I had this moment...

10 Minutes About "The Illustrated Man"

I first read The Illustrated Man when I was maybe 12, and my Uncle Steve loaned it to me. I had the feeling that the book was taboo, and wasn't sure that my uncle (who was about 20 years older than me) should have loaned it to me.

That concern was doubled by the actual book, which at 12 freaked me out. Those stories were so scary that they stuck in my head for years and years and years: madmen on Venus and puppets locking people in boxes and stuff like that.

I think I re-read the book again maybe in college, but I can't really remember. Now I'm listening to it on audio, and it's been, so far, somewhat of a letdown.

It was written in 1951, and like a lot of scifi written in the 1950s and into the 1960s, it has a completely different tone, if tone is the right word. A lot of the stories I've read from back then -- from Theodore Sturgeon, Bradbury, and even Phillip K. Dick -- are hamhanded, with rather obvious, Twilight-Zonish twists.





So far, I've gotten through the first 4 1/2 stories. Of them, only  two stand up so far.The Veldt  is okay: a straightforward, somewhat predictable but still creepy story of two little spoiled kids in a rich family who have a room that's basically a holodeck from Star Trek; they program it to be set on Africa, with lions, with rather predictable results. That's not much of a spoiler; you can see the ending coming from about ten million miles away but it's done well.

Kaleidoscope still manages to be excellent, although less creepy to 48-year-old me than 12-year-old me; it's the story of a bunch of guys whose rocket blows up, and they all drift off in separate ways into space, talking over their radios about what it all means to them. It's sad and amazing and even with a hokey ending still a great story.

But The Other Foot, about what happens when the first white man lands on Mars after it was colonized 20 years earlier by blacks, is drivelish "Magical Negro" type of writing, essentially wish-fulfillment for white people who would like to think that black people might forget about all the ill treatment and just shake hands. And The Highway, about a man who lives by a highway and sees a bunch of people fleeing the "atom war" that has ended the world, just feels pointless.

There are still fourteen stories left; tonight I left off halfway through The Man, about astronauts landing on another planet where, apparently, Jesus has just come and gone. It's not very good either but I've got hopes for the next 2/3 of the book that it will live up to what I remembered.

GIT R DONE: Why throwing more money at cops won't help.

Madison journalist wonders why cops dont arrest people before they commit crimes: https://t.co/gSxe0WoFhZ. @ChrisRickertWSJ

— BrianePagel (@BrianePagel) August 26, 2017

There was recently a spate of shootings and related retaliatory violence in Madison, Wisconsin, where that sort of thing isn't supposed to happen.

This morning, Chris Rickert, a columnist for whatever is left of the local media, posted an editorial which has some remarkably backward thinking in it.   The gist of Rickert's editorial (that link leads to the whole thing) appears to be that long-term action is useless and we should devolve to a police state because that GITS THINGS DONE.

Seriously: The piece's title is "Madison do-gooders haggled over shootings police stopped." It begins "provocatively":

Madison’s mayor and City Council spent valuable time this spring and summer feuding among themselves and with local activists over how to respond, ahem, quickly to a rash of shootings.
Madison Police Chief Mike Koval on Aug. 9 announced plans to round up those suspected in the violence and two weeks later announced that the shootings had largely stopped...

Wait for it...

— at least for now.

The best problem solving is always temporary! Rickert went on to ask why the cops hadn't just arrested the bad guys BEFORE they committed the shootings, and when I questioned Rickert's commitment to creating a pre-crimes unit at the MPD he suggested the police already had warrants for the future-shooters and could've just picked them up.

Rickert's piece plays up the notion that all we have to do is GIT THINGS DONE by throwing more money at the cops. He talks about how all the money already thrown at social programs aimed at ending violence haven't stopped ALL THIS VIOLENCE and whether it's worth it to try again.  This is the same fatalist debate that people use to argue guns ought not be outlawed: people will still HAVE guns won't they? Can't turn back the tide might's well just let people do what they want.

The argument that something has not worked at 100% capacity is a false argument. First of all, my computer crashes about 10 times a week. According to Rickert's philosophy, since all previous fixes have not corrected the problem permanently, I should go back to an abacus. Secondly, NO law or social program is 100% effective. Kids fail school. Murders happen even though murder has been illegal since Moses broke the tablets. The internet hasn't yet killed local newspapers. So just because social programs haven't ended all violence is not a reason to simply say "well they failed SADDLE UP BOYS WE'RE FORMIN' A POSSE."

