My first task in taking this was to find a way out of my duties at Mary Queen of Peace, since singers are easier to come by than sackbutteers. Indeed, I only really know 3 in town, including myself, and we were all on duty (there are a couple trombonists I know who have played sackbut, but have no experience doing so at A415). I felt obligated to play, and Jonathan Moyer, music director at Covenant, made it worth my while. So I found a sub; I’ve not yet heard how that worked. And I found face, as I’ve been playing brass very little.

We met Friday night for an instrumental rehearsal.. “we” being a Most Excellent Crew. There were Peter Bennett, James David Cristie and Webb Wiggins on organs, Julie Andrijeski and a band of mostly present and former Case grad students on bowed strings, Covenant’s carilloneur George Leggiero on recorder, and me mates David Betts and Paul Furguson. on sackbuts. And, oh yeah, checks sitting on the stands. When I got my instrument, back in 1981 or so, I got a low pitch crook, but the other guys were reading everything down a half step. We didn’t have a bass sackbut, so I played the bass on tenor, transposing up the octave as needed. Paul plays alto, which was OK for the Schütz (which still could have been played on tenor) but problematic for the Gabrieli. Still the guys rose to the challenge magnificently. The only problem encountered was that one of the organs had a transposing keyboard and had been tuned at A440 (which meant that at A415 it was wretchedly out of tune). That got fixed easily enough afterwards. There were 4 organs in the church for this: borrowed chamber organs on either side, the Newberry in back, and the main one in front. It suggests a performance of Steve Reich’s eponymous piece, though 4 acoustic organs, 3 in meantone and one in equal temperament, would be quite inauthentic performance practice for that work (though it might be less irritating that way.). 4 organs in one church! I saw this as an act of expiation and reparation for all the organs that Calvinists trashed during the Reformation. And if you think that’s just Popish snark, the Catholics have a near-equal need to atone for the organs trashed in the wake of Vatican II.

Saturday morning I had to come into town again for the tutti rehearsal, which was kind of a meeting of old buds (Lynn Glickson, composer Jenny Conner) and folks I see every day in the Case library. The chief problem to be handled was to use eyes rather than ears in keeping together (as there were always 2 choirs separated). I’d done this to an extreme over the Internet, about a decade ago, and this was easier but still not easy. And there was the challenge of intonation (NONE of the partials on this instrument are in tune with each other; the higher you go in the low register, the farther the slide has to come out, which is counterintuitive.) Afterwards, I got lunch at Udupi Cafe (south Indian buffet), tried to do some shopping, tried to go to Mass but I got there way early and was feeling poorly, so I ditched my idea of going to a MQoP Schola member’s graduate recital, and went home to early bed, as I had to be out the door at 7.

Call at 8:45, ran through the big pieces, then sat back to hear the pregame show with strings and organ. I was listening to Castello and the Gabrieli Sonata a tre, thinking “This can’t be church music. Church music sucks, and this is 100% suck-free.” The choir did Byrd’s Sing Joyfully, and we did our big pieces without any great flaw (there are always little things that could have been better). The only problem was in the last hymn. In the bulletin, it was in A. We’d been given another hymn, with a different number and name and slightly different words, but the same tine, in Bb. But we hadn’t been told “play the Bb version”. So we came in, a half-step below the organ. I took out the crook (I might better have transposed), the other guys stopped their transposition games, and all was relatively presentable…and the organ drowned it all out anyway.

Well, then I still had to go to Mass. I shot in to the Mac, ran into Fred, who thought I should sing. So, just in case the morning hadn’t been exciting enough, I sight-read a Latin mass, singing tenor, and reading tiny notes for the Ordinary. I was in good voice and had somebody else on the part, so it went fairly well (less so where the notes were tiny).

Back to Covenant, do the 2 pieces again, listen to the organ recital. The new organ sounds wonderful. When’s the Hauptwerk sample set coming out? I want to take it home. I thought the morning had gone slightly better overall. Reception afterwards. I saw Carolyn Peskin, local recorder maven. for the first time in years, and by the looks of things it may well be the last time. I wanted to talk, but I’d spoke to a stranger who wouldn’t let me go (“…and I’m a Aspie.” “I never would have guessed.”) and she disappeared.

