Getting Noticed: Fifty Thousand Voices, All Talking At Once

45 years ago, Mad Dog exulted in the news that his first book was accepted for publication. 

Gustave Wiegand, Blue Lake

It was an improbable story, taken off the "slush pile," after having been rejected at 20 New York publishing houses, but one reader, an oddball gig worker named Brendan Boyd, who read manuscripts for a publisher with offices in Boston and New York, read it on his breaks at a Boston bookstore, where he worked, and told the publisher to publish it, and Mad Dog thought his ship had finally come in.

"Publishing is not a dream fulfilled," Brendan told Mad Dog. "It's a nightmare."

Gustave Wiegand, Springtime, New Hampshire

Mad Dog was too delirious to listen, but then he got sent down to the annual Booksellers Convention, this one in Washington, D.C., and he rode up on the escalator to the 2nd floor, where all the publishers had their displays, and stepping off the escalator, he looked around and saw Brendan's point. That year, 1981, there were 50,000 books published. Mad Dog looked around, and it was like trying to find one penguin among those throngs on the beach in "Planet Earth." 

Then it hit him: his one book, although published, printed, was a single peep among a huge expanse of birds.

In 2024, there were roughly 2.2 million books published.

How do you ever get heard, even if your idea, your voice, your story is the most magnificent of the year?

In fact, Mad Dog's book was nowhere close to the most magnificent of that year, and it was never heard of again. It was ignored, hardly reviewed, unnoticed, likely deservedly.

Actually, that's an over simplification, for purposes of clarity: The book did get one single, glowing review in the Washington Post Book World, front page, but what the reviewer liked about the book was its verisimilitude, its dark depiction of a hospital and the doctors, a sort of Nordic Noir, but Medical Noir, and the droves of people who streamed to local bookstores discovered the book had a bodice ripper cover which belonged on a romance novel, and so they left without the book, and if it ever had an audience, it never found it. So there is a case of a voice heard as a chirp, but then lost in the vicissitudes of marketing. So many things have to go right for a rocket to be launched. 

Gustave Wiegand

This Spring the Boston Museum of Fine Arts will do an exhibit of Van Gogh's paintings from his time at Arles, when he lived with the Roulin family, and he painted its members and he painted a number of scenes around their home.  When you get off the boat along the Seine, at Arles, you walk past a church and outside the church is a one foot square display of a Van Gogh painting of that church, and the town is dotted with other such displays in front of places he painted and you look at the things he painted, and you look at how he saw them, and you realize he was seeing things you could not see. 

Pink House, Obadiah Youngblood

Van Gogh was virtually unknown in his own time.

But, somehow, years later, we can all see his brilliance.

Andy Warhol gave away his paintings, strategically. Mad Dog was part of a group of friends from New York City who rented a summer house in East Hampton and one day, a woman named Nancy,  lying on her back in a bed in one of the rooms focused on what looked like a child's painting, which was unframed, but mounted on a board on the wall next to her bed. At the bottom of the painting was an inscription: "For Linda, From Andy."

Nancy pulled on her bikini and wandered out to the dining room table, where Mad Dog was mangling a  bagel, and she asked, "What was the name of that family on the lease for this place?"

Van Gogh and His Brother at Arles

As it happened, Mad Dog had signed the lease, and he somehow remembered: "Eastman," Mad Dog told her. "I remember because it's East Hampton and the name was Eastman. East, Eastman. Get it?"

Warhol

 

"Come with me," Nancy instructed, and Mad Dog followed her down to the bedroom, his hopes and curiosity rising in tandem--Nancy was a good looking woman. "Look at that," Nancy said. 

Mad Dog looked at the painting and said, "So?"

"So!" Nancy said. 

"Some kid painted..." Mad Dog said.

"To Linda," Nancy said, "Linda Eastman."

"Paul McCartney's Linda Eastman?" Mad Dog said.

"Yes, of course! Who would likely own a place in East Hampton she didn't use in the summer? And what Andy would give her a little sketch?"

"Andy Warhol?"

"Absolutely," said Nancy. "Who else?"

And that is one strategy for getting noticed. Give your stuff to famous people, rich famous people, and hope they hang it in their homes and then other people will want your stuff. 

If only Van Gogh had thought of that.

