The piazza at Marzamemi, a fishing town in Sicily

A friend of mine is convinced that the entire world is built for the extreme rich. I would argue, instead, that they get an obscene share of the wealth, but that they don’t benefit from it as much as they’d like, or he believes.

The tech world has eliminated many of our jobs, but in doing so has provided aspects of luxury living for the vast rest of us. We can afford limos on demand, even if the chauffeurs can’t make a living wage. We can afford TVs the size of a wall with a thousand channels. It used to cost a lot of money to build up a huge music collection and wire a house with stereo. Now it takes just a few hundred dollars to hitch every room to a Sonos system. For a $10 monthly streaming subscription, we get all the music we could ever want.

Here, the rich people have a point to make. The quality of that streamed music, they might say, isn’t really that great. If you had a decent stereo, you’d practically hear the space between the bits.

True, but that makes my point. The person streaming the Four Tops on Spotify, as I am at this moment, thinks the quality is just fine. So the rich person, as if to justify his money, spends thousands of dollars for a top-end stereo. And yes, the quality is higher. But the difference is subtle. A ton of money for a small improvement. If you look at it that way, the rich are getting ripped off. 

I think about the 11-day trip my wife and I took to Italy in late October. We had what most people in my town would consider a fairly economical vacation, at least for our graying generation. It cost about $6,000 for the two of us, maybe a tad more. From a class perspective, we traveled mid-bourgeois. We paid an extra $100 each way for Economy Plus, rented the cheapest little car (and paid for insurance, which I don’t do in America). In Sicily, we stayed in hotels for less than $100 a night, and also spent less than $100 for the best dinners we could find, with wine.

 
Now what if we had loads of money and were willing to spend $50,000 for that week, would our experience have been superior? I’m trying to imagine. Maybe instead of hanging out on the Piazza in Siracusa, we’d have spent an afternoon on a yacht. Our hotel room would have been bigger, and with a view (we had only a skylight) and maybe we’d have champagne or prosecco on ice.

But at some point, we’d walk down to that Piazza, where the kids are playing football on the smooth stone, and the baroque Catholic cathedral sits like an intruder atop the sturdiest imaginable Greek temple to Diana. (It was built around 500 BC, and it looks to me as though those massive Ionic columns will still be standing for centuries after the church has crumbled.)

 
The money they spend is on the edge of the experience. Maybe they find better restaurants to eat at. (We didn't find the food as special as we'd expected.)  I’m sure they'd spend more on wine. But we had some very nice bottles for between $10 and $20 in restaurants. You could have convinced me that a couple of them were $100+.

My point isn’t that the middle class is winning in this economy. And the trends, from politics to automation, are not good for many of us who have to work for a living. But the same companies that are screwing us as workers are busy pampering us as customers.

This photo accompanied our special report on sentencing. Joe Old is on the right.

Thirty years ago, when I was starting out as a reporter at the afternoon paper in El Paso, the Herald-Post, I got an assignment that sounded ominously like a term paper. The job was to analyze the sentencing patterns of the district judges in El Paso, and see if any of them gave tougher sentences for certain crimes, or were less than even-handed. My partner for this job was a reporter named Joe Old.

I barely knew Joe at that point. But I could see he was different. Most of the other reporters had a touch of cynicism, which serves as an insurance policy against looking dumb. Joe was older than us, and didn't have time for such silliness. And while most of us were focused on getting good clips, so that we could climb the ladder, to jobs in Dallas, LA, or in my case, Mexico, Joes ambition was simply to do great work in El Paso. He believed in the promise of journalism, and in himself. He was shameless in his idealism, which is rare in a newsroom.

We were both single and footloose that year. We had plenty of time, both to work on our project and to laze around talking about books and history, to drink beer and eat Mexican food on one side of the border or the other. Within a year, I got a job at BusinessWeek and moved to Mexico and got married. Joe remarried the same month. Our lives moved apart

All these years later, Im so sad to see on Facebook that Joe died last week. Last time I saw him was in 2008.

