Meritocracy: The Demon Seed of Eugenics

"The immigrant is a brutal destroyer. He spoils every bit of nature in his own country, then comes to new fields in our country to destroy them."
--Charles Barker Bradford

"Filthy, lousy, and diseased, scum of the earth, the off scourings of European nations."
--Hudson Maxim

Reading Daniel Okrent, the value of book length treatment of an important topic comes full force.

"The Guarded Gate" is primarily about American attitudes toward immigration, but Okrent cannot explain the who, how, what and why without examining the mindset of those who drove, and who attempted to drive, thinking about immigrants.

Of course, in the 18th century, America was not rich, and it was separated from Europe and Asia by oceans, so there was no great wave of immigration to consider, but as American wealth grew, that force, analogous to osmosis, began to draw inexorably increasing numbers of immigrants to the continent. So it has always been with wealth: wealthier locations exist (cities vs rural, rich countries vs poor) and people living in poorer areas begin to migrate toward wealth.

By the end, of the 19th century, America became a magnet for the destitute, the starving, the abused of Europe and Asia. The potato famine in Ireland, poverty in southern Italy, pogroms throughout the Pale in eastern Europe drove Irish, Italians, Jews in large numbers (hundreds of thousands) to the United States. They were the huddled masses yearning to breathe free.

Immigration is always a matter of numbers and rates. 

If only 10% of all Chinese (which would be 150 million) and 10% of all folks living in India (another 150 million) decided to immigrate to America tomorrow, that would be a number virtually equal to the current US population. Add to that the roughly 40 million Central Americans and you see the problem. Even a lifeboat has room for only so many. 

But in 1890, America was not "filled up." In fact, the captains of industry wanted more immigration because that meant cheap labor, while labor unions opposed it, because they thought they were protecting members' wages. It was the millionaire class, the factory owners, who voted down Henry Cabot Lodge's "literacy" test which was meant to screen out imbeciles and low grade intellects from admission to the US shores. Actually, the literacy test was meant to screen out not just individuals but entire groups, i.e. Italians, Jews who were often not able to read English.

Lodge and his Boston gentry were disturbed by what he saw as the dregs and rejects Europe was dumping on the US. 
"The degenerate spawn of Asiatic hordes...They were coming to America to cut throats, throw dynamite, conduct labor riots and assassination."

But, as his opponents noted, it was unlikely European royalty would want to move from their positions of wealth and privilege; it was the losers who would look for another game. 

Okrent explores the attitudes of the reigning powers in America around the beginning of the 20th century and the cast of characters includes people we thought we knew: Theodore Roosevelt, whose image is on Mount Rushmore, who spoke of the threat of "racial suicide" if the white race did not reproduce up to the fecundity of other races arriving in America and the USA was overwhelmed by non white immigrants of low intelligence and drive; Eleanor Roosevelt, who later advocated for Blacks, but who remarked she could not face another "Jew party" where those uncouth undesirables were present; Oliver Wendell Holmes, Civil War warrior, Supreme Court justice who famously said, "three generations of imbeciles are enough" when he voted for sterilization of a woman who was said be mentally retarded (but who probably was not.)

Davenport

Meanwhile, a Harvard PhD came up with a theory of "eugenics" which proclaimed that a gene existed for each of separate qualities: courage, artistic ability, discernment, the ability to cooperate with others, social graces, tact, humor, mechanical ability, moral stamina and sexual morality. He was Charles Davenport, the founder of the Cold Spring institute which developed a survey of the population for these and hundreds of other traits, the Eugenics Records Office, in hopes of guiding gifted and talent people to mate with each other and, ultimately, to exclude people with inferior genes from the country, by either deportation or denial of entry.

The implications of Davenport's bogus "biology" all rest on the idea that complex traits, like "intelligence" or "morality" were inherited like the color of pea flowers, controlled by single, discrete genes.

