Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia

Written by an Italian poet
From the thirteenth century
And every one of them words rang true
And glowed like burnin’ coal
Pourin’ off of every page
Like it was written in my soul from me to you
--Bob Dylan
Tangled Up in Blues
Blood on the Tracks

Gore Vidal led a gaudy life. Watching the documentary, "Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia" is great fun. But it is more. Vidal was wonderfully inventive and daring. I was, regrettably, mostly oblivious to him during his heyday in the 1960's--there were too many other voices, too much noise in America. Now, I wish I had paid more attention.

But all is not lost, this documentary helps enormously.

He says things which I thought were original within my own mind, but which, apparently, he had already thought and said and I may have simply absorbed them from the revolutionary air. 

"We should stop going around babbling about how we're the greatest democracy on earth, when we're not even a democracy. We are a sort of militarized republic."

How many times have I said words to that effect, and thought myself very clever and original?  But now, Gore Vidal said it all before. 
Or maybe, great minds think alike. But, whatever the case, it is not exactly that his words written in my soul, like burning coals, but there are a number of remarks which do resonate.

Here's a sampling.

On Our National Capacity for Obtuseness:

"The United states was founded by the brightest people in the country--and we haven't seen them since."

"Big oil, big steel, big agriculture avoid the open marketplace. Big corporations fix prices among themselves and thus drive out of business the small entrepreneur. Also, in their conglomerate form, the huge corporations have begun to challenge the very legitimacy of the state."

On Justice:
"The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along."

"Well, the Constitution has not yet been pregnant."

On Leaders: 
"For reasons that I leave to a higher psychiatry, Jr. wanted a war in Iraq. ...Jr. is really pretty vague, you know. He just wanted to go 'Bang! Bang! Bang!' We gotta stand tall, ya know? We can't cut and run...' We've had bad presidents in the past, but we've never had a G--D--d fool."

"You know, I've been around the ruling class all my life, and I've been quite aware of their total contempt for the people of the country."

He is tough on Kennedy, who, he says, was one of the most intelligent people he ever met but a "disastrous"  President.  "He spoke intelligently on every important subject of his time. Brilliantly. Then nothing would happen."  
(Personally, I'm not sure I agree with Vidal on this one.  Kennedy, far as I can see,  was hemmed in by the shifting political and social tectonic plates of American history. But what do I know?)

On the sexual revolution:
"Never pass up a chance to have sex or to appear on television."

"I can understand companionship. I can understand bought sex in the afternoon, but I cannot understand the love affair."

"As one gets older, litigation replaces sex."

"Certainly I am devoted to promiscuity and always have been. I believe the more you do the better it is for you. I am a great health nut. I don't like the word "love." It's like "patriotism." It's like a flag. It's the last refuge of scoundrels. When people start talking about what warm deep emotions they have and they are loving people, I watch out. Somebody is going to steal something."

On human nature:
"A narcissist is someone better looking than you are."

"Envy is the central fact of American life."

His debates with the officious William F. Buckley, Jr. are alone worth the price of admission.


I liked Burr and Lincoln . Never got into his stuff on sex and society, like Myra Breckenridge. But, as a person to watch, to listen to, he is in a class with Truman Capote and David Sedaris. 

Watching him is a peculiar experience:  You know he is coming from a place you cannot come from--the gay, libertine who rejects the notion this nation is or ever was a center of virtue, a force for good. But he nibbles away--you know he's correct about some things, why not about others?  He points out we have never been nor really wanted to be a democracy--when the Constitution was signed, out of 3 million Americans only 700,000 got the vote--white propertied men. And patriotism--well that's just an excuse for empire. He never heard a soldier or sailor say anything which smacked of patriotism the two years he spent on board his ship in the Pacific during the war. War, soldiering is not about patriotism, wasn't then, isn't now. And once you begin to see what is behind the mask, whether it's a pedophile priest or a hypocritical politician, you begin to think, well maybe some of the other outrageous things he says are not so outrageous. 

It's a worthwhile two hours, watching Vidal.