So, a lovely time was had by all. I think I’m going to try to put some work into sackbut solo and try to do something.

In reply to his comments:
1. Two wrongs don’t make a right. “what I did was some destruction of property to issue a scream and cry against an illegal war in which 6,000 people a week are being killed.”

2. You only committed property damage through incompetence. Your buds blew themselves up making a nail bomb (not an anti-property weapon) to use at a soldier’s dance (how, to blow up the venue before anyone arrived?) The difference between your girlfriend and the Blew Brothers was that the Tsarnaevs got better training.

3. All indications are that there was nothing nihilistic about the Tsarnaevs; they believed passionately in a cause. Indeed, the label fits the Weathermen better.

4. “How different is the shooting in Connecticut from shooting at a hunting range?” Ayers said. “Just because they use the same thing, there’s no relationship at all.” Better analogy: Boston is to your bomb as Sandy Hook is to the Peter B. Lewis shooting, which was not a mass murder only because Biswanath Halder bought cheap guns.

Mr. Ayers, I hope you find Jesus and repent of your youthful sins. Otherwise, you can (and will) go straight to Hell. In the meantime, shut up.

Then in the ensuing conversation, I was alerted to this:

which is apparently only half (!) of a longer ditty available on itunes, where, oddly, it gets rave reviews.

I’m going to dispatch the Rindfleisch first.If I were going to write a parody of a professor of composition writing a pop-ish song against conservatives, it would sound exactly like this. It’s self-parodying. It follows in the footsteps of another liberal academic singer-pianist, Tom Lehrer. But Lehrer had true wit, a deftness with language, and specific sacred cows to slay (as opposed to writing a song against, oh, half the country). Since he was a mathematician first instead of a composer, he knew that facts were facts, that reality was not a matter of whim. And the purely musical values of Lehrer’s products far outclass this work; it’s as if Rindfleisch isn’t even trying. He’s relying on his audience to consider their moral preening as fit recompense for the time spent listening, and that’s thin gruel artistically. It might work at a party, where everyone is drunk on Belgian Tripels and are your friends anyway; notsomuch on the iPod in your car.

As for the text, judging by the YouTube version (What? You want me to pay a buck to be insulted for 8 minutes?), it’s basically a list of alleged hates and loves of conservatives. It’s as if Rindfleisch lined up row upon row of strawmen in front of a trench and mechanically mowed them down with a machine gun, Nazi-style. To refute his generalizations would be a waste of time; the song is not about policy, but about how our guys are cool and your guys are not. It doesn’t even function as Alinskyan ridicule; to do so, it would have to say something unexpected, accurate, and funny about conservatives, and it fails at all three.

Bolcom’s song is dedicated to Woody Guthrie, and more-or-less written in his style. Unlike the Rindfleisch, it is dedicated to a particular specific policy position: victim disarmament. I say “dedicated to” rather than “argues for”, because it’s not an argument; it’s an imprecation against the Senators who chose not to vote for cloture, for “giving up this way / to the bullies of the NRA”. “The country screams and sobs / all you can think of is your jobs” . “how can we vote for you conscienceless men / when you’ve sold us out yet again”. If the Senators who voted no were indeed thinking of their jobs, it was because they were representing the people in their states, who didn’t “scream and sob” for the same things that Bolcom did. Or do the “bullies of the NRA” (i.e., the organization I won’t join because they are the pusillanimous self-serving compromising Vichy regime of gun control) spend their magical money, which somehow seeps into Diebold machines and turns the votes all red, while the money of Bloomberg and Soros is perfectly inert? In any case, it’s not a cogent position; it’s the yawp of a cranky old man. Now, I understand cranky old men, being one, and Bill has better cranky old man cred than I do (he’s just old enough to be my father, if he’d knocked up my mother in high school, which wouldn’t have happened because she was a senior when he was a freshman). But to see a revered master (well, revered by me, anyway) stoop so low as to bang out tonics and dominants beneath 4th-rate poetry, well, that just hurts. OK, it’s not contemporary music; as we said at the University of Michigan, it’s temporary music, as played by the Temporary Directions Ensemble. It’s a jeu d’esprit… but jeux d’esprit are best left to the young.

