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Tuesday, December 20, 2005

Trust

Today we return to the creed of the radical right’s defense of domestic spying, “I trust in the Bush admin’s good faith and in the process that led up to authorization of the program.” I don’t imagine that I have to work very hard to convince readers of this humble—but never credulous—blog that anyone who utters such a sentence in 2005 should not be trusted with any task more consequential than ordering pizza.  But because national security inevitably involves matters about which government cannot be perfectly transparent, it is not unreasonable to expect ordinary citizens to have some level of trust in their leaders regarding foreign and domestic intelligence to which we have no access (even if we do have a couple of “friends” in intelligence).  So for now, I’m going to pretend that the burden of argument is on me to explain why I don’t trust the Cheney Administration with any secret powers.

The first reason has to do with the law itself:  as Russ Feingold points out,

• FISA established a secret court that could issue wiretap orders if the government showed probable cause that the individual to be tapped is an “agent of a foreign power,” meaning he or she is affiliated with a foreign government or terrorist organization. This is an easier standard to meet than the criminal wiretap standard, which requires that there be: (1) probable cause that the individual to be tapped has committed, is committing, or is about to commit a crime, and (2) probable cause that communications concerning that crime will be obtained through the electronic surveillance.

• In the 27 years since it was established, the FISA court has turned down only a handful of applications for wiretap orders. The number of approved FISA wiretap orders has jumped since September 11, 2001, with 1,754 FISA orders issued last year, up from 934 such orders in 2001.

• FISA already addresses emergency situations where there is not time to get pre-approval from the court. It includes an emergency exception that permits government agents to install a wiretap and start monitoring phone and email conversations immediately, as long as they then go to the FISA court and get a court order within 72 hours.

(The full text of Feingold’s statement is up at TalkLeft.) FISA already gives any administration all the tools it needs to conduct surveillance of anyone suspected of being an “agent of a foreign power.” The Federal Intelligence and Surveillance Courts are “non-adversarial”; there are no challenges to any case brought before them by the government, and, as you can see, they almost always approve applications for wiretap orders.  So the idea that the radical-right Cheney Administration needed some extra-FISA authorization for really fast, really secret surveillance is simple nonsense.  Any person making such a claim is a person I do not trust, and any government making such a claim is a government I do not trust.

The idea that FISA speaks or belongs to a “pre-9/11” world is especially disingenuous.  Exactly how is FISA’s emergency exception inadequate to the world after 9/11?  It permits the government to begin surveillance immediately.  To make the kind of case Condoleezza Rice tried to make this past Sunday, you would have to argue that the Cheney Administration needed to bypass FISA in order to go back in time and install wiretaps before they decided to do so.

But there’s another reason I don’t trust the Cheney Administration, quite apart from its production of faux-news reporters and programs, its doctoring of scientific reports on the environment, its delusional claims of Iraqi WMD and Saddam’s links to al-Qaeda, and its response to natural disasters in the Gulf Coast in non-election years.  That reason is Jose Padilla.

Now, sometimes I’m as gullible as the next fellow.  (Just ask him!  He’ll tell you.) When the Department of Justice first announced its apprehension of Padilla, I got the impression that John Ashcroft himself had intercepted Padilla on his way to Dupont Circle, about to detonate a dirty bomb that would kill millions.  (Am I alone in this?  I need to ask the next fellow.  Do you get that impression too?) Only gradually did I learn that although Padilla was, in Bush’s words, “a bad guy” who may have had very, very bad thoughts, his dirty bomb was not about to go off in any American city anytime soon.  Instead, Padilla, for all his thuggery and all his contacts with al-Qaeda abroad, seems not to have gotten past the stage of having ideas for dirty-bomb-related program activities.  Nevertheless, this did not stop the Cheney Administration from adducing Padilla as Exhibit A in the domestic front of the War on Terror:

WASHINGTON (CNN)—President Bush on Tuesday plans to highlight the disruption of an alleged “dirty bomb” plot as proof of his view that government agencies are cooperating effectively to fight the terrorist threat, officials said. . . .

According to his prepared remarks, the president will make the case that having the intelligence analysis in the same department as the agencies that would respond to threats will streamline the government’s response time and reduce the possibilities for delay and confusion.
In those remarks, Bush refers to the arrest of Padilla as proof that his directives to improve coordination between the CIA, FBI and other government agencies “are yielding results.”

Remember those wild and crazy days of May-June 2002?  Padilla was the very first American citizen we nabbed in the post-9/11 world, and the Cheney Administration wasted no time or effort in trumpeting his arrest to that world.  Indeed, as you’ll recall, Padilla was deemed to be so dangerous that he was held for over three years without legal representation and without being charged with a crime.  So while we mourn the Cheney administration’s shredding of the fourth amendment, folks, let’s take a moment of silence to remember the passing of the fifth, as well.  You know, the bit about not being deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.

