R.P. Barr

Confrontation in Cambridge

 

 I wasn’t in Cambridge when Harvard Professor Gates was arrested in his own home.  However, while many are outraged, I tend to characterize the officer’s actions as unwise.  I reserve the right to become outraged as more is learned.  But, here is why I am more moderate in my views.

 Even before I got a badge of my own, I would tell anyone who would listen that a police officer is just another human being who happens to have a gun and a club (or chemical spray or a Taser), and is trained in how to use them.  The only thing standing between you and the receiving end of one of these enforcement aids is the officer’s self-control.  Like everybody else, officers have good days and bad, and you don’t know which he is having today.  Therefore, the correct behavior is to be as cooperative as possible with the aim of keeping this interaction as brief as possible and getting away with a whole skin.

 It is true that if the officer abuses his authority, he/she could be fired or prosecuted.  You, however, could be injured or worse.  It is far better to remember everything that is said and done, then save your arguments for court.

 As far as profiling goes, it has certainly existed in the past and probably persists in some pockets and individuals.  That said, there is no race, age, sex, religion, physical condition, profession, economic status, or educational attainment that is either inherently criminal or inherently innocent.

I was once called to an apartment where two post-middle-aged white men had been playing cards.  They got into an argument and the one in a wheel chair picked up a table knife and stabbed it deep into the thigh of the other man.  The assailant was not prosecuted, because the prosecutor did not believe that a jury would convict an old man in a wheel chair.  As a store detective, I saw a man on crutches steal an expensive overcoat.  He was also released.  While I worked for Customs, inspectors uncovered a ring of California “valley girls” that had been hired by Nigerian drug smugglers in an effort to defeat perceived profiling.  I could go on.  I could mention the millionaire beautician’s wife who walked into the store with her baby and proceeded to steal a stroller.  Or, the UN diplomat who, when shopping with his wife and teenage daughter, stepped into the men’s department and stole a sport coat.  The point is that a middle-aged black Harvard professor could be as innocent as he appears, or he could be—say--an abusive spouse, a child predator, or who knows what.

 He was breaking into a house where there had been a break-in reported in the past.  The officer was answering a 9-1-1 call.  That is reason for questioning.  Did the officer perform his duties professionally?  That is one question.

 Often times what an officer regards as a serious and professional tone of voice, the subject will regard as threatening and intimidating.  In any situation, officers know that losing control of the encounter could be fatal.  When the other person is also trying to take control, then things can escalate.

I once knew an officer who enjoyed goading suspects into fights.  It was stupid behavior and I was glad when he was fired.  I also know of instances where officers engaged in racial profiling—more, in my experience, from laziness than from bigotry, but the effect was the same.  And, officers have lost their jobs over it.

I have also known a few African-American individuals whose stress level goes through the roof when confronted by a white police officer.  These individuals do not follow my etiquette rules, but provoke and argue with the officer apparently to see how far they can push him.  It’s a way of exorcising their own fears and resentment.  While I can sympathize with the feelings that lead to this behavior, I have to say that it carries a high degree of risk.

And, incidentally, as almost every officer knows from experience, accusations of racism and other abuse  come from guilty individuals more often than from the innocent.

 So, was the professor inappropriately confrontational?  That is a second question.

 Even if he was, the officer should have known better than to arrest someone in his own home who had not committed an obvious crime.  The academies should include the lesson that an angry person cannot be taught anything.  Anger is corrosive and its own punishment.  If you can’t defuse it, just walk away.

 And, the professor should be aware that the next time someone breaks into his house, there won’t be a patrol car anywhere nearby.

Flu Review

A few weeks ago, I dismissed the novel H1N1 “swine flu” as a flash in the petrie dish.  I could have said that it was bound to spread, because that is the nature of the flu, but didn’t.  It is still a rather mild disease, but thanks to a cool start to summer, the flu lingers.  WHO has raised the classification to a Stage 6 pandemic, i.e. a disease that has occurred in a number of countries and continents.

 This is a good thing, because without a large death toll the experience has taught us many valuable lessons.  Not least of which is that what we have learned will not generate enough change to protect us against a really bad pandemic.

 For instance, the so-called “Spanish flu” of 1918 was also an H1N1 strain, and came in three waves.  The first of which was rather mild.  Is this spring’s H1N1 a precursor of something more sinister to follow?  Probably.  Most experts are predicting a comeback in the fall along with the  other flu strains.  Will it mutate to become as deadly as the 1918 variety?  Nobody knows.  Mutations are random.

 Another thing that this flu has in common with its ancestor besides the alpha-numeric designation, is that it strikes mainly at those in the prime of life, unlike other diseases that concentrate on the very old and the very young.

The good news is that medical science is much more advanced than in 1918.  Already there are expectations of a vaccine.

