The Revolution We Need

Re-Reading Only Yesterday, a history of the 1930's, Mad Dog has been struck by the rhetoric, beliefs and personalities of that era are indistinguishable from today. The Depression was tied closely to banking misdeeds, inadvisable mortgages, speculation in banking.  Conservative Republicans insisted the government had no role in rescuing the economy and Democrats insisted action must be taken.
Herbert Hoover, the Republican President during the stock market crash, said that Roosevelt was irresponsible and would lead the country to debt and insolvency, although Hoover did work hard to mitigate some of the damage tariffs posed to America's ability to deal with the rest of the world. Economies in Europe were tanking and radical elements there were on the rise.

Thomas Jefferson said, when he helped design the new American government, he thought a democracy needed a "little revolution now and then," to steer the ship of state away from perilous shoals. Roosevelt offered such a revolution by promising "action now," and he was able to deliver because the Republicans and the Democrats in Congress gave him everything he wanted, and he sent bill after bill which Congress enacted. He argued the government had to try something, to experiment; to do anything was preferable to doing nothing. 

And that is where the difference is. Mr. Obama does not have a willing partner in Congress. Mr. McConnell, in the Senate refuses to even confirm Mr. Obama's own appointees to his executive team, and by refusing to confirm appointees, the Senate has effectively destroyed a variety of agencies the conservatives do not like, even though the Congress voted these agencies into existence. Consumer protection, environmental protection have been thwarted by conservatives in a sort of back door torpedo maneuver.  Using the filibuster, Mr. McConnell has undone the Constitution by eviscerating the executive.

President Roosevelt was nearly undone by an intransigent, conservative Supreme Court, which Roosevelt tried to "pack" by adding justices, but there the Congress drew the line and would not cooperate. Mr. Obama has not been any more successful and undoing the damage done by the four conservatives on the Court.

 So we are stuck in a bad place. No national emergency has prompted a little revolution in behalf of the many. 
Only the Tea Party has staged a revolution.
And we are stuck with that until the mass of Americans realizes the ship is headed for the iceberg, and in the collision, typically the ship does not come out on top.

First Name Basis: Mary Hamilton

Miss Mary Hamilton

Arrested first in Mississippi

Good Ol' Boys, sheriffs in a southern courtroom, expressing their respect

This morning NPR ran a report on a case which reached the Supreme Court in 1963, of which Mad Dog had been unaware. 

On the Court were William O. Douglas, Arthur Goldberg, Hugo Black and William Brennan.

The case concerned Mary Hamilton, age 28, who was a worker for the Congress of Racial Equality in Alabama, (which must have been roughly analogous to being the field director for the United Jewish Appeal in Berlin in 1936,)  and she had been arrested during a civil rights demonstration in Gasden, Alabama. 

At that time in the South, white men and women were addressed by judges and prosecutors as "Mr. Jones" or "Miss Smith," while Blacks were called by their first names, in keeping with the tradition and prevailing idea that Blacks were child like, mentally retarded semi-human beings.  When Etowah County Solicitor Rayburn addressed Mary Hamilton as "Mary" and asked her questions, she replied, "I will not answer a question until I am addressed correctly," for which she was thrown into jail by a Judge Cunningham, and she was fined $50, which she refused to pay and the case went to the Alabama Supreme Court, which denied her appeal and then to the Supreme Court of the United States, which dismissed the case against Miss Mary Hamilton on summary judgment, ruling that all those brought before the bar of justice ought to be addressed equally, regardless of race.

This startling outcome must have come as a shock to the good people of Alabama, and likely equally disturbing for the good folks of South Carolina, Mississippi, Georgia and Louisiana who were likely heard saying things like, "I just don't understand: All our colored down here are happy."

Mad Dog well remembers, living in Virginia in the mid 1950's as a child and  addressing Black adults as "Mr" and "Mrs" or "Sir" or "Ma'm" and seeing the reaction, asking his mother whether or not he had said the wrong thing. 

She reassured him, "You have done nothing wrong. It's other people who have done something wrong."

Government Regulations and Plane Crash Survivability

What? Me Worry?

Virtually every expert interviewed since the airplane crash in San Francisco has said the reason there were so few deaths is "government regulation."  Stronger seats, seats which do not burn, materials which do not emit toxic gases when burned, escape devices, all mandated at the instigation of the  Federal Aviation Administration and National Transit Safety Board, meant that a plane load of over 300 people suffered a crash with only 2 deaths (so far) , and some of those may have occurred on the ground when rescue vehicles ran over passengers.

So here we have that nasty monster, "Government Regulation"--which every Republican candidate, every Tea Party Patriot decries-- saving lives and allowing people to walk away from a catastrophe.

No Government Is Good Government!

Of course, seat belts, air  bags and a myriad of other improvements to car safety save lives more quietly, every day, all over the country and these were resisted by the auto industry for years, but that ogre, the intrusive, freedom-killing government, insisted on regulations to make cars safer. Damn that business killing, meddling, intrusive government!

General Motors sent out private investigators to dig up dirt on the author of a muck raking book, Unsafe, At Any Speed, in the 1960's,  in order to discredit him as a homosexual, a Communist--anything--but they could not find a flaw in the crusader who became famous, as much for his blemish free character as for his book, and that was Ralph Nader.

Milton Friedman, the patron saint of the Tea Party and libertarians everywhere, of course has argued that government regulation is always bad--the Food and Drug Administration should not be able to prohibit unsafe drugs from the market, Friedman argues--let those injured by the drugs sue the companies who sell them, i.e., let the marketplace govern and police the bad or unsafe products, but under no circumstances allow the government to police industry in behalf of public safety. For that bit of idiocy, and presumably for other expressions of moronic insight, Professor Friedman was awarded the noble prize in economics.

When boats flounder offshore, the United States Coast Guard flies to the rescue. When hurricanes devastate North and South Carolina or Louisiana, FEMA moves in with relief. 

The government prevents injury and responds to injury, but it is the great Satan in the eyes of the Right.

Down with Government Regulation!

Let us make a list of all the things government does for which we should be happy, of which we ought to be proud.  Put airplane safety at the top, just below Social Security and Medicare.

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.