The Bell

 

          In his fine introduction to J.L. Carr’s A Month in the Country [1980] (New York: New York Review Books, 2000), Michael Holroyd suggests Carr added in honor of his late wife ‘the poignant epigraph by the Irish poet Herbert Trench’:

         

SHE comes not when Noon is on the roses—
Too bright is Day.
She comes not to the Soul till it reposes
From work and play.
But when Night is on the hills, and the great Voices
Roll in from Sea,
By starlight and by candlelight and dreamlight
She comes to me.

 

          Biographical and bibliographical sources on the internet for Herbert Trench are very slim.  My ultimate source here is The Oxford Book of Victorian Verse (1922).  So, I assume this exquisite poem comes from Deirdre Wed & Other Poems (1901), his first book, published the year of the Queen’s death.

           Whatever Carr’s motive for adding these verses to his epigraph, they bespeak the novel both in spirit and in style.  But I like to think Holroyd is right about this and his other surmises.

           A rare man, J.L. Carr.

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          Rarely, one comes to a novel from watching a movie based on it.  Even more rarely does a very faithful movie – a superb film – lead to surprises and pleasures no film can capture except by quoting the novel – which it does.

           J.L. Carr’s A Month in the Country (1980)[1] is just such a book, and ‘A Month in the Country’ (1987) is just such a film.  Only John Huston’s loving adaptation of James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ is comparable.[2]

           As in ‘The Dead’, the big action occurs off stage.

           A shell-shocked soldier returns from WW I to find his marriage over.  A chance encounter leads to a month’s work in Yorkshire restoring a painting in a medieval church.  The picture proves a mysterious masterpiece.

           The narrator, the veteran, tells his story in what seems a relaxed, discursive manner.  It’s only on reflection one realises how tautly balanced the prose really is.  Here’s the narrator setting the stage for his task in the church:

Medieval wall-paintings keep to a well-thumbed catalogue.  There are the three voluptuaries displayed in jolly dissipation, than racked in hellish torment; there is Christopher wading through fishes and mermaids with the Christ-child on his shoulder; there are those boring female saints stoically enduring wheel, rack and sword-slicing (these fitted conveniently along aisle walls or above the nave arcade).  But the big spread of wall between chancel arch and roof timbers almost always got the Big Treatment – a Judgment.[3]

           Almost of necessity, the movie loses the gentle ironies of the book.  It also loses until its end the constant reinforcement that the narrator is describing distant memories through the miasma of sixty years.  The quoted paragraph a man full of years would write, not a young man in the moment.

          In his introduction to the New York Review Books edition, Michael Holroyd suggests the narrator is not altogether reliable.  Nowhere does that seem clearer than in the final paragraphs when he writes,

Then (and I can’t explain it) the numbness went and I knew that, whatever else had befallen me during those few weeks in the country, I had lived with a very great artist….[4]

 Not the revelation of his self-worth, of the kindness of strangers not of your class, of the stirrings of love for another man’s wife….  What an ironic thud that is!  Of one thing the reader is certain, the numbness earned at Passchendaele left only room to feel regret at what he’d lost, failed to grasp.

           The last three paragraphs shorn of irony and distance are unforgettable, as good as anything I’ve ever read anywhere.[5]  I won’t quote them in the hopes you’ll read them yourself.  And, you should.

 

 NOTES

           1.  I recommend the NYRB Classics edition which like all in the series is beautifully printed.  It is well-introduced by Michael Holroyd whose picture of J.L. Carr is almost as elegiac – though quite funny in places – as the book itself.

           2.  The contrasts between A Month and ‘The Dead’ are as haunting as the works themselves.  Until today it had never occurred to me to read them together, but they should be.

           3.  J.L. Carr, A Month in the Country [1980] (New York: New York Review Books, 2000), p. 32.

           4.  Id., pp. 134-35.

           5.  Id., p. 135.

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The year of the snake on the Chinese calendar has inspired HSBC to a slick advertising campaign with an arresting image: a brush-painted black snake.

The constrictor’s  long body is shaped into the western letters RMB, its bright red tongue into ¥.  ‘Discover how HSBC can help you embrace the RMB’ the teaser reads.