Exactly how close was Padilla to detonating his bomb?  Lewis Koch, writing in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, explains just what it takes:

The richest source of radioactivity is spent fuel rods. But spent nuclear rods are not exactly lying around like piles of abandoned automobiles. Terrorists looking to get the “dirt” for a dirty bomb from spent nuclear fuel rods would have to get them from a nuclear facility.

Putting aside the controversy surrounding security at U.S. nuclear power plants, a would-be dirty bomber faces a Herculean task. A spent fuel rod weighs about 28 kilograms, with 36 rods weighing more than a metric ton. Heavy shielding and remote controls are required in their handling, because each rod exposes anyone standing nearby (within a meter) to a lethal dose within seconds. To prevent a quick death from radiation, the thieves would need to encase the rods in a 40-plus-ton, lead-lined shipping cask (18 rods will fit in one cask) and use shielding and remote handling equipment to move the rods at every stage of the operation. After securing the rods in a protective cask, the thieves would need to move them to a location where they could be matched with explosives, then move them to the target site. All that shuttling means the gang would need a specialized truck built to handle the rods and cask. These trucks are, as one can imagine, large, cumbersome, slow-moving, and easily identifiable—not exactly stealthy.

Now, don’t get me wrong here.  I’m not suggesting that we should have waited until Padilla and his friends (if he had any) had collected a dozen or more rods and put down a rental deposit on a large, cumbersome, specially designed truck.  This humble and law-abiding blog will not become the online headquarters of Free José Now.  On the contrary, I think Padilla should have been charged and tried a long time ago, and it would be OK with me if he were convicted on conspiracy charges, too.  But that’s not my point.  My point is this:  based on how the Cheney Administration handled the arrest of Padilla, I don’t believe they’ve used their extra-FISA powers to apprehend a bunch of Padillas we don’t know about in the intervening years.  Everything about the Cheney Administration tells me that if they had uncovered more “agents of a foreign power” like Padilla, they’d have wasted no time in making the announcement, crediting themselves with having averted death and terrible devastation, and designating their would-be terrorist as an enemy combatant.  Honestly, they’re not shy about doing things like that.

So I tend not to think that the Cheney Administration needs super-secrecy in order to do lots of good anti-terrorist deeds they can’t tell us about.  Quite apart from the fact that they didn’t need to evade FISA to apprehend Padilla in the first place, there’s the fact that they used his arrest—and deprived him of certain rights we once considered inalienable in this country—as part of a PR campaign for their version of the post-9/11 world.  And that version looks like this:  as Lewis Koch writes,

The government’s case rests on an unusual argument. The spokesman for the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, Bryan Sierra, contends that U.S. Code 18, section 4001(a), which reads, “No citizen shall be imprisoned or otherwise detained by the United States except pursuant to an Act of Congress,” provides no check on the president’s powers as commander in chief. Instead, Sierra cites section 4001(b)(1), which reads, “The control and management of federal penal and correctional institutions, except military or naval institutions, shall be vested in the attorney general.” And to whom does the attorney general report? The president. In other words, in the Justice Department’s tortured logic, as commander in chief, the president is not bound by Congress’s rules on imprisonment and detention.

This is a radical-right government at work, folks.  It specializes in tortured logic, just as it specializes in torturing suspects until they tell them whatever the Cheney Administration wants to hear.

And for lack of a steady supply of more Jose Padillas right here in the land of the free, your radical-right government has been snooping into interlibrary loan, interrogating college students [12/24:  nope, it turns out they haven’t been doing that—check the new link] and threatening scholars and publishers with “grave legal consequences for editing manuscripts from Iran and other disfavored nations.” I know, it’s sometimes too much to think that it’s really happening here.  But I believe that’s no excuse for being so foolish as to trust this government with anything as serious as national security, and I also believe I’m not alone in this belief.

Posted by Michael on 12/20 at 01:00 PM
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Monday, December 19, 2005

They hate our freedoms

Over the weekend, Mark Earnest, a local conservative-libertarian blogger, wrote to me to say that even though he still considered me a Communist liberal leftist (to which I replied, I really resent being called a liberal), he wanted me to know that he could no longer recognize his compatriots on the right as “conservatives.” His post reads, in part:

I almost feel I don’t know these people anymore. It seems now they feel government cannot have nearly enough power. Secret courts, secret warrants, secret prisons, suspect torture, massive data gathering on all aspects of US citizens including medical records, library records, and financial records are all wonderful things. . . .

I truly and honestly do not understand. People who once proudly quoted Franklin’s “Those who give up essential liberty for a little safety deserve neither” now cheerlead the executive branch on in removing any judicial oversight, congressional oversight, and in fact ANY oversight (as most of these laws are secret) from the land. Far from the transparent government the founders imagined, we are now entering a system where laws are kept secret, prosecutions are kept secret, and national security is a password to removing any and all liberty that stands in the way of anything government wishes to do.

That’s just about right, Mark, except for one thing: when they’re not cheerleading for the executive branch, they’re calling the rest of us “traitors,” and demanding that the New York Times be prosecuted for reporting that the Cheney Administration has been spying on American citizens by executive fiat since 2002.

