Alex Pretti Is Still Dead

And so is Renee Good.

But who can remember?

So is that kid in the photo from Kent State, lying in the street, shot  by National Guard on campus. That kid was not even in the protest, just walking by.

(For that matter, so was the black man in the photo of the the police dog which became famous.)

This is what state terrorism, in other words, state totalitarianism, looks like.

Sieg!

Heil!

At the Democratic "forum" in Portsmouth last week no questions were asked of the six Democrats seeking the nomination to run for Congress about Alex Pretti or Renee Good. Last month's news. (Actually, February's news.) So, ICE, government murders caught on video, not really a topic any more. That was so last February. "Qualified immunity," they call it. Police are above the law. Police are the law. They were just following orders. The Democrats do not debate any of this in their "forums." The Democrats here in New Hampshire do not debate. They have forums, which sounds less confrontational. And the last thing we want in New Hampshire is confrontation. Or discord. Or to be reminded that maybe, just down the road, ICE will construct a "detention center." Arbeit Macht Frie. Nobody's seen ICE round these parts lately, anyway. No way they might come back. And for damn sure, nobody wants to be reminded of all that unpleasantness.

Or, for that matter: Remember Ukraine? Remember when we were upset about the Russians trying to do to Ukraine what the Israelis did to Gaza? So unpleasant. Better to not talk about it. 

Remember her?

 

You May Say That I Ain't Free

So, oh, well. Move on to the next outrage. The CDC refuses to publish a report showing the most recent COVID vaccine reduced hospitalizations. The US Navy is stopping ships as part of the war against Iran nobody voted for. Secretary of Treasury defends bribes from Qatar to the Trump family. What are a couple of deaths of some Midwestern middle class people, really? 

But It Don't Worry Me

Just bury my heart at Minneapolis and move on.

What?

Custer died for our sins. Who did Alex Pretti and Renee Good die for?

Me Worry?

Don't be a martyr.

As the Bard said,

Don't follow leaders

Watch the parkin' meters.

Look out kid

They keep it all hid

Better jump down a manhole

Light yourself a candle.

The price of bread may worry some
But it don’t worry me
Tax relief may never come
But it don’t worry me

Economy’s depressed, not me
My spirit’s high as it can be
And you may say that I ain’t free
But it don’t worry me

It don’t worry me
It don’t worry me
You may say that I ain’t free
But it don’t worry me

They say this train don’t give out rides
Well, it don’t worry me
The whole world is taking sides
But it don’t worry me

'Cause in my empire life is sweet
Oh, just ask any beau you meet
And life may be a one-way street
But it don’t worry me

It don’t worry me
It don’t worry me
You may say that I ain’t free
But it don’t worry me

--Keith Carradine, "Nashville" (the movie)

Guillermo Rodriguez Cringe

 

As a bone fide Youtube addict and a fan (mostly) of Jimmy Kimmel, who is the most effective Trump defiant late night comedian left standing, now that Stephen Colbert has been run out of town, the Phantom finds himself in a peculiar and disorienting position.

Kimmel is wonderful when skewering Trump, but he has this bizarre, disturbing twitch in the form of a short, portly, determinedly vapid "sidesick," whose range of responses whenever Kimmel turns to him and asks, "Isn't that right, Guillermo?" covers the space all the way from A to B.  

Guillermo responds, almost no matter what the question, with a sprightly, "That's right, Jimmy!" and claps his hands and beams brightly as if he has just been told he has won the nursery school prize for precocious behavior. 

What is most disturbing is the look behind his eyes which clearly tells you he has no idea what is going on and he is desperate to cover up that void of understanding with a laugh so pathetic it could deflate blimps. 

When I first started watching Kimmel, years ago, I thought Guillermo was one of those Down's syndrome kids who load up groceries into cars outside supermarkets, but he clearly does not have Down's and most Down's kids function at an intellectual level way higher than Guillermo. And, in any case, those kids are doing useful service, and nobody feels sorry for them because they are doing a service, most often cheerfully, and we are all happy to see them thriving.

But Guillermo is an object of pity, or should be, and his incongruous laugh, as he clearly is almost never in on the joke, is so pitiable it is dreadfully sad. 

It's as if Kimmel has found a really low functioning mentally retarded (--oh, sorry, politically incorrect--cognitively challenged) child and Kimmel is making him the butt of jokes by asking him if he gets Jimmy's point, which poor Guillermo never does, but then responds with a bright faced, "Thaaat's right, Jimmy!" and everyone in the audience laughs and claps and Guillermo thinks he's done good, and is very pleased with himself.

