wagon,” the barkeep said.

“Yeah, like the coal wagon, the Burns Brothers,” Abie said, and the doors opened for the Burns Brothers and the beginning of their career, their first act in the new live entertainment form at the end of the nineteenth century, Vaudeville.

The Burns Brothers eventually took on two more partners and became “The Pee-Wee Quartet,” and then like most acts, the partners went their separate ways with other partners. Nathan Birnbaum partnered up with a seal, and then he met the person he would perform with for the rest of his life until she died. Even then, he would visit her every day, talking to her before heading home. And he still worked until almost the very day he died, sitting in his high director’s chair at his studio on Las Palmas. The other Burns changed the spelling of his last name when he partnered up with Dan Stanley and played the Keith Orpheum Circuit, the White Star and Cunard steamship lines, and eventually at a command performance before King Edward in London. Then he met a silent movie actress named Viola Katz from the Bronx, who changed her name to Kaye, and the two became Birns and Kaye.

Funny, though, how Nathan Birnbaum, now George Burns and partnered with his wife Gracie Allen, always played the straight man. And funny, too, how Abie Kaplan, now Al Birns, also played the straight man in his act Birns and Kaye.

As Budd Abbott, probably one of the greatest straight men in all of show business, once said, playing a straight man is harder than delivering the punch lines because you have to be the one to lay the pipe for the joke. That’s how Benny Kubelski played it when he became Jack Benny, and how George Burns and Al Birns played it.

Being a straight man is hard. I know, especially when you’re hunting UFOs. 📯

No Conclusion at Khe Sanh

Wed, 03 May 2017 00:00:00 -0400

Allentown, N.J. church steeple at sunrise.

In 1972, rural Allentown, New Jersey, sitting on the westernmost tip of Monmouth County, was a throwback to an earlier time in America, defying with an almost furious resistance the changes taking place in the rest of the United States and exploding on college campuses. The town only had one traffic light that sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t at the one intersection where Main Street crossed Church Street. There were the humble single-family duplex frame houses at the poor end of town and the gingerbready manses at the high end of town, aptly called “Hill Street.”

There was a small fire department with a pumper truck, a tanker, and a field truck for fighting brush fires, a rescue squad with two vintage Dodge vans converted into ambulances, and a three-person police department headed up by a retired New Jersey State trooper who didn’t believe in automatic transmissions and started his car in low, moved it into 2nd, and then into drive as he tried to catch speeders bounding through town on their way to Trenton. The town’s mayor ran the borough’s only general store from behind which meat counter he would rail at things like welfare, civil rights, socialism, college students, and anyone else younger than thirty.

There was a local minister who would announce his presence as he sashayed down the street, his arms swinging widely to and fro as of to define his space while singing his favorite hymn of the day. And even a milkman would deliver bottles of milk, cream, and butter to the back doors of the manses on Hill Street, much to the consternation of the town’s mayor who complained about the lack of loyalty from the rich folks not shopping in his general store. It was a town where Nixon was worshiped, local high-school students marched to and from school under the watchful eye and metronome-like swinging baton of the one police officer on duty, and young housewives would parade their baby carriages up and down the Main Street, dutifully following the admonition of Dr. Spock to get the newborns out early no matter what the temperature.

Now imagine that a too-young and too-cocky college journalism professor takes up residence in the town and quickly lands himself at the local paper, actually a printed community bulletin board of classified ads, announcements from the local Daughters of the American Revolution, farm auctions, and yearly “get your fresh turkey” ads in the month before Thanksgiving. While the campus at Trenton State College, thirty minutes down the road from Allentown, was aflame with anti-war protests, be-ins on the main quadrangle, and teach-ins about the subjects of the moment, events in Allentown were a hundred years away, just like the mythical village of Brigadoon.

