ICE on the Seacoast

 The July 14, 2025 meeting of the Select Board was an exercise in the New Hampshire version of democracy in action. Which is to say members of the public were allowed to speak, to voice their opinions but this is not exactly a redress of grievances. The Board does not engage in "back and forth." Once elected, apparently you may, as with gods, pray to them but do not expect an answer. Live Free or Die.

Actual Patriot

Governor Ayotte had just signed a law requiring local town police departments to cooperate, aide and abet masked ICE agents as they abduct people from Hampton streets for the crime of not looking like they come from here.

We should all feel much safer for this cooperative police action, we were told by Representative to the State House Linda McGrath, who also let everyone in on a little secret apparently only she knows about: There are row houses just across the Piscataqua River in Maine, filled with Chinese Mafia, and they are just ever so eager to launch an attack on New Hampshire Seacoast towns. No cat or dog will be safe in Hampton, unless we allow our police to cooperate with ICE.

Regina Barnes excoriated those objecting to this melding of town police with ICE agents as people who are taking a simple matter of law enforcement and turning it into something it is not: POLITICS!

Imagine that! Making immigration political!

As if neither Ms. Barnes nor Ms. McGrath are not political down to their MAGA undergarments.

As if this whole law is not simply MAGA agency invading the statehouse and then washing downstream to drown the liberties of Hampton citizens.

As noted in previous posts, Chris Muns and others spoke at the meeting but one speaker particularly caught Mad Dog's attention for her power and brevity.

Brevity can sometimes be a power in itself. Before Lincoln gave the Gettysburg Address, the speaker who preceded him spoke for 2 hours. Lincoln spoke for less than 5 minutes and his predecessor told him afterwards: "I wish I had managed to say in 2 hours anything close to the importance of what you said in a few minutes."

Something of the sort obtains with the remarks of Cybele Grier:

"The ICE raids we see being carried out in American communities across this country are nothing short of state sponsored terror. ICE raids do not make neighborhoods or our communities safer. In fact, they make them more dangerous for all of us.

This is not who we are as Americans. I do not want us living in a police state like Putin's Russia or Erdogan's Turkey. This is not who we are. These are not our values. It is un-American!

Select Board, I urge you, say No to our Police Chief signing any cooperative agreement with ICE. Our police officers should be focused on making our community safer. I want them to stay focused on Hamton's issues and not do the federal government's job with our tax paying dollars."

******

Five cheers for Ms. Grier!

The fact is, we have seen things like this before in America. We corralled Japanese Americans in concentration camps during WWII while their sons died fighting for America in Italy. IWW "Wobblies" were rounded up in Western towns and deported out of state. Emma Goldman was deported for saying unkind things about Woodrow Wilson and J. Edgar Hoover. 

America has always been berserk. We have occasionally managed to do astonishing and unique things: We are the only country in the planet's history to fight a Civil War on behalf of an underclass, trying to liberate from above those who could not do it for themselves. We created Social Security and Medicare and we put up a statue in New York Harbor with a poem by Emma Lazurus which said, "Send me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free." 

But we have also elected Donald Trump twice. And now he is here in Hampton. 

This is what Ms. Grier reminded us.

July 16

 July 16th has longstanding bleak resonance in Mad Dog's life, for personal reasons.

But in cosmic terms, July 16, 1945 is the day the world ended, in Kurt Vonnegut's words, the day Robert Oppenheimer's Trinity test in New Mexico exploded the first atomic bomb. 

That sword of Damocles is still hovering over our heads.

Vladimir Putin continues to snarl about using nuclear weapons whenever he feels particularly threatened in his rat cage. 

We still have people with their fingers on the button who are men who are determined to prove they are real men, not cowards.

As Adlai Stevenson once said, "Maybe what the world needs when it comes to nuclear extinction is a man who is willing to be a coward."

What the world needs is another Mickhail Gorbachev.

 

Hasn't been one since him.

