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The burden of domestic violence

The news hit Boston like a bombshell:  Jerry Remy‘s son was arrested for murder.  Jerry Remy is the former Red Sox second baseman and long time Sox television commentator.  He is the President of Red Sox Nation.  We have seen him through cancer, depression and a recent reoccurrence – a minor one he told us.  When he is not broadcasting games, we miss him.  So hearing that Jared Remy had been involved in a domestic violence incident that resulted in the stabbing to death of his girlfriend and mother of his child was shocking.

All the facts are not in, but there was a violent incident two days before that resulted in injury and a court appearance for Jared Remy the next day.  Jennifer Martel, for reasons that we really don’t know, did not appear to ask for a retraining order and, even though Massachusetts law allows for it, the district attorney did not request one.  Jared Remy has a history of violence.  A little over 24 hours later, Martel was dead.  She had been stabbed to death on the patio of their home.  Some neighbors tried to intervene and one of them was also injured.

The DA and the state attorney general are both investigating and looking into changes that might prevent similar incidents in the future.

Everyone is wondering why Martel didn’t just leave, but the question I want to ask is why is it always the woman who has to leave?  I’ve been on task forces, on the board of the Richmond, VA. YWCA, and executive director of a women’s commission.  I have supported shelters and hot line and assisted women to leave home and go to a safe place.  I ran a Clothesline Project.  Everyone in the field knows that the most dangerous time for a woman is when she is getting ready to leave her abuser, but we still expect her to be the one who leaves.  When there are school aged children, they are often put in different schools.  The woman is separated often separated from her friends and support system and so are the children.  She bears the burden, not her abuser.  (And yes, men can also be abused.  Gays and lesbians can abuse their partners and spouses.  But the vast majority of those suffering abuse are women.)  Martel’s family says she was also making plans to leave.

Friends and relatives said Martel, 27, an aspiring teacher who worked at a nearby Market Basket to provide for her daughter, had been trying to extricate herself from what she told them had become an abusive relationship with Remy, the son of famed Boston Red Sox player and broadcaster Jerry Remy.

“I talked to her on Wednesday; she said she was planning her escape,” said Patty Martel, who on Friday was driving from her home in Virginia to Massachusetts. “It started off she was very happy with him, but, as time went on, he showed his true colors, and it got worse and worse.”

Right after the murder of Jennifer Martel, I read a story in the New York Times about a new kind of law.  If someone makes too many calls to 911, the law can require the landlord to evict.

The police had warned Lakisha Briggs: one more altercation at her rented row house here, one more call to 911, and they would force her landlord to evict her.

They could do so under the town’s “nuisance property” ordinance, a law intended to protect neighborhoods from seriously disruptive households. Officials can invoke the measure and pressure landlords to act if the police have been called to a rental home three times within four months.

So she faced a fearful dilemma, Ms. Briggs recalled, when her volatile boyfriend showed up last summer, fresh out of a jail stint for their previous fight, and demanded to move in.

“I had no choice but to let him stay,” said Ms. Briggs, 34, a certified nursing assistant, even though, she said in an interview, she worried about the safety of her 3-year-old daughter as well as her own.

“If I called the police to get him out of my house, I’d get evicted,” she said. “If I physically tried to remove him, somebody would call 911 and I’d be evicted.”

This may be an unintended consequence of a law designed to help landlords with squatter and drug dealers, but the burden often falls on women who are victims of domestic violence.

“These laws threaten citizens’ fundamental right to call on the police for help,” said Matthew Desmond, a sociologist at Harvard.

In a study of citations issued to landlords in Milwaukee, conducted with Nicol Valdez of Columbia University, Mr. Desmond found that domestic violence was involved in nearly one-third of the cases and that rentals in largely black areas were disproportionately singled out.

Legal experts say the laws can give tenants the lasting stain of an eviction record without due process.

In a federal lawsuit being watched by legal aid groups elsewhere, Ms. Briggs has challenged the Norristown ordinance as unconstitutional.

She did so after her fears were realized.

In June 2012, days after her ex-boyfriend, Wilbert Bennett, moved into her house in this struggling town northwest of Philadelphia, he started another drunken, late-night argument. Then came his most violent attack yet: an assault with a broken ashtray that left a gash on her head and a four-inch stab wound in her neck.

Before she passed out, Ms. Briggs begged her neighbor not to call 911 because of the eviction threat, according to the suit, which is being argued by the American Civil Liberties Union.

The neighbor called anyway. Ms. Briggs was taken by helicopter to Philadelphia for emergency treatment. Mr. Bennett is now serving a sentence of one to two years for aggravated assault.

The town says she never got a restraining order.  What if she had gotten one when the boyfriend got out of jail?  In all likelihood he would have come around anyway and she would have had to call 911.

I don’t pretend to know what the answer is, but we need to figure out how to deal with men like Wilbert Bennett and Jared Remy.  Putting them in jail is not the entire answer.  That may well work for a while, but they will get out and often turn up again.   There are a few programs for men, but they are very few.  Some prisons have anger management classes which may work for some.  But as long as we continue to think of ending the abuse as the woman’s responsibility, we will never think of any new solutions.

A death from domestic violence leaves families shattered and children anchorless and what happened with Jennifer Martel and Jared Remy is not an exception.

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Boston’s men in the news

No, I am not talking about the mayoral candidates all but one of whom is a man.  And I’m not talking about Alex Rodriquez and the Yankee who beat the Sox last night. (Maybe we shouldn’t have taunted him so much?)  I’m speaking of James “Whitey” Bulger, recently convicted felon and Larry Summers who thinks he should run the Federal Reserve.  Here is a great take on the two from cartoonist Dan Wasserman.

wise guys

Maybe I’ll go for a walk at Castle Island this week in memory of Whitey.  While I’m walking, I can send negative thought waves to President Obama about Larry.

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Richard the Third – still controversial – updated

King Richard III was a polarizing figure during and after his brief reign over England and he continues to generate controversy still.

You may remember that his bones were found in a Leicester parking lot last year and confirmed to be his earlier this year.  The discovery and my subsequent re-reading of Josephine Tey’s “The Daughter of Time” were subjects for several posts.  Now Leicester and York are in court fighting over where to bury his bones.  The New York Times story appeared yesterday.

As if 500 years of ignominy lying in a grave hastily dug after his defeat in battle were not enough, King Richard III now faces a new battle in the English courts over which of two cities, Leicester or York, will be his final resting place.

A high court judge in London, Charles Haddon-Cave, ruled on Friday that a group backing York’s case, called the Plantagenet Alliance and involving several distant relatives of the slain monarch, could take legal action against the government and the University of Leicester.

The university has laid plans for Richard’s reinterment in Leicester based on a government license that authorized the dig that found the remains. The license specified that the university should decide where the dead king’s remains, if found, should be reburied.

The skeleton of King Richard III was unearthed beneath a municipal parking lot late last year.

The skeleton of King Richard III was unearthed beneath a municipal parking lot late last year.

The plans for a tomb in the near-by Leicester Cathedral and a visitor center began shortly after the remains were discovered.

But in the case heard in London, York’s champions argued that Leicester was never more than a waypoint for Richard on his last night before the Battle of Bosworth Field on Aug. 22, 1485, 20 miles from Leicester. They contend that the slain king’s ancestral home, and the place he had designated as his preferred burial place, was York. They have described Leicester’s haste to lay permanent claim to Richard as a “hijack,” prompting some in the Leicester camp to retort, tartly, that king or not, it is a case of “finders keepers.”

The link with York was underscored by no less an authority than Shakespeare, who began his play “Richard III” with a monologue in which the future king, speaking as the Duke of Gloucester before the tortuous events that would make him monarch, speaks of his older brother, Edward IV, in one of the playwright’s most quoted lines, as a Yorkist. “Now is the winter of our discontent/Made glorious summer by this son of York,” Richard says, before laying out the treacherous schemes that form the webbing of Shakespeare’s work.

It is all quite wonderful.  Maybe the War of the Roses will begin again.

In his ruling on Friday, Judge Haddon-Cave urged Leicester and York to settle the case out of court and to not renew the animosities that drove the 15th-century period known as the Wars of the Roses, between two rival branches of the Plantagenet dynasty, the houses of York and Lancaster. The hostilities ended with Richard’s defeat at Bosworth Field, which gave rise to the Tudor kings under the Bosworth victor, Henry Tudor, who became Henry VII.

“In my view, it would be unseemly, undignified and unedifying to have a legal tussle over these royal remains,” the judge said, appealing to the two sides to avoid engaging in a “Wars of the Roses, Part 2.”

He added that it was inevitable that the question of Richard’s final burial place should arouse “intense, widespread and legitimate public interest” since it involved “the remains of a king of England of considerable historical significance, who died fighting a battle which brought to an end a civil war which divided this country.”

It will be interesting to see where Richard ends up.  Maybe he can be buried in London in Westminster Abbey as a compromise.  And according to the BBC, there are seven other kings (well, six kings and a ruler) whose burial places are unknown.  They are:  Alfred the Great, Harold II, Henry I, Stephen, Edward V, Oliver Cromwell, and James II.  Some one needs to get to work!

UPDATE:  The New York Times reported on May 24, 1014

A British court ruled on Friday​ that King Richard III should be ​re​buried in a cathedral in Leicester,​ the city​ where his remains were found in a parking lot two years ago. The ruling was a defeat for the king’s descendants​ who wanted his remains to be reburied in York,​ arguing that he had spent ​much of his life there. But archaeologists who discovered the king’s remains decided to keep the body in Leicester, a decision backed by Britain’s Justice Ministry. The judges said, ​”There were no public law grounds for the court interfering with the decisions in question.”

Photograph: Getty Images

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The joy of Latin

I took four years of Latin in high school.  My teacher was Kenneth Sheridan who was related to the Civil War General Sheridan.  The highlight of my four years was translating parts of John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural Address into Latin my Senior year as my project.  I don’t remember a great deal of Latin today, but I can read and figure out a little Spanish, French and some Italian because of my Latin.  My high school didn’t participate in Junior Classical League and looking back now, I wonder why.  I think it would have been fun.  At least the Massachusetts folks had fun this year.  They didn’t make the news, but they were the topic of a column by Lawrence Harmon in yesterday’s Boston Globe.

Jeffrey Dubuisson, 17, is rattling off the names of the rulers of the Roman Empire in chronological order as he munches on pizza (derived from the Latin verb pinsere, to pound) at Papa Gino’s in Cleary Square. He speaks with authority on the satirical writings of Juvenal and the epic poetry of Vergil. Boston’s public school system is doing something right.

Jeffrey Dubuisson

Jeffrey Dubuisson

Dubuisson, an incoming senior at Boston Latin Academy, is fresh from Las Vegas where he and three teammates won the national title in the advanced division of the classics competition hosted by the National Junior Classical League. There is no higher honor for players of Certamen, a form of intellectual combat requiring rapid recall of facts about the culture, peoples, and languages of ancient Rome and Greece. After years of falling short to Virginia, Florida, and other powerhouses, a Massachusetts team finally has taken its rightful place in the Pantheon of high school brainiacs,

…

Dubuisson, who lives in Hyde Park, can trace his interest in the classics back to a day in eighth grade at Boston Latin Academy when he was fretting about his D-plus average in Latin. Legendary Latin teacher Janet Fillion [also my neighbor, friend, and cat sitter] urged him to attend Certamen practice as a way to earn extra credit.

“I went to save my grades and ended up loving it,’’ said Dubuisson, whose friends refer to him in the third person as “the Latin dude.’’

I don’t care much if it is music, art, theater, Latin, a sport or science that turns a kid on to school.  I think we’ve move too much into testing and getting “practical” skills to make school fun.  Harmon points out

In Massachusetts, only 42 schools host chapters of the National Junior Classical League. In Boston, only two of the city’s schools — Latin Academy and Boston Latin — offer Latin. Introducing the subject at the city’s middle schools — even for an hour or two a week — could provide students with needed structure and stimulation. Boston’s mayoral candidates are talking about the qualities they want to see in the next school superintendent. An educator who appreciates the importance of the classics belongs on that list.

The students who went to the JCL Convention and won were

…immigrants or children of immigrants from Haiti, China, Albania, and India. Dubuisson is the go-to player for literature, history, and derivatives. Christopher Liao, an incoming junior at Boston Latin School, specializes in translation. Joana Jankulla, an incoming senior at Latin Academy, excels in Latin grammar and mythology. And Meghana Vagwala, an incoming senior at the Advanced Math and Science Academy Charter School in Marlborough, specializes in mythology, quotations, and figures of speech.

We don’t need to be cutting activities in schools, we need to be adding them.  School should be fun and every child should find the thing that makes them smile like Jeffrey Dubuisson, the Latin Dude.

Photograph provided to the Globe by Jeffrey Dubuisson.

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The 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom: My memories

Fifty years ago I was a sixteen year old high school student living in New Jersey.  My parents were community activists and very politically involved.  My mother and several of her friends decided to go to Washington for the march and took me and several of my high school friends.  I know there was some discussion about whether the march would turn violent and some calls were made (and long distance was a big deal back then) to my uncle who lived in D.C.  He must have reassured them and said that he had signed up to make sandwiches to give out to people who didn’t bring their own.  I remember being impressed because he was still a bachelor and, as far as I knew, wasn’t much of a cook.

So we kids were allowed to go along.  I remember the bus ride as long and the bathrooms at the Maryland House really horrible.  When we got to Washington, we asked to go off on our own and set off with a thermos jug of ice water (No bottles of water back then, just a jug and paper cups)  and some bags of oranges and peanut butter and jelly (they wouldn’t spoil in the hot weather) and set off.  It was an interesting little group:  me (Japanese American), at least one African American girlfriend, and several white American boys.  We wormed our way toward the front of where the march was to start instead of going to the end.  I remember people shouting and seeing the folks from the famous picture of the front of the march go by.  We fell in behind them.  I later learned that some people had already started marching and the dignitaries were trying to catch up.

Baez and Dylan

Baez and Dylan

Once we got to the Lincoln Memorial, we first found a spot to sit near some trees, but we soon moved closer to the Reflecting Pool so we could see better.  As it got hotter, and it was very hot,  we joined many by putting our feet in the pool.  We were pretty close to the front, close enough to see Joan Baez and Bob Dylan as well as Marion Anderson and Mahalia Jackson.  We heard rumors that President Kennedy was going to come join us.

I’ll be honest and say that there were a lot, a huge number, of speeches.  I don’t remember very many of them, to be honest.  I know that I was excited to hear and see Myrlie Evers, Rosa Parks and Daisy Bates as part of a tribute to women of the Movement.  But the speech that I remember best was not the famous one given by Martin Luther King, Jr.  The one I remember most clearly was given by John Lewis.   I think that was because he was with the Southern Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and I had met SNCC organizers.  Also he was young and had been arrested many times.  I had no idea at the time the speech was given that it had been censored, but it was still the most militant speech given that day.  He ended

To those who have said, “Be patient and wait,” we must say that we  cannot be patient. We do not want our freedom gradually but we want to  be free now.

We are tired. We are tired of being beat by policemen. We are tired of  seeing our people locked up in jail over and over again, and then you  holler “Be patient.” How long can we be patient? We want our freedom and  we want it now.

We do not want to go to jail, but we will go to jail if this is the  price we must pay for love, brotherhood and true peace. I appeal to all  of you to get into this great revolution that is sweeping this nation.  Get in and stay in the streets of every city, every village and hamlet  of this nation until true freedom comes, until a revolution is complete.  We must get in this revolution and complete the revolution. In the Delta  of Mississippi, in Southwest Georgia, in the Black Belt of Alabama, in  Harlem, in Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia and all over this nation the  black masses are on a march for jobs and freedom.

John Lewis at the Lincoln Memorial, 1963

John Lewis at the Lincoln Memorial, 1963

They’re talking about slow down and stop. We will not stop. All of the  forces of Eastland, Barnett, Wallace, and Thurmond will not stop this  revolution. If we do not get meaningful legislation out of this  Congress, the time will come when we will not confine our march into  Washington. We will march through the South, through the streets of  Jackson, through the streets of Danville, through the streets of  Cambridge, through the streets of Birmingham. But we will march with the  spirit of love and with the spirit of dignity that we have shown here  today.

By the forces of our demands, our determination and our numbers, we  shall send a desegregated South into a thousand pieces, put them  together in the image of God and Democracy. We must say wake up America,  wake up! For we cannot stop, and we will not and cannot be patient.

I still carry that image in my mind.  A young black man thundering, “We want our freedom and we want it now.”   But if he had included words he had wanted to include it is likely that the microphone would have been cut off.  The original text included

I want to know, which side is the federal government on?

The revolution is at hand, and we must free ourselves of the chains of  political and economic slavery. The nonviolent revolution is saying, “We  will not wait for the courts to act, for we have been waiting for  hundreds of years. We will not wait for the President, the Justice  Department, nor Congress, but we will take matters into our own hands  and create a source of power, outside of any national structure, that  could and would assure us a victory.”

At sixteen those words would have sounded so much better than “I have a dream.”

View of the Lincoln Memorial

View of the Lincoln Memorial

I think this was taken relatively early in the day.  My friends and I were at the pool on the left, not too far back and for all I remember, we might already have been there when this was taken.

It was a long ride back to New Jersey and it turned out that I had heat exhaustion, but it was worth it to have been part of history.

There were about 250,000 people there and probably many more will claim that they were there, but I really was.  It was my first large demonstration, but by the time the War in Vietnam was winding down, I was a veteran at these events.  I’m not planning on attending the 50th Anniversary March this year, but I will be there in spirit.

Photograph:  Baez and Dylan uncredited from Wikipedia

Photograph:  John Lewis  Bettmann/ Corbis

Photograph:  Lincoln Memorial  Miles Hodges, Kingsacademy.com

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A cautionary tale

Some Republicans want to pass a comprehensive immigration bill and some voted to do so in the Senate.  And now two of them, Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham, will likely have challengers from the Tea Party wing.  Which brings me to the cautionary tale.  They should read some history and look at what happened to the Federalist Party.  They could begin by reading the very interesting piece in yesterday’s New York Times by James Traub.

Tea Partyers often style themselves as disciples of Thomas Jefferson, the high apostle of limited government. But by taking the ramparts against immigration, the movement is following a trajectory that looks less like the glorious arc of Jefferson’s Republican Party than the suicidal path of Jefferson’s great rivals, the long-forgotten Federalists, who also refused to accept the inexorable changes of American demography.

The Federalists began as the faction that supported the new Constitution, with its “federal” framework, rather than the existing model of a loose “confederation” of states. They were the national party, claiming to represent the interests of the entire country.

Culturally, however, they were identified with the ancient stock of New England and the mid-Atlantic, as the other major party at the time, the Jeffersonian Republicans (no relation to today’s Republicans), were with the South.

John Quincy Adams portrait. "John Quincy ...

John Quincy Adams portrait. “John Quincy Adams”. Metropolitan Museum of Art . . Retrieved September 4, 2009 . (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

And then came the Louisiana Purchase.

“The people of the East can not reconcile their habits, views and interests with those of the South and West,” declared Thomas Pickering, a leading Massachusetts Federalist.

Every Federalist in Congress save John Quincy Adams voted against the Louisiana Purchase. Adams, too, saw that New England, the cradle of the revolution, had become a small part of a new nation. Change “being found in nature,” he wrote stoically, “cannot be resisted.”

But resist is precisely what the Federalists did. Fearing that Irish, English and German newcomers would vote for the Jeffersonian Republicans, they argued — unsuccessfully — for excluding immigrants from voting or holding office, and pushed to extend the period of naturalization from 5 to 14 years.

They even thought about separating New England from the rest of the country.

,,,in the fall of 1814, the Federalists convened the Hartford Convention to vote on whether to stay in or out of the Union. By then even the hotheads realized how little support they had, and the movement collapsed. And the Federalists, now scorned as an anti-national party, collapsed as well.

Contrast that defiance with Jefferson’s Republicans, who stood for decentralized government and the interests of yeoman farmers, primarily in the coastal South.

They ruled the country from 1801 to 1825, when they were unseated by Adams — who, after splitting with the Federalists, had joined with a breakaway Republican faction.

In response, Jefferson’s descendants, known as the Old Radicals, did exactly what the Federalists would not do: they joined up with the new Americans, many of them immigrants, who were settling the country opened up by the Louisiana Purchase.

Their standard-bearer in 1828, Andrew Jackson, favored tariffs and “internal improvements” like roads and canals, the big-government programs of the day. The new party, known first as the Democratic-Republicans, and then simply as the Democrats, thrashed Adams that year. (Adams’s party, the National Republicans, gave way to the Whigs, which in turn evolved into the modern Republican Party.)

Will the Republicans disappear like the Federalists?  Traub doesn’t think so.  But hey are, like the Federalists, on the wrong side of history.

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The daughters of Nancy Pelosi

I’ve always thought Nancy Pelosi was one tough woman.  She would never have allowed her caucus to do to her what is happening to John Boehner and she knows how to count her votes.  I remember watching C-SPAN during the votes for health care – that was a cliff hanger – but I knew that before it came to the follower Speaker Pelosi had counted her votes.  Maybe it would be close, but it would pass.  I don’t know if she will want to stick around long enough for the Democrats to take back the majority again, but she has women coming up behind her.  I’m not talking members of Congress here like Patty Murray and Tammy Duckworth,  to name only two of many, but at the state and local level.

I was reminded of this by a story in the Daily Beast yesterday.    What first caught my eye was that one of the pictures is of my former boss and current Boston Mayoral candidate, Charlotte Golar Richie.

Dem WomenCharlotte is in the upper left.

The story by Patricia Murphy begins

They’re fierce, they’re fearless, and they’re shaking up races and state houses across the country. Meet the new breed of Democratic women who make no apologies for themselves, their beliefs, or their party.

The article says this about Charlotte

In 2000 The Boston Globe wrote, “People who matter in politics predict that Charlotte Golar Richie will be the first black mayor of Boston.” Thirteen years later the former adviser to Mayor Tom Menino and Gov. Deval Patrick, onetime state legislator, and nonprofit executive is finally making a run at the Globe’s prediction in a crowded Democratic field. At a recent campaign rally, she danced herself onto the stage and told the crowd, “If you really want to make change, you can’t be sitting on the sidelines, people! You’ve got to be in it to win it. And I’m in it.” As for the chance to be the first woman to run the city, Golar Richie said, “Women in politics have been dutiful followers. Now it’s my turn. It’s our turn.”

As with the two others in the top row with her, Alison Lundergan Grimes and Wendy Davis,  Charlotte is in a tough race.  Actually Davis hasn’t said yet if she is running for re-election as Texas state rep or will run for governor, but Lundergan Grimes is taking on Mitch McConnell in Kentucky.

Like Christine Quinn who is running for mayor in New York City (bottom right), Charlotte is the woman in a race for with a lot of the candidates – all men.  Wouldn’t it be wonderful if New York and Boston both elect their first women mayors this year?  Nancy Pelosi will be proud and the Republicans who like to rail against her will have lost again.

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Digging in Boston

Nothing new here you might think.  Someone is always digging up a street, a hole for a foundation, or for planting in the park across my street.  But I’m talking about a different kind of digging.  Think Indiana Jones.  Boston City Archeologists have been digging in a backyard in the North End of Boston this summer.  Think Old North Church, Paul Revere, and lanterns.

The dig followed a decision by the Old North Church, which owns the Clough House, to build a new public walkway to the rear of the home. Under its deed, the patch of land must be studied by archeologists before work can proceed.

The city offered to do the dig for free, Bagley [City archeologist, Joseph] said, in a section of church property where archeologists had never dug before. “We knew we would find stuff back here, but we never expected to find so much stuff from the 1700s,” Bagley said.

I first learned about the dig a couple of weeks ago in an email newsletter from the City.  And I found out that archeology program has a Facebook page where they have been posting nice pictures of pottery shards.  The Boston Globe ran a story yesterday explaining more about the dig.

“This whole backyard was a trash dump,” city archeologist Joseph Bagley said, smiling as he walked gingerly around the site. “And back in the day, I think the backyard would have been just disgusting.”

In other words, perfect.

During two weeks of digging, Bagley and a crew of volunteers collected tens of thousands of items from the 1700s. The haul included long-ago leftovers of everyday life: animal bones, doll parts, and uncounted chips and fragments of dishes and cups that archeologists hope will reveal more about how Bostonians lived as a bustling city sprang up around them.

North End map

If you have ever visited the North End, you know that every square inch seems to be developed so an undisturbed backyard is very unusual.

The household debris came from a home built around 1715 by master mason Ebenezer Clough, who bought open land down the slope from Copp’s Hill. Clough also helped construct the Old North Church, which opened only steps away in 1723.

“He wasn’t hurting, but he wasn’t rich,” Bagley said of the mason.

The home, originally two stories, was passed down through the family and later used by a merchant, then a mariner, and finally a glazier before being expanded to three stories and converted into a tenement about 1808.

So far no Ark of the Covenant has been uncovered, but we will learn a great deal about life in Boston in the 18th Century.

This beautiful piece of pink-bodied tin glazed ceramic was just washed. It dates to the 18th century and was found 70-80 cm down during the Clough House dig

This beautiful piece of pink-bodied tin glazed ceramic was just washed. It dates to the 18th century and was found 70-80 cm down during the Clough House dig

Map:  James Abundis Boston Globe

Photograph:  City of Boston Archeology Program

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Talkin’ Biogenesis and A-Rod

As I write this on Monday morning, Baseball Commissioner Bug Selig is expected to announce who is getting suspended for use of performance enhancing drugs.  One has to have some respect for Ryan Braun the 2011 National League MVP who has already started his 50 game suspension without a whimper.  Contrast that to Alex Rodriguez.  There are rumors of a suspension through the end of next season, but I’m not sure why he isn’t being banned for life.  He’s already been caught once.  Can you tell that I don’t much like the man?

George Vecsey has a  great piece in the New York Times today about A-Rod and the entire scandal.  Rodriguez’s father disappeared when he was nine – the excuse for his inability to grow up.

The singular event in the life of Alex Rodriguez is not his imminent suspension, or the career home run record that now will never happen.

The event that makes him so remote, so rudderless, took place when he was 9, when his father disappeared. This is not pop psychology to explain a man who blundered into the airplane propeller of adult reality. This is his own theory.

Back when he was a young major leaguer, Rodriguez would occasionally explain himself in terms of his missing father. His mother was strong and smart, and remains so to this day, but he expressed bewilderment that a father could just take off.

Many commentators have pointed out the we have a President who actually never knew his father.  While some consider President Obama to be aloof, he cannot be accused of not being an adult.  He also has what is from all appearances a terrific marriage and kids who love him and he loves back.  So can A-Rod really use this as an excuse?   Everyone is different and reacts differently to the same situation.  But here you have an intelligent, gifted man who has wasted his life

Now A-Rod is like the Zelig of baseball, showing up in the spotlight on the busy Canadian doctor, Anthony Galea, who helped bulk up American superstars. And now he is unable to bury his tracks leading to the defunct anti-aging clinic Biogenesis in South Florida. He was a five-tool player. Now he is a multitool cheat, rejected, like a badly grafted body part, by the main corpus of the New York Yankees.

I’ve never been a Yankee fan even before I moved to Boston.  They were the team my friends and I love to hate, but even I understand that there are guys who play for the Yankees and then there are Yankees.  (The same could be said about the Red Sox – just think about Carl Crawford.)

He swatted a ball from the glove of a Boston Red Sox pitcher, violating the rule, and he yelled at a Toronto Blue Jays third baseman trying to catch a pop-up, violating the code. You could vaguely sense Yankees heads jerking and eyes rolling, nothing you could prove, as A-Rod walked past.

In February 2009, Rodriguez made one of those ritualistic explanations of his adventures with drugs. Jason Giambi had staved off the posse in 2005, and Andy Pettitte had charmed us with his spiritual confession in 2008. Now A-Rod was supposedly coming clean. His old pal Jeter looked sick as he made the mandatory response to A-Rod’s comments about how common drug use was back in the olden days, a few years past.

“One thing that irritates me is that this was the steroid era,” Jeter said. “I don’t know how many people tested positive, but everybody wasn’t doing it.”

Alex Rodriguez with Derek Jeter in 2004

Alex Rodriguez with Derek Jeter in 2004

Too bad A-Rod had a falling out – of his own making with Jeter who is clearly a grown-up and someone even a Red Sox fan can admire.

By contrast, Derek Jeter has a father, Charles, who was a drug counselor, and a mother, Dorothy, who was an accountant, as well as a sister. The family seems to have sent him a message: Derek, whatever you do, don’t be a jerk. Which he never has been.

Rodriguez and Jeter discovered each other when they were teenagers, and in their early years in the majors offered the spare room on trips to Seattle and New York.

In 1999, the teams milled around in one of those baseball brawls, and Jeter and Rodriguez paired off away from the scrum, smiling and keeping each other occupied. A transient Yankee, Chad Curtis, criticized Jeter for waltzing with the enemy, but Jeter and Rodriguez were showing good sense in not risking their expensive talents.