Coming from an old Boston family of impeccable credentials, Abolitionists, Harvard and Stanford pedigrees, Davenport gained entry to the American royalty of the day, particularly the heirs to the Harriman railroad fortunes, but also Rockefeller (oil) and Carnegie (steel).
Davenport differed from most of his fellow travelers in the eugenics movement in that he believed there were some intelligent people among even the most "backward" groups--even Italians might contribute the occasional good genome. But most of his friends saw no exceptions among the undesirables and would have banned all immigration apart from Scandinavia and the British Isles. 

Mary Harriman

Once Okrent describes the almost unimaginable wealth of these people, you can almost understand how and why they came to believe they were, like Arthur drawing the sword from the stone, cosmically (and genetically) destined to greatness, and by extension, why the ragged, huddled masses were not.

And once you peruse the lists of traits the Eugenics Records Office used to fill up index cards with scores for confidence, drive, courage, musical ability, mechanical ability, vocabulary, confidence, optimism,  you can fast forward to the SAT exams, and the Harvard admission office which assigned a "personal score" to applicants, particularly tough for Asian applicants, for traits like "courage" and "likability."

Mary Patton

And you get Susan Patton, the Princeton alumna, who implored Princeton women to marry only Princeton men, to ensure the best genes mix and Princeton grads not squander their superior traits on lesser human beings, who will only dilute the talent pool of the nation.

"Simply put, there is a very limited population of men who are as smart or smarter than we are. And I say again — you will never again be surrounded by this concentration of men who are worthy of you."
--Susan Patton, on marrying and propagating with Princeton men

The whole idea of "meritocracy" in America might be separated from race--although ideas about merit so often travels with ideas of racial superiority it is often hard to do--but, at bedrock, it rests on the notion you can define the worth of a person, assign a scoring system, and then cull out the inferior, as if you were selecting for superior vs inferior potatoes, and you can improve the "stock" of the nation.

Whew.

SCOTUS & The Black Magic of Objectivity

A particularly irritating and insipid article by some professor at Pepperdine Law School appeared in the Sunday Times. Mad Dog is still trying to simmer down.

Professor Barry McDonald faults Justice Stevens for allowing his personal experience to interfere with "the objective and consistent application of established rules of law."

This is the old "we don't make up the law; we just call balls and strikes," argument, which is the fundamentally pernicious canard which continues to strangle efforts to bring to SCOTUS the critical changes it so richly requires.

The framers of the constitution never specified Supreme Court justices had to be lawyers, or for that matter, how many justices the Supreme Court should have.

The idea that the justices should be rigorous adherents of law, of stare decisis (precedent) is a more recent development. (And one which Justice Thomas most flagrantly denies.)

In fact, the most important cases reaching the justices have no true basis in law; they reach the Court precisely because law is unclear.

Does a man who is not a human being, but property (Dred Scot) have standing to sue in court?  That gets decided not by law but by the experience and bias of the justice. The Constitution does not define a human being.

Can a school system which is separate but equal be faulted? Only if you conclude separate but equal is an oxymoron, that separate is never equal by virtue of the discrimination which defines the system.

If a student protests, off school property, as a publicity stunt from a morally questionable enterprise (The Olympics, Inc.) is paraded in front of his school, can the principal rush across the street, tear down his banner and suspend him from school? Where in the Constitution is the answer to this question? Free Speech? No, free speech is on the student's side; but  the justices found an  imperative for students to be kept under adult control in the Constitution. Where is that passage?

And if a local jurisdiction outlaws handguns (Heller v DC) and the 2nd amendment is a single sentence, containing the only explanation in the Constitution for why a particular right is granted:  "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed," how do you reach the conclusion, by following the law, by simply calling balls and strikes, that grants a right to personal, individual ownership of a hand gun? Talk about "consistent application of established law: Justice Scalia did intellectual contortions to find a reason to reject generations of established law on that one. He was a gun enthusiast.

The travesty wrought by this persistent fantasy that black robed justices are somehow wiser and more qualified to render "objective and consistent" rulings would be risible, if it weren't so damaging, keeping us mired in the dreary reality of a reactionary court for the next 30 years.