Although the local newspaper was technically a local news stringer for the budding New Jersey edition of the New York Times, the paper’s editor steadfastly stuck to his motto that all news is local, national news is not our business, and there’s no such thing as human-interest unless it’s about births, engagements, marriage announcements, and deaths. Certainly not about an out-of-control war sucking up all of the male high-school graduates like a vacuum.

Now imagine that the young journalism professor decides to shake up the newspaper, bring in the rest of the world, and wake up the sleepy folks in Allentown with electrifying features and probing reports about the goings-on at the local zoning board and town council. Now imagine the newspaper’s editor cringing in a mixture of terror and anger with each weekly news feature, literally taking out his scissors and cutting the paper into separate paragraphs and rearranging them for the typesetter, deleting anything he believed would jar his readers’ emotions over their morning coffees.

But journalism doesn’t sleep, especially when two of the town’s local police officers were Marine veterans who shared, albeit across almost fifteen years, a common bond. Both had served in Vietnam, the elder of the two at Dien Bien Phu as a gunnery sergeant with a small contingent of American advisors to the French Foreign Legion, who were holding the base against the encroaching Viet Minh. The younger of the two had served at the Marine firebase at Khe Sanh, which in 1968 withstood an unrelenting barrage of mortar fire and attacks by the Viet Cong. Two local police officers, two Marine veterans, two moments during a fruitless war. For a crusading young journalism professor, this is the stuff feature articles are made on: a searing commentary in the tradition of “The Grand Illusion” about a war that keeps going on, young men hurling themselves at one another, not really knowing why except that their governments have ordered them to do so.

Now imagine the look on the local newspaper editor’s face when the journalism professor happily presents his feature column on the two police officers, revealing for the elucidation of local readers, and possibly for the New York Times, that the United States was actually in Vietnam as early as 1954 at the siege of Dien Bien Phu. How’s that for an exclusive? Now imagine a long, ink-stained finger pointing to the door of the local newspaper office while the other hand of the editor pointing the finger crumples up the heartfelt prose of the would-be headline-making journalism professor.

Two Marines serving in a small town police force; two sieges in a hopeless war; two men whose memories of living under constant mortar fire and having to fight their way through a thick jungle out of a death trap; and two memories buried deep inside their psyches, bubbling up the surface every time a young unwary driver runs the quirky red light at the town’s one intersection.

A snapshot of War, 50 years in.

All that came to mind this week when a photo from freelance photojournalist Robert Ellison came to light in the Washington Post of a Marine second lieutenant being dragged out of the thick jungle brush by members of his unit after he was killed in an ambush outside the perimeter of Khe Sanh almost fifty years ago. Ellison was killed just days after he captured this image. 📯

A Law Day Note

Mon, 01 May 2017 00:00:00 -0400

My (very) short stint in law enforcement as a security guard for the William J. Burns (no relation) Detective Agency, NYC.

Today is Law Day. The president signed a proclamation acknowledging Law Day, a day in which Americans look around in appreciation that we are a society of laws – not simply of regulations – but laws that protect our basic rights and guarantee justice as a remedy for wrongs. Sometimes we disagree with the interpretation of laws and sometimes we agree with them. But, regardless, each and every person living in America has the basic right to walk into court, have his or her day in court, to argue for justice.

When my law school put out a call to alumni to submit papers on an aspect of law, the Fourteenth Amendment’s application of the Bill of Rights, initially only applied to the federal government, I wrote about how the first amendment, the protection of free speech, second amendment, the right to keep and bear arms, and the fourth, fifth, and sixth amendments , all having to do with rights protecting against arbitrary search and seizure, the right to due process of law, and the right to be represented by an attorney at hearings all apply to the states in specific cases. Here is that law note.

