Shouting Fire

Last night I saw Lester Maddox on a TV show
With some smart a** New York Jew
And the Jew laughed at Lester Maddox
And the audience laughed at Lester Maddox too
Well he may be a fool but he's our fool
If they think they're better than him they're wrong
So I went to the park and I took some paper along
And that's where I made this song

We talk real funny down here
We drink too much and we laugh too loud
We're too dumb to make it in no Northern town
And we're keepin' the n*****s down

We are rednecks, we're rednecks
We don't know our a**
From a hole in the ground
We're rednecks, we're rednecks
And we're keeping the n*****s down

--Randy Newman, "Rednecks"



Just got through the episode in Ken Burns' "Vietnam" which covered the murder of students by National Guardsmen at Kent State.

A little clip caught my attention, which Burns does not dwell upon, but it made me pause, then replay it: A distraught professor has rushed up to the Guardsmen who are kneeling and standing, weapons poised to unleash another volley of deadly gun fire at unarmed students across a grassy stretch and he implores the Sheriff or whatever he was, who seemed to be in charge, "Don't shoot!" 

"They have to disperse in thirty seconds or we'll shoot again," the Sheriff tells him.

Apologists for the National Guard always have claimed these were 20 year old kids with rifles, poorly trained, terrified of the mobs of students, who panicked and shot in fear for their own lives. (This defense became a mantra for every White cop who shoots a Black kid in the back after a traffic stop, of course, but in 1970, it was new.)

But what this three second bit of documentation showed clearly is how calm, and pre mediated this act was, on the part of a middle aged man and his calm and collected henchmen, who were methodical as any mob hitmen.

Some time later, the author James Mitchner went to Kent Ohio and spent a lot of time talking with townsfolk, students, police and his "Kent State" details how thoroughly many townspeople loathed the students who they felt were pampered, rich, unfairly privileged and somehow they believed the good fortune of these rich kids was responsible for their own deprived, miserable lives.

If this sounds familiar, it should. 

Captured by an aghast neighbor from Hampton NH

Speech, of course, is not action. You can say anything you want (except on Twitter now). But as Justice Holmes famously remarked, "The First Amendment does not give you the right to falsely shout 'Fire' in a crowded theater." The Alex Jones, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and now Donald Trump right wing stokers of the flame are the Santa Anna winds which explode into conflagration. 

They are speaking to those weak minded among us, the kindling just waiting to erupt.

These are the folk who burn with resentment, who smolder with self righteous wrath. They have their guy in the White House now. 


And they're loving it. 

Why Trump Will Win In 2020

Brett Stephens, writing a near future imagining the day after Trump wins re-election has spoken an uncomfortable truth.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/26/opinion/trump-re-election-2020.html

It's worth a minute to read.
He argues that 3 things won the election for Trump:
1/ A booming economy: "What part of a Dow of 30,000 did you not understand?" a voter tells an exit poll worker.
2/ The argument that illegal immigrants from Central America threaten law and order in the United States.
3/ Democrats clinging to unpopular ideas: free college tuition, Medicare for all, which sound great but would "bankrupt you and bankrupt the nation."
Nice catchy phrase, that. Bankrupt you, blah, blah.

For me the problem for the Democrats is the failure to think anew. Democrats are supposed to be the change makers, but they cling to the old with a grip which makes their knuckles white and which is unrivaled by even Republicans who want to make America 1950 again.

It was Trump, not the Democrats, who looked at our military bases and soldiers and sailors stationed in Europe and Asia and asked why we needed all that expense and exposure?

An article by a former German Ambassador to the United States, Wolfgang Ischinger, in the 7/22/18 NYT laments America for following Trump in rejecting "the foundations of Western grand strategy since the mid-1940's...The era of America's benign hegemony may be over, with Europe extremely ill prepared."

Well, what, you may ask, does America get from "hegemony"?
And if Europe is ill prepared is that because we have enabled the Germans, Italians, Belgians and Brits by providing an army to protect them while they spent on their free healthcare and day care centers?
If Russia's neighbors were not worried enough to spend money on arms, why should we?

"Any doubts about America's commitment hurts the credibility of NATO's deterrence," Mr. Ischinger tells us.

Deterrence to what? 
If Russia sends tanks across the borders into Latvia, Estonia or Lithuania or into Ukraine or Slovenia or Slovakia, would Americans even be able to find these places on a map? Would we send our sons and daughters over to fight the Russians? Why?

Our deterrence is found in our ultimate trump card, you should excuse the expression: We got nukes.
But would we start a nuclear holocaust to protect Estonia?

