Hampton School Board Ducks and Hides

 

I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute—where no Catholic prelate would tell the President (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote—where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference...

For while this year it may be a Catholic against whom the finger of suspicion is pointed, in other years it has been, and may someday be again, a Jew—or a Quaker—or a Unitarian—or a Baptist... Today I may be the victim—but tomorrow it may be you—until the whole fabric of our harmonious society is ripped at a time of great national peril.

--John F. Kennedy

At their meeting last night, November 14, 2023, the five members of the Hampton School board provided the adults and children of our town with a lesson in Lincoln's famous observation, "You can fool some of the people all the time, and all the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time."

But they tried.

You can see this display of four adults trying to talk about anything but the issue plainly put to them, and one who did, but later dodged responsibility.

The link below begins with a presentation by school children talking about their visit to an environmental camp, which allowed the Board members to smile warmly at the children of Hampton, and to prove, once again how all they care about is every Hampton child. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HonSScjwzGA

But at 19 minutes and 29 seconds a citizen rose to ask the Board members about their votes 9 months earlier to fund the Sacred Heart School, and he asked if the school Board members cared about using taxpayer funds to pay for religious ceremonies and pageants at the school.

The chairperson Ginny Bridle Russel, paused a moment, and then started to move on without commenting, but then Andrea Shepard raised her hand and began a lament about what a difficult and wrenching decision this was and wound up saying she had really, really tried to reach a conclusion but she was still undecided about how she felt about using taxpayer funds to fund streaming of religious services on computers paid for by Hampton taxpayers.

Les Shepard then tried to dodge the bullet entirely by saying the Board had no such request in front of it yet, rather than say what he intended to do when that request arrived. In fact, he was assured by Ms. Russel the Board does have the request and is processing it. To which he said something to the effect of, "Oh, well, then."  He then sank into what looked like a stupor, as if by falling asleep at the wheel, he could avoid facing the consequences of any statement about giving money to buy paper crowns for nativity scenes at the school.

Frank Deluca saw this as a nifty dodge and said, in effect, we may never get the request the Board had already received--a neat trick considering the school has submitted this same warrant every year for the past 50 years and had again this year-- but he would withhold judgment about whether to recommend it, as if the challenge to say how he felt about sending dollars to fund religious teaching had been fully met. He did say, however that kids had no real choice but to go to SHS when the public schools shut down during COVID, obliquely suggesting the snowflakes who shut down our public schools had it--the flight to parochial schools--coming, and again, believing he had deceived everyone in the room to think that he had not remained silent because he was talking about something, just not about the actual question of whether taxpayers should fund religious pageants or computers which stream a mass from St. Patrick's cathedral. On that he remained silent.

Wendy Rega began boldly, but then, inexplicably, tried to absolve the Board of any consequences of of their opinions, even if they stood up boldly and voted to fund a Christmas manger scene, to send kids on a field trip to the Vatican or to pay for invoices for painting the walls of the classrooms. The Board cannot prevent the warrant article from being placed on the ballot, Ms. Rega said, as if that were the point. All we do is make a recommendation, as if that recommendation were immaterial and without importance. 

This ploy has got to be a truly brilliant example of the meaning of the word "disingenuous," in the sense of someone saying something she claims to know less about than she clearly really does know.

Lying silently in front of the meeting was the simple truth that in a package of warrant article ballots extending 30 pages, most citizens simply read the panels at the bottom of each article and if the school Board and the Budget committee recommend it, they shrug and vote for it.  Recommendations against a warrant article are typically a death sentence for that article; recommendations for are typically followed by a rubber stamp approval.

Finally, Virginia Bridle Russel, the chairwoman, inveighed against this whole idea of the importance of the Board's recommendation and said it was up to citizens to "do their own research," as if citizens were lining up for vaccines at the warrant article vote. 

Nobody rose to object that Ms. Bridle was taking the same position as the captain of the ship who directs his crew to pull hard to starboard and when the ship runs aground claims to have nothing to do with it; the crew should have done their own research.