Three Hawks, Obadiah Youngblood

Somehow, some people with talent do get noticed.

Bob Dylan pursued Woody Guthrie, and he got Pete Seeger to put him on the stage at the Newport Folk Festival, and he played the Bitter End in Greenwich Village. 

Linda Ronstadt hung out with the Eagles, Joni Mitchell and Jackson Browne. 

Sometimes, groups of people can help each other get noticed.

But what if you want to start a political movement?

Hitler hung out at the beer hall in Munich.

Hamilton hung out with Aaron Burr and a bunch of friends in New York.

Locke 8, C&O Canal Obadiah Youngblood

But how many Van Goghs, Dylan's, Hamilton's never get noticed, never get heard? 

Gustave Wiegan, The Birches, Schroon Lake

In a Democracy, a government of, by and for the people means everyone has a voice, but if everyone is speaking and not enough people listening, what happens?

Marsh Family: THAT'S WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT!

 

We have Donald Trump and his Simpering Scoundrels; we have pandemics; we have mindless embrace of unexamined orthodoxy on the left and mindless derision of those orthodoxies on the right. So there is a case we live in the worst of times. (Although, I would say 1968 was worse.)

But it is also the best of times.

Because we also have youtube and this morning I stumbled upon the Marsh Family and after they blew me away with an understated little song, I was able to google them and find out more and be even more inspired.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPfwtXulKS4

This may provide a model for resistance. If we could only mobilize a thousand Marsh families--a tough challenge, given the level of intelligence and talent in this group--we might just bring Trump down.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYILYILPrXs

We have 330 million souls living in America. Do we have even a hundred folks who can do what these folks do?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvT3aQjLxdE

Relics of Hypocrisy: Thumb On the Scales of Just Causes

 

The first time ever I went to vote at the March exercise called "The Warrant articles" and elections, in Hampton, I thought this must surely be some sort of elaborate joke, or a community performance ritual, like Oberammergau Passion Play in some Bavarian village.

Town Hall Debate: Real Democracy

There were two or three ballot sheets with choices for candidates for the School Board, Library Trustee, Zoning Board or the Budget Committee, which needed no explanation.

But then there were forty odd "warrant articles" with several paragraphs each, like the one asking the voters to authorize a $1,000 fine for people who did not pick up their dog's poop from the beach. That one, I voted against, thinking $1,000 sounded a bit harsh for that, admittedly uncouth, offense. But I thought maybe I was missing something. 

Mostly, however, the paragraphs were undecipherable to me--stuff like whether the town should spend $10,000 for a study of water damage abatement along Ocean Boulevard and its effects on undermining the seawall. No clue there. Is $10,000 a reasonable amount for such a study? Do we even need a study? What happens if we don't do the study?  So I skipped most of those.

Later, my neighbors explained I was supposed to go to the "Deliberative Sessions" held before the voting, where citizens could ask questions about each warrant article and get full explanations, and hear objections or support for each.

So, the next year, I did that, but they lasted for eight hours and most people seemed to drift and and out, so they could voice support or opposition to some particular article. There might have been 200 people at these meetings, and about 3,600 voters show up to vote on voting day, so it's a safe assumption, most of them have not taken the time to consider each of these articles.

Turns out: you really needn't have worried about people not showing up at the Deliberative Sessions, to deliberate, to consider the pros and cons of each article: Once the final articles are presented to the town, there is a helpful line printed beneath the paragraph presenting the article and directly above the boxes where you check your choice:

RECOMMENDED BY THE SCHOOL BOARD 6-0

RECOMENDED BY THE BUDGET COMMITTEE 5 YES-2 NO

Then you check:

YES:   ____

NO:     ____

So, there you have it. You might not know anything about the article, but the town officials on the various committees tell you how to vote. Presumably, they have debated or thought about these articles.

So, if they have done all the hard work, who am I to vote against what they recommend?  It's as if a jury has sat through a week of testimony, hearing the evidence of guilt or innocence and then voted, and then asked me for my opinion, as if I should even have an opinion.

One might ask: Why go through the whole charade that citizens are considering these questions, if you are going to tell them how to vote, in the end?

Well, it helps folks give a patina of legitimacy to whatever cause they support: "Well, the citizens of the town voted for it!"

This always came up when objections were raised to using taxpayer money to support a church school in town: "Well, the voters voted to do it!"