We have 65,000 American troops in Europe, 38,000 of those in Germany, 12,000 in Italy, as if we were still worried about the Axis powers rising up. We have 55,000 in Japan! Japan! Why? 
And we have 25,000 in South Korea.
Now South Korea, in a sense, you can understand when you look at who they have on their northern border, a country with enough craziness to actually invade with troops carrying guns, to try to take over Samsung, Hyundai and other prizes. 
But do we really need to play war games with the South Koreans?

Much as I hope Democrats can find someone to beat Trump, we have to begin by recognizing his appeal, and Democrats have their heads in the sand when it comes to that.

America: This Is Who We Are

Watching Ken Burns's documentary "Vietnam" there were some vignettes which spoke to me. 

They made me think of George W. Bush talking about Abu Ghraib prison, where naked prisoner were made to form human pyramids, and he looked into the camera and said, genuinely distressed, "This is not who we are."

But he was wrong, this is exactly who we, or at least some of us, are.

One of the students killed by National Guardsmen at Kent State was a ROTC student, walking across campus to class,  and his parents were deluged with letters from outraged citizens who told his parents he deserved to die for demonstrating with those Commie loving scumbag students. 

They interviewed a construction worker in his hard hat after the construction workers had stormed down from a building they were working on with an American flag and slogged into a crowd of students demonstrating against Kent State and the bombing of Cambodia,  in lower Manhattan,  and the workers beat up as many as they could. I remember those guys, because I was there that day. He said he and his buddies were out there every day in the heat in the snow and rain working on buildings, building the country,  and these wimpy, privileged rich kids are out on the streets with signs trying to tear the country down he's building up. It was straightforward class resentment. 
Archie Bunker meets the preppies. 

The construction workers charged our contingent from medical school but they did not reach me. They got taken down by some of my classmates. My classmates may have been privileged preppies, but there were some good athletes, some former wrestlers and football players and they gave as good as they got. Made the front page of the Daily News, in their white coats, pummeling the construction workers.  You could look it up.

Notice the babies at 9 & 10 o'clock

Burns has somebody reading letters to the jurors of the William Caulley trial, after he and his platoon shot babies, women, children at Mai Lai, letters saying he was justified. Polling after Mai Lai supported the massacre. 

Polling after Kent State showed most Americans supported the National Guard shooting the students. 

The police chief at Kent State, standing front of the troops, told the professor of Geology if the students did not disperse he'd have the Guardsmen shoot again. This was not some mob of ill trained terrified Guardsmen shooting in a panic. This was pre-meditated murder, condoned right up the chain of command.

This is, most definitely, who we are. 
You ask who voted for Trump, who supports him still?  
It's Nixon's silent majority, still out there, that malignant infiltration among us, who look pretty normal, who you'd never guess, until you talk to them a few minutes.

Treason: What Is It?

When Bennedict Arnold, a general in the American army contacted the British army, gave the enemy information about Washington's military plans and then joined the British army as a general leading forces against Washington and the colonials, that was clearly treason.

Arnold

When Robert E. Lee, an officer in the United States Army resigned his commission to fight for the Confederacy, to destroy the United States, that clearly was treason.

Righteous Treason

But if Trump uses the stuff Russian hacks produce to frame Hillary Clinton, to suggest she has some criminal or unsavory doings buried in her emails, is that treason because the source of all this was Russia or Wikileaks?


Thinking about the use of foreign powers to foster success in American elections, Richard Nixon becomes a case study.


Of course, we can never know whether or exactly how Nixon contacted the leader of South Vietnam, Nguyen Thieu, in the fall of 1968 to convince him President Johnson was going to sell out South Vietnam in the Paris Peace talks, and to promise that if Nixon won, Thieu would get a better deal. But there is a paper trail and while some dispute it, it looks pretty convincing.


1968 was a pretty eventful year: Martin Luther King was murdered in March; Bobby Kennedy was murdered a few months later. Eugene McCarthy challenged Lyndon Johnson in the New Hampshire Democratic primary and did not beat LBJ but showed well enough to shock everyone: Johnson got something like 49%, McCarthy 43% and George Wallace was eventually in the mix in later primaries. The Democratic Convention was a horror show and blood flowed in the streets of Chicago as demonstrators on the outside were bludgeoned by a police riot using what Senator Abraham Ribicoff described from the convention podium as "Gestapo tactics" while Mayor Daley screamed "Fuck you!"

