Hanah Arendt, commenting on Adolph Eichmann on trial in Israel, reflected on the banality of evil. The people who carried out Hitler's final solution, for the most part, were not foaming at the mouth fanatics, but ordinary people who simply bought into the Third Reich's notion that killing Jewish babies and Roma was a good thing.
Looking at the images of the two young men suspected of participating in the Boston bombing, a red headed woman on the street was shaken by their ordinariness: "They could be anyone," she said with a shudder. "They look so unremarkable."
Most people seemed to harbor a working hypothesis about their motivations. Mad Dog assumed they were avenging drone strikes in Afghanistan/Pakistan which have killed innocent villagers. Others have suggested it was some libertarian anti tax group. Each person seems to have a favorite villain, depending on that person's most cherished group to hate.
But what will we do with the information, if it ultimately does come out? If it turns out to be an Afghan out for revenge? Or if it is a latter day Columbine alienated teen ager group? Or if it is a white supremacist group? Mad Dog supposes we'll use the information to support our own biases: See, that's where that type of thinking leads to-- the killing of innocent people.
In the end, the result may be a surprise: Some years ago a sniper shot people in the Washington, DC area in what appeared to be a totally random way. Police were looking for a white guy in a white van. It turned out to be a black man and a black boy firing from the trunk of a dark sedan. The man was out to kill his ex wife, and the other shootings were a ruse. If he had shot only his wife, he would have been the prime suspect, but if he shot her as part of a random shooting spree, she's just another random victim.
Or, we may never know, just as we never knew who sent those Anthrax ladened letters. Now we have letters to President Obama laced with Ricin. An echo from the past.
Oddly, just days after Boston, a fertilizer plant leveled much of a Texas town. Timothy McVeigh used a fertilizer bomb to level the federal building in Oklahoma City. Echos from the past.
Has Rush Limbaugh had time to say, "Nobody's talking about background checks for people who buy fertilizer" yet?
We are fortunate to have someone in the Presidency who can rise to these occasions. After eight years of cringing, what a relief to hear from a man who can soar rhetorically, and who can rally our spirits.
The news from Boston was pretty bleak, made bleaker by the efforts of careerist reporters, who were thrown on television and radio with no news to report, but with hope in their hearts this could be their own big moment. So they interviewed each other and repeated the words de jour : "Chaos" and "Heart wrenching" and "Like a war zone" and "panic."
Which is to say, the news people had no news to report beyond the first three minutes: Two explosions ripped through crowds around the finish line of the Boston marathon after the first wave of (fastest) runners had finished, and at a time when the spectators lining the street had diminished in number. Had the bombs gone off earlier, casualties would have been higher. Police are in the early stages of painstaking investigation and really will have nothing to say until they gather evidence and reconstruct and think out what the evidence means, which means we will all just have to wait to learn what happened.
There was alarm and there was surprise, but there was not "chaos,"as far as Mad Dog could see: Doctors who were in attendance in significant numbers ran straight toward the victims lying across from them, despite the obvious danger, and police reacted with calm and deliberation and the hospitals swung into their well rehearsed "disaster" drills, as they have been trained to do, and patients were transported to the waiting teams at Mass General, Tufts and Boston Medical center and operating room teams awaited them and treated them, and intensive care units received them, even at Childrens' Hospital, and while many questions remain about who did this, why, and how, what was never in question was the proficiency, efficiency and efficacy of the medical community, one of the nation's best--in Boston--and the calm deliberate and speedy response of the "first responders" the police, fire and rescue.
As far as Mad Dog can bring to mind, this is the first attack which actually took a toll of civilians since 9/11/2001. There have been thwarted attempts--the shoe bomber, the underwear bomber and the Times Square bomber, but this is the first that went off and killed people since New York, 2001.
Speculation immediately was centered on Middle Eastern terrorists, as it was immediately after the Towers came down in 2001. In the case of the Towers, that speculation was basically on target. Not so clear here, yet.
It must be remembered, Timothy McVeigh fit nobody's profile of a Middle East terrorist.
As any fan of The Wire knows, there is much that can be learned from a patient, thorough, unhurried examination of the crime scene, done without bias or preconceived notions, just methodical, meticulous and clean. When emotions run high, sometimes the in charge cop has to order everyone out of the area, just to allow those with specific tasks to do their jobs.
