The New Yorker in New Hampshire

 

In the mid 20th century, moving to New Hampshire from New York City or from Washington, DC or any other sophisticated urban environment might have been a leap into a backwater, something like the scene of Dr. Zhivago stepping off the train from Moscow, with his family, at the Varykino train station in the Urals: you were launched into another world, not alone, but surely disconnected from the people, values and ideas you had lived with before. 

Of course, with the internet, with podcasts, even with the old fashioned snail mail delivery to your rural mail box, you can read what they are saying, hear what they are thinking in Manhattan just as much as if you really lived there. After all, when I lived in Manhattan, did I ever have lunch with David Remnick or Jane Mayer? No. I heard what they were thinking the same way I do now: I read the New Yorker. I might as well have been in New Hampshire, for all the actual connection I had with the minds at the New Yorker.

But listening to the New Yorker's podcast about the January 6th committee and its recommendation to the Justice Department that Donald Trump be prosecuted for his crimes of January 6, I can only marvel at how marvelously disconnected these urban sophisticates are from the rest of the country, as opposed to the other way round.

Jane Mayer

Jane Mayer describes the actions of John Eastman, one of Trump's "lawyers" and she has to pause to gather her breath when she describes how he recommended Trump simply refuse to accept the results of the election, while admitting the case he would make to the Supreme Court would almost surely fail, and she says, almost choking at the enormity of the risk Eastman was taking: "He could be DISBARRED!"

Oh, the Horror!

Susan Glasser

Ms. Glasser added that Mr. Eastman had admitted he thought the Supreme Court would have rejected his argument as if that is the same thing as saying he did not believe in his argument or that he thought they would be correct in doing so.  And he had such stellar "credentials" having clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas! As if clerking for Thomas proves you have been molded in the most clarifying fires, and have a mind like tempered steel! He must have know what he was saying and advocating was wrong!

No, actually, Ms. Glasser, I don't think serving as a clerk for just any Supreme Court Justice makes you a legal scholar, or even a smart lawyer.

John Eastman on Jan 6

I tried to imagine Ms. Mayer, Evan Osnos and Susan Glasser having their conversation in a diner in the 14th Congressional district of Georgia, the one that sent Marjorie Taylor Greene back to Congress with a 65% mandate, after she informed her constituents that the wildfires in California were started by  space lasers devised by the Jewish bankers, the Rothschilds, and after she advocated for the execution of Nancy Pelosi.

Evan Osnos

"Sophisticate" means, at its essence, "knowing." It suggests a type of knowledge from worldly experience, which, when gained, allows one to operate in a setting where the stated rules of church and state are well known, but broken, and other rules which allow people to pursue their pleasures or their own ideas, really prevail.

So, in that sense, these New Yorkers are essentially unsophisticated because they know only their own world, their own rules.

What would Ms. Mayer have said to the woman who took my passport ID photos at the local Walgreen's, who told me the charge was $16.99, "Which ought to satisfy the government, which makes you do this but doesn't do anything for you."

"How's that?" I asked.

"Well, when has the government ever done anything for you? The government isn't good for anything."

"Oh, I think the government is good for a lot of things, like Social Security and Medicare," I replied. 

"Yeah, and they won't even pay for COVID tests any more," she retorted.

I hardly knew where to begin with that one, as it implied she thought it was the role of government to offer free COVID tests, and, in fact, I had just that day read the government was once again sending out free tests, so I said, "Well, the government got the COVID vaccines done in a year, which was amazing.

"Yeah, and I got three vaccines and still got COVID twice and my husband didn't get any vaccine and never got it. And COVID only had a 0.5% mortality rate."

"Closer to 1% with the first go round of the virus. And that would have meant 3 million dead," I rejoined.

"Yeah, well, have a nice day," she said.

So, what would Evan have had to say to her?

