New Hampshire Senate Race: A Greater Sense of Grievance

One wonders how fanatics can gain power over the masses. How does ISIS over run enormous swaths of Iraq, Syria in weeks and carve out a "caliphate" when American troops slogged through months of battle to win a single Iraqi city? How does a small group of odd balls, losers and misfits gain control over a German nation of seventy million to found the Third Reich?  How does a small group of billionaires gain control of the US Supreme Court, the House of Representatives and the US Senate, when they are so vastly outnumbered by the millions of work a day people who live in this nation?

One of the many mantras of which Mad Dog grew weary when he was a teenager on various varsities was:  "It's not the size of the dog in the fight; it's the size of fight in the dog."

Or, as Roger Butterfield noted in his classic textbook of American History, explaining the near success of the Confederacy, which was at overwhelming disadvantage at the start of the Civil War, those fighting for "The Cause" had a greater sense of grievance.  There was also that other sense of grievance, however, that of the abolitionist and the slave, which ultimately gained ascendance. 

Here in New Hampshire, as we see the overwhelming tsunami of Scott Brown lawn signs, internet ads, TV ads, radio spots and rallies, as we see the polls showing Scott Brown on his way back to the U.S. Senate,  we watch in dismay as the Democrats are missing in action, and we can understand how a minority party can win elections, has won elections and control of the government: they simply want it more.

We Democrats, in the immortal phrase of Maud, would rather stay home and make jello. 

Jello R us.

Scott Brown vs Elizabeth Warren: What is Past, is Prologue

The Man Is An Empty Suit

Looking at the youtube recorded debates between Scott Brown and Elizabeth Warren, it was wonderful seeing the adage:  "The Worst Thing for a Bad Product is Good Advertising" come to full life.
Mr. Brown was asked who the perfect Supreme Court justice would be.
He paused, and you could see the lights are not all on upstairs, but eventually he came out with "Justice Scalia," but when the groans from the audience grew loud, he added, "Justice Kennedy." Silence. Then, "Justice Soto-Mayer."

Well, give him points for at least being able to remember the names of some Supreme Court justices--a feat you know would have been way beyond the capacity of Sarah Palin--but, when he was reminded he had traveled a long distance between Justice Scalia and Justice Soto-Mayer, he said, "Well, that's the thing about being a bi partisan guy who can cross the aisle."

Fact is, his first response was the honest one, the spontaneous revelation of just how conservative he is, if we can actually believe he knows anything about Justice Scalia's positions. More likely, he's just heard his backers say kind things about Scalia.

The fact is, he is an empty suit. He has learned the lines from the GOP script, the GOP Hymns and Verses, the GOP gospel, but he has no idea about what they really mean.

Anyone who continues to scream about deficits in a depressed economy has got to be able to answer Paul Krugman's lucid explanation about why deficit spending in our current economy is not a bad thing, and in fact, how much more government spending is just what we need right now, not forever, but now. 

But Mr. Brown is not interested in testing his beliefs, in critical analysis. All he wants is to be able to play the role of United States Senator, to be back at the Senate gym, to have his parking space at the airport and his nice office in the Senate office building.

For an airhead, this is the best job he can ever hope to get.

Just for fun:  go to youtube. Here's the link

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNIia6k3yYw

Scott Brown: The Ultimate Empty Suit

Mad Dog recently noticed on youtube, right next to the posting "Introducing Scott Brown: The Prettiest Candidate Yet," a youtube posting of a debate between Mr. Brown and Elizabeth Warren.

What was remarkable about this youtube was:  1/ It was 59 minutes long  2/ It had 92,000 views.

So many people were willing to sit through a candidates' debate. Well, actually, we do not know how long anyone watched, but so many people at least were interested enough to open the thing up.

And what you see there was this good looking man reading from a script which others had prepared for him. He started off by attacking Ms. Warren for having got into Harvard by claiming to be an American Indian or of American Indian origin. Mr. Brown kept repeating the only way for Ms. Warren to prove this was not true was to release all her personnel records or some such thing.  

Ms. Warren effectively destroyed the impact of this attack by recounting how her father was told by his family not to marry her mother because her mother was part Cherokee and Delaware Indian, which Oklahoma, in that time, was like having slave ancestors.  Mr. Brown simply kept saying what he had been prepped to say: You have to release your personnel records.

