Death by Suicide

Finn Casperson was an enigma. He took. He gave.
by Charlie Leck

Finn Casperson, one of New Jersey’s very prominent citizens, died last week by his own hand. The news rattled me and my wife quite thoroughly and we looked at each other with frightened confusion. The question hung over our thick emotions: “Why? My God, why?”

We couldn’t, in any way, call him a friend. We knew him well enough, however, that he wouldn’t hesitate to call us for a chat about donating funds to one of his favorite organizations, the U.S. Equestrian Center, at Hamilton Farms, in Gladstone, New Jersey. Somehow, over the years, I also became a member of a couple of fairly unusual clubs of which he was also a member. And, we once found ourselves, quite coincidentally, as guests at a cocktail party aboard a yacht in the harbor of Stockholm, Sweden.

So, we had some opportunities to chat and to get to know one-another. We weren’t anything alike, but I enjoyed his company. Though Finn was enormously successful in many ways and had achieved great wealth and prominence (see the following story about his death), he wasn’t a bold and confident character. He was always hesitant in conversation and seemed nervous about engaging with people he didn’t know well. He liked his cocktails a great deal and talking with him became easier as he loosened himself up; however, very few people were ever going to get to know him very deeply. He had built up a strong defense system over the years and he was only going to let you glance at the surfaces of his character.

Nonetheless, I admired him for his successes and for his charitable habits. He ran Beneficial Finance Corporation for years and, when they sold out to Household International for 8.6 billion dollars in 1998, Finn walked off with over 25 million dollars to add to his already staggering wealth. At the time, William Aldinger, who was brought in to run Household’s new holding, had some pretty unflattering things to say about Caspersen’s management skills. He thought Finn spent too easily and too freely. That matched pretty closely to the guy we had gotten to know. Finn liked to live big, comfortably and obviously. We were at a couple of lavish and sumptuous parties at his home where no expense was spared.

Yet, Finn was also generous. He was a major supporter of Drew University, in Madison, New Jersey. He also gave large amounts to Brown University, Harvard College and Law School, and Morristown Memorial Hospital (a place where my mother spent a considerable amount of time during the last, painful years of her life).

It was clear, however, that the organization he loved most and to which he gave most of his time and effort was the United States Equestrian Team. That’s how we first got to know him. He supported both the riding program of the team and helped it develop a significant driving program. Under Caspersen’s direction, the U.S. teams, in a change from the past, became extremely competitive. While Finn was the chairman, the U.S. brought home 71 medals from international competitions and that included 25 gold medals.

“How could he do this?” My wife kept asking the question. She was stupefied. She was also angry.

“How selfish,” she ranted. “How selfish! Just think about poor Barbara, and his children, and his grandchildren.”

I tried to defend Finn. After all, we didn’t know what he was going through – what was going on in his life. Sure there were rumors of some severe financial reverses, but there were also stories about his health and that he was dealing with a significant amount of pain. Is that selfishness? Or, is it a loss of centeredness?

“When you’re in that state of confusion and agony,” I argued, “you don’t make good decisions. You only make desperate ones. It’s difficult to think of others when circumstance and pain won’t allow you to see anything but your own falibility and miserable condition.”

I wish I had gotten to know Finn better. I would have liked to find the quiet, confident and comfortable side of him. That never happened. Perhaps I should have worked harder at it, but that’s not my way either. Now, it’s too late anyway. Finn has moved on and out among the stars and he shall get to rest eternally. There will be no more pain and all confusions of mind and spirit become settled and clear. When he made his decision, in a fog of self-centeredness, that’s what he was seeking.

The following is a poem by Edward Arlington Robinson:

WHENEVER Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
"Good-morning," and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich—yes, richer than a king,
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.

Obama and Afghanistan

This could be the BIG and fatal mistake of the Obama administration!
by Charlie Leck

His failure to get what he wanted and promised us on health care reform will certainly be a major part of the Obama legacy. This alone may make his reelection impossible.

But, like presidents before him, a nasty and unnecessary war is what will doom him. The President has taken the bait and has been hooked into the hopeless and tragic war in Afghanistan. It is no longer George Bush’s war. Now, it is Barack Obama’s war.

And now, the war issue threatens to cream our current promising and talented President. A few weeks ago I wrote here about the hopelessness of this current war (Snagged or Snarled in an Unwinnable War).

