Is America More Dysfunctional Now than Ever?

With all the talk about the staggering start to Obamacare, with the crumbling of the middle class, the emergence of gridlock as a permanent state of Congress, the capacity of a few Southern states to throw a wrench into the gears of the federal government, we hear  a lot about how things are simply not working, dysfunctional and blame is assigned depending on your Republican or Democratic roots.

But, the fact is, banks are lending. Maybe to the wrong people, maybe for the wrong projects, but they are in business. Insurance companies (outside of health care insurance) are doing business and cheating their customers just as happily as they ever have. Automobiles are being made, sold, crashed, replaced. Hospitals are doing surgery, admitting patients, discharging at least some of them.

The military has found wars to fight, and although they are winding down some wars, new opportunities for dropping bombs, shooting guns, air lifting troops to war zones will inevitably present themselves. Career advancement in the military may not be as rapid or assured as it was when the armed forces were larger, but in the era of eternal war, which has persisted since WWII, things look good for the military's long term prospects.

Our infrastructure may be crumbling, but, eventually, unless the Tea Party wins more elections, the government will get around to refurbishing bridges, roads, telephone and power lines. 

Fracking may pollute under ground aquifers, but we are likely to be less hostage to Saudi sheikhs and we may be more energy independent and we may even use methane, wind and sun power better someday.

When you look at the 1860's, with open rebellion from the states which became the Tea party states, or at the 1960's, when boys were torn from the bosoms of their families, sent to Vietnam and killed, today's mercenary armies look much more benign--at least for the 98% of people who know they will never have to wear a uniform and shoot a gun in combat.

It may not be the worst of times/ best of times, but, for now our problems are mostly financial, and financial problems were worse in the 1930's.  Just about every problem we face now, was worse at some other decade in our history.

Of course, it will take only one terrorist with a nuclear bomb to undo this rosy picture, and we ought not tempt fate.

But we ought not despair. History can be a wonderful nostrum.

Eric Schlosser: Command and Control or Lack Thereof

Eric Schlosser

"When the missile left the ground, you could feel it in your bones. The blast, the roar, the sight of the flames slowly lifting the Titan II upward--they suddenly affected me. They were more visceral and powerful than any Cold War story. I had grown up in the 1970's hearing about missiles and warheads, throw weights and megatons, half believing that none of those weapons really worked, that the fears of nuclear Armageddon were overblown and based on some terrible fiction. The Titan II hesitated for a moment and then really took off, like a ten-story silver building disappearing into the sky. Within moments, it was gone, just a tail of flame somewhere over Mexico.
Watching that launch, the imaginary became tangible and concrete for me. It rattled me. It pierced a false sense of comfort. Right now thousands of missiles are hidden away, literally out of sight, topped with warheads and ready to go, awaiting the right electrical signal. They are a collective death wish, barely suppressed. Every one of them is an accident waiting to happen, a potential act of mass murder. They are out there, waiting, soulless and mechanical, sustained by our denial--and they work."
--Eric Schlosser, Command and Control

Thus ends Eric Schlosser's book, Command and Control. It is a catalog of accidents involving nuclear bombs: Bombs dropped five feet while being loaded into airplanes, bombs carried in airplanes which crash and explode, and one bomb which was simply struck by a falling wrench when a nineteen year old Air Force Airman--just a boy really-- dropped a wrench piercing the "skin" of a Titan II missile, setting off a chain of events culminating in the missile exploding, taking lives with it, as airmen and officers frantically tried to undo the mistake, the slip of a metal tool. 

The book is repetitive and could have used some editing, as events and time sequences are jumbled,  but that is forgivable in a book which took 6 years to write. Even the repetition and losing track of sequences of events is not wholly a distraction, in that it builds the central thesis which is that all works of man are inherently subject to error and are flawed, imperfect creations which can do harm as well as function the way they were intended to function.

Schlosser takes us through eras past, when the Soviet Union constructed a perimeter defense of nuclear tipped missiles which would automatically fire, unless manually over ridden, if the system detected  an "attack" from the United States occurred. It was straight out of "Dr. Strangelove," because the Soviets never told the United States about this system, so it had no deterrent effect. It was simply an instrument of reprisal. 

He takes us through the current perils of India and Pakistan armed with nuclear weapons, of terrorists who are plotting to steal a few.

The critical point Schlosser makes is that more weapons have not made us more secure, but less.  

We once had three parts to our deterrent scheme: Part One, Airplanes with nuclear bombs which were kept aloft circling the northern borders--Pease in New Hampshire was part of the Strategic Air Command--and New Hampshire was targeted because airplanes with nuclear bombs flew out of Pease; part two,  missiles in the ground in places from Arkansas to Kansas to Washington state to California; and part three,  missiles in submarines which were and are essentially undetectable and untouchable and are enough of a deterrent all by themselves, because there are enough of these stealth weapons to kill Russia and before that, the Soviet Union several times over.

The problem with the airplane part is that airplanes were clearly  ineffective. They never would have reached their targets. They also were very risky to the owners, i.e. the people of the USA. Airplanes crashed. They accidentally dropped bombs on the land they flew over, namely the United States of America. Fortunately none of these mishaps resulted in the detonation of the nuclear part of the bombs, but that was, as one of the generals said, "Part good technology, part  heroism and part divine intervention. The last part being by far the most important." The airplane part was kept going because the Air Force wanted to be in on the game; air force generals wanted to be power players in the game. And they had political clout. But the lumbering B-52's were kept parked by runways, or lumbering into the sky long after they were a credible threat or deterrent. They were like so many Don Quioxte's, riding on broken down steads off to do glorious but doomed battle, no real threat to anyone.

The problem with the in ground missiles is they needed maintenance, and they were sitting ducks. The Russians could target them, and did, dozens of times over and the ground missiles would be wiped out in any first strike. There was once a plan to move the missiles around in a massive shell game, to thwart a first strike, to remediate this vulnerability, but this plan was too expensive even for the American Congress. Even jackasses can occasionally do sums. So the missiles we've got which are still in the ground, are magnets for nuclear missiles from Russia, but likely they pose more threat to the communities they are buried near than to any city in Russia or any Russian military base.

The submarines were and are still pretty much invulnerable, as long as no captain or crew goes berserk, and as long as communicating with all those submarines occurs flawlessly.

This is a worthwhile book. It is a book Congress men and women should read, if they can still  read at all.

Mr. Schlosser has written about other important topics: he has focused on the American food chain, made a movie based on Michael Pollen's Omnivores Dilemma, the excellent "Food, Inc."  He has written about the American prison system.   So he picks topics we do not want to think about, because thinking about these things it makes us uncomfortable.

The problem is, this is the same problem "The Wire" encountered. Truth, no matter how important, when it becomes too uncomfortable, is something the greater public (and I use that phrase ironically) is apt to deny, or to ignore or to simply refuse to hear. As magnificent as "The Wire"was, it never won an Emmy, never won a large audience. It was simply, funny as it could be, in the end, too sad and depressing. And this may be the fate of Command and Control an important topic we'd rather not think about.

As T.S. Eliot observed: Humankind cannot bear too much reality.

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.