As the "debate" progressed Mr. Brown trotted out all the key speaking points about cutting taxes, not offending the "job creators" by taxing them, letting "private enterprise lead the way," and Ms. Warren deftly demonstrated that Mr. Brown had refused to vote for tax breaks for the middle class because, as he explained, the tax breaks were not also extended to the super rich, er, the "job creators."

"So you held the middle class tax break hostage to the tax break for the super rich."

There was no spontaneity in Mr. Brown. He had been so thoroughly coached, he might have been a puppet, controlled by other hands, speaking in someone else's voice.  

Which brings Mad Dog  back to the youtube video he had originally tuned in to see: Introducing Scott Brown: The Prettiest Candidate Yet.

Worth a look. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNIia6k3yYw

Scott Brown: The Prettiest Candidate Yet?

There he is, in his truck, in his barn coat, wowing New Hampshire voters with his good looks, reading from the GOP Hymns and Verses. 

Has this man ever had an original idea?

There was a band (probably more than one) in the 60's which was entirely the creation of a record company which put together all the elements common to successful bands. Mr. Brown is that sort of man--read the gospel as given to him by Mr. Koch, and Rush Limbaugh and all their fellow travelers.

A group of citizens has responded with this youtube posting:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNIia6k3yYw

If the link doesn't work, try youtube search, "Scott Brown: The prettiest candidate yet."

Worth a try.

The Aroma of Political Ideology: Under arm scent and Political Preference

 Who knew?  Were it not for National Public Radio, Mad Dog  certainly would not have been aware of a Brown University study which involved collection of underarm scents (Mad Dog will spare you the details) from 146 subjects who were divided into liberal and conservative political persuasion groups. 

Exposing subjects to the scents from other subjects, the researchers asked each subject to select aromas which appealed to them and those which repelled them.

While the results were not completely sharply divided, there was a statistically significant divide,  in which politically liberal subjects found the underarm scents from other liberals attractive and pleasing while they found axillary odors from conservatives repellent.

The study, "Assortative Mating on Ideology Could Operate Through Olfactory Cues," might explain why in 21st century America when people speak of a "Mixed marriage" they are not talking about the marriage of a Catholic and Jew or a Black and a White, but of a Republican and a Democrat--James Carville and Mary Matalin.

Of course, we all know of wonderful marriages between conservatives and liberals, and those are especially evident in the purple state of New Hampshire, but once again, science has leaped in to provide the news we all wanted to hear and will rush to believe: It's just chemistry.

Actually, Mad Dog recently had an experience which may, or may not lend credence to the study.  While taping a puppet show, which required him to raise both hands with puppets above his head, he found he could not turn the pages of his script, and he needed a page turner, as a pianist, whose hands are busy, needs  page turner.  That task fell to an unfortunate colleague who had to reach under his arm, while keeping her head down so as not be be visible to the camera, so she was forced to dip her head under Mad Dog's fetid arm to turn pages.

Both actors in this drama were liberals, and while the page turner was not relishing her predicament, she at least was able to survive two and a half hours of underarm exposure. Had Mad Dog been a conservative Republican, could she have survived without having to be carted out on a stretcher?

It is doubtful we will ever have the follow up study, with the page turner subjected to arm pit exposure while turning the pages under a conservative, but if we can write a grant, perhaps we can get funding.

White Power In America

When Mad Dog was an adolescent, they were integrating the University of Alabama and the schools in Arkansas.  George Wallace, the governor of Alabama, stood in the school house door and declaimed, "Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!"

Mad Dog worked at  his local swimming pool, in Bethesda, Maryland, an affluent white suburb of Washington, D.C., where there were very few Blacks, not because of official discrimination but because Blacks could not afford to live in Bethesda.  A Black child, a guest of a member, swam in the pool and a few hours later the manager got a call from a man who wanted to know when the manager was going to drain the pool, how long it would take to drain and refill it and when the pool would be opened again. 

The manager said, "Come on down right, now: The water's fine!"

Philosophically, we didn't like racists much in Bethesda, but then again we weren't exactly integrated in a practical sense. 

The manager of a Florida motel, seeing Blacks in his swimming pool, poured a bucket of acid into the water. Just to show how much he cared.

The locals came out to protest the admission of Colored to Alabama public schools, and they did the same in Mississippi, Georgia  and Arkansas.

Of course, in Bethesda, we asked: Why would anyone want to go to any "school"
in any of those states?  Can you imagine what they were teaching those Yahoo's down there in the South? Can you imagine having to go to class with those brain dead bigots? If you added up the IQ's of the entire population of Mississippi would the total exceed 100?