Alicia Preston X

Alicia Preston Xanthopolus pressed this argument in her editorial in the Seacoast News:

What is wonderful about our form of government in our small town, is that we actually vote directly on these funds. That is quite an empowerment and if “we the people" want our tax dollars to go to a religious organization, we do and should have the right to say so.

And there you have it: it's democracy in action!

When someone at one Deliberative Session observed that Sacred Heart School is the only non public school to ever get a special taxpayer account in town, the reply was: "Well, anyone can get it. All they have to do is get the voters to approve it."

When someone then put forward an article to do that, the same SHS advocate objected, saying if we made money available to just any school, then a school for the Church of Satan might move to town and claim that money, and the idea was voted down.

Voting her Heart

When a citizen complained that the School Board and the Budget Committee had always voted to recommend the slush fund to the taxpayers, and that's why it always passed, and it wasn't really something the voters wanted; it was simply something they did not understand, that objection was met with stony silence.

Influencer

That's the way we've always done it here.

Until this year, when the School Board and Budget Committee voted to not recommend taxpayer funds for the church school, and members of the congregation howled bloody murder over the nasty practice of those committees putting their thumbs on the scales of justice.

The Fire Next Time: Alicia Preston Xanthopoulus

 

Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

--AMENDMENT ONE: RATIFIED 1791

Readers of this blog are understandably weary of the fight over the Sacred Heart School warrant article. The voting this year voted it down, but it will surely be resurrected (excuse the pun) next year. 

The Seacoast News, what passes for our local paper, carried this screed from a columnist for the paper in support of the warrant article slush fund for the church school and that it carried no rejoinder is all that we can expect from this amateurish journal. 

Alicia Preston Xanthopoulos 

So, knowing it will arise again, Mad Dog provides the rejoinder, for those not completely fed up with the whole debate.

Commentary: Here's why I support Hampton tax dollars going to Sacred Heart School

Alicia Preston Xanthopoulos

Sun, February 11, 2024 at 5:08 AM EST

5 min read

When I go to the polling location to vote in the Hampton town election on March 12, I will vote yes for $52,521 for non-religious costs (like a school nurse) for Sacred Heart School, as I do every year this question is posed to me. Which I think is every year I’ve been eligible to vote.

I am not Catholic. I have never attended a private school or religious one — unless Sunday School at the First Congregational Church counts. I am a product of the public schools in Hampton and feel I received a wonderful education and experience as a student. I'm still voting for that small amount of funding for Sacred Heart so students and parents who choose to attend can keep tuition reasonable and give them choice as to what is best for their child. I hope I am in the majority, but the opposition is getting louder.

 

I find the opposition, based on “separation of church and state” and “government shouldn’t be funding religious anything,” to be both constitutionally untrue and not in the best interest of our community and most importantly, our students.

First, on the constitutionality issue, quite simply the U.S. Constitution doesn’t protect us “from” religion, it protects the freedom “of” it. It has been interpreted that way for generations.

 

No, actually, Alicia, this is not even close to being true. The First Amendment has two clauses: 1. The establishment clause (which is what the Sacred Heart School slush fund warrant article violates) and the 2. Free exercise clause, which is what you are talking about. The free exercise clause has not been predominate for generations; in fact, the opposite is true, although lately with the Trump Court, it has gained advocates. Of course, "Congress" is now accepted as meaning "government," state, city or town, and some have argued that making no law respecting establishment means no law for or against establishment, but that is such sophistry, nobody bothers to say that anymore.

More and more frequently, this issue of “government” money going to religious schools is being raised as a constitutional dilemma. I don’t find it to be. As a matter of fact neither does the U.S. Supreme Court as recently as 2022, when it ruled that our neighbors next door, Maine, cannot exclude families who send kids to religious schools from its tuition reimbursement program.

The Maine case had peculiarities which do not apply to Hampton and the SFS slush fund. In Maine, children sued the state for refusing to pay their tuition to a religious school, saying there simply was no other alternative school for them to attend within a hundred miles. In Hampton, there are four public schools within a mile of SHS.

In the opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote, “A state need not subsidize private education. But once a state decides to do so, it cannot disqualify some private schools solely because they are religious.”

