Commentary-Confessions of a Condor: Safe Harbor

By Mark J. Plawecki The following is the printed text of Judge Mark Plawecki's remarks made before the Detroit Catholic Central Shamrock Bar Association on April 12, 2011. Good evening! I have no idea why I am up here, except that word has perhaps gotten out of what I always tell alumni of Brother Rice, De La Salle, and "That Vile Seven Mile Institution," -- two years at Catholic Central are worth more than four years anyplace else (applause). I normally also tell people that I studied more hours in two years at CC than in three years at Cooley but, with Justice Brennan in attendance, I'll forgo that line tonight. You know, when I started at Cooley the only attorney I even knew was my cousin Ed Plawecki, who advised me not to go to law school because "there are already too many lawyers." That was in 1984. I wonder if I can get a response from the founder of a school that in 2010 had 3,664 students? (Note: apparently anticipating Condor's remarks, Justice Brennan was a no-show for his Distinguished Lawyer Award). I write a column called "Confessions of a Condor", and let me start with three confessions: 1) I left CC in 1977 because of a slight disagreement between the Basilian Fathers' dominions and me over my athletic abilities -- they didn't think I had any. So I took my well-disguised talents to the Dearborn Heights Riverside Rebels, where I played tennis and was the shooting guard on arguably the best 2-17 basketball squad in state history. 2) I did NOT then put a curse on the CC basketball team, saying they'd never reach the state semis again (11 times previously achieved), although the record shows that is exactly what has transpired since I left -- despite some outstanding teams, some very controversial calls and no-calls in 1996, 1998, 2002, and just last month have prevented the boys from advancing. Nevertheless, I fully expect the 2012 edition to break the three-and-a-half decade drought. 3) I WAS the first to say that the primary reason the school moved to Novi was so that the hoopsters could finally win a regional title, and one was brought home, after 26 years in the wilderness, in 2009. My column began as "Spartacus." I wrote my first in late 2000 in response to a column called "From the Right" by a Michigan Court of Appeals judge which argued that the Florida Supreme Court had messed up things so badly in the Bush-Gore recount that the U.S. Supremes, despite there being no Federal issue in the case, had to intervene. The idea of Spartacus, who led a slave uprising against ancient Rome, was that I'd be writing "from below," since as a district judge I knew I could be overruled by a higher court. I then basically took four years off to write a book about major league pitchers which argued, among other things, that a formula I had created did indeed prove that Judge Olzark's teammate Art Houtteman was the best American League pitcher of 1950, and also that Frank Tanana was, with one exception, the best 22- and 23-year-old pitcher in MLB history. Why did I do this? As former Circuit Judge Richard Hathaway once said, "District judges have way too much time on their hands." I've since changed the name [of the column]to "Confessions of a Condor" -- as in California Condor (CC again), a rare bird that lives mainly in captivity (much like a judge with three teenage daughters) and is from the family falconiformes (my three are Divine Child Falcons). Condors are vultures who feast on dead animals, much as I feast on and borrow the ideas of great minds in history and tradition, which Chesterton calls "a democracy of the dead." "Confessions" I stole from my favorite book, Garry Wills' "Confessions of a Conservative." Wills in turn had been inspired by his favorite thinker -- Saint Augustine, who, at the end of the 4th century, wrote his own "Confessions." "Confessions" in this literature means not only an admission of guilt, but also a profession of faith. So what do I ( hopefully without pontificating) profess tonight? Briefly, the underpinnings of American elite educational institutions have been girded by two constant ideas: 1) The Market is rational and self-regulating, and 2) the U.S. must police the world, for the good of all. The first idea has been spectacularly shredded to smithereens with the financial meltdown of 2007-09. This was caused mainly by 1) the repeal of Glass-Steagall, which removed the previously existing separation between Wall Street investment banks and commercial banks, 2) the non-regulation of derivatives, and 3) allowing banks' leverage to go from 10-1 to 30-1. Light regulation is, says Robert Shiller, "one of the most remarkable errors in the history of thought." The second is very much alive and revered by the elite. It had a more sound basis than pillar one -- The Cold War. We were locked in a Manichean struggle with the godless Soviet Union, "A third world country with a first world military." CC's legendary history teacher Frank Garlicki told us lower classmen that "we will, in our lifetimes, see its collapse." The Gar was right! The Cold War ended-with us as lone superpower. But in the two decades since, our military has become ever more bloated, ever more wasteful, ever more controlling of our civic affairs. An unaccounted for $2.3 trillion in the Pentagon, our Defense Secretary told us on 9/10/01. But that was forgotten a day later . . . Seven hundred billion spent last year -- which doesn't include veterans' benefits and medical care, storage of nuclear weapons, State Department foreign aid, interest on the debt from past wars, the CIA, the NSA, or Homeland Security. Meanwhile, the U.S. infrastructure of roads, bridges, sewers, airports, trains, and mass transit are in dismal disrepair. Our empire of over 1,000 foreign bases, unknown to most Americans, is unsustainable. Now we are on the verge of becoming the Third World Country with a First World Military. So, I say: End the Empire! Restore the Republic! Stop electing Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford types. And get some CC alumni in the nation's leadership -- as long as they remember that of the Basilian Trinitarian school motto "Teach me Goodness, Discipline, and Knowledge," Goodness comes first. For without Goodness, Discipline and Knowledge lead nowhere. Thank you. ---------- Mark J. Plawecki is a District Court Judge in Dearborn Heights. Confessions of a Condor offers a dissenting opinion on the current American status quo. Published: Fri, May 6, 2011