But I don’t want to quibble over tiny details—not when a sane conservative- libertarian has reached across the ideological chasm to join me in opposition to secret domestic spying and torture by executive order.  So let me change direction.

Late last Thursday night, Atrios tossed down the gauntlet as the Times story found its way into print (after only a year’s delay): “The End of Conservatarianism,” he wrote . . .

Not quite, but I think their response to the NYT story on domestic spying is pretty much the test.

And I’m happy to say that I know of—hell, I’ve met and served on a blog/ wiki panel with—one guy who’s met that test with political and intellectual honesty.

Not so the chirpy fellow responsible for “Protein Wisdom,” who, most of the time, takes pains to assure us that his conservatism is nothing like that of the religious right, but, rather, is a swingin’ party full of happy tax cuts and South Park marathons.  Curious to see how P. Wisdom would respond to the news that his President had been engaging in domestic surveillance by diktat, I read this:

The Democratic spin doctors, spurred on by their disingenuous Congressional taskmasters, are all over the tube this morning trying to gin up additional outrage over this NSA domestic “spy story”—even as the President stands firm and defends the practice.

Well, give Jeff G. credit for density: Democratic spin doctors, disingenuous Congressional taskmasters, ginning up outrage, “scare quotes” around “spy story,” and a firm hard President, all in one lede.  It’s like a neutron star of wingnut talking points, it is.

But what makes this post especially strange, even by faux-conservatarian standards, is this:

If it turns out—like I believe it will (and I’ve heard now from several people familiar with intelligence)—that what the President was doing (and will continue to do) was not only legal, but from a practical standpoint, critical to monitoring domestic terror cells and stopping terrorist attacks here and abroad, I believe that any pro-defense American with the power to do so should insist that these intelligence leaks be investigated.

That parenthetical, by the way, is the second time Mr. Goldstein refers to his “intelligence” contacts in the course of five paragraphs.  What kind of speech act is this, I wonder?  Domestic spying by the NSA, on secret orders from the President, is as illegal as illegal gets—unless, of course, you believe the Nixon/ Yoo theory that the President can never act illegally. But we’re supposed to take this guy’s word not only for its legality but for its effectiveness because he claims to have heard from several people in intelligence?

Perhaps one of those people is “Steve in Houston,” whose “excellent comment” Jeff recommends to us all, because “it sums up the anger many of us feel at the partisan undermining of the war effort”:

I’m just bewildered by this whole thing, and the ongoing maneuvering to kneecap any of our more effective terroristic countermeasures. . . .

No one that I know is saying that gives license for wanton snooping; speaking for myself, though, I’m willing to give up a portion of “privacy” that I didn’t realize I had in order to more effectively combat the people who have declared war on us and are trying to kill us.

I’m willing to give up a portion of “privacy”—and what is it with these postmodern faux-conservatarians and their scare quotes?—that I didn’t realize I had. There, folks, is your new Patriot Motto: dude, I didn’t even know I had a right to be secure in my persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures!  Besides, what does that really mean, anyway?  It’s not like I was even using that right, so, like, whatever.

(As for Jeff’s “legal” claim: sure enough, in a later post he turns for support to noted legal analyst Al Maviva of the Institute of Simply Making Things Up, and dismisses political scientist Scott Lemieux as someone nobody takes seriously.  Which is probably true on the right side of the blogosphere, since Scott has what they regard as the distinct disadvantage of knowing what he’s talking about.)

The belief in Bush’s effectiveness is another matter, and Jeff does not fail to recite the creed: “I trust in the Bush admin’s good faith and in the process that led up to authorization of the program.” I’ll come back to this one tomorrow, when I discuss how “critical” it is for intelligence officials to visit the homes of parents of college students who request Mao’s Little Red Book from interlibrary loan.  But in the meantime, I’d like to propose a simple and straightforward clarification of terms, for future reference.

People who support a clandestine program of warrantless domestic spying are not “conservatives” or “libertarians.” Neither are people who support the creation of a worldwide archipelago of secret torture sites. Neither are people who support the usurpation of the functions of government by the executive branch; who espouse the theory that the executive branch is the final arbiter of the legality of the actions of the executive branch; and who call for the investigation or prosecution of a free press that dares to report on the executive branch’s secret programs of domestic spying and outsourced torture.

Those people, my friends, are called the radical right.

Forget Jesusland.  Forget the War on Christmas.  You don’t have to be a crazed theocrat to be a member of the radical right!  All you have to do is support the right of the Leader to create secret torture and domestic spying programs, and vent your spleen at the few remaining journalists with the courage to report on them.  That’s what a radical right does for a living.  It’s what a radical right lives for.

Do you know a self-described conservatarian who needs new shoes for Christmas the holidays?  Shoe-fittings are available free of charge. 

UPDATE, Dec. 22:  reader Marc Simmons informs me that some principled Republicans are kicking off their old shoes.

