Talking New Hampshire Down Home Blues

 

We've got the best Congress money can buy.

--variously attributed

Girl by the whirpool

Looking for a new fool

Don't follow leaders

Watch the parking meters

Get jailed, jump bail

Join the army, if you fail.

--Bob Dylan, Subterranean Homesick Blues

George Carlin famously advised Americans to not vote. Our elected leaders cannot be one whit better than we are, and as a nation, Americans suck--and that's why those who represent them suck. 

That was Carlin's argument. 

Having heard all that, Mad Dog attended a "forum" for Democratic candidates for the open seat in New Hampshire's first Congressional district which extends from Hampton along the seacoast up the eastern side of the state to Lake Winnipesaukee.

The truth is, we know precious little about anybody we vote for. Mad Dog knew that from growing up with the children of Congressmen and government officials in Washington, D.C. When you meet the people who people our government, it's always a disappointment.  That is not true for having dinner with journalists, university professors, doctors, scientists, who may not be winning personalities, but they tend to be more interesting and engaging and impressive off stage than they are on stage. The opposite is true for politicians and actors. 

Carleigh Beriont

The forum was supposed to be an opportunity to get to know better the candidates for the Democratic nomination to run in the general election. There were five candidates at the forum, three men and three women, and any one of them would be better than whoever the Republicans might choose, because, you know, they are none of them MAGA.

But first the Democrats need to find someone who can do both of two things: 

1. Win the seat

2. Go to Washington and vote to change things, i.e., be brave.

The surprise of the night was Sarah Chadzynski, who very few of the Hampton voters in that room had ever heard of, but she turns out to be very smart and she has worked for a non governmental organization lobbying Congress to support Ukraine, so she has spent a lot of time in Washington and she has spoken with every single member of Congress, which even most Congressman cannot claim. The problem is, she can't win the seat. No name recognition and nobody can even spell her name. So, while she may have won the Hampton Derby as a dark horse, she's not Mad Dog's choice. 

Oh, And did I tell you?...I was a Marine!

Then there is Maura Sullivan, who has the backing of mysterious big money and a resume of having been a woman in the Marine Corps, which she reminds you about every third sentence. Semper Fidelis. We got it. This is her second primary for an open Congressional seat in New Hampshire--she ran in 2017, announcing her run about 2 months after first moving to New Hampshire. Clearly, she does not lack ambition or drive. Her last time out she came in 2nd to Chris Pappas, who went on to win the seat. She presided over the forum as if all the other candidates on stage were her guests, who she thanked for coming. There is something so relentlessly superficial and artificial about her, Mad Dog drove himself crazy trying to put his finger on just exactly why she comes off the way she does. She is probably a decent human being down there somewhere, but she plays a role she thinks is winning and that is a turn off for Mad Dog, although she had her supporters in the crowd.

No Show Stefanny

The one candidate not there, the one candidate who is almost never there is Stefany Sheehan, daughter of the current U.S. Senator from New Hampshire who purportedly is leading in the polls.  Having attended a variety of events where Stefany did not show, Mad Dog thought she was simply too busy as the front runner to bother with events of less than a thousand people, but Mad Dog has recently heard another explanation: Stefany's neighbors in Portsmouth say they believe she is pathologically shy, and that's the generous interpretation. They say hello to her, walking their dogs, passing her in the street but she barely acknowledges them.

Did I mention, my mother was Senator?

Now pathological shyness is no disgrace, but running for a Congressional seat may not be the best choice of vocation for someone thus afflicted. Mad Dog would love to be a rock star, but he has no sense of rhythm and is tone deaf, so he opted for another occupation. Stefany probably ought to opt for another option, no matter what her mother tells her to do.

Mad Dog's favorite is Carleigh Beriont, who checks off most of Mad Dog's boxes, but not all the boxes.

Of all the candidates running, Carleigh has by far the most glamorous academic record, which may actually be something she has to hide when asking for blue collar, resentful white male votes, which will likely go to the Republican anyway. College at a Seven Sister's school (Mt. Holyoke) PhD at Harvard, field work in Micronesia (the Marshall Islands), and now an adjunct faculty lecturer at Harvard, which is great for Harvard because they can pay her pennies, but allows her to devote herself to her two children, and to serve on a variety of town government boards.

Ennis, Ireland

But don't hold all those glittering academic merit badges against her: She is actually, simply put, very smart. You can see her shifting gears, depending on who his is talking to--she smiles more and says less, and with fewer syllables, when she is talking to some folks, but when she is confronted with someone who has written his thesis on the topic he's asking her about, she shifts gears and replies with the precision, vocabulary and cadences required to meet him on his own level and let him know she's no push over.

