Modern American Wimpdom

Yesterday,  a motorcycle decked out with a huge American flag, big enough to act as a mainsail on a frigate, roared past me.  Also smaller flags, Don't Tread On me, maybe a Stars and Bars--I don't recall.  It was loud as a freight train and its rider's hair, what there was of it, mostly gray, streamed in the wind. 

There you had the essence of American manhood, New Hampshire style.  You knew this freedom fighter would be heading to a gathering of like minded patriots, to drink beer and smoke and laugh about all the snowflakes out there who wear masks to grocery stores.

Ms. Maud has recommended John Steinbeck's "East of Eden,"  and though I did not think I liked Steinbeck much, Ms. Maud is of such discernment, I figured I give Steinbeck another try. After all, beyond bike rides, what else to I have to do now in the lock down Covid day?

But before I got to Eden,  I discovered a slim volume of his war correspondence "Once There Was a War."  Each little dispatch is a gem, but two have stayed with me and bubbled up behind my eyes, watching that red blooded American easy rider rumble by down Route 27 on his way toward Exeter.  

One was a report of a movie theater in a suburb of London, where children, soldiers, nurses watch a Veronica Lake movie and the children thrilled to her blond glamour and took what they saw on the screen as absolute truth about life in America, and the soldiers stared numbly and the nurses laughed, until a German bomb collapsed the roof and set fire to the building and the kids, or parts of them were extracted, methodically, by rescue teams and hauled off to hospital.

Another dispatch, titled simply, "Chewing Gum" described a line of children held back near the gangplank of an American ship, holding out their hands for chewing gum from the disembarking GI's. 
"When you have gum you have something permanent, something you can use day after day and even trade when you are tired of it. Candy is ephemeral. One moment you have candy, and the next moment you haven't. But gum is really property."

But the real moment occurs when a bag of orange peels is dropped on the dock from the ship, "Golden with squeezed orange skins. The children hesitate, because it is against all their training to break the rules. But the test is too great. They can't stand it. They break over the line and tumble on the garbage box. They squeeze the skins for the last drop of juice that may conceivably be there."

A bobby comes along and shoos them off, desultorily.  He has to do his job but his sympathy is with the children. They get very hungry for oranges, he says. Nobody over 5 years of age is allowed oranges in England. The bobby hasn't had an orange in 4 years.

Reading the New York Times about the deprivation of Americans locked down in their apartments or homes, unable to go out to restaurants or to bars, or swimming pools or country clubs, I marvel at the fortitude of my fellow countrymen, who have suffered so much with this COVID19 pandemic.

Those who have lost jobs, yes. They are hurting as Americans did during the Depression--although now we do have unemployment insurance, at least temporarily for many.

But when it comes to deprivation, everything is relative. 

What is this Trump Thing?

I am no historian, but at least in my lifetime, I cannot recall a President who inspired local people to fly flags with his name on them outside their homes. 

Some of this may have to do with the ease of printing and design in the 21st Century, but this really is something new. At least I've never seen anything like it. 

After Lincoln died, people displayed Lincoln likenesses, and that long train ride from Washington, D.C. back to Illinois--people lined the route and people wept openly after FDR and Kennedy died, so there was a personal connection for many with the President. But this is different. Nobody's died. 

This Trump flag thing is something different in my mind. 

Hitler inspired the Germans to public displays of affection, and, for all I know, Franco and Peron may have as well. There was a time after World War II when German magazines were not allowed to run Hitler's photo on their covers, for fear people would frame them and hang them in their homes and businesses. 

But these are flags outside homes, on porches. In America. 

I saw them on a car ride through Buck's County Pennsylvania last Christmas, along with rebel flags, but mostly alone, just flags with Trump 2020.

Is this simply brilliant marketing? But no, you can send a man a Trump flag; that doesn't mean he'll fly it.

On my bicycle rides through Hampton Falls, I see the flags.  On Hidden Pasture road, on other roads.

The man can barely parse a sentence.

At least with Hitler, you could understand: he gave long, rousing, coherent, if vile, speeches and he appealed to something.  Racial pride. Fear. Loathing of the other in a country defeated, humiliated. The Germans, one might imagine, had a sense of grievance. But where does that sense of grievance in America come from?