Eventually, we will learn more of value, but watching the yammering nabobs on TV Monday, we saw the worst of the commercial news making machine. They did not serve the nation well.
Mad Dog begs the reader's indulgence: Let it be understood, Mad Dog attended public schools until he matriculated at a private college. One of Mad Dog's sons went to public schools, the other to private schools from high school through college.
So Mad Dog claims experience in both realms, and no particular emotional attachment to either.
In today's New York Times is an article about a high school teacher in Albany, New York who assigned her class the task of writing a "persuasive piece" using traditional high school essay structure (5 paragraphs: introduction, 3 paragraphs, conclusion) as an argument to a Nazi teacher "Jews are the source of our problems." "You must argue Jews are evil and use solid rationale from government propaganda to convince me of your loyalty to the Third Reich!"
Now, of course, no analysis is on firm ground without knowing the facts, and we do not have all the facts in this newspaper report. Did the teacher give the students other options? Could they in fact choose some other topic designed to make them think in terms which most current Americans find repugnant? Did the teacher preface the assignment with a discussion of what the Nazis espoused, the history and outcomes of their time in power? What, in short, was the context of the assignment? Did students object? What was the response to their objections? And what did she mean by "solid rationale?" What does anyone mean by that?
All we know is Maruertie Vanden Wynagaard, the superintendent of Albany's schools said, "Obviously, we have a severe lack of judgment and a horrible level of insensitivity."
Obviously, we have Ms. Wynagaard concerned to protect her own job, but it is not at all obvious we have a lack of judgment.
Rabbi Eligberg said, "The assignment was flawed in its essence. It asks students to take the product for a propaganda machine and treat it as legitimate fodder for a rational argument. And that's just wrong."
Actually, not.
Clearly, the rabbi does not like the exercise of mind games. The rabbi wants only to hear, "This is wrong." He is made uncomfortable by or has never attempted, the exercise of inhabiting "evil," living in its skin, getting its feel, moving within it.
Mad Dog has on occasion tried to get into the mind of really freaky people: Republicans like Paul Ryan, various Texas and South Carolina senators and Congressmen, Rand Paul, Mitch McConnell, and even, yes, people like Joseph Goebbels and Adolph Hitler, and Henry Ford (author of "The International Jew.") It is a clinically useful exercise: Imagine I am a germ. What would I do? What would give me pleasure and what would I seek?
In law school, I am told, students are made to argue for the defense and then assume the role of the prosecutor. It's a way of making them identify the types of arguments made and to understand the vulnerabilities of these arguments. It is a way to prepare oneself for the fight.
But in public schools, students and teachers alike have to be always mindful of "how it would look" or "how that might sound" if some politically unpopular or incorrect statement leaks out from the classroom into the press or general public.
The superintendent, we are told, met with "Jewish leaders" in Albany to assure them she did not endorse the Third Reich, Adolph Hitler or anti Semitic sentiments.
All this sounds very familiar to Mad Dog. By the time he finished 12th grade, he was convinced his teachers, with some happy exceptions, were mediocrities and not smart enough to teach their much more intelligent students.
The whole dreary exercise of form over content--5 paragraphs. Why five? Introduction, conclusion. What is so important about that? What makes that form "good?"
In college, where the professors were not looking over their shoulders, the discussions were so much more intelligent and relevant and deeply cutting. There was no superintendent meeting with community leaders to reassure everyone children in classrooms were not being taught Nazi doctrine as received truth.
Mad Dog has often fantasized about what if? What if, in a former life, Mad Dog had been a Hitler Youth? An SS trooper? A concentration camp guard? What would that have felt like? How would he have dealt with the cruelty?
Mad Dog realized it might have begun with love, of all things. Listen to Hitler's speeches and notice how much time he spends building a picture of beauty, an imagined world of blond, blue eyed, healthy, smiling, happy boys and girls, those darlings of the Third Reich who will sweep away the badness and replace it with purity. All those efforts to breed beautiful blond girls with beautiful blond boys. And the movies of those Aryan youths--it's all so euphoric and Hitler riding by, standing in an open automobile, arm straight out and women thronging to him, arms outstretched in ecstatic salutes; they are weeping with joy.
