Infospigot: The Chronicles

End of a Desperate Ruffian

Doing some research on a possible future project, I came across this: a judge passing sentence in a Revolutionary War case that today might be called today attempted murder with special circumstances. The prisoner, named Abijah Wright, had with several confederates broken into the home of a Pennsylvania militia colonel; his intent was to murder the colonel or deliver him to the British; but the colonel, aided by one of his sons, "discomfited" the attackers. Wright was captured, tried and convicted of "felony and burglary," and sentenced to death. (He was also charged with treason, but there's no record of how the jury disposed of that charge, apparently; I found a recent paper on Wright's trial, one of nearly two dozen similar proceedings held in late 1778 and early 1779 in Philadelphia).

Here's what the judge had to say to Mr. Wright:

"YOU have been indicted of a burglary and thereto pleaded that you were not guilty, and for trial put yourself upon God and your Country: They have found you guilty. What have you to say, why sentence of death should not be pronounced against you?

"(A long pause ensued and no answer)

"A copy of your indictment, and of the panel of the jury who were to try you, was delivered to you many days before your trial, that you might be prepared in the best manner for your defence and challenges. Upon your trial you have had two able Counsels assigned you by the Court to render you every possible assistance. A sensible and unbiased jury have found a verdict against you upon as clear and full evidence as ever was given in a Court of Justice. It only remains for the Court to pronounce the awful sentence prescribed by law.

"Before this is done it may be useful to you to remind you of the heinousness of your crime, and in what manner you ought to employ the few days which may be allotted to you in this life. The law has so particular and tender a regard to the immunity of a [man's] house, that it stiles it his Castle, and will never suffer it to be violated with impunity. You have in the dead of night, with a number of desperate ruffians, broke and entered the mansion house of Colonel Andrew Knox, in this county, then peaceably in his bed, it being after midnight, and when all the creation, except beasts of prey, were to be supposed at rest. You broke and entered this house in a hostile manner, with arms in your hands and with an intent to murder the owner, having discharged many loaded muskets at him. It has been alledged, that you might have intended not to murder him, but to carry him away a prisoner to the enemy, then in possession of this city. This is so far from being an extenuation of your guilt, that it is an aggravation of it; for you, in such a case, would have been guilty of treason. ... [Y]ou, his countryman ... attempted to put him into the power and under the dominion of his inveterate foes, foes to God and man, by whom you were sure he would at least have been confined in a loathesome dungeon, if not assassinated, or starved to death. But he, with the assistance of his son, discomfitted seven of you, whatever your wicked purposes might have been, and has proved that he was not deficient in that prowess and courage necessary for the station he was in. ...

"Let me intreat you for God's sake, who wisheth not the death of a sinner; for Christ's sake, who died for all mankind; for your own sake, whose eternal happiness or misery depend upon a sincere repentance; to reflect seriously upon your past life, to redeem your time, and to be earnest and importunate at the throne of grace for mercy and forgiveness. If your desire the conversation, advice or prayers of any pious divines, or other good men, the Court will use their best endeavors to obtain them for you. Do not go out of the world in the manner too, too many thoughtless wretches in your condition are apt to do. Be convinced of the justice of your punishment, ask pardon of your offended country; but strive, above all things, to make your peace with God.

"Having now discharged my duty to you as a Christian, I must resume the office of the Judge.

" 'YOU shall be taken back to the place from whence you came, and from thence to the place of execution, and there be hanged by the neck until dead.' God be merciful to your soul."

Burma

From the New York Times: Satellite-based maps of the coastal area before and after this week's storm struck. I don't know from Burma--my most intimate knowledge came from reading the post-World War II novel (and seeing the movie) "Harp of Burma." And the country has made incidental appearances in other readings. And then there's been the news about Aung San Suu Kyi. And that's it, except I've the name Irriwaddy River has always had a lovely resonance for me. Like Mississippi.

And now this. One of the breathtaking things about the maps is the storm track they depict. I'm not sure if that path is characteristic of storms in the region, but look at it; eyeballing the scale on the map, I'm guessing it scraped along the coastline for a good 400 miles. In the newsroom, my impulse would be to put that in terms familiar to the reader, so here goes: Imagine a storm of that ferocity traveling the coast from San Diego to San Francisco; or from Norfolk to Boston; or Memphis to Chicago.

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News of Note

That paper from yesterday? It's done. It beat me up, too. If you like surprises and want to know what it's about, just send a self-addressed stamped envelope.

Now just have to finish my take-home final for cognitive linguistics. Due tomorrow. It's like one of those long, long multiday bike rides I've done: at a certain point, it's just about managing to ride the thing in any old way you can. By the way, that's the sound of me in a buoyant mood.

