Washington Flacks, Job Seekers and Democracy

A real general

A real President.

A man who did not need an image maker

Don't stand in the hallway
Don't block up the hall

--Bob Dylan


Reading Bruce Catton's wonderful Stillness At Appomattox again, Mad Dog felt an old feeling well up, and that froth bubbled over reading Mark Leibovich's article in the New York Times Magazine about Darrell Issa's publicist, or what they call a "flack" in Washington, DC, Kurt Bardella.

Mad Dog was reminded of his brother's comment, "In most organizations, there are people who actually do the work, and then there are the rest, who actually do nothing, but simply pretend to work."

Mad Dog would amend this to, "In this American century, there are people who actually matter, on whom we all depend, and there are those who are simply posers."

Leibovitch's depiction does look like life imitating art, as anyone who has watched VEEP would recognized. The Vice President in this TV show is surrounded by people for whom the only reality is the image making they conjure up in their own minds. Their only real jobs are to keep their jobs. 

When asked to describe their jobs, they sound very important: The man who is supposed to be the "liaison" to the White House says he is  "the Go To Guy for All things White House" to the people in the Vice President's office. 
The VEEP's administrative assistant says she is the "trouble-shooter, problem-solver, issue-mediator, doubt-remover, conscience-examiner, thought-thinker and all-round everything-doer."  Her secretary who schedules her appointments says she is the 3rd most important person in the world because she controls access to the 2nd most important person in the world.  This may be fiction, but it is drawn from what you actually hear people in Washington say. 

There have been worse instances of political buffoons in our history, who caused real harm.

In the case of the Civil War, there was Samuel Butler, a man who wore the uniform of a union army general because he was politically connected and he got himself appointed general, although he had no significant training or aptitude--he could play the role in those days, by simply dressing up as a general.

Butler was a godawful general, a political hack, who never mastered any of the essentials of generalship. He managed to destroy a brilliant plan which would have broken through the last Southern defenses at Petersburg, simply because it was not his idea.  But he managed his image with great energy and he was so well connected, politically, neither Grant nor Lincoln could risk removing him. 

He did untold harm by simply being incompetent getting in the way--he blocked up the hall.

There are simply too many hangers on, people who convince themselves they have an important role when, in fact, they simply get in the way.

Today, there are "flacks" in Washington, DC whose job it is to hustle the talk shows and the media to get their bosses--Congressmen or Senators--exposure. These "flacks" do not write legislation; they do not puzzle out the economic impact of a new health care bill; they do not run the numbers when it comes to the impact of a tax on an industry. They are, like the literary agents, image people, people who supposedly control perceptions. 

Of course, if the world woke up tomorrow and every last one of these image people simply disappeared,  nobody (except, perhaps, their mothers)  would miss them. Government, hospitals, industry, transportation, telecommunications would all buzz along.  

During snowstorms in Washington, DC, you can hear radio announcements which say, "Only essential federal employees are required to report to work." That must cause deep seated angst among the flacks and image makers. Suppose a snowstorm provoked a reckoning of who really is essential?
 
In the internet age, one might hope "connected people" would no longer be perceived as being important, because anyone with a computer can now be connected, but Mad Dog suspects in Washington, the atmosphere is too thick with self importance masquerading as actual importance for anyone to really be able to see through the smoke to the mirrors.


Reading Leibovich's article, watching VEEP, or House of Cards for that matter, one has to ask: Is this any way to run a democracy?

Lives Which Change in a Few Seconds of Rage: Programs for Impulse Control

NPR had a fascinating piece about a study done by two sociologists who tried to understand the origins of "Black on Black" murder by gun.  

The author of the study, Jens Ludwig, asked the NPR host this question: "Suppose I have a cookie in my hand and you want that cookie. How would you proceed?"

The NPR host said, "Well, I'd say: 'I'm really hungry and I'd like that cookie very much. Would you give it to me, or perhaps share it?"

When the Professor Ludwig,  gathered a group of inner city youths, from a high murder district,  and asked that question of one of the boys. The study subject walked over to the boy with the imaginary cookie and started pounding him with his fists.  After a few minutes of mayhem, Professor Ludwig settled the boys down and asked:  "Why did you not simply ask for the cookie, first?"