Posted by Michael on 12/19 at 08:16 AM
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Friday, December 16, 2005

Second thoughts

The Wizbang Weblog Awards are now final and certified, and as expected, Sadly, No! ran away with its (and my) category, Blogs Roughly As Big as Rhinoceroses.

Sadly No 26.94 % (2240)
Michael Berube Online 15.85 % (1318)
Austin Bay Blog 12.07 % (1004)
baldilocks 7.68 % (639)
Confederate Yankee 7.40 % (615)
Betsy’s Page 7.38 % (614)
Sister Toldjah 4.45 % (370)
Florida Cracker 3.03 % (252)
Speed of Thought 2.96 % (246)
Yourish 2.75 % (229)
Nickie Goomba 2.56 % (213)
Chase me, ladies 2.38 % (198)
Straight White Guy 2.14 % (178)
The American Mind 1.25 % (104)
Ex-Donkey Blog 1.15 % (96)

Congratulations to Seb, Gavin, and Brad for running a clean and honest, if somewhat postmodern, race.  I think it’s a testimony to the soundness of our blogging philosophies that through all our campaign hijinx and japes, we engaged in none of the organized voting fraud that almost marred the General’s exceptionally heterosexual triumph over Scott Adams of Dilbert fame.  Would that Ohio and Florida had voting certification systems as rigorous as Wizbang’s.

I just want to add two things.  One: as first runner-up and most tearful contestant, I stand ready to serve as Mister Best Blog of the Blogs That Inhabit the Two Hundred and Fifty-First through Five Hundredth Positions of the Large Mammal Section of the Truth Laid Bear Ecosystem should Sadly, No!, for whatever reason, prove unable to carry out its duties.  Like, for example, if someone publishes sexually explicit photographs of their blog or something.

Two: never mind all this. The Koufax nominations are open! Last year, as some of you may recall, I managed to squeak into the top four in Best Writing (losing to Digby), the top four among Best New Blogs (losing to Amanda, back when she was Mouse Words), and the top three in the Most Humorous Post competition (losing to The Editors).  Not that I keep track of these things!  This year we’re hoping, like the Rangers, simply to make the playoffs.  So if you’re so inclined, please stop by Wampum and nominate me for something like Best David Horowitz Smackdown Series or Best Post about Jamie, because I’m told there is no Best No-Longer-New Blog category.

Sadly, No!
Digby.
Amanda Marcotte.
The Editors.

I am proud to be the owner of a blog that loses to the blogosphere’s very best.

Posted by Michael on 12/16 at 05:13 PM
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On retainers:  part two

When last we left Jamie Bérubé, it was March 2004, and he had just gotten his braces.  Janet and I told him that he’d probably need to wear them for about nine months, and that we hoped they would come off for Christmas the holidays. 

We hoped wrong.  With each orthodontist appointment, it became clearer that Jamie would be wearing braces well into 2005.  He was getting much, much better at understanding the intermediate future (that is, not next week and not twenty years from now), and partly as a result, he was getting more patient with the constant goalpost-shifting.  After a while, he got used to the ideas that (a) his braces would most likely come off at some point in 2005 and (b) his parents and his doctors couldn’t commit themselves firmly to (a) because they had to keep readjusting their own expectations with each readjustment of the braces.

Jamie’s orthodontist visits varied widely in intensity and duration.  Sometimes he would zip in and out after a checkup determined that everything was fine; sometimes he would need new brackets, new wires, or other procedures that involved keeping his mouth open for long periods (and keeping very still) while people poked at his teeth with metal implements and shone the heating lamp on them (to dry the glue, of course!).  Jamie quickly learned to ask for the zip in-zip out kind of visit upon arriving at the doctor’s office.  “We will just talk and have no tools,” he would propose to the lab assistants, who would usually reply by telling him that maybe they would have to use just one or two tools.  Janet and I, for our parts, traded off taking Jamie to each appointment, but if one of us endured a thrash visit, then the other one usually had to go to the next two, so as to spread the parental dental-care burden around as evenly as possible.

But at long last Gehenna froze over, pigs learned to fly, and the braces came off this fall . . . whereupon Jamie learned that he would have to wear retainers for six months or so.

Retainers!  Jamie complained strenuously, feeling like he’d been betrayed and hornswoggled again.  We assured him that it was only a short-term thing, and we reminded him how terrific he was about his braces, and we renewed the promise of Beef Jerky Yet to Come.  And so Jamie went back to the orthodontist for the forty-ninth time (or thereabouts) and had an impression of his teeth made.  He hated that shit, let me tell you.  Who wouldn’t?  Who gets up in the morning and says, “jeez, I hope I can lie back in a orthodonist’s chair and have my mouth filled with pink goo today”?

Janet and I felt kind of sheepish about the fact that we hadn’t told Jamie what his retainers would entail (honest, we didn’t know!  Janet thought he’d need retainers only at night, and I was completely ignorant of everything), so at first we cheated a little: realizing that he was having a very hard time eating with his retainers in, we allowed him to take them out during meals.  Well, you know where this is going, so let’s get there.  One day I picked him up from the Y and discovered that his upper retainer was missing.  He said he didn’t know where it was, but maybe it came out when he was swimming.  “While you were swimming?” I asked.  “I don’t know,” he shrugged.  “I’m not sure.” Oy.  So one of the Y staff and I searched the entire building, looking for a little black plastic thing with a small metal strip in the front.  Yeah, like that’s gonna show up.