During Vietnam, in the 60's, we had the same thing: That hate which stoked the murders at Kent State, a class hate really. That was palpable. There was racial hatred, as colored people confronted institutionalized racism and Southern whites saw their privileged status challenged. There was the "moral majority."

Trump fans are no more loathsome than the "patriots" who hated the anti war demonstrators, who hated the hippies or hated the "Freedom riders." But at least, when George Wallace "with hate dripping from his lips" cried out, "Segregation now. Segregation tomorrow. Segregation forever!" you knew what that was. 

I don't really know what Trump love is. 
I talk with folks every day from Haverhill and Methuen, Massachusetts and Salem, New Hampshire.  On many topics, they seem normal.  But then, you stray a little, and you discover they love Trump and they hate something, someone, but their hate and bitterness and resentment remain inchoate. 

In some ways it's like those scrawls you see on walls: "Fuck you!" But you don't see those so much any more. You see more Trump signs than "Fuck you!" signs. Or maybe they are just the same thing.

In some ways, one has to believe this is just fate playing out the hand.  If Gavin Newsom were the presumptive Democratic candidate, you could say, okay, now the pendulum is swinging back. There's going to be a real chance. But with Biden, a vessel so fragile one can hardly imagine his making it across a calm sea, much less a rough and tumble campaign--you have to be able to see what is coming.

I can make it to Canada on a single tank of gas, is all I'm saying. 

The Weirdness of American Hate

Reading an article about natives in the American South, I used to get angry, frustrated, rage. 

The people of "To Kill A Mockingbird" who would convict an obviously innocent Black man because it was unacceptable to accept a white man had raped his step daughter, but a Black man would be expected to rape a White Woman. But I figured, that is the Old South. 

Now, in a no nonsense, just the facts style Eyal Press, an Israeli, a stranger in a strange land, slogs through that bizarre state of Alabama, interviewing white and Black women who are dying of cervical cancer, one of the few cancers no human being needs to even acquire, much less die from. A single vaccine against the HPV virus can prevent most of it and a Pap smear detect it early enough to cure, but the women of Alabama get neither and so they die agonizing deaths in higher numbers than in Biafra.

Along the way Mr. Press listens to the good folks of Alabama tell him why they reject the idea of extending Medicaid, of embracing Obamacare, two moves which could pay for themselves, if only the state of Alabama and its people would accept them. 

He describes a man who hobbles about with an amputation, a portable oxygen tank in tow, who rejects extending medical care to the whole population:  [he] "complained that people on welfare with 'ten and twelve kids' were abusing the system. 
Another claimed that 'illegal motherfuckers' received all the benefits and that ordinary Americans were subsidizing them."

Press talks to an Alabama academic-yes, there is such a thing--who published a book "Dying of Whiteness" in which he quotes a white man: "No way I want my tax dollars paying for Mexicans or welfare queens...Ain't no way I would ever support Obamacare or sign up for it. I would rather die."

In fact, he was dying of liver failure.

This is not exclusively a White attribute. A Black pastor reported one of his congregants in South Carolina told him he would not vote for Bernie Sanders because, "I earned my Medicare. Now you want to give it away for free to just anyone."

How many bitter residents have I spoken with in Haverhill and Methuen Massachusetts, who describe the $600 they had to spend on their insulin when their Hispanic neighbor, on Mass Health, gets his insulin for free?

I've asked a number of these resentful citizen who they are angry at, about this and they always say, "The government, of course. They give him the insulin for free!"
And then I ask: But why are you not angry that they don't give you your insulin for free?  Would it bother you if he got free insulin if you got free insulin?

I find myself staring into blinking, uncomprehending eyes.

Americans, apparently, are not Danes.

Notes from COVID19 Frontlines

Nobody wants to have a kid go to war, but sometimes it happens.

My brother got sent off to Vietnam, and while our family opposed that war, his choice was a Hobbesian choice, which is to say, not much of a choice.

With respect to NYC right now, doctors who are employed by any of the major hospital health care systems  are more or less conscripted, but they have more choices to avoid service, if they wish.

As the email below mentions, if you are employed as a physician by a hospital system, you can choose not to report for duty--you simply won't be paid. For those who had enough financial cushion, that is an option.