The answer from the boys in the study indicated none of them ever expect a positive response from a social encounter. And if they had asked nicely,  they would have been considered a "punk."

After a training period of 6 weeks, inner city youth who were taught through practice sessions to think of alternatives to violence and coercion, to consider alternative approaches, were compared to a control group of boys who had no training. Over the next 6 months, the trained group had a 50% lower incarceration rate than the untrained,  control group.  Of course, the effect lasted only 6 months. After that, the trained kids slid back into old habits.

What this suggests, the Professor Ludwig said, is the reason for gun violence in the ghetto is that young men who confront each other begin with the maximum confrontation tactic--violence--and if they have a gun in their belt, well the results are predictable. 

In fact, the study began when the professor tracked down every boy convicted of murder in a given precinct and  asked each youth why he shot his victim: Usually, the explanation was the other boy had disrespected him, i.e. it was a very unplanned, volatile flare rather than a murder as a settling of scores, a tactic to achieve a specific goal.

He said, "It's not what you see in 'The Wire,' where the murder usually makes sense to eliminate a snitch, or to seize a prime drug selling territory."

 (In fact, of course, the authors of "The Wire" are very much aware of this sort of ghetto culture--a boy is shot to death because he makes a disparaging remark about another boy's new sneakers. But Professor Ludwig can be forgiven his lapse where "The Wire" is concerned. He is emphasizing what happens most commonly, not what is most interesting in a story.)

The professor's focus is on what happens in the majority of cases-- shootings emanate from unplanned, tantrums. Young men, boys wind up in prison for life because of a minute or two of rage,  for which they would very much like a do over.

If this is true, ought not our gun  policies and our youth programs reflect this? 

We do not prevent the careful planner, the psychopath, from mowing down innocents on playgrounds or in shopping malls,  with current practices. There may never be a program or a law which will deter that sort of gun violence. 

We do not prevent the lethally explosive inner city youth who may be, statistically, responsible for most gun deaths. But there may be interventions in this culture which might make a difference. 

So what sort of laws could we pass, what sort of programs, policies might work  to address he under-parented inner city  boy with a gun in his waistband,  who is responsible for the large majority of gun deaths?

Fire in the Shire: Wherefore Art Thou New Hampshire?

Daniel Webster

Holderness Graveyard

North Beach, Hampton

Lake Winnipesaukee from Mount Major

In the "Lord of the Rings"  a small, modest, happy Hobbit has greatness thrust upon him, much to his chagrin, and he has to embark from his happy Hobbit home in his beloved shire to meet threats and to have adventures in the greater, threatening, astonishing world.

In some ways Mad Dog thinks the same story may be played out for the children of New Hampshire, whose schools are conceived and restricted within the confines of their small towns, rather than, say across larger counties. 

And yet, having visited some of the town high schools, Winnecunet, Exeter, Portsmouth, Mad Dog has been impressed by, if nothing else, the architecture, and the presence of some enviable technology--particularly the TV studio at Exeter.

Mad Dog wonders whether life in New Hampshire prepares the rising generations to deal with the world marketplace of talent.  One indicator of this might be looking at the numbers of New Hampshire high school graduates who leave the state for college in other states.  Recently, this indicator of adventurousness has been affected by the sheer cost of going to an out of state university: Somehow the University of Colorado at Boulder seems to attract New Hampshire students, but how many go to Berkley, The University of Chicago, Rice University, any of the Ivy League schools, Swarthmore, Haverford, Carlton College, Grinnel, Vanderbilt, Duke, Stanford, New York University?

If there are very few New Hampshire Hobbits sallying forth, cost may be the major factor, but somehow families in other parts of the country manage to send their children to these far flung schools.  Mad Dog suspects there is doubt among New Hampshire parents about the value of such exposure for their children, or perhaps simply, there is fear: How you gonna keep them on farm once they've seen gay Paree? Or Chicago, New York, San Francisco and Washington, D.C.?

If New Hampshire really is inward looking, as Mad Dog thinks is possible, is that good for New Hampshire or for the country, or the world?

