Belief

Someone you can believe in

Anderson Cooper told President Obama many people in this country believe the President wants to and is laying plans to seize their guns. The President reacted by saying that was absurd and there is plenty of evidence to the contrary, not the least of which is after 7 years, he has not done it, or attempted it or even shown the slightly indication of laying plans. 

To which Cooper replied, well, but people think you are thinking it. How do you prove what you are not thinking? Some people want to believe this, for, as Mr. Obama suggested, political reasons (it plays well to the crazies) or financial reasons (it spikes gun sales.)

People also believe:
1/ The Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) has been a "disaster." 
2/ The Holocaust never happened.
3/ President Obama plans to send in the black helicopters and seize control of the nation, declaring marshal law.
4/ President Obama was born in Kenya.

I'm now watching "The World At War."  What strikes me is the capacity of people to believe in things, large numbers of people, despite evidence to the contrary, despite significant evidence which a reasonable person should find convincing. 

We believe in the flag, the Fatherland and the Furher

So Germans were told by public broadcasts, even as Russian troops were on the outskirts of Berlin, the war was still winnable, that a wonder weapon was being held in reserve to save them, that they could throw back the hordes. When films of concentration camps liberated by the allies were shown, people believed they were hoaxes. American soldiers felt they had to bring Germans to the camps in person to convince them. 

Of course, Germans also believed the Jews were the major source of Germany's economic problems before Hitler came to power that Germans were a "Nordic race"  and as "Aryans"  they were the master race, destined by God to have dominion over the lesser races. 

Japanese believed the Emperor was a god. 

Hitler sold Germans on a lot of belief in no small part because things improved when he came to power for so many of them:  Farmers found they could thrive financially; work camps were organized where rich merchants worked and ate side by side with peasants and, for a weekend or a week, a  sense of community welled up; Hitler youth marched through the woods singing happy songs; infrastructure was built, providing work for the previously unemployed and a huge highway system was built; low cost automobiles (the Volkswagen--the "people's wagon" ) were built and sold on the installment plan. Hitler actually drew sketches of the Volkswagen beetle and claimed authorship of this boon to the middle classes. 

After the first World War, which left Germany in economic ruin, Germans wanted to believe, as the song in "Caberet" said, "The Future Belongs to Me." 

With all this positive stuff going on, why not believe everything Hitler and Goebbels  said?

But here in 21st century America, we have large portions of the population who believe the worst, even in the face of good news. "Obamacare is a disaster" is a battle cry from Republicans despite all evidence to the contrar: millions who now have insurance, pre existing condition exclusions vanquished, costs plummeting. 

How can this be?

In part, it's our public media system: Ted Cruz or Mitch McConnell are shown decrying the failures of Obamacare on the floor of the Senate without a picture of Elizabeth Warren decrying the lie.  Our media are good at presenting the accusation but they dreadful  at presenting the reply. The accusation if the story; the refutation is just not sexy. And we are trying to sell our stories, in commercial journalism. 

The only news program which regularly presents both sides of any argument is the PBS New Hour, which I have to watch alone because it's "boring" according to my family.

The New York Times described a study in which Republicans were asked if they thought the economy was doing well during the tenure of a Democratic President and they said "No" in high percentages despite all indicators of robust economic indicators, whereas they said "Yes" in the face of poor indicators when the President was a Republican. Democrats did the same--evidence be damned, I don't want to believe it.

The trouble with evidence is there is always other evidence or something about the evidence you suspect. The jury in the O.J. Simpson murder case didn't believe the evidence. They were Black and they didn't want to believe the police.

"The Serial" presented a series about a murder in Baltimore which left you wondering. There was no clear message to believe. It was frustrating and felt incomplete. 

Belief, for whatever else it may be, is comfortable. It makes you feel in control. Doubt is uncomfortable.  

I believe in the flag. 

