The Ordeal of Mark Judge

At the heart of the proceedings to place Brett Kavanaugh in the vacant seat on the U.S. Supreme Court is a man in hiding . . . a man the Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee have tried hard to avoid questioning in public.

Christine Blasey Ford has repeatedly identified Mark Judge as the other student from an all-boys Catholic school, Georgetown Preparatory, who joined Kavanaugh in pushing her into a bedroom at a party. She was a 15-year-old who had just completed her sophomore year at Holton-Arms, an all-girls school, and the boys were one or two years older.

Both young men were “highly inebriated,” she recalled, and played loud music to cover the other sounds in the room. Judge was present, she has stated, when Kavanaugh held her down on the bed, tried to pull her clothes off, and clapped his hand over her mouth when she tried to scream.

Ever since the story broke two eventful weeks ago, Judge has repeatedly said (through his attorney) that he doesn’t recall any such event, that he never saw Kavanaugh behave in the manner she described, and that he does not wish to comment or be questioned about it publicly.

Defenders of Kavanaugh, whether they know him or not, try to assert “that’s it.” If Judge and the other attendees at the party named by Ford say they saw and remember nothing, then there’s no need to question them. Plus, he has pleaded, “As a recovering alcoholic and a cancer survivor, I have struggled with depression and anxiety.”

On Friday morning, Senator John Cornyn (Republican from Texas), made a big deal about this: “… our colleagues across the aisle believe that the appropriate course of conduct is to drag Mr. Judge into this circus-like atmosphere and to subject his battle with alcoholism and addiction to public investigation and scrutiny and ridicule. That is cruel. That is reckless. That is indecent.”

Of course, the committee had no problem with dragging Dr. Ford into the same circus, despite her long struggle with anxiety and psychotherapy for post-trauma stress. Judge celebrated and tried to profit off his years of drinking and sex by writing several books about them; a pity he can’t see his way to talk about his past for the good of his country as well.

If we accept Ford’s account as true, then Kavanaugh is lying to protect his reputation and land a lifetime post on the nation’s highest court. It’s not difficult to see why Judge might want to avoid having to testify as well, since:

• His honest account would show Kavanaugh has been lying simply by having been there, and Judge probably doesn’t wish destroy his longtime friend’s career.

• If the encounter played out as Ford has described it, Kavanaugh was clearly pushing the boundaries beyond what Judge could see he should. Ford’s July 30 letter says she remembers Judge saying “stop” as well as “go for it,” and he later jumped on the bed and “the two [boys] scrapped with each other.” Whether Judge intended to help her escape or not, that was a result.

• Judge is also implicated in the assault as an accessory, in deed if not necessarily under the law (the statute of limitations has likely lapsed).

To put it simply, Mark Judge holds his friend’s future in the palm of his hand, and if Christine Blasey Ford’s account is accurate, he faces the following tough choice.

1. Tell the truth, and end Kavanaugh’s career. Clearly, the nominee would be denied a seat on the high court. I don’t know whether he would lose his current job as a judge on the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit. But Mark Judge would likely be subjected to abuse and execration at least equal to what Dr. Ford has suffered in the past two weeks: death threats that drove her and her family out of their home, doxxing, fake emails in her name, and an inability to do her work.

OR

2. Lie to protect his old friend and help him land his dream job . . . but risk committing perjury and being punished for that if the truth were to come out some other way.

It may even be his conscience as well as his fear of the consequences that has driven him to go for a third option: plead ignorance and noninvolvement, and hide. “I did not ask to be involved in this matter nor did anyone ask me to be involved,” he repeated in both a Sept. 18 letter and a Sept. 27 letter after she testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

But one could say the same for Christine Blasey Ford . . . in terms of both the attempted assault in 1982, and the way her life has been overturned this year. “My greatest fears have been realized” she told the committee, “and the reality has been far worse than I expected.” She and her family have been “the target of constant harassment and death threats. … Since September 16, my family and I have been living in various secure locales, with guards.”

She had hoped to avoid this; she initially requested that her July 30 letter be kept confidential and her name kept secret, because she feared the infamy and abuse that indeed occurred.

But in that letter, she wrote: “I felt guilty and compelled as a citizen about the idea of not saying anything.” Once the letter had leaked, and she had been identified (how, has yet to be determined), Dr. Ford stepped up to the plate and entered a place in history.

If her account is true, Mark Judge is still trying to dodge his duty and a possible spot in history that would reflect better on him than he has thus far behaved or chosen to depict himself.

Abortion in Rural Oregon, Part 4: a Retired Pediatrician Looks Back

Below is the final piece in a series of features I wrote for the Roseburg News-Review when I was a full-time reporter.

