The Limits of Sympathy

Makers, not "takers"

This morning, on NPR a story about some Boston facilities to treat opioid addicted people told of how heroin addicts do not like being revived with naloxone because the drug blocks the receptors for heroin and precipitates an acute drug withdrawal, so typically the addict, once revived, bolts of of the facility in search of another dose of heroin.  

There are other problems not addressed by naloxone:  typically the heroin addicts pop benzodiazepams like Valium, and other drugs, once the high from the heroin ebbs, to prolong the good feeling, so they often arrive at the facility with slow pulse and low blood pressure which are not induced by the heroin but by the follow up drugs.

They interviewed some of these sad souls.  I used to see people addicted to heroin when I was training in a big city hospital, but much more often, we'd see alcohol addicts and we certainly saw nicotine addicted people.

Nurturer

As Chris Christie noted, nobody ever told him or his family that his mother should be denied help when she developed lung cancer because she had been a smoker and brought her disease on herself--we respond to the need, and hate the sin, but not the sinner.

On the other hand, anyone who has been on the front lines of this sort of care and gotten to know addicts as they repeatedly present themselves for help knows the sense of anger one develops as people return for help time and time again. 

Mrs. von Doenhoff, my high school history teacher used to bark, "The only right you have in life, is the right to starve!"  We thought she was a sort of neo Nazi at worst or a Republican, at best.

But there comes a point where you have to ask, am I part of the problem? This is the concept of the "enabler."

Is the "heroin epidemic" something government ought to believe is its responsibility to solve?

The assumption in every news report is that we owe care to these "patients."  The focus is always on how little or how much money the government has appropriated for the care of these afflicted citizens. The story has been, oh, look how we are failing these unfortunate countrymen. 

Perhaps the question ought to be: Ought we be doing more...or less?

Where the decisions must be made

There are reports concerning housing violent mentally ill people at a prison rather than at a hospital facility in New Hampshire.  Apparently, if you house them at a prison the state cannot collect federal dollars for health care, but it may still be cheaper because the prison is already constructed where new construction would be needed for construction on hospital grounds.  But where do people who bite the attendants or who try to strangle their keepers belong? What do we owe them? What do we owe society when it comes to protecting normal citizens from their homicidal fellow citizens?

This is the nerve Mr. Trump tweaks when he shouts President Obama cares more about the rights of perpetrators than he cares about the people they harm.  We have to worry less about who we might hurt, Mr. Trump says, and we ought to care more about who they have hurt. In Trump's case, the "they" are Muslims, all Muslims, but this rhetoric comes from the same well--we are the victims, not them.  I've not heard Mr. Trump talk about heroin addicts, but I would be surprised if he expressed much sympathy for them. He might blame their addiction on President Obama, of course, since Obama is the source of every problem, according to Mr. Trump. 

Looking out for the wretched refuse of American life

When we say healthcare should be a right, I do think of Mrs. von Doenhoff. Healthcare may be a right, but does that give someone the right to wake me from sleep, drag me out to an emergency room to treat the tenth overdose of a man who has no intention of doing anything but seeking his next high?  Someone has to pay people to render care which citizens claim as a right. 

This is the sort of thing Democrats should be discussing. Heaven knows, Republicans have already discussed and decided these issues. 

But where are we, as "liberals" when it comes to the management of society's dependent, failed citizens?

Policy and The Donald

Thing about "policy" is it's a word about "rules."

And rules are general prescriptions for behavior based on patterns of behavior  the rule makers have recognized.

So when Mr. Trump sees a pattern--Muslim men shoot non Muslim Americans, he makes a rule: NO MORE MUSLIMS. Okay, that's it, no more Muslims because "they" are dangerous.  That one attribute is all you need. Profiling, yeah, I'm politically incorrect, so sue me. That's the Donald.

Yes, it's true we had San Bernadino and now Orlando where whackos tried to explain their psychopathology as something admirable: I'm with ISIS. And of course, ISIS, being an organization of psychopaths blows kisses right back.

The fact that Auora, Sandy Hook, Oklahoma City, Charleston, Columbine were not done by Muslims doesn't matter. The Donald has a short memory--that much we all know. 

Thing is, sometimes there are patterns. (And if we can't identify patterns, we make them up.)  

Chris Rock has for years been wonderful about identifying patterns of crime, going way back to Saturday Night Live.

http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/weekend-update-segment---chris-rock/n9947


As Rock notes, if you hear about a grandmother hit over the head, pushed down a stairwell for her Social Security check, Black guy.  "We may be stupid," Rock says, "But we aren't crazy.  You hear about somebody's head cut off and their blood drunk and smeared on the walls: White guy."  