Ms. Chennault

As the election neared, LBJ finally agreed to stop bombing Vietnam and the North and the Viet Cong then agreed to meet South Vietnam and America at the table. Nixon reached Thieu through a woman intermediary, Anna Chennault,  and Thieu refused to join the talks and the pre election hope of a settlement of the war collapsed.


Nixon was elected, and the war ground on for another 7 years with 20,000 more American deaths and untold Vietnamese deaths.


Whatever Trump may have done, nobody is accusing him of sacrificing the lives of American soldiers so he can attain office, but the idea of manipulating public opinion by intrigue with foreign players does sound familiar.

Max Head Room Doctors

The background story provided for the Max Headroom character in his original appearance comes from a dystopian near-future dominated by television and large corporations. The AI of Max Headroom was shown to have been created from the memories of crusading journalist Edison Carter. The character's name came from the last thing Carter saw during a vehicular accident that put him into a coma: a traffic warning sign marked "MAX. HEADROOM: 2.3 M" (an overhead clearance of 2.3 meters) suspended across a car park entrance.

Last night I attended  Journal Club at the Portsmouth Regional Hospital, where doctors assemble after hours to discuss the month's New England Journal of Medicine articles, an effort to keep up to date.

As usual, before we got down to the articles, there was a little banter and gossip and the big news was that the virtual neurologist had gone on the fritz and the neurologist at the table was roped into seeing a stroke victim in the Emergency Department.


Turns out this was all just a small window into a much bigger story:  Apparently, the Hospital Corporation of America (HCA) has concluded that its efforts to support office practices of neurologists, pulmonologists, cardiologists, primary care is a losing proposition, financially. These practices have always been what hospitals depend on to "feed" the hospital patients, who need the MRI's., emergency care, laboratory studies, hospital beds, ICU beds, maternity beds. But the practices often just barely break even and, the speculation is, HCA realized they can do away with all that burden and simply try to profit from the hospital.

They got the hospital declared a Level Three (or some level) "trauma center," to focus on where the money is.
But, to do this, you need to create a "Stroke Center" which means that any patient who comes to the Emergency Department with a stroke has to be seen within an hour and evaluated by a neurologist to see if he needs a "clot busting" drug run into his carotid arteries to break up a clot which is preventing brain tissue downstream from getting oxygen carrying blood.


The problem is, if the stroke victim has a Hemorrhagic stroke, one cause not by clot obstructing blood flow but by bleeding into the substance of the brain, giving a "clot buster" makes the blood flood a large part of the brain, making the stroke much worse.

So a neurologist has to see the patient.
The problem is, HCA fired most of its neurologists so how do you get the neurologist to the bedside in the emergency department?


Enter the mobile monitor/computer on a rolling cart and the neurologist appears courtesy of a Skype like technology. He may be in Nebraska, and he "interviews" the patient, while a nurse does the physical exam.


Now, of all physical exams, the neurological physical exam is among the most difficult and requires the most experience and touch, but, never fear, a nurse can be trained up, apparently.


At this point, my mouth is agape and I know I'm being played. I started laughing.
"Oh, for a moment there, you had me going! I thought you were serious."
Actually, they were serious. There is such a thing.


And that day the system went down on the "Stroke Center."
That got me thinking about what can and cannot be done off site.

For nearly a decade CT and MRI scans have been done in American emergency rooms and read by a doctor sitting at a computer in India. That horrifies American patients but doctors have long ago accepted this. After all, American radiologists, seeking an easier life, demanded the images be sent to their homes so they didn't have to get out of bed to drive over to the hospital and it's all on computer, so why not?


In a sense, American doctors have brought this concept and its consequences on themselves.


But neurologists were among the last bastion of real live clinicians, that neurological exam being an art and a hands on thing. Like plumbers and electricians, you can't just do it virtually from afar. Until now.


I guess surgeons are safe, for now at least. We haven't go to the point where you are wheeled into the operating room, lifted off the gurney and placed on the operating table by a robot and have your appendix removed by a robot.

But just you wait.
It's all so much more efficient and profitable.
Who wants to be the Luddite in medical care?


We have reached the point of the Max Headroom physician. He is not an actual human being at the bedside. He exists only on the monitor screen.


That's your Trauma Center and Stroke Center you drove past your local community hospital to reach. 
Welcome to for profit medicine, America. It's all yours now.

Trump Derangement Syndrome

Rand Paul is not a guy I would vote for, but his diagnosis of CNN, PBS, and a host of other networks is manifestly correct. 


