Scott Brown: U.S. Senator from New Hampshire?

Francis Underwood

“What you have to understand about my people is that they are a noble people. Humility is their form of pride. It is their strength; it is their weakness. And if you can humble yourself before them they will do anything you ask.”
--Francis Underwood, House of Cards

Scott Brown wants to go back to the U.S. Senate, this time representing New Hampshire. If he wins, New Hampshire would be represented by two Republicans in the Senate, likely giving the Republicans both houses and ending any hope of President Obama being able to do much of anything in his remaining time in the White House. 

Karl Rove is salivating. The Koch brothers are sending millions to Brown's campaign.
All that stands between this dismal prospect and fruition is the New Hampshire voter.

United States Senator Jeanne Shaheen

It must be admitted, in terms of how we assess candidates for political office, Brown has the advantage from an "image" viewpoint: He is, as the lingo goes, an "attractive" candidate.  Even that stalwart Democrat, Maud of Hampton, has noted he is good looking.
He also has that most appealing of all characteristics:  A dark past. He says he was sexually abused by a camp counselor, mistreated by his several step fathers--his mother was married three times--and he was arrested as a youth for shop lifting before finally straightening out and attended Tufts and then BC law.

Brown will play on his wayward, dark past. As that most canny of all politicians, Francis Underwood, from South Carolina has noted, his constituents worship at the church of humility. Underwood always positions himself to be more humble than thou, and his constituents love him for it. He arrives with all the pomp and circumstance of a United States Representative and then throws himself on their mercy--and soon has them eating out of his hand.
Mr. Brown will do that same thing in New Hampshire. It will have wide appeal here, because, outside of the Seacoast, there are substantial populations of voters in the Granite state who burn with resentment at their "betters." For these voters, there was no chance of staying in school beyond high school, not when you come from a family of eight children, and your father drives a truck and your mother works at Walmart and your high school teachers think coloring maps within the lines is the highest form of academic achievement.  For many voters, their options were going to work after high school, or going into military service. 

Mr. Brown "served" with the National Guard in Afghanistan, albeit for only 2 weeks. He is something of a dilettante soldier.

Beefcake, Lightweight Brown

As a senator from Massachusetts, he had enough sense to realize he had to represent a liberal state from a reactionary party, so he voted for a Democratic jobs bill and spoke the words of bipartisanship: He voted for allowing the morning after pill to be given to rape victims to prevent pregnancy (implantation) thus risking the wrath of the Republican hard liners who would say a fertilized ovum is a human being and the morning after pill prevents that human being from finding a home in the uterus.

So, he was not the most right wing of the right wing party.
On the other hand, he talked the Republican talk, blaming the poverty stricken for their own poverty--they are poor because they are lazy, don't want to work and are deserving of their poverty. That is the fundamental doctrine of the fundamentalist Republicans, and Scott Brown embraces it.

Some have argued we need more Republicans like Susan Collins in the Congress, to help the Republican Party move away from the ultra right position it currently embraces. 

Nothing could be farther from the truth. That same argument is always advanced in the face of very extreme political parties:  There were no "good" Nazi's. Those who remained silent, who joined the party to change it from within, who excused their membership as an attempt to be in a position to moderate extreme positions found themselves being part of the problem, co opted by the villainy which sucked up the moderates.  The venomous snake also has muscles and bones and a nervous system, all of which function to put the snake into position to strike and to sink its venom into its victims. Those nerve, muscle and bone cells are no less a part of the snake than the venom.

The Worst Form of Government Possible: Except for All The Others

Plaice Cove, Hampton, February

Scott Brown will try to take Jean Shaheen's seat in the United States Senate this Fall. The man who wore pink leather shorts on his first date with his wife may just win.  Now Mad Dog  has nothing (much) against a man who wears pink leather shorts, as long as he wears them on a first date, but really, is this lightweight going to waltz into a seat in the United States Senate because enough ignoramuses in New Hampshire, who have not been personally hurt by Obamacare will vote for Brown, because they have heard Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly and the whole chorus of Tea Party hyenas howling how terrible Obamacare has been for the unnamed, mostly imagined masses?

