Montebello E-News

June 14, 2007

And in the end, it's not the years in your life that count.
It's the life in your years.
Abraham Lincoln, 1809 – 1865,
sixteenth President of the United States 

1.  Paris Hilton and the Chain of Command

2.     From History to Hysteria, Part 2

3.     Announcements

4.     Some Sobering Facts

5.     The Flashback Quarterback on Being Tricked Again

6.     About Montebello E-News and “My Montebello” 

Paris Hilton and the Chain of Command

One afternoon last week, an acquaintance who graduated from Montebello High the same year as I did called the office about his immigration case.  As we chatted, he asked whether I had heard the news about Paris Hilton, namely, that she had been taken out of county jail and put under house arrest.  This fellow alumnus noted the gravity of Sheriff Lee Baca’s action in circumventing the authority of the court.  This acquaintance said that  the chain of command must not be broken. 

This led to an interesting exploration.  Is there ever an instance when the chain of command must be broken?  My answer is, without hesitation, “yes”.  I fuzzily recall (the operative word is “fuzzily”;  see the essay “From History to Hysteria” in this newsletter) that, at the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals, the defense of “I was just following orders” was rejected at least in some instances. 

In our society, we accept that the chain of command must be broken when a command would lead to action which would shock the conscience.  Yet, we punish those who follow a command and those who disobey. 

In “Is Everyone ‘LOCO’?, Part 2”, we noted that that diverse situations continued to arise, and to expect teachers and peace officers to know what to do in all circumstances would be illogical.  (And if we agree that there is illogic here, yet continue doing what we are doing, are we not being hypocritical?) 

No matter what manual the armed forces might devise, unique situations will continue to arise.  Soldiers will have no guide as to what to do.  Yet, such unique situations cannot lead to hesitation by soldiers.  Hesitation is mortification.  On the other hand, if the soldiers take the wrong action—as determined in hindsight by a military board—they might be punished. 

Can there be a straightforward rule which not only cover soldiers, but, also, others who find themselves in a conundrum as to a course of action based on an order from above?  Perhaps, paralleling the conclusion in “The Eleventh Commandment”, the more harm which our action or inaction could do, the more discretion we must give a soldier or Sheriff Baca or somebody else down the chain of command in deciding on action or inaction.  An easily imagined situation would be a patrol on the streets of Baghdad pinned down by a sniper in an apartment building with many families.  Should a soldier obey a command to launch a rocket-propelled grenade, knowing that innocents might be killed?  Should the innocents have the obligation to leave the area or seek shelter as quickly as possible, knowing that a gun battle could not be confined to the combatants? 

Using the rule above, even the guards at Nazi concentration camps would have been guilty, as there was no harm to them from the prisoners whom they were guarding but whom they subsequently helped kill. 

Unfortunately, needed deliberation about action or inaction can be pre-empted by the conflagration of media sensationalism.  In other words, when we need to think about what to do, the media might take away that precious time by creating hysteria.  This might have happened with regard to Paris Hilton.         

If you answer the multiple-choice questions below and e-mail to lessonanswers@mymontebello.com with “Lesson answers” in the subject field, you will be credited toward a “certificate of recognition in community affairs” to be awarded in 2007 by a local nonprofit organization. 

1.  The chain of command in civilian or military life

(a) must never be questioned, lest lives be put at risk.

(b) cannot always be obeyed because of the lives put at risk by unquestioning obedience. 

2.  A key criterion for obedience to a chain of command is

(a) the harm which would ensue from obedience versus the harm which would ensue from disobedience.

(b) the severity of the possible punishment should a command not be obeyed. 

(1) Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.
(2) Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
George Santayana
Spanish-born philosopher, essayist, poet, and novelist, 1863 – 1952

          In part 1 of this essay we noted the harmony between Santayana’s two statements.  We must be skeptical because        

·        schools give us a survey of history;  that means that we get only a glimpse, and it is dangerous to make a judgment based on a glimpse;

·        history is not made relevant to us when we study it, so we are apt to forget much, if not most, of it;

·        history, as we learn it, is an interpretation, a faith, as somebody chooses the events, reasons for events, and personalities about which and whom we learn.

It seems as if the more time we took to deliberate and the more we learned and remembered from history, the less likely we would be to make costly mistakes these days. 

However—said with finger raised and a pregnant pause—there is a contradiction between Santayana’s two statements.  If we accept the conclusion in “How Little We Know, Part 4”, we can never know everything which we need to know to make weighty decisions.  There are so many factors which keep us from having a true understanding and, therefore, true interpretation, of history: 

·        events of consequence never recorded or remembered;

·        events of consequence deliberately misstated to suit some purpose;  we have heard that the victors of a war write the history of that war;  perhaps we have read George Orwell’s 1984;

·        motives which have been covered up or misinterpreted;

·        our anatomical failings:  we see things that never were, we hear things which were never said;  this applies as well to the chroniclers of history;

·        the battle between human recollection and human imagination;  we embellish naturally and, thereby, stray from the facts;

·        we do not have the time to read primary sources, like Lincoln’s letters about slavery and the South;  we rely on others to interpret and summarize for us;  this is a reason why we are in Iraq now;

·        even assuming that we read primary sources, we do not know that those sources would be accurate.