He dismisses the whole Trump/Russian collusion story as "Trump Derangement Syndrome," which is motivated by an underlying desire to see Trump driven from office the way Nixon was, by investigations, charges of criminality. So a self important fool like former intelligence chief Brennan says Trump's behavior in Helsinki was "treason" gets big play, Cuomo, Camerota are quoting it, when in fact, Trump isn't smart enough to commit treason if he wanted to.

Of course the Russians wanted to see Trump win, just as a variety of conservative Americans did, and they fomented false stories on social media, just as a whole host of Trumpees did. As Rand says, every nation spies on other nations; every nation tries to influence the outcome of elections in other countries in a way which will benefit their own countries.


No country has tried harder to do this than the United States, in many Asian, South American and African nations, and likely in Europe on occasion.

It's the height of hypocrisy for government officials here to get all sanctimonious about "Russian interference" in American elections, when America has interposed itself in elections and governance in Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt, Brazil, the Philippines, Cuba, Nicaragua, Viet Nam, Chile, Venezuela, Indonesia, and these are only the countries somebody has bothered to write a book or an article about.


Americans in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida and the entire Confederacy voted for Trump not because Russia fooled them but because Trump fooled them, or maybe not. Maybe he was just giving them the racist red meat they hungered for.

Watching Chris Cuomo, Alisyn Camerota, Judy Woodruff, Mika Brezynski, Mark Shields carry on about smoking guns and illegal behavior, obstruction of justice because they suffer from the delusion this can be another Watergate leaves Mad Dog frothing.


Trump told you he fired Comey because he could. No such thing as obstruction of justice when he came to Comey. Comey should have been fired for politicizing the FBI and he was.


Trump has done nothing but what he said he would do when he was campaigning.
We want him out. We got to beat him on building the wall, vilifying Hispanic immigrants, killing Obamacare, trying to reverse Roe v Wade with Supreme Court appointments.  If we cannot beat him on the issues, we got no right to be in power.

Trump Balloon: Where's that American Entrepreurnial Spirit?

The Tea Party had its yellow Don't Tread on Me flag.

What the Democratic Party, Indivisible, Resist and all the other folks who see Trump as they do in London need is a Trump balloon.

So, I went on line to see where I can order my version of that London Trump balloon, and nada, none, empty!  I want several, each in different sizes.

Amazon, don't fail me now!
Esty, where are you when I need you.

God save the Republic! Someone out there needs to get those Chinese factories churning out Trump balloons.

Or, better yet, factories in West Virginia!

Of course, Mad Dog productions is hoping for a hand puppet version.

But really, people, here is a need crying out to be met.

Something's Not Right With That Boy

As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

H. L. Mencken

Today, Donald J. Trump, President of the United States, the man who sits in the same building where Abraham Lincoln once sat, tweeted:


Thank you to all of my great supporters, really big progress being made. Other countries wanting to fix crazy trade deals. Economy is ROARING. Supreme Court pick getting GREAT REVIEWS. New Poll says Trump, at over 90%, is the most popular Republican in history of the Party. Wow!




Wow, indeed.

You have to give him credit for his sunny disposition, except of course, when he sucks his thumb and pouts.

But really, when you read that tweet to his supporters, what do they say? Do they not see a problem here?

Meritocracy, Affirmative Action, Harvard, America, Trump: Ugh

If ever there was a topic which screams "political correctness," affirmative action has got to be it.

How well I remember when one of my classmates in college asked our English professor if we could set aside the discussion of Sheridan's "School for Scandal" to discuss instead a proposal to insure 12% of the college's next freshman class would be Black students. That would be 77 of the 640 members of the class.

I thought then, and I do now, that finding 77 Black students should not be a problem. Our Dean of Admissions, greeting us on the first day told us he could have filled the freshman class with "qualified applicants" from New York City alone.  Typically the college got 5000 applications for those 640 slots and accepted 1,000. The 360 extras went to Harvard, Yale and Princeton. They had applied to my college as a "safety school."

Today, the argument persists that one of the best way to address the problem of systematic discrimination against Black people is to place them in elite colleges, because, you know, all you have to do is get into one of those colleges and your ticket has been punched; you will be handed a lucrative job at the best banks, corporations, or you will move on to one of the best law schools or medical schools. Once you had that name "Harvard" or really any Ivy League school next to yours, it didn't matter if your name was Keesha, or Latisha or Keyshawn, you could start looking for a mansion in any upscale neighborhood and shopping for your Mercedes.

There were a lot of underlying assumptions to that argument, among them, that simply being present in the college would assure later success, that the students selected were no better than those rejected and anyone could be placed on that campus and go on to live happily ever after. When you put it that way, advocates said, "Of course, we don't believe that. But these students of color ought to be given the chance to compete."

