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??
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.
“I think people actually love truth a lot more than a lot of people think they do. I think that people really want truth and love truth, and in a detective story, the truth is the hero of the story.”
Rex Stout discussing the popularity of mystery stories with Eleanor Roosevelt on radio, July 30, 1951. https://blogs.loc.gov/now-see-hear/2020/10/rex-stout-on-the-air/
Periodically, I take a deep dive into the world of the mystery writer, Rex Stout, to re-experience the Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin stories. My PhD advisor and great mentor Herrlee Creel once told me my thesis was coming along okay, but I’d do better in life if I wrote it in readable English. He told me to read Rex Stout and write like him. I’ve been trying ever since.
The list of authors, literary critics, academics, and statesmen who have praised the Nero Wolfe-Archie Goodwin stories ranges from John Le Care to Jaques Barzun, all the way to Henry Kissinger. Stout is read on many levels: sheer escapism, social commentary, and the study of human nature are among the reasons. I read the stories to discover the sources of Stout’s greatness; not only to learn the tricks of his trade, but also to examine his insight into the world he lived in.
Stout and Hammett, Chandler, and Macdonald
Stout is not cynically realistic like Hammett, nor is he lyrical like Raymond Chandler, and he is certainly not deeply psychological like Ross Macdonald. Hammett, Chandler, and Macdonald are firmly rooted in the west coast, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Stout is a New Yorker from the Midwest. The west coast bunch surveys humanity with clear cold eyes; on the surface, Stout is only a short step above an “Oh Gosh Golly, how sophisticated” recent arrival to the big city.
Just when I think I have pushed a pin through Stout’s chest and mounted him under glass, I notice that Stout’s Inspector Cramer has more depth in his admiration-tainted frustration with Wolfe and Goodwin’s antics than any of the Dickensian caricatures who populate Chandler’s LA, or that Archie’s wise cracks have wheels within wheels.
In Chandler, Hammett, and Macdonald’s California the police and city governments are often venal and corrupt. In Stout’s New York, Wolfe revels in luxury. He connives for big fees and repeatedly skirts ethical boundaries. Murderers whom Wolfe thinks may get off in court are forced into suicide. He lies for his own purposes. He snatches the choice bits off the serving platter ahead of his dinner guests. Honest and stolid Inspector Cramer knows all this, yet he, and we poor readers, admire Wolfe, a force for justice that transcends quotidian ethics.
This Dive
My latest dive has been into three books: Target Practice, a compilation of pre-Nero short stories; Fer-de-Lance, the first Nero Wolfe novel, published in 1934; and And Be a Villain, a post WWII novel published in 1948.
I had a purpose in mind: the Nero Wolfe novels are often said to have sprung to life fully mature in Fer-de-Lance. Was that true? I set out to compare Wolfe’s debut with Stout before and after Wolfe.
Target Practice
Target Practice is a collection of short stories published between 1914 and 1917, roughly twenty years prior to Fer-de-Lance. Frankly, I didn’t enjoy them. The words on the page were good: clear, concise, to the point. But the plots felt contrived, disconnected from the characters, and almost all the endings were more like general social comments than the inevitable consequences of the stories themselves.
Stout’s switch to writing mysteries in the mid-1930s conveniently solved his story ending issues. Mystery writers have an advantage: the ending is set. When hidden truth is revealed, the mystery is resolved and the story is over. Mysteries can still fail in many ways, but finding a resolution is seldom a challenge.
The two stories in Target that I liked best were mysteries with strong endings: “Justice Ends At Home” and “Heels of Fate.”
“Justice” has been described as proto-Archie-Wolfe. An office boy and a lawyer who work together in the story are said to be prototypes for Archie Goodwin and Nero Wolfe. I see the similarity, but the duo in “Justice” are bland compared to Archie and Nero. However, Stout showed much of his later flair for the tension through carefully paced revelation of the truth of deception and crime at the heart of the story.
In “Heels of Fate,” I saw more of the future Nero Wolfe. In this story, a livery stable owner has the Nero role; a country lawyer plays the Archie-narrator. The lawyer has none of Archie’s panache. The livery stable owner is decidedly not an arrogant epicure like Nero, but he sizes up a situation and schemes to deal out justice without regard to conventional ethics. “Heels” is a tight and absorbing story and, unlike most of the other stories in Target, the ending is both startling and satisfying.
Fer-de-Lance
When I began to read Fer-de-Lance, I was surprised. Archie and Nero are there, but not fully formed. Archie’s wit and style show only rare hints of what is to come. Nero is crafty, claims to be an artist and a genius, but he is not the great man he becomes in the ensuing books.
The iconic brownstone house and office doesn’t have the rich texture that appears later. There’s no red chair for Wolfe’s client or the huge custom chair for Wolfe’s bulk. The giant globe is still to come. The Wolfe posse is present, but barely. Fred Durkin, Saul Panzer, and Orrie Cather appear, but no Inspector Cramer. Purley Stebbins is a name only. There’s a newspaperman, but he’s not Lon Cohen. The posse has few of the enduring characteristics they take on later. Saul Panzer, New York’s greatest freelance operative, is not a freelance. He’s on retainer with Wolfe.
Most surprising was the writing itself. Raymond Chandler is known for his startling similes. For example, “a face like a building superintendent was watching the work and looking as if it was breaking his heart,” from the first paragraph of The Lady in the Lake. Much of the humor in Archie and Nero comes from Archie’s apparent non-sequiturs that reflect deep knowledge.
The arch non-sequiturs are largely absent from Stout’s pre-Nero era, but appear in Fer-de-Lance. An example: “the house was brand-new, wood with panels and a high steep slate roof, one of the styles I lumped all together and called Queen William.” That’s Archie talking.
Both Stout’s Archie and Chandler’s Marlowe twist our sensibilities. Marlowe flaunts his jaded vision while Archie mocks his own knowledge and taste.
Many of Wolfe’s characteristics appear in Fer-de-Lance. Throughout the series, Archie is the detective who digs out evidence, passing on information, evidence, witnesses, and suspects to Wolfe, who is the active hunter, directing the search, manipulating evidence, setting traps, and, in many cases, meting out judgement and punishment. Ultimately, a Nero Wolfe novel is a recount of Wolfe’s quest for truth from evidence that Archie gathers.
To my taste, Stout’s word craft, characterization, and scene construction in Fer-de-Lance took a step back from the quality of the short stories, although the overall construction is better and Stout’s sure hand with dramatic tension moves the story on. Stout said he changed his entire approach to writing with Fer-de-Lance. Maybe he had to relearn some of his style.
And Be a Villain
I won’t say much about And Be a Villain. During WWII Stout vigorously supported the war effort on radio and the Writer’s War Board and devoted less time to writing mysteries. And Be a Villain is a product of Stout’s post-war burst of stories. It is the first of the Arnold Zeck trilogy in which Archie and Wolfe confront and eventually defeat Zeck, a coldly calculating gangster with a vast organization.
Villain has all the features of a fully realized Wolfe novel. Wolfe’s posse appears in full regalia. The brownstone is complete. Archie wise cracks his way through a mess of unpleasant characters and awkward situations. Wolfe is high-handed. He ignores Zeck’s threats; when the truth comes out, Wolfe sidesteps Zeck’s wrath.
Stout’s statement to Eleanor Roosevelt quoted above is a great insight into the success of the Wolfe-Archie mysteries. Stout’s relatable characters help, the wit and humor that touches almost every page contribute, but Wolfe’s intent pursuit of truth is the principal attraction.
Buy Temple And Power by Marv Waschke today! Dismiss
