2024: Jigsawed America (A Crowd Sourced Sci Fi Project)

Okay, fellow voyagers of the blogosphere, here's your chance.  
Let us create, as a flashcrowd/crowd sourced/ 21st century group orgy of imagination--the new Netflix Series: "2024: Jigsawed America"

Here's the set up: you write the follow on scenes, events and outcomes.

But here's a suggestion for the opening: 

Single card each: white on black. Ten seconds each. Roughly a three minute sequence.

Background music: Marvin Gaye, "The Ecology"

2024
+ President Trump is starting the final year of his Presidency.
+ Medicare and Social Security have been privatized.
+ The Supreme Court Overturned Roe v Wade. Abortion now legal in only 12 states.
+ The Right to Parenthood Act stipulates wives need written permission from their husbands to have an IUD inserted
+ Sanctity of Marriage Act, outlaws Gay marriage.
+ The Supreme Court has struck down all restrictions on gun ownership and sale.
+ The Immigration Reform Act of 2022 forbids immigration of Muslims.
+ Camps in Arizona and Texas house 10,000 illegal immigrants
+ Gitmo houses 5,000 prisoners.
+ Reservations for Muslims near Detroit house 20,000
+ Windmills, solar panels now carry a 50% excise tax.
+ Drilling in Alaska and the lower 48 states is permitted without government approval.
+ Fishing and shrimping collapse from Maine to the Gulf of Mexico after a series of oil leaks from offshore drilling.
+ The average annual  temperature in Minneapolis has risen from 55 o F to 74 oF. 
+ Palm trees planted along lake Michigan in Chicago have survived four winters.

FADE IN:

Rally in Madison Square Garden, New York City.
Man at the podium: I don't need to tell you why we are here today. Why we have to be here today. And I don't need to say more than, "Here he is!"

To the background of general tumult, a man walks across the stage. He is smallish, trim beard, might resemble Ulysses S. Grant, or maybe Jon Stewart, or maybe that hobbit from "Lord of the Rings."

He reaches the podium, barely seems to hear the crowd, pauses to smile a friendly smile and begins:


Hobbit: Are you ready for something completely different?

The crowd responds with delirious roar, standing on chairs, thunderous.

Hobbit: Really, this can't go on. Not like this.  
I've never been one of those to think we have seen anything really abnormal in this country over the past 8 years. 
Our national history, since its inception has seen wild partisan divides, conspiracy fantasies and true conspiracies, punctuated by political violence, assassinations, deliberate subversion of constitutional principles, years of bumbling ineptitude, bizarre personalities in the Presidency.

And I am happy to live in a country which, unique in the world's history, fought its most costly war, its most desperate, tragic and costly war to free an underclass. 

That war was sold on a lie, at first, or at least it was sold as one thing and then there was a bait and switch:  It was a war to save the Union, which even racists could support, but by his second Inaugural, Lincoln, in a burst of candor and deep honesty, admitted, "everyone understood that somehow slavery was the cause of the war."

Well, I'm glad we fought that war. It was the right thing to do.
But you know, as we've begun to engage in this discussion about dissolution, we keep hearing, "Well, we fought a war about that already." 
But no, not really.

That's a half truth.
I'm glad we stayed together in 1865. Our nation, a continental Goliath, played a huge role in defeating two of the twentieth century's most malignant nation states, and had we been divided, had we been smaller, we might not have been able to play that role.

But now we have to face a different truth.

You know, in the final years of the Soviet Union, Russia became a society where everyone knew what their leaders were saying was not real. But everybody accepted that and pretended it was real, because NO ONE COULD IMAGINE ANY ALTERNATIVE.


Silence in the Garden. You could hear the proverbial pin drop. The hobbit looks around and continues:

Hobbit:  Well, we have reached that stage in our nation's history, where "alternative facts" and "fake news" and "don't take him literally but take him seriously" have played out for the past 8 years. 
And now folks who depended on, who planned for health care with Medicare are languishing, dying for lack of care. Retirees are losing their homes, moving in with their kids, if they have kids, going on the street if they don't. The ranks of unwanted children are swelling again. Racism has been institutionalized again, this time aimed at Hispanics and Muslims.

And it is all so normal now. And legal. It's been enacted by Congress and supported by the Supreme Court.

But that Court is the creation of a new mean gerrymandered tide centered in the Bible Belt and which now controls Congress, not by force of numbers, but by manipulation of an obsolete and now corrupted system of redistricting and a President who has appointed the 21st century version of Roger Taney at every opportunity.