In some ways, New Hampshire conjures up in Mad Dog's lame brain the Amish, a group which has looked around at the world and said, "No."  Of course, the Amish, admirably, encourage their children to leave their farms and to live among the gentiles for a year or two and to come back only when and if they are convinced life is better among the Amish. Mad Dog is not sure a similar exposure happens in New Hampshire.

Mad Dog hastens to add, he has no reliable data. His only source of impression is a very unscientific observation that he rarely sees college decals on the back windows of New Hampshire automobiles or T shirts or sweatshirts  for any of the above mentioned schools as he drives and bikes around New Hampshire.  When you do see a decal, it's usually UNH, Keene State or Plymouth State, or its on someone summering on the New Hampshire beach before they vacate for Boston or New York. This is certainly different from a drive around the Washington, DC suburbs or from observations in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Chapel Hill, Raleigh, Richmond.

Mad Dog recently met a woman who once owned a flower shop in Portsmouth, which had been the law office of Daniel Webster. She was proud of that. She was pleased New Hampshire once played a role in the nation's life which placed it at the center of what was happening.  There is a marble bust of Webster in the Supreme Court and a statue of him looming over a traffic circle not far from the Capitol.  New Hampshire once sent the flower of its youth out to meet the world, and to mold it.

Lincoln sent his son to Phillips Exeter Academy and visited. George Washington rode through New Hampshire.  The state was important enough then.

Walking around a graveyard in Holderness, New Hampshire, Mad Dog was stunned by the gravestones:  Row after row of young men who died between 1861 and 1865.  New Hampshire may have been far away from the monumental  struggle of those years,  between the forces of darkness and the forces of righteousness, but its men were in it. They stood up; they stepped forward;  they were counted. 

The same is true in the graveyard in Gilmanton, where Grace Metalious, author of Peyton Place, is buried: There are graves of soldiers from the Civil War through Vietnam surrounding her. And her artistry touched the nation and moved it. At the time, her book was dismissed as an inconsequential pot boiler, but no one can read that lurid opening paragraph, one of the best in American literature of any generation and fail to see the deep New Hampshire well of knowledge and affection from which it sprang. And, Mad Dog notes, one of its essential plot lines explored the moral conundrum embodied in the decision to do an abortion on a teenager who had been impregnated by her own father.  Huckleberry Finn was much admired by Hemingway. Peyton Place is much admired by Mad Dog, which likely explains its obscurity.

Fly home from Europe and you watch the screen on the back of the seat in front of you and the first thing you see which is identifiable on the map is Lake Winnipesaukee, the first landmark in America is New Hampshire.

Of course, we have the primaries, and all that attention those bring, but nowadays what happens in New Hampshire is quickly forgotten as campaigns move quickly on to other states and the TV cameras leave yesterday's news in the dump.

We have great talents visiting the Music Hall in Portsmouth and the Casino in Hampton and the Ogunquit  Playhouse, just across the river. 

But are we being left behind as the world globalizes? Are the people here, who have the intelligence and the talent being stoked with the ambition to change the world?

And, Mad Dog wonders, should we care much if the answer is "No"?

DOMA Goes Down

"The federal statute is invalid, for no legitimate purpose overcomes the purpose and effect to disparage and to injure those whom the State, by its marriage laws, sought to protect in personhood and dignity,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the majority opinion. "By seeking to displace this protection and treating those persons as living in marriages less respected than others, the federal statute is in violation of the Fifth Amendment."

--Justice Anthony Kennedy

With those words, the Supreme Court, or rather the liberal portion of the Supreme Court found an ally to strike down a hate law. 

Justice Scalia was particularly scathing and personal in his dissent, even by his own standards, suggesting those who opposed the law suffered from an obvious character disorder.  Justice Roberts, in his typically obtuse style,  suggested there was no malice intended by those who passed the law--they were simply trying to embrace a positive view of marriage. 