I composed these in the spring and summer of 1990 to prepare readers for the November election, which featured two anti-choice initiatives: a full abortion ban, and mandatory notification of parents if a minor sought to terminate pregnancy. (Both went down to defeat.)

Not all of what I wrote was published at the time. Worse, none of the stories saw print until three months after the election (and after I had resigned from the newspaper in December 1990). I may provide that background in a separate blog commentary later.

But here is my interview with a retired physician who had practiced pediatrics in Roseburg for a decade and a half before Roe v. Wade, and was the only consistent provider of legal abortions in the entire county thereafter.

Once Dr. Harris had retired, roughly four years before my interview with him, abortions ceased to be available anywhere in Douglas County, as far as I could discern, even though women were legally entitled to them . . . and such was the case across much of the rest of the state then, and now, as well as in nearly 90 percent of counties across the United States today.

Making choice harder to exercise in practical terms is equivalent to a ban for women in financial hardship (or dependent on their parents, as most teens are). It parallels the longtime conservative-libertarian strategy of strangling government funding for environmental protection, workers’ health and safety, prohibitions against violation of work and wage laws, and so on. In practice, no money for enforcement is an effective revocation of the law, which has been a political strategy of the right since at least the Reagan administration.

Though Oregon is reportedly the only state in the U.S. that has never passed any limit on the right to choice since 1973, this year we enjoy the dubious distinction of being only one of three states who will have to vote once again on the issue. (The other two, who are considering more drastic constitutional bans on abortion rights, are West Virginia and Alabama. Six U.S. states host only a single abortion provider in the entire state, and Kentucky may lose that single one this year.)

Oregon Ballot Measure 106 would prohibit the use of public funds for abortions, which means wealthy women will continue to be able to control their family size and their destiny, but poor women will have to work that much harder to do the same. The long-term result will be more poverty, more crime, more alcohol- and crack-addicted newborns, and more government, welfare, and law enforcement to address them.

So these nearly two-decades-old stories of mine are unfortunately timely once again.

*      *     *      *      *

ROSEBURG DOCTOR OFFERS VIEWS ON CONTROVERSY

Having presided over more than 9,000 births and 200 legal abortions, retired Dr. Jim Harris knows a lot about the effect of pregnancy on women’s lives.

Before abortion was legalized, he helped many women with information about where to get one. He also assisted 200 others in the adoption process, a choice he much prefers.

“I feel that in most instances, abortion is morally wrong and should not be used as a method of birth control,” Harris said in an interview at his Roseburg home. “Doing the right thing is putting it up for adoption, as far as I’m concerned. You’re not giving it up, you’re providing for it to have a good situation when it otherwise would be in a horrible one.”

Harris served in the U.S. Navy in San Diego before settling in Roseburg in 1956. He practiced OB/GYN here steadily until his retirement four years ago. Although several other Douglas County physicians performed occasional abortions after Oregon legalized it, Harris did the bulk of them.

Harris said he started doing abortions about the time they were legalized. Most of his referrals, he said, came from other doctors, health care agencies, and high school counselors. “Just a few were my own personal patients,” he said.

“It’s a tolerable procedure, but it’s certainly not a pleasant one,” he said. “My assistants didn’t like to do them and I said: ‘I don’t blame you. I don’t like to do them myself, and I’m certainly not going to force you to.’ ”

One thing he remembers is the lengths to which patient and physician had to go to preserve secrecy. “Fear of others finding out about the pregnancy, the abortion, was the main concern of the patients, more than the fear of the procedure itself. Most of the time the main people they didn’t want to know about it were their parents and relatives or the boy’s family.”

Harris said he always “strongly” advised patients to inform their families, but many were afraid their folks would insist they “pay for their mistake” and make them keep the baby.

“I would hate to have legislated the requirement to notify the parents. The reason they didn’t want to tell their parents is because they’re so afraid their parents will talk them out of it. All they want is to get rid of this pregnancy. They would procrastinate too long to where it would be unsafe to abort, and end up keeping the child out of wedlock.

“I would love to have (the family) know and give support but … if she’s old enough to get pregnant, she’s old enough to decide how she wants to handle it.”

Harris is quietly indignant about people who say physicians perform abortions for the money. Nothing could be further from the truth, he said. Harris charged $175 and it was not cost-effective.

“I was losing money doing abortions. I was busy enough without the abortion business. These days, you almost have to charge every patient $50-$100 a visit just to cover malpractice insurance.”

(Specialists in OB/GYN currently average more than $30,000 a year in malpractice insurance premiums, according to Jim Fenimore of Fenimore Associates Inc., the insurance agent for the Oregon Medical Association liability program. Fenimore said rates have been dropping the past two years, however.)

It was important to have someone stand by and “hold their hand and reassure them. I’d never do it without having someone there to help and give moral support to the patient.”