From the beginning to the middle of the 20th century, a small, determined group of Southerners controlled Congress and made sure our armed forces, our neighborhoods, our schools, our restaurants, swimming pools and even our bathrooms were segregated. Eventually, they were thwarted, but only temporarily. Their will remained unsuppressed.

Our Congress is now in control of an equally determined group of reactionaries, but they are not exclusively from the South, although, for the most part they are from the South and those from the South are almost exclusively in this Far Right party.

I do not pretend to like these people, but I cannot say they have done anything illegal or immoral. They have simply seized power and wielded it.

But they have created a country which suits them, not us. It is said every Northern state is a melange of large metropolitan with Alabama in between. But the fact is, nationwide, the Alabamans among us are not in the majority; they reign by voting in blocks and by playing with voting districts. Nationwide, the Right constitutes about 2/5 of the population and the Left about 3/5. The distribution places the Right in the empty spaces of the West and the rural parts of the Midwest and solidly in the South, so they are strategically placed to control the country as an army, strategically deployed can control and occupy a much larger population.
We have, in the North, the East and the West Coast, functionally, become an occupied country. Occupied by the Far Right. 

They want their guns and their Bibles in public schools and their churches ruling community life and they want their communities to be all White again and they don't want immigrants or different languages heard on the street or in stores and really, they want to return to the 1950's when Whites ruled and the colored cowered and things were stacked in their favor.

Can't blame them. They want to be winning again.

So, as you know, I've proposed a difficult but obvious decision.
We have a dysfunctional, unhappy family. Let us dissolve it. Let us divorce--a no fault divorce. We do not ask Southerners or rural Pennsylvanians  to accept our view of them or their values. We simply ask to be allowed to go our own way.

It will be good for them, and we surely think it will be good for us.

There will be a time of transition and difficulty.  I hope and expect conservative people living in the new United States of Diversity, will look around and find the taxes, the role of government, the restrictions on guns and proscriptions against religion in government will not suit them, and many, if not most will move to the more welcoming South. 

I hope we'll not have anything so traumatic as the India/Pakistan experience, where Muslims moved out and Hindus remained behind and the two new countries were at each other's throats for generations. I hope our parting will be less rancorous.

We have simply reached the point of irreconcilable differences and we should part.
The details remain to be worked out. 

The only clear form I can see is our new nation, the United States of Diversity, will not be contiguous. But we've had Hawaii and Alaska which have not been physically connected to the lower 48 and we can easily handle this.

Will we need passports to travel from Boston to Montgomery, Alabama? Very possibly.

But, from my point of view, that is a price well worth paying to not have Alabama controlling my Medicare, my Congress, my future.

If fate wills it that we should part, then let us make the most of it. 
Let us appeal to the Red States to accept our request for divorce and start our negotiations.

The USD (In Blue) Member Need to Apply

And let us consider, as we do this, exactly what sort of a nation we want to build among the states or parts of states which want to join us. 

FADE TO BLACK.
Okay, that's the pitch.  You've seen the pilot.  You write the next episode. 

A Brexit for America? The Case for Divorce.

Just as a mind experiment, let us consider, with as little emotion as possible, what we might do to resolve the intractable divisions in our country. 

The letter cited in the blog "Alabama In Between" was both dispiriting and in some ways, possibly illuminating. Of all the convictions firmly held among the author's in-laws: climate control simply part of a benign cycle, Obamacare causing more loss of health insurance than increase, every period of economic boom under Democratic presidents being attributable to prior efforts by Republican presidents, and so forth, the one conviction not mentioned is that abortion is murdered of the unborn. 

Especially when you throw abortion in there, these constitute truly irreconcilable differences.
And, in civil society, irreconcilable difference form the basis for divorce.
If we've learned anything it's that keeping a dysfunctional, unhappy family together is far worse than simply dissolving those bonds.
We may have to, at long last, recognize, we simply can no longer live together, that a miserable family under one roof is untenable, and we need to find separate places to live.
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
What the Alabama complaint coalesces around is a deep complaint against the idea of other people, of government, (except when it comes to abortion, where Alabama wants government to intervene.) That Alabama of the soul sees oppression in the heavy hand of government everywhere, from gun control, to taxes, to healthcare, which is to say these folks find government simply not worth the price. 

In that deep seated opinion may be the solution. 
Suppose, for a moment, all those Alabamans living in New Hampshire, Maine, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin could move easily to a place where government is minimal, taxes low, guns unregulated, where they can be left alone?  
Is it possible that seeing this place beckoning, especially if there were economic incentives to move, the Alabamans in Pennsylvania and Ohio would do what poor Whites and Blacks in the South did in the 1930's, 1940's and 1940's and migrate? 

