Try To Stop Smiling

Mad Dog has had a very serious talk with himself.  He has pointed out, to himself, that his life has not substantively changed since November 6. He still goes to his day job, every day, still arises at 5 AM, still gets back home at 6 PM. His salary is unchanged. He drives the same car with no prospect for a new one. His house is still the same color. His lawn is unraked, and leaves still need raking.

But, as the song goes, I have often walked down this street before, but the sidewalks always stayed beneath my feet before.

As David Remnick says in this week's New Yorker, the joy of seeing the brothers Koch and Sheldon Adelson failing to buy this election, of knowing that despite the Supreme Court's best efforts to hand the election to the Republicans with their Citizens United ruling, they failed and the delight of seeing  Donald Trump, that epitome of buffoonery,  sputtering impotently, and that wonderful exchange between Megyn Kelly and Karl Rove--"Is this just the math that you do as a Republican to make yourself feel better or is this real?"--all that was sooo satisfying. 

To see those haters, like the guy in Albany, New Hampshire who owns the Kawasaki motorcycle dealership, who put up the sign shown above at the gateway to the White Mountains--to see them vanquished is oh, so sweet.

But the really sweet part is not just seeing the scoundrels lose, but to see a really fine man prevail.

But then there is the question of what we are facing now.

For Remnick, the biggest issue is not the fiscal cliff, but global warning.  

As Mark Twain (or possibly it was Charles Dudley Warner) said, "Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it." The question remains, not so much whether man has changed the climate but whether or not he can do anything to fix it. 

There is the old saw about throwing a frog into a pot of boiling water--he jumps out. But put him in a pot of cool water and gradually turn up the heat and he stays in and boils--that applies to humanity in a gradually heating planet: It all happens so slowly, we hardly notice and take no action to save ourselves.

Remnick does his cause no service by saying the European heat wave of 2003 left 50,000 people dead.  This is Mad Dog's Law of Big Numbers, as soon as you hear somebody throwing around big numbers, you know he's wrong, or at the very least bogus and doesn't know where those numbers come from.  So we hear this disease costs the American economy $5 billion a year, and so does that one and by the time you add up all the thousands of diseases which cost that much you have a number which exceeds the gross national product.  It's a number, so it must be authoritative and correct. The fact is, few of us really understand the numbers and the evidence which support the idea of global warming--we have read about it and we choose to believe the sources we choose to believe. Mad Dog believes in global warming and believes it is prudent to do what we reasonably can to ameliorate it, especially since we are talking windmills, solar power and stuff that are likely a good idea even if we are wrong about global warning. 

The fact is, Mr. Obama is doing what his constituents will allow--he's investing in green energy and this week NPR informed us the United States is likely to become energy independent within the decade, and we import only 10-20% of our oil from the Middle East today, most of our oil coming now from Canada, Mexico, Brazil and the rest of South America and from our own drilling in the USA. The boom in natural gas production apparently has made a game changing shift. While all the politicians were posturing, some scientists were actually solving the problem of providing sufficient fuel for this nation, at least for the next decade or so. This strikes Mad Dog as under reported good news. 

From Mad Dog's perspective, the big agenda item ought to be health care, which Obamacare began to address, but did not come close to actually solving. We can tweak and try the Massachusetts solution, but if we see it falter, we ought to be ready to offer Medicare for all. Don't have the votes for it yet--but come 2014 there are a lot of seats in the House up for grabs.

But, for now, we can rejoice. There is a season for all things. For crying and for laughing. This is the laughing part.

We must be on guard however--remember it was less than a week after Lee surrendered at Appomattox that an assassin slipped past a drunken guard and shot Lincoln dead. All of our joy could turn on a dime, if we cannot keep Mr. Obama safe. That is the disquieting part. So much of what has brought the joy coalesces around one man. Joe Biden has his virtues, but he is no Barack Obama.

And those haters are still out there. Mad Dog has  not been back to Albany, New Hampshire, but he is willing to bet that banner is still unfurled up there. There are plenty of little men with big guns out there, just looking for their chance to show how important they are.