Ms. Bridle Russel then launched into her tremulous support for "every child in Hampton" as if those who opposed religious education funding did not care about those poor students at Sacred Heart.  She did not mention that 75% of the SHS students do not come from or live in Hampton, that those Hampton taxpayer dollars are not paying primarily for Hampton kids, but for kids whose parent want them to be in a Catholic school, no matter where they live. We care about those Hampton kids who go to school in Massachusetts, Ms. Russel said. Our love for Hampton kids is so consuming, it extends to even those kids from surrounding communities who want their kids taught at a religious school and to kids who are for reasons unstated, sent off across state lines. 

At this point nobody shouted from the audience, "Ginny, I love all the children of Hampton, too!  But I don't want to pay for their confirmation dresses or their bar mitzvahs! That's what they got parents for."

Ms Russel did not say whether or not it bothered her that taxpayer dollars may be used to stream services to SHS kids, except by not commenting on it: As was said, silence implies consent--she did not object to that practice, therefore, she is willing to allow it.

To the great credit of the Board, nobody tried to make the argument made by Samuel Alito and John Roberts, that if a local government decides to fund any form of private school when it allocates funds for the education of kids in its community, it cannot "discriminate" against religious schools, as if that invidious comparison between racial "discrimination" and religious "discrimination" actually is not obscene. "Discrimination" when it comes to race, of course is directed at something the Black child and parents cannot help, cannot change, their own skin color. Discrimination in how we hand out taxpayer dollars, is a different thing entirely, because that word is about the distinction we make between people who do not have a choice and those who do.You can send your kid to a school where religion is never mentioned, pro or con, or send your kid to a religious school for a religious education. That is a choice, and we can make a distinction between religious schools where kids are taught about Jesus Christ and, possibly about the "sin of homosexuality," and public schools where neither of these are mentioned.

During the discussion of the warrant article, an amendment to give the same amount to any religious school requesting funds as is given to the Catholic school was proposed but  was rejected with the argument that then Hampton might have to fund a "Church of Satan" school. 

Which is to say, in Hampton, we only fund churches we like.

And so, there we have it. Taxpayers for Religious Education.

John F. Kennedy must be rolling over in his grave.

Gazza: How You Tell The Story

 When Amna Nawaz opens every PBS News Hour with a story and the accompanying images of the children killed in the day's Israeli bombing of a Gazza Hospital, how much difference does it make if she adds, after the first few sentences, "Israel says Hamas has established its control center in the tunnels beneath the hospital"?

Amna Nawaz

By the time you get to this Israeli explanation, which is not presented as an established fact but as a lame explanation, you are so stunned by the suffering of the children and their parents, nothing can undo the story of the dead children, not even the story that Hamas may be hiding behind the skirts of women and children.

I've watched PBS News Hour every day since the October 7 attack by Hamas and yesterday, more than a month into the reporting, was the first time I ever saw images of the teenagers who were fleeing Hamas at that concert, who were sprayed with gasoline and set afire so only their crispy critter bodies were visible, barely recognizable, and that was on a cell phone of an Israeli soldier being interviewed about his attempts to go to the concert site to try to rescue civilians under attack. And that interview was deep into the News Hour. By that time, I imagine, many viewers were pretty numb.

Israeli Babies burned by Hamas

And nothing was said about the moral difference, if there is one, between the direct intention to immolate children by the Hamas attackers and the willingness of the Israelis to kill children inadvertently, in an attempt to kill Hamas.

Is there a difference between the man who aims his gun to shoot and kill a child and the man who drops a bomb, knowing he may well kill a child, but who drops it anyway? One intends to kill the child; the other is simply willing to allow it to happen.

Ms. Nawaz did a longish interview with a woman who heads an organization which tracks the deaths of journalists in war zones and she noted the high number of casualties among Palestinian journalists in Gazza and she says we cannot get a clear picture of what is actually happening there, if Israel keeps killing journalists trying to report from Gazza.

At which point, I found myself asking: What on God's green earth are journalists doing there, if not expecting they might be killed? Again, is are the Israelis intentionally killing journalists? This is the tacit implication.