          The disconcerting conclusion is that what we think to be history is a type of faith.  Yes, there is more supposed fact in such faith than in religious faith, but history turns out to be faith nevertheless.  What we teach our youth and use as a justification for our policies and decisions is a secular faith.   

          With that in mind, we see the contradiction between Santayana’s two statements.  Yes, we should be skeptical, but in remembering history too well, we might be succumbing to a faith which clouds our judgment and results in bad decisions. 

          So, where does that leave history?  We will look at that in part three.

FOR EVERYONE.  Home Buying.  Mark your calendars for Saturday, June 23, 2007.  Montebello Housing Development Corporation invites you to its upcoming Montebello Homeownership Opportunities Fair, from 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. at the Montebello Senior Center, 115 South Taylor Avenue, Montebello.  To register as a sponsor or exhibitor, contact Marie Lugo right away at 323.722.3955.  Seminar topics will include buying a house for the first time, financial-literacy, the Cal Home Program, and refinancing existing loans.  Everything will be available at no cost to help first-time homebuyers experience the American dream of home ownership.  

FOR EVERYONE.  Foreign Languages.  Foreign newspapers carry news which affects our lives here in America, even though our American newspapers do not carry the same news.  Thus, it is useful to be bilingual or trilingual.  Here are a couple of examples. 

If you are wondering about how to reduce traffic congestion (by the way, my thanks to Mrs. Angela DeLorenzo, teacher of Italian at the Montebello adult school, who helped me learn enough Italian to understand the gist of simple news articles), here is an excerpt of interest from the online newspaper, Roma One, 5.29.07: 

Oltre 21mila auto in meno nel centro di Roma negli ultimi quattro mesi, mentre diminuiscono anche le auto blu (5480 targhe in meno) che affollano la zona dove hanno sede le istituzioni più importanti. Dà i suoi primi frutti la politica di contenimento del traffico nel cuore della città messo a punto dal Campidoglio. L'effetto dell'aumento delle tariffe per ottenere i permessi di circolazione, insieme alla norma che associa, a differenza di prima, una sola targa a ciascun tagliando di accesso alla ztl è molto chiaro: le vetture circolanti sono passate dalle 85.908 alle attuali 64.451. Ed è solo l'inizio.  

"E' un risultato straordinario, che in effetti non ci aspettavamo - ha detto il primo cittadino in conferenza stampa - 25% di auto in meno e più soldi da investire nel servizio pubblico". 

And while we are awaiting a regime change in Cuba, Spain apparently is taking a different route, according to Deutsche Welle, 5.29.07: 

La reunión, que tiene lugar hoy y mañana, está enmarcada en el mecanismo formal de diálogo acordado durante la visita a Cuba del ministro español de Relaciones Exteriores, Miguel Ángel Moratinos, a comienzos del pasado mes de abril. 

En esa ocasión, ambos Gobiernos pactaron que esta comisión política se basaría en el pleno respeto a la soberanía de ambos Estados y la no injerencia en asuntos internos. 

No obstante, el gobierno cubano ha manifestado estar dispuesto a dialogar con España sobre derechos humanos, uno de los asuntos más espinosos para las autoridades de La Habana, aunque considera que aún no se dan las condiciones para hacerlo con la Unión Europea. ...

Every year an inmate spends in prison costs taxpayers an average of $22,000. As prisoners get older, the cost of maintenance rises, ultimately reaching an average of $69,000 per year for those over the age of fifty-five. A study by a Stanford University professor estimated that the cost of a life term for an average California prisoner is $1.5 million.

From http://www.fun-facts.com/item/71627.

Compare the money figures above with the suggestion in the essay “Is Everyone ‘LOCO’, Part 5“, March 15, 2007, about separating criminals from society at less cost.

In “The Eleventh Commandment” and “How Little We Know”, we have read about the untrustworthiness of information and the need to take time to make decisions.  Many, many examples can be adduced to underscore this wisp of wisdom.  Here is an example: 

“Wolfowitz Blames Media for Flap, Resignation”, USA Today, May 29, 2007: 

LONDON (AP) — The outgoing president of the World Bank, Paul Wolfowitz, denied his actions were the reason for his departure and blamed an overheated atmosphere at the bank and in the media for forcing him to resign, in a radio interview broadcast Monday.  Wolfowitz, who has announced he will step down June 30, told the British Broadcasting Corp. that he was pleased the bank's board accepted he had acted ethically, and in good faith in his handling of a generous compensation package for his girlfriend and bank employee Shaha Riza in 2005. 

"I accept the fact that by the time we got around to that, emotions here were so overheated that I don't think I could have accomplished what I wanted to accomplish for the people I really care about," he said. ... 

Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved….

To learn about this newsletter, Montebello E-News, and the accompanying, growing Web site, “My Montebello”, visit www.mymontebello.com.  Also, you will find instructions and contact information for submitting announcements for publication in this newsletter.