Meals From The Marketplace

“War is merely the continuation of policy by other means.”

-Carl von Clausewitz

              “Anyone who has ever looked into the glazed eyes of a soldier dying on the battlefield will think hard before starting a war.”

-Otto von Bismarck

Here’s a question to get us started:  If a guy tells you that he knows he was wrong when he told you to do something the last time you had a tough decision to make, but now he is telling you to do the same thing, claiming the circumstances are different, what do you think?  Well, if you’re like me, you think twice about taking that person’s advice.  It’s somewhat akin to that saying that George W. Bush famously botched at one point during his presidency:  Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.

I had those thoughts earlier this week when Bill Keller, the former Executive Editor of the New York Times, said in an OpEd piece in his newspaper (“Syria Is Not Iraq,” May 6) that he knows he was wrong when he supported going to war in Iraq, but now he thinks it’s right to beat the war drums on Syria.  Really, Mr. Keller?  After you and your newspaper were largely responsible (through poor reporting and your own editorials) for the public’s ultimate acceptance of the Bush-Cheney war cries on Iraq, you want to take up the charge again?

Oh, you say the situation is different now?  Well, let’s see.  This time there’s a tyrant who is gassing his own people in an Arab land that is a hotbed for radicalism and for unrest, not just against the ruling regime but against all things non-Muslim and especially against the United States.  Gee, that really doesn’t sound all that different from what was going on in Iraq some ten years ago when you came out in support of the Bush administration’s push to go to war in that country.

I start with the premise that whenever there is a choice between going to war and not going to war, the default decision should be not to go to war.  I have lived long enough, and consider myself a good enough student of history, to have come to that conclusion.  As an Air Force Officer during the Viet Nam War, I saw what war does and how often it doesn’t play out as planned.  And as a pacifist ever since, I have argued against every war the United States has entered (or started).

World War II is generally thought to have been a good war, but not by my calculation.  Yes, it was entered and fought by the United States for good reasons: those being to defeat fascist aggression, to respond to a direct attack by Japan, and to stop the slaughter of millions of innocent victims of the Holocaust.  But don’t tell me it was a good war.  Not when it ended with the use of nuclear power in the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, immediately incinerating thereby upwards of a quarter of a million innocent civilians.  Not when those bombs were preceded by fire bombings of numerous other Japanese cities, killing untold thousands more.  Not when similar military tactics were used against the German people (many also innocent civilians) in things like the Dresden fire bombing.

Many will say that certainly the U.S. Civil War was, if not a good war, a necessary one, what with the southern states intent on seceding to preserve the practice of enslavement of a whole race of people.  Again, a good reason but hardly a good war, not with the utter destruction of many southern cities and the still unresolved hatred borne by the descendants of many of the vanquished in that war.

But Mr. Keller and many others are now clamoring for Obama to take military action against the Assad regime in Syria.  They say that to do nothing encourages other tyrants to similarly treat their own people while furthering the impression that the United States is a paper tiger, unable to pursue policy objectives by “other means,” as Clausewitz casually put it.

Okay, let’s think about it.  What would U.S. intervention accomplish in Syria?  It would hasten the demise of the Assad regime, which, presumably is going to happen at some point anyway, so not much long-term gain there.  It would reduce the amount of killing of innocent civilians by Assad, which would certainly be a plus.  But what would the cost be and what would emerge after his fall?

The answers to those questions are far less clear.  Would a pro-U.S. democratic government naturally spring up?  Unlikely, since many of the anti-Assad forces are either jihadist or militant Islamists (if there’s a difference between the two).  So would the United States have to remain in the country to help “create” the façade of a pro-American regime, a la post-Saddam Iraq?  Would five or ten years of U.S. presence in another Arab country help to defuse the hatred of many in that region for the United States?  And can the U.S. afford such a commitment, with a sluggish economy that seems stalled by politicians who cannot agree on how to avoid something (sequestration) none of them want.

Those questions don’t even address the added collateral damage that a U.S. military presence in Syria would create.  What that collateral damage would be is uncertain, but what isn’t uncertain is that there would be a bunch of it.  There always is, in every war, be it unexpected acts of brutality like the My Lai massacre in Viet Nam, or the hideous acts of torture at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, or just the thousands of innocent civilians whose lives are destroyed by the errant bomb or the unintended destruction of property or the unthinking act of a single soldier.

War is Hell; it’s humanity at its worst.  It should never be entered casually or as merely another means to effectuate policy, and it should never be counseled by someone who has already wrongly recommended it in the past.

In the good old days (circa 2000), when the economy slipped into even a near-recession, let alone a full-blown one, law school applications soared.  The thinking was that if you couldn’t get a job in the business world, you could certainly find one with a law degree.  Thus college graduates would turn away from MBAs and other normally popular graduate degrees and flock to law schools in times of economic strife.

