Unlearning: The Bitter Potion of Disappointment and Revision

--They always disappoint you.
              --Norman Wilson, "The Wire"
--You got to be taught to hate and fear
   It's got to be drummed in your dear little ear
   To hate all the people your relatives hate
   You've got to be carefully taught.
             --"South Pacific"
--These are the worst people. Really the worst and most dishonest.So unfair!
            --Donald John Trump
--Say it ain't so, Joe!
            --Kid to Shoeless Joe Jackson

One of the most difficult things in life is to learn that what you have already learned is wrong, or only part of the story.  
For one thing, what you've learned sometimes releases all sorts of endorphins, joy juice: Babe Ruth, who you've seen step to the plate under nail biting circumstances and face the fear of failure and triumph with a home run, has to be a great man, has to be a ROLE MODEL!  Then you find out more about him: not so much.

One of the most destructive things ever to happen to the Catholic church, to millions of Catholics world wide was to have their faith in the Church dealt a body blow with the emergence of revelations of pedophile priests abusing children. Pope Pius XII may have been complicit in the Holocaust, bishops may have blessed corrupt politicians--well, everyone who swims in the dirty waters of our planet gets dirty, but the priests sexually abusing children, no.

When that attractive, bright young priest has been fondling your daughter, or that venerable old pink perfumed priest has had sex with your son, that shakes your faith in a way nothing else could.

When you have been brought up and conditioned to think we live in a meritocracy, and if you just work hard and apply yourself and resist the temptation to go out and play baseball and stay in and learn your calculus, and practice your clarinet and the college acceptances come in and you don't get into Yale, but you do get into Penn, well, you just weren't worthy. It's not that the meritocracy doesn't work. But when you transfer in your sophomore year to Yale and you discover the students and faculty look no different in quality, you are disappointed. When your father gets sick and can't work and you wind up at the University of Maryland, a dreaded state school for the C students, and you discover there are plenty of kids there who are every bit as bright as those you befriended in the Ivy League and the faculty is of equal quality, then that whole psychological structure of "deserving" the glittering prizes starts to collapse.

It's even worse with historical figures, who are even more creations of our imagination than real people in our own lives: Roosevelt rebelled against his own class, brought relief and hope to the suffering, destitute masses, stood up to Hitler, sent forth the forces to bring Japan to its knees, turns out to have been the kind of man who would throw people into concentration camps for being born to Japanese parents, embraced the genteel antisemitism of his class, allowed a boatload of Jews to be denied entry to America and sent back to die in the gas chambers of the German concentration camps.

Churchill, who vanquished the racist Nazis, was himself the leader of a fundamentally racist regime. 

Philip Sheridan, that essential pillar of the cause to save the Union and free the slaves, after winning that war through a scorched earth campaign in the Shenandoah, went on to wage war on the Indians and to say, "The only good Indian is a dead Indian." Sherman, his brother in arms, was no friend to the freed slaves or the cause of abolition.

Labor unions, the only real and effective force to champion humane and just treatment for workers, have too often proven to be corrupt and their officers self enriching. "Animal Farm" depicted this problem so brilliantly, with the slogans of liberation and justice written in chalk on the blackboard, but then changed over time, so "All animals are created equal" becomes "But some animals are more equal than others" and pretty soon you cannot tell the pigs from the human beings.

And doctors!  Ayn Rand said the doctor in his daily work uses more learning, skill, perception than the President, and we grow up experiencing the benevolent pediatrician who brings down our raging fevers, relieves our burning throats and throbbing ears, and now, it turns out a physician's assistant with two years of schooling past college--less time than it takes many people to get a Masters in computer science or strategic communications or broadcast journalism--can now wear a white coat and stethoscope and see you in the office just as the doctor once did, the doctor who had to slog through organic chemistry and physics in college, gross anatomy in medical school and then do an internship--that trial by fire--and a residency. 
Nope! Don't need that. Just put on that white coat and practice medicine, pediatrics.

We have accommodated ourselves to seeing heroes from the military in that Jungian way--good and bad, heroic and cowardly. Same for police--as the cop in "Crash" who sexually molests a woman after a traffic stop later risks his life in pulling her from a burning car just before it explodes.

We can learn to do that for people. 
It's harder for whole systems:  The political system of "service" to our country as a United States senator, who turns out, if you look at the website Open Secrets, is simply bought in advance by whoever gives her the most money.
The health insurance companies, which run soft focus commercials on TV portraying their beneficent works, when all they care about is returning profits to their shareholders and if they deny you a life saving procedure today, and you die 4 years from now, well, by then, you will have another health insurance company, and the cost of your last few months will be on someone else.

Mad Dog has imagined what it would be like to arrive at the Pearly Gates, to be admitted to Heaven, and to find a reception line there, like at a wedding, and to walk down it and shake hands with Martin Luther King, and Jonas Salk, and a variety of luminaries, but to find on the line Adolph Hitler,  the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, smiling, greeting the newly received from planet Earth, with bonhomie. 

What would you think then?    

Italy Loves Mad Dog! Go Figure

Some dozen years ago Mad Dog was trapped into visiting Italy, when his son decided to do a summer abroad studying there.

Mad Dog does not like getting on airplanes to Europe, does not like walking about where people do not speak English, is very much a thorough going Hobbit who is happy in his shire and not inclined to seek quests in strange and threatening lands.

He was completely charmed by Italy and the Italians he met, many of whom, unexpectedly spoke English and all of whom (except for the guy who tried to steal his luggage at the train station) were as pleasant, helpful and accommodating as they could be.

In Italy, Mad Dog discovered the wonder of really excellent olive oil, which the Italians savor as much as they do wine.  

Waiting for a bus to the airport, homewardbound, Mad Dog struck up a conversation with a Dutch guy, who had been in Italy for a holiday.

Mad Dog: Wow, these Italians know how to live. They are unhurried, contemplative, and they do not rush through anything, meals, conversations. What a people!

Dutch Guy:  Yes, well, they are very laid back, but, of course, they do not work, so they can afford to be laid back. Schedules do not oppress them.

Mad Dog: But their trains run on time.

Dutch Guy: The only legacy from Mussolini.
Mad Dog: Still, I love the country.

For some reason, the affection seems to be reciprocated. Every week, Mad Dog's audience is heavily weighted to viewers from Italy. Typically, in a given week there will be 50% more viewers from Italy than from America. Russia comes in 3rd. 
Why would Italians be interested in some ranter from New Hampshire, USA? 
Makes no sense.

Mad Dog would like to think this is true affection, but he suspects trolls and Russian internet hacks route themselves through Italy. If these were real Italians reading Mad Dog in Rome or Florence, Mad Dog would expect an occasional comment from one of them. Italians do seem to value conversation. They would sit in piazzas for hours over a cup of espresso, just talking with one another, like human beings. 

But no Italian converses on the Mad Dog blog. 
So these could not be real Italians.
Must be some sort of cyber hackers.

Can there be another explanation?

White Cop Shoots Black Man: Misunderstanding

whenever I hear about a white cop, or any cop shooting a Black man, or shooting anyone, I think of that beautiful seen from "The Wire," and I grow frustrated with all the blather and ignorant solutions proffered by politicians who want to do "sensitivity training" for cops or who want to hold demonstrations or who want to add more Black cops to the force, but of course, none of them are talking about putting policemen in neighborhoods where they can walk the streets and get to know the citizens.


Even in my small town, the police ride around sealed off in these glass and metal isolation booths they call police cars.


If any of the policy makers, office holders, radio talk show hosts who offer opinions and solutions to cops shooting people would simply watch this sequence from "The Wire" they might have some idea what they are talking about.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TW6FLFLDSYY


And don't even get me started on drug interdiction and drugs on the table and sending a message to the gangs and the drug kingpins.

Did Shaheen and Hassan Sell Out New Hampshire Main Street for Wall Street?

At the Hampton Happening, Terence O'Rourke, Democratic candidate for the United States Congress seat in the New Hampshire First, built a case carefully that the vote to repeal the Dodd Frank Act was far from an obscure and technical correction to a banking bill.  It actually was the expression of a rapacious sect which may well destroy our economy.  

Once having established that fact, the corollary was that knowing this about that bill did not require clairvoyance or great insight or special genius; any Democratic senator should have been able to see that clearly.

O'Rourke

Once he had established A/ The bill was a disaster  B/ Knowing that was easy,  then the next judgment about why Democratic senators would have voted for this horror show became hard to avoid. 
If there was every reason to vote against it, and if the banking lobby had contributed half a million dollars to each senator over the previous 5 years, what other explanation could there be, other than that our two Democratic senators were bought?

There were two dozen citizens in the room, many of whom had not just voted for both the senators but who had worked to elect  both senators, had knocked on doors, thrown house parties, manned telephone banks for them.  And they asked each other: What other reason, other than the money, could these Senators, who we thought we knew, have had?

Say it ain't so, Maggie.
Say it ain't so, Jeanne.

How did O'Rourke manage to convince this jury of citizens?

Sell out?

He started with the Great Depression, a catastrophe which has been explained in many ways, from Milton Friedman to Krugman, but prominent among the explanations was that Wall Street banks gripped by greed and rapaciousness, engaged in an orgy of misbehavior and when they failed, the brought the economy down with them. 
In response to that, Congress passed the Glass-Steagall Act to separate banks which held the savings of common folk from the wild and reckless speculator banks. 

Proud to be Bought and Sold

But sometime during the Clinton years, Democrats caved to Republicans, who were always whining about unleashing the stallions of innovation and energy in the markets, and Glass-Steagall was repealed.  
And sure as night follows day, the scoundrels exploded out from under their gated communities and you had community banks, savings and loans swept up in a frenzy of lending along with Wall Street banks.

All sorts of reckless schemes erupted, spread like a contagion throughout the financial world and as was documented by books and movies like "The Big Short" you soon had things we never heard of, still don't understand, like credit default swaps and other vehicles of mayhem setting up the nation for a trip over the economic cliff.

So came forth Dodd Frank, to prevent that from happening again.

O'Rourke walked the assembled citizens through all this in step by step detail, explaining what credit default swaps were and a whole host of other things, during which Mad Dog's mind wandered, but he got the point: This was madness, and it happened because the government and the ratings groups like Moody's were asleep at the wheel. And because those regulators were looking forward to the time they could leave those jobs, join Lehman Brothers and cash in themselves.

O'Rourke did it, step by step, with everything but that woman in the bubble bath.

Now we all could see the folly, the disregard for lives and fortunes of the unsuspecting, the sheer recklessness against which we have only our public officials to protect us. 

But then an email from Senator Shaheen got read: She claimed she was as appalled as anyone by those Wall Streeters, but she was trying to protect Main Street, namely "Community Banks" which had got swept up into this effort at clamping down on the bad guys. 

That's when O'Rourke pounced:  Those Community Banks are not innocent good guys, he said and he named the New Hampshire "Community Banks." Every one of those Community Banks has just one wish and goal, to become a too big to fail powerful Wall Street Bank or to be bought up by Goldman Sacks. Just as every small start up really wants to hit the pay day of being bought up by somebody with deep pockets--Nantucket Nectars wants to sell out to Ocean Spray--the Community banks controlling only $5 billion want to combined, get bought or otherwise elevated into a too big to fail bank of $30 or even $250 billion.

Paul Wellstone

And when you see those Open Secrets tables, showing the contributions from the banks to the senators, you try to imagine how they were not bought.

You say, "Well, they got even more money from Emily's List than they got from the banking lobby and we don't complain about that because Emily's List is out there to promote women's rights."  Sometimes money is given because of what a senator has already done, because of what she stands for.

But sometimes, the money is given to change what the senator might do some day.
If you say, "Here's $250,000 if you vote against Dodd Frank," that's a bribe.
But if you say, "Here's $250,000. We are your friends," that's not a bribe, it's just I'm your Godfather and one day, I may call upon you for a service, and then you will remember who is your Godfather.

When someone objected: "I'd rather have a Democrat in that seat than Kelly Ayotte or Scott Brown," O'Rourke replied that's a false choice. You could have another Democrat, a Paul Wellstone. 
We don't have to settle for the bought and sold.
That is the sort of thinking which lost Democrats the last election and which made them vulnerable to the Trump tsunami:  We have to be sophisticated, nuanced, practical, real politic, willing to compromise.  
And that begat Trump.

Hearts and Minds

During the discussion with Terence O'Rourke a citizen rose to challenge him on his assertion the United States military had no business in the Middle East fighting undeclared wars.
"But what about all the good we did in Afghanistan? The Taliban was horrible. Women had no rights. Girls could not even go to school!"

Terence O'Rourke

Before Mr. O'Rourke had a chance to respond, another citizen challenged the first, citing the widespread and never denied reports that Afghan military officers and police, who were often on the same military bases as American soldiers and marines, rounded up village boys and raped them, often chaining them to beds in the barracks and American soldiers and Marines had to endure the screams coming from the Afghan barracks all night long.

When American soldiers protested to their superiors, they were told to show some cultural sensitivity and not to interfere with what was a cultural practice.

Dan Quinn

When Dan Quinn, an American green beret finally could stand it no longer and beat up one of the Afghan officer rapists Quinn was disciplined and his career virtually ended.

So how much good were we really doing over there, in that setting, in that culture?

"We always were taught we were the guys in the white hats," O'Rourke said of his time commanding troops as they did sweeps through Iraqi villages. "Well, to those Iraqis we were not wearing white hats. We were invaders"
From the NY Times:

Rampant sexual abuse of children has long been a problem in Afghanistan, particularly among armed commanders who dominate much of the rural landscape and can bully the population. The practice is called bacha bazi, literally “boy play,” and American soldiers and Marines have been instructed not to intervene — in some cases, not even when their Afghan allies have abused boys on military bases, according to interviews and court records.

The policy has endured as American forces have recruited and organized Afghan militias to help hold territory against the Taliban. But soldiers and Marines have been increasingly troubled that instead of weeding out pedophiles, the American military was arming them in some cases and placing them as the commanders of villages — and doing little when they began abusing children.

“The reason we were here is because we heard the terrible things the Taliban were doing to people, how they were taking away human rights,” said Dan Quinn, a former Special Forces captain who beat up an American-backed militia commander for keeping a boy chained to his bed as a sex slave. “But we were putting people into power who would do things that were worse than the Taliban did — that was something village elders voiced to me.”

The policy of instructing soldiers to ignore child sexual abuse by their Afghan allies is coming under new scrutiny, particularly as it emerges that service members like Captain Quinn have faced discipline, even career ruin, for disobeying it.

Such is the power of the American propaganda machine that many otherwise informed American citizens still believe we were the agents of a benign order swooping in and laying a little civilization on those Afghan villagers.

As we learned in Vietnam, we do not change hearts and minds. What hubris. The Jolly Green giants bringing enlightenment to the local savages.

And don't even get me started on "The Spirit Seizes You and You Fall Down."

The Simple

Watching "Berlin Babylon"  about the year 1929 in Berlin, you get this eerie feeling of deja vu.

In Berlin at that time there were few Nazis. There were far more Communists and there were "monarchists" who wanted to reinstate the Kaiser, who felt democracy was a fool's dream and could not reign in the passions of competing groups. But Nazis were most definitely a fringe group, apparently mostly a regional phenomenon, trying to gain hold in more rural parts of the country, in the southern parts, Bavaria.

Mad Dog can say all this because he is untutored. Never took a college course in history. Last course in world history was in high school taught by a true dolt, a twenty something who was never more than one page ahead of his students, except when he had read some pamphlet he handed out as if Saint Peter himself had written and published it for the young. 

Mad Dog is not sure Madeline Albright is much of a historian, but she's written a book about fascism.  
A historian goes to primary sources, and as Nancy Isenberg notes in her wonderful preface to her equally wonderful book about Aaron Burr, "History is not a bedtime story." 

Mad Dog discovered the essential wisdom of this listening to the Lyndon Johnson tapes, which he first heard on NPR and are available through the Johnson library on line.  
In them you hear Johnson at his best, talking to some young Ivy Leaguer, an official in the Dept of Agriculture, who reports to Johnson the farm state Congressmen are being unreasonable in negotiations about some farm bill, arguing over three cents per pound in some provision about beef, and Johnson interrupts him and says, "Whoa! When you're talking about a 1,000 pound heifer and you've got 10,000 head on your ranch, that's $3 million, that's real money to a rancher." So, when he is on familiar ground, he's very sharp. 
And you hear him talking with his old chums, Southern Senators, about the civil rights bill, men who he clearly likes and respects like Richard Russell of Georgia, you can hear how patiently but stubbornly, he pushes the cause of equal rights.  
He's not doing this for political gain--you are sure of that much, listening. In fact, he knows he's going to lose a lot of votes over this. But he really believes Negroes must be liberated. And the fact is, the author of Profiles in Courage showed a lot less of that quality than Johnson did about Civil Rights. 