It is beyond cringe worthy, and it is completely baffling.

Why is Guillermo on that stage?

Why is it okay we are laughing at him, not with him?

On Reddit, people describe this as "racist," but the Phantom thinks they are wrong. We are not laughing at Guillermo because he is  Hispanic, or because he speaks with an accent. He's not funny because he is representing some idea of a stupid Mexican. Spanish accents are not stupid. Sophia Vergara has a Spanish accent, but she is sly, funny and enormously attractive. Guillermo is not sly, or funny or even attractive. He is just lost at sea, every night, clinging to a stool on the stage, wondering when the roof will fall in on him. He is perpetually confused, and unable to get the joke. We are not seeing him as a representative of Mexico. We are seeing him as a representative of a person of no intelligence, but his dumb and dumber affect is not sharp enough to be funny. 

He is more like a cuddly Labrador. No, he doesn't have a Lab's intelligence. He is more like an eager to please, anxious, child.  So he desperately clings to Jimmy, hoping Jimmy will never turn on him.

We are asked to laugh at him because he is not smart enough to get the joke, which strikes the Phantom as simply cruel, the ultimate in what mean girls do to the outsider, as they all laugh as someone or something, and the outsider laughs too, hoping to be accepted as part of the group, but everyone can see the outsider hasn't the foggiest about what is funny, and can never be accepted as anything but the stupid kid. So the mean girls get to ridicule the object of their scorn and they get to ridicule the object which tries to join the scorn club, but never can. 

Very disturbing.

Thinking Alike: Fauvism or Just Color?

 

Gaugain lived with Van Gogh for a short time, until Van Gogh went truly stark raving mad, but both men agreed Van Gogh learned a lot about color from Gaugain.

Gabrielle Munter learned about color from Kandinsky, and the Fauvism experiment of Matisse and De Rain reflected the use of saturated color, said to express emotion rather than to reflect reality had its day.

But what of the man who paints as a hermit, who has not hung out with any of these artists, although their work is now available to anyone with a computer, but what of the guy who simply paints and then is told, "Oh, that's like Munter. Go check her out."? 

If he has never seen Munter or Matisse's Fauvism phase or DeRain, can an artist have "unconsciously" absorbed the elements by simply seeing their downstream effects?

Painters, for generations, were taught to paint by sending them to museums and plopping them down before the work of a master and instructing them to copy. The sight of those students was commonplace. That was not considered plagiarism, but learning.

In the March 10 New Yorker, Anthony Lane writes about plagiarism in music--Did George Harrison unconsciously plagiarize a three note riff from "He's So Fine," for his "My Sweet Lord," as a judge later wrote that he did?

If we unconsciously plagiarize three notes, or a style of short sentences or long sentences connected by "and's" and "but's" should we be sued and chastised, sued and said to have expropriated, acted unfairly? 

And what is language but imitation? And what is the difference between imitation and appropriation?

Of course artificial intelligence "learns" by reviewing the work of others, and incorporating that into an essay. Is that plagiarism? When we learn language as a two year old, are we not plagiarizing other people's thoughts and words? Are we not doing as we learn new languages just what AI is doing? 

Somehow, the visual arts seem less bound by the idea of plagiarism. In fact, the ability of an artist to render a "likeness" of a human face or a scene has been celebrated as a skill and as art.  Then photography came along and really stole images. Now, people argue about the rights of a sidewalk photographer to photograph someone without their permission. Some primitives, seeing a photograph were aghast and claimed the photographer had stolen their souls.

Sometimes, for fun, it's an exercise to simply see where people arrive, even if the road there is not clear.

So now, at the risk of displaying paintings which resemble each other in a way some may stamp "plagiarism," the Phantom provides:

Youngblood

DeRain

Youngblood

DeRain

Youngblood

Matisse

Youngblood

Youngblood

Matisse

Youngblood

Matisse

Youngblood

Youngblood

DeRain

Youngblood

DeRain

Youngblood

Gaugain

Munter

Youngblood

Munter  

Youngblood

Gaugain

Munter

Youngblood

On Marrying A Princeton Man

 

Susan Patton, Princeton '77, wrote a letter to the Princetonian campus newspaper in 2013 advising women to find their husbands in the fertile pastures of the Princeton campus because they would never again find the concentration of men worthy of them, men intelligent, driven, competent, daring and quality enough to qualify as  spouse material.

Happy Hunting Grounds

Of course, uproar ensued, 

What she was saying was unromantic, of course, but to her mind, eminently practical--as a matchmaker in the 19th century Jewish shtetls might have said, you are looking for quality and potential. Love is just so hopelessly romantic and really, a big con.

