The Rocket Powered Butterfly

Last week, I was planning a post around the re-emergence of David Foster Wallace’s This Is Water commencement speech, this time featured in a brilliant video by a PR firm.¹ The post was sidetracked by a death, but that same event made the post more relevant, and important, then ever. Watch the video.²

In essence, DFW captures a thought so obvious it’s frequently forgotten: how we live our life is a choice.

 “You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t.”

It’s the same reason I consistently return to “COURAGE UNDER FIRE: Testing Epictetus’s Doctrines in a Laboratory of Human Behavior (pdf)” Admiral James Stockdale’s account of his time as a prisoner of war and how the matter of choice, of choosing how to respond to his fate, made his survival at least a possibility.

In the same way, the nature of grieving is a choice. How we respond to death is a choice. We can celebrate or denigrate, fall into a pit of despair or push onward.

“The only thing that is capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re going to try to see it.”

That is what makes me so mad when people say things like “It’s in God’s hands now” or “Insha’Allah”. Because it’s not. It’s in our hands, for better or worse, and even when things seem out of reach, we still choose how that helplessness becomes real for us.

Life is hard, but the harder you work, the better it is.

“The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day. That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.”

It’s so easy to forget, we need constant reminder.

“This is water. This is water.”

I first met Dennis Lane, the famed Wordbones of Tales of Two Cities, almost exactly two years ago, over a beer at Victoria. We were brought together by fellow blogger Tom Coale after I had, in Tom’s words, taken Dennis “to the woodshed” over his pro-CSX stance on the proposed intermodal in Elkridge.

Thirty minutes ago, I found out he was killed in what is being called “a domestic homicide”. I decided there was no more fitting tribute to the man I called The Godfather of HoCo blogs ¹  than to post something.

I had, of course, been religiously reading Dennis before meeting him in real life. You can’t be even tangentially interested in the Howard County political scene and not read Dennis. His posts were frequent, funny, and required. His take could be…slanted, but he never wanted to be mistaken for a journalist. He wanted to help. I always felt like he just cared for his community so much that that love needed some constant outlet and, to our benefit, that outlet took the form of blogging. Others would have planted trees or worked on their golf game, but Dennis decided to perform a true community service, illuminating otherwise missed issues and keeping all of us informed.

He didn’t take disagreement personally, even when I described his writing as a “self-indulgent Donald Trump ramble”. That was part of the fun for him, the back and forth. He relished debate.  He loved to kick back with a beer and get deep into deeply local issues that 90% of the population preferred to ignore. He cared, and he wanted to help you care with him. Disagree, fine; just come to the table and dig in.

I was depending on his coverage of the 2014 races, and I do mean coverage. His incredible local networks and commitment to attending every political event he could made him the eyes and ears of thousands of Howard Countians without his access, time, or writing ability. (I fall under all three categories.)

I never understood his penchant for links to New Yorker cartoons and goofy YouTube clips. It always made me mad I couldn’t just hover over the link and figure out what it was, I had to click through and see what silly semi-related joke he had found. I never knew how he found all of those. Google, I guess. Wish I had asked his method.

He emailed me last week, and I put replying into the “to-do” pile that, now, will never get done.

As far as I’m concerned, there is no one to fill the void he leaves behind in this little blogging community. I can only guess at the pain his family feels today; he wrote about his daughter with such unabashed pride and joy.

The time will come for deep mourning, for full remembrance, for justice. For now, for today, though, it’s worth reflecting on the measure of the man: how many people will miss his daily posts on classic cars or local supermarkets, the tributes he’ll receive from local politicians he routinely skewered, the family and communities he leaves behind as a true and lasting memorial.

One last wag of the Wordbones tail for you, Dennis. You will be missed.

Last night, my wife and I turned on the Orioles-Red Sox game just in time to watch Jake Arrieta pitch eight straight balls. My brother-in-law texted about the end of the Fenway sell-out streak. After a double play got the O’s out of the jam and ended the inning, we watched as Nick Markakis slapped a homerun into the Red Sox bullpen. “How does that make you feel?” my wife asked. I had no idea.