Oddly, it took a President likely in early dementia, a man who race baited, who invented the "Welfare Queen" a man who said that there will always be poor and implied the poor deserve to be poor and if they worked harder they wouldn't be poor--that same President was able to say, having 1500 missiles armed with multiple warheads is enough.  And so we came down from 70,000 on each side to simply enough missiles to annihilate both countries but maybe leave a sliver of habitable planet.

Having read two of Gorbachev's memoirs, Mad Dog wound up thinking: Too bad we didn't have an American Gorbachev. Never have. Never will.

And Gorbachev was overthrown, dismissed and ostracized for his humanity. But while he lasted he was a world figure who may just have saved humanity from itself.

Surely, Harry Truman was nothing close. He never lost a wink of sleep about dropping atom bombs. To his credit he resisted dropping them in Korea or elsewhere.

During Vietnam, Lyndon Johnson went down the road of trying to prove his masculinity with bombs, but he resisted the advice from his Dr. Strangelove generals to drop atomic bombs on North Vietnam.

For all the existential threats we face today: climate change, pandemics, nuclear Armageddon is the game ender.  

That is the legacy of July 16.

Who Believes Jeffrey Epstein Committed Suicide?

 Not me.

Chris Muns at The Select Board: A Glimmer of Sanity and Stature

Yesterday, July 14, Bastille Day, at the meeting of the Select Board of Hampton, NH, people spoke in favor of allowing/forcing Hampton police to cooperate, aide, abet ICE officers in Hampton, and others spoke against it.

Chris Muns

As has been true at similar meetings, former chief of Hampton police, and former Selectman Rich Sawyer, and current Deputy Sheriff of Rockingham County (in which Hampton is located)  leapt up to set the stage for the discussion to follow by saying:

1. It is not within the power of the Select Board or any local government to refuse to cooperate with ICE. As a current Deputy Sheriff of Rockingham County his office has "entered into an agreement" with ICE which is meant to train police how to avoid getting sued, when they pull people who don't look like they come from here out of their cars, and hand them over to ICE. He said there is a lot of misinformation out there about the agreements between ICE and the sheriff and the Hampton Police. 

(This surprised Mad Dog because there is almost no information out there about what the Sheriff or the chief of Hampton police have agreed to. In fact, there has been a news black out about this. When asked exactly what has been agreed to or what is even being considered neither the Chief of Police nor the Sheriff has said word one.)

2. Nobody should worry about the police cooperating with ICE because police are the good guys.

Having been thus told that nothing we might have to say during the "Comments" part of the Select Board meeting would have the slightest effect on what is coming down the road from Governor Ayotte, the legislature in Concord and ICE itself, members of the seventy-five or so people who crowded in the basement at Town Hall got up to say what they came to say, no matter what Deputy Sheriff Sawyer said, or how dismissive he or anyone else might be.

Deputy Sheriff Sawyer's admonition did not seem to register with Hampton State Representative Linda McGrath, who promptly admonished the assembled citizens that illegal immigrants have flooded across the Southern border at the rate of 10 million a year,  100,000 of whom are dangerous felons, rapists and murderers. Where she got those numbers one can only imagine, but if you're interested, you might Google Qanon, or The Storm Front, or White, Aryan Nation. 

And not just that! Representative McGrath revealed, for the first time,  that just across our border, in Maine, are row houses filled with "Chinese Mafia," raring to rape and pillage in New Hampshire. 

She also complained that this is all just a question of concern to police, but some people are trying to introduce politics to it. 

It was all Mad Dog could do to stay in his seat and not rise up and shout: "There is nothing more political than this! Nothing more political than immigration! And you are political right down to your MAGA underpants!"

But Mad Dog was subdued by his friends who murmured: "Don't worry, Chris is going to speak."

Linda McGrath at Large

One could only pity the other Representatives from Hampton, who have to drive to Concord every week and listen to Ms. McGrath. Listening to her speak last night--she spoke twice--Mad Dog began wondering if it was such a good idea to reduce the number of psychiatric beds in the state, as the Republicans have done every time they get control, although now Mad Dog knows why they reduce those slots--presumably, on some level, they know who would be conveyed to those psychiatric facilities. These people know its better to be a state Rep than a resident of a psych ward, which is where they really, most sincerely do belong, Ding Dong.

