No, Elizabeth, Trump is Not a Racist

Hear ye, Hear ye: I do not know Donald Trump.

Never met the guy.
Never had beers with him.
Never played baseball with him.
Never even watched his TV show.


So I am willing to take his son's assessment on face value: The man is not a racist. The only color he sees is green.


That fits what I have seen of him.

He's got nothing against Black people or Arabs or Jews. All he cares about is money.
So the main crime, the major offense of all those SHC's is they are filled with poor people and the countries themselves are poor.


In this, he is not far from the core sentiment of the Republican party.


He is not far from Andrew Undershaft, that "hero" of "Major Barbara" who provides an affluent living for his workers, for all the people in the company town he presides over, a town which makes weapons of mass destruction, a town which thrives on killing people from other towns.

He doesn't want to allow poor people into the United States.


In that, he is not too far from the Downton Abbey crowd. They lived in the ultimate walled community, free from interaction with the lower classes, except of course, for the servant class, who they try their best to ignore.


Republicans, Trump included, fit that world view which is best exemplified by the charming, pretty Southern lady I met at a barbecue some years ago who was talking about why she hated the whole idea of welfare, public assistance, public housing, Social Security, anything which established mechanisms for the government to help the poor.  "It's like we always say down home: Don't feed the stray dogs--they'll follow you home."

She was wearing upon her ample, pink bosom a gold cross, simple, elegant, understated.

And she wanted nothing to do with stray dogs.

Catherine Deneuve and Me Too

Catherine Deneuve, the French actress and others signed a letter, for which she has now partially apologized.


I'm still trying to figure out why she apologized.
She said so much more clearly what I have been trying to say:

PARIS — Rape is a crime. But trying to pick up someone, however persistently or clumsily, is not — nor is gallantry an attack of machismo.

The Harvey Weinstein scandal sparked a legitimate awakening about the sexual violence that women are subjected to, particularly in their professional lives, where some men abuse their power. This was necessary. But what was supposed to liberate voices has now been turned on its head: We are being told what is proper to say and what we must stay silent about — and the women who refuse to fall into line are considered traitors, accomplices!

Just like in the good old witch-hunt days, what we are once again witnessing here is puritanism in the name of a so-called greater good, claiming to promote the liberation and protection of women, only to enslave them to a status of eternal victim and reduce them to defenseless preys of male chauvinist demons.

Ratting out and calling out

In fact, #MeToo has led to a campaign, in the press and on social media, of public accusations and indictments against individuals who, without being given a chance to respond or defend themselves, are put in the exact same category as sex offenders. This summary justice has already had its victims: men who’ve been disciplined in the workplace, forced to resign, and so on., when their only crime was to touch a woman’s knee, try to steal a kiss, talk about "intimate" things during a work meal, or send sexually-charged messages to women who did not return their interest.

This frenzy for sending the "pigs" to the slaughterhouse, far from helping women empower themselves, actually serves the interests of the enemies of sexual freedom, the religious extremists, the reactionaries and those who believe — in their righteousness and the Victorian moral outlook that goes with it — that women are a species "apart," children with adult faces who demand to be protected.

Men, for their part, are called on to embrace their guilt and rack their brains for "inappropriate behavior" that they engaged in 10, 20 or 30 years earlier, and for which they must now repent. These public confessions, and the foray into the private sphere or self-proclaimed prosecutors, have led to a climate of totalitarian society.

The purging wave seems to know no bounds. The poster of an Egon Schiele nude is censored; calls are made for the removal of a Balthus painting from a museum on grounds that it’s an apology for pedophilia; unable to distinguish between the man and his work, Cinémathèque Française is told not to hold a Roman Polanski retrospective and another for Jean-Claude Brisseau is blocked. A university judges the film Blow-Up, by Michelangelo Antonioni, to be "misogynist" and "unacceptable." In light of this revisionism, even John Ford (The Searchers) and Nicolas Poussin (The Abduction of the Sabine Women) are at risk.

Already, editors are asking some of us to make our masculine characters less "sexist" and more restrained in how they talk about sexuality and love, or to make it so that the "traumas experienced by female characters" be more evident! Bordering on ridiculous, in Sweden a bill was presented that calls for explicit consent before any sexual relations! Next we’ll have a smartphone app that adults who want to sleep together will have to use to check precisely which sex acts the other does or does not accept.

The essential freedom to offend

Philosopher Ruwen Ogien defended the freedom to offend as essential to artistic creation. In the same way, we defend a freedom to bother as indispensable to sexual freedom.

Today we are educated enough to understand that sexual impulses are, by nature, offensive and primitive — but we are also able to tell the difference between an awkward attempt to pick someone up and what constitutes a sexual assault.

Above all, we are aware that the human being is not a monolith: A woman can, in the same day, lead a professional team and enjoy being a man’s sexual object, without being a "whore" or a vile accomplice of the patriarchy. She can make sure that her wages are equal to a man’s but not feel forever traumatized by a man who rubs himself against her in the subway, even if that is regarded as an offense. She can even consider this act as the expression of a great sexual deprivation, or even as a non-event.

As women, we don’t recognize ourselves in this feminism that, beyond the denunciation of abuses of power, takes the face of a hatred of men and sexuality. We believe that the freedom to say "no" to a sexual proposition cannot exist without the freedom to bother. And we consider that one must know how to respond to this freedom to bother in ways other than by closing ourselves off in the role of the prey.

For those of us who decided to have children, we think that it is wiser to raise our daughters in a way that they may be sufficiently informed and aware to fully live their lives without being intimidated or blamed.

Incidents that can affect a woman’s body do not necessarily affect her dignity and must not, as difficult as they can be, necessarily make her a perpetual victim. Because we are not reducible to our bodies. Our inner freedom is inviolable. And this freedom that we cherish is not without risks and responsibilities.

---

*The letter was co-written by five French women: Sarah Chiche (writer/psychoanalyst), Catherine Millet (author/art critic), Catherine Robbe-Grillet (actress/writer), Peggy Sastre (author/journalist) and Abnousse Shalmani (writer/journalist). It was signed by some 100 others. See the full list of signatories.

Trump In the Blue Wall States: Cutting Into the Buboes

When Alexandre Yersin arrived in Hong Kong in 1898 to investigate the outbreak of Black Plague there, he was a shabby looking French speaker who was shoved aside by the proper British authorities, who had invited some very high profile, famous microbiologist from Japan to help them with the crisis.

Yersin managed to see some of the autopsies the Japanese were doing on victims and he was astonished that they never cut into the buboes, the swollen lymph nodes which gave the disease it's name: Bubonic plague. The famous Japanese pathologist examined and sampled liver, lung, spleen but not the buboes, which Yersin went right for, when he acquired a few bodies to examine in his bamboo hut and in the buboes was the answer: they were swimming with plague bacilli.
The Japanese identified the wrong bacteria, accepted the glory and gratitude from the Brits and went home.
Yersin identified the real culprit, the true cause of the plague, and he went back to his base in French Indochina and sent off his report to Louis Pasteur, his mentor in Paris, having named the bug, "Pasturella pestis" and Pasteur promptly renamed it "Yersinia pestis," and after 500 years of pestilence, the causative agent was finally known to mankind.
That led to an antiserum, which Yersin raised in cattle back in Indochina and when plague hit there, he was ready to save the locals. He is still revered in Vietnam for his work there.

Mad Dog suspects something of the same thing is happening now, in the wake of the 2016 Presidential election. Pundits are focusing their lights on everything from Steve Bannon to Russia to gerrymandering, but they are not cutting into the buboes: The buboes in this case are those Blue Wall states, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and all those counties therein which voted Obama twice before voting Trump.

It's got to be there the answer to Trump must lie. It's got to be those counties swimming with the causative agents.

And its to whatever the pestilence is found there, the anti serum must be raised.

Mad Dog has been ruminating, more or less incoherently for the past few posts about the failure of the powers that be, and how those at the bottom of the pay scale, at the bottom of the SES scale have reacted.

Mad Dog told stories about how it felt to be a grunt in the war on cancer, and he alluded to the grunts in the trenches of fighting crime in Baltimore (as seen in "The Wire") and in a variety of other settings. The people down below eventually get angry and come to hate in an unfocused way all authority and then a guy who promises to disrupt the hold the ruling elites have comes across with great appeal.

That is why Bernie appealed to the same group.
That is why Hillary was doomed even before she opened her mouth.
We call that a "change election," but even today the liberal half is clueless; read Twitter, Facebook and the same bromides, the same old same old is washing out of the same old faucets, about how hurt people are by the offensive Trump and all who sail with him, but what they do not see is that is exactly what those folks in those flipped counties want. They want those feminists, globalists, well educated on the top of the pile Leave It To Beaver types to feel hurt.

Until the Democrats come up with an answer to all that, Trump is safe and will be re elected and the Senate and House will remain in GOP hands.

The pestilence will continue.

Immigration and the Starship Enterprise

Never much into Star trek,  but I vaguely remembered the image of the crew of the Enterprise being very multi racial, which in the 1960's and 1970's seemed pretty unusual and cool--everyone seemed to function smoothly and to accept one another. Looking at images of the crew now, it looks pretty tame and you can see more variety at my office today.

Very Diverse, for their day.

Nevertheless, I always liked the idea of a melange of people in America, strength through diversity.

How we could get there, seemed pretty clearly, immigration, but I have not been able to get my head around where all the people have come from, are coming from. Seems like for the past decade most of our immigrants are from South of the border, but then there's Africa and the Middle East.

One thing which the numbers show is the porportion of the nation which is immigrant, i.e. not born here is not at an all time high, but it is hovering around the vicinity where we've been at peak immigrant decades, roughly 13%. When I was a kid it was in the 6% range, which might be one reason I thought I was living in Leave It to Beaver land, and everyone was White.

I do know that between 1890 and 1965 the policy of the United States was to restrict the largest number to specific countries, so people from England and Germany and Scandinavia were preferred and the rationale was mostly racial: We Whites settled this continent (ignoring those non White folks who were here before them) and we want to keep our country looking just like us.  Then, the Italians and Southern Europeans got in, then some Jews, then some Poles and Slavs. 

Ideal Immigrant. We need more of these. Or from Norway

But then in 1965, Congress decided to give preference to people who already had relatives living in the USA, the idea being we could say we just were pro family, but the real idea was if you had mostly White families here, then the folks allowed in would also be mostly White. 

Didn't work that way.

So what do the numbers show?

click to enlarge

Here are a few graphs. The best visual is the link showing where people came from over the decades and usually, they seemed to come from places where wars or famines or other disasters motivated people to leave their SHC's and gamble on a future in the USA.

click to enlarge

Here's a very cool link which shows the sort of dynamic ebb and flow and notice where the immigrants come from tend to be from where on the planet the greatest trouble has been fomenting:


http://metrocosm.com/animated-immigration-map/

Disruption, Qualifications and Competence

Easy writing's damned hard reading.

Free associating yesterday, I wrote about Trump's SHC remark as part of a rumination on politically correct thinking, or thinking which hews to the rules laid down by the prevailing authorities. My most enduring experience with highly qualified authorities laying down rules was medical school and subsequent medical training, and my conclusion was that the powers-that-were misled us, the grunts in the field, and we were fools to have bought into the notion the system they set up was worth slogging through.

Reading the Patrick O'Brian series about the British Navy sea captain, Lucky Jack Aubrey and his intrepid friend, Dr. Stephen Maturin, is another portal into a world where competence matters, or should matter, but the people at the top are the least competent, although they reap the richest rewards. Jack Aubrey is supremely competent but the admirals above him are self serving fools.

Watching again, for the umpteenth time, "The Wire" is another window into organizations where the people at the top are venal, self serving, fundamentally incompetent. 

Reading "Grant" you see how much generalship is dependent on fundamental competence to organize all the details, to get supplies, men and mules moving on sodden roads and to bring soldiers to the firing line in time.

In all these lines of work there have to be high levels of craft and competence--medicine, commanding warships or armies, dissecting out crime scenes and figuring out whodunit--and typically, if there is any competence at all, it flourishes far down the chain of command, not at the top.

Recently, I've had conversations with people who get paid in the $500K range to be health systems executives, and I've been astonished by the profundity of their incompetence, in the very areas where you'd expect them to be most knowledgeable.

So when Trump appoints Ben Carson to be head of the Dept of Housing and Urban Development or Rick Perry to head the Dept Energy, or Betsy DeVos to head Dept Education or Scott Pruitt to head EPA, you see a statement that the people at the top do not have to have command of the details which constitute competence. 

They are simply like the captain of the ship who says, "This ship is going to India" and then hands off the execution of that goal to others, people who actually know how to sail a ship. 

Problems arise, however, when the captain, sailing from Spain, does not know (or care to know) that between him and India is a nexus of continents (the Americas) which will block his way. 

Lincoln was an amateur when it came to military matters, but he could see clearly enough that his armies were not fighting, and his generals were incompetent. As the war progressed, he felt compelled to fill that leadership gap and showed up at McClellan's camp to urge him to pursue the enemy.  
When Mead repulsed Lee at Gettysburg, he failed to pursue Lee and destroy Lee's army. Lincoln, who was not qualified to lead an army, was outraged. 
When he finally found a general in Grant who would do what Lincoln saw the army needed to do, Lincoln was delighted to back off. 
Reports of Grant's drunkenness reached Lincoln and the apocryphal story was Lincoln said, "I'd like to know what whiskey he drinks. I'd send a bottle to all my other generals." Lincoln later said he wished he had  actually said that. 
Accusations that Grant won despite his own incompetent generalship elicited from Lincoln the simple  judgment: "He fights."

And that is what Trump's acolytes are saying now. Trump may not be "competent" in a variety of ways, but as the man at the top, he doesn't need to have command of the details.  

He fights. 

Trump's Genius of Cupidity

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,

With conquering limbs astride from land to land;

Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name

Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she

With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

--Emma Lazarus at the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island

Of course, I shook my head and smiled ruefully when I hear Dick Durbin's recitation of Trump's expostulations, "Why do we need people from these shithole countries?" and "Do we really need more Haitians?"  and "Why can't we have more people from Norway?"
(Has anyone asked the Norwegians?)

I knew he was saying what a lot of people are thinking but most people have a filter on what they say.

Later, I started thinking about things I hadn't thought about for years, and I couldn't understand why, at first.

When I was a medical intern, fresh out of medical school, I was poor, came from what we might now think of as genteel poverty, or at best, modest middle class circumstances, but I was entering a promising apprenticeship, which I had been assured would be the next step toward the gravy train: the medical profession.

I had taken on faith a lot of stuff: for four years I had memorized meaningless things, spent countless hours at my desk studying and learning organic chemistry, comparative anatomy, calculus, physics which had about as much meaning for me as memorizing Latin poems or Greek. But I had done it and sure enough, I was rewarded by being admitted to the next phase of absurdity, medical school, where more of the same with more assurances the reward is in sight. Then internship, and more stuff to do, only more repulsive this time.

I loved that wonderful movie, "The Karate Kid" where the aspirant kid comes under the tutelage of a karate master, an old coot who makes the kid wipe and clean his wooden backyard fence, but in a very particular way, with circular arm movements. Finally, the kid rebels and screams, "I wanted to learn karate, and all you do is make me wash your fence!" Then the master shows him how everything he had done, all those circular motions with his arms are part of the circular exercises of karate moves. It was all relevant, after all!

We all kept telling each other, all the medical students, that medical school was like that: We'd understand someday how it all had actually been part of making us medical karate masters, not simply cleaning other people's fences.

It was a lie, of course. We had been used, exploited. If we had really been taught what we needed to know to practice medicine or  surgery, it would have taken half the time and we would have been better trained.

But we awakened to this in stages, and each person at different times.

One of my fellow interns finally bucked and refused. His resident told him to find some toenail cutters and to cut the toenails of a patient. This intern, George, simply refused, "No way. I'm not cutting anyone's toenails."  All the other interns looked at each other thinking, "Uh-oh, George is in trouble."  Each year along the three year training sequence, they cut about a third of the young doctors from the program, and George was insubordinate.

We all had to do stuff  we hated: My favorite was "disimpacting" constipated patients whose colons, from rectum up miles north, were packed with stool, and you had to put on a rubber glove and stick your finger up the rectum and haul out yard after yard of stool until the patient could actually have relief. 
The smell was enough to knock a buzzard off a shit wagon, as they said then.

But we each accepted these interminable, disgusting tasks. We were used. The older, more experienced doctors had done their time and were at home in Westchester.

So what does that have to do with Donald, the Slithole President Trump?

Well, he was like George, who simply said "No."  Trump is insubordinate. You will ask how can a President be insubordinate? He is at the top. But even the President is supposed to bow to certain gods--the idol of racial tolerance is right up there with patriotism, respecting the flag and honoring our valiant servicemen and veterans.

What we didn't know back when, was George had already got an ophthalmology residency in his pocket and he was back in Baltimore after a year of abuse;  he escaped and got trained as an ophthalmologist and made more money in a shorter time than any of us and he retired at age fifty four. George had said, "Stick it in your ear," and he he walked off, unscathed. 

George got indoctrinated into a certain way of thinking, just like the rest of us. He was told the exploitation was necessary to improving ourselves.  The ruling elites who ran medical schools and training told us to jump and we asked how high. We did not question enough. George was not fooled.

Now we have Mr. Trump, who was born rich. Trump never had to slog through any apprenticeship, never had to fear he'd be cut, never had to do everything he was told to do.  He could listen to prevailing authority and say, "Screw that!" He don't need no frigging system. 
And all those lowlife people living in trailer parks are watching him and they don't care if he was born on third base; all they care about is he is sticking it to the man.

In fact, there is much about immigration which should be examined.

From SHC

Most of my friends and I accept the idea of immigrants as suffering people who will work harder than the rest of us and build their families and our country and we can all congratulate ourselves about how wonderful we are for allowing them to work three jobs and die young so their kids have a better chance at "The American Dream" whatever the hell that is.

We love that poem by Emma Lazarus and we feel all noble embracing that.

Heart warming, no?

But Trump looks at the other sort of immigrant, the exception to be sure, the MS-13 gang member and he says, "Hell, no. I don't like poor people and if they are going to misbehave or if they are going to even look like that, I don't want them in my club."

He is doing what he was elected to do: He is disrupting embedded liberal belief.

Long Island

His idea of good immigration is not pulling drowning people out of a roiling sea, but inviting Miss Universe pageant nubile creatures over to his house for a party. Or getting smart Indian doctors or Ukrainian computer geeks to come live in America. Why should the Norwegian doctor have to get in back of the line when a bunch of Salvadorans have sneaked in ahead?

Ellis Island

He puts it crudely: Why do we need more Haitians? That is, why do we want to admit more poor people or Black people when we could go for more Melanias? 

But this is what more refined people are saying, in more acceptable phrases, when they talk about eliminating "chain immigration" i.e., allowing family members to come in ahead of Indian doctors who have no relatives already here. They are saying we should put our own needs and desires ahead of the needs of the suffering poor who seek   refuge here.
In fact, the idea of making reuniting families a priority is a relative new idea in American immigration thinking and policy. It dates back less than fifty years. Before that, we admitted people based on country of origin and the preferred countries of origin were, you guessed it, a lot more like Norway than Tanzania.

Now that's what I'm talking about. Good immigrant.

And the fact is, we always do weigh our own needs and desires in this formula. We could not possibly allow every person who wants to come from the Subcontinent or from China or from Central America or from a combination of all these into our country without accepting the fact that we would quadruple our population and we would likely have English speaking people in the distinct minority and Chinese would like become our lingua franca. 
We all accept we want immigration to occur in a way which costs us the least, personally. We're all okay with allowing in poor people,  as long as we don't have to think much about them or see them much, beyond clearing dishes at the restaurant, or working in the factories or the fields.

Out of sight. Out of mind.

And what really upsets all us liberals is we know that what Trump is expressing perfectly expresses what 49% of Americans actually believe. They are quietly, safely, nodding in agreement. Even some of our own liberal friends inwardly agree.

That's the rub.

Miss Universe Meets Shithole Countries

Maybe he really is a Very Stable Genius, after all. 

At a conference with Senators who were trying to work out some immigration policies, the President of the United States asked which immigrants from which countries would be benefited by various provisions of the proposed laws and, when told Haitians, Africans and some Salvadorians would be allowed to stay, he asked, why we, as Americans, would want to invite people from all these "shithole" countries?

Are we getting the best people here? 

Now, that may sound like a typical Trumpian eructation, and it was, but you know they were cheering it down at the bars in South Carolina, white Baltimore, Texas, Alabama, Mississippi etc. 

Now there's a guy who tells it the way it really is, our Slithole President.

Definitely Shithole-esque, although not Black

What we want, Trump added, is more immigrants from Norway.

The image, if it wasn't clear from the original expostulation, was unmistakable when he threw in Norway.  Africa, Haiti, uh, Black.  Norway: Could you get much whiter?

Now THAT'S what I'm talking about in an immigrant. 

Well, maybe Slovenia.