Hampton Select Board: Gods on Mt. Olympus

 

Select Board meetings have been hearing every week from citizens who are somewhere between concerned and outraged about the prospect of Hampton police operating in tandem with ICE agents to kidnap people around town. 

There are also those speaking out in favor of ICE deployment in Hampton, those who assert Hampton is threatened by dangerous immigrants who will steal from Hampton homes and citizens, may rape, murder or (though it hasn't yet been mentioned--you know its coming) pose a lethal threat to Hampton's pet cats and dogs.

This happens during the "Public Comment" time which begins each Select Board meeting. Members of the public are allowed to comment, are cut off at 3 minutes and under no circumstances are they allowed to ask questions of the members of the Select Board or attempt to exchange in a "back and forth" with the Board members.

Through all this, the Select Board sits silently, like carvings on Mt. Rushmore, or gods on Mt. Olympus, listening but not interacting--beyond Mr. Rusty Bridle, who has interrupted speakers who look as if they will speak for more than the 3 minutes the Board allows for each individual to comment.

The Select Board is not alone in forbidding "back and forth" between citizens who have come to speak at meetings and members of the Board. The School Board does this. The School Board also cleaves to the 3 minute rule.

The reasons for limiting speakers to 3 minutes have been variously stated as, "Well, we could be there all night. We have to place some limits," to, "Well, we don't want one guy hogging the podium so nobody else gets a chance to voice an opinion."

But, of course, at the Deliberative Sessions which are held in February for discussion of proposed warrant articles, there is no time limit per speaker and there is a Moderator, who can intervene if someone gets off topic or obstreperous enough to derail civil discussion, but somehow that does not seem to work for either Board.

And, of course, you could solve the logistics problem by simply asking for a show of hands about who wants to speak that night, and if you've allowed 60 minutes for public discussion, and 12 people raise their hands, then everyone gets 5 minutes or if there are only 6 people, then each gets 10 minutes. There are simple solutions, if you really want to address the problem.

If you really wanted to allow people to express their opinions you could change the rules and put in safeguards, like a moderator. But more important even than hearing what citizens are thinking, we need a mechanism to hear what the elected representatives of Hampton citizens are thinking. 

We elect candidate in every election from Select Board to the Presidency, without knowing much about them. The one way we get a real insight into who these people are, what they are thinking, is at press conferences, where they have to answer (or more often evade) questions. Nothing like that happens in this small town in New Hampshire. There are no press conferences for either the Select Board or the School Board. Of course, there really is no local press in the Seacoast worthy of the name "free press."

State Rep Chris Muns

 Allowing citizens to question their government raises the prospect of anger. We've all seen raucous town meetings on TV where audiences shout down their representatives and shout at each other, so the strict limits on time and the wall between the speakers and those to whom they speak is said to be justified as a way to keep things under control.

But isn't there always the tension between free expression and order? We can have a very civil town and town government if we simply have no meetings at all, or meetings where only the Board members are present and they may or may not choose to speak about town issues. For that matter, if we had a king, things could be very civil. Supplicants before the king, kneel and beg for indulgence. Citizens of a Republic can demand a redress of grievances.

We have seen on TV those meetings of the Chinese and North Korean governments, where "representatives" of the people simply sit silently and applaud their leaders at the podium. There is no anger and no disorder and everything is very much in control.

Hampton is more like that than it is like any raucous town hall in Ohio.

There are instances of Hampton representatives speaking out publicly at the Select Board meetings--but these are not members of the Select Board. Three members of the state House of Representatives have spoken as citizens during the Public Comment session: Chris Muns, who asked the Select Board to vote a resolution of defiance against ICE cooperation; Erica DeVries who decried the violation of habeas corpus and the imposition of unfunded mandates to spend town taxpayer dollars on funding required for the protection of Hampton police should they join ICE; and Linda McGrath who Mad Dog found difficult to follow until she summarized by warning of impending invasion by tattooed gangs of illegal aliens from their home bases in Maine. 