You are taught to love, to desire, blond hair, white skin. That can look so clean. And after the mud and grime of WWI trenches, clean must have been a very sacred thing. Then you see people who dress in black and wear long curls for sideburns and who do not look like that blond ideal. Can you feel the repulsion? But what of their children? Do you not feel badly murdering the children? Well, but children grow up.
You get the idea: You can, by suspending your own conditioned responses, get to a new place and see the world, however tendentiously, from behind different lenses.
And you can use that knowledge: When Mad Dog was an intern, working on a ward where people were dying in droves every day, he and everyone he worked with, became inured to the significance of death and physical destruction. As nurses wrapped bodies, they chatted about which bar they were going to after work. And Mad Dog recognized: We are no longer even seeing these people we are packaging. He could see that because he had imagined that kind of behavior before.
And from that perspective, you can achieve a new power to attack the flaws in the thinking, the perceptions.
In his own life, Mad Dog was raised as a white child among people who were soul mates to the Nazis. White Southern racists, who earnestly told you swimming in the same swimming pool as Blacks would infect you, for whom the idea of a white girl dancing with a black boy at a school dance was nothing less than miscegenation, for whom homosexuality was a sin against God, for whom Catholics were suspect, Jews barely tolerated pariahs, and the best life on earth was for two white Christian people, boy and girl, to meet in high school, marry after college and produce three little pure white children who would repeat the cycle.
So anything which rattles a cage strikes Mad Dog as a step in the right direction. That cannot happen in schools which are publicly funded, politicized, where teachers must teach to the tests to satisfy the political postures of downtown politicians, schools run by careerists who care only for their own jobs and naught for something as lofty as opening young minds.
For most of his life, Mad Dog lived in Washington, DC, and whenever he would meet someone from overseas he would ask, "So what is different about living in America?" It did not matter whether the ex-pat was from England or Italy, Germany or Spain, Norway or France, he or she always said the same thing: "You Americans: You drive everywhere!"
This was usually followed by a deep sigh and then a flabbergasted look: "If there is a 7-Eleven a half mile down the road, you will drive down there, for a loaf of bread and a quart of milk!"
New Hampshire, for the most part, is not pedestrian friendly. You can walk on sidewalks in Hampton or Dover or Portsmouth, but outside of the commercial centers, any citizen fool hardy enough to walk or bicycle much beyond town center takes his life into his own hands.
Mad Dog has now walked or skied nearly the entire length of the abandoned railroad bed from Hampton to Portsmouth and he is convinced it would be wonderful space for a paved bicycle, walking, roller blading path.
But it is a big project. Pulling up all that track and hauling it away, preparing a surface for paving, laying down the asphalt, whew! There are about half a dozen homes within sight of the path. Those owners may object. There are about half a dozen industrial properties along the way, mostly in Hampton and Portsmouth; again, there may be resistance from the owners.
Mad Dog has learned from the many people who saw two letters in the Portsmouth Herald supporting the idea of a bicycle path free of cars, there have been prior efforts to convert the rails to a trail. None have succeeded.
This is one of those things which define a community, its leaders and its character. A bicycle path would not be used by the vast majority of its citizens. It would be available to all, but used by less than 10%, at least at first.
But it would, like the ocean, become part of what draws people to the Seacoast and what makes it vibrant.
How do you put a dollar value on what it would mean to have a 10 mile refuge from the automobile for families, for exercise addicts, bicyclers, roller bladders, walkers, runners, bird watchers?
You may note the Mad Dog omits "hunters." One hopes hunters would be excluded from this swath. Not that Mad Dog has anything against hunters--but he does not like hunters shooting off guns along a path where children ride bicycles.
You have to say that in New Hampshire. Hunters by law may hunt on the Sagmore Creek 100 yards from Route One and along the Urban Forest trails where mothers and children walk their dogs. Somehow hunters' rights take precedence over family rights in New Hampshire. But Mad Dog digresses.
The fact is, this effort is going to be made again. We are told the likelihood is there will be meetings, petitions, hearings and ultimately, no action. It is usually easier to do nothing than to create something. We'll see what New Hampshire is made of in the upcoming weeks and months.
Dan Baum in conversation with Joe Nocera in today's New York Times makes some good points about efforts to diminish gun deaths.
