Let's Compare, Shall We?

47 has offended so many of us in so many ways that I seriously doubt that anyone's keeping track any longer. His latest is a classic: Putting himself on an equal basis with someone whose sneakers he couldn't possibly lace.

I'm talking about John F. Kennedy, whose name 47 has deigned to supersede on the face of what used to be the Kennedy Performing Arts Center in Washington, DC. I went there more than once when I had an office there and also lived there a while back. It is a tribute to a president who, representing the best of us, had an attraction to and a deep appreciation for the performing arts.

All 47 has a deep appreciation for is basking in the glow of a bunch of very rich people so he can be identified with them, being rich himself. But that richness only consists of how many dollars he can possibly be connected with, not rich in things that truly matter: Style, eloquence, tact. In those, he has consistently displayed himself, and continues to do so daily, as a national embarrassment.

Yes, I am embarrassed to have him as my elected leader. I take nothing from him as an example except for how not to act, what not to say. It is a slap in the face of our political life that he was allowed to get anywhere near this otherwise cherished position, where he is allowed to represent anything good about my country. As big and, yes, as diverse as it is, it still flows from the same roots and same actions that identified it as undeniably American. He only wants to enhance not its prestige, but his. But the harder he tries, the less he does so.

Instead, he seizes upon opportunity after opportunity to name things and buildings after himself, in a ridiculously desperate attempt to become 'famous' and to name his own legacy. But in his utter stupidity, he fails to understand that he succeed in that attempt. Only the populations that follow him will, and he must surely understand that to a certain extent, many will strive to forget nearly everything about him.

Not so John F. Kennedy. To be sure, his name became connected with many things that could have been named after other famous or noteworthy Americans; his assassination, dramatic as it was and so deeply mourned, reflected excessive admiration and lionization, tarnished in later years by the discovery of a rather jaded personal life. But to name a performing arts center after him has never seemed inappropriate. He enjoyed, rather at times basked in, the performing arts, having noted musicians perform at the White House--Pablo Casals, Igor Stravinsky, Ella Fitzgerald, even Chubby Checker, for instance--and people got dressed in gowns and tuxedos for the concerts. This was a direct influence of Kennedy's wife, Jacqueline, who saw the White House as a place of elegance and enduring class.

Not so 47. He has, instead, destroyed the East Wing of the White House, which used to contain the offices of the First Lady, just because he didn't like it. That wing was exactly where the Kennedy sponsored concerts were held. For him to destroy it represents that much more of an abomination, a curse upon what was an excellent addition to the building's history. 

Not ironically, the National Trust for Historic Preservation has sued 47's administration for that destruction. Kennedy addressed a meeting of the Trust's delegates in 1963, a little more than a month before he was murdered. He said, in part: "What you are attempting to do and what interests me, of course, is trying to maintain and keep alive in this country a very lively sense of our past....with all that sense of motion and progress and looking to the future, we have a good many things in our country that are worth retaining. One of these, of course, the most important, the White House...."

47, I guess, wouldn't agree. He wants to make the East Wing one big ballroom, to hold dinners and raise money for, I suppose, himself. This ghastly ruination of a significant part of our history wrenches us from our moorings. I was lucky enough to take a tour of the White House about 25 years ago. No way I would subject myself to that now. I deny belonging to anyone or anything that would ruin that history for me. I am not responsible for it. I cannot attach myself to it in any way.

Consider, also, the crassness with which 47 makes public statements. He put himself on awful display again Wednesday night, when he tried, I suppose, to rally his supporters into further denial of what's right in front of them: A country and society that he's leading right down into the sewer. 

I have a copy of Kennedy's official papers and speeches during his presidency: It is refreshing to read them again with a yearning for something, anything, meaningful to come out of our present leader's mouth. 47 said, almost to make an excuse, that his Chief of Staff, Susie Wiles, who herself had found herself embarrassed by her own comments to Vanity Fair, rather made him get up there and once again make a complete fool of himself. Effective staff assistance would rather try increasingly to get him to shut up.