But unless I miss my guess, I am betting even doctors with a lot of cushion will not leave town.  I can think back to docs I knew in NYC and I can name those who have likely already decamped to their places in the Hamptons. Medical practice  for them was never about anything but the money, so hazardous duty makes no sense for them.

But for a lot of docs, like the 60 year old with two coronary stents, he will not fail to step up--he will not fade from the firing line, because if you are a doctor, you show up.

A check out clerk at Market Basket told me, "I did not sign up for this. If I didn't need the money, I wouldn't be here."  I can see that.  She felt that simply standing across the checkout counter was too big a risk. Some grocery stores are installing plexi glass panels to protect the cashiers now.

There are no plexi glass barriers for the doctors and nurses in NYC now.

But for many doctors, they just could not face their colleagues later on, if they were not visibly present now.

Nurses, too.  Nurses especially. Nurses are closer to the patients than doctors mostly.

And it's the innoculum, the number of virions, viral particles, that likely determines who gets the overwhelming infection. 
Also the host. 
The author of this email has underlying asthma. A respiratory infection for him is a far more dangerous thing than for his non asthmatic colleagues.

But there he is.

He is writing his uncle, who is a doctor at Duke, replying to his uncle's inquiry about how things are going in NYC.

On Fri, Mar 27, 2020 at 2:14 PM 

Hi,
How are things going for you in NYC? The evening news makes it look pretty bleak - but hopefully they are exaggerating a bit for effect.

So far Duke Hospital has no cases of COVID-19, although there are two hospitalized at Duke Raleigh Hospital. Only a matter of time before the virus makes its way to Durham.

Hey Unc, (added dad as well)

Things are pretty much at capacity in NYC with the smaller satellites starting to get overwhelmed. I think that trend will progress to our main hubs by next week. As an example, at Brooklyn Kings Highway (a sinai affiliate near cony island) 146 of 220 beds are currently occupied with covid patients, their ICU expanded into their ORs and PACUs. Our colleagues there paint a pretty grim picture, the morgues are only used to about 5 deaths a day, so there is a refrigerated truck taking bodies away.  We have many more covid  patients in Manhattan but obviously way more capacity. As of last count, there were about 50 open ICU beds system wide. 

Surgeons were first told we could volunteer for "platoons" consisting of 2 surgeons and 4 mid levels/ trainees. These platoons would be sent to hot spots to help out in ICUs and ERs system wide. We will be functioning as whatever they need, ICU attending? ER? whatever. We were then told today that these platoons were only voluntary in the sense that we can also choose not to get paid. My immediate boss is in his mid 60s and has multiple coronary stents, and he will go to the front lines with the rest of us. 

A bright spot is it sounds like there is a decent amount of PPE to go around in manhattan, and have not heard stories like they are sensationalizing on the news. 

But yeah, all in all, we are in for a dark couple weeks. I plan on doing what I can on my platoon and being extremely paranoid with PPE. I also think it is quite possible [his wife] had and convalesced from it, so hopefully I already had an asymptomatic case. No way to know without serology (not available)

Bernie Sanders: When Fantasies Crash and Burn

Contemptible you are in your wealth,
You kings of coal and steel!
You had your thrones, parasites,
At our backs erected.
All the factories, all the chambers –
All were made by our hands.
It's time! We demand the return
Of that which was stolen from us.

--The Internationale

The collapse of Bernie Sanders' campaign came as no surprise to Mad Dog.
Had Bernie been more successful, Mad Dog would have been astonished.

Whenever Mad Dog saw Bernie, the words of Mad Dog's father echoed in his ears from years ago:  The NFL players had gone on strike and these players, who were paid millions, were organizing as a brotherhood of workers.  

"I'm all for the workers," my father said. "My parents were union, through and through. But these are not WORKERS."

By which he meant, millionaires are not workers.  Working class people who live in working class homes in working class neighborhoods are workers. These were millionaires complaining about their ill treatment by billionaire owners.

Workers just aren't what they used to be.

In fact, likely, workers haven't been "workers" likely since the end of the Great Depression, or at least since the late 50's.

Workers of the world unite!

But, as Sanders himself as noted, sadly, the Democratic party is no longer the party of the working class. "The Democratic Party has become the party of the more affluent people, while the Republican Party has become the party of the white working class."

