SamSaid!

FREE SPEECH

     Back in college days, my majot was Political Science, regarded  in those days as pre-law. After getting my undergarduate degree, I chose the path of business instead of law and, considering the events of the past year, I am proud to say that I am neither a lawyer nor an accountant. How lucky can I get?

     A major element of PolySci study was the US Constitution, very much including the 1st Amendment. Good old free speech. But over the past 40+ years, the whole notion of free speech has been stretched way beyond what was contempleted by our forefathers. Now we have obscene filth at art exhibits, and a veritable tidal wave of coarseness, vulgarity, oscenity and pornography beamed at us by the media purveyors of garbage  –  printed material, movies, and the internet. And what does our Court system say?  –  “OK, 1st amendment”  –  and the ACLU stands back and cheers. In all of this stuff  mailed to me or beamed into my living room there isn't much I can do about it whether or not I am offended or my sensitivities have been violated. When you hear the defenders say “control your channels or monitor the PC –  keep this stuff away from your kids” it's nothing short of laughable. If I am offended, too bad: if I find it insensitive to my values, too bad. Those who create this garbage just point to the 1st amendment, chuckle, and hide behind it.

     But in the great world of academe  –  on our prestigious campuses, it is a different story. Here we have speech codes to ban the use of terms that may be offensive or insensitive to others. We can't use words like “fat, broads, rag-heads, slant-eyes, hunkies, krauts, nigs, spics, queers, fags, wops, or even Indians (since real Indians aren't really Indians). So now the criterion isn't free speech, it's terms that are offensive or insensitive. The terms cited above are not gentle, kind or considerate. And indeed they may offend some. But why are some offensive terms accepted but others are not. If I am at home with my family and become offended by obscenities or pornography coming from a Federally approved media broadcast, why is that to be ignored or sanctioned under the 1st Amendment while non-flattering terms –  pejorative or not  — are verboten on our campuses? And some of the student penalties are severe. So some people are offended. So what. We either have a 1st Amendment or we don't.

     After 3 years in the military and 4 years on a college campus, I am no prude when it comes to language. But the very idea that a charge of insensitivity by someone trumps the 1st Amendment is flat out ridiculous.

     Harry Truman had it right, “If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen”. I frankly think the 1st has been stretched way too far and a cooperative judiciary has contibuted to having the moral fiber ripped out of our culture. But if we are going to say (via the courts), “anything goes”, then we should get rid of asinine college speech codes that make a joke out of the 1st Amendment. Just tell the students on the first day, “if you are offended, tough; if you find comments insensitive, tough”. After a couple of bumps, life will go on.

TWENTY MILES

     After a pleasant round of golf, my companions and I stopped at the Grill to enjoy a cup of New England chowder laced with Taco sauce. Good zesty taste. As we settled in, we couldn't help but overhear a couple of guys at the next table really tearing up Big Oil. Unscrupulous, money grubbers, price gougers, rip-offs — these were the more polite terms  –  all because gasoline prices had risen to $1.70 per gallon for Regular. Granted, gasoline proces in California are higher than in most places, but I began to wonder if all of the condemnation was justified. I thought about it driving home.

     Gasoline is black slimy stuff found in pockets under the surface of the earth, often in very inaccessible places. It takes some smart cookies to find it, bring it to the surface and control it so that it doesn't splash all over the landscape. Then it has to be transported to a good location for storage until it can be transported by railcar, pipeline, or huge ship to still another storage point often thousands and thousands of miles away. All of this doesn't come cheaply. After the latest storage stage, it has to be transported again to a refinery (a very expensive complex facility) in order to be converted into a form suitable for consumer use. Different octanes, diesel fuel, etc., etc., etc. Then as a last step, it is transported again to locations all over the country  –  all over the world. And in our case, to the local neighborhood gasoline station where we can buy it for $1.70 a gallon  –  enough to drive our cars about twenty miles. Just imagine the huge costs to get this far in the process. Rip-off??  Sounds more like a miracle to me considering where the whole process started

     I hate to hear reasonably smart (assumption?) people bitch and moan about about trivial matters. With a buck-seventy in your pocket you can't buy a hot dog at the ball park or a draft beer at the local pub. And you can forget about a movie, a rental V-tape or a sandwich. In my view the best solution would be to take these kinds of folks out front and have them walk twenty miles. After 19 miles, ask them if they want to walk back or get a ride back for a buck-seventy. Either that or let them try to buy a gallon in Europe or Japan. That might restore a degree of perspective. Maybe. But in any event, don't try this exercise on left-leaning liberals who frimly believe that Big is Bad. Got that??

CAN'T WINN'EM ALL

     James Q. Wilson is a savvy editorialist/columnist and whenever I see his by line I make it a point to read the article. In a recent issue of the WSJ, he authored “The enemy will always surprise us”.

