Bob Schwartz

MLB (Major League Baseball) spring training begins today.

I am a lifelong baseball fan. On a scale of 1 to 10 (the most fanatic) I would put myself over the years at 8. There are certainly those much crazier and more committed than me, but I’m up there.

In recent years, my fandom has moderated a bit, as other imperatives and interests nudged baseball more to the side.

Still, there is a post of mine from January 2020. It explains how, no matter what, I still buy the baseball magazines of winter in anticipation of the baseball soon to come in spring.

I could not see what was to come. It certainly wasn’t in those magazines. The pandemic baseball season of 2020 was about to begin. Like so much else, adjustments had to be made, to put it mildly, a shortened season was played, and against all odds, MLB managed to push and pull it all the way through to a World Series, with Dodgers as World Champions.

In the spirit of returning to a still elusive normality, MLB is planning on a season that more resembles the old days. Whether we as fans and citizens can come close to pulling that trick off as a public health matter is still tentative and to be determined. Maybe we are exiting a scary ride for good, maybe we are getting off the giant monster roller coaster to get on a less forbidding but still up-and-down smaller roller coaster.

Spring training is usually so exciting. My interest never really fired up during the 2020 “season”. It feels a little disloyal saying that, but I’m confused about which loyalty I’ve betrayed. My old self? The game? The teams and players I’ve followed and rooted for? The shelves filled with baseball books, along with that souvenir bat they give you when you visit the Louisville Slugger bat factory?

Spring training begins today. I may watch some games online. I may visit the MLB site regularly to check up on which teams and players are succeeding, some beyond expectations, and which are struggling.

But to be honest, that twinge of excitement in my belly is not there, at least not yet. It wasn’t there as 2020 unwound. Maybe that feeling is just gone for a while, the way that so much else has been gone for a while.

All things must pass. That’s George Harrison, the biblical Book of Ecclesiastes, the whole Bible, and the lesson of life itself. If baseball isn’t what it once was to me, or to America, things will still go on as they will. Just not the same, and, like it or not, maybe very very differently.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — A NASA rover streaked through the orange Martian sky and landed on the planet Thursday, accomplishing the riskiest step yet in an epic quest to bring back rocks that could answer whether life ever existed on Mars.

I am a big fan of science. I set out to be a scientist, but switched tracks in college. I have visited Cape Canaveral and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. I appreciate both the heroic drama and the practical results of space exploration. I take nothing away from the awesome efforts of those who worked on this mission. Most of all, I believe that we as an American government and people can do many different things at the same time.

But the humanist and poet in me has no doubt been warped as we begin the second year of the American pandemic. And so when I saw that the point of the mission was to look for “past life” on Mars, I could not help thinking about almost 500,000 lives lost in America just this past year to Covid, many of those deaths avoidable.

I’m not saying that we shouldn’t be going to Mars now, or that money or attention is being diverted from our still unsuccessful mission to handle the pandemic. Although we have successfully landed on Mars, while we have not yet landed even a technical knockout on Covid.

I’m not sure what I’m saying. I hope that there will be a day, sooner than later, when we can see people enthusiastically raising their arms in celebration as Covid becomes a manageable disease. So we won’t find as many past lives here in America on earth.

The search for true life love
Is as easy and rare
As knowing without knowing
When if finds you

© Bob Schwartz

Pocket

The smallest thing
you could see with your eyes
The biggest thing
you could see with your eyes
The smallest thing
you could see with no eyes
The biggest thing
you could see with no eyes
Put them in your pocket

© Bob Schwartz

A Bridge in Chelm

A river flowed right through the middle of Chelm. It occurred to several merchants that a bridge over it would be good for business on both sides of the river. But some of the younger people objected. They said: “Of course it would be nice to build a bridge, but let’s not do it because it would be good for business; we should build it solely for aesthetic reasons. We’ll be glad to contribute to the building expenses for beauty’s sake, but we won’t give a penny for the sake of trade.” Still others, even younger people, said, “A bridge! That’s a good idea, but not for the sake of trade or beauty but to have someplace to stroll back and forth. We’ll be glad to contribute money to build a bridge for strolling.” And so the three groups began to quarrel, and they are quarreling still. And to the present day Chelm does not have a bridge.

From Yiddish Folktales by Beatrice Weinreich

See also How the Wise Men Got to Chelm: The Life and Times of a Yiddish Folk Tradition by Ruth von Bernuth

There are many Yiddish folktales from Eastern Europe about a town called Chelm. In these stories all the people of Chelm are fools, though they all think they are smart.

Not a day goes by when I don’t think about Chelm and learn something, particularly about the news of the day.

As regular readers know, I am not sanguine about those lawyers whose conduct in public affairs raises issues of ethics and professional responsibility. It was early in the last administration that I wrote about the lawyers of Watergate and the fact that almost two dozen of them ended up sanctioned, including disbarment.

Over the past four years, a lot of lawyers have been engaged in the life and administration of the last president. A number have supported and cooperated, while some have eventually pushed back. A few days ago, for example, his legal team in the upcoming impeachment trial resigned, apparently over the defense he demanded they offer. A new team has been hired at the last minute.

There are far too many questionable situations and lawyers to mention. They range from the top of the government justice pyramid to other administration members and advisers to private attorneys who have served on his behalf in various initiatives and disputes. And yes, that includes some U.S. Senators who are as well-educated in the law (Harvard, Yale, Oxford, plus Supreme Court clerkships) as any in the country.

There is a tension between zealous advocacy and professional responsibility. Zealous advocacy demands that you do everything possible to serve the interests of an individual you represent. Professional responsibility demands that your zeal be tempered by considerations including truthfulness, respect for the law and judicial process, and the integrity of the courts and the profession. Sometimes the line is bright (knowingly lying to a court for instance), but frequently fuzzier. That’s when professional arbiters are moved to investigate and determine whether lines have been crossed and sanctions are appropriate.

A number of times over the past four years, lawyers and scholars have come forward to question whether attorneys involved with the last president have crossed professional lines. They wonder, as I have, whether and when the appropriate bar associations will be looking at the conduct, if looking at all.

I commend a recent piece from the American Bar Association, Baseless lawsuits bring model rules into focus. It is written by Teresa J. Schmid, current director of the ABA Center for Professional Responsibility, and past executive director for the Oregon State Bar and for the State Bar of Arizona.

She closes with some hope for those who wonder if anything might ever happen regarding possibly frivolous lawsuits:

An additional cause of some frustration for those who want to know what disciplinary agencies, including mandatory bars, are doing is confidentiality. Many disciplinary systems have rules that maintain confidentiality during the investigative stage of a disciplinary complaint. Many unified bar associations and other disciplinary agencies throughout the country are undoubtedly in triage mode, well on their way to disciplinary proceedings.

So why is nothing happening in lawyer regulation? Actually, maybe something is.