Harris insisted that a loved one accompany the patient, with mixed results: “Often, the boyfriend would come in and didn’t want to stick around. He’d say, ‘When can I come back and pick her up?’ Then he never showed. We’d be closing the office at the end of the day and have to give her a ride home, which isn’t fair. Someone’s got to give her a little moral support.”

Harris refused to do welfare abortions: “I felt, ‘This is wrong; why should we pay?’ I wanted to see that they wanted it bad enough that they would pay for it themselves. I told her, ‘You have to have some responsibility for these things, young lady.’ Or the boy who was with her.

“Usually they’d call back the next day and say, ‘OK, we’ll get the money somehow.’ Which is fine, and I think that’s important.”

As a physician who enjoyed delivering babies, whether for happy parents or for adoption, Harris looks at abortion in the context of what he calls a much larger problem: irresponsible sex that increases the number of teen-age pregnancies, babies born out of wedlock, and parents who go on welfare and raise the chances the baby will end up on public support as well.

The worst solution for an unwanted pregnancy is for the parents to get married simply because the girl is pregnant, Harris said. “I can’t recall offhand any couple who married just because she was pregnant, and needed to be made an ‘honest woman,’ that weren’t divorced within a couple of years, usually with at least one more child and on welfare.”

He feels the next worst choice is to have the baby and keep it, unless the mother is self-supporting and has a loving, supportive family. “Even then it’s a tough row to hoe, and I personally know of only two situations where the girl was successfully able to have and raise the child by herself with minimal family help,” Harris said.

Harris says a lesser evil is to have an abortion and continue on in school or work and avoid pregnancy until it can be a “wanted” situation. “It has been my experience that the girl who opts for abortion and gets on with her life has as good a chance of becoming a happy, useful citizen as her peers,” Harris said. “She usually is a bit wiser and makes better decisions with regards to future sexuality.”

Harris noted that when an unwanted pregnancy turned up in the family of a staunch anti-abortionist, some of them changed their tune: “All that went out the window and they insisted their own daughter get aborted.”

Harris said he rarely saw any sign of post-abortion guilt or depression. “The only thing they feel guilty about is the fact that she didn’t have the gumption to take nine months out of her life and put the baby up for adoption. They may get depressed because of the stupid situation, but not because they killed this young life, or potential life. What the Pro-Lifers try to do is make everybody feel guilty about it and force them into that worst category.”

Harris said the best solution to unwanted pregnancy is to have as healthy a birth as possible by avoiding tobacco, alcohol, or drugs and “seeing that the baby is adopted by a responsible, loving couple.”

Harris blames the advent of welfare for pushing many women from what he feels is the best choice (adoption) to one of the worst (keeping the baby with or without the father’s presence).

“It wasn’t hard to talk the girl into the right thing. But a day or two later I’d get a call because someone had told her: ‘You can’t give your baby away! You can’t desert your child, your own flesh and blood!’ And it was often some aunt, someone who just two years before had said (to me), ‘You have to do something; we can’t have our daughter giving birth!’ (Welfare) made the difference between doing the right thing and doing the worst thing, which is keeping the baby out of wedlock.”

Ideally, Harris would like to see no welfare money paid for abortions. He said he thinks the Health Department should have an abortion clinic -- “but they never will because of picketers!” -- and charge the client something.

Adoption services should be encouraged and supported, he said. Parents who want to adopt would pay for birth and legal costs “so that the only thing the girl has to put in is time, more or less.

“The pro-lifers and the pro-choicers aren’t really that far apart in what they feel: This is a little life that has some rights and we should do all we can to give it a life. Both sides really don’t like abortions and would be happy to see that option reduced or absent. Both pro life and pro choice should spend their time working together to educate and help the pregnant girls choose better options.

“To harass politicians and try to disrupt our whole legislation system by making pro life or pro choice the single reason for voting or not voting for a candidate is unproductive.

“Life is important -- maybe more important to me than to most other people -- but what’s also important is quality of life. And the quality of life of all of us is going to suffer if we continue to let those generations of welfare patients go on. These unwanted children are the ones who most often suffer abuse, incest, and teen pregnancy later on.

“In thinking back, now that I’m several years away from the pressure and soul searching involved in doing abortions, I still have no regrets for having done any of them. Successfully doing the abortion with minimal discomfort and being able to comfort and reassure the frightened, vulnerable young lady has its rewards.

“The only greater satisfaction I had in dealing with unwanted pregnancy was to see a pregnant patient, who had previously given up a baby for adoption, happily married and ecstatic because she was going to have a baby she ‘could keep.’ On one occasion, I recall that the husband of this happy patient was the father of both the adopted and the legitimate child. He was equally thankful and happy with the second pregnancy.”