State Rep McGrath

Here in Hampton, Mad Dog would like to see a meeting where a citizen stands up and addresses the Select Board Directly, beginning with the Chairman, Rusty Bridle: 

 "Mr. Bridle: Do you think immigrants are enough of a threat to Hampton to involve Hampton police in their arrests? What do you think of immigrants here in Hampton and beyond, Mr. Bridle? Do you think immigrants are a risk or a benefit to Hampton?"

State Representative Erica Rachel DeVries

And then, to Amy Hansen:

"Ms. Hansen: We have heard from folks who say the law is the law and the new state law says we here in Hampton have to pay for our police to cooperate with ICE.  Do you believe it's as simple as 'The law is the law?'  Are we bound to obey every law, even if we think its unconstitutional or immoral?"

And then, to Chuck Rage:

"Mr. Rage: Would you approve of Hampton police and ICE agents breaking down doors in Hampton? How about raids on work sites where landscapers, tree trimmers or construction workers are removed without arrest warrants?"

Not A Representative Government

And then, to Carleigh Beriont:

"Ms. Beriont: Do you believe Ms. McGrath, when she says there are row houses across the Piscataqua filled with murderous illegal immigrant gang members poised to invade the New Hampshire seacoast? Do you think this fear justifies masked ICE agents throwing human beings into unmarked vans at Hampton Beach and disappearing them?"

Immigrant: Can I come in? Uncle Sam: I guess you can--there's no law to keep you out

And, to Jeff Grip:

"Mr. Grip: Do you believe that Governor Ayotte and the state legislature can legally force Hampton to participate in extra judicial violation of habeas corpus and if you do not, would you be willing to have Hampton join a coalition of New Hampshire towns in resisting this law and fighting it in court and at the local town level?"

Now, if we had that sort of exchange, we may not change anything, but at least people watching on Channel 22 would have some idea of what their representatives are doing or not doing to represent them.

But until we can actually hear what our representatives think on this issue and related issues, we can do nothing to really affect the behavior of the board, or its composition.

Until then, they reside behind a veil of silence, imperious, silent, hearing prayers and admonitions but never deigning to reply.

Trump Acts All Tough: Playing at Martial Law

 Mad Dog had to laugh at the sight of Trump declaiming from his podium that Washington, D.C. is out of control mayhem and needs more police, and soldiers to restore order so that the criminals will be afraid, not the citizens.

Tough Guys

There he was, flanked by two of his cabinet officers, right out of Central Casting, the three of them not able to muster enough neurons for a synapse, but they looked really Hollywood. So much theater. So much glitzy Hollywood.

Washington, D.C. is actually Mad Dog's home town. There are more police, per capita,  in Washington, D.C. than any other American city. There are the DC Metro police, Park Police, White House police, embassy police, METRO transit police, in uniform;  and  there are FBI, ATF, DEA, in their parkas with their letters emblazoned, and Mad Dog forgets what else. You cannot drive a block in Washington, D.C. without seeing, or being passed by a policeman or some sort of law enforcement guy. One the the things Mad Dog really did not like about DC was all the police, everywhere, all the time. And they did not do community policing, walking beats, getting to know people. They were just mini dictators driving around in patrol cars, or roaring around on loud motorcycles, or stepping out on to  the street, doing their authoritarian thing. 

At least that was true in White Washington. Parts of Southwest and Northeast DC were, at times, more like Roxbury, MA, but even those parts have been "gentrified" and now parts of town, which were once cut and slash areas, have turned upscale and nobody can afford them--like the area around the Washington Hospital Center and Catholic University and along U Street.

As for soldiers: there are so many military guys in DC that many of them are ordered not to wear their uniforms for fear the town would like like a military camp.

Ordering the National Guard to the streets is actually not new with Trump. When Mad Dog was young and even stupider than he is now, in 1968, after the assassination of Martin Luther King, riots erupted in DC.

"Hey, they're burning down downtown!" Mad Dog's towhead friend said.  "There's soldiers on the streets! Let's go see! We may never see anything like this again!"

                         An actual emergency in DC 1968

Sounded like a terrific idea to Mad Dog, and so hopping into his friend's open MG, two white guys, one looking like a blonde Hitler youth, they drove down to see the sights.

