Get a Life

A longtime friend, a woman who is now a multimillionaire, one of the brightest women I know, recently remarked that people who chat on blogs, "need a life."  Having read through Reddit progressive comments, Huffington Post articles and comments, the comments section of various New York Times sections, I thought I understood what she was talking about.

The gods have their own problems, and right and wrong have nothing to do with it

During my residency, one of my friends, Michael,  was the son of the owner of a grocery store, and he had no interest in discussing politics or political theory or philosophy about how things ought to be. What he cared about was how money is made.

The war in Vietnam was still going on when I first met Michael, and he got quickly bored when friends would talk about the war, the injustice of sending the poor off to fight the war, while the better connected often got student deferments, or assignments to the National Guard, which in those days remained stateside.  All he cared about was he had his deferment. 

When fiberoptic technology arrived and meant the inside of the gut could now be visualized directly with endoscopes and colonoscopes, he quickly realized this was a surgical procedure which reimbursed generously, and for which no formal surgical training was required. Surgical residencies took five to seven years after medical school graduation, but colonoscopy could be learned in six months.  Rather than hanging around to do the typical year of training after internship, Michael learned he could begin his specialty training that second year, a "fellowship" and if he hustled, he could spend most of that time perfecting his skill with the colonoscope. Two years after finishing his internship, he was done with his fellowship and he purchased a colonoscope and opened his practice, with a mortgage on his first office and a cash cow in the colonoscope. 

Over the years, I would get phone calls from him asking about something he had read about in the "New England Journal of Medicine" but he was not interested so much in the science as in the investment potential of a new drug or procedure. 

He, too, became a millionaire. 

Michael would not be interested in whether or not it was moral or just to exclude Muslims from America, or whether or not calling illegal Mexican wetbacks "rapists" was just.  He was simply not much interested in things which did not affect him directly, or which were unrelated to making money. 

I don't know Donald Trump.  But I suspect, having watched him interviewed, he is like Michael.  A reporter asked him which bathroom he would make a transexual use at the Trump Hotel, and he shrugged and said, "Whichever one he wants to use."  He simply did not see this as a question of principle.  When asked how he could justify excluding Muslims as a class, rather than as individuals, he looked confused.  Issues like "group guilt"  are too abstract for the man. What he wants to know is how what he does might affect profit.

Like his supporters, Trump has simply never wanted to learn about constructing an argument using evidence, logic, dialectics. He just wants to make money and to use money.  Like Trump, his supporters are bored by the questions which inspire such passion in the readers of Huff Post and Reditt Progressive.  Is it right that 40 million Americans don't have health insurance?  Is abortion right?  When does something cross the line between abortion and infanticide?  Is it right for the government to force parents to vaccinate their children before allowing those children in schools? Is public school a right or even a good idea?  Is it right that 10 percent of the upper strata of wealthy people own 90% of the wealth of the country? Ought we try to change the distribution of wealth? 

The only question among all these which is of any interest to the me-thinkers is:  How would the answer affect my own personal wealth? 

Is it right for a man running for public office to vilify his opponent and claim she is a criminal and then refuse to offer any evidence for that charge? Well, how does that affect me?  What do I care what he says? Is it right for a man running for public office to respond to a question about his bankruptcy by calling the journalist who asks it a despicable failure as a journalist who is a liar and corrupt?  Well, how does his attack on a reporter or on the media in general affect my bottom line? Not at all. 

Then what do I care? 

I suspect America has drunk the Kool Aid prepared for it by Ayn Rand--you take care of yourself, and the country will take care of itself.
My father lived long enough to retire and spend the winter in Florida. He liked the weather and the fresh orange juice and he would call every Sunday and ask what the weather was like up north and I always emphasized how icy and miserable it was in Washington, D.C., which delighted him.  But he could not abide the men and women who he met around the swimming pool at his condominium. "What bores!" he would say. "They never talk about anything but money. They have no other interests."

My grandfather had no money but he had lots of interests. He walked down the four flights in the tenement he lived in in New York City and, picking up two newspapers at the news stand, he proceeded to the park. When I was visiting, I'd accompany him.  In the park, on the benches, sat a dozen of his friends, most of whom were retired on their union pensions and within minutes, animated arguments would begin, in whatever language was most convenient, never English. I would listen, picking out words which had English cognates, and every once in a while, someone would pat me on the head and say, "Schoner kopf" to reassure me they were all really friends, just arguing. Walking back home, I asked my grandfather what they had been arguing about that day, "Oh, which newspapers are good and which are rubbish, whether the Ukrainians are worse than the Russians or the Poles, who was worse to the workers, Rockefeller of Carnegie. Politics."