Mad Dog has said in the past and now says again he does not embrace gay marriage, because he does not embrace heterosexual marriage as an institution the state has any place in injecting itself.  It is an institution and an ideal which has nothing to recommend it in either ideological or practical terms.  At best, it is an absurd notion, the "Bride's Day" image of marriage as a happily ever after state of bliss and at worse, it is a destructive fantasy, which dooms people who discover the psychological impossibility of eternal psychological faithfulness and unchanging adulation.  From a practical point of view, marriage is unnecessary, as long as laws do not require it for health insurance, and all the other things which marriage automatically conveys. Legislatures have found  legal aspects of marriage convenient--it is convenient to convey a "package" of rights and benefits on a couple which has registered at the courthouse as a married couple. You could award the same package to a couple who simply signed a contract, but that would require the legislatures to do some work.

Some people want to believe they see the hand of God at work at a wedding. God wanted this particular John to marry this particular Jane. Most Americans in the 21st century, at least the people Mad Dog knows, do not buy this.

Some people say you need marriage for stable relationships to raise stable, well grounded children.  Mad Dog is not sure. He sees plenty of unstable people who were the product of strong marriages and plenty of stable people who are the products of a "broken" home. Perhaps the home was not "broken" but simply more flexible. 

But, as Mad Dog is well aware, marriage exists in American society, at least in some parts of the country.  In Hollywood, in the inner cities,  marriage hasn't been seen for years. Couples live together and ignore the whole idea, happily enough. Where there is enough money, two people live together and raise kids or one parent raises her kids alone, and hires help for when she is shooting a film. Where there is no money, women often choose to not wait for a husband to support her, because she knows the man she chooses likely won't hang around long enough to be a real source of support.

Today, the court displayed itself to be a political instrument, with the 4 conservative horsemen predictably voting to "uphold" marriage as between opposite sex partners and the 4 liberals saying, "ridiculous."

As far as Mad Dog is concerned, he is with Chris Rock on this one: Gays have a right to be as miserable as the rest of us.

Reading back over this, Mad Dog realizes it sounds as if it has been written by someone who has had an unhappy marriage or who has never seen what appears to be a happy marriage thrive among others. This, actually, is not the case. Mad Dog has witnessed "happily married" couples, and more in New Hampshire than in Washington, D.C. and New York City, although there are happily married couples even in those places, from all appearances. 

But these happy marriages have little or nothing to do with other people, or with  the government "sanctifying" the union.  These couples would have been happy without anyone else's blessing.  What Mad Dog cannot understand is the idea of a couple needing other people to share the joy at the wedding or to support the joy afterwards. Either it is there between the two people involved, gay or straight, or it is not --a thousand wedding guests and twelve angels blowing horns as the clouds part and the sun shines will make no difference to those two people, if what happens within each of them and between the two of them does not work.

The Problem of Female Libido

Chris Rock

Dr. Freud

Erica Jung

Inspector Libidinous

Here are some random musings on an under analyzed conundrum in today's world: The mystery of female libido.

Chris Rock, who, along with Bill Russell and George Carlin  ranks high on the Phantom's  list of trenchant observers, has noted that women are different from men. One difference, which affects behavior is men, for the most part, cannot have sex whenever they want it, whereas women, for the most part, can. For women, it's simply a matter of who, when and where--demand is never an issue in the supply/demand equation. For men, supply is the big issue.

"The Fall," a British TV series has a scene in which the newly arrived chief inspector is being driven along the road and spots a good looking male on the road, a police officer, and she stops the car, and walks over to the male cop and tells him she is in the Hilton Hotel in room 203, and follows up by pulling him into bed, when he arrives. 

"The Wire" has a political consultant who likes to bed men on short notice.

These are not women most men recognize: Women who forthrightly solicit sex for no other reason than libidinous urge. No money is involved. No power trip. No social advantage. The woman looks at a man as men are accustomed to looking at women and says, "Let's have sex."

In medical practice, women occasionally consult physicians because they have lost all interest in sex. This is, for the physician, usually a very frustrating experience. Nothing works. 

One woman presented saying she had great sex with her partner, until he got her to move into his apartment with her, and that night, she lost all interest in having sex with him.  The diagnosis there was no mystery: As Gloria Steinem once remarked, "I cannot mate in captivity."