In other words, while she comfortable with the PTA moms and the landscaper, she is just as fluent in academic speak and there is nobody in Washington who will be able to intimidate her. The real question is whether she will be inclined to intimidate anyone during hearings. 

Which brings us to what used to be called, "qualifications,"  a quaint concept which was dying before Donald Trump became President having no government experience but is clearly, truly and most seriously dead now. Nevertheless, Carleigh has got the nuts and bolts experience of serving on the Select Board, which is the town equivalent of collective mayor, and the Budget Committee, which manages a multimillion dollar budget in a town sucked dry by an avaricious state government in Concord, which looks at the wealth generated by Hampton Beach, the seacoasts major resort town, and grabs all the dollars it can, while leaving the town to figure out how to pay for it. It's Hampton makes, Concord takes. 

Given that tally sheet, you might expect her to be a tough, maybe arrogant Brahmin type, but she is deliberatively not that. If Maura has created a lean, green, killing machine macho-Marine woman persona, then Carleigh has cultivated a local mother with spittle in her hair, trying to keep a dozen balls in the air while keeping the town financially and administratively afloat. She is PTA mom on steroids. 

In fact, it's her amiability which other candidates quietly allude to: One of her competitors from the forum, in the mingling and conversation aftermath, where candidates one on one with voters, said Carleigh is a wonderful person but "she will be eaten alive down there in Washington."

"Too nice," is the message.

And surely, New Hampshire has already sent too nice to Washington with Chris Pappas. Many of us worried sending Pappas to Washington to face off against Jim Jordan, Marjorie Taylor Green and Lauren Boebert was like sending a house cat into the lion's den.

And there is something more than snide back biting to that criticism. 

On two occasions, Carleigh was simply too politic (or maybe you'd prefer "polite")  and not enough the warrior, in Mad Dog's view.

One thing you have to say for Carleigh in spades is she shows up, and when the Deliberative Session considering the annual Warrant Article awarding taxpayer money to the town's Catholic church school took place, Carleigh showed up, the only Select Board member to do so. The School Board was all present. Anne Marie Galanis from the Budget Committee was there, but not the Select Board, nor any other governmental elected folks.  

This Warrant article has been voted through for 43 years, every year, until 2025, when somebody pointed out that it is floridly unconstitutional, in that government "shall make no law respecting religion" (First Amendment) and "no person shall ever be required to pay for the schools of any religion or sect" (Article 6, New Hampshire constitution) both apply and have been flagrantly violated under the aegis of "just let them try to enforce that!" prerogative of local town government.

One of the arguments for continuing to violate the First Amendment as been that sending kids to the Catholic school is cheaper for the town, where it costs $68,000 a year per student to go to a public school, or some such enormous sum. Carleigh rose to clarify that that number is misleading--it really does not cost that much to educate a kid in the public town schools, and the number includes the cost of providing for special needs children who are very expensive, but the cost for a child in Hampton public schools is actually far less. 

This struck Mad Dog as maddeningly off the point. It had already been said that there are empty seats in all Hampton schools now, seats which have already been paid for, so keeping kids out of those seats and sending them to the Catholic school saves no money at all--that money has already been spent. 

Carleigh could have said, "Look, I'm Catholic born and raised. My neighbors love the Catholic school and send their kids there and I considered it myself, but I don't expect town taxpayers who are not Catholic to pay for a Catholic school education any more than I'd expect them to pay to send my kids to Phillips Exeter down the road."

But she did not. She argued, indirectly, against the article but without confronting the real beating heart argument about separation of church and state.

She was not a warrior. She was a mediator.

In fact, if you look at the video, Carleigh's diffidence is subtly revealed: One of the speakers told a joke about how difficult it can be for a public official, for anyone in government, to hew to the principle of separation of church and state--it was that old story about Anne Richards, governor of Texas, who was told she had to tear down the Christmas nativity scene with baby Jesus, the three kings etc., on state grounds outside her office. Governor Richards exclaimed, "Damn! I really hate to do that! This is the only time, once a year in Austin, when we can ever collect in one place, at one time, three Wise Men!"

If you look at that video, there is Carleigh in the audience laughing, but she quickly collects herself and places her hand over her mouth and bows her head. The principal of the Catholic school stomped to the podium to say this very important topic was no laughing matter.  Carleigh was, instinctively, careful not to offend.

