Hampton New Hampshire Mad Dog Democrat: 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?" ]