In her dissent, Justice Sotomayor asserted with Robert’s ruling the Supreme Court (SCOTUS) had virtually ruled that separation of church and state is unconstitutional. As the First Amendment is what embodies separation of church and state, SCOTUS had ruled, very peculiarly, that a part of the Constitution is unconstitutional. If we ever get a SCOTUS comprised of actual jurists, as opposed to the Alito/Thomas/Gorsuch/Barrett/Kavanagh cabal, this decision will be surely overturned.

While this is a very different case regarding state “voucher” programs, what it demonstrates is there is no absolute ban of taxpayer dollars funneling through a government to a religious school. In that respect, it is no different than Hampton taxpayer dollars simply funneling through Hampton to Sacred Heart.

Oh, no, Dear Alicia, there is a ban on state funds being granted to churches and church schools, and that is called the First Amendment of the United States Constitution and even more unambiguous, the New Hampshire state constitution which says: “No person shall ever be compelled to pay towards the support of the schools of any sect or denomination.”

What is wonderful about our form of government in our small town, is that we actually vote directly on these funds. That is quite an empowerment and if “we the people" want our tax dollars to go to a religious organization, we do and should have the right to say so.

The thing about the Constitution of the United States is that it applies all across the nation, from every mountain top to every hamlet, and it tells you what you cannot vote on. For example, you cannot vote to segregate your local schools on the basis of race, even if the local voters want that. We have nullified the Constitution in Hampton for 50 years, just as the governor of Alabama tried to nullify the Constitution, but we got away with it, and ultimately, he didn’t.  

Besides, we already do it all the time. We approve funding to St. Vincent de Paul to support its amazing efforts to assist low income families with needed food, clothing and even home medical supplies. We support money to assist with the “Christmas Parade," one of my favorite days of the year.

This is what is called the “common good” thing. It is accepted that government cannot do everything, and some charities which happen to be religious run soup kitchens and may ask for government money for this charitable purpose. But the distinction is they do not teach religion in a soup kitchen and you can have your soup and not sign up to be converted or taught a particular gospel. But, as Justice Robert O. Jackson noted in his Everson decision, a church would give up everything before it gives up its church school, because without church schools every church would be doomed to extinction with the next generation. The difference between SHS and St. Vincent de Paul and all the other examples of Catholic charities is that schools teach religion; charities do not.

We give tens of thousands of dollars to maintain our cemetery, a place that hosts more religious services than anywhere but a church itself.

This is an embarrassingly inept analogy: Our Hampton cemeteries have interred people of all faiths and government funds to maintain these or, for that matter parks, do not violate the separation of church and state. 

You might have cited other examples of violation of government establishing religion which would be more problematic: The “In God We Trust” on our coinage; the “one nation under God,” in our pledge of allegiance, the opening of Congressional events with a chaplain and a prayer. Yes, all of these mix state with religion, and the only thing one can say about all that is, "wish it weren’t true," but these erosions of separation do not make us a theocracy.

We’ve given, through our ballots, to Waypoint, who doesn't seem as religious now but was founded “as the Manchester City Missionary Society, a collaborative of several Protestant churches in the areas, whose purpose was to ‘save the unclaimed souls of the city.’ Primarily, it tried to church the ‘unchurched.’”

Should we look at the founding of an organization to see if it meets the criteria of “no religious connection anywhere”? Of course not. That’s absurd. Let’s remember, these funds we’re talking about do not go to any religious activities, so a religious connection is simply irrelevent. The only questions that matter to me when I decide whether to vote on one of these “donation” articles is, 1. Does it do good work for the community? 2. Is the amount requested fair and reasonable? When it comes to Sacred Heart, it checks both boxes so I will check mine “yes” in a few weeks.

Oh, Alicia, you haven’t been listening to the Deliberative Sessions. It is very clear from public statements (available on Channel 22) that the money given to SHS is not separable into money spent on religious things (like crucifixes) and money spent on non religious stuff. To try to separate monies is like telling the person who is allergic to peanuts it’s just fine to eat the stew because you can eat the carrots and the peas and use your spoon to separate out the peanuts.  The Treasurer who wrote the check for the SHS computers testified that she had no idea if those computers were used to stream services from St. Patrick’s cathedral. And even the principal of the school never denied that only 25% of the students at SHS come from families in Hampton; the other 75% of students at SHS come from families who are paying taxes in other towns, not Hampton. So what the taxpayers of Hampton are being asked to do is to fund a Catholic education for anyone who wants one, no matter what town they come from.

Some often say — not just regarding Sacred Heart but these types of issues in communities across the state and country — “if you want to donate, donate, but use your own money!” Whose money do you think we're talking about? The magic money tree in Depot Square, or our money, in the form of taxpayer dollars, that go to where we vote it to go to, after it just passes through the town on the way to its intended target?

I also don't understand the argument that is noted on this matter, as well as regarding our state Education Trust Fund Program, that money spent on a religious or private schools comes directly out of the coffers for public schools. How? If they don't have to educate that kid, aren’t they saving money? And these voucher programs and the non-religious funding for Sacred Heart is far less than the allotted "per pupil spending” local schools get. They're actually making out on this deal.

This is the old, “it’s cheaper to send kids to SHS than to the expensive public schools." Fact is, we have empty seats in our public schools, so paying again to send kids to SHS is like going to the cafeteria, where the meals are all set out to feed all the kids, and then saying, “Well, but for those of you who want to go eat at McDonald’s, here’s some cash to do that.” We are paying twice for these kids.

Across society and multiple topics, there’s a lot of “just because it’s always been done, doesn't mean it still should be.” Well, it also doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be either. For four decades we’ve assisted this school, and more importantly our fellow community members who are students, families and neighbors, I see no constitutional, fiscal or political reason to stop now.

Oh, back to the “we’ve always done it this way” thing. That argument is so worn and corrupted (as it was in the Jim Crow South) it hardly is worth mentioning.

"But we've always had Negro children going to Negro schools and White children going to White schools!" 

This is the old "hasn't done no harm," thing. We have nullified the Constitution here in Hampton and nothing bad has happened argument. "We haven't done no harm having the school teacher lead the students in the Lord's Prayer every morning. What's all the fuss about?"  

What you are really saying, dear Alicia, is that we have done it this way, offended principles this way, for years and you haven't felt harmed by it. That does not mean other people have not felt offended, belittled or outraged.

On March 12, this Protestant, public school product will be voting for funding Sacred Heart’s non-religious costs, and I hope the majority joins me.

 

David Remnick and the Anointed Pundit

 

Mad Dog admits it, right at the starting line: He reads the New Yorker regularly, and listens to The New Yorker Radio Hour podcast. Mad Dog is a fan. Sort of. Well, mostly. Well, not really.

Discoverers of Insulin: How Much Good

Remnick begins his interview with Atul Gawande with the sentence: "It's hard to calculate all the good Atul Gawande has done in the world."

And therein is contained a bias to which Mr. Remnick is assuredly blind:  Dr. Gawande may have done good in the world, and it may be incalculable, but if Dr. Gawande had been a graduate of Cornell University Medical College, at least until the advent of the 21st century, faculty there would have looked at his career and you would have seen a lot of heads shaking in disappointment.  

Gawande trained as a surgeon, and he once did some  surgery. 

And he told a wonderful story about being called to the Emergency Room for a woman with an abdominal aortic aneurysm, which he thought would surely kill her, but she refused surgical intervention, and he sadly watched her son take her home to certain death, only to learn, a year later she was still alive, which taught him a valuable lesson, and he used it to great effect with his audiences, that doctors are not always correct.  Of course, ask a vascular surgeon and he will look at you quizzically, and say, "Rupture of any large abdominal aortic aneurysm, and the decision to try to fix it is always a risk versus benefit thing--there is a certain percentage of aneurysms which do not rupture. You are always talking about risk, not certainty."

Paul Offit, MD

Dr. Gawande gave up surgery for a job with Amazon medicine, with much fanfare about how he would change the medical care delivery system for the entire country, and when that didn't work out,  he took a government job with the Agency for International Development. 

And he wrote two books, one of which extolled the virtues of surgeons stopping before beginning a procedure to run through a check list, as airline pilots do, which was a reasonable suggestion, if not revolutionary, but he got a book out of it.

And he wrote a famous New Yorker article which got a lot of attention in the Obama White House, about how doctors often change their practice to skew toward more profit, gaming the insurance system.  And he wrote about how nice it is when doctors can directly communicate with each other, the way doctors at the Mayo Clinic can do,  because they are all in the same building. 