Hampton, March Storm 

And the Democrats, good as they are at managing and parsing date about the electorate, are facing obliteration because they have not managed to get out from behind their computers and make a visceral connection with the electorate, which is to say with Joe Sixpack and Josiah Whitebread Yankee, who reads the Manchester Union Leader or Foster's, if he reads any newspaper at all, but mostly he just listens to Greta and company on Fox News.

Clearing a Driveway on Garbage Collection Day

Mad Dog loves his adopted state. He has real affection for the cynical Yankees who are his neighbors, but he despairs of their lack of sophistication when it comes to Washington and their place in the global marketplace.

He despairs, that is, until he thinks back to his experiences canvassing door to door last election for President Obama. Wandering up a driveway, toward a house, with all the wrong indicators in place--work van in the driveway, American flag hanging out front, dead deer strung up from a branch on a nearby tree, Country music blaring from a radio as the man of the house, with a half drunk six pack of beer next to his truck, and he is deep over the front fender, working beneath the hood of  his truck.  He finally notices Mad Dog , when he is  about three feet from him. Mad Dog looks  around for the Pit Bull dog, who he knows will be bounding out from behind some shrub, hungering for Mad Dog's vital organs. 

Mad Dog is wearing his  "Obama" hat.

The weekend mechanic is holding a wrench like a bludgeon, and he looks at Mad Dog's  hat and at his clipboard, which Mad Dog  holds as a shield.

He says, "I can guess what you want."
"Just want to ask if you are planning to vote Tuesday."
"Yeah, I'll be there," he says. "Wouldn't miss it."
"Fine," Mad Dog  says and turns to go.
"Don't you want to know who I'm going to vote for?"
"That's okay," Mad Dog saya. "I just have to check off I've talked to you."
"Obama," he says, looking at Mad Dog  from the corners of  his eyes.
"Really?" Mad Dog  cannot help blurting. "Hasn't been an easy first term."
"I figure with the shit sandwich they handed him, and no help to eat it, he deserves some more time."

So there you have it.  Independent thinking in Hampton, New Hampshire. Doesn't show up at the polls often enough, far as Mad Dog is  concerned. But it can happen. Maybe it will happen this Fall, if lightning can strike twice in the same town.

The Lies We Live By: Redeployment

You say you want the truth?  Whose truth?  We all live by lies, some more than others, but for every truth there are two lies. 

To be politically correct, one must always begin by saying, "I honor your service," and "The brave men and women who have borne the burden of this war."  And, "He is serving a greater cause."  And "He is fighting for his country." And, she is "fighting for freedom, for us, for our freedom over there."

There have been wars which should have been fought because they brought down evil--the Civil War of the United States 1860-1865, and the war against Hitler. In those wars, Mad Dog likes to think, he would have served, even though that might have meant obeying orders from incompetent officers who had conceived breathtakingly stupid approaches to fighting the enemy. 

But in his lifetime, Mad Dog has seen only unnecessary, stupid and unsuccessful wars against Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, part of a cycle of unending war fought for a filthy web of reasons, profiting the few at the expense of the many.

In "Redeployment"  a book of short stories about American soldiers in Iraq, the fighting men and women of the U.S. forces are deployed and re deployed, as the rest of the country goes shopping, pays little more in taxes and never has the war hit home in the form of a neighborhood kid returning in a body bag.

The narrative about what an injustice this is--that only a few serve--has been used to shame us into taking action, and is meant to say, "Look how heroic these people who fight for us are, while the rest of us go about our fat, self indulgent lives."

And what are these soldiers actually doing? Are they awakening every morning saying to themselves, "I am going to defend America today?"  For many soldiers, war was the greatest adventure of their lives. It was terrifying. It was risky. But like driving fast and drunk, it was fun.

War took them, to exotic places, and put guns in their hands, where,  in the immortal words of  Private Joker of "Full Metal Jacket, "I wanted to meet interesting and stimulating people, of an ancient culture...and kill them."

Which is not to say American soldiers walking down an Iraqi street have the same level of blind lethality and rage their fathers had in Vietnam, but the experience is similar in the sense these young Americans are dropped into a strange planet and they are armed and there to kill.  On his helmet is penned, "Born To Kill," and in the case of so many young men and women who see no viable financial options in life, they are indeed.

