The View from St. Paul  

D. J. Tice

      D. J. Tice is an editorial page writer for the St. Paul Pioneer Press. These articles are reprinted from the Pioneer Press.

Summer’s Strange, Familiar Splendors Include Memories, Surprises

      Down in the country, butterflies flutter weightlessly above swaying, waist-high grass.

      Overhead, the boundless summer sky is equally restless—a fickle, inverted sea, changing by the hour from a menacing, gray-black boil to baby blue serenity, with cotton-ball clouds drifting across its surface.

      The heat of the day rises like a floodtide, until the dam of heaven breaks and pelting rain drenches grateful cornfields. You can almost see them grow.

      The countryside in summer is a doorway to forever. Step through and you can’t help seeing, hearing, even smelling a bit of always.

      C. S. Lewis’s devilish Screwtape said the seasons of the year are God’s trick for giving the world change and constancy at the same time. With them he foils the infernal plot to drive human beings crazy with longings for mutually exclusive things.

      Every summer is a marvel (especially, perhaps, in Minnesota), even a kind of surprise. Yet the almost (not quite) unbearable weight of summer—the weather, the colors, the desperate fertility of life—also returns as an old friend, whose oft-repeated stories somehow never grow dull.

      If summer is timeless, life is not. The passing of the years was vivid as my fellow hobby farmer, Cindy, and I enjoyed our annual Fourth of July holiday at an old farmhouse in southeastern Minnesota’s bluff country. The clip-clopping horse-drawn Amish buggies common to the area add to the sense of being adrift in time.

      So do universal personal dramas. We planned on even more work than usual at what we laughingly call our “recreational property.” We’re getting ready for my stepdaughter’s wedding, before this summer is out.

      I frankly do not understand how this can be happening. In the same way I can’t understand why, every time I’ve entered a bar in recent years, I find the place full of children. Even the bouncers are children! Has anyone else noticed?

      As if this weren’t enough, Independence Day brought a visit from another “child”—a 32-year-old child I have known for more than 20 years. I first met John when I volunteered (as a worldly wise 30-year-old) for the Big Brothers program. I wasn’t much good as the “grown-up,” but John was an exceptional kid. We’ve remained close ever since.

      Today, John has a “little brother” of his own, and he brought the boy along for his first trip outside the metro area.

      At the archetypal small town Fourth of July parade in Harmony, Minnesota, nearly everything was pleasingly predictable: The dairy and pork princesses did their window washing wave from convertibles; homemade floats represented the local plumber, the beauty shop and the hardware store. The one new wrinkle was a “living portrait” float paying tribute to the heroes of 9/11. Several local men re-enacted the famous news photo, posing as New York City firemen hoisting the stars and stripes above the World Trade Center rubble.

      I recognized, as the tableau went by, the kind of plain, goodhearted sentimentality that is still easier to find outside urban America.

      Meantime, maybe because of the heat, I felt dizzy as I listened to John admonish his young charge: “Don’t be in such a hurry about everything.” “Can you say thank you?” “Sometimes ‘no’ means ‘no.’”

      Wasn’t I telling John that just the other day?

      There is a certain comfort in the changing of the guard—in seeing children ably embarked on adult life. There is relief in the feeling that one’s own care-taking duties are discharged—that one is largely free of all that.

      And the moment you start thinking that way, Providence has another trick to show you.

      My stepdaughter had left her husky in our care last weekend. Cindy and I enjoy our brief stints as hobby dog owners, too.

      But while taking a walk on one of those sun broiled afternoons, Cindy and our grand hound discovered an abandoned puppy, shrieking in terror and climbing frantically out of a lonely roadside ditch to plead for another chance at life from these unlikely passersby.

      Not everybody in the country is good-hearted. This is not the first discarded pet we’ve had occasion to rescue.

      With the castaway’s arrival our getaway became somewhat louder, wetter and harder work—and we got less done in a practical way than we’d planned.

      But it was a nice surprise, like the return of a familiar but always remarkable season.

