The Complicity of Susan Collins

 I'm the last person to ask for advice about people. Especially women...If she was here I'd probably be just as crazy now as I was then in about 5 minutes. Ain't that ridiculous?... Naw, it ain't really. 'Cause being crazy about a woman like her is always the right thing to do. Being an old decrepit bag of bones, that's what's ridiculous. 

--Sam the Lion, "The Last Picture Show."

Imagine this life changing event: After years of rejection and being ignored, your book has finally been accepted for publication by a storied New York publisher and you are invited to the American Booksellers Convention at the Convention Center in Washington, D.C.

You have written about the most important subject of your life, but 19 publishers returned the manuscript, either unopened or with a letter, "Thank you for your submission, but we find your book does not meet the needs for our current list."  One woman, an editor fresh out of Princeton, liked it, but passed on it. At least she wrote an actual rejection note.

Then, just after you hauled 19 manuscripts (400 pages each) out to the dumpster, you realize you cannot account for the 20th, and you check your list and you realize it was that one you dropped off with some ninety-nine year old woman at the Beacon Street, Boston office of a New York publisher, and you are not sure he ever even got it. That secretary may have died before he got back from lunch. So you phone his office, and he answers--the secretary  probably did die--and he says, "Oh, right. Well, don't get your hopes up, but I gave it to my editor and he said he thought it had some merit, and I'll send along his comments."

The "editor," it turns out, is a twenty-something college drop out named Brendan, who works in a Cambridge bookstore and lives in his parents' basement in Charlestown, but whenever this publisher stops by the bookstore, he chats about books with this guy, and the publisher is impressed by his insights into literature. In fact, this publisher had published Katherine Anne Porter, and he was astonished that this twenty-something even knew who she was, never mind  that Brendan could say exactly why "Ship of Fools" and "Old Mortality" were such fine works of art. 

So, the publisher started dropping off manuscripts with Brendan, and Brendan didn't find much in any of them, until he read your book. "Needs some cropping and direction, but some scenes of considerable power and some very good sentences."

And the rest is, as they say, unlikely history. The book is sold to the Literary Guild as its main selection for the month of March. Rejected by 19 publishers and at least one Ivy League editor, seen by a blue collar reader in a Boston bookstore. 

 And you get invited to a few star studded parties in New York City, where you meet famous people, who turn out to be disappointing, and less than meets the eye.

And, finally, the book is officially published and presented to the world at the American Booksellers' Convention in the nation's capital.

And you arrive, and here is the part I've been leading up to: you find the Convention Center, which is a city block large, and you take the elevator up to the exhibition hall, and you get off and look around and there is a sea of stalls, filled with books, which makes the Library of Congress look like your corner Mom and Pop bookstore: Fifty thousand titles that year. (In 2026, it would be 650,000, and that does not include the large self publishing list.)

And you look around, and you can only by asking at various information booths, find your publisher's kiosk area, and there, nestled among scores of celebrity author books, books by authors with audiences, books by authors who write novels about jockeys and some who write about suburban infidelity or sexual repression, books about cats and self help books, is a copy of your book.

And so you have been published.

And you think about the visits you made with various literary agents because someone told you you needed an agent, but you couldn't understand why, since you had already sold your book to the publisher, but the agents smile demurely and say, "Well, but you need someone to champion your cause."  

But now you think: Yikes! 

How does anyone ever get heard in this ocean of voice?

So that's what this post is about: Who gets to offer advice? How are they chosen from among that vast ocean roar of voices and sounds? Who gets the microphone? And why. And How? 

Somehow, some people do get heard; they do occupy the spot light and some get into that spot light regularly. And people listen to them, for advice.

Garry Trudeau's latest Doonesbury has the president of Walden University saying to the graduates at the commencement ceremony, "Graduates, I'm sorry to report we were unable to find a speaker for today. With AI transforming every aspect of life at warp speed, it seems non one felt up to offering advice to this year's class. So, instead, I'd like each of you to take out your phones and spend a few moments consuming wisdom from your preferred online influencer."