A Harvard gynecologist, speaking at a conference on the hormonal basis of sex drive, said her group had tested a group of women who had sought advice for loss of libido and they had tested all  they could think of which might possibly be relevant: testosterone, estrogen, progesterone, thyroid, cortisol, prolactin. No differences were found among the women with low or no libido and the control population who had normal libido. "Then we tried every known pharmaceutical--from Viagra to estrogen--and nothing worked," she said. "In fact, the only thing which was reliably effective in restoring sexual drive, satisfaction and libido was a new partner."

The laughter in the room was resounding and emanated mostly from the women in the audience. Knowing laughter.

The idea that women might have strong sexual desire which is unconnected to a desire for a cuddling relationship with a man,  unconnected to desire for protection, for an improved lifestyle, for creature comforts, for bragging rights, for a connection to fame, power or glory,  has been thought to be threatening to social stability, to men, especially in certain cultures,  where women are literally kept under cover. One wonders about those cultures, where women are considered so tempting and explosively disruptive you literally must hide them under a black tent of cloth.

One striking difference between the sexes, for people who are involved with trying to help women regain libido, is the answer to this question:  What are your fantasies about sex? 

With women, this is often met with a deer in the headlights look.  What fantasies?  

Men fantasize about sex, if not constantly, then frequently, and they do it from puberty until death.  Women, if they are reporting accurately, do not. Or may not.  Or if they do, they do not feel comfortable sharing those fantasizes, whereas with men, you cannot get them to shut up about it, ad nauseum.

In that difference, the Phantom believes, may be an important clue.

Government Surveillance: A Sartre Moment

Louis Brandeis

Samuel Warren

Hendrick Herzberg

Jill Lepore

Huis Clos ("No Exit" or "Closed Doors") is one of those rare works which made the agonizing work of qualifying in French in college almost worthwhile.  Sartre's thesis, as elaborated by this excruciating, funny and mesmerizing play is, simply put: "Hell is other people."
 The obverse of that coin is nirvana is also other people. You can read alone in your room, camp in the wilderness, paddle down the river alone, but essentially, like D.H. Lawrence's caretaker, Mellors, living alone  in his stone hut, in the woods, eventually, you need other people, (in his case, Lady Chatterly.)

And so it is in the debate about privacy, which is, in itself, not the most intensely interesting or important debate extant in our public discourse today, but look at the people it has brought to surface, and listen to the music pouring forth from their souls.

Jill LePore, writing in this week's New Yorker, traces the intellectual history of the notion of a legal guarantee of privacy back to the famous paper by Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis, "The Right to Privacy."  Brandeis, of course, would later expand his thinking in his erudite dissent in Olmstead v United States, saying Olmstead's right to be left alone had been violated by the wire tap of his telephone which led to his conviction for boot legging illegal alcohol.  Brandeis argued that before our Constitution prohibited it, the government could break into a citizen's home without warrant to obtain incriminating evidence, could obtain incriminating evidence by torture and this amounted to, among other things, espionage by our government on our citizens. It constituted forced testimony of self incrimination.

Of course, the response to this intrusion has been largely determined by what other feelings the speaker has about the government: Rush Limbaugh said the NSA spying program is just another example of Mr. Obama's "totalitarian nature," a nature he did not see in the same actions and programs when they were directed by Mr. George W. Bush.

Professor LePore sums up the quandary: "This has led, in our own time, to the paradox of an American culture obsessed, at once, with being seen and with being hidden, a world in which the only thing more cherished than privacy is publicity. In this world, we chronicle our lives on Facebook while demanding the latest and best form of privacy protection--ciphers of numbers and letters--so that no one can violate the selves we have so entirely contrived to expose."

Mad Dog spent an entire blog trying to say what Dr. LePore has said in a single paragraph.

On NPR today,  the history of the program subsumed by the NSA was explored. The CIA had demanded of the phone companies that as they switched to digital technology they not employ technology which would make it impossible for the government to tap it. The companies agreed, despite the substantial costs involved in making phone records accessible to the government, but insisted the data be obtained with warrants.  The conversations themselves were of little interest to the government, but the patterns of calls were of great interest: If a caller orders surveillance equipment and information about airports and the World Trade Center and makes phone calls to Pakistan, Berlin, Qatar and Saudia Arabia, then flies to Somalia and then to New York, the NSA wants to be able to connect all that and to track that caller.