To combine the names of both these presidents on the facade of one building, any building but particularly one devoted to the performing arts, as 47 has just done, is to combine silver with mud. It signifies the affliction under which we presently suffer: a tribute to phoniness, to contrivances, to fakery and fabrication. 

47's name will go down in tribute, sure. Now that it has ruined two very honorable buildings in our nation's capital, it will descend in dishonor for generations to come. The mistake the country has made, twice, in electing him will only now multiply in scars he casts upon our national landscape.

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

Mister Mark

Now You Can Feel It

The post office does you what's supposed to be a favor by telling you when parcels sent through the mail are supposed to arrive. It does that through its own website.

The other day, it said that something was to arrive last Friday. It didn't come. That's happened before. It usually arrives the next day.

Then it said it would come Saturday. It didn't arrive, either.

Then it said it would come Monday. Nope.

Then it said it would come Tuesday. I didn't believe that. I was right.

At this point, I sincerely believed that it had been lost. There were things I had sent for that would be genuinely helpful with battling a case of arthritis that has suddenly sprung up. I thought about sending for it again. But why pay double?

It finally arrived Wednesday, five days after the original notice. I did not sigh with relief. I simmered. More like seethed.

This is annoying and builds up tension that you can fairly feel. It is also, I have learned, something I--we-- should probably get used to.

There's been an adjustment, I've been told, where cost-cutting is at the center of postal services. What's the best way to do that? Why, slow things down, of course.

Mail is now being routed through regional centers, a process called "consolidation." As a result, there are delayed postmarks, at least a day later. This is being called Delivering for America, which makes you think that somehow, the government is more on your side than ever. But it's not. Surprised?

The advice? Adjust by sending what you need to send earlier. That especially means bills. Meaning: If you don't want your payments to skyrocket, or pay the extra adjustment bill at the end of the pay period, you'd better get cracking.

That irritates, doesn't it? It's a way of artificially making you displeased with government. If that's some kind of experiment, it's working very well.

It's a way that someone has to make your security feel that much more tenuous. The other effect is to find something more efficient. Like: a private entity. If you can.

In a big city like mine, Milwaukee, that's not too tough. But what about if I live somewhere rural, say west of Wausau or north of Eau Claire? I'm familiar with those areas. Trying to find something out there is like finding a geographical marker. Best of luck. Guess you'll just have to wait.

Privatization is the government's deepest threat. It's an ongoing test: Can a private business deliver on its promises better and more efficiently than government?

It's one thing to try that on your own. It's quite another to get driven into that choice by forces beyond your control. But there's a disingenuous backdrop: Relying on government to deliver for you either gets to cost too much or doesn't meet your brand of efficiency or quality. That's arranged for by lack of funding, just like this shenanigan. So you're forced to conclude that government is against you instead of for you, and you turn elsewhere.

If you've spent a career in education, you aren't surprised in the least. That's where it began and still thrives. Milwaukee, in fact, is something akin to the founder of that attitude, seeing as how it went to the state Supreme Court to have its voucher program approved. That was 35 years ago, and the result has been staggering, if not unpredicted:

• a two-tiered system
• overcrowded classrooms
• dilapidated buildings
• shrinking classroom supplies
• the steadily dropping morale of teachers

All of which is a patented effort to look askance at the public school system as inadequate, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy meant for parents to siphon their kids into privatization. The fact that the public continues to fund these privatized schools has continued to be beside the point. The draining of funding toward public schools makes them look bad, which is only appropriate because increasingly, they can't help it.

Most of the time, though, it is only those within that system that notice that things are slowly but inevitably unraveling. With the mails, though, it's universal. We all notice. And it's not going to take years: It will take only months to see that backing away from a pursuit of increased quality belongs only to the administration that's responsible for it.

