Diary of a Mad Democrat

 

As Election Season is staggering to its inevitable conclusion, Mad Dog thumbs through the pages of his diary in hopes of making some sense of it all.

Why, he wonders, did he ever allow le sale espoir --the "dirty hope," in Sartre's phrase--to infect his sinuses, with that short path to his brain? 

The scent was, it must be admitted, intoxicating, and it would have taken a very disciplined man indeed, to not inhale deeply that perfume. That was the idea that Lauren Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Greene, J.D.Vance, Matt Gaetz, Rand Paul and Jim Jordan would lose their races and be replaced with educated individuals whose brains have been conditioned to organize their thoughts along lines of taking in information, presenting evidence to others, rather than simply swallowing FOXNEWS whole and declaiming that space lasers are controlling our thoughts and vaccines are simply vehicles for chips which will allow Bill Gates and Dr. Fauci to rule the world.

The thing about Republicans is they are so sure of themselves, and so giddy about the stuff they believe--like so many believers who grin in ecstasy as they spread The Word to all those within earshot. It is no accident so many are Christian evangelists, like Ms. Boebert who, when she finally eked out her victory, Tweeted ecstatically, "Jesus is Lord."

Belief relieves one of the hard work of analysis: my son told me about being presented with a very knotty problem in college, that classic runaway train headed toward a station full of people, which can be diverted by simply pulling a switch to divert it, but on that diversion track lies a baby who will be crushed. The professor called on a student for a course of action, asking how he would weigh the options and make a choice and this student smiled serenely and replied, "Well, I'd just ask myself what Jesus would do."

That stopped everyone in their tracks, if you'll excuse the pun, because, after all, nobody could think of a parable Jesus had ever uttered concerning locomotives in Jerusalem. 

But the Republicans, grounded in the solid faith of FOX, are never in doubt.

Democrats on the other hand, have to think about stuff.

Here are some pages from Mad Dog's journal of this most recent season:

September: 

Monthly meeting of the Hampton Dems. The president of the group of twenty odd townsfolk yields the floor to one of the newer members, a middle school teacher, who distributes to each of the hapless citizens arrayed on folding chairs, a paper with instructions about how we are to create a document stating what it is we are fighting for, what we believe in.

Mad Dog thinks of Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, in their sweltering room in Philadelphia, trying to put down on paper exactly what should be included in the Declaration of Independence. 

But here, in Hampton, New Hampshire, the teacher has organized an approach, so we do not have to rely on mere inspiration, or past readings of great books sequestered in home libraries. We now have a step by step plan with which to formulate our document.

Mad Dog seizes the paper proffered, already imagining how he will sign our Declaration in a flourish which will put John Hancock to shame. 

It reads:

Communications Agreements:

--"Pass" or "pass for now" if you're not ready or don't wish to respond, with no explanation needed

--Speak for yourself and from your own experience 

[A disappointment to Mad Dog, who hoped to speak from the experience of others]

--Speak one at a time and respect time limits

--Maintain confidentiality regarding stories. Take the learning but not others' stories. 

[Mad Dog madly searches his mind re: his spotty knowledge of copyright law.]

Purpose:

A message is only as powerful as the people who carry it to voters, and organizations are stronger when people are talking and listening to each other. The purpose of this conversation is not to directly revise the values statement or make a decision about our final message right now. Rather, it is a chance for us to share some of the stories and values that brought us here tonight, and then for those values and stories to inform the message that we can call carry to voters this fall. 

[Mad Dog becomes immediately thirsty, and for reasons which he cannot fathom, images glitter before his eyes of a beer hall with long tables and everyone swilling beers and shouting in German.]

Connect: (Go around, 1 minute each)

Tell your group about a person who influenced you in some way to be here tonight. 

[Mad Dog cannot get Donald Trump out of his brain. It's a trap.]

Question 1: (Go around, 2 minutes each)

Share a story with your group about an experience here in Hampton that inspired you to want to seek change or protect something in the community you really care about. 