One would think that history cannot be ignored. It has been.

War brought Lyndon Johnson’s Presidency down. It did the same to Richard Nixon. It destroyed George W. Bush.

Recently the President asked Congress to allow him to send more troops to Afghanistan.

“Hooray,” cheered all the Republican members of Congress.

“Wait just a minute,” howled the Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, a Democrat. This Senator knows how to read a tea leaf – or at least public sentiment. Public support for the war is declining dramatically. This doesn’t come as a big surprise to anyone who follows contemporary political history. We are supposed to hear a speech today, in which this Senator (Carl Levin, of Michigan) will express grave doubts about deepening America’s involvement in this tragic war.

What is the major complaint? It has to do with mission. Are we involved in another war without a clearly stated mission? When one does that, in either love or war, it is difficult to find end points. When there are no goals and purposes to fulfill, how does one decide the end has come? If you'll remember, we went into Afghanistan to get Osam bin Laden. Now we're there for reasons even God probably doesn't know. If I were in Congress, considering the President's request for more troops, I'd demand that he explain his precise mission for this war and what events would trigger the return of all our troops.

The Senator from Michigan carries great street cred! His abilities and knowledge on military matters are admired by Senators on both sides of the aisle.

Over in the House, the Speaker herself has warned the President that he will face significant opposition to any request for more troops.

“I don’t think there is a great deal of support for sending more troops to Afghanistan in the country or in Congress,” Ms. Pelosi told reporters on Wednesday.

The President has recognized that he’s in a hornet’s nest and he’s decided to delay his requests until he can build up more political support for what he wants to do.

In the meantime, polls show that public sentiment for supporting the war is declining rapidly.

There is clear evidence of a split in the Democratic Party. The progressives are getting snubbed on health care and now they feel neglected on the Afghanistan issue as well. This is a huge wing of the party we’re talking about and, without support from this group, the President’s productivity is seriously wounded or, perhaps, destroyed.

There are plenty of Democrats who are starting to wonder about President Obama’s persuasive abilities. In this case, it’s difficult to be persuasive when you’re wrong!

Late addition to this blog
After putting this blog to bed and scheduling its posting, I came across this extremely thoughtful column by Robert Scheer on Alternet: Obama's Quagmire Looks a Lot like Vietnam! Perhaps you should read it.

PUBLIC OPTION NOW

Why we can’t wait!
by Charlie Leck

One of my daughters put this video on her FACEBOOK page yesterday. I found it very moving. I thought I’d post it here for you to see. The number of uninsured people in this country is rising alarmingly. Something must be done. Health care reform without a public option is not health care reform. Be sure to let your Representative and Senators know that Health Care Reform legislation must have a public option.

Arnold S. Relman, M.D. and Professor Emeritus of Medicine and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School pointed out, in an article in the NY Times, what was missing from Obama's speech on Wednesday night.

"The main drivers of medical inflation are fee-for-service payment of physicians, and all the other incentives in the current medical care system for increasing providers’ income. We will not control costs without major changes in the way medical care is organized, delivered and paid for. Without such changes our health care system is not viable for much longer, but hardly anything of substance was said about that. In fact, the president emphasized his determination to keep the structure of the present system largely intact by steering a middle course between the major reforms advocated by liberals and the free market approach favored by conservatives. He even seems willing to abandon a strong public insurance option in order to get something done now.

"This political strategy may work in the short term, but certainly not for long. I’m afraid history will not heed Mr. Obama’s intention to be the last president who will have to fight for health reform. Until a political consensus for major change appears, the struggle will continue."

Obama's willingness "to abandon a strong public insurance option in order to get something done now" is precisely what scares me and it is what we all have to keep screaming about -- loud enough and long enough that he will hear us. We must scream to him and to our Senators and our Congressperson.

A large number of my readers are upset with me, that I have been so harsh and so critical of the President. I'm sorry, but nothing has been so important in my lifetime for the future of this nation. I am ashamed that our country cannot take care of its ill and injured properly. I am ashamed that people, through no fault of their own in most cases, are driven into poverty but serious illness. It should not happen in a country that considers itself great. It often does happen.

Andy Driscoll, the Driscoll Group, from whom I get regular emails had this to say on Tuesday to his regular readers. He suggests a petition demanding a public option. I signed the petition. Here's your chance to sign it.

