On Being An Unwoke Democrat: Of Indians, Pronouns and Transgender Clinics

 

Having attended the New Hampshire Democratic Party state convention, having heard the wonderful Jamie Raskin confront, slam and otherwise undo Republicans in particular (Lauren Boebert, Jim Jordan, Mike Johnson) and in general (Trumpists, Trumplings and other sub genera of Trumpies), I have returned home to Hampton renewed and reinvigorated, determined to say what I'm actually thinking, rather than silently self editing into demure quietude. 

Congressman Jamie Raskin

I'm determined to resist what used to be called "political correctness" and now is called, "wokeness."

One is the pandering, simpering embrace of identity politics, which may flatter a single group but alienates many more. The Cleveland Indians felt compelled to rename their team because "Indians" is now deemed derogatory. I agree with George Carlin that one owes it to a man to call him what he wants to be called: So Muhammed Ali gets to discard his "slave name," and you should call him by the name he chooses. And a group name which is, or has been meant as a slur, like "Kike" or "Nigger" should be abjured, by consensus. 

But insisting on "Native Americans" or "Indigenous People" is simply to insist on a misconception at best and a lie at worst. As George Carlin insisted, everybody is from somewhere else, except maybe the original human beings who walked out of the Rift Valley in Africa. But Native Americans did not simply materialize out of the soil on the Great Plains or anywhere else in North America. They clearly walked or boated to North America from Asia. They got here first, to be sure, maybe by hundreds or even a thousand years, and Europeans washed up later, and then displaced the Indians.

There is argument about the derivation of the word, "Indian" which, for years has been taught in history courses as the name Columbus gave the people he found living in the Caribbean, thinking he'd reached India,  but more recently claims have been made Columbus knew full well he had not reached India and the name came from In Deus, (Of God, or people of God).  History, of course, is one long argument, but it doesn't matter. The name was not used by whites to denigrate those who preceded them, as, say "Redskins" might have been said to do.

And to say, "I'm sticking with 'Indians'," is not to deny these stone age people deserved to be systematically murdered or treated savagely. Whether Phil Sheridan really said, "The only good Indian is a dead Indian," the sentiment was the same. Sheridan and Sherman understood to bring the Plains Indians to heel you had to kill all the buffalo, on which these cultures depended, and that the generals did, bringing in hunters and accomplishing a real genocide of animals, reducing a sea of buffalo, millions which covered miles of the vast Great Plains, to near extinction.

Having said all that, I'm sticking with "Indians."

I also don't like "native species" and "invasive species"  when it comes to plants and wildlife. Everything arrives, tries to successfully occupy a niche and either succeeds or does not.

So, as Democrats, let's not pander to "Indigenous People" and open our conventions with 15 minutes of drumming on tom toms. Let's just say we did them wrong and move on.

As for pronouns, no less than The New Yorker writes its articles using "they" to refer to a person who prefers to use that pronoun. I agree you call a person the name he or she wants to be called, but that applies only to proper nouns, to names, not to pronouns. My pronouns belong to me and so do your pronouns belong to me. I'm owner of what pronouns I use.

And lastly, while I cleave to the idea that every patient be treated with respect, and nobody should be belittled or made to feel badly about his or her sexual preference or gender identity--which is something which should matter only to those individuals, the idea that patients who present themselves to clinics for treatment of their gender dysphoria should be in control of what that treatment should be, without challenge is not just absurd, but it is inimical to the effectiveness of treatment. 

Now that a scholarly, dispassionate review of the experience of treating patients in the United Kingdom has been published by one of that nation's reigning and respected pediatricians, Hilary Cass, MD, it is alright again to ask whether we are doing more harm than good in our efforts to help.

These areas of contention: Transgender , Woke acquiescence to demands for pronoun chaos and obsequious abjuration of words like "Indians" are losers for Democrats. 

Not only that, caving in to these misapprehensions is simply to embrace wrong thinking. 

