Forgive Me My Trespasses

By Ian M. Evans

Finalist in the 2017 Beverly Hills Book Awards
In this novel, Ian Evans explores the problem of sexual harassment by those in positions of power. While the story is humorous, the issues of sexual misconduct are considered seriously.
Dave Gordon, a professor of clinical psychology, has become interested in the emotional consequences of notorious political sex scandals. A former client he once treated for feelings of shame and humiliation has given him innovative ideas. This semester hes teaching a class in psychotherapy, using important principles of compassion and forgiveness.
As each graduate students personal concerns and needs come to the surface, however, complaints of his own inappropriate conduct are levelled against him. Professor Gordons first response is one of anger. But over three stressful weeks he comes to realize his old attitudes are in need of re-examination. Where has he been going wrong? Have his efforts to promote gender equality been misjudged? What can he now do to decrease sexually prejudicial attitudes and harassment on campus?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Mar 27, 2015
• ISBN: 9781480816664

Ian M. Evans

Ian Evans was born in England and grew up in South Africa. He completed a doctorate at the Institute of Psychiatry (Kings College, London) and has been a professor of clinical psychology at universities in Hawaii, upstate New York, and New Zealand. Forgive Me My Trespasses is his first novel, set in a fictional public university in New York State. In his second novel, The Eye of Kuruman (Pegasus/Vanguard Press, 2017), a young public health nurse travels to Botswana and South Africa, where she finds both romance and challenge. In Menace (Austin Macauley, 2017), a thriller, Ian draws again on the university setting and threats to student safety. On retirement from academia, Ian and his wife returned to Honolulu, Oahu, a place where the children and grandchildren love to visit.

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

FELICITY

Felicity’s written an article. Something of an exposé apparently.

My wife, Veronica, holding the Saturday morning newspaper in one hand, was standing in the doorway to our study, the one I use about ninety percent of the time and considered equally shared.

Uh huh. I was in the middle of composing an email to my dean, who had written an enthusiastic memo on how to reform the college’s BA degree. She had the strange idea that a BA should be useful. She completely misrepresented its utility by equating it with getting a paying job. Surely utilitarianism is about pleasure and the only way you can prove something is desirable is that people actually desire it? What student would truly desire a course in computer programming when they could immerse themselves in the poetry of E. E. Cummings or study Garibaldi’s campaign to unify Italy?

Is that all you have to say? The slightly testy tone in my wife’s voice made me abandon my witty rejoinder to the dean’s juxtaposition of the BA and the workforce. It was cuttingly clever to cite John Stuart Mill and just short of being rude. Now I had to refocus.

Felicity who?

"How many Felicities do you know? Felicity Rimberg, of course. It’s an essay in The New Yorker called ‘Resilience in the Digital Age.’"

I sat back in my chair and stared at my wife, scratching my right ear. That takes gumption. How interesting. Does she want public sympathy after all or to be finally granted absolution? Maybe she wants a new start. Maybe she needs the cash. What is she doing now anyway? Still working for that think tank? Is it this month? I’ll have to see if I can get it online. I wonder if she mentions me anywhere.

My wife’s facial expression—or should I say lack thereof—told me she wasn’t impressed with this stream of questions. I damn well hope not was all she said, dropping the paper on my desk and exiting the room with what I judged to be a slightly disapproving flounce.

I picked up the paper. The short news item about Felicity’s essay was written in a distinctly hostile tone with the headline ‘Felicity Rimberg Comes Out of the Shadows.’ It mentioned that she had written about her humiliation and of ‘finally standing up’ for herself so that she could own her ‘future as a life of value.’

Life of value, I repeated to myself, smiling. I’m there; I’m in it, I thought, if not in name.

It’s funny how memory works with simple associations—take your finger out of the dyke for just a moment and everything floods out. I hadn’t thought about Felicity Rimberg for some time. I first met her on a cold spring day in April in Oxford. Daffodils were flowering in many of the colleges’ more rustic gardens and along the banks of the Cherwell and Isis rivers, but they seemed to have jumped the thermal gun. You can tell it’s spring in England when men in business suits strip down to their undershirts, strangely called vests, and sit in deck chairs in the public parks at lunchtime even though the ambient temperature is barely fifty degrees.

That particular day the steady drizzle was not the showers sweet that Chaucer promised for April, and the sun, when it was visible, still had that pale, weak cast that I found so depressing the first time I had gone to England, to London, to earn my PhD in 1972.