It might make sense though to situate these works in the tradition of political music. Looking at the classics of the repertoire, the IWW Little Red Book, The Internationale, Woody Guthrie, the union organizing songs of the 30s, one can draw some generalizations.  One is that they are by-and-large positive in tone. They advocate for a specific condition or course of action. They are not personal in tone; if the oppressor is described or addressed, it is in terms of oppressive actions, not as a target of character assassination. Even the most biting and memorable lines are more about actions than people. For example, in Joe Hill’s Preacher and the Slave, the Salvation Army are not bad people, they just have an inconsistent sense of social justice, and offer “pie in the sky” instead of pie here on earth. In his Casey Jones, if anyone is abused, it’s Casey, for putting up with too much, refusing to strike and valuing his “wooden medal”.  In Guthrie’s 1913 Massacre, the villainy of the “copper boss thug men” takes a back seat to the unfolding of the tragedy. The pattern begins to unravel somewhat in the ’60s. Tom Paxton’s Lyndon Johnson Told the Nation is personal, but still in a focused way: LBJ is a liar who sends us into an unwinnable war in spite of what he said in the campaign.The other element of the best protest music was poetry, the telling image. I’ve given a few examples already. In Guthrie’s Pretty Boy Floyd, “Some will rob you with a six-gun/ And some with a fountain pen.” After the Punk revolution, vulgarity became acceptable in the protest song. One example is Mojo Nixon’s I ain’t gonna piss in no jar: “I ain’t gonna piss into no cup/unless Nancy Reagan’s gonna lap it up.” Agtain, a striking image, but more for its shock value… and intensely personal.

Setting the two works under discussion into this context, the differences can be seen to be generational (1938 vs. 1963 birth dates). Bolcom is working consciously in the Guthrie tradition, without the same solid practical grounding in the Anglo-Saxon ballad tradition. (One wonders what sort of agitprop music would have been written by Ross Lee Finney, Bolcom’s predecessor at the University of Michigan, who was a professional folksinger.) He IS very well grounded in the American Songbook tradition, as was Lehrer, and one wonders what an artisticly serious attempt by Bolcom would sound like. Rindfleisch’s poetic voice sounds like somebody who had grown up listening to the Feederz’ Jesus entering from the rear. I don’t know if he was ever guilty of playing punk rock. The music affects the surface of urbanity without the content, so not punkish at all. That raw energy would have improved it, I think.

Like these gentlemen, I am no good at keeping my mouth shut. I suppose I will get no more performances of my music by the Cleveland Contemporary Players; on the other hand, I’ll get no fewer either. I can’t think of a classical composer writing agitprop song whose work in that genre has become canonical. Since some of them worked with Berthold Brecht, this is not simply a matter of poetic skill. This leads me to believe that music would be better served if we all found a different outlet for our political agitations, and made art for art’s sake. I’ll admit that I have a hard time taking my own advice here; there is certainly at least generalized political (or more accurately, anti-political) content in my Assault March of the Assistant Deputy County Environmental Safety Director. And I’ve written a libretto for an opera about the hen who bakes bread, updated for modern conditions. But neither of those works are in the agitprop/mass song tradition. So Bill, how about that next symphony for band? Andy, how about some more choruses or brass pieces?