What these three lovely and intelligent people focused on was the 1000 witnesses, the slow, methodical accretion of evidence the committee had created and the obvious malfeasance of Trump.

What they seem oblivious to is what the Walgreen's clerk knows instinctively: The truth is, as Roy Cohn once told Trump, "Don't tell me about the law; tell me about the judge."

The law is just one long argument and as Mr. Trump knows well, the longer you extend the argument, the less likely you'll ever have to pay a price.

What counts, in the end, is how you are judged and that depends on who is doing the judging--the 14th Georgia or the New Yorker.

Meritocracy, Again

 Reading a book called "The Meritocracy Trap" by Yale Law School Professor, Daniel Markovits, and having watched Michael Sandel's series of lectures at Harvard, in which he finally crystalizes his major objection to the idea of "meritocracy" as the psychological and social damage done by the idea--that meritocracy means the losers are made to feel they deserve to be losers and are unworthy--I was struck by how very prosaic and fundamentally banal the product of thought from these two ultra-elite professors really is.

Professor Markovits had a stellar career at Yale in math, graduating summa cum laude and then off to Oxford and the London school of economics where he got degrees in "econometrics" and other stuff before returning to Yale, where he got his J.D. 

But when you read his book, you find yourself saying: This is what all those highfalutin degrees gets the writer and the reader? Somewhere in the muddle of his argument the professor finds that meritocracy is responsible for deaths of desperation, a decline in life expectancy among non college educated white men, and stagnation in central Michigan near Lake St. Clair. 

Not getting into Yale did all that to those dying Midwesterners in those stagnant communities in the Rust Belt. 

He employs  a case study--a bartender who found he could live better in a small, stagnant middle class town in Michigan than he could in Seattle, where he felt like a loser compared to the high tech rich guys working at Amazon, Microsoft and Boeing. Yes, professor, as so many of us knew already, you can live better on less money outside the glamour cities, where rents and mortgages are set by the upper 1%. 

So far as I've got into his book, Dr. Markovits seems to blame the Ivy League and elite institutions for the ills of meritocracy, rather than the clueless titans of industry who make a B.A. degree a requirement for jobs which should not require a college education at all. 

As so many of us know, there are folks among our own friends and families who had the experience of being better at their jobs than those who were hired to manage them simply because those incompetent hires had  a college degree. 

General Electric wanted to make my friend a manager because, after 15 years on the line doing ultra high tech welding on airplane engines, he knew more than any of his managers, and all the managers kept going to him to find out how to organize the production line. When they called him in to promote him to management, they discovered he never did finish at the University of New Mexico and so, for want of that diploma, they couldn't promote him. He shrugged and said, "Fine, I like being a union worker."  He retired at age 54, after 35 years with the company, with a good pension, well before any of his siblings, all of whom had advanced degrees and professional careers.  He sits in front of his computer in his den watching the graphs and curves of his investment instruments, including several Vanguard accounts, and he travels with his wife all over the world.

His story reminds me of that classic Thomas Hardy poem, "The Ruined Maid" about the woman who laughed off the socially prescribed mores defining success and saw the truth by rejecting what society said was merit:

The Ruined Maid

BY THOMAS HARDY

"O 'Melia, my dear, this does everything crown!

Who could have supposed I should meet you in Town?

And whence such fair garments, such prosperi-ty?" —

"O didn't you know I'd been ruined?" said she.

— "You left us in tatters, without shoes or socks,

Tired of digging potatoes, and spudding up docks;

And now you've gay bracelets and bright feathers three!" —

"Yes: that's how we dress when we're ruined," said she.

— "At home in the barton you said thee' and thou,'

And thik oon,' and theäs oon,' and t'other'; but now

Your talking quite fits 'ee for high compa-ny!" —

"Some polish is gained with one's ruin," said she.

— "Your hands were like paws then, your face blue and bleak

But now I'm bewitched by your delicate cheek,

And your little gloves fit as on any la-dy!" —

"We never do work when we're ruined," said she.