I grew up in New England, but to say I’m a lifelong Red Sox fan is…misleading. Sports are generally inherited from the father, and my father had little to pass on. Through my childhood, he never willingly watching any televised sport, and still doesn’t.¹ I only have three real childhood memories of the Red Sox.²

1. 1988, second grade, Lowell: Foil wrapped pencils were a massive fad in my classroom; somehow, I had stumbled into a Red Sox one. I traded it without hesitation for a fistful of non-sports related generics. I remember specifically what a seller’s market it was: I had a line of desperate bidders, each outdoing the last with outsized offers for a dubious prize. (A theme for Red Sox fans.) The logo meant nothing to me, but it was important to my classmates. I just wanted more shiny pencils.

2. Unknown year, circa third grade, Hampton Beach: My grandfather and uncle were watching the All-Star game and pointed out Wade Boggs. Wade Boggs became my favorite player, an ultimately meaningless honor because I never watched baseball anyway.

3. Unknown year, circa fourth grade, Boston: My first trip to Fenway. I mostly remember being terrified at having to pee into the Fenway men’s rooms troughs, packed shoulder to shoulder with sweaty, swearing Bostonians.³

True Red Sox fandom only bloomed after I left home as it become a touchstone of what I left behind; I watched the 2003 ALCS collapse from ship and read the 2004 comeback via Navy message.

But now those feelings are clouded, my loyalty in doubt. I feel Orioles magic creeping into my bones, and I don’t know what to do.

My conversion has occurred slowly, and began long before our move to Howard County. When I met my to-be wife for the first time, she was watching a Red Sox-Orioles game, and our first conversation was about baseball. Since then, we’ve been a house divided. I dragged her to Red Sox games at Petco Park; she introduced me to Camden Yards. Once we moved to Maryland, though, things quickly tilted in her favor.  Since that move, some four years ago, I’ve attended two Orioles home openers, at least 20 games at Camden Yards⁴, 0 at Fenway, used MASN as background for dozens of summer evenings, had a son that chants “Let’s go O’s!” at the slightest provocation, sat behind homeplate as Red Sox collapsed and endured a two hour rain delay to see my first playoff baseball game…at Camden Yards, against the Yankees. (No need to change rivalries!) As our life rooted down in Maryland, my Facebook feed has slowly been overtaken by enthusiastic Orioles proclaimatons and consternation, widening the path laid down by my father- and brother-in-law. New friends pushed the birds. Old friends were far away. Buck Showalter’s gritty brand of baseball was tough to shake.

I feel like a Montague adopted by the Capulets. To whom do I owe my loyalty?

The lineage of sports fandom has always been of outsized importance to me. I despise frontrunners and bandwagoneers, sneer at pink hatters and outsized expectations.⁵ Sports loyalty should be earned, celebrated, and endure, not swing wildly from fanbase to fanbase.You marry teams, you don’t date them. So is this possible? Can I divorce my geographically determined mate for the new hometown hottie that…makes me happy?

I like to think that if sports are inherited from the father, but my bequeathal was empty, than perhaps things can run in reverse. Fathers, maybe, can inherit from sons. Tonight marks my son’s first teeball practice. His team? The Orioles.

I was in a roundtable discussion not long ago when a comment was made and passed unchallenged, drifting by as the current of conversation moved on.

“We’ve become a too touchy-feely society.”

You’ve probably heard or seen something similar, generally as a comment on an article like this one, where a second grader was suspended for turning a Pop-Tart¹ into something vaguely gun shaped, and who then may or may not have pointed it at a fellow student².

This incident has been taken as evidence that we, as a society, are too quick to judge, too focused on being kinder and gentler, a society that is still called, decades after the term was popularized, too “P.C.”³

The Baltimore Sun quoted the boy’s father: “I feel this is just a direct result of society feeling that guns are evil and guns are bad … and if you make your pastry into a gun, you’re going to be the next Columbine shooter.”

I disagree.⁴

I think outsized punishments for pint-sized offenders has less to do with any societal stance on gun control, or violence, and more to do with bureaucratization, the replacement of common sense with Rules From On High For All.

I asked my wife, a teacher, what she would have done if confronted with a Toaster Pastry Gun being waved around her classroom. Her actual answer was more nuanced, but to sum up: Take the treat away, and ignore the larger implications. Which would probably not be in line with official school policy.

Senate Bill 1052, technically titled “Electronic Harassment of a Minor” but generally known as “Grace’s Law”, is coming, sponsored by Howard County’s own Allan Kittleman. It’s flying through the legislature. It passed out of committee unanimously.

Look at this language in the bill⁵:

A person may not maliciously engage in a course of conduct, through the use of electronic communication, that alarms or seriously annoys another: with the intent to harass, alarm, or annoy the other; after receiving a reasonable warning or request to stop by or on behalf of the other; and without a legal purpose.