Automotive Parts & Services
• America’s Tire
• American Car Care Centers
• CarCarONE
#Discount Tire
#Kauffman Tire
• Maaco
• Meineke
#Midas
#Pep Boys
Electronics & Appliances
• Abt
• BERNINA
• Bjorns
• BrandsMart USA
• Conns
• Crutchfield
• Goedekers
#hhgregg
• OneCall
• Paul’s TV inside Art Van
• PC Richard & Son
• Sony Store
• Vanns
• Westrich
Flooring
• Adairs
• Carpet Barn
• Carpet Mill Outlet
• Carpet One
• Carpeteria
• Flooring America
• Jabaras
• Lumber Liquidators
• Mohawk
• Pierce Flooring
• Sam Kinnairds Flooring
• Shaw Floors
• World of Floors inside Art Van
Healthcare
#CareCredit
Sporting Goods
• Freedom to Ride
• Golfsmith
• Specialzed Bicycles
Home Furnishings
• American Signature
• Art Van
• Ashley
• Drexel
• Furniture World IN
• Furniture World PA
• Grand
• Havertys
• Hudsons
• Johnny Janosik
• L Fish
• La-Z-Boy Furniture Galleries
• Mattress Discounters
• Metro Mattress
• Morris
• Pieratts
• Regency
• Rooms To Go
• Sheelys
• Sleep Country
• Sleep Number (Glenn, Rush, what ya gonna do?)
• Sleep Train
• Sleepys
• Thomasville
#Value City
• Westrich
#World Market
Home Improvement
• Bargain Outlet
• Blains
#Champion Windows
• McCoys
• Sutherlands
• System Pavers
Heating & Air Conditioning
• Bryant
• Lennox
• Service Experts
• York
Jewelry
• Diamonds on Web
• Tappers
• Tivol
• Ultra Diamonds
Lawn & Garden
#Husqvarna
• System Pavers
#Toro
Music
• Sam Ash (the one here is conveniently near Guitar Center )
Glasses & Eye Care
#LensCrafters
Power Sports
• Kawasaki
• Suzuki

The ones I’ve marked with a hashmark are the only ones I’ve used or would be likely to use. And there’s no pain involved in giving up any of them. I’ve cancelled credit cards for gun-banning banks before; this is much easier.

“Here is an unfair way of choosing political systems: compare the worst form of anarchy to the best form of government; one then finds that government looks pretty good. The comparison between Somalia and the United States would be a case in point. A fairer comparison would be between Somalia before and after its government collapsed, or between Somalia and other societies in the same region that have governments.[8] Even better would be to compare the best feasible governmental system with the best feasible nongovernmental system. That is what I suggest in the book,[9] and that is the comparison that I tried to conduct over the course of part II. Anarchists do not hold that all anarchic situations are desirable any more than advocates of government defend all governments, including those of Nazi Germany, Uganda under Idi Amin, and the Khmer Rouge.”

What interests me here is WHY the disparity in comparisons exists. This discussion will involve both politics and theology, so both my Catholic and political friends will find something to offend them. Take the things that you don’t believe in as metaphors.

We have a fairly good idea on how to fix suboptimum governments. If they are only slightly dysfunctional, and are democratic, we can replace bad people with good people, who will replace bad law with good law. In practice, this is difficult, as good people tend to become bad people, and because the virtue of the citizenry is a limiting factor; i.e., they have to be able to look beyond their own narrow self-interest. If the dysfunction is deeper, the entire system can be replaced through revolution. This is very expensive in terms of blood and capital, and of uncertain success. But there is a long tradition of doing so.

But we have no idea at all on how to fix suboptimum anarchies, because we have no tradition of anarchy. One does not fix an anarchy through voting, because there are no elections, and nothing to elect people to. One does not do so through revolution, as there is nobody to revolt against, and any armed force strong enough to reset the institutions of an anarchy is a de facto government. It would seem that one must destroy the anarchy in order to save it.

If one posits an anarcho-capitalist / market anarchy society, it functions through the voluntary cooperation of its citizens. Thus, if the society functions suboptimally, it must be because cooperation is suboptimal. If one compels the citizens to cooperate, one no longer has an anarchy. Thus, one must persuade one’s fellow citizens to improve their cooperation. If the failures are fairly specific, they can be addressed by concrete proposals: “If we did THIS, things would work better.” “This” could be tried in a community, and if it proved successful, other communities would adopt it. And of course market forces are one of the main means of cooperation.

But what if the breakdown in cooperation was due to the will of the citizens? What if they don’t WANT to cooperate in a particular way? What if their self-interest conflicts with their neighbor’s interest? One possible solution would be to fix the moral basis of the citizenry, so that they see their neighbor’s self-interest as their own. But that’s a solution many libertarians are uncomfortable with, as it implies religion.  And “to fix” anarchism in such a way implies either forcing religion into the citizenry  (in which case, no anarchism), or else taking the matter out of political philosophy entirely and concentrating on religion. Since we have no other acceptable idea on how to fix anarchies, it is natural to use the worst anarchy in comparisons. On the other end, the better governments and anarchies are, the more they resemble each other. I call this the “Kingdom of Heaven paradox”: Is Heaven a perfect government where Christ rules with a rod of iron, or is it a perfect anarchy, since everyone there seeks to do the will of God?  Can you be forced to do what you want to do anyway? The better citizens are, the less government is necessary; the worse they are, the more government is necessary. So perhaps the most revolutionary act is to guide the citizenry toward holiness. This means friction with the State, because the State’s self-interest is to discourage reliance on anything besides itself, and the State will do what it legally can to erode morality and moral institutions.  This suggests that a necessary activity of religion is to erode the State. There are plenty of peaceful ways of doing this without directly confronting power: agorism and mutual aid are two examples. The Amish can be our guide here.