Dear Friend,

If we don't make a stand now for a public option, the Obama administration may hedge on its plan for health care reform.

On Wednesday, the president is expected to lay out his vision for health care reform at a joint session of Congress.

But there are already troubling signs that the Obama administration might be open to passing health care reform without any provision for a public insurance option similar to Medicare that could compete with private insurance companies. For example, reports came out on Friday that President Obama held a conference call with House progressives and asked them how far they'd compromise on the public option.

For those of us who support single payer, a robust public option is the compromise. Aside from single payer, a health care bill without a robust public option is just more of the same.

I just signed a petition to tell President Obama that the public option is not optional and that he should tell Congress and the voters that he will not sign a bill without a robust public option similar to Medicare.

I hope you will sign this petition too. Please have a look and take action.

http://act.credoaction.com/campaign/publicoption_bo/?r_by=5846-60376-1608e4x&rc=confemail

Thanks, Andy

MAKE A HELLUVA RACKET

Do you know what a “public option” really is?
by Charlie Leck

President Obama’s speech to Congress last night was brilliant – brilliant and “pretty” tough. It stopped short of guarantying that he would not accept any health care reform legislation that comes to his desk without a public option.

Just what is a public option? Robert Reich explains it very well in this video, which you certainly ought to watch. He also explains what you must do if you think a public option should be included in health care reform legislation – and he tells us we only have a few weeks to do it! Please watch.



Here’s one of the best demonstrations of grass roots democracy at work in America that you will ever see. Without people of every kind getting involved and demanding their representatives in Congress support the public option, it is not going to happen and then what we get will NOT be reform. I ain’t just a’ kiddin’ folks.

Make sure your friends see this video!

WHAT SHOULD COLLEGES TEACH? by Stanley Fish

This discussion between NY Times blogger, Stanley Fish, and his readers is crucial reading for those of you who care about education in America!
by Charlie Leck

Though the title seems to limit the topic of this blog to college education, that it not at all accurate. Much of the discussion, to which I am going to point you, has to do with high school and middle school education as well.

Stanley Fish, who blogs regularly in the NY Times, is one of the most important bloggers in America. I have recommended him to you many times in the past. Fish has some seriously impressive credentials and he does some serious and impressive writing on his blog, Think Again. He currently teaches law at Florida International University in Miami. He is also a dean emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Chicago. He has taught at the University of California at Berkeley, John Hopkins University and Duke University. He is the author of eleven books, most of which deal with the subject of higher education.

Fish’s extraordinary blog, WHAT SHOULD COLLEGES TEACH?, is in three parts. I got so expansive because of the hundreds of response comments Fish received to the first blog. Most of the comments were polite and offered in the spirit of discussion and honest debate. That led Fish to expand on his first blog in an attempt to answer questions that the commenters had raised.

A great deal of Fish’s argument has to do with the question of teaching both reading and writing in preparation for college and during the college years. If you are a regular reader of my own blog, you know these subjects are important to me.

As someone wise once said: “You can lead a horse to a flowing blog, but you can’t make it read.”

Well, I have led you to the river’s edge and, now, the rest is up to you.

Read Part 1 of What should colleges teach?
Read Part 2 of What should colleges teach?
Read Part 3 of What should colleges teach?

For those of you too timid to delve into the river, I’ll provide some excerpted quotations. If you are particularly interested in the question of how we improve writing skills in students, this will only be a tease to what Fish includes in the three part series.

“A few years ago, when I was grading papers for a graduate literature course, I became alarmed at the inability of my students to write a clean English sentence. They could manage for about six words and then, almost invariably, the syntax (and everything else) fell apart. I became even more alarmed when I remembered that these same students were instructors in the college’s composition program. What, I wondered, could possibly be going on in their courses?

“I decided to find out, and asked to see the lesson plans of the 104 sections. I read them and found that only four emphasized training in the craft of writing. Although the other 100 sections fulfilled the composition requirement, instruction in composition was not their focus. Instead, the students spent much of their time discussing novels, movies, TV shows and essays on a variety of hot-button issues — racism, sexism, immigration, globalization. These artifacts and topics are surely worthy of serious study, but they should have received it in courses that bore their name, if only as a matter of truth-in-advertising.” [Opening paragraphs of the blog]

***

“It probably is neither; curricular alternatives are just not that world-shaking. The philosophical baggage that burdens this debate should be jettisoned and replaced with a more prosaic question: What can a core curriculum do that the proliferation of options and choices cannot? The answer to that question is given early in the report before it moves on to its more polemical pages. An ‘important benefit of a coherent core curriculum is its ability to foster a common conversation among students, connecting them more closely with faculty and with each other.’