And then there was the bit where a Palestinian journalist, wearing his blue "Press" helmet, tears it off, and also his flak vest, and exclaims: "They care nothing about the martyred children!"

Wait. "Martyred" children? 

How about dead children? 

As soon as he calls them "martyred" you might ask whether or not this is a "journalist,"  a reporter, or a propagandist. 

In fact, to her credit, Ms. Nawaz did ask someone about the claim most Palestinian "journalists" make no pretense of objectivity and have become propagandists.

John Hersey was a journalist when he wrote "Hiroshima" and his report on what happened to the children there never strayed into the "martyred" territory. What he reported, with no adjectives, just simple declarative sentences, was horrifying enough.

The real story, of course, is that total war, which is what Hamas launched and Israel responded to, is by its nature going to kill as many or more innocent civilians as it does soldiers, just as Americans and Brits did at Dresden, Hamburg, Berlin and as Americans did with their fire bombing of Japan even before Hiroshima. In fact, the author of the Japanese bombing, Curtis Lemay, took his show to Vietnam and continued killing women and children from the air in that theater. 

The story which I'd like to see reported is what the Israelis hope to accomplish. We keep hearing interviews with the words, "We have to destroy Hamas," as if you can kill every last Hamas fighter and expect that to destroy Hamas. Can you kill an idea?

Some PBS person did ask some Israeli about that and he replied, "Well, you Americans won your war on terrorism, after 9/11. You killed ISIS and all the leaders of Al Qaeda." But nobody followed up with a question about, "Really? What happened in Iraq and Afghanistan? Did we really win there?"

Read Christopher Hitchens in 2009: he said the combination of a very Right Wing Israeli government which encouraged settlement of disputed land in the West Bank and a Palestinian insurrection which rejects the Palestinian Authority's willingness to accept the existence of Israel, is a potent bomb waiting to explode. 

And that was 2009. 

Can the rise of Bibi Netanyahu and his Right Wing be unrelated to the appeal of Hamas?

I have no way of knowing what the issues are in Gazza and Israel. All I know is that, unlike other foreign imbroglio's, like Bosnia and Kosovo and Ukraine and Afghanistan and, most especially, Vietnam, where I thought by reading and listening and watching the reports coming out of those areas from war correspondents like Kurt Shork and others, I had the sense I was getting a story which might be comprehensible.

Kurt Shork 

With Gazza, I have no such sense. 

It's a hot mess and our best press, PBS News, even though they've sent Nick Shiffrin and Ms. Nawaz over there occasionally, have done nothing to really inform. In some effort to appear objective, they have opened themselves to reasonable suspicion of being biased by the horrible sights of dead Palestinian children.

They do interview people who keep saying things like, "We need a humanitarian pause!" And I keep thinking: What do these people actually know? I know as much as this dumbo.

And it's not like the Palestinians do not have a valid complaint, going right back to 1948. 

But where are the stories about the complexities of that history? 

And where is the penetrating discussion you might have had if Christopher Hitchens were still alive.

It was Hitchens, after all, who observed: Many nations today have had their origins in a crime, or at least in some injustice. The question is how do you proceed now?

PBS has interviewed all the government officials and NGO talking heads, but the real penetrating analysis by people like Hitchens is distinctly absent.  Too many empty suits on The News Hour. What they need is to figure out who are the folks who really might help America understand this conundrum and put them on. 

So far, all they've got is David Brooks and Jonathan Capehart, and to their great credit, they at least do not try to say more than they know.

Children Dying in Gazza: That's What War Is, You Know...

 

Images of children dead and dying, or simply stunned into silence, coming out of Gazza are horrific, no matter what your background. 

Any human being has got to respond to these.

Gazza

Since the advent of total war, civilian casualties, the slaughter of innocents, has become a constant, and yet, curiously, sometimes we are focused on these deaths and sometimes not; sometimes we totally ignore the deaths of children, mothers, innocents and sometimes it's all we hear about.

