Friends

Now that I'm retired, and coincidentally my friend and most recent (and last) running buddy, John, moved to the Southwest, I don't interact regularly with many people. I have lunch with my former colleague, mentor and friend Steve once a month so we keep up.

We and a third lawyer did a two-week trial together in Reno in the nineties and had several memorable moments, such as Steve having to go on the penultimate night of the trial to the casino hotel where our star witness, due to testify on the last day, was staying to co-sign for his impending hotel bill because the witness had racked up too many expenses in the casino. Our expert, scheduled to testify first the next morning to open the trial, had showed up in town late the night before dead drunk and incapable of undergoing any meaningful witness prep.

That was the trial where, famously at my agency and infamously generally, we demanded the opposition's witness list during the five-minute recess at the conclusion of our case-in-chief, just before they proceeded with their defense, and the lead defense counsel, a former U.S. Attorney, took out a casino matchbook, scribbled the defendants' names on it, added "rebuttal witnesses"on it as an afterthought, tore the half-cover off and handed it to us as his "witness list." The outrageous but funny incident was later recounted in the February 2001 issue of Regardie's Power magazine as part of its cover story.

It is important to make a concerted effort to keep up with friends after you have moved on, like Steve does by scheduling a monthly lunch. I'm keeping up with my friend John because I'm planning on taking a driving trip to the Southwest during the winter.

Also, for instance, I recently had an enjoyable lunch with a former colleague and friend on the new waterfront in the District earlier this month to catch up with this busy lawyer, trying to juggle work and three children. I remember I was lead attorney on a case with this woman, trying to reach settlement with a young, pro-se, destitute defendant containing a judgment amount in five-figures, representing full disgorgement of his ill-gotten gains which would be fully suspended under an inability-to-pay theory, provided he provided us with a sworn financial statement verifying his claimed impoverished state.

We were getting nowhere after multiple negotiations with this young man, a student actually, because he couldn't timely provide us with sworn financial statements due to, you know, the fire, the move out of state, the flood, the bailment, the repossessed car. My colleague finally interjected pointedly during another interminable discussion with him about his excruciating difficulties that he'd just have to owe the full amount then.

Bingo, the defendant readily agreed to being responsible for paying the full amount (he obviously had an IRS problem and feared a perjury charge). Case settled.

The eventual effect upon the judgment would in reality be the same, dischargability of the amount as unpaid versus suspension of it based upon inability to pay. I love it when a lawyer cuts through all the endless, highfaluting, legal mumbo jumbo with a pithy, common-sense solution.

More Christmas Tree Traipsing

This week I went into the District to view the holiday decorations, and detailed in yesterday's post some of the spots I went past. There is more to this holiday's celebration than Christmas trees.  (Minnesota's tree on the Ellipse, one of fifty-one smaller Christmas trees ringing the National Tree.)

For instance, celebrating Hanukkah, which is upon us right now. President Jimmy Carter started the unveiling of the National Menorah on the Ellipse and it has been upheld ever since.  (The National Menorah with the WH in the background.)

Nutcrackers somehow symbolize the season.  So does lighting strung on trees or bushes.  (Nutcracker Suite outside the Portrait Gallery near the Verizon Center.)

DC is full of such displays at this time of the year.  I haven't even been by the street-level glass front displays of the very few remaining department stores in downtown to see if they still lavishly feature the holiday season on display.  (A Scandinavian Fjord and village with a little electric RR running through and around it, in Union Station.)

Xmas Trees

Before I was forced to involuntarily retire due to pernicious ageism discrimination at my agency fostered by the new breed of managers there, ambitious, callow persons all a full generation younger than me who only saw their own advancement as paramount, I used to lead an annual Christmas tree run around the Mall that took in as many holiday decorations as we could run by and that stopped briefly at some to admire them. Because of the current cultural wars climate, where the true description of what you're doing can't be hurtful to somebody somewhere, we called it the holiday lights run.  (Union Station tree.)

The organized noontime running club at my division within the agency has fallen into disuse since I left last year via forced retirement, so no more happy, fit workers returning to their desks in the afternoon ready to put in a full closing flourish to their workday. But I went into the District this week to go by my personal favorite spots to view Christmas trees for my own gratification. (Canadian Embassy tree.)