I guess my millionaire friend would say they should get a life. All they did was sit on the benches with each other, these comrades in arms who had fought for their union when fighting for a union meant getting beaten up, jailed and threatened. Now they were old and there were still fights worth fighting, things to make your blood boil and get your juices flowing. Somehow, I think they have a life. 

The Feminist Bank Teller

Reading "Thinking Fast and Slow" has been fun, but frustrating. Of course the author,  Daniel Kahneman, deals in areas we might now call "psychology" or even "philosophy" but most often this is called a problem of "logic." Consider the problem he and his colleague, Amos Tversky, gave test subjects:

Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations.

Which is more probable?

1. Linda is a bank teller?

2.Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.

If you answer #1, you get the question right and go to Harvard. If you answer #2, you get the question wrong and wind up selling tires at "Town Fair Tire" the rest of your life.

This is because you got fooled by all the information they gave you which developed a picture of the woman in your mind, but the question was not about what you had pieced together about her, but it was about probability.  If you had broken the question down into "which is more likely, that one thing is true about a person or that two things are true about that person?" well then everyone would have said, well one thing is more likely than two.

But where's the fun in that?

In fact, in literature and all sorts of performing arts, one small detail about a person is used to stand for a more complete picture of the person. Oh, she's the type who wears love beads and a flower in her hair, earth mother. From that you can expect a whole raft of things about her, that she is probably going to be tolerant of gay marriage, may bake her own bread, drive a hybrid car, wear T shirts with  peace symbols printed on them.

We all understand there are risks in making these assumptions, but we use them as a short cut to understanding more about a person than we have time to elaborate. 

But the logical problem here is called "conjunction fallacy" in which the mistake is to assume that a specific conditions are more probable than a single general one.

This is the sort of thing which college board exams have thrived upon, have built a billion dollar business on. And on these sorts of games, our "meritocracy" has been built. 

And you can say, well the guy who sees through to that answer, and gets it right while so many get it wrong is a smart guy and deserves to go to Harvard, but I beg to differ.

I would say the girl I knew in high school, who was so literal minded that when we were assigned, as a group, to explore the use of "roads" in "A Tale of Two Cities," she went through the book from page one to page 401, and found the word "road." And this was in the days before computers. She got into Harvard (then Radcliffe.)  The other three members of our study group in senior A.P. English class stared at her, stunned, as she rifled through her twenty pages of notes. Finally, I said, "Uh, Martha, I think what the real questions was how the idea of the road was used as a metaphor." 

She looked at me, vexed and said, "No, the questions says, 'Trace the use of roads through the text.' And that's what I've done."

"But, to what end?" I persisted. "Why you want to know that the word 'road' appeared on page 145?"

"Because," Martha said, exasperated with my inferior intellect, and my slacker ways, my unwillingness to do the slow, tedious thing, "That was the assignment!"

I have no doubt Martha got that feminist bank teller question (or questions like it) correct on the SAT.

What is a Symbionese?

I would have spent precious minutes during that test day dreaming about other attributes of the feminist teller: what sort of necklace she might be wearing under her bank teller suit, what her living room looked like.  Did she have something going with a lover who planned to rob the bank?  What would she have done if Patty Hearst had stepped into the bank with the Symbionese Liberation Army,  holding that assault rifle? Would she have lept over the counter and screamed, "I'm with you" ?  I'd have been day dreaming about that bank teller  for ten minutes and not getting on to the next question.

Not a bank teller, but way more interesting.

In fact, I would have argued to ignore the stuff they fed you about the bank teller and to say all we can know with any certainty or with more certainty about her is she's a bank teller is wrong. But no, the authors would say. The question is not really about her, it's about the probability that she is one thing being greater than the probability she is two. We are playing a game here and I have forgotten the rules, and made up my own game with my own rules to make the game more interesting.

Now, where was I? Is she a feminist?

The fact is, you will say, I don't belong at Harvard, and you are correct.