So, with the deep recession that hit in 2008 and with the continuing economic stagnation that has become the norm since, you’d think that law school applications would be up.  Think again.

Legal education is in crisis, and no law school is immune from it.  Here’s why:

When the economy crashed in ’08, big businesses took a big hit.  As it became apparent that the depth of the crash was profound and that getting out of it would be anything but a quick fix, corporate boards began to  look at ways to cut costs.  The spike in unemployment was the first result, as layoffs for “non-essential” employees rose dramatically.  But for most businesses the savings that resulted were not enough to keep companies afloat (or to keep profits at levels that kept shareholders happy).  So, other cost-saving measures were considered, and one that became readily apparent was the legal fees paid regularly to many of the nation’s biggest law firms.

In many instances, those fees were in the form of monthly retainers paid to firms just to keep them “in the loop” on corporate issues.  Most CEOs considered those retainers money well spent, assuming that having legal counsel available at all times was good business (keeping the corporation out of possible legal binds in decisions that management made).  Many of the nation’s largest law firms banked on those retainers almost as much, if not more, than the litigation they would be hired to defend or prosecute for business clients.

A second part of the plan many businesses adopted was to reduce the amount of litigation they engaged in.  Litigation is costly.  The bigger the case, the costlier it is.  Thus, many businesses began to seek non-litigious resolutions to disputes that in the past would have ended up in court battles.  Again, the result of this cost-saving approach was to reduce the need for and expense of law firms.

But law firms are also businesses.  The bigger ones are big businesses.  And when the demand for their services diminished, so did their revenues.  As a result, they also looked to ways to save money, to cut costs.  And one way to do so was to reduce the annual hiring frenzies that would result in hefty six-figure entering salaries for top graduates from the country’s top law schools.

In fact, this adjustment by the big law firms in the country took a very short time to effectuate.  By 2010, many firms were putting the hires of third-year law students they had made in 2009 on hold, and new hiring beyond those promised jobs often stopped entirely.  While most big firms are still hiring, they are doing so in much smaller numbers than they had before this adjustment set in.  And without those high-paying Big-Law jobs available, top law school graduates began to look for good paying jobs in smaller firms and in government positions.

But at the same time that big business was cutting way down on its need for lawyers, government agencies and those smaller firms, also because of reduced revenues (remember government spending was also cut to try to balance state and municipal budgets), also needed to find ways to save money.  And, again, in many instances, lawyers were deemed expendable.  Thus, many potential jobs for law school graduates have disappeared (or been far more scarce) across the board in the last four years.

Word travels fast, especially, it appears, in bad economic times.  And so, as readily-available jobs for new attorneys dried up, so did the interest many undergraduates had in a career in the law.  As a result, law school applications began to drop as recently as three years ago.  But a second factor has caused them to drop far more significantly.

That fact is the confluence of the rising cost of a legal education and the bad press that the traditional law school model has been getting.  As to the first of those points, the facts are irrefutable.  Law school is expensive.  Average tuition alone now runs around $40,000 a year even at many second tier ABA law schools.  (Top tier schools, the ones that used to provide the tickets to those nice $150,000 starting salaries, are closer to $50,000 a year.)  That means that many graduates are looking at indebtedness of anywhere from $150,000 to $200,000 when they graduate (not counting whatever debt they graduated from college with).

It’s one thing to have sizable debt if your income can handle it; it’s quite another if you aren’t even sure you’ll be getting a decent paying job after you get your license to practice.

The bad press for legal education has primarily been focused on the alleged worthlessness of the degree awarded at the end of the three years of study.  The traditional law school model, consisting of the Socratic Method and the reading of innumerable appellate court opinions, has been criticized as failing to prepare students for practical work in the law.  In this regard, the old joke about the law school valedictorian from a top law school, who, on graduating, had never seen the inside of a courtroom or drafted a contract, is not far from the truth.

To their credit, many law schools are scrambling to deal with this perceived deficit, offering innumerable clinical courses and providing varied experiential sessions in their basic courses.  And, pushed by organizations like the American Bar Association and top law firms, that old joke may not ring so true for students graduating even as soon as this year.

But the bloom is decidedly off the rose.  This year, law school applications are down nationally by 40%, and the farther down on the U.S. News rankings a law school is, the weaker its applicant pool tends to look.

Some law schools are destined not to survive this crisis.  Others will get much smaller than they have been.  Many will reduce senior staff and tenured faculty positions and move to using adjunct faculties and lower-paying support staff.

The irony is that those students who do attend these law schools, because of all the changes being made in their curriculums and teaching methods,  will probably end up getting better educations and being better prepared to practice law, albeit they still may not find jobs that provide them with enough income to support the debt service they will incur in getting their degrees.