Hungarian Rhapsody

 

Returning to the States after a holiday in Franco's Spain, my father said, with some dismay, "Everyone looked so happy in Madrid. Don't they know they are living in a dictatorship?"

Which meant a simple truth had escaped him: People live their lives concerned only about whether they can afford to go out to a good restaurant, buy food, travel,  have a car--"kitchen table" things. They don't give more than 10 minutes thought to abstract issues like democracy, tolerance, and the suffering of other people.

Here in Budapest, Mad Dog looks around and sees smiling faces, people eating at sidewalk cafes, strolling along the Danube--everyone looks so...happy!

Their prime minister, whom they have re elected for 14 years, says Hungary is a Christian nation, which should be ethnically homogeneous and should erect walls to prevent the immigration of undesirables. Views which contradict this prevailing view are said to be disloyal.

And yet, one of the most famous and consequential Hungarians in history did just that: He espoused an unpopular, highly inconvenient view which made the ruling hierarchy look bad.

Semmelweis

He was an obstetrician named Ignaz Semmelweis, who noticed that women died after childbirth of something called puerperal fever, now understood as sepsis, in the maternity wards of Budapest at an alarming rate. Well, they died on certain wards at an alarming rate, but not on other wards. The death row wards were those run by faculty and medical students of the medical college, but the wards where patients were seen only by midwives, this calamity was rare.

He suspected the explanation for this discrepancy had something to do with the fact that the doctors went from doing autopsies, from examining one woman post partum to the next women-- without ever washing their hands.  The midwives did none of this; they simply delivered the babies and sent mother and baby home.

Now, this was about 1850, years before germ theory had gained widespread acceptance, but Semmelweis insisted doctors wash their hands in a solution we now know was a disinfectant, and only then examine a woman after childbirth-- and the rates of sepsis plummeted.

Doctors of that time and place were not happy about having their practices questioned, especially if it meant they were blamed for causing the deaths of their patients, so they punished Semmelweis in every way they could, and he wound up admitted to an insane asylum and he ultimately died at age 47 under murky circumstances, possible homicide. 

Makes one think of Paul McHugh and his campaign against transgender clinics in Baltimore.  Makes one wonder about the risks of challenging orthodoxy anywhere at any time. 

Hilary Cass and Those Uncomfortable Questions: The Orthodoxy of Transgender Medicine

Hilary Cass, a Scottish pediatrician has done a courageous thing: She has insisted on critically evaluating the science behind current medical practice.

Dr. Hilary Cass

And not just any medical practice, a practice which in the commercial medical system of the United States has become a mighty industry, and in the socialized national health systems of Scandinavia, the Netherlands, France and the United Kingdom has skyrocketed into a huge cost and some would say, burden, for those publicly funded systems: Transgender Clinics.

Her report was commissioned and prompted owing to the explosion in demand for transgender care seen across Europe. Some have asked, "Where have all these kids been, until now?" Tens of thousands of children from age 10 to 18 have been brought to clinic by their parents with the chief complaint: I do not feel like a girl, although I was born a girl. I'm in the wrong body. I am the wrong sex for what I am.

This is called "gender dysphoria."

This complaint is not new, but what is new is the vast numbers of children presenting for care.

Some have claimed these kids were always out there in the real world, but like homosexuals, they were in the closet, afraid to report the torment they were going through.

Unlike homosexuals, however, these children are not seeking to be simply left alone; these children are patients because they are presenting themselves asking doctors to help them, and this help takes the form of powerful hormones and, ultimately for some, reconstructive surgery and castration.

More than fifty years ago, patients with a variety of abnormalities in production of various hormones, usually testosterone or its downstream products, were described, and some of these people were born with "ambiguous genitalia" which could not be clearly called either scrotum or vulva, penis or clitoris. Some were born with normal appearing female external genitalia, i.e. vulva, clitoris, but who in fact did not have female internal genitalia (i.e. uterus, ovaries). But these patients could be understood biochemically and ultimately, genetically. 

The current wave of patients presenting to transgender clinics have no such biochemical or genetic abnormalities yet identified.