Stephen Jay Gould

But, then I tell you Stephen Jay Gould said, "I know the statement is least probable, yet a little homunculus in my head continues to jump up and down, shouting at me--'but she can't just be a bank teller' read the description.'"

Ah, now you are not quite so dismissive of me, are you?

A moment before Stephen Jay Gould weighed in, I'm just a loser who couldn't play the game. Now that I've got the big guy on my side, well, maybe I'm not so stupid.

And that's what I mean by the corruption of meritocracy.

When we have institutions filled with the "best and the brightest" we had better be sure we know what constitutes the best and the brightest. 

You may say, well Harvard was good enough at identifying talent to select Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg. But I would say actually, Harvard did not select them so much as they selected Harvard, because they could have gone anywhere and they thought Harvard was probably the best college. 

When we ponder how and why the sixty million plus losers out there came to reject the powers that be, the vaunted winners in the meritocracy of the American delusion, we might go back to the experience of those folks when they were sixteen, seventeen in high school getting told they could go no farther along the road to the top of the economic pyramid, because they did not make the cut, did not answer the questions correctly. 

Andrew Hacker

Andrew Hacker has argued the same thing in "The Math Myth" persuasively, persistently, patiently, but he's been largely ignored. Too many people are making too much money from a perverted system of testing for merit. As we used to say as premedical students, if calculus was not required to go to medical school they'd have to cut the math faculty by 60%. 

Somehow, the perversion of the selection process all along the line, from school days, to factory and industry and corporate advancement has finally caught up with this country, to the point where enough people have said, "I've got no faith in this system. Let's put a dummy like me in charge, and see if we actually do any worse."

I've got the best words. I come from good genes. 

Who Really Counts in America

Thomas Edsall, who writes for the New York Times, has been talking for some time now about how the voting bases of the Democratic and Republican parties have flipped--the Republicans now claiming the "working man" and the Democrats now claiming the professionals, the upper middle class, the educated who used to be called the "country club Republicans," rich enough to own big houses, expensive cars, send their kids to private schools, but not necessarily in the upper 1%.

Edsall

His most recent article noted a study by the Brookings Institution about the counties won by HRC vs those won by Trump and it was "found" that the counties which voted, often overwhelmingly for HRC were the "high productivity" counties where 64% of the country's GDP and economic activity occurs, while the counties carried by Trump accounted for only 36% of the nations "productivity" and economic activity.

So basically, what Brookings was saying is what most of us Democrats have said privately: it was the losers, the rural rubes, the ignorant and idle, the work a day resentful under toads who voted Trump in. These Trump voters are marginalized and not as important to the vitality and vigor of our economy or our national life.  And here you have a Brookings study to verify this belief, to validate it for us.

But, as is so often the case, it's the letters (or in 21st century lingo, the "comments" section)  which provokes the most thought. Consider this response:

Jonathan

is a trusted commenter NYC 1 day ago 

Part of the problem is that the higher incomes and salaries are to some extent artificial. Affluent professionals have used their political power to create monopolies that channel the money to themselves. Doctors, lawyers, and bureaucrats collect salaries that are much higher than the salaries of those people out in the hinterlands who produce necessary goods like food, lumber, steel, and fuel. So when we say these people in these counties produce lots of GDP, we are counting many things that most people consider worthless as highly valuable. If I do a Sarbanes-Oxley analysis of the general ledger system, and file it in 20 white binders that no one reads, the $200,000 I am paid to produce this these valuable goods counts just as much as the $200,00 worth of wheat a farmer grows in his fields in North Dakota. is this right?

I would also like to address the supposed 'skill downsizing'. If you read books like Academically Adrift, you will discover that many 'college graduates' know little or nothing. A study by the Department of Education found that about 4% of recent 'college graduates' were functionally illiterate, and another 20% read at the fifth-grade level. For them, serving coffee to customers IS the right job.

What he is doing is to question the underlying assumptions of the Brookings scholars--I had accepted the definition of "high productivity" counties because I wanted to believe that counties like Montgomery County, Maryland, Westchester County New York,  or some of the high tech counties in California are where the energetic, educated, innovative drivers of our economy and our nation's well being live. And those superior people are who ought to be selecting our political leadership.