Why the NYT did not allow for online responses to this nonsense is beyond me, unless of course you suspected what the reaction would be.

Emma Sky and The Unraveling

Read this description of a joke told by American soldiers and British civilian workers in Iraq during the post war attempt to reconstruct that country in the image of a Western democracy and tell me you are not hooked and do not need to read the rest of Emma Sky's book, "The Unraveling."

Ms. Sky with American soldiers

This comes at page 100 in the copy I found on the Viking cruise ship and Sky's account of the efforts of her wary band of Westerners trying to meld the fractious elements of Kurds, and Arabs, Shia and Sunni who the British had thrown together into an artificial country they called "Iraq."

"Why did the Iraqi chicken cross the road?

COALITION PROVISIONAL AUTHORITY:
The fact the Iraqi chicken crossed the road affirmatively demonstrates that decision making authority has been transferred to the chicken well in advance of the scheduled June 30 transition of power. From now on the chicken is responsible for its own decisions.

HALLIBURTON:
We were asked to help the chicken cross the road. Given the inherent risk of road crossing and the rarity of chickens, this operation will only cost the US government $326,004.

MUQTADA A-SADR:
The chicken was a tool of the evil Coalition and will be killed.

US MILITARY POLICE:
We were directed to prepare the chicken to cross the road. As a part of these preparations, individual solders ran over the chicken repeatedly and then plucked the chicken. We deeply regret the occurrence of any chicken rights violation.

PESHMERGA [Kurdish fighters fighting for Kurdish independence and statehood]:
The chicken crossed the road, and will continue to cross the road, to show its independence and to transport the weapons it needs to defend itself. However, in future, to avoid problems, the chicken will be called a duck and will wear a plastic bill.

1st CAVALRY DIVISION:
The chicken was not authorized to cross the road. without displaying two forms of picture ID. Thus, the chicken was appropriately detained and searched in accordance with current SOPs. We apologize for any embarrassment to the chicken. As a result of this unfortunate incident, the command has instituted a gender-sensitivity training program and all future chicken searches will be conducted by female soldiers.

AL JAZEERA:
The chicken was forced to cross the road multiple times at gunpoint by a large group of occupation soldiers, according to eyewitnesses. The chicken was then fired upon intentionally, in yet another example of the abuse of innocent Iraqi chickens.

BLACKWATER:
We cannot confirm any involvement in the chicken road crossing incident.

TRANSLATORS:
Chicken he cross street because she tangle regulation. Future chicken table against any request.

US MARINE CORPS:
The chicken is dead."

If that doesn't say it all...Ms. Sky's perspective on American soldiers (very religious, often simplistic with their "good guys and bad guys" mentality, trying to function in a world where sophistication and subtly are demanded but not possessed by the soldiers or officers) is remarkable. 
This is one of those "it was even worse than we knew" books.

Ms. Sky tells the tale well, with an eye for the telling detail. 
I'm not yet through it, but I'm hooked. 

Stonewall Movement Displays at Exeter, NH

Last night, two speakers from New Hampshire's branch of the Stonewall Movement spoke at the monthly Rockingham County, New Hampshire meeting.

They were speaking to a sympathetic crowd, to say the least.

One described marching in the Boston gay pride parade, under a banner "New Hampshire Stonewall" and he recalled, with evident delight, how many people from the on looking crowd called out support, apparently surprised there were homosexuals living in New Hampshire, or at least so many, or at least so many willing to march.  He felt welcome in Boston.

One of the questions from the audience asked: "Well, but you know, what we hear in our conservative towns is: Why can't we have a straight men's march? What's wrong with that? How do we answer that?"

It should be noted Rockinham County has 30% more registered Republicans than Democrats.

The Stonewall spokesman fumbled for his smart phone, so he could google the "9 reasons we need to march" and finding it, he listed 9 depredations suffered by homosexuals simply because they are homosexuals: being harassed on the job, fired for being gay, beaten, murdered, having the power of the state aimed against them: being outlawed from adopting a child in a state with legal gay marriage.