Duty, honor, country.
They are fighting for "freedom."
But, really, are these men and women fighting for your "freedom" and mine?  Are they fighting for their country?  Sad to say, Mad Dog cannot buy that. They are fighting as mercenaries and dressing up their decision in patriotic terms. The American soldier enlists because it's the best job and the best career he or she can find. These soldiers fight out of self interest and they say, and we say and their generals and Congressmen say they are fighting for "freedom." That's really a deep insult to the idea of fighting for freedom. The 20th Massachusetts fought for freedom in the Civil War.

Today's American soldier is fighting for a paycheck, fighting for himself, for respectability and, as too many learn, they are doing it all for chump change. It's a business, like the merchant marine. You go abroad, you come home and you go out again. It's a job. 

Which is not to say, on some level, the American soldier does not believe that by taking orders he is fighting for freedom, serving his country, but as Thoreau observed long ago, mindless marching off to war is not serving your country: Thinking serves your country. You serve your country by acting to prevent young men and women from being swept up into the military, told they are fighting for freedom. Whose freedom?
How free are the soldiers who fight for freedom? Are they not trapped by a paucity of economic and financial options? 

If we never fired a shot in Iraq would a single American be less free? Less safe?

"Full Metal Jacket" the movie based on "Short Timers" documents how typical, feckless American boys are transformed into green, mean, killing machines and what happens to them as a result.  There have been other depictions of this experience, and "Redepolyment" is a part of that line.

What Mad Dog has seen is this:  You are born into a family of eight children. Your parents cannot provide for the education of all these children. They were in the same boat themselves. Your father, if you and he are lucky, was gainfully employed, drove a truck, worked for the state or for Walmart. Your mother went to cosmetology school and works as a cashier at Seven Eleven. You got through high school, looked around and by far the most money you could make, the best promise for ongoing employment is the Army or the Marines, or the Navy if you have Navy in the family or Air Force if you grew up in near Pease.  Not only that, you can take a leap up in respectability, if you get yourself into a uniform. Your girlfriend's parents look at you differently now.

So off you go, to fight for the Koch brothers and for all those American voting districts where they make weapons systems,  which the government wants to close but which are so much part of the economy, Congressmen keep those factories going, and the forts and bases open--It's Undershaft's truth: There is too much money in weapons and war to close it down.

So are you fighting for freedom or for wealth?

At your funeral, they will say the words: "Duty, Honor, Country."

Shakespeare had Falstaff look at a bloated, rotting corpse and say, "There's honor for you."

That they are sold lies is nothing new. It is necessary, even. How do you get an eighteen year old to carry a gun, to fire it at someone, to go back out the next day even when he's seen his friend's head blown off? You train him. Duty, honor, country. What you are doing is good. This is the best thing you have ever done in life, the best thing of which you are capable.  A lie you can fight by.

This is why Slim Charles tells his chief executive, in "The Wire:"
"I mean, shit, it's what war is, you know?  Once you in, you in it. If it's a lie, then we fight on that lie. But we gotta fight."

Even during World War II, how did the kid in Brooklyn know that Hitler was killing children in concentration camps? Before the Civil War, how did the farm boy know that Simon Legree  was chasing down the slave woman across the ice floes--how did anyone know what was the representation of reality, of truth? Was slavery "Uncle Tom's Cabin" or the contented darkies singing "Swing Lo, Sweet Chariot," as they happily worked the cotton fields of Tara?  How do you get the truth, when truth is the first casualty of war?

As for "Duty," well now you are talking about a contract.  You sacrifice something to get something.

And "Country," well, our country fought Hitler, fought a bunch of Nazi thugs who were trying to cleanse Europe of dirty, dark, non Aryan vermin. But we fought the racist Nazis with an army which segregated Black men from white men, because, Heaven Forbid, those Black men contaminate the white troops. Back home, in America, in Alabama and Mississippi white men were lynching Black men, and raping Black women while   Black brothers and fathers,  in uniform, flew airplanes, dug ditches, died and burned alive for their country, for honor and to do their duty. 

Duty, honor, country, all true. 

Whose truths? 

Paul Ryan and The Hammock Theory: The Poor Deserve Their Fate

"We don't want to turn the safety net into a hammock that lulls able-bodied people to lives of dependency and complacency, that drains them of their will and their incentive to make the most of their lives."