The Constitution and the Mentally Ill: A Balancing of Rights

As reported in the Federal Register (Vol. 81, No. 243, December 19, 2016), an executive order was set forth directing the Social Security Administration (20 CFR Part 421 [Docket No. SSA–2016–0011] RIN 0960–AH95) to provide “relevant records” to the Attorney General for inclusion in the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) for the purposes of identifying those receiving Disability Insurance on the basis of a qualifying mental illness. The qualifying mental illness must be one that renders the individual unable to manage his or her own affairs or one who has been adjudged to be mentally ill with a propensity for dangerousness to self and others so as to preclude those so identified from purchasing a firearm. That executive order was rolled back by a House of Representatives vote shortly after the new Trump administration took office, and the result was an outcry, but not along the usual partisan lines.

In critical responses by what otherwise might be deemed strange political bedfellows, both the National Rifle Association and the American Civil Liberties Union opposed the Obama executive order, both of them on Constitutional grounds. The NRA argued that the rule violated an individual’s Second Amendment rights while the ACLU argued that it was unconstitutional for the executive branch to act summarily as prosecutor, judge, and jury to deprive individuals so identified of their Second, Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendment rights, thus setting up an apparent conflict among the different constitutional protections and raising multiple issues: Does the Second Amendment’s prohibition against government’s infringement upon an individual’s right to keep and bear arms trump (a) the government’s obligation to provide for the general welfare and the states’ sovereign police powers, and (b) an individual’s right to due process of law when one agency of government summarily acts in a legislative and judiciary role?

Although on its face, it seemed as if the House were giving guns to the dangerously mentally ill, the real argument involved the reach of executive agencies into the Bill of Rights so as to modify and restrict their application to certain individuals. Had not the House rolled back the executive order, this issue would have most likely reached the U.S. Supreme Court for a resolution.

Docs versus Glocks

In a corollary controversy, Florida in 2011 enacted into law the Firearms Owners’ Privacy Act (Fla. Stat. §§ 790.338, 456.072, 395.1055, & 381.026) (FOPA), which raised a prima facie issue before the federal court in the Eleventh Circuit as to whether an individual’s First Amendment right to free speech has a greater weight than an individual’s Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms. This was a case, whose ruling was published on February 16, 2017, dubbed “Docs v. Glocks” by the press.

The FOPA restricted doctors, and healthcare professionals in general, from asking their patients or clients about firearms in their homes unless, very specifically and in “good faith,” that a question about a patient’s or patient’s family’s gun ownership was “relevant” to the patient’s or family’s safety or care. The intent of the NRA supported legislation, the opposition argued, was really to prevent family practice physicians and pediatricians from discussing gun safety with families and so raised the issue of a potential conflict between the First Amendment’s right to free speech against the Second Amendment’s right to keep and bear arms, both of which apply to the states under the Fourteenth Amendment. But, as vehemently as the FOPA’s supporters argued that Florida had the authority to regulate healthcare within its borders and to guarantee that medical practices not violate the individual’s Second Amendment guarantees, the Eleventh Circuit did not see it that way. The court held in an 8-3 decision, overturning an earlier holding of that court’s three-judge panel, that insofar as the FOPA restricted a doctor’s or healthcare practitioner’s inquiry about firearms in the home, that restriction amounted to content-related speech, thus requiring the strictest standard of analysis, and its restriction was violative of the First Amendment’s free speech clause. On its face, though, the decision, albeit on First Amendment grounds, also advocated for the prerogatives of medical practitioners to protect the health and safety of their patients by separating the claim of an “infringement” under the Second Amendment from a content-based infringement under the First Amendment, thus using a Constitutional basis to skirt the issue of a state’s regulation of the advice given to patients by physicians.

