Home

6-1-98

Monday is the second day of the Jewish festival of Shavuot…yom tov sheni… but Prager, unlike traditional Judaism in the diaspora, does not keep the extra day of Jewish holy days. So Dennis delivered his show from KABC radio AM 790 from noon to 3PM on the topic of evil.

Prager opened his show by reading from a copy of an email that a Prager fan received from an LA TIMES journalist who wrote on children shooting children. Why do some kids shoot others? The journalist supposedly wrote that emotionally healthy folks do not commit evil. Ergo, anyone who shoots the innocent is psychologically sick. The journalist said that values can not be taught.

Prager strongly disagreed. He's devoted his life to teaching values.

The second half of the show largely shifted to children who refuse to talk to their parents. Prager says that parents are owed honor, even if you do not like them. Write them letters if talking is too painful.

6/8/98

DP spoke at SSW Saturday morning, attracting a crowd of several hundred. Prager has been lecturing at this liberal Bel Air synagogue most Saturday mornings since 3/98, tripling the attendance.

On Monday, 6/8, Prager discussed a column by non-liberal Jeff Jacoby in the Boston Globe about a decision by a childrens' soccer league in Massachusetts to discontinue keeping score. Prager says that we need to learn how to lose with dignity. Morality is most important, not the wiping out of competition.

A soccer referee phoned to complain about our "goalless" society which is discontinuing standards of excellence. And excellence comes from competition.

One of the first questions Prager asks about any social policy is: How will it affect kids. DP thinks we scare kids about stuff that we should not bother them with - nuclear winter, alard on apples, strangers molesting or abducting them, second hand smoke…

Prager agreed heartily with the following Washington Post column.

The Wrong Example for Kids

By Richard Cohen

Friday, June 5, 1998; Page A31

If, perchance, some magazine is thinking of doing an article on an "all-American" school district, I nominate Cherry Creek, Colo. In the first place, the name alone is hard to beat, and, second, the suburban Denver district is where a principal of a magnet school was demoted for letting a group of seventh- and eighth-graders taste wine while on a class trip to Paris. It has a zero-tolerance policy.

The district also has a zero common-sense policy. It shares this with many other American communities and school districts which think, for some odd reason, that the way to deal with kids and alcohol is not to deal with it at all. Booze is banned, forbidden, off-limits, not to touch the lips of these kids no matter where they may be. When in Rome (or Paris), act like a Coloradan.

Of course, the Cherry Creek kids are too young to drink on their own -- and may be, depending on what their parents think, too young to drink at all. But they are not too young to learn about drinking and about how wine, for instance, is not something you guzzle in the back of a car but a libation that complements a meal.

And a meal, in point of fact, is where the 13 kids from the Cherry Creek Challenge School had their sip of wine. On their last night in Paris, they were having a three-hour meal -- escargot and duck, among other things -- and they were allowed to have a thimbleful of wine. When they got home, the group's chaperon -- school principal Shawn Colleary -- was busted, demoted to teach in another school.

What happened next is a testament to the power of political correctness: Colleary repented. He acknowledged guilt, "poor judgment" and praised school Superintendent Robert Tschirki, who ultimately changed his mind and reinstated the principal. Earlier, though, Tschirki had stood his ground before a group of parents who thought he had acted arbitrarily. "The laws of that country mean nothing to me," Tschirki said of France and its odd appreciation of wine. "This was a district program."

But Colleary was right in the first place. If the idea of the trip to France was to broaden the education of the kids, then it was perfectly appropriate -- even beneficial -- for them to learn how to drink wine. It's true that they could not -- and should not -- do so on their own. But in a little time, there is no reason why they could not join their parents by having a sip of wine at dinner, maybe for some occasion or another. This is how the French and Italians learn to drink wine -- and why, according to some social scientists, public drunkenness is both rare and not tolerated.

America, though, is off on one of its periodic attempts to deal with a problem by, in effect, simply banishing it. Zero tolerance sounds nice, but it does little more than make alcohol taboo and, therefore, more attractive to young people. It may account -- since logic cannot -- for the apparent upsurge of binge drinking on American campuses. I can think of no other reason why anyone would want to get instantly drunk and almost as instantly sick.

In fact, binge drinking is the antithesis of what the Cherry Creek kids were being taught in Paris: You don't guzzle wine (or beer or booze); you savor it. The idea is not to get sick drunk, it is to have a thoroughly enjoyable and sensuous experience -- and to be able to remember it the next morning.

The zero-tolerance approach is suffused with moralism at the expense of common sense. In this, it is similar to programs that teach kids sexual abstinence and -- if social conservatives have anything to do with it -- nothing else. This approach has not worked since, approximately, the Neanderthal era.