And that is the box Mad Dog cannot check for Carleigh. She is too careful not to offend. We need Democrats who want to offend, who will join the battle, not evade it.

And then there was the great ICE debate. The Select Board heard arguments that it should support a citizens' resolution to direct the chief of Hampton police to enter into no agreement or contract with ICE. This was during the Minneapolis occupation by ICE and Trump's Border Patrol and a week before ICE shot dead Renee Good and Alex Pretti. 

Ordinarily, the Select Board just sits in their chairs and listens and says nothing either to those citizens who show up to speak or among themselves, but on this occasion, before voting to endorse or reject the resolution, Amy Hansen who was endorsed by the Hampton  Democrats but usually votes with the Republican, spoke up. She said she wanted to make it clear her vote was motivated by the desire to keep the Board out of partisan politics--as she was going to vote to reject the anti-ICE resolution, along with Rusty Bridle, the Republican Board chairman. 

Carleigh, smiling, said, gently, "Well, but Amy, due process is hardly a partisan issue."

That was it. She did not say, "Inviting ICE, an agency which might be generously described as a lawless, rogue agency into Hampton where we could expect them to be no more likely to respect due process than they have been in Minneapolis hardly should be thought of as a political issue. It's an issue of public safety and respect for the rule of law."

But she did not .

As it played out, Carleigh had another shot at ICE and, to her great credit, she took it.

Several weeks later at the town Deliberative Session, the resolution was again introduced, this time as a Warrant Article and by then both Good and Pretti were dead and one citizen asked, "How many Hampton mothers will have to be shot before the town of Hampton is willing to reject the presence of ICE here?" 

A Republican state Representative offered an amendment to the Warrant Article, thus technically allowing for the Board to vote again. By this time even Amy Hansen and Rusty Bridle could see the animus of the crowd, the volatility of the situation and Carleigh, reading the Board called for a re-vote, and the Board voted unanimously to pass the anti-ICE measure.

So Carleigh played her cards right, got the result and brought along the Board with her.

But, Mad Dog would argue, while that may well have been slick management and crafty statesmanship, it was not leadership, or at least the leadership New Hampshire Democrats long for.

If the world were just: It would be Carleigh

Had Maura Sullivan been there, she might have said, "I have led Marines into battle and grieved at their deaths and I want to see no more deaths among either ICE troops or the good people of Minneapolis!"

But, what Mad Dog would have liked to have heard just one public official say is: "Hampton stands with Minneapolis. We are not a sanctuary town, but we are an American town and we believe no agent of the government should wear a mask, that no agent of government should prowl the streets, arresting citizens or non citizens without due process and against the wishes of the citizenry. We believe ICE has proved to be unrestrained by law and in fact has injected lawlessness into places where law once prevailed." 

And all like that.

Having said all that, Carleigh Beriont is clearly the pick of the litter and should be the nominee, and she should be the next Congresswoman from the New Hampshire First, but she won't be because she does not have enough big money backers.

And if she does go to Washington, of course, she will find her first and most pressing job, from the moment she moves into her office is to start dialing for dollars all over again.

But for now, she has been put in the position of trying to win an election on simple merit, and in New Hampshire, that is a tall order.

And so we'll dance to that discordant music, and Carleigh will have to chase after small donors like some Mary Kay promoter, hoping to generate enough grassroots money to win a pink Cadillac.

Obadiah Youngblood

Mad Dog would be the first to volunteer to drive up to Wolfboro, Alton Bay, Rochester and all points remote from Hampton to speak to whoever might be willing to listen, to sing Carleigh's praises, but he'll not be asked--because there is no mechanism for that sort of mass communication in New Hampshire, or likely anywhere in America. Now it's all TV or Face Book or something online, where the eyes are.

We will never elect another Lincoln. When Lincoln spoke at Cooper Union, his hour long speech was carried in newspapers which were sent nationwide--and people read it. Now Lincoln would have to condense it all into snappy phrases on Whatsapp!

So here's how the money chase stands currently:

                                    

Maura Sullivan                 $2,638,370

Stefany Shaheen              $1,800,994

Carleigh Beriont                   $385,021

When every campaign becomes a money chase, we paraphrase American paratroopers in World War II, as we rumble along in our trucks and caissons, "It's a Helluva Way to Fight a War." 

Calling a Spade a Spade

 

"Smug, greedy, well fed white people have invented a language to conceal their sins. Israeli murderers are called commandos. Arab commandos are called terrorists...In the age when torture as become 'enhanced interrogation techniques,' when the rich are 'job creators,' when murdered children are called 'collateral damage.'"

--George Carlin

"Now your Northern nigger's a Negro

You see, he's got his dignity

But down here we're too ignorant to realize

The north as set the nigger free.

Yes, he's free to be put in a cage in Harlem in New York City

--Randy Newman, "Rednecks"

"In olden days a glimpse of stocking

Was looked on as something shocking

But now God knows

Anything goes.

Good authors, too,  who once knew better words

Now use only four letter words

Writing prose

Anything goes."

--Cole Porter, "Anything Goes."

One thing which triggers Mad Dog is euphemism.

As George Carlin noted, this "softening" of language allows us to live with the reality of murdered children, ethnic cleansing or racial hatred by calling it something less offensive.

We are such delicate hot house flowers, our society would just disintegrate if the newscaster reported that some Congressman called someone a "Nigger," or that some Senator called a colleague a "dumb fuck." 

Over fifty years ago, in 1972 Carlin's wonderful exegesis of the "seven deadly words" which could never be said on television, or in any public American setting titillated audiences and his album sold millions because saying these words in public was simply out of the question. As he examined the word "fuck" he pointed out that was a word which referred to the act which begins life, and as a sound it is actually not offensive, beginning with a soft sibilant and ending emphatically. It's a good word, Carlin concluded--so why is it used to hurt people?

What he was talking about was not really euphemism but crudity. It was crude to refer to sexual intercourse and the scatological "shit" instead of "excrement." There were acceptable substitutes--"fudge" or "frigging"--for "fuck" and "shoot" for shit. But it all came down to words which would be unacceptable in church or at the PTA or in a lecture hall or at a Thanksgiving dinner as painted by Norman Rockwell,  where women and children (the hot house flowers of American society) were present.

That Normal Rockwell, "Leave it to Beaver" time was, of course, an illusion, and it is not without irony that Trump tells us he wants to return America to that time, when we were great. But of course, comedians have always told us  it was all a lie: June Cleaver was cheating on Ward and Beaver died in Vietnam.

Thirty years ago, Mad Dog was struck by a report from the public grade school his kids attended--an eight year old was sent to the principal's office because he had said, "Fuck, no!" to his teacher. The child was Black and he came from the one part of Bethesda, Carver Road, where Blacks had lived since just after the Civil War. He likely heard his parents and siblings use "fuck" freely, but he had not learned that in polite, formal, White society you cannot say such words.

Of course, now turn on Youtube and watch any comedian from from Carlin to Robin Williams to Bill Burr and you hear a steady stream of "fuck's" used almost as punctuation marks. You may say, well, that's a different setting, and that is true, but it is still a public setting and women (if not children) are present. 

When his adoring MAGA mob cultists talk about Trump, the first thing they always say is, "He talks like us." Meaning, he doesn't lie to us: He says "fuck." 

Avoidance of crudity, of those seven deadly words is a conscious choice, a "lie" in a sense, in that it is a self edited version of presentation where really inflammatory stuff is avoided.

There few comedians who can be really funny without ever using an off color word--Rita Rudner is the epitome of that "clean" humor. Her humor is sly, not without reference to sex, but it relies on the listener's own intelligence to see the joke. That kind of comedian is a rarity. ("I love to sleep, don't you? Isn't it great? It's the best of both worlds, where you get to be alive and unconscious." Or, "I love being married, it's so great you to find that one special person you want to annoy for the rest of your life." And, most current in today's bro tech world, "Some people get to be so rich they lose all respect for humanity. That's how rich I want to be.")

Part of why people laugh at Richard Pryor or Dave Chappelle or Chris Rock is they use profanity freely in a public hall--often immense public spaces--filled with people who've paid to hear them, paid to be titillated. Of course, each of these men would be funny without the profanity, but the rhythm and gestalt of their shtick requires the four lettered words.

Nobody would ever think of charging them with public lewdness. People are paying for that lewdness.

It's what Trump does. 

There was a famous Supreme Court case where the defendant, appealing his conviction to the Supreme Court, had written the words, "Fuck the Draft" on his  jacket and he was arrested for Disturbing the Peace. 

His attorney chose to use the word, "Fuck" in oral arguments before the Court, believing that by saying that word out loud in the hallowed halls of the Supreme Court of the United States, and demonstrating the walls of the Supreme Court building did not immediately collapse, he might win his  case.

