But there is an i in pseudo-intellectual.

I'm doing a couple of pieces related to happiness or the lack thereof, and in the course of my research I came across a quote, from an article in Discover, that's almost breathtaking in the magnitude of its stupidity. The speaker is Harvard's Nancy Etcoff (the latest academic to hop on the positive-psychology bandwagon* that has all but hijacked the psychology department at that Ivy League enclave), and her thinking goes as follows: "The more selfish you are, the more unhappy you are. If you look at suicide notes, they are filled with I, me, and my." See the reasoning? Unhappy people commit suicide. Suicide notes are full of I, me, my. Selfish people use I, me, my a lot. Ergo, selfish people are unhappy people.... Got it? (Maybe Etcoff has better proof than this, but it's the example she uses, and I don't think it's unfair to judge a person's argument by the evidence she uses.)

First of all, anyone writing a suicide note is about to end his life and is pausing briefly to explain why, so perhaps he can be forgiven his momentary self-absorption. But the real point is, people commit suicide because they are in pain, and pain is experienced personally. What would you expect a suicide note to say? ("You people are always so damn depressed. And those folks down the road! Don't even get someone else started....") That is no more an indication of selfishness than if you were to ask some guy who'd just applied a Band-Aid why he did it and he replied, "I cut my finger and, well, it was kind of bothering me."

This is the problem I have with making "emerging sciences" out of realms that are so highly speculative and uncertain. The so-called authorities in those realms, in order to justify their existence and position, end up looking for things to expound on, finding significance in happenstance or random apocrypha, connecting dots that have no business being connected, at least not yet. In the attempt to sound all-knowing about the unknowable, they overreach big-time, and usually end up sounding just plain dumb.

Moreover, this notion that you can tell how selfish a person is by examining his prose and counting the appearances of I, me, my... Well, some of us could go on and on, but why not end with the words of a person who, based on that formula, is surely one of recorded history's most selfish people. I mean, will you look at all those i's!:

"One evening we went out and we picked up four people from the street. And one of them was in a most terrible condition. And I told the Sisters: You take care of the other three, I take of this one that looked worse. So I did for her all that my love can do. I put her in bed, and there was such a beautiful smile on her face. She took hold of my hand, as she said one word only: Thank you—and she died. I could not help but examine my conscience before her, and I asked what would I say if I was in her place. And my answer was very simple. I would have tried to draw a little attention to myself, I would have said I am hungry, that I am dying, I am cold, I am in pain, or something, but she gave me much more—she gave me her grateful love..."
—Mother Teresa, from her Nobel acceptance speech, 1979

* Fathered by Marty Seligman, whom I cite in several places in SHAM.

Flocking to the polls.

(DISCLAIMER: I'm writing this "in one take," from Vegas, no less, so I apologize for any errors in computing or manipulating numbers that the reader may find herein. Please feel free to point them out. Broad-brush, however, I do believe that my case is sound.)

I must be either the dumbest or—giving myself the benefit of the doubt—the most naive person in America. I say that because I was actually shocked by the results of a poll question on AOL today that sought to take the temperature of public sentiment on race's role in the forthcoming election. The poll had four questions. One asked whether the nation was ready for a black president, and I'm not sure we can deduce any meaningful insights from the dispiriting results; a "no" answer could simply be a sign of fatalism from a well-meaning person who whiffs a good deal of closet racism in the air. I'd even imagine that quite a few who support Obama answered "no" to that question.

But the next query was direct, and telling: "Are you personally ready for a black president?" This was the stunner, to me: 47 percent of the roughly 200,000 respondents (at this writing) answered "no."