The Lessard Case

In another case, the federal court in Wisconsin held that even an individual who may be deemed mentally ill according to the opinion of a healthcare professional, nevertheless does not surrender his or her Constitutional protections of due process. This was the Lessard case in Milwaukee, Wisconsin (LESSARD V. SCHMIDT 349 F. SUPP. 1078 (E.D. WIS. 972), VACATED AND REMANDED, 414 U.S. 473, ON REMAND, 379 F. SUPP. 1376 (E.D. WIS. 1974), VACATED AND REMANDED, 421 U.S. 957 (1975), REINSTATED, 413 F. SUPP. 1318 (E.D. WIS. 1976), in which the federal judiciary, while setting aside Wisconsin’s involuntary commitment law held, in essence, that there was no such thing as mental illness and set a new standard for “dangerousness.” It held that commitment required a finding that “there is an extreme likelihood that if the person is not confined he will do immediate harm to himself or others.” In so doing, the federal court required that an individual facing a hearing for involuntary commitment be afforded the same Constitutional rights afforded to a criminal defendant including, but not limited to, Fourth Amendment protections again search and seizure, Fifth Amendment guarantees of due process, and Sixth Amendment guarantees of right to counsel. Included in this package of rights was also the right to remain silent in the face of an inquiry into an individual’s mental health, which was, in essence, a Miranda protection to the suspected mentally ill individual, along with an exclusion of hearsay evidence. The court believed that mental illness was simply a label enabling psychiatrists to “shoehorn” certain people into medical diagnosis to “line their pockets” with fees based on The American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic codes, the DSM manual (Liebert, John A., M.D. and William J. Birnes, Ph.D., Psychiatric Criminology, Boca Raton, FL.: CRC Press, 2017).

The Tarasoff Decision

Yet in another case, Tarasoff v. Regents of the University of California, (17 Cal. 3d 425, 551 P.2d 334, 131 Cal. Rptr. 14 [Cal. 1976]) the Supreme Court in California held that a mental health practitioner, in this case working for the University of California, had a duty to warn and a duty to protect a potential victim from a potential perpetrator of a violent crime, who posed a threat to the potential victim, even when disclosing that threat may be a violation of the doctor/patient privilege. Failure to warn or protect would make the practitioner liable for damages in negligence.

The justices in Tarasoff argued for common sense and ruled that clinicians have “Peculiar Ability,” meaning an ability singularly relevant to the expertise of clinicians, that enables them both to know what is the problem and how it will unfold. They held that victim Tatania Tarasoff would likely be killed by patient, Prosenjit Poddar, and, like contagious diseases, such knowledge demands control, for which “psychotherapists,” like doctors diagnosing infections, have the power to do.

The Lessard and Tarasoff cases are not mutually incompatible because both cases at core deal with the Constitutional rights of the mentally ill and those likely to be harmed by a mentally ill individual. Lessard held that just because of a mental illness, an individual does not forfeit his or her Constitutional rights and is guaranteed due process of law. Tarasoff holds that a mental health practitioner must use common sense judgment in weighing the danger his or patient may pose to another individual and, thus, has an absolute duty to warn and protect that individual. These cases, as well as the recent Wollschlaeger Docs v. Glocks case in Florida, demonstrate that the American criminal and civil justice systems are in the throes of a struggle to determine the nature of individual rights versus the rights of the public for protection from the dangerously mentally ill. Unfortunately, though, because of the closure of many state mental health institutions since the Reagan-era “mainstreaming” of the mentally ill, resulting in a cost-shifting from the public health budget to the states’ emergency services budgets, the full burden of dealing with the dangerously mentally ill has fallen upon law enforcement and first responders. We must wait to see whether the new administration and, in particular, the new Secretary of Health and Human Services can find a resolution to the plight of the mentally ill, including our military veterans suffering from PTSD.

Dr. William J. Birnes, J.D. ’06, is a New York Times bestselling author, a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow, a literary agent, Chairman of the Board at Sunrise Community Counseling Center in Los Angeles, and was a writer/consulting producer for the History Channel.

Holy Week

Sat, 15 Apr 2017 00:00:00 -0400

With my father at my Masters graduation.

Holy Week fifty years ago came at the end of a wet and harsh winter in New York’s Greenwich Village. It came near the end of my first year in graduate school year, a shock to the system of someone who had glided through college spending more time in student politics, varsity athletics, and fraternity beer bashing than doing anything else during this era of “Mad Men.”