Vaccines and Politicians: Public Health vs Private Ambition

Child with Diptheria

“There’s a woman who came up crying to me tonight after the debate. She said her daughter was given that vaccine.  She told me her daughter suffered mental retardation as a result. There are very dangerous consequences.”

--Michele Bachmann

"I have heard of many tragic cases of walking, talking normal children who wound up with profound mental disorders after [hepatitis B and measles] vaccines...I don't think there's anything extraordinary about resorting to freedom."

--Rand Paul, MD, United States Senator, R-Ky

Measles Killed 450,000 in 2014

No discussion about vaccines and public health should turn on, or even begin with anecdotes about a single case. Vaccines and the public health are about numbers, statistics, risks and benefits.

Tetanus

But they are also about the evils of the diseases we vaccinate against. The simple truth is, because we have not seen much of measles, diphtheria, polio, and influenza in this country, we have forgotten how nasty these illnesses once were, and could be again.

In a sense, we are the victims of our own scientific success: People no longer remember the terror of a polio outbreak in a community, not to mention more remote scourges like diphtheria or tetanus or measles or influenza. Influenza killed more people during the war years of World War I than all the battles of that war did.

Having just said anecdotes are unscientific, let me tell an anecdote about one of my patients who I bullied into having an influenza vaccine. She got Guillain Barre syndrome, a sort of short-lived polio like state, following the vaccine, a rare but well known risk of the influenza vaccine. She wound up in a wheel chair for four months. But that did not stop me from bullying my sons and friends and patients to get influenza vaccines. I get one every year, even this year when it wasn't as effective.

Why? Another anecdote: When I was in training at the New York Hospital, I admitted a  lovely 21 year old woman with influenza from the Emergency Room. She was blue as a frozen foot and she died five hours later. Influenza, nothing we could do. A young life, snuffed out. 

Why would a man who went to medical school inveigh against vaccinations? Because he is playing to an audience which values individual freedom above all other values--the libertarians, who do not want the good of the group to determine what any individual might want to do or think.

So Rand Paul and, it must be noted, Chris Christie, pander to this group, making the question of "choice" of vaccine into a struggle between freedom and governmental oppression rather than a choice to protect the many from the irrational few.

The fact is, we are talking about public health. If we were talking about the family living off the grid in the wilds of Wyoming or Montana, people who never came into contact with anyone else, outside members of their own family, then we would not be concerned so much about their choices and the impacts on public health.

Polio

But, when you have people living among other people, that is, people who live in suburbs, towns or cities, who send their kids to public schools, who shop at public shopping malls, who use public bathrooms, who eat in public restaurants, who swim at community swimming pools, who attend church and Christmas parties with other members of their community, then you have to think about more than individual's freedom. What that individual does affects the health, life and freedom of all those members of the group he might infect.

We do not allow people to defecate or urinate on their own lawns, or in the street, for fear of contagion. That, too, is public health.

That's the thing about the diseases we vaccinate against: They are infectious, which is to say, they pass from person to person, or from person to public water supply or from child to child. The nature of public health is a concern about the public and the "right" of the individual to start an epidemic is overwhelmed by the concern for the welfare of the many. 

It is understandable when an uneducated ignoramus, say Chris Christie, says vaccination should be a matter of "choice" for parents.  That you can write off as an honest lapse into idiocy. 

But when a man who went to medical school, who has to know better, like Rand Paul,  decides to frame the world of contagion and pestilence through the lens of the rights of the individual, you know you are looking at some deeply bizarre and cynical political calculation.

Does some public health officer have the right to tell some parent--who is worried about a vaccine turning her walking, talking, healthy beautiful child into some autistic monster--does the government have the right to insist that her child must be vaccinated against measles? Well, DUH! Of course! The public health service, a governmental agency which is supposed to protect the public. The agency of the government should be concerned about the many, and that agency not only can but should stomp ruthlessly all over anyone who would put his neighbors at risk. 

Would you have Rand Paul saying the same thing in the middle of an Ebola outbreak, if we had an effective vaccine against Ebola? 