And so, there we are.

Advice.

Opinion.

Which brings me to David Brooks. 

David Brooks commands big bucks from speakers bureaus. He lectures a Yale, at the University of Chicago. He gives commencement speeches. He has stopped writing his newspaper columns, but he continues to appear each week on the PBS Newshour in a segment with Jonathan Capehart, called "Brooks and Capehart."

Last Friday, he was asked his opinion of the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Maine, Graham Platner, and Brooks, with admirable concision, said, "He's a moral degenerate." Brooks went on to say why: Platner has a tattoo which may be a Nazi meme; he has abused  and intimidated women and he has written nasty Reddit posts in the past. 

There are 330 million Americans and 100 U.S. Senators, Brooks notes, and we can't do better than Platner? Never mind the fact there are only 1.4 million Mainers, less than 100,000 voters actually vote, a quarter of those are over 65, so, not to quibble, but the willing and able to become the next U.S. Senator do not number in the millions.

But, really, what was Brooks saying? 

He does not like Platner because Platner does such declasse` things as getting a tattoo, getting drunk, sex-texting women. Which is to say, Platner acts like a blue collar, pick-up truck driving bar hound. 

But maybe we need somebody to represent the whoring, hard drinking men of the world. 

In "Charlie Wison's War" Tom Hanks, as Charlie Wilson, is astonished to learn that a puritanical, Bible thumping committee chairman has appointed him to the committee Charlie thought he had no shot at. "I'm a booze hound and a  womanizer," Charlie reflects, "Maybe he thought guys like me needed more representation."

If David Brooks had been that committee chairman Charlie would have had no shot at membership.

Brooks is very insistent about how much he tries to be out on the hustings, listening to ordinary people. He, of course, is not himself "ordinary." He is rich, for one thing. And he makes his living by talking and writing and he would doubtless say, by "thinking." He's a thinker.

But maybe Brooks ought to consider thinking about this:

Who is the moral degenerate: A man who is unfaithful to his wife or a woman who is unfaithful to her country?

While she smiles beatifically, and wears her Ann Taylor suits, Susan Collins has voted to confirm 95% of Trump's judges, who have in turn given Trump a get out of jail free card; she voted for "border protection" to launch ICE agents attacks on American (Democratic) cities and the concentration camps they call "detention centers;" She supported firing FBI director James Comey and installing Cash Patel in his place; she could not bring herself to condemn the shootings of Renee Good or Alex Pretti, saying only that she hoped ICE would improve its training and use of body cameras. She voted against the Trump impeachments. 

Silence Implies Consent 

And while she says she hopes democratic Ukraine can prevail against autocratic Russian rape, the most she can manage to say about Trump's attempt to humiliate and repudiate Ukraine's democratically elected President Zelensky is that the White House scene where President Trump lectured Zelensky about not holding any cards, where VP Vance scolded Zelensky for not being sufficiently grateful for American support and where the boyfriend of MGT shouted out a question about why Zelensky was not wearing a suitably respectful suit--in the face of all of that her best response was that it was "unfortunate."

Which is like the mother of a school shooter saying she wished her son had been better behaved.

If Graham Platner is guilty of having dirty hands, then we have to admit the choice is now between a low grade misogynist, a randy bro, and a sweet looking grandmother with blood on her hands.

Susan Collins is the moral equivalent of the wife and mother of those Mississippi good ol' boys who murdered the freedom riders and ensconced them under a bridge, the loyal wife and mother who remained silent and complicit and smiled sweetly for the cameras. 

The Purity Test

 

For MAGAs, i.e. for Republicans, the only requirement is you love Donald Trump, or at least obey him and nod yes to every wackadoodle action he takes.

She Gives Him What He Wants

For Democrats, it's not enough to be for vaccines, to believe people of all races enrich our nation, to think that before making war on a culture we do not understand, in a part of the world we have never comprehended is stupid, to believe we can afford a well designed national healthcare system and to agree if that health care system extends to caring for people who don't look like us or sound like us that's okay, to believe that the government ought to stay out of the bedroom, that contraception is just fine and to believe that abortion, while regrettable should not be denied--all of that is not enough.

