Ratatouille #3

Barbarism ... an act of medical terrorism. Right now, murder is being committed against a defenseless American citizen in Florida.

--Homo Rightwingus specimen Tom DeLay, the House Republican majority leader.

It is a federal crime for anyone to interfere with a person's testimony before Congress.

--Homo Rightwingus specimen Bill Frist, the Senate Republican majority leader, referring to a subpoena summoning Ms. Terri Schiavo, a woman who doctors have testified has been in a "persistent vegetative state" since 1990, to appear at a congressional hearing March 25.

It's simply outrageous. It is abusive and disgraceful. Even a senator has an obligation to use his power honestly and not to engage in subterfuge and pretense.

--A Harvard law professor and former solicitor general.

I can't think of any parallels. McCarthy, for all his abuses, did not reach out and try to undo the processes of a state court. It's Congress trying to change the decisions of the state judiciary and violating the purposes of federalism. It's Congress trying to deprive someone of an adjudicated right by political edict in violation of due process of law.

--Another Harvard law professor.

It was odious, it was shocking, it was disgusting, and I think all Americans should be alarmed.

--Schiavo's husband's lawyer.

There's a gap between man's law and God's law. And right now, the gap is hell.

--Preacher demonstrating outside Schiavo's hospice, commenting as he leans against a six-foot fiberglass crucifix.

The judge is a tin-pot dictator, a murderer.

--Protesters, one using a trailer to haul a giant Jesus figure on a crucifix down the block outside the hospice.

(The Judge himself is under police protection and his whereabouts are unknown.)

Thus the American circus [1], as Terri Schiavo's feeding tube is removed, an act that will finally (as long as opponents' feverish legal maneuvers don't succeed, like the previous two times, in getting the tube reinserted) bring her surcease and the dignity of death, after 15 years' vegetating.

Unless ........!!!

In America's other reality [2], Satan's emissaries from Hell have hijacked the U.S. legal system to enact the evil destruction of a sentient woman who desperately wishes to live:

Ms. Schiavo's parents, Robert and Mary Schindler, have circulated pictures and videos of their daughter's appearing to smile at her mother, tracking a balloon with her eyes and responding to other stimuli from her bed.

Barbara Weller, a lawyer for the Schindlers, told reporters that Ms. Schiavo had responded emphatically Friday morning when Ms. Weller asked her to say, "I want to live." According to Ms. Weller, Ms. Schiavo's eyes "just popped right open" and she made loud noises, startling a police officer stationed outside her room, and then wept.

Lawmakers of both parties say they have been moved by the videotapes they have seen of Ms. Schiavo, viewing themselves as the last barrier between her and a death sentence.

Doctors claim that "what appear to be emotion and cognition are in fact involuntary reflexes." But the doctors might well be liberals, bent on wanton murder.

As Congress grapples with the fate of one comatose woman, a Times columnist reminds America that there are some other items on the national agenda:

[I]magine two waves crashing down upon us simultaneously, each magnifying the damage caused by the other.

The first wave is the exploding cost of the entitlement programs. The second wave is the ever-increasing polarization of the political class. The polarization will make it impossible to reach an agreement on how to fix the entitlements problem. Meanwhile the vicious choices forced on us by entitlement costs will make the polarization even worse.

The realities of the first wave - the looming fiscal crisis - are pretty well known. According to the Congressional Budget Office, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid will consume 14 percent of national output in 2030 and 21 percent in 2075 - up from about 8 percent today. Partly as a result, the federal government will have to come up with an extra $50 trillion just to pay for the promises it's made as of today.

To cover these costs, federal officials will have several options, all of them horrible. If they acted immediately, according to the economists Kent Smetters and Jagadeesh Gokhale, they could increase federal income taxes by 78 percent; they could double payroll taxes; they could cut Social Security and Medicare in half; or they could do some combination.

Tax increases on that scale would decimate the economy. Benefit cuts would cause pain. Doing nothing would lead to enormous deficits, an immobilized government and stratospheric interest rates. It would mean the end of the United States as a great economic power.

The realities of the second destructive wave - polarization - are also widely recognized.... We're seeing polarization in action in the Social Security debate. It's a straightforward problem compared with Medicare, but Congress is deadlocked. We see polarization in action in the looming fight over judges, which is producing talk about nuclear options and threats to shut down the Senate. A political class that can't make a deal on a few judges is not going to be able to cooperate when it comes to filling a $50 trillion hole....

["The Do-Nothing Conspiracy," by David Brooks, New York Times, March 19, 2005.]

Brooks offers his hope that "some anti-politician [will emerge] - of the Schwarzenegger or Perot varieties - to crash through the current alignments and bust heads."

Nothing implausible about that, though one questions whether it would allay the problems.

Here in Canada, we putter along with our own relatively modest dramas.

Having received no response to my trumpet call to the Toronto Star ombudsperson (see Toronto Star Doesn't Shine), I re-sent my letter a week later. This time a reply came, from a Janice Richardson, advising that the paper didn't have an ombudsperson (despite the indications on its website). The last ombudsperson had retired two months earlier. But a new one would be taking office a few days hence, and my correspondence would be forwarded to her.

New ombudsperson (or "public editor") Sharon Burnside has allegedly been in office since March 7, but I've still had no word from her. In the meantime, new problems have surfaced -- in her inaugural column of March 12.

The column (entitled "Let me get this right, I'm here to serve") appeared on the Star website without Ms. Burnside's name being visible anywhere on the webpage. The article did provide an email address -- pubed@thestar.ca -- so, why not, I dispatched a note: "Greetings. When I read your article at [web address], I do not see your name."

An automatic response came at once from postmaster@thestar.ca: "The recipient name is not recognized."

So. The column was missing the author's name. And the email address, which did appear, was wrong. This in the introductory column of the person who's supposed to fix problems.

I forwarded the autoresponse to Ms. Richardson, along with my note about the missing name. Ms. Richardson replied: "please send your emails to publiced@thestar.ca."

I did so (a few days ago). But still no word.

The Star's contact information, incidentally, still shows pubed@thestar.ca as the address for its Public Editor.

Canada is teeming with screwups. Maureen Paulin got snared by one the other day when she arrived at daybreak at Toronto airport with her 80-year-old mother, her three children, and her new fiance, for the flight that was to take her to her new wedding in Florida.

"I am pissed -- severely. This is so ignorant on their part."

Ms. Paulin's sentiment is more than understandable. Her family's $4,000 tickets turned out to be worthless. The airline, Jetsgo, had abruptly ceased operations the night before.

Unable or unwilling to pay $1,000 per person for an alternate flight, the family set out for the wedding by "hit[ting] the road at 9:30 a.m., cramming in everything from wedding gear to the older woman's walker and enough junkfood to get them through 72 hours on the road." ("Travellers run for cheapest exit," Toronto Star, March 12, 2005.)

For Ms. Paulin, one of the most infuriating things was that Jetsgo didn't even have anyone at the airport to inform arriving passengers of its shutdown. But the core problem here isn't Jetsgo -- and the public's failure to see the root cause promises more Jetsgo-type fiascoes in future.

The real problem, in a nutshell, is the deficient regulatory system.

Here's an off-the-cuff solution that would eliminate such situations: Require all airlines (and anyone else collecting substantial money from customers for services to be delivered later) to carry insurance that would cover the customer's expenses for alternate arrangements if the pre-paid services aren't delivered.

It's not rocket science.

Although spontaneous airline breakdowns are totally unnecessary, a foolish Star editorial suggests the opposite:

Super store or little store, online or over the phone, the first rule of shopping is so old that it still goes by the Latin, caveat emptor -- buyer beware.

As every one of the 17,000 stranded Jetsgo passengers in 30 cities across North America and the Caribbean learned the hard way last week, there is always some risk involved when a consumer makes any purchase, although certain goods and services clearly carry much greater risks.

But the nature of a ticket on Jetsgo made for a double risk.

First, as a so-called low-cost carrier, Jetsgo carried the same risk as anything else bought "on the cheap." Buying a flight from Jetsgo was only slightly different from buying a "no-name" television set from a manufacturer that the consumer has never heard of before. The reason the circumstances at Jetsgo were "slightly different" from buying a TV from an unknown company is that in Jetsgo's case, chief executive Michel Leblanc already had a reputation for starting airlines that ended in failure. Before Jetsgo, there was Intair and Royal Airlines.

Second, there is special risk arising out the nature of the product. Unlike most purchases that are paid for when the good or service is actually received -- a pair of shoes, a radio, a bag of groceries or a haircut -- airline tickets are typically paid for weeks or even months before the customer actually boards the plane.

["Airline passengers deserve protection" (editorial), March 15, 2005.]

So. Smart shoppers should avoid low prices. Is that how capitalism works? And flyers should research the CEO's history before buying an airline ticket.

As the editorial's thought processes slowly rumble along, however, it eventually bumps into a puzzle: "If banks and insurance companies make provisions to protect their clients from business failures, why not airlines?"

Then (better late than never), insight arrives:

The bottom line is that Canadian airlines keep running into trouble and their customers often pay. But no one who bought a ticket last month, last week or, in the case of some Jetsgo passengers, last Thursday night should lose all their money. And no one should be stranded in Florida or anywhere else because an airline has suddenly folded.

The government and airlines should get together immediately and bring in measures to protect consumers from airline failures.

The same insight has broad application. Consider spam (junk email), which costs $17 billion in lost productivity and network maintenance in the United States alone. ("Law Barring Junk E-Mail Allows a Flood Instead," New York Times, February 1, 2005.) Ending such waste is simple if we don't assume that minimally intelligent government intervention is an impossibility. Here's a simple idea in principle that could terminate spam, as I recently expressed it to a resistant correspondent from a tech discussion list on spam:

Start with the U.S. This is a public problem warranting government intervention:

Require EVERYONE in the U.S. with a hook into the Internet to be registered with some authority. I'm talking organizations like ISP's, not individual consumers. Now, I'm proposing LIGHT regulation. I believe in freedom, avoiding Big Brother, etc. etc. A simple requirement: Any user sending email targetting more than, say, 50 recipients in one day, has to be IDENTIFIED. Just to the ISP, not to the government. Actually, it doesn't even have to be that burdensome. A $ deposit would be sufficient. Some amount corresponding to the number of mail recipients, which exceeds the general value to the sender of that much spam.

I'd love to hear why a simple setup like that would be impossible.

And please, no quibbles about the difficulty of judging (in court) whether something constitutes spam or not.

While the world is full of screwups, the Canadian variety seems to be in a realm of imbecility all its own. I am convinced this is closely connected with Canadians' terrible submissiveness to authority -- and the great civility with which they accept abuse.

In the wake of the Jetsgo abomination, a Florida airport director remarks how impressed he is at the "very level-headed" behavior of the frazzled passengers, as he helps some jump through silly hoops imposed by still-functioning airlines, while helping others get to other airports to face further outrages:

About 40 Jetsgo passengers [went] to the airport in Clearwater, some of them unaware their 11 a.m. flight had been cancelled. Airport officials rushed to accommodate them and 30 found seats for $300 (U.S.) apiece on a Skyservice Airlines flight leaving at 10:45 a.m.

The only snag was that the airline required a cash payment for the tickets -- leaving passengers rushing to find the airport's automated teller machine.

"We put in a call to make sure the cash machine was stacked with extra money," said Noah Lagos, the Clearwater airport's director. "We also offered a free shuttle service over to Tampa International Airport for passengers who wanted to look for alternative arrangements."

Over at the Tampa airport, passengers hurried back and forth between airline counters.

"I've never seen so much discount shopping," said one Air Canada ticket agent. "I was doing up a ticket for this one passenger and her friend came running over from the WestJet counter, saying `Don't buy it! WestJet's got a better price!' Well, in the time it took them to go over to that counter, those WestJet tickets were gone."

["Scrambling for flights back home," Toronto Star, March 12, 2005.]

Screwups are so much the norm in Canada, I suspect I'm one of the few Canadians who even pauses to reflect on them. Most Canadians just pick up the pieces and look for a detour, without stopping to wonder how stupendous bungles can keep happening in a supposedly first-world nation.

My latest occasion for wonderment came when I innocently sought to update my Canadian passport the other day. This is a procedure requiring one's birth certificate (unless one goes through the 8-month process of obtaining a "certificate of Canadian citizenship," which native-born Canadians normally have no reason to do). But the application instructions I checked stipulated a curious condition:

Since November 26, 2001, for Quebec-born citizens, only birth certificates issued after January 1, 1994 by the Directeur de l'état civil in the province of Quebec are accepted.

As you'll have guessed, I was myself born in the province of Quebec -- a not particularly insignificant portion of the country. (About a quarter of Canada's population lives there.)

My birth certificate, which has served well enough til now, was issued by Quebec's Department of Health, not "the Directeur de l'état civil." Was it acceptable to the passport issuing authorities?

The bureaucrats, evidently unschooled in the fine points of logic, had written ambiguous instructions. True, the optimistic interpretation (of the certificates issued by the Directeur de l'état civil, only those issued after January 1, 1994 are accepted; all those issued anytime by agencies other than the Directeur de l'état civil are OK too) was probably not the intended one. But then why not simply stipulate: Only birth certificates issued after January 1, 1994 are accepted. Could the screwup be even more momentous than I saw? Could even some Quebec birth certificates issued after January 1, 1994 (by agencies other than the Directeur de l'état civil) be worthless as well?!