[Mad Dog has a flashback. He is back in high school and he is fantasizing about placing a bomb under the teacher's desk. Cold sweat washes down Mad Dog's back.]

Question 2 (Go around, 2 minutes each)

When you think about the story that you shared, what values or beliefs were at the core of your desire to take action? 

[Mad Dog cannot get the image out of his mind of his gangly French teacher, crossing and uncrossing her spindly legs provocatively, in a student desk in the back of the classroom, flirting shamelessly with the basketball player, who is the only boy taller than she is in the class. As she had passed Mad Dog's chair on the way back, the delicate reek of her dress, which she has not changed since Monday, three days earlier, wafts by with her. It is body odor mixed with some sort of deracinated perfume. Her name is Mrs. Loftness, and she is from Luxemburg, a place where they apparently believed in economizing on dry cleaning bills, and which Mad Dog has never, to this day, been able to find on a map.]

 Questions of understanding (Open Q&A, 10 minutes total)

Closing Questions (Go around, 1 minute each)

After listening to the other members of your group and sharing your own story and values, what are you noticing as points of convergence and possible divergence when it comes to your path to political engagement and the values that underpin that journey?

[We are sitting now in groups of five, and the teacher keeps popping his head and shoulders among us, admonishing us to stick to the schedule, brandishing a stop watch.

What emerges from this ruthless exercise is the "Three Themes" which has, at the very least, the great advantage of being more economical than Wilson's 14 points--which Clemenceau noted, at the time, were remarkable because even the Good Lord had only ten. ]

1/ Hampton Dems are fighting for excellence.

 [As opposed, Mad Dog wonders, to what? Are Republicans advocating mediocrity, or simply living it?]

We want the highest quality social services from education to healthcare. 

[Healthcare, as a local issue, strikes Mad Dog as a bit of a large bite. Virtually every medical practice in the Seacoast is owned by a large corporation which owes it's primary reason for existence to generate profit for its stockholders.] 

 Schools that prepare every student to thrive in adulthood and participate in civic life with a full knowledge of our history. We want hospitals that have the resources to provide the highest quality care to every patient. We want resilient and appealing communities, from the mountains to the seacoast, where people can visit and live with fear of the devastating impacts of climate change! 

[Mad Dog considers this idea of full knowledge of our history. (Italics provided by the teacher.) Mad Dog has come to believe that history is one long argument. Unlike arithmetic, reading and writing, as soon as you start talking about the past, you are going to story telling, and if the courts have taught us anything, it's the perils of eyewitness testimony. Take that one step beyond, where the testimony is second or third hand, and you are swimming in very murky waters.

 In fact, the town of Hampton votes each year to fund the Catholic grade school in town, as a sort of sanctuary against the non secular public schools which have been contaminated by Critical Race Theory, which teaches that the Civil War was fought to end slavery and that Martin Luther King was a saint, when, in fact, he was a jailbird who languished in a cell in Birmingham, Alabama writing letters which got published and should not be read by children.]

2/ Hampton Dems are fighting for a compassionate state...

[By this point Mad Dog's brain was swelling mightily, trying to expand beyond the confines of his skull. There was something more about communities where people take care of one another, especially the neediest and most vulnerable.  And oh, Mad Dog knew what THAT would mean to at least half the home owners on whose doors he would be knocking.

 "You want my taxes to pay for dead beats and illegal dark skinned immigrants who are coming here to take my job?" ]

3/Hampton Dems are fighting for a town and a state where residents can afford, not just to live but to thrive.

[Yes! Mad Dog thought. And Mad Dog, added silently, "And I'd like to wake up tomorrow morning 30 pounds lighter and 30 years younger."]

And there you have it. 

 

We Can Live Without Democracy: It Won't Be So Bad

 

As we contemplate the ascendancy of the Republican Party, there is some good news.

But first, we ought to consider what losing the Senate, the House and several governorships to Republicans might mean:

1/ Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Green, Lauren Boebert, Jim Jordan, Rand Paul, Dr. Oz, Herschel Walker, Mitch McConnell, Gov. Abbott, will be sworn in and will strut and preen and continue doing what they are already doing.