     The point of the article was the virtual impossibility of our investigative agencies in discovering the nuggets of information in the “clutter”  –  the intelligence term for useless trivia. With hundreds of thousands or millions of bits of information received every day from do-gooders, off-the-wall wackos, disgruntled spouses, double agents, misguided academics, those desiring to mislead, foreign agents, etc., etc., there is no way that the brightest guys in the world can consistently or reliably sift thru all the clutter and come up with good hard data  –  particularly in a finite period of time. And add to this the fact that lots of data comes in umpteen foreign languages where translation is required. Now that is not to say that the FBI and CIA can't do a better job. Sure they can. But under the best of circumstamnces, they might spot 3 out of 5 terrorist plots  –  maybe 4 out of five  –  but not all five. We may as well live with that harsh reality.

     Nowadays the media and congressional committees are in a feeding frenzy over blame fixing and “connecting the dots”, the current buzzword that is surely best suited for 20:20 hindsight. Easy to connect the dots when the game is over. But, we are going down a predictable path. To wit:

     Nazism could have been prevented……..if..

     The holocaust could have been prevented….if..

     Pearl Harbor could have been prevented…….if..

     Princess Diana could have survived…….if..

              and now,

     The 9/11 tragedy could have bee prevented….if..

     And what does all this accomplish?  Ashcroft is a good man. Let's let him do his job. And the FBI and CIA will do better. They were never founded to be cuddly buddies exchanging information. Each protected their own turf  –  and Congress planned it that way. Now that is changed. Now, let's see how well they do.

     Wilson was right. We can't winn'em all, but we just changed the odds. That's a positive step.

TOLERANCE

     It was a bit unnerving to hear our Veep and FBI chief say that it is only a matter of time until a terrorist suicide bomber strikes in the US. With that prospect in mind, it is understandable that we all pay closer attention to others, i.e., strangers, while going about our daily lives  –  particularly if they wear different apparel, speak a different language, hold to different beliefs, eat different foods, etc., etc.

     Even after 9/11 there have been very few incidents of attacks on middle-easterners. Under the circumstances, Americans have shown remarkable restraint and tolerance. And of course, we are regularly bombarded from the usual sources about judging ethnic or religious groups on the basis of the actions of a few who are conveniently called “extremists”. That's a no-no.

     But something tells me that if a middle eastern terrorist detonates a suicide bomb among Americans somehwhere on US soil, that tolerance will wear thin or disappear very quickly. It is at this point when the argument shifts from intellectual reasoning to gut feeling. The academicians may continue to live in their dream worlds of ideas, since most of them wouldn't fight for anything. A few dead Americans certainly wouldn't dissuade them from bashing America. But the man in the street is something else. I think Joe Citizen is far more concerned over life and survival than ACLU preoccupation of “rights”. Most people are not concerned about expanded investigatory rights of the FBI and CIA; they are more concerned about the threat posed by hostile aliens running loose around the country.

     Conceding their legal “blinders”, the ACLU and others may be “right”; but if they guess wrong a whole lot of us may be “dead right”. That is scant consolation

     Thus far, the middle eastern ethnics in the US have been relatively quiet in supporting the war on terrorism which, after all, is being waged against some of their countrymen. After the first suicide bomber, I think that the tolerance level toward middle easterners will drop from 8 down to about 2 on the scale of ten. It doesn't matter whether the attitude change is right or wrong; that's just the way it will be.

ANGER

     Late afternoon is a nice time of day at our house. Sitting in my favorite chair, I scan the newspapers, idly watch the news on TV and enjoy a cocktail while anticpating still another super meal being prepared by my wife who is an excellent cook. It can't get much better than that.

     Then my tranquillity was broken by three telephone calls from tele-marketers. One was to re-finance my home, the second was to give me a special vacation deal in the Caribbean and the third was to manage my IRAs. I know I can stop these calls by Caller ID, but I really hate to isolate myself from the rest of the world. What really irritated me about these three unwelcome calls was that the callers had heavy accents and I had a hard time  understanding what they were pitching. It's a helluva note to sit in your own home and be hustled for something you don't want by someone whom you can't understand. I don't know whether the accents were Swahili, Urdu, Cambodian, Guatamalan, or Farsi  –  and it doesn't matter. For the life of me, I can't understand why someone desiring to sell something would hire sales people who can even speak english clearly. The chances of me showing any interest in that type of sales approach are about the same as Castro embracing capitalism and apologizing to George Bush. As a kid, I remember the words of our neighborhood baker, Andy Pasquini, who said, “I didn't come to this country to be an Italian; I came to be an American”. If people come to this country, the least they can do is learn the language.

     The calls didn't ruin my evening, and the salmon dinner quickly changed my perspective. I know these callers can barely speak english  –  but I wonder if they understand four letter words.