Bernie Sanders: When Fantasies Crash and Burn

Contemptible you are in your wealth,
You kings of coal and steel!
You had your thrones, parasites,
At our backs erected.
All the factories, all the chambers –
All were made by our hands.
It's time! We demand the return
Of that which was stolen from us.

--The Internationale

The collapse of Bernie Sanders' campaign came as no surprise to Mad Dog.
Had Bernie been more successful, Mad Dog would have been astonished.

Whenever Mad Dog saw Bernie, the words of Mad Dog's father echoed in his ears from years ago:  The NFL players had gone on strike and these players, who were paid millions, were organizing as a brotherhood of workers.  

"I'm all for the workers," my father said. "My parents were union, through and through. But these are not WORKERS."

By which he meant, millionaires are not workers.  Working class people who live in working class homes in working class neighborhoods are workers. These were millionaires complaining about their ill treatment by billionaire owners.

Workers just aren't what they used to be.

In fact, likely, workers haven't been "workers" likely since the end of the Great Depression, or at least since the late 50's.

Workers of the world unite!

But, as Sanders himself as noted, sadly, the Democratic party is no longer the party of the working class. "The Democratic Party has become the party of the more affluent people, while the Republican Party has become the party of the white working class."

Bernie sought to rally all those idealistic young people who reminded him of his own youthful group, the kids who marched against the war in Vietnam, against "The Man" against the controlling, soulless Wall Street rich.  And he would bring them out to vote in numbers un-imagined. Well, not un-imagined, because Bernie imagined them, but the fact is, there were never enough of them.

An African American minister spoke of one of the members of his congregation who told him, "My Medicare isn't for all. I worked for it; it's mine. And now you want to give it away to someone else who hadn't earned it."

There you have in a nutshell, in a single congregant's confession, the nub of the problem: These workers are not singing kumbaya, locking arms with other workers, marching arm and arm for the greater good of the working man, singing "We Shall Overcome," or The Internationale.

This is a man who is not amenable to the idea of supporting someone else, when it comes to health care. He's got his. He earned it. He doesn't want to help deadbeats or people who didn't work as hard as he did.

It's the same thing we heard when a Danish woman was asked by her friend how she could stand to live in America, where they don't have universal health care and the Danish woman asked her friend, "Well, wait a minute. How would you feel if your taxes went to pay for the medical care of an Italian?"
Her friend started, blinking, a deer in the headlights. "Well, but that's different."
"No," said the Danish woman. "The white guy in Wisconsin doesn't want to pay for the healthcare of the Black guy in Kentucky. Same thing."

When Bernie was mayor of Burlington, Vermont, demonstrators picketed the factory which made Gatling guns which were sold to Central American dictators who mowed down demonstrators seeking  democracy. Bernie chose to side with "the workers" who were making the guns, but these weren't really "workers" by my father's definition: Real workers would never have made guns used to suppress other workers by autocrats.  "Remember," Lenin said, "A boyonet is a weapon with a worker at either end."

Workers who are despoiling the environment by fracking  in Pennsylvania or drilling in the Gulf of Mexico aren't dreamy eyed workers dreaming of a workers' paradise.  Bernie had to face the roles these workers played in destroying the climate and his response was "We'll retrain them and pay their salaries while they learn something new."

But that was just a dodge. That was like saying, "We'll convert them to Christianity" and once they have accepted the Lord Jesus, or the environment, they'll want to do good.

Bernie was beaten by the very working class people he claimed to want to fight for and liberate. 

Trouble was, they didn't want to be saved. They just wanted what they thought belonged to them. 

Exeter Road Tree Massacre

Route 27 in Exeter, New Hampshire is called "Hampton Road" and in Hampton it is called "Exeter Road" which confused me mightily when I first moved to the Seacoast a dozen years ago, until I realized the logic: In Hampton, Rte 27 is the road to Exeter.

There are hundreds of prettier roads in New Hampshire, but Route 27 runs straight into the Atlantic Ocean, as it crosses Ocean Boulevard at its terminus. 