In a subsequent question that plumbed the racial breakdown of poll participants, 77 percent self-identified as white and only 9 percent as black. Making the reasonable (though not ironclad) assumption that the same demographics hold for the responses to all questions*, one must conclude that at least 36 percent of the whites (i.e., 77 percent of the 47 percent who answered "no," they weren't ready) are confessing that they wouldn't vote for a black candidate. Now, AOL polls hardly can be said to carry scientific weight. But I'm floored nonetheless. Truly, and sadly. (I'm also left wondering: Who are the rest of the 47 percent? Did all the Hispanics and Asians say they wouldn't "vote black"? I know, I know: I'm assuming that almost no blacks weren't ready for a black president. Read on.)

At the same time, I'm troubled by the conventional wisdom on what such stats "tell us about today's America." The springboard for the AOL poll was in fact a New York Times piece on a similar (and more scientific) survey, which found a similar racial divide. But again, in its calculus of American bigotry, the Times had no particular comment on the 83 percent of blacks who said they lean towards Obama. Eighty-three percent. You're telling me that's just coincidence? Seems to me that that level of approval rating has to have racial underpinnings, too. (Nowadays it's hard enough to get 83 percent of any given constituency to agree on the spelling of the word agree.) Put another way: Many black voters probably like the guy because he's black and he's viable, and/or they figure he'll support "black causes." This, by the way, echoes the findings in exit polls from primaries, especially as the spring wore on and Obama's viability was certified. So I return to another question that I've asked a half-dozen times on this blog:

Why is the fact that four of five black voters favor Obama somehow more benign (and/or better news for race relations) than the fact that at least a third of whites reject him? Is not bigotry—pro or con—still bigotry?

* Not all respondents answered all questions. The question on demographics garnered the lowest number of total responses.

An unconvincing 'mallrat'-ionale?

Once again, to underscore how selective we can be in deciding whom we discriminate against: A major shopping venue in my region, Delaware's Christiana Mall, has decreed that henceforth, after 5 p.m., shoppers under 18 no longer will be welcome unless accompanied by parents or other adults. The rationale is simple: Teens cause trouble. They're loud, they're obnoxious, they start fights. They drink illegally, then come into the mall and curse and carouse, or cruise the parking lot with their 500-watt stereos blaring profane hip-hop. Even when they're not wreaking havoc, these swarms of so-called mallrats indulge in embarrassing PDA sessions with their BFs/GFs. So the mall is drawing a line in the marble. This is actually part of a trend. In fact, there are malls that have banned teenagers, period, after certain hours. And, of course, there are many downtown areas (and some entire cities) that have established curfews for underage citizens. In such cases, the message to teens is blunt and unflinching: You're either home by a certain hour or we arrest you.

As targets of discrimination, you see, teenagers are "safe." They can't vote until they're almost done being teens, and they're often apolitical anyway; it's hard to be too political when you're constantly texting Heather to, like, find out who Josh hooked up with last night*. We don't see teens as a legitimate constituency. Basically, everyone past the age of 20 thinks of teenagers as airheads whose rights aren't worthy of consideration. So when a mall steps forward and announces a policy like the one described above, we don't force the mall to justify its actions. We don't demand proof that teens, by and large, are unruly. We know how we feel about teens, and that's good enough for us. Therefore, even though the mall may be curtailing the freedom of all teens based on the transgressions of a relative few, we nod and say, "Yeah, that makes sense. And it's about damn time, too!"

But suppose we replace the word "teens" with the word "Hispanics" (or even, say, "Hispanic teens"). Suppose mall management had asked its security people for an assessment of who was causing the most trouble, and the security people replied, "That's easy: It's the Latinos." Regardless of whether the security team's perceptions were valid—let's say there were stats showing that Hispanics had accounted for 78 percent of all crimes committed in the mall during the past five years—would a mall be permitted to enact a policy that banned Hispanics only (or even "just" Hispanic teens) from the premises? If a mall tried to do that, would the media report the event uncritically, as my local ABC affiliate reported Christiana's decision vis-a-vis teens as a class? Or would the reporting sound a distinct note of outrage and indignation?