Some have noticed you never see a Hamas soldier in any of the photos coming out of Gazza. It may be the images have been controlled and restricted by Hamas, so the war looks as if it is being waged exclusively against defenseless women and children, so there may be some manipulation by the Hamas propaganda machine. 

Oddly, the Israeli women and children killed by Hamas with it's surprise attack which started the war are nowhere to be seen.

 But the fact remains, children have died and are dying still in Gazza.

Gazza

Watching PBS News Hour and listening to NPR, my impression is that Israel is committing senseless war crimes out of sheer rage, or possibly out of carelessness or simple indifference.

Hirsoshima

And yet, I have asked myself, are children, their mothers and women not always part of the casualty lists in modern wars?  Once total war is launched, is it not guaranteed that innocents will be slaughtered?

Tokyo

Were no children killed at Hiroshima?

Did American and British bombers not kill women and children in Dresden?

Dresden

Did no children die in the London Blitz, when Germany bombed England? 

London

We distinguish between those children killed by American soldiers when they massacred Indian children in their villages at Wounded Knee and other reservations from those killed inadvertently in bombings. It's hard to know, but from what reports we have, the Hamas soldiers swept through villages killing children and raping women in something more akin to Wounded Knee than to the London Blitz.

When children were "collateral damage" from American firebombing of Japanese cities, we never saw photos of that. Children deliberately imprisoned in concentration camps are clearly a crime, but children who die as bombs explode at a wedding in Afghanistan or Iraq, those are just accidents.

Nanking

But Palestinian children are dying in what we do not excuse as accidents. 

Through all this,  at my back, in my ears, I always hear ringing those immortal words of Slim Charles in "The Wire:"  

"That's what war is, you know."

Joe Biden Wins New Hampshire Primary By Write-In Landslide

 

Now, here's a bit of bizarre exotica which could only happen in New Hampshire, the most perverse and cantankerous state in New England. The Live Free or Die, don't tell me what to think state.

Just imagine: It's January 23, 2024, and the official ballot for Democratic candidates for President does not have the name of Joseph R. Biden printed on it. It has Marianne Williamson and a variety of other odd fellows on it, but no Joseph Biden.

Once the ballots are counted no delegates to the National Convention will be awarded or seated at the Democratic National Convention that summer because by holding its election on that date, New Hampshire Democrats have defied the Democratic National Committee which has decreed that the first in the nation primary will happen in South Carolina. 

The reason the DNC did this is because the leader of the Party, namely President Joseph Robinette Biden lost ignominiously in the last New Hampshire primary--came in 5th in fact, and he left the state before the polls closed so he could fly down and start his campaign in South Carolina, where no Democrat has had a snowball's chance in Hell of winning in the Presidential election, but where a Black minority voted to give him his first Democratic primary victory. 

South Carolina is no more representative of the United States demographically than is New Hampshire and has no business having the first in the nation primary, which is an honor which translates into millions of dollars for advertising in local TV markets, hotels and restaurants.  So, the loss of the first in the nation status is a thumb in the eye of New Hampshire, and a hit to the wallet.

Given all that, why would 600,000 New Hampshire citizens trudge out in the snow and wind on January 23 to write in the name of the man who spurned them, once they had spurned him? It's like the man who saw his spouse of 40 years walk out on him, and a year later, he shows up at her wedding to her new husband, carrying a bouquet of her favorite flowers and an envelop with a fat check for the new bride.

Why would New Hampshire Democratic primary voters do this?

Because they are sick of all the news stories about how Joe Biden is all washed up, cooked, toasted, punch drunk and won't last a round against Donald Trump, who leads him in every poll in every swing state. 

And Granite Staters just don't like being ignored. They are going to make some news on fake primary day, and with the landslide, by write in, this is a news story no media outlet can resist. 

Folks in New Hampshire just love sticking the glossy media types in the eye.

So, take that, DNC. Do you miss us yet, Joe? And ignore us at your peril, FOX News. 

It's better than the town which elects the dead man mayor. This state, spurned, rejected, written off, forgotten, votes by write in ballot of all things, for the walking dead.

Don't tread on me. Live Free or Die. Stand Fast.  Regnant Populi. 