But as Jonathan from NYC points out, the work many of these folks do may actually be "worthless" to the nation, valuable only to the private bank accounts of those doing this work. We are, in some cases at least, counting GDP (gross domestic product) merely as dollars rather than actually examining the value of what is produced.  Would anyone actually miss the output of a McKenzie consultant, or a medical researcher whose work has thus far not affected health or even expanded knowledge?  Filing a report in 20 white binders may make the author richer, but would anyone but him actually be affected by that? This is an important, maybe even a profound question. I certainly see people working in my own organization daily who, if they simply disappeared tomorrow would hardly be missed, and yet they generate GDP and spend money to help the economy. If you gave them a salary but did not require them to show up for work, their worth to the economy would be unchanged. 

There is much about our economy which is dysfunctional.  This includes the corruption of the idea of "qualification." We all love the idea of a meritocracy because it arose in opposition to people given jobs because of accidents of birth, but qualifications and merit have been so corrupted the idea of merit has been fatally wounded.  Electricians or veterinary assistants who have to solve polynomial equations and pass irrelevant and meaningless math tests to be licensed. Doctors who face "board exams" which do not insure or improve quality of medical care but simply support the industry of examinations which support CEO's making millions.

Raging against the machine

One might see Trump's election as a revolt against the idea of "qualified." He was "disqualified" from the Presidency according to many pundits. He didn't have HRC's qualifications. Well, the voters had other ideas about what constitutes a qualification.  In your eye, they said. We've had it with your idea of merit, qualifications and deserving. 

Under valued contributors to the GDP

While there is much to decry in the ascendancy of the underclass, I hope at least, this election might help clear away some rotten timbers in the walls of the frigate of establishment hierarchies. 

What Makes Democracy? What Makes a Nation Great?

Two Harvard professors wrote an article in Sunday's NY Times, "Is Our Democracy in Danger?" 
One salutary effect of Donald Trump is he has freed me to say this:  These pundits may be Harvard professors, but they don't know what they are talking about.


Professor Steven Levitsky has "studied" Latin American countries where they adopted the U.S. Constitution and nevertheless saw a collapse of democratic government. Professor Daniel Ziblatt studied failed governments in Italy and they have "identified" warning signs of the displacement of democratic rule by authoritarian regimes and they see the signs now, in Donald Trump and in the "alarming glimpse at political life in the absence of partisan restraint."

Throughout the article they make the case that the concept of a loyal opposition has been essential to the functioning of our republic, with reference to "The Broken Branch" by Tom Mann and Norm Ornstein, which documents how legislators from the two parties fail to cooperate in ways they once did.

These two men clearly spend the majority of their time reading books and papers by other academics, but they do not read much history, and they don't get out of Cambridge much. When you read about the way Jefferson and Adams behaved, you can be reassured the country can survive. Adams made it illegal to criticize the government--the Sedition Act. Jefferson tried to get his former Vice President convicted of treason, not once but several times.

It's true, we just haven't seen his particular brand of idiocy since Joe McCarthy, at least not in an office holder above the level of Congress. We have seen lots of Congressmen who are at least as stupid (e.g. Louie Gohmert of Texas, and any Republican member of the House Select Committee on Investigations.)

The fact is, it is the exceptional time when government attracts really smart, talented people in any significant numbers.

But there is hope.  I've been reading David McCullough's book about the building of the Brooklyn Bridge and watching "Nashville" Robert Altman's masterpiece about, well, about America and what makes it what it is.

America  has never been "great" in the sense that Finland or Sweden are great, but it has been great in the way America can be great.

"Nashville" was released in 1975, just as the Vietnam war was winding down, 7 years after the assassinations of 1968 and it follows a politician whose words you hear but you never see. He is a right winger with all sorts of conspiracy beliefs, a proto Tea Party type who believes government is run by inept lawyers and who believes the Catholic Church ought to be taxed. The sound truck broadcasting his homey words weaves through scenes filled with a cast of 24 characters who are trying to eek out a living or maintain their place in the world of Nashville, Tennessee--successful Country and Western stars, wannabes, no talents, unknown talents, people sleeping in cars, or in rooming houses, groupies sleeping with anyone in a band.

There are so many things about "Nashville" which make one wonder and think but one theme is about the meaning of competence and talent.  The one political operative you see is played by Michael Murphy and he is slick and manipulative and focused but he is in no sense talented. He is a grifter in a suit, like most politicians.


Haven Hamilton (Henry Gibson) is an unctuous country star, married to a woman you never see, but accompanied by his "companion" played by Barbara Baxley.
Baxley's character  worshiped the Kennedy brothers,  and she  worked for their election in Tennessee and still burns with resentment at their defeat in that state, and she  knows the exact vote count for Kennedy and for Nixon in the 1960 campaign. You look at her, at how deeply she felt about the Kennedys, and you are able to see the depth of feeling of people who feel so strongly either for Trump or against him. There is something about certain public figures which resonates in some deep, dark places in the souls of their countrymen. But watching "Nashville" you can appreciate the deep absurdity of this sort of identification, of this sort of hero worship and of the opposite.


People were weeping in Havana when Castro died. They wept when Kennedy died. Citizens in the audience invest in the actors on the stage-- who are really no more than ideas to them--with great personal meaning.


What is so mesmerizing about "Nashville," written by Joan Tewkesbury, is the depiction of clearly different levels of competence and talent.
One tip: watch the DVD with the captions--the dialogue is often lost behind ambient noise.
At one end of the competence spectrum is Sueleen Gay (Gwen Welles) who cannot carry a tune. There are the merely competent who parlay what small talent they have into disproportionate success, like Haven Hamilton, who barks out  maudlin pieces pitched to pander pablum.  And then there is the genuine talent, Barbara Jean (Ronee Blakeley),  who is simply head and shoulders above everyone else, but she is so neurotic she is barely functional.


The really stunning experiences come when people you've been following, but who have not actually been allowed to speak (or sing) in any significant way, finally get their moments.  So Keith Carradine (Tom) rocks the screen when he gets his chance, but most surprisingly is Mary, the wife of the trio's leader, who has fallen in love with Tom, opens her mouth and finally performs at an impromptu scene in a club, and she is really good, jaw droppingly good.  But, of course, the biggest surprise of all is Albuquerque (Barbara Harris), who has been trying to be heard the entire movie and finally gets her chance to belt out the tune you've been barely aware of, which has wafted through scene after scene, "It Don't Worry Me," which was actually written by Keith Carradine.


Of course, what this song says, what the movie says, is in America, we have not been free, at least for long intervals, but it doesn't really matter to people who are consumed in their own problems, trying to just get by or to just maintain. It don't worry me that I ain't free. 


Beyond all this, is the fact that Christina Raines, who plays Mary, in real life,

gave up her stage career at the age of 40, went to nursing school and works now as a dialysis nurse. She gave up one form of competence for another.

And that brings us to the Brooklyn Bridge. What "Nashville" tells us is it really doesn't matter how bizarre the people at the top are, as long as the masses have people who keep the wheels turning and the machines oiled. These are the necessary but not the sufficient elements in society.  For a nation to flourish, it does need leadership, competent leadership.  The men who conceived of and built the Brooklyn bridge John Roebling and his son, Washington Roebling, were indispensable. 

We can limp along without a bridge to Brooklyn, without Medicare, without Social Security, without health insurance for a third of our people, but we need smart, thoughtful and competent leaders to get the nation, together, to greatness.
If you want to look for historical precedents, there is Germany during the Third Reich. There you had a highly competent population, lots of engineers who were able to get the machines of war moving and sustained against overwhelming odds. The trouble was, the leader, der Furher, took all that competence, that well engineered machine and drove it straight off a cliff.


In our presence circumstances, we may be seeing something different, the well oiled machine broken by a group of incompetents heading the important departments of Health and Human Services, Defense,  Interior and Energy, unrestrained by a feckless President. 

240 Year Experiment

These imperfectly United States of America started hurtling into history 240 years ago this coming July 4, 2016, but they did not become a nation immediately. In fact the nation was not really any sort of political moiety until it ratified a constitution in 1789, and some would argue, not until the Bill of Rights was added. 

And, of course, there was the matter of the fatal flaw contained in Article One, Section 2 which enshrined slavery with that oblique but clear phrase, "three fifths of all other persons," those all other persons were not "Indians," nor were they "free persons" or "those bound to service for a term of years," thereby distinguishing different classes of personhood:  at the top free persons, followed by indentured servants (semi free, or projected to one day be free) followed by "Indians" followed by "other persons" who could only be...slaves. 