Greater Boar's Head, Hampton Beach--Obadiah Youngblood

Once it crosses Route 1, aka "Lafayette Road" the housing prices along that road rise because now you are less than 2 miles from North Beach and you can, on some days, smell the salt in the air.  As you travel away from the ocean, heading West, the homes along the road become more modest, mostly one story ranch homes, until the road crosses over Interstate 95 and heads past open fields and much more upscale homes approaching Exeter.

But between the interstate and Route 1, it's a modest little road, charming only because of the two hundred year old pine trees which line and shade it.

The high school in Hampton is called "Winnacunnet" which means "place of beautiful pines," and pine trees are the main species, apart from the occasional stand of birches, as the soil is loamy approaching the ocean.

One of the strangest rites of Spring in town is the town vote on "warrant articles" which is a package of 40 pages of questions ranging from voting approval for a million dollar renovation of the middle school, to voting yes or not to allow Mrs. Gertrude Jones to plant her petunias on the easement along the road, on the other side of the sidewalk. 

Given that sort of concern about every little thing that goes on in town, Mad Dog was stunned to see the wholesale destruction of the trees along Exeter Road, with nary a mention of what was to befall the road, its trees and the folks who live along the road or who simply drive along it as they head toward town and beyond to the beach.

Sixty foot trees, six feet in diameter, likely 200 years old--Mad Dog lost count, trying to count the tree rings--have been cut down with dreadful efficiency all along the road, transforming a tree lined lane into a sort of Levittown, where denuded lots now stand exposed--all to protect the power lines running along the south side of the road.

Now, Mad Dog values electric power as much as the next man, but really, how much more expensive would it have been to spare the trees and simply bury those power lines?

People who walk their dogs or just stroll along the sidewalk look at each other in stunned silence, as if their town had just been bombed out. 

Who did this? What were they thinking?

It is a sort of New Hampshire terrorist attack: Why? Who? 

The "Why" is pretty evident: they were trying to protect the power lines which would be damaged if large trees or tree limbs fell on them.

Horse and Buggy Democrats

At a recent meeting of Rockingham County Democrats, a citizen asked Ray Buckley, the chairman of the New Hampshire Democrats, about the efficacy of the famed and vaunted New Hampshire "ground" game.

Buckley had finished his customary pep talk about all we have to do to win New Hampshire for the Democratic presidential nominee, whoever that may prove to be, was to get out and knock on doors as we always have. "Nothing beats neighbors talking to neighbors, one on one, in New Hampshire," Buckley intoned.

The leader of the "senior" faction of the Democrats, Gary Patton, remarked that, actually, on his block, neighbors had tacitly agreed to not discuss politics, as it was "disruptive of the balance" of neighborly comity.

He might have added that on Navy ships, politics and religion are forbidden topics of conversation for the same reason. Discussions of both tend to get emotional and testy and group harmony tends to fray.

The fact is, when groups of volunteers are sent out from the Democratic field offices, during the canvassing campaigns which begin in September of each Presidential election year, the canvasser is handed a map of a part of Hampton he or she usually doesn't know and when they knock on doors they have to introduce themselves as a "Hampton" town person because they are strangers in that particular neighborhood and often know nobody at any of the doors, or at best, they may know someone the home owner knows.  It's not "neighbor talking to neighbor" in anything but the most arbitrary sense of geography and town lines.

What if we showed these graphs to our neighbors?

Another man remarked that people living in Hampton, which is almost entirely suburban, value their privacy and isolation and  hate strangers ringing their doorbells, trying to push one agenda or another. Democrats canvassing are about as welcome as those Mormon boys in their white shirts and black pants trying to convert you to the Church of Jesus Christ and the Latter Day Saints, pressing their pamphlets on you.

Phone banks have been largely abandoned since caller-ID. The Dems who manned them realized they were not even able to preach to the choir. The choir didn't want to hear it.

Buckley's interlocutor said, "We never saw, or only very rarely saw, a Trump canvasser knocking on doors in 2016. The streets were swarming with our Democratic canvassers. We flooded the zone. And Trump came within 100 votes of beating us in Hampton, without a ground game."

"Ah," Buckley raised his finger, "But we won. And if we hadn't canvassed, we would have lost. That's what happened where they didn't canvass in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin."

Which is to say if you hold a race and the Democrats harness up a team of horses on Friday and whip it mercilessly across hill and dale, and arrive at the finish line Tuesday evening,  10 seconds ahead of Donald Trump who had just hopped into his Ferrari ten minutes earlier, that the horse and buggy is the preferred approach to the race. That's our way to win elections. Always has been. Always worked before.

Mad Dog has thought about Lincoln and his famous "chicken bone" case, where he used a simple display defending his doctor client before the jury. The doctor faced a suit because the plantiff's femur failed to heal properly but Lincoln held up two chicken bones before his rural jury.  One was a bone from an old chicken which snapped in Lincoln's hands with a loud crack. Then Lincoln tried to break the young bone, which bent and gave but would not fracture. "The starch has gone out of the old bone," Lincoln told the jury.  Points of law, words, the old fashion manner of convincing a jury did not play well, even in the 1850's. What helped was a new idea: a demonstration, something visual, something familiar.

Mad Dog is not convinced door to doors work at all, but if we are to do any of this, would it not make more sense to arm our door to door salesmen and sales women with some visual aids?  A little kit of photos, charts and graphs to address the various claims Trump makes.

Like: it's the economy stupid: We can show the economy is the Obama recovery and Trump is simply riding it.

Trump is just surfing the wave Obama started

Things are continuing to look good, but not because of Trump

We can show he actually has done little to stop illegal immigration.

We can show his border wall is impotent and incompetent and falling over.

We can carry those visual aides with us.

Or better yet, as one man in the meeting suggested. Don't knock on doors. Hold block parties. 

Elizabeth Warren and Believe the Woman

Last night's debate and Elizabeth Warren accused Michael Bloomberg of telling a pregnant employee to "Kill It" and have an abortion.

Mr. Bloomberg denied ever having said that.

Googling this it appears Ms. Warren simply takes the word of the accuser and when pressed why she should believe the woman she replied, "Why should I not believe the woman?"

Which is to say, "Oh, we know what cads men are. Bloomberg is just like all those horrible men we all know. He puts money ahead of life and a woman's happiness. That's the way men are. So I don't believe men any farther than I can throw them. I believe the woman."

This comes on the heels of a PBS interview with Harvey Weinstein's lawyer, Donna Rotunno, who pointed out that in America, there should be the presumption of innocence, even when the defendant is as creepy looking as Harvey Weinstein, and then she dissected out the inconsistencies in the story of some of the accusers, who carried on sexual relationships with Weinstein for years after having been "raped." And, yes, we know about women in abusive relationships who do this but those women are typically living with and financially dependent upon their abusers. These women lived apart but kept coming back to Weinstein.

And the explanation "I had to keep sleeping with him or my career would have suffered" is really nothing more than a woman saying she is trading sex for job advancement.

To answer Senator Warren's question: Why not believe the woman? The woman is SUING Bloomberg. Is it beyond the realm of possibility she might have some to gain by winning her lawsuit.

Senator Warren's posture of the self righteous, aggrieved woman is simply too much for me to stomach. The victim card. The woman who tells a story about how a man once did her wrong by firing her for being pregnant and thus Bloomberg must be of that same ilk. He's a man, after all, a member of that dreadful class of human beings with a Y chromosome.

How different is this from saying, "A Black man once abused me. This man is a Black man so any woman who accuses him, well, I believe her!"?

Really, this ME TOO stuff is simply too much to bear. 
She is the last Democrat I would vote for right now.
But if it were a choice of Warren or Trump, well...I guess I'd hold my nose and vote for the lesser of two weevils. 

Inside Donald Trump's Head

Surely, just the thing for  Mar a Lago 

Reading, "The Guns of August" and listening to the Podcast "Revolutions" it has gradually dawned on Mad Dog just exactly what is going on inside the head of Donald J. Trump.

How did he earn those medals?

He is not your classic racist:  He will throw his arm around a gay, a Black, a Hispanic, anyone who will wear a Trump MAGA hat or a T shirt saying, "Trump: The Greatest EVER!"

Whose hat do you like better?

He does not have an ideology. Although he reportedly keeps a copy of "Mein Kampf" by his bedside, it's clearly not the anti Jewish screed which appeals to him: It's the manual for marketing ideas parts he loves.

I don't know. Red might be more fun.

No, what is inside that skull, beneath the comb over and the orange skin is pretty much what was inside the heads of the last real monarchs, the Russian Czar, the king of England and Kaiser Wilhelm.

The sword is a nice touch, don't you think?

The Kaiser changed his uniforms five or six times a day. He loved uniforms and he had all sorts: He was an honorary colonel of a British cavalry regimen and he had the splendid uniform from that regiment.  He loved naval uniforms, infantry uniforms, all sorts of splendid uniforms. And medals! Oh, he had won so many.

These are actually different men, but cousins

Each of these monarchs believed their people adored them. 
And there was evidence it was true: Brits lined up for, literally, miles to walk past the coffin of King Edward in 1910 and they lined the streets to gawk at all the royalty in their splendid uniforms ride by.  They were dazzled by what "The Times" of London called "splendidly mounted princes." 

Nothing beats feathered plumes

Ever since Caesar, autocrats had known the people love "bread and circus." 

Trump loves military parades.

His tea time uniform

The wonder is he has stuck to his navy blue suits. 
If he wins a second term, which is looking increasingly likely, Mad Dog predicts--you heard it here first, he will start wearing uniforms. He'll be changing six times a day, between tweets.

He will be the best dressed President of the United States EVER!

Bernie Sanders and Why We are Not Finland

Reading Michael Booth's "The Almost Nearly Perfect People"  ethnograph on the Scandinavian countries, Mad Dog felt a wash of memory and experience surge over him.

Until a year ago, Mad Dog's only experience of Scandinavia had been mostly with people of Scandinavian descent he knew in America, or the odd Finn or Swede he ran into during his university years. 

Mad Dog did get pushed into a trip to Norway in 1980, because his wife's mother was living in Oslo while her husband worked on the North Sea drilling platforms Mobil Oil was building there. This was years before Norway was actually able to extract oil from the North Sea, before it became the Saudi Arabia of Scandinavian, awash in oil wealth.

All Mad dog knew about Norway was it had fjords and blonds and he had read "The Moon Is Down" Steinbeck's rendition of the Nazi invasion and David Howarth's astonishing "The Sledge Patrol" about the resistance in Norway.

Mad Dog objects to going places where they don't speak English, but his multilingual wife assured him all the Norwegians spoke English because it's Scandinavia and not to worry. 

Nobody spoke English in Norway, at that time, as far as Mad Dog could tell and neither he nor his wife spoke Norwegian, although his wife spoke pretty good German, which got you a lot of hostile stares in Norway, and having read about the German occupation, Mad Dog knew why. 
More Norwegians, of a certain age, spoke German, but they didn't like Germans and Mad Dog's wife could easily pass for German, visually, and Norway was fun, but not a place Mad Dog thought he'd want to live or visit again any time soon. 

Last year Mad Dog got hauled off, once again, to Scandinavia where, he was, once again,  assured everyone speaks English, but this time it was mostly true.  Over the past 30 years, apparently,  English is taught in schools from Iceland to Finland and most of the kids speak pretty good English, which goes to show how good Scandinavian education is, as Mad Dog took 4 years of French and can barely order a meal in French, but these kids were very conversant. In fact, when a Finn talks to a Dane, they typically use English. 
During his brief excursions from the safety of his Viking cruise ship, Mad Dog was able to ask English speaking Norwegians, Danes, Swedes and Finns what they thought of their healthcare systems. Their startled looks told a tale. "Our health care?" Why would anyone ask about their healthcare? This was like asking, "How do you feel about your mother?"  Healthcare just IS in Scandinavia. It's there for you and it's good the way your mother is good when you stagger home with a fever or a bloody nose. Whenever he could, Mad Dog would peek into a clinic door, where he noticed the reception area did not have that first desk, the barrier to all American patients, where they ask for your health insurance card. 
In these government clinics there were no money changers, no business offices, no secretaries processing insurance forms, just nurses and doctors.

Across the street from Mad Dog's childhood home in the Washington, DC suburbs, lived a family named Juntilla, from Minnesota. The father had been shot down over Germany during the war, and was now a lawyer for the Justice Department and his main case seemed to be a lawsuit against "Playboy" and the fact it was mailed through the United States Postal service, which meant the Juntilla house was the place to be for all the neighborhood boys because, apparently, the lawyer needed to do copious background reading for his case, and there were stacks of "Playboy's" in the basement.

They also had a drop dead gorgeous daughter, who most of us ignored until she demonstrated she could throw a baseball adequately, and as our tenure was from age 9 to age 18, we didn't really see her until she got to be 13 and we were 18 and about to go off to college.  Then we asked each other: who is that girl we thought we knew?

Mrs. Juntilla did not work. She never got a driver's license, but she drove her VW Minibus all the time, as every suburban housewife drove their kids around, and she smoked and looked amused as she talked to the neighborhood boys who hung out on her couches and in her kitchen. 

Mrs. Juntilla, as I remember her

She was the only mother in the neighborhood who was the least bit attractive, physically, and her blond, high cheekbone looks placed her somewhere between Grace Kelly and Eva Saint Marie.  She looked glamorous, but she did not act glamorous. She grew up on a farm and everything about suburbia seemed to amuse her, as life was just too soft and comfortable and she could not believe the complaints she heard from the other stay-at-home mothers, who were living on easy street but still dissatisfied. (The fact is, another neighborhood housewife drank herself to death, and one up the street was wheel chair bound with multiple sclerosis, and two died of breast cancer, but overall, most of the women had typically comfortable, if mind numbing, suburban lives.)
Mrs. Juntilla made an exception for Mad Dog's mother, who taught at the high school and did not get home until five o'clock most days, which was one reason Mad Dog hung out at Mrs. Juntilla's house, although he was glad for the excuse because Mrs. Juntilla was very cool. She would have been right at home at Woodstock, although she would have been unimpressed by it. Bathing in the nude? Marijuana? How is that different from her Minnesota farm?

She told stories about the animals on her farm. Chickens, she said, were stupid. There was just no getting around that. But pigs were intelligent, if uncouth, and goats were just very weird. You could not fool a goat. Goats watched you and you had to respect goats.

Mr. Juntilla brewed homemade apple cider, hard cider in his garage with the enthusiastic assistance of his neighbor who worked for the CIA, and another who owned a bar.  He lay on his couch on weekends, and read "Catch-22" and laughed until tears rand down his cheeks and when Mad Dog asked him why he liked the book so much he looked Mad Dog over and said, "Because this is the closest thing to what it was really like I've every read."

I never heard Mr. Juntilla speak Finnish, but whenever it snowed, which was maybe ten days a year in the DC suburbs, all the Juntillas got on their wooden skis and wool Finnish sweaters and they skied down the street to the highway at the bottom. You could do that then because the county only had 10 snow plows and the street remained unplowed for days, or until it got warm and melted.

The next time Mad Dog thought about the Finnish was as he was finishing his medical training and his department had a Spring party at a park and Viekko Koivisto, one of the young faculty, told Mad Dog he was moving his family back to Finland. 
"But Viekko," Mad Dog expostulated, "You're the most successful guy we've got! You've published more and the stuff you've done is more important than just about anybody else. How could you leave? You're a star."

Viekko allowed himself a faint smile and nodded toward a gaggle of children chasing each other around a set of swings and jungle gyms, laughing, shouting, spraying each other with squirt guns. 

"Look at those kids," Viekko said. "Can you tell me which ones are mine?"
Mad Dog looked at the kids and guessed maybe the tallest, blondest kids were Viekko's but they might have belonged to Hans, a German fellow, or Kurt, who was from Texas or Jan from the Netherlands. 
"No," Mad Dog admitted. "I give up."