— "You used to call home-life a hag-ridden dream,

And you'd sigh, and you'd sock; but at present you seem

To know not of megrims or melancho-ly!" —

"True. One's pretty lively when ruined," said she.

— "I wish I had feathers, a fine sweeping gown,

And a delicate face, and could strut about Town!" —

"My dear — a raw country girl, such as you be,

Cannot quite expect that. You ain't ruined," said she.

And I think of my son's high school girlfriend, who was a star student, and the daughter of a mother who was a Yale graduate and who wanted her to go to Yale.  

She chose to transfer from an Ivy League school to join my son at a lesser institution, Vanderbilt, where he had spent a desultory first year, struggling to keep up his grade point average. When she arrived, she told him to stop studying more than he had to in any given subject. He would get fascinated by some topic and read beyond the assignment, leaving less time for other demands. "No," she told him, "You've done what you need to do for your 'A' in zoology,  now move on and do enough in the next subject for an 'A' there. this isn't about learning or fun or getting deep into things. This is about grades."

 From the time of her arrival, my son got nearly straight "A's" and he graduated magna cum laude and got into Columbia P&S, a very elite medical school. He did that by hardening into cynicism and he was a star there, as he reverted back to his tendency to get absorbed in subjects which fascinated him and he won the prize for best student in surgery and went on to become a vascular surgeon, a specialty which put to use some of his great strengths. We had despaired of his ever graduating college. 

The former girlfriend went on to get a PhD at Yale. But her ultimate career is instructive. After all those glittering academic prizes--she had as stellar a summa cum laude career as one could have--and then on to Yale, what did that mean for her ultimate financial and career fate? 

She went to work for the federal government, as had her mother before her.  The former girlfriend worked briefly at Ft. Dietrick, in a virus lab, but the went on to a more administrative job with the Department of Health and Human Services.

So how much does that elite education really determine the economic fate of American generations?  Markovits and Sandel think the meritocracy is pervasive and fate determining--like the university admissions process in Japan, where you either leap up into the stratosphere because you have got into the University of Tokyo, or you wind up stuck in the middle with the hoi polloi, working every day, living with your wife and her parents in an apartment at the outskirts of the city.

Of course, those graduates of the U. of Tokyo are also living with their wives and children with her parents in crowded apartments, but they are living in better neighborhoods.

Which makes me wonder what happens to all those wunderkind folks whose wedding announcements (advertisements) you read in the New York Times.  That woman who graduated from Princeton, went on to study at the Sorbonne for a degree in semiotics, and then Cambridge in philosophy and corporate anthropology and then a degree from Yale in public health and finally an MBA from Harvard. And she marries a guy who went to Princeton and then Yale Law and got a job with a fancy Washington, DC law firm, which is the actual source of their income, and none of those degrees earned by the wife mattered much to their status or income, because she now works for a non profit devoted to preserving architectural landmarks. 

So, yes, the academic pedigree might buy a job at Goldman Saks or some fancy law firm, but how long does that last? As so many of these high achievers discover the wash out rate at these places is high,  and they wind up working at less glamourous places, for less inspiring salaries.

Meanwhile, my HVAC guy visited my house this week, and the electrician is due any minute. And the plumber was in last week and all those guys live in New Hampshire in houses which are as roomy and comfortable as my own, but unlike me, they don't have diplomas from three different Ivy League institutions framed on their walls. I always ask them when they plan to retire and they tell me they could retire any time but they are having fun and they don't know what they'd do with their time that would be more satisfying.

I tell them about the Midwestern businessmen I meet on Viking tours and and they tell me they've been on Viking cruises and had fun, but they wouldn't want to live on a cruise boat.

And I have to agree with them. 

Harvard is just down the road and the folks wandering those lovely green yards are convinced they are masters of the universe and in the drivers' seats. But I'm not so sure.