And it was a sight Mad Dog will never forget. Sights and smells. You could smell ash and fires burning. And on street corners Mad Dog knew, 24th and M, Constitution Avenue, Massachusetts Avenue, you saw soldiers shouldering their M-1 Garand rifles, standing on every street corner, and they looked at us zip by them with some attention, but they did not stop us. We made it home unscathed, but we did realize that was not a smart thing to do. It wasn't that the local outraged citizenry was an evident threat: It was the soldiers on the corners who got Mad Dog's attention. The local citizens were nowhere to be seen, but the soldiers had their fingers on their triggers. Washington, D.C. was an occupied town, like Berlin after the Wehrmacht surrendered. Actually, maybe it was Mad Dog and his mad blond buddy who were a threat to public safety, joy riding down a potential riot zone. 

In any case, Washington, DC did not look like the home of the free land of the brave that day. It looked like the land of the twitchy. 

Something similar happened after 9/11 attacks. In fact, then there were warplanes flying low over the city and its suburbs. People asked each other, "What are they supposed to be doing?" We all assumed it was just for show. It's not like those planes were going to strafe a bunch of terrorists running down Wisconsin Avenue. 

During the London Blitz, when Londoners took refuge in the London tube (subway system), the British Army set up anti aircraft artillery outside the tube stations, and when the planes flew over they opened up with tremendous thundering fire into the black sky. Emerging from the tube, after the all clear was given, a citizen asked one of the artillery officers why they were shooting into the sky when there wasn't a chance they'd hit anything, most especially any enemy aircraft. The Brits didn't  have more than a few searchlights at that stage, so they were just firing blindly into the dark night sky.

"So why shoot?" the citizen asked. "You can't hit anything."

"But, it made you lot feel a bit better down below, didn't it then?" the officer replied.

So the show of force was just theater in London that night. The show of force in Washington, D.C. now is more of the same. Theater. Strutting power. No goose stepping columns of troops--just a lot of masked men in body armor holding lethal looking weapons, but the same effect: "Look at us! See how tough we are!"

Of course nothing happened in DC like what happened at Kent State in Ohio, when the National Guard arrived on the scene there.

There is a wonderful scene in "The Wire," where the policeman Carver and his team embark on a wild chase through streets and alleyways,  after a twelve year old boy fleeing a drug bust with a bag of heroin, and the boy artfully dodges through the streets like a rabbit pursued by hawks, and he goes to ground and disappears. 

Carver hops up on the roof of a police car, and shouts out to the empty windows and walls of the surrounding ghetto buildings: "You do not get to win! We do!"

But, of course, the joke is, it is clearly the kid who wins. The police do not get to win. Not when the population in occupied territory refuses to lose.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsF5x6eQR9s

Arguing From A Class

 

Whenever Mad Dog hears an advocate of ICE round ups holding forth on the grave threat illegal immigrants pose to American society, there is almost always the same progression of establishing the case: 1/ First, the most horrible example of a Nicaraguan tattooed gang member having raped and dismembered a White woman 2/ Then, there is the statement that this is what Brown skinned illegal immigrants from South of the Border are and do, 3/ Therefore we have to get rid of the whole lot of them.

So, you start with the one indisputably bad guy, move to this guy as a representative of the essential nature of all members of his class, e.g., Nicaraguan men who have sneaked into the country all share these characteristics: prone to rape, murder and dismemberment. Never mind if this guy is a hard working tree pruner: He's from South of the Border, ergo he's a potential rapist wannabe.

Same thing was true for centuries in the South: A Negro male rapes a white woman: Well, that's what they do.

The same has been applied to Southerners, for that matter. Ku Klux Klan members are white males, therefore all Southern white males are Ku Klux Klan.

Ku Klux Klan members were Christian. Does that mean all Christians are Ku Klux Klan members?

General Ulysses S. Grant was the general Abraham Lincoln had long sought. After a succession of cautious, passive generals, he finally found an aggressive, decisive general with a sense of grand strategy.  

But then, one day, General Grant was told that Jewish merchants had been engaging in a black market for captured Southern cotton, and Grant issued General Order # 11, expelling all Jews from his military district of Tennessee, Kentucky and Mississippi. 

So here we have the progression. These black marketeers have engaged in bad behavior. At least some of these black marketeers are Jewish, therefore all Jews are black marketeers and have to be expelled, at least from this district.

The Union Army did not have ICE agents, but it did have soldiers in uniform and none of them wore masks to expel the Jewish merchants.

Much as Lincoln loved Grant, Lincoln immediately quashed that order, telling Grant, "You cannot apply such punishment to a class of people." Each individual has to be investigated and prosecuted for what he individually has done, not for the crimes of his group.

That, of course, is the essence of "due process."

In fact, seeing "the Jews" as a group was an obvious construct.  Are you talking about only male Jews? Are you talking about Jews from Spain or from Germany?  Are you talking about male Jews only, or also females and children? Are you talking about Jews born in the USA or Jews who have recently immigrated? Are you talking about citizen Jews or non citizen Jews? Are you talking about blue eyed/blond Jews or swarthy Jews?

One can only imagine Lincoln, the lawyer, talking to Grant about this later. "You're a great general. You're not a great lawyer. And you are certainly no Constitutional scholar."

Lincoln applied the same principle of individual responsibility as opposed to  group guilt when it came to the infamous Indian hangings in Minnesota. After a bloody rampage by Dakota Indians, nearly 400 captured Indians were scheduled to be hanged, and the governor of Minnesota wanted Lincoln to sign off on this. 

Lincoln insisted on a form of due process. He insisted the files on every accused Indian be sent to the White House. The governor assured Lincoln if he did not act then the governor would hang all 380 Indians. 

Lincoln selected out 38 Indians from the files which he thought provided enough evidence of guilt, and the rest were spared. It was the largest mass execution in American history.

This episode is often used by revisionist historians and Lost Cause advocates to suggest Lincoln was a racist, not the great Emancipator, but a typical White politician. But, of course, what it really was was Lincoln, the lawyer, insisting on individual trials for individual crimes. 

(Of course, on a personal level, Lincoln hated the idea of executions, whether for deserters or insurrectionist traitors. That underlying personality trait is often important in what moves a President to action. He had no need to demonstrate his capacity to dominate, never cried out, "It is not US who should be afraid; it is THEM who should be afraid." Lincoln was confident in his own courage and power--he felt no need for gorilla chest thumping.)

The impulse to indict a person because he is a member of a group you do not like, is, of course, at the heart of racism.

Seeing a Black person as a Black, rather than as an individual is fundamental to this world view.

Seeing Brown skinned immigrants, whether they are poor people from El Salvador, or blue collar workers from Mexico, or nuns from Honduras, is another feature of deep seated racial hatred.  When people begin to look not like individuals, but as simply a member of a vilified group, that is an America none of us should want to go back to.

 We had enough of that the first 300 years.

What is a Terrorist?

 

The word "terrorist" has origins which date back generations, but its use like most language has changed and evolved.

In the 21st century, the men who flew the airplanes into the Twin Towers were certainly "terrorists."

One the the features of their act was their anonymity. Nobody in New York knew who they were.

Another feature was the uncertainty of their motivation, but that quickly emerged as the men who financed and supported them quickly claimed credit and gave meaning to their acts, sort of. 

Clearly, the targets spoke from themselves: New York City's Twin Towers, the heart of American capitalism; The Pentagon, the heart of American military might and the Capitol building, which was thwarted by passengers on that plane.

That act was an assault, a protest against American dominance, and it came from Arabs unhappy with American support for Israel.

Typically, most terrorists whether Irish Republican Army or Arab, or even Zionist (of the King David Hotel bombing) are engaged in "asymmetric" warfare, i.e., they recognize they do not have the power to simply organize an army and move the English out of Ireland or the British out of Palestine, or the Israelis out of Israel, so they aim to sow fear (terror) into an otherwise placid community, to announce that their cause is not just important, but pre-eminent: all other functions of society must stop to deal with the bomb in the marketplace, or violence to a crowd.