Go to part 1: Abortion past and future

Go to part 2: a history of illegal abortion in an rural Oregon county

Go to part 2a: conclusion of a history of illegal abortion in Douglas County

Go to part 3: women’s personal stories about their abortion

Abortion in Oregon, part 3 . . . several women’s real-life accounts

Here is another piece of the special feature series I initiated and mostly wrote when I was a reporter for the Roseburg, Oregon daily, The News-Review. This portion (part 4 as presented on this blog) consists of the personal accounts of residents of Douglas County who had obtained legal abortions, and how they felt about the matter in retrospect.

The series was intended to illuminate the issue for voters because there were two anti-abortion measures on the Oregon ballot in November of 1990. And here we are again, with another one on the ballot for this November. You can read about the background here, but there’s more behind-the-scenes to this project, which I will share later.

For now, treat these as a light shined into many women’s experience, especially since by the time I did this story, legal abortions simply weren’t available anywhere in Douglas County, and that is apparently the case today in nearly 90 percent of counties across the U.S.

This was published on February 3, 1991. (And yes, that was months after the election, though I had proposed and written all the pieces well before voters went to the polls; that’s another part of the tale.)

WOMEN TALK ABOUT THEIR DECISION TO HAVE ABORTION

(Editor’s Note: Each of these women has requested that an assumed name be used to protect her privacy. All are from Douglas County.)

“Beth” was 34, married to an alcoholic, and working full-time to support a houseful of kids ranging in age from 11 months to 10 years when she found herself pregnant again.

“We were in debt, and barely making it,” she said. “He was away for extended periods of time, supposedly working. I would say I was bringing in 80 percent of the household income.”

The side effects from birth control pills had made her switch to condoms. A doctor had discovered a cyst on one of her ovaries.

Beth said her husband forced himself upon her one night when he was drunk.

“It was simply out of the question to have the child. I would have been crazy. My doctor was concerned that I would carry it to term. That there would be some complication.

“I also knew that I loved all my kids a lot. And to put living children who are already existing under some strain, and to add to their mother’s strain and responsibility . . . It was one of those times when you don’t agonize about whether you should or ought to do something. You just do the hard thing.”

Beth borrowed the money and took a bus to Lovejoy Clinic in Portland. Though it was an early weekday morning, she found a handful of picketers outside.

“The thing that disturbed me the most was that a young girl, I’d say 16, had had to go through this crowd of people: ‘Don’t you know that you’re murdering your child? How can you…?’ Just these rabid, judgmental . . . We think that Khomeini and the Iraqis have got a bizarre look, these guys were just as fanatical.

“And the woman was just undone. I spent my time comforting her, she was crying and shaking. One of them said, ‘Tell your mother.’ She said, ‘Those people are crazy. They don’t know my mother.’

“No one in their right mind would believe that -- after someone has gotten to the point of coming up to the clinic doors, clearly with an appointment, and has gone through all of that agonizing -- what they do is going to make any difference, and save that unborn child’s life. They just want to make sure they stone that mother. It’s stoning.”

Beth got a hysterectomy shortly after the abortion, divorced her alcoholic husband a year later, and is now happily remarried.

*     *    *     *     *

Now 18, “Cindy” got pregnant five days after her 16th birthday, at the end of her sophomore year at Roseburg High School.

She had met a boy at a 4-H camp in eastern Oregon, corresponded with him afterward, and accepted an invitation to his school prom. He raped her while she was sleeping in a guest room.

Cindy decided not to prosecute. “The idea of having to go through their exams and things just didn’t . . . Enough humiliation for a while.”

She said it was not a hard decision for her.

“(The pregnancy) wasn’t something I had agreed to (so) I wouldn’t have stopped doing anything that I had done. I would ride horses and run and things like that, therefore the child wouldn’t be taken care of.”

Also, her parents were supportive. Her stepfather paid for the abortion and her mother drove her to the Women’s Clinic in Eugene.

Cindy estimates there are 30 to 50 pregnancies a year at Roseburg High, although that number is impossible to confirm. Only five to 18, she says, come to term.

“We probably come close to 10 pregnancies (a year),” says Sandy Walker, a counselor at the high school.

More than abortion, “It’s the fact that they were stupid enough to get pregnant” that teenagers want to hide, Cindy argues. “People look at them and go, ‘Oh, well, that’s what she did: She got pregnant.’ A lot of them end up falling out of the popular category.

“Their parents’ social classes are going to frown upon it, they don’t want anything happening to their parents. Especially the ones that are wealthy. They’re not worried about what’s right; they’re worried about what’s going to make them the most money or keep them where they’re at.”

Cindy works part time and attends classes at Umpqua Community College.

*     *    *     *     *

“Jeannie” calls herself a fence sitter. She had an abortion in California 18 years ago, she wouldn’t rule them out for other women, but she’s not sure she made the right decision and she voted yes on the two abortion measures on November’s ballot.