The bad news is that with global travel being what it is, quarantines are very limited in what they can achieve.  Last month we also learned that the number of hungry people in the world has topped a billion for the first time.  If these people cannot get enough food, how likely are they to receive adequate medical care?  In short, the world has a number of fertile breeding grounds for contagiouos diseases to develop.

 In this country, which has the best medical care in the world—if you can afford it--many businesses have dropped medical coverage for employees, or have transformed their work forccs from full-time with benefits to part-time without.  Part-time workers don’t get paid if they stay home sick.  At my facility, we sent an employee home on sick leave because her child had the flu.  Part-time employees wouldn’t even tell their employers about sick family members.  And, where do we find the most part-time workers?  In retail and food service jobs—exactly where they are most likely to spread whatever they catch. 

State budgets, which have been quietly underfunding health care for years, are being cut across the board due to the economic downturn.  Hospitals and local health departments were overwhelmed by this spring’s bush league flu.  Unless there are serious increases in funding, they will be staggeringly inadequate for a serious pandemic.

 The inescapable conclusion is that we have a significant portion of the public who will not seek medical treatment until they are very sick.  By that time, with a disease like the flu, they will have had many opportunities to pass along the infection to others.  The increasing scarcity of medical care could lead to civil unrest.  If you don’t think so, talk to hospital workers about the crush in the ER this time around, the fist fights that broke out, and the potential for riots.

On the positive side, a catastrophic pandemic would probably lead to a serious overhaul of our medical care establishment, something not likely to happen as long as the public is less emphatic than the insurance/pharmaceutical/medical industries. 

And, then, the  world is over-populated already.

Worried about Ebola?

The administration is spending more on swine flu prevention.  Vaccines will be produced and stockpiled.  Rationing plans are already drawn up with priority groups identified. 

 I still worry that the largest class of part-time workers—and therefore most likely to be uninsured—are shop clerks.  The very people that are in the best positions to spread contagion are the ones most likely to stay at work if they have sick family members, and remain on the job longer if they become ill.  Part-timers don’t get sick leave.  Workers who have to juggle multiple part-time jobs are more likely to stress their bodies with lack of sleep and improper diets thereby weakening their immune systems.

This week, BBC had a report that hints that the flu may not be the biggest threat on the horizon. [http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8143823.stm]  Scientists have found ebola virus in pigs in the Philippines.  Read the sentence again, there are three important statements there.

First is ebola.  This is as nasty a disease as ever evolved.  There is no vaccine and no cure.  Ebola hemorragic fever interferes with the lining of blood vessels causing them to leak.  Meanwhile, it also interferes with the surfaces of blood platelets which prevents clotting.  The effect is widespread internal bleeding.  That is the bad news.  The good is that ebola is not easily contagious during the early stages, and becomes virulent only when the bleeding spreads beyond the body.  In developed societies where good hygiene is widely practiced, the chances of spreading ebola are greatly reduced.  It is not spread by air—except when it is, apparently.  In the famous outbreak in a Reston,Virginia animal laboratory, the disease did travel from cage to cage by air.  And, air transmitted microbes killed a nurse as well. 

 But, now it is in pigs.  When ebola was first discovered in Africa, scientists tested some 3,000  species and found the disease in only a few rodents and primates.  Outbreaks were isolated and self-limiting.  Swine, however, are perfect hosts for microbes that want to mutate.  The chances that something bad will come of this pairing are higher than if it had been found in—say, rats.  Plus, the disease had to mutate to attack pigs in the first place.  The ebola may have jumped from monkey to pig or the other way around, or it may have been spread by bats.  The studies continue.

The third shocker in the announcement is that ebola is in the Philippines, not Africa.  Apparently it has been there for some time.  The pig tenders--I’m speaking of people here—are not currently getting sick, although some have tested posiive for the virus.  The pigs are not so lucky.

 The conclusion is that ebola has jumped halfway around the world and adapted to a new species.  Or, it has spontaneously developed half a world away from the initial discovery.  Neither scenario makes me more comfortable.  However, since the Philippino version is not deadly (except to pigs), we don’t have to worry about it this year.  Next year, maybe.

 Meanwhile, I just heard a round-table discussion about reducing traffic in the metropolitan area.  The powers that be want to charge people for driving in certain lanes in order to force car pooling and motivate people to take public transportation.  I think the pandemic planners ought to get together with the folks who want to coerce the work force into close proximity while commuting.  While going to part-time jobs without medical insurance.

Remembering Gale Storm and Karl Malden

There were two other entertainers’ deaths at the end of last week.  I was a fan of both, and feel that their passing has been overshadowed by the public mourning for Michael Jackson and Farah Fawcett.  I am speaking of Gale Storm and Karl Malden.