Before Mad Dog gets to that, a disclaimer of sorts: although Mad Dog has never owned a gun, he has gun owners in the family. And Mad Dog does have one bit of relevant personal experience. When Mad Dog was a medical intern at a big city hospital the head nurse on one of the wards he covered at night locked up all the needles and syringes. Nurses would call Mad Dog to see a patient on that ward who needed a blood culture drawn, but there were no needles available. Mad Dog would have to hunt down the ward nurse in the dark and he finally gave up and just ran down a flight of stairs for the unlocked supplies on the ward below and ran back up fully loaded to do his blood culture. When Mad Dog complained to the head nurse she said she locked the needles to prevent drug addicts from getting them. "But the drug addict would have to walk up nine flights of stairs, past all those other wards with open needle cabinets to steal your needles!" The head nurse was unmoved. "It's the law," she said. "And if other head nurses want to leave their needles vulnerable to theft, that's their business."
So Mad Dog has some experience with ineffective efforts at prevention. And he has felt the anger of the self righteous.
Now needles used by drug addicts are different than guns used by maniacs. As my resident said at the time, "I hope drug addicts are stealing clean needles. At least they won't be re using old ones and spreading hepatitis." Guns are never used for purposes of administering healthful doses of anything.
On the other hand, Dan Baum makes some good points: For one thing, if you look at statistics, assault rifles are used only in the most spectacular but rarest events. We do not worry as much about hand guns, which kill far more Americans every day. The thing is, when assault rifles have killed people, it was white, middle to upper class people and hand guns are the ghetto weapon of choice, killing mostly people in the zip codes that don't matter--who cares about deaths in the ghetto? When Nocera says parents ought to ask whether there is a loaded gun in the house before sending their kids for a play date, Baum says, fine but if you are really playing the odds, ask if there is a swimming pool--far more kids drown in swimming pools every year, but that's not as emotionally charged for the rest of us, and swimming pools are owned by rich people; guns are the narcotic of the Joe Sixpack class.
Baum's main point is there are at least 300 million guns out there right now; trying to limit sales is closing the barn door after the horse has left. As for limiting clip size, he is not as persuasive, but the answer usually is, the average maniac will accumulated lots of clips in his planning for the next shopping mall spree.
In Dodge City, Matt Dillon could disarm any varmint who rode into town and keep his gun at the jail until he left town. You cannot do that in America anymore. The varmints all have stashes of guns all over the place. So the argument from the gun owners is, these laws are ineffective. They are annoying in the same way the theatrics at the airport security gate are annoying--anyone can see through them to a way they could defeat the system. The net catches the wrong fish.
Baum's main argument is the intention of guns laws is to make us safer and limiting assault rifle sales does not do that. He is saying these are feel good gestures to allow politicians to posture and say, "See, we've responded!" In fact the response is half baked and transparently ineffective, affecting the people who are not the problem and leaving the bad actors unaffected.
His secondary point is the people who love their guns feel insulted and vilified. And he has a point. A subtext to this argument is rich, urban, upper class people who do not own guns look at rural, less affluent people who cling to their guns as pathetic, relatively powerless people who can only get a sense of self importance by brandishing a gun, by going to a shooting range and making noises and feeling the power of the machine in their hands. When President Obama gave a speech in Portsmouth, some fool showed up carrying a big gun in the parking lot outside the high school and made all the papers. What he was saying is, "Look here. I have a gun. That means I could kill President Obama, which means I am as powerful and important as he is."
But not all gun guys are that pathetic. People love guns for, likely, deep psychological reasons--a sense of power, a sense of potency, a sense of self reliance, a sense of I may make only a small fraction of what you make, but I'm a lean, mean killing machine. Some actually simply like the workmanship of guns, and they look at them as works of art. They collect them but do not fire them. Or they like skeet shooting.
It does stick with Mad Dog that in the Army, when recruits are sent out to the shooting range they are given a certain number of bullets and they had damn well better return with that exact number of spent casings. Every casing is counted and every bullet accounted for. The Army does not want any recruit using a bullet on his drill instructor. In the real world, the government cannot keep that kind of clamp on its citizens. When the government tries to clamp down on objects, whether they are books or guns or vials of drugs, it always entails invasion, search, seizure.