--Congressman Paul Ryan 

As Paul Krugman points out in Today's New York Times, encased in this sentence are actually two bedrock Republican beliefs:  1. Antipoverty programs breed complacency. 2. The failure of the poor to work as much as they should is what traps them in poverty.

Krugman is correct about what Ryan is saying, but there is more to Ryan's beliefs. This is a belief system Ryan, his fellow country club Republicans, the Koch Brothers, my own colleagues at work who are white bread Republicans, my former Southern neighbors, teachers and gentry all embraced because they needed to embrace it. They all loved Ronald Reagan because he could dismiss the poor and their suffering with a shrug of his shoulders--"There will always be poor," Reagan said, and he let his voice trail off, stating quite unmistakably the part of the sentence he did not have to speak: And there is nothing any of us can do about them, for them. They are not our problem, and we should not feel guilty about their suffering while we eat well, drive expensive cars, enjoy several lavish homes and dream vacations. 

This is simply an echo of what White people used to say about Blacks when Mad Dog was growing up: They are poor because:  1. They are lazy  2. They are stupid 3. They are happy being poor and have no ambition. They are not our fault.

Of course, the rich and the dominant need to feel this way.

They cannot believe they were born on third base and they must believe they deserve all the good things they have earned , that they won their success fair and square, by hard work and that the flip side is the losers lost fair and square. So, as Mr. Ryan and Mr. Boehner and Mr. McConnell and every last Republican in Congress would have you believe what we have in America today is the undeserving poor and the deserving rich.

As the Republicans see it, America is a just society, and everyone here gets his just desserts. If you work hard, you prosper. if not, you starve, unless those Democrats start giving away money to the undeserving poor, start trying to redistribute the wealth in some unfair way.

This rationale has been used to justify cutting back on food stamps for the poor: If you feed them they will breed. Of course, anyone who looks at the farm bill is struck by the enormity of government hand outs to farmers, most of whom have never wielded a pitch fork or bailed hay, most of whom are large corporate executive types in expensive suits,  who get paid by the government for not growing or raising stock at times, or  they simply hand off their losses to the government when things go poorly.  

Then there are the subsidies for oil companies, for all sorts of companies:  The system boils down to  rich people paying to elect Congressmen and Senators who then vote billions to support the businesses and incomes of those same rich people. 

We have the best Congress money can buy.

Of course, we have all learned about the working poor, who work two or even three jobs a day and cannot make ends meet and, until Obamacare, could not possibly afford health insurance. But now giving them health care just encourages them to breed, don't you know?

The solution to providing for the needy among us is to allow individual rich people to give to charity--so it is the wise rich who deserve who should be saved--or, another solution is  allowing rich people to make enough money they can afford to hire the undeserving poor. Of course, with the advent of technology, the richest companies often employ very few people--we no longer have an economy of mega factories employing thousands of workers. That sector is shrinking rapidly into a dot.

What's a Democrat to do?  About all we can do is every time a Republican opens his mouth about the deserving rich and the undeserving poor is to call him or her on it. We have to stand up and say, "Oh, so the poor deserve their poverty because they are lazy and probably just not bright enough? Is that what you are saying?  And the rich deserve their wealth, not because they've bought themselves a rigged system,  but because they are genetically superior, and they work harder and are more deserving?  Voters, if you believe that, vote Republican."

America at High Noon

One of the alluring aspects of the story of St. George and the dragon is the individual, solitary effort of St. George. The dragon had been a real problem and the elders  had been unable to solve it--giving up their young women to the dragon.  But St. George, without having to organize any group, without having to think about regulations, simply rode out on his horse and dispatched the dragon. One man: problem solved.
It's a story we have told in different forms through the ages:  Gary Cooper, at High Noon, has to face the gang of killers alone. Ultimately, he has to rely on himself, as every man in this life does. In the end, we are all alone. We come into t he world alone and we depart alone. The solitary soul. Odysseus may travel with companions, but in the end, he is washed up on his home shore alone.