As I was reading at Ace that they had a suspect, it came to me. There’s been a crapload of video to work with in this case, as everybody has been capturing their loved ones at the finish line. And there’s been amazing crowdsourced analysis. Really, video is the hero of this case… which means that Sgt. Video will get a promotion.  The degree of video surveillance common to the UK is coming to every major city in America.  The Federal government will fund it, and conservatives will cheer.

UPDATE 4/20: The Boston Globe validates the comments above.

4/23 And Gauleiter Bloomberg weighs in.

The most offensive thing about this is that here we have an event celebrating the achievements of the human body. And right where those bodies achieved their goal, they were damaged beyond repair. It seems blasphemous, a punishment for excellence. I don’t know who among the injured were athletes, if any, but in a sense it doesn’t matter; the crowd united its thought to those who struggled to finish. Well, then, say “Νενικήκαμεν” and die; we will overcome the Persians and their neighbors, or whoever was responsible for this.

Dear College Kid Who Misses Me,

Glad you had a great time at the Macklemore concert.I understand that sense of belonging, of being taken outside yourself. That’s a lot of what I do, but I don’t do enough of it, it seems. You want more, and you want real. And you think I’m in the business of excluding and hating people. Yeah, Fred Phelps, but you know me better than that; you know Westboro Baptist isn’t Church. Dad’s gonna spank that man, when he come home.

In particular, you think I hate gay people. I love gay people. I love gay people so much, that I don’t want them to hurt themselves. You remember, just a few years ago, when your mom wouldn’t let you eat your whole Easter basket all in one day? Or when she made you eat your vegetables (or at least try them)? She made rules about organizing your stuff so it didn’t get stepped on. And she had a screaming hissy when you wanted to overnight at your boyfriends’. Your dad had rules too, and your parents backed each other up. Oh wait, you didn’t have a dad. That makes my heart ache. But anyway, they really hated your guts, didn’t they? Oppressive patriarchal fossils who didn’t understand. Uh, no, they loved you. You know that now. You’ll know it even better soon, when you have kids of your own.

You seem to think that because there was some science that part of me was wrong about once, that I’m wrong about everything, and can change my mind about everything. I never claimed to be a scientist; I claimed to be infallible in matters of faith and morals. I know where you got that. The Schmuck of the Body of Christ who is typing this grew up in a “church” started by a priest who didn’t like some of what he saw in me either. He wanted to marry a nun. So a bunch of young people left and made their own “church” that didn’t oppose priestly marriage. They left those haters. (Of course, the guy they left with hated Jews, but none of the kids were Jewish, so it didn’t matter.) And people kept on following that pattern: they didn’t like Dad’s rules, so they’d start a church that did just what they wanted. You probably grew up in a church like that. But God is Truth. If you have a bunch of truths that contradict either other, some of them have to be false, right? Consider those Episcopalians you speak well of. They got started over sex too. And they’re losing members in droves, more than almost any other church. If people leave me because I’m fake, what does that say about them? God doesn’t change. If I speak for God, then I can’t change either. That should be pretty obvious. The world is supposed to conform to me; I’m not supposed to conform to the world. On the other hand, look at all the young people going to Latin Mass. That’s pretty hardcore. Maybe changing and pandering makes you a little less real.

But yeah, sex. You’re horny , right? I’m not who decided that you’re a child until you’re 26. I didn’t establish this messed-up social order. You should be getting married now, and working, not wracking up debt for a Gender Studies degree. That’s my plan. And I know you have issues with it, that the whole society does. You should be campaigning for heterosexual marriage. That got eliminated about the time your parents were born. You hate fake things; that’s why your generation isn’t getting married. If you can leave each other when the going gets rough anyway, why call in the clergy and the lawyers? Shack up. So do you want gays to get married, the way I mean marriage? Forever and ever, what God put together? If you do, I’d respect your argument more.

