Mission Statement: Our Friend the Pig

"Nobody would have mistaken Brunhilda for a saint, but nobody could forget her, either. Exasperating as she was, I would never had punished her by locking her in a cage so small, she couldn't turn around. That sounds like torture to me."

--Nicholas Kristof, New York Times, May 31, 2026

Growing up a suburban kid the closest I ever got to farm animals was saran wrapped steaks and pork chops at the Giant Food store in Bethesda, Maryland, except for one summer when I got sent to a day camp on a farm where I saw them giving a horse some sort of injection and the horse reared up, and had to be restrained with a harness, and I refused to return to the camp until my parents finally figured out what it was that had so disturbed me, and the farmer/camp owner explained to me the horse was unharmed and, in fact, benefited from his injection just as I had benefited from injections. 

Twenty years later, I wound up living for a year on a potato farm, and my neighbors all raised animals--chickens mostly--but also pigs, goats, some cows on what would now be called "free range" farms and as I went jogging down those country roads, I saw them killing animals daily. 

In fact, fifty feet off my front door was a small pond, and one day I awoke to see ten empty plastic milk bottles bobbing up and down in the pond and going out in my rowboat, I discovered they were anchored by cinderblocks to the bottom and I commenced pulling them up. A neighbor had set traps for the turtles in the pond, and he complained to the owner of the farm about my depredation of his attempts to catch himself turtle soup.

The owner of the farm backed me, mostly because the neighbor had never asked his permission. 

My girlfriend and I  would sit on the porch at night and listen to the sounds emanating from the pond. "That frog," she said, "Must weight fifteen pounds."  The frogs, with the deep bull frog bass, and the soprano frogs could have made a great Doo-Wop group, but the turtles were silent, now safe at whatever depths turtles hung out. 

That was my first venture into animal rights. 

I had just moved to that farm after eight years on Manhattan's Upper East side, and that guy in the movie "Martian" had nothing on me for psychological disorientation.

Today, I live a mile from a farm which raises pigs, cows, goats, and starting each July, turkeys. Bicycling past the pig sty, it one day struck me that the little piglets I saw suckling grew over the months to the size of a Boston Terrier, but they never seemed to get any larger and then disappeared. When I mentioned that to my neighbors, they rolled their eyes and told me I could find them at the local Hannaford's, in the meat department.

The turkeys arrive as small fluffy things and are consigned to Camp Turkey, where as Mary, my local native guide to things Hampton, called them, "Death Row Turkeys."  The farm sells them each November the week before Thanksgiving, and that whole story has been told in The Phantom Speaks Blog as "Game of Bones," so I'll not elaborate on it now, other than to say these turkeys at least are about as "free range" as white turkeys can be, with a football field sized enclosure, screened off from the wild turkeys who sometimes gawk at the white turkeys as if viewing captive animals at a zoo.

None of the farms I've just mentioned are anything like the huge industrialized protein factories Kristoff was talking about, where pigs are kept in cages so small they cannot turn around, where profit motive and industry mission statements dictate these sentient beings be treated as a protein source to be raised as cheaply as possible to be sure the overhead side of the ledger is small as possible.

Wild pigs, or boars, are, of course, destructive of farm crops and they are dangerous animals and youtube is full of channels showing men hunting them with AK-15 attack rifles on foot, from helicopters or from trucks. The creepy thing about these videos is all the delighted whooping when one of these hunters hits a desperately running pig and the glee from the unseen, off screen hunter is unnerving. 

Killing This Looks Justified

If you saw a small boy sitting, grinning, as he pulled the legs off a grasshopper or praying mantis, or locking a kitten into a microwave, or tying a brick around a puppy and heaving it into a lake, you would cringe and call the psychiatrist. But the delight in killing exhibited by the boar hunters is just boys having fun.

When the railroad cars at Auschwitz were opened and an arm, tattooed with a number flopped out into view, American GI's reacted in horror: "Like cattle!" they gasped, the way these bodies were stacked. 

To treat them like cattle was horrible.

To treat cattle like cattle is not.

When I was 19, my parents got me a plum job working in a lab at the National Institutes of Health, which was just a short drive from my home. In those days, there were no fences or walls around the campus, which really looked like a big college, with gracious green sun lit lawns and red brick three story buildings.

I worked in three different labs over the course of three summers there. These jobs were something I could put on my applications to medical school to make me look like a more promising applicant.

The first summer, I worked in a lab which studied the evolution of sleep, which meant various electrical devices got implanted through the skulls and into the brains of various animals from possums to spiny anteaters to frogs. Turns out, most animals sleep and they may even dream, although what they dream about was beyond the purview of the guy who ran the lab and published many papers about sleep in "lower forms" of animals.