Curiously, Dr. Cass notes, over the past decade most of the flood of patients have been requesting female to male transition, which was not the case twenty years ago.

When she looked at the data to try to ascertain the fates of kids who had been "transitioned" to the opposite gender, it was not clear, but it appeared many if not most of the preadolescents treated at the clinics had, by age 18, reverted to identifying as the gender they had originally been designated at birth, mostly female.

Simply put, these children had "outgrown" their problem or "got over it." (Not Dr. Cass's words)

I was particularly interested in this report because this whole phenomenon has been such an anomaly in medicine: It is the only session at the Endocrine Society meetings where scientific method, open inquiry and challenging the data and conclusions presented were shouted down and treated as heresy, blasphemy really. To question what was being done in the Transgender Clinic was to declare yourself as one of "them," the censorious world of bigots who, blinded by hate and intolerance, refused to acknowledge the suffering of this cohort of patients.

Paul McHugh, MD

In fact, this reaction was not new or confined to the Endocrine Society: Dr. Paul McHugh was vilified at Johns Hopkins after he questioned the Transgender Clinic programs which included surgery to transform female to male and male to female. Medical students refused to even speak with  him. At Johns Hopkins!

McHugh arrived at Hopkins in 1975  to assume the chair of the Department of Psychiatry, and one of the first things he was asked to do was to integrate psychiatry into the Hopkins Transgender Clinic, which included  plastic surgery, gynecology, urology and endocrinology.  And, being a scientist, he sat down to review the data and one thing leapt out at him: The patients at the clinic were committing suicide (or making serious attempts, not just gestures) at a rate exceeding 45%.  He asked: if you had a program in cardiology or surgery which had a 45% death rate, would you not pause that operation to re-evaluate it? 

Galelio

Hopkins had been doing sex reassignment surgery since 1966, but it was hoping to ramp it up in 1975. McHugh withdrew psychiatry from the program. By 1979, the Hopkins sex reassignment surgery program was discontinued. 

In 2017, McHugh wrote an amicus brief in a Supreme Court case outlining his objections: 

--Policy Should Not be Used to Enforce Bad Medicine — Treating Gender Dysphoria Through Social Transition and Mandatory Gender Affirmation Rests on Unreliable Testimonials

-- Social Transition Encourages a Gender Dysphoric Person to Indulge in a Falsehood, Which does not Address the Root Issues Causing Clinical Distress and Makes it Harder for the Mind to Accept Reality

--Hormone Therapy has not been Proven Beneficial, and there are Harmful Consequences to Artificially Manipulating the Body

--Surgical Intervention has not Proven Beneficial, and there are Harmful Consequences to Surgically Altering Healthy Bodies

--There is Insufficient Scientific Evidence to Support Treating Gender Dysphoric Children as if They are the Opposite Sex

-- Gender Dysphoric Children Suffer from a Psychological Disorder that Can Be Resolved through Therapy in Many Cases

--Gender Affirmation and Medical Intervention for Gender Dysphoric Children is Not Helpful, and Can be Harmful

--Protocols Calling for Social Affirmation, Hormone Treatment, and Sex Reassignment Surgery are a Reflection of Ideology and Activism, Not Evidence Based Medicine

 His basic argument was, and is still, that gender dysphoria is analogous to anorexia nervosa, where a 90 pound woman who is 5'7" looks in the mirror and says, "I'm so FAT!" She has a single "wrong idea" and the child with gender dysphoria is similarly afflicted. He was arguing that the doctors in the Clinic were participating in confirming that wrong idea to the patient and to the patient's family. 

Attending the Endocrine Society meetings some years ago, I went to a session on "Androgen Abuse Syndrome" where cases of men who looked like the Incredible Hulk, with huge musculature, visited clinics asking for testosterone injections because they looked in the mirror and saw themselves as 98 pound weaklings. In Dutch clinics,  patients signed contracts to taper themselves off exogenous testosterone, run on the model of their opiate addiction clinics and their anorexia nervosa clinics. 