The greater irony is that although paying jobs for new attorneys are scarce, the need for attorneys throughout our society is probably greater than it has even been.  But that’s another story for another day.

The week just past had most of us glued to our TVs as one horrible event played out in full view of a national audience while another that would have been equally compelling almost went unnoticed, save for those who were tragically affected by it.

The first was the detonation of the two bombs at the finish line of the Boston Marathon that left three dead and over 170 injured, many seriously.  The second was a massive explosion of a fertilizer factory in a small town in Texas (West by name, although it’s actually closer to the middle of the state) that left at least 14 dead, over 100 injured, and as many as 50 homes destroyed or seriously damaged.

In both instances, the causes were secondary in importance to the results for those who suffered from their occurrences.  Put another way, as newsworthy as the events were (the one as a possible footnote in the ongoing war on terrorism, the other as a possible example of the inadequate regulation of an industrial activity), the immediate lesson from both is that sudden tragedies are very often the result of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The Boston Marathon bombs were a cruel and despicable conclusion to a joyous event, occurring as it does every year on what Massachusetts dubs “Patriots’ Day,” which commemorates the anniversary (actually April 19) of the first battles of the Revolutionary War.  It is always marked by a Red Sox home game (played in the morning) and by the running of the marathon (the country’s oldest such race, having been run every year since its inaugural in 1897).  Thousands enter the race every year, and tens of thousands cheer on the runners, many doing so at or near the finish line in downtown Boston.

The bombs were detonated about an hour after the first runners had finished, which means the explosions occurred when many of the runners were approaching the finish line.  The terrorists who set out to destroy the day for everyone, and, in the process, the lives of those directly affected, were disturbed young men who probably had misguided visions of sainthood and martyrdom in the commission of their evil act.

Their motivations are considered critically important to government officials and cable news producers, but to those crippled by the bombs, those whose lives will never be the same, the reason they did it is less significant than the result of what they did.

Similarly, the explosion of the fertilizer factory may well have been the result of poor maintenance of the plant by an overly greedy owner, or of an incompetently managed operation by inept plant managers, or of a badly regulated industry by an agency that lacks the funding and the legislative authority to keep plants like this one safe, but the result for those who lost loved ones in the blast, or who were badly injured by its effects, or who lost their homes and all they owned from its impact, was far more significant.

In each incident, the damages that resulted were visited on those who were, essentially, at the wrong place at the wrong time.

This point is, perhaps, too obvious to merit much attention.  It is very much the equivalent of the “there but for the grace of God, go I” sentiment that was expressed by many runners in the marathon who knew that had they finished just one minute slower or been just one minute faster, they might have been at “ground zero” at the moment of the bombs’ blasts.  Similarly, the firefighters who had not yet arrived at the fertilizer plant due to any number of little impediments that got in their way as they rushed to attend to the alarm may have thought of how “lucky” they were to have been delayed.  And the point, however it is stated, in no way detracts from the hideous evil that led to the decision to bomb the finish line or to the malfeasance that led to the fertilizer plant explosion.

But in the end, many of the events that befall our fellows, much more than the causes that give rise to them, are all a bit of happenstance.  Much of the good or bad fortune that visits everyone, in relatively equal quantities so far as I have been able to determine, does so irrespective of the quality of life that led to that point or the reasons why bombs are detonated and factories explode.

Thornton Wilder explored this theme in his great novel, “The Bridge of San Luis Rey.”  Why, his narrator asks, did these five humans happen to be on that particular bridge at the moment that it collapsed?  Note that the question is not why the bridge collapsed, but why did its collapse occur so as to take the lives of these five, particularly and specifically.

I often find myself studying obituaries (which I am reading far more frequently now that I am older) for the cause of death and for some link to the cause in the life the person lived.  Was this victim of lung cancer a smoker, for example?  Ah, so that makes sense.  That makes it easier to accept.  Was this person severely overweight and out of shape?  Ah, then the heart attack was not unexpected.  Was that person wearing a seat belt?  Oh, well that’s why he didn’t survive.

Those rationalizations, however, only take me so far.  Seven years ago I got cancer.  I hadn’t done anything to suggest I was likely to be a victim of that disease, didn’t even have a family history that suggested I would contract this particular form of it.  Still, I got it.

The victims of the Marathon bombs and of the fertilizer plant explosion didn’t do anything to justify or otherwise make their harm acceptable.  They weren’t doing anything that should have put them in harm’s way.  They weren’t bad people or even negligent in their actions.

They were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.  It isn’t just.  It isn’t fair.  It just is.