“The reason I voted yes was because I felt like it’s too easy to get them,” she said. “That was my way of saying the system is too permissive.”

Jeannie was a naïve teenager who had been raised “pretty conservatively” when she found herself pregnant.

“Kids who are raised that way don’t plan on having this activity happen. Because I didn’t plan on it happening, it just happened. (And I was) way too young to have any business having sex with my boyfriend. And then to be a mother.”

In retrospect, she wishes she had told her parents, but at the time Jeannie was too terrified.

“We didn’t have back-up systems like they do now. Teen moms can go to school and bring their kids there (but) we had nothing. You dropped out of school and you went away. I was really sensitive to bringing shame on my family, and I just chose to be very clandestine about it.”

Her boyfriend sold a car to raise the money and she went 30 miles to a clinic in a big city.

She calls the experience a sordid ordeal: “It was at night and there was a long waiting period. I had to lie to my parents.

“I think it had a big effect on me. My performance at school dropped off, and I became a little more cynical and hardened. I feel like I’ve suffered mentally from it. I kind of feel like I took a life, and I sacrificed something to better myself.”

Although Jeannie has been married since and wanted a family, the circumstances have not been right for it: “I have a fulfilling life, but there’s something missing there.”

Still, she will not be the one to tell other women no.

“We can’t put ourselves in that person’s shoes. And it depends on that person’s upbringing, whether they feel this is really something wrong, or something that’s not wrong. I can only say that I wish I’d had more counseling. I wish that it was a little more difficult (to get an abortion) so that people would have more time to think about it, because it’s a big, big event in your life, and I can’t tell you for sure whether my life is better for it or not.”


Read part 1: Abortion, past and future

Read part 2: An inquiry into the illegal past, Douglas County, Oregon

Read part 2a: Illegal abortions in Douglas County, conclusion

A Word or Two About Courage . . . the Latest Flap Over Colin Kaepernick

It’s been just a week since Colin Kaepernick tweeted a photo of his face from the upcoming Nike 30th anniversary “Just Do It” ad campaign. Nike reportedly garnered $43 million in media exposure within less than 24 hours after that tweet, according to Apex Marketing group.

The 2018 “Just Do It” ads prominently feature such groundbreakers as Serena Williams, LeBron James, Odell Beckham Jr., Lacey Baker, and Shaquem Griffin . . . but the one that rolled out Thursday during the NFL season opener was narrated by Kaepernick.

The catch line that appears over his face is: “Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything.”

And the firestorm of catcalls and abuse we’ve witnessed repeatedly over the two years since the quarterback began to kneel during the National Anthem at 49ers games rolled across the news media and the Internet once again.

CUT THE CRAP, PEOPLE

I’m not going to waste time on the bogus assertions by critics -- including and especially the occupant of the Oval Office -- that the former star quarterback for the University of Nevada in Reno who played six years for San Francisco somehow showed disrespect for the flag or the military by kneeling to express his dissatisfaction with ongoing racism and fatal violence against African Americans.

I’m certain everyone who reads this is already well aware that Kaepernick launched his protest in August 2016 by remaining seated during the “Star-Spangled Banner” . . . then, specifically concerned that this might be regarded as disrespectful to Americans in the service, he consulted a former NFL player and U.S. Army Special Forces veteran Nate Boyer.

The Army vet suggested that kneeling during the National Anthem would be more appropriate, and respectful of both flag and veterans: “Soldiers take a knee in front of a fallen brother’s grave, you know, to show respect.”

Boyer was also fair and honest enough to say to Kaepernick, in print: “What you are doing takes a lot of courage, and I’d be lying if I said I knew what it was like to walk around in your shoes. I’ve never had to deal with prejudice because of the color of my skin. . . .”

THE NATURE OF COURAGE

That hasn’t been sufficient for Kaepernick’s detractors, so I want to talk about courage. Critics called Kaepernick’s sacrifice minuscule compared to that of citizens in the military who risked or gave their lives for their country.

Set aside the fact that this is a bogus piece of reasoning (because nobody, including Kaepernick, wishes to deny military service personnel who served in combat their due).

Let’s concentrate, instead, on the nature of courage. Now, courage involves putting yourself in a situation where things you really don’t want to happen -- injury, failure, humiliation, death -- have a distinctly higher potential of happening.

Different activities test different people’s courage. I’ll note here that, if we just count heads, more people have the courage to go into battle than do public speaking or acting. In repeated surveys, citizens have said one of the things they fear most is public speaking. I’ve done it many times, and I wouldn’t say I’m any braver than the average person.

