Monday, May 13, 2019

cops & robbers (& mediocrity)

The case of the Boston gangster Whitey Bulger -- who avoided prosecution by becoming an FBI informant while actually divulging very little information -- is typical of the FBI.


The article touches upon the relationship between Bulger and his FBI handler John Connelly, who was a childhood friend. The potential career paths of the Irish Catholic working class in Boston is limited to 1) police work or municipal services, 2) crime, and 3) drug addiction and alcoholism. It's been like this since the 1840s. 

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/17/dining/barbara-lynch-south-boston-cooking.html

[The Departed, 2006, trailer]


North Boston is Italian and famous for organized crime; south Boston is Irish and famous for disorganized crime.

[The Town, 2010, trailer]



It is somewhat typical of the working class everywhere to move up in the vocations and then move into politics or government jobs (William Shakespeare's father was a glovemaker who prospered, held a number of municipal jobs, became mayor of Stratford, and was supposedly later embroiled in a corruption scandal which led to his fall into poverty). This results in all sorts of subterranean relationships between the police, the unions, the political system and organized crime. Most famously, Bulger's brother was William Bulger, President of the Massachusetts state Senate and later president of the University of Massachusetts (pushed out eventually by Governor Mitt Romney).

[Brotherhood TV show, intro]


So this kind of underlying personal relationship between cops and gangsters and politicians from the working class is common. What is unusual in the case of the Bulgers is that the Bulger brothers are both highly intelligent. Usually these kind of people are pretty mediocre or even just plain stupid.

The 1990 movie "Q&A" offers a glimpse of this working-class world corruption, mediocrity and strangely intertwined relationships. Without getting into the plot, here is a list of coincidental relationships:


1. Timothy Hutton plays Al Reilly, an idealistic young prosecuting attorney and former cop who is not very good at his job. He is investigating a Puerto Rican gangster who turns out to be married to Reilly's former fiancee. 
2. The Puerto Rican gangster was in the same street gang as the Head of the District Attorney's Office, Kevin Quinn (who assigned the case to Reilly because Reilly is not so bright).
3. Nick Nolte's character, a crude, corrupt cop named Mike Brennan, is killing off the old street gang members so that Quinn can run for higher office. 
4.  Reilly cannot reveal the facts to the public because it turns out that his own father, a hero cop who died in the line of duty, was actually a corrupt bagman and racist whose job it was to terrorize minority groups, and Reilly's mother would lose her pension if that were revealed.

[Q&A, 1990, trailer]



Another glimpse into the world of not-so-brilliant working-class people who have entered the judicial system as a path to upward mobility can be found in the 2002 PBS documentary on the San Francisco office of public defenders, "Presumed Guilty" (not the famous 2008 Mexican documentary). Ninety percent of criminal defendants in San Francisco cannot afford their own lawyer, so they rely on public defenders who are overwhelmed by their caseloads.


In this documentary, the public defenders do seem to be very nice, dedicated people who do care about their defendants, people who are invariably economically disadvantaged (and not very bright). Another thing about public defenders that (unintentionally) emerged from the documentary is that they seem to be intellectually average, typically state university graduates who went on to obscure law schools. (The office secretaries giggle when one of the defenders just can't seem to figure out how to use the office telephone system.) Their salaries as public defenders seem quite low.

In the documentary, there is a moment of shock when Mayor Willie Brown seeks to replace one of the hardest working public defenders -- a Japanese American -- with the daughter of one of his black friends. Brown sought to build up his support network of wealthy African Americans by shunting aside a young, aspiring ethnic minority member in favor of an inexperienced affluent minority member. (Of course, the members of the new black elite, with the exception of Willie Brown's then-girlfriend Kamala Harris, were until recently at the very bottom of American society until they learned to work the system for their profit just like the Irish before them.)

A parallel world to that of mediocre and ethically compromised cops, lawyers and politicians would be that of academia as described by the sociologist C. Wright Mills in his 1951 "White Collar". He describes a feudal world that was comprised of unimaginative if earnest scholars who largely derive from the lower-middle class, and for whom an academic career is a huge step up in status. Lacking the social graces, they also lack grace of mind and imagination. (IIRC, Mill's was himself an Irish Catholic from Texas, the son of an insurance salesman, so this critique is also self-criticism.) (126)

4. The Professors 

Schoolteachers, especially those in grammar and high schools,
are the economic proletarians of the professions. These outlying
servants of learning form the largest occupational group of the
professional pyramid; some 31 per cent of all professional peo-
ple are schoolteachers of one sort or another. Like other white-
collar groups, their number has expanded enormously; they
have, in addition, been instrumental, through education, in the
birth and growth of many other white-collar groups.