And then, as promised, Chris Muns rose to speak. 

Chris is  one of the four Hampton representatives to the House of Representatives at Concord.  He noted (as you will see below) there is, in fact, something which can be done by the Select Board, and by extension, by all those Hampton citizens who cringe at the idea of masked goon squads waylaying roofers, or landscapers who are trying to drive to and from jobs in Hampton guilty of the crime of looking like they don't come from hereabouts.

Chris Muns is well known in Hampton from his work in Concord as a Representative, from his work with the Hampton schools and from many campaigns where he went door to door for thousands of doors.  He is ordinarily the essence of fairness, tact and civility.

Last night he got his Dutch up, one might say.

Here is the text  of what Representative Muns said:

.

"Members of the Board:

Establishing and enforcing our immigration laws is a federal responsibility. As we struggle to fix our broken immigration system, we need to support the difficult job law enforcement has enforcing the immigration laws currently on the books. And we need to make sure everything we ask them to do is consistent not only with those laws but the moral principles upon which this country was founded.

Two of those are that in America EVERYONE is considered innocent until proven guilty and EVERYONE is entitled to due process under the law. We must not stray from those principles, and we must not allow our LOCAL police officers to be put in a position where they may be forced to stray from them.

There are well-established practices and procedures in place that our police officers follow when they stop or detain someone to determine if there are any outstanding warrants against that individual from other jurisdictions, including their federal partners. There is no reason why they should not continue to follow those practices and procedures if they identify someone with an outstanding immigration related charge against them.

But our local police department should NOT enter into a so-called section 287(g) agreement with ICE. These agreements deputize local law enforcement as agents of ICE and make them available to participate in enforcement actions ICE chooses to take. Not only will the federal government NOT reimburse the town for any expenses incurred by our officers while engaged in those activities but given some of the questionable practices of ICE we have seen, it could expose those officers and the town to significant legal liability. SB62 which was signed into law by Governor Ayotte gives our Chief of Police the authority to enter into one of these agreements and removes you – our Select Board –from that process. I have the utmost respect for our Police Chief and the work he and everyone in our police department has done to build and maintain trust in our community. That is precisely why I do not want us to put him in the position of having to make this decision – on his own – without any input from “we the people” of Hampton, particularly as the pressure from ICE and Governor Ayotte’s administration increases.

SB62 is also an unfunded state mandate, increasing our share of law enforcement costs that the state already does not reimburse us for.

To provide our Chief of Police with a sense of where you – the elected leaders of our town – stand on this issue, I urge you pass a “sense of the board” resolution stating that it is not – at the present time – in the best interests of our town for our Police Department to enter into any additional agreements to provide additional assistance enforcing our immigration laws over and above what they are already doing."

And so, Mad Dog heaved a sigh of relief. 

Decency may not prevail, but it survives. 

Remarks (Unabridged) At the Hampton Select Board Meeting on ICE Agents in Hampton

Last night, July 14, 2025, the Select Board of Hampton met and, as always, after the Pledge of Allegiance, the meeting begins with public comments. Any person with an address in Hampton can comment about anything. There is a homeless man, an agent of the United Nations and the US Supreme Court who has, for the last two meetings questioned whether the Hampton Police are drug tested. The Board chairman replies that the Board does not reply to questions.

This is a peculiar truth about Hampton Board meetings, whether they are Select Board or School Board, the elected members, once elected, once sitting on the stage, as it were, do not answer questions or prayers, as gods, once elected, do not speak to mere mortals.

Usually the gallery is nearly empty, but last night it was standing room only and people flowed out into the hall because Governor Kelley Ayotte had just signed into law a law requiring local town police forces to cooperate, aide and assist ICE agents and, anticipating revolt, established financial penalties for towns which refuse.

The usual cast of characters appeared including Regina Barnes and Hampton State Representative, Linda McGrath.  Both women decried the politicization of this very reasonable law to enlist Hampton police in the effort to protect the community from all those dangerous immigrants we see about town, when we can find them on rooftops replacing roofs, or landscaping or pruning trees.  We were told this is simply a matter of enforcing the law and even if we disagreed, it's the law and there's nothing we can or should do about it. Making this political, they insisted is nasty, unpatriotic and self immolating.

Ms. Barnes emphasized her 45 year tenure in Hampton, which Mad Dog took to mean that since she came over on the Mayflower or whatever boat landed in 1638, everyone else following her is an immigrant and her ideas should be taken as law.

Linda McGrath

Ms. McGrath enlightened the audience by spooling out statistics which, she claimed, showed 100,000 violent immigrants cross the Southern border yearly, even under Trump, and that is a hard number derived from her sources which say 10 million illegals cross annually and 1% of them are violent up to no goods. Her math was unimpeachable, and numbers, as we all know, do not lie.

Except for Ms. McGrath's numbers, which require quite a large inductive leap. She also informed us that just across the border, in Maine, are row houses filled with "Chinese Mafia," just aching to cross over into New Hampshire. This is a woman who represents Hampton in the state House of Representatives. We can only hope that the old adage, "the worst thing for a bad product is good advertising" applies here. Or, "sunshine is the best disinfectant."

There were several worthwhile speeches given by opponents of ICE, notably by Chris Muns, Cybele Grier and  a Mr. Plank and others. 

Mad Dog will endeavor to present the texts of their speeches, as many of them cut their remarks shorter than the 3 minutes allowed to allow others to speak as there was a large crowd. If everyone spoke 3 minutes the meeting might still be going on.

Here is one for which Mad Dog has the written text, unabridged from a Hampton resident.

"I have lived 18 years in Hampton. Before that I lived in two big cities, three small cities and the suburbs. And in all these places, I have known the local police. Nowhere has any police better, and truth be told, nowhere has police as good as here in Hampton. Most people I know really like the police here. They do community policing.

But, you know, police should not do every job. A few years ago dead seals washed up at Plaice Cove. Died of bird flu, it turned out. I was pretty sure they had died of something infectious because two weeks earlier the beach was littered with dead sea gulls. It never occurred to me to call the Hampton police about this. I called the New England aquarium: they know how to investigate stuff like this. 

Call the Cops!

And if, tomorrow, a Russian submarine surfaces off Plaice Cove, I will not call the Hampton Police. I might call 9/11, but only to ask how I can reach the Navy or the Coast Guard. Not every job should be sent to the Hampton Police. The police should not be put at unnecessary risk doing jobs they are not trained or equipped to do, and should never do.

Some years ago, Tip O'Neill, the Massachusetts congressman said, "All politics is local." But times have turned this on it's head. Now all local politics is national.  We have been told by Ms. Barnes and Ms. McGrath that we should not make ICE collusion political. But this could not be more political. This is all about politics. That's why we are all here tonight; that's why this crowd. We are told we should not turn a police action into something political. But this ICE stuff is not about policing or even about Hampton. It is Washington politics being rammed down the throats of Hampton citizens.  And those who dissemble about being not political are, in fact, political as Richard Nixon would say, political right down to their MAGA underwear. 

I'm told the law carries a provision to financially penalize towns which do not comply. Governor Ayotte knew there would be an uprising. 

But money can be intimately tied to patriotism and honor.

My father used to smile when he wrote out his check to the IRS on April 15th. "I guess I'm just a closet patriot," he would say.

Patriotism must involve sacrifice, sometimes financial, sometimes life.

Real Patriotism

I consider myself a patriot, but I know my country sometimes does bad things, sometimes goes astray. We put Japanese Americans into concentration camps while their sons fought and died for America in Italy during World War Two. I'd like to think members of this Board would vote against that, given the chance. Out of honor.

This law is about a MAGA witch hunt. It is not about Hampton. It is about what President Trump and Kristi Nome want. 

$50 on the Internet: Anyone can have one

It is not even about police. President Trump pardoned January 6th insurrectionists who bludgeoned police. His no true friend of police.

We can resist, but it will cost us money.

But we should remember the final sentence of the Declaration of Independence: We pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, our sacred honor.

I don't know if this Board will ever get to vote on ICE collusion, but if you do, I hope you'll cast a patriotic vote of honor.

Re-Reading

 Mad Dog typically has five or six books going on his Kindle and bedside books, most of which he has already read months or years before, and is now re-reading.

Klimt, Before the Deluge 

Short attention span, poor memory, for whatever reason. Mad Dog just likes it.

Isherwood

Of the new books is one Mad Dog has had on his Kindle for years: Christopher Isherwood's memoir, "Good-bye Berlin," which Mad Dog just never got around to reading but  just recently read, having stayed up all night, unable to put it down. Not since "West With the Night," that singular Beryl Markham memoir, has Mad Dog been so enthralled with a book. 

Reading this while re-reading Nancy Isenberg's "White Trash," and Kuznick and Stone's "Untold History of the United States,"  and Edmund Morris's series on Teddy Roosevelt, and Daniel Okrent's "The Guarded Gate," H.C. Richardson's, "West from Appomattox," and Bruce Caton's "A Stillness at Appomattox," affords a soul roiled by the daily news, which is All Trump All The Time, a certain emolument quality.

One realizes, this too, shall pass, and today did not arise as a random, unlucky asteroid which slammed into our nation. 

Isenberg traces the whole phenomenon of the unpropertied, white, rejected rural poor called "white trash" by both the gentry and colored folk, as a culture of people who love to brag and who love braggarts, the man who will claim to be the best President ever, the man who kilt him a bear when he was only three. These folks do not know the rules of debate, and do not care to know. They elected Andrew Jackson because he talked like them, married an already married woman, and simply ignored the Supreme Court's rulings and went right ahead and deported Cherokees and other Indians along the Trial of Tears to claim Florida for the (white) United States.

Isherwood, speaking of Weimar Berlin, explores how everyday people, whether they are wealthy Jews who own department stores, or spinster women eking out a living by subletting rooms in their houses, or young men barely out of adolescence trying to discover their own identities, flirting with prostitutes at night clubs or declaring themselves revolutionaries as puffery, for effect, and  all of them just trying to live a life, as an unseen tidal wave approaches.

Next up may be "Charlottesville" by Deborah Baker, which just got a review in the NYT Book Review, and explores "old-fashioned white nationalism and white supremacy, with its grab bag of bigotries, wrapped in contrarian, countercultural and hypermasculine cool."

Democrat Terrence O'Rourke

This brought to mind Terence O'Rouke, who spoke at the Exeter Hotel in a candidates' forum in 2017 running the Democratic primary among 11 candidates. Mad Dog was sitting in the back of the room, yakking with his friend and foxhole mate, Olivia, making fun of various people in the crowd, when a sentence emanating from the podium caught his attention: "As divided as our country is right now, with all the arguments and cultural divides, I would have thought the one thing we could all agree upon is that there is no such thing as a very fine Nazi."

"Wait!" Mad Dog hushed Olivia. "What did he just say?"

Of course, O'Rourke was referring to Trump's response when Trump was asked about the mayhem in Charlottesville at the Unite the Right rally, where James Alex Fields, Jr., a man who kept "Mein Kampf"  and a photo of Hitler at his bedside, ran his car into a group of people protesting against the vile Unite the Right and the "We Will Not Be Replaced" mob. Fields aimed his car and stepped on the accelerator, crashing into that group trying to stop Nazis,  killing a 32 year old woman, Heather Heyer, and hospitalizing 36 others. When asked about this, Trump said, "Well, there were very fine people on both sides." Oh, then Mr. Fields, is a very fine person. A murderer, a self proclaimed Nazi, but still, a very fine person.

There are always those who shrug off whatever Trump says--as Trump marvels at the fine command of English of the President of Liberia, who is the president of a country where English is the official language and taught every child from an early age, or when asked when and why Trump halted arms shipments to Ukraine shot back to the reporter asking the question, "I don't know. Why don't you tell me?"  Or when a reporter asks about  the federal response to the Texas floods, and Trump replied, "You have to be an evil person to ask such a question. You are an evil person." 

All of this is predictable, expected, and not at all a sign of diminished cognitive function, at least not a precipitous decline; it's just always been there and it's what his fans voted for. 

So, yes. None of this is a surprise. Nor is it a unique American characteristic. As Rick Perlstein said, "If you're not writing about the berserk, you're not writing about America."

Ernest Hemingway said that all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.

And, of course, the pivotal moment in that book is often said to be when Huck has to choose between returning the slave, Jim, to slavery, which is what polite Confederate society insists is the morally correct thing to do, or he can choose to abet Jim's race to freedom, which Huck is sure will mean Huck will go straight to Hell. 

For me, however, there is another pivotal moment, mostly unmentioned, when Huck returns to their raft after disappearing in the fog and Jim expresses his relief that Huck is alive and tells Huck how devastated he was at the thought of Huck's drowning in the fog. But Huck tries to convince Jim that Huck had never left the raft, never been absent and Jim must have been dreaming. It's an early case of what is now called "Gaslighting" after the movie "Gas Light" where a husband tries to manipulate his wife into questioning reality as she perceives it and claims he knows reality, where she is only imagining it and getting it wrong. Jim tells Huck that attempt at manipulating Jim is cruel and unworthy of him, a man who has loved Huck and would never do anything to hurt Huck.

And Jim, of course, is absolutely correct. Huck has been cruel, just for the fun of it. That's one quality inimical to the qualities of "white trash"--cruelty, and the others are braggadocio,  and hate of authority.

And now, in the 21st century, we are living in the gas lit world of Trump, where we are told we are threatened by an infestation of criminals--who are not here to pick our crops or roof our homes--but to rape our white women; where we are told masked goons throwing people into unmarked vans are here to protect us; where we are told tariffs will magically cause new factories to arise from the rusted out hulks in the Rust Belt; where we are told measles vaccines kill more kids than measles ever would; where we are told fluoridation of drinking water poisons our bodily fluids; where we are told government waste is what is causing inflation, economic despair and it's all because of lazy, or evil civil servants who are supposed to be protecting and maintaining our nuclear missiles in their silos;  where we are told Confederate generals were not fighting to preserve chattel slavery but were only fighting to preserve Southern heritage;  where we are told patriots seeking only to tour the Capitol on January 7, 2021 as ordinary tourists, while they smeared feces along the marble walls and invaded the offices of Congressmen were only brave, patriotic tourists; where we are told Trump did not incite an insurrection; where we are told by the Supreme Court that Trump is king and any break on executive power is unconstitutional; where we are told by that same court separation of church and state is unconstitutional; where that same court says the First Amendment is unconstitutional and the Second amendment guarantees the individual the right to own a howitzer;   where we are told Ukraine started the war by invading Russia; and finally, where we are told there were very fine Nazis out there in Charlottesville.

Berserk is something of an understatement, of course. 

Big Beautiful Blondie Bombies

 

And here Mad Dog thought it was just him.

What Makes a Lady FOXY?

He has some trouble distinguishing among all the blonde ladies with long hair who serve Mr. Trump. They are not exactly doppelgangers, but it can be a little disorienting.

Maybe they are FOXBLONDES.

But then there's that cross thing. 

Mad Dog noticed it but told himself, Naw, just let it pass.

For some reason, those crosses on chains were very common on nurses back in the day. The protagonist of "House of God" commented on it. They turned him on.

There is something in those crosses-- almost a dare, maybe a tease. You know, if a fetching nurse was wearing a cross, it was almost like a wedding ring; it was saying, "I'm not going to bed with you," or something. But then, that was a challenge. That's what was happening in "House of God." Back in the day only women wore crosses on chains. Now, with men wearing bling, there may be more crosses on men, but those non bling, modest little crosses are so...feminine. Or something. 

But what is the message?

MAYBE  the message on the Trump blondes is different: It's a dog whistle to all those Aryan nation types, all the evangelicals that well, you know, America is a Christian nation, as they've been telling us all along.

But then Jon Stewart picked up on it, and Mad Dog was so relieved: It wasn't just some dark psychopathology buried in Mad Dog's mind--other people noticed it.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/NFifXeZdolI

So, it's a thing. 
Maybe.