Red vs Blue America

 

Every two years, Mad Dog does his penitence, wandering through the streets of Hampton, New Hampshire, like those penitents of the Middle Ages who walked among the plague stricken towns of Europe, self flagellating, in an attempt to atone for their sins. In the case of Mad Dog, this consists of knocking on the doors of his offended neighbors, and watching them scamper from the fronts of their houses to the inaccessible back rooms, where the Patriot's game is playing on their TV screens.

What makes the exercise magnetic for Mad Dog is his partner, who we will call "Olivia" and who is the epitome of a local citizen who sacrifices for her country. 

There is no better, and likely will never be, a better door knocker/canvasser in New Hampshire. About ten percent of those doors are actually opened by the citizens who are willing to engage.  Olivia quickly introduces herself and Mad Dog as neighbors who live in Hampton.

The faces of these wary home owners transform almost instantaneously from the picture of annoyance to something approaching delight.  There are two reasons for this: Firstly, there is the face of Olivia.  Picture what most people look like when presented with a yellow Labrador puppy, or an adorable child. Oliva's blue eyes are so captivating that when Joe Biden was campaigning through New Hampshire some ten years ago, before his cognitive abilities slipped, he stopped his movement down the handshaking line, did a double take and told Olivia, "Those are some gorgeous eyes!" 

In all the years Mad Dog has accompanied Olivia to thresholds, he has never seen a homeowner whose countenance did not simply melt under the radiance of her smile.

Then there is her prodigious use of memory and connectivity: Olivia knows everyone in town, or if she does not know them personally, she knows that your cousin's brother went to Winnacunnet High School with her daughter's best friend's cousin. 

Talk about six degrees of separation! For Olivia, in Hampton, it doesn't matter if the connection is twelve degrees: She'll make that connection.

Now, the homeowner is ready to invite us in for tea or a beer or nachos and all is warm and welcoming until Olivia feels compelled to get down to business, because, after all, we are working off a computer list provided by the state Democratic Party and she has to present the slate of Democrats running for US Senate and the House and for the state representatives and for sheriff. Mr. or Ms. Homeowner's face changes from delight to tentative tolerance but it's still smiling, until...Olivia has to progress on, as the Party demands, to the next function beyond shoring up good feelings for Democrats to a polling function when she has to ask, "So, can we count on your supporting Senator Hassan?"

Renny Cushing

At that point, a dark shade is pulled own across half the faces and sometimes a diatribe ensues to the effect that Senator Hassan has voted for a law which allows "abortion" at such a late stage that the baby may be met with a scalpel as it is coming down the birth canal. 

Sometimes, the citizen will agree she will support the Democratic Senator, and then Olivia is obligated by Party fiat to ask the citizen to sign a blue post card saying the citizen agrees to show up and vote on election day, although this request often provokes a look which clearly says, "And here I thought we we friends. What are you trying to sell here?"

For those who have expostulated about the late term abortion bill Senator Hassan voted for, Mad Dog will sometimes interject: "Excuse me. I must have missed that. What bill, exactly was that and when did she vote for it?" But that only results in overt hostility and slammed doors. Mad Dog tried to reach the offices of Senator Hassan and Congressman Pappas without success as a succession of interns answered with flustered dodges that they are not authorized to speak for the Senator or the Congressman even though they answer the phones in their offices. 

Dudley Dudley

Thus we find the Party has undermined the magic Olivia is capable of working, or we find that we don't have all the answers when it comes to what our candidates actually stand for. 

But, the effort of canvassing did allow Mad Dog to experience actual field research from which he has formed these hypotheses:

1/ Most citizens are not as cleanly divided over abortion as he thought. In fact, they draw a line between abortion and infanticide; they are fine with abortion up to a certain stage in pregnancy, but late abortions look like infanticide to them. For some, of course, life begins at conception and a two cell zygote, but for most, they are much more nuanced and the Party has completely missed this with their "women must control their own bodies." For most folks we met, this is an aggravating simplification which neglects the obvious objection that at some point in pregnancy there are now two bodies involved and both may have rights.