“For most people who are not actors what we do is terrifying -- the idea of walking out onto a brightly lit space in front of several hundred or even thousands of people in a darkened auditorium,” Patrick Stewart says in the book In Character: Actors Acting. “[But] for most actors it’s the exact opposite.” Stewart grew up in a chaotic and violent environment as a child, so “that brightly lit space where I was being observed was far more secure and safe than the outside world.” The formality of theater was, for him, “an antidote to the chaos and danger of my offstage life.”

The thing I’ve noticed in accounts of battle, however, is that military personnel don’t typically think of the flag or their country or “defending freedom” when they’re under fire; their concern is not to fail their buddies. Plus, quite a few military service people never put their lives on the line. Many work in support positions: drivers, cooks, IT specialists, mechanics, analysts, media liaisons, engineers, translators, and so on.

These are essential roles that qualify as service to one’s country, certainly, but they don’t necessarily entail any particular courage or risk. I wouldn’t call them any more honorable -- or of any greater service to the nation -- than nursing, teaching, or long-haul trucking. We need them all to survive and prosper.

I recently read a fascinating book titled Stolen Valor: how the Vietnam generation was robbed of its heroes and its history. The author, B.G. Burkett (assisted by journalist/co-author Glenna Whitley), is a Vietnam veteran who was puzzled by the outsize role that atrocities and torture played in accounts of the war -- and especially entertainment about it, from The Deer Hunter and Platoon to Casualties of War and First Blood.

Burkett was also suspicious of how PTSD became such a growth industry over time in terms of both Veterans Administration funding and care, and private medical practice and psychiatric theory. There seemed to be so much more of it decades after the war than immediately following it.

The author delivers an astonishing and sobering account of how many people have lied about their military service (piling up medals and ribbons, relating tales of action they couldn’t have seen), and claiming to have been “in country” when their military service records clearly indicate they weren’t. Many bogus military “heroes” have hoodwinked newspapers and even top broadcast journalists like Dan Rather. Others cited false experiences and misleading service records while running for political office.

Individuals who were failures and screw-ups in life before they entered the military have used Vietnam (whether they actually served there or only in the U.S., Japan, or Europe) as an excuse for their drug habits, criminal behavior, and supposed symptoms of PTSD. Some were not ever in the service have risen to positions of responsibility in veterans organizations and advocacy groups.

Neither Burkett’s book nor Kaepernick throws any dishonor upon veterans who served honorably . . . but merely being a veteran doesn’t confer automatic honor in itself, and we should stop presuming it does. There are venial, lazy, cowardly, and even criminal citizens in the service and afterwards, just as there are in the general population.

THE HEART OF THIS MATTER

But let’s get back to courage. Here’s a simple question: If you were told not to do something that meant a lot to you personally (for example, praying to your God, wearing a shirt or button with a particular political message, or getting to spend some extra time with our child in the hospital) and your job were on the line . . . would you still do it?

If we’re honest, most of us would come up with an excuse to dodge that dilemma: What we wanted or value is “not that important at the moment” . . . or we just plain declare: “I need this job.”

Kaepernick didn’t take that easy way out. He decided the woes of the average African American were his fight, too. It’s easy to say “he’s not suffering” when he can afford to give away $1 million to charities that support the cause. But he hasn’t had a proper job in two years now: a job in which he got to do what he loves, what he trained all his life to do.

How would you feel in that position? It might not matter how much money you had, if you didn’t get to do what you love. Especially if, as alleged by the lawsuit Kaepernick filed, all the potential employers colluded to keep that job from you on purpose.

So which of us is willing to give up our job -- right now, especially if we’re good at it and enjoy it -- with the added threat that you might not get another chance to do it ever again?

Show of hands, people: Who else has that kind of courage?

What's Wrong With Nickelback? . . . an Exercise in Critical Thinking

We’ve been hearing a lot over the past two years about the “death of civility” in this country. But almost as dire has been the scarcity of critical thought. Much of the problem is that whenever one has an emotional investment in the issue, it’s far more difficult to apply one’s critical skills (assuming you have any) to it.

I’m going to offer an example of a critical analysis of a topic about which I had zero knowledge or emotional investment.

Several months ago on a music lovers page I frequent, someone posted a link that featured a three-minute video about a band called Nickelback. As best I can tell, the video had originated on a site called Smosh Bits, and was titled “SCIENCE: Why Nickelback Sucks.”

People who like the band got upset; others chimed in their approval. I had no opinion on the matter: I’d barely heard of Nickelback. I’m not sure I knew a single one of their songs (and I still don’t). Without watching the video, I suggested to the others that it might have been offered with tongue in cheek.

A fan of Nickelback urged me to watch the video anyway because, she claimed, it was symptomatic of the recent lack of civility in this country, so I watched it. My assumption going in was that the video probably shouldn’t be taken seriously because it starts from an untenable position (basing an aesthetic value judgment on “science”), and that makes it something of a joke from the get-go.