It's happened in the past: People followed the money. Of course back then they were following salaries, but might they follow the siren call of being able to keep almost all their money, leading a life without taxes, or with only minimal taxes? Might the guys who drive around with Confederate flags on their pickup trucks up here in New Hampshire move to Mississippi if given some incentive?

As for the Northeast, the West Coast and parts of the Midwest, there is no doubt they would be only too happy to accommodate a request for a divorce.  To no longer have to carry the poor, ignorant parts of the country, no longer have to fund these malcontents, oh, yes, let them leave!

What would these new countries look like on a map? 

The United States of Diversity (USD) would likely be non contiguous: It would look like those maps on election night, bicoastal, with a few states like New Mexico, Colorado and possibly Nevada in between.
Would we need passports to travel to Austin, Chapel Hill and Atlanta? Likely, we would, but is that not a small price to pay for a government which actually represents our beliefs and protects our interests? 
What about our armed forces? 
Likely the USD would spend less on a more streamlined military, focusing primarily on nuclear deterrence and police capacity to deal with terrorism. The New Confederate States of America would likely be more interventionist, and have larger standing armies and navy. More power to them. Let them pay for that.

In the USD, there would be Medicare, National Health Care, Social Security, free day care, highly integrated schools and workforce and more open immigration, and much higher spending on public education, public transportation  and internet infrastructure. 
The USD would likely have to import oil and gas from the Confederacy, which is where most of the oil and refineries are, but that could be mutually beneficial and in the USD electric cars, wind and solar power would make them less and less dependent over time. 

Yes, you'd need to get a visa to go visit Grandma in Charlottesville for Thanksgiving and to go to your home in Florida, but it would be no worse than having a time share in Portugal or Greece. 

Really, think about it. Would you really miss the South or the off the grid folks in Idaho, Wyoming and the Dakotas? Would your life be poorer?

Yes, I know, we fought for the Union 150 years ago, would we now turn our backs on that huge sacrifice, a war which claimed more American lives than all the other wars we have fought since put together.  
Well, yes we fought for Union, but what necessitated that fight was slavery. In the end, as Lincoln noted, that war was fought to end slavery and it did. That was a good and necessary fight.
But now it's the 21st century and we are married to people we do not love and in fact, do not even like, and in fact can barely stand to be in the same room with. Let's not continue to hate them, to loathe their presence. 
Let's divorce and move on.

And Alabama In Between

Writing in response to a NYT article by Timothy Eagen, a correspondent said:




Sorry Tim, but you're wrong. Truth won't ever win out when half the population refuses to acknowledge it. I just spent Thanksgiving with my Alabama-living, hyper conservative Christian in-laws, and was absolutely amazed by their version of reality. Roy Moore? Those child-dating allegations have been debunked. The Clinton economic expansion? That was because of Reagan. W's recession? Clinton's fault. The Obama recovery? That was because of the GOP house. The ACA? More people have lost insurance than gained it, but the liberal media won't tell you that. Climate change? It's just cyclical; scientists are lying and/or it's God's will. Did I mention Christians are oppressed because they can't lead a mass prayer at football games? What about the uptick in violence against minorities? Well, you know Muslims throw gay people off buildings so the US isn't so bad.

There is literally no reasoning with these people. Down is up, and up is always by the grace of the GOP. Democrats are evil; the media can't be trusted* and should be investigated for perpetuating "Fake News!"; Donald Trump is extremely smart because he didn't lose the money he inherited (despite the fact that we don't know anything about his finances because he won't release his tax returns, which to them, is not suspicious).

Don't have faith that reason will win the day, because to these people, their worldview is reasonable.

*Certain exemptions apply: media that reenforces your preconceptions is fair and balanced.

We have joked in New Hampshire that our state is Portsmouth, Manchester, Durham and Alabama in between. (There are versions of this for many states from Pennsylvania to North Carolina) but we had no idea.


The detail of what these folks in Alabama are like is stunning.

And to think, we fought to keep these guys in the Union.


We have Union dead buried in cemeteries from Hampton to Holderness. And this is what they died for? To keep these people as our countrymen?

Yale Psychiatrist Diagnoses Trump As Certifiable: Poor, Wimpy Yale

If ever we needed a clue about why Donald Trump has succeeded in capturing and enrapturing his base, we need look no further than the letter to the editor in the New York Times from somebody, Dr. Bandy X.  Lee, who is supposed to be a "forensic psychiatrist" at the Yale School of Medicine. (Yale, highly ranked by U.S. News and World Reports--the definition of fake news if there ever was one. But that's another story.)