That was until my last year when the the advisor to the student government gathered us in his office to deliver some very harsh news. We were, he said to those of us now on our way to law school and thence to the beckoning glassed-in suites of the white-shoe firms of Wall Street, instead headed to a place we had only heard about on the evening news, Vietnam. No 1L status for us, only 1A, and our local draft boards were waiting to suck us into their huge maws, process us, and spit us out onto troop carriers for distant jungles where pajama-clad insurgents would pop their heads out of the foliage or where land mines on the edges of rice paddies would do us in for sure.

But there was a way out, our advisor told us, his very soft midwestern demeanor now smoothing out the harshness of his dire prediction. A way through the morass that would envelop those of us who unpresciently had not already put our names on the waiting list for the National Guard. Uncle Sam can pay for your law school, med school, or whatever, our advisor explained, and then he looked at me.

There was a rumor swirling around campus about the background of this particular student advisor. Most of the advisors were quasi-academic. This guy was not. Nobody knew where he came from or how he got his job. But he was good at it – as if he had the ability to read tea leaves to ascertain what the future had in store. For those of us who would gather in his office for Friday morning coffee and bagels, he would lay out the state of the world, the politics that would shape our lives, and the directions those of us wise enough to understand should take. And one day, when we were all dispatched to our morning classes, still chewing the last of a bagel, he asked me to hold up for a minute because he had a question.

Did I ever consider graduate school? Of course, he knew that I was in a four-year law school/grad school journalism program. He made it clear that I would be drafted out of law school in seconds. But there was a way out, if I accepted a job he offered.

“What job?”

“Call it information gathering,” he said with a very wry smile.

“I can get you a very nice job in the housing department here, free room, all the food you can eat, maybe knock off some tuition and recommend you for a fellowship, if you do a little wok for us.”

“Who was the us?” I asked him.

“You don’t need to know that precisely,” he said. “Just believe that we’re the good guys. We’re the good guys in a sea of bad guys.”

Maybe it was my expression that prompted him to say, “tres lettres.”

We left it at that. And in short order, after the nods and handshakes, I got a letter posting me to a graduate fellowship and a job in our newest dormitory at the northern edge of Washington Square in a venerable hotel that was being refitted into a dormitory. There were only a few of us who would shepherd incoming upperclass transfers from schools in Iowa, Kansas, and Montana to their new lives in the heart of Greenwich Village at the very dawn of the age of the Counter Culture within its East Coast beating heart as British rock groups brought their music and their drugs to the well-scrubbed wide-eyed faces of new students.

Winter seemed to come early that year, and graduate school was especially brutal, particularly for one for whom actually going to class had been a four-year distraction from life. Here’s a tip. When a course-listing in your school catalog says “Advanced,” for heaven’s sake, don’t take that course. I know that now, and for almost twenty years that’s exactly what I would tell my own students. But, thinking more about fitting courses into neat little schedules rather than the content of them, I wound up in courses so difficult I could see myself stacking jars on pharmacy shelves, sweeping sawdust off a butcher-shop floor, or burying my head in soft dirt as bullets whizzed over it. Law school, and my visions of becoming the real-life Atticus Finch swaying juries to the side of my client faded into the haze of heavy wisteria floating through the halls of the dormitory, supposedly camouflaging the odor of marijuana.

And from down the street at another old hotel, this one favored by the British rock group flavor of the month, came the sounds of electric guitars, sitars, and the screams of those locked into their visions during bad LSD trips. Then my instructions came in an invitation to morning coffee and bagels.

“Timothy Leary,” my former student advisor with three letters after his name said, and not at all cryptically. “Timothy Leary is coming to New York. And he’s coming to St. Mark’s place.”

“And this involves me how?” I asked as innocently as I could, though by now completely jaded by the incessant aroma of marijuana vapors floating through the dorm halls, into the elevators, and down the fire stairs.

“He used to work for us,” my old advisor said. “And he went rogue. That’s where you come in.”

Now I was getting worried.

“We need you to attend his talks, find out what he’s saying, preaching, encouraging people to follow him. Get it? And report what you learn to me. That’s all.”

I was a spy. I had sold my soul to the man. Maybe not my soul.

Leary’s first meeting was my first and last report. He had assembled a group, mostly of students and East Village habitués down at a church on St. Mark’s Place, back then in the pre-gentrificatoin days a bazaar of gyro shops, head shops, and after-hours bars. With somebody playing a very bad sitar in the background, Leary began his spiel. LSD would be the savior of our generation. We tune in to the message unlocked by the hallucinogen, tune out the corporate advertising overlay that was driving our lives, and drop out of a society that chewed us up like so much fodder. We would follow the white rabbit down the rabbit hole into a land of wonder where down was up and left was right.

A walk in a Kodachrome park.

I dutifully reported on Leary’s visions of a brave new world week after week to my old advisor as winter closed in around the city with an especially brutal cold. Loneliness, the solitary demands of studying Old English, Middle English, and an obscure Scots dialect that I’m sure no one ever spoke, not even in the fifteenth century, and the routine of dealing with undergraduates so tripped out that we would sometimes have to restrain them from jumping off the parapet on the roof because they saw Jesus beckoning them. Marines, just returned from Vietnam, would suffer their own particular horrors and their screams would fill the hallways. And we even had a murder of two twins from Thailand whose entrails were scattered over the walls and ceiling like an exploding pot of spaghetti. And then there was the fuel-oil truck driver strike for weeks on end. No heat, no hot water, and I simply grew a beard, not in protest, but out of necessity.

There was this one course I was taking about an otherwise obscure period in Medieval English literature during the reign of Richard II called the Alliterative Revival, a amalgamation of social protest poetry and bitter satire. The late fourteenth century was a lousy period in which to live. You know, the bubonic plague and the peasants’ revolt and all. Among the poems was a particularly troubling one that actually had no name. Modern – and by modern I mean nineteenth century scholarship – gave it the name Piers Ploughman.

I wrestled with this for most of the semester, but I couldn’t figure it out. You see, who ever wrote this – he was anonymous – wrote it three times. He stopped at one point the first time he wrote it, then picked it up a few years later and finished it. Then, presumably unhappy with what he’d written twice, rewrote it. All of this before the age of Microsoft Word.

Why did he do this? And where was Timothy Leary, by the way? Leary had disappeared, presumably back to Massachusetts where some other graduate student picked up his surveillance while I was left to struggle with a bitter poet who had lived six hundred years before I was born, but whose struggles with life and literature were now eating through my psyche like an acid. Burning.

Why did he write the same poem three times? Why did he stop in mid-creation the first time he composed only to pick it up later? But there was a clue to the analysis that didn’t come from any literary scholar, didn’t come from my professor, nor from inspiration on the wings of a dream. It came from Lieutenant Commander Spock during the first season of “Star Trek.”

Spock, as I would write forty-five years later, was the science-fiction equivalent of Sherlock Holmes, a logician who would argue that when you find a clue, follow it down the path it leads until you either reject it or find another clue along that path. My first step, upon finally hitting upon a methodology, was to figure out where this poet stopped writing the first time he set his poem down on paper. What was his stumbling block? That would be an important clue. Start at where he stopped and work backwards from there.

The poet, let’s call him William Langland, as nineteenth century scholars have done, because he identifies his narrator in the poem as Long Will who has lived long in the land, abruptly cut his narrative off at the point when Jesus, having been resurrected, must venture into Hell to confront Satan. Perhaps the poet couldn’t figure out what happens next. Why? Go back earlier in the narrative and the poet is wrestling with what strikes him as a conundrum. What is the way to salvation? Under the old law of justice, pure justice, or under the law of grace, which can be looked at as inherently unjust. If someone has lived a life of evil, why should that person be granted salvation just because he or she asks for it? Where’s the justice in that? Isn’t it unfair, in the Parable of the Vineyard, when Jesus says that the first shall be the last and the last shall be the first? That’s socialism.

That was my premise for analyzing the next go-round of the poet, what scholars call the “B-text.” This incarnation picks up from Jesus’ entry into Hell where he is confronted by Satan, who challenges him on the basis of the Old Law, demanding “By what right do you remove these souls from Hell? By the Old Law, they’re mine by contract. I won them in the Garden before you even showed up. First in time is first in right.”

Then Jesus begins to argue. “You used trickery in the Garden. And the law says when you use trickery – in modern legal tort law intentional misrepresentation – the contract is null and void.”

But Satan is wily and says that if Jesus is filing a claim for repossession of these souls, there is no writ (claim) under law He can file, again, in modern civil procedure, He has failed to state a claim. No claim, no suit, no suit, no repossession.

This would seem to be a conundrum and it would cross the eyes of any poet trying to formulate a legal argument absent a writ on which he could hang a claim. Then, on a hunch because I was taken by the alliterative legal formulas, such as the phrase for the conveyance of property “to have and to hold,” that populate the language of the poem, I researched what was happening in law during the fourteenth century. And lo and behold, I found something astounding.

While the king, whose royal signet ring was the seal by which he effectuated statutes of the realm, was traveling through the country, his other seal, called a Privy Seal, was held by the Royal Chancellor. And landowners seeking justice under arcane statutes of land-holding who could not find a writ upon which to base their claims, begged the Chancellor to use his Privy Seal to allow them into court on the basis of “grace,” “caritas,” and “equitas.” That rung a bell.

Equity, a legal principle today under which one can argue, states that a plaintiff has no right to state his or her claim before the court because plaintiff has waited too long. Plaintiff has, in modern terms knowingly “slept on his or her rights.” Was this the very beginning of the equitable jurisdiction, the filing of a claim on the basis of what’s right and not just on the basis of an existing writ or claim under which a case can be filed? It’s the foundational basis for such things as adverse possession in real estate law or the redemption of a mortgage that the lender claims has gone into default.

“Redeem.” That word resonates. I went back to the specifics of Jesus’ argument to Satan and saw that it hit all the right points as if it were an argument in court. First, intentional misrepresentation to rescind a contract, second equitable jurisdiction on the basis of grace and charity, and third, if a king should look upon the condemned, the condemned is granted an immediate pardon. Remember how Queen Elizabeth refused to look upon Mary Queen of Scots after she was condemned? Why? Because looking at her would have granted her a pardon. Thus, in His argument with Satan, Jesus says that because He has looked upon the condemned, under law, under the very justice of the Old Law, He has pardoned all.

A snapshot of a stranger.

That was it. That was the key. Langland had gone back to his A-text at the very point where Jesus was confronted with an apparent conflict between the Old Law of pure justice and the new jurisdiction of Equity, already gaining prevalence in England, so as to resolve the conflict over by what means one can receive salvation. Thus, Langland completed his poem. Then, maybe fifteen years later he rewrote it again because during the Peasants’ Revolt, the rioters were quoting lines from his poem, which was probably appalling to him.

Maybe Langland was a lawyer. Maybe he had been bailed out of jail by a lawyer. I did not know, but the resolution of the mystery of why this poet rewrote that poem would carry me through the rest of graduate school, would become the subject of my dissertation, and, years later, would fill me with happiness during my 2L course in Real Property.

And all of this happened fifty years ago in a burst of inspiration on this very night, the night before Easter morning. 📯

Why I’m Running

Wed, 12 Apr 2017 00:00:00 -0400

Speaking at some conference, somewhere. As is my wont.

At the end of the 1990s, my old writing partner from our book The Riverman approached me with a question: Would I be interested in participating in a United States Department of Justice grant to audit the ways previous DoJ hardware and software grants to local and municipal law-enforcement agencies used their federal money? The issue was that the federal government was looking for follow-up on the scores of millions of dollars it had spent purchasing and donating state of the art computer systems to local police agencies to enable them to review cold cases involving sexual assaults and homicides. The Department of Justice wanted our new grant audit team to ascertain whether the expenditure had made any difference in closing these cases.

It was an experience in learning how money – taxpayer money – can be thrown away by the government to solve problems that can be addressed less expensively through training. Sure, departments like the LAPD’s Robbery Homicide made good use of data analysis, just not the equipment the federal government gave them, at least not in 1998. You can imagine our shock seeing all those bright shiny new computers stacked up against a wall, unused, unplugged, while detectives relied on their cellphones and an occasional trip to the NCIC terminal for records checks. Other departments had made better use of their equipment and had actually identified suspects in cold cases, whom they later prosecuted.

Our audit back then showed that, in at least this one instance, shoveling money at a problem doesn’t always solve the problem. It was instructive, however, because it taught us, taught me, that pound foolish isn’t always the corollary of being pennywise. You just have to follow the money to see into whose pocket it goes.

This also served me well years later when I was asked to be part of another team, this time with retired DEA agents training South American banks in identifying money-laundering operations by auditing the accounts and backgrounds of high-roller customers fronting for drug cartels. Narco-traffickers need to clean their dirty money, and they do it by routing it through banks and into sham businesses for which they pay taxes, and then back into their own bank accounts. In this way, money from illegal narcotics sales is co-mingled with legitimate money from businesses and takes on a new identity as legitimate revenue. Banks, particularly foreign banks, can be unwittingly complicit in this or they can be willfully blind. It was our team’s job to teach bank officers how to audit the financial records of their customers, flag accounts that seemed suspicious, flag sources of income that couldn’t be tracked by legitimate means, and report that to their compliance regulators. This was auditing on an entirely new scale.

Then, early in the next decade, I was asked by the Director of the Sunrise Community Counseling Center to step in as Chairman of the Board of Directors to oversee the audits of their federal, state, and county grant fund use as well as their budgets for operations and delivery of community services. Again, the compliance regulations governing federal and state grants were particularly stiff, but, given the amount of money and the obligation to spend it scrupulously, auditing was not just a byproduct of the operation, it was central to it.

Now fast forward to the complacency of 2016 right here in Pennsylvania, right here in Solebury Township. Complacency breeds smugness, and I was poll-watching last November and saw badge-wearing self-described “voting enforcers” march into our polls at the Solebury Township building, demanding to inspect the voters. I was outraged. It had all the trappings of voter intimidation, and I was not about to stand for it. I asked our local constable – who was also making sure the voting went smoothly – to confront these “voting enforcers” and order them either to take off their badges or leave. They took off their badges, and then they left.

I have had a long career, teaching graduate and undergraduate English at Trenton State College, editing and producing encyclopedias for McGraw-Hill and Simon & Schuster, writing military fiction for Tor Publishing, and incredibly, chasing flying saucers across the American Southwest, up steep inclines outside of Area 51, turning over chaparral and scrub brush in the Roswell Chaves County desert of New Mexico, and discovering the nature of Nazi super weapons deep in hollowed-out mountain complexes in Poland. I’ve helped unravel serial-killer cases and even made a movie about it. And I have stood my ground in court.

When, in the wake of the 2016 election, our local Democratic Party asked me to run for the position of Auditor (a 2-year term), I agreed because I want to do what I did thirty years ago and keep an eye on your money, where and to whom it goes, and whether it is spent wisely. But it’s more than that. I want to prevent a wholesale looting of our middle class, which, sadly, seems to be the aim of this administration. That’s why I’m running and that’s why I’m a Democrat.

Sometimes you have to find your hilltop, plant your feet, and make your stand.

Here’s where I’ll make my stand.