Some years ago, Mad Dog was walking down a New York City street, carrying a long umbrella and a police patrol car screeched to a halt and a policeman jumped out of his car and demanded the umbrella. He twisted and pulled at it to no effect and finally handed it back to the dumbfounded Mad Dog. "Looking for a sword inside," the cop explained, a little sheepishly. "I feel safer now," Mad Dog said, being careful to smile. Of course, Mad Dog was trying to make the policeman feel better. His heart was in the right place. But if Mad Dog had been walking in Bedford Styvestant last week and a policeman had thrown him up against a wall and frisked him as part of Stop and Search, Mad Dog would have been outraged. If Mad Dog had been hauled off to the station house and strip searched, he would have been on the phone to his Congressman and if Mad Dog had been thrown into Gitmo, he would have spent every day planning his revenge against a government which could be so evil.
Somehow, the argument has to progress beyond the emotional and the personal to a level which the article by Mr. Nocera and Mr. Baum approached today.
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| Lunatic Giteau |
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| Experts |
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| President for 6 Months |
In 1881, President James A. Garfield arrived at the railroad station in Washington, D.C., accompanied by a friend, but no retinue of Secret Service Agents clearing a path. Presidents of the United States walked about Washington like normal mortals then. Garfield was in high spirits, on his way to his Williams College reunion. He had been a general in the Union Army, and now he was only a few months into his first term as President.
Charles Giteau, who wanted to be Ambassador to France, or possibly thought he was King of France, raised a pistol and fired several shots into the President from a few feet behind him, hitting him in the arm and sending one through his back into or near his pancreas.
Giteau was tackled and quickly removed to jail, where he expected General W.T. Sherman would send a company of troops to protect him and to thank him for his great deed. Garfield was carried to the White House where a team of surgeons, headed by an imperious and famous physician of the day, proceeded to kill him, by stages, by the probing of his wounds with bacteria ladened fingers and instruments.
Although the idea of antisepsis was well known in America in those days--Lister had presented their ideas to American doctors--the prevailing thinking in American medicine was that pus was a good thing and surgical instruments dropped on the floor were simply picked up and used, and not cleaned between cases.
In her lovely account of this dreary sequence of events, Candice Millard details the folly of the imperious doctor who ensured Garfield's fate, turning what could have been a serious but non lethal wound into a fatal blow.
There are lessons in history. We remember things in ways which are useful to us today. Of course, the obvious parallel between a maniac with a gun and the shootings at Newtown and Aurora is obvious. We have never been able to protect the innocent from the deranged very well, mainly because the nature of derangement is unpredictability. The lethally inclined maniac always has the element of surprise and often has planned to evade defenses.
For the denouement, the long road to sepsis for President Garfield, there are more lessons. The respect accorded experts was misplaced, should have been questioned and the authoritarian physician, had he been questioned more ruthlessly could have been prevented from doing more harm.
Alexander Graham Bell tried to quickly fabricate a metal detector to allow the localization of the bullet--there were no X rays then. But the doctors actually thwarted his efforts by refusing to move the President from his metal bed and Bell's metal detector could not distinguish one metal from another.
That Bell was famous was the only reason he was allowed in the President's room.
Fame, exposure, in America, has always been a substitute for real quality. Dr. Oz is listened to and believed because he is on T.V. David Stockman can get on the front page of the Sunday Review in the New York Times because he was famous once, even though his thoughts are manifestly stupid. Paul Krugman, a few days later, demolished Stockman's recycled version of Andrew Mellon and Herbert Hoover with only faintly dimmed contempt, as well he should have.
In American resumes, "Appeared on Ophra" or "As seen on TV" is proudly displayed as a badge of authority. I have been heard by millions: I must be smart.
Shakespeare said, "Speech is logic," which meant, if you say something, especially if you dress it up with elocution and a good suit, people will believe it; it is persuasive if only because you have said it.
The great failing of American education is not enough children are taught to doubt, to question to separate what is being said from the aura of the person who says it. When a local politician says that building a motorway, two lanes from Hampton to Portsmouth, will reduce idling time on Route One and thereby reduce air pollution better than creating a bicycle path in that same space, and the Portsmouth Herald publishes that without comment, speech is logic. Discourse on the seacoast is brought down to the lowest common denominator, to below that.