What Rep. Boebert Knows: Separation of Church and State Ain't No Thing

 Standing before a crowd of 300 Hampton citizens, on two occasions over the past two years, I have seen the eyes of at least 200 citizens in that crowd, on each occasion, staring back at me blankly, as I urged them to embrace the separation of church and state. 

These occasions were the meetings to vote on a warrant article which allocates taxpayer funds to pay for a Catholic church school in town.

These 200 odd citizens had pulled on their winter coats and boots and driven to the Academy, where the meetings are held to vote money for their Catholic church school and no amount of persuasion, no appeal to reason was going to change their minds. They came to vote for their church and that was that.

To these folks "separation of church and state" was an affront to their fate. By saying the state should not write checks to support their beloved institution the clear message was there is something wrong with their church in the eyes of those who would erect a wall between church and state.

If the church is a good thing, then why would you not want the state to embrace this good thing?

I pointed out that the Constitution says, government "shall make no law regarding the establishment of religion."

But Lauren Boebert, a United States Representative (R-CO) has said: "I'm tired of this separation of church and state junk. This is not in the Constitution, it was in a stinking letter and it means nothing like what they say it does." 

And, it's pretty clear, that's where those 200 citizens are.  What does it mean to make no law respecting the establishment of religion any way?

Does it mean if you want to make a law respecting the establishment of religion, to forbid establishing a religion, well then, you cannot do that?

I mean, if the government should stay separate from all churches, why not just say that?

Boebert was right about that stinking letter, which was written by Thomas Jefferson, who was always hostile to churches becoming involved in politics. He really did not like organized religion, and he wanted to keep churches in America from playing the same role churches in Europe had played in God and Country type countries like England, France, Spain, Italy and Russia.

Trying to "separate" churches from state funding is an act of hostility. If the citizens of Hampton want to vote money to pay for computers and religious festivals at the church school, well isn't that their right to do that? It's their taxpayer money, after all. 

And, they're right, at the core. The reason Jefferson and I both fear the Church immersed in government is the history of what happens when you have that: holy wars, wars over religion, governments ruled by Ayatollahs which beat women to death for refusing to cover their hair, blood baths in Jerusalem as Crusaders chop at Muslim defenders, beheadings by crazed jihadists defending their faith. But as soon as you go down that road, you are saying the church can do harm rather than good and you've lost them.

"Who are these people who are objecting to giving money to the Church of the Miraculous Medal?," they ask. The Church of the Miraculous Medal has never done any of those things.

It's true, that church removed books from its book sale that depicted homosexual behavior, but homosexuals are sinners who have made a bad choice, and the Church is simply protecting its children.

The Church is a good thing. People in town love the Church.  Who are these protesters who hate this beloved church?

Looking into those uncomprehending, offended faces of the good folk of Hampton, I knew a lost cause when I saw one.

To these folks, words like "the Constitution" or "the first amendment" or "the establishment clause" were all just incomprehensible abstractions. All they knew is they loved their church and I was trying to take money away from their church and they wanted that money.

If the Church is good, then why would you want to defund it?

Gazza and the Dakota Sioux

 

Whenever anyone asks me my opinion on Gazza, Israel or the Middle East, I say I don't know. I have no opinion.

Then, if they allow it, I ask what their opinion is.

And if they have one, I ask them how they know what they know.

Me, I've never been there, either literally or figuratively.

Just no feel for the history of the place. Never been there.

What I do know is that it's best not to form an opinion from superficial bits of information; you'd best ask, "what else?"

Just to take the most obvious example:  Abraham Lincoln has been denigrated as a phony great liberator, as a man who was, at heart a racist. One of the most shocking bits of evidence for this is the fact he signed the death warrants for the largest mass execution in American history, and none of those who were hanged were White Confederates; they were Indians, 38 of them, all hanged on a single day in Minnesota. Ipso facto: Lincoln was an Indian hater and for Lincoln the only good Indian was a dead Indian. (That was actually said by one of Lincoln's most important generals, Phil Sheridan.)