Ms. Patton argued that once women left Princeton to swim in a sea diluted by lesser lights, and pursued a career there would be far diminished chances of meeting Mr. Right.

Susan Patton, Princeton '77

The storm she provoked had much to do with the idea that the Ivy League, and not just the Ivy League, but Princeton, was peopled by people who thought themselves superior to others much as British aristocracy thought itself peopled by superior people selected in the case of the Brits not by meritocracy but by bloodlines, which, as in race horses, simply bred for the proper traits. The Brits thought themselves selected by God; the Princeton crowd was selected by the SAT exam.

Fiddler on the Roof: Celestial Match-making

Of course, she was writing at a time when Michelle Obama (Princeton '85)  was calling the White House home, and she managed to fine a pretty good husband who did not go to Princeton, but then again, she was Black and somehow I do not think Ms. Patton was thinking much about Black Princeton women when she gave her advice.

Ms. Patton insisted she was not saying marrying outside the faith, marrying someone say, from Harvard, was the problem; she was simply arguing that when you think about the places where you are likely to find a good husband, the chances are your best selection will occur while you are still at Princeton. 

It turns out the whole marry-a-Princeton-man was not entirely an amusing kerfuffle--some people actually took this seriously. And they were not thinking about playing the odds about where you are most likely to succeed in finding a good catch,  but they were morphing Princeton into a new tribal identity.

The Phantom's son mentioned a woman in his medical school class who had gone to Princeton, who had boyfriends amongst her Columbia P&S classmates, but she really never consider marrying anyone who had not graduated from Princeton.

"You're kidding, of course," the Phantom said.

"Not at all," the son reported. "She had gone to the magnet school at Montgomery Blair High School, then Princeton, now Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons, but marrying someone who had not gone to Princeton would be like a Jewess marrying outside her faith, just sacrilegious. In fact, this woman happened to be Jewish, but marrying a Jew meant nothing to her. The real proscription was against marrying a non-Princeton guy." 

And thinking in his own generation, the Phantom realized he had seen something which might have explained the mystifying behavior of a medical resident he knew.  He  had a girlfriend for whom everyone envied him-- a nurse. She was beautiful, whip smart and a sort of queen bee of the medical center, and she was crazy about him. But, in the end, he dropped her and married a woman who had gone to Princeton. The nurse went to an Ivy League nursing school, but in nursing, and, at any rate, not to Princeton. 

In 2013, when Ms. Patton was writing,  likely significantly more than half of the women graduating Princeton went on to graduate school, if not immediately, then eventually, where, very possibly another happy hunting ground for husbands, pre selected for quality might prevail. So maybe Princeton women did not need to pull the trigger quite so soon. They could, like the Phantom's son's friend, wait, go off to medical school, but they must always return to marry within the tribe.

Matchmaker...If I were a Rich Man!

When the Phantom went to college, age 17-22, he was in no frame of mind to consider marrying anyone; he was simply too young and inexperienced.  In fact, the very experience of having a college girlfriend convinced him marriage was a very unsound idea. As the years passed, it struck him that there was "love," or more accurately, women and sex, which had to do with desire, and sometimes even emotion, and then there was the marriage contract, where you negotiated with a woman for a long-term partnership which committed you to share child raising (a very expensive commitment), home buying, wealth building, vacation planning, heath care and obligations for family gatherings, weddings, funerals etc.

Women, it was pretty clear did not look at men, at least in the world of the hospital culture in which the Phantom lived, in the same way men looked at women. Men looked at women as sex objects, who got boring quickly if they turned out to be dumb. Women looked at men as a source of economic advancement, of social security, much the way women in Jane Austen's time did.  Among hospital women, there were more and less promising males--surgeons were going to be richer than physicians, and some specialists were going to be richer than others--better find a cardiologist than a pediatrician.

Which is not to say personality did not matter, or kindness or intelligence or humor, but basically women could find a lot more signs of all that in a guy who was going to be rich.

Terri Gibbs

So, there was the cult thing surrounding Princeton, but even if you were not captive of that particular oddity, the enduring, cross cultural dictate came down to money, as embodied in the hard edged ode from Terry Gibbs,  which echoed Marilyn Monroe's "Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend," but for Gibbs it was "Rich Man."