But when you hear him on Vietnam, that's when you realize how obscure history can be.  Mad Dog remembers that history. That's history he lived through. And he remembers Johnson on TV sounding like a perfect horse's ass, talking about defending freedom.
But on the tapes you hear him talking with Richard Russell, who tells him, "You know, Mr. President, you really do not want to be in Vietnam."
"Yes," Johnson agrees that's true. "It's the damndest mess I ever heard of and I wish to Hell we'd never got in. We just can't stay there forever."
"Thing is," Russell tells him. "Them Cong, they know that, too."
"Yup," Johnson muses. "I think you're right about that."

History is one long argument. Like all memory, it changes as new information surfaces and as our needs to use history for present day purposes change. 

But, even given the limitations of history, there is something eerie about listening to Adolph Hitler, even today, from this American moment: 
"I will tell you what has carried me to the position I have reached. Our political problems appeared complicated. The German people could make nothing of them...I on the other hand...reduced them to the simplest terms. The masses realized this and followed me."

This is why that Alabama which exists in between the urban centers in every state voted Trump: Simple answers. 

As Jake Lamotta says in "Raging Bull" when someone asks him why he is so angry, and why he needs to fight. "At least in the ring," Lamotta says, "I know who to hit."

For some folk, that's the problem. Problems are complex. Just point them in the direction of who they should hit, to solve them. Immigrants. The media. The Koreans. Anyone, just show them who to hit.


Obama was a joy to listen to, but he embraced complexity and while that was his great strength, it was also his great weakness. He would, like the Constitutional scholar he is, look at every problem from one side, then the other. 

And he was a compromiser. And he followed the rules. When the Secret Service and his West Wing staff took his computer and his cell phone from him, he acquiesced. Trump's West Wing staff tried to do the same thing, get Trump off Twitter and he told them to go to Hell--he was President and he'd damn well do what he wanted to do. And he was right and his base, which will re elect him, loves it. It is revolutionary, a new "fire side chat" putting him directly in touch with the people.

He was right, of course. And unless the Democrats can do better than Bernie Sanders, that doggedness will carry Trump to a second term.

Resenting the Immigrant

Lincoln Soldati asked "Where does the resentment and fear of the immigrant come from?"  He went on, "Have any of you, raise your hands, lost a job to an immigrant lately?"

He laughed at the Louie Gohmert line about all those dark skinned immigrants massing on the borders poised to flood across and take our jobs and to rape white women.

"Of course, if they raped women of color, he'd have no problem with that," Soldati observed.

But all this made me think.

I talk to people living in Lawrence, Mass every week, a town which is densely populated with immigrants from the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Middle East, South Asia. One Black man told me he was leaving Methuen because the Hispanics have ruined his neighborhood, playing loud music, speaking Spanish.

I can think of no better depiction of resentment against immigrants than the 1989 Spike Lee movie, "Do the Right Thing," in which three Black men sit across from a Korean owned grocery and contemplate why the Koreans seem to have been successful so quickly, while they, Black men who have lived in the United States so much longer, have not.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUbvT6YKPzk


That's where the resentment comes from. Not from anything the immigrants have done but from the disappointment which wells up from a sense of failure.
One of the men speaks with a Caribbean accent and he laments that Korean grocer has been off the boat no longer than three years and already has a thriving business, while he, who has been in the States for a decade has failed to acquire any wealth.

Watch that clip and you can see it all there. So many of the Trump crowd have that same sense of rage, and it must come from a sense of  humiliation--that  they have not done better, and the unspoken suspicion they cannot admit to themselves derives from their own sense that they have not done better because of their own failure to advance themselves.

It is a question they must see in the eyes of their wives: Mr. Kim across the street, he buys his wife a new car. We can barely meet the rent. What's wrong with you? And that man has to ask himself, "What's wrong with me?"
MAGA.