Didn't Go to Yale

For Democrats, a man who leers at women at a bar, a man who gets drunk and disorderly who bullies or brags is disqualified from holding public office. For Democrats, every candidate must be virtuous, having learned morals at the feet of approved philosophers. He must choose his pronouns carefully.

To question whether people who went through puberty as boys ought to be able to play on a field hockey team against girls who went through puberty as girls, or to be able to swim on women's swimming team--that is a litmus test for the truly deserving, the sincerely moral. 

Only paragons of virtue need apply.

What the scandalized, sanctimonious cannot abide is the Jimmy McNulty's of the world. (Mad Dog understands that most people have not watched "The Wire," and so they do not get that allusion,) but what the reaction to Graham Platner's rough edges is all about is not morals, nor character but it is all about class.

David Brooks looks at Platner and sees a tattoo, a brute, a guy who drinks at the bar, not in a corner booth.

Not Reality

So David Brooks calls Platner a "moral degenerate." 

But, fact is, there is are vast herds of Platners out there who look at Brooks and see an example of a  privileged snotty class of would be aristocrats. The lobstermen, truck drivers, HVAC guys will never vote Democratic because they know their class is no longer welcomed in the Democratic Party. They know they are seen as moral degenerates.

And the women, oh, the women! Who could vote for a man who would twist the wrist of a woman, or who would get so angry he would lock her in a room until they both calm down? So much better to vote for a Woman who looks so sweet in her Ann Taylor suits, who wears lapel pins with the American flag (and sometimes with an added Ukrainian flag)  while she quietly votes for a man who betrays an actual hero in his fight against a real autocrat trying to rape Ukraine.

Collins Betrays Her

  Remember, it was the women who were so taken with Der Furher, who voted for him.

Better to have that nice grandmother voting to install Robert F. Kennedy Jr into office so he can cancel vaccines and unleash epidemics, better to choose a woman who votes for Kristie Noem and her storm trooper brigades and better to vote for a woman who reacts to the murders of Alex Pretti and Renee Good by suggesting perhaps next time we can ask ICE agents to wear body cameras. Or perhaps counseling and better training for the goons.

So Sweet

The fact is, the choice is not between voting for a nice old lady and a moral degenerate, who, out of a population of 1.4 million Mainers is the best the Democratic Party can offer. We are not being asked to scold the Democratic Party for its temerity in running a tattooed soldier who snarls at his lovers. Our choice is between a guy with dirty hands and a woman who has blood on her hands.

This is the woman who would wash and iron her husband's Ku Klu Klan robe and hang it in the closet for him and then hold a tea for the wives and daughters of their murderous husbands and fathers.

Susan Collins' middle name is, officially, Margaret.

Susan Collins's middle name in truth is "Complicity."

Graham Platner & the #METOO Quicksand

" He's a moral degenerate...he's a pathetic, empty guy who postures in a way that's kind of repulsive.  There are 330 million Americans, and there are 100 Senators, We can't have a decent human being in those hundred? We have to settle for this?"

--David Brooks, PBS Newshour June 6, 2026

Oh, it never gets resolved. It never got looked at, sorted out, so we moved passed it, and as if possessed by some sort of Freudian ghost lurking in our subconscious, the Democratic Party keeps jumping off a roof, or swims upstream, drawn by some inexorable force to spawn, turn brilliant scarlet and go belly up in the shallow waters.

Let us do a sort of Rorschach test: Think of these men, and women who I'll group deliberatively:

1/ Justice Clarence Thomas. Anita Hill. Justice Brett Cavanaugh. Christine Blasey Ford.

2/ Harvey Weinstein. Bill Cosby. O.J. Simpson.

3/ Willy Horton. George H.W. Bush. Michael Dukakis.

4/ United States Senator Al Franken.

