Where Everyone's an Expert

Mad Dog recalls, only dimly, some novel by Flannery O'Connor--may have been Wise Blood-- which had a character, a twenty-something, who feels "called" to preach God's word and he stands on the street corner proclaiming "truths" which he just simply "knows, " like, "There is no man without sin."  This scene made a great impression on Mad Dog, because it portrayed so clearly that desire to be a person who "knows." This was an unschooled, thoroughly ignorant young person who, on some level, understood his own paucity of knowledge, rigorously examined,  and he wanted to become a person of wisdom and knowledge, without the drudgery of acquiring wisdom and knowledge. 

There is almost an Augenblick diagnosis of the man who has only phony, dreamed up knowledge: He is wide eyed, excited, eager, while the man who has acquire knowledge slowly, systematically, rigorously is slumped shouldered, burdened by the effort and almost burdened by the weight of his knowledge. Where the ignorant zealot is eager to convey the simple truths he knows, the genuine article has no simple truths, only complex truths. 

This will for instant understanding and enlightenment may be the same impulse which causes people to blog--instant punditry: I speak, therefore I know.

The same impulse is clearly what fuels many people to talk, read, exchange about politics and the blood brothers of politics: economics and sociology.

You can see this will to be a savant in Ted Cruz, Rand Paul and New Gingrich. They all share that sense of urgency, the will to preach, to make others understand the truths they "know," truths, which of course, are only the containers for the realities these men wished were true.

When Ted Cruz says the battle over Obamacare is really the first skirmish in the war between those who would abolish the free market in this country and those who believe in capitalism and free market, he is preaching his gospel on the street corner, speaking in tongues.

When Rand Paul says we need to cut government spending and reduce deficits because government spending is unsustainable and will cause economic catastrophe, he knows these things because he wants to believe them. Paul Krugman, of course, looking at history and at numbers and debating this proposition over the years, knows  just the opposite: We ought to be spending more in times of slow economic growth.

These articles of political and economic faith cannot be tested with double blind, randomized, prospective, controlled studies.  That's what makes them articles of faith. 

It is precisely because nobody can really know whether more spending will save us or sink us that the actors proclaiming, declaiming, exclaiming do so with such urgency and drama--when you don't really know, you better look like you have no doubt.

My Own Private JFK

Fifty years! Hardly seems possible. Some part of you always remains 16.

JFK was the first President Mad Dog can really remember in great detail, personally. Eisenhower was a gray old man. Now that Mad Dog has learned more about Eisenhower's critical approach to the reactionary forces within the US military, Ike looks a lot better. But then Eisenhower was just another irrelevant old man.

And now JFK looks...well, a lot different.

What swept Mad Dog away as a teenager was the marketing, the glamor machine--JFK had that great regional accent which made him sound smarter and more exotic. The only regional accents Mad Dog heard growing up were from the South, and Mad Dog associated those accents with stupidity, brutality and backwardness. 

And there were those press conferences, full of wit and joy and class. And those gatherings at the White House of luminaries, Nobel prize winners, scientists, artists, athletes. One night, JFK stood in front of a glittering dining room, looked around at all the famous, accomplished people and said, "This is perhaps the greatest concentration of talent, creativity and accomplishment to be present in this room in  the White House,  since Thomas Jefferson dined here, alone."

Mad Dog pleaded with his parents to allow him to go downtown to the Kennedy Inauguration, and finally they gave consent, but it snowed 8 inches and that much snow paralyzed Washington, DC. So Mad Dog had to watch it on TV at home, the same way kids in New Hampshire did. Robert Frost tried to read a poem he had written for the occasion, but the sun reflecting off the snow blinded him and JFK stood up to shade the lectern so Frost could read, but Frost gave up trying to read and said he would recite a poem he didn't need to read, one he knew from memory, a poem called, "The Gift Outright." There he was, an old man, standing next to the youngest President, reciting from memory. A lovely moment in American history.  Mad Dog never saw JFK in the flesh. He did meet Jackie Kennedy, much later, when Mad Dog was a resident in medicine at New York Hospital, but never JFK himself.

Mad Dog's father thought Kennedy something of a light weight, and he could not abide Jackie Kennedy. Every time Jackie's name came up, Mad Dog's father would tell the story about when she was a cub reporter and he had to take a telephone call from her,  to answer some questions about some government program and what really struck him was "that awful, brassy voice."  She had no class whatsoever. Just a pushy career woman, trying to make it in Washington.  When she gave her famous televised tour of the White House with that phony whispery voice, Mad Dog's father just howled. "You want a breathy whisper, go for Marilyn Monroe. She, at least, is just being funny and she is a class act."

Apparently, JFK may have agreed.