"That's my point," Viekko said. "I've got to get them home before they forget they are Finnish."

Reading Booth about Finland, Mad Dog learns that the Finnish school system is rated by some international program to assess the educational systems of about 80 countries, and it always comes in first or second overall, and usually first in math, language and analytical thought. They do this, starting kids in school at age 7, keeping them in class only 4 hours a day, assigning little homework and allowing for summer vacations. They do this without much formal testing until kids are about 18.

They do this with a system which is entirely government run, with virtually no private schools, which is free through college and even graduate school

They do this by making teaching jobs highly prestigious, requiring master's degrees in programs which have 10 applicants for every space. They do this by making sure every teacher is constantly re educated, updated on new material on new ideas about effective teaching techniques and thoroughly and frequently evaluated. 
Booth, raised in England asks the reader to consider the "psychopaths and social misfits" who served as teachers in the UK or America. 

The Finns ensure that no matter where your school is, in Helsinki or in the far reaches of the deep forests, your learning experience is identical. About 1/3 of all students get personal tutoring to bring them up to snuff whenever they fall behind in math or language or any subject. No child is left behind and every child is observed.  They do this spending less on each child than we do in America and they do this for every child.

Mad Dog thought about a book club the Democratic Party organized in Exeter, New Hampshire. A lovely lady, in her fifties, showed up with a school text book she got from her high school son, from which she learned we have 3 branches in our federal government. 
Once Mad Dog managed lift his jaw from his chest, he zoned back into this lady's explanation of how the three branches have more or less separate functions and there is this thing called "checks and balances." She seemed delighted to learn all this, at age 50 something, having graduated from a public high school 30 years earlier and never, apparently, having been taught any of this. 
Mad Dog was about to ask her what branch of government this lady thought the upcoming Presidential election was about, and then he thought about asking her if she had ever heard of "The Constitution,"but, before he could choose which question, he was savaged by a swift and painful kick in the shin under the table from his stalwart and ever vigilant co conspirator, with whom he canvassed neighborhoods before every election. His co conspirator smiled daggers at him, and Mad Dog refrained. 

As Booth relates, when he tried to interview Finnish adolescents, they were much the same as teenagers in the States or Britain: hormonal, monosyllabic, distrustful, about as cooperative as a prisoner being watched for signs he is a stool pigeon.  But when they were tested by the international assessment folks, they do spectacularly well.

But why? Are they genetically smarter?
Talking to a variety of people who are supposed to know, or at least, who are supposed to have theories about this two things come up:
1/ There are virtually no immigrants in the group of Finnish students to pull down the average scores.
2/ The population is committed to the idea that education should be about education, not status. Ergo the absence of private schools. 
Jobs, careers, opportunities are not based on whether to went to the "right" schools, which in every country which has a "right school" really reflects class advantage. 

Can you imagine an America, where the upper class would give up its bragging rights, of saying, "Oh, my son is at Princeton," or Harvard, Stanford, Yale etc?

We do not embrace equality in America. We thrive on inequality and striving. 
The "American Dream" whatever that is, is all about "rising above" origins to make yourself bigger, better, richer, more privileged than the peons from whence you came.
Or, at the very least, they will be living at a higher rung than Hispanics, Blacks or dark skinned immigrants.

This is the problem Bernie has. The poor cleave to the idea that someday they will be rich, they will be riding around in the golden carriages, waited on by servants and vacationing in the Caribbean. Cinderella. Snow White. Aladdin. Disney's princesses, selected from the humble, living in toil and squalor. But does Disney ever look back at the folks Cinderella left behind? Does anyone care about whatever became of the Seven Dwarfs? Of course not. They are just dwarfs.  Oh, no, they disappear. All that counts is Snow White or Cinderella has made it big. 

In Finland, school children are taught to not call attention to themselves; do not try to steal the spotlight. This is true, to a greater or lesser extent in Iceland, Norway, Denmark and Sweden, in about that order.

We the people, in America,  love a pecking order and Bernie promises to destroy that.