The next time something you were anticipating coming through the mail gets there two and three days late, think of those responsible. Think of the neglect it will take for that to additionally fall apart within a relatively short time. Then think of what's happened to education--not because of those who are practicing it, but because of those who are supposed to be caring for it, but don't.

Think about that when you get notice that, in case whatever you sent someone in the mail for Christmas got there a little late. Everybody will apologize, but there will be no oversight involved. You can read that last clause any way you wish.

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

Mister Mark

Of "Caste" and Other Worthy Books: The Protracted Battle

I must say that I've not yet read the book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, by Isabel Wilkerson. I have it, but I haven't read it.

Apparently, if I lived in Llano County, Texas, I'd consider myself pretty lucky. I wouldn't be able to find a copy of Caste there in any library anymore.

Such is the effect of a recent Supreme Court decision, issued just a few days ago. The Court decided not to intervene in a local dispute about that and other books in county libraries, which had made itself up through the federal appellate court in that circuit.

Caste is, apparently, a powerful testament to the racial divide which still plagues us. Wilkerson is also the author of an important work entitled The Warmth of Other Suns, which documents the experiences of those caught up in The Great Migration, as it is called, from the South to mostly large Northern cities in the years between the world wars--a movement that changed the political and cultural landscape of the United States forever.

Wilkerson calls our divide a caste culture. Many, including me, have never heard it put that way. We think of that as belonging almost exclusively to India, which has declared their class divisions as such, while turning our backs on our own obviousness. It's how so many of us learned about the word and its horrible unfairness, dooming millions (out of a country which now boasts a population of over one billion) to lives without hope of upward mobility.

But a caste culture we are. We know of the stories. We know of the ceilings. Such was also established, for a time, in Nazi Germany. But the Nazis had an excellent example to draw from: Us. Our abuse of blacks and Natives was, and still is, a blueprint for systematically excluding people from significance just on the basis of their race. 

The following is from the preface to Caste. It alone is plenty food for thought: Enough for it to be one of Time magazine's ten best nonfiction books of 2020, and receiving a 2020 National Book Critics Circle Award, among others (source: Wikipedia). But this book may be banned now in many other libraries, for reasons you'd quite frankly have to ask the banners, because it's (purportedly) incredibly well done about a topic necessarily turned on its ear for examination. But since book banners are gathering nationwide, one community at a time, it may lead to an epidemic of banning without the kind of challenge it deserves. So enjoy: You have a place where you can at least read a few pages. It's called "The Man in the Crowd":

        There is a famous black-and-white photograph from the era of the Third Reich. It is a picture taken in Hamburg, Germany, in 1936, of shipyard workers, a hundred or more, facing the same direction in the light of the sun. They are heiling in unison, their right arms rigid in outstretched allegiance to the Fuhrer.

        If you look closely, you can see a man in the upper right who is different from the others. His face is gentle but unyielding. Modern-day displays of the photograph will often add a helpful red circle around the man or an arrow pointing to him. He is surrounded by fellow citizens caught under the spell of the Nazis. He keeps his arms folded to his chest, as the stiff palms of the others hover just inches from him. He alone is refusing to salute. He is the one man standing against the tide.

        Looking back from the vantage point, he is the only person in the entire scene who is on the right side of history. Everyone around him is tragically, fateful, categorically wrong. In that moment, only he could see it.

        His name is believed to have been August Landmesser. At the time, he could not have known the murderous path the hysteria around him would lead to. But he had already seen enough to reject it.

        He had joined the Nazi Party himself years before. By now though, he knew firsthand that the Nazis were feeding Germans lies about Jews, the outcastes of his era, that, even this early in the Reich, the Nazis had caused terror, heartache, and disruption. He knew that Jews were anything but Untermenschen, that they were German citizens, human as anyone else. He was an Aryan in love with a Jewish woman, but the recently enacted Nuremberg Laws had made their relationship illegal. They were forbidden to marry or to have sexual relations, either of which amounted to what the Nazis called "racial infamy."