For those of you who don’t know what retainers look like, they resemble small eyeless sea creatures.  Hope this helps:

Why were Jamie’s retainers black, you ask?  Because he’d rejected all these more colorful designs as “too weird,” that’s why.  He hadn’t wanted colored brackets on his braces, either.  He’s just a basic-black kinda kid.

Finally one of the YMCA staff remembered that Jamie had taken out the retainer during lunch and put it in a napkin.  Oy again.  So I started to comb through the lunchroom garbage can—the nice, full garbage can—musing as I did so on the fact that his retainer was very like the color of a Hefty bag . . . when I found it! Readers, I kid you not.  I found it.

I took the opportunity to teach Jamie the phrase “needle in a haystack,” because I know he has trouble with idiomatic expressions.  He thought that was very amusing.  But I also took the opportunity to tell him, sternly, never to lose his retainers again, or he’d have to go back to the orthodontist for another round of pink goo.  He really didn’t like that idea. So he learned his lesson!

But I didn’t learn mine.  Just last month, as Jamie and I went to see Chicken Little (my groundbreaking review of which is here), we stopped at the Nittany Mall for some pizza.  And because we were going to follow the pizza with movie popcorn (crucial five-servings-a-day components of the USDA food pyramid), I told him he could leave his retainers out for a while, and I’d carry them for him.  Why did I do such a stupid thing? Because I was being smart: I thought ahead, and reasoned that it would be a bad idea for him to be popping out his retainers in a dark movie theater.  OK, so guess what.  I wrapped the retainers in a napkin . . . and by the end of our little meal, the table was covered with napkins (this was some seriously unctuous pizza we were eating), and I tossed the whole mess into the garbage.  And even though Jamie was, by this point, especially vigilant about putting his retainers back in (as a result of the Y episode), he didn’t say anything as we left the mall, precisely because I’d told him not to worry about them until after the movie.

I realized what I’d done when we got to the octoplex parking lot and found that I hadn’t, after all, put that napkin in my pocket.  Panicking, I told Jamie we were driving back to the mall, and that I wanted him to stay in the car while I ran to the pizza joint, because I’d lost his retainers and it was all my fault.  “I’ll just look through the garbage again,” I assured him.  “I won’t be long.” “Like a needle in a haystack,” he replied.

But this time I wasn’t so lucky.  I told the guy at the pizza joint that I’d lost my son’s retainers by throwing them in the trash, and he hoisted the garbage bag into the back of the kitchen and sifted through it with me, but, alas, his extraordinary helpfulness was offset by the fact that he didn’t speak much English and didn’t have a very clear idea of what he was looking for.  I tried to insist that I could go through the mess by myself, but to no avail, and he kept tossing things from one garbage bag into another while I tried to unwrap napkin after napkin while sifting through paper plates, pizza crusts, half-eaten calzones, and discarded salads.  “You don’t understand,” I wanted to say.  “If I don’t find these damn things, my kid has to do the pink goo in the mouth thing again, through no fault of his own, just after I threatened him with having to do the pink goo in the mouth thing should he ever lose his retainers.” And I thought of the day, four and a half years earlier, when he’d had to go back for post-tonsillectomy surgery even though he’d been a good kid and listened to his mother about drinking his juice and Gatorade.

We reached the end of the garbage.  I wanted to give a second look to some of the garbage the pizza guy had ripped his way through, but he insisted, “no, is not here,” so I gave up, paid him $5 for his time, and sprinted back to the car, near tears.  “Jamie, I’m so sorry,” I said when I climbed into the driver’s seat.  “I couldn’t find them.  I looked and looked but I couldn’t find them, and it’s all my fault.”

Sweetly, Jamie tried to console me, just as he had when I’d forgotten his backpack.  “It’s OK, Michael.  It’s not your fault.”

“Oh yes it is my fault,” I said.  “I threw your retainers in the garbage, and now we have to get new ones.” Jamie nodded, but then that little light bulb went on, and he asked about the goo.  “Yes, we have to do the goo again,” I replied, “and I’m so so sorry. . . you didn’t do anything wrong. . . .” Well, this was just too much.  Fortunately, Jamie’s gotten vastly more mature about such things, so he didn’t squall or fuss or act out, but he was stunned.  Betrayed yet again! Would the Dental Drama never end?

“Look,” I said.  “I’ll tell you what.  I’ll call the doctor, and we’ll ask for new retainers, and after you have the goo, I’ll buy you that beef jerky we talked about.  Is that a deal?” It was a deal.  Still, I kept apologizing all through the rest of the day (and of course there was a fresh round of apologies to be made when I told Janet what happened), to the point at which Jamie finally said, “it’s not your fault, Michael, it’s my fault.”