They’re tough rules. I understand. The Schmuck who is typing this had a big problem with them too, when he was your age. He thought he was good enough and smart enough to make his own rules. He hit 50 and saw that his rules didn’t work: not for him, not for society. His sexuality was disordered, and he doesn’t get my Gold Star of Approval just because it was disordered in a heterosexual way. I want you to be bound in love to each other, and to time, and to Dad. That’s what marriage does. And with gays, the time part is missing, because spit don’t make babies.

Dad wants gays not to play boinkie with each other. And that seems so unfair. But Dad didn’t make them gay. The world is broken, and He hurts because of it, hurts so bad that He let his own Son hurt like hell to fix it. Dad and I are trying to implement the fix, and we can fix individuals, but it’ll be awhile yet before we fix the world…or rather, Dad will replace it with a new world. Again, I don’t make the rules; I just pass them on. It’s up to each of us to play the cards we’re dealt, with Dad’s help, even if it seems like the dealer cheats. And that makes it all the more important to be kind to gay people. They have a tough row to hoe. I’ve got to call a sin a sin, but other people’s sins aren’t any of your business. You have enough sins of your own to worry about.

A lot of this stuff is even harder because of your parents. A lot of them said, “I want my children to make up their own minds about religion”. Funny, they didn’t say, “I want my children to make up their own minds about ALGEBRA.” You learned that, and maybe you don’t use it, but if you ever needed it, it would come back. If you don’t know what religion is, or how it works, or what it’s good for, how could it ever come back? Why would you ever become interested? And then maybe you go to church, and hold hands and sing Kum-ba-ya, and the pastor never says anything that’s challenging, because somebody might get offended and withhold their money. That’s fake too. Jesus is the most real, the most countercultural and rebellious thing out there, and it’s my job to point to Him and provide a space where you and He can hang out together, and where somebody can speak the truth, even if it hurts.

I’ve failed you in a lot of ways. I’ve always failed, because I’m made up of folks like the Schmuck and you, who are always looking for the easy way. This is not an easy way. Your friends won’t like you. People may even kill you. Life will become a live-action film, and you’ll be the hero. But the movie is realer than real. I think you’ll like it. Please come back to me.

Canticle was written at the high point of American Catholicism, the mid-50s, before The Spirit of Vatican II (not the letter!) tore everything apart. Miller was a Catholic convert who had before his conversion taken part in the bombing of the Benedictine Abbey of Monte Cassino, which was traumatic for him, and which was a definite influence on Canticle. It’s a bit of a shock in 2013 to read a novel, not specifically aimed at a religious audience, which treats the Church accurately and respectfully, and which deals with theological issues with 99% fidelity. It’s a realistic portrayal: there are sadistic abbots, bad popes, and a priest who punches somebody in the face (like St. Nicholas!). But there is no pederasty and no conspiracies (aside from a little politicking by an abbot). Rather, there is (among other matters) a battle over euthanasia which is shocking in its timeliness.

The theme of the novel is the relationship between religion and science, and the practical necessity for religion to guide the use and development of science. The first part of the novel (originally, three separate novellas) is set 600 years after a nuclear war. In the aftermath, the survivors had attempted to wipe out all knowledge and learning. A scientist named Isaac Edward Leibowitz joined the Church for protection, and founded an order of monks, The Albertine Order of Leibowitz (coincidentally and amusingly abbreviated AOL), to preserve what knowledge had escaped the howling mobs. The monks hand-copy books, as they did during the Dark Ages. A postulant encounters a Jewish pilgrim who points him to the final resting place of the Beatus Leibowitz’s wife, and to some relics, which eventually leads to the canonization of Leibowitz. This mysterious pilgrim appears in all three sections of the book (the only character to do so, given that the time span is 1200 years). In the first part, he is taken by some to be an apparition of Leibowitz himself. In the second section, he scoffs at this and declares himself to be Lazarus. As a type, he fits the legend of the Wandering Jew; he is always looking for the Messiah (who Lazarus would presumably recognize). And it should be noted that standard Catholic belief is that Lazarus eventually died again.