His emotional pitch rose as he elaborated on each of these outrages, matched by many in the audience.

But he never answered the question asked.
The question he answered was the question he was keen to talk about, to wit: These are the reasons we, as gays march. We have huge grievances, and to that question, he responded well.

But what he did not answer was the question asked. 
As if, the question was either not worthy of an answer or he simply could not hear the question coming from the "other side."

What Mad Dog was waiting to hear was the obvious answer:  "Look, anyone has a right to march to express their grievances. If straight white men feel oppressed, if they believer they are facing a 'white genocide', if they believe gays are displacing straight men and women in American society, they have a right to parade. 

It's a free country: Nazis had a right to march in Skokie Illinois, and in Charlottesville, Virginia. First amendment. Free speech. Right to assemble peaceably. Right to seek a redress of grievances. But, given the offenses against gays I have just listed, I'd be most interested to see what paltry and imaginary offenses these folks might have."

Or words to that effect.

But that was not what happened. What happened was the gay spokesman virtually said only he and his side should be listened to. 

The Dems were too polite to press him on this and time ran out.

There was more to what he said which was disturbing, if you are a Democrat worried about keeping his party unified. He spoke of transgender suffering. The New Hampshire legislature recently passed a law to put on drivers' licences a third option for "sex." You now have "Male" and "Female" and "X."

Sitting next to Mad Dog, a woman of most liberal and tolerant opinion, murmured: "What's wrong with two sexes? Male and female? I guess I'm a dinosaur."

It is understandable why gays have aligned with and sympathized with the tribulations of transgenders. Transgenders, like gays, have been humiliated, denigrated, beaten and even murdered for the crime (sin?) of being transgender.

But, Mad Dog submits, there is a significant difference between transgenders and gays. Mad Dog once thought himself alone in this opinion, but he has heard from gay friends how uncomfortable they are being lumped in with transgenders.

The fact is, gays do not need, seek or request help from the medical establishment. Gays are what they are, born that way, as far as anyone can tell. Efforts at "reprogramming" or "conversion therapy" have been thoroughly discredited. 

But transgenders need to get male hormones to "transition" to male if they were born female and female hormones if they wish to become female. For male to female transgenders, the removal of external male genitalia was once part of the program of achieving female identity.

But then the 40% suicide rate started catching up with "transgender clinics" and male castration surgery has become less common. 

Then there is the industry, the professional careers in "transgender medicine" and "transgender clinics" which drive the transgender movement.

Paul McHugh, MD

Paul McHugh, the Johns Hopkins psychiatrist in chief who closed the Hopkins clinic at one point, took the position that transgenders, unlike gays, suffer from a single captivating idea which rules their lives and which becomes an obsession, and any idea which does that is "wrong." 

Another way of seeing McHugh's point is anorexia nervosa. In that disease the patient has one supreme, controlling idea, that they are too thin, and that idea is wrong.  With anorexia nervosa, almost all agree this is a disease, a disorder.  But even with that disease, you do not see a 40% annual death rate.

Vilified for Raising Vigorous Questions: Accused of being a Hater

McHugh argues, doctors treating the transgender patient have abrogated their responsibility to say "no" to the patient. No, you are not too thin. No, your idea that all that is wrong with you is your assigned gender.  Instead, the doctors say, "Yes, whatever you say must be true because you think it is."  

And you see this dramatically at medical conferences where the treating physician at the transgender conference says he escalated the testosterone level to astronomical levels because "the patient wanted his voice to be lower. That was his goal."

"His goal?"

And the whole idea of the average citizen having to learn a new vocabulary, have to be careful to refer to the trans male as "she" or to the "fluid" transexual as "they" as in "Pat is going downtown and they said they is going to pick up some Thai food."

Now, really, are we, as Democrats prepared to embrace all that?

And why? Because we might inadvertently "hurt' the feelings of the fluid non binary or trans person, who feels victimized by our insensitivity.

Democrats have to face a determined, homogeneous, organized group which walks in lock step with a single purpose: Re elect Trump.