 In fact, just such a program was being developed at an Army base in suburban Washington, D.C. prior to 9/11 and the analysts there were on the trail of the plotters when they were shut down by Army lawyers, who saw Constitutional issues as violations of the Fourth Amendment.

The main question, of course is this:  If you knew allowing the government to collect this data for millions of Americans and non citizens would have prevented the attack on the World Trade Center, would thwart future attacks, would you still say, "No, you cannot gather this data" or would you say, well, we need to balance the loss of a sense of inviolability against the loss of life and treasure?

Mr. Obama said, "This war, like all wars, must end...We must define the nature and scope of this struggle, or else it will define us...difficult questions about the balance we strike between our interests in security and our values of privacy."

The best thing about this argument, of course, is the pleasure of watching good minds at work.

Of course, the answers are far simpler than the subtly and complexity of the argument:   You do not need a Harvard degree to know the answer here. You have only to have watched the 5 seasons of "The Wire" (yes, there it is again) to understand how that balance must be struck. 

When The United States Intervenes

Mad Dog occasionally is compelled to venture out of the Shire and wander among the creatures far from his Hobbit realm.

San Francisco is filled with wondrous creatures doing odd and fascinating things and just looking at them is enough to set Mad Dog's eyes spinning--Eurasians with their high zygomatic arches, a couple, white and black walking down the street with their beautiful blue eyed son; this is definitely NOT whitebread New Hampshire.

The meeting is international, languages Mad Dog recognizes but cannot speak (German, Spanish, Swedish, Portuguese) languages Mad Dog can understand but not speak (French, Irish) and languages he can only guess at (Hindi, Arabic, Russian, Polish).

In the midst of all this cacophony comes news a married male doctor in Afghanistan attempted to examine a female patient who was not his wife in an examining room in his office--an unremarkable event which occurs all across the USA, Europe, South America, Africa, Asia, but in Afghanistan all hell was unleashed. The doctor and his patient were chased out of the office by a howling mob, and both were stoned. Reports are sketchy and it not clear whether either survived but both may have--the doctor may have been removed to India for treatment of head wounds. 

When Mad Dog studied anthropology in college, there was a strong effort to discourage students from judging the values and actions of other people of other cultures by American standards. 

This idea has been supported by many since--the most emphatic example being The Spirit Moves Me and I Fall Down, about the efforts of American doctors in California to save a Hmong child who was suffering from epilepsy, whose parents refused to treat her with anticonvulsants, and the child was brought repeatedly to the Emergency Room in status epilepeticus, and the child eventually died in a convulsive event. But it was the American doctors, not the family, who the author faulted, for their lack of understanding of this ancient Hmong culture. The doctors and social workers viewed the parents as child abusers. For shame--the parents were merely viewing a seizure disorder as a universe which was out of harmony.

So Mad Dog understands he will be viewed as intolerant of other people and other cultures when he says, Let Us Get Out of Afghanistan, poste haste. And more than that, let us withdraw from all those places around the world who consider women as nothing more than baby making machines, who ought to be veiled, kept uneducated, treated like possessions and children and generally made to live half lives under the thumb of male domination. 

Mad Dog realizes that Franklin Roosevelt was reviled in some quarters for not doing more to intervene in places where Nazis were mistreating Jews. And Clinton still regrets not having done more to intervene in Rwanda.  But Mad Dog would submit, you cannot change some people and you cannot change cultures and you have cultures which, as their basic premise are intolerant. 

The one thing Americans ought not tolerate is intolerance, the unwillingness of any culture to hear the other side. Parte.altera tantum parte,  Hear the other side. 

We did not understand what was going on in Vietnam and we staggered around like demented Green giants for 5 years, killing and maiming and doing the Devil's work.

We may understand Afghanistan better, but that doesn't mean we have to like it or that we owe them anything. We will certainly never change or reform that way of thinking.

So let us simply remove our gallant young men and women and Bring 'Em Home. 

And let us resolve to not make that same mistake twice--no we are already into twice. Let us not make it a third time.