Anyway, a thin ray of wishfulness permitted me to hope for the interpretation that would save my existing certificate. But a phone call to the government soon extinguished the hope, confirming that everyone born in Quebec before 1994 is obliged to replace his or her birth certificate.

There are no explanations, there is no embarrassment. That's just the way it is. The birth certificates of one quarter of the people born in this country have somehow, through some little booboo, turned into Jetsgo tickets.

I've documented Canadian wonders before. In chapters 66 to 79 of Inside China's Diplomacy School, I interrupt my observations of breaches by various authorities in China to report comparable deficiencies involving the Toronto Dominion Bank, the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, the Financial Consumer Agency of Canada, the Office of Consumer Affairs at Industry Canada, the Toronto Police Fraud and Forgery Squad, a Toronto City Councillor, a Toronto lawyer, and the Law Society of Upper Canada.

Bottom line: While Canadian agencies generate prolific quantities of self-justifying blather, what the humble citizen ends up with in the end is still zilch.

Even the simple pursuit of sport and leisure activities in Canada is beset by difficulties. Some years ago, the management of Toronto's YMCA, where I was regularly playing squash for a time, made an inexplicable decision to eliminate some of the squash courts. The decision was irrational, but management was intransigent. Protesting members got plenty of happy talk -- but no results. A campaign ensued, in the course of which a lawyer acting for the Y threatened me with a libel suit -- a suit that plainly had no basis.

Now, the Y is a charitable organization funded with taxpayer dollars. So this appeared to be an abuse of a charity's public funding by managers attempting to squelch legitimate criticism of their own performance.

But Canadians hate to protest, so the Y managers got away with it. (Details at Toronto YMCA Mismanagement.)

My attempt at the time to rouse the Canadian press accomplished little. An account published by the National Post managed to misquote me, even though the statement the reporter was attempting to quote came from a written document I had provided to him, at his request.

Then the paper refused to publish my gentle followup letter to the editor.

Then, when I presented this seemingly sound grievance to the paper's senior editors ("The Post thus attributes a phrase to me, with quotation marks, that I never wrote or uttered"), managing editor Hugo Gurdon replied that "this should not have happened and the reporter has been spoken to appropriately." However, he went on, "I do not believe you have serious ground for complaint." (Toronto's National Post Misses the Boat.)

What's a Canadian to do? In my opinion, fiction is the only recourse.

The other day I stopped by a bookstore to consider buying Allison Pearson's I Don't Know How She Does It, a novel that was favorably mentioned in a Times op-ed piece not long ago.

However, as early as the book's immediate outset, this tiresome cliché is thrown in the reader's face:

How did I get here? Can someone please tell me that? Not in this kitchen, I mean in this life.

I'm sorry, but that is just crappy writing.

It's a story about a woman faced with the familiar modern predicament of juggling motherhood and career:

I take my time brushing my teeth. A count of twenty for each molar. If I stay in the bathroom long enough, Richard will fall asleep and will not try to have sex with me. If we don't have sex, I can skip a shower in the morning. If I skip the shower, I will have time to start on the e-mails that have built up while I've been away....

Ugh.

Is this what pushes book sales these days? Literature was once thought to expand experience and bring insight into unfamiliar terrain. Is literature now used to "validate" the reader's own experiences? Do modern readers want nothing more than a fictional rearrangement of the familiar, mundane furnishings in their own lives?

Browsing elsewhere on the shelves, I happened upon Ian McEwan, an author I hadn't read before, and ended up buying his Atonement. It turned out to be a wonderful, funny, and captivating story, opening with a charming depiction of a quirky, individualistic, imaginative 13-year-old girl who later in the story commits a horrible crime. Appalling though it is, her act is nonetheless plausible, understandable, and largely innocent.

Having finished Atonement, I'm now on to the same author's Amsterdam. I'm at the point where two men who've been close friends for many years have just had a serious dispute over certain photographs. The issue dividing them is substantial, serious. They have opposite positions. And each is absolutely right .......

Screwups Article Sparks Fresh Screwups!

Writing this article about screwups produced yet more screwups, as shown below in Amazon.com's uncomprehending replies to an inquiry.

So many screwups! Perhaps you too, dear Reader, will become enmeshed in new screwups by the time you finish this piece.

Continued: Ratatouille #4

Notes