My next session was the Transgender Medicine session, where the speakers readily admitted the suicide rates in their clinics had always exceeded 40%, and showed no signs of declining--which they attributed not to anything they might be doing to their patients, but to the pressures society puts on transgender people. 

The doctors in these clinics were using doses of testosterone which were 4-5 times higher than I had ever used to treat males.  I was stunned, and I texted the man from University of Michigan who had led the "Androgen Abuse" session, and he replied, "There is nothing wrong with that, because these doses are being used in gender affirming therapy."

So in one patient, we've got him signing contracts to taper himself off testosterone, and in another patient we are giving patients orders of magnitude higher doses to affirm their new gender.

One case presented was a male to female (still with penis and testicles) and the lesbian partner who wanted expensive IVF treatments to get pregnant. Nobody asked, wait, what kind of sex are they having?

Another case of a female to male was being given testosterone in 5 times the usual dose because menstruation had not been ablated and the monthly menstrual flow was undermining the patient's new identity as a male.

We are not talking science here. We are talking faith.

The problem with complaining about Transgender Clinics is you immediately find yourself grouped with Marjorie Taylor Greene and the "there are only two genders" crowd, or with Abigail Shrier, who wrote a screed calling Transgender Medicine part of a "craze," doing irreparable harm to young people. 

What doctors crave is a pathway to the truth, and the way there is, and always has been, the dispassionate, rigorous pathway and in the case of transgender medicine, this has been discarded by the medical profession, until now, until Dr. Cass published her report.

What to Say When

 

Watching Katie Porter (D-CA) during a hearing in the House of Representatives, when a witness (Lindsey Burke, of the Heritage Foundation)  testifying before the Committee inveighed against Congress "spending other people's money," Rep. Porter made the simple, but devastating observation that the job of Congress is, in fact, to spend other people's money, namely taxpayer money, and if Congress refused to do this job we would "zero out all spending for the Defense Department." And turning to the witness, she asked, "Is that what you want?"

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/3c-qT2wZ9CY

This is just one example of someone who has heard a simple, telegraphic prop, a synecdoche really, where a short hand phrase stands in for a whole, longer argument, and who explodes into a longer, more detailed deconstruction of what that, by logical extension, would actually mean.

So, the Heritage Foundation would like us all to believe that taxation is really government imposed theft, taxes being robbed from citizens, and thus are, ipso facto, illegitimate and taxes should not be collected, because doing so is the crime of theft. 

Of course, as Porter explains, without taxes, without a source of revenue, there can be no government, which the Heritage Foundation would possibly like, but then, even the Heritage Foundation realizes there are some things the government does even the most ardent Republican, libertarian likes: armed forces. 

Built into the macho proponents of strong men, violent men of iron will, is the love of guns and armed forces.

So Porter demolishes that empty phrase: "You are spending other people's money," with the riposte: "Of course we are spending other people's money, and other people want us to spend their money to provide for their defense, and likely, for a variety of other things."

Another phrase adored by people like Marjorie Taylor Green and other gun worshipers is, "If you make guns illegal, only the bad guys will have guns." Or, the spin off, "The best way to deal with a bad guy with a gun, is a good guy with a gun!"

To this, Dominic Erdozain ("One Nation Under Guns") replies: The good guy with a gun is always good, until he becomes a bad guy with a gun.

In fact, as he asserts, citing a welter of gun death statistics, the vast majority of gun deaths, in particular mass shootings, are committed by people who, until they unsheathed a gun, were thought to be good guys--no criminal record, no actionable history to deny or question their right to gun ownership.

But what Erdozain is saying is people who own guns are the people who kill other people with guns. He cites statistics which suggest a very common murder scenario is fathers who shoot to death their own sons. 

Who knew? 

Actual good person with gun

My real point is here, if we know or can identify an argument which is really, at heart, stupid, we can torpedo that particular piece of stupidity if we are prepared. Otherwise, the moment passes and we are left sputtering.