And then look at the penalty for such an act:

A person who violates this section is guilty of a misdemeanor and on conviction is subject to imprisonment not exceeding 1 year or a fine not exceeding $500 or both.

How hard to you have to try to come up with a scenario in which this generic language overrides common sense? All it would take would be hyper-protective parent or politician trying to make a name for himself and a thirteen-year-old making thirteen-year-old decisions. Misdemeanors don’t read well on college applications.

This isn’t to say cyber-bullying, or any bullying for that matter, is not important or a problem or a threat to children. But this bill does not empower teachers to correct classrooms. It does not give administrators another tool in the anti-bullying toolbox; in fact, it may take them away. If a teacher or administrator worries that correcting a normally well-behaved child could lead to a court case, what should they do? What will they do? What would you do, if you found your child calling someone names online? Are they a criminal?

Have we empowered our teachers and administrators or boxed them in?

I visited my wife’s school recently as part of an ongoing Career Café.⁶ The teacher running the program pulled me aside just before I began and asked me to talk about the importance of being responsible in online behavior. “These kids don’t realize that stuff will be out there for anyone to find for a long time,” she worried. This teacher took it upon herself to monitor kid’s profiles, making sure they were set to private, and constantly tied “being a good citizen” –the school’s offical goal for students- to “being a good citizen online, too” in every possible lesson. That type of program, in the case, run only by the free time and energy of one teacher, could actually make a difference. It ties the lessons kids learn in school about proper behavior with what they do at home and online, connections that are something that have to be taught. Teaching that takes time, expertise, and resources. Things the state could potentially provide.

That one teacher is going to be far more effective against cyber-bullying than SB 1052.⁷

I believe in the power of good government, and think that proper policy sets the foundation for a civil, in both sense of the word, society. I know Senator Kittleman has the best of intentions, and what’s more, he also co-sponsored legislation this session to remove criminal penalties for low-level crimes that did more harm than good.

A hammer might be the easiest tool to reach for, but it’s often not the best. SB 1052 is the wrong approach.

The web is awash in “Iraq: 10 years later” writing (guilty). Below are what I found to be the most interesting and thought provoking, with money quotes.

Michael Ware describes his conversations with former Baathists, and wonders if the insurgency could have been avoided if the U.S. had been paying attention.

The war’s ultimate goal, he told me, to much nodding approval around the room, was for the Sunnis to fight and negotiate their way to a seat at the table of power in the country. A seat they felt they’d been egregiously denied.

But in the weeks and then months I was being told such things, I could not find a single attentive ear within the US mission. Government authority then rested with the Coalition Provisional Authority of proconsul Paul L Bremer. Along with declaring so foolishly that the tribes of Iraq were effectively dead, CPA officials I encountered merely sniffed at the insurgents’ desire to converse. They would buckle under the heel of a new, soon-to-be democratic government. There was absolutely no palpable interest in encouraging a dialogue. Perhaps, even, quite the contrary.

The US military, it seemed to me, was labouring under an entirely different misapprehension. The US Army, which then owned Baghdad and the rest of the country with it, simply could not understand who was shooting at them nor why they would be shooting in the first place.

Interview with General McChrystal in Foreign Affairs

What lessons did you learn in your Iraq and Afghanistan tours?
In Iraq, when we first started, the question was, “Where is the enemy?” That was the intelligence question. As we got smarter, we started to ask, “Who is the enemy?” And we thought we were pretty clever. And then we realized that wasn’t the right question, and we asked, “What’s the enemy doing or trying to do?” And it wasn’t until we got further along that we said, “Why are they the enemy?”

Angry Charlie Pierce, in Esquire.

I can hardly wait for this week to end. If it’s not Dean Baquet, copping a cheap alibi for his newspaper’s unforgivable malpractice, it’s Richard Perle. who should be displayed in a pillory outside Walter Reed for the next 10 years, being allowed to vomit blood all over the op-ed section of USA Today.

Many commentaries on the Iraq War, including the one to which this is a response, show little understanding of what it means to manage risk. We do not normally consider it to have been foolish to pay for fire insurance when the house does not burn down – or particularly clever to have done so when it does. When thousands of American lives are at stake, insurance, sometimes pre-emptive military action, is not cheap.  