 Gale Storm was a contract actress who typically played the love interest in a variety of movies that are mostly forgotten.  She had started out as a singer, but had little chance to show off that talent.  However, genetics were on her side and when she was thirty, she still looked young enough to play the twenty-ish title role in the television series, My Little Margie.  I Love Lucy had broken new ground in TV comedy in October 1951, and My Little Margie premiered the following year.  (That part confuses me, because I remember the series fairly well, but I was still pre-school when it started—I wasn’t that precocious.)  Storm excelled at light comedy.

She wore her dark hair short and curled, and her dresses full, portraying a meddling young woman with a good heart whose plans never went according to plan.  Margie lived with her father, Vern, played by the star of silent movies, Charles Farrell.  Farrell’s gray hair was high above his forehead, swept back, and he had a penchant for light colored suits.  They lived in a high rise apartment building.  Vern’s love interest, Roberta Townsend was played by the sultry Hillary Brooke.  Roberta lived conveniently across the hall and was often sucked into Margie’s schemes.  Margie’s backup boyfriend, Freddie was always a phone call away, but he was a dork and Margie was always looking to trade up.  She delivered a trademark gutteral "D-d-d-d-d-d-d" sound into the camera that marked her realization when her plans went awry.

I don’t remember any of the plots.  Fess Parker of Davy Crockett fame was in a couple episodes.  My most vivid memory, however, was of an episode called, “The Health With Yoga.”  I remember it because Margie and a reluctant Freddie embraced health food.  I had never heard of yoghurt or wheat germ before they tried both and pronounced them inedible.  More than five years passed before these products finally appeared on the grocery shelves in my town.  A teenager by then, I promptly brought them home for a trial.  The plain yoghurt was indeed unpalatable, and I didn’t try it again for another five years when I moved to New York and found that Dannon had added flavors to the stuff.  Wheat germ, on the other hand, became a regular additive to my diet.

 After a four year run, My Little Margie lost it’s lease.  Gale Storm had become a small-screen star and promptly launced another show called, Oh, Susannah in which she played a cruse ship’s recreation director.  Her cohort in nautical adventure was another silent  film star, Zazu Pitts. 

 This show gave Stom opportunities to sing.  I specifically remember “Dark Moon,” which became a hit for her.  Although in her mid to late thirties at this time, Storm released a rock-and-roll song that also sold well: “I Hear You Knockin’”  (The record companies at that time did not realize that a fundamental feature of rock-and-roll was to reject main stream adult performers.)  These and other Storm recordings are available on-line for downloading. 

Karl Malden is better known to today’s audiences.  The face that prevented him from landing leading man roles was instantly recognizable.  He was also very believable in all of his roles.  I never saw a bad or even mediocre perfomance from Malden.  He knew how to find the passion in all of his characters.

 He was nominated for an Academy Award for his work in On the Waterfront.  There is a famous scene in which Malden’s character, a priest, is in the hold of a cargo ship trying to rally the longshoremen to rise up against the mob-controlled union.  At one point, one of the longshoremen throws a soda can that hits Malden in the forehead, causing it to bleed.  This angers the priest and he hammers home his diatribe.

 As it happened, the director, Elia Kazan, was not pleased with Malden during the run-throughs of this scene.  The rubber can would bounce off Malden’s head again and again, but the dialogue did not explode the way Kazan wanted.  So, when the cameras were rolling, Kazan substituted a real can for the rubber one.  These were the days before aluminum cans, sodas were inside steel cans with welded lids.  The blood you see in the movie was real, and the fire in Malden’s eyes is not acting.

 Having lived in San Francisco, I was a devoted viewer of The Streets of San Francisco,  the show that finally brought Malden to the small screen.  Michael Douglas became famous as Malden’s sidekick.  Those were strange times for cop shows, and Malden felt betrayed by the network when the show was finally cancelled.  As he explained it, he had wanted to make the show more about the characters and the procedures of catching the bad guys.  The networks kept pushing for more action to pull in the viewers.  Then when there was pressure from the public to tone down the violence on TV, the network responded by pulling Malden’s popular show.

 Aside from On the Waterfront, two other performances that I recommend are his cuckolded husband in Tennesse Williams’ Baby Doll,  and as the father of the victim in the TV mini-series Fatal Vision.  The latter was based on the true story of an Army Special Forces doctor who murdered his wife and family.  The real-life father of the wife defended his son-in-law and performed his own investigation to prove the doctor innocent.  Malden was facinating as he uncovered fact after fact that changed his mind and convinced him of the doctor’s guilt.  Then, he had to convince the authorities.

I couldn’t find that Karl Malden and Gale Storm had ever worked together, or even knew each other.  But, there is something that they had in common.  They were both competent working actors who honored the profession, and had quiet, stable personal lives.  Malden recently celebrated his 70^th anniversary with his wife.  Storm had four children and 45 years with her first husband until his death.  She subsequently remarried for another eight years until that husband passed away.  These are people who deserve to be remembered.