"We urge the public and the lawmakers of this country to push for an urgent evaluation of the president, for which we are in the process of developing a separate but independent expert panel, capable of meeting and carrying out all medical standards of care.

BANDY X. LEE, NEW HAVEN

The writer is a forensic psychiatrist at the Yale School of Medicine."

So now, we have Dr. Lee and Yale suggesting a solution to our problem with President Dotard: simply put him in the care of "expert panel" of august psychiatrists who can judge his sanity and his worthiness to command.
Oh, Rush Limbaugh will love this one.

If anyone is detached from reality, who do you think is the more likely candidate: Dr. Lee or President Donald Trump?


P.S. I doubled checked: This is not from The Onion. It's from the NY Times

On Dying Unnoticed: Kodokushi

There is some saying that God notices every sparrow who drops dead to earth.

Yesterday, in the NYT an article about elderly Japanese dying unnoticed in their apartments drew over 200 anguished replies within hours.


Apparently, owing to basic changes in Japanese society, thousands of Japanese men and women now in their 70's and 80's and 90's are living in vast tracks of bleak government buildings and when one dies in one of those apartments, the only way anyone knows is a stink from the decaying body calls attention to the fact.
A new industry of body removal and apartment decontamination has sprung up.

Kodokushi

One man was not discovered for an estimated 3 years, and the cockroaches and mice had picked his skeleton clean.


The reasons for this phenomenon include changes in the economy so that multigenerational family homes have disappeared and Japanese have few children, so if you are a widow and your one offspring dies before you do, there is nobody on earth to notice when you die.


A woman in the story arranged with her neighbor to call for the body removers if she has not raised her window shades in the morning.

Death was Noted

Talk about living in isolation. It's not really the idea of dying unnoticed so much as living unnoticed which got to me.


As we age in America, our kids grown and moved away, we become less and less relevant, less important, and we accept this. We retire. More than retire, we withdraw. One of the things about continuing to work is if you don't show up, somebody may notice.

They did not die alone; small comfort

We express our opinions and nobody listens. As Bill Clinton noted, leaving office was liberating because he no longer had to be so careful about everything he said; he could say anything he wanted to say, no filters. Trouble was, he added, "Nobody cares what I say now."
Of course some elderly folks still command attention--Warren Buffet, the Koch Brothers and Donald Trump.
But the day they retire, well they'd have to pay somebody to go find their bodies.

In American Concentration Camp

Watch those dottering preachers on TV, all those prosperity church men and women.  They will get on TV and exhort their congregations as long as they can because as long as they can get on screen, they matter. They matter because the money keeps flowing in--just send your cash and God will Bless YOU!

Somebody noticed

This has got to be the ultimate alienation:  I do not matter. I'm just road kill.
At least the crows, ravens and vultures pay attention.
The circle of life.

The Alienated Liberal

Is the accuser always holy now? Were they born this morning as clean as God's fingers?
--Arthur Miller, The Crucible

Mad Dog was liberal once. Now he's alienated. You know, you grow.

Pia Guerra

Mad Dog actually enjoys the Dotard's tweets every morning. After his morning ablutions, Mad Dog  checks in with the Pink Puffer.  Dotard tweets sharpen his senses. They make him feel superior and alive.
It's his own tribe drives him crazy.

Alienated Left

It all starts with NPR in the morning, on the drive to work.
Mad Dog starts screaming at the radio.
And he likes NPR. He sends them checks every year.

A sampler:

1. A story about transgender patients who just want to be accepted for who they are.

2. A story about the opioid crisis which suggests if only the uncaring Trumpian hordes would allow Democrats to fund drug rehab programs overdoses and addiction would end by New Year's Day.

3. A story about a woman who out-ed Al Frankin as a misogynist, groper, sexual harasser who should resign his Senate seat.

 4.  A story on global warming causing "invasive species" to proliferate in the Mediterranean and other places.

+The transgender story:  Mad Dog wholeheartedly agrees people should not be attacked, belittled or scorned because of their sexual preference, identity etc. There is no excuse for trying to hurt someone who has not hurt you.  And Mad Dog believes homosexuals do not "choose" to be different (although they may embrace it.) They simply are. Gay is not a disease. But transgender folks are different, qualitatively, from gays and if you sit in a room with enough transgender folks for long enough, you see that difference very plainly. There is a reason they had to stop the transgender program at Johns Hopkins because of a suicide rate which exceeded 30%.