But it was then 2009 and I no longer had a semi-Beatles’ haircut or the secondhand pea jacket bought off a barrow in a Camden Town street market. I had a suit and a tie and a double-breasted camelhair overcoat hanging behind the borrowed office door, and I was on sabbatical at Cromwell College, Oxford.

There was a slightly timid knock on the door, and a woman stepped into the office. Dr. Gordon? Do you have a minute? There are no office hours posted outside. If you’re busy I can come back later.

There was no mistaking who she was. She didn’t have the carefully bobbed haircut of all the tabloid photos; her blonde hair was longer and casually tied back in a ponytail. She appeared thinner than in the infamous 2004 video clips. Yet she had the same big chestnut eyes, high cheekbones, slightly aquiline nose, and full lips, and as she smiled at me, she showed a lot of white teeth.

I suppose if I had passed her on the streets of Oxford I wouldn’t have recognized her, although I would have given her a second glance, as she was undeniably good looking. But I had heard it mentioned somewhere that she was studying at Oxford University, so I must have been slightly primed. Even so there was that pause, that moment of recognition, and later I hoped that although it must happen to her all the time, wherever she went, my little double take wasn’t obvious.

No, no! I exclaimed, later hoping I didn’t sound too jovial. Now is a good time. Come in and sit down.

She stuck out her hand and I shook it. Wow, your hands are cold I said.

It’s freezing outside and I’ve just walked up from the CNC in the Tinbergen Building.

You’re American, I added lamely, furtively shoving a copy of The OxStu, the student weekly newspaper I’d been reading, under some journals. I didn’t want anyone to think I was casually whiling away my precious sabbatical time.

She smiled. I’m Felicity Rimberg. I’m at Cromwell College, here at Oxford … in psychology.

I don’t remember feeling nervous exactly, but I was definitely edgy. Maybe nonplussed is a better description. I needed to gain some composure. Most people say My name is…, not I’m…, yet the last thing this poor woman needed was some old geezer professor gushing and gaping like a fool.

What are you studying? Are you doing a thesis? What’s your topic? Sorry, that’s three questions in a row.

I’m in the cognitive science program. I’m hoping to finish a DPhil. My study is on financial decision making under stress. There, that’s three answers in a row.

I grinned. It wasn’t exactly brilliant repartee, but it was way more confident than my own feeble conversational mumblings. I wanted to normalize this whole interaction a bit more and take charge.

I guess I didn’t realize you had a background in psychology. There was no point pretending at this stage that I wasn’t fully aware of who she was.

Sure thing, she replied, I was a dual economics and psych major at the Northern California Institute of Technology.

Good school. Did you ever come across a former student of mine, Phyllis Cohen, on the faculty—probably teaches abnormal?

I’d now produced two predictable academic clichés: commenting on the university’s standing and name dropping to establish my credentials as the kind of person who produced students that went places.

I took a 400–level seminar in child psychopathology from her. She’s great. Funny.

Yup, it’s a topic that’s always good for a laugh. My joke fell flat on its own hint of sarcasm, and I had to recover—fast. Well, Miss Rimberg, I’m sure you’re not here to chitchat about your undergraduate days. What can I do for you?

She sat up straight in her chair and for the first time dropped her eyes and looked away from me. Her brow knitted and I thought I saw a tiny tremble in her lower lip, which she bit gently, not answering for a few moments.

Well, I’m not really sure. I don’t know. Like, I’m probably just wasting your time. But Larry—Dr. Lawrence Ross—he’s my thesis supervisor, he mentioned that you’re a well-known clinical psychologist visiting the college (I gave a slight sideways tilt of my head in modesty) and that you have done work on shame, guilt, forgiveness, and stuff like that. I thought maybe I could talk to you, like, sort of like counseling, you know.

And that’s how I met the notorious Felicity Rimberg in person in the spring of 2009.

Veronica was at the door again. I looked up and asked her, Do you remember when I got back to that funny little flat on Hollybush Row we were renting and told you that I’d been approached by none other than Felicity Rimberg and that I’d agreed to talk to her as a therapist?