And he wrote about a famous doctor who ran a famous clinic for cystic fibrosis patients, with a little vignette about a doctor who asks a patient, "What have you done this week to make this the best C.F. Clinic in the world?"-- as if the most important thing to this patients ought to be the  clinic's success rating. 

Of course, this famous clinic could offer nothing to really help these patients. Pulmonary toilet in CF is just a band aide on a wound. It may get a patient 5 more years of life. You can really appreciate how inept a therapy is only when a truly effective therapy emerges:  in CF, that is gene therapy and CRISPER technology which may promise patients a normal lifespan and a normal life. This clinic, though famous, had nothing more to offer its patients than Elliot Joslin, who was treating type 1 diabetes with a diet of dubious benefit, before the discovery of Insulin. 

Famous, but useless. That's a thing in medicine. Sort of the Dr. Oz phenomenon. 

Gawande was not, in Cornell speak, a "real surgeon."  A real surgeon, on a gorgeous Spring day would want to be in the operating room, doing a lovely dissection. 

Semmelweiss

But that world of dedicated physicians and surgeons has receded into the mist: the world of doctors for whom medicine was a calling, the highest and most rewarding pursuit in the world.

Dr. Gawande, those ancient physicians would say, "Went Hollywood." That is, he sought personal fame and fortune, doing stuff that was not really surgery or medicine. But for Mr. Remnick, the fame was the thing. 

If you want to talk about doctors who did incalculable good in the world, you might consider Dr. Frederick Banting and Charles Best, his graduate student, who discovered the molecule insulin one hot Toronto summer, sweltering in a lab, dissecting dogs. They sold the patent rights to their discovery for $1. They had wards filled with children dying from type 1 diabetes. They did not want any delay over patent rights to delay treatment. Those are real heroes. Not famous. Not a single student at Winnacunnet High School in Hampton can tell you who Frederick Banting or Charles Best are. But these doctors did incalculable good for the world. They just don't make the pages of school textbooks, or popular magazines.

Before Insulin

Giving up bedside medicine does not mean you have lost the faith.  Tony Fauci was a Cornell product and he left bedside medicine, for the most part, for a job in the  government which was mostly administrative, although he did cleave to bedside medicine for may years after most of his colleagues had stopped making rounds on real patients. 

Of course now, even at the Cornell Medical College reunions, the alumni who are  celebrated are those who got famous: a guy who became famous as the orthopedic surgeon for the New York Rangers and the New York Knicks. 

Did that famous orthopedic surgeon do more good in the world than some other orthopedist who labored away in obscurity for 40 years, fixing up high school students in Fergus Falls, Minnesota, or the guy replacing hips in Portsmouth, New Hampshire? Did he affect medicine as broadly as the Cornell graduate who became the chief of radiology at Duke for 35 years, who trained hundreds of radiologists, whose textbooks of radiology trained thousands others? 

Lynching: American South Berserkdom

David Remnick is a man whose career has to do with mass communications, and he has drunk the Kool Aide that the celebrated, the famous, the folks at places like the Hoover Institution, or the Harvard faculty, are the people who are important, who know more, and who have more impact in the world.

So, when he interviews some guy from the Hoover Institution, whose critical insight into our current fix with the Trump mob is that America has always been "berserk," Remnick finds that notion profound, important and something which, if only he could get out there, might save the world, or will, at least, make millions feel much relief.

And yet...anyone who reads enough American history has known, America is berserk and has been since its inception. Read "The Guarded Gate," by Daniel Okrent, or "A Peoples History of the United States" by Howard Zinn or "The Untold History of the United States," by Oliver Stone or "White Trash"  or "Fallen Founder" by Nancy Isenberg or "The Best and the Brightest," by David Halberstam, anyone who has drunk from these founts of knowledge knows just how vile, wonderful, nasty, superlative, corrupt, pure, and checkered the USA has always been.

Or, you could simply read Huckleberry Finn.

Journalism 101

 

There was voting in Hampton yesterday, and about 10,000 ballots were cast, although with the ballot running into what felt like 100 pages, not all voters voted on every warrant article. Mad Dog typically skips the warrant article yes/no vote on allowing Mrs. Moneypenny to plant petunias across the sidewalk on the grassy strip by the road which technically belongs to the town, for which she needs voter permission to plant. Live Free or Die, New Hampshire.

Among the warrant articles to go down to defeat was the article awarding $52,000 to the Sacred Heart School of the Catholic Church of Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal.   During the Deliberative Session on this article the woman who writes the checks to cover the invoices presented her from the school for computers admitted she had no idea whether those computers were used to stream services from St. Patrick's cathedral. 

That question arose because the argument has always been that none of this taxpayer money ever goes to buy crucifixes or Bibles, but is only used for "non religious purposes," as if you can separate the peanuts in the stew from the tomatoes, so it's safe to dip in your spoon, even if you're allergic to peanuts.

But what is really fun is to see is how the reporter for the Seacoast News, Max Sullivan, who has reported on this warrant article for years, wrote about this defeat.

 Sullivan's previous stories about this warrant articles featured quotes from the principal of Sacred Heart, along with a photograph of her standing in front of some poster with an inspirational message, like "It's All About the Kids!" Nowhere in his paragraph are responses from any of the opponents of the article. Well, saying "any of the opponents" may be a bit of a reach, as there has only ever been one opponent to speak against the warrant article, (until this year when a public school teacher expressed doubts, without fully opposing it.) But Sullivan has never interviewed this rowdy opponent, which prompted the malcontent to question the owner of Seacoast News whether Sullivan was a member of the congregation, which the owner heatedly denied.

Here is Mr. Sullivan's rendition:

"Voters have supported funding under RSA 198:49 to the Catholic school each year since 1975. The state law was created to allow non-public schools the means of attaining education resources normally provide to public schools by the state. None of the funds are used for religious purposes and are directly used to benefit the students of Hampton who attend the school. The article which was not recommended by the School Board or the Budget Committee was defeated by a vote of 1,345 to 1,961."

Of course there are things to unpack here:

1/ None of the funds are used for religious purposes we've covered: school funds are not fungible, i.e. if you pay for paving the parking lot, the church school has more money to spend on the altar.

2/ The article was not recommend by the School Board or the Budget Committee: In previous years the School Board was stacked with members of the congregation of the Church, and so they were voting taxpayer funds to support their own church. This year, the Board is not so overwhelmed by church people, and at the Deliberative Session there was much ire coming from congregants about the Board's change of heart. For years, the congregants thought it was just fine to have the recommendations of the School Board printed on the ballot; this year there was prolonged objection.

3/ The RSA is the law which has been used to circumvent the state constitution which clearly states no citizen's taxes can ever be allocated to any church or religious organization, a provision which has suffered local nullification since 1975. Here's the actual constitutional passage: "No money raised by taxation shall ever be granted or applied for the use of the schools of institutions of any religious sect or denomination." That passage is so clear that efforts have been made to expunge it in the legislature. Not a problem in Hampton, where we simply ignore it.

 

4/ The $52,000 is used to benefit the students from Hampton who attend the school, but only 25% of the students are from homes in Hampton, which means 75% of the students benefited are from households where the parents are paying taxes in another town. As was noted at the Deliberative Session, what this article has guaranteed is not equal treatment for all Hampton kids, it has guaranteed that anyone from neighboring towns who want their kids to have a Catholic education can send there kids to Hampton, where the taxpayers will pay for it. Mr. Sullivan echoes the words of the Sacred Heart principal who frequently uses that phrase: funds "are directly used to benefit students of Hampton who attend the school." True enough, but there are precious few of those attending the school and the funds are Hampton taxes supporting kids from towns which are not Hampton.

And, oh, Mr. Sullivan has never addressed the question about  the woman who has  written those checks to cover Sacred Heart invoices for so many years: Is she herself a graduate of Sacred Heart?  Is  this town official, who has been writing checks from taxpayer funds all these years, never having refused to pay an invoice from the school, actually writing taxpayer checks to her own alma mater?

So, some significant points have been missed by Mr. Sullivan. 

When he was challenged about why he never interviewed the rowdy article opponent, Mr. Sullivan replied he had tried to call that man but never got an answer, and he was writing under deadline. The opponent asserted his phone showed no such phone  call, and no message was left. 

There you have the essence of journalism along the Seacoast. 

Some have decried the death of local newspapers. 

Mad Dog wonders whether we are better off without them.