We know more now. JFK took his pleasures where he found them. His sexual mores were aligned with those of his father. You married a woman, who you put on a pedestal, and you bedded other women, for pleasure. Once Upon A Secret is but one memoir of a woman who JFK had procured, brought to the White House and had sex.  All those sexual adventures mean to Mad Dog now, is JFK lived in an era which demanded he lie about his sex life, an era which has not yet ended.

The Friday Kennedy was shot, there was supposed to be a Judy Collins concert at the  high school, which Mad Dog was in charge of publicizing and there was considerable criticism Mad Dog had done a pretty poor job. Judy Collins was then an  unknown folk singer and she had agreed to appear at the  high school because it had the biggest gym in the county--a field house with a geodesic dome designed by Buckminster Fuller, and the ticket sales had been anemic and that field house was going to be empty. Of course, the concert was cancelled with the news from Dallas.

A few kids at school had transitor radios, but  it was not like today, where everyone is  linked in--radios were not usually turned on until the bus ride home from school. But students  looked out their windows and all those yellow buses were pulling up in front of the school and it was only 2 o'clock in the afternoon. There was that long line of buses and everyone knew something was up. And kids who had radios, turned them on.

They interrupted classes with a Public Address system announcement. 

They were smart enough to select Mr. Good to deliver the news. He really did live up to his name: Everyone really liked him. He was the vice principal.  He said the President had been shot in Dallas but there was no word as yet about his condition. On the way to the buses, kids clustered around anyone who had a radio to his ear, and they knew before they got on the buses: the President was dead.

That school, Walt Whitman High School,  was just miles from the District line, and most of the kids were children of  federal employees, civil servants, Congressmen,  Cabinet officers. Like adolescents everywhere, the students  were more concerned day to day with who was cool and who was dating whom, and it did not matter much what their parents did for work, or who was a Senator's daughter. It mattered if she was cute or bright or stupid, but nobody cared much if your father was a Congressman. But at that school most kids did feel some direct connection to the federal government, and even if their parents were Republicans, nobody was anything but distraught that day. Didn't matter if Kennedy was a Democrat, the idea that somebody could shoot dead the President of the United States made everyone pretty grim.

Personally, Mad Dog was furious. Mad Dog was mad at himself for thinking about how at least he would not have to look out at all those empty seats in the field house and feel like a failure, but he was really furious about the idea somebody could shoot the President, his  President, a President to whom he felt somehow personally connected. 

We heard a lot about Texas over the next few days, how they were all a bunch of haters down there.  But we could see the television images from Dallas and it was pretty clear not everyone in Texas was happy Kennedy had been shot.

As fate would have it, Mad Dog's college girlfriend was from Houston and one of his best friends from Dallas.  Mad Dog sort of made them exceptions, like people in the South made exceptions for Negroes they knew personally. "Oh, he may be a Negro, but he's okay."  That's the way Mad Dog felt about Texans in college. In the end, though, there was a cultural gap between Mad Dog and the girl from Texas.  Broke up with her in medical school. It would never have worked. You can take the girl out of Texas, but you cannot take Texas out of the girl.

But back to Kennedy.

As for his presidency, Command and Control (Eric Schlosser) tells the story Mad Dog had not appreciated, about just how close we came to nuclear war and the most harrowing part of it was not the craziness of Khrushchev, but it was the craziness of our own military leaders, who seriously urged JFK to launch a first strike against the Soviet Union. How did these maniacs rise to the top of the American military?

JFK was rendered impotent to pass legislation to reverse Jim Crow in the South. There were drinking fountains, bathrooms, restaurants, motels for whites only throughout the South and others marked "Colored."  JFK himself was clearly appalled by this. But the Democratic party in those days was a Southern party. Only the Confederate states voted reliably Democratic, against the Republican party of Lincoln, while New Hampshire had William Loeb of the Manchester Union Leader, and the Granite State was reliably Republican, as was much of the Midwest.

LBJ, who may have murdered JFK, changed that alignment of the parties. He pushed for the passage of the Voting Rights Act, and legislation which made segregation illegal and the South jumped ship and turned Republican on a dime.

So, in retrospect, JFK was a transition figure, who managed to keep America from going over the Armageddon cliff, but could not do much to change the nature of life in America for the underclasses. He really could not accomplish much. And he did inject advisers into Vietnam. We'll never know whether or not he would have extricated us from Vietnam. 

We do know he did not push the button during the Cuban missile crisis.

And avoiding Armageddon is no small accomplishment.

The Honor Roll

Here is a list of the states with the highest rates of child poverty, in order:

1. Mississippi
2. New Mexico
3. Arkansas
4. Louisiana
5. Alabama
6. Georgia
7. Arizona
8. South Carolina
9. Kentucky
10. North Carolina
11. Tennessee
12. Texas

The 13th state is Florida, the 14th Michigan.