This arresting image appears on some internet pages of the Mar. 23 New York Times.  It links to a site that makes plain HSBC’s message: ‘In the future, 2013 will be seen as the year of the renminbi’, the year of the Chinese currency (RMB).

For the less sophisticated amongst the Times audience, the unpronounceable ‘renminbi’ has become the ‘yuan’.  That is not entirely wrong.  Randall Mah on EmergingMoney.com explains why:

 Both terms are transliterations from Mandarin. Renminbi, which translates as the “people’s money,” is the official name given to the currency by China’s communist government.

 Given that the country’s formal name is the People’s Republic of China, renminbi gives the currency a more egalitarian air.

 On the other hand, yuan, which can be translated as “dollar,” is the unit of currency.

Britain’s currency provides a good comparison. While sterling is the name of Britain’s currency, the pound is the unit. Consequently, in the same way you would say, “The jacket costs 100 pounds,” you would also say, “The pants cost 500 yuan.” [Link as in original]

The Chinese Yuan and the Japanese Yen share the symbol:  ¥.  Just like the Canadian dollar and the American dollar: $.

The black RMB constrictor’s probing tongue, its forked ¥ tongue, carries a sinister, threatening message to American viewers probably not intended by the British bank known once as the Hongkong & Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC).

It’s not usually the mammal who embraces such snakes but the other way round.

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          Does Whitey Bulger have a secret passion unknown to his chroniclers and fabulists?  Yes, and I know what it is.

***

           Saturday, I bought Whitey Bulger, the well-blurbed new book by Kevin Cullen and Shelley Murphy.  Fine reporters both with The Boston Globe.

           Standing in Porter Square Books, I thumbed past the familiar Alcatraz mug shot of James Joseph Bulger, Jr., looking as tough as the Rock itself.  To my surprise, just after the table of contents, I found four very useful maps.

           The first two put his life in a context few can appreciate who’ve not lived in the Hub of the Universe.  Bulger’s Boston can be captured in a full-page map representing less than 65 square miles. [p. ix]   Actually, its dimensions overstate his field of concentration perhaps by 25 percent.  The second map, covering two pages, emphasises that point. [pp. x-xi]

 ***

           The third and fourth maps are of the US.  Each is a half page. [p. xii] They show ‘Whitey on the run’.  They would be more aptly titled ‘Whitey on his ass’.  Few middle class couples, I’d wager, have covered less ground in 16 ½ years than he did with his two girl friends.

           It was the second US map, his 16 years accompanied by Cathy Grieg, that caught my attention.  It shows a round trip they made in 1996 between Long Beach, Mississippi, and Okemah, Oklahoma.

           Okemah, Oklahoma?!

           Why would anyone make a 1340 mile round trip to a town 70 miles from Oklahoma City and 60 miles from Tulsa where evidently he did little more than buy calling cards which he then used?  Okemah, population a bit more than 3000, has a Wikipedia entry that strains for significance.

          Except for one thing.

           Okemah is the birthplace of Woodrow Wilson Guthrie, the legendary Woody Guthrie who wrote ‘This Land is Your Land’.

           Is Whitey Bulger a deeply closeted folkie?  You come up with as plausible an explanation for a round trip to Okemah.

 ***

           One thing you won’t be able to do with Cullen & Murphy’s Whitey Bulger is check the index for Okemah or Long Beach.  Incredibly, astoundingly the index only lists proper names.  People’s names, not organisations like the FBI or the Organised Crime Strike Force which play major roles in the Bulger saga.

           It’s like publishing a book on John F. Kennedy and only indexing ‘Lee Harvey Oswald’, not ‘Dallas’ or ‘CIA’ or ‘Secret Service’.

           Whitey Bulger should be an important reference.  Its authors’ reporting did much to force the reluctant authorities to do something – albeit far too little way too late.  Their publisher has made it unusable by anyone who hasn’t read the book and indexed it himself.  The authors have earned better treatment.

           W.W. Norton & Co. has produced an embarrassment.

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          Like ‘Watergate’ and ‘Iran-Contra’, ‘Whitey Bulger’ stands for a group of interrelated crimes followed by less or more successful cover ups.

           ‘Truth will out’ we came to believe with the unraveling of the Watergate cover up.  But did the truth come out as to what was being covered up?  Have we been so fascinated by the serial exposures of at least misfeasance that we’ve missed the root malfeasance?

           An extraordinary (I use the word precisely) ruling last week in ‘Whitey Bulger’ suggests we have.

 ***

           On March 14^th, the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit removed the trial judge assigned to Bulger’s case

…because it is clear that a reasonable person would question the capacity for impartiality of any judicial officer with the judge’s particular background in the federal prosecutorial apparatus in Boston during the period covered by the accusations.[1]

 So wrote for the court retired US Supreme Court Justice David Souter.

           Appeals courts remove trial judges far less often than blue moons recur.  The departure of US District Court Judge Richard G. Stearns reduces the stink around the Bulger prosecution.  But much remains to be dispersed.

 ***

           Almost never do lawyers ask judges to recuse (remove) themselves from cases, much less take the issue to an appeals court.

           Judges don’t like lawyers questioning their ability to fairly rule on a case.  Lawyers, who may appear in other cases before judges whose integrity they’ve questioned, have a good idea how their future clients will be treated.

          Add to that reality the law:  the standard an appeals court applies is almost impossible to meet.  So, litigants seek removal only in extraordinary circumstances – an unquestionable appearance of bias or counsel’s desire for professional suicide.

***

           The law on recusal seems plain enough.  ‘…28 U.S.C. § 455(a), provides that a judge “shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned.”’[2]

           But the procedural bar to enforcing the statute is almost unjumpable.  To appreciate the magnitude of what the First Circuit did, some arcane law will help.

 ***

           A criminal defendant can’t appeal a judge’s denial of a motion to recuse.  It’s what’s called an interlocutory order.  These pre-judgment orders can only be challenged as part of an appeal of a guilty verdict.  And then, the defendant must show actual bias injuring the defense.  The chances of winning reversal on this ground are almost nil.

           The alternative is to seek an ancient remedy, a writ of mandamus.  A writ of mandamus is an order to a government official to take a particular action.

Before the writ will issue, “the petitioner must satisfy ‘the burden of showing that [his] right to issuance of the writ is clear and indisputable.’” Cheney v. U.S. Dist. Court for Dist. of Columbia, 542 U.S. 367, 381 (2004) (quoting Kerr v. United States Dist. Court for Northern Dist. of Cal., 426 U.S. 394, 403 (1976)). A petitioner for mandamus relief must also demonstrate that he has no other adequate source of relief; that is, he must show “irreparable harm.” In re Vázquez-Botet, 464 F.3d 54, 57 (1st Cir. 2006)….[3]

 From first hand experience, I can testify the courts apply these standards rigorously.

***

          So, as a legal matter, Judge Stearns’ removal is extraordinary.  But it is also as a political matter.

           Stearns was a senior prosecutor in the Massachusetts US Attorneys office when, through its Organized Crime Strike Force, its relationship with Bulger was at its most intimate and when its coverup was being revealed.

           Other prosecutions involving Bulger lieutenants and his FBI handler established beyond debate the fact, if not the dimensions, of the relationship.  These Justice Souter cites and relies upon.

          Bulger has claimed that the Justice Department granted him a blanket immunity from prosecution for any crimes.  After the First Circuit heard arguments on the writ, Stearns denied Bulger the right to raise immunity as a defense.  Wrote Justice Souter:

These disclosures of record do not, of course, add up to showing that any federal officers promised the immunity the defendant claims (let alone that anyone had authority to do so). But they do tend to indicate that the Government and the defendant were not at arm’s length during all of the period in question, and that any evidence about the terms on which they dealt with each other could reflect on the United States Attorney’s Office as it was constituted in those days.[4]

 And, on Judge Stearns.

 ***

           Justice Souter’s generally respectful, mildly irate, opinion is a rebuke

 • to the trial judge for not removing himself,

 • to the generation of US Attorneys for Massachusetts and their minions who enabled Bulger, and

 • implicitly, to the current US Attorney who should have supported the defendant’s motion.

           US Attorney Carmen Ortiz has the duty – one she has during her three and a half years in office shown no inclination to shoulder – to convince the public Bulger’s prosecution is not just another chapter in thirty years of Justice Department cover ups of its own criminal activities.[5]

           Instead, she has defended the indefensible, as she did shielding the Justice Department against damages claims by Bulger’s victims.

           It is unfortunate that on Friday the luck of the judicial draw assigned the Bulger case to US District Court Judge Denise J. Casper.  She, too, came to the bench via the Massachusetts US Attorney’s office, though well after the collusion with Whitey Bulger is believed to have ended.

           Says Wikipedia of Casper:

In 1999 Casper become an Assistant United States Attorney in Boston and was the Deputy Chief of the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force starting in 2004.  Casper served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in Boston from 1999 until 2005.

In judging her fitness to preside over the Bulger trial, no reasonable person looking at her last post as an AUSA could fail to impute to her some of the poisoned and poisonous culture of the US Attorneys Office – whether rightly or not.

           She should recuse herself.

 ***

           In a very important article last week on an unrelated story of crime in government, Robert Parry wrote:  ‘A favorite saying of Official Washington is that “the cover-up is worse than the crime.”  But that presupposes you accurately understand what the crime was.’

           We still do not ‘accurately understand what the crime was’ in the relationship among the Massachusetts US Attorney’s Office, the FBI, the Deparment of Justice (the explosion of this clown’s can of worms can’t have been kept localised) and Whitey Bulger’s Winter Hill Gang.

           As with Watergate and Iran-Contra, we are only beginning to understand the crime we call ‘Whitey Bulger’, a crime greater – far more profound – than its cover up.

 

Notes

          1.  In re William J. Bulger, Case No. 12-2488 (1^st Cir. Mar. 14, 2013).  The slip opinion appears on line without pagination. http://www.ca1.uscourts.gov/opinions/allcircuits.htm  See also Shelley Murphy & Sarah Schweitzer, ‘A Bulger win as trial judge is removed’, Boston Globe, Mar. 15, 2013, p. A1.

          2.  Id.

          3.  Id.

          4.  Id.

          5.  That the rot in the US Attorney’s office has spread and that the US Attorney herself is unwilling to deal with it, the suicide of Aaron Swartz has brought to national attention.

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          Climate change is a security risk, indeed the largest Asia Pacific security risk:  So warned Admiral Samuel J. Locklear III, Commander, US Pacific Command, The Boston Globe reported on March 9.

          Locklear is one of six US four-star admirals, the highest rank now serving in the Navy.  In December he described his area of command to the Asia Society:

The Asia-Pacific has been described as stretching from “Hollywood to Bollywood” and that’s really the area of my focus, from California to India. It encompasses over half the earth’s surface and well more than half of its population… the Pacific Ocean itself is the largest physical feature on the planet. If all the world’s landmasses were placed in the Pacific, there would still be room left over for an additional Africa, Canada, United States, and Mexico. [Ellipsis in original.]

           According to Bryan Bender (‘Chief of US Pacific forces calls climate biggest worry’, Boston Globe, Mar. 9, 2012, p. A7), Adm. Locklear

…said significant upheaval related to the warming planet “is probably the most likely thing that is going to happen … that will cripple the security environment, probably more likely than the other scenarios we all often talk about.’’

His charge includes North Korea and China.

           He continued:

           “People are surprised sometimes,” he added, describing the reaction to his assessment. “You have the real potential here in the not-too-distant future of nations displaced by rising sea level. Certainly weather patterns are more severe than they have been in the past. We are on super typhoon 27 or 28 this year in the Western Pacific. The average is about 17.”

The imminent consequences of rising seas are clear to Adm. Locklear:

          “The ice is melting and sea is getting higher,” Locklear said, noting that 80 percent of the world’s population lives within 200 miles of the coast. “I’m into the consequence management side of it. I’m not a scientist, but the island of Tarawa in Kiribati, they’re contemplating moving their entire population to another country because [it] is not going to exist anymore.”

           The US military, he said, is beginning to reach out to other armed forces in the region about the issue.

           “We have interjected into our multilateral dialogue – even with China and India – the imperative to kind of get military capabilities aligned [for] when the effects of climate change start to impact these massive populations,” he said. “If it goes bad, you could have hundreds of thousands or millions of people displaced and then security will start to crumble pretty quickly.’’

           That last paragraph bears rereading a couple of times.  Adm. Locklear has the responsibility to look beyond coastal erosion and the losses of homeowners and coastal businesses to storm surges. 

           Last week’s storm cost – at least temporarily — a dozen or so families their homes on Plum Island, near Newburyport, Mass.  Their displacement will cause little disruption to civil society.

           But ‘hundreds of thousands or millions of people’: ‘then security will start to crumble pretty quickly.’

 ***

           Over the weekend, I thought much about what Adm. Locklear said and the clarity with which he said it.

           He brought to mind an assertion by Samuel Eliot Morison, an influential Harvard historian of the mid-20th century and a US Navy rear admiral.  In his best selling Oxford History of the American People (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1965), he argued Queen Elizabeth I had shown great wisdom to avoid sending armies into Europe, but instead had focused on lands beyond the seas.  For Morison, the implications of military (land) and naval power were clear:

But sea power has never led to despotism.  The nations that have enjoyed sea power even for a brief period – Athens, Scandinavia, the Netherlands, England, the United States – are those that have preserved freedom for themselves and have given it to others.  Of the despotism to which unrestrained military power leads we have plenty of examples from Alexander to Mao. [p. 46]

           As the tattered military (ground and air) continue the war on terror whilst Homeland Security walls up fortress America, Adm. Locklear, I think, suggests the most likely threat to global security: global warming.

           Can the notion of freedom represented in nations ‘from Hollywood to Bollywood’ survive rising seas and ever-increasing displacements?

          We’re in the process of finding out and doing almost nothing to shape the outcome positively.

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          A census-taker in backwoods Kentucky, found hanged, naked, with ‘FED’ scrawled in black magic marker on his chest: most people remember hearing about it.  No one I’ve asked remembered any more than that.

           Rich Schapiro explains why in ‘The Hanging’ in the March 2013 Atlantic. In the process, he reveals a story more compelling than I imagined on first hearing.  The reality is a 21^st century tragedy.

 ***     

           Telling a story about Appalachia without making its topography and climate a dominant character is like starting Genesis without God.  It’s why ‘Justified’ is just another California cop show with a gimmick: southern (not Kentucky mountain) accents.

           Rich Schapiro does not make this mistake (or any others).  His first three paragraphs:

          The road to Hoskins Cemetery snakes deep into the Daniel Boone National Forest, a 700,000-acre swath of rugged wilderness in southeastern Kentucky.

           The cemetery isn’t easy to find; it lies hidden about 100 yards off Arnetts Fork Road, a narrow, winding stretch of pavement that ends abruptly at a grassy clearing, about a mile farther on. Hunkered down along its final half mile are about 15 weathered ranch houses and ramshackle trailers. Most of the families living along the road have been doing so for generations, eking out a hardscrabble existence driving tow trucks or repairing cars or digging up and selling wild ginseng and other herbal roots. Jagged ridges wall off this tiny community, making it a lot like many other places in Clay County—remote, clannish, and foreboding, even to Kentuckians from the next county over.

           To reach Arnetts Fork, you must drive two miles into the forest on Big Double Creek Road. In late spring and summer, the thick brush lining the road and a canopy of leaves overhead form a sort of cocoon. Cellphone service is spotty. Outsiders say that if you stumble across any people in these woods, chances are they’re up to no good. It’s the kind of place you don’t go without a gun.

***

           Rich Schapiro, a New York Daily News staff writer, went to the cemetery in reporting the story of William Sparkman Jr., a census-taker living in ‘the next county over’, forty miles away.  Said former Clay County magistrate, Jimmy Lyttle: ‘Once you go east of I-75, there’s two things they don’t like: change and strangers.’

           On Sept. 12, 2009, a family (well-armed, Schapiro reports) looking for ancestors’ graves found him hung from a strangely rigged noose.

           The story afforded a momentary sensation for an internet and national media focused on the rampaging right.  In the absence of a chatter-worthy follow up, the story died.

           But Sparkman’s life and death deserved remembering.  Schapiro tells his story and the investigation of his death as it should be told, false scents and all.

          There’s Sparkman,  a stranger in a very strange land.  Raised in a small Florida town, he was briefly a student at Vanderbilt and had moved in his 30s to London, KY.

          There.s an obvious suspect, Sparkman’s adopted son, a troubled youth who at least verbally abused his loyal stepfather.

           There’s a suggestion of pedophilia:  Sparkman was a Boy Scout leader and executive.  After moving to Kentucky he chose to work as an elementary school teachers aide.

           There’s an inference of homosexuality: he never showed an interest in dating women and worked a woman’s job.

          False scents all.

***

           In fact, Sparkman’s death was an American tragedy of the century’s first decade unique only in its details.

           Schapiro tells his story in an understated tone and with a fine reporter’s attention to nuance and detail.  And, he leaves his crushing conclusion to the reader’s imagination, the same imagination that had led him wrong in 2009 when he’d heard of Sparkman’s death.

           Sparkman was an intelligent man, who despite three jobs, was about to lose his rundown house.  He’d just been turned down for the teaching job he’d long coveted.  He couldn’t pay his bills, partly because he subsidized his son’s habit of totaling cars.  He was paying old credit card balances with money from new cards.  He still borrowed money from his mother.

          A year before his death, he’d taken out two life insurance policies, one naming his son as beneficiary, the other a friend of his son’s.  Neither paid on suicide.  Hence Sparkman’s choice of setting, the condition of his body and the horror of his nearly botched hanging and his will to die.

           Two agencies – the Kentucky State Police and the FBI – not usually associated with rapid, meticulous case work and honest reporting co-operated in discerning Sparkman’s bleak existence and lonely death.  They closed the case in 35 days.

           The insurers, in fact, did not pay.

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         ‘The Harlem Shake’?

           Until this afternoon, I’d missed this current teen craze.  Indulging my prurient interest and my reflexive desire to crticise the rising generation, I did a Google search.

           I can report – to my surprise – it looks like a lot of fun, though it is unlikely to sweep my cohort.  Maybe it should.

           My thorough thirty second search produced this gem on NJ.com, ‘Bergen County does the Harlem Shake’ (Feb. 25, 2013).  The third video there is set on the steps of Teaneck High and includes an enthused tourist.  Hysterical.

           Lest one think the administration of Teaneck High School, which has been one of the country’s best for generations, sanctioned shaking on its hallowed steps, NJ.com makes clear its video was shot on Sunday.

           That detail’s important.

           Half a continent away, administrators and a ‘school’s resident police officer’ did not approve.  So reports Nicole Norfleet in Mound Westonka principal, student offer different takes on ‘Harlem Shake’ in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune yesterday.

           Norfleet summarises the view of Jake Brandstetter, a senior hockey player:

The students, including six hockey players, were recording a school-sanctioned video of themselves performing the “Harlem Shake” in the cafeteria so that they could submit for a weekly school broadcast, he said.

 As two lunchroom supervisors watched approvingly, the dancers recruited other students to join in and some of the dancers jumped onto lunch tables, Brandstetter said.

 He said he did not see any tables or other school property damaged or any food thrown. After the dance, as he and others were returning their lunch trays, the school’s resident police officer and its activities director, Dion Koltes, confiscated the video camera students had been using….

           A cell phone video snippet accompanying the article shows the dancing – and students walking by carrying their trays ignoring the dancers.  No ‘Animal House’ cafeteria scene this.

           But in Mound, Minnesota, on several of the 10,000 lakes due west of the Twin Cities, ‘The Harlem Shake’ defied natural order.

About 2 p.m., [Brandstetter] said, he was called into the office, where [Principal Keith] Randklev, Koltes, the school police officer and an assistant principal handed him a $75 ticket they said was for “engaging in a riotlike activity and starting a mob.”

He was also told that he would be suspended for two days and would not be allowed to play in Friday night’s game….  The other dance participants were called in one by one after him, and told the same thing, he said.

           What earned them their $75 tickets isn’t clear:

Randklev wouldn’t say what exactly the students were doing that went beyond dancing but he said, “school policies were infringed upon.”  The Minnetrista police conducted its own investigation, but Randklev wouldn’t detail the results.

 Love that passive voice!  Unlike Dean Wormser in ‘Animal House’, responsibility was not taken.

           The first consequences for the team, the school and the community came that evening.

On Friday night, the boys’ varsity team played Blake School in Minneapolis in a section quarterfinal playoff game. Blake had twice as many players on the bench as Mound Westonka. The Bears won 6-4. Parents and students expressed their anger toward Koltes at the game and on social media.

 One can imagine quite easily those expressions.

           By Sunday, the Principal had heard enough and reduced the students’ – six hockey players and two swimmers – suspensions to time served.  So reports Heron Marquez Estrada, ‘Mound Westonka reduces suspensions of hockey players’ in the Feb. 25 Star Tribune.  The $75 tickets are still at issue.

           Tonight’s Mound Westonka school board meeting, I hope, will be recorded for internet viewing by those who savour their fellow citizens at civic best.

           One hopes the ‘school’s resident police officer’ has his ticket book handy.  He’ll have many parents to cite for ‘engaging in a riotlike activity and starting a mob.’

           Fifty-five years ago, Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim’s West Side Story juvenile delinquents put it more gently than Mound residents will tonight:

Gee, Officer Krupke,
Krup you!

 And the Principal and the activities director and the Minnetrista police department.

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          You probably don’t have a lot in common with Whitey Bulger.  You may wear a Red Sox cap.  You may time your walks for early morning or twilight.  You may find Santa Monica a great get away.  But you likely share not much more.

           Or do you?

           In some court – your conscience or someone else’s mind – you’ve been indicted, if not yet convicted.  But most fundamentally, you and Whitey share a common humanity.

           You have some minimum level of human comforts without which you can’t imagine yourself.  A double hospital room with dueling televisions and you in the coffin-sized bed next to the bathroom and the door onto the busy corridor gets close to your lowest bar.

           Mitt Romney’s Golden Retriever crated on his station wagon’s roof let out for a bit of exercise, some food and water, and a potty break: that would be a bit below your minimum.

           Now think of yourself in Whitey Bulger’s living conditions at the Plymouth County (Mass.) Correctional Facility at least until his trial in June.  In letters to Richard Sunday, who served time with him in maximum security federal prisons in Atlanta and Alcatraz 55+ years ago:     

           He has complained that since his capture in June 2011, he is only let out of his cell for an hour a day five days a week, is fed cold food through a slot in the door, and has no access to television or radio. [Shelley Murphy, ‘Bulger is checked for heart issue again’, Boston Globe, Feb. 21, 2013, pp. A1, A11.]

           Plymouth County ‘has a contract … to house defendants who have been ordered held without bail while awaiting trial on federal charges.’ Reports the Globe, the US Marshals Service says the ‘jail is one of the top facilities used by the marshals and has housed hundreds of federal pretrial detainees.  [At p. A11]

           Bulger’s lawyer not only hasn’t complained about his treatment in Plymouth County, he is quoted as saying the Sheriff and Superintendent ‘have been very professional in the pretrial detention of my client, an inmate in his 80s who presents particular issues, and they have been responsive to them. [P. A11]

           You can appreciate a veteran criminal lawyer’s caution in crticising your keepers.  But in Whitey’s shoes, how would you feel for 24 months in super-max-like solitary whilst presumed innocent?  Like Mitt’s mutt, or worse? 

           Now imagine you’ve been arrested and your lawyer says in a bail hearing, you have, as the Globe reported of Alexander Hilton on Feb. 22, ‘a severe mental illness that [you] have suffered since childhood….’ [Milton J. Valencia, ‘Mass. man fights UK extradition in poisoning’, Boston Globe, Feb. 22, 2013, pp. A1, A15.]

           Suppose, as with Hilton, the Federal authorities recognized your condition.  So: ‘He has been placed on suicide watch at the Donald W. Wyatt Detention Center in Central Falls, R.I., and stripped naked with only a blanket to keep him warm.’ [P. A15]

           No matter what you or Whitey Bulger or Alexander Hilton may be guilty of, nothing justifies these conditions.  They put the lie to our claim to be civilised, to be human and humane.

           From Plymouth County Whitey Bulger wrote his old prison pal, ‘Wish I was back on Alcatraz.’ [Murphy, p. A11]

           No wonder.

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          Great documentaries come in as many points of view as there are film makers.