2/ Abortion is not a vote determining  concern to voters who are for it; for those opposed it is the only determinant.

3/ Anger over Dobbs flared and then cooled, like the passions of the million woman march. Once the march was over, passions cooled.

4/ Most voters do not have "issues" which drive their votes. When we asked voters what their big issues were we got mostly blank looks. Issues? Can't think of any. When we suggested, well, abortion, democracy, inflation, the war in Ukraine we'd get, "Yeah, well, all of that. I just don't like those MAGAT's!"

So it goes back to the problem of trying to run on a platform of policies against an opposition which is all about charisma and emotion. David Brooks calls this "performative" politics, in which Marjorie Taylor Green or Lauren Bobert pose with guns, at shooting ranges and rant from the galleries of Congress trying to drown out President Biden at the State of the Union. 

During the last Presidential primaries, we asked Amy Klobuchar how she planned to run against a candidate of charisma (Donald Trump) with a campaign of policies and she was clearly flustered by the question, which at that point in her campaign she had never been asked. She finally said, "Well, I think I have charisma." 

The fact is, the United States of America has changed. 

Lincoln, speaking in 1865, at his magnificent Second Inaugural Address noted, "One eighth of the whole population were colored slaves not distributed generally over the union but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war."

Apart from the importance of this observation, which answers definitively the canard now promulgated by Southern apologists that the Civil War was not about slavery, the demographic importance Lincoln alluded to is relevant today.

While the former Confederate states are still deeply, although not completely "Red" in the sense of being MAGA Republican, the distribution of white supremacy is not confined to the southern part of the nation. The nation is truly "purple" in the "blue" states. 

So, we do not have the option of simply dividing and going our separate ways.

Blue vs Red Counties in the USA 

We have to live with one another, and, the fact remains, our great strength and our advantage over Europe is that we have remained one country. It is easy to move from Uvalde, Texas to Hampton, New Hampshire.  People live in Maine and winter in Florida. The National Football League and Major League Baseball makes household names out of players who are as well known in California and Green Bay, Wisconsin, as they are in Washington, DC and Boston.

Obama was correct to say there is no Blue America and Red America there is only the United States of America. Or at least there is no way to easily split us up now that the MAGA folks in Pennsylvania cannot be dissected away from the blue cities of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. 

A Civil War today would be more like the fight between the Reds and the Whites of the Russian Revolution: There is no way to Balkanize the United States of America. 

For better or for worse, we are stuck with each other and there is no avenue for divorce.

Diary of a Mad Democrat

 

As Election Season is staggering to its inevitable conclusion, Mad Dog thumbs through the pages of his diary in hopes of making some sense of it all.

Why, he wonders, did he ever allow le sale espoir --the "dirty hope," in Sartre's phrase--to infect his sinuses, with that short path to his brain? 

The scent was, it must be admitted, intoxicating, and it would have taken a very disciplined man indeed, to not inhale deeply that perfume. That was the idea that Lauren Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Greene, J.D.Vance, Matt Gaetz, Rand Paul and Jim Jordan would lose their races and be replaced with educated individuals whose brains have been conditioned to organize their thoughts along lines of taking in information, presenting evidence to others, rather than simply swallowing FOXNEWS whole and declaiming that space lasers are controlling our thoughts and vaccines are simply vehicles for chips which will allow Bill Gates and Dr. Fauci to rule the world.

The thing about Republicans is they are so sure of themselves, and so giddy about the stuff they believe--like so many believers who grin in ecstasy as they spread The Word to all those within earshot. It is no accident so many are Christian evangelists, like Ms. Boebert who, when she finally eked out her victory, Tweeted ecstatically, "Jesus is Lord."