Very doubtful. And why? Because the emotional argument--the visual images of what dying Ebola patients look like--would overwhelm any discussion about individual freedom of choice. The same should be true for measles, diphtheria,  polio, tetanus and influenza. The fact is, while Mr. Paul tries to pretend he is being thoughtful and open minded about the rights of those frightened parents, he is accepting the proposition their emotion, their irrationality should trump the cold, statistics based rationality in favor of mass vaccination programs. 

A very canny propagandist once remarked it is easier to sell the big lie than the small one. Your adversaries are so dumbstruck by the stupidity of what you are saying, they do not even know where to begin. That is where we are now, in a sense, with Rand Paul, Chris Christie, Michele Bachmann and all those freedom loving, God fearing, Tea Party  upright citizens who sail with them. Their frame of reference is so far out, we do not even have a common language--only Barney Frank ever seemed to have a Democratic response to these irrationalists: Looking one in the eye at a press conference, he asked, "Excuse me, m'am, but on what planet do you spend the majority of your time?"

I have told this story before, and will likely tell it again, because I think it is the most elegant argument in favor of vaccinations I have ever heard--forgive me for repeating myself. When Dave Garroway stepped up to the podium to introduce Jonas Salk, Garroway told his audience he had been at home, in his bedroom, pulling on his tuxedo, adjusting his bow tie and  thinking about what he should say by way of an introduction, when his seven year old son appeared beside him and seeing the tuxedo and bow tie,  asked his father what the big occasion was.
Garroway told him, "Well, I'm going to introduce the man who conquered polio, the man who made the first successful polio vaccine." 
And his son asked, 'What's polio, Dad?'"

 Then Garroway smiled and  looked at his audience: "Can you imagine any seven year old of our generation, who would not have known what polio was?"

Jonas Salk said that was the best introduction he had ever had. 
I


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Brave New World: How Change Happens

Dr. Carl Djerassi

"Recreational sex is an integral part of society. According to the World State, sex is a social activity, rather than a means of reproduction and, as part of the conditioning process, is encouraged from early childhood. The few women who can reproduce are conditioned to use birth control, even wearing a "Malthusian belt," a cartridge belt holding "the regulation supply of contraceptives" worn as a fashion accessory. The maxim "everyone belongs to everyone else" is repeated often, and the idea of a "family" is considered pornographic. Sexual competition and emotional, romantic relationships are rendered obsolete because they are no longer needed. Marriage, natural birth, parenthood, and pregnancy are considered too obscene to be mentioned in casual conversation."
Wikepedia description of "Brave New World"

Sunday's New York Times carried several different articles which struck me as being related, although I doubt the editors would have grouped them

One was an obituary of, Carl Djerassi,  the biochemist who first devised an economical way of making progesterone, which was the breakthrough required to manufacture oral contraceptives. He was called, "the father of the birth control pill," although, as he correctly noted, many scientists contributed and he was simply a convenient icon.  

The second article was a meditation on how change happens, using abolition of slavery as the template.  The historian who wrote the piece noted that Abolitionists, those pure of soul folks who worked diligently to abolish slavery were widely reviled, and, ultimately, ineffective. Their righteousness is now indisputable, but their effectiveness minimal, and without the war, and the desertion by the Southern senators and congressmen from the government in Washington, and the craftiness of Lincoln, the 13th amendment would never have been passed and slavery might have survived into the 20th century. 

The final piece was Ross Douthat's piece on how people of the liberal persuasion have turned to protest and social issues, now they find the path toward economic justice blocked by the Republican majorities in Congress and on the Supreme Court.
He correctly notes that Occupy Wall Street has gone the way of the Yippies, just one more example of a group of well meaning, righteous and in some ways admirable people who simply fumbled the ball because they had not actually thought through what they wanted and how to get there. 

Douthat goes on, "Finally, the late-Obama left is shaped by the success of the same-sex marriage movement, a rare example of a progressive cause that seems to be carrying all before it. To activists, its progress offers a model for winning even when electoral obstacles loom large. It shows that the left can gain ground at the elite level and then watch the results trickle down."