Bernie sought to rally all those idealistic young people who reminded him of his own youthful group, the kids who marched against the war in Vietnam, against "The Man" against the controlling, soulless Wall Street rich.  And he would bring them out to vote in numbers un-imagined. Well, not un-imagined, because Bernie imagined them, but the fact is, there were never enough of them.

An African American minister spoke of one of the members of his congregation who told him, "My Medicare isn't for all. I worked for it; it's mine. And now you want to give it away to someone else who hadn't earned it."

There you have in a nutshell, in a single congregant's confession, the nub of the problem: These workers are not singing kumbaya, locking arms with other workers, marching arm and arm for the greater good of the working man, singing "We Shall Overcome," or The Internationale.

This is a man who is not amenable to the idea of supporting someone else, when it comes to health care. He's got his. He earned it. He doesn't want to help deadbeats or people who didn't work as hard as he did.

It's the same thing we heard when a Danish woman was asked by her friend how she could stand to live in America, where they don't have universal health care and the Danish woman asked her friend, "Well, wait a minute. How would you feel if your taxes went to pay for the medical care of an Italian?"
Her friend started, blinking, a deer in the headlights. "Well, but that's different."
"No," said the Danish woman. "The white guy in Wisconsin doesn't want to pay for the healthcare of the Black guy in Kentucky. Same thing."

When Bernie was mayor of Burlington, Vermont, demonstrators picketed the factory which made Gatling guns which were sold to Central American dictators who mowed down demonstrators seeking  democracy. Bernie chose to side with "the workers" who were making the guns, but these weren't really "workers" by my father's definition: Real workers would never have made guns used to suppress other workers by autocrats.  "Remember," Lenin said, "A boyonet is a weapon with a worker at either end."

Workers who are despoiling the environment by fracking  in Pennsylvania or drilling in the Gulf of Mexico aren't dreamy eyed workers dreaming of a workers' paradise.  Bernie had to face the roles these workers played in destroying the climate and his response was "We'll retrain them and pay their salaries while they learn something new."

But that was just a dodge. That was like saying, "We'll convert them to Christianity" and once they have accepted the Lord Jesus, or the environment, they'll want to do good.

Bernie was beaten by the very working class people he claimed to want to fight for and liberate. 

Trouble was, they didn't want to be saved. They just wanted what they thought belonged to them. 

Exeter Road Tree Massacre

Route 27 in Exeter, New Hampshire is called "Hampton Road" and in Hampton it is called "Exeter Road" which confused me mightily when I first moved to the Seacoast a dozen years ago, until I realized the logic: In Hampton, Rte 27 is the road to Exeter.

There are hundreds of prettier roads in New Hampshire, but Route 27 runs straight into the Atlantic Ocean, as it crosses Ocean Boulevard at its terminus. 

Greater Boar's Head, Hampton Beach--Obadiah Youngblood

Once it crosses Route 1, aka "Lafayette Road" the housing prices along that road rise because now you are less than 2 miles from North Beach and you can, on some days, smell the salt in the air.  As you travel away from the ocean, heading West, the homes along the road become more modest, mostly one story ranch homes, until the road crosses over Interstate 95 and heads past open fields and much more upscale homes approaching Exeter.

But between the interstate and Route 1, it's a modest little road, charming only because of the two hundred year old pine trees which line and shade it.

The high school in Hampton is called "Winnacunnet" which means "place of beautiful pines," and pine trees are the main species, apart from the occasional stand of birches, as the soil is loamy approaching the ocean.

One of the strangest rites of Spring in town is the town vote on "warrant articles" which is a package of 40 pages of questions ranging from voting approval for a million dollar renovation of the middle school, to voting yes or not to allow Mrs. Gertrude Jones to plant her petunias on the easement along the road, on the other side of the sidewalk. 

Given that sort of concern about every little thing that goes on in town, Mad Dog was stunned to see the wholesale destruction of the trees along Exeter Road, with nary a mention of what was to befall the road, its trees and the folks who live along the road or who simply drive along it as they head toward town and beyond to the beach.

Sixty foot trees, six feet in diameter, likely 200 years old--Mad Dog lost count, trying to count the tree rings--have been cut down with dreadful efficiency all along the road, transforming a tree lined lane into a sort of Levittown, where denuded lots now stand exposed--all to protect the power lines running along the south side of the road.