In the real world, however, at least in the 21st century,  what one man can accomplish alone, is limited. Dragons who can be killed by a single knight on horseback are now few and far between. Most really important problems today cannot be solved by a single brave man, of great resolve and strength.  They require lots of people and lots of organization.
Ulysses S. Grant solved the greatest problem of his age, but not alone. He was single minded, but he did not act alone. 
He would show up at the tent of a subordinate general, his eyes fastened on the tops of his own shoes, kicking dirt, shoulders hunched, listening to the subordinate's explanations of his problems, why his army could not move from its current position, but the soldiers watching the conversation always knew: When Grant showed up, there would be fighting soon. 
The fox is very clever and knows many things; the hedgehog is not so clever, and he knows only one thing, but he knows it well.  Grant knew one thing: He had to engage the enemy, to keep in constant contact, to keep the pressure on Lee and Lee's army. He knew that territory, arms, supply lines, cities--none of that would win the war. He knew his one objective was to meet the enemy army and destroy it. 
After the war, one of the great Southern generals was asked how the Army of Northern Virginia had been brought to defeat. What logistical problems, what economic problems, what strategic problems had led to defeat?  "I think the Union army likely had something to do with it," he said, in the end. 

Grant was the force which drove that army.
But that took other people, organization, getting people to  swing into action.
Reading Raffi Khatchadourian's  long, excellent article in the New Yorker  (March 3), the long, complicated, push to develop a hydrogen nuclear plant which could produce an inexhaustible supply of energy for everyone on earth, out of abundant hydrogen, one has to appreciate how much working together, as frustrating and inefficient as it may be, is the only way to achieve really enormous goals. 

Albert Einstein did not make the atomic bomb in his garage. A large group of men did that. 

For all their insistence that government is the problem, the Tea Party, Joe Sixpack, the heart and soul of the Republican Party have cleaved to one, central idea: We do not need each other; we do not need group effort. It's really every man for himself in this life and that's the way it ought to be.

It's a seductive idea, especially in income tax season. But it is a bankrupt idea.
The fact is, solitary confinement is no joy.
We do more and do better in groups. 
We just don't like to admit it. 

The War on Christianity: It's not All Bad

One thing about getting older:  When you see a certain set of symptoms, signs and behaviors, it's something you recognize; you don't get fooled so easily.

As Pamela Druckerman noted in today's NY Times, at 40 when you meet someone extremely charming, you have learned to be cautious instead of dazzled; you've gotten better at spotting narcissism.  Rush Limbaugh, Hannitty, Bill O'Reilly, think they share that trait?

In the case of what Thomas Eagen calls (in another lovely piece in the same section of the Times) "the sulfurous talk radio wing that dominates the Republican Party," the new effort to ban gay marriage is simply another manifestation of the paranoid style of American politics which has been with us for generations, as Richard Hofstader pointed out when he was talking about Senator Joseph McCarthy, who sought to create a very scary threat, and then presented himself as the knight on horseback who was prepared to  delivers us all from evil.

So it is with the sulfurous right and their "War on Christianity," and the law in Arizona which seeks to carve out an exception to civil rights laws which insist that anyone holding himself out to offer a service to the public must actually be willing to serve the entire public, not just the parts of the public he considers attractive or proper or morally acceptable.

Russ Douthat teases out some of the problems, on both sides of the argument, about these laws as they relate to gay marriage.  The man who refuses to take photographs at a gay wedding, to bake a cake for that wedding has refused to serve a category of people,  as surely as the owner of the lunch counter or the motel has refused to serve a whole category of people because they are black. All those refusing may have "moral" objections to gay behavior or to Blacks mixing with whites, but those "moral" or even, if you want to call them "religious"  and deeply held objections run up against the law of the land, an expression of the will of the majority and they must give way.

But what is really behind all these Rush Limbaugh/Sean Hannitty types is the desire to be angry, to find a cause which will make themselves indispensable to its solution. This is the modus operandi of the current Republican Party.

For many Tea Party Republicans it's not just the war against Christianity they are trying to mount their white chargers to ride to the rescue: No, these hero Republicans must also save the nation from those reckless, degenerate Democrats trying to bankrupt the nation with unrestrained spending. So, these same Republicans who are the loudest mouths proclaiming their love of the military find money for Veterans medical care and benefits has to be cut because cutting government spending trumps the cause of the veterans. Only austerity can save us now. Let us self flagellate and stop spending any government money, and we will save the economy and our children's future.

