The Great Disappearance Act

If you'd like to contact the U.S. Department of Education to discover what issues might be relevant to it, good luck. You'll have to find them first, as well as the department itself.

The gonzo, insipid excuse for our national administration completed a 70-year process of eliminating any essence of providing a place for educational priorities the other day, when it announced that for the most part, the USDOE would be gutted and absorbed into several other Cabinet positions.

Oh, yes. It started way back then. The minute that the Supreme Court announced its decision in Brown v. Board, segregationists began planning and plotting for integration in our schools to disappear--even though at that particular moment, it hadn't yet started.

The first state to take a measured approach to this was, ironically, Virginia, which is now a state controlled by Democrats. But most of the rest of the old Confederacy has stood its ground, gathering up opponents of federal intervention into just about anything, including White Citizen's Councils and various other ersatz organizations which, among other things, scream about godless public schools (as noted in a recent book called Money, Lies and God, by Katherine Stewart. It'll open your eyes about the pervasiveness of these crazies.).

But it took Ronald Reagan, the emergence of the Federalist Society, and thorough funding behind a stubborn, closed-minded devotion to "originalist" legal philosophy that has kept education from becoming anything near a national priority. So did the Founding Fathers include education in the original Constitution? Well, no. But four years before the Constitution was written, the seriously self-hampered but functional Congress passed the Northwest Ordinance, which had as one of its parts the raising of funding for public schools by land sales. So you could say with some justification that they determined education to be so important that they included it as a priority before the rest of the country fell apart so badly that they had to start over.

No matter. It has culminated in the utilization of the same 'Deep State' that right-wing radicals have condemned for decades now--all the more useful in watching educational priorities dissolve, like the Mafia dumping corpses into acid vats or inside walls. Michael C. Bender notes in a New York Times article (11/18) that these have been adjustments in moving educational directives around:

• A child care grant program for college students and foreign medical school accreditation--to Health and Human Services;
• Fulbright programs and international education grants--to State;
• Indian Education--to Interior;
• About three dozen programs that provide funding for low-income schools will be siphoned--to the Labor Department;
• A serious reduction in the department's Office for Civil Rights, created to enforce Congress's promise of equal educational opportunity for all students, so that what's left will be shifted--to the Justice Department (and good luck for that initiative; they're too busy feeding 47's temper tantrums);
• Eliminated the DOE's research arm for tracking student achievement, which has dropped due to a number of things, including COVID-19;
• Adult education, family literacy programs and career and technical education--to Labor.

All that will, of course, allow some empty desks created by DOGE to be filled up. But tracing them? Best wishes. All in line with making education as a national emphasis disappear. "We're going to shut it down, and shut it down as quickly as possible," said our unesteemed president of the DOE. Check back in six months to see if any of those programs, of course funding by Congress, have as much as a name plate on someone's desk.

The most important removal is that which will be missing after decades of activity: Lobbying by teachers' unions. Knowing who to contact, and where, is essential to monitoring attention and funding. With the absorption of educational programs into various other Cabinet agencies will come along with it a xeroxed response to inquiries: We'll get back to you. Which means: You might as well be looking for the Loch Ness monster.

The underlying idea of all this is to hand education back to the states, to avoid any federal commitment whatsoever. The most vital lynchpin to this is the guarantee that children of color get the same kind of instruction, supplies, and attention that white students have always had. Leave it to the states, and once again, they get swept under the rug. That was the idea behind the resistance to the Brown decision in 1954, and it hasn't changed a bit. 

The Republicans have finally managed to gain control over education so that it can back-handedly dismiss it. Lip service? Plenty of that. But little else.

Some time ago now, I recall a state legislator in Wisconsin who off-handedly suggested to me that the federal government just give its money to the states. That was Glenn Grothman, then a West Bend state legislator, now the Republican Congressperson from Wisconsin's 6th District. 

That conversation was about 30 years ago. I never asked him why he took that position. I wish I would have. At any rate, you won't find an objection to the dismantling of the Department of Education coming from his office, for one example. That would make the big crab in what's left of the White House very unhappy.

In the meantime, education, which has always struggled to find a place in national priorities, will be taking a very definite step backwards. 47 would rather you not worry about it at all. He'll use the bureaucracy he says he otherwise hates, creating a handy smokescreen so that you don't: the Great Disappearance Act. Out of sight, out of mind.

Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark

Fighting City Hall

I got an inside look at Milwaukee's justice system the other day, due to someone else's mistake. That did not deter me. I decided to fight City Hall. They say you can't do that. Oh, yes, you can. You just have to be willing to put up with the system that's not designed to please nor hurry to serve you.

Back in August, I was about to get into my car, parked outside in an alley lot available for those renting in my building and the one next to it. I've paid for a spot in that area for the past seven years. There are about 16 spots available; anybody with a parking sticker can park in any one of them. 

This particular morning, I was in spot #3, quite some distance from my back door. On the other hand, it gave me a chance to do a little more walking, not a bad thing for someone my age.

So you can imagine my utter shock when I found a parking ticket on my windshield. The ticket hadn't been issued by my landlord, either. It had been issued by the city of Milwaukee. It accused me of a parking violation, and fined me $40.

It was time for the famous outcry from John McEnroe: You cannot be serious. 

It was simply ridiculous. I had parked in a spot among which I could have chosen any that were open. At least, that was the arrangement I thought had been made by my landlord. 14 of the spaces are numbered and two aren't, for whatever reason. If you pay monthly, which I do, you can park in any of them that are open.

That was on a Saturday night. Sunday morning, this ticket greeted me. Something had changed, but I had no idea what.

Infuriated, I took the ticket to the office of the rental company, with which I'd had good relations these past seven years, despite some serious repairs that cropped up. They were always nice about it and responded with decent speed, considering their large territory.

And their response was: We know nothing about this.

Well, that answered that. Someone had made a mistake, thought I was parked wrong, must have called the police instead of the apartment management. Someone rushed right over and gave me a ticket. So they called the wrong person for the wrong reason and the wrong thing happened.

And I was stuck with it. I had no idea who made the mistake. The referred address was the portion of the apartment complex that was south of mine, so the only thing I could possibly do was knock on all those doors and find the culprit. But what if people didn't answer? What if they were still in error, and thought I had it coming to me? Ugly possibilities arose. I rejected that option.

There is a remedy, but of course you have to go to some trouble. The first step is to respond to the ticket by getting online and explaining yourself, putting it inside one of those boxes they create for that purpose. Fortunately, I thought, the landlord had given me a phone number for them to call to clarify the matter. So, in addition to telling them that a mistake had been made and that anyone who had paid the rental for a space could in fact park in any of the spaces, I gave them that number as well as holding back on my absolute indignance that I should have to go through such an ordeal. There, I thought: The matter will be settled quickly.

Except within about ten days, the response came back: Sorry, still guilty not guilty. But ah, there was another step: I could appear in front of a magistrate or someone like that. Then I could bring whatever proof I needed and get out of the $40.

But it led to this question: Was it worth the $40? Why didn't I send the fine into the appropriate post office box and be done with it? I would ask myself that more than once in the following days.

I arrived at the county courthouse parking lot with plenty of time before I was to appear in front of, well, someone to process my complaint about someone else's complaint. That was a wise move. I had no idea where this building and/or this room was, and fifteen minutes in, I still didn't. I wandered through hallway after hallway and reminded myself about how angry I was, as well as reminding myself that all I had to do was go home, put a $40 check in the mail, and that would be that. But I occasionally get hung up on principle, and this was burning a hole right through it. 

Turns out I was in the wrong building. Finally, I hailed someone who worked in the parking office, and she was a big help. I dragged myself into a room about five minutes after I had been told to report, and I wondered whether my case would be forfeited after all that. But no: a nice young man took my information, had a couple of questions to ask me, and directed me to have a seat in a waiting area. I asked him how long it might take to hear my case; maybe half an hour, he said.

He was about right. I was herded into a courtroom with used wooden benches. We had a female judge named Molly, who was as good-natured as she could be, all things considered.

She explained herself thoroughly to all those gathered with some kind of parking issue or issues. "You have three possible pleas today: Not guilty, no contest, and guilty," she said. "If you plead no contest or guilty, we can talk about your case. If you want to plead not guilty, I don't want to hear anything you have to say about it."

She didn't mention that doing so would be possibly incriminating yourself, which is a violation of the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution, a document which, though our president is busy trying to maneuver his way around it each day, does really count even here in a traffic violation tribunal. But that meant that, if I should want to go on with this extremely unnecessary process, I would have to return on another date and talk to someone from the City Attorney's office and then I could finally have my day in court, or my second day in court, as it were. Maybe.

I was called fourth in line. Two people had already pled guilty and, as the culture has dictated these many years in various misdemeanor courts, if you go to the trouble of throwing yourself upon the mercy of the court, you have performed a form of plea bargaining, and you get a lower penalty than you otherwise would; one fellow, for instance, got his fine lowered from $195 to $100. I supposed that's what I could have done--maybe, say, have it shaved down to ten bucks or something. But damn it, I wasn't guilty. I had done nothing inappropriate or wrong or illegal. I would continue the fight.

Turns out I was to report right back there in a week at the same time on that next Monday morning. The hearing, as it were, was to be performed live, but on a laptop or phone--a carryover, the directive said, from Covid days. That might cause a problem. I had a couple of photos to show the magistrate, as well as the phone number the landlord had given me, and although apparently that hadn't worked in step one, it might on step three. I would come in with distinct advantages, though: I knew exactly where I was going this time, so no anxiety would result; I had already gone through a process that was nowhere near as daunting as I thought it would be; and, of course, I would finally have a decision made on it.

The "hearing" that took place, if you want to call it that, happened through a window (again, to avoid Covid) in a waiting room that couldn't, by any measure, be called a courtroom. This time, someone from the city attorney's office held the conference. He informed me, first, that if I lost my case, the worst that would happen is that I would be charged the original cost of the ticket, or $40. That, I assumed, was mentioned upfront as a guarantee that my own costs needn't be too overbearing, and that, if I were to dispense with all this bother, all I would have to do is to report to the pay booth on another floor, write out the corresponding check, and that would be that. Thus constituted the plea bargain, which of course wasn't one except to save everyone time for a minor issue, compared to the other things that city government has to deal with.

It's not as if that hadn't occurred to me, though, and I wanted assurance that this nonsense would never again happen. It had occurred to me that, since the original ticket had been issued some ten weeks beforehand and no other ticket had been issued--they weren't stalking me, at least--the bureaucracy had somehow gotten hold of the fact that they had committed a goof and had backed away, as they certainly should. But--there was left the 40 bucks that I, being the unfortunate pawn of someone's loss of temper for no reason, I still owed. The attorney offered me a cut rate, that of 20 dollars, if I would admit no contest. It amounted to a plea bargain: I would plead nolo contendere and write out a check.

Then there was the Constitution. There's a place where my concerns could be addressed: the 7th Amendment. That amendment guarantees that, in cases where the cost is over 20 dollars, I could have a civil trial, or whatever constituted one. So what the city attorney was actually offering me was a deal where I would give up my right to have a trial, a bargain rate, and a plea of guilty for something I hadn't done wrong or even badly. Again, I didn't feel like admitting that. So I said no--firmly, decisively, and with no hesitation.

So I walked back to the courtroom where they provided yet another hearing date, this time with some literature accompanying me. To wit: Since I had just decided to take on the court to prove my innocence, how best to do that? The advice was pretty simple: Hearsay evidence probably won't do me much good; get my facts in order; and rehearse what I was going to say.

I didn't have real solid facts, I had to admit. But I did have an e-mail sent out by the person in charge of parking for the rental company. About a month after the event, he had obviously heard from someone who, really angry about not very much, had insisted that someone was parked in his exact spot. Except he didn't have an exact spot, as neither did I. He alerted everyone, then, of something that nearly everyone already knew--anyone paying for renting a space could park in any of the 16 spaces without penalty. 

That kind of evidence could only be described as circumstantial, but it might just work, I figured. Why else would he have sent out the e-mail if there hadn't been a misunderstanding? That's pretty much all I had, but at least I had more than my verbal testimony.

I figured it was worth the gamble. I wasn't working, either, so I had the time to appear. But there would be one more attempt to get me to, I suppose they thought, come to my senses. That would be December 1. Once more, they would make an offer. Once more, I would have to say no. Hmmmm. Maybe I could bring the e-mail and show it to them. Maybe that would do it. I waited, this time patiently.