"My mamma said girl I can see that you're a woman

There's something that I want you to know

You got to get yourself a rich man

You got to marry you a rich man

You gotta live your life if you wanna be a wife

I know you got to have love

But it's just as easy lovin' you a rich man

You got to get yourself a rich man

If you're a poor man's wife

You'll live a poor man's life

You can never get your hands on a dime

And you can sing the blues

And you can pay your dues but you can never pay the rent on time

But there ain't no reason for doing without 

If you're married to the man who's got the dollar in his hand."

So, in one sense, Ms. Patton had it right: Marriage is not about romance, but it is a practical partnership with a person you project just might grow on you, but at least who won't bore you and leave you asking yourself: What did I get myself into here? 

What was I thinking? 

Ineffable: Knowing It When You See It

 "I cannot define obscenity, but I know it when I see it."

That line comes from Justice Potter Stewart's opinion in Jacobellis v Ohio, in which he held a movie in question was not "hard core pornography."

He did not actually use that exact phrase, but it has been a reasonable and widely used paraphrase ever since, as it says that some things are hard to define but that doesn't mean we cannot make a judgment.

Flower Bed Porch, Obadiah Youngblood

The same is very much true for paintings and music.

People make good livings writing and talking about artworks--what makes Van Gogh exceptional? I cannot say, but I know he is. 

Gabrielle Munter 

But the same is true for other artists, who in their own way are just as stunning, although less known.  Gabrielle Munter's paintings adorned the Phantom's previous blog post and they are wonderful, but why the Phantom is at a loss to explain.

Gabrielle Munter

So is Andre DeRain, whose paintings are shown with this post, and so is August Macke. 

Andre DeRain

Munter, Macke, DeRain were orbiting the art world in overlapping orbits, although how much each influenced the others is beyond Mad Dog's ken.  Munter lived for a time with Kadinsky, a Russian artist, who became her lover after he became her art teacher. 

Andre DeRain

They are all wonderful, and they bear a familial resemblance, but like siblings and cousins, they are distinct, not clones or twins.

Andre De Rain

Knowing What Good Is

Long before "Moneyball," John Madden, who coached the National Football League Oakland Raiders, caught my attention with a sort of rant as he was filling in some down time during a game. "You know," he said, "People think football players have to be big, intimidating guys, but really you can't win games with that. You need the quick, little guys who run so close to the ground the defensive lineman have trouble finding them; you need the big guys, sure, to protect the passer and to rush the passer, but you also need the gazelles, the wide receivers who if they weren't playing football might try out for ballet and you need a quarterback who can see the whole field and who can throw accurately sixty yards or fifteen. You can't just have one type. You need 'em all."

Gabrielle Munter 

Then came Michael Lewis's "Moneyball," where talent scouts talked about players and rated their likelihood of success not just by what they had done on their high school teams, but by how they looked, whether, as Billy Beane put it, "They look good in jeans."  In the movie adaptation, one scout doubts the prospects of a player because his girlfriend is homely. "Not even a five, I'd say. I mean guy with a girlfriend like that has no confidence."

There is no purer form of meritocracy than professional sports because you can actually keep score: You can track how the players you've selected actually perform, over time, with numbers.

Gabrielle Munter

Of course, what Moneyball demonstrated was that the people who were suppose to "know baseball" did not know what numbers to look at, which numbers were actually meaningful,  and they fell back into superstition, superficiality and gossip.

Two phone conversations highlighted the cluelessness of the men who select who gets into medical school have stuck with me: I had phoned a dean at Vanderbilt, where my son, who was a premedical student, was struggling with calculus and I remarked that in medical school I had never used calculus; beyond the final exam in calculus in college I have never seen any use for it,  and the only reason I could see it was included in the requirements set down by the American Association of Medical Colleges is that the guys on that committee got good grades in calculus and they were trying to select people who were like them. 

Gabrielle Munter

"Oh, no," the dean told me. "Math is the language of science. You have to be good at math."

"Excuse me," I asked, "But where did you go to medical school?"  He had not gone to medical school. He was a sociologist.

The other conversation was with a dean who guided undergraduate students at Wesleyan University.  I had phoned him because the son of a good friend had been told to take a year off after graduation before applying to medical school, and my friend did not understand that advice and neither did I.  My friend's son was not unusual in getting that advice: the dean at Wesleyan advised kids to take a year off after college, to work somewhere, in a lab, or even in the Park Service, before applying to medical school and the dean told me this was a good idea because it helped them mature, and to be sure medicine was really what they wanted. Wesleyan wanted only the very top students applying right out of college. 

"And," I observed, "Makes Wesleyan look good: I notice your catalogue says that 98% of your premeds graduate with an acceptance in medical school, but I can see now that high success rate is misleading, because you've already eliminated the kids who might not get in."