Congressmen like Jamie Raskin seem particularly adept and prepared to blow Ms. Greene out of the water, likely because they have heard it all before. When MGT tells Raskin she will not answer his "stupid questions" he rejoins with, "Well, will you answer my intelligent questions? Or my devastating questions?"

What we Democrats really need is a playbook, a hymnal, filled with Republican tropes, so we can develop our own tropes, prepared in advance, to sink those Republican vessels.

Trumpkin Police: Beyond Law and Order

Sometimes, a picture can speak more eloquently than words. 

Looking at those police goons in Michigan, standing behind Trump, tells you all you need to know about some police departments. 

You could see it in Birmingham, Alabama in that iconic photo of the cop and his police dog--although, as is so often true in life, that photo may have been misleading.

You can see it in Texas with Governor Abbott.

You could see it in Alabama when George Wallace stood in the school house door and declaimed, "Segregation today. Segregation tomorrow. Segregation forever," backed up by his police. 

Today I have stood, where once Jefferson Davis stood, and took an oath to my people. It is very appropriate then that from this Cradle of the Confederacy, this very Heart of the Great Anglo-Saxon Southland, that today we sound the drum for freedom as have our generations of forebears before us done, time and time again through history. Let us rise to the call of freedom- loving blood that is in us and send our answer to the tyranny that clanks its chains upon the South. In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny . . . and I say . . . segregation today . . . segregation tomorrow . . . segregation forever.

--Governor George Wallace

You see it in the New York City Police.

Police often, but not always, are people who like beating people up. They are frequently resentful. They like tough guy leaders who "have our backs."

Less of that in New Hampshire, but true in many places.

George Orwell got it right in "Animal Farm," where Napoleon the pig takes a brood of puppies from their mothers, raises them and then unleashes them to run his rivals off the farm and to intimidate all the other animals, especially those who might challenge his authority.

Police like the ones standing behind Trump in Michigan ought to be in the mind of every voter walking into that voting booth on November 5, 2024.

2nd Amendment Blues

 

"A well regulated militia, being necessary to the Security of a Free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."

--Second Amendment, United States Constitution

Watching a youtube Obama town hall, I saw a man rise to say that Chicago has among the most onerous gun laws in the nation, and yet it has the highest murder rate, and this in a city run by Democrats who want to take away guns from the good guys, the law abiding citizens who want guns only for their own protection. Wherever Democrats are in charge, the man said, murders by guns are way higher than in Republican places where law abiding good guys can defend themselves with guns.

President Obama responded by saying there is a lot packed into that question, but he began by saying that neither he, nor Hillary Clinton have ever suggested taking away guns legally owned by citizens, even though there are now more guns than citizens in the United States. 

He also noted that Congress has refused to allow the government to study gun deaths. And he pointed out that without confiscating automobiles, the nation has managed to reduce auto accident deaths by government regulation and intervention, requiring seat belts, air bags and certain improvements to road design, implying that government intervention isn't always ineffective and onerous. 

But he might have pointed out, if he really wanted to embarrass this proponent of the "good guy with a gun" theory, there are two flagrantly wrong things about this argument:

1/ Most gun murders or accidental deaths are perpetrated by a good guy with a gun who, until he murders someone with it, was a good guy--the man in an argument at a bar, the outraged husband, the father who shoots his son (a surprisingly, statistically frequent scenario.)

2/ The gun death rate per capita is far higher in Mississippi (33.9) than in Chicago(16.4), higher in Louisiana (29.1 ) than in Philadelphia (18.7), higher in Alabama (26.4) than in Washington, DC (18.2)  higher in Wyoming (26.1), Montana (25.1), Alaska (25.2), Tennessee (22.8) than in Chicago (16.4). 

So those red states where gun ownership is so high, where the good guys own the guns, are places where the good guys are killing their fellow citizens at far greater rates than in those supposedly wild and untamed urban centers where President Trump says there is nothing but mayhem and chaos.