The increase in enrollment and the consequent mass-produc-
tion methods of instruction have made the position of the col-
lege professor less distinctive than it once was. Although its
prestige, especially in the larger centers, is considerably higher
than that of the public-school teacher, it does not usually attract
sons of cultivated upper-class families. The type of man who is
recruited for college teaching and shaped for this end by grad-
uate school training is very likely to have a strong plebeian
strain. His culture is typically narrow, his imagination often
limited. Men can achieve position in this field although they
are recruited from the lower-middle class, a milieu not remark-
able for grace of mind, flexibility or breadth of culture, or scope 
of imagination. The profession thus includes many persons who 
have experienced a definite rise in class and status position, 
and who in making the climb are more likely, as Logan Wilson 
has put it, to have acquired 'the intellectual than the social 
graces/ It also includes people of 'typically plebeian cultural 
interests outside the field of specialization, and a generally philis- 
tine style of life/ 
 
Men of brilliance, energy, and imagination are not often at- 
tracted to college teaching. The Arts and Sciences graduate 
schools, as the president of Harvard has indicated, do not re- 
ceive 'their fair share of the best brains and well-developed, 
forceful personalities.' Law and medical schools have done much 
better. It is easier to become a professor, and it is easier to con- 
tinue out of inertia. Professions such as law and medicine offer 
few financial aids by way of fellowships, while that of teaching 
the higher learning offers many. 
 
The graduate school is often organized as a 'feudal' system: 
the student trades his loyalty to one professor for protection 
against other professors. The personable young man, willing to 
learn quickly the thought-ways of others, may succeed as readily 
or even more readily than the truly original mind in intensive 
contact with the world of learning. The man who is willing to 
be apprenticed to some professor is more useful to him. 
 
Under the mass demand for higher degrees, the graduate 
schools have expanded enormously, often developing a me- 
chanically given doctoral degree. Departmental barriers are 
accentuated as given departments become larger in personnel 
and budget. Given over mainly to preparing college teachers, 
the graduate schools equip their students to fulfill one special 
niche. This is part of the whole vocationalizing of education— 
the preparation of people to fulfill technical requirements and 
skills for immediate adjustment to a job. 
 
The specialization that is required for successful operation as 
a college professor is often deadening to the mind that would 
grasp for higher culture in the modem world. There now is, as 
Whitehead has indicated, a celibacy of the intellect. Often the 
only 'generalization' the professor permits himself is the text- 
book he writes in the field of his work. Such serious thought as 
he engages in is thought within one specialty, one groove; the 
remainder of hfe is treated superficially. The professor of social 
science, for example, is not very likely to have as balanced an 
intellect as a top-flight journalist, and it is usually considered 
poor taste, inside the academies, to write a book outside of one's 
own field. The professionalization of knowledge has thus nar- 
rowed the grasp of the individual professor; the means of his 
success further this trend; and in the social studies and the hu- 
manities, the attempt to imitate exact science narrows the mind 
to microscopic fields of inquiry, rather than expanding it to em- 
brace man and society as a whole. To make his mark he must 
specialize, or so he is encouraged to believe; so a college faculty 
of 150 members is split into 30 or 40 departments, each autono- 
mous, each guarded by the established or, even worse, the 
almost-established man who fears encroachment or consolidation 
of his specialty. 
 
After he is established in a college, it is unlikely that the pro- 
fessor's milieu and resources are the kind that will facilitate, much 
less create, independence of mind. He is a member of a petty 
hierarchy, almost completely closed in by its middle-class en- 
vironment and its segregation of intellectual from social life. In 
such a hierarchy, mediocrity makes its own rules and sets its 
own image of success. And the path of ascent itself is as likely 
to be administrative duty as creative work.

In sum, in postwar America, the USA continued with its expansion in the number of students completing high school and going on to college. There was a need to churn out more professors, and the most efficient way to do that was to have graduate students focus on acquiring a very narrow range of knowledge in a factory-like environment, and to have many PhD programs at all sorts of universities. This would tend to appeal to geeky young men with a purely technical cast of mind. This is a personality profile so different from the European ideal of a polymath intellectual.


In the 21st century, the academic world is not continuing that expansive growth (something like 5 to 15 colleges close down every year in the USA). It could be that the old European ideal of the elite Renaissance scholar has become more appropriate. This might mean that there should be fewer PhD programs and that these programs should be more selective, and that these programs should not be so narrow in focus. 


Mills' portrait of 1950s academia might provide a diagnosis and prescription that might be applied to other areas of professional stagnation. 

For example, it might apply also law school -- there are too many law schools, they are lame, they are too narrow in focus, and they are a scam.



Likewise, perhaps police officers should be better educated, and perhaps there should be fewer of them.

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