But, if you ask more questions, you discover that act, of condemning 39 men to death may not mean what it sounds like it means. 

It turns out, Lincoln was presented with something of a Sophie's choice: The local militia and the federal army had captured 2,000 Sioux and were determined to execute  303 of them and they said if Lincoln did nothing, they would kill them all.  Lincoln said he wanted nothing to do with this. It was August, 1862 and he had a little more on his mind, namely the Civil War, and he hated killing people who weren't actively trying to kill him or his troops.

Fine then, we'll execute all 300. 

Oh, all right, send me the files on the trials of these men, all 300 files. 

After sifting through this load, he came up with 39, thereby sparing 264, actually, as it worked out, 265. 

So, the moral of the story is just knowing the action does not inform, unless you know the back story.

And actually, the back story here is oddly interesting when thinking about Gazza, the Palestinians and Hamas.

In 1859, the US government persuaded the Dakota Sioux to stop hunting buffalo and leading a nomadic existence and to move into a small reservation and raise crops, but in 1862 with a drought the crops failed and the Sioux were literally starving and they were forbidden to hunt and having been displaced by these European descendants and pushed off their land, and confined to small strip of land, they erupted and in August, attacked a government station and settlers and raped and murdered hundreds of white American settlers.

A local militia was formed, and the army, being busy trying to put down the Southern insurrection, was delayed in arriving in Minnesota and by the time they did, there were hundreds of dead women, children, raped women and the Indians had taken hostages. The settlers wanted revenge and blood, and they were barely restrained and the 2,000 Indians, were women, children and some warriors. 

Sound familiar?

I've read Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee and a host of other books about the Trail of Tears and the depredations visited upon the Indians as the continent was cleared, farmed, crisscrossed with railroads, bridges, steamboats and all the infrastructure of a modern 19th century nation. I wish I had been the benign dictator back then, who could have helped the Indians more and spared them the horrors visited upon them, as men like Sheridan and Buffalo Bill slaughtered their buffalo herds, in an effort to drive the buffalo to extinction and thus drive the Indians to extinction, or at the very least, to reservations.

And looking at those vast, unoccupied parts of our continent, it seems to me there may have been better options for the Indians.

But, you know, I can say without apology, I'm not sorry "we," as in the European descendants, took control of the continent, and replaced a nomadic, superstitious civilization with an industrial, scientific civilization. The role the United States of America has played over the ensuing 19th, 20th and now 21st centuries could never have happened if "we" hadn't displaced those Indians.

The same may be true of Palestine and the Palestinians.

Or, maybe not. I just don't know.

I don't know if the Palestinians were just goat herders who got shoved out of some homes when a more technologically advanced civilization arrived and made the desert bloom.  Or maybe, they had homes and communities which were ruthlessly stolen from them and they responded violently, as the Dakota Sioux did.

All I know, is I don't know.

I do know, however, there are some times you don't need to know the whole back story:  When they opened those cattle cars at the concentration camps across Germany and Poland, and all those shattered, dead and dying Holocaust victims were discovered, you don't need any more background or context.

Then you get into the problem of who actually should get punished. We can be sorry for those children at Hiroshima, who may have known nothing of what their parents and countrymen did to Nanking and the rest of Asia. We can be horrified at the immolation of women and children at Dresden, who were, after all, possibly unaware of Auschwitz. 

When big, nasty atrocities are committed, the people who get mauled in the retribution are often "innocents." So it is with the people of Gaza. They may not have launched the rockets into Israel; they may not have dug the tunnels, or dug command centers underneath hospitals.  But some of them at least voted for Hamas as opposed to the Palestinian authority. 

Civilian populations may know only the joy of unity with a cause, but they may not have the foresight to see where that cause is leading. 

But, about Palestine, I'm willing to reserve judgment, for now.

Verbal People

Now there is a term, "mentor," which means someone who is usually older than you who knows stuff you do not know, and guides you to discover new knowledge, without necessarily spoon feeding or "teaching" you anything.