Of course, death rates by jurisdiction and guns are all about statistics: Are we going to add in death by guns for suicides? (Do suicides even belong in this discussion?)  Are we including only homicides or do we add in accidental deaths where a child finds a gun and shoots his brother? And then there is the odd fact, often unmentioned, that the likelihood of your dying by a gunshot is highly related to how quickly you can be got to a trauma center where they have surgeons who are really good at treating gunshot wounds. Part of why people who are shot in Mississippi die so often is that when they do get shot, they are a long way from any trauma surgeon.

But the fact is, if you want to talk about where you are most likely to be shot by someone, and fatally, it has never been the big Democratic cities; it has been the deep Red, Confederate South. 

Why this image of the violent inner city has been so widely accepted as truth is complex, but it surely includes the depiction in film and media of city carnage ("The Wire," LAPD etc) but also it fits the preconceived notion of the white guy who posed the question to President Obama, namely that we got Black guys with guns in those cities, and even out here in suburbia and we need White guys with guns to shoot them. This was clearly as subtext, as the White guy posing the question was saying all this murder is happening in those urban centers with strict gun laws (which just happen to be Black) and so we need to arm our Whites.

And then there is the right to individual gun ownership: Until 2008, every court at state level (even in Texas and the Confederate states) and the federal level and the Supreme Court stated the obvious: There are two parts to the 2nd Amendment, and the part about gun ownership being tied to a "well regulated militia" has always meant individual ownership is not a right guaranteed by the Constitution.

You can refer to all the wise men who said this is so, or you can simply believe those who do not want to accept this, like Antonin Scalia, who wrote the opinion in Heller v DC, which said individual gun ownership is in fact guaranteed by the 2nd amendment, and all that jurisprudence, all those scores of decision and opinions between 1789 and 2008 were wrong and it all depends on the history and what the founding fathers meant by words like "the people" and how you define "the people" and "bear arms" and what "keep" means. You see Justice Scalia tying himself into knots to get to the place he was determined to get to in the first place: Gun ownership cannot be interfered with, not in Washington, DC nor in New York City, places where you might think restrictions on gun ownership might be a public health good.

Then there is the whole topic of whether what we think of a man owning a gun as he travels across the continent, in his Conestoga wagon in 1859, across hostile Indian territory, might be different from what we think about a man who lives today in Columbine, Colorado or Newtown, Connecticut, where Sandy Hook school was found--whether the circumstances of new problems in new times might make us want to think anew for new solutions.

All of this is well reviewed in "One Nation Under Guns," by Dominic Erdozain. 

Mad Dog was pleased to see him say what Mad Dog has often said about Heller--it is one of those infamous, ignominious decisions which will take its rightful place alongside decisions like the Dred Scott decision, which hinged on the idea that a slave is not a human being, or Plessey, which sanctified racial segregation. But Heller is distinctive because it disregarded all prior decisions, it crushed the idea of stare decisis, i.e. that any decision by a court ought to be consistent with prior decisions on a subject. Scalia was so determined to get to the result he wanted, he simply abandoned all principle to get there. The only principle which counted for Scalia was guns are good.

And so, our Court, has almost by itself, allowed for the ongoing reality that we will have schoolhouse slaughter for the foreseeable future and shopping centers, concerts, really any public venue where Americans gather, will continue to be bathed in the blood of citizens sacrificed on the alter of the good guy with the gun.

The Sacred Right to Murder Mallards

In a sense, Heller raises a bigger problem than just the 2nd amendment. It goes to that famous remark from Roy Cohn to Donald Trump: "Don't tell me about the law: tell me about the judge."  This is the key insight--America is not a nation of laws, but a nation of people with opinions and the law can always be bent and interpreted to get to the result you want. If that is true, then the Supreme Court of the United States is nothing more than one more political group, guided only by the prejudices of the judges, and ought to be treated that way. If Mad Dog had his way, every new President could appoint 3 new justices per term and the justices would rotate from the federal judiciary in and out of the Court. They would still serve for life pending "good Behaviour" but they would no longer hold the nation hostage for 30 years at a time.

