"The People" and their Representatives

My father would respond to my diatribes about the structural problem with a representative democracy: I maintained the majority of people were too lame to actually know what they wanted or what was best for them.


"Oh," he said, "They may not know how to get what they want, but they know what they want, at least in general terms."

But yesterday, in my office, I was struck again by what's out there.
A woman whose bones were found to be thin and likely to fracture kept insisting this made no sense at all because she swallows four calcium pills a day. When I told her there is no evidence that oral calcium was effective in building bone density or strength or preventing fractures she said, "But I take my pills every day." It turned out she did not understand what "oral" meant, as in taking a pill by mouth.

And another woman who came in walking with a red and white cane: I asked her, "Do you have any vision at all?

She did not know what vision meant. And English is her native language. She also could not recall the name of the doctor who had operated on her brain aneurysm. It was "Chan." Not a complicated name. She was conversational, and would have struck nobody, from ordinary conversation as being demented. She is a lovely grandmother to her grandchildren. She just never got much of an education.
She does not watch "The PBS News Hour." She watches Fox.

As Ben Franklin emerged from the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, a woman asked him, "What kind of a government have you given us, Doctor Franklin?"
And he replied, "A Republic, madam. If you can keep it."


Watching Nancy Pelosi's investiture on CSPAN was one of those experiences when hope was ascendant over experience. Our hope is so high, but there among the House CSPAN panned over Jim Jordan chewing his gum like cud and Ted Yoho and Louie Gohmert, who really do represent people who, in the immortal words of Stringer Bell, from the Wire, are simply "too ignorant to have the floor."

(This occurred when Stringer tried to run his meetings of hoppers and touts and street thugs by Roberts' Rules of Order and a young tout challenged his plan for becoming less confrontational and more business like and Bell cut him off and one of the other touts reminded him, "Stringer, Poot do have the floor." And Stringer Bell dismissed all that with, "This nigger too ignorant to have the floor.")

Guerra

And so we wonder, as the American Experiment goes forth, are our people simply too ignorant to have the floor?

The Fifth Risk: Why Government Is Necessary

Michael Lewis has in 219 pages outlined what is wrong with Trumpism.

Michael Lewis 

And what is Trumpism?  At it's essence is the conviction we do not need government except for two things: Military might and defending our borders.

What Lewis shows, by telling stories of various admirable people who chose to work in the federal government, is how important the daily workings of the federal government really are: The Department of Commerce, which is really the department of Data, which collects weather data and transforms it into weather predictions. The Department of Agriculture, which is really the Department of Rural Development and the Department of Science and Technology.

Part of the problem is the names of the various Departments are misleading. We know what Defense and State do, even though those, too are misnomers: These are really the Department of War and the Department of Foreign Affairs. But most of us do not know or understand what Commerce or Agriculture do.

Growing up in the Washington suburbs, I went to school with the kids of Congressmen--this was back when Congressmen, especially Senators, moved their families to Washington and lived there--but most of the parent of kids I went to high school with worked for agencies like Standards and Measurement or NOAA or the National Institutes of Health, or NASA.

They did things like figuring out how much stuff had to be in building materials so skyscrapers wouldn't collapse, or figuring out how to predict tornadoes in time to warn people to take cover. They were involved in collecting huge troves of data which allowed airplanes to fly, buildings and bridges to remain functional. They did all the work which was too expensive or unprofitable for private enterprise to be interested in doing but which made private enterprise profitable--like developing something called "the world wide web" and the internet. 

These are the people of what Trump's friends at Fox News call "the deep state." These are the men and women vilified by Steve Bannon:  All those nefarious civil servants who Trump wants to root out.

People like the folks at the Department of Agriculture who, with astonishing speed, developed a lab test for bird flu so only a few million chickens had to be culled rather than hundreds of millions, and who protect us from Mad Cow Disease getting into McDonald's burgers across the land, or Toni Fauci, who heads the institute at the NIH which oversaw the identification and treatment of HIV/AIDS.

Toni Fauci

But as Lewis demonstrates, the men President Trump has appointed to run these departments have either been actively hostile to the idea of what they might be doing-- without actually knowing--like Rick Perry who thought the Department of Energy was all about funding solar energy, killing "clean coal" and proving climate change was man made, and was clueless about it's more important mission, which is to track loose nukes (stolen nuclear war heads) to insure our own nuclear arsenal is maintained safely and to clean up vast areas contaminated by previous nuclear bomb building factories which currently are moving in subterranean drift toward the Columbia River.

Rick Perry

Wilbur Ross, who heads Commerce, thought the business of Commerce was business and tariffs and had no idea it is actually the main data collection center of the federal government, which does the census, tracks water temperatures, weather patterns and most of the data on the planet's natural phenomenon which control fisheries, airplane and ship travel, and when he was told about these other, more important functions said he was not interested in any of that.

Wilbur Ross

And there is Barry Myers, who founded a commercial weather prediction company which predicted a tornado would hit a town in Oklahoma but informed only his subscribers so the rest of the population of that town was struck without warning, whose company, Accu Weather, functions completely dependent on weather data collected by the federal government's National Weather Service (part of NOAA) but who considers the government a competitor and sought to become Secretary of Commerce so he could strip the Weather Service of its capacity to offer its services to any company but his own. 

Barry Meyers

All of this is the devil in the details. 
We think we know the venality and avarice and sheer depravity of Trump and those who sail with him from the Trump tweets and from CNN, but the details of these banal creeps who have swarmed in to eat out our government from the inside is only apparent when you dig into it with someone like Lewis. 

Reading Daniel Patrick Moynihan in 2018

Daniel Patrick Moynihan was a Democratic United States Senator from New York, an academic, an ambassador to the United Nations, but he is best remembered as an adviser to Richard Nixon.

Like many academics, he seemed happiest when he didn't have to do anything to accomplish change but could simply write a paper and watch the person or people in power execute his advice.

Nixon, like Trump, was not a deep thinker, a policy wonk.  
It is said there are 3 types of Congressmen: pot hole fillers, politicians, policy wonks, which is to say people who do constituent services, people who only care about getting re elected and people who like the idea of manipulating rules and systems to achieve big goals. 

This applies to Presidents as well. Nixon and Trump clearly had no real interest in anything but staying in power and getting re elected. 

So, it is natural that the President would put in place some people to tell him what to think and what to do.

In 1968 Moynihan was writing memos about the problem of global warming and CO2 emissions and burning fossil fuels.

He also wrote the famous memo, promptly leaked to the press, about "benign neglect" in the case of racial relations. What he actually was saying is there had already been too much said about race, that it began and ended every discussion and enough already!

Reading his memos to Nixon one sees the gauche pandering to a damaged ego, a friendly therapist who knows he is dealing with a fragile psyche he is being careful to bring along.

But the big take home is how very much more volatile and tumultuous the 1960's and 1970's were than what we have now with the Trumpling. American soldiers were coming home in body bags, or limbless, and were murdering Vietnamese villagers, women and babies at Mylai; demonstrations  were drawing hundreds of thousands; National Guardsmen murdered 4 students on a college campus; large parts of the inner cities were being burned down; white racist Southerners were murdering white Freedom Riders and black people; women were still not advancing in the workplace.

Compared to all that, the Trumpling is merely a malodorous cloud of gas emanating from the hind parts of a dyspeptic and flatulent nation.

B.S. "Big Sissy" Trump

Mad Dog has been trying to come up with a moniker for the Trumpling, in an effort to respond to his joyous playground practice of hitting his targets with mud pies like, "Adam Schitt" and "Little Marco" and "Pocahontas" and "Low Energy Jeb," and "Da Nang Dick Blumenthal."

Oh, we've all heard "When they go low, we go high."

And we've heard the advice you can't out Trump Trump.
But the fact is, you do not stand up to bullies by smiling in a superior adult way.

But the fact is, there is a certain potency in these jibes. He really does identify the most vulnerable thing about a person and goes for that.  Elizabeth Warren, that Waspy blue eyed blonde, claiming to be a Native American on an Harvard application, Richard Blumenthal caught in the lie of claiming to have seen combat in Viet Nam-- those speak to real flaws, disqualifying flaws of character because they are grounded in truth, however distorted or over played. 

So what is the undeniable vulnerability in Mr. Trump?


Joe Biden roused some spirit among dispirited Democrats by saying he'd take Trump out in the alley and beat the shit out of him, but Biden faded from the scene.

After Nancy Pelosi walked out of the White House, she joined fellow Democrats back on Capital Hill and she reportedly said, 
“It’s like a manhood thing with him — as if manhood can be associated with him,” Pelosi deadpanned. “This wall thing.”

And that is exactly what we need.
The appellation is now obvious. Listen to Trump talking about the wall. He quakes and quails about the nasty, dangerous, scary dark skinned people on the other side of the border, and he wants to build a wall to keep them out.

He is terrified. Dark people scare him. Violent people scare him. He will not visit the troops because he's afraid of being shot. 

He is, in fact, a Big Sissy, which would make it B.S. "Big Sissy" Trump.

All this time we have been searching for alliteration.
And all along the truth was right in front of us.

Liberal Excesses

Betsy DeVos is no liberal's idea of an enlightened mind.
But, as Trumplings are apt to do, she is very good at finding the seams in the liberal armor and striking there.


She has attacked the campus rules governing responses to accusations of sexual assault and harassment.

Listening to a Harvard professor on NPR, who found herself unable to avoid saying the words, "I have to agree, DeVos is right on this one,"  Mad Dog had to begrudgingly agree.


As the professor described the process, where a boy accused of sexual assault, rape or harassment was often called to a meeting without prior notice, unable to confront his accuser, unable to even get a clear statement of the offense, it sounded like something out of an old movie, a "Darkness at Noon," the ultimate in authoritarian nightmare, where the accused has no rights, no chance to defend himself.


This connects to the #MeToo phenomenon, hard to call it a "movement," more of a "cultural revolution" redux, where the dogma, never to be questioned, is that when a woman accuses a man of rape,  fondling, anything really, she is to be believed, which means, ipso facto, if the man denies it, he is to be disbelieved.

Few things have done more to discredit liberal figures than the blind embrace of "the woman is always right," credo. This stance simply rejects the whole notion of fairness, of the importance of discussion, of cross examination.


"Oh, but you then traumatize the victim twice!" is the cry.
Well, what of the trauma to the accused?


If the woman cannot be in the same room as the accused, because she is such a delicate flower, where does that leave justice?


Mad Dog well remembers the first case of "date rape" reported decades ago, in his college alumni monthly, and the few details of the event raised multiple alarm bells in his own mind about whether or not a rape had occurred: Not the least of which was the fact the girl accuser, awakening in the boy's dorm room bed the next morning wrote down her actual, real phone number and gave it to him, presumably so they could repeat the experience. But when she got back to her dorm room, she decided, after speaking with her friends, she had been raped. The boy was expelled from the college, not tried by a criminal court, where rules of evidence, cross examination would have been available. He was tried in a Star Chamber at the college and expelled. In his junior year.

Such things do more than hurt individuals caught in the snare of these events, they utterly destroy the trustworthiness of the liberals, mostly women, who defend and espouse them.
The sine qua non of the liberal mind has got to be an openness of mind, a willingness to hear the other side. Aude alteram partem.
When you lose that, you lose everything.
I would argue the women who embrace the current mess governing campus sexual assault charges are not true liberals. They are Gospel Zealots, Strident Infallibles. But they are not any with whom true liberals should want to be associated.


 

Should America be Soup or Salad?

Reading over the letters to the editor in the "Failing New York Times" this morning, in response to Paul Krugman's piece on the the "Senate America" in which he decried the structure of our government which allocates 2 United States Senate seats to 600,000 Wyoming residents but only 2 to the 40 millions in California, I was struck by the argument that we need to honor local sentiment, folkways, beliefs, customs which distinguish life in the smaller states from that of the "elite" coastal urban states. A law professor from Berkeley, no less, suggested we can have our cake and eat it too if we simply remember the 21st amendment, which struck down a national prohibition against alcohol and allowed local jurisdictions to decide whether or not the risks of demon rum were worth the benefits of legalizing it.

But that professor fails to recognize the 18th amendment which was put into place because of outsized power of Bible Belt states.  Today, 50 United States Senators represent just 17% of the American population, which puts the Bible Belt in the driver's seat.  A man from Terre Haute, MO tells Mr. Krugman, "Quit whining about how stupid the voters are and work harder to convice us in flyover country that your policy beliefs are the best way forward for our nation." 
As if you can actually fix stupid.

But another writer (from New York) noted: "In the 21st century, the United State is not a federation of separate states, as it was in 1776 or 1787. It is a radically integrated nation in a radically integrated world." 

All this crystallized the basic problem: significant parts of the country have not been integrated into the global hole, and they fear and resent the idea that they ought to be.

Of course, the good citizens of Iowa who sent the repugnant Steve King to Congress do not object to being integrated, some would say, "homogenized" into the rest of the country and the world by commercial forces: I have never driven through Steve King's district, but I would be astonished if I did not see Home Depot, McDonald's, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Staples, Starbucks, Walmart, Target and all the other big national chains, with their recognizable and uniform logos and colors. 

Obadiah Youngblood

It's the "blindfold and the parachute" test: Drop me blindfolded over any big American city: New York, Washington, Boston, New Orleans, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Seattle, Miami, and allow me to whip off that blindfold and look around, walk around for 5 minutes and I will be able to identify where I am. But drop me into any rural area of Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Kansas, Iowa and it's all "Alabama in between." Most of rural and even suburban America looks pretty much the same. You might pick up a regional accent in the South or in New England, but even in Pennsylvania what you will hear is a "rural" accent, not a Pennsylvania accent. 

The fact is, our states no longer are sufficiently different from one another to actually represent distinct entities. Yes, Montana is vast and different from Maine, but the problems of low population density and small industrial base are pretty much the same. And yes, water rights and grazing rights are more ascendant in Utah and New Mexico  than in Connecticut and Vermont, but the dividing lines of thought and concern are not contained within the state lines any more, "state and local concerns"  are historical relics, the shed chrysalis of  the of a country which has metamorphosized beyond its larval stages.

State boundaries do more to hinder the progress, financial and economic well being of the USA than they serve any justifiable purpose in the 21st century. 

Edward Hopper

This is not to say there are not cultural differences between Mississippi and New Hampshire. 

It is entirely possible people in Ohio and Mississippi may decide that life begins at fertilization and will not allow abortions because there are enough people there who cannot be budged from that conviction. Ohio is on its way to passing legislation to forbidding  abortion after a heartbeat is audible at 6 weeks.

Mad Dog, for one, could certainly live with a reversal of Roe v Wade, and sending the question of abortion back to local control. 

Within our current state structure, that would mean if you are carrying an unwanted pregnancy, you would have to leave Ohio or Texas  and get thee to a Northern state for your abortion. Unless, of course, you can buy abortion pills over the internet and have them sent to your home in Akron or Biloxi.


But  even if you are too far along for an abortion pill, you could get a safe, legal abortion. You'd just have to make plans and travel. 

Mad Dog realizes this would mean poor, uneducated women, women with little in the way of financial resources would likely opt to have unwanted children, then give them up, or they might go back to the back alleys.

Edward Hopper

Likely, this will result in a substantial  increase in births of unwanted infants in these states. Ohio, Texas and other states who insist on bringing into the world these children, unwanted, predestined to sad, violent lives would not be the only places to suffer the consequences as these children come of age. 

Likely, many of these unwanted children would be sent North, where adoptive parents would care for them, much as Southern states are now the main source for "rescue dogs" in New England. 

But we can make accommodations for all this. The better educated "elite" in the coastal cities have supported the less educated populations of Ohio, sending government munition contracts to Jim Jordan's district there, and sending defense contracts to the poor Southern States. These less educated, determinedly ignorant are the educated man's burden. 

Trump and all his Trumplings are fond of saying "countries need borders." And Mad Dog emphatically agrees: Nations need borders. If 300 million Chinese and 300 million Indians and Pakistanis decided to immigrate to the USA tomorrow, we would have a country Mad Dog would not recognized or desire. 

But one might ask, why do these United States need state borders? The framers of the Constitution settled on agreements which the current European Union now envy: Louisiana cannot tax goods coming in from Illinois; no passport is required to travel from New Hampshire to Massachusetts; and since Marbury v Madison, a law which forbids denial of voting rights, public education and restaurant use to Negroes/African Americans in South Carolina cannot stand if the Supreme Court of these United States says borders cannot be used to deny basic human rights.

Photo by Obadiah Youngblood

The impulse toward empty space protections, whether it be in Idaho, Wyoming or Montana is an impulse to say, "Leave me alone. I do not want to be part of anything larger. I want to reject the rest of the world and live on my own land, with my six wives, my 20 white children, who will never be vaccinated, never learn to read, and I will be king of my own castle. I will graze my cattle on land no matter who may claim it; if I can string up barbed wire, it's mine. I will teach my children the White Race is under siege and we will live here awaiting the final Armageddon." 

Mad Dog can live with that. Let the Aryan nation claim parts of Idaho.  Hopefully, they'll stay on their reservations. 

Seventy seven years ago, when Pearl Harbor exploded, Americans from very different worlds within the same country amalgamated to form an army, produce war materials and boys from Georgia joined boys from Wisconsin and discovered they were more like each other than they were like Frenchmen, Belgians or Italians or even the English. Exposure to the greater world changed Negro men from Alabama, so when they returned home they were no longer docile. Women who worked in factories  were no longer content to sit home with children and their new refrigerators. 

Photo by Obadiah Youngblood: Lock 8

Until the 21st century, there were only three TV networks disseminating news, and Hollywood formed values and desires. In that sense we were, even then, radically integrated. With the Internet, we can be even more so.

It's a new world now, but we still  have an 18th century government. 

It used to be America was like a salad: you could stick a fork into one part and get a tomato and into another and get an anchovie. Now, it is more like soup--dip a spoon into any part of it and you get to taste the whole of it. Of course, there may be clams in there, like the difference between the cities and the rural areas, but the differences in different parts of the soup are minimal, compared to the salad. 

Fact is, things will not change without a fight. Montana has the power to exert outsized effect and will not give that up willingly. Right or wrong has nothing to do with it. 
But eventually, if we keep pushing, we can change. 

The Reveal: Outmoded in New Hampshire

Finally, at 65% by my Kindle, into "These Truths" Mad Dog stumbled onto what he had been looking for, or, at least, an open window into the room, through which he could see some of  the truth.

Jill Lepore reports on a meeting which occurs at Harvard after every election, in which men who headed the campaigns of each of the candidates sit around and talk about what they had done running those campaigns, like generals after a war, or, as Lepore puts it more pungently, as butchers with no sympathy for the pig.

The managers of each of the 17 campaigns for the Republican primary candidates were there. Now, of course, as Lepore had demonstrated, what the campaign managers wrought was only part of the story, as campaigns get out on the internet and into the public discourse, but there was such an illumination when Trump's campaign manager spoke, you knew there was important truth there. 
Corey Lewandowski said:

"We were going to ...run on our wealth, and not run from it, and to monopolize the media attention by using social media unlike anybody else. What we know is that when Donald Trump put out a tweet, Fox News would cover it live."

Lepore reports: "Field organizing was over, he said. Newspapers, newspaper advertisements? Irrelevant, he said. 'Donald Trump buys ink by the television station,' he said. Trump hadn't run in any lane. Trump had run from a plane."

Lepore noted that during the 2016 campaign 37,000 polls had been conducted using 3 billion phone calls and more than 90% had refused to speak with the pollsters. 

The crisis within the polling community was profound, as an entire industry realized their product was a sham. Nate Silver and his 580 group tried to explain that he had not been wrong to say there was a 70% chance Clinton would win because that meant there was a 30% chance, a real chance, Trump would win. That argument appealed to only the most sophisticated. What we wanted from Silver was the answer and he had given the wrong answer. He had said: Trump wins. And if he did not say it, that is what we heard. Why would we even be listening to Silver if all he had to offer was: Well, nobody really knows. It could go either way. 

Mad Dog finds in this report, great relief. 

At a meeting with Hampton Democrats before the recent Nov 6, 2018 election, he had asked about investing in exit polling and was immediately confronted by the chairman of the Rockingham County Democrats with an irate, "We can't worry about that! We have to worry about winning!"  
The head of the "Senior Democrats" also bellowed, exit polling, any effort other than getting Democrats knocking on doors (canvassing) or writing letters to the editor of the Portsmouth Herald, anything other than what Democrats had done for the past fifty years to win elections was a dangerous, energy sapping formula for defeat. 

Mad Dog looked at these two men and could only groan, inwardly.

Old men, whose identities were tied to old methods, railing against the machine. Cobblers of fine shoes who raged against assembly lines and mass production.
Luddites. 

Why were these men even at this meeting? They were both retired. They found meaning in doing what they do for campaigns. It made them feel important, relevant. It afforded them the sense of still being in control.

But their time had passed. They were like those old, gray haired school teachers who insisted children should still be memorizing Latin declensions. 

Mad Dog had insisted since Nov 8, 2016 the Democrats had no idea what hit them.
He had "canvassed" every weekend for months in the run up to that election and saw teams of Democrats knocking on doors, and never a single Trump canvasser. And yet, in certain towns, Kingston, Hampton Falls, he saw a sea of Trump lawn signs.

Where did all those lawn signs come from? They were like phantoms...no people visible, but signs everywhere.

Now Corey Lewandowski had answered that question. Trump had had no "ground game" because he had an airplane. He had campaigned from the top down, not the bottom up and he had reached millions.

He still disdains retail persuasion--he flies to huge arenas, crows about the lines wrapping around the buildings trying to get in, stokes up 20,000 fans at a time and then flies away. Three times a week. 

Meanwhile, in Hampton, New Hampshire, we have pairs of citizens in blue jeans, knocking on doors, and it's a good morning if 5 out of thirty citizens even bother to answer the the knock at the door. 

When he knocked on doors prior to this "blue wave" election, Mad Dog learned, again, the pollsters and the two old men back at the Democratic headquarters on Route 1 had no idea what was out there, driving decisions.  He heard from men and women who had benefited from the Trump tax cut for the rich who said they were going to vote Democratic, straight down the ticket, "Because of him." And they did not have to say who "him" was.

"But what do you not like about him? What are your issues?" Mad Dog asked. "Immigration? The Wall? Guns? Opioids?"

They'd just shake their heads and say, "Him."

These reticent citizens, it should be noted were educated, wealthy, privileged. 
The best Mad Dog could guess is that Mr. Trump's insistence on rejecting the standards of "reasoned" argument, of basing everything on "you hear that" or "they are terrible people" offended their notion of what reason, intelligence and fairness is all about. 

But we have no real exit studies. We cannot really know.
In medicine, sometimes a single well studied case can tell you more than a study of 20,000 patients who you know little about.
Maybe the same is true here. We just have to study a few voters, but really question them, really keep asking until we figure out how they actually think.

Whatever we do, going forward, we cannot beat the foe who is flying airplanes, by riding along the ground on our horses, waving swords at the air. 

Those two old men and Ray Buckley and all the Democrats in place now claim their methods were proven correct on Nov 6, 2018. Democrats swept into majorities in the state House of Representatives, the state Senate and the Executive Council. 
Of course, the Democrats cannot really explain why they lost the Governorship.

Rockingham County Democrats recently met to congratulate themselves on their success this past election. But looking at the results, one can only conclude the success at the state house did not accrue because of efforts in Rockingham County--it must have been from other parts of the state. It is true, Hampton and Exeter went blue, but Candia, Deerfield, Nottingham, Raymond, Sanddown, Londoderry, Derry, Windham, Salem, Danville, Hampstead, Kingston, Atkinson, Plaistow, Newton, Kensignton, South Hampton, Seabrook, Hampton Falls sent a grand total of two Democrats to Concord, against 54 Republicans.

And we still don't know what hit us.