In the second section, set 600 years later, a Renaissance is beginning., along with secular science, which finds itself being co-opted by political power. The Church (in the form of the AOL Abbey) is open-handed with scientific knowledge, while challenging the moral choices of scientists. In the 3rd section (600 years yet farther on) civilization has returned to its former state, including nuclear weapons, and they are starting to be used. A group from the Church, including bishops, sets off in a spaceship to the colony on a planet of Alpha Centauri, to perpetuate the Church, before Mankind destroys itself again (and possibly finally).

The writing style is engaging (indeed, at points so virtuosic as to call attention to itself), the plot energetic, and the ideas of consequence. It’s well worth the read. One wonders what effect the post-Vatican II disruptions would have had on Miller’s writing. Miller suffered from PTSD and depression all his life, and after he wrote Canticle, he became a recluse. He had finished most of a companion novel, Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman, before shooting himself in 1996. It’s been finished and published, I haven’t read it, but the Wikipedia summary suggests that either the Church’s demons or Miller’s own had gotten to it, set as it is in a time of a Babylonian Capitivity of the Church. I might look for it; in the meantime, Canticle gets this layman’s official Nihil obstat and recommendation.

The case was about negligent builders.  3rd generation members of a highly-respected local residential building company family decided to do a couple of spec houses on their own, so that they could get experience with the financing end of things; they’d been working as project managers in the family business. So they built this $470K house, which was bought by a family from Texas. The 2nd winter they’re there, they went back to TX for the holidays. Meanwhile, the temp went down to zero, with high winds. Hubby had to return early for business reasons, returned to flooded house. A copper pipe had burst in a chase between 2nd-floor bathrooms. About $160K in damage to structure ($61K) and contents, paid for by their insurance company, who brought the suit. The homeowners had the $500 deductible tacked on, though they really hadn’t wanted to bring suit. (Indeed, the aforementioned building co. that the defendants were involved with did the restoration.) As one of my fellow jurors said, “If this were about $40K, we wouldn’t be here.” In February of ’07, when the builders still owned the building, temperatures were even lower, winds nearly as high, and the thermostat set even lower, yet the pipes didn’t freeze.

Element of negligence claimed: there was no “true wall” between the unheated attic space over the garage, and one of the bathrooms. This wall was the tub shower surround, with friction-fit insulation on the outside (attic side).  The inspector had made them take the kraft paper off that insulation as a fire hazard, as there was no wall covering it. This is on a southwest interior corner. The forensic engineer claimed that in the high wind conditions, air blew through the soffit and the insulation, under the void created by the rounding of the tub, and into the pipe chase. The pipes there were not insulated, because they didn’t have to be, being surrounded by interior walls…except that apparently that space was communicating with untreated air and should have been dealt with like a crawl space, OR there should have been wood or sheetrock blocking the air.

The installation was according to code, was passed, and the builders are quite meticulous about cosmetic detail. I don’t think that the loss of the paper backing was that big an issue; you lose some r value and gain some permeability. (In fact they had replaced the insulation with non-backed insulation.) But I was asked to believe that there was enough wind to force air up the soffit, blow 6 feet to that wall, go under the 6″ or so of insulation not backed on the bottom, be drawn under the tub and cool that chase to <32 for long enough for the pipes to freeze, with heat on at 60. A power failure alone wouldn’t have done it, because of the thermal mass of the house, though it was possible, given that the pipe was near to the garage and would lose temperature more quickly. But Ohio Edison no longer had or doesn’t keep outage information, and nobody asked about the clocks in the house.

What was annoying was all of the BS info being presented to sway the jury…arguments about whether it was actually 55 or 60 or should have been 68 per insurers’ recommendations, whether they should have turned the water off. (That wouldn’t have been BS had we gotten to proximate cause, I suppose.) The house felt tropical at 61-62 because of the moisture…wouldn’t it feel COLD at that temp? (not if it was the hot water pipe ruptured…as a perceptive juror pointed out.)   If OSB would have sufficed against the insulation, why not the fiberglass surround? Owners felt a draft under the vanity, but didn’t report it when they had reported other problems. And the lawyers sucked. I had so many questions that I couldn’t ask, things that seemed obvious, but they weren’t asking, because neither one had any knowledge of construction whatsoever.  The fact that I was even on this case and not voir dire’d off shows they’re hacks; they asked about insurance industry connections but not building trades. As it turned out, HALF the jury (3 males, including me, 1 female) had building trades connections of one sort or another. Not that it helped either side; we were split evenly. The plaintiff counsel was particularly slimy, not well organized, trading in emotionalism. The way he browbeat the defendants during cross of their testimony was shameful.