Eleven days prior, I received a call from the city attorney's office. It was from someone else other than the fellow who had made the first offer. He identified himself as the person who would be prosecuting my case. It felt odd that I would be the recipient of a prosecution; one would think that one would be in court for a serious matter, not this foolishness. But in the lexicon of the legal community, there was nothing else to call him. I would be coming to the stand, and he would be grilling me about this less-than-heinous violation I'd allegedly committed.

Except it was clear that he wanted to handle this over the phone, if at all possible. He focused for a moment at the difference between the address of the ticket itself and my address, which is actually next door in the same building. He thought he could get me there. But I explained myself accurately enough, so that the next question was: Who are the people renting out the spaces, and can I get hold of them? You should be able to do that, I said, and gave them the landlord's name.

This was at about five minutes to 4 on a Thursday. Less than five minutes later, he called me back, also e-mailing me with his decision that he would be recommending to the court that the case be dismissed. Oddly, instead of writing "dismissed" on the e-mail, he wrote "DM", which might have been what in their processes they were supposed to do. But he added that that didn't necessarily eliminate my need to report to court on December 1.

That, I thought, would be the final comedic conclusion to this fiasco. Would I really have to show up, stand there like a dolt, and have the attorney officially dismiss my case--all for a silly parking ticket? But, as had to be true, he had no power to actually dismiss the case; all he could do was recommend it.

At least he got it where it was supposed to go with some dispatch: back, I'm guessing, to Judge Molly. The very next morning, I received a call from the municipal court: Yes, the case was dismissed; and no, I wouldn't have to actually show up to have someone declare it as such. His docket was cleared. So was the judge's. So was mine.

At last, it was over, more than three months after the original ticket had been issued. Not exactly the efficient dispensation of justice, but I doubt that the taxpayers would go for better funding to open more parking courts. 

I wonder whether the legal system in larger municipalities like Chicago or Houston or LA shuttled you into a similar maelstrom, or if they created even more levels for someone to overcome. They were bigger cities. There had to be plenty more parking violations, bogus or otherwise.

Never mind. I had other things to attend to, like the very slow draining of my kitchen sink. I had to wait forever for it to empty. Funny: It felt like the same thing.

Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark

Two Years Later: Back from Hiatus

I'm reading--in parts; I leave it open for breakfast each morning--a book called Lessons on the Road to Peace, written by an interesting traveler, John Noltner, who doubles as a professional photographer. He'd decided to travel the country, with his wife, to find positive influences. There's one that particularly caught my interest, though.

This fellow, Neal Moore, decided to travel the country, too, but by kayak. He reckoned to start one year before the 2024 elections, and return one year afterward. He should be done about now.

I want to talk to him and find out that he's learned. He had high hopes starting out: "The idea was to paddle the year leading into national elections and then the full year after, no matter how it would have turned out. What would we look like as a nation the year after national elections?" 

In a kayak, by oneself, though, figuring out what the country would look like seems to me the wrong way to do it. In fact, he probably was better off traveling that way, along quiet, unobtrusive waters, taking oneself away from the tempest, rather than take on the head-banging ferocity we continued. Because here's what happened:

• About two years ago, it looked as if Joe Biden was going to edge The Monster for another presidential term. Things seemed upbeat, the inflation was easing, and government, chugging along as it does, seemed accessible and trustworthy once again. There was no name-calling being thrown around, at least not by his adherents. We knew that his opponent was going to insert all kinds of gloom and doom and trashing, but since he had proven his incompetence during a previous four years, it would be folly to suggest that he would once again buffalo the public into accepting another four.
• As Moore began, the Middle East became awash with the Palestinian ambush of Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Whether Hamas was expecting Iran and/or Hezbollah to join them actively we might never know. But they were left hanging on that limb. Israel responded as it always has--it sought to grind the perpetrator into sawdust. And so it has. Hamas has dreamed of killing every single Israeli; It has had the tables turned. Two years hence, Gaza is now a wasteland; over 60,000 have died. No one knows what to do with it. The Palestinian cause became attached to Biden and the Democrats; they didn't know what to do with it, either. Both sides took hostages and these became the major pawns in the growing devastation. Just now, two years later, most of them have been exchanged--or, rather, their dead bodies have.
• Then, disaster at our end: last June, Biden wandered into a presidential debate that would, if he once again wielded the panache and brush-off disdain he showed in the State of the Union speech of 2023, prove decisive and stonewalling to The Monster. Instead, the opposite happened. Biden, for the first time demonstrating his fading mental acuity--which, understandably, came and went as staffers constantly scrambled to hide it; read Jake Tapper's book on it if you want details--made himself look like someone who had no grasp of situations, and if so, couldn't tell you if he tried; The Monster kept putting the ball on a tee, and he kept missing it. The Monster was his normal ridiculous, lying, insulting, egomaniac self; clearly, he hadn't learned a thing in his four years. He was ripe for the taking, but his preposterousness faded in comparison to the severely damaged Biden revealed for the first time. Biden not only didn't take advantage, he managed, in one terrible moment, to turn the campaign against him. His backers panicked.
• The Democrats spent a month both denying the obvious and slowly accepting it. Biden, for his part, came around and withdrew from the race, but that month proved decisive. His vice-president and anointed successor, Kamala Harris, came out of the gates like a ball of fire, and it looked for a while like she, now oddly the underdog, would overcome the situation and we would be perhaps free from The Monster forever. In the debate between the two of them, she completely dominated him and for once displayed the dismissal of his nonsense that all Democrats should have been displaying for eight years. Her performance was masterful.
• Then, as Democrats are great at doing, she managed to bring her growing momentum to a screeching halt. She did what sports teams sometimes do despite the obvious need not to: She sat on her lead. Someone told her not to tempt fate; she followed instructions and in doing so she succumbed to it.
• When Republican money poured into making a much bigger deal out of trans-people and gays than needed to have attention, young adults turned on the Democrats. The Democrats did not have an answer for that; they felt that, with the election coming in with its usual closeness, they couldn't afford to clarify their attitudes towards trans-people in any way. The Republicans scare tactics flourished, people ignored the Democrats' warnings about the end of democracy, and with it the election was sealed.
• Now, we have a big, beautiful mess. Quoting Jamelle Boule in The New York Times: "In 2024, the Americans who decided the election voted for lower prices and a lower cost of living. What they got instead were soldiers on the streets, masked agents leading violent immigration raids, arbitrary tariffs, new conflicts abroad, dictatorial aspirations, endless chaos and a president more interested in taking a wrecking ball to the White House to build his garish ballroom than delivering anything of value to the public."
• The first opportunity for Americans to vote on these horrible changes came Tuesday, just as Moore was pulling his kayak out of the water for the last time. Virginia and New Jersey elected Democratic women to governorships; California decisively passed its redistricting answer to Texas' attempt to use a back door method to add more Republicans to the House of Representatives; Pennsylvania decisively voted down an effort to flip its state Supreme Court. All responses to a president who has been constantly trying to steal power from the Congress, and mostly succeeding. People are starting to get pretty tired of it. But we will see, in another year, whether this is a blip on the screen or a real electoral unrest: the whole House is up for election then.
• That should pretty much catch him up. Oh, and this--the latest issue of The Atlantic outlines in detail the illegal and unconstitutional efforts 47 will probably try to steal a Republican majority in the House. Read it and think about it. This is truly a person who will stop at nothing, who is driven by rage and a craving to dominate, who sees democracy only as something in the way. I think of The Who's song "Behind Blue Eyes":

No one knows what it's like to be the bad man,

To be the sad man, behind blue eyes.

No one know what it's like to be hated,

To be fated, to telling only lies.

But my dreams, they aren't as empty

As my conscience seems to be:

I have hours, only lonely--

My love is vengeance that's never free.

No one knows what it's like to feel these feelings

Like I do--and I blame you:

No one bites back as hard on their anger;

None of my pain and woe can show through

"I think our greatest strength is empathy," he wrote, and that may be. But a great deal now thwarts that, and our elected leader has none. That is becoming dangerous beyond measure. Moore wanted to see our common humanity, and I'm sure he found some out there. But 47 respects none of that. He is a white supremacist, and sees nothing remotely close.

"Around the bend, we're going to be okay," he said. Only if this is stopped somehow. Only if this need for domination does not become our fallback position. And it will not take care of itself.

Ever the victim, ever the bully, acting in pure spite: Nothing can satisfy him. He is the singular danger to our future. We must stop him. Moore, in his kayak, took a hiatus from the fray. But now that the pushback has begun, it is here in full electrical force. The showdown is coming. 47 will fight back desperately.

What do we look like as a nation, Moore asked? If he sees clearly, he now knows that we hang by a thread.

Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark