Where Have All the Real Men Gone?

Some days, after watching Fox News, CNN, Morning Joe, The Squawk Box on TV as I do my treadmill, seeing The Dotard, Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, various pundits, I just groan inwardly.

Beneath Contempt

Phony tough guy

Phony tough guy

Phony tough guy

I think about the men I've been reading about lately, Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, Lee, Longstreet and I think, "Where have all the REAL men gone?"

Real tough guy

Just look at these current incarnations of what passes for leaders of men nowadays--puffy pink men,  full of sound and fury, signifying an inner gelatinous core. Never  had a shot fired in anger at them.  They talk tough to hide their core softness.


Then look at Sherman, Sheridan, Grant.  And, of course, Lincoln. 

Of course, these real men are not angels, nor even "heroes." 
Sheridan, after his service in the Union army playing a large part in winning the Civil War, led the cavalry as an  Indian fighter, and was said to have been the author of the immortal line, "The only good Indian is a dead Indian."


Sherman hated newspaper reporters: "If I could kill them all, I would. But then we would likely get reports from Hell before breakfast."
 And Grant, frustrated with the black market in cotton behind his lines and told (by his father) the merchants were mostly Jews issued an order banning all Jews from his department, which Lincoln, who tried to never interfere with Grant, had to, in this one instance, intervene, reminding Grant you cannot ban a entire class of people; you have to deal with individuals when you consider the law.
Lincoln, of course, was a lawyer.
Lincoln was  real man. He would have seen right through a Muslim ban.

Tough guy veritas

Lincoln was not the Great Emancipator. He was the Reluctant Emancipator. He did not free all the slaves, just those who were politically expedient to free.


But, for all their faults, they were real men.
Just look at their photographs and compare the real men to the sorry excuse for malehood we have today.

"Occupied" The Future is Now

As I am carried along by "Occupied" the Norwegian dystopia on Netflix, I have the same recurring thought:  "How could I have been so ignorant?"

Consulting Professor Google for background I read about Finland. Finland, which shares a long border with Russia, was, during the cold war, so intimidated by the colossus on its border that no Finnish cabinet could form without Russia's approval, and dissidents who escaped Russia were promptly returned to their fate back in the motherland. This gave rise to the word "Finlandization" which meant the reduction of a supposedly free state to a puppet state by the Russians.
Apparently, while the Norwegians have looked at their own past, with respect to the individual choices made during the Nazi occupation, Finland has not. 
In Norway, when I visited 30 odd years ago, few people spoke English, but if you tried to speak German, you got dirty looks. They don't forget, apparently.

The word "Quizling" actually derives from the Norwegian puppet who delivered control of Norway to the Nazis. Collaboration meant that Jews trying to escape Germany were delivered back to the maw of the Nazi holocaust machine. 

Quisling

Watching "Bordertown" the Finnish nordic noir, one gets the feel for the relationship between Russia and Finland, but in some ways, "Occupied" feels more revealing.

A review in Politico by James Kirchick, from early in 2016 remarks on how upset Russia has been by "Occupied" and a statement from the Russian embassy in Oslo trots out the three cardinal features of Russian mindset:
1/ Russia is the victim of character assassination in the West
2/ Russia won the big war against Hitler and without this heroic effort Western Europe would still be under the rule of the Third Reich
3/ Russia is a pussycat and no threat to its neighbors.

All this, and nobody mentions Ukraine or Crimea. Not that I really know anything about Ukraine or Crimea, but I do read there are Russian troops in both places now, and Mr. Putin claims Ukraine really isn't a country, just a part of Russia with pretensions.


For his part, the Norwegian Prime Minister, who spends most of his time looking like he was written by Ethan and Joel Coen, one of those Minnesota types who is always breaking into a sweat and unable to finish his sentences and says, "Well, but, no..." a lot, squirms from one bad position to another. He explodes at his adoring assistant for wearing high heel shoes which make too much noise, so he is unable to concentrate. When he wakes up in bed with her, after a drunken celebratory party, he asks her for aspirin and barely seems to know where he is, but he gets on Skype to talk to his wife who is in Paris. 
It is Scandinavia, after all, and there's a lot of extra marital sleeping around. 
Another interesting character is the owner of a restaurant, fallen on hard times until the Russians discover it and take it over, keeping her bank accounts solvent. She eventually starts sleeping with the Russian overseer, but she has second thoughts about that when the Russians, some Russians, decide to kill her husband, who is a journalist digging into a false flag explosion at a Norwegian gas plant, which provides an excuse for the Russians to extend their "assistance" at the Norwegian power stations.
This whole narrative is a little difficult to follow, of course. One of the reasons Europe is behind the Russians in their take over of Norway is that oil from the Middle East has ceased flowing owing to civil wars there. But you would think Russia would be overjoyed at that development, being a major oil producer and one of their big competitors has just been eliminated. You'd think they'd be only too  happy if Norway took itself out of competition as well. Oh, well, not everything can be explained. It's television, after all. 

The Beast You Can't Ignore

But the best thing about "Occupied" is the wonderful character of the Russian Ambassador, a ice cold blonde, with her hair severely pulled back, who begins every scene by protesting how she is only trying to maintain peace between Russia and Norway and she is forever put in the position of having to defend Russia from the irascible and dangerous Norwegians. She seems blithely unaware that the presence of Russian troops on the Norwegian oil rigs and gas fields and the tendency of the Russian "security" forces to cordon off streets in Oslo might be found somewhat provocative by the average Norwegian. 

When Russians in black body armor storm the Norwegian prime minister's office, she begins with the Russia is a pussycat trope--we have no idea who these men are; they have nothing do to with the Russian government, and then she slides to the "we can't control terrorists" and to the "we do not negotiate with terrorists" and then slides to the "you are impugning our reputation and assassinating our character." But she also finds the demands of these mysterious men in black reasonable, "They were clearly provoked because the prime minister started rounding up innocent Russians in Norway and deporting them."  When the terrorists are shot dead in a surgical SWAT team operation, she is outraged because "You have shot Russian citizens!"  So the men she previously disavowed are now her victimized countrymen.

What you can see from this series is how vulnerable small European, particularly Scandinavian states, feel living next door to this brute, Mother Russia. 

Now I understand why NATO seems so important to its members, outside of Donald Trump.
Of course,  what Trump says feeds into what people on both sides of the Atlantic have always said in private--The Europeans doubt we'd actually risk our necks to defend them against Russia and Americans say we have no business propping up these slackers who haven't spent on their own defense and expect us to continue giving the Europeans a free ride.

Well, well, well, this is all very interesting. 
Who knew? 
I did not even know Norway shares a border with Russia. Sweden does not, but Norway does. I have a globe and I just consulted it.

I have lots more to learn about Scandinavia. Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark.  
Each has a story to tell and they are living right next door to Mr. Putin and his pugnacious country, which saved us all from Hitler, is not a threat to anyone and which suffers the slings and arrows from the West, which is always trying to belittle, demean and insult Mother Russia for no good reason other than innate perversity.

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.