And, he adds, when Blacks hear about some bank robbery gone wrong and people killed all the Blacks are saying to themselves, "Oh, please don't let it be some Black guys."  

Just think how Muslims must feel every time a mass shooting occurs. 

Still, I am so glad, every day, my grandfathers got on the boat came to America. Most of the Americans I know look at a playground full of kids of every race, of mixed races of all backgrounds, playing together, their parents chatting along the fence rails and it's the Starship Enterprise.  For these citizens, that dream has been realized.  

Qui Tacet Consentit: Ken Burns Speaks

Mr. Burns

Ken Burns gave the commencement speech at Stanford. 

He told the audience he had carefully avoided taking political sides over the 40 year course of his career because he wanted his histories to speak to everyone; he did not want his efforts to be dismissed as partisan.

Why he thought a series on baseball or jazz or the national parks would be taken as partisan, I can only imagine, although he did lard them heavily with stories of how Blacks were kept out of the major leagues and how Louis Armstrong was forbidden to play with white performers in New Orleans.

But at this time in our nation's history, he decided to jettison that stance and without naming him, clearly identifying Donald Trump as something unlike any other candidate with a serious chance to become President.

Burns said:

"You know, it is terribly fashionable these days to criticize the United States government, the institution Lincoln was trying to save, to blame it for all the ills known to humankind, and, my goodness, ladies and gentlemen, it has made more than its fair share of catastrophic mistakes. But you would be hard pressed to find—in all of human history—a greater force for good. From our Declaration of Independence to our Constitution and Bill of Rights; from Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, Fifteenth and Nineteenth Amendments to the Land Grant College and Homestead Acts; from the transcontinental railroad and our national parks to child labor laws, Social Security and the National Labor Relations Act; from the GI Bill and the interstate highway system to putting a man on the moon and the Affordable Care Act, the United States government has been the author of many of the best aspects of our public and personal lives. But if you tune in to politics, if you listen to the rhetoric of this election cycle, you are made painfully aware that everything is going to hell in a handbasket and the chief culprit is our evil government."

It is a relief to hear someone, anyone, but especially a historian, flatly state that federal government can be a force for good.  We almost never hear any politician, even a Democratic politician say this forthrightly.  

Some years ago, I wrote Mr. Burns to see if he'd help some Hampton Democrats organize a media campaign against Scott Brown, who was trying to unseat a Democrat in the U.S. Senate. Never got a response. I guess he was still cleaving to the idea of remaining impartial. But there comes a time when silence implies consent. Qui Tacit Consentit.  If vitriol goes unanswered, it becomes accepted, received wisdom.

Ever since Ronald Reagan delivered that line, "Government is not the solution; it's the problem," we have had Democrats running away from embracing government as any solution out of fear.  Part of the appeal of Bernie Sanders is he does not shrink from proposing grand government solutions, for healthcare and for education and likely for other things. 

Reagan said, the scariest  words in the English language are: "I'm from the government and I'm here to help you." And all the knuckleheads out there still roar when they hear that line.  

Oddly absent from Mr. Burns's list are  Medicare, the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights act.  And those are just the federal programs we can be thankful for and  American life would be far worse without.  

Here in New Hampshire we have borderline personalities who have congregated under the banner of Free Staters, who are essentially anarchists, who believe public schools, public roads, public safety, fire, and police should not be governmental but given over to "free enterprise."   These pathological specimens live in an alternate universe where paradise is every man for himself and the idea of community is an anathema.  

One of our better angels 

One can only imagine the life histories of these individuals, as they spun down into an ossified brain state in which "Hell is other people" has become a creed.

We see these pathetic men carrying rifles into public gatherings, proudly packing sidearms in parking lots outside political events, men so demeaned in their own minds they need a gun to establish their self importance and potency. 

There will always be deranged and psychologically wounded among us. The problem is when they find a leader who appeals to this pathology and exhorts them to believe their particular brand of mental illness is a good thing.

We have to go back in history a considerable way to find leaders who rose to power on the strength of such pathology: Hitler, of course, is the classic example, but remember Lester Maddox, Jefferson Davis and any of those Southern racists who loudly proclaimed the superiority of the white race and the sub human status of blacks and Indians (now called Native Americans.)

Better than we deserved

For Republicans, the choice may be a little more difficult, but even Republicans will have to ask themselves if they are Republicans or Americans first. 

pied piper of pathology 

Ultimately, this is about what the idea of America really is.  If you think of America as a place which celebrates differences, embraces diversity, faces the demographic changes sweeping across our continent, then you have to vote against the Republicans.  If making America great again is really code for make America white again, then you vote for Mr. Trump.