2/ Congress might pass a national ban on abortion, but at least for 2 years, that will be vetoed by the Democratic President. 

Planned Parenthood will shut down, but other organizations will spring up to provide contraception, except where state laws outlaw contraception.  

Deaths from back alley abortions will increase slightly, but most media attention, especially through FOX NEWS will focus on women who got septic after incomplete abortions induced by abortion pills they bought online and once they recover, they will be tried for murder and the coverage of these trials will make FOX even more watched than it is today.

3/ Religious schools will receive state funds and private and charter schools as well.

Public schools in some, but not all  districts will collapse or simply regress into holding pens for the poor, the marginalized kids, who will simply quit and go looking for work or join criminal gangs. 

Laws to fund religious schools will pass in the Red States and some purple states and the Supreme Court will find them legal. 

Any teaching of the Civil War, the Civil Rights movement, slavery  will be forbidden in public schools in all Red State as woke "Critical Race Theory."  Discussion in classrooms of anything which might reflect poorly on the American Past will be forbidden. 

This will mean, eventually, schools will teach only reading, writing and 'rithmetic. 

4/ The Supreme Court will strike down Affirmative Action. But that will, for now, affect only colleges, which will do just fine with less diversity, as the University of California system is currently doing.

 The Court will strike down efforts to prevent voter suppression or redistricting which will lock in Republican safe seats in Congress.

5/ Immigrants will continue to cross the Southern Border but much theater will ensue showing how harshly they are dealt with and Democrats will try to embarrass Republicans with images of children being mistreated in border prisons. Nothing will change along the Southern border, although much theater will play out there.

6/ More and more states will encourage open carry gun laws and gun deaths will increase.

7/ All efforts at ameliorating climate change will cease and coal fired power plants and oil drilling will stoke up. Plastic will choke the sea and its creatures.

8/ As resurgences of COVID occur, schools will remain open and the proportion of the population over the age of 70, which has been steadily rising as baby boomers age, will decrease, as high mortality rates cull grandparents across the nation. 

But the overwhelming of hospitals will likely be only brief, during January and then decline as the warm months ensue.

9/ Efforts to defund Medicare and Social Security or to privatize it will be vetoed by a Democratic President.

10/ A new form of entertainment: Congressional Inquisition, starring Jim Jordan and a whole host of Republican stars will bring Tony Fauci, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Hunter Biden, Adam Schiff  and Nancy Pelosi before the Committees for a Republican attempt to imitate the January 6th hearings.

All and all, it won't be all that bad.

We've certainly been through worse: Only 100 years ago opposition to the draft, criticism of the government, of the war was outlawed and people went to prison. Eugene Debbs spent years in prison, ran for the Presidency from prison and got millions of votes. His crime was voicing opposition to sending American boys to fight in World War One.

The famous phrase, "You can't falsely shout 'Fire!' in a crowded theater," was actually Oliver Wendel Holmes's line in a case about people who published a pamphlet opposing America's draft for World War One.  Holmes sent the men who wrote that pamphlet to prison for 10 years because he considered opposition to the draft "a clear and present danger" to the nation, its government and the war effort. It was not Holmes's best moment. He later recanted and decided people ought to be able to dissent without going to jail but those men who wrote the pamphlet languished in prison, so his change of mind did not help them.

Influenza was far worse than COVID, and the government's response to it was ineffectual and millions died in wave after new wave and the toll was not as high among the elderly as it was among young men and women.

There was no such thing as Social Security or Medicare 100 years ago and people died in poverty and old age was much briefer. In fact, without Medicare and Social Security, the likelihood is the nation, demographically, would be far younger, as the elderly would tend to die shortly after their 65th birthdays.

Gun violence in the South was just as high or higher in the 1920's as it is around the country today. Lynchings were even more common than now and the murderers of Emmet Till were acquitted because in the South it was not accepted that White men killing Black people should be illegal.

Before the 1920's America was open to immigration, but around 1924 a campaign among American elites, who embraced "eugenics" and who included Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson and virtually all the faculties of the Ivy League, and they advocated restricted immigration of "subhumans" from Southern Europe and Jews and Africans and Asians. To allow non white immigrants was "racial suicide" according to Teddy Roosevelt, whose image is today carved  into Mount Rushmore.

Elite colleges refused to admit Jews and country clubs refused to admit Catholics. Irish need not apply for jobs and Negroes were controlled by Jim Crow in the South.

So, will the world we are entering be so much worse?

It will be unpalatable, illiberal and it will be Scoundrel Time, but that is no different than for most of our history. 

Making America Great Again, will mean going back 100 years, when life in America was remarkably mean and violent. But we'll be no worse off in 2023 than we were in 1923.

The problem is, really, we thought we were better. When Obama won, we thought we had turned a corner. 

We were fooling ourselves.

Affirmative Action: What's It Good For?

 When it comes to Affirmative Action (AA), we tend to see the proposition from the point of view of our own individual experiences or from an eagle's eye view of large numbers and statistics.

August Macke 

Currently, I am working my way through Melvin Urofsky's book, "The Affirmative Action Puzzle," and it has changed my mind in some important ways, but the biggest controversy is over applying AA practices to schools and there I'm not quite moved.

When labor unions excluded Blacks from being firemen or plumbers or electricians, the harm that did Black men and their families could be measured in dollars and cents.

When the Dixiecrats made sure Negroes did not get VA loans and so could not buy houses after World War Two, the effect on family wealth was measurable.

But if a Black kid cannot go to the University of California at Berkeley,  or Harvard or Brown, or Princeton what has been lost is less clear. The Ivy League colleges have guarded follow up data on their graduates tightly for generations. What you would want to know is how much the 4 years at college changed the financial fates of the students who graduate.  After the Second World War, when so many veterans went to college, often the first in their families to go to college, a whole new middle and upper class was established as a college degree became a passport to upper level management jobs. It's not at all clear that going to Princeton does that any more--children of rich parents who send their kids to Princeton tend to become rich and upper class but is that because their families made sure of that or because they were transformed into leaders at Princeton? 

What we assume is that going to a highly selective college is getting your ticket punched and you are launched into the upper classes. Not at all clear this is true.

The concept of admitting people to schools (or jobs) BECAUSE they are members of a particular group, race or ethnicity collides with the notion that, in America, you should advance yourself because of your own personal qualities, your individual drive and willingness to work hard, not because you are White or the son of a rich man. We aspire toward a "meritocracy." 

As Michael Sandel has noted, that idea of meritocracy is not as benign as we thought.  For one thing, the whole idea of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps means if you find yourself poor, working in a dead end job  then it's your own fault because in a meritocracy all you have to do to succeed is work hard. So, if you're poor, you deserve to be poor and miserable.

In my own family academic achievement was the top priority. My parents didn't care if their sons were good athletes or if we could sing or dance or make money; what they cared about was our grades and our test scores.

So, it came as something of a shock, when, in my freshman year at college--an Ivy League college, no less--a student asked the professor of English if we could interrupt our scheduled discussion of the play we had read to discuss the important issue of whether our college should commit to admitting to the next freshman class 12% Black students--as that was the percentage of Blacks in the national population.

This struck me as ludicrous: If Blacks wanted to go to our college, let them apply and compete as we all did, playing by the same stupid rules we had to play by, study for the SAT exams, grind away coloring maps and taking quizzes and exams to earn our "A's" and get in the same way we all did.

Making the goal achieving some outcome, like 12% Blacks in our classes seemed absurd. If 100% of the class turned out to be Asian, I said, that was fine with me, as long as we all played by the same rules.  I noted that nearly 100% of our basketball team was Black, and nobody suggested we have 88% white players on that team to reflect the general population.

The goal should not be 12% Blacks in our classes but the goal should be that every body who got in had the same chance when they applied.

Of course, what I did not appreciate was how thoroughly the Black kids had been disadvantaged and for how long in the training for the races and contests which would "qualify" them for admission to our college.

The other thing which nagged at the back of my brain was the rules, the criteria, the colleges used to judge who was talented and desirable and who was not.

As a junior in college I tried to be exempted from taking a calculus course required for my major (Biology) and I had to see a dean who also happened to be the Dean of Admissions. During our discussion, he reached into a file cabinet and retrieved my admission folder, scanned through it and he expostulated: "How did you ever get in here?"

I wanted to be exempted from that course, so I did not say: "Well, I've been in the top 10% of my class since first semester freshman year, so maybe you're not much of a judge of talent."

The fact is, since the California system eliminated AA, the campuses have seen only minor changes at the state schools, Chico State, Fresno State, which are more like community colleges where kids live nearby and often commute, but the number of Blacks at Berkeley fell by half and Hispanic students fell by about 25%. Asians have increased slightly but not overwhelmingly. 

The loss of places at universities is only important if what happens at those universities really makes a difference in the lives of students.

For me, at least, college was broadening, maybe transformative in some ways, but looking at most of my classmates, I doubt this was true. Apart from the engineers and the pre meds, most of the students I could see who majored in the humanities or arts did not change much or get enough out of college to say that denying them that experience would have hurt them much.

Macho Republicans vs Snowflake Democrats

W hen FOX heard about a college which had offered kittens to cuddle to stressed out freshman, FOX  ran with it. 

Who knows what the real story is? Did a real college actually do this? Or did FOX simply invent it because it is so perfect for the FOX narrative? 

 Mad Dog was intrigued to watch the FOX ladies, on their white leather couches, crossing their legs conspicuously and inveighing against these colleges where elite, effete liberals try to raise and groom snowflakes.

 Kayleigh McEnany asserted that when she was in college, all she needed was a cup of coffee and a library. Another panelist said all those kids needed was a slap in the face.

How very FOX.

Of course, Mad Dog has been appalled by the very notion of "safe spaces" in colleges. Colleges are not supposed to be comfortable or safe, in the sense of this is where you get your ideas challenged and must learn to defend them. College is about conflict and learning to resolve conflicts. So Mad Dog had some sympathy for the cant, even if he doubted the veracity of the actual kitten story.

But this whole episode is so characteristic of what FOX and MAGA sells: We are the tough guys, the realists. Democrats are soft, unworthy of leadership.

Watching political ads on TV, Mad Dog hits mute and tries to guess if it's a Republican ad or a Democratic ad.

If there is a person holding a huge gun, showing some arm tattoos: it's Republican.

If there is a soft focus of a woman, or especially if she is cradling a baby or hugging children:  that's a Democratic ad.

Republicans are the party of warriors, manly men, violence, shoot 'em up and you don't need no friggin' education to understand what they stand for.

Women like these manly men; these men make them feel safe.  And they know they can control boy/men like this, because often those are their boyfriends and husbands. Big backs, small brains.

Pete Buttigieg, Eric Swalwell, Adam Schiff, Corey Booker--none of these guys is threatening. They are all soft, speak in complicated sentences and appeal to the warm, soft side of women. There are no hard edges among Democratic males, except for John Fetterman, and he's so hard edged he refused to take coumadin despite having been warned his atrial fibrillation could cause a stroke.

In fact, this is why Obama scared the beejesus out of the Republicans: He was just so lean, hard, fit and Black!  Could not accuse Obama of being soft and, in fact a little soft in a Black man is ok, because it runs against the grain.

In fact, Democrats eliminate manly men from consideration. They discourage the bold and insist on the meek. They begin their introductions with, "Hi, I'm Sally, she/her." 

(But that's another story: How Democrats charged headlong into the transgender trap laid by Republicans.)

When Chris Pappas ran among 10 other candidates for the open  US House seat there was another candidate, Terrence O'Rourke, who stood out among all the others. O'Rourke is a lawyer for the town of Rochester, a tough, blue collar place. He had won a Bronze Star in Iraq as an officer. (Unlike Ron DeSantis who struts around in his camouflage fatigues, but who was a military lawyer and never had a shot fired in anger at him, O'Rourke took fire and returned it.) But local women Democrats recoiled from O'Rourke. "He just seems too angry!" Several of my Democratic women colleagues told me.

Terrence O'Rourke

"But we NEED angry," I told them

Made no difference. Democratic women aren't looking for a warrior, they are looking to cuddle kittens. 

So the house cat, Chris Pappas got elected. 

Now, we're hearing, "He's not tough enough."

So, we'll have Kevin McCarthy as Speaker, Mitch McConnell back as Senate leader, Jim Jordan running Congressional witch hunts for Dr. Fauci and Hillary and Ms. Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz flouncing around posing with big guns on Twitter for the next two years. 

The Supreme Court will kill affirmative action, and that may not be all bad. There will be a national abortion ban, but the pro choice people, who all the pollsters have told us for eons are in the majority will simply have to deal with it, as Mr. Bolduc has suggested. Abortion may be embraced by 60% of Americans, but it isn't nearly as important to them as gas prices, inflation, talk of crime and the "border crisis" and having trans people playing on girls' high school teams. 

The big question is whether that will be enough exposure to undermine the resurgence of Trump in 2024. If the Republicans get enough sunlight, they may get disinfected. But Hitler, after whom Mr. Trump fashions himself, made good use of his time in jail after his attempt at a coup failed, and we'll see how closely Mr. Trump can make US history imitate German history.

It Doesn't Take A Genius

 

"I didn't spend my life defending this country to let a bunch of pansies squander it away."

--Don Bolduc

Mad Dog has never claimed to be the sharpest blade in the drawer, but he does appreciate some simple things:  For any democracy, especially a republic, to be a democracy, the citizens must believe in voting.

Without accepting the notion that by voting people can elect folks to represent their concerns and point of view, there can be no democratic government, no republic.

This, of  course, requires that citizens believe their votes are counted and tabulated honestly and without manipulation. Mad Dog has worked at the polls and seen how mail in ballots are accounted for and how they are processed, in a procedure he can only describe as "scrupulous."  There is no monkey business in vote counting or voting machines in Hampton, New Hampshire. But what happens to those tabulated votes once they are reported up the chain, Mad Dog acknowledges is beyond his observation.

At some point, we rely on others, not our own personal observations. As Alex Jones' lawyer once asked, "Unless you were present at the morgue, how do you know any children actually died at Sandy Hook." Yes, Mr. Lawyer, we do have to invest belief in some things we cannot verify ourselves, personally. 

But I still believe children were killed at Sandy Hook and I still choose to believe Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in 2020. 

When President Trump said that he would not accept the results if voters voted him out of office--as in, 

Q: President Trump will you accept the vote if you lose? 

A: "We'll see." 

And when he said he could not possibly lose, then he was saying, one would have to accept, that he had no intention of leaving office, no matter what. No matter the verdict of the voters.

Only Donald Trump's opinion about the validity of the announced votes matters. Only he is allowed at the morgue. 

But how can anyone really know if the voters' votes were actually counted accurately, fairly?

That requires some faith. Faith in news reports, faith in voting observers, faith in courts to examine whether or not there is credible evidence--as opposed to simple statements of belief--for "voting irregularities."

Now, there are any number of Trump acolytes--most visibly Kari Lake in Arizona--but also Tudor Dixon (whose name alone ought to be disqualifying anywhere but FOX world)--who say they "cannot" lose their elections and if it is claimed they have lost, then voters ought to know, in advance, the election was stolen from them, which is to say, there is no point in going to vote because the decision, at least in MAGA minds, is already a fait accompli. Ipso facto, if I run, I win. Why bother with all the expense, time, effort of actually holding an election?

This attitude has been dignified with a category name: "The Big Steal."

This is, of course, what January 6th was all about.

If you somehow KNOW that Trump actually got more votes than Joe Biden and not only that, if you KNOW that he won key states, then it is entirely justifiable to launch a revolution against the Big Steal.

This is a form of simple faith. If you BELIEVE, then all things are possible.

Evidence is a dirty word. For the true believer all that matters is faith, or the word from the only source that matters: Der Fuhrer. 

This sort of rationale is routine in some African countries, where the losing side simply refuses to believe the votes were counted honestly.

In America, we have shaken our heads when viewing videos of post election mayhem in third world countries, those "shithole countries" Trump so despises, countries where you see crowds rampaging through the streets after election results are announced, tires burning in the streets, crowds of young men in rhythmic dance headed toward the Presidential palace to overturn the election. 

Until, of course, we saw much the same thing here in Washington, DC with the Proud Boys leading the charge wearing shirts saying, "Stop the Steal" and "Camp Auschwitz" and "Veteran: Capitol Hill War" and "The Civil War Starts Now."

These folks are true believers in the Trump victory and no amount of evidence or persuasion will ever change their minds. As Lincoln said, "Twelve angels blowing Horns, the clouds parting will not convince them otherwise."

Locally, here in Hampton, we go door to door and we try to perform our civic duty of talking to our fellow citizens. But we work for a Democratic Party organization which wants us to follow a script, even as they say the best sort of campaigning is neighbor talking to neighbor. But they want us to say to our neighbors certain things, to ask specific questions:

1/ We are supposed to ask (and record the answer)  if the citizen at the door intends to vote for Maggie Hassan and Chris Pappas. This is not an attempt to have neighbors talking to neighbors, but to have neighbors reporting on neighbors, perform polling duties, which actually undermines the whole effort to "reach" citizens where they live.

Most people come to the door annoyed. Someone is intruding on their Saturday morning or their Sunday watching the Patriots game, probably trying to sell them something. 

Good canvassers know to begin by making connections: Oh, your daughter went to Winnacunnet with my son. And then move on to "What matters most to you in this election?" 

2/ But that does not satisfy the Democratic bureaucrats, because now comes the second questions the Party wants asked:   canvassers are told  to present a blue post card for the home owner to sign saying they promise to vote for Democrats on November 8th. Will you sign this commitment to vote? 

Thus neighbors talking to neighbors is  transformed into a transaction; this friendly discussion morphs into a sort of sales promotion and the looks on the faces of most homeowners at being asked to sign some card on their porch says it all: "Oh, and here I thought you were my friend."

So the Party brass, the Ray Buckley's squander the opportunity to allow local citizens to engage in conversations which they know will be more effective than the Party line. Our candidate, Maggie Hassan may read from a script, may avoid getting negative for fear of offending, but local folks do not have to do that. Local folks can say "We are not pansies. Bolduc wants to kill Social Security and Medicare. He denies Biden won the election. He doesn't believe in democracy! He says COVID vaccines are a way Bill Gates can get microchips into us. He says facemasks do more harm than good. He says Democrats want schoolchildren to use kitty litter in schools. He wants to ban abortions and IVF." 

Of course, some of us do that, but most do not, which only feeds into the image of a toothless party of pansies. 

Democrats thought, last August, that the decision killing Roe would be the big moment, the thing that swept all Republicans from the field, but that is now so yesterday. Three months later canvassers found abortion was hardly in the top five of what voters said motivated them to vote.

All the outrage, all the certainty that THIS would finally be the thing which defeats the Republicans, gone now. 

"Oh, I don't like that," voters would say about Roe. "But I'm more pissed off about gas prices right now. And the economy and crime."

And of course FOX has managed to sell a lot of people on the notion that crime is rampant--which is statistically untrue--and that President Biden has the power to lower gas prices if he really cared.

So, here we are in the 21st  century, with a republic we may not be able to keep because, well, the Democrats are simply not bright enough to know attack ads win elections and door to door canvassing does not matter, especially when done wrong.

And there is no Democratic Party propaganda machine like FOXNEWS.

And, well, maybe we've just got tired of democracy, which takes so much time, effort and thought. 

We'd rather watch the Patriots game.

New (York) Amsterdam vs Old (Current) Amsterdam

 A week ago, Mad Dog was in New York City, USA. 