And precisely what risk did you “manage”? What chance did you take? You gambled with other people’s children in a game you’d helped rig. What cost was exacted from you, sitting your fat ass in a swivel chair at a wingnut intellectual chop-shop while kids are still staggering around the wards without legs and arms, or the cognitive functions to get them through the day? What price did you pay? You have to send out for lunch one day? Show me the butcher’s bill for the Perle household, you vampire son of a bitch.

On Kurdistan, in The Atlantic.

It’s been ten years since the U.S.-led invasion, and most will observe the anniversary by remembering the dead and evaluating mistakes. Things are a little different in Iraqi Kurdistan, the northernmost autonomous region where the “invasion” is still referred to — insistently — as a “liberation.” It’s a strange, parallel universe in which American ideals like freedom from tyranny and economic promise are more intact than they are in America, as is the belief that those ideals can be spread and won through war.

The area is popular with tourists; many wealthier Arab Iraqis travel from the embattled south to relax and enjoy amenities like electricity.

A New Republic online symposium. From Anne-Marie Slaughter:

I now see the decision to invade Iraq as cynical, tragic, immoral, and irresponsible to the point of folly. I do not think that the thousands of U.S. and allied lives lost were lost in vain: Only time can tell what Iraq will become; how the Iraqi people will look back on the toppling of Saddam Hussein and the ensuing ten years of violence; and what role Iraq will play in the larger Middle East. It is very difficult to imagine any transition from Saddam to post-Saddam without some violence and political upheaval in a nation as fractured religiously and ethnically as Iraq. But in hindsight, the U.S. decision to spend tens of billions of U.S. dollars; to ignore all knowledge, planning, and expertise about Iraq with regard to what should happen when the bullets stopped flying; and to ignore the opposition of many of our closest allies in deciding when and how to take action is virtually indefensible. And I could not in good conscience look an Iraqi widow, parent, or child in the eye and tell them that the tens of thousands of Iraqi lives lost served a larger purpose, which is a burden that every American who did not actively demonstrate against the war must carry.

PART I: THE BEGINNING

March 20, 2003: I was onboard USS Kearsarge in the Northern Arabian Gulf, providing sea basing for 16 CH-53E Super Stallions from an operating area called LHOA 3. ¹(At least, I think that was the number. It was ten years ago.) I could probably draw the operating area’s vaguely tetrahedronal shape still, but only in the fluorescent green lines that defined LHOA 3 on our radar scopes and electronic charts. ² We had left our homeport of Norfolk, Virginia, some two months earlier, weighted down with thousands of Marines and their equipment. Those Marines had been summarily discharged into Kuwait a month earlier, leaving only behind their aviation brethren, and presumably sitting in the Kuwaiti desert since. ³

The ship’s crew had been collectively waiting to invade Iraq for months. All the stuff we saw on CNN, Hans Blix, weapons inspections, whatever, struck as a farcical holdup to the main event. The pieces were in place, and had been set in motion a long time ago. As in World War I, once the gears of war began turning, stopping them was beyond the will of any man. The sooner it began, we reasoned, the sooner we could all go home.

As a junior ⁴ officer onboard an amphibious assault ship whose main purpose had already been fulfilled, little information (Surprise!) trickled down to me. We found out the invasion was for real only obliquely; a destroyer stationed near us radioed the afternoon of the 21^st, when I happened to be on watch, to warn us to stand clear from them that night. They refused to say why.⁵ It didn’t take a naval genius to figure it out, though: that destroyer, a “shooter” in Navy parlance, would be firing Tomahawks that night. Tomahawks drop a booster stage early after they launch, which then falls into the sea…or onto an unwitting amhib. The word spread quickly from the bridge. Watch for fireworks tonight.

Sure enough, there was a light show after sunset, as the Gulf (and beyond) lit up with the fiery launches of hundreds of cruise missiles. We were watching the “Shock and Awe” portion of the campaign, and we figured we’d be going home soon. How long could a rag-tag Middle Eastern army withstand such an awesome show of force?

As it turns out, not long at all. And as it turns out, defeating that rag-tag army was barely the beginning.

When you’re way down the rungs of the military ladder, you pretty much have to assume someone, somewhere, knows what the fuck is going on. You, for one, almost never do. But someone has to be in charge, and they have to have some semblance of a plan. That’s how you justify doing things that make no sense. Maybe staying in this imaginary box is silly, sure, but someone, somewhere has a reason. Our is not to reason why. Iraq and, more particularly, post-invasion Iraq, is what happens when that chain of assumption reaches up to the very top…and it’s linked to nothing. What will we do after we invade? We’ll be greeted as liberators! These things will just work themselves out naturally.