I remember it only too well, and I remember telling you that I thought it was a bad idea. You weren’t registered or licensed or whatever they call it to practice in the UK. You were behind on your book contract with Cambridge University Press, and we wanted to take lots of little excursions in the Cotswolds outside Oxford and to go to Paris on the Eurostar. And to be honest, I thought she was a manipulative little minx, and you were doing the classic male thing of being flattered by the attention of a coquettish, sybaritic female. I couldn’t believe you were even entertaining the idea. I wasn’t pleased at the prospect.

She wasn’t so coquettish by that time, I retorted, and immediately wished I hadn’t.

But I remembered Veronica’s remarks only too clearly, just as I remembered trying to justify my arrangement with Felicity in a way that confirmed I had empathy for her without any underlying feelings of attraction; that I wasn’t motivated by prurient fascination with the most lurid scandal yet of the twenty-first century; and that I wasn’t susceptible to flattery or feeling honored at being picked for this task.

In truth, however, all of those things had probably influenced my decision, and that made me defensive, so I came on a little smug: Those things you said then rather confirmed your own prejudice and gave me an inkling of the sort of quick and harsh judgments that people still passed about Felicity while knowing essentially nothing about her or her circumstances. At least I approached the whole matter with a totally open mind. I don’t judge people’s behavior; I just try to understand it.

Realizing that a potential squabble was brewing, I changed direction. Hey, I’ve just checked, and I can’t get her article electronically from the library while it’s still the current issue. I’m going to take the car and pop down to the bookstore to buy a copy.

Go for it, she sneered, but if that doesn’t prove my point that you always had something more than a detached clinical interest in her, I don’t know what will.

Driving to the bookstore on Riverbank Parkway that afternoon I thought about my wife Veronica’s attitudes. Also a university professor, her field is social history, especially the emergence of political protest movements in nineteenth century America. When I’d broached the subject of spending my sabbatical leave at the University of Oxford in order to explore some new work in social psychology that was relevant to my recent ideas about psychotherapy, she jumped at the notion. She was sure she could get a leave of absence and maybe even a small travel grant from her own university, Cornell, to collaborate with one or two dons at Cromwell College whose work she knew. It’s the most progressive social science research center in the world, she’d commented, although neither of us had a clue as to how one might quantify such an assertion. We were, however, certain it would be a good line to include in our respective leave applications.

Another benefit I’d thought might work for her was that Cromwell College had, or used to have, something of a reputation for radical thought. And Veronica is a radical. Her publications, which are numerous, are on civil rights and minorities. Dr. V. H. Jurgens: on Scopus you can look up her h-index, which is high for a historian. At the same time she is definitely not a radical feminist, nor indeed any type of feminist. She takes gender equality as a given and doesn’t whine about the need for women to be given special dispensation, and she particularly dislikes women who say they chose a career over having children. They are in no way incompatible, she would assert dismissively. When the Harding-Rimberg scandal broke in 2004, I remember her being sharply judgmental, acutely sympathetic toward Harding’s wife, and praising her fortitude. I think it was hard for her not to moralize along with the rest of the country, especially as she had admired Adam Harding both as a person and as a presidential hopeful. She was mad that he’d be so stupid as to play around with a young intern, and that he’d put his entire career at such extreme risk over a tramp. Her words.

At the beginning, perhaps, she had seen Felicity as being used, politically as well as sexually, by a predatory older man with a sexual compulsion. But as more and more of the intimate details unfolded in the press, her ire extended to Felicity as complicit, without in any way diminishing Harding’s own responsibility. I think the fact that Felicity had kept the video recording really turned the tables on her views about Miss Rimberg.

I remember one conversation we had back then when I argued that what a presidential candidate did in private was no one’s business. Veronica snorted her derision at this suggestion: Don’t be absurd; it goes to character. The whole situation was totally inexcusable and you can’t try to defend it in any way.

I shrugged and said nothing; you need to know which battles to pick in marriage. Veronica, however, did not, and continued: I think you men secretly admire Harding. In fact you yourself keep saying he is no different than FDR or JFK, which is a pretty low level of moral reasoning. You just think it’s a pity it’s been all so exposed. We might agree that that awful guy in the FBI’s public corruption division was malicious and out to get both of them, but how naïve was Felicity to keep the video, unless she is so darn needy she had to boast about it?

What about Ike and his chauffer? I’d tried interjecting.

How the hell is that relevant? You’re talking to an historian, remember. There’s simply no evidence that Eisenhower ever did anything sexual with Kay Summersby although I’m sure she was in love with him … Anyway what has that got to do with the price of eggs or the fall of Adam? And why are you smirking like that?