I will have to go back and re read Brave New World, but I can well recall how powerfully it affected me as an adolescent. It was supposed to be a dystopia, but I was so taken with the idea of such complete sexual and social freedom, of the then fantasy of what it would be like to live in a world where all the repression surrounding sex and man/woman relationships could be jettisoned, that, for me, it was a secret utopia. 

And, lo and behold, much of Huxley's dream came true.  So much of science fiction in the first half of the 20th century had to do with fantasies about transportation and firepower--obvious concerns for those times--but I cannot recall much about a future ruled by changes in information technology or biological manipulation. Brave New World was all about the social forces which could be unleashed by advances in biology.

I had forgotten the parts about test tube production of new human life, but even that has come to pass. Of course, in the American wrinkle, it has been co-opted by money.  "Infertility" doctors are ruthless in their pursuit of dollars as they guide their customers through IVF and other procedures designed to achieve parenthood. That is the dark side of progress.

But, on the bright side, there are grateful parents who never would have received that gift of parenthood. Even the most bizarre and cruel murderer, "The Fall" 's Paul Spector, is entirely convincing when he takes his young daughter in his arms and tells her, "Whatever happens, remember: The best thing in my life has been watching you grow up."

When I was growing up, sex was for procreation, to be had for the first time on the wedding night and only within marriage. In the (relatively) short time of one life, it has become, as Huxley described, "recreational" and if not encouraged, at least accepted to begin as early as possible, or as early as the child/adolescent if ready for it. 

And, truth be told, the sex part is really not the essential part. In Huxley's world, separating breeding from human contact was important because it allowed for the continuation of a social order, in which people remained in their own classes, happy there and not rattling cages. Biology had progressed to the point where you could choose to produce people with various levels of intelligence and physical capabilities, almost as you might breed cattle or dogs, to fill certain niches and occupy certain occupations.

And what do we have now in America?  Do people move from the upper 1% down to lower classes with any regularity?  Do people born in the lower 15% of the SES group move, with any regularity up to the upper 20%?  Do we not have a remarkably static society now, in which people get born into their station in live and stay there--the rich get richer (and stay richer) and the poor get...well, we used to say, and the poor get children, but now at least, happily, we do not have to say that.

  

Unreconstructed Liberal

Boys in the Hood: It will take more than cash to help these guys

Mad Dog has been taken to task by none other than Ms. Maud for suggesting we "throw up our hands" at the idea of spending money to improve the lot of the Children in the Basement, the dispossessed, the struggling, the underprivileged, the most vulnerable who face hopeless lives of deprivation while corporate profits soar to record highs and the 1% get richer and laugh all the way to the bank.

This really set Ms. Maud off, and evoked such an inspiring outpouring of indignation, it set Mad Dog dreaming about setting up an exploratory committee for Ms. Maud in her run against Kelly Ayotte. Wouldn't you just love seeing Senator Ayotte having to respond to this? It would be one of those, "At long last, Senator, have you no sense of decency?" moments. But Mad Dog digresses.

Surely, we can spend money in a constructive way to better the lot of the most needy.
Paul Krugman has suggested as much, in a way, by saying virtually any government spending in a recession helps lift the economy, and a rising tide lifts all boats. You could bury money in a mine and there would be jobs created just to dig down to it.

But that technique has been tried, back in the 1960's, to try to change the fate of inner city lives, and it was ineffective. 

Mad Dog  does agree we ought not give up. 
Ms. Maud is correct: there is no such thing as "benign neglect."  Mad Dog does agree that:
1. We should do whatever we can do to effectively raise the poor into the middle class and beyond. 
2. Throwing up hands in frustration or despair will never help. You can only hit what you aim at, for the most part. As FDR said: better the occasional faults of a government which lives in the spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of  a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.
3. Government can be at least part, maybe the major player, in accomplishing the goal of helping those who dwell at the bottom or who struggle to remain in the middle.

What affects Mad Dog's thinking, however, is the memory of the last great effort to do all this, the "War on Poverty." Lyndon Johnson set as a goal ending poverty in America in 1964 and from his efforts Congress funded the Office for Economic Opportunity and many other agencies and programs directed at the inner city poor.
Many were the voices which warned against raising unreasonable expectations, which, when dashed, who cause more unhappiness than if we had just left well enough alone. These voices mostly had Southern accents.