Aaron Sorkin, Verbal Person

So, I had a mentor, who I'll call Andrew, during the last phase of my training, who for some reason liked me, although he thought of me as a "verbal" person, which was, in his world, not at all a complement. Now, this was a man who loved Shakespeare and would drive us 90 minutes down to Stratford, Connecticut for their Shakespeare festival, and who was verbal enough to learn Spanish at the age of 32, so he could give a lecture about a new hormone he had identified to an audience in Spain.

Christopher Hitchens, Verbal Person

But, it was very apparent what he meant, when we'd be talking about a colleague in our Endocrinology department, a department devoted to laboratory work, hard science, numbers, graphs, studies, biochemistry, test tubes and lab rats, and he would say of someone who had not published work which seemed sufficiency trenchant, but who, nevertheless seemed to be moving up in the career track, toward tenure, and Andrew would say of him, with a conspiratorial smile, "Well, he's okay. He's verbal, though, you know?" 

Which was to imply there is something somehow shady, phony, not quite honest about a person whose success derives not from his graphs and papers in the New England Journal of Medicine, but through conversations, verbal agility and expressiveness.

Something about being "verbal" in Andrew's world was suspicious, not quite honest.

I liked Andrew, but I could not agree at all about this.

People with a facility for language, whether they were only good in one language, or good at learning languages seemed to me to be often the most interesting people.

Andrew valued engineers, and I could definitely appreciate the creativity and perceptual agility which made engineers so wonderful, but verbal people had their moments.

My college roommate, Nick, was one of those people who seemed to be able to acquire a new language on the way in from the airport by chatting with the taxi driver. He spoke French, Italian, Spanish, and those were just the languages I knew about, but he seemed to chat in just about anything, Swahili, for all I knew,  and he spent all his waking hours in the "reading room" lounge of the Rockefeller library, and I don't know how he ever graduated because I cannot recall ever seeing him type a paper or spend any time studying. 

Wm. F. Buckley, Jr, Verbal Person

The reading room lounge was made for Nick. I've little doubt it was the reason he chose our college. On his college tour, he must have seen the students gathered on the couches and plush chairs, in the large "lounge" room which was separated from the actual reading room.

The actual reading room was where students sat at long wooden library desks reading assigned material which various professors had put on hold, and that's where you signed out the book and read it and returned it so other classmates could come in and read it. This, obviously, was before computers and the internet--the mid 1960's--and when I tell my kids or grandkids about this, they always say, "You had only one book? And everyone had to share it?" And, when they say that, I realize I really did grow up in the stone age.

Verbal Person

But back to Nick. He sat there on the lounge side of the glass wall, on his couch. The glass wall was sufficient to completely insulate the reading room, where the real business of completing assignments from professors took place, from the noise of the lounge, which could only leak through when someone passed through the glass door in the glass wall. The lounge was a very lively pub scene without the alcohol. There were bathrooms at the back wall of the lounge, so any coed who had to use the bathroom, had to leave the reading room and make it past Nick and his merry band of talkers to get to the bathroom. 

Every evening after dinner until 9 or 10 pm, Nick held court, chatting up the various co-eds who loved to be part of his own version of Dorothy Parker's Algonquin round table, and they talked and talked. 

They talked in French about Camus who, Nick asserted, could not hold a candle to Sartre, when it came to philosophy, although he did have an attractive writing style. Or he'd launch into one of his tours of local Rhode Island accents, and when he did Cranston and then Woonsocket and then the haughty aristocrats of Newport, you could really hear the difference as you never could before. He was a latter day Henry Higgins, who could identify your place of birth by listening to you speak, and Nick could do that, if that place of birth was anywhere from Presque Isle, Maine to Darien, Connecticut. 

I was born in Washington, D.C. and Nick would dismiss that as "vanilla America dialect." He felt sorry for me, as I was speaking a language you could have got by listening to the evening news on TV.

Does Not Need to Be Verbal

And now, living in New Hampshire, I strain to catch distinguishing inflections in accents, but I cannot. People here could have grown up in Bethesda, Maryland for all I can tell from listening to them.