President Obama's Town Hall on Guns

As if in answer to the Phantom's question: Yes, it is possible to have a civil, reasoned discussion about guns in this country. Anderson Cooper hosting the President on CNN in a town hall setting with members of the audience asking questions took a step in that direction tonight.

A Republican sheriff running for Congress asked why Mr. Obama thought trying to take action would reduce gun deaths when no background check would have stopped the Newtown shooting or the San Bernadino shooting or any other mass shooting. President Obama said, "That's the same as saying since we could not prevent those crimes, why bother to try to stop any crime?"

When the widow of the hero soldier who was killed by his deranged friend at a gun range asked why the President thought she should not have a gun to protect herself, he said he had no objection to her having a gun; he objects to deranged people shooting innocents.

When a rape victim said she wanted a gun in her house to be sure she was never raped again and to protect her two infant sons, the President said he had no objection to her having a gun but he wasn't sure that gun would protect her if she were taken by surprised and he wondered whether her children were safer having that gun in the house. 
And when the husband of Gabbie Gifford said he had testified at a Senate hearing where Senators (Republican Senators) suggested President Obama was planning to take away everyone's guns, all 350 million guns in 62 million households from Key West to Alaska. President Obama laughed and said, he had been President 7 years, when do these conspiracy theorists think he is planning to spring this massive round up on the nation? Do they think he can snap his fingers and collect all the guns in a few months? 

Once again, I feel grateful to have Mr. Obama as President. I do continue to worry that so rational and benign a figure is simply too good to survive in a country filled with the likes of the crazies who call themselves Republicans.

Is There A Middle Ground On Guns?

This morning, on CNN, Donald Trump told Wolf Blitzer the whole problem with guns is President Obama. President Obama has failed to negotiate, failed to find a middle ground.

For Republicans there is always a simple answer, the same answer: it's Obama's fault.

Driving to work, , listening to  NPR who organizes gun shows across the West, I heard a man who, for the first time in a long time, struck me as a reasonable person who likes guns. He said the basic problem is  people react to highly visible shootings and they  want to make all guns go away; on the other side are people who say, the government can't protect me, so I want to protect myself: Give me guns. "I don't see where there is any middle ground in this discussion," he said.

Actually, I do think there is a middle ground. The problem is, not a single Republican wants to stand on that ground because screaming about the 2nd Amendment "energizes the base" of the right wing group now called the Republican party. 

It doesn't help that President Obama and Democrats approach the debate as if they had the answers, when, in fact, the solutions offered thus far--more criminal background checks, better technology to restrict use of guns to a single owner with a fingerprint ID, waiting periods to purchase guns--would not  prevent determined mass shooters like the San Bernadino, the Sandy Hook, the Aurora movie theater lunatics, from executing their plans. 

There is also the problem of seeing all gun violence as the same--the kid who shoots another kid on a Baltimore street corner for insulting his sneakers is not the same problem as the San Bernadino shooter or as the Planned Parenthood shooter. 

There are gun deaths and there are gun deaths and not all are the same problem.

Just as  there can be  no middle ground on the abortion debate if you draw your line at a fertilized egg as the beginning of human life, there is no  room for discussion once you have already staked out an absolutist position on guns:  You cannot pass a law about guns or you cannot have guns. 

But with respect to approaches meant to reduce specific types of gun deaths, there could be middle ground, if there were Republicans who were willing to step beyond the absolutist boundaries.  

Anyone who has ever read George V. Higgins's wonderful novel "The Friends of Eddie Coyle" will know illegal trafficking in guns has been around for decades and will never die.  But, if you draw your lines more carefully, then you might be able to inhibit some bad outcomes.  
Focusing on bullets has not been given enough attention.

Were Bernie Sanders President, there might be some hope of negotiating some action to reduce high octane shootings: He is one Democrat who  cannot be accused of wanting to take away your guns.

But two things would have to happen:  Every Republican who claims to be defending the Second Amendment  would have to be asked, every time, "Would you please recite that one sentence amendment?"

"A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be abridged."

Once you've said that, it will be apparent the Constitution does not guarantee individual ownership of guns, and in fact it wasn't until Heller v District of the Columbia that the current reactionary element of the Supreme Court was able to make individual ownership the law of the land. For two hundred years prior to this Court, the Court had clearly said, "No, you don't have a right to own your own gun. That's a privilege."

Once we agree, the government has the right to restrict your access to guns, has the right, if it desires, to come seize all your guns, we can begin the discussion. 

Everyone at the table, however, should understand, we have to be humble. It is also true no law, no government policy anyone has proposed or dreamed up will stop gun violence in a nation with 300 million guns. Trying to stop gun deaths by eliminating guns would be about as likely to work as trying to reduce auto deaths by outlawing automobiles. 

I know my neighbor who hunts, who has the heads of wild boar, antelopes and deer on the walls of his house is no more likely to shoot down school children than I am. We can begin by saying that. Yes, he has the means of wrecking havoc, but he will not, no more than I would drive my SUV through a school yard filled with children trying to kill them. We all have means of murder and mayhem available to us, but we do not do murder and mayhem, and not because laws prevent us.

Where should this discussion take place? Well, it would be nice if we could have it in the halls of Congress, but until the place is swept clean of Tea Party Republicans, of Ted Cruz, of Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan and their ilk, it is not likely to happen.

Home on the Bizarre Range

In 1965, at the height of his substance abuse, Johnny Cash was called in to make a deposition, but not about possessing drugs. Instead, the singer was in trouble for leaving a burning truck at the side of a road in Los Padres National Forest in California. The flames had started a forest fire that jeopardized not only the refuge itself, but the lives of nearly 50 critically endangered California condors, which at that time made up a sizable portion of the global population. Facing the prospect of a lawsuit, and filled with “amphetamines and arrogance,” as his autobiography put it, Cash defiantly told his government questioners, “I don’t give a damn about your yellow buzzards.”

--Peter Cashwell, New York Times




When men seek to do something really outrageous, first they try to change the past, or our perception of it, and then they claim their enemies of the present have defiled what once was a veritable Garden of Eden by valuing yellow buzzards over freedom.

As Nancy Langston details in her wonderful Op-Ed piece in the New York Times, about the history of the American prairie, the men under the command of Ammon Bundy at a bird sanctuary  in Oregon are facing the cameras, spinning a myth about how wonderful everything was in the West until those muddle headed liberals in Washington got it into their heads to control every blade of grass on the Great Plains and to save some birds and frogs nobody should care about and to save wolves and coyotes which were ravaging the herds honest ranchers and farmers were struggling to keep alive.

Their lips dripping with derision, loggers have inveighed against restrictions on denuding hills of old growth forest for the ridiculous purpose of saving the spotted owl when loggers' families are starving; condors, nothing more than "yellow buzzards" are nothing compared to the rugged Marlboro men who ride the range herding cattle and earning a tough living only a man could earn. There you have dream spinning in an American way.

The truth, as Professor Langston documents so well, is the great outdoors west of the Mississippi was dominated by land barons who would make today's Wall Street tycoons look like Mr. Rodgers in cardigan sweater, singing to your kids. They ruthlessly monopolized water and land and there was no freedom but the freedom of the few oligarchs to control vast swaths of the Western landscape.

This is the same sort of fable spinning we hear from gun advocates, who yammer about how free we were in the days when every hearth had a musket hanging above the mantle, in the 18th century, which is why the founding fathers wrote the Second Amendment, because they knew to keep this paradise of liberty called America, every man needed a gun. (Of course the founding fathers wrote no such thing--they were talking about a "well regulated militia" not some unregulated neurotics running around brandishing AK-15 assault rifles in shopping malls, or some  lunatic with Glock 9 hand guns shooting at the driver who cut him off on the freeway.)

For Donald Trump and Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, today's present is a living apocalypse and the past was a serene oasis of liberty and self fulfillment. 

Of course, Mr. Bundy is a Mormon, and as anyone who has seen the Broadway show, "The Book of Mormon" will know, you have to be able to believe in a pretty bizarre back story to be a believing Mormon--and we do not know Mr. Bundy is that. 

But belief continues to be a wondrous thing. 

Cologne Immigrant Rapists

In Cologne, Germany, on New Year's eve or day, an uncertain but large (in the hundreds)  number of women were either robbed or fondled or assaulted or raped by men who were described by some victims as having been part of groups of men, and at least some of these appeared to be Middle Eastern men.

This is a fine mess. The German police have been very careful not to feed into a story line of dark, Middle Eastern immigrant men raping blonde, Germanic women. You can just see where this might go. Germany has been among the most welcoming of European nations; some might think this stance by President Angela Merckel is something of expiation for past sins.  Even Sweden and  Denmark have erected barriers to further influx of Middle Eastern refugees, and now Ms. Merckel will inevitably face the question: Why did you allow these rapists in?

Donald Trump will doubtless claim vindication--of course, he was talking about Mexican immigrant rapists, but why quibble? Aren't they all dark males, the frightening "Other?"

Ordinarily, one might dismiss these reports, confused and lacking details, but it's not that easy to dismiss such suspicions out of hand for a number of reasons:
1. Women are treated as property, as if they were children, and any woman who would wander the streets without a male relative to protect her is considered not much better than a street walker by some devout Muslims. 
2. Western women, journalists, were raped in public by men in Egyptian crowds during public demonstrations.  This was, presumably, not an expression of libidinous urges so much as acts of intimidation and disdain for the way Western women behave. 
3. Western women shopping alone in markets in Riyad, Saudia Arabia are frequently fondled by men, for reasons which are not entirely known.

All this, taken with the Saudi beheadings of over 40 "terrorists" do make you wonder what sort of culture accompanies those fleeing from the Middle East. 

One wonders: When immigrants arrived in the United States in the past, and processed in a more or less orderly way through Ellis Island, were they mostly law abiding and grateful, or were they more like wolves granted admission to the chicken coop?

I have no answers. Presumably there are some academics somewhere who have answers.  And, of course, as always, Donald Trump can tell us just what to think.

Urban Raccoons, Coyotes: They Live Among Us

New York City Tough

On his way to work at 5 AM every morning, my younger son crosses Central Park, from West 92 Street to the East Side. He has assured his mother Central Park is safe enough, despite the long history of attacks, muggings, the famous rape. He  says all that was from another era. 

He insists he has little to fear from human beings; it's the raccoons who bother him. A gang of them, eight or ten, hang out on an asphalt path, not far from a bench and a streetlight, and they give no ground, looking up at him, who they clearly consider an intruder on their turf.  "You looking at us? Huh? You looking at us?"

He veers off the path and hopes he'll not stumble over any of their friends in the undergrowth.

Central Park Division, Hell's Angels

The New York Times carries a story today about a licensed raccoon remover hauling off a specimen from South Park Slope, Brooklyn, the last of a brood of a dozen, and the woman who owns the townhouse, who called the pest remover, says they were pretty tough customers, and "they beat up my cat."

Yeah, right, they can be cute

But neither the guy who hauled the raccoon off in a cage nor the woman wanted to kill the bandit. And that's against New York City law. The pest remover guy, presumably, could lose his license for not killing the raccoon, but he didn't have the heart to do it.  He wouldn't give his name, for fear of governmental sanction. 

Raccoons do get rabies, which is likely the reason the law says kill them.

Good Image Marketing: Not So Cuddly in Real LIfe

Squirrels almost never get rabies. Bats do. And raccoons do. So do skunks. 