I didn't see all my favorite spots but I did the best I could in the limited time I had downtown before new toll-road considerations, based upon expansive and expensive rush-hour electronically monitored charging via a windshield transponder, kicked in to make my transport prohibitively costly, basically surge pricing called dynamic flow that allows for only a few free hours of use midday of the main traffic artery into DC, which severely restricted my ambulation downtown. I saw old and new favorite examples of Christmas trees like the National tree, the Capitol tree, and trees at the Willard Hotel, the Trump Hotel, Union Station, the Peace Officer Memorial, the Navy Memorial and the Canadian Embassy. (Willard Hotel tree.)

I didn't get to the Botanical Garden tree or other pretty trees that I know of but my circuit, for as rushed as it was, was pretty comprehensive.  I'm so currently out of shape due to lingering injuries that it was an exhausting, but fulfilling, journey largely by Capital Bike Share. (The National tree.)

The invasion of Japan... .

On this day in 1941, the Japanese launched a sneak attack on the U.S. Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor, decimating it, and plunged us into WW2. The U.S. brought the war to an end in 1945 by dropping two atomic bombs on Japan, forcing her to surrender. I am reading Hell to Pay by D.M. Giangreco, written in 2009 and updated this year, which lays out in sobering detail the U.S. plans to invade Japan in 1945 (Kyushu) and 1946 (Honshu). It also examines detailed Japanese plans for homeland defense.

U.S. casualties were estimated to be one million. Japanese casualties were estimated to be ten million. The book makes clear that Japan would not have given up without the shocking event of the two nuclear detonations, as it was a militarized nation of fanatical, committed people who were induced by their leaders and culture to fight to the death, as epitomized by their asymmetrical and effective use of kamikazes against American warships.

 

It would have been a bloody battle to the death for U.S. servicemen against soldiers, old men, women and young children, many armed with sharpened sticks. For instance, the Japanese civilians on Saipan famously leaped to their deaths off cliffs, carrying their children with them, rather than surrender to U.S. personnel who were beseeching them to give up in end-of-the-battle mopping up. The U.S. estimated it would lose 10% of its fleet to kamikazes in the invasion of Japan, figuring on Japan having 5,000 such planes. The Japanese actually had 12,000 planes hidden away, with ample supply of fuel for the purpose of one-way flights, and estimated they would destroy 20-50% of the U.S. fleet. They also had thousands of small, wooden motorboats ready for use in deadly nighttime suicidal attacks against U.S. ships, explosive-laden fast boats which, being wooden, would evade radar. 

The book points out that after three years of war, Japan had "figured out" American tactics and invasion strategy and knew exactly which beaches the U.S. troops would storm ashore on and had been preparing to meet them in these final two battles for half a year or more. The Japanese deductions were 100% correct, on both islands, and the defenses were becoming more formidable by the day. They planned for massive kamikaze attacks on the fleet, opposition at the shoreline and a defense in depth, all the way up the large (compared to previous island battles) island. The kill-ratio of Japanese deaths to U.S. casualties had been dropping steadily as the war progressed from 5-1 to near equality. The opposing forces at or near the beachheads would have been at approximately a one-to-one ratio, not the preferred 3-1 ratio when launching an attack against heavily-defended positions. Civilians on both islands were being mustered into and trained in quasi-military brigades for use as cannon fodder, damage repair, road-building and even infiltration. To avoid the Americans' overwhelming superiority of firepower, especially from naval guns, the Japanese had several reserve divisions a day's travel by foot away from the battlefront, ready to appear at a disputed zone overnight.

Japan is a mountainous country with a rugged spine of mountains perfect for guerrilla warfare, which was being planned on if and when the battle went against the Japanese military forces. Japanese forces on previous island battlegrounds such as Guam successfully evaded U.S. forces for decades after the war, not knowing or believing that the war was over. Operations in Japan would likely have dragged on for years.

 

Japanese planning for homeland defense figured on using 100% of its population in the fight to the death. The Japanese supply lines were mere miles long, the U.S. supply lines stretched back thousands of miles with every single item having to arrive by ship. The Japanese even had some tanks on hand, and had modified an existing automatic hand-held weapon to be a deadly and effective tank-killer, overcoming a serious drawback they suffered from in other island battles, the inability to counter American tanks.

 

Consider how protracted, bloody and savage the battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa had been, and multiply that horrendous experience ten-fold for U.S. forces thrust into the maelstrom. The U.S. planned on having five more nuclear bombs by the fall of 1945 when the first invasion forces went ashore on Kyushu in Operation Olympic, and planned to use them tactically at or near the beachheads. U.S. forces, with dangers unbeknownst yet in the nascent nuclear age, would have been fighting over radioactive ground!

