Osler's Razor

Yesterday, President Trump had a meeting at the White House with Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. The topic was to be a new infrastructure initiative. It appears that the following things happened:

1) Pelosi and Schumer showed up, along with some other congressional leaders.
2) President Trump said that he wasn't going to deal with them until they concluded investigations into his administration.
3) Then President Trump left the room.
4) In the Rose Garden, Trump gave a press conference at a podium bearing the words "NO COLLUSION. NO OBSTRUCTION."
5) The press went nuts. Headlines blared things like "Dems react to Trump-Pelosi feud!"

So, really, nothing of substance happened here. They had a non-meeting.

The thing is, Donald Trump has learned how to control the narrative. And he controls it the way a reality show contestant does: by creating drama, and then letting others talk about it.

At some point, the press bears some responsibility for covering the show in exactly the way Trump intends.

Hearing no objections, starting next Wednesday I'm going to start profiling the people I went to law school with. I have begun to do some digging around, and the more I find the more intriguing the project becomes. There is a fascinating variety of stories, and an amazing array of paths that have been followed from that one point in place and time.

One thing I have found intriguing already is the different ways in which we seem to have defined and pursued success. Some, from the start, sought power. Others sought meaning, or to create social good. For some, probably, financial security was paramount, and it is clear that some chose family above everything else. And, of course, for a lot of us there is a mix of things. Seeking power and social good, for example, need not be mutually exclusive (though they do create tension if they are pursued simultaneously, I suspect).

And, of course, some people found success in a place or doing something that they did not intend to end up in. That happens, too.

As I start this project, I'm going to set some ground rules:

1) Only positive things and setbacks that have been surmounted will be part of what I describe. I have no interest in embarrassing anyone or writing about personal tragedies.

2) I'm only going to rely on and relate information that is already publicly available, preferably in bios that the people themselves have some control over. This isn't much of a limitation; I've found that for nearly everyone I have looked into there is a wealth of public information out there right now. I'll also rely on my own (positive) recollections for some people.

3)  I'm not going to go in any particular order-- it's going to be fairly random.

We'll start next week!

Not long ago, I was thinking about all the remarkable people I got to share law school with. Some of them are famous, a few are infamous, and all of them are fascinating. Over the past year, I've had the opportunity to re-connect with a number of them, and it reminded me of what an unusual crowd that was.

My idea is to pick one of those classmates to profile on, say, Wednesday of every week. What do you think?

I love what people did with this (though I thought more people would have bus stories!). We had all four directions of the country represented. First, from the West, this from DDR:

The school bus driver
Was a true alcoholic
And yet we lived.

CTL remembered a bus in the East (Philadelphia):

SEPTA buses are 
Zoos on wheels, but where people,
Not apes, throw feces.  

The Medievalist has a most Minnesota reflection:

Riding the school bus,
Going north to Grand Marais,
Lutherans canoeing.

And, probably my favorite, Christine rode the bus in the South:

Caught bus in Daytona
Moon lit skies, snow covered fields
A red-eye ride home.

Yesterday was commencement at UST law. Because the students chose me as the "Professor of the Year," I got the honor of being the person who puts the academic hood on each student as they cross the stage.

It is actually a tricky job. I'm not an especially tall guy, so it's a challenge to get it over the heads of some of the taller folks, and if you do it wrong it starts to look like a version of human ring toss. Those hats aren't too stable, either, and there is a real danger of knocking them off. And, of course, since the student is facing away from you, there is a good chance of putting the hood over their face instead of around their neck. At this commencement there was a special challenge, too: it was held at Westminster Presbyterian Church downtown, and the passageway by the pulpit where we did the hooding was very narrow, and fronted on a five-foot drop. There was a very low one-foot rail by the edge. There was a pretty good chance that if I messed up, some new grad was going to take a header over the edge.

But, none of that happened.

Instead, it was this series of really wonderful moments. As you do the hooding, all eyes are on you, of course. And yet, there is this intimacy to it, too, standing there with these people we have known for three years. As they came up, I knew many of their stories-- what their challenges were, their hopes, the context of all this fuss-- and it was hard not to get choked up. As I slipped the hood over their cap, I whispered something in their ear, some little bit of encouragement or thanks.