Notice anything about these places? (Hint, consult the map above, which is a map of the districts which sent Tea Party Representatives to Congress.) One other connection you might make is every Confederate state is listed, save Virginia. Florida of course, would have made it had it not been for New Mexico grabbing a spot.

And New Mexico is the anomaly. One might think New Mexico made it because of "Breaking Bad" but Mad Dog's guess is there are a lot of impoverished Indian reservations in New Mexico.

Arizona, of course, was not in the Confederacy, but only because it was not a state at the time. With Sheriff Arpaio driving the streets in his customized tank, looking for dark skinned people who must be illegal aliens, Arizona is at least an honorary member of the Confederacy.

Is it not remarkable that those places represented by Tea Party fanatics are the most backward, impoverished, uneducated, underachieving parts of our country? We don't need no help from Washington, these districts say. Well, maybe you might ought to think again about that, pardner.

Think of Texas Representative Pete Olson, who spoke into the cameras at a recent Congressional hearing on the troubles with the Obamacare roll out and said, ever so modestly, "Being a computer science major from Rice University and a former naval aviator who could not afford to have my computer drop off line as I'm rolling my plane to drop a torpedo to stop a Russian submarine from launching a ballistic missile, a nuclear missile at our country..."

Wow! There's a lot going on in that little tirade. What a man! He has been saving our country, ever since he went to a FREE university, and worked for the FEDERAL GOVERNMENT to protect our nation using the flawless technology aboard his United States Navy, federal government made and maintained airplane. And he has nothing but scorn for the federal government, which just cannot do anything right, and ought to be defunded, shut down and put out of business, even if kids in his own state are starving, uneducated and think school is about marching bands and Friday night football games. 

It has struck Mad Dog nearly mute when he realizes that many of the most vehement anti government, free market, Ayn Rand, frothing, self made men have been government employees (often military) state employees or employees of big corporations which fed on the government teat, their entire careers.  They have never been out there in that vaunted "free market" risking their own financial fate at sea. They have always had a W-2 form and a steady paycheck. (Mad Dog was self employed for most of his career and can smell a salary man from way off.) Mr. Olson, one might note, currently gets his 6  figure pay check, his health insurance and his gym and franking privileges courtesy of the federal government he so reviles.

Was Mark Twain being overly generous when he said, "Consider our Congress. Now, consider a pack of jackasses. But then, I repeat myself"?

Website Debacle: Oh, Government Just Can't Do Anything Right

Gleeful Republicans, Eric Cantor most vociferously, have pointed to the frustration experienced by millions trying to sign up for Obamacare and failing to get past the first screen. 
What this signifies, you see, is:
1. Government cannot do anything right.

2. Obamacare is a big government program that doesn't work right. That cannot work right. That will never work right. Because government is the problem, not the solution. (This being the only Republican zing phrase which has ever really had mass appeal and it is beloved of the Tea Party, having been coined by Ronald Reagan. Reagan should have known, since, in his hand, that was very true.)

3. When government does not work right, the only reasonable response is to abandon the whole idea of government and to eliminate government programs, in this case, Obamacare.


On the other hand, when the Republicans attempted to dis-enfranchise millions of voters with their voting place laws, restricting hours, eliminating mail in ballots, eliminating early voting (all in the name of preventing "voter fraud) well, that was just fine.  Long lines and frustration there meant everything was working as planned, no problems.

Do John Boehner, Eric Cantor and all the other Tea Party losers really think this line is going to sell?

Stay tuned.

Arthur Herman and Nuclear Bomb Blindness

Reviewing Eric Schlosser's excellent book, Command and Control, Arthur Herman writes in the Wall Street Journal that Mr. Schlosser's Jeremiad is based on an irrational fear which is belied by the evidence at hand.

Herman asks: If having 10,000 nuclear bombs on missiles, in airplanes and in submarines is so dangerous, then why have we not have more accidents?  
Mr. Herman finds the very fact that there was only one case where a nuclear bomb blew up in a silo (in Arkansas) and the nuclear part of the bomb did not detonate-- because safety systems worked--very reassuring.   Having large number of bombs, any one of which could level a state and contaminate the entire East Coast in a way which would make Fukishima look like a garden party, is no problem for Mr. Herman.

Reading this review, from a conservative professor (a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute) in a conservative newspaper (WSJ) says all that needs to be said about the capacity of the human mind to use the mechanism of denial to achieve a sense of comfort and to validate dearly held beliefs.

For any normal human being reading this book, with its long list of accidents, and narrowly avoided catastrophes, this catalog of near catastrophes is a cautionary tale--this would be a cautionary tale, for anyone not welded to an ideology, an ideology which says private enterprise and big corporations feeding on the government teat are--not just works of man but works of God.