Joe found life endlessly interesting, and took the bumps with good humor. He already had three ex-wives when I met him, and he was great friends with all of them (though, in the spirit of journalistic rigor, I should note that I have only Joes word on that). He had served in the Air Force as a helicopter mechanic in Taiwan and returned with a passion for China. He was well into a PhD program in Chinese history at the University of Illinois when he decided to make a switch, and to write history while it was happening. So he plunged into journalism. First he covered crime at the City News Service in Chicago. Then he went down to El Paso, arriving about a year before I did.

As we started the criminal justice project, Joe hoisted a few huge boxes onto his desk. This was a goldmine, he said. In the boxes were thousands of papers, each one the disposition of a criminal trial in the El Paso courts. It had the name of the defendant, the charge against him or her, the attorney, the judge, and the sentence. What we had to do, he explained, was code these papers for those various data points, and then enter them into the brand new tool we had, the newsrooms first IBM personal computer.

I didnt know what to call it then, but Joe and I were launched into data journalism. We spent long evenings punching the numbers and letters into the computer, and then backing them all up onto floppy disks. As we went along, Joe, who read widely, explained to me the principles of Boolean logic. We were going to be able to use it to formulate queries, and the computer would reveal the judges patterns.

It took a long time, but we crunched all the numbers. By culling out Spanish names, we got a glimpse into how Hispanics and Anglos were sentenced for similar crimes. One Hispanic judge, for example, seemed to treat his own people much more harshly. Another judge sent prisoners away for twice as long as the average. We couldnt read too much into our study, however, because the numbers were relatively small. One or two life sentences could move a single judges numbers.

What we had to do, we agreed, was take our charts and graphs to the judges, all nine of them, and get their insights. So we started a series of interviews. If I had been working alone, I would have taken the relevant studies to each judge and spent maybe 20 minutes getting the necessary insights and caveats for the story.

Joe didnt work that way. For him, each interview was a priceless opportunity to sit down at length with the judges, and to discuss not only our study, but also the American judicial system, the judges backgrounds, philosophies, what theyd studied in law school, their work as lawyers, their feelings about crime and punishment and the state of American society. We sat in the judges chambers, the tape recorder whirring away, and the interviews went on and on. Most of them took more than two hours.

Back in the newsroom, we spent hours and hours transcribing the interviews. For Joe, this process was a chance to catch important points that hed missed. He would come by my desk, excited,  and show me underlined quotes from one judge or another. We have to get this in there, he said. This is great. Then hed laugh, and tell one of the other reporters just how great our stories were going to be.

Finally it came time to write our report. This was a concern for me, because I was convinced that Joe would push to get every single detail into the stories, and that he'd water down our revelations with too much context. The thing couldn't read like a law journal, I said. He agreed, but said it also couldn't scream its conclusions like the New York Post.

We found a middle way. I'm not sure how much impact the report had. But it highlighted the discrepancies, and it was fair. Even a few of the judges said as much. Later it won a Silver Gavel award from the Texas Bar Association. By that point, I was working in Mexico. I think the paper was too cheap to send Joe to Austin to receive the award. I'm not sure about that. I wish he were around to ask. He'd remember. He always did.

---

My condolences to Joe's widow, Monica Wong, and to all the students whose lives he touched at El Paso Community College. 

I have this habit when I'm writing. I call it a paragraph stroll. When I finish a paragraph, and sometimes even when I don't, I get up from my disorganized and disgusting desk and make my way toward friendlier climes. Sometimes, when I was at BusinessWeek, it was to the snack bar, which really wasn't a whole lot less gross than my desk, but at least provided a chatting potential. Sometimes I took strolls down the long hallways, with the big posters of old BW covers (none by me). I'd occasionally wander to the windows by the copy machines and gaze down from the 43rd floor to midtown Manhattan. I had lots of places to stroll.

