Articles, Etc.

          Tired of popularity? Had enough tedious interruptions of your tranquility by boring and intrusive admirers who offer you a pen while shoving the edge of a newspaper between your spoon and your soup? Tired of adulatory grins, heads nodding at each phrase when you pontificate? Ever wish for some gritty contrast to this honey and oil, some bared teeth, clenched fists, murmured oaths, at best averted glances from those who love you best?

            Here’s all you need. Glance over these unpopular notions, easy to absorb, declare to those within earshot the items that take your fancy, and you’ll get what you want.

Foreign

            a) Abandon our Naval Base on Guantanamo Bay and place its counterpart on our own shore. If it were Gibraltar, it would be worth keeping, but this location has no strategic value to us, and, to many non-Americans in the Western Hemisphere, this advertisement for Yankee imperialism serves as a stone in the shoe. (We can keep some leverage on Cuba by the threat to send back the Miami Cubans.)

            b) Recognize Cuba and enter full commercial engagement. The tourism and trade will powerfully press that society to open itself.

            c) Withdraw from Puerto Rico, leaving that Island on its own, treated as any other Caribbean country, paying it no money and imposing no control. Fifty states are enough.

            d) Give the government of Israel the choice: Forthwith accept and adopt the peace settlement terms proposed by the Mitchell Commission or submit to a 2/3 cut in the US annual subsidy.

Legal

            a) If we are to have punitive damages, treat them according to the spirit with which they are imposed: as a penalty or fine for wrongdoing. As such, award such damages to the unit of government represented by the court that awards the damages. The wrongdoing imposes an obligation to the society, it should not grant an undeserved windfall. Where two plaintiffs have been awarded fair and proper compensatory damages, should one get a windfall, as though holding a winning lottery ticket, and the other nothing, just because the defendant in one case is ugly, crooked, malicious and rich, and the defendant in the other is a silver-haired retired school teacher?

            b) No added penalties for hate crimes against a person. Impose no greater criminal penalty for a crime against another’s body where the motive was hatred of the victim’s race, religion or sex preference than where the motive was a relish for bloodshed. The victim suffers the same, and society’s loss is the same, regardless of motive. An added penalty is justified for a hate crime that offends rather than injures; a swastika put on a synagogue or a cross burned on the front lawn inflicts more pain than does simple vandalism.

Philanthropic

             No gifts by charities or government to the relatives of those killed by the 9/11 attacks. The total episode made a profound emotional impact on American society, but to each person who lost to the 9/11 attacks one near and dear the degree of pain and grief do not exceed what that person would have been suffered if that one death had been caused by an intersection collision or by a heart attack upstairs. Every day, people lose their lives, leaving loving dependants with nothing. Those who believe they have a cause of action against one of the two air lines and air ports should be free to pursue such action. U.S. loan guaranties would be necessary and proper to keep the planes flying.


Educational

             Cut appropriations and withdraw §501©3 status from schools that allow lower standards of scholarship and behavior for entering and staying in school from athletes who play on money-earning sports teams than for other students.

Social  

             Grant American Indians full status as adults. Remove the status of guardian and ward. Give each tribe full legal rights and powers to all its property. Treat each tribe as a municipality, allowing it as an institution to do what it wants with all it owns, no longer to require the permission of Uncle Sam before a tribe can sue or be sued, buy or sell. Cease to give money to Indians as such, measuring beneficiaries by sufficiency of ancestral blood, but treat them like other Americans. Close down the BIA. Several generations of humiliating and corrupting dependency are more than enough.

1/14/02                                                                                     SB