5/ John F. Kennedy. Marilyn Monroe.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvoqK6aLE2E

6/ Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Lucy Mercer Rutherford.

7/ Frank Underwood. Zoe Barnes.

8/ Benjamin Franklin. Thomas Jefferson.

9/ Teddy Roosevelt and his son, Quentin Roosevelt.

10/ U.S. Senator Susan Collins.

11/ U.S. Senator Mitch McConnell

12 /Donald Trump

So here are some of the charges by women against Graham Platner:

1/ "One former girlfriend alleged he was physically forceful, claiming he twisted her arm and held her in a room during an argument." NYT, Google AI

2/ "Sending sexually explicit text messages to women who were not his wife while he was married." Google AI. Source, his wife.

3/ Reddit posts dating back a decade. In these posts he made inflammatory remarks that used homophobic slurs, mocked law enforcement, insulted a Purple Heart reciipent and suggested women bear responsibility for being raped." Google AI.

So how do we resolve the difficulties we face with our choice now? 

And let's be clear, our choice is to vote for Susan Collins, or to not vote against her (which is the same thing) or to vote for Graham Platner.

Are we going to settle our arguments about the dirty dozen on the Rorschach test above with this vote? 

Quite definitely not.

It might be an opportunity to, once again, discuss all the things we want to say about this dirty dozen of American history and public figures, and surely Mad Dog could devote a blog post (and may well, once he cycles back into his manic phase) but for now, the choice is between Platner, who is not the moral paragon David Brooks would like to see, claim the United States Senate seat for Maine, but, undeniably, he is not Susan Collins, who wears a lapel pin with the Ukraine and American flags crossed, while voting 99% of the time for the man who ambushed President of Ukraine Zelensky in the Oval Office, to whom she has shown almost complete obeisance, as Trump verbally assassinated the courageous, democratically elected  leader of a nation fighting for its life against  a Russian dictator.

Remember: Collins voted for This

And for This

Zelensky, remember, turned down offers to fly him out of Kiev when the Russians attacked, replying, "I don't need a ride. What I need is ammunition." 

You want to talk about moral fiber? Talk about Zelensky. Or courage. And then consider what Trump has done to Zelensky and Ukraine while Collins silently acceded. 

So Zelensky stood tall against Putin, who brooks no dissent and who has said he wants to restore the Russian empire in Europe and Asia.

 

And Trump slaps down Zelensky. Asked for her reaction, Collins called the meeting "very unfortunate," as if Trump had simply upset a cup of tea, splashing on the Ukrainian stalwart. "Very unfortunate?"  That's like calling the Hiroshima bomb "very destructive." Or like calling the crashing and burning of the Hindenberg, "A disturbing mishap."  Or calling the murder of Alex Pretti, "An unfortunate incident."

She did not want to  halt military aide to Ukraine but she did nothing when Trump halted it.

She voted against impeaching Trump for his actions toward Ukraine, saying he had "learned his lesson."

She remained virtually silent about Trump's depredations from Ukraine to Minneapolis. And as Martin Luther King said, "In the end, it is not the words of our enemies we will remember, but the silence of our friends."

And what we must remember about Collins is her silence, and her quiet votes to give Trump everything he wants.

Brooks has decried Platner's posts concerning rape; but Collins votes with a man convicted of rape--well, technically not "rape" but, you know, not to mention his metaphorical rape of the Constitution.

What did Collins say when Trump's thugs murdered Alex Pretti and Renee Good? Well, she said, maybe we should consider better use of police body cameras and better training for ICE agents. 

Ya think?

There is an old legal doctrine: Qui tacet consentire videtur  "Silence Implies Consent." Susan Collins might have her picture placed right next to that one.