At my own graduation, 29 years ago, Dean Guido Calabresi did just that as I graduated. And I can still hear his voice.

I heard a short presentation today about new electric buses coming into service here in Minneapolis-- $1.5 million buses!

Sometimes I'll take the bus to work, and in the past I have taken some longer trips on the bus (as have most people... and isn't it weird that we refer to any kind of bus in the simple singular, ie "the bus?").

We all have a bus story. Let's make them into haiku. Here, I will go first:

I sat with Fournier
All the way to Iowa
Epic adventure.

Now it is your turn! Just use the 5/7/5 formula, and have some fun!

I love when haiku reflect the writer; the kind of thing that no one else could have done. And there were two like that last week, on the subject of rain. First, there was this from Christine:


I smell it, nearing...
Slight breezes ruffle the leaves
Raindrops hit my cheeks.

And then there is this from (naturally) the Spanish Medievalist:

The rain in Spain falls
On the just and unjust alike,
Just made this one up.

It's a weird holiday, isn't it?

Here is why: I don't think we ever fully realize what it is that our mothers have given us. We see the obvious stuff--advice, the provisions of life-- but there is always something deeper in play, too. Our moms, in a million different ways, crafted who we become. Sometimes it was intentional, and sometimes it was not.

For me, that is all to the good. One thing about my mom that is remarkable is that she always tries to see the best in everyone; she takes no pleasure in anyone's tragedies. That is such a rare quality today.  When I am tempted to do otherwise (a temptation I sometimes succumb to), I hear her voice urging the better way.

There is no one thing that can be said about all mothers, other than this: they mattered.

Clemency in the form of a commutation (shortening of sentence) is, in a way, a delicate social pact between the executive and someone in prison. The president is counting on the person receiving the commutation to hold up their end of the deal and take advantage of the mercy they have been shown.

That's why it is discouraging to read things like this piece in the Waco paper, which describes Ricky Lamont Garrett's commutation, re-arrest, and conviction. I'm surprised he got clemency under the Obama program, given its supposed limits, and saddened by his poor choices once he received that gift of freedom. He evaded police and was found with three bags of ecstasy.

One incident, though, does not indict the entire project. The truer metric will be to compare redivism rates of those who received clemency with those who served a full term. That work hasn't been done yet, and I won't go beyond discouragement based on one case until we see that.

If you live in or around DC, I hope you will be able to come to something I have been looking forward to for weeks. Tonight, Dr. Joanne Braxton will moderate a discussion between Nkechi Taifa and I about the idea of reparations for African-American communities. It's a complicated and important issue-- just the type I love to talk about. We'll get things going at 6, and it's all happening at the Potter's House in Adams-Morgan. You can get all the details here.

Ah, summer! And the wacky travel it can bring. There were some wonderful haiku on the subject this week. For example, we had this from the Spanish Medievalist (which I suppose makes sense, right?):

Madrid summer sun,
Old medieval monuments,
Steaming paella.

Jill Scoggins has a dream-- like, a real nighttime dream-- about this:

From my dreams last night:
A Portuguese jewel hued
sun soaked palace. Why?

And I loved this evocative poem by CTL:

Salty ocean breeze 
Fills the lungs, soaks up troubles,
Carries them away. 

Over the course of my life, I have failed to achieve many things I really desired in that moment. Sometimes, it hurt a lot to have failed. In my early 20's, having graduated from college, I really struggled to find my footing. I tried very hard to get a job as a copywriter at an ad agency, and got nowhere. A few place asked for more information; I provided it and then never heard from them again.

After a while, I tried to get almost any decent-paying job that would allow me some financial independence. Again and again, I was turned down.  When I tried to get a job with Northwest Airlines as a gate agent or flight attendant, I didn't make it past the first round. My self-esteem was dragging.

Eventually, I took a low-paying, no-status job doing menial jobs for a law firm, including working as a process server.  Probably, I wasn't that good at it, in part because I read over everything I was handling, fascinated. Which, of course, led to law school.

When we fail, we often think God has failed us. But... perhaps there is something larger going on, as always.