The Fen Shui of the Scythe

Connectedness is a strange thing. This morning, I mowed around my flower beds, trimming serpiginous patterns.  The neighbor's boy mows our lawn every other weekend. He is saving up for his first car, and the income from mowing is important to him, so I had to go over and explain to his father I'd be mowing just the front lawn which faces the street so I could get a Fenway Fen shui effect there, but his son could count on doing the sides of the house and the big back yard running down to the woods. We respect the rights of labor here in this part of Seacoast New Hampshire.  I am now connected to that boy's dream of his own car. 

The sun was so bright, I brought up my painting from the basement to my driveway, so I could paint in natural light for a change. It didn't make my "art" any better--in fact it was like an aging woman looking in a mirror in bright light--sort of discouraging. But I did block out the colors and it was nice standing in the sunlight and the gusty winds,  which have pushed out the heavy summer air for the weekend.

Then I sat down with the Sunday New York Times on my front porch in the rocking chair and read the wonderful article by Jeremy Hastings describing his day with a scythe in his hand, on an island an ocean away, in the Inner Hebrides, off Scotland. He described starting on an outer ring of his lawn in a way designed to allow ground nesting birds to fly away before he could do them any harm. He was mowing in Scotland; I was mowing in New Hampshire, both taking about the same pleasure from it.

Accompanying the article was the wonderful painting by Winslow Homer, "The Veteran in a New Field," and Hastings quoted Tolstoy describing the pleasure of cutting a field of hay with a scythe.  Now the thread ran to Russia.

I've lined up stones I gathered from the beach, 3 miles away, and lined the flower beds with them.  It's the best art of which I am capable, sort of a paleolithic caveman level of art, but still. 

These are the pleasures of country life.  

A good friend took a train down to New York City and emailed me from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where the Homer painting hangs. She said she could have spent all day there, all week, but she had to get to a Eugene O'Neill play.  Such are the pleasures of the city.

It's June in the Northern Hemisphere.  We are all connected.

The Revolution Last Time

Woodstock 

Having dinner with my kids and their wives before the New York primary I was surprised to hear one say, "I don't want a revolution. My life's just starting."  She is twenty something, grinding through the seven separate exams to be certified as an architect, having finished a graduate program at Columbia in architecture, the daughter of immigrants. She is on the cusp of a new life, one she has worked hard for, and Bernie Sanders strikes her as someone who might disrupt all those plans. All that is understandable, but my Bohemian son, the musician, who lives life on the edge, feels the same way. He is into a dozen projects, cobbling together a career and there is enough uncertainty in his life for him to feel  inclined to embrace a great unknown. All of them were voting for Hillary in the New York primary.  

I thought, "This is just the demographic Bernie is supposed to own."

Bernie Wins Burlington Mayorship

I voted for Bernie in New Hampshire, but as I told my friends--I'd rather see Hillary President.








The thing about revolution is that it's risky, and can veer off in unanticipated directions and when I last saw a revolution in full swing, as much as I wanted change and hated the entrenched powerful forces being attacked, I was not thrilled by the folks who were leading the charge.

Revolution Turns To Mud

They seemed to have nothing better to do, and they struck me as superficial and I could not imagine them as old people clinging to the beliefs they espoused--Tom Hayden wouldn't allow Jane Fonda to own a clothes washing machine because it was too bourgeois and it was part of an economy which oppressed the workers. I kept comparing Tom Hayden to my grandfather, who joined the first, unsuccessful Russian revolution, who held guns and when things fell apart, he had to leave his homeland and start a new life. None of these 60's "revolutionaries" were going to leave America and start over if the "revolution" failed.  They were weekend revolutionaries. 

Meet Your New Leaders

There were simply too many people who seemed to be opportunists saying things they thought might buy them some immediate advantage, but they couldn't really believe that engineering and science and all technology was just a tool for the venal and powerful to keep the masses down.

One thing you can say for those delusional adolescents who are hopping airplanes for the Middle East to fight with ISIS--at least they are all in. They are idiots, of course, but all in.  So many of the 60's revolutionaries were playing at revolution. They hadn't thought things through, but they had some underlying voice in their brains which told them not to go too far.