For anyone who works in medicine, or in any of a  variety of technical or engineering realms, the experience of things going wrong is very familiar. Things go wrong on the ward, doing procedures, doing surgery, all the time. It's part of the experience of working with mechanical things. Things happen. 

 In the case of surgery, you inadvertently nick an artery and you put your finger on the punctured artery, hold it, maybe throw in a suture to stop the bleeding, and you move on. In the case of nuclear bomb, not so easy. Things go wrong there, it's not so easy;  the consequences are large. The chance to correct, to retrieve, to adjust is simply on a different level, when it comes to a bomb which can level the state of Arkansas. In the case of the Arkansas missile, they knicked a missile fuel tank and they put the entire state of Arkansas at risk and there was precious little they could do to avert catastrophe. They quite literally flew on a wing and a prayer.

For the Wall Street Journal, for Professor Herman, this book is a screed, a polemic and a call for fuzzy minded liberal efforts to reduce the number of nuclear bombs around the planet, and that would be bad for business.

From the point of view of an engineer or a surgeon, this is a simple document of numbers:  You have a certain number of bombs and things go wrong with those bombs at a certain rate, an incidence, and if you multiply out risks and incidence, you get a certain rate of occurrence. We haven't reached that occurrence quite yet, but it's coming.

Any one can see this. Only the willfully blind cannot.

Ted Cruz and Joseph McCarthy

But Jane Mayer reports today that it wasn’t too long ago that Cruz delivered a speech at a Fourth of July weekend political rally, sponsored by the Koch brothers’ political group, accusing Harvard Law School of harboring secret Communists on its faculty

Cruz greeted the [2010] audience jovially, but soon launched an impassioned attack on President Obama, whom he described as “the most radical” President “ever to occupy the Oval Office.” (I was covering the conference and kept the notes.)
He then went on to assert that Obama, who attended Harvard Law School four years ahead of him, “would have made a perfect president of Harvard Law School.” The reason, said Cruz, was that, “There were fewer declared Republicans in the faculty when we were there than Communists! There was one Republican. But there were twelve who would say they were Marxists who believed in the Communists overthrowing the United States government.”

A Harvard Law spokesperson told Mayer the school is “puzzled” by Cruz’s accusations.



One of the many humbling thing about the blogosphere is the realization it forces on you that your voice is one of millions, and whatever brilliant thought you may have had, whatever insight, others have likely already noticed the same thing.

All this is by way of saying, when Mad Dog ran photos of Senator Joseph McCarthy and Senator Ted Cruz on a recent post, he was not the only one or possibly not even the first to notice the eerie resemblance.  Try googling "Ted Cruz and Senator Joseph McCarthy."

But, if great minds think alike, then so be it. If many people see the same thing, maybe, and only maybe, there is something to it. A demagogue in search of his own personal enrichment and fame, fueled by vainglory, is a demagogue.

High Tea at Dewey LeBoeuf: The Rich, The Entitled, The Foul

In the midst of the acting out of Tea Party Congressmen and Senators, we must always remember these Washington clowns are only part of the circus which has become America.

Pictured here are various lawyers who were part of the law firm Dewey LeBoeuf, which failed and collapsed into bankruptcy last year.

The New Yorker article, by James  Stewart,  detailing the collapse in this week's issue is astonishing for the simple, unvarnished portrayal of rapacious avarice which characterized every one of the lawyers mentioned. 

Mitt Romney became infamous for his portrayal of the "takers" who, with an outrageous sense of entitlement make demands on the federal government food stamp programs, on Medicaid and on a wide variety of "safety net" programs which Tea Party Congressmen claim are the bleeding this country dry.

The most egregious welfare queen cannot hold a candle to any of these entitled graduates of prestigious law schools whose sense of entitlement does not extend to a food stamp or a free visit to the emergency room:  These guys feel mortally offended if someone suggests they should be paid less than $6 million a year, before their bonuses.  One still claims the now defunct law firm owes him $60 which he richly deserves. 

And what makes them so valuable and so deserving of this sort of salary?  They bring in clients like Disney and they negotiate deals with other people's money, at no personal risk to themselves, their families. No lives are at stake.  They play with the big dollars of big corporations, which, if things fall apart, will simply invest in new ventures.

Mad Dog is profoundly depressed reading about these people, just to learn how very loathsome human beings can become.  He is currently trying to figure out how he would design a law to strip them of their huge, undeserved wealth.

After the Civil War, Thaddeus Stevens wanted to strip the plantation owners of their slaves, their estates, their wealth and make them get back to the soil and to a life of humble labor, to strip these arrogant aristocrats of their imperiousness and restore them to the life and virtues of a humble Republican.

Of course, "Republican" had an entirely different meaning in those days.