It was created, I supposed, only to attract clicks and be viewed by as many web surfers as possible, and therefore was framed in a way to attract viewers who are either Nickelback lovers and haters, and stir up discussion, disagreement, and further web traffic (presumably to justify or raise the site’s ad rates).

INITIAL REACTION

I wrote: “Anyone who takes it seriously might be said to be participating in, and contributing to, the divisions in this country -- and the extent to which the news media play this game in order to whip up traffic and clicks by reporting on the extremes is somewhat analogous to what is happening here, but I doubt most people who watch or share this video take the subject half as seriously as the people who argue about gun control, immigration, or the idiot incumbent in the Oval Office.

If someone made such a video about, say, The Monkees, The Eagles, Chicago, or anybody else I like (Led Zep I adore, but I’ll readily agree that Jimmy Page is not a very admirable person), I won’t get worked up about it, or regard it as symptomatic of the bigger conflicts and problems facing this nation. 

The person who felt the video was mean-spirited still didn’t see what I called “the joke,” and labeled it an expression of unnecessarily nasty currents in this nation. So I decided to analyze the video in depth. Below, edited somewhat for length and clarity, is what I wrote, as an exercise in -- and illustration of -- critical thinking, especially when one has no emotional stake in the subject.

Here’s the original video. Below is my analysis of it.

WHAT THE VIDEO SAYS (AND DOESN’T)

First, the entire premise of “SCIENCE: Why Nickelback Sucks” -- that “science” could render a definitive judgment on a matter of taste – is suspect, and therefore, I would say, intended to be tongue in cheek. Perhaps if a research scientist had done an in-depth analysis of tone patterns and chord progressions, then discussed their potential effects on the brain and thereby human psychology, there might be something to it, but none of that was the case here.

Second, the piece leads off with assertions that are instantly disprovable: for example, at 0:11, “everyone, even Nickelback fans, seem [sic] to know the band is trash….” Well, I didn’t know that; I’ve barely heard of them, so I’m perfectly indifferent, and there are undoubtedly other people of all ages for which this is also true, so that’s a false statement.

The so-called scientist cited as authority is “Finnish researcher Salli Anttonen” [0:22]. Before I Google this person’s credentials, I’ll just critique the attributed content. I won’t repeat the title of Anttonen’s study, which also has “joke” written all over it. (Turns out, the title took most of its content from a phrase in a disparaging review of the band, which we will eventually discover was very much to the point.)

Anttonen reportedly studied music reviews from 2000 to 2014 [0:31-0:36]. There’s nothing particularly scientific about doing a content analysis of reviews; that would be like writing the history of a U.S. President’s tenure in office based solely on editorial columns from newspapers of the day, which would tend to be critical, and focus on immediate concerns to the exclusion of the big picture.

Briefly, the band formed in 1995, had its first major hit in 2001, and subsequent singles did not do as well. Also “Nickelback received negative reviews from most critics” [1:11], from which the study “drew convincing conclusions about why some people might like this band” … and the video quotes terms such as “boring,” “bland,” “fake,” “unoriginal,” “borrowed,” and “sounds wrong.”

Any of this sound the slightest bit scientific to you?

HIGH-SPEED DISDAIN

From there, the video shifts into cheap but flashy insults, and it’s impossible to tell whether they came from the original music reviews or the Anttonen study, or were simply cooked up by the video maker himself. There’s no chain of evidence or citation of authorities here.

A conclusion of sorts turns up at 2:16: “Basically, Nickelback is just a little bit of everything and a lot of commercialization.” But one could say as much about many bands, big and small.

On to part three, “Their lyrics suck” [2:31], which declares that Nickelback songs “mostly … have sentimental lyrics targeted toward women…” [2:36]. One could readily argue the same about most songs by Billy Joel, post-1977 Chicago, even gay singers such as Elton John and Freddie Mercury/Queen.

“It’s definitely not how most rock bands do business” [2:40] is an easily debatable statement (and possibly even scientifically disprovable). Lyrics at a “third grade reading level” [2:56] characterize some of the greatest rock and pop hits in history, from Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti” to Springsteen’s “Pink Cadillac.”

Note how the video shifts into the passive voice: Nickelback’s lyrics “were also ruled ‘dumber’ ” than Eminem’s Nicky Minaj’s, and Mariah Carey’s [3:06]; “were ruled” by whom? There’s no attribution.

“Ruled” by what measure? Richness of vocabulary and grammar? Yes, ELP/Pete Sinfield, and Gentle Giant all had far more intelligent lyrics than Johnny Cash, Ray Charles, or Chuck Berry, but that didn’t make them greater or more beloved by the public.

