White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Notebook: Requiem for American Justice

by Leave a Comment

I have loads of my words to eat, a feast of kingly proportions.

I don’t know when I started, but it must have been back when I was traveling on the speaking circuit. It doesn’t matter.

This tale of getting it wrong starts in London, where I was asked to address a conference on investing in America. Most of the questions weren’t — as I imagined they would be — about investment and returns on it, or taxes, or the exportability of profits. Instead, the questions were about the U.S. legal system; how litigious we are and what that is like.

My response was that our courts are fair, there is less day-to-day litigation than you might think, and the courts can serve you as well as those who dispute your actions. I said, “Don’t be afraid of litigation. It could be your friend.”

Next stop: New Delhi. The question was how can we get more U.S. investment? My answer: Fix your courts. They are famous for how slow they are to reach a decision. Americans are used to predictable legal speed.

In Moscow, during the halcyon Mikhail Gorbachev days, I was asked about how to get U.S. companies to invest in Russia. My answer: Make sure the courts work fairly and, above all, are clear of politics.

In Ireland, I debated Martin McGuinness, the late IRA leader. It went well, despite my English accent. My contribution was to tell McGuinness that if there ever is a united Ireland, make sure the constitution doesn’t hide anything under the mat (I was thinking of slavery in America) and make sure the court system looks to that constitution, not to politics.

Why am I eating on my words? Why am I shoveling them down my throat by the (Imperial) bushel?

The front page of The Washington Post for July 18 tells the story: Three pieces there add up to up a requiem for American justice.

Exhibit 1, this headline: “In deadly raid DOJ eyes 1-day sentence.”

Exhibit 2: “Thousands here legally have 60 days to leave.”

Exhibit 3: “Brazil judge in Trump’s sights.”

Two of these shameful reports show that neither the judicial process nor the laws of the United States are sacrosanct anymore.

The third shows that the Trump administration not only doesn’t respect our own judicial processes, but also those of other countries.

The perversion of justice isn’t a domestic matter anymore.

******

The Trump budget cuts are moving through the system, like a virus. There are clusters of damage and some slow lower infection, but nonetheless are capable of inflicting severe harm.

I was reminded of this when at a Newport Classical Music Festival concert last week, the deputy chairman announced that they needed $40,000 to make up for the termination in National Endowment for the Humanities’ funding.

Now you could argue that Newport Classical will get by, and divine music will continue to echo through the Gilded Age mansions — known as “cottages” — without the government’s help.

But what about less-affluent places where concerts, plays and ramp-on for young people in the arts will be reduced or ended due to a lack of government support?

******

Some things take a long  time to invent.

Take cup holders in cars. No technology was needed but it wasn’t until the 1980s that a convenience store chain realized that their hot coffee needed a place of rest in cars.

They came up with a plastic device that hooked over a window. Okay unless you opened the window inadvertently, in which case the coffee or other liquid would land squarely in the customer’s lap. Ouch!

Detroit saw the possibilities and soon you were urged to buy an automobile based on how many drinks could be stowed safely in built-in cup holders during travel. Not to be outdone by Detroit, and all the other car manufacturers, recreational boats were next to secure drinks in holders.

One has to wonder why this wasn’t done in carriages or stagecoaches a long time before the automobile?

******

I flew from Rhode Island to Washington this week and I am writing this on my return trip on the train — unquestionably, a superior way of making this trip.

Of course, predictably, the plane was late, but I was feeling smugly superior. I had scored a first-class seat. My wife found me a first-class fare that was cheaper than coach. I think the term of art for this is: Go figure.

For my lucky break up front, I had nice service and a choice of protein bars or Biscoff cookies. For this people pay a lot of money?  Go figure.

Notebook: Friends Who Share Friends Are the Nicest People

by Leave a Comment

I treasure the friends who share their friends. One of those friends, Virginia “Ginny” Hamill, has died. 

I met Ginny at The Washington Post in 1969, and we became forever-friends. 

Ginny had an admirable ascent from a teleprinter operator to an editor in The Washington Post/Los Angeles Times News Service. She was promoted again to the enviable job as the editor of the news service in London, where she bloomed — and met her future husband, John McCaughey.

Ginny brought wealth into my life — and later to that of my wife, Linda Gasparello — through the introductions to her friends from that London period. They included David Fishlock, science editor of the Financial Times; Roy Hodson, also of the FT; Deborah Waroff, an American journalist; and Guy Hawtin, a rakish newspaperman on his way to the New York Post.

They constituted what I called “The Set.” In London, New York and Washington, we worked at the journalism trade on many projects from newsletters to conferences and broadcasts. 

We also partied; it went with the territory.

I once wrote to Ginny and told her how instrumental she had been in all our lives through sharing her friends. I am glad I didn’t wait until obituary time to thank her for her generosity in friend-sharing.

******

I think for many, myself among them, it was a somber July 4. There are dark clouds crossing America’s sun. There are things aplenty going on that seem at odds with the American ideal, and the America we have known.

To me, the most egregious excess of the present is the way masked agents of the state grab men, women and children and deport them without due process, without observance of the cornerstone of law: habeas corpus. None are given a chance to show their legality, call family or, if they have one, a lawyer.

This war against the defenseless is wanton and cruel. 

The advocates of this activity, this snatch-and-deport policy, say, and have said it to me, “What do these people not understand about ‘illegal’?”

I say to these advocates, “What don’t you understand about want, need, fear, family, marriage, children and hope?”

The repression many fled from has reentered their luckless lives: terror at the hands of masked enforcers.

I have always advocated for controlled immigration. But the fact that it has been poorly managed shouldn’t be corrected post facto, often years after the offense of seeking a better life and without the consideration of contributions to society.

Elsewhere over this holiday, the media is under attack, the universities are being coerced, and the courts are diminished. 

America has always had blots on its history, but it has also stood for justice, for the rule of law, for freedom of the press, freedom of speech. Violations of these values have dimmed the Fourth. 

Nonetheless, happy birthday, America. You deserve better: It is guaranteed in the Constitution, one of the all-time great documents of history, a straight-line descendant of the Magna Carta of 1215. That was when the noblemen of England told King John, “Cut it out!” 

A few noblemen in Washington wouldn’t go amiss.

******

I was fortunate on my syndicated television show, “White House Chronicle,” along with my co-host, Adam Clayton Powell III, this week to interview Harvey Castro, an emergency room doctor. Castro, from a base in Dallas, has seized on artificial intelligence as the next frontier in healthcare.

He has written several books and given TEDx talks on the future of AI-driven healthcare. I have talked to several doctors in this field, but never one who sees the application of AI in as many ways from diagnosing ailments through a patient’s speech, to having an AI -controlled robot assist a nurse to gently transfer a patient from a gurney to a bed.

A man with infectious ebullience, Castro says his frustration in emergency rooms was that he got there too late: after a heart attack, stroke or seizure. He expects AI to change that through predictive medicine and early treatment. 

His work has caught the attention of the government of Singapore, and he is advising them on how to build AI into their medical system.

******

Like everyone else, I spend a lot of time in frustration-agony on the phone when I need to talk to a bank or insurance company and many other firms that have “customer service.” That phrase might loosely be translated as “Get rid of the suckers!”

I don’t know whether the arrival of AI agents will hugely improve customer service, but maybe you can banter with them, get them to deride their masters, even to tell you stuff about the president of the bank.

It might be easier talking to an AI agent than talking to someone with a script in another country before they inevitably, but oh, so nicely, tell you to get lost, as happened to me recently. 

You could enjoy a little hallucinatory fun with a virtual comedic friend, before it tells you to have a nice day, and hangs up.