Rickert talks about how the cops don't have the resources to track down the 8000 outstanding warrants MPD has, and finishes his piece with this bon mot:

[The chief] doesn’t think the shootings have stopped for good. But given how much police have been able to accomplish in a few weeks of targeted effort and overtime, it’s hard not to wonder whether violence could become less prevalent if the mayor and City Council were slightly more receptive to Koval’s calls for more resources.

The well-intentioned social progressives who  run Madison don’t like to consider it, but there may just be some hardened criminals who can’t be reformed by anything paid for by government or carried out by Madison do-gooders.

None of which is to say the do-gooders shouldn’t keep trying.
But if all the trying fails, it’s nice to know something as simple as more policing hasn’t.

So piece that out: we need only "slightly" more resources -- in an unknown amount -- thrown at the police to achieve... what? Rickert's piece admits the police DO NOT THINK THE SHOOTINGS HAVE STOPPED. That undermines Rickert's whole thesis: quick action achieved a temporary lull at best and maybe achieved nothing at all.

More importantly, it is not a matter of SLIGHT increases in resources.  Give the police 8,000 more men, say, one for each of those warrants. Those guys go out and arrest EIGHT THOUSAND people in the Madison area.

The Dane County Jail, where MPD keeps criminals awaiting charging who have not been released, has 341 beds and 24 segregation cells. Maybe we could just put 25 guys in each bed.  Or, if we still consider human rights, what would happen is at least 7,659 arrestees would be IMMEDIATELY released back out on the streets on some form of bail or signature bond. At least that would give the 8,000 new cops something to do: they could monitor them! And arrest them and release them again if something new happens!  Catch And Release as law enforcement.

Once those 8000 guys are booked, they will have to be arraigned.  Dane County has 17 judges and about 8 court commissioners who can do initial hearings and other LEGALLY REQUIRED steps in prosecuting cases.  One Dane County judge recently commented -- ON THE RECORD -- about how more and more accused were demanding speedy trials (it's only a constitutional right, after all) and that was placing a burden on the court system.

Those 8000 guys will need lawyers. Most criminal defendants get public defenders. In Wisconsin, the public defender system is so overburdened it led to the Seattle University of Law releasing a study in which it described Wisconsin's system as "Justice Shortchanged."  Public defenders in Wisconsin are paid $40 per hour by the state. Average overhead per hour for a lawyer in Wisconsin is just over $41, so assigned counsel public defenders barely make ends meet. I won't go into what that means because I don't want to demean the GOOD lawyers who do that work. But there simply aren't the resources to dump 8000 new cases onto public defenders and private lawyers willing to do pro bono or extremely cheap work.

But maybe you're one of those people who doesn't think the criminals deserve lawyers and all that liberal do-gooder nonsense. Even for you, there's problems: Wisconsin's prosecutors are overburdened and underpaid. In 2016 a study said Wisconsin needs at least 140 more prosecutors -- about 2 per county. District attorneys described what they do  as "a public safety crisis" and "essentially malpractice."

Hey, guys -- here's 8000 MORE CASES to prosecute.  Have fun!

This "crisis" it should be noted is almost ENTIRELY the fault of the Republican party.  While Wisconsin's criminal justice system and law enforcement was already in trouble in 2008, the GOP has controlled Wisconsin since 2010 and it was in 2016 and 2017 that the nation began to notice just how truly bad Wisconsin's justice system is. So much for law and order, right? Republicans talk a good game but don't back it up.

It's easy to write up six quick paragraphs about how we need to GIT THINGS DONE. It's a lot harder to actually try to understand the systemic problems that lead to an 8000-warrant backlog, and even harder to understand the failure of a nation to even TRY seriously to undo the terrible educational, social welfare, and medical 'systems' we have allowed to develop. We do a terrible job of helping people get educated, find work, take care of their children, get medical care, stay off drugs, and generally be good people. Anyone wanting to fix any of those systems runs into billion-dollar opposition from the Republican party, and gets no help from a Democratic party that has given up and exists solely to promote the good of a few people within it.

All of THOSE problems are worsened by editorials which make no effort to investigate the facts or understand the problems, but instead just blithely suggest that if we were willing to just pay the cops a bit more everything would be all right.  People read those things, and believe them, and it makes it harder to fix things. It is a failure of the media to publish that kind of drivel.