But my most common landing spot was Heather Green's office. It was only five or six steps from mine and was as neat as mine was messy. She had framed photographs on the walls, a spotless desk and a fairly comfortable chair for me to sit in. Heather worked far more consistently than I did. She was usually busy with something. But she was nice enough to take a few minutes to chat. Sometimes it was about work, since we did a number of projects together and were co-bloggers. But more often it was about books we were reading, movies, French, her life, my life.

These interactions with colleagues were what I liked most about the job. Heather and I were (and are) friends.

And yet, here's what's really weird. While Heather and I were talking about all sorts of things, I had only the slightest notion of what she was up to across the river, in Union City, NJ. I knew she had a boyfriend named Matt, and I seem to remember hearing once that they'd rescued a stray cat. (She asked me one time if we wanted to adopt a kitten. I caucused briefly with our two cats and came back with a negative.) In any case, she and Matt were running an entire cottage industry out of Matt's house in Union City. She and her future husband were coaxing strays, jury-rigging traps to catch them, and networking with loads of fellow cat rescuers, both in North Jersey and online. It was like a second career, full of mystery and adventure, and I had virtually no idea.

The other strange thing is this. Heather and I wrote together. That's what we did. We edited each other's stories, we collaborated on cover stories, we even shared a blog. Our business, if you boil it down, was coming up with words, sentences and paragraphs. And yet I had no idea that Heather had the writing skills--the scene-setting, dialog and characterizations--of an excellent novelist. That part of her was lost to me.

I got an email from her a few months ago asking if I'd give her manuscript a preliminary read. Naturally I said yes. And that's when I encountered this wonderful book. It's lively and funny and, at points, disarmingly honest. It introduced me to a good friend who, it turned out, lived a life I knew next to nothing about.

Look at all those great drivers

But when I drive here in New Jersey, or anywhere else, for that matter, I’m always impressed at how well the vast majority of us drives. I exit and enter streams of traffic heading down the Garden State Highway, or onto the George Washington Bridge. People, for the most part, are doing their part. Sure, there are a few wise guys shifting lanes, and an occasionally distracted driver leaks into the neighboring lane. But the others adapt to them, for the most part. They swing clear of them (sometimes adding a honk) and drive responsibly.

The trouble is that the occasional fender bender will jam up traffic for a half hour of crawling and rubber-necking. This leads thousands of frustrated commuters to the conclusion that we, as a people, are bad drivers.

I disagree.

And this disagreement extends to the air. I’m struck by how civilized people are. They smile at other people’s noisy kids, switch seats to let a couple sit together, and help each other heave outrageously heavy carry-on luggage into tiny overhead bins. They’re as diverse as America itself, and seem accepting of others, and considerate. They wait patiently for what seems like hours while the plane unloads. I’m almost always impressed, and appreciative.

Yet in this Washington Post story by Caitlin Gibson, the unquestioned premise is that we’re at our worst in the air: Rude, bullying, drunk, racist, paranoid, you name it. Of course, she has no trouble citing examples of all of the above.

But I would venture to guess that we behave better in the air than on the ground. In the air, after all, we’re under the surveillance of the entire security apparatus as well as that of our fellow passengers. We’re being watched. And I would also argue that most of us are decent and, without sacrificing too much, mean well.

Think about the numbers. There are some 28,000 flights a day in the United States alone. They carry 1.7 million people, about equal to the population of Philadelphia. Gibson reports that in the entire calendar year of 2015, the FAA recorded 99 incidents of unruly passengers. That means that on many days, 28,000 flights took off, flew and landed without a single reported incident. And yet we’re supposed to believe that we behave badly in the air?

Just imagine if those 1.7 million people spent their flying hours lazing around the house, down here on earth. I think they’d get into a lot more trouble. But that doesn’t fit the narrative of her story.

When confronted with outrageous conclusions drawn from anecdote, my mind automatically turns Trumpward.

Donald Trump is an expert of feeding myths, and his followers promptly hunt down examples to document them. It's not hard. Take any population of 11 million on earth, and you'll find certain numbers of criminals. Immigrants are no different. Yet single cases appear to justify Trump’s charges--even if, in fact, immigrants break the law less often than the rest of us. (After all, the consequences of a run-in can be ruinous for them. Indeed, President Obama, who voices sympathy for them as human beings, has been quietly jailing and deporting thousands, including women and children, as my son Jack Craver reported in the Progressive.)

