Rambling Thoughts on Deference, and Substitute Teachers

One of the threads of discussion on the Gates/Crowley affair is the issue of deference: does one owe deference to a police officer? How about to a learned professor?

Let me wander a moment--I'm personally rather deferential to most authority figures, and I'd be more deferential if I had good manners. But I was brought up to regard parents, elders, teachers, policemen, etc. as figures of authority to whom one deferred. In the Congress there may have been a time where Congresspeople gave great deference to the President, at least where Senators deferred to Presidential nominations. That appears to be dwindling now.

Back in 1770 Americans were brought up to know their betters and to defer to them. But there's always been a revolutionary, anarchic strain in our culture which resists deference, which asserts people are equal or that deference must be earned. I was struck in reading "Renegade", a bio of Obama focused on the Presidential campaign by the description of the pickup basketball games in which he plays: no deference observed, it's pure performance. But in pro basketball, where people have careers, people do get deference, both from their peers and from the referees.

So on the one hand we have the establishment and deference to establishment figures. On the other perhaps Dennis Rodman. Think of Shaq--he's the iconic big man of pro basketball. He expects and gets deference, based on past performance. But he's also an establishment figure. Rodman was a great defender and rebounder, amazingly so given his physique. He got little deference. Some respect, yes, but little deference. And he represented the anarchic strain quite well. And no rookies get respect or deference.

I'll circle back to substitute teachers. I gather things haven't changed much in schools. Consider a run of the mill school where teachers get some respect and deference in the early days of the year. A substitute teacher comes in for the day--he's got to earn his way in. There's just a little bit of deference. Perform and you get more; stumble and you get chaos.

[Added: There's the argument Sgt Crowley didn't offer proper deference to someone who was identified as living at the address, once Prof. Gates had produced ID. That's okay. But I keep remembering the Banita Jacks case in DC--there an officer went to the house, asked Ms. Jacks about her kids, saw three of them, and deferred to her assurance everything was fine. Some months, a year?, later, it's discovered her four kids are dead, and she's on trial for murder. The sergeant is being criticized for excessive deference to an obviously suspicious person.)]

So, is there a proper balance between deference and anarchy? As usual, I go with the Greeks who said everything in moderation.

Dairy Supply Management Proposal

Sometimes when agricultural surpluses mount, people come up with supply management schemes. That's happening with dairy (which already has a voluntary dairy herd buyout program going), via Agweb:

"The Initiative would have three functions:

• It would set national production levels consistent with national usage
• Each cooperative would be assigned a production base level consistent with their share of national production
• CMI would set target prices at levels that would enable their members to profitably produce milk".

I'm a bit sceptical of these ideas--people tried them before the New deal and the "free rider" problem was too big. But it might work for dairy, at least for a while, if coops can control their members.

Land Tenure in Israel

According to this Treehugger post:

Should land be held as a public asset, or traded as a private commodity? In Israel, where 93% of the country’s land is publicly owned, state ownership of land is anchored in legislation, and even in the Bible. However, a new plan to transfer a massive amount of state land to private ownership is afloat, provoking plenty of opposition among environmentalists.

I'm always curious about land tenure because it seems to structure much of our society, at least in history.

The Perils of Moderation

William Saletan at Slate writes about the middle way amidst the land mines of abortion.

Words of a Blogger

From Ta-Nehisi Coates:

Either way, this past week has crystallized why I write. I am not here to think for people. I'm not here to respect all opinions. Some ideas about the world deserve honest debate and others deserve scorn. Each person must decide for themselves which is which. Even as I am aware of my own limits, I will not hesitate to make the choice. We can't talk our way out of everything.

(After heated discussions on race, and Gates, and ....)

Homesteading Hickory, Goodbye Ron

Ron and family have had their ups and downs homesteading somewhere in the Ozarks, mostly chronicled on this site. I risk reading too much into this, the penultimate post on the site, but the agrarian/locavore lifestyle seems sometimes to be a temporary fix, not something which today's generation is willing to endure/enjoy for a lifetime. People such as Ron and his wife have options, and they can use them. That's good; that's better than being stuck in a rut.

5 Million Dutch Paintings?

That's from a Smithsonian article on shell collecting--the claim Dutch painters of the 17th century produced over 5 million paintings. Apparently the Dutch collected tulips, paintings, and sea shells, paying more for some tulips and shells than for paintings.

The Most Important News of the Day

A small item in the NYTimes reports East Africa now has fiber optic connections to the Middle East and Europe.

PART and the Obama Administrations

Government Executive has an article on performance evaluation of federal agencies, with the hook being the confirmation hearings of Jeffrey Zients, OMB deputy director for management and chief performance officer, who is revising the Bush's PART system. I'm disappointed because there's no indication that Zients is trying to sell Congress on using any system. If the people who hold the purse strings don't use the system, it's mostly a waste of time.

My Investment Earned 23 Percent

From the Post:

"Treasury spokesman Andrew Williams said the government received an annualized return of 23 percent on the $10 billion in rescue funds it gave to Goldman Sachs last year."

Of course, this factoid won't get the ink the bailout did.