+The Opioid Story: People dying of overdoses, young people addicted to heroin, meth, cocaine, squandering their youth, getting heart infections, hep C, AIDs is alarming and sad.  But to suggest all we need to do is to change government policies is not just naïve and wishful thinking, it's bound to reap a back lash once people figure out this has been a wasteful, unsuccessful approach. 
Watched a meeting chaired by Steny Hoyer, during which someone mentioned "compassion fatigue" very common among EMT's, ER doctors, nurses who see the same guy over dosing dozens of times,  readmitted for heart valve surgery for infected valves from the use of dirty needles.
 The collapse of the "war on poverty" programs of the Great Society, disillusioned the Joe Sixpack, lunch pail crowd who became cynical and hostile when they saw mindless embrace of programs which are bound to fail. We may well see the same for our war against the opioid epidemic.
You want to really go at this problem: study Portugal. Go all in: legalize every drug and treat this like a public health problem with tough love.

+The Accuser Du Jour.:   Mad Dog is sorry to admit it, and he knows he is inviting vituperative response, but he has the feeling some of the women lining up to be "Me Too" are just enjoying their moment too much. He knows, he knows, it is so difficult to come forward, but really?

Yes, get your revenge. Unload on the jerks who made your life miserable, but remember, there are phony accusers out there as the NY Times op ed said today. 
Not every woman always speaks the truth. The Duke Lacrosse story, the UVA Rolling Stone story demonstrate that much, surely. "Believe the women" can be taken too far.

And playing into the hands of the Roy Moore crowd by stabbing Al Franken is putting your own satisfaction over the needs of the nation. This may sound Machiavellian. Should we excuse Franken to protect the Senate?

 But there's another reason to give Franken a pass: the evidence, such as we have it is very different in his case and Moore's case. The news accounts provide enough data to conclude, given the detail of the stories about Moore, there is a pattern there,  attested to by enough different women to conclude his was a pattern of malicious behavior sustained for decades. 
About Franken, not so much. He might be as slimy as Moore, but he might also be simply boorish, puerile and unfunny. I'm sorry but a photo WHICH FRANKEN KNEW WAS BEING TAKEN AS HE WAS MUGGING FOR THE CAMERA may be stupid and tasteless and gross,  but it is a far different thing from a 40 year old man, secretly, in an automobile, running his hand up the skirt of a 14 year old. Can you not see that?


Of course, it has been said we believe the accusers if the accused is a conservative Republican but not if the accused is a liberal Democrat. 
You believe what you want to believe. 


But the stories and the public testimony and evidence looks vastly different in these two cases--only the Rush Limbaugh crowd can see it the other way.

+ Invasive Species:  As anyone who has read about evolution knows: evolution does not anoint favored species because it has favorites, nor does it designate "invasive species." 
Environments change; species take advantage of these changes to claim a niche and they thrive. Just because there's a fish or a tree which you lovefor some reason, does not mean we are seeing tragedy writ large on the planet if that fish or tree is replaced by a new species which is more successful in the new environment, which has spelled the end of your favorite. "Native species" once replaced other species. There is no plant or animal which belongs in a given place, which has a right to that space.

Okay, Mad Dog's  done it now. He's said it. 
Hate him. 
Spew your bile. 
But there it is.

Guns in America

Tonight, at a party,  I chatted up the chairman of the Maine House of Representatives committee on Health and Human Services. 

I asked her what she thought we ought to do about guns and she started talking about mass shootings. 

Then she talked about the level of gun violence in our country.

Then she mentioned we are #1 in the number of guns per capita in the world.

Then I asked her again what we ought to do about guns.  
She said she didn't know. 
A refreshingly honest answer.

The "gun problem" is actually at least four different problems:

1. Mass shootings with guns by homicidal maniacs.

2. Street shootings with guns unrelated to robberies or other crimes, where men get into arguments at dance clubs, or one kid insults another kid's sneakers. 

3. The number of deaths by gun, which includes suicides and accidents at home, where some kids shoots his brother while playing with a gun, or household disputes.

4. The use of guns in commission of crimes. 

Trying to stop the mass shooter may have you looking at identifying psychos by various means, but trying to stop street shootings might mean you can't allow handguns to be sold to just any kid with $50 at the local Walmart.  Accidental shootings of kids by kids might require some sort of fingerprint recognition system on triggers. The use of guns in crimes is likely insoluble. Read "The Friends of Eddie Coyle" and you know that there is a whole underground industry, generations old, devoted to providing working tools to America's street criminals.

Whatever legislatures do, I doubt America would be successful in a gun usurpation/confiscation program.  You can bury guns in your back yard and dig it up a year later and go shoot your wife, no matter what the local police do.

I do not have the answers. 
But neither do those who reflexively cry out for "gun control" after every mass shooting.