Because I’m interested; I’m taking mental notes. Because I study attitudes and people’s reactions to situations. Because you’re super intelligent, but full of biases. Because you are usually open minded and tolerant and believe in justice, and yet you’re quick to condemn and judge. Because the entire country is doing the same. Everyone’s opinions are based on their own morality. I don’t know anyone who is thinking about it all psychologically, except for some seriously idiotic things I’ve read from psychiatrists—but also some psychologists—trying to diagnose Harding as having a mental illness, a personality disorder, an addiction, a deficit in self-control. All of which is completely ludicrous—the media is full of pundits who’ve taken one psychology class and are now expert psychoanalysts.

I had been about to add that maybe she felt threatened like all the other fearful women in America by the flagrant infidelity, but wisely didn’t go there. Maybe I’ll write a proper psychological analysis one day, when we have some more facts and the hoopla has all been forgotten.

Heading now to the bookstore, I started thinking about one of the things I had tried, largely unsuccessfully, to get out of Felicity. What fascinated me once I had agreed to be her therapist back in Oxford was not what they, Felicity and Adam, had done together, which was now widely known, or why they had done it, which was patently obvious, but how she had imagined the relationship would unfold? Beyond the short-term passion did Felicity have expectations of more permanence, even if she never voiced them? Evolutionary psychologists argue that attraction to older men is to the security offered by the powerful, but Adam Harding hardly offered any of that. In fact in his recent autobiography, doubtless ghost-written in preparation for a possible re-run for the nomination in 2016, he stated that he repeatedly tried to break off the relationship but that Felicity was volatile and he was fearful of what she might do. The press was vicious in the reviews of his book: ‘Adam blames the serpent for his fall from grace’ was one. Another article began ‘Who was responsible for biting the apple? Adam, or Evelyn (the first three letters were in bold in case any slow reader missed the witticism), or the snake?’

All heterosexual men regardless of age have lustful thoughts about attractive women they encounter. Women are attracted to good-looking men, for sure, but rarely to pure beefcake, although I’ve seen videos of women’s hen parties going crazy to male strippers. Of course I assume those guys are all gay; who else would want to work out like that? But for women surely there has to be some emotional connection first, some form of worthiness, intelligence, potential? Or maybe not. Maybe this is a ridiculous generalization. I had a woman client once, a high-powered company executive now working for the State of New York, single and in her forties, who regularly had one-night stands with construction workers and truck drivers. She told me she found them less complicated, less emotionally needy, and willing just to give her a good screw, sans complications. And even I myself could not imagine being the slightest bit sexually enticed by those physically attractive airhead dingbats who think they are so fascinating on reality programs on cable TV.

How foolish I was back then, I thought, as I bought the very last copy of The New Yorker in the bookstore. This incident will never be forgotten. The video was indistinct in places, but it could not have been more explicit. Two things Felicity had said on the tape were clear: one was when she said to Adam Ooh, you’re so hard! and another was when she had said Tickle my ass.

The gutter press and the worst of the tabloids’ cartoonists had a field day, calling him Adam Hardon. But nevertheless Adam Harding has retained his enormous popularity with both liberals and the business community, and with his wife’s continued loyal support is planning a second run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016. Is there deep forgiveness, I wondered? Does his charm outweigh the constant snickering and bad jokes? What does all this reveal about psychological processes? I decided that when I met my graduate seminar class the next semester, Rimberg’s article would be a topic of the conversation in Psychology 609—Advanced Study in Psychotherapy, an optional course for students finishing a PhD in clinical psych.

CHAPTER 2

PSYCHOLOGY 609

The summer of 2014 passed pleasantly. It was a mild summer in upstate New York compared to the previous one. We were grateful that last year we had been able to escape. During the worst of the heat of 2013 we were in Italy, staying in a rented villa in Bellagio, on the shores of Lake Como, one of the most beautiful spots on earth, I’d say. We both love Italy and had even picked up a smattering of Italian, only to discover that our Italian was invariably worse than the average Italian’s English, at least in touristy areas. We pretended we were there for peace and quiet and finishing some writing projects, but there were so many wonderful villages and grand villas to explore, Cynar to be drunk, and plates of vitello tonnato to be consumed at lakeside restaurants, that if truth be told we got very little accomplished.

But this summer we had stayed at home and contented ourselves with barbecued spiedies, Syracuse salt potatoes, and Spiro’s world famous ice cream. World famous in Fenton, that is. I was working on issues related to forgiveness in families and connecting it to the experience of shame that I had been discussing with some British colleagues ever since my sabbatical at Oxford. Felicity Rimberg’s essay had given me some new ideas, as well as reminding me vividly of my sessions with her. I knew that I wanted to work these ideas into Psy 609.

It was about the second class of the year, mid-September, when I opened the seminar on Monday morning with a question. What do any of remember about Angelo Castillo? I asked the class of eight students. I had decided not to lead with the Felicity situation because I was still a tad uncertain about some of the ethical implications.

Wasn’t he the cardinal who was involved in some sort of sexscapade in the nineties? Albert suggested. Albert, as one of only two men in the class, was inevitably the first to have an opinion on any topic; Veronica always referred to it as Male Answer Syndrome, especially when it was me answering confidently on something I knew fuck-all about. Albert had a somewhat self-righteous, know-it-all air about him, anyway, syndrome or no syndrome. I nodded agreement.

I think I’d just started high school, Albert went on, but I remember there was quite a stir. He was on the cover of Time magazine, poor bastard. Maybe it was Newsweek—whichever one my parents subscribed to.

Nara added: I think he was the first Catholic cardinal in the States whose parents were from the Philippines originally. I know he was born in San Antonio, Texas. After he was first made archbishop he became highly admired for his work on confronting, exposing, and rehabilitating parish priests who were involved in sexual abuse of children, at a time the church was trying desperately to cover up these crimes.

Okay, well done, I said. Other heads were nodding uncertainly, with that slight frown and pouting of the lips that signals ‘maybe I know what you’re on about, but don’t press me for details.’ Right; you all seem to know some of the basic facts and can probably remember the general case, and Albert has expressed some sympathy …

Only for the humiliation Albert interjected.

Fair enough; ‘humiliation,’ a very good word in this context. Last week I started talking about some slightly different emotions that clients seek treatment for, such as jealousy, grief, and guilt, especially survivor guilt in Posttraumatic Stress Disorder. In cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy we are so used to dealing with anxiety and depression and anger we tend to forget that there are other complex, negative emotions that cause people distress and which they sometimes bring up in therapy. So what I’m going to do today is ask you to consider how you would go about formulating a treatment plan for someone experiencing intense shame or guilt. Putting this another way, let’s imagine that Angelo Castillo was your client. Now you have to think about him without moral judgment as a person in distress, and design a helpful treatment that will allow him to get back onto a meaningful path in life …

At this point Melanie interrupted me. She was something of a black-and-white thinker, in my view. She’d come into the clinical psychology training program with a background in the natural sciences—I think genetics was her major and she had psychology only as a minor. She was bright and hard-working, but I tended to think she lacked creativity. She was always looking for the facts, and Are there any data to support that? was one of her most common questions. Of course we trained them to ask just that very question, so it’s a bit unfair of me to be irritated when she did so. I had a sense she also irritated the other students in her year, although in general they were a tight lot. The clinical faculty had an understanding to discourage competition among such a potentially competitive group; good relationships properly forged in grad school could last them all their professional lives.

I’m just not sure I’d accept the referral. I remember he was frequenting a prostitute, a high-class call-girl, who eventually recognized him and then blackmailed him. When he couldn’t get away any longer with stealing church funds to pay her off, he threatened her, physically. Except for some kind of psychopathic personality disorder, I don’t think Castillo has a diagnosable condition. Unless you’re going to consider blatant hypocrisy a new syndrome for the revised Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. So there’s pretty well nothing to be targeted in therapy. What would be the goal of the intervention? Visiting brothels is not a symptom of mental illness, and I doubt his goal would have been to quit doing so.

There was an unusual level of intensity in Melanie’s comments. She could always be a bit prissy, but not usually quite so harsh. Bad mood or a raw nerve? I tried to remember what her family was like from the early admission interviews where the applicants talk about themselves. Italian and working-class was all I could remember; I’m fond of Italians.

Indeed, Mel, those are exactly the sorts of clinical issues a case like this raises. Does he have a mental disorder? Would he benefit from psychotherapy? And if so what would be the goal, other than helping relieve his conscience so that he doesn’t have to feel negative all his life about what he did—but maybe he should? Are there implications for his future? It’s not a trivial issue from either an ethical or a professional standards point of view. I mean, quite apart from anything else, don’t you think he might have been depressed? So let’s say he consults you because he’s feeling suicidal. Are you going to turn him away? Are you still going to get up on your high moral horse and say you can’t accept him as a client? I hope you wouldn’t do that, because in the end, as clinical psychologists, it’s not up to us to judge our clients. We have to approach each one in terms of their needs, not in terms of our own personal beliefs and scruples.

I continued, pontificating a little: I know some of you have done practicum work in a forensic setting with violent criminals. Yet there you were willing to design an intervention that was targeted on redemption of some kind, trying to ensure that the person will not reoffend. Of course, it’s not comparable at one level because Castillo, although he seemed to have amassed considerable personal wealth, was never prosecuted and the Church made no effort to get their money back—perhaps there was institutional shame and they wanted to bury him. So he wasn’t obligated to seek treatment. But he might have wished to do so. Did he seek absolution from the Church? I don’t know, in fact I don’t know what finally happened to him, but I’d like to use this scandal as a case study, an illustration of the real themes of today’s class: shame, guilt, disgrace, regret, remorse, compassion, forgiveness, redemption. It all sounds rather biblical …

Very appropriate for a cardinal, Simon chimed in.

I smiled, and went on: But anyway I feel it’s important for you as budding psychologists to think about emotional disasters that shape people’s lives and determine their futures.

There was a long silence, and then Simon, who doesn’t like silences in therapy and is working on it with one of his practicum supervisors, said: "I saw the hooker’s spread in Playboy a few years ago. She’s something else. Hot."

Oh for god’s sake, Simon, Melanie lunged out, trust you to lower the tone of the entire conversation. She looked at me pleadingly: That is why we can’t objectively discuss issues like this when we have Neanderthals in the class, salivating over the prurient details.

At first I thought she was semi joking because the class atmosphere is usually friendly and respectful even when teasing, and I’d never seen her come on this strong before. But she turned to Simon and continued, sarcastically: I suppose your therapy with Castillo would be sitting around discussing what a hot fuck she was.

Well he paid her like thousands of dollars, so I hope she was, Simon blurted out—he really did not know when to shut up. I had to step in.

"Come on guys, don’t make this personal and don’t make it crude. I don’t want to dampen your enthusiasm, but I think it’s worth reflecting that a case like this arouses strong feelings about values. And that’s why it is also worth discussing this from a professional and a scientific perspective. It’s easy enough to keep your personal feelings about a client out of the therapy situation when you are dealing with problems like social phobia or panic disorder or dysthymia, but it’s harder when your client is a sexual offender, or someone with a borderline personality disorder, or someone whose behavior or lifestyle you strongly disapprove of. I want to bring this back to the relevant scholarship, simply using Cardinal Castillo as a convenient hypothetical case. After all, none of us actually knows diddlysquat about the man, but we can make a few assumptions from what little we do know, and what he has said, and what others have said about him.

"I think one of the issues that doesn’t happen much with more ordinary clients is that with public figures the opinion of society in general is so relevant, although of course we do have lots of clinical disorders where general social criticism aggravates the client’s problems—a good example is eating disorders where there’s a strong social antipathy toward people who are considered overweight. There are huge documented levels of stigma attached to schizophrenia, which is harmful when it comes from the patient’s own family—you all know the literature on expressed emotion and how patients discharged from hospital do less well if their primary caregivers feel hostility toward them.

"Maybe the media’s obsession with celebrity scandals is painfully damaging to people, even if they deserve to be exposed. Look at Michael Goodall, the congressman from Hawai’i—oh god, I keep forgetting some of you weren’t even born then. Anyway, he was almost certain to be elected to the Senate before he was photographed hugging a bikini-clad model on board a charter fishing boat with the unfortunate name of Chasin’ Tail. The media went into a feeding frenzy, forgive the fishy metaphor, and he tried to tough it out, with his wife Nancy’s support, but the electorate deserted him big time and he never held office again. I hear he’s still working quietly as a lawyer in Honolulu, totally disengaged from politics and public life. Keeps a low profile, out of the spotlight. So let me start off the serious discussion today with someone telling me the difference between guilt and shame."

There was an even longer silence. I think that people outside academic circles have little awareness of what a class full of the best