Unappetizing Authority

The vicious racists who ruled the South had to be opposed, and the Black Freedom Riders who faced them had real dignity, but the white kids who walked with them struck me as somehow phony. Those white kids could and likely would go back to their suburban communities, their Ivy League colleges and their future  lives in corporate America--these white kids were just playing at revolution, slumming really. Of course, there were some who were very brave and some who died for their Black friends, but there were too many whose commitment was questionable.
Those Black folks, however,  had no where else to go. They had their backs against the wall. I could believe they did not just want revolution--they had to have it.

Thugs with Badges

The war in Vietnam had to be opposed, and the kids my age who opposed it were not phonies. Our lives were literally on the line.  My friends had already gone and I was scheduled to go. My brother was over there.  We had our backs against the wall.

Fighting for Freedom Vietnam Style

The sexual mores of the time were absurd and destructive: Be a virgin until you are married; never have more than one sexual partner your entire life, and, if you were Catholic, don't use contraception. That meant, of course, women had to stay at home raising kids and could not have careers and families grew to financially untenable sizes.  That had to go.

Better than War

But the alternatives put forward by the revolutionaries went beyond what even I could embrace.  I liked wearing clothes in public and thought sex probably ought not occur, even between consenting adults, in public places. 











Also drugs.  Never could see marijuana or LSD or cocaine as anything but weakness.  If you couldn't get in the mood for sex without these, there was something wrong.  If your own un-medicated senses were inadequate to appreciate a gorgeous day in New Hampshire, a swim in cold water, the fragrance of gardens, then you were pitiable, not someone to emulate.

The revolution of the sixties tied a revolt against malignant racism, with revolt against government authorities who foisted endless war upon a nation which refused to believe we had any good reason for making war and the sexual revolution, which was necessary to liberate women from the status of being baby making machines who had no better prospect in life than earning the title "Mrs." It was all of a piece, although some people embraced one or two parts of the rebellion, not all three. But even someone like me who embraced all three could not help finding many of the leaders, much of the rhetoric, repellent. 

You could understand, yes Louis XV and Marie Antoinette might be decadent, but eventually, with enough heads in baskets and the tumbrels filled, you began to feel a wave of nausea carrying the revolutionary tide. Okay, the Czar was arrogant and needed to go, but what swept across Russia over the ensuing decades, the thought police, the gulags, the millions starving to death for the sake of a bankrupt ideology, then you began to wonder about revolution as an instrument of change.

If you had to go combing through the pages of history for a revolution which was both necessary and, overall, benign, the American Revolution comes as close as any. Men like Hamilton, Washington, Franklin and Adams kept it under reasonable control.  We didn't have anyone like that in the 1960's, save for Martin Luther King, and thank God for him. He kept the most important leg of that three legged stool strong and firmly planted. 

Bernie When

So, yes, I love listening to Bernie. There is a lot left to change.  The rich keep getting richer and the poor keep getting poorer and the government can and should do something about that. 

But there are some people who are poor for a reason. There is nothing much the government can do about that. Even Jesus observed: there will be poor always.

We can only do what we can do, and leave the rest behind. 

Our Need for Superman

If God did not exist, we would need to invent Him, someone said. (Actually, likely several people said some version of this.)  

I see this every day in my office--people come to me looking for a miracle cure. People want to believe there is a man (or woman) who has power beyond their power to change their lives for the better. In some cases, this is at least partly true. After all, you stagger into the Emergency Room vomiting, dehydrated with the virus which has been making its way through the community and the doctor comes in wearing his spotless white coat, confident, smiling, starts an IV, gives you medicine and within an hour you are no longer nauseated, or dizzy and in fact are quite comfortable and restored and it's like when Daddy picked you up and made everything all right again.

This same phenomenon operates in representative democracies--we want to think there is some bright, talented man who can make us well again.  It's no accident they called Franklin Roosevelt the doctor who had the cure for the Depression. 

From the founding fathers onward, I suspect, the rabble, in their coarse, earth stained clothes, who knew they were uneducated, looked upon those silk stockings worn by Hamilton, Jefferson and Washington, and thought, maybe these smart, educated, successful men know what they are doing--that's why they are successful and they can dispense some of that knowledge to benefit us.

What we like best of all, or at least what some of us like, is the Hamilton type, who was born in poverty and through his own efforts achieves great success. 

But we are fine with a Kennedy, born to wealth, but still a striver.  We have to admire a guy like that, who could have been a playboy and enjoyed his wealth, but he gets on a small boat with a bunch of regular citizens and fights in the big war.  And FDR, there's a guy who could have enjoyed life at his estate, but he rebelled against his own class on behalf of the little guy. 

The problem for a woman, however, is on some subliminal level we do not think of women as having that sort of magical power. A woman may be a nurturer, but can she be a powerful thrower of thunder bolts?  