Trump spins his ugly myths into perceived reality. And they’ll endure, long after he flies off for the last time in his 757.

Millions of Americans will no doubt continue to believe the most poisonous points of his message: that the American system of justice is rigged, that Mexico sends its criminals north, and that at least certain types of Americans invariably favor their particular clan over the law.

These points should not even be in discussion. But a insurgent set of beliefs is taking shape. It’s built on anecdotes masquerading as facts. It’s punishing our democracy.

I just finished reading an extraordinary book called Gospel Prism, by Gerald Weaver. In one sense, I’ve never read another book like it. But in another sense, every book I read and every book I write is similar, because Gospel Prism is about every book and even goes so far as to try to be every book.

Needless to say, it’s a very ambitious novel.

Some history. I met Gerry Weaver in the ‘70s. He was a roommate of a friend of mine at Yale. I haven’t seen him since. But during those decades, he rose to a powerful staff position in Congress, was embroiled in a scandal there in the early 90s, and spent some time at a minimum security prison. This experience provides the setting and context for Gospel Prism, though the book stretches far beyond the jail walls in its themes and its scope.

A couple of years ago, Gerry got in touch with me and told me that he’d written this novel. He wondered if I might read it and provide feedback. I said yes. About a week later, an immense envelope arrived in the mail. 

I was a bit overwhelmed. I was (and am) used to helping people tell stories and organize their thoughts. But Gospel Prism wasn’t journalism or a traditional story with a beginning, middle and end. It was a big, weighty hunk of literature. It was unclear and dreamlike.

In many ways, Gospel Prism was the opposite of everything I write. My goal in writing is to make it so easy and fun that people forget they’re reading. If there’s a difficult concept or technology, I try to sand it down to a smooth surface. 

Gerry takes the opposite path. He wants readers not only to remember they’re reading, but to celebrate it. Reading, after all, is miraculous. It’s how we share ideas and experiences not only from one person to another, but also from century to the next. It may be closest thing we have to a universal brain.

Gospel Prism drives home this theme by running through the canon of Western literature. Each chapter draws from a different classic and delivers a different life lesson. It wrestles with the biggest questions, about life, love,  and God. It starts with Don Quixote, and runs through Shakespeare, Dante and Milton. It’s a book about books, and it’s only fitting that toward the end it takes the voice of the ultimate bibliophile, Jorge Luis Borges. 

I’m not going to try to summarize the book in this review. (I’m sitting in a Starbucks in Sacramento and have a redeye flight to catch in San Francisco in only 10 hours!) 

So I’ll just break out one part of it: The unreliable narrator. Gospel Prism’s first chapter, Lepanto Road Dogs, is modeled after Don Quixote, which (if we put the Bible to one side) features perhaps the most famous unreliable narration in literature. It’s supposedly written by a Moorish historian, Cide Hamete Benengeli. His text was translated into Spanish by an unnamed (and no doubt unreliable) “morisco,” and it was then edited for the reader by the one-armed Spaniard (who, like Gerry, spent time in prison), Miguel de Cervantes. (The battle in which Cervantes lost his arm, Lepanto, is referenced in the book. I have no doubt that I missed hundreds of other references, but I caught that one.)

Gerry Weaver plants plenty of seeds of doubt in his own narration. The beautiful female Jesus who guides his narrator along his journey tells him to “be suspicious of all words, even and especially the word of God, because words are limited in and of themselves and by the human minds that form and then hear them.”

Hundreds of pages later, the narrator remembers telling his mother a fib. With that lie, he recalls, ”[T]he secrets of an entire universe had just opened up to me. She could not see that I had told her a lie and there was something about that which had been sublime and had been more than liberating.”

So the character, who for some reason winds up in prison, likes to lie, and it’s his story we look to for truth. Funny enough, we might find it there.