Things, we are told, have changed.  But what about those protesters outside the school buses along the border states of Arizona, Texas and California?

What do you do with a population which approximates the hate index of the Poles who cheered as the boxcars rolled past on  the train tracks headed toward Auschwitz?

Nicholas Kristoff: How not to be a Liberal

Nicholas Kristoff has a piece in today's New York Times which is enough to give liberalism a bad name. 

He wants to tell us how we should eliminate poverty in this country and he starts off by trying to impress us with his deep understanding of the complexity of the problem:  "Within four weeks of conception, human embryo has formed a neural tube, which then begins to produce brain cells."

Okay, we got it. You have read some heavy books and you have learned: "It all begins early."

And he winds up with "If you want to help, here are a few organizations whose work on early childhood has impressed us."

And here they are:
1. Nurse-Family Partnership: is a proven home visitation program that gives a risk kids a shot at reaching the starting line.
2. Reach Out and Read: supports pediatricians who hand out books to low-income children during doctor visits, with instructions about bedtime reading.  Careful studies show that the parents red to the children more often and the chilrdren end up with larger vocabularies--all for just $20 per child per year.

There are more, but it goes downhill from there.

AS IF.
As if sending a nurse by once a month, or even once a week, or even once an hour could really make a difference to the children of Baltimore whose parents are sending them out to the corner to sling drugs, who view their children as their meal tickets, who game every government program to cash in vouchers so they can buy more heroin and cocaine.

Mr. Kristoff should be strapped into a chair and forced to watch The Wire continuously, all five seasons until he has assimilated the lessons there.  

Can you imagine any of the mothers, so carefully depicted there,  being influenced in any positive way by the visit from some nurse, even if she were not white?  

Can you imagine Michael's mother, who uses every monthly payment for Aid to Dependent Children to buy heroin, reading to her children at bedtime, even if she did ever bring them to a pediatrician and even if, at that visit, she were handed a book with instructions on how to read to her children. If she could read herself. If she did not try to sell the book for money to buy drugs?

The problem with so many solutions proposed from so many quarters is the people who develop these solutions have no clue about what life is like for the people they are trying to improve.

What Mr. Kristoff  needs is not a new program to recommend but an anthropological ethnograph which might actually clue him in to the hard shell of the problem.

The best such anthropological study, by a country mile, is The Wire. 

When you see children living in abandoned buildings, hijacking electricity from neighboring buildings, living without parents because they are better off without the adults who might be related to them, when you see the variety of parental depredation to which these children are exposed, you will know no book hand out in a pediatrician's office will make a difference. 

When you see the boy whose mother buys him a set of back-to-school clothes which is not intended to be worn at school but which will make him look right for his work slinging drugs on the corners, you know a visiting nurse will not help that situation. 

When you see the boy whose foster mother does try to guide him but is defeated by the world she sends that boy into--a world where the most powerful socializing organizations in the neighborhood are not the schools, nor the government, nor the church, nor the local YMCA, but the drug gangs, then you understand that Save The Children, which provides home visitation, screening and literacy programs for the bargain rate of $28 a month, will  not make one wit of difference.

When you have widespread dissolution of families, cultural values which direct young boys and girls into selling, using and extolling drugs, then all the best intentions only pave the way to hell.

As a medical student in the 1970's, I worked in a project in Bedford Stuyvesant, which was then a desperately poor Black neighborhood, where a gleaming new clinic, built with War on Poverty money, stood unused in its magnificence. Our project was to figure out why the locals were not keeping their appointments for medical care there. 

It didn't take long:  The first few days we visited the addresses where the prospective patients were supposed to be living, we found open doors, or no doors, on the once magnificent stone townhouses, which were now occupied by people, not families, with children in dirty diapers padding around the prostate bodies of adults in heroin stupors and nary a clock nor a calendar to be seen. These people could not keep appointments because they had no concept of day of the week or time of day. 

You can talk about neural tubes until you are blue, but you are never going to change poverty in the inner cities until you really know what that poverty is and does. 

Good intentions are not enough.  Been there (in the 1970's). Done that.

Watch The Wire, Mr. Kristol and trade your bubbly do goodism for a little nihilism. 

Do not think you can change people unless you are willing to control way more of daily life than you can now imagine, and that goes not just for Baltimore, Washington, DC and Detroit. That goes for Baghdad, Syria and Libya.