For the benefit of those who periodically accuse me of being a closet bigot: I'm not suggesting that malls ban Hispanics. Nor is this my "clever" way of saying that if malls really want to get rid of the problem, they should ban Hispanic teens specifically, not all teens. I'm saying that there are some forms of bias that we're allowed to have based merely on general impressions—e.g. that teens are a pain in the ass—while there are other forms of bias that we're not even permitted to contemplate, regardless of whether we have hard data to back up those impressions. In much the same vein, we are permitted to have (and espouse) positive bias rooted in nothing more than anecdotal inference—"women excel at teamwork"—but not negative bias rooted in anecdotal inference—"women make lousy bosses." We wouldn't be allowed to say that last one even if we had reams of statistical data supporting it.

For the 153rd time, I ask: Will someone explain this to me?

* and in making that remark, I hereby show evidence of my own biases.

Criminal (in)justice.

I've been watching a lot of true-crime lately. It's not hard to do; true-crime is the staple content nowadays of TV newsmagazines like 48 Hours, Dateline, and Primetime: Crime. (Seems like every show on television is either a reality series, a drama set in a hospital or police precinct, or a true-crime newsmagazine.) Invariably as such shows rouse to a finish with the obligatory guilty verdict, thus providing closure to hard-line viewers who otherwise would've felt cheated, I end up leaping to my feet and screaming NO! at the television (which, oddly, does not reply or even acknowledge me). I do this not because I think the defendant is a nice person, or even that he or she is innocent, necessarily; most of the time it seems likely that the cops got the right guy (or gal). But—call me crazy—I always thought guilt actually had to be proved beyond a reasonable doubt (and to a moral certainty, the oft-forgotten part of the admonition given to juries*). In nine out of 10 of these shows, unless whole portions of the prosecution's case unaccountably got left on the cutting-room floor, guilt goes sorely un-proved, at least from my POV. Not only that, but when the reporter convenes jurors after-the-fact to question them on their thinking, it becomes clear that the jury rendered its verdict based on factors that had no business even being included in the case. Again, IMHO.

Ergo, I hereby take the liberty of presenting a few recommended changes to a criminal-justice system that—if these shows are any indication—is seriously broken:

1. PLEASE: No so-called evidence rooted in the defendant's demeanor upon learning of the crime.
I don't want to hear testimony from cops (or a post-mortem from a juror) that goes, "I was immediately suspicious because he didn't react the way you'd expect people to, when they just found out their wife is dead...." Human beings are different and react differently to things. I know people who fly into a blind rage when confronted with the slightest speck of adversity, and I know people who just sort of swallow and do/say nothing even when faced with major setbacks. "Unexpected reactions" are not evidence of anything, have no direct relevance to the commission of a crime, and should never be admissible at trial. Related to this:

1a. PLEASE: No so-called evidence that suggests that the defendant was happy the victim was dead.
I don't care if the defendant started laughing or burst into applause when informed that her husband or former business partner had just been found decapitated and on fire. Maybe she hated the man and wished him dead. That has nothing to do (legally) with whether she killed him.

2. PLEASE: No so-called evidence based on commonplace things the defendant did, or didn't do, or would've normally been expected to do (or not do), in the days following the crime.
Look, it's one thing if the defendant was observed out in his yard throwing guns, knives and body parts into a giant vat filled with sulfuric acid on the night his wife disappeared. But I don't want to hear vague evidence about how so-and-so "never called the cops to check on the progress of the case" or "seemed perfectly fine to me" or began screwing the neighbor-lady up the street the day of the funeral. (Nor, for that matter, do I want to hear about how he'd been screwing the neighbor-lady up the street for the past two years. That has nothing to do with what happened the night of the killing.) Once again, people are different, and people in a high-stress situation may act strangely. That's not evidence of anything, has no relevance to the commission of the crime, and should not be admissible at trial.

3. PLEASE: No so-called evidence based on the defendant's behavior/comportment at trial or during testimony.
I don't want to hear jurors say things like, "I was watching him as he sat there during the testimony, and he just seemed so arrogant to me" or "I didn't see any emotion in him at all when they talked about the night of his wife's death...." That's not evidence of anything, has no relevance to the commission of the crime, and should not be admissible at trial. Moreover, if the defendant chooses to testify, I don't want to hear jurors later say things like, "I just didn't believe him. He wasn't credible to me." Jurors shouldn't be permitted to simply discount sworn testimony on the basis that "I just didn't buy it." Now let me be clear: Jurors can make that determination if they catch the defendant in a lie, or spot contradictions/inconsistencies in his or her testimony. But no juror should be allowed to disregard otherwise consistent testimony simply because that juror "didn't like the guy's manner" or "didn't find him credible." If the defendant testifies under oath, that testimony must be given proper weight. Not only that, but in the absence of refuting evidence, that testimony must prevail.

4. PLEASE: No cases built entirely on circumstantial evidence.
I know, this is a really controversial one that would have prosecutors nationwide screaming bloody murder. But people, I've had bizarre things happen to me in life. In all likelihood, you have, too. There are times when things that just don't happen...suddenly happen. Ergo, you cannot, I repeat, cannot send someone to jail for life (or, god forbid, to the gas chamber!) because a series of bizarre coincidences suggest that s/he committed homicide. If there are no witnesses and there is no direct/physical evidence, there is no case. Period.

5. PLEASE: No cases built primarily on the fact that prosecutors couldn't seem to find anyone else around who would've/could've done the deed.
This, to me, is prosecution "by default," and shouldn't even require further comment.

Though most of my gripes are with the prosecution, I do have some quibbles with the defense as well. And so:

6. Defense attorneys should not be permitted to advance "alternative theories of the crime" that they know are fictitious.
If the defendant has confessed to his attorney, then the attorney's defense of his client must be limited to highlighting the reasonable doubt in the prosecution's case. No attorney should be permitted to put on an affirmative defense that suggests the involvement of other people he already knows had nothing to do with the case. That is fraud. And if laws (and even constitutional protections) need to be changed to effect this, so be it.

Reckoning guilt or innocence should be based on a balance sheet. As much as possible, we should seek to remove the "human factor." I'll have more on this as time permits.

* though that phrase has now come under fire.

Cut-throat marketing.

Perhaps you've wondered, as I have, where the end-game may be in the loopy and ongoing bout of one-upmanship that holds razor manufacturers in its vice-grip. (I do not claim to be the first to wonder. See what Gizmodo had to say, riffing on an article in The Economist.) How many blades is enough? Too many? First we had the twin-blade revolution (Trac II), then we marched on to three blades (Mach-3 etc.), then four (Quattro etc.)...and now some of these gizmos look like embryonic miniblinds. (Here's a little background on Gillette's product progression.) As it is, I can't imagine what a man of my father's generation would make of all this—and yet the trend shows no signs of abating. These days, if you shave your face with a single-bladed razor, you feel like that vaguely ominous-looking old guy in the small cottage just outside town who still does his front lawn with a push mower.

The real kicker is, we've reached the point in shaving evolution where function takes a back seat to form. If you're a man who likes his face smooth and clean-shaven (or whose honey does), you know what I'm talking about. The bigger and bulkier today's "shaving systems" become, the more unwieldy they are to maneuver around the angles of one's facial contours. For example, 'round about the time Gillette trotted out Mach-3 (and my ever-helpful wife began buying them for me), I began to notice how much more difficult it got to effectively shave the tiny mustache hairs directly below my nose. You just couldn't get the damn contraption in there anymore and still leave yourself room for the distance of travel necessary to cut the uppermost hairs; I had to keep a single-blade razor around for such tasks. Similarly, I defy anyone to execute a nice, straight, one-pass sideburn cut using a razor above the two-blade level. You usually end up cutting about a half-inch's worth of hair north of where you intended to. And unevenly at that.

The Economist hit the blade right on the edge when it noted, "It took a leisurely 70 years after King Gillette invented the safety razor for someone to come up with the idea that twin blades might be—or, at least sell—better" (emphasis added). This phenomenon is sales-driven, not functionality-driven. As is true of more than a few products on the market today, five-blade razors exist because people will buy them. What such devices add in utility (if anything) is far less important than what they offer in "cachet," or the buyer's belief that the products are simply the Clear Next Step In Shaving and thus a necessary component of any proper gentleman's personal-hygiene arsenal.

This may sound innocent enough, especially when you're talking about products that top out at $10 or $12. But think about it: Why should there be products that, in essence, exist solely to create a marketplace niche for which there was no preexisting need? If a single-blade razor shaves as well as (or better than) its five-blade counterpart—for less than half the price—then why should anyone even consider buying the five-blade razor? Ergo, why should there be a five-blade razor? Nor does the discussion end there, because an interesting thing happens along the way: Typically, the mere existence of the "better" product exerts an incremental upward force on the prices of many or all of the products beneath it. It does this by creating an artificial ceiling from which "lesser" versions of that same product are discounted. Look at it this way: If there were no Cadillacs, then who would willingly pay $35,000 for a Buick? But because GM has conditioned many status-minded buyers (especially older ones) to think of a Buick as "almost a Caddy," people pay almost-Caddy prices for a car that is, in every meaningful aspect, just a glorified Chevy.

Of course, so is the Caddy itself, in many important respects. But because that requires some amplification, and I'm already at risk of going pretty far afield here, it's a good place to stop. I'll just leave you with an exhortation to think about such things when you make your consuming decisions. Yeah, it's a pain. Only, if more of us took those pains, lots of things would cost a whole lot less. Including gasoline.

An outlook that fits me to a tea?

True baseball fans will remember Jim Abbott. Even those just casually acquainted with the sports world will recall hearing something about "that one-armed pitcher" who became a Major League sensation for a time. In reality Abbott was one-handed, which is to say, his right arm ended just below the wrist. He pitched successfully for a decade, 1989-1999, after devising a brisk and efficient way of transferring his glove from his right stump to his (left) throwing hand after delivering each pitch.* He even tossed a no-hitter in 1993. Just as impressive, perhaps, Abbott collected two hits of his own during his swan-song year with the National League's Milwaukee Brewers. He'd spent the rest of his career in the American League, where pitchers generally don't bat.

This morning I was reading an article about Abbott and what he's up to these days, and I was at first dismayed to learn that what Abbott is up to is motivational speaking. That's not to say I was surprised. If you think about it, who better personifies the standard Sportsthink mantra—"It's all up to you! You can do anything if you really put your mind to it!"—than a one-armed ballplayer?** Well, I'm here to tell you that I was pleasantly surprised by what I actually heard from Abbott (or at least what was quoted in the newspaper. For all I know, his seminar audiences may be treated to an hour's worth of Lasorda-style magical (sports)thinking). Abbott points out that in the game just prior to his no-hitter, he'd had a terrible outing, so bad that he wondered how he was going to right the ship and become a successful pitcher again. And what does he conclude from this astonishing game-to-game turnabout? "You might be down now but you don't know what's going to happen tomorrow." Or—to paraphrase—if things went from good to bad, they can go from bad to good again.

Now that's a terrific motivational message—not just because it's uplifting, but because it's likely true in most settings. Also notice what Abbott doesn't say, at least in this passage. He doesn't try to blur the distinction between the possible and the probable. He doesn't lapse into Byrne-ese and start blabbering about how, if you believe it, it will happen. He just says, in essence, that you shouldn't give up too soon. Point is, we don't know what's going to happen next. Ergo—if I may be permitted to supply my own expansion on Abbott's thoughts—while there's no reason to expect life to suddenly shower us with abundance, there's no reason to expect life to keep kicking us in the ass, either. But if you don't at least strive for greatness, then you're probably going to get a lesser result than someone who tries really hard.** So just go out and keep striving and maybe, just maybe, you'll be rewarded.

File that under "What Steve's self-help book would sound like, if he wrote one, Chapter 5...."

===================================

And then, at the other pole of the vast attitudinal continuum (I would say "on the other hand," but I don't want to be accused of having some tasteless fun at Jim Abbott's expense), there's my youngest son. This morning he phones his mother from Vegas, where he lives these days, quite upset about the fact that Wendy's doesn't offer iced tea (at least not at 8:12 a.m. his time). I'm not overstating. He was indeed quite upset over this, my wife reports. I think the message here is this: If you're the kind of person who gets "quite upset" because there's no iced tea at your local fast-food joint—upset enough to phone home at 8:12 a.m. specifically to complain about it—you could probably use an attitude adjustment. Hell, maybe even a one-on-one with Tommy Lasorda.

* "Normal" two-handed pitchers, of course, wear the glove on the non-throwing hand, which Abbott was unable to do because he lacked any fingers with which to control the glove. It should be obvious that a pitcher requires a glove not just for defensive purposes—to field the ball as part of his team's overall effort to retire the opposing batters—but also for self-defense, in the case of laser-shots that come back at him at speeds well in excess of 100mph.
** Even though the odds of any given one-armed ballplayer making it to the Major Leagues are probably 5 million to 1, no matter how much he "wants it."
*** though even then, the link between effort and outcome is far from conclusive, especially in a sport like baseball, where totally random events play a key role in separating winners from losers.

Of long-ago loves and loose latter-day lips.

We'll start with a little trip down memory lane. When I was 17 and still a sweet and trusting young man, I fell head over heels for a Jewish girl named Zandra. (The ethnicity is relevant here.*) I thought we were soul-mates in every respect, from our spooky-similar tastes in jazz and literature right down to the fact that we shared the same date of birth—March 1, 1950. Naturally, this meant that our love couldn't be allowed to last.

Zandra warned me from the outset that there really wasn't anywhere for the relationship to go, given her parents' image of the boy she was "meant" to marry: First and foremost, as well as last and utmost, he would have to be Jewish. But being Steve, I insisted on setting myself up for failure and heartbreak anyway, and we managed to hold our star-crossed** love affair together, in mostly clandestine fashion, for almost a year. In the end, her parents, who were not only Jewish but practicing Orthodox Jews, so abhorred the prospect of their daughter pairing off with a gentile that her dad actually planned and executed a top-secret exodus late in her senior year of high school, spiriting my beloved away to another neighborhood in the dead of night so that we could no longer see or even locate each other. (Note to younger readers: Believe it or not, there was a time before AIM, texting and Facebook.)

In postscript, I should mention that four years later I ran into Zandra one evening in the Brooklyn College cafeteria—she'd recently enrolled to get her Master's at night—and I couldn't help noticing the glittering rock on her left hand. She smiled sheepishly. I smiled back, though I'm not sure my eyes participated. We both kind of shrugged. "It is what it is" wasn't yet in vogue in those days, but it should have been, as it was the perfect expression for the moment.

The thing is, Zandra's parents' objections went beyond religion. She had explained that they harbored deep prejudices against Italians in particular, whom they viewed as being immoral, vaguely subhuman, and frankly dangerous. Whenever Zandra tried to edge into the subject with them, her father would pound his fist and start thundering names like "Capone! Luciano!" It didn't help matters that one of the major New York crime bosses of the era also happened to be named Salerno, as in "Fat Tony."