Belief relieves one of the hard work of analysis: my son told me about being presented with a very knotty problem in college, that classic runaway train headed toward a station full of people, which can be diverted by simply pulling a switch to divert it, but on that diversion track lies a baby who will be crushed. The professor called on a student for a course of action, asking how he would weigh the options and make a choice and this student smiled serenely and replied, "Well, I'd just ask myself what Jesus would do."

That stopped everyone in their tracks, if you'll excuse the pun, because, after all, nobody could think of a parable Jesus had ever uttered concerning locomotives in Jerusalem. 

But the Republicans, grounded in the solid faith of FOX, are never in doubt.

Democrats on the other hand, have to think about stuff.

Here are some pages from Mad Dog's journal of this most recent season:

September: 

Monthly meeting of the Hampton Dems. The president of the group of twenty odd townsfolk yields the floor to one of the newer members, a middle school teacher, who distributes to each of the hapless citizens arrayed on folding chairs, a paper with instructions about how we are to create a document stating what it is we are fighting for, what we believe in.

Mad Dog thinks of Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, in their sweltering room in Philadelphia, trying to put down on paper exactly what should be included in the Declaration of Independence. 

But here, in Hampton, New Hampshire, the teacher has organized an approach, so we do not have to rely on mere inspiration, or past readings of great books sequestered in home libraries. We now have a step by step plan with which to formulate our document.

Mad Dog seizes the paper proffered, already imagining how he will sign our Declaration in a flourish which will put John Hancock to shame. 

It reads:

Communications Agreements:

--"Pass" or "pass for now" if you're not ready or don't wish to respond, with no explanation needed

--Speak for yourself and from your own experience 

[A disappointment to Mad Dog, who hoped to speak from the experience of others]

--Speak one at a time and respect time limits

--Maintain confidentiality regarding stories. Take the learning but not others' stories. 

[Mad Dog madly searches his mind re: his spotty knowledge of copyright law.]

Purpose:

A message is only as powerful as the people who carry it to voters, and organizations are stronger when people are talking and listening to each other. The purpose of this conversation is not to directly revise the values statement or make a decision about our final message right now. Rather, it is a chance for us to share some of the stories and values that brought us here tonight, and then for those values and stories to inform the message that we can call carry to voters this fall. 

[Mad Dog becomes immediately thirsty, and for reasons which he cannot fathom, images glitter before his eyes of a beer hall with long tables and everyone swilling beers and shouting in German.]

Connect: (Go around, 1 minute each)

Tell your group about a person who influenced you in some way to be here tonight. 

[Mad Dog cannot get Donald Trump out of his brain. It's a trap.]

Question 1: (Go around, 2 minutes each)

Share a story with your group about an experience here in Hampton that inspired you to want to seek change or protect something in the community you really care about. 

[Mad Dog has a flashback. He is back in high school and he is fantasizing about placing a bomb under the teacher's desk. Cold sweat washes down Mad Dog's back.]

Question 2 (Go around, 2 minutes each)

When you think about the story that you shared, what values or beliefs were at the core of your desire to take action? 

[Mad Dog cannot get the image out of his mind of his gangly French teacher, crossing and uncrossing her spindly legs provocatively, in a student desk in the back of the classroom, flirting shamelessly with the basketball player, who is the only boy taller than she is in the class. As she had passed Mad Dog's chair on the way back, the delicate reek of her dress, which she has not changed since Monday, three days earlier, wafts by with her. It is body odor mixed with some sort of deracinated perfume. Her name is Mrs. Loftness, and she is from Luxemburg, a place where they apparently believed in economizing on dry cleaning bills, and which Mad Dog has never, to this day, been able to find on a map.]

 Questions of understanding (Open Q&A, 10 minutes total)

Closing Questions (Go around, 1 minute each)

After listening to the other members of your group and sharing your own story and values, what are you noticing as points of convergence and possible divergence when it comes to your path to political engagement and the values that underpin that journey?