David Brooks did not stop with condemning Platner as a moral degenerate, in an exegesis typical of Brooks, who, as a "public intellectual" always wants to draw grand conclusions from the particulars of our contemporary landscape, Brooks goes on to explain why people support people like Platner and Trump. It is because Americans are not as smart as he is, nor as well schooled:

"Democrats are supporting Platner for the same reason Trump people are supporting Trump," Brooks said.  "It's because 20 or 30 or 40 or 50  years ago we privatized morality. We told people we're not going to teach morality in schools. It's up to you to come up with your own values. And the problem is when you do that, unless your name is Aristotle, you probably can't come up with your own philosophy. And so what happens is...you've got a lot of people in this country who are morally inarticulate; they're morally undeveloped."

The fact is, if Mad Dog lived in Maine, morally inarticulate and underdeveloped (i.e. working class)  as he is, Mad Dog would vote for Jack the Ripper, if he were a Democrat, running to unseat Republican Collins.

Banners in Washington

 

Remarking on the banners of Trump displays on buildings in Washington, D.C., a thirty something woman said, "Oh, that's such a Hitler thing."

This surprised Mad Dog because for her Hitler, the Third Reich, should not be a thing. She is of a generation for which Hitler is just some grainy black and white image on a youtube video, or possibly she's seen "Inglorious Basterds" or "Sophie's Choice," but she is of a generation which seldom refers to Hitler. She has tattoos. She met her husband on the internet. She read "Project Hail Mary," and saw the movie and loved them but she has never heard the soundtrack to "Hair" or read "Exodus" or seen the movie.

For many of Mad Dog's friends who still live in Washington, D.C., the Trump banners hanging from the stately granite buildings have been particularly demoralizing. For some who have decided to retire and move away from Washington, the topic of the banners arises with some frequency.

What is it about a cloth banner?

In its very impermanence, it contrasts with the stolid stone building from which it is hung, and it proclaims an ascendance of a feeling of what that building means now, in the moment.

Banners may have been used before Hitler and the Third Reich, but nobody ever embraced them to the extent the Nazis did. Rallies with thousands of bright red banners thrilled the masses.

The sight of Trump's face on the Department of Justice or the Department of Agriculture looks to Mad Dog as much a desecration as spray paint graffiti tags on the Lincoln Memorial would be, or Swastikas on a Jewish gravestone.

And for longtime residents of DC, seeing those banners is more than jarring. 

Trump has even hung his banner next to a banner with Lincoln's image, which is interesting. Next to Obama, Lincoln is the President Trump wants most to best. With Obama, who so thoroughly humiliated Trump with his devastating digs at the White House Correspondents' dinner, it's personal. Obama, lean, athletic, who played basketball weekly is simply the cool kid Trump grew up seething against, someone who was simply so superior Trump knew he could never compete. Lincoln, on the other hand is someone Trump never met, and all he knows about Lincoln is everyone says he was our greatest President and that's a title Trump wants.

Of all the photos of Trump banners, the one with Lincoln is Mad Dog's favorite. Trump put it up there to show he belongs in the same company as Lincoln. But, of course, it shows just the opposite. Everyone can see it. Everyone but Trump.

One thing about those buildings--the Agriculture Department, or the Justice Department buildings-- is by their very permanence they were quiet reminders that this, too, shall pass. Administrations come and go, but those buildings remain. They were there before Trump. They were there for Hoover and Roosevelt and Kennedy and Reagan and Obama and they will, hopefully be there for whoever follows Trump, but the banners say, "Trump rules."

Trump, of course, wants to be on Mount Rushmore, but that's in South Dakota, and in the famous Hitchcock movie with Cary Grant, and it's so artificial and something of a joke. It's sort of a gauche American attempt to emulate the Pyramids or the Sphinx.

The Trump banners in Washington are not so much gauche as louche. 

Colleges fly banners, sometimes for occasions like graduation, or, in the case of NYU, to distinguish college buildings from other city buildings in a college which has no discrete buildings of its own.

But banners on the State Department, the Justice Department, the Department of Labor? Those are supposed to be beyond politics. Those are supposed to be the civil service which  just trudges on and does its work no matter who is in the White House, doing the science so we can have accurate weather predictions (Commerce), tending to the missile silos (Dept. Energy), scouring the country to prevent Mad Cow Disease from infecting human populations (Agriculture), monitoring and alerting for the next pandemic (HHS) and rescuing people from storms at sea and hurricanes and tornadoes on land. 