Today, of course, different voices, with the same message howl that any effort to spend taxpayer or(Heaven forbid) corporate money to help the less fortunate is doomed to be money poured down a black hole to no effect.  Only trickle down from the top 1% can help create real jobs, they say. They always point to the fruitless efforts of the War on Poverty. These voices emanate from people like Paul Ryan, who believes the reason for inner city poverty is the "laziness" of inner city people. And there are other voices, emanating from people who bear a striking resemblance to turtles. The turtle, you will recall, can retract his arms and legs and head into his shell and seal himself off from the world.

Fear the Turtle

 In 1964, Martin Luther King, who had needed Johnson to pass the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, began speaking out against Vietnam, which struck many of his supporters as biting the hand that fed.
But King saw clearly it was all part of a larger picture:  Penniless Black kids from every inner city ghetto saw every opportunity closed to them and they had no other viable option but to join the military, or at least allow themselves to be swept up into the military. King saw the great American war machine as somehow being part of the reason Black people were kept down.

Now, Andrew Bacevich, a West Point graduate, a retired soldier and  a professor at BU, writes about the Breach of Trust between citizens and the soldiers they hire to fight an eternal war, putatively in "service to their country," but actually in service to their own financial security, their own families, and, ultimately, to  corporate bonanzas and to moneyed interests. 

Whereas in the past, service in the Army actually provided some legitimacy to the claims of Black citizens to reap the benefits of the American economy, once they came home,  in the new, all volunteer (i.e. mercenary) Army, this is no longer true. The only claims the Black youths have now is to an artificial arm or leg at the VA Hospitals. That's part of the contract. And "service" has been reduced to contract work. All that talk about "Duty, Honor, Country," has been displaced by talk about better housing, better pay and scholarship money. Part of the payout is a certain claim to social respectability, but we no longer have an army where rich boys serve with poor boys, where the rich defer their entry into upper class pursuits while they "serve their nation" as JFK did on his PT boat, as Oliver Wendell Holmes did when he served in the Union Army.  When you have people who are clearly not improving their own finances in the service, it really is a "service."

Bacevich ties many ills you would not think related to the way we have constructed our military, and while his screed is clearly a polemic, written in white heat rather than cool remove, he does marshal enough thought, if not evidence, to be persuasive.

Essentially, what he is saying, is the Child in the Basement argument: When you have something very rotten at the core, the whole foundation of society is weak and the superstructure totters.

If you have slavery at the core of the Southern economy, eventually that structure will fall.

When you have corporate profit driving the disposition of armed intervention and when you have Congressional districts depending for their wealth on military bases and munitions plants, as directly as the cotton farms depended on slaves, then you have some serious structural problems for the whole society.

Spending money is a necessary but not a sufficient condition to lift all boats. This goes back to George Bernard Shaw and "Major Barbara. " There is no such thing as "clean money" or "dirty money" in a society which prints its money in ink made of blood.

Mad Dog believes we do not actually benefit our economy or protect ourselves effectively by sending only 1% of our population (and not the 1% that owns this country) who comprise our military, off to fight in Afghanistan or Iraq or Ukraine. But the infrastructure which supports this so corrupts Congress and our priorities that this rotten core begins to affect the rest of our society and damages prospects for those at the bottom of the heap.  

So, to address the needs of the underclass, good intentions are not enough. We need to figure out what ails the patient first, and then fashion therapy.

Lessons from Arachnids

Female Coin Spider: Many Suitors

Male: The Ultimate in Self Abuse

Yep, And I won both those elections. Eat Your Hearts Out

Mad Dog and his sons are addicted to nature shows, but the lessons learned there can be disturbing or dangerous.
After watching the spider wasp devour its host spider from the inside, leaving only a husk as it departs, Mad Dog's older son remarked, "This proves there is no God."
To which his brother replied, "Well, at least not a benign, forgiving God. Maybe an Old Testament God is still possible."