Now, Mad Dog values electric power as much as the next man, but really, how much more expensive would it have been to spare the trees and simply bury those power lines?

People who walk their dogs or just stroll along the sidewalk look at each other in stunned silence, as if their town had just been bombed out. 

Who did this? What were they thinking?

It is a sort of New Hampshire terrorist attack: Why? Who? 

The "Why" is pretty evident: they were trying to protect the power lines which would be damaged if large trees or tree limbs fell on them.

Horse and Buggy Democrats

At a recent meeting of Rockingham County Democrats, a citizen asked Ray Buckley, the chairman of the New Hampshire Democrats, about the efficacy of the famed and vaunted New Hampshire "ground" game.

Buckley had finished his customary pep talk about all we have to do to win New Hampshire for the Democratic presidential nominee, whoever that may prove to be, was to get out and knock on doors as we always have. "Nothing beats neighbors talking to neighbors, one on one, in New Hampshire," Buckley intoned.

The leader of the "senior" faction of the Democrats, Gary Patton, remarked that, actually, on his block, neighbors had tacitly agreed to not discuss politics, as it was "disruptive of the balance" of neighborly comity.

He might have added that on Navy ships, politics and religion are forbidden topics of conversation for the same reason. Discussions of both tend to get emotional and testy and group harmony tends to fray.

The fact is, when groups of volunteers are sent out from the Democratic field offices, during the canvassing campaigns which begin in September of each Presidential election year, the canvasser is handed a map of a part of Hampton he or she usually doesn't know and when they knock on doors they have to introduce themselves as a "Hampton" town person because they are strangers in that particular neighborhood and often know nobody at any of the doors, or at best, they may know someone the home owner knows.  It's not "neighbor talking to neighbor" in anything but the most arbitrary sense of geography and town lines.

What if we showed these graphs to our neighbors?

Another man remarked that people living in Hampton, which is almost entirely suburban, value their privacy and isolation and  hate strangers ringing their doorbells, trying to push one agenda or another. Democrats canvassing are about as welcome as those Mormon boys in their white shirts and black pants trying to convert you to the Church of Jesus Christ and the Latter Day Saints, pressing their pamphlets on you.

Phone banks have been largely abandoned since caller-ID. The Dems who manned them realized they were not even able to preach to the choir. The choir didn't want to hear it.

Buckley's interlocutor said, "We never saw, or only very rarely saw, a Trump canvasser knocking on doors in 2016. The streets were swarming with our Democratic canvassers. We flooded the zone. And Trump came within 100 votes of beating us in Hampton, without a ground game."

"Ah," Buckley raised his finger, "But we won. And if we hadn't canvassed, we would have lost. That's what happened where they didn't canvass in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin."

Which is to say if you hold a race and the Democrats harness up a team of horses on Friday and whip it mercilessly across hill and dale, and arrive at the finish line Tuesday evening,  10 seconds ahead of Donald Trump who had just hopped into his Ferrari ten minutes earlier, that the horse and buggy is the preferred approach to the race. That's our way to win elections. Always has been. Always worked before.

Mad Dog has thought about Lincoln and his famous "chicken bone" case, where he used a simple display defending his doctor client before the jury. The doctor faced a suit because the plantiff's femur failed to heal properly but Lincoln held up two chicken bones before his rural jury.  One was a bone from an old chicken which snapped in Lincoln's hands with a loud crack. Then Lincoln tried to break the young bone, which bent and gave but would not fracture. "The starch has gone out of the old bone," Lincoln told the jury.  Points of law, words, the old fashion manner of convincing a jury did not play well, even in the 1850's. What helped was a new idea: a demonstration, something visual, something familiar.

Mad Dog is not convinced door to doors work at all, but if we are to do any of this, would it not make more sense to arm our door to door salesmen and sales women with some visual aids?  A little kit of photos, charts and graphs to address the various claims Trump makes.

Like: it's the economy stupid: We can show the economy is the Obama recovery and Trump is simply riding it.

Trump is just surfing the wave Obama started

Things are continuing to look good, but not because of Trump

We can show he actually has done little to stop illegal immigration.

We can show his border wall is impotent and incompetent and falling over.

We can carry those visual aides with us.

Or better yet, as one man in the meeting suggested. Don't knock on doors. Hold block parties.