 

My father was a Pacific war veteran who survived two horrific battles, Peleliu and Okinawa, where casualties ran one in three, and I have no doubt he would have been killed or maimed in participation in another all-out no-quarter asked for or given invasion. The author James Michener, a Pacific War veteran, has a letter in the appendix of Hell to Pay which lays out the feeling of indescribable relief such young men felt upon hearing that a super weapon had been used and the war was over and they would live!

 

Anyone who thinks that dropping the bomb on Japan in 1945 was obviously wrong, or that it was obviously racist (we used it on the only enemy we had left when its development was completed, as Germany had already surrendered, and the U.S. was in an almost desperate quandary as casualties mounted and more bloody fighting loomed because Japan would not surrender despite being beaten already and having its country totally devastated by conventional bombing), should read this book, become informed on the subject and think further on the matter.

Holidays

November gave me a couple of opportunities to try to reconnect with my family. Veterans Day presented two, with the actual holiday being on Friday, November 10th, and the actual day of remembrance being on Saturday, November 11th.  (Lunch with The Empty Chair on Armistice Day.)

Life moves on. I decided to go to visit my sister and her family in red Ohio for Thanksgiving this year, after visiting my sister in blue Colorado for the last two Thanksgivings.  (Holidays are for reaching out to family and promoting family togetherness.)

I traded in my little "roadster" for a big truck for my planned upcoming cross-country trips. I put 1200 miles on it and enjoyed a week in the midwest.  (I visited this sister this year, whom I hadn't visited in many years; any normal person would agree it's natural and important to keep in touch with family.)

Now that I'm home again, it's time to prepare for the holiday season. I already know that someone nearby is moving, maybe out of town or out of state or even, perhaps, out of the country.  (Don't forget to leave a forwarding address, in case I need to get in touch with any of our three children, and enjoy NC!)

Record or Assist

It was cold and rainy on election day Tuesday but at least I had the opportunity of working inside all day, although I walked outside several times to introduce myself to every observer, volunteer and candidate out there doing hard duty handing out sample ballots, blue for democrats and green for republicans, to voters as they walked up to enter the local high school to vote. All were unfailingly polite.  

Inside, there was a stark difference in what I perceived my duty to be as an inside poll observer and what my republican counterpart's assigned duty was. All day I stood or sat near the check-in table and watched for problems voters encountered in being enabled to cast their ballots--wrong precinct, no longer living in the district, their name spelled wrong in the voter rolls, their sister voted previously in their name because the staffer couldn't decipher the Asian name properly, the voter couldn't understand English and required assistance but couldn't write either and thus couldn't sign her requires-assistance form--and followed them discretely to the chief's table to stand by and listen to the problem's resolution. Almost always there the situation was resolved in favor of the person being entitled to vote, sometimes after a call being placed to the registrar. Three provisional ballots were cast (the aforementioned sister/brother mix-up, for instance), often the voter was sent to one of the other two precincts to vote and rarely the voter was turned away, usually after being registered on the spot to entitle them to vote in the next election. I never felt the need to intercede with the election officials in support of a voter and only made one or two suggestions to them all day, and asked them questions about situations or procedures several times. I often spoke conversationally with the officials to varying degrees during slow moments, having introduced myself to each of them and made a point of remembering their names. It was an efficient organization with heart there.

The other poll observer had a different reason, obviously, for being there. Aside from getting up occasionally to go outside to make a call on his cellphone I assumed or use the facilities or stand in order to stretch his legs, he sat in a chair within 3 feet directly behind central check-in person and furiously thumbed his I-phone all day, doing his best mark on his "app" (I presumed it was a registered voter list or perhaps a list of persons that party had contacted during the campaign) the appearance of every voter who checked in as they announced their name and the name was repeated back to them by the staff member. Never did I see him wander around the voting room by the officials' tables except to plug in his back-up battery, nor did I see him converse with the staff except in the course of a situation arising out of him placing his chair initially so close behind the check-in person's chair that that officer complained that the observer was in such proximity with him that he was uncomfortable and felt interfered with in the performance of his duties. He literally couldn't get up from the table without the observer moving his chair back. (He also conversed with staff in the course of graciously being offered a donut or two during the long day.) The chair incident produced the day's only "drama" as my friend across the aisle, Joe, termed it. 