Now we have the coin spiders.

Female coin spiders may be impregnated by several males, but males mate only with one female.The male mates only once, because in the process he loses his male reproductive organs, some parts of which remain embedded in the female, and the remaining parts, he chews off himself.

This is a behavior familiar to any observer of Democratic candidate behavior. It turns out, Democratic candidates have been emulating, either consciously or unconsciously, the mating habits of the coin spiders for years now.  Eating their own testes. Any Democratic candidate can feature that. 

Mr. Obama finally displayed some testosterone driven behavior last Tuesday, and departed the stage at the Capitol Building fully intact.  but the Republicans responded, significantly, with Ms. Ernst, who has a long history of scissors wielding effectiveness at removing dangling appendages.  The brilliance of the Republicans in coalescing around Ms. Ernst's theme of scissor driven management of Democrats is remarkable.

The one Democrat who seems to be unfazed by Republican tools of appendage paring is Elizabeth Warren. Which just goes to show...I'm not sure, actually. Nothing good, probably. I do like Ms. Warren, however.

I  also know once Ms. Maud gets certified, I will be looking over my shoulder in Hampton. 

Gas Prices At Hampton Hess: Thank Anyone but Obama

Obama In Full: The Man We Thought Might Be In There, State of the Union

Returning each summer from my infamously monastic sojourn at the university, I would pursue what any hot blooded twenty something would among the fields of romantic  play in my hometown. But I approached my desired goals incrementally, cautiously, not wanting to push too hard, dating some likely object of desire, and not wanting to get ahead of her responses,  I did not reveal my desires and intentions and feelings until about two weeks before I had to leave and go back to the monastery. The pattern emerged, every summer, in which by mid August the young lady in question would say, "I wish you had said all  this sooner. But now you're almost gone." The revelation of inner self had occurred too late.

I had much the same feeling listening to the President last night.  Why did it take him this long to be the man we thought he could be? The man I liked so much when he first appeared in 2004, the man who spoke plainly, confidently, who was challenging but reasonable has been missing in action.  Why has it taken him so long to reveal that inner Obama?

Last night, he went back to the theme from his seminal 2004 speech, that we are not Red or Blue or Purple Americans, and we ought not divide ourselves. He spoke of making the rich pay for what all of us have provided. He sought common ground: Surely we can all applaud the falling teen pregnancy and we can applaud falling abortion rates--and the implication was "pass the over the counter birth control pill law." He spoke of the injustice to young Black males harassed (without mentioning stop and frisk) and he spoke of the fear of the wives of policemen for their husbands' safety.

Of course, the Republican response was instant rejection, and the messenger was none other than Maud's favorite Senator from Iowa, the master castrator-in-chief, Senator Joni Ernst. And, as is typical of Republicans, they all read from the same book of Hymns and Verses, obviously handed out before the speech so they could read from the same page in the interviews which followed.

The best part of the speech was unscripted, when Obama said he was no longer running for anything--and some Republicans applauded. President Obama did not miss a beat:   A sly smile crossed his face, and he said, "That's right. And I'm not running because I won both of those elections." Thunderous applause from the Left and sour looks from the thoroughly outclassed Republicans.

There were many good lines--we can do more for our infrastructure and energy economy than build a single pipeline.  Nice zinger.

Unfortunately, a single speech might catapult you into the race for the Presidency, but it cannot change the direction of governance. As Mr. Obama said, governing wisely is not done in headlines or single moments.  He slammed his predecessor by remarking the response to a terrorist attack should not be bluster and an intemperate headlong rush into military action. "That's what our enemies want us to do." I do wish he had said, "So when George W. Bush rushed to send American youth to die in Iraq, he provided Al Qaeda just what they wanted--easy targets."

His presidency has been the slow and deliberate response--to the border crisis, to the problems with the roll out of Obamacare, but the problem with that slow and deliberate approach is that, while it solves problems, everyone has forgotten about the problem by the time it's solved, so the accumulation of effect is--oh, Obama, he can't do anything. Which is to say, he can't solve each problem in each news cycle instantly, so he must not be solving any problems.