[We are sitting now in groups of five, and the teacher keeps popping his head and shoulders among us, admonishing us to stick to the schedule, brandishing a stop watch.

What emerges from this ruthless exercise is the "Three Themes" which has, at the very least, the great advantage of being more economical than Wilson's 14 points--which Clemenceau noted, at the time, were remarkable because even the Good Lord had only ten. ]

1/ Hampton Dems are fighting for excellence.

 [As opposed, Mad Dog wonders, to what? Are Republicans advocating mediocrity, or simply living it?]

We want the highest quality social services from education to healthcare. 

[Healthcare, as a local issue, strikes Mad Dog as a bit of a large bite. Virtually every medical practice in the Seacoast is owned by a large corporation which owes it's primary reason for existence to generate profit for its stockholders.] 

 Schools that prepare every student to thrive in adulthood and participate in civic life with a full knowledge of our history. We want hospitals that have the resources to provide the highest quality care to every patient. We want resilient and appealing communities, from the mountains to the seacoast, where people can visit and live with fear of the devastating impacts of climate change! 

[Mad Dog considers this idea of full knowledge of our history. (Italics provided by the teacher.) Mad Dog has come to believe that history is one long argument. Unlike arithmetic, reading and writing, as soon as you start talking about the past, you are going to story telling, and if the courts have taught us anything, it's the perils of eyewitness testimony. Take that one step beyond, where the testimony is second or third hand, and you are swimming in very murky waters.

 In fact, the town of Hampton votes each year to fund the Catholic grade school in town, as a sort of sanctuary against the non secular public schools which have been contaminated by Critical Race Theory, which teaches that the Civil War was fought to end slavery and that Martin Luther King was a saint, when, in fact, he was a jailbird who languished in a cell in Birmingham, Alabama writing letters which got published and should not be read by children.]

2/ Hampton Dems are fighting for a compassionate state...

[By this point Mad Dog's brain was swelling mightily, trying to expand beyond the confines of his skull. There was something more about communities where people take care of one another, especially the neediest and most vulnerable.  And oh, Mad Dog knew what THAT would mean to at least half the home owners on whose doors he would be knocking.

 "You want my taxes to pay for dead beats and illegal dark skinned immigrants who are coming here to take my job?" ]

3/Hampton Dems are fighting for a town and a state where residents can afford, not just to live but to thrive.

[Yes! Mad Dog thought. And Mad Dog, added silently, "And I'd like to wake up tomorrow morning 30 pounds lighter and 30 years younger."]

And there you have it. 

 

We Can Live Without Democracy: It Won't Be So Bad

 

As we contemplate the ascendancy of the Republican Party, there is some good news.

But first, we ought to consider what losing the Senate, the House and several governorships to Republicans might mean:

1/ Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Green, Lauren Boebert, Jim Jordan, Rand Paul, Dr. Oz, Herschel Walker, Mitch McConnell, Gov. Abbott, will be sworn in and will strut and preen and continue doing what they are already doing.

2/ Congress might pass a national ban on abortion, but at least for 2 years, that will be vetoed by the Democratic President. 

Planned Parenthood will shut down, but other organizations will spring up to provide contraception, except where state laws outlaw contraception.  

Deaths from back alley abortions will increase slightly, but most media attention, especially through FOX NEWS will focus on women who got septic after incomplete abortions induced by abortion pills they bought online and once they recover, they will be tried for murder and the coverage of these trials will make FOX even more watched than it is today.

3/ Religious schools will receive state funds and private and charter schools as well.

Public schools in some, but not all  districts will collapse or simply regress into holding pens for the poor, the marginalized kids, who will simply quit and go looking for work or join criminal gangs. 

Laws to fund religious schools will pass in the Red States and some purple states and the Supreme Court will find them legal. 

Any teaching of the Civil War, the Civil Rights movement, slavery  will be forbidden in public schools in all Red State as woke "Critical Race Theory."  Discussion in classrooms of anything which might reflect poorly on the American Past will be forbidden. 