At Wesleyan, at least, the calculus course instructors provided the answers to the test questions before the exam, my friend's son told me, so calculus was not a gauntlet  tool used to eliminate hopeful premeds. 

Gabrielle Munter

Many, if not most medical students suffer from the imposter syndrome, when they arrive in medical school. They know they are not doctors, and they cannot quite imagine what they need to do to transform into doctors. In the old days, they got this sense of inadequacy reinforced in anatomy labs, in courses in microbiology, where an insane number of bacteria and viruses were served up to memorize.  Some, if they were lucky in the first two "preclinical years," discovered something they actually liked and were interested in, which gave them hope they might become a good neurologist or surgeon, even if they were not much good at memorizing the side effects of random drugs or the names of random bugs. 

But the point is, those who were guarding the gates, and those who were selecting for talent were simply not very good at their jobs, from college to early medical school. 

I had two conversations with deans which drove home this point. In college, I met with the dean who oversaw premedical students because I did not want to take a higher level calculus course. He told me I'd need to have that math to do the reading in my upper level courses. (He was a economist.) I replied that I had already taken those upper level courses and had not noticed any difficulty doing the reading, and, in fact, I had done well in those courses. At that point, he swiveled around in his desk chair, pulled out a drawer from his metal file cabinet (before computers), plucked out a chart and start thumbing through it. He was also the director of undergraduate admissions and he had my original application file from when I had applied three years earlier. 

"My God!" he gasped. "How did you ever even get in here?"

Gabrielle Munter

"I'm not the one to answer that," I replied. "But I've made it to the end of my junior year."

In fact, I refrained from saying, not wanting to antagonize this man who I needed for higher math dispensation, "And I've been on Dean's List every semester." The test scores this Dean had such faith in apparently were like the "he looks good in jeans" faith of the baseball scouts--really a form of a data free zone. 

The next dean conversation was less fraught. It was in fact, friendly. A medical school dean was driving me back to New York City from his Adirondack home, where he had invited five medical students. While the medical school did record grades for us, we were never told what  grades we had been awarded in the various courses. The medical school said it needed those grades so it could guide us where to apply for internships. "You were in the middle of the class, maybe just below the median,  your first two years," the dean told me, "But in your clinical years, you got honors in everything but Pediatrics. Hell, Fred Plum gave you honors, and  I can count on one hand the number of students who got honors in neurology over the past ten years. So, what got into you?"

I knew very well what had got into me, and it wasn't that I worked any harder in the clinical years.  It was the difference between multiple choice questions devised by microbiologists who asked if fungi had chitin in their cell walls and hematologists who asked you on rounds to tell them why a particular patient had anemia, what the different possibilities were and how to figure out what pertained to this patient.

The wonder to me, then and now, is how we get so many really talented people flourishing in medicine. It seems to me we get good people despite, rather than because of, the talent scouts.

Gabrielle Munter

The thing about medicine is it is a very broad arena. Like the football team, you need all sorts of different talents: the heart surgeon likely will make a terrible psychiatrist and vice versa. 

The other thing is that while you can read law, or you can read history, but you cannot just read medicine. You have to do medicine, and for that you need an organization of teachers who know medicine.

The next generation is going to be interesting. Colleges have noticed that the talent is flowing toward money. The "top students" (if we can believe the colleges even know who these are) want to go into finance, Goldman Sacks, not medicine, or even law.

These 18 to 22 year old kids are sophisticated enough to see that doctors in America now, have drifted into the social strata of British doctors: Mostly upper middle class, making $90,000 to $200,000 a year, depending on specialty, which is about what a McDonald's franchise owner or an enterprising plumber can make. 

And as this reality has sunk in, medical school classes have shifted toward majority females, who are likely to not be the sole bread winners for their families, who want to limit their hours at work and maximize time off. Women choose specialties like Radiology, Opthalmology,  Anesthesiology, Dermatology (the ROAD to happiness) which have fixed schedules, limited on call and which happen to be among the best paid.

Some doctors, in some specialties make much higher salaries, some in the millions, but the real money in medicine is, as it is in so much of industry, in administration. The managers take care of themselves first.

The current generation of doctors is not self employed. Ninety percent are working for large corporations--Partners, Beth Israel Deaconess, Mass General. They are employees getting W-2 forms. The entrepreneurial doctor, who employs workers, and who manages his own practice is gone with the dinosaurs. 

This may not be all bad--it's not clear medical care has suffered because it is no longer provided by shop keepers.

But, it is different and the talent has followed the money, however you discern "talent."