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Sam Spade Mug Shot

My friend Bill sent me a link to a Huffpost on the meme frenzy following posting of P01135809’s mug shot in Atlanta. Here’s another collection. Most of the memes are amusing, even side-splitting, but none of them notices the Sam Spade-Maltese Falcon connection, which happens to delight me.

P01135809’s mug shot is a study in Vs, like Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade of the Maltese Falcon:

“Samuel Spade’s jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of his mouth. His nostrils curved back to make another, smaller, v. His yellow-grey eyes were horizontal. The v motif was picked up again by thickish brows rising outward from twin creases above a hooked nose, and his pale brown hair grew down—from high flat temples—in a point on his forehead. He looked rather pleasantly like a blond satan.”

I imagine P01135809 working on his pose in front of a mirror, modeling himself on Sam Spade. P01135809’s pale brown hair is flounced into a v and the v of his forehead lines, brows, and eyes meet at the point of another v that comes up from twin creases aimed toward the bridge of his nose. His lipless mouth and round chin underline the v’s pointing to his leering eyes.

P01135809 does not look ” rather pleasantly like a blond satan,” He has the “this ain’t nice” leer of someone who thinks he may have hatched a hemorrhoid or realized that his partner was killed by the bimbo with whom he thought he was falling in love.

I consider The Maltese Falcon to be a masterwork, but I also see it as close to the light touch of Hammett’s most popularly successful work, The Thin Man, not the detective stories he wrote previously. I don’t see Sam Spade as the swashbuckling and justice-seeking hero he is often made out to be.

The pursuit of the falcon is massive joke, a cavalcade of characters, portrayed comically in the 1941 John Huston movie by the geniuses of Mary Astor, Sidney Greenstreet, and Peter Lore. The global wild goose chase draws Spade in, only to dump him when the bird is revealed to be a fraud. In the end, Spade loses the falcon and sacrifices the femme fatale he may have loved only to avenge his dismal two-timing partner, Miles Archer, whom he didn’t much like.

Nice choice of models, P01135809.

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Lessons in Looney Tunes Democracy

The indictments against former president Trump trouble me. I’m not a lawyer, but as I see it, an indictment against a former president is unprecedented, but aside from that, they are legal business as usual: A prosecutor suspects a crime has been committed. Random voters in a jurisdiction are called together in a grand jury panel. The prosecutor presents evidence against the accused, then an indictment is issued when a majority of the grand jury votes that the expense and trouble of a trial is justified.

An indictment is not a statement of guilt or innocence, only that the evidence is worth pursuing. A trial follows; evidence both for and against the accused is presented. Then a judge or a trial jury decides guilt or innocence. State and federal grand juries differ in detail but are for the most part the same.

To this observer, the former president is cutting off the presidential limb he sits on. This is Looney Tunes.

Indictments are expensive in time and resources, a drawn out and elaborate ritual designed to make it difficult to obtain a conviction against an accused person. The deck is intentionally stacked against the prosecution. Therefore, prosecutors seldom pursue an indictment unless they have a strong case. Over ninety percent of indictments result in a conviction, which we taxpayers payers who foot the bill for grand juries and trials should applaud.

Despite all speculation over the strengths and weaknesses of the cases and a “past performance does not guarantee future results” warning label, odds are high that at least one of the former president’s three indictments will result in a conviction. With more indictments expected the likelihood that at least one strand of spaghetti will stick to the wall approaches certainty.

Not a typical post-presidency, but if Trump had not been president and didn’t have a major political party backing him, only his friends, family, and associates would care. In this world, crimes are committed and criminals are punished.

Nothing special to see here folks.

This week the New York Times reported that two conservative law professors, Federalist Society types, have suggested that Trump is ineligible for federal office, unless two-thirds of both the Senate and the House of Representatives vote to grant him amnesty for his conduct on January 6, 2021. The former president may have more than indictments to fend off in court before returning to the office he covets.

Election winners love democracy, losers not so much— until the next election. The marvel of democracies is that the losers always have a next election to win. That next election depends on the continuity of the democratic system that validates elections and governs terms of office. In the U.S., the system is derived from the U.S. constitution that is the basic contract between the U.S. government and its citizens. Federal officials swear to uphold the constitution, which, in turn, empowers them to carry out their functions.