Of course, the quintessential American terrorists were the members of the Ku Klux Klan. Like today's ICE agents, they were careful to mask. Anonymity lowered the risk for them. They were all brave and big and strong when they could hide their identities. The Klan grew out of the resistance to the defeat of the Confederacy; it allowed Grand Wizard, Nathan Bedford Forrest, to continue the fight, to slip back into the countryside and terrorize recently freed slaves. 

Klansmen, were, of course, often known in the community and the Klan was winked at in many places. The difference today is, the Klansmen in their ICE hoods are employed by the government.

But sometimes, and more often recently, the terrorism is generated from those in power, who seek to dominate a placid population more completely, to really assert in shocking ways the power wielded by those in power.

So now, in our time, the terrorists are government terrorists: ICE agents with faces covered--still anonymity is important to the effect: They are the Star Wars soldiers in white metal helmets, anonymous, carrying out the will of the Empire. They strike without warning. Their message is their cruelty: Colored people go back to your "shithole countries" or we'll slam you into vans and transport you to Alligator Alcatraz.

No law need apply.

We are the terror. 

ICE "DEFENDS LIBERTY" MAGA STYLE

 Historical analogies are never perfect, but history can instruct and lend perspective by allowing for some distancing--sometimes you can see the whole picture more clearly if you take a step or two back.

Defending Liberty, MAGA style/The Sanctimonious Goon Squad

So the analogy of today's ICE agents hustling off people to Alligator Alcatraz or worse, without due process to the internment of Japanese Americans during in 1942, at the outset of WWII is not perfect. The Japanese Americans were, in fact, for the most part citizens, or at least "legal" residents--they had not overstayed visas and had committed no misdemeanors, while ICE arrests, at least until recently are said to be directed against "criminals" (who are not, technically felons) who have jumped the line and overstayed their visas.

As I understand it, only a vanishingly small number of those now being arrested without warrant and hustled off by ICE are even known to have overstayed visas or come in without permission, but they are simply being rounded up for not looking like they come from here. Nothing much is known about them; they just look wrong.

But even if they have overstayed a visa, they would be guilty not of a felony, but of a misdemeanor, and so wrestling them off to a van would be like doing that to somebody with an unpaid parking ticket or even an overdue library book.

They are not the rapists and murderers Trump is always pointing to as the "illegals" he wants to arrest to protect white American womanhood.

What is appalling, then, is the indiscriminate nature, the complete disregard for due process and the obvious criterion for arrest: They are not white. You never, ever see an ICE agent hustling off a blond, blue eyed Norwegian, or, for that matter a blond South African.

And then we get to the self righteousness of the cowardly ICE agents, who mask themselves, not because they fear ultimate justice at the hands of some Nuremberg trial, but because they fear the "drug cartels" will seek retribution.

And that MAGA piety is summed up in that image of a MAGA ICE man who is wearing a mask, if you look closely, even though you see only the back of his head, but there is an ear loop, and his T shirt says, "We The People"  and "Defend Liberty" and "FREEDOM" as he manhandles a man toward the opposite of freedom: incarceration. 

That this round up is based on race (appearance) can hardly be denied.  Well, it is denied, but that is a bald faced (not a masked faced) lie, apparent to all who see it. 

In the case of the Japanese in 1942, there was panic after Pearl Harbor that the West Coast would be invaded and that unveiled the underlying fear of "people whose eyes are oddly made" and so anyone who looked Japanese was hustled off to a concentration camp. And as the signs show, this was, ultimately if not entirely based on racial animosity, it was surely fed by it.

The same is true today. Brown skin bad. White skin good. Blond best of all. And that's without even getting into who has the best genes/jeans.

The Vaccine Witches: Outlander Instructs

 Paul Offet posts on his "Beyond the Noise" substack/blog about RFKJR's plans to destroy vaccinations. 

It's a post worth reading, if only because it so succinctly describes just one of the maneuvers RFKJR and his MAGA  mob have used to cancel vaccinations.

Here is an excerpt:

"Despite his claim that anyone who wants vaccines can get them, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), is on the verge of eliminating vaccines from the United States. He believes that vaccines have replaced infectious diseases with chronic diseases. By eliminating vaccines, he believes he can eliminate all manner of chronic diseases, including autism. Here is how he plans to do it. On June 18, 2025, RFK Jr. directed his newly appointed Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), which he recently stocked with members who have a history of anti-vaccine activity, to evaluate aluminum-containing adjuvants in vaccines. What are aluminum adjuvants and why are they in some vaccines? Aluminum adjuvants have been used in vaccines since 1926 to enhance the immune response, allowing for fewer doses and lesser quantities of vaccine components. Live, attenuated viral vaccines (such as the measles-mumps-rubella [MMR], varicella, and rotavirus vaccines) don’t require adjuvants. But some vaccines, which aren’t live (such as the DTaP, pneumococcal, meningococcal, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, Haemophilus influenzae type b, and HPV vaccines) wouldn’t work well without an adjuvant. Are aluminum adjuvants dangerous? Aluminum is the third most abundant element on Earth. It’s in soil, water, air, plants, and food. Aluminum is literally everywhere, including in breast milk and infant formula. In the first 6 months of life, babies will be exposed to about 4.4 milligrams of aluminum from vaccines, 7 milligrams from breast milk, 38 milligrams from infant formula, and 117 milligrams from soy formula. Not surprisingly, researchers found that the level of aluminum contained in an infant’s hair and bloodstream didn’t correlate with receipt of vaccines. In other words, aluminum in vaccines is a trivial addition to what infants encounter and manage every day from the environment. Consistent with these findings, researchers in Denmark recently studied 1.2 million children between 1997 and 2020 who received different quantities of aluminum in vaccines. They found no evidence that aluminum adjuvants caused autoimmune, allergic, or neurodevelopmental disorders, including autism and asthma. For RFK Jr., however, none of these reassuring facts or studies about aluminum matter. Sometime in the next few months, he will hold up a poorly done study claiming that aluminum adjuvants cause autism or diabetes or multiple sclerosis or asthma or eczema. Then he will do something that could eliminate vaccine manufacture in the United States. And, if you don’t believe that, just look at what happened in the United States in the early 1980s. On April 19, 1982, a local NBC affiliate in Washington, DC aired a one-hour documentary titled DPT: Vaccine Roulette. The film featured children with withered arm and legs wearing bicycle helmets, seizing, drooling, and staring vacantly up at the ceiling. The cause of this apparent brain damage, according to the film, was the “P” in DPT: the pertussis or whooping cough vaccine. The film launched a flood of lawsuits against vaccine makers. In 1981, one year before Vaccine Roulette aired, three lawsuits were filed against vaccine makers. By the end of 1982, lawyers had filed 17 lawsuits; during the next four years, they filed 41, 73, 219, and 255. The amount of money requested by plaintiffs increased exponentially from $25 million in 1981 to $414 million in 1982, $655 million in 1983, $1.3 billion in 1984, and $3.2 billion in 1985. The cost of defending these lawsuits exceeded sales from the vaccine. Vaccine makers left the business. The number of companies making pertussis vaccine dropped from seven to one, measles vaccine makers from six to one and oral polio vaccine makers from three to one. Americans were on the verge of losing childhood vaccines. Then, in 1986, the Regan administration stepped in, creating the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act which included the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP). Now people could be compensated for vaccine injuries through this special vaccine court, which was funded by a federal excise tax on every dose of vaccine. The bleeding stopped. Nonetheless, whereas 18 companies made vaccines for American children in 1980, only four remained by the end of the decade. Subsequent studies found that the pertussis vaccine didn’t cause brain damage. But those studies came far too late to save vaccines. Ironically, 25 years later, Samuel Berkovic, an Australian researcher, found that the children featured in Vaccine Roulette had Dravet’s Syndrome, a genetic disorder characterized by a sodium channel transport defect in brain cells. In other words, the pertussis vaccine was blameless."

So, this is a classic story of true witch hunt--foment a fear with horrifying images; point to an occult culprit; destroy your witch, burn her at the stake. 

Last night, Mad Dog happened across, on youtube, the wonderful scene from "Outlander" where Jamie points to Claire's smallpox vaccination scar and asks if this is the mark of a witch? Is Claire a witch? Jamie is living in 1718, (when people believed in witches)  and Claire was born in 1918 and received a small pox vaccination as a child. Of course, nobody in 1718 had ever seen a smallpox vaccination scar, had ever had a vaccine of any sort. That would not happen until 1796.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qB49rx_VFXE

Had Claire been born in 1982, she would not have had that telltale vaccine scar, because smallpox was declared eradicated in 1980 and vaccines for smallpox were discontinued. 

It was a canny choice to make Claire a nurse, then, later, a physician, because of all the accomplishments of humanity, the big leaps have nothing to do with empires, or even industrialization, but with medicine, and public health. The recognition of "germs" of micro organism, viruses, parasites and bacteria has led to an entirely different experience of life on Earth. Life today is vastly different, for every resident of advanced societies more owing to the freedom from devastating diseases and epidemics than because of railroads, airplanes or even steel plants. 

But RFKJR does not believe in the germ theory.

There is a chapter in an obscure novel Mad Dog recalls because it's called "Of Jonas Salk and the Real World," in which an old doctor tries to convince his younger colleague to forgo the wealth and affluent life style of a private practitioner in a wealthy suburb, and choose instead the life of a researcher in infectious disease at the dawn of the AIDS era. 

Dave Garroway

He tells the story of Dave Garroway, who was, in the 1960's a famous TV personality, who has to introduce Jonas Salk at some fancy dinner and Garroway says he could not think of what to say, but then his seven year old son, watching him put on his tuxedo, asks what's up, and Garroway says, 

"Well, tonight I'm going to introduce Dr. Salk, who cured polio," and the son asks, "But what's polio, Dad?" And Garroway looks out at the audience and says, "Can you imagine any seven year old of our generation or of any before ours, not knowing what polio is? That's the best introduction to Dr. Salk I can think of."

The old doctor says, 

"The history of man on this earth is, for the most part, pretty uninspiring. All those kings and dictators and strongmen: just a bunch of cavemen hitting each other over the head with clubs. I never could get very interested, you know? They were all doing pretty much the same thing, through the ages, for pretty much the same reasons, when you get right down to it. But there have been some men who've really made this world different. I'm not talking about changing some line on a map. I'm talking about guys who really changed life the way every little guy leads it. Jonas Salk was one of those men."

Dr. Salk

And RFKJR has decried the polio vaccine as doing more harm than good:

SV40 and Cancer: He has claimed that some polio vaccine batches between 1955 and 1963 were contaminated with Simian Virus 40 (SV40), which he alleges caused an increase in soft-tissue cancers that killed more people than polio itself.

--From Google AI

So now Mr. Kennedy has taken us on another time travel trip, back to the days before vaccines, when wards were filled with kids in iron lungs and limbs were withered and lives ruined.

Back to the time before vaccines.

Nobody has ever said vaccines are entirely without risk, but risk has to do with numbers and experience, and those are of no interest to the forces of darkness led by Mr. Kennedy.

He want's to take us back to times of superstition, before science.

Make America Great Again.

President Spoiled Seed Builds His Ballroom

 

Mad Dog can imagine having lunch with President Obama, or with Franklin Delano Roosevelt, or with Theodore Roosevelt or even, with President Lincoln.

It's all in imagination, of course. Mad Dog reads lots of biography and history. Really the only stuff Mad Dog reads now--no fiction for Mad Dog.

History and biography are not really "non fiction;" they are not intentionally "fiction," but they are also imaginings.

The only President Mad Dog ever met was President George H.W. Bush, at a party, and as was true of every politician Mad Dog was ever introduced to, it was a shadow dance: you never had the sense you had actually been anything more than a shadow crossing the celebrity's face.

Mad Dog's wife met President Bill Clinton and he focused on her eyes and spoke with her about something she could not remember afterwards, but she said she had sexual fantasies for about a week. THAT, at least, was what most of us would call a "human connection."