“The nice thing about this benefit is that it can be had no matter what the content of the core curriculum is. It could be the classics of western literature and philosophy. It could be science fiction. It could be globalization. It could be anything so long as every student took it. But whatever it is, please let it include a writing course that teaches writing and not everything under the sun. That should be the real core of any curriculum.” [The closing two paragraphs of Part I of Fish’s blog]

***

“The negative comments on my previous column (there were many positive ones oo) fall neatly into two groups, the attacks on me and the attacks on my ideas.

“Let’s do the ad hominem stuff first. More than a few posters declared that while I talk the talk, I don’t walk the walk. Eric issues a challenge: “So Mr. Fish, how about teaching some comp classes yourself?” English Professor is confident that “we can safely assume that Mr. Fish has never actually taught a composition class himself.”

Ditto anonymous writing instructor: “I’m sure that Fish is paid too dearly for his opinions here and elsewhere to actually teach composition classes.” Maeve asks, “By the way, when’s the last time you taught a freshman composition class?”

“That one’s easy. The last time I taught a regularly scheduled freshman composition class was my last year teaching in a liberal arts college. That was 2004-2005, and in the years before that, when I was the dean, I taught the course every fall. Since 2005, I’ve been a faculty member at a law school where there are no freshmen to teach, so I’ve had to make do with offering a non-credit writing workshop on Mondays; it’s my version of pro bono work and last fall 50 or so students and a few colleagues took advantage of it.

“Earlier in my career I taught composition (sometimes two courses in a semester) for 12 years at the University of California, Berkeley. I was one of two full professors to do so. In 1974, I moved to Johns Hopkins, where there was no writing course because of the (mistaken) assumption that students who were good enough to get into the university didn’t need one. An enterprising graduate student named Pamela Regis enlisted my help in setting up a fledgling program, and by the time I left for Duke in 1985 the program was established and growing.” [The opening paragraph of Part II of Fish’s blog]

***

“Johnny provides a deeper analysis. I wrote, he says, two essays, one about writing skills, the other about conservative efforts to undermine professorial autonomy. They didn’t quite mesh and got in each other’s way.

“He’s right. I should have remembered a fellow columnist’s golden rule — one topic at a time. I’ll try to do better in the future.” [The closing lines of Part II of Fish’s blog]

***

“By all the evidence, high schools and middle schools are not teaching writing skills in an effective way, if they are teaching them at all. The exception seems to be Catholic schools. More than a few commentators remembered with a mixture of fondness and pain the instruction they received at the hands of severe nuns. And I have found that those students in my classes who do have a grasp of the craft of writing are graduates of parochial schools. (I note parenthetically that in many archdioceses such schools are being closed, not a good omen for those who prize writing.)

“I cannot see, however, why a failure of secondary education relieves college teachers of a responsibility to make up the deficit. Quite the reverse. It is because our students come to us unable to write clean English sentences that we are obligated to supply what they did not receive from their previous teachers. No doubt this obligation constitutes a burden on an already overworked labor force, but (and this is one of those times a cliché can acquire renewed force), somebody has to do it.

“The question of the relationship of reading and learning to write is more complicated. Classical rhetoricians preached the virtue of imitation; students were presented with sentences from the work of great authors and asked to reproduce their form with a different content. I like this exercise because its emphasis is so obviously formal.

“But what about just doing a lot of reading and hoping that by passing your eyes over many pages you will learn how to write through osmosis? I’m not so sure. If to wide reading were added daily dinner-table discussions of the sophistication and wit found in many 18th and 19th century novels, I might be more sanguine. And if your experience with words were also to include training in public speaking and debate (itself a matter of becoming practiced in forms), I might say, O.K., you probably don’t need a form-based composition course. Unfortunately, however, reading is not the favorite pastime of today’s youth and debate societies don’t have the cache they once did; so my insistence that a narrowly focused writing course be required for everyone stands.” [Paragraphs from Part III of Fish’s blog]

***

“You have to start with a simple but deep understanding of the game, which for my purposes is the game of writing sentences. So it makes sense to begin with the question, What is a sentence anyway? My answer has two parts: (1) A sentence is an organization of items in the world. (2) A sentence is a structure of logical relationships.