This will mean, eventually, schools will teach only reading, writing and 'rithmetic. 

4/ The Supreme Court will strike down Affirmative Action. But that will, for now, affect only colleges, which will do just fine with less diversity, as the University of California system is currently doing.

 The Court will strike down efforts to prevent voter suppression or redistricting which will lock in Republican safe seats in Congress.

5/ Immigrants will continue to cross the Southern Border but much theater will ensue showing how harshly they are dealt with and Democrats will try to embarrass Republicans with images of children being mistreated in border prisons. Nothing will change along the Southern border, although much theater will play out there.

6/ More and more states will encourage open carry gun laws and gun deaths will increase.

7/ All efforts at ameliorating climate change will cease and coal fired power plants and oil drilling will stoke up. Plastic will choke the sea and its creatures.

8/ As resurgences of COVID occur, schools will remain open and the proportion of the population over the age of 70, which has been steadily rising as baby boomers age, will decrease, as high mortality rates cull grandparents across the nation. 

But the overwhelming of hospitals will likely be only brief, during January and then decline as the warm months ensue.

9/ Efforts to defund Medicare and Social Security or to privatize it will be vetoed by a Democratic President.

10/ A new form of entertainment: Congressional Inquisition, starring Jim Jordan and a whole host of Republican stars will bring Tony Fauci, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Hunter Biden, Adam Schiff  and Nancy Pelosi before the Committees for a Republican attempt to imitate the January 6th hearings.

All and all, it won't be all that bad.

We've certainly been through worse: Only 100 years ago opposition to the draft, criticism of the government, of the war was outlawed and people went to prison. Eugene Debbs spent years in prison, ran for the Presidency from prison and got millions of votes. His crime was voicing opposition to sending American boys to fight in World War One.

The famous phrase, "You can't falsely shout 'Fire!' in a crowded theater," was actually Oliver Wendel Holmes's line in a case about people who published a pamphlet opposing America's draft for World War One.  Holmes sent the men who wrote that pamphlet to prison for 10 years because he considered opposition to the draft "a clear and present danger" to the nation, its government and the war effort. It was not Holmes's best moment. He later recanted and decided people ought to be able to dissent without going to jail but those men who wrote the pamphlet languished in prison, so his change of mind did not help them.

Influenza was far worse than COVID, and the government's response to it was ineffectual and millions died in wave after new wave and the toll was not as high among the elderly as it was among young men and women.

There was no such thing as Social Security or Medicare 100 years ago and people died in poverty and old age was much briefer. In fact, without Medicare and Social Security, the likelihood is the nation, demographically, would be far younger, as the elderly would tend to die shortly after their 65th birthdays.

Gun violence in the South was just as high or higher in the 1920's as it is around the country today. Lynchings were even more common than now and the murderers of Emmet Till were acquitted because in the South it was not accepted that White men killing Black people should be illegal.

Before the 1920's America was open to immigration, but around 1924 a campaign among American elites, who embraced "eugenics" and who included Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson and virtually all the faculties of the Ivy League, and they advocated restricted immigration of "subhumans" from Southern Europe and Jews and Africans and Asians. To allow non white immigrants was "racial suicide" according to Teddy Roosevelt, whose image is today carved  into Mount Rushmore.

Elite colleges refused to admit Jews and country clubs refused to admit Catholics. Irish need not apply for jobs and Negroes were controlled by Jim Crow in the South.

So, will the world we are entering be so much worse?

It will be unpalatable, illiberal and it will be Scoundrel Time, but that is no different than for most of our history. 

Making America Great Again, will mean going back 100 years, when life in America was remarkably mean and violent. But we'll be no worse off in 2023 than we were in 1923.

The problem is, really, we thought we were better. When Obama won, we thought we had turned a corner. 

We were fooling ourselves.