           Spike Lee’s ‘When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts’ (2006) shows only enough footage of Hurricane Katrina blowing through to set the stage for dozens of human dramas that run through its 255 minutes.

           Seven and a half years after Katrina – with the intervening wakes of Irene, Sandy and Nemo – ‘When the Levees Broke’ presents a now familiar story with familiar villains and unfamiliar heros.  Dozens of heros.

          No matter how well you think you know the story, Lee will move you, shock you, make you think.

           Lee shows little of New Orleans before Katrina.  He relies on the longing in its victims’ descriptions of what they lost.  And, they are eloquent.  There is no narrator.  Contemporary news footage and interviews over the following eight months carry the story lines.

           The villains, headed by President George W. Bush and Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco, get less screen time than the invective hurled at them by residents and critics.  The Rev. Al Sharpton, a New Yorker, is one of the calmer voices.

           The eerie footage – widely shown at the time – of Bush, alone, staring out the window of Air Force One, on his first New Orleans flyover reminded me of photos of a brooding Hitler staring out the window of the Eagles Nest seeing God knows what. 

          ‘When the Levees Broke’ would be worth watching for no other reason than to remind what ‘individual responsibility’ means in the face of a catastrophe.  Each survivor’s story should be a permanent antidote for the delusional social policies of the right.

           The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the US Army Corps of Engineers take the brunt of survivor anger in Lee’s telling.  The state of Louisiana – one of the models of low taxes low services states – gets far less of a hit than it earned.

          The barricading of New Orleans’s neighboring parishes against their fellow citizens continues to shock.  No matter how bad the storm and its effects were, what people did made Katrina a catastrophe rather than a disaster.

           Ray Nagin, then Mayor of New Orleans, seems unflustered, somewhat ambivalent, somewhat sympathetic.  His habitual hint of a smile gives him an air of untrustworthiness, regardless of what he is saying.  And, Lee gives Nagin his say.

           So, too, some of the compelling survivors.  Garland Robinette talks emotionally about communicating New Orleans’s desperation over the booming voice of WWL-AM and leaves no doubt of its current needs.

          Phyllis Montana LeBlanc has, perhaps the most time on screen.  From the flood to taking refuge at the New Orleans airport to months of agony about her family’s fate to the arrival of her FEMA trailer, her story is the documentary’s clearest narrative thread.

          It is no coincidence that the compelling first season of ‘Treme’ features Montana LeBlanc and Wendell Pierce whose story is almost as prominently told.  Having watched ‘Treme’ before ‘When the Levees Broke’, I had a nagging sense of watching it again with different actors.

          The art in making a great documentary is focus.  Lee offers little or no background or foregroundfor the people he features.  They are in a moment describing a singular event.  The colorful history of, for instance, Garland Robinette, Lee alludes to not at all.

          Of course, ‘When the Levees Broke’ speaks more of anger and grief than it does of heroism or villainy or indifference.  The inexcusable delays – months, not days – in offering basic relief would dictate that.  So, too, the agonies of New Orleans families dispersed – without means to communicate – from Utah to Texas to Oklahoma to Georgia….

          Still, the omission of relief efforts by individuals and organizations is noticeable, as is the bare nod to the national outrage the state of Katrina’s survivors provoked.

          One scene deserved more explanation than it got.  In a sequence about the sorry performance of the New Orleans and Louisiana public safety officers and of the US Army, a three-star general comes on a street corner guarded by a tank with a rifleman at the ready in its turret and infantry with weapons poised.  He angrily orders the weapons put down.  The officer isn’t credited.

          The general is black; his soldiers are white.  Lee allows the survivors, black and white, to express outrage at what still seems racist indifference to New Orleans’s plight.  No fair-minded person can doubt it existed in some measure.

          But Spike Lee refuses to let us – his viewers, his society, his government, himself – off with an easy ‘it’s the South’ explanation.  He gives fair measure to the political, social and environmental dimensions of Katrina.  It is a complex story.

           While ‘When the Levees Broke’ is a masterpiece of the documentary form, it is about outrage – that felt by Katrina’s survivors and that inspired in its viewers.  For more than anything else it is about people who just want to go home.

          When Fats Domino sings ‘I’m Walking to New Orleans’ (1960) over the closing credits, it’s more than one can bear.

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