Our local papers, and even some national papers routinely fail to ask the obvious follow up question, to challenge authority, to seek a rebuttal.
David Brooks writes today that American universities should teach people how to disagree pleasantly. Mad Dog disagrees. Where people disagree politely, in the South, things do not change. The most outrageous things can be said and people say, "Well, I understand where you are coming from and you make some good points, although I cannot agree with your conclusion," when what they should said is: That is a mean, nasty and misguided sentiment and is not worthy of discussion and you should think twice before you say such things in public. To say Blacks should not be allowed to swim in swimming pools with Whites is not an opinion to be entertained over tea and biscuits with pleasant smiles.
Stringer Bell, who is running a meeting according to Robert's Rules of Order, explodes and cuts off an impertinent questioner with the explosion, "This nigga's too ignorant to have the floor. I will punk your ass, say such things!"
A little more Stringer Bell and a lot less David Brooks would do New Hampshire a great service now and then.
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| Best& Banting |
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| Edison |
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| Yersin |
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| Sherman |
Mad Dog traveled 500 miles away from home to go to college, at a time and in a century before cell phones and the internet. Long distance phone calls were expensive and if you wanted to communicate with mother, you wrote a letter. Like many of his classmates, who came from all over the country, he discovered he was lonely and homesick, but he was surprised to find he was stronger than most of his classmates in one way: He was comfortable and not afraid to be alone.
Some days, walking from the library to a late afternoon class, he realized he had not spoken to another human being for days. He looked forward to class because he would have contact with other people, but he did not need that interaction the way so many of his classmates did. He could study alone, be alone, and he noticed his dorm mates could not tolerate isolation; they studied together, just to be in the same room; they walked to the cafeteria together; they had parties together and went out on double dates. They seemed afraid to be alone with themselves.
As Mad Dog progressed through training in later years, he found he could be alone on a ward and function without calling for help. He could apply himself to a problem and rely on his own internal resources to solve it. He found himself, in a way, in a position of leadership because of this capacity--nurses looked to him, waiting for orders. And he felt comfortable giving those orders, not because he was superior, but because he had been prepared by others and then he was capable of sailing the ship without the help of others.
In the world of medicine, real leaders are self directed, "inner directed" some academics call it. Frederick Banting, the Canadian surgeon who pushed ahead, alone, convinced the pancreas contained some critical element, the thing which turned out to be insulin, was such a leader. Alexander Yersin, pushed ahead to identify the causative bacillus of the black plaque, after being spurned by governmental authorities (Brits who had invested their hopes in a famous Japanese microbiologist, who botched the job). Thomas Edison worked for long stretches alone. Like Banting, he had capable and dedicated colleagues, but the cardinal feature of Banting, Yersin and Edison is they pushed ahead alone, undeterred by the opinions of others.
In American politics, the loner is not likely to be chosen as a leader. Lincoln, who some have called the loneliest of men, achieved his greatness by working with other men, by manipulating them, by persuading them but not by isolating himself, except at the times he needed to think through a problem; then he would isolate himself.
Mad Dog wonders whether some of the intractable problems we face in government today arise because we have elected the wrong sort of men to lead us; we have failed to appreciate the importance in leaders of the capacity to be self directed. We have men like John Boehner and Mitch McConnell who raise their sails to catch the wind, whichever way it is blowing, rather than setting their own course, and steaming toward the star of their own choosing. They are men of compromise and complexity, but they are afraid to be alone with their own thoughts and decisions. Mad Dog wonders whether or not it is this character flaw in our leaders which has hurt us as a nation.
Jimmy Carter is always held up as an example of the man who failed because he failed to involved other people; he was too much of a loner. But he had more flaws than that and but for a sandstorm in a desert, he might have been remembered far differently.
Apart from Mr. Obama, Mad Dog despairs of our leadership. There are some good men and women, smart people in Congress--Dick Durban, Chris van Hollen, Diane Feinstein--but they are swamped by the other variety. One has to fear for our fate, in the hands of the lemmings who lead us now. Start with the Republican majority in the House, add the Republicans in the Senate, not the least among them Kelly Ayotte, and look around and it's pretty bleak.
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| Lincoln |