Some social scientists think we are going through a neo-prohibition era -- booze, sex, you name it. Maybe. But the Cherry Creek principal won reinstatement because the community thought he had been unfairly treated and, to the chagrin of social conservatives, the nation as a whole seems largely untroubled by Bill Clinton's affairs, alleged or allegedly confessed. Most Americans seem to have a zero tolerance for zero tolerance.

But the issues here are not ideological -- they are eminently practical: What's best for kids? Always, the answer is education, knowledge, an appreciation of both the pleasures of a substance (or an act) and its risks -- and, of course, the admirable virtue of moderation. Cherry Creek's kids, though, were instructed in arbitrariness, absolutism and the supposed virtues of ignorance.

I bet they can't wait to finish the bottle.

© Copyright 1998 The Washington Post Company

**

A mutual friend of DP's and mine phoned to discuss his struggle with alcohol. Maurice saw alcoholism as a disease rather than primarily a character issue.

6/9

Prager spent two hours on capital punishment, in the light of the Texas murder. Several white racists dragged a black man, 49, from their jeep for several miles until parts of his body fell off. Prager wanted to know if opponents of capital punishment ever doubt.

Hour number three went to the problem of computers dealing with the year 2000. P had on an author who speculated about plane crashes, stock crashes, business failures, riots resulting from this problem and the author warned us to stock up on food, water and cash before the big day.

6/10

Prager discussed for two hours the Southern Baptist statement on the family, including the notion that wives should submit to their husbands. Then P discussed a jury in Florida who awarded money to a family who'd lost the father to years of smoking. P says this lawsuit and others like it, against Big Tobacco, reflects the abdication of personal responsibility in the US.

A caller suggested that much of the problem lay with the Bill of Rights, which should've been called the "Bill of Responsibilities and Privileges."

Prager said that the litigation problem exploded in the 1960s, but P. evidently did not realize that the US has always been highly rights' drunk and litigious.

The Prager List's "Gil from Echo Park" phoned to agree with Prager. (Sgil46@aol.com):

Not quite. I was hoping for a dialogue for a change. Dennis let me say my piece, then "click" -- he launched a bit tangentially, but mostly agreeing with me.

What I got to say was (approximately, as I didn't tape it, I was nervous as usual, and I know I write better than I speak): "I would love to know what arguments were presented to the jury. We know that judges have discretion to include or exclude testimony based on any number of factors. But given the amount of brainwashing [I wish I thought of the word propaganda at the time] we all are subjected to, right or wrong, I would imagine a great many of judges are as susceptible to that as are the rest of us. And, given our advocacy system, I'm sure the attorneys were even more over-the-top. If so, the judge in this case (and judges in other cases) may have been predisposed to allow terribly biased and erroneous testimony rather than using unbiased judgment -- and that can cost us all a great deal." Somehow I left out "in the end," but it is still there elliptically.

Dennis then said, "I don't know if it would cost us all, since we're not all smokers." [DAMN that cutoff! (They do that nearly every time I've been on) THAT'S NOT WHAT I MEANT]. Dennis went on, "Of course, it's a tragedy in the long run [PHEW -- he got there]...." Well, not quite. He went back to his original rants.

What additionally I wished I could have discussed with DP was to make the further connection to how this kind of saturation propaganda could affect the judiciary for many different types of future cases, and how ominous THAT was.

Then there are so many other issues this raises. There was even a judicial connection between this case and the Texas murder yesterday -- and you guys know how I love to discuss CP....But what's the use! Cut-off again! <G>

Gil from Echo Park

From the Wall Street Journal:

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. -- A state-court jury ordered Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp. to pay the family of a two-pack-a-day smoker who died of lung cancer $500,000 in compensatory damages, plus $450,000 in punitive damages.

The verdict, which pushed down the prices of tobacco companies' shares, marks the first time a jury has awarded damages intended to punish a tobacco company in a traditional smoker's suit. It was only the third time a jury has awarded compensatory damages. "We were sending a message that they [the industry] are responsible for their actions," said juror Gary Doski. Added John Bowman, another juror: "I don't think they've got a leg to stand on for much longer."

On his 6/15 show, Prager discussed this Wall Street Journal editorial:

In a decision handed down Friday in Boston, Superior Court Justice Isaac Borenstein ordered a new trial for Cheryl Amirault.

He declared that the prosecutors had conducted their investigation of the Fells Acres Day School in a manner "highly prejudicial and irreparable" and that the way the state's investigators questioned the children raised "extremely serious doubts about the reliability of their allegations." That testimony was, he ruled, forever tainted--and unusable in any future trial. And Justice Borenstein posthumously acquitted Violet Amirault of all charges.