That case was Cohen v California, 1971, and the Court  ruled that "fuck" was not enough to justify a conviction for disturbing the peace. (A wonderful phrase, when you think about it. Could anyone be charged with that today when Mr. Trump and his MAGA mob are all about disruption?)

 Writing for the Court (in a 5-4 decision) Justice John Harlan noted the violation of local norms in the case of displaying the written word, "Fuck," was purely matter of  speech--the words had been written on a jacket, but the man wearing it had not behaved in any way other than wearing that jacket to disturb the peace. Cohen had not done anything to endanger or threaten anyone.  

Harlan went on to say that "one man's vulgarity is another's lyric"  

Four justices disagreed. Their dissenting opinion was written by Harry Blackmun who said wearing that jacket was not speech, but was "an absurd and immature antic." They would have preferred,  presumably, a jacket which said, "F-word, The Draft."

(Intriguingly, this uptight justice, Harry Blackmun wrote the majority opinion allowing for abortion in Roe v Wade.)

Of course, Donald Trump uses the word "fuck" frequently and publicly, as he did at his  New Hampshire rallies--and nobody seems to mind, because it makes him "authentic." The Court Jester is authentic, but, of course, now the Jester is the king.  

In fact, the crowds seem to delight in it, just as if he were a comedian using his jester hat to titillate and illuminate. "He sounds like one of us," which is to say, he talks to us the way we talk to each other at the barbecue. He doesn't pretend to be better than us by using language you'd have to go to some Ivy League college to learn.

So maybe it's not the word per se, but who is using it and under what circumstances. 

Speaking at meetings where only adults are present, like the Hampton Democrats meetings, Mad Dog would never say, "I just heard Trump say that if the United States pulled out of NATO, then Europe would be fucked." That word "fucked" would have to be replaced with, "You know, the 'F-word."

Even writers at the  New York Times do not report that an ICE agent in Minneapolis called someone he arrested "a nigger." They say he "used a racial epithet," or he used "the N-word."

And what is the benefit of saying "the N-word" or "the F-word," other than virtue  signaling?

Oh, HE said that, not me. I would never be so crude.  

But that's a lie, and every MAGA mother knows it. Of course, you would and do use the "F-word" word," in private conversations. But in public, you'd pretend that word never passes your lips.

"The N-word" is a little different because it signals an attitude of derision unto hate and it is meant to dehumanize. . Anyone who uses, "nigger" is a hater, by definition. But saying a word is different from using a word; if you are quoting, you are not endorsing--you are reporting. 

Not even Trump employs "nigger," (at least in public) because he wants Black votes.

But, apart from "nigger" now, 50 years after the seven deadly words, and Cohen v California, almost anything goes on the American public stage. We are not living in Downton Abbey. We are not even the first to decry the coarsening of American society--Cole Porter wrote "Anything Goes" in 1934. 

Of course, even today, we are told using words like "fuck" and "Shit" coarsen" our public discourse, sully our culture and grows hair on our palms.

Imagine American culture tolerating words like "fuck"!

HOOTERS MIDDLE SCHOOL BASEBALL TEAM

Mad Dog thinks we are long past all that, with the advent of Mr. Trump and those who sail with him.

And, Mad Dog asks, quite unironically: How could we possibly "coarsen" public discourse or American culture any more than it already has been coarsened--in an America where a middle school baseball team goes out after the game to Hooters, as a reward for a hard won victory on the diamond? Good job, you pre pubescent players--now you  can oogle the waitresses.

The fact is, most people, like Mr. Trump who use "fuck" use it because they have limited working vocabulary, like that nine year old Black kid from Carver Road,  and they use this word as a sort of verbal exclamation point; for many it is a verbal tick, a sort of easy rhetorical finger in the eye.

They use these words because they have no better words.

For some, it is a way of saying, "There, I've said it. You want a piece of me? Let's step outside and settle this like men."

But, of course, guys like Pete Hegseth, Markwayne Mullen and Trump are not actually real men. They are children who have acquired years, but their brains have been arrested in development, mired forever in the dumpster of stunted display and degenerate neurons.

There is a wonderful scene in the movie "Roxanne" where Steve Martin, playing Cyrano, accosts a man who has attempted to insult Cyrano's unwieldy nose. Cyrano spews out 20 superior nose insults. If you had any real wit, any smarts at all, you could have done way better, Cyrano is demonstrating. You could have said, for instance, as sexual innuendo, that my nose is so big,  "some of the ladies have asked if you wouldn't mind putting that thing away," or you could have leaned toward the meteorological: "Watch out, she's going to blow!"  

Of course, what he is saying is "you are so low grade you can't even come up with a good insult."

Can We Tolerate Coarse Language?

And that may be what is so dispiriting about Trump and his fellow travelers: they are simply not even bright enough to engage in imaginative deprecation. They can't even taunt with any panache.

One would like to paraphrase John Randolph, the antebellum Virginia Congressman, responding to an insult to his virility. One might clean it up for today: You pride yourself on an animal faculty, in which the chimpanzee is your equal,  and the jackass infinitely your superior. 

John Randolph

The Barking Dog

 

And here's the nub...

The Problem of RFKJR

 

The PBS Newshour ran a segment last night about the effects of RFK JR's war against "unhealthy" diets as it gets expressed in food stamp programs (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or SNAP) in Texas.

RFK JR does not want food stamps paying for soda pop, sugary cereals or a variety of other foods he deems "unhealthy."

And PBS found a dietician who informed the viewers that sugar gets converted into triglycerides which cause heart disease, which is about as close to the truth as the advertising on the Fruit Loops package claiming Fruit Loops are "heart healthy" providing significant bran content--but that's another story. (PBS NewsHour always believes you need to provide an expert to tell you what to think, or at least to set the table with the prevailing wisdom.) So, there you have it: there is authoritative opinion to support RFKJR's war on sugar. 

More interesting, PBS interviewed a woman who has used SNAP to buy Coca Cola and Pop Tarts and other things of which RFKJR would not approve, and she said that when you're working three jobs and you are throwing your three kids into the back of the car, driving them to day care, you don't have time to cook a three course meal, so you grab whatever you can out of the fridge, and you stick the plastic bottle with soda pop and the Pop Tart or pastry into the hands of your kids and you say, "There's breakfast" and they can eat it in the car, on the way.

There you have it from the mouth of a White, likely Christian, hard-working Texas mother who works three jobs, has three kids and does not have an office in Washington, D.C.

All this, of course, opens that can of worms which is how Americans, all people really, make food choices. And there is the bigger issue of who should make the rules by which this woman and millions like her should live.

As the wonderful documentary, "Food, Inc." showed, the American mother (who ordinarily does the grocery shopping, and who makes most of the food choices for the family) is driven by price, convenience and a strong desire to see her children actually eat the food she puts in front of them, and children, cats, dogs--any mammal really--will reliably eat sugar and they will smile.

The foods in the middle aisles of the grocery story, or on the shelves of convenience stores are A/ less expensive B/ prepackaged  C/ ready to eat D/ larded with salt, fat and sugar, so it tastes good. 

"Food, Inc." followed a mother, a Walmart employee, as she made her way down the aisles of her grocery store, comparing the price of a quart of orange juice to a two liter bottle of orange pop soda, to a six pack of orange pop soda she could hand out to each kid on the way out the door, and you know RFKJR would have a conniption. 

So, what we caught a glimpse of, from the PBS interview with that Texas mother, was the reality of how food choices get made in America. 

There was also a snippet with the owner of a convenience store (with the emphasis on convenience) who said, waving at his food shelves, with the gasoline pumps visible through his front window, and he said, "You think I got the time and space to stock fresh produce or steaks here?"

The only thing in that entire convenience store RFKJR would have found acceptable was the milk, and not even that, because it was pasteurized and homogenized.

But, the really interesting thing in all this is the inconsistency between the libertarian, "I do my own research" of RFKJR, when it comes to vaccines, and his insistence that when it comes to food, diet and groceries, RFKJR is perfectly happy to insist you eat the way he does, not the way you'd prefer to eat. He has done his own research--for you.

This is what happens, of course, when you have government: If government is going to pay for your meal, then you damn well have got to eat the way the government wants you to eat.

It's one thing to be on the outside, screaming about how Big Food is contaminating your precious bodily fluids with their sugar, their salt, their fat and their fluorinated water,  robbing you of your God given right to make your own choices for yourself, but it's quite another thing when you are now in power. Then you want to make those choices for other people.

There's also a more subtle culture war thing going on here. When Paul LePage was governor of Maine, he insisted that welfare queens were using Maine SNAP to buy tobacco, drugs, lottery tickets and all sorts of nasty things, as he tried to close down that program, which he thought was mainly supporting undeserving dark skinned people--there was actually an immigrant Somali community in Maine. So, his attack on SNAP was really a way of saying Maine had an unwholesome group--African immigrants--and he'd be damned if he'd give them a dime to support their habits.

There may be some of that going on with RFKJR's cohort going after SNAP, but many, if not most SNAP recipients are White, and poor and often working two or three jobs, and in the case of RFKJR himself, this is really most likely about his own certainty that he knows what good is, when it comes to food, because, of course, he has done his own research.

And, as is so often the case for people who do their own research, what they find out for their own selves affects a lot of other people as they execute the implications of their own findings, based on their own research: The classic case in point is Aaron Rodgers, the superlative quarterback for the Green Bay Packers, who did his own research and decided he would refuse to get a COVID vaccine, thus putting at risk every other player in his locker room.

The point is, when it comes to public health, there is that sticky word, "public." Almost by definition, any decision you make, or do not make or fail to make will have direct effects on other people, not just yourself. 

If you decide you know the truth, and you act on that, then a chain of events ensues: whether that's measles, COVID, gonorrhea, syphilis, Mad Cow Disease, pertussis, you name it. 

And if you take on the office of the head of the Department of Health and Human Services, then, almost by definition, you are going to impose your beliefs across the entire population of the United States. 

And if you reject the research of others, and opt instead to base your actions on your own research, well God Save America.

RFKJR operates in the mode of Rush Limbaugh here: He begins with a belief, then scours "the literature" for a selective reading to cherry pick anything which supports his original belief. 

He's not always wrong. Children would likely be better off eating from the perimeter of grocery stores, where the produce, the dairy products and the fish and meat are displayed, rather than eating from the middle aisles, filled with processed, boxed foods rich in salt, fat and sugar. 

His problem is he can make the rules, but that doesn't mean people will obey them. He can cut off SNAP benefits, but that may not change what people eat.

But mostly, as is true of nearly all convictions about food, you may not be able to define what makes food good, but you know it when you see it. Or at least, you believe you do.

Real Food and MAHA

 

The trouble with "nutrition science" is there isn't any such thing.

Real Food for Real Americans

This is one of those things which depends on discoveries and advances now centuries old, and then gets frozen in place.

Food Pyramid 1950
Cereal/Bread 11 x daily

Modern nutrition science began with scurvy, a truly horrific disease which afflicted sailors during the age of sail and wooden ships in the 18th and 19th centuries. Isolate cohorts of human beings in a self contained bubble, and you have a very nifty laboratory for experiment, as so many things available to human beings living in a community on dry land, with access to food, sunlight, fresh air, heat and sanitation have to be consciously provided on board.

RFK/MAHA: No fake food
What is "Nutrient Dense"?

So, when men sailing on ships were deprived of vitamin C--the whole concept of vitamins being then unknown--they developed dreadful mouth ulcers; old wounds and fractures re opened; fatal hemorrhaging; loss of teeth and swollen gums.  Then a simple observation: in ships where men had access to limes, scurvey simply did not happen. There was something in those limes. Eventually, that something was discovered to be vitamin C.

                       Would this Nurse Lie to You?

A whole belief system ensued: if there was one vitamin which could do all this, there might be/must be others, and if you were going to launch a man into space, where resupply of limes and other nutrients would be impossible, perhaps we could micro manage and simply provide a diet with all the necessary "nutrients" and vitamins and that would be compact and light weight enough to fit on a space ship and enough to maintain health. 

All we needed to do was to break down the components of foods, biochemically, to understand what we needed to send a long with the astronauts.

And thus: Tang!

But life is not usually that easy, and it turned out neither was feeding man based on a chemistry lab.

A typical American meal, whatever that may have been since the 18th century, has always contained thousands of different molecules beyond vitamins, and it was the great hubris of 20th century scientists to imagine we knew what they all were and how they interacted. 

And then there were insights from diseases: The lining of arteries got clogged with cholesterol rich plaques and thus eating cholesterol is BAD! Because  how could that cholesterol have got into those arteries beyond eating it? Turned out, it came from somewhere else entirely.

Norman Rockwell Repast

Meanwhile, American children growing up in the 1950's were shown food pyramids in all their schools, posters devised with the help of the American Dairy Council, which, unsurprisingly, showed diary products as the most healthy and necessary features, and along the way other commercial interests (Wonder Bread)  got their say and products were placed before the American public for fun and profit, but not based on science.

He thinks he knows. 

Mad Dog once spent all afternoon in a medical library searching through journals of nutrition and he was alarmed to discover that he could not find a single article anywhere in the "medical literature" he could call "science."

Science requires hypothesis, testing (experiment), challenge, confirmation. 

Beyond hypothesis, nutrition science in medical journals had little to none of any of this. Double blind experiments were, of course, impossible. The subjects and the researchers ordinarily knew what it was they were eating, although in a few studies something like chocolate or a vitamin was encapsulated in a pill and given to the subjects, but if you are eating a banana or an apple, you and the researcher know it. 

And then there was the problem of controls. You eat one thing and another person in a control group does not eat that. But just try enforcing that. We did one study at Yale which involved keeping subjects on the fifth floor Metabolic Research Ward and feeding them nothing but white turkey (thought to be pure protein, but of course it was much more)  and water. These subjects were carefully instructed in what the project entailed and were paid to live and eat on that ward. 

The problem was, the hospital cafeteria was also on the fifth floor, just around the corner and down the hall. Subjects were stealing off undercover, down the hall and buying the cafeteria's truly scrumptious oatmeal cookies, and when the results were in, the researchers could not find any effect of a strictly turkey (all protein?) diet, because, in fact, the subjects had not been eating a strictly turkey diet but they were  eating an oatmeal, sugar, salt, fat and turkey diet.

There have been occasional studies from Israeli kibbutz's which have enough control of what is eaten to approximate a ship at sea, but these are few and far between.

For the most part, dietary recommendations reflect the beliefs, the nutrition faith and ideas about what is a healthy diet which borders on religious beliefs of the person making the recommendations. Mad Dog is not talking about religious proscriptions against pork but he is saying the beliefs about what constitutes healthy food are just beliefs, as dearly held as religious beliefs, but with no actual science on which to base these beliefs.

It's sort of like the scouting reports from baseball scouts: if a player "looks good in jeans" i.e., if he looks well built, looks like a great athlete, he'll be able to hit the ball out of the park reliably. But that's just bias, not science.

And so, when we look at RFKJR's criticisms of "processed foods," we can well imagine he may be on to something. Just look at the ingredients on the label--which, it must be admitted, list the things we know are in those cookies, or that frozen lasagna but not the stuff which is in there we don't know about. But the stuff listed looks bad enough.

The director of a biochemistry lab at the National Institutes of Health once told Mad Dog about the coffee maker in his lab which was made whole by whoever got in first in the morning. There were 10 people in the lab and they consumed 40 cups by 10 AM. 

Then, one day, a summer intern, a college sophomore, did what kids that age might be expected to do, which is to say, he got up to mischief, and he brought over a cup of fresh coffee to the NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance) machine, a very expensive, sophisticated instrument which shows a graph of the different molecules in any sample, and he sucked up coffee into the machine using the little plastic sampling tube and forty different molecules printed out from the coffee, only twelve of which were known compounds or molecules.

After that, the coffee pot remained full all morning and the lab director eventually felt compelled to remove it because nobody in the lab was drinking coffee anymore.

"But did the NMR did not show anything bad," I asked. "I mean, no poisons or known bad actors?"

"No," the lab director said. "But what bothered everybody was all the things in coffee nobody knew anything about. It freaked everyone out."

"But if you did that for an entire meal on your tray, there would likely be thousands of molecules nobody recognizes."

"Might well be," the lab director said, "But the difference is nobody knows about all those mystery molecules. We haven't actually seen them print out on the NMR. And after that coffee NMR, nobody wanted to sample any other foods. Ignorance is bliss."

Mad Dog makes no recommendations about diet to anyone.

Personally, he does not eat barnyard animals or meat because he doesn't like the idea of killing animals or raising them in industrial settings. He eats salmon, which are suicidal fish and would just wind up belly up upstream after they've released their eggs and sperm and provide a feast for some lucky bears. So salmon, are okay to eat. And things without faces, like shrimp and lobsters. No guilt there, although, truth be told, Mad Dog buys his lobsters cooked--he does not have the heart to throw a living lobster into a pot of boiling water and listen to that hissing sound.

Having held a living fish in his hands, wriggling, trying to escape, desperately wanting to live, Mad Dog has wilted at the idea of becoming a full pescatarian, not with any sense of moral superiority--far from it--he realizes he is not morally superior to meat eaters--he's just a wimp when it comes to killing things that want to live.

But what is good for you? What is a "healthy diet"? 

Mad Dog has only the vaguest idea. Something uncontaminated by bacteria and parasites. Things not in the middle aisles of the grocery stores in boxes. Those things have been through some assembly line.

Better maybe to just take things off the tree or the vine or to pull it out of the ground and cook it. Add nothing but the spices from your pantry--and who knows what's in those, but a chance Mad Dog is willing to take.

Beyond that, Mad Dog believes, nobody really knows.