But their styles of speech, their individual cadences and fluency are as different as fingerprints.

My best friend, locally--I'll call her Maureen--is like listening to, or more accurately, becoming swept into a Robert Altman movie. You know, "Nashville," where there are several conversations going on at once in every scene, and so many digressions, you wonder if there is actually a story line developing, but there is, of course-- you just have to allow it to all coalesce and congeal, and meanwhile you are treated to such a wealth of color and detail you feel as if, just by watching and listening, you have developed an entire new world of friends. 

Maureen introduces you to cousins, uncles, friends of cousins, parents of children her kids went to school with, friends who got divorced who are still sparing with their ex'es, local officials, local lunatics who stand on street corners shouting into bullhorns, demented neighbors, neighbors who shoot rifles in their backyards for no apparent reason, not to mention the hawks who congregate for hawk meetings on her back porch, hummingbirds, the stray coyote, raccoons, turkeys who rise like Lancaster bombing groups and head right for her upstairs bedroom window, only to lift just enough to clear  the roof and head off to wherever turkeys head off to in November, not too far, as Maureen's cousin, Siobhan, has seen them on her walks in the Exeter woods, so you know they stay in town or nearby in the winter.

So, that's Maureen. Mesmerizing, immersive, fascinating and very, very verbal. Not an engineer.

Then there's another verbal person, who, like me, and unlike Maureen, is a fairly recent transplant to Hampton, New Hampshire, which is to say, she did not get born here or arrive in time to have gone to the Academy or Winnacunnet High School, but she's pushing 20 years in town. We'll call her Rachel. 

Whereas with Maureen, you would know it's Maureen simply by reading a transcript, for Rachel, you'd need face time, because with Rachel, half the conversation takes place in her face, mostly around her lips, before she says anything.  With Rachel, there's always a pause before she allows any declarative sentence to unfold, and you can see the beginnings of a little smile working at the edges of her lips as she edits, suppresses, processes and then delivers.

I heard about a Rachel  conversation and I did not have to be there to see her face as she delivered; I know exactly what it looked like. 

She is in court, suing her neighbor who has released his goats and pigs and sheep in a backyard expanse of land shared by about ten neighbors, which is locally referred to as the sheep meadow. The meadow is actually owned by a ninety year old man who no longer lives in his house with its backyard the sheep meadow, but is now in a nursing home on the dementia ward. The neighbor with the goats and pigs and sheep has exploited the absence of the owner of the sheep meadow by allowing his animals to maraud through the meadow and through all the backyards which blend into the meadow, and the goats in particular have demolished and eaten thousands of dollars of landscaping, shrubs, trees, flower beds.

So, Rachel is on the stand, and the defendant's lawyer asks why she hasn't sued the man who owns the sheep meadow. Why has she picked on the goat owner? whose only offense has been to allow his goats into the meadow, which is okay with the owner of the meadow, as far as anyone knows.

And here I can see the corners of Rachel's mouth flickering, as she tries mightily to not break into a beam to beam grin, as she struggles to say, keeping her voice register low, like Kathleen Turner's Jessica Rabbit, and says, "Let me understand your question here. You are asking me why I'm not suing a ninety year old demented man?"

The judge swings in his chair, and according to the transcript admonishes Rachel, "That's not how we do things here. You answer the question asked. You do not get to editorialize about the question."

He did not have to add, "You're a lawyer. You ought to know better."

Everybody knows Erica is a lawyer. She grew up in Maine and went to college there and then she applied to law schools where the winters would not require her to follow a snow plow to class. She got into Duke, but Vanderbilt offered her more money, so she went to Nashville and lived in a part of town which met her budget, but she felt she needed to buy a gun to stand a reasonable chance of survival in that neighborhood, and coming from Maine, owning a gun did not seem like a bad thing. But if she ever had to use it, you know she'd be suppressing that smile at the corners of her mouth.

Rachel replies to the judge, "Thank you, your honor. I understand your point entirely."

But of course, everyone in the courtroom has understood Rachel's point entirely.

Verbal people.

Gotta love 'em.

David Sedaris