Finally, the video fails to close the logical circle of its argument: It doesn’t show why its supposed “objective” criteria for rating the band low would cause both its critics to hate them and its fans to feel ashamed of them.

That’s a social phenomenon, not a scientific one. Science could perhaps measure the nature of those social norms -- the details of taste (such as why certain rhythms or chord progressions and lyrics can have an emotional resonance for the average person) -- but never really tell you WHY.

The final statement in the video -- “Share this with a Nickelbacker to ruin their [sic] love of the band!!” [3:12] -- openly acknowledges the nonscientific motivation of the enterprise. It’s a nyah-nyah exercise that’s not going to alter anyone’s taste based on bogus scientific “facts,” but merely seeks to make people feel smaller or cooler over a mere matter of taste.

So much for what meets the eye in the video itself. Now let’s go and see if we can find anything “scientific” in the background: the source of this “scientific” analysis and the researcher. . . . 

WHAT A LITTLE RESEARCH TURNED UP

Here’s a more fair-minded report about what the Finnish doctoral student (not a “scientist” at all, really; I doubt she would claim the term for herself) in cultural studies wrote.

First, Anttonen studied music reviewers and critics, and the concept of “authenticity” from their perspective, not the wider one of fans and haters, or the nature of music in general, or the average person’s emotions and motivations.

Note also that Anttonen was ONLY studying music reviews and critics IN FINLAND and what they had to say about a Canadian band . . . again, not a particularly broad canvas, let alone fundamental psychology of the human species.

Finally, here are the crucial three paragraphs from a BuzzFeed report that might well have inspired the Smosh Bits video (although my Google search for Anttonen turned up reports on her paper that ran on BBC Newsbeat, US Magazine, and mentalfloss[dot]com):

One thing Anttonen noticed is that earlier reviews of the band were not as negative. The more successful the band became, the more critics delighted in hating on it.

“It became a phenomenon where the journalists were using the same [reasons] to bash them, and almost making an art out of ridiculing them,” she said.

The reason, according to her, is that rock critics see themselves as the protectors and arbiters of authenticity and originality. Hating on Nickelback is a way to assert their authority. So the more success the band has on the charts, the more critics feel emboldened to dismiss Nickelback as inauthentic commercial crap.

WHAT GOES UP GETS KNOCKED DOWN

Those of us who’ve been around a while have seen this phenomenon many times. Bands or artists who looked or sounded new and different at one point received warm attention from critics who “discovered” them early in their careers, for instance:

• white boys from Britain who performed African-American blues with a heavy beat and loud guitars 

• a permanent brass section (such as this band . . . or this one)

• dual female guitarists/singers performing hard rock and metal

• earnest singer-songwriter sincerity (James Taylor, Elton John, Billy Joel, etc., etc.)

. . . only to be thrashed later when they achieved massive sales, and tried either to duplicate the pattern of their early success or dared to try something different.

In sum, Anttonen was studying and drawing conclusions primarily about FINNISH MUSIC CRITICS and THEIR PERSONAL AGENDAS (although the odds are high reviewers in other countries operate in a similar manner) . . . which is to say, self-appointed experts or “gatekeepers,” and not really Nickelback’s music per se or the band’s fans at all.

None of this constitutes “science” (certainly not any direct scientific evaluation of the music itself); it’s about perception (particularly the self-image of critics), cultural supervision, and the creation and maintenance of professional reputation. It’s about justifying oneself and one’s job as a music reviewer, rather than taste itself.

Thus, the video is little more than a labored version of a political photo-with-caption meme. Various publications, from the BBC to Smosh Bits, took the barest notions from Anttonen’s study and ran with them, to produce fodder for their news feeds that largely had little to do with what she had actually written.

THE LESSON OF A SILLY VIDEO

Similarly boneheaded (and even mendacious) videos and memes, not to mention entire “news stories” -- or at least proper news reports with improper and misleading headlines -- are circulated on topics of much greater import (climate change, Russian collusion, the supposed crimes of past U.S. presidents) every day.

It is OUR job to:

1. regard them ALL more skeptically, ESPECIALLY when we like what they say

2. read and listen to them carefully, and watch for the cutting of corners and leaps in logic

3. NOT pass them on to others until one has made some attempt to verify their worth independently

One of the best critical comments I ever got on a college paper, early in my schooling, was “You move too fast here.” This is an ongoing problem with public debate everywhere, but particularly on the Internet.

People respond to others before they’ve fully absorbed what the other person has said. They often argue with what they THINK the person wrote, not what he actually said. They react from the gut . . . which usually means nothing more than their biases, prejudices, and assumptions.

When I get in arguments on social media, much of the time my basic message is “It Ain’t Necessarily So.” Slow down. Read more carefully. Check the background.


And try to be more polite and respectful of others, whether they’re average people on the Internet like yourself or celebrities.