      Feeling as though autumn has arrived? That you’re not needed as before? Look out. Someone innocent and needy could be waiting around the next bend.

Could Bennett’s Gambling Carry a Message About, um, Gambling?

      I was away from the office, indulging a slavish addiction to yard work (not, I hasten to add, my only bad habit), when news broke about William Bennett’s overgrown taste for gambling. I can’t resist reacting to some of the predictable reaction Bennett’s embarrassment has inspired.

      A good example came from the Chicago Tribune. Noting that Bennett, the high-profile “moral crusader” and author of The Book of Virtues, will inevitably be diminished by revelations that he has “lost some $8 million in high-stakes gambling over a decade,” the Tribune editorial page mused that if damage occurs

. . . it won’t be because (Bennett) had a weakness for gambling. No, Bennett is far more vulnerable to accusations of hypocrisy.

Syndicated columnist Richard Roeper strummed the same chord by rhetorically asking Bennett:

How can you rant against other destructive habits when you can’t control your own?

      The Minneapolis-based Star Tribune, saying it would “refrain from harsh words,” offered a suggestion: “You (Bennett) conduct your life. Let us conduct ours.”

      What we have here is the reflexive modern response whenever people who have dared to uphold principles of personal morality are found to have personal weaknesses. That response is to demand, not that the wayward sin no more, but that they moralize no more.

      We moderns are positively eager to forgive vice. It is standards we find intolerable.

      It doesn’t much matter whether Bill Bennett’s franchise as a virtue promoter is devalued. But there is danger in the contemporary notion that moral hypocrisy is the worst of all vices, to be avoided even if it means no one speaks up for virtue at all.

      A distinction needs to be made between (1) “hypocrisy” in the sense of promoting values one truly does not really believe in, and (2) “hypocrisy” in the sense of simply being unable to live up to standards one believes in.

      This second sort of “hypocrisy”—falling short of an ideal one aspires to—is nothing more nor less than the human condition, or anyhow the condition of a human being who has private ideals.

      There seems to be an unspoken rule in modern life that no one is qualified to proclaim the beauty and importance of private virtue—or, if you like, to “rant against destructive habits”—who is not personally free from all such failings. Of course, this means that no one is qualified to uphold moral aspirations—which may suit modern liberationist leanings just fine.

      The healthier view, surely, is that we should all be “hypocrites” of this kind. We should all be aspiring to, and acknowledging, standards of virtue that are, at the moment, beyond our strength—just as the math student strives to solve problems that currently confound her, and just as the body builder seeks to lift a weight that yesterday he found too heavy.

      All this said, I am quite willing to criticize Bennett. But I’m inclined to find fault with his prodigal gambling, not his genteel moral crusades.

      Gambling, perhaps I should note, is just about the only harmful habit-forming behavior I have difficulty understanding. It’s particularly baffling in Bennett’s case.

      What’s troubling about Bennett’s having squandered $8 million on slot machines is that doing so was surpassingly stupid in every way—and not least because of the risk Bennett ran of eventually being exposed and disgraced. Why would a tolerably intelligent man do such a thing?

      What’s more, Bennett claims that losing a true fortune gambling has not put his family at risk—that it is financially unimportant. This leaves one wondering: Where’s the thrill?

      If a man is so rich that losing millions doesn’t matter, what is the excitement in gambling, especially on slot machines, where little challenge or glamour is involved?

      This little-noted mystery speaks, no doubt, to the powerful addictive pathology of gambling. Apparently gambling’s hypnotic force can even enslave a person who has every reason to resist it and no rational motive for finding the slots alluring.

      Maybe Bennett, oddly enough, is teaching another ethical lesson here, through the eloquence of his very weakness. Maybe the moral of this story is that commercial gambling is a cruelly exploitive enterprise of frightening power. What’s certain is that it victimizes many people, who, unlike Bennett, cannot afford their losses.

      Perhaps American society should reconsider the choices it has made about gambling in recent decades. That might be an even braver response to Bennett’s story than relishing his humiliation.