        His personal experience and close connection to the scapegoated caste allowed him to see past the lies and stereotypes so readily embraced by susceptible members--the majority, sadly--of the dominant caste. Though Aryan himself, his openness to the humanity of the people who had been deemed beneath him gave him a stake in their well-being, their fates tied to his. He could see what his countrymen chose not to see.

        In a totalitarian regime such as that of the Third Reich, it was an act of bravery to stand firm against an ocean. We would all want to believe that we would have been him. We might feel certain that, were we Aryan citizens under the Third Reich, we surely would have seen through it, would have risen above it like him, been that person resisting authoritarianism and brutality in the face of mass hysteria.

        We would like to believe that we would have taken the more difficult path of standing up against injustice in defense of the outcaste. But unless people are willing to transcend their fears, endure discomfort and derision, suffer the scorn of loved ones and neighbors and co-workers and friends, fall into disfavor of perhaps everyone they know, face exclusion or even banishment, it would be numerically impossible, humanly impossible, for everyone to be that man. What would it take to be him in any era? What would it take to be him now?

What indeed? For the pestilence that threatens to now engulf us will not end with its creator. Count on that. There are too many--you can already see them, too, in the headlines--who believe, or have made themselves believe, that they can turn the USA into a cesspool of cheap obedience and white supremacy. We dangle on the edge. Those who would ban a book like Caste will now ban other books just as important and just as revealing, as it has a book about the Ku Klux Klan, about a transgender teen, and about the sexual changes we all go through.

The original case was heard in federal court with the advocates of reading, of libraries, of freedom having won. The county briefly considered closing all its libraries, but it won a reversal in federal circuit court. And now the Supreme Court will not review it, letting the reversal stand and potentially engulfing many other local communities in the same ongoing battle for the public's minds.

That battle is proving to be protracted. In order to maintain some decency about the right to think, people of my age, or so, will have to practice resistance for the rest of our lives. That need to resist may be coming, soon, to a town either near you or to the one to which you belong. This ugly era of authoritarianism assures us of that.

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

Mister Mark

Garbage in the White House: The Chief Creep

It stunned me, I must admit. I never knew.

As a member of the Executive Committee of the National Education Association, I got myself invited to a member conference in Lincoln, Nebraska, in 2008. I don't recall the precise title of it, nor the precise focus. But a discussion of the challenges of English as a Second Language (ESP) broke out in one of the presentations that I attended.

It was there that I learned that not only were there members having to deal with Hispanic students in South Sioux City, Nebraska--just across the Missouri River from Sioux City--but that immigrants from Somalia were working in meat-packing plants in mid-state, were sending their kids to public schools, and those kids needed help.

Somalis. In the middle of south Nebraska. More than a decade ago. Who knew? Talk about a language transition. Wow. 

That thought came to mind when 47, in his ever-present eloquence, referred to Somali immigrants as "garbage," with vice-president J.D. Vance pounding the table in agreement. 

He continued with his generalizations that amount to racism. "These aren't people who work," he is reported to have said. "These aren't people who say, 'Let's go, come on, let's make his place great.'"

But clearly they are working at jobs others would avoid, and have been for some time now. He's unleashing another ICE round-up of immigrants in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, not too terribly far away from Lincoln, and wants to justify it to himself as necessary.

Karoline Leavitt, ever the obedient sycophant, called those remarks an "epic moment." Well, yes. I wonder if they'll go up on whatever monument additional minions put up for 47, like the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural inside the Lincoln Memorial. He said he was a better president than Lincoln, didn't he?

What he's really doing is conflating all Somalis with Ilhan Omar, one of the original "Squad" of four particularly notable female, Democratic members of Congress, back when the media made something special of them. He's obviously resented that, resented that anyone get attention outside of him, and has carried it over to include her along with others trying to make this now rather confusing country their own.

"She's garbage," he said. "Her friends are garbage." Omar happens to represent part of the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, so I'm sure he's getting ICE ginned up to do their worst. As if they needed to.

It has mystified him as to why we would accept people from "shithole countries" in Africa. I have one answer for him to contemplate: Because they're better people than you are, dummy. And, again, turning some away and deporting some more does nothing more than shout at the wind, seeing as how Somalis have been here much longer than he'd ever want to consider. He's not going to clean up anything.

Instead, it'll make us look quite the opposite than what we've been used to being. "His obsession with me is creepy," Ms. Omar said. Right again. Creeps do act creepy. And the chief creep, the biggest creep, is likely to act the creepiest.

He's truly not well. Garbage? The new, overdone, ridiculously ostentatious East Wing can't disguise the smell coming from the building.

Those Somalis working in the meat-packing plants had kids. Some of them might be married already. Some of those married might have married white people, too. And had kids. He ought to think about that while brewing his fetid stew of racist, fascist hate.

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

Mister Mark

A Tap On the Shoulder

I thought I've been facing it well enough. Parts are wearing out. In particular, my heart.

Sunday morning came soon enough. I was signed up for duties with my church, but of course I had to get there.

One walk across the parking lot to my snowed-in car suggested trouble. There had been something like 6 or 7 inches of snow, for all purposes the first snowfall of the season, through Saturday night--the wet and heavy kind. It had ended, and there wasn't a lot of wind at the moment (but it would soon turn much windier).

Just removing the snow that had caked onto my car told me the obvious: Going behind the car to get a decent amount of snow removed so I could back into the alleyway would take a tremendous effort. Tremendous, as in lots and lots and lots of work, lifting a sizable shovel for unfluffy snow. Ten feet, about what I knew I'd have to clear, looked like half a mile.

There was a day, and it seemed not long ago now, where I'd probably take a moment to complain and get on with it. I would build up a huge sweat. And I would be breathing hard, very hard, as my mind went somewhere else but my body subconsciously picked up the pace to get that snow the hell out of there.

That's what I was facing. But I made the non-macho, logical, sensible thought: This may easily kill you. I'm 74, not 54. And overweight. And hampered by a hip that never completely came around after two surgeries on it.

I have had a triple by-pass, followed just a year and a half ago by the insertion of a pacemaker. It's not like I'm ready for Olympic training any longer. Strain on my heart must be made slowly and gradually. Sudden bursts of strong activity might bring about my sudden demise.

And there I'd be, in a parking lot, lying in snow with no one else around me and the next person coming out of the building in who-knows-when. Not good odds. My Sunday scenario did not include collapsing and freezing to death. But for the first time in my life, I gauged a strong possibility.

My independence and self-sufficiency were suddenly compromised. I became, right in front of my eyes, old. But I know about too many men who, determined to turn back time, had seen it suddenly disappear and hadn't survived the experience.

My old father, older then than I am now, had nearly had that moment himself. Back much earlier in this century, and despite four by-passes six years before, he had a whole driveway to shovel. He nearly didn't make it back into the house. That rather large tap on his shoulder told him to sell the house and move into apartment living. He is still with us now, at 99 (Mom is 101, amazingly). I don't figure to last that long, but excursions like the one I was considering would sure cut me short as well.

I felt lousy about letting my church brethren down, especially at the last minute. But we have a meeting on Tuesday, and the chances of my being there at all just increased significantly.

Cleaning off my car was my tap on the shoulder: an attack of karma, perhaps. If that should mean that I'm marooned for two or three days, then so be it. Whatever I have to do, I can always re-schedule. In effect, I would be re-scheduling the end of my days--a much larger agenda.

It is a sobering matter. But the horizon is there, awaiting. Instead of attending church, I watched interesting interviews on both Fareed Zaharia GPS on CNN and those of a pair of Russian analysts on C-SPAN3. Got a lot out of both of them. But then, I was around to listen.

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

Mister Mark

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