And maybe that's why the banners matter now. The Supreme Court (which, as far as Mad Dog knows does not yet have a Trump banner) is supposed to be doing its thing guided not by Trump but by the law. Same for the Interior Department and Justice and State. The White House establishes policies, but the civil service is supposed to follow the law, which means Congress has a role, but you don't see images of Congress on any of the buildings. 

And, so far at least, there are no Trump banners on the Capitol dome, although it wouldn't be a surprise. Stay tuned.

It's not rational, but maybe that's why banners are so effective. They do not appeal to the rational. Like flags, they are meant to provoke emotion, not thought.

Banners are mute testimony and they speak not to the brain but to the heart.

If You Build It, They Will Come: Seacoast Style

 

When Mad Dog moved to Hampton in 2008 he discovered the only place to bicycle was along roadways; what New Hampshire considered a bicycle path was a yellow line painted along the road which was not much respected by pick up trucks pulling trailers with landscaping equipment, F-350 trucks, motorcycles or anyone really. 

So he started looking for a real bike trail, like the rail to trails system he new which surrounded and interdigitated with Washington, DC, the "Crescent Trail," which allowed you to ride into downtown, or along the Potomac to Mount Vernon or out almost to Dulles Airport without ever having to share the road with motor vehicles.

Scott Bogle

By 2009, he tracked own an employee of the Department of Transportation named Scott Bogle, who was hoping to purchase an old railroad path running from Hampton to Portsmouth. The company which owned it and had not used it for decades was in no mind to sell it cheap, especially when it learned someone might want to buy it, but Bogle persisted and there were lots of hurdles to overcome, mostly from people who owned land abutting the path who were sure, in quintessential New Hampshire mindset, that whatever anyone was planning it would violate their property rights; never mind that having a bike path run behind your house would increase its value substantially, as it has everywhere else bike paths have been built. Mad Dog stopped going to meetings after a few years, as he concluded the path would never be built.

But Scott Bogle soldiered on and in May the segment connecting Hampton to the trail was completed and now the trail ran continuously, unvexed to Portsmouth and it is a joy to behold.

Joe's Meats Breakfast Nook on the Trail North Hampton

Along the way Bogle had to navigate around Free Staters, who believe any number of things but one thing they all believe is the state has no business doing anything at all, from public roads to public schools, to public health and certainly, if the Free Staters had their way there would be no bike path.

North Hampton

But now, there is a bike path and Mad Dog has been on it nearly every day, along with scores of other bicyclists, baby strollers, walkers, dog walker,  and nature freaks, not to mention wild turkeys, ground hogs, and some animals Mad Dog cannot identify which look like foxes with clipped tails.

Bogie's Hampton

And commerce has blossomed: Free Staters would be surprised to learn a government project can actually stimulate private enterprise: In Hampton, Bogie's restaurant, which has a back porch on the trail is expanding it's porch; the Airfield Cafe lies right on the trail on the Border with North Hampton and further down in North Hampton is a breakfast place connected to Joe's Meats, also on the trail. Just before Portsmouth is an exit to Portsmouth Hospital, in case you work there.

Along the way are signs reminding bicyclists that in hunting season, hunters are allowed to shoot their guns along the trail, because, you know, this is New Hampshire, where the rights of the dozen or so hunters who may want to walk out their back doors to shoot their guns take precedence over the rights of the hundreds of bikers and hikers, so bicyclists are advised to wear orange in hunting season. In New Hampshire, there are only 8 roads a hunter is forbidden to shoot across--mostly eight lane divided highways like Route 95 and Route 101, but otherwise, a hunter spotting a deer roaming in a field across Route 27 can stand in his yard and shoot across the road to nab the deer, because, well, it makes sense in New Hampshire.

The trail, if Mad Dog had his way, would be named the Scott Bogle Bicycle Trail, but this being New Hampshire, it will likely be named the Kelly Ayotte Community Connection.