Dragged Out of the Shire

 

Mad Dog, like any Hobbit, is content in his happy home, in his lovely shire, but he is occasionally compelled by obligations to travel outside it. And like the Hobbits shepherding the ring, he finds that travel beyond his shire is an adventure, if not sought, at least possibly edifying.

Sedona, Arizona

The ocean at the end of his street, the town with all its amenities just a short walk away, the woods and ponds and birds are enough for contentment, but there is some value in seeing the larger world.

Hampton, New Hampshire 

Sedona, Arizona provided enough edification to make him think over how Hampton might be improved. 

Town Clerk, City Hall, City Manager Sedona

Take the public buildings, for example: In Hampton, our town building with its clerk's office is a converted bank, and its soviet style block brutalist architecture cannot be improved by the recent attempts at new siding, but in Sedona, every effort is made to make the building reflect and complement the natural colors and lines of the mountains and soil of the surroundings.

Blending In

Even the police station is subdued and not allowed to disrupt the karma. 

Of course, you have to be very determined to find the police station in Sedona, which has no signs visible from the road, and is ensconced in a courtyard. If you were a distressed citizen, hoping to find help from the police, you'd need a Google Maps to find it. Mad Dog, walking down the main drag, Rte 89A, saw a sign "Police" with an arrow, but walking down Roadrunner Drive, as directed, even on foot, Mad Dog could not espy the place, because the station has no door on Roadrunner drive, only a camouflaged back wall, and you have to make your way down a service road and walk into a courtyard to find the police station, and even then, it's not easy. 

Stealth Police Station

There are no electric wires on poles, and anything which is unsightly seems buried.

There are two urgent care/ emergency medical facilities in Sedona, but neither is open on Wednesday and any medical emergency would have to be medivac'd to somewhere else and it's not clear where.

Even national chains are melded into the color scheme: Mad Dog drove past the McDonalds four times before he recognized it.

There is a lot of talk around Sedona about spirituality, and karma and spiritual vortexes and things you might see after inhaling mushrooms, which you do not hear about in Hampton. Mad Dog never quite got an explanation of what a spiritual vortex might be, but whatever it is, they have it in Sedona, apparently. It may be connected to the Indians who once had Sedona to themselves, but to Mad Dog, that sort of spirituality derives from a pre scientific culture which sought to imagine explanations for observed phenomenon rather than investigate anything with experiment and deduction. 

Doughty New Englanders will drive you crazy when you are on line at the post office, trying to send your package off while the lady at the counter banters on with the postal clerk, who wants to hear about all the grandchildren. Same thing at the dry cleaners and the bank, but if you're in a hurry, why are you living in Hampton?

View From Plaice Cove Obadiah Youngblood

This sort of connectivity in Hampton has its charms: Mad Dog picked up his laundry at the dry cleaners, and the owner, who is the son of Korean immigrants, asked him about Mad Dog's grand daughter in California, who just turned one and in the Chinese tradition, had a ceremony which involved the baby being presented with a display of objects and whichever object the baby chooses is supposed to predict the path in life that baby may follow--a sort of Chinese ground hog day ritual, predicting the future by signs. 

Covered Bridge Obadiah Youngblood

The dry cleaner man remembered about Mad Dog's grand daughter because the Koreans have something similar, and he had chatted with Mad Dog's wife about it. But the point is, this dry cleaner store owner remembered and he made the connection and he took some joy in it.

Hampton Barn

Rte 1A Hampton

Most of the people Mad Dog encountered in Sedona seemed to be from somewhere else, having wound up in Sedona much as flies wind up on flypaper. In Hampton, you are apt to meet people who grew up in town, graduated from Winnacunnet High School and either never left, or returned after a time outside the sect.

Rte 27 Hampton

At the end of the tale, the Hobbits have returned safely home to their shire, and they watch the fireworks from their front yards as everyone celebrates the joy of living in the shire--and that is how Mad Dog felt, returning from the 6000 feet above sea level to the Ocean at the end of the street.

Pink House, Drinkwater Road