Tomorrow, not that anyone asked, is the 25th anniversary of my first date with someone I'm still going out with. That worked out well, I think.

More later.

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Paper

It's finals time, sort of, at UC-Berkeley. I'm in the midst of trying to wrestle a history research paper to the ground. That struggle is signified by the mess around me chair. And after that's done, I have a take-home final to finish for my cognitive linguistics class.

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Still Life, with Rolodex

The dining room table as the sun went down this evening. Kate got the sunflowers earlier this week--or was it just yesterday?

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Vignettes 1 & 2

On BART, going from North Berkeley to downtown Berkeley on my way to class. I got on the last car of a three-car train and since I was going just one stop, I didn't sit down. I stood next to a woman in a motorized wheelchair; she was facing away from me and toward a vacant seat. It's about a two- or three-minute trip from one station to the next, and I was preoccupied. But gradually it dawned on me that the woman in the wheelchair was reading a newspaper that she had place on the vacant seat. She was turning the pages with one of her feet. A couple of days ago I was reading about Christy Brown, the Irish artist (subject of the movie "My Left Foot") who taught himself to paint and write though he had control over just one of his feet. Watching the woman in front of me, I was reminded of that and I thought about the determination it would take to learn to do what she was doing and take it into the world--to be as "normal" as she can be, "normal" defined as what the rest of us are doing. Even in the short time I was watching, I became absorbed in what she was doing. If she had turned and looked at me, I would have said something vague like, "Hey, how's it going?"

Across the aisle from the wheelchair woman sat an African-American woman with a striking straw hat and stylish sunglasses. She was nicely turned out. The straw-hat woman was looking at the wheelchair woman. She looked like she was going to say something. As we approached the Berkeley station, she spoke up. "Excuse me. ... Excuse me," she said, looking at the woman in the wheelchair. "It's amazing ... it's amazing what you're able to do. I really admire you." I couldn't see the wheelchair woman's face. But I heard her say, "Well, that's my life." She sounded matter of fact--no impatience or crossness in her voice. "I admire that," the straw-hat woman said, "the way you've learned to get along with what you have. ...""

The train had stopped at the platform and the doors had opened. I got off and didn't hear any more of the conversation. The straw-hat woman's frankness was as striking to me as the wheelchair woman's physical performance.

* * *

In Ohlone Park with the dog. As usual, he had spotted a squirrel and went into stalking and observation mode. I didn't hurry him along, and we wound up under the canopy of an 80- or 100-foot tall redwood. There was a commotion overhead, a bird fluttering. I looked up and saw that it was a little hawk--a sharp-shinned or a Cooper's. You see them around here; they hunt other birds. The one overhead was pretty well obscured by redwood boughs, but it moved twice into higher branches. It was only when it settled down that I saw it worrying something with its beak--a freshly killed bird, it turned out. A steady fall of downy feathers came down from the tree, and I caught a few. While looking for feathers around the base of the tree, I discovered a used syringe. More feathers fell, maybe from a mockingbird, which, per Harper Lee, would be a shame. Finally the hawk had worked its way to the main course, I guess, because the feathers stopped. I look at the birds around here and often think of the calories they need to survive; how many mockingbirds does a Cooper's hawk need to kill and lunch on to enjoy a healthy, rewarding lifestyle (and raise a family)?

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Strictly Partisan

The Bush-McCain Challenge: It's a bit of partisan "education" by way of MoveOn.org. It's not an intellectually demanding quiz, but it's worth playing through to the "carrot round." Have fun.

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Tonight's Fund-Raising Call

The Democratic National Committee called tonight. After all the sterling work the party has done since the 2006 election, helped of course by my hefty donations (five figures if you go to the right of the decimal point), a very cheerful and polite and hopeful-sounding young woman wanted to ask me for another couple hundred bucks.

You know, I was on the verge earlier today of writing down the litany of the woes I read about and hear about and witness and the sense I have that we'll be good and tangled up in these things for a good long while: The people blown to pieces day after day after day in Iraq and Afghanistan, the people losing their homes or walking away from them, the four-buck-a-gallon gasoline, and the president who says everything will be fine if we just do things his way. Then there's the stuff we apparently just accept as part of the landscape now--our shambles of an education system (tell me, when's the last time you heard the candidates slug it out over that?), our excellent but increasingly unaffordable system of health care, and the fact we've apparently decided that as a country we can't or prefer not to pay our own way anymore.

Did I mention that domestic ferry passengers in Washington State are being accosted by border agents demanding proof of citizenship? Or the sudden and calamitous decline of the last big salmon runs in California over the last year? Declining dollar, anyone? The estimate of my state's budget deficit for the next year increased from $8 billion to $10 billion to $20 billion in just the last four days (or maybe it didn't).

And then I look at the parties and the trio from whom we'll select our next president. While all of the above is transpiring, one of the Democrats has been reduced to talking about his minister's loony views and apologizing for speaking frankly about the fear and frustration that drives the electorate. His principal opponent is capitalizing on the fear and frustration to sabotage him (and probably herself, too, in the fullness of time). The guy from the other party appears to be promising more of his predecessor's worst policies along with a few gems of his own.

Plenty of tunnel. No light. I know this is not the glass-half-full view. I know I am not being "part of the solution." I am not being the change I've been waiting for or that you've been waiting for either.

You know, tonight's not a good night to ask for that two hundred bucks.

Advice from the Neighbors

One thing about living in Berkeley: You can count on encountering advice from all quarters on how to conduct yourself in public; sometimes the advice is very detailed. Here are a couple examples dealing with the plague of dog waste, Now, the town does have a law on the books about this: If your dog bestows a precious leaving on lawn or sidewalk or village green, you, the dog's best buddy, need to pick it up. And the evidence is that most people do. Given the number of dogs around, it's uncommon to find evidence of their alimentary workings underfoot, and the public garbage cans all over town are brimming with those little plastic newspaper delivery bags, all filled with crap of the non-editorial variety.

I guess I wonder who the signs speak to. If you are the kind of person who thinks nothing of having your dog take a dump on someone else's lawn, and there are plenty of that kind, do these signs stir your conscience and make you think, "Gee--I should really think about other people sometimes!" And if you are the kind of person who does your best not to leave fecal surprises for your fellow townsfolk to step in, do these signs do anything more than irritate you a little? I suppose there's a middle population of people who walk around not knowing what they'll do when their dog unloads. These signs might make them say, "Jeepers! That's a good point!" But since you actually have to prepare yourself to deal with the eventuality that your dog is going to be leaving day-old Alpo around the 'hood--you need to carry bags, etc.--there really isn't a middle group. If you're not prepared, by definition you're in the Dump and Run Club.

As far as the dog urine sign below: What it says may very well be true. Though the sign says in small type at the bottom that it is the work of "people who love dogs and flowers," I question whether the authors have actually observed one of these lovely dogs. Because, even with the most fastidious owners in the world, most dogs are gonna go where they're gonna go (and mostly that means where another dog went).

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Guest Observation: Tom Kettle

Two or three weeks ago in my Irish history class, we were going the World War I years. One of the things the professor does is weave in poetry and song; he has even sung a song or two despite the palpable discomfort of many of his auditors. For the poetry, his habit is to declaim a stanza or two unless the piece is quite short. During the World War I lecture, he brought in a sonnet by a man well-known in Ireland but little known elsewhere: Tom Kettle.

Kettle was an Irish nationalist of the Home Rule stripe. Meaning: He hoped for an independent Ireland, but supported a campaign to create an Irish government that would still be part of the British Empire. Just as that goal was about to be realized, the European war broke out. When the fighting began, in August 1914, Kettle was in Belgium trying to buy guns for Irish nationalist militias. Instead, he spent several months helping the Belgians in their futile bid to hold off the German onslaught. Prompted largely by what he had seen, he volunteered for service in the British army when he returned home and recruited fellow Irishmen into the ranks. Among radical nationalists, who held to the age-old position that England's difficulty was Ireland's opportunity, Kettle's position was akin to a sellout. When the nationalists launched the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916, Kettle was devastated; though in poor health, asked for a front-line combat position. He was sent to France to join an Irish unit in the Battle of the Somme.

It was there that he wrote "To My Daughter Betty, The Gift of God":

In wiser days, my darling rosebud, blown
To beauty proud as was your mother's prime,
In that desired, delayed incredible time,
You'll ask why I abandoned you, my own,
And the dear heart that was your baby's throne
To dice with death. And, oh! they'll give you rhyme
And reason: some will call the thing sublime,
And some decry it in a knowing tone.
So here, while the mad guns curse overhead,
And tired men sigh, with mud for couch and floor,
Know that we fools, now with the foolish dead,
Died not for flag, nor King, nor Emperor,
But for a dream, born in a herdsman's shed,
And for the secret Scripture of the poor.

The poem's postscript reads: "In the field before Guillemont, Somme. September 4, 1916." Kettle died leading his troops into action five days later.

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