“What?” I exclaimed.  “It’s not your fault at all!  You did everything I asked, and I threw your retainers in the dang garbage.  It’s completely my fault.”

“No, it’s my fault,” he insisted, and this went on for a while.

Now, I didn’t believe he really understood the concept of “fault” at stake here.  He and Janet and I have an odd little routine in which I say, “I think this is Lucy’s fault,” he laughs and says, “Janet, say it,” and Janet says, “Michael, you can’t blame Lucy, she’s just an animal.” Jamie likes this routine so much he can do it eighty or ninety times in a row!  Or he would, if we didn’t knock it off after four or five times.  Anyway, I wasn’t sure that Jamie got the joke behind this routine—which is to say I wasn’t sure he understood why you can’t “blame” an animal, which is also to say I wasn’t sure he understood that the concept of blame relies on a whole host of other concepts having to do with futurity, responsibility, likely consequences, right and wrong. . . .  But you know what?  As it turns out, he damn well does understand what he’s saying when he claims that it’s his fault the retainers got tossed in the garbage, and he’s saying (as he’s since explained to me) that he should have kept his retainers in his mouth during meals.  Which is quite true, as far as it goes.  But (a) we allowed him to take them out, (b) his dang fool father didn’t bring along the bright orange retainer case to put them in while he took them out, and (c) his dang fool father put them in a napkin and tossed them in the garbage.  So really, in the end, it’s my fault.

Jamie got his new retainers two weeks ago.  He hated the goo, of course, but he did much better with it this time, and I promised promised promised we wouldn’t be doing it again.  And then I bought him some good, chewy beef jerky, and allowed him two big bites before school.  “How is that stuff?” I asked as we drove away from the convenience store, the one that stocks dozens of varieties of beef jerky, right next to the big display of dozens of varieties of chewing tobacco.  “Really great,” Jamie replied.

I told him he couldn’t get black retainers again, just in case they ever wound up in the garbage.  But he once again rejected all the day-glo colors as too weird and insisted on black.  So we compromised.  We got camouflage-colored retainers.  Oh, heaven help me.  At least they have patches of green, brown, and yellow in them.

Maybe this time we’ve all learned our lessons.  Jamie knows that his teeth are healthy and looking great.  He keeps his retainers in all the time, except when he brushes his teeth.  And his dang fool father has learned that the family dental plan only covers one set of retainers, so, quite apart from the fact that he wants never to subject his son to the pink goo again, he can think back on that exceptionally expensive slice of pizza whenever he needs reminding to take care of his son’s things.

Or, in other words,

Chicken Little matinee: $12.
Popcorn and soda: $10.
Tip for the helpful pizza guy:  $5.
Pizza and retainers: $400.
Jamie: priceless.

Posted by Michael on 12/16 at 09:32 AM
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Thursday, December 15, 2005

On retainers:  part one

Moving to central Pennsylvania changed Jamie’s life in many ways.  He finally got his own room, at the age of ten; he learned to swim; he developed a keen taste for Indian food (central Pennsylvania is world-renowned for having invented Indian food); and he learned the phrase “two hour delay.” Central Illinois could get crazy bitter cold in the winter, but it rarely snowed enough to cancel school.  Here, with the snow and the mountains, two hour delays and cancellations are quite common, which also means it’s quite common for Janet and me to hear our teenage Jamie come halfway up the stairs to our attic bedroom at 7 am and announce, “two hour delay!” Today, however, we had an announcement for him: no school!  It’s the second cancellation in a week.  So while he’s off at the Y playing basketball and video driving games, I figure this is a good time for a Jamie story.  It’s a long one, so I’m going to do it in two installments.  Part two will appear tomorrow.

Before we left Illinois, Janet and I decided that Jamie could use some serious orthodontic work.  We also decided that he needed a tonsillectomy.  We also decided that this was a lot of stuff to impose on any nine-year-old, let alone a nine-year-old with a cognitive disability who really didn’t understand why any of this would be desirable or necessary.  We also also decided that we were making these decisions for Jamie’s health and well-being, not for cosmetic reasons.

(Four years ago I wrote a short essay about the ethical dilemma entailed in these decisions; it was published in Literature and Medicine, and the teaser is here.  Those of you with access to MUSE can get behind the firewall and read the whole thing, if you like; for the rest of you, I’ll reproduce and update a bit of that essay—namely, the next eight paragraphs—here.)

On June 5, 2001, Jamie went into surgery for a tonsillectomy and multiple tooth extraction.  We wanted to have these things done before we left Illinois and all the doctors most familiar with him; we knew the tonsillectomy was the proper thing to do for his persistent sleep apnea; we had decided to combine the procedures rather than submit him to general anaesthesia twice with his possibly compromised airways; and we had become alarmed that his baby teeth weren’t budging even though his mouth was too small for all his budding adult teeth.  So, then, his tonsils and five—count ‘em, five—teeth would be removed in two simultaneous surgical procedures, combining a surgeon from ear-nose-throat and a surgeon from oral-maxillofacial in a plan that required only eleven months of preparation and a ream of hospital paperwork just slightly less complicated than the invasion of Normandy.

Jamie had very little idea of what would happen to him before he went in for surgery that day, and what pained us most, in the painful aftermath of his surgery, was his bewilderment and irremediable ignorance.  Months earlier, he’d been subjected to the requisite sleep apnea test, which meant that he had to show up at the hospital for an overnight stay during which he would have an array of electrodes fastened to his skull.  Janet accompanied him and assured him that although he would have wear some “wires,” everything would be all right.  Jamie responded by asking whether “lemur,” his little stuffed lemur (at the time, all his stuffed animals had such names, like “anteater” and “buffalo” and “gibbon”; now their names are far more extravagant), could have a wire too; the hospital tech staff went along, dutifully prepping lemur for his electrode.  All this was very cute, of course, as was his faint but palpable delight, in his post-surgery bed on June 5, at having four small stuffed animals stacked on his bed who would all fall over when we pulled the anteater’s nose.  But in the exhausting weeks that followed his surgery, nothing was cute, and nothing was delightful.

Jamie had his surgery on a Tuesday morning, and his doctors determined that it would be best for him to stay overnight.  Janet stayed with him.  He coughed up some blood that night; his surgeon came in to look at him, and decided that all was well.  Janet, now on high alert, didn’t sleep again until I arrived early the next morning.  Jamie was watched carefully all day, particularly for signs of dehydration, and was released later that afternoon.

That Thursday was quiet; Nick and I went to a Cubs-Cards game up in Chicago, and Janet spent the day telling Jamie that he needed to drink lots of juice and Gatorade.  Jamie’s throat was raw and five of his teeth were missing; he didn’t feel like doing anything but watching TV and drifting in and out of sleep, which was most unlike him, but Janet kept up a steady flow of liquids—and warnings, gentle but firm: you have to have fluids, and if you don’t drink them through your mouth we’ll have to go back to the hospital for an IV.  And you don’t want that, so here’s your juice, and your pillow, and your lemur too.

On Friday morning Janet left Jamie in the playroom for a moment, put on some coffee, and then came back to find him in a small but spreading pool of blood.  (She’d been alerted that something was wrong by Lucy the Dog, who came out of the playroom barking, “hey, hey, something is wrong.”) He had popped a bleeder, as they say in the business.  But we didn’t know that at the time.  All we knew was that we needed to get him to the hospital immediately for another dose of general anaesthesia and (at the very least) a cauterization of whatever had opened in his throat.  Jamie looked at me desperately and pointed to the blood that had soaked the Sammy Sosa shirt Nick and I had bought for him at the Cubs game.  “Please clean?” he asked in a tremulous voice.

Jamie was treated and released on the same day; though the morning had been dramatic and heart-rending, it became gradually clear that this was only a minor glitch, that a quick cauterization would in fact do the job.  But although Jamie was all right physically by Friday night, psychologically he was shaken.  For 72 hours he’d been told that if he drank his juice and Gatorade he would get better and wouldn’t have to go back to the hospital.  He’d done as he was told, but to no avail: he’d gone back anyway, to anaesthesia and grogginess and a fresh IV in the back of his aching hand.  And now he was inconsolable.

The weekend was terrible.  Janet had to leave to close the deal on our new house and wouldn’t be back until June 12; Nick and I had Jamie for four solid days.  He doesn’t eat sweets and was oblivious to all the nurses and assorted well-wishers who tried to cheer him up with promises of ice cream and popsicles.  His throat was now so sore and scraped that even the tiniest little swallows were excruciating, and I had to force at least 8 ounces of fluid into him each day along with 10cc of Tylenol every four hours and antibiotics every six.  Sometimes, to get any fluids into him I had to immobilize his limbs and his head with one arm while squirting a syringe into his mouth with the other.  The pain this caused him—especially when he protested vocally—almost made the Tylenol seem worse than useless.  It was like his early infancy all over again, except that now he was nearly ten, and fully conscious of everything I was saying to him, and very strong in resistance—though (and this was no consolation) weakening measurably every day.  I took him to the movies again and again, hoping he would forget himself and drink some soda along the way; normally he drains a large cup before the opening credits have finished rolling.  We saw Shrek four times in five days, and yes, Jamie did sample a few sips of Sprite and Gatorade each time, much to my relief.  (Bless you, Shrek.)

As child-care stories go, this is a fairly sombre one, and yet it’s not all that grim.  Though Jamie endured serious pain for many days and lost eight pounds—one-eighth his body weight at the time—in one week, he did recover fully.  His teeth are much better off, and he no longer has those frightening ten-second pauses in his breathing at night. 