To wonder about what a frog dreams about gets you thinking. But I am sure animals do dream, having watched my dog sleep, his back legs moving as if running, and listening to his grunts and whimpers: He is either chasing or being chased, but he is clearly dreaming. You don't need an implanted electroencephalogram to know that.

The lab had a farm in rural Maryland and one day we went out to plant a radio transmitter in the stall of a goat who had an electroencephalogram device implanted in his brain, through his skull, sticking out of his skull. My job was to distract the goat so the lab technician could sneak in and plant the transmitting device in the back of the stall without the goat noticing it. The goat had found and destroyed every previous monitor the lab had tried to install. 

"Goats are uncanny," the lab guy told me. "You can turn cartwheels in front of the cage, play a trombone and if I try to creep into the back of the stall from the back door, you'll see him looking over his shoulder and he turns around and pays attention to me, like he knows what we are doing, trying to distract him."

So, was that goat really a "lower form" of animal? 

As a side gig, the guy who ran the sleep lab did the favor of testing various drugs in possums to see if those drugs lowered their seizure thresholds. If a new sleep medication lowered the seizure threshold in a possum, it might not be the best choice for human beings. The way you discovered whether the drug lowered the possum's seizure threshold was to grab its tail and whip the possum up and down, its head whapping the hard concrete floor of the lab--I'll never forget the sound their jaws made hitting that floor--and you had to do it thirty times. If the possum went into a grand mal convulsion, that was not a good drug for people. If not, well, the possum had had a bad morning, but it could have been worse, and the drug might be safe.

I could only bring myself to do three possums before I managed to find other tasks to do around the lab so I didn't have to whip possums by their tails.

The next summer I worked in a biochemistry lab which was trying to delineate various pathways in the metabolism of glucose in the liver. To do this, white lab rats were splayed out, as if on a rack, each limb pulled taut by a plastic manacle and a midline chest to abdomen incision made, and the exposed liver was catheterized with a plastic tube. After about two hours on the rack, the rat was "sacrificed."

I don't know how important figuring out those glycosylation pathways in the rat really was. I'm not sure that knowing what was happening in a rat's liver actually told you what was happening in a human liver, but I do know I had dreams at night about those rats and I lost a lot of sleep that summer.

Walking into the building where we were working on those rats, sometimes I'd see a line of six or seven people holding up signs from a group called People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) which said, "Animals Have Feelings, Too," and "Is It Really Worth It?" And I thought, "Oh, you have no idea what an understatement that is."

Obviously, I was not the only person thinking what I was thinking: Years later I discovered a wonderful animated movie called "The Secret of NIMH," which my sons loved, and it was about rats at the National Institute of Mental Health, and their escape from torture chambers there. This was based on a book by Robert Conly, a journalist not an NIH employee. His book, "Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH" won a lot of awards, but I had never heard of it, and I surely would have read it to my sons, but we were lucky to have the film. The book was published in 1971, when I was in medical school, so it's development likely took place during the years when I worked summers at the NIH.

Of course, I wanted to show the movie to my grand daughters but their mother, a pediatrician, would not allow it because it was too likely to upset them. Thus are we protected in American life from thinking about what we do to animals. I take her point, though. Still, I raised boys, and they were not mentally traumatized by considering the fate of lab rats and Jeremy the Crow (voiced by Dom Deloise is worth the cost of the DVD.)

Robert Conley

Throughout medical school and post graduate training, I always ran the other way when asked to participate in studies involving animals. Those rats and nude mice and spiny anteaters may have contributed some small bit to a sea of knowledge but what it seemed to me was what they were really sacrificing for was the publication list of the lab director, toward tenure or career advancement, but not so much toward human health.

Banting, Best & Lab Dog

Which is not to say animal studies are never necessary. Without animal studies the polio vaccine would not have been possible and insulin would not have been discovered in 1921. 

But I preferred other kinds of research.

Looking at those cows who are standing in their own excrement on industrial farms, being fed tons of antibiotics--which is the real source of drug resistant bacteria, not promiscuous use in human patients, I would bet--and pigs trapped in metal cages on their way to the slaughterhouse, I can see the reason for this industrialized approach.

Efficiency experts maximize things to achieve goals. If the goal, the mission statement,  is to produce animal protein at the lowest cost and greatest pound per dollar, then you would keep pigs penned mercilessly, and the pork farmer's lobby, "Big Pork" has got Republicans to legislate a law into existence called the "Save Our Bacon," law. (Republicans are always so good at creating names for laws, much better than Democrats.) So these pigs are just "bacon," and don't we all love bacon?