But hard as he tries, Mad Dog cannot quite imagine what meeting Trump would be like. 

Well, Mad Dog CAN imagine it, because he thinks he grew up knowing guys like Trump. 

There was always a boy in one school or another, who wasn't really present, psychologically, among the cohort of students. We, who were a band of brothers, connected by some common experience--a baseball team, or a wrestling team--where we suffered defeats and exulted in victories together, we were important to each other. 

But there was always this one guy among us, who was physically present in the group, but not spiritually with us. We weren't important to him. His father, his family might have been important to him, but not us. And somehow, Mad Dog sensed, that boy was alone, even in his family.

In "Band of Brothers" that would have been Lt. Dyke, who asks Lipton about where he comes from, but before Lipton can even answer, Dyke has wandered off, uninterested.

And Mad Dog knew people like that--simply not present, not involved, not part of the group. And part of that was because he was never very good at whatever we were doing. If it was pickup football, he might have had a head to toe uniform, while we wore scraps of a helmet and shoulder pads, whatever we could assemble, but when the ball was snapped, he was just pushed to the ground while the play ran over him. He didn't care, because he wasn't really there, psychologically.

He usually didn't say much, and he was always hunched forward, as if he might be edging into a group where he didn't really belong.

Mad Dog would catch glimpses of characters in films who had glimmers of the essence of this bad seed:  Fredo, the hapless Corleone brother, who never had the steel of Michael, or the raw exuberance of Sonny, the brother who flitted on the periphery, the brother who could not even hold his gun well enough to get a shot off as assassins shot his father. He was part of the family, but alone in it.

Or King Joffrey, of Game of Thrones. A poltroon, whose sadism sprang from deep seated cowardice.

Donald J. Trump really, Mad Dog senses, is not interested in being President--he loves gold ornaments, gold embellishments, and he wants to throw parties where he is center of attention and, possibly, adulation. Thus Mar-a-largo and now the Grand Ballroom at the White House.

Mad Dog cannot imagine Donald Trump dreaming about moving a crowd to tears or exultation with rhetoric. Donald Trump would never dream of delivering a Gettysburg Address because Donald Trump could never appreciate what made that speech so great, or what such words could mean to other people.

Trump has never read enough to develop a sense of self--because that comes, at least in part, from a sense of other people. 

Would you have the exuberance of a Teddy Roosevelt, the fundamental, grounded decency of a Lincoln, born of a hard life of many sorrows? You cannot really become yourself unless you are willing to examine other people, to try to imagine yourself facing their challenges, imagine how you would like to think you would respond in their place.

Which is not to say Mr. Trump cannot read a room: He knows enough about other people to know what they resent, what buttons can be pushed.

But you cannot really hope to lead other men until you have seen in other men qualities you yourself can only emulate, but never achieve.

Mad Dog could never do what he saw cardiac surgeons do in the operating room. But, if Mad Dog were President, he'd know what qualities he'd be looking for in other people, because, over time, he's collected a full catalogue of things he can see and admire in others.

But Donald Trump has never done, never been able to do that. He looks out from his corner, from his dark table at the Washington Correspondents Dinner, and he does not learn, he only cowers and seethes. 

He does not know what good is. He burns with resentment, fear and loathing. He does not, fundamentally, really like other people. And, assuredly, he is no fan of himself.

He thought he had found something good in Jeffrey Epstein, Mad Dog is guessing, but, of course all Donald saw in Epstein was pathology masquerading as confidence, and possibly a sense of what it meant to have a good time.

Jeffrey made Donald feel valued, Mad Dog is thinking. They were "pals." And what "pals" meant Mad Dog must leave to the imagination of the reader.

 

It might have been like Mo Green and Fredo:  Mo Green provided Fredo with a playground, and treated him well, but that did not end well for Mo. And Fredo was left saying, "Well, isn't this swell? I have everything now. So why am I not happy? That is a secret I share with Mo."

It's possible you can never know another man's motivations completely. 

But sometimes, you can see enough of a man to know when you are staring through an empty vessel.