The staffer who felt Joe was too close to allow him to do his duty properly requested him to move back permanently and the observer refused, saying he couldn't hear the names as they were announced otherwise and to do his "job" he needed to be right there behind the staff member. Thus the right of the observer to be able to see and hear everything being done and said at the check-in table clashed with the right of the staffer to be free of interference or influence in the performance of his duty, and this stand-off at the fulcrum point of the free and transparent operation of our basic voting rights pulled in the Board of Elections Directer and Mr. Dan Dodds, who I presumed was the roving Republican operative assigned to that district.

In my opinion, Mr. Dodds was a pissant, and I watched from my perch five or six feet behind the check-in table where they had set up a table for the observers as in the back, the twenty-something tall gaunt man argued down in an angry voice, with much finger jabbing interspersed with backhanded slaps across the sheaf of important papers he was clutching for awe-inspiring emphasis, with the diminutive fifty-something Director who was standing her ground even as, at one point, the rover had a metal chair slung menacingly over his shoulder as he gesticulated. In a word he was, in my opinion, nasty.

Order was restored to the process with a compromise as the two came out and together moved Joe's chair to a spot about 32 inches behind the staffer's chair and declared that that was the redline, for both of us. Joe tried his dictated location and claimed that he still couldn't hear but Mr. Dodds spoke to him like one would rebuke a dog, telling him to do his "job," to get busy with his "app," and that that spot was "final." Then Mr. Dodds stalked out, obviously an important personage with more places to be on that day.

The rest of the day was long and uneventful for us. Joe liked history, and had brought two books to read, and we talked history and books sometimes. I tried to time our quiet discussions for when a crowd of voters came in and he tried to time them for when a voter was spending an inordinate time at the table, indicating a problem. I offered him a cracker smeared with spicy tuna from a small tin I had for lunch, which he declined, and he had a bag of nuts in his pocket which he would occasionally go into the hallway to nibble from, of which he offered me none. We got along famously, and I even told him that I had observed that the voting machines were set at zero that morning before the polls were opened at 6 a.m., something he hadn't observed in person, as that apparently was on both our checklists.

During the long day I had the opportunity to reflect upon which course of inside poll observation action was better--to record on your hand-sized computer every voter who comes in so that at HQ they can selectively utilize their phone banks to get out their voters, or to look out for problems as they develop inside the voting area and follow them through to their resolution, thus allowing as many voters presenting themselves to vote as possible. Since the permissible number of inside observers is limited, doing both is well-nigh impossible. I'm not surprised at the very different choices each party made in this election, and I wonder what it augurs for the future of voting and inside observing.

America's Coming Back

Against my better judgment and against all my wishes, I signed up to work in the gubernatorial race in Virginia for democratic candidate Dr. Ralph Northam, who is a fine man and a moderate in the recent trend of winning democrats in turning-blue Virginia.  I was gun-shy because I have worked intensively in two campaigns in my life, Hillary Clinton in 2016 and George McGovern in 1972, thinking they were transcendent times, and the result each time was a devastating defeat resulting in utter disaster (an effing moron winning and a president resigning in disgrace).  (5 a.m. somewhere in Virginia yesterday.)

But I volunteered to register voters and make phone calls last month, I sent out e-mails and undertook training to be an inside poll observer this month and yesterday I put in a 16-hour day working at Precinct 1 in Manassas Park.  When I got home from my exhausting day I was astounded and gratified to learn that already Northam had been declared winner and the democrats had won the other two top state spots of lieutenant governor and attorney general.  Maybe the country has awoken from its self-induced stupor.  (Taking training at the George Mason School of Law, trying to quell my gag-reflex.)

The day was interesting watching rough looking voters in not-quite-Northern-Virginia not-really-Tidewater-either file through all day.  One man angrily asked if we were "letting all them illegal aliens vote" and another angrily objected to the check-in election worker call out his name out loud, as is required, due to "privacy" concerns, and the local roving Republican operative showed up to angrily berate the local Board of Elections chief in strident terms over some supposed infraction of the rules or the law with much finger jabbing towards her face and hand slaps on the important papers he was holding, obvious anger and disdain infusing his body and soul, a tall twenty-something man towering over a diminutive fifty-something woman as he gesticulated for show, in his mind's eye a projection of power.  Dan Dodds, you're a querulous a**.  (Just like your hero, who is a train wreck.)

When the long day was done it was Northam 669, Trump surrogate Gillespie 295, with similar showings for the rest of the top of the ticket.  Make America great again.  (Campaigning a year ago, before the fall.)