Rachel Madow did a very nice segment on Margaret Chase Smith, the first woman to declare for the Presidency and basically, her countrymen laughed at her.  Shirley Chisholm was both a woman and Black, so they did not even bother to laugh at her; her countrymen simply ignored her.

By the time Hillary Clinton won California, Madow noted, nobody was laughing at the thought of a woman President. 

Mrs., Ms., Secretary Clinton might steal a page from the playbook of women physicians and surgeons, who manage to operate as authority figures by simply exuding confidence, and underplaying the authority angle. 

At her best, Hillary Clinton can be as good as she needs to be. 

Who Can Judge Mr. Trump?

Astronaut Ochao

We really must try to be reasonable when we consider Mr. Trump's claim that the judge hearing his case concerning the complaint by former students at Trump University that he conned them out of their life's savings for bogus "courses" in a scam university.  
Mr. Trump, after all, strikes a reasonable tone when he tells us that the judge hearing his case is of Mexican origin, and is a member of a Mexican American organization, sort of a Hispanic version of the Rotary Club, which, as Mr. Trump says, is fine. 

 It's just that since Mr. Trump wants to build a wall between the judge's ancestral home and the United States, so it's only common sense the judge cannot possibly give Mr. Trump a fair hearing, after all, that one attribute of the judge--his Hispanic background has to be his core identity. Of course, if Kurt Vonnegut was correct, the judge might consider his Indiana birthplace the most important thing about himself--being a Hoosier is one of those things people from Indiana seem to escalate into a cause. 

Mr. Trump is simply saying he  understands how he may have offended the judge-- can't blame the judge Mr. Trump says; the judge simply cannot be fair and should recuse himself.

So let us consider who might be acceptable as a judge for any case involving Mr. Trump, now and in the future. 

Let's break people down into simple attributes.  We could look for fellow television celebrities.  like maybe, Jimmy Smits, who has affinity for good roles on TV, and attribute he shares with  Mr. Trump,  but, no, being Hispanic, he is obviously disqualified as that Trumps everything, although he is also excluded for  having played a Democrat on West Wing.  

Justice Sotomayer is clearly out, if for no other reason than Obama appointed her, and she is Hispanic, a double whammy.  Women, are in general excluded, but especially Hispanic women, especially if they are particularly accomplished, because accomplished people, like the astronaut Ochoa, have it in for incompetent amateurs like Mr. Trump.

Personally, I'd like to recommend Joan Baez, but there's that Mexican thing.
She has a wonderful voice, and she hung out with Bob Dylan, which should be enough to recommend anyone, but no, there's just that South of the Border thing.

Mr. Trump would, by all indications, exclude Muhammad Ali from a jury hearing his case, because Ali was, well, Muslim. Not born that way, but still. And he rejected his God given Christianity, so he is doubly suspect. I mean, he had a wonderful name, "Cassius Clay," which he jettisoned like used Kleenex , to become Muhammad Ali. 

George Carlin, who was Irish, actually judged Mr. Ali quite generously, despite their ethnic differences: Mr. Carlin observed that Mr. Ali had an unusual profession--beating people up, but Ali drew the line at killing them. The government wanted Ali to kill people in Vietnam and Ali said, "No, no, no. I'll beat them up, but I won't kill them," and so he got stripped of his livelihood and treated poorly. Well, he's dead now, so this is a moot point.

And we don't want any losers, like guys who got captured during any wars. Even if they are veterans, those guys who got their airplanes shot down are just so lame. After all, Mr. Trump went to a military school so he almost knows about combat.

That loser McCain

Dr. Oz is also stricken from the jury--another Muslim, although surely Mr. Trump must appreciate his showmanship. They've got that in common, but still if Mr. Trump had his way, Dr. Oz would have never been allowed past the customs gate at JFK airport. Doesn't matter all they have in common, being rich, living in New York, being TV stars--that Islam thing Trumps all.

Now, who could be left?  Should be someone not Muslim, Hispanic or a Democrat.  Nobody too dark because, well the Donald is very blond and you know how dark skinned people envy blonds.  No women, because, like Meghan Kelly, they bleed from all the wrong places. Women cannot be objective about Mr. Trump, although, like Hispanics, women love Mr. Trump.

We really ought to match up the ethnic background, which might sound politically incorrect, but liberals do that all the time with affirmative action, so if we are selecting people or excluding people for attributes, well then we are profiling, but everyone does it. Let's just use the profiling in a positive way to choose someone who would likely see so much in common with Mr. Trump, he'd be a good bet for the jury.

So, who? Or what?

Wait, I've got it: