More dental, day one.

The twenty-six year old crown with a post that had been wrenched out by chewing on a cold snickers bar was formerly over a ground-down tooth that had my first root canal in it.  Back in the eighties, that procedure turned into a gruesome two-week process for me.  I think it was that dentist's first root canal and several times as I was deep in the chair hearing the electric whine of the drill and smelling the smoke of pulverizing bone, I drew back as an electric shock raced through my jaw.

This always annoyed that dentist and after the obligatory, "Did you feel that?" he'd jab some more novocaine into the back of my mouth.  If the jolt happened again during that session, he'd always dismiss me for a day or two and have me come back later.  This went on for two weeks before the root canal was finished, a time I'll always remember, and I had so many novocaine shots in my mouth that my mouth hurt like, well, the living pincushion it was.

Back in the present, the dental tech lightly placed the old crown into place, saw that it fit, took it out and went to get the dentist.  He repeated that process, saw that it fit perfectly and tightly, and tried to get it back out.  That turned into a struggle that ended with the porcelain bullet finally popping out of the confined space and the suddenness of its release caused him to drop it by accident into my mouth with my face facing upwards and my jaws stretched wide open.

I have always feared something dropping down my throat during a dental procedure but I deftly swept the crown into my cheek with my tongue, where the dentist fished it out.  After the vacant place was filled with cement, there followed a long series of unsuccessful attempts to get the crown back  into place so that it seated correctly.  The fit was too tight and eventually the dentist told me that we would have to create a new crown.  He then ground the tooth stump down a little to clean it off, after asking me if I wanted novocaine although assuring me that I shouldn't feel anything because of the root canal.  I declined the shot and waited nervously as he worked with the drill in my mouth but he was right and I didn't feel any jolts.

So that was the end of day one and I was scheduled to come in to create a mould the next day, as my visit had already consumed 90 minutes.  The doctor asked me if I wanted a prescription for valium to allay my discomfort and anxiety but I turned that down by joking that a staff shot of bourbon would do just fine.  He laughed and said, "Well, we shouldn't be celebrating just yet because we still have work to do."

Rough 'em Up

The Acting Administrator of the DEA, Chuck Rosenberg, released a memo earlier this week instructing his employees to disregard the president's recent admonition to police officers to not be "nice" to suspects any more and instead rough 'em up a bit.  Director Rosenberg directed DEA personnel to always adhere to the "Rule of Law, Respect and Compassion, Service, Devotion, Integrity, [and] Accountability" in their interactions with the public, whether they be an arrestee, suspect, witness or victim.

I couldn't agree more with Mr. Rosenberg.  I was a police officer for nine years before I went to law school, two years as a sheriff's deputy at a county jail as transportation officer and director of the medium security unit, and seven years as a State Trooper, working nights on solitary patrol in remote parts where back-up often was 20 or 30 minutes away.

Mr. Rosenberg's pithily-stated directive is a much more efficient, productive and humane model for police work than the crassly stated screed of our president at the Suffolk County Police Academy graduation ceremony last week, with its the throwback appeal to bygone times.  Its successful application, as a first and foremost approach, acts to calm situations rather than escalate them, and I ought to know, that's how I conducted myself, to the best of my ability, those several years when I was a peace officer on patrol, tamping down heightened situations during scores of DUI and warrant arrests and several high speed chases and one gun discharge situation, and I never had a fight nor fired my weapon, except once to dispatch a grievously injured deer when no animal control officer was on duty.

I know Mr. Rosenberg personally and he is is no partisan advocate on one side of the political spectrum or the other.  He was in my small section at law school and I had many long conversations with him there, and I ran into him earlier this year and spoke lengthily with him then, and he is a devoted, apolitical public servant imbued with principles, who swears fealty to no man, loyal only to institutions and the truth.

Call Me

So I have three sons.  I'm not the only dad in America, nor even among my friends, whose ex-wife has served a death penalty upon any paternal influence by him through her insidious pernicious overbearing influence on minor children during the divorce.

Whatever.  What a society, what a gender.

Bad ol' me has a prepaid Virginia tuition plan that I own that has my oldest child as its beneficiary.  It pays 100% of the lad's (he's well into adulthood now) tuition and fees at any in-state public university.

The IRS is going to vacate this plan in 2014, ten years after he graduated from high school, due to its tax-preferential treatment for all these years.  I sent Jim's mother a letter a year ago asking for Jim's address so I could communicate with him about this but she blew me off as usual, and she's a teacher of little first-graders!

Anyway, Jimbo, I sent you a Christmas card at your mom's address, and it hasn't come back (yet), telling you all this in addition to wishing you a happy holiday.  I know you live or lived there, or were there for an extended period this summer.

Check it out.   Call me, I'm in the book and my work number hasn't changed in over two decades.

Battlin' Billy

As a graduate of the University of Virginia School of Law, I received my annual UVA Lawyer magazine recently and it disclosed to me that Professor William J. Stuntz passed on last year, practically a mere stripling at 52. He taught my Criminal Procedure class in the spring of 1988.

He was so youthful looking, still in his twenties, that he grew a beard in an attempt to look more wizened. He still looked more like a student that a professor, but he was a terrific teacher, sometimes using movie protagonist Dirty Harry Callahan as an example to illustrate police procedure gone bad such as the use of torture to extract information from a suspect (Dirty Harry stepping on the open wound of a bad guy he'd shot to find out where he'd buried alive the kidnap victim).

One day as we filed into the large classroom for Crim Pro, Muhammad Ali was just finishing a lecture to the previous class. He was a friend of that class's teacher and had been invited to speak on the subject they were covering that day.

Everyone in the prior class lined up at the lectern to get Ali's autograph. Then everyone in our class lined up to get Ali's autograph. Meanwhile, Professor Stuntz, known informally by us students as Billy Stuntz because of his callowness, was off to one side fidgeting because he was losing class time and his lectures, while always entertaining, always went right to the final bell.

Finally Billy went up to Muhammad Ali and tapped him on the shoulder. Ali turned to him, a towering figure looking down upon the slightly-built Billy, and they had a quiet but animated conversation.

Ali thereupon stared at him while he slowly gathered up his notes and then he walked slowly through the classroom to the door. The tension created by the apparently testy exchange between the two men was palpable.

At the door, with all eyes upon him, Ali stopped, turned and pointed at Billy with a tremulous finger. He rasped in a voice that couldn't have been heard save for the hushed silence, "That man there just put me out!"

The class burst into laughter at the notion that Billy Stuntz had knocked out The Greatest. Already a legend at UVA for having graduated from the law school a few years earlier with the highest GPA in memory, he acquired a new monicker that day, Battlin' Billy Stuntz.

Tricoteuse

I went to a school in the South which has an honor code. No lying, cheating or stealing. It's an honor code violation not to turn in anyone committing an honor violation. The single sanction is discharge from school.

I am against honor codes. They institute great uncertainty into the mores of practical folks, and institute a reign of terror, in my estimation, because they set the bar at the personal standard of the most stringent interpretation of "honor" by its most zealous advocate. Lost in this is the notion of "prosecutorial discretion."

In the realm of ordinary affairs, offenses pass a number of preliminary barriers before they appear before the ultimate arbiter, a court of law, where they become fully vetted. First, though, a policeman, or injured consumer, decide if the "offense" (jaywalking, or a dinged car door) is worth pursuing. Only then is it passed up the food chain. We all have a sliding scale of values for this--a tiny pock on the bumper earns the culprit a glare, a dent in the quarter panel elicits an exchange of insurance information (the "referral"). But no one lives in fear that their de minimis standard in ignoring a "violation" will earn them a trip before the tribunal and ultimate ejection from the system.

In honor code environments, cheaters go on cheating but take greater care not to get caught. They can actually thrive in the atmosphere of elevated, but not necessarily warrantedly so, sense of trust. Practical folks maintain a low level of anxiety that their common sense attitudes in how they go about their business, either through omissions or commissions, could come to the attention of zealots with stringent, rigid or tortured idealism, who would feel duty-bound to turn them in to the honor board for potential application of the ultimate (and only) sanction.