On the other hand, Republicans are perfectly willing to spend money on for profit colleges, because those colleges are A. Not Harvard, which is to say, not elitist and B. Are all about profit, and everyone knows the profit motive is the highest Christian value. Never mind that the median debt of the student who gets his BA from a for profit is $33,000 compared to $18,000 for  the non profit college grad. And, as far as the numbers go, it looks as if a degree from Hesser College or Phoenix may not be worth what a degree from the University of New Hampshire or from the University of Michigan may be worth.  At least, that's what it looks like from the default rates, which is substantially higher among debtors to the non profit colleges, who claim they could not market their degrees.

Does it not strike anyone that a degree purchased on line may not carry the same weight at a job interview as a degree from the University of California, Berkeley? But the kid from Alton Bay, New Hampshire, who comes from a family of eight, neither parent nor any of her siblings having gone to college, may not understand that her degree from the University of Phoenix may not translate into the return on investment she anticipates, especially if part of the money is approved by her veteran's benefits, which seems to offer official assurance the on line degree is a bone fide ticket to the next step up the ladder.

And here we have the really impolitic question: Does the economic advantage of a college degree derive from the piece of paper, the credential, or from what you learned to qualify and be awarded that paper or from the cachet that piece of paper conveys, as a symbol of your entitlement to a place in a particular American caste?

This is an open question--the value of a college degree. There may be as many answers as there are individuals who hold them.

But there is one answer which is not in dispute. And that is that not all arguments have two equally meritorious sides. The Republican party in the 21st century is not the revolutionary party of Abraham Lincoln; it has become sulfurous collection of saboteurs, intent on destroying the federal government and having a grand old party in Washington, while they do it. 

The tactic is easily recognizable: Create a scare, present yourself as the savior and dazzle the masses with your insight, and your revealed truth: The profit motive is always best, and we must only do what our God tells us to do, not what the government tells us to do, because, after all, we are a Christian nation.

Left, Right, Center

For Ronald Reagan, most questions were simple, and there was a clear answer.  Likely, he was significantly in the grip of dementia even during his first term, and for many demented patients there is often a wonderful clarity; the world and it's contradictions becomes simple, and clear. For Mr. Reagan, the answer to all problems of poverty and lives lived and wasted struggling with economic deprivation was simple: The free market solves all problems. Should we bring the resources of the government to bear on the problem of health care? Let the market bring its ruthless efficiency to the health care system and provide the best, most innovative solutions to the lack of health care for the poor, the unaffordability of basic care for the struggling middle class, but do not allow the government to dictate solutions in health care because the scariest ten words in the English language are: "I'm from the government and I'm here to help you."  That was a very catchy line.  It implied Mr. Reagan had confidence in his audience to see the joke.  It became the anthem for the Tea Party, Rush Limbaugh and the far right. It had clarity.

The problem was, it was the essence of facile. It seemed so simple, it had to be wrong. And it was.

Free markets, the profit motive work are potent forces, but where in America is there a really free market?  Certainly not in health care. 

What Mr. Reagan's supporters mean by "free market" is allowing rich and powerful corporations who got to be rich and powerful with government help, like the railroads, the oil companies, the drug companies, to be allowed, by protection of law, to crush all real threats to their supremacy, once they had achieved a position of advantage.

On the other hand, Karl Marx's idea of government as the ultimate planner and force of justice has no clear model of success. The collapse of the Soviet Union was predicted by that brilliant examination of its practical weaknesses in Orwell's Animal Farm. Communists, socialists never successfully answered Orwell's argument.  

In fact, socialized medicine in England, Germany and France has worked much better than the American patchwork quilt of medical care. Obamacare, has, for all we know, improved healthcare for large numbers of people, but there is little in the free, competitive media to document this. 

There are certain public endeavors which simply are not amenable to the profit motive. Health care is certainly the most obvious example, but national defense, space exploration, water management, power distribution and infrastructure, like bridges, roads and air traffic control are areas where the profit motive may simply be antithetical to the business at hand: The public good in these instances is simply not served by the drive toward profit.

The problem is, nobody has yet come up with a catchy little line for the failure of the profit motive. 

The closest thing is Upton Sinclair's line, "It is difficult to make a man understand something, if his salary depends on his not understanding it."