There was one particular skunk I'd have no compunction about sending back to his maker.  He lived outside, or under my house for a month or two and he squirted my dog in the face and he ambled about under the tree in our front yard as if it was the Old Salt's All You Can Eat night, and he gave no ground when I went out with my flashlight and baseball bat and pan. Just looked at me for a moment, decided I was no real threat and kept on eating the little things which fell from that tree. 

 I still don't know what that kind of tree that  is, but it has little fruity things which drop on the ground in early Fall, and the skunk apparently had a taste for them. 

Dog Unfriendly

I did not like that skunk at all. 

A friend was semi horrified at my attempts to intimidate, harm and possibly kill the skunk.  I had been thinking out loud about my options, and not wanting to have a gun, I had closed in on the idea of a bow and arrow. 

Bad Actor

"I could walk right up to within, maybe 10 feet. He ignores me. Couldn't miss from that distance."
"You wouldn't do that," she said.
"Oh, yeah? Just stay tuned. That skunk is toast."
"He's just a skunk doing skunk things."
"Which includes squirting my dog and eating my fruit tree dropping things."
"And you never even noticed the fruity things, until that skunk started eating them."
"That skunk's days are numbered."
"You are a Democrat. You value all living things. You believe in global warming and you think income inequality is obscene. Your values will not allow you to kill a living creature for eating fruity things. The penalty is disproportionate to the offense."

She had failed to perceive the level of antipathy I bore toward this particular skunk. He was a bad actor. It wasn't a racial thing or a genus thing. He was just a bad skunk. He had it coming. 

"Nobody has anything coming," she said.

But then again, consider the source. 

She has coyotes living in her neighborhood. They howl at night. She goes out for night  walks to look for them. She loves having coyotes for neighbors!

New York City Coyote

In Maryland, we lived in the woods and my sons found an eviscerated deer. The deer was partially dismembered and we looked it over, trying to imagine what sort of animal could have done that to a 500 pound deer.  I had seen a bobcat in the neighborhood, but no bobcat could have brought down a deer and done that. A cougar, more like it, but nobody had ever seen a cougar in the woods, or along the nearby Potomac.

Forgive Those Who Trespass? 

Then we heard the coyotes howling at night. 

The Undeserving Rich: The Rigged Economy

When people speak of the "rigged economy" one part of the concept has to do with the idea that if the upper 1% of the population controls 43% of the economy there is "something wrong" with that. Nobody, this line of thinking goes, can deserve so much. 
This is an argument that goes way back to the kings of France, where the starving masses asked why they should live in squalor while the aristocracy lived in opulence and the king answered basically God, (some higher power) wants it this way.

Now, in a capitalist "democracy," (some would say we have no democracy but an "oligarchy")  the same answer is given:  I have a right to this wealth because I am superior and I deserve it.

I got my wealth legally, playing the game by the rules.  

"Behind every fortune is a crime," no longer applies.

In some cases, the manipulations which allowed the winning of a fortune are occult, like those of Mitt Romney, who, at least one story goes, made his money at Bain Capital, by using his company's money to buy up one company at  a time, and each time using the newly acquired company to borrow money, then awarding himself and his partners huge "fees" or bonuses from the new capital, and escaping from the company before it's inevitable collapse and bankruptcy, only to move on to the next victim. All perfectly legal, leaving ruined companies, ruined lives, lost jobs, lost pensions behind, as the "vulture capitalists" moved on.

Of course, Mr. Romney and the Republican Party told the story differently.

Then there is the story of the financial men who saw the Great Crash of 2007 coming and rather than warning the driver of the great 18 wheeler that around the bend the road was washed out, they unloaded all the value from the truck, said nothing and allowed the truck to go off roaring around the bend and off the cliff into the chasm. They did not cause the crash; they simply saw it coming and joined the upper 1%. In that case you can argue, well, they were smarter,  and they deserved to win. 

But these are extreme cases. What of the every day sort of person who is made rich enough, makes a salary of over $400,000 and simply does not do a good job, but is rewarded anyway? If the CEO is really incompetent, does he or she deserve that reward?  

From my worm's eye view, I saw the unfolding of a much smaller, but likely more representative, disaster in the management of a hospital system.  

In this case, the CEO, who was an employee of a large corporation which manages scores of hospital systems across the country, and she arrived on the job, fresh from managing a much smaller hospital. 

 She was confronted with trouble in the Emergency Room-- falling numbers of patients, a relatively high overhead for physician salaries. She responded by selling the Emergency Room concession to a company that manages Emergency Rooms. Same thing with the hospitalists,  who admitted and cared for the patients in the hospital:  Falling admissions, shorter hospital stays, fixed salaries. Sold that concession to another company.  Radiology, ordinarily a rich source of income for any hospital, was run by a private group bt she did nothing to capture that income for the hospital.  Same process with the doctors running the intensive care unit--sold off that concession. She was like the spider wasp, who eats out the wasp host from the inside and emerges eventually, leaving only the outside husk behind.  

It was true, she had unloaded overhead, but she had also hollowed out the parts of the hospital which generated income and profit. You have to, at some point, spend money to make money. She did not seem to understand that.

Through it all, the big problem was falling numbers of patients crossing the thresholds of the hospital entrances, whether for elective surgeries, through the ER or for admissions.  

It finally dawned on the CEO that the patients who crossed those thresholds were mostly sent in by doctors; they didn't come to the hospital because they had seen the advertising or the sign from the road; they came because their doctors referred them. 

Across the street from the hospital were two buildings filled with those doctors in practices of all sorts. These physicians, mostly, were also employees of the same corporation which owned what was left of the hospital.

 And  there was trouble in these practices.  Many specialty groups were dissolving: Endocrinology, Pulmonary, Neurology, Cardiology and Oncology were hemorrhaging doctors as contracts came up for renewal and the young MBA's in corporate headquarters in Richmond and Nashville told these doctors to "take it or leave it" and most of the doctors left. All of these practices closed, save Oncology.

But some months before these practices fell off the cliff, the CEO called the doctors from across the street into her office to "open lines of communication" so the doctors could send the hospital more patients. One of the doctors said, well, the corporation was undermining the health of the hospital by dismantling the practices which fed the hospital.

The CEO replied, "Well, I don't want to hear about any of that. That's not my problem. My problem is I haven't been able to meet a budget in the hospital for 3 years." 

"Well, but when you lose a single endocrinologist, you lose $850,000 worth of lab fees which your hospital lab gets from doing the studies he sends in. So that's a loss to your budget." 

"That's not my job," the CEO said."I don't control the practices."

Everyone laughed. The CEO, by this time,  had been called, "Ms. Thatsnotmyjob," 
among the doctors. She, famously, refused to allow her name or picture to be used in the hospital website or in any of the promotional material because, she said, she didn't want to get hate mail at her home mail box. She wanted to remain the anonymous head of the hospital. Don't bring me problems. Just give me my $400K.

"Well, you asked us here to discuss improving communication and the first thing you do when we try to tell you something is to tell us you don't want to hear about it."

We could all see so clearly what this woman, whose job it was to see this,  could or would not see.  But didn't matter. She still got her salary.

What could she have done?  Well, her predecessor had called up the powers that were at headquarters in Nashville and raised a howl. "You are killing the practices that feed my hospital!" he had railed. "If you want the system to work, you can't cut it into pieces, and bleed it dry and  expect the heart to keep beating. These parts are all connected. You are creating silos."

This sort of thing must happen at all sorts of companies, from small to large.  When the CEO's and their minions in the hierarchy at GM and VW failed, they were not fired or punished. 

And workers below can see all this, can see what is not working and yet they take home the small paychecks while the fools at the top continue to thrive. To the underlings, the people they can see in the upper 1% do not deserve to be there. 

That, too, is part of the "system is rigged" story.