“The second part tells you what kind of organization a sentence is, a logical one, and in order to pinpoint what the components of that logic are, I put a simple sentence on the table, something like “John hit the ball” or “Jane likes cake.” I spend an entire week on sentences like these (which are easily comprehended by students of any
background), asking students to generate them, getting them to see the structure of relationships that makes them all the same on a formal level, getting them to see that the motor of meaning production is form, not content.

“Once they see that — and it is an indispensable lesson — they are ready to explore, generate and practice with the other forms that organize the world’s items in increasingly complicated ways. Basically, there is only one thing to be learned, that a sentence is a structure of logical relationships; everything else follows.” [Paragraphs from Part III of Fish’s blog]

CAN YOUR U.S. SENATOR DO THIS?

U.S. Senator Al Franken (Minnesota) astounded folks last week at the Minnesota State Fair!
by Charlie Leck

Okay! There’s lots of reasons to be proud of your elected representatives to Washington; however, newly elected Senator, Al Franken, may have taken the biggest blue ribbon at the Minnesota State Fair last week for a sketch he did before a live audience.

This is so astonishing that I recommend you go take a look at how he did it. It’s speeded up to save you time.



Now, folks, I dare you to give that a try!

MICHELE BACHMAN ANNOUNCES THAT SHE IS PRESIDENTIAL MATERIAL

The Minnesota Congresswoman claims her political enemies are just trying to sabotage her chances to become President!
by Charlie Leck

Recently, on a nationally broadcast radio show, Michele Bachman, Congresswoman from Minnesota’s 3rd District and our leading nut-case in the state, announced that she ranks among the leading incumbent House members who have been targeted by Speaker Nancy Pelosi for defeat in 2010. Why? Bachman explained carefully that it’s because she has a good chance of running for President in the near future.

Representative Mrs. Bachman is letting the world know that there will be certain “destruction of our great country if we continue to go down the Obama path.”

Further, the Democrats are frightened, she explains, that the Republicans will elect a woman President before the Democrats will – and that she and that Palin woman from Alaska are remarkable possibilities for assuming that high office.

I probably wear out my readers (especially those of you who don’t live in Minnesota) with my rants about Representative Michele Bachman. She is one of the looniest, nuttiest simpletons who ever sat in the House of Representatives. It is an embarrassment to have someone like she representing our extraordinary state. I keep giving my friends in the 6th Congressional District hell for allowing her election to happen.

If you want to read more about Bachman’s most recent proclamations about her greatness, you should go to Media Matters (one of my most frequently visited web sites) and read about Bachman’s crazy statements or listen to an audio of them.

What frightens me is that my readers from places other than Minnesota will begin to get the wrong impression about our state. When they wonder how any state could send such a ding-bat (as Archie Bunker may have described her) to the U.S. House of Representatives. I simply have no answer for that query. It’s a strange district, the 6th, and Minnesota, like many other states, has some real red-necks hiding out in some of our rural communities.

Bachman is a ‘Jesus saves’ type personality and she’s been thoroughly “saved” while the rest of us dangle over the fires of Hades. Jesus has shown her the right way and it’s been hidden from the rest of us. In Bachman’s mind there is good and bad, right and wrong, truth and falsehood, and saved and condemned – and there are no hues or shades in between these black and whites.

My challenge to my friends in the 6th District is to make sure this woman gets soundly defeated in the next election. Do it fairly! Do it honestly. Do it with great honor! Just make sure you don’t send her back to the House where she can continue to embarrass the hell out of us with her utter stupidity.

My God, I had this incredible nightmare a few days ago that featured Michele Bachman taking the oath of office for the Presidency. Hundreds of thousands of people were fleeing the nation and looking for refugee status in Europe, Asia and South America. In the dream, I, personally, had chosen to move with my children to Toronto in order to evade the wrath that this woman would bring to the office.

I awoke in a frantic state and my wife had to shake me and console me back to reality. I was covered with perspiration and my heart was pounding. I heard the coyotes howling out in the rolling fields of our farm. I could swear they were saying “Michellllllllllllllllle, Michellllllllllllllllle!”