23 of the Marines we sent ashore in February would not return. ⁶

PART II: MISSION NOT ACCOMPLISHED? THAT’S UNPOSSIBLE!

I spent six months deployed with Kearsarge on that go round (13 days in port), including quick missions off the coast of Egypt (to support a Bush visit) and Liberia (to exfiltrate some special forces caught in embassy attacks).

We deployed again a year later, with 3 weeks notice, for 3 months. (Even when I first saw it, I knew this would become a symbol of absurdity.) I came back for two months, then left again to join my next command, PC Crew Delta, aboard USS Firebolt, in Bahrain.

It wasn’t until my second deployment with Delta, in 2006, that I would actually, you know, met an Iraqi. I was assigned as a Visit, Board, Search, and Seizure (VBSS) officer, which, in our case, generally meant mostly visiting.

That six month deployment was by far the most interesting. I was an old salt by then, far more comfortable underway than back at home port ⁷, and I had an opportunity afforded to few. Deployed on USS Typhoon, PC Crew Delta spent much of that six months circling the platforms that linked Iraq’s oil supply with the world. Pipes carried oil from the interior of the country to the platforms; ships filled up with crude and carried it away. Shut them down, shut down Iraq- so the coalition keep the terminals surrounded by ships. Just off the Al-faw peninsula, we also just happened to be just off Kuwait and Iran. The area was packed with fishermen from all three countries, with a leveling of Indians and Pakistanis who had traveled up the entire length of the Gulf chasing their catch and trading everything from second hand cars to grey market oil. Routinely, the boarding team and I would go out to talk to fishermen, locals, trying to get a feel for the flow of illegal goods and information. (We once came aboard a fishing dhow just as a load of shrimp was being dumped onto the deck. Despite the protestations of the ship’s cook, who was also on the boarding team, I turned down the crew’s offer to share. I’ve always regretted it.) Guidance was…unclear if we should speak to Iranians, who we could identify from far off by their distinctive boat type. ⁸ If the interpreter I had that day was up for it ⁹, I would always approach. It wasn’t until months into our deployment that we found out if IRGCN forces happened to see a fishing crew talking to Americans, they could be detained when they pulled into port. ¹⁰

All of which to say, I got to talk to a lot of people, from a lot of different places, about the American presence. Their (generally positive) response always had to be filtered through the perspective of unarmed fishermen trying to eke out a living talking to a crew of heavily armed Americans, watched over by a heavily armed ship a few hundred yards away. (Our friendly “Hey, mind if we come aboard?” was rarely turned down, even by Iranians risking God knows what. There’s a rock and a hard place for you. International enmity squeezing some fisherman in its vise.)

Kuwaitis routinely complained about Iraqis and Iranians. Iraqis complained about Iranians and Kuwaitis. Indians complained about Americans and Iranians. Iranians didn’t complain about anything. Occasionally, we would hear cries of “Ali Baba! Ali Baba!” over bridge to bridge radio, which meant someone was getting robbed somewhere. Most fishermen attributed these incidents to Iranian security forces, but who knew? What I did know was the American Navy had essentially airdropped itself into disputes decades, if not millennia, in the making. What were we supposed to do? Prioritization was given to maintaining security around the oil terminals; if they were hit, everything else wouldn’t matter. After that, we helped out as much as circumstances and mission allowed- trying to use a show of force to prevent Ali Baba from creeping out, training the nascent Iraqi Navy. Sandcastles in the tide.

I was in the pilot house of a tug, trying to gain a rapport with the ship’s captain, who resolutely ignored my questions¹¹ while watching Saddam’s trial on a small TV. (We were close enough to shore that a standard TV antenna got a signal.) Suddenly, he looked up as if finally realizing I was there and went on an extended tear. Saddam was a bad man, he informed me via interpreter. He, the captain, knew people who had disappeared during Saddam’s reign. Everyone was always afraid. The Americans had done Iraq a favor by getting rid of him. I felt, momentarily, some pride. U! S! A! Maybe this whole thing was worth it after all! And then the captain continued. But now we have no electricity, he complained. It was hard to get fuel for his tug. If you wanted a job, you had to pay a bribe. Why weren’t the Americans solving these problems? Where was the police? I had no idea.

In 2006, I’m not sure anyone else did, either.

PART III: WHAT IT ALL MEANS (Or doesn’t.)