Had we gotten to compensation it would have been more interesting yet. One juror wanted to award the $500 deductible to the homeowner and that was IT. The defense had done a pretty good job of discrediting figures. (totalling out a non-depreciated $2500 Toro mower for rust? ) The family was in $144/day lodging for 5.5 mo, largely due to dawdling by the insurance co.

Anyway, at 10:30 today we finally got to discuss the case. Nobody else much wanted the job, so I became the foreman. An initial check showed 6 for the defense (6 out of 8 needed) but people wanted to talk it out. We had one guy (BME, had worked for NASA, had building experience) who was adamantly for the plaintiff, and another guy (builder) leaning that way, as well as eventually another woman. So it became 5-3. After some fairly loose discussion we broke for lunch. A bunch wanted to go to this sandwich place they had heard good things about, and they assured me there were veggie or fish options.  Well, they were out of tuna, and they no longer do the crab cakes because of prices, so they basically had no entrees, so I bid them adieu. Yeah, I could have made a meal of tomato soup and cupcakes, or have them invent a price for a cheese sub,  but why would or should I? Being out of menu items is shameful at any time; being out of your non-meat options on a Friday in Lent is inexcusable (though it was more likely ignorance than active prejudice). So I popped over to McD’s to try the Fish McBites (OK, not cosmic, probably better than the Filet-o-Fish.)

During lunch I had an idea to move things along. I pointed out that the real division in the jury was whether the definition of “workmanlike manner” was the building code, or some other standard. Everyone agreed that the code COULD be a standard. When I said, “If we didn’t have a building code, what would the standard be? How would we establish it?” nobody had any ideas.(And this was a pretty bright and not at ALL liberal crowd). It eventually became clear that the code was what we had to apply, and we eventually voted 7-1 for the defense. There’s a slightly incoherent element here, because we mostly agreed that the damn board should have been there. (it is now!) But there was also a freak element to the incident.  I later got called by one of the recalcitrant jurors who had been compelled to check the building code…and it doesn’t define what constitutes a wall (that was his personal issue.)

Afterwards he and I were talking to the defendants. In an amusing incident, I was referring to one of Plaintiff’s most egregious misstatements. “…’a wall you can walk through’? Uh, no; there’s a fucking TUB SURROUND there.”, and just then Plaintiff came out of the jury room.  After he passed, a defendant said, “You have GREAT timing”, clearly seeing Plaintiff hearing himself being mocked just made his day. Personally, I couldn’t look at him during closing arguments. That said, we did take care not to let that contaminate our judgement. But I’d have to say that the builders largely got off on a technicality. This same juror later talked to Plaintiff and told him everything he’d done wrong. “You’re a better man than I am, ” I said when he told me.

OK, here’s my advice for lawyers:
1, Don’t deal with snark or emotion. All we want is the facts. Be kind.

2. If part of the applicable law involves “workmanlike manner” and “ordinary care”and something passes code, you might want to offer evidence as to what else that is in the industry.

3. If you’re  a large national home insurance company, hire a lawyer with a clue about the building trades.

4. Enter the freaking building code into evidence.

5. If you’re defending builders, find a witness besides them to testify that they follow good building practice.

6. When you have to prove that “a reasonably careful person would have anticipated that an act…would likely result in some damage”, and your expert witness admits that it took him 2 weeks to find the problem, YOU have a problem.

7. Using the word “profit” as an epithet doesn’t fly in any part of Portage Co. east of the Kent city limits. Nor does trying to bring up the insurance co.’s profit margins (besides bringing an instant objection)

And last, a shout-out to my fellow jurors: there are great human beings, attentive, humane, and just, and it was a pleasure to work with them.