Hampton, N.H., USA

Today, he has just got back from 5 hours walking around Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

What he is most struck by in Old Amsterdam is what is not there.

The noise, of course, is the most striking thing. Emerge from a bus at Port Authority or a train at Penn Station and step out onto a New York City Street and you are blown back by a tsunami of sound, mostly auto horns blaring, but car engines reviving and people shouting. To the uninitiated this must sound like a tidal wave of anger, but it's just normal, angry New York.

In Old Amsterdam, there is the silence of bicycles and the low purr of the occasional trolley. The streets, filled with people, are remarkable quiet.

In New York City, you pick your way down the street stepping past or over the bodies of homeless people.

In Old Amsterdam are are no homeless to be seen, not even at the train station.

In New York City, you walk by beggars with their hands outstretched, their pleas invoking instant guilt, but nary a pan handler in Old Amsterdam.

In New York City, the trash bags are piled up on the sidewalks in front of restaurants.

In Old Amsterdam, they apparently generate no trash, or in good Dutch engineering fashion,  they turn it into energy or wound dressings for hospitals.

Every block in New York City you hear angry people shouting at one another, or at least people shouting, angry or not. 

In Old Amsterdam you simply do not hear people raising their voices. People may not display harmony, or even a lot of joy, but they do not display much hostility. 

In New York City everyone belongs to a tribe and they display their team hats, (New York Yankees  or New York Mets) or their Hoboken High varsity jackets or their Harvard sweatshirts. 

They must have teams, at least soccer teams, in the Netherlands, but people do not walk around in jerseys with the names of their favorite players.

Amsterdam is filled with people on the streets, walking, talking, dodging into restaurants or little bistros that make french fries as their sole product, but there is little palpable, visible anger.

New York is all about anger. And joy. More anger than joy, but emotions are raw and very much out there. Amsterdam, people smile, they chat, but nobody much looks ready to engage in mortal combat. In New York people live on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and they seem to like it.

Dutch women do not look bold.

New York women look bold.

Obadiah Youngblood (Not VanGogh)

Dutch women strike Mad Dog as concerned about their looks; false eyelashes are very common. Dutch women in this city dress stylishly, but not daringly, for the most part. It is as if having long blonde hair, high cheekbones and no weight problems is not enough. 

Waiting outside the women's bathroom at the Van Gogh Museum, Mad Dog was fascinated by the cluster of Dutch women who stood in front of a mirror fussing with their hair, striking poses, turning for a left side view, a right side view. It went on and on. Mad Dog could not see the mirror which had claimed their attention, but it was clearly what stopped them for all the preening. It was placed there so they could check themselves out before leaving the bathroom. 

The men's room had one, too: you could see if your fly was down on the way out.

The women's room mirror could show you if you were insufficiently beautiful from any angle.

The Van Gogh Museum is wonderful, by the way. Even if the bathrooms had no mirrors, it's worth going to the Van Gogh Museum to see a hundred Van Gogh paintings, from all along his career is stunning. They also have a flair for display, with Large walls plastered with out takes from his paintings.

You do not see all the Van Goghs you know and love from calendars and posters and that's a downer, but then you realize the reason not every Van Gogh is in that museum is because they are hanging in museums from New York to London to Melbourne to Paris to Berlin. He painted a painting a day at Auvers during the last year of his short life, but even those 300 plus paintings cannot all be in Amsterdam; too many people around the world want the thrill of seeing them.

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The Dutch have their political problems: Geer Wilders stokes hate for immigrants and his followers have occasionally claimed the second most seats in the Dutch parliament. But, somehow, the Dutch quietly seem to do well.

Once, at an Endocrine Society Meeting in the United States a Dutch physician described how they manage patients who become addicted to testosterone medications, a sort of male version of anorexia nervosa. After he outlined all the steps an American physician remarked, "God, they would never let us do that in the States! You'd have the DEA or the sheriff in your office inside of a week."

"Well," the Dutchman said. "Everything's easier in the Netherlands."