In March 2001, A-Rod moved to Texas for that infamous contract of $252 million for 10 years. Just as infamous was an interview with Esquire in which Rodriguez blabbered that Jeter was “never your concern” when playing the Yankees, and that Jeter “never had to lead” his team. They patched it up superficially, but they never waltzed after that.

Jealously?

Vecsey ends on this sad note.

During the 2007 World Series, Rodriguez opted out of his contract, making himself available to other teams, but the Yankees re-signed him to a higher infamous contract, the one ticking over the team today. His broken marriage and his escapades are well known. So is his testing of the Yankees’ front office. All that is left now is for Rodriguez to save as much as possible of the approximately $95 million that remains on his contract.

He is heading for the dreaded Sargasso Sea of sports, where banished athletes wait, becalmed, hoping for winds of pardon. Shoeless Joe Jackson, who never ratted on the plot to throw the 1919 World Series, never reached the Hall of Fame. Pete Rose hobbles around on his aging, stumpy body, paying for being a knucklehead when baseball caught him betting on his team’s games, as a manager. Lance Armstrong is downsizing his life in Texas. Many behemoths of the past generation are hoping baseball writers forget why they aren’t voting all those fantastic career statistics into the Hall. And good luck with that.

Alex Rodriguez, just turned 38, is about to fade away. He never had that stern voice in his ear that said, “Alex — don’t!”

I don’t know if he will ever play again and if he does if he can play at his all-star level.  What a waste.

Photograph: Barton Silverman/The New York Times

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American defectors: life for Edward Snowden in Russia

Now that Edward Snowden has been granted temporary asylum in Russia (I suspect they mostly just wanted him gone from the airport.), it is not so certain he will have an easy life.  No matter how terrible you think surveillance is in the United States, I can guarantee that it is worse there.  And he likely has nothing more to trade to get better treatment.  NPR ran this story a few days ago.

If NSA leaker Edward Snowden is allowed to leave the Moscow airport and enter Russia, as some news reports suggest, he’ll join a fairly small group of Americans who have sought refuge there.

So how did it work out for the others?

In short, not so well. Some became disillusioned and left, like Lee Harvey Oswald. Others were sent to Josef Stalin’s gulags, where they served long sentences or were executed. Some lived out their days in an alcoholic haze.

“There’s little evidence from historical records that [Snowden] has anything good to look forward to,” says Peter Savodnik, a journalist and author of the upcoming book, The Interloper: Lee Harvey Oswald Inside the Soviet Union. “Essentially, nobody from the U.S. who has defected to Russia has gone on to think that’s a smart decision.”

In the 1920s and ’30s, hundreds of American leftists moved to what was then the Soviet Union, motivated by a desire to build socialism.

Alexander Gelver of Oshkosh, Wis., was taken there by his parents. But when the 24-year-old wanted to return to the U.S., he was stopped by Soviet police outside the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. He was arrested and disappeared. Only in the 1990s did his fate become clear: He was executed in 1938, one of Stalin’s many victims.

The Associated Press documented the case of Gelver and 14 other Americans who disappeared in the Soviet Union in the 1930s and ’40s. All were either imprisoned or executed. Dozens, perhaps hundreds of other Americans, met a similar fate during the rule of Stalin, who suspected that foreigners were spies.

A famous case in the Cold War era has parallels to Snowden. William Martin and Bernon Mitchell, cryptologists at the NSA, defected in 1960. But they came to regret their decision and became alcoholics. Martin died in Mexico in 1987. Mitchell died in Russia in 2001.

One defector who did return was Oswald. He left for the Soviet Union in 1959, returned to the U.S. three years later, and became infamous as the assassin of President Kennedy in 1963.

Edward Snowden, the NSA leaker seen here in a photo taken in July, has been granted temporary asylum in Russia. Thursday, he left Moscow's airport for the first time in more than a month.

Let’s hope that Snowden has better luck.  It will be tough not knowing many people and not speaking Russian.  Personally, I don’t think he made a good choice or got good advice.  I have never understood why he couldn’t go directly from Hong Kong to South American someplace.

Photograph:  Tatyana Lokshina/AP

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