Some things will have to be worked out: Kids and adults on two hundred pound electric bicycles going 40 mph are a menace to life and limb and there is no sign of police presence or cameras or even speed limit signs. 

The local government in Hampton has been typically mute and clueless about all this. It's not entirely clear the Select Board is even aware of its existence, or would care if they knew.

The police have enough to do controlling the crowds at Hampton Beach and worrying about finding police officers who might want to ride even electric bikes along the trail would be a big ask.

But, overall, Hallelujah! the Bike Trail done cometh.

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 bled at the injection site, a rill running down its hip, and he reared up, and had to be restrained by a farmhand pulling on its harness, and I refused to return to the camp, refused to say why,  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. 

Barber's Pond

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 tethered to cinderblocks at 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 mood shift. 

Today, I live a mile from a farm which raises pigs, cows, goats, and starting each July, turkeys. Every week I bicycle past the pig sty, and one day it 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.

Obadiah Youngblood, "Covered Bridge"

The turkeys arrive as small fluffy things and are consigned to Camp Turkey, where as Mary, my local native guide to things Hampton, calls 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 and squeals,  when one of these hunters fells a desperate fleeing pig, who collapses and his legs jerk in what looks like a seizure,  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 praying mantis, or locking a kitten into a microwave and gleefully hit the cook button, or tying a brick around a puppy and heaving it into a lake, you would cringe and call the psychiatrist. But the delighted squeals from the boar hunters as they blast the panicked boars  is just boys having fun.

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

To treat them like cattle was horrible.

To treat cattle or pigs like cattle is not.

Charnel House

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 who published many papers about sleep in "lower forms" of animals.

Spiny Anteater

To wonder about what a frog dreams about gets you thinking. But I am sure animals do dream, ("to sleep; perchance to dream; aye, there's the rub" as the Bard said) 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.

Annoying, Undistractable Goat

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 but 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 ignores you and pays full attention to me, because he knows you're just the hired fool. How does he know that? Really annoying."

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

Unfortunate Possum

As a side gig, the guy who ran the sleep lab did the favor of testing various drugs in possums, for someone studying some drugs,  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, considering what was done to other lab animals, and if the possum did not convulse,  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. This was a lot worse than watching a horse get an injection, but I was older by then and maybe my medical school admission depended on my beating up on helpless possums. (As it turned out, medical school admission officers were uninterested in my cosmetic lab experience--the only summer job they asked me about was working as a lifeguard and swim team coach, which I loved because the kids were so great, and you could see the smiles on the interviewers who were sick of hearing about how many test tubes applicants had rattled during summer vacations.)

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 three hours on the rack, the rat was "sacrificed."

I don't know how important figuring out those particular glycosylation pathways in the rat really was. I'm not sure that knowing what was happening in a rat's liver actually tells you what is happening in a human liver, but I do know I had dreams every 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, "We Treat Lab Animals Badly."

 I thought, "Oh, you have no idea what an understatement that is."

                              Tough Guy Carnivore

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 lots of awards, but I had never heard of it, or 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 torturing rats.

No Mercy Kid

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 some 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. I came to think there are lots of ways to achieve your goals without torturing animals and that ought to be a last resort.

And if your goal is to get cows to produce the maximum gallons of milk, maybe there's a way to do that without locking them into stalls. 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 for whatever short life they may have before the slaughterhouse, I wonder if the industrialized engineering of animal protein could not be achieved some other way.

Samantha and the Pig, Obadiah Youngblood

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 on board with a law 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, takes 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.

Of course, the EMR drives faster appointments while it delivers bigger bills for the hospital, but the patients often feel they are not seeing a doctor but a data entry clerk who isn't really listening but simply filling in the blanks. The patients get to feel like the pig in the steel cage: hemmed in.

In 2008 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 would have no trouble existing on cereal, breads, vegetables, I thought. Why not try it? Would I really miss chicken, beef or pork? 

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. 

"Save Our Bacon"

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