Apart from the aforementioned heartbreak, I had two levels of reaction to all this. As someone who had long ago rejected race and ethnicity in my own life, I resented being lumped together with the Sons of Italy en masse, especially when it was being done to tar me with the same brush. But on another level, the human level, I understood Zandra's father's fears. Though his attitude seemed unfair and dismissive of my individuality, it did not seem wholly unreasonable in a big-picture/experiential sense, because when you heard Italian names in the news in those days, there was often some sinister Mob connection. Certainly there was no shortage of high-profile hoods whose names ended in vowels. Even in just a local sense, it was clear that too many of the rough-hewn, tee-shirt-wearing Italian kids from Flatbush made a favorite sport out of picking on the docile Jewish boys coming home from Yeshiva. In that context, could I really have expected at least some folks—above all, those with a strong sense of their own ethnicity and shared cultural values—to feel differently about "my people"?

And that's my long-winded anecdotal way of wading into the latest Don Imus flap. No doubt you've heard by now, so I'll treat this in "second-day format" (you can get the particulars here). According to the Authorized View of the matter, Imus once again inserted foot firmly in mouth, then arguably made things worse the next day by offering an explanation that not a few observers considered pretty bogus. And yet I find myself wondering—applying the same standards of judgment that my teenage sweetheart's dad employed in critiquing Italians—what was so cosmically unforgivable about what Imus said in the first place, even if he made no subsequent effort at CYA? What is the color of many of the professional athletes who break the law, after all? And wasn't it the Rev. Jesse Jackson himself who (in)famously conceded*** that if he hears footsteps behind him at night, he feels relieved when he turns around and sees a bunch of white kids?

Look, by now you probably know my basic stance here. I'd much prefer that we abandon the entire concept of race. Just scrap it. Trouble is, we live in a society that has an obsessive-compulsive fascination with race in all its manifestations; a society that's determined to add an overlay of race/racism to any situation involving a diverse array of people, even when no plausible reason for that overlay readily suggests itself. So if we insist on giving race the exalted role that it clearly plays nowadays (and that it's sure to play much more of, as the 2008 presidential campaign heats up), then you cannot view it through a lens that selectively filters out the negative shadings.

Once again here, I'll be purposely provocative in making my point. The numbers tell us that, while blacks constitute just 12.4 percent of the overall U.S. population, they are arrested in just under half (47.7 percent) of the total number of murders nationwide. To put it another way, in 2005, blacks were seven times more likely than whites to be arrested and prosecuted for a homicide. That skew has remained fairly constant, ebbing or flowing a few points one way or another, for more than a quarter-century, according to breakdowns by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. This could indicate a grievously racist system. That is in fact the explanation that receives the most frequent play in mainstream media. It could also indicate that the social dynamic acting on young blacks is such that they come of age having a lower boiling point than their white counterparts. That possibility is somewhat more controversial, but is still acceptable in public discourse, as it basically blames the environment in which many blacks are forced to live. There is, of course, a third possibility, and it's the one that you cannot publicly utter without being attacked, marginalized and ultimately silenced: that black Americans may have a lower innate boiling point, merely by virtue of being born black. In other words, there is something about being of the black race that makes you genetically more violent.

Let me restate: I am not saying that I believe this to be true. I'm merely saying to the folks who champion race—who talk endlessly about racial role models and glory in all the milestones, the first this and the best that—that you can't have it one way only (just as my own dad couldn't have it one way in talking about DiMaggio and Fermi; if he wanted to be identified with the stars, he had to be identified with the thugs, too). You can't go around picking and choosing the characteristics by which you want your race or ethnic heritage to be represented. You take the whole mix, or you take none of it.

Which is why I say again: Let's have none of it. Or let's leave the Don Imuses (and parents of young girls like Zandra) alone, sad as that seems. No middle ground makes much sense.

* Yes, technically, I know, Judaism is a religion, not an ethnicity. But in New York especially, many people of orthodox Jewish faith treat their religion more as an ethnic way of life that governs all aspects of lifestyle and social behavior.
** and, I might add, sexless. Zandra, the last of a dying (and now dead) breed, was committed to "saving herself" for her husband.
*** albeit with much chagrin.