The amount of time and treasure spent in Iraq and Afghanistan is MIND BOGGLING. American dollars have flowed around the world, funneled through war zones. Even as the wars wind down, American taxpayers are the owners of a defense budget twice the size of a decade ago- and that doesn’t even account for the cost of the wars. ¹²

Ten years later, how many Americans know the difference between a Sunni and a Shi’ite? How many know what Kurdistan refers to? What finding bin Laden in Pakistan means for India?

I frequently think of something I read once, about Americans in World War II. Newspapers would print maps of Europe, and children and parents would hang the maps and mark American battles and advances. Who, really, paid that much attention to Iraq or Afghanistan? Blame has been laid at the feet of everything from The Bachelor to the recession, but I’m not sure. Perhaps it’s still too soon to figure it out, but I think the ignorance and miscalculation and straight-up mistakes that led to the initial invasion forever hung over the war. We never really knew what we were doing there, so who could get smart about it. There was no goal to push for, no advance or battle to mark on a map. It takes a lifetime to learn the tribal complexities of a place like Iraq or Afghanistan; you can’t put that in a graph or chart or even an article. If the president didn’t know there were two kinds of Muslims in Iraq, what could we expect of the American people? And if we didn’t know, what were we doing?

Iraq is proof of the limits of military power. ¹³ It’s proof that belief in American-style democracy means next to nothing outside of the U.S., proof that the concept of “American exceptionalism” doesn’t sell well when you’re standing by and letting fishermen get robbed, or beaten, or blown up. Classmates who studied Russian poetry have journals and kill lists published in Foreign Policy.

I still don’t know if we did “the right thing” in invading Iraq. I don’t think anyone does. Sure, we removed a dictator, but the headlines show we maybe didn’t do much else and maybe, in the end, made life for the lowest levels of Iraqis a little bit worse. What more does a simple person want, really, but certainty that he and his family can safely go to the market? Iraq still teeters on the edge of anarchy and, come 2014, Afghanistan is unlikely to do any better. ¹⁴

We all did the best we could, and, in the end, it probably wasn’t good enough.

23 of the Marines we sent ashore in February would not return.

The fundamental nature of bureaucracy is inertia. ¹ After years observing federal bureaucracy at close-quarters, I’ve found fundamental resistance to change is less at the individual level (the “useless government worker” of popular imagination) and is more systemic: everyone you talk to, both in and out the system, deplores the current state of affairs, wishes for change, dreams of cutting through the endless red tape and hassle…only they can’t pull it off. I’ve been part of teams that tried to fix some basic, obvious, common sense problems…and failed miserably.

And that’s why I loved this blog post from the Harvard Business Review, Innovating Around a Bureaucracy. ²  Although the entire article is worth your time, especially if you’ve ever stood in a post office line and said “Why don’t they just do X?”, for now I want to highlight the author’s three critical factors for success:

• a team of insiders and outsiders to come up with new ideas
• a clear external motivation to do something
• strong leaders who believe in the ideas and push the bureaucracy to implement them consistently over a number of years

Which brings us to Laura Neuman. HoCoRising pointed me to a (breathless) interview between the (obviously taken) Baltimore Sun and the new Anne Arundel County Executive. Three related quotes from Ms. Neuman stood out:

“After the swearing-in, I had several meetings with the press, then walked into my new office. There was no computer, believe it or not, and the [physical] environment was very uninviting. [The rest of] that day was devoted to meeting the people who work here.”

“Our calendar and email system in [county government] is 10 or 15 years out of date. This will sound shocking, but I haven’t been able to access email on my computer since the day I arrived. It takes several seconds to pull up an email on my iPhone.”

“We also need to bring a little light to [government offices]. Everything here is outdated, like the old-time portraits on the first floor.”

I work in a former World War II era barracks, half of which is burnt out. ³ Cabling that would be considered obsolete by any rational standard is strung everywhere, our tenuous connection to the outside world. I work with offices that have lost conductivity to the Internet for weeks at a time. Left hands not only don’t know what right hands are doing, they are unaware of another hand’s existence in the first place. ⁴ These problems are known, are basic, but fixing them…almost impossible, at a very fundamental level. What we lack, most frequently, is that strong leader willing to push the bureaucracy to change over the period of years required for succeess. More often, military leaders or political appointees cycle in and out, unable to redirect a bureaucracy willing and able to outlast them. ⁵

Anne Arundel County has suffered from more than just bad personal behavior at the hands of John Leopold; while he was busy in the backseat, the bureaucracy blundered on. Email and calendars may seem like non-issues, below the notice of the Executive, but think of what “a responsive government” requires: an ability for the government to respond ⁶. Solutions are often a lot simpler than the initial problem may seem to be, if you have a captain willing and able to redirect the ship.

Despite 537 million dollars spent (so far) on a computerized system, a new investigation claims 97 percent of veterans’ claims are processed on paper by the VA. We tend to blame problems like this on uncaring, faceless government workers, but imagine if half of your day was taken up just trying to log on to your desk computer so you can put in a trouble ticket to fix the log on of your desk computer? ⁷ Imagine if you didn’t have windows at work, or the bathroom was always out of paper towels, or you had to maintain four separate calendars that don’t talk to each other, or you couldn’t access work email at home. And imagine the system fought you when you tried to fix it. What would your productivity be like?

Those are the type of problems Ms. Neuman is stepping into, and it’s clear from the interview she’s figured out pretty quickly that change will be neither easy nor immediate, nor does it need to be “dramatic” to see results. She wants “…the system to be more user-friendly. We need to make it easier for people to get the job done.” Making simple, common sense changes like easy access to email can have as tremendous an impact as the effort that will be required to make them. Progress will not be quick, relative to the start-up world Ms. Neuman is used to, but the effect could be wide-ranging and long-lasting.

Laura Neuman is an outsider; John Leopold’s fall provides a clear external motivation to do something; and she’s a strong leader. What remains to be seen is if she can keep up the ideas and direction over a number of years innovating in a bureaucracy requires. Although she demured from answering if she’ll run in 2014, if she wants to succeed, she’ll have to.

I work on a military base. These are the Top 10 things I see in the parking lot on a daily basis that make me smile.

1. Monster Energy drink themed rims.

2. A Porsche Cayenne in the commanding officer’s parking space.

3. Yellow Chevy Camaro with black racing stripes, Autobot rims, Cyberglyphics on the doors, and a sticker on the windshield reading “Bumblebeast”.

4. An “Honorably Discharged Veteran” Virginia license plate. ¹

5. An “In God We Trust” Kansas license plate. ²

6. “LIVFREE” vanity license plate. ³

7. More NRA members than random distribution would predict.

8. More Ron Paul supporters than election results would predict. ⁴

9. At least three vehicles I could crawl under on my hands and knees in no danger of bumping my head.

10. A sticker that reads “I can’t fix your dick.”

TL;DR: Abolish the death penalty because it has become too cumbersome and expensive to even consider using. So why bloat our gun control laws?

“We believe in nothing, Lebowski.” -Nihilists

The current legislative session underway in Annapolis has focused on two marquee, national-level, attention-grabbing topics. Here’s the rub: they barely matter. They’re nominally about crime, but passing either bill probably won’t prevent any, nor will defeat cause more. And both highlight the limits of what government can actually accomplish via ham-handed legislation.

Capital punishment and gun control are on the docket for the 2013 General Assembly, with the government response to the issues on diverging paths. On the death penalty, Governor O’Malley is leading the charge to simplify Maryland’s thicket of regulation by abolishing it entirely; on the issue of guns, he wants to plant some new government thorn bushes in the path to owning a firearm. ¹

Since 1961, 6 people have been executed in Maryland, none since 2005. That’s a shade over an execution a decade. There are five prisoners on death row, with the most recent crime committed over twenty-five years ago. Twenty five. The role of the death penalty in deterrence is a shaky thing, and most often in the eye of the beholder: crime rates are so variable, and subject to so many factors, that most studies seem to end up where they want to. ²

The best death penalty, like most coercive means of modifying behavior, is the one never used. Under that philosophy, Maryland has developed one of the most restrictive death penalties in the country- and one of the most expensive. A former Maryland prosecutor is quoted as saying, “I’m not morally, religiously or legally against the death penalty,” he said. “It’s on grounds of practicality. It becomes ridiculous and ludicrous after 30 years. If they’re not going to impose the death penalty, why have it on the books?”

So, in essence, Maryland is moving to remove an obsolete and rarely used law from its books, with the stated aim of reappropriating savings to victim’s groups.

But.