Choosing the best musicians for the New York City philharmonic, the candidates are placed behind a screen and the judges listen to the music they make. Nothing could be a better mechanism for choosing for merit than that.  But there is no screen like that for college admission. Even if you could devise one, advocates for affirmative action would say the game is rigged: Black students haven't had the advantages of years of private lessons, getting toted from one teacher to the next by "Tiger Moms."

But if you are really interested in a meritocracy, the disadvantages endured by Black kids should not matter. All that should matter is how well they can play that violin at the time you need to choose the best violinist.

But no, the argument goes, that college admission can be the make up mechanism for all those violin lessons never received over the prior 12 years.

Well, if you want to remedy that disadvantage, the reply comes, you have to start 12 years earlier, unless you don't really care about merit so much as about giving some lucky students a break, at least for a few years.

The other outcome, not desired by anyone, is that if there is any advantage to having that Harvard name on your application, if the other name on that application is Keyshawn or Latisha, the person reading the application says, "Oh, she may be Harvard, but she's Black, so we know what Harvard means in her case."

Trying to solve the disparities in opportunity, income inequality and class by admitting Blacks to elite colleges is trying to solve a maze of complex problems with a simple one step solution:  As if you had an automobile run off the road, sitting in a ditch on its top, wheels spinning, frame  bent, windows blown out and you go down and put on a set of new tires.

It's the old problem of process vs results. If the Civil Rights movement is about process, equal opportunity, right to vote, right to use public accommodation, that's as it should be. But when you look to make the measure of success results, well then, you've got another problem entirely.

Headline Dissonance

While we focus on the bestial practice of separating children from their mothers at the border, we fail to aude alteram partem. 
Decent, well meaning liberals have fallen into the trap inadvertently set for them by Trump and Co.

Or, more likely, liberals like "Crying Chuck Schumer" have instinctively tried to show how compassionate, feeling, warm and fuzzy they are by focusing on the children.

Available for your next garden party

But in the bars I hang in, you hear, "Hey, what do you think happens right here in New Hampshire, when a mother gets jailed for shop lifting? You do the crime; you do the time."

Of, course there is a difference in sympathies here and a misunderstanding of the "crime" of crossing the border undocumented.

What we really need now is an Al Franken in the Senate, someone who could ridicule Trump and Sessions effectively, as Pia Guerra has done.

Pia Guerra

But, no, all the Dems rushed to expel Franken because he was accused of sexual harassment, mugging for a photo he clearly knew was being taken, while placing his hand on the flak jacket of a reporter at breast level. Oh, for shame!

Democrats are still into shame, where Trump laughs at shame, and that is a kind of strength the Democrats cannot wrap their minds around.

Pia Guerra

Our problem with Central Americans from 3 desperately dysfunctional Central American countries (whose total population adds up to 21 million) is different from what the Europeans face. 

The Europeans have absorbed a million refugees and some, but not most, of these are men who reject basic European values, like allowing women to walk outside without a male guardian, allowing women to vote, allowing anyone to dance, allowing anyone to imbibe alcohol. These are not the rapists Trumps sees in Hispanic gate crashers; these men are far more dangerous because they arrive seeking refuge and then, in a graft v host reaction, they reject the very nations which offered them refuge.

So they grope blonde German women in the public square in Cologne Christmas eve.
Groping any unaccompanied woman in the market in an Arabic country is fair play. Not so much in Germany, Sweden or Britain.

Our refugees are different. Much as Trump, Louie Gomhert and Kris Kobach want to depict them as MS-13 rapists, they are not.

Trump's West Side Story

For the most part, the Hispanic families cross our Southern border share certain characteristics: The family unit is strong. They work hard at low paying jobs Americans tend to eschew. Far more of the men are skilled carpenters than MS-13 types.  Many real estate developers, construction company magnates say their Hispanic employees are the best workers they have, as a group, if you want to generalize. 

Democrats should begin every discussion with the statement: Nobody is suggesting it would be a good thing for the United States to admit 130 million Chinese and 130 immigrants from India and 21 million from Central America tomorrow.  We wouldn't be helping either them or us if we did. But what we are saying is with a population of 300 million, we can admit, and actually need to admit (given our falling birth rates), immigrants in a controlled way.  Immigrants are not an infestation simply because they are not as blond as Ivanka.  Think of the Spanish speaking folks you know. Do they look more like MS-13 or Lin Manuel? 

Adolf's demon seeds