As Paul Krugman has pointed out in recent columns, the Obama presidency has been remarkably successful--the economy was saved from the banking crisis which the Republicans created with deregulation; health care has been finally, if imperfectly extended to the masses, Osama bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive. By every reckoning, by every measure, the man has had a very good run. Except for perception. 

You get the leaders you deserve, most of the time. Sometimes--Lincoln, Roosevelt and now Obama--you get better than you deserve. 

David Brooks: The Child in the Basement

David Brooks writes of Ursula Le Guin's parable, the child in the basement, about a community whose prosperity depends on keeping a single child locked in a basement, sitting in its own excrement and starving. The villagers all know about this child and its suffering and some even visit it but none will act to rescue the child because, for unstated reasons, the suffering of the child is essential to the welfare of everyone else.

Now, Mad Dog is as much a fan of parables as anyone else, but usually with parables one can say, "Oh, that is like..." but for the life of him, Mad Dog cannot conjure up a situation in which the suffering of a very few is so directly and inexorably tied to the welfare of a larger society. Ordinarily, the Phantom would have ignored this column, but it was recommended by an impeccable source, so the Phantom will struggle with it.

Brooks says the analogy is with the child laborers who make the world's cell phones. But this fails because the fact is their exploitation is not necessary to world prosperity. In fact, if they were paid a living wage everyone would pay more for cell phones but the world economy would grow and prosper even more because you'd have wage earners in those factories spending and building economies.  The excuse from the factory owners and the stockholders that we "have" to keep costs down is bogus.  Those workers could be paid more and the stockholders may make less profit but they would still profit--prosperity does not depend on worker exploitation.  And, in fact, in the case of workers producing products, it's not a case of the suffering of the few benefiting the prosperity of the many; it's just the opposite--the many (working class people) suffer for the benefit of the few (the factory owners.)

This has always been the conservative argument: To make the production of goods work, we must starve the workers. In fact, as non other than Henry Ford demonstrated, to make the production line work, you pay the workers better.

Another analogy Brooks suggests: To kill the terrorists, you have to kill a few children, so everyone can live in safety. But it has never been demonstrated the "collateral damage" of killing innocent civilians  with drones has ever really resulted in greater safety for the masses of Americans back home. That is what the guys pushing the drone buttons tell themselves. Don't you believe them.

And then there is the rejection of qualified applicants for spots at highly selective colleges--but there the few are benefited while the mass suffers. Not a good fit.

One might have argued the best fit would be the Third Reich's murder of Jewish children and Roma children to "cleanse" the Fatherland of the pestilence of impure races. A "few" die so the many can prosper. But we all can see the problem with that thinking. 

Had Mad Dog had to propose an analogy, it might be the killing of severely deformed babies so the huge expense of their care might free the great number of citizens to live free of that burden. But the problem here is there have never been enough of these infants to actually threaten an economy the size of the American economy. These infants may bankrupt their parents, but not the whole economy.

So, Mad Dog has to say, he cannot see this parable having any real merit, in the real world. It is not a parable of allowing the distressing suffering of the few for the benefit of the many as a practical solution because, practically speaking, raising up the suffering almost always benefits the many. Abolishing slavery did not bankrupt the South; in fact, it benefited the South. Abolishing slavery actually freed the many (the slaves) while bankrupting their owners (but not in all cases), who were in fact, a small minority of the Southern population.

The only example Mad Dog can conjure up is the American military: They are the injured small number, sitting in their own excrement and in Bethesda Naval Medical Center without arms or legs and by their suffering, they assure prosperity for the rest of us (a debatable point.) As Andrew Bacevich has so clearly explored, we have mistreated our military and broken faith with them "Breach of Trust." They suffer so we may shop and have our feel good moments at stadiums and public gatherings.
Funny that did not occur to either Mad Dog or Brooks immediately, but it does fit the suffering few and the prospering many living well because of that suffering. Likely this did not come to mind because the young who are our military are so invisible and forgotten, trotted out only like a circus act, at Fenway or the Super Bowl, so we can all feel warm and virtuous and then go back to ignoring them.