Only towards the end of “42,” the powerful new film by Brian Helgeland, does Branch Rickey, the owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers who in 1945 decided to break baseball’s “color barrier” with a dynamic ballplayer from the Negro Leagues, reveal why he decided to take on that challenge.  His story, related to the player by Harrison Ford (in possibly the best performance of his career), strips away all of the business-of-baseball cover he had theretofore claimed as his motivation.

The player to whom he reveals his own guilt-ridden past is the great Jackie Robinson, who is certainly the hero of the film.  But in terms of history, he shares that title with Mr. Rickey, the cigar-chomping, Bible-quoting baseball genius, who, with the signing of Robinson and the other black stars who followed him on those Dodger teams, ushered in an era of greatness for his team and opened doors for African-Americans in all walks of life.

As movies go, “42” probably isn’t this year’s “Citizen Kane.”  If it is less than hagiographic, it certainly doesn’t want for a heavy dose of sentimentality, complete with a musical score that almost drowns some of the film’s more poignant moments.  But the movie should have impact on a generation that may never have known of the horrors that Rickey challenged and that Robinson overcame in the first years following World War II.

It was a time when Jim Crow was alive and well and not just in the Deep South.  One of the most virulent racist displays in the film comes from the Phillies’ manager who taunts the rookie mercilessly in an early visit of the team to Philadelphia.  In another scene in that city, the players are refused their normal hotel accommodations because of Robinson’s presence on the team during the 1947 season.  He wasn’t even supported, initially at least, by many of the Brooklyn residents who attended the team’s games in Ebbets Field (recreated with remarkable CGI accuracy in the film), and was scorned by most of his teammates before they learned that he could actually help them win ballgames.

As much as Robinson’s courage is vividly portrayed (in a fine performance by Chadwick Boseman), Rickey’s is more subtly presented, partly because he never appears shaken once he makes the decision to go ahead with the Robinson experiment.  Ford’s portrayal of Rickey is nothing like his action hero roles.  Here, he is gruff and not all that attractive, physically or otherwise.  But he is steadfast in his belief that the color barrier in baseball must be broken, and he is equally unswerving in his distaste for racist displays, even from his own minor league manager (who quickly gets the message and gets on board with the plan).

I wept several times as I watched the film last weekend.  Most of the tears, I’m sure, were born of nostalgia for that time in my childhood when Jackie was one of the superstars on my team (a team laden with many great players, all thanks to Mr. Rickey’s astute judgment of baseball talent).  I fell for Robinson and the Dodgers a half dozen years after the color barrier had been broken, and, in my youthful innocence, I didn’t even understand that Robinson’s skin color had been a big deal only a few years before I discovered him and his team.

So it may well be with today’s young people, at least with respect to racial differences.  And that is part of the Rickey-Robinson legacy, as, it can well be argued, is the election (and re-election) of Barack Obama.  Indeed, even the suddenly rapid movement to acceptance of homosexuality and of the demand for equal rights for the LGBTI community can be traced to the breaking of baseball’s color barrier.  Ditto the move to immigration reform, which seems, finally, to be gaining real traction, as xenophobia dissolves to political realities.

Let’s remember what America was like in 1945 as regards racial differences.  The country had just ended a war that had seen Japanese-Americans interred lest they pose a threat to the nation’s internal security.  That German-Americans were not similarly treated is clear evidence that skin color was a mark of distinction and a cause for prejudice.  Blacks who fought in the war were segregated in their own units, another indication of skin color differences as a basis for prejudice.  Harry Truman only desegregated the military in 1948, notably after the Rickey-Robinson experiment had succeeded.

Schools weren’t desegregated as a matter of law until 1954 (with the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education).  The Equal Rights Act (making segregation unlawful in public facilities) wasn’t passed until 1964, and the Voting Rights Act (making poll taxes and literacy tests illegal) wasn’t enacted until 1965.

By then, of course, the civil rights movement, led by Martin Luther King, Jr. (another hero, to be sure) was in full swing, but query: how much more difficult would King’s movement have been had the color barrier in sports still existed at that time?

At their first meeting, Rickey told Robinson that he wanted him to be man enough not to fight back.  Rickey needed Robinson to be a fighter, but he needed him to fight smart, which meant beating the opposition on the ball field and ignoring the taunts and threats that he faced in the process.  Had Robinson failed, either as a player or as a human being, the great likelihood is that baseball would have reverted to its segregated ways for years to come.  And, with the failed experiment, racist attitudes would have been emboldened, making the success of King’s movement that much more problematic.

Certainly, in time, justice would have prevailed.  But how much time?  Ten years, twenty, fifty?  Who can say?

What we can say is that in 1945, baseball was America’s game, and, at its highest level, it was only open to white men, emblematic of the way the white-dominant nation viewed those with different skin colors.  But after Branch Rickey and Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier, skin color could never again justify discrimination, and the country would never be the same.