The former president has repeatedly questioned the authority of the constitution to govern the presidency and the validity of the election process. To this observer, the former president is cutting off the presidential limb he sits on. This is Looney Tunes.

The U.S. constitution has survived two centuries to become the governing document of the wealthy and powerful nation. Is it possible that it is coming to an end??

I hope not.

Hold fast. Be patient. Keep trying.

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Digital Presence

As we leave the Covid-19 pandemic, new ways of life are emerging. New vaccinations have entered the fall flu shot ritual and we cautiously wait for an annual “summer covid surge.” Management experts debate the effects on productivity of a “return to the office,” and cities fret over declining tax revenue from empty office buildings.

I’m reminded of a productivity study, perhaps ephemeral, I heard about in high school. A factory experimented with lighting. They increased light on the factory floor and productivity improved. They increased light more. Productivity improved further. They were on a roll. Then someone noticed that lighting costs were high, so they decreased lighting. Astoundingly, productivity increased again. After fiddling with lighting for some time, they concluded that changing the lighting in any way short of darkness increased productivity.

I keep this story in mind while thinking about working from home.

There’s nothing easy about managing a workforce. As a cynical observer of business management, I’ll hazard that short term decisions on remote work depend more on preferences and prejudices rather than objective analysis of pros and cons. Nevertheless, eventually, a smart manager will figure out a solution in their organization that gives them a winning edge and it will be written up in the Harvard Business Review, thus becoming common knowledge.

I doubt that the smart solution will be a return to 2019. Some increase in working from home over pre-pandemic is likely, but the form and extent of that increase is still unpredictable. In any case, I will be thunderstruck if one solution is best for all enterprises.

I worked remotely long before the pandemic. I still live on a homestead farm that goes back to my emigrant great-grandparents, a heritage I will not relinquish, but I don’t have the farming gene.

Most of my career has been with multi-national corporations. For nearly thirty years my official corporate office was on the Seattle east side, a two hundred mile commute from the farm. I’ve burned outrageous airmiles, sometimes effectively commuting between the northwest corner of Washington State to a job in New York City, but most of the time my real office was in the old farmhouse on Waschke Road from which I participated in and led development teams that stretched all over the world.

I have faced the challenge of remote work. I’m not here to say that I have answers, but I have experience.

Before I go on, I should disclose that I’m an introvert. After meeting face-to-face, I seek time alone to relax and recover. After online interaction, I’m often energized. However, my preference for online connections does not reveal anything about the quality of those interactions, only that I am open to them.

Aside from the remoting forced by pandemic lockdowns, online interaction is particularly suited to the 21st century.

Having lived in the same geographic location for over seventy years, I am aware of how much life has changed in my community. When I was growing up, we had far fewer neighbors than today and most were more or less related. Everyone knew everyone else’s business, who was arguing with whom, and what they were arguing about. Calling ahead to announce a visit was unheard of and knocking was often optional. I note that in this, our life was similar to Jimmy Carter’s account of growing up in rural Georgia.

That has all changed. I have a nod-and-a-wave acquaintance with everyone living on “our” road and the four-lot development that has popped up at its end, but I don’t know all their names, and I’ve never entered most of their houses. I’m content with this relationship. My circle of friends is no longer limited to physical proximity, and I am glad it is not, because I now communicate daily with friends in every U.S. time zone and beyond.

I read and write daily emails, message, and video conference with a group of friends who share my interest in Victorian novels, software architects from my former career, a group who lived in the same dormitory fifty years ago on the South Side of Chicago, and friends from my church, which happens to be close to my old corporate office in Seattle not the farm. This bunch includes astronomers, lawyers, surgeons, geophysicists, psychologists, and chemists, very different from the narrow physical community of sixty years ago.

This in an improvement in life.

For those who cling to the magic of personal proximity, I point to Christian and Zen Buddhist communities. Today, churches hold daily online prayer sessions following centuries old traditional rites. Zen sanghas hold online zazen meditation following traditional practices. These things work. They don’t replace face-to-face interaction, but they add opportunities that didn’t exist in the past.

Is humanity about to become a disembodied digital phantasm? No. Digital connections augment physical presence, they do not replace it.

But we are entering a new world.