But what made this whole episode so disturbing for us was precisely our realization that Jamie could not have given his “informed consent” to the surgery in any meaningful sense of the term.  He didn’t understand what was going to happen to him, he didn’t understand what was happening to him, and he didn’t understand how long it was going to keep happening.  Although I told him time and again that his throat would get better and would not hurt any more, I know there must have been times when he wondered if this was how he was going to feel for the rest of his life.  At some point I imagined, watching him tongue his missing teeth day after day, that he had begun to fear that he’d lose a couple more teeth every time he fell asleep.

. . .

OK, now back to the present. Four years later, Jamie now knows this story, and he now understands what the hell all the fuss was about.  But only gradually did we find out what Jamie thought about it.  That summer, Janet had tried to prep him gently for the next phrase—namely, braces—and we started shopping around State College for dentists who have experience dealing with kids with special needs (which reminds me that this whole process started in 2000 when Janet first detected his sleep apnea and I decided that his dentist wasn’t addressing his looming oral problems because hell, why bother about looming oral problems when you’ve got Down syndrome, right?—yes, some doctors still think that way).  But Janet’s attempts to explain things to Jamie (which included the reassuring information that Nick had had braces too) had a perverse effect: she told him that he would probably get braces when he was ten, and so, when he turned ten on September 16, 2001, he insisted that he was “still nine” or “almost ten.” After a few days of this, I finally got him to tell me why he wasn’t ten:  “I will be eleven and have no bracelet,” he replied.  Apparently he’d thought he would be fitted with braces from September 16, 2001 to September 15, 2002, and this was his way of letting us know he didn’t care for the idea.  (He now knows this part of the story too, and thinks “I will have no bracelet” is very funny.)

Well, he didn’t get braces when he was ten.  His adult teeth came in just fine as a result of the multiple tooth extraction, but we still weren’t sure just how aggressive we wanted to be about crooked teeth.  Our options ranged from the extreme—a procedure so complex and intervention-laden that I referred to it as skull replacement surgery—to the laissez-faire: let’s just chill and see if any problems develop down the road.  After a bunch of consultations, including consultations with Jamie, we agreed that braces would be sufficient, and that oral-maxillofacial surgery would be going way overboard.  (There is, as you might imagine, a spirited and contentious debate going on about the ethics of surgically “shaping” children with disabilities.  We didn’t—and don’t—even want to go there.  We simply wanted to minimize Jamie’s chances of having oral health problems as a teenager.)

So for the past two years, we’ve been in more or less Ordinary Teenager-with-Braces Mode: Jamie got his braces in March 2004, and every so often Janet and I would take him to the orthodontist to have them adjusted, repaired, tweaked, refined, augmented, or replaced.  There was one almost-scary moment last year when one of his wires popped loose from a molar bracket, so that he had a fine metal wire sticking out on the right side of his mouth; “Michael,” he said, calling me into the TV room, “I need help.” And he did!  I asked him to hold very, very still while I cut the wire with, well, you know, wire cutters.  And he did!  (I managed to keep the cut wire from falling into his throat.) There was also one almost-comic moment when I drove him to school after a braces appointment only to realize that I’d left his backpack at the orthodontist’s.  “What’s the matter, Michael?” he asked when he saw me slap my forehead.  “Oh, sweetie, we have to go all the way back to the doctor’s and get your bag,” I said.  “I’m just doing everything wrong today.  I feel like Neville Longbottom.” Jamie put his hand on my shoulder and consoled me: “You are not like Neville Longbottom, Michael.  It’s okay.”

Jamie got used to his braces gradually and gracefully.  At first they were painful and weird, and his speech was unintelligible for a few days.  But he got used to the feeling, and he got used to using one of those tiny between-the-braces brushes.  He was really quite grown-up about the whole thing, and we praised him heartily and often for being such a great kid about his braces.  And I promised him that when they finally came off, he would be allowed to eat . . . beef jerky!  He responded to this promise with much hand-rubbing glee.

Tune in tomorrow for the shocking conclusion, “On retainers:  part two.”

Posted by Michael on 12/15 at 10:58 AM
Jamie • (51) Comments • (19) Trackbacks • Permalink

Wednesday, December 14, 2005

Who writes short shorts?

OK, I’ve never heard of anything like this before, but Bruce Holland Rogers writes short shorts and sends them directly to you.  Seriously:  he writes short short stories and sells subscriptions by email.  For $5 a year, you get yourself three short short stories every month.  Even this notoriously arithmetic-challenged blog can figure out that’s 36 stories a year, emailed to you every month, for five bucks.  You can check out sample stories and a description of the service, if you like, and Bruce says he’s happy to grant trial subscriptions for review purposes.  He also promises to answer questions about the service—why he started it, where he publishes his stories after they’ve been distributed by e-mail, and how he deals with the peculiarities of the genre.  And you should have questions, because even though literary works have been sold by subscription before, all the way back to Virgil’s innovative Augustan Priority Remuneration plan for each book of the Aeneid (which gave rise to today’s so-called “A.P.R. financing” deals), I don’t think there’s been a literary production-and-distribution system quite like this one, ever.

And in the More Information Department, there’s a very nice (and informative) review from Infinity Plus.

Posted by Michael on 12/14 at 10:07 PM
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