Can Democrats go to battle if we are forced to accommodate the Stonewall extreme?
Is it unfair to ask the aggrieved gay and transgender community to hear the other side? Aude alteram partem. Of course, many will say, the gay has been hearing nothing but the other side for years and it's now time to become militant. There is, in Martin Luther King's phrase, the "fierce urgency of now" for the downtrodden. But even Dr. King looked at those Negroes who aligned with him and criticized their excesses and approach: He famously disagreed with the Nation of Islam and Black Panthers and Malcom X for having "given up on America." Mad Dog would argue some in the Stonewall Movement have done the same. 

Well, maybe. Eisenhower, after all, managed a coalition of different and unfriendly allies. DeGaulle, far from being grateful for the landings at Normandy, reportedly dismissed the breaching of Hitlter's fortress Europe as "an Anglo Saxon invasion."

So it's possible to align and conquer.
But it won't be easy.

Stare Decisis: The Republican Party's Radical Counter Revolution

Consider 3 things:

1/ Recent laws enacted in  Missouri, Alabama and other Confederate states to undo Roe v Wade and outlaw abortion

2/ The Republican victory in denying Obama his choice for a Supreme Court nominee, which resulted in a majority "Trump Court" committed to over turning Roe

3/ The 1.7% margin of victory in Doug Jones' victory for the US Senate seat in Alabama over Roy Jones who was banned from an Alabama shopping mall because it was evident he prowled the premises in a search (often successful) for teen age girls. 

Judge Moore was forgiven his pedophile proclivities because, outside the urban centers of Birmingham, Montgomery and Huntsville, citizens loved him for spurning the First Amendment's separation of church and state (with sculptures of the 10 Commandments placed in court houses) and his endorsement of the 2nd Amendment, which those citizens knew was going to be violated, someday, by agents of the federal government who would swoop out of the sky in black helicopters and blue helmets to seize the guns of law abiding citizens and members of the Ku Klux Klan.

Arguments against "packing" the Supreme Court, voiced by otherwise liberal Democrats coalesce around the idea that the Court is a bastion of stability, an anchor to core principles, which abides over generations to protect the People and their Constitution against the vicissitudes of partisan struggle.

The Court, they argue, is neither Republican nor Democrat. There is no such thing, Chief Justice Roberts has said, as an "Obama justice" or a "Trump justice."

That, of course, is manifestly untrue. 

In fact, there is not only such a thing as  "a Trump justice" but there is such a thing as "Trump justice" and, for that matter, Southern justice.

In the most recent case, "Franchise Tax Board of California v Hyatt" Justice Thomas speaking for justices Roberts, Alito, Kavanaugh and Gorsuch has declared the principle of stare decisis obsolete and inoperable. Kaput. History. Which is to say, legal precedent, settled law means nothing now. If the current Court disagrees with Roe or with Brown vs Board of Education, well then, those decisions mean nothing.

So how much does the Court now represent continuity, stability, a focus on that guiding star of the Constitution?

Of course, the whole idea of the Supreme Court justices simply calling balls and strikes once the Congress has established the strike zone is ludicrous. Anyone with the most passing familiarity with Court decisions knows the justices regularly make up a new strike zone. 
In Dred Scott, the Court decided Negroes were property and had no "standing" to sue in court. Where did that strike zone come from?  In Brown, the Court decided "separate but equal" is an absurdity, as separate is invariably unequal when it comes to public schools. Where in the constitution did that come from? In Roe, the Court found a right to privacy in the Constitution, a word never mentioned but only "implied" there. 

It was always an absurdity to claim what was so obviously untrue: That the justices "just follow the law" rather than the passions of the moment. 
The justices follow their own individual passions, or as they call them, their principles, and they cherry pick excuses from the Constitution exactly as preachers find support for whatever they want to believe in the Bible. You can find support for subjugation of the Black race in the Bible (the stain of Cain), for murder, for rape, for incest.  The Good Book and the Constitution are shape changing, morphing phantasmagoria. 

But we need a Supreme Court when Congress is divided and cannot or will not, out of cowardice or intransigence, make a decision.

One way to fix this would be to simply admit the Court is the most political of our branches, a group which can make decisions without worrying about adjusting what they want to do by what they perceive the citizens desire.  Knowing that, allow the President at the beginning of each of his 4 year terms to appoint 2 new justices, so by the end of two terms, the President has shifted the Court toward a more liberal or a more conservative make up, reflecting the drift of the ideology of the electorate.

This requires no Constitutional amendment and sets no fixed number of justices (which the Constitution does not set) but allows it to float.

Packing the Court may be something like the Great Compromise of 1850, which postponed the inevitable conflict over slavery for 10 years.

But, ultimately, these United States may have to face a larger issue: The center no longer holds.

We thought we settled the issue of whether or not the United States could remain united with the Civil War, but, to Mad Dog at least, it now appears this was wishful thinking. 

What drove the states into conflict, of course, was slavery, and what slavery required was the belief that Whites rightfully should rule Blacks and that Negroes were not, as Justic Taney said in Dred Scott, actually fully human. The idea of subhumans who could be whipped, sold, destroyed at the whim and will of superior White human beings was the foundation of slavery then and it persists as the foundational belief in the South, or at least in the rural South and in all those rural parts of America which constitute the "Alabama in between" parts of America whether that is Wisconsin, Pennsylvania or Missouri. 

And there are parts of the south, like the research triangle (Durham, Chapel Hill, Raleigh) where neurons connect in wonderful ways in mentating human beings who loathe the vicious racism they encounter daily. They even removed a statue of a confederate soldier in Chapel Hill. 

There are, of course, White folks living in Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana who are horrified by the Ku Klux Klan, by the idea that blowing up a Black church in Birmingham, Alabama was a good thing because it killed 4 Black girls before they could breed. The juries which convicted the White Birmingham bombers 37 years later had Whites voting for conviction.

Of course, in 1963, when the bombings happened, no South Carolina jury would convict the White KKK bombers. No South Carolina jury would have had a single Black member.  Murderers of freedom riders in those days, obviously guilty, were routinely acquitted. 

Douglas Jones argues in his worthy "Bending Toward Justice" that the arc of history is long but it truly does bend toward justice. 

And reading about the low life conspiracy theorist men who blew up that church, and reading about the society which supported them, either tacitly or vocally, either directly or indirectly, you can hope their form of Southern was like the rabid dog, dangerous, lethal, but staggering toward its own demise.

But, after the exhilaration of the conviction and imprisonment, of the meting out of justice, Jones, who was the prosecutor in the convictions of those Birmingham bombers,  runs for Senator against Roy Moore, a frothing pedophile, a soul mate of Strom Thurmond (who fathered a child with a Black twelve year old) and Moore, the sweetheart of the KKK leads Jones until the find moments of the election, when Jones finally manages to win by 1.7% of the vote. 

Rural Alabama voted overwhelmingly for Moore.

What this suggests is we are not on an arc bending inexorably toward justice but it suggests that the demon seed of racism is passed on generation after generation and cannot be expunged, that the South, despite the presence of "decent" and tolerant Whites, despite enclaves in North Carolina and Georgia,  is too thoroughly infected to be cured of the sepsis which festers beneath.

Would it not make more sense to simply admit what has become obvious: We gave it a mighty try. We tried to stick it out, but a bad marriage is worse than no marriage.

Let us take the West Coast and marry it to New England and the Middle Atlantic states down to the Potomac.  Pennsylvania could go either way. 
Let us keep Minnesota and Illinois and maybe Colorado. Let us take New Mexico, and maybe Nevada. Let this become the New Union of America, non contiguous in geography, and not completely homogeneous in philosophy, but close enough. And let us wish the Confederate States of America all the best.

They can have their Confederacy which forbids abortion, segregates schools, restaurants, hotels, swimming pools, water fountains and toilets. They can exclude non white immigration and they can do away with courts and simply organize lynching mobs. They can establish a church and put up the 10 commandments in all state buildings. They can have football teams which support universities rather than the other way round. They will have excellent hospitals in Texas, Tennessee and North Carolina which will be Whites only. 

Sail on South Carolina. You will be unperturbed by unpleasant thoughts imposed by outsiders. 

In New York and Oregon and New Hampshire, we will argue and we will debate whether we really want a mix of government option and private health care and we'll try to figure out whether we want to ban capital punishment. We'll fight about how to provide day care and how to provide the best education for the best price. We'll struggle with infrastructure and how to meet the ravages of earthquakes, mudslides and fire in California and how to keep the East Coast from submerging into the rising seas. 

But, at least, at our core, we'll be family in the New Union of America. 

People will, no doubt, pack up their guns and move from the North Country of New Hampshire and find more amenable communities in Georgia and Mississippi.

The main coast for the New Confederacy will be the Gulf of Mexico. They can drill in it and pollute it all they want. 

But the New Union of America will still have New York, Boston, Chicago, Minneapolis, Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles.  We ought to be able to eek out an existence.

Peace. 

The Trouble with Joe

Joe Biden spoke in Hampton today.
The line formed an hour before he was due and the place was packed.
Anticipation was high.
People really love Joe.
Of course, for most of them, that love has grown from afar. 
This was a place to see him, touch him, etc.

https://www.c-span.org/video/?460665-1/vice-president-joe-biden-makes-campaign-stop-hampshire

I began to allow myself to hope: It will be tough beating Trump, given the strong economy and the fierceness of his support. But talking to the people around me today, I heard as much genuine affection for Biden as you see at Trump rallies.

When I asked two guys in their 70's why they like him, they grinned and shrugged their shoulders and could not say exactly why: "I just like Joe."

He arrived and began his stump speech, talking about how we've lost a sense of decency and how his father told him a job was more than a paycheck, it was about dignity.

He had a lot of anecdotes about things his father said, about the dignity and ennobling aspect of work, which evoked warm burbling about the times some of us can remember when there was fellowship, pride and a sense of contribution in jobs, whether it was turning out automobiles, steel or even operations at hospitals. A time when you might work for GM or Dupont or General Electric for 30 years. 

He launched into a joke based on a cartoon from the New Yorker. He started describing the cartoon--Barack used to kid me about it-- about a man sitting in an interrogation room with a bag of money he had stolen and--did I tell you this was from the New Yorker?--and he is saying "How was I supposed to know he was the job creator?" Polite laughter. I think I got it: The man had expected if he stole money from a rich guy he would be forgiven but if the rich guy is seen as a job creator, that's a crime. But most of the audience seemed confused. Laughed politely.

The gag went so nowhere I actually Googled it. The cartoon, actually, is funny. But you have to be able to describe it properly. And Biden could not. But he uses it in his stump speech. And he has more handlers than O'Rourke, Delaney and Gillibrand combined. Has nobody talked to him?

He righted himself and I thought: Okay, he's going to be okay now. But then he seemed to lose track of what he was saying. He'd forget the subject from the first part of his sentence by the second part. He'd flub his lines.  "We used to want to be an example of power; now we ought to show power by example," became, "We used to want to be example power by showing power."

Or something. 

It got to where I was feeling: Can't we help this guy somehow?

Questions came next and it got ugly.  The usual audience member who started off with several paragraphs about the experience of having a husband who developed early Alzheimer's and what it did to her family and to herself and to her husband and to their friends. I have to admit, my mind wandered waiting for her to find a question in all this.

But finally she asked what Joe would do to solve the Alzheimer's problem.  Joe sallied off into a long voyage about curing cancer, which had taken one of his sons, and which he had talked to Barack Obama about and got appointed to a task force called "The Moon Shot" for cancer, based on the premise that if America could send a man to the moon and return him safely back to Earth, then, by golly, we ought to be able to solve the cancer problem. So Joe traveled all over the globe, talking to people to learn how to cure cancer. And doing this, he discovered "cancer" is not just one disease but 240 different diseases. (Where that number came from is still a mystery to me.) But all you really have to do is to get scientists sharing information, which they currently do not do.

So here is the rub: 1/ Politicians who believe they know enough about science to solve scientific problems.  2/ The question was about Alzheimer's. 

The audience could, it is true, think, "Oh, well, he means, like cancer, all Alzheimer's needs is for scientists to start sharing formation."

But when you get to the point where the audience has to finish your thought for you, because you've lost the thread, this is not good.

Physically, his skull shows temporal hollowing, and he has a sort of worn out, gaunt look. He's that neighbor who coached your kids' baseball team, who sold Christmas trees at the local fire department tree stand, who marched in the Fourth of July parade and everyone likes him.  

But you are making allowances for him because, well, he's lost a step or two but, well, Hell, you have to like the guy.

My neighbor, who saw him speak in 20012, observed:  "He's not the same man. He used to be quick." Today, he was a little at sea. 

Last polls put him up by 18 points on his nearest competitor in New Hampshire. 
What that may reflect, if that poll is not just sheer baloney, if it really represents voter sentiment, may be a longing for a return to normal. A restoration figure. Someone who is the opposite of the mean spirited, nasty and divisive Trump.

Joe is certainly a swing away from Trump. 

But if New Hampshire does its job, if it really vets the candidates, Joe will do so poorly here, he'll fall out of the race. Trouble is, even in New Hampshire, it's only the small minority who is even thinking about 2020 or the primary. 

Trump: His Living Gospel

"The psyche of the broad masses is accessible only to what is strong and uncompromising.
Like a woman whose inner sensibilities are not so much is under the sway of abstract reasoning but are always subject to the influence of a vague emotional longing for the strength that completes her being, and who would rather bow to the strong man than dominate the weakling."

Guess who wrote that?

You know it wasn't Donald Trump, because it has complete sentences and no internal repetition or digression. 
If Donald Trump had written it, it might go something like this:

"You know, I know you know, what we need. We really need it. It's not getting screwed. It's winning. We like winners, here. Not captives. Winners. Really. You know. People with the best words who don't get captured. So true.
Women like that  in a man. Especially if he's a celebrity. Women love me. So do Hispanics. Hispanics love me. Big time. Hispanic women love me especially. Miss Argentina could not keep her hands off me. They just love me. Hugely. 
And you know why? They like somebody they can't boss around. Somebody, really, who might just boss THEM around. Cause that's what women want, deep down. They do. They want winners. Not captives. They don't want to be captives.Well, maybe they do. I don't know. It's possible. But they want winners."

Or something like that.

But the Donald likely got that insight from somewhere. Hard to imagine him from drawing on life experience.

He keeps only one book on his bedside table. People say that. Just one book. Really, I saw it on Fox News. On the bedside table, next to his bed. Where he and Melania sleep. Well, where he sleeps. It's not clear the Secret Service trusts Melania to sleep with him.

Some people say she doesn't really like him that much. 
How they know that, I couldn't say. Despises him. Really. Can't see how anyone would know that. But people say that. They do. So sad. They do, though.

Where would he get that book, anyway?
Roy Cohn give it to him?
Or did he find it on his own?

It's pretty boring, really. The guy who wrote it did not even finish high school. He's, like, always explaining things most people learn in high school, as if it's some great insight he came up with himself: like people who are raised in poverty often are raised in dysfunctional families, because families need money and not having it makes them dysfunctional, and gross and mean and not very nice. 
It's the "Hillbilly Elegy" thing, only in 1923. Guys from the hood, or the hollow, just signifying.

Well, duh, Adolf. 
"Mein Kampf" is a little slow. I mean, you expect something more scintillating, actually, from the master of mayhem, but actually, pretty boring, sad to say, pretty pedestrian, or, as Hannah Arendt observed, "the banality of evil."



But, apparently, it speaks to Donald, who is nothing if not banal. 
He does have the best words, though. People say so.