Maryland’s new proposed gun laws add some tougher restrictions to current tough law, like a fingerprinting requirement. But access to those fingerprints is likely to be problematic- for instance, I doubt they would be folded into criminal databases, as they’re not of, you know, criminals. It’s a bureaucratic requirement that will likely, quite literally, do nothing. No crime will be solved. The law also bans (state-defined) assault weapons and high capacity magazines, moves that restrict the restrictive- Maryland already bans magazines of 20 or more rounds, as well as “assault pistols”. We’re in a semantic and numbers game.

The best examination of U.S. gun control was written just before the Sandy Hook shootings. In it, Jeffrey Goldberg basically points out that with 300 million weapons already in circulation, attempts at gun control are nothing more than that. Attempts to solve the insolvable.

We cannot legislate guns out of existence. Adding layers of bureaucracy to an already restrictive process does nothing- it will play well in the spotlight of immediacy, but solve no problem while introducing a host of unintended costs and consequences.

Is more legislation, more bureaucracy, the answer?

I spoke to someone who purchased an AR-15 in Maryland. He wanted it, basically, because he heard on the news he couldn’t have it, not for any good purpose. He also wanted a thirty round magazine, basically, because that’s what the news said he couldn’t have, not for any good purpose. The magazine he couldn’t buy in Maryland. Instead, he had one shipped to a friend in Virginia and then drove down and picked it up. This is all perfectly legal, and the weapon now legally in his home will remain so no matter what happens with the legislation.

In the case of the death penalty, Maryland legislatures sought to make an inherently morally ambiguous policy (you’re killing people, after all, no matter how “bad” they are) conform to bureaucratic notions of “fairness”. The attempt, like most attempts where the solution is adding more layers to an already difficult process, solved nothing, changed nothing, while adding time, expense, and frustration in the most difficult and important of processes. Regulation will never replace measured thought. You can’t legislate common sense.

When our heart tells us something is wrong- death at the hands of the state, weapons in the hands of the unhinged- what is the responsibility of our legislators? Is government the solution? ³

There is a tendency among well-meaning politicians to believe that they have to do something. After all, you can’t be caught doing nothing. Sometimes, though, the something leaves you worse off than before. Imagine if instead of just restricting the sale of firearms, legislators simply required licensing, provided at the gun purchaser’s expense. Think about your driver’s license. The state sets the parameters for the licensing and schooling of car operators; the private sector fills the need. I wonder if my AR-15 owning friend would have followed through with his purchase if he had to sit through a course explaining how children of gun owners are far more likely to be killed, with photos. ⁴

In the case of the death penalty, the best thing for the state to do was simply make a decision. Instead of trying to make it impossible to carry out the death penalty by killing it with expensive bureaucracy, simply end the death penalty. Instead trying to make it impossible to purchase a firearm by reams of do-nothing requirements, simply set common sense safety parameters and put the onus on manufacturers, sellers, and owners to met them.

Neither issue has anything to do with most of the discussion that surrounds them; they are not about crime, or punishment, or mental health. They are about attempts to legislate things we probably already know, or should. And sometimes, like with the death penalty, the simplest solution is the best. The General Assembly should take a cue from itself and realize when law is over-reaching.

In my house, every night, both kids are in bed by 8 o’clock. My wife and I follow together, rarely any later than 9:15. (Adventure? Excitement? A parent craves not these things.) That interstitial between bedtimes, an hour, an hour plus, is Quiet Time. We lounge on the couch and maybe eat a Berger cookie, watch The Bachelor (split into two nights because it’s over an hour long.) We don’t do anything. This is the one waking hour of real rest per day, with no job to do or kid to please. It is a Magic Hour, and I guard mine jealously.

Last night, I listlessly watched a hockey game involving two teams I don’t care about during Magic Hour. Alone. Where was my wife? I found her cutting out dozens of construction paper hearts. Tying ribbons. Hanging the hearts around the house. For our three year old, so he would get out of bed the next morning and have a surprise hanging, waiting, even on a holiday that barely counts as one.

It may not seem like much of a sacrifice, giving up that one hour. I must assure you it is, and her actions were altruistic in the purest sense of the word. If those hearts hadn’t been hung, there would have been no harm. Today would have been like any other. But with them, with that effort given, with that sacrifice made, our son had a Morning He Would Remember.

To an outside observer, our family is basic, nothing special. (I’m certainly no catch.) Our household bears no distinguishing markings, is undifferentiated from legions like it across vast swaths of suburbia. It’s almost impossible to quantify what might make a wife special, or a mother good, or a family strong. But inside our house, I know what it takes. I know I have something unique, and precious, and mine. I saw it hanging, waiting for me this morning.