The same thing happens when efficiency experts apply their skills to medical practice, where electronic medical records have allowed doctors to see more and more patients every day because record keeping, which is essential in medical practice, took a long time to produce when written by hand and new computer programs, "electronic medical records" or EMR's,  vastly increase the speed with which records can be generated, and the programs can even improve the doctors' practices by reminding them to ask certain questions, suggesting medications or tests and generally functioning as "ectopic" (i.e. outside the skull) brains. 

But the EMR's were mostly developed as billing devices, so insurance companies could be sure that any test ordered and any drug ordered would be approved by the insurance company in accordance with its contracts with the patients. Mostly, they were billing devices with an offshoot, side benefit of improving some aspects of patient care--especially when coupled with A.I. programs like "Open Evidence." 

Human beings as patients sometimes get the feeling the doctor sitting in front of them, screened off by her computer monitor is simply a data entry clerk and is looking at them much as the farmer looks at the pig in the steel cage.

In 2006 I read Michael Pollan's wonderful, "Omnivore's Dilemma" which traced the sources of the food an American finds on his dinner plate, and that turned out to be, overwhelmingly, corn. Even the steak was corn, when you got right down to it, in the most cost effective efficient sense.  Turning the last page, I thought, "You know, I really don't need to eat farmyard animals." Pollan was not writing a Vegan screed and he finished his book with his wild boar hunt and the meal he made from it, but I was not persuaded.

I had no trouble existing on cereal, breads, vegetables. 

Later, watching nature shows on Youtube, I decided salmon are okay to eat because they just swim upstream and those not taken by bears turn all red, go belly up, and die after spawning, so they are suicidal fish and their protein would be wasted anyway, so I'll eat salmon.

I am also willing to rationalize lobsters, who are like giant ants with no facial expressions and anyway, I live in New Hampshire where lobsters are inexpensive and called "New Hampshire chicken."  And the lobster rolls at the Beach Plum down the street on the North Hampton ocean front are pretty wonderful.

But I still cannot bring myself to plop a lobster into a boiling pot of water and listen to the hissing and think about that living creature trying to escape. So, yes, you are correct, I am not rational about this.

I certainly do not believe myself to be righteous in not eating meat or pork. I do eat this stuff occasionally, and I would never feel morally superior to meat eaters, which I was, shamelessly, until 20 years ago. 

But, just for me, I'd rather not eat things that show me they really want to live.

On The Beach Redux

I can't remember when I first read "On The Beach," the Neville Shute novel about the post apocalpyse following a nuclear war; I was either 10 years old or 12, but I was definitely 12 when the movie came out,  and both had a powerful effect on me.

The movie had a powerful effect across many nations, when it premiered in 1959 in Moscow, Washington, New York, Sydney, London and Paris all on the same night, adjusted for the time zones.

It was the most powerful Jeremiad against nuclear brinksmanship and nuclear weapons until "The Day After," a 1983T.V. show about nuclear war and the total destruction it would bring. President Ronald Reagan later said that this show moved him and President Gorbachev to sign the nuclear arms reduction treaty in 1987. 

So "On the Beach," powerful and widely seen as it was, may have been ahead of its time, as 1959 was not long after the Red Scare, McCarthy period and no nuclear disarmament treaties got signs after that. In fact, just a few years later the world came within a hair's breadth of nuclear obliteration during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Neville Shute was appalled by the movie made of his book--they took it from a bleak, nihilistic work and tried to make a love story out of it with Ava Gardner and Gregory Peck, and the big conflict seemed to be whether Peck would bed Gardner or remain loyal to his dead wife.

So what prompted an Australian company to re make the film in 2000? 

Well, for one thing, they updated it: in the original, the nuclear holocaust began in the Middle East with a war between Israel and its Arab neighbors, but the 2000 version is sparked by a Chinese invasion of Taiwan with an American nuclear response.

The crucial scenes are preserved in both films: the expedition to Northwest America to investigate what turns out to be a spurious signal which might signify life, the escape of a sailor from the submarine, who opts to die at home rather than back in Australia, the fiery demise of an Australian scientist in his Ferrari, choosing a spectacular way to die rather than just taking his suicide pills. 

But the 2,000 film is vastly superior: At one point, looking at her sister and her sister's daughter playing in the garden, Moira says, "Look at that! A picture of that mother and child should have been pasted above every nuclear launch switch, and this war would never have happened." And we find out later something exactly like that did happen on board the American submarine.

Upon its arrival in Melbourne, the American submarine is pelted by Australians who are furious at the Americans for the war they ignited. The Australians advise Americans to not wear their uniforms off their ship. 

There is a much better and more extensive rendering of the argument about whether the nuclear cloud hovering over the Northern Hemisphere would ever actually cross the equator and doom Australia and the Southern hemisphere, which, for the purposes of the story has to happen, but the authors are careful to show how scientists cannot be sure and argue continuously about what their data means. Most scientists argue the air currents in the two hemispheres are so separate a nuclear cloud in the Northern Hemisphere would never cross the equator, but nobody's ever done the experiment. And, nobody is sure if nuclear detonations in Taiwan, and Micronesia would be close enough to the Southern Hemisphere to change the calculations.

In the end, in the story, the nuclear cloud relentlessly spreads south, latitude by latitude toward Melbourne.

Virtually everything is better in the 2000 film but it is a gut wrenching experience--in the end you've got to watch a mother and father give their own child a lethal dose to save her from further radiation induced suffering, before swallowing their own doses. Not since the scene in "Downfall" where the Goebbels poison their six children with cyanide capsules in the bunker has a scene of infanticide been so starkly rendered. 

The Australian authors also introduce a mishap which infects an American officer with a nuclear dose and we watch him die slowly, agonizingly from the resultant leukemia, a demonstration of what is going to happen to the women and children we have been watching.

There are no speeches from Fred Astaire decrying the fecklessness, incompetence and stupidity of heads of state, but simple conversations among people who know they are simply not in a position to prevent catastrophe.

The 2000 movie was made over 25 years ago, and one might ask why it was made at all, 40 years after the original, as nothing much has changed in the realm of nuclear holocaust discussions.

But the real theme is one of helplessness of ordinary people to prevent such horrors from reigning down upon them and their families. You and I, in our New Hampshire town or even our Washington, D.C. suburbs, are no better positioned to stop a "nuclear exchange" than we are to stop an asteroid from destroying the earth--like the folks in that wonderful movie, "Don't Look Up," there is simply nothing we can do.

There is the theme of sheer incompetence among our leaders which has even more appeal today than it did in the year 2000. The message is that if we simply accept this incompetence, it may ultimately come round to destroy us.

The crew asks the Captain to offer a prayer before they take their submarine back out to sea to go to die in America, and he admits he has no religious background, which becomes immediately apparent when he asks the Lord that their deaths not be "in vain."

Whatever that may mean.

Was he saying that he hopes life has meaning, even if, on the brink of death, he can't for the life of him figure out what that meaning might be?

But this film is not a Sartre essay on Being and Nothingness.

It's not a romantic comedy, nor even a science fiction excursion. 

It is profoundly depressing, but it is beautifully wrought.

At one point, Moira finds the Captain reading "Great Expectations," and asks why. "It's not a great title for current circumstances," he admits.

"Are you enjoying it?" she asks.

"More now than when I originally read it," he says. "Don't know why."

She laughs and we laugh with her--it's just a simple moment of humanity we've all shared, and it makes the people, the story, the whole enterprise seem very real.

Song of Hi-ya Kelly Gitche Gumee

 

On the shores of Winni Pesaukee

By the shining clear blue water

Smiling dimpled in the gloaming

While her citizens are roaming,

Lost and searching for the foaming

Path away from Free State moaning 

Wyeth 

And she slips into the waiting

Laps of creeps she calls her brothers 

Grand Old Party now corroded 

Spreads its poison reviling others

She reposes dark and comely

While the Granite State decomposes...

Party Girl

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. 

With some exceptions, e.g. Carleigh Beriont, but we'll get to her in a moment.

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 six 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, because she's from Goffstown, which even in New Hampshire is remote,  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, currently is the leader in money raised, in the three million range, and a resume of having been a woman in the Marine Corps, which she reminds you about every third sentence. Semper Fi. 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 may well be 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 votes from blue collar, resentful white male voters, 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 this 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 she 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 PhD 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 intellectually. The real question is whether she will be inclined to intimidate the people we want her to intimidate during hearings. 

Which brings us to what used to be called, "qualifications,"  a quaint concept which was dying before Donald Trump became President having had 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 persona as the  lean, green, killing machine macho-Marine woman, then Carleigh has cultivated an image as the 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 that 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 "too 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 this 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 because the Supreme Court found it violated separation of church and state. 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, but 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 anti-ICE 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 about 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 dead 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's alarm,  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 or of Hampton!"

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 American  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 she 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 simply not done. 

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. But the fact is, even if her 100 best friends contributed $1,000 each, she would still be far behind the millions raked in by Maura and the absent Stefany by a factor of 10.

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 whomever 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 Whatsapp!, or "Snapface" as Bill Bellicheck said, 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, singing, "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