Let-Them-Eat-Brunch Conservatives Aren’t Likely to Go Soft on Crime

      Only two months ago, state Republicans were under fire for their heartless cruelty to convicted criminals. They had introduced budget cutting legislation to limit state prison inmates to two meals a day on weekends. DFLers (the Democratic Farmer Labor party) protested that Sunday brunch was barbarous.

      One DFL House member reminded her colleagues that the famished felons “might be our brothers, sisters, uncles and neighbors . . . ” Another proclaimed that Republicans would “have to deal with a higher power” for their sins.

      In recent days, Governor Tim Pawlenty’s administration has been accused of a rather different transgression—of going easy on rapists. A news report, along with Attorney General Mike Hatch, suggested Pawlenty’s Department of Human Services is making plans to release some of the most dangerous sex offenders in the state, partly to save money. DFL legislators want to investigate.

      Pawlenty and other administration officials have denied these charges of mercifulness with uncharacteristic sputtering indignation. They insist nothing has changed about the release criteria for sex offenders committed under the Minnesota Sex Offender Program. The program, they say, is simply exploring new treatment approaches in the expectation that eventually some offenders might be released by courts or a review board.

      It is frankly a little hard to believe that Pawlenty and company are anxious to unleash the hounds of hell on the community. Not only is the administration crowded with throw-away-the-key, let-them-eat-brunch conservatives, but any imprudent releases would be reckless politically.

      What has largely been lost in this debate is the odd and constitutionally awkward nature of the Sex Offender Program. Its history goes back to the early 1990s, when prosecutors in Minnesota (and other states), responding to hardened attitudes toward crime, started seeking indefinite commitment to mental hospitals for certain sex offenders who had completed their prison sentences and were coming due for release.

      At first state and federal courts balked at these attempts to impose retroactive life sentences on criminals who had served their time. In 1994 the Legislature went into special session to pass a tougher law. Pawlenty, Charlie Weaver and Kevin Goodno—today the governor, chief of staff and human services commissioner, respectively—were all legislators at the time and voted for the measure.

      The law essentially allows the state to indefinitely commit any sex offender it considers dangerous, and who suffers from a “mental abnormality” or “personality disorder” or “really, really bad attitude.”

      OK, I made up that last bit—but that’s about what it amounts to.

      Through many challenges, courts have upheld this arrangement, with some evident discomfort. In a 2001 ruling, the Minnesota Supreme Court held that the state must provide meaningful treatment to committed offenders and establish a special review board to consider their release.

      “[We] are concerned,” the court wrote,

. . . about the constitutional implications for [these] commitment proceedings if we conclude that mental illness is not a component . . .

      The court added this unassailable logic:

[U]nder the statute, the Sex Offender Program facilities are secure treatment facilities. . . .  “Secure treatment facility” suggests that in addition to being secure, the facility is also a treatment facility.

      Well yes. But the fact that no one in Minnesota’s expanded Sex Offender Program has ever gotten well enough to be released raises some questions about how effective, and serious, treatment efforts have been. The fact that the administration’s critics seem to believe no one should ever be released from this program raises even more questions.

      Courts are in a dilemma. The offenders in this program are, to use a technical term, scary. Nobody needs to shed a tear for them, even though they, too, are somebody’s brother or uncle or neighbor.

      The trouble is simply that under the U.S. Constitution we are not supposed to lock people up forever in mental hospitals just because we think they may commit future crimes. And we’re not supposed to retroactively lengthen incarceration because we decide somebody didn’t get a long-enough prison sentence the first time around.

      But that’s pretty much what we are doing with these laws. The courts are allowing it, while insisting on real treatment for what’s wrong with these people, which implies considering the possibility that some of them may someday be fit for release.

      Cost concerns, of course, should never drive such decisions. But those watching this debate might want to remember that Minnesota has long boasted about some of the lowest incarceration rates in the nation, and some of the lowest prison costs.

      This means that, while no one yet has been released from the Sex Offender Program, many quite unsavory characters are on Minnesota’s streets who in other states might be in prison.

      Maybe politicians worried about public safety should investigate who is responsible for the policies behind those facts.     Ω