Abigail Adams, speaking with Thomas Jefferson in Paris,--Jefferson, you remember, was bedding his slave woman, Sally Hemmings-- and Abigail challenged him about slavery, which she found repugnant. She managed her Massachusetts farm without slaves. Why did a man as enlightened, engaging, charming as Jefferson embrace the anathema of slavery, human bondage?

The founding fathers left that ticking time bomb in the Constitution and launched  the nation with it still ticking,  which was left to Abraham Lincoln to face, in the second American revolution. Some have argued the United States did not become a real, unified nation until the Civil War, when "these United States" plural became, "the United States," singular.

We cannot know what Jefferson, Washington, Hamilton, Adams, Burr or Madison were really like. We cannot know what Donald Trump or Barack Obama are really like and we have a lot more data on these modern figures. But really, for most Americans, all we have is television images.  Even if we press their flesh briefly, we do not know these men.

We can read the letters of our founding fathers, and in that sense we, those few of us who can actually hold these fragile papers in hand, can know these men better than we can know people from television. But we can only imagine what their real passions actually were. The men who wrote those letters in the 18th century knew they would likely be read by others beyond the addressee.  These are men who we know from fragments. We have not dined with them ourselves, gone hiking with them, spoken with them ourselves. They are images, perceptions, imaginings. 

One thing the musical "Hamilton" has allowed us to do is dream about what these men might have actually struggled with.  George Washington, for my part, comes alive in a way I had never imagined, torn, doubting, frustrated, but essentially decent in many ways. 

About George, however, I can never get over my visit to Mount Vernon, where I saw his marble crypt and down a dirt path, the graves of his slaves.

But the experience of imagining these men, and the nation they tried to forge, goes back to "Dead Poets Society" as Robin Williams and his students gaze through glass cases at old photographs of former students,  and try to imagine what passions lived in their breasts when they were young men.

All we can know is ourselves. 

In these dark days of Trump, we can know how imperfect and confused even our greatest men were, and that means we are not doing much worse today, in our confusion, in our inability to look through the mists which shroud the future. We can only be bold, move forward into the fog of the future, determined to live lives we will not be ashamed of when we think back on them, as we lie waiting to  die in some unknown future time. 

Moral Midgetry

Theresa D'Agostino sits across from Tommy Carcetti and his wife, and she tells him he needs to be more likeable. Carcetti has just eviscerated the police brass during a Baltimore City Council hearing, against DiAgostino's advice. The mayoral election is a year away and nobody is going to remember Carcetti's moment of triumph a year from now. He's shown his hand too soon.

All politicians are self righteous at some point, D'Agostino says, but that can sink your ship, if you're not smart about it.

Facts will help you in a court of law, but not in politics.  Kennedy had facts. Clinton had facts. Reagan couldn't have remembered a fact to save his life. But people liked Clinton and they liked Reagan. You stood in a room listening to them and they made you feel all warm inside. That's what wins elections.

I watched this scene from Season 3, an episode called "Moral Midgetry"  of "The Wire" this morning and had an eerie sensation. This episode aired a dozen years ago but watching it, I thought Theresa D'Agostino was speaking to Democrats today. 

The dated part of it was two women were telling this man he had to make people feel warm and fuzzy inside. These were women who wanted to see the soft side of the man.

The Donald knew something different. Yes, you have to make people feel, not think, if you want to get elected. But you don't have to appeal to the feminine side, if you want to be President.

So now the Righteous Right has come to power, has seized control of those nefarious government agencies, the EPA, the Departments of Energy, Interior, Defense, State and the CIA.  They did this because they spent years in the wilderness arguing their ideas, refining them.

This is what happens before people can seize power: Even Hitler spent time with his acolytes testing his material.

Mad Dog recommends liberals now do the same--retreat to our beer halls and watch the best depiction of any Dystopia in the world's literature, and discuss what has brought the world to this state, and think about what, if any, path exists for a way out.

Leave It To Beaver Days

Western Electric, Lucent, the IRS, Raytheon. Here in Essex County, Massachusetts those names ring out.
Those were the days in Essex County.
There were places all around the country where there was work. The war was over, the economy was booming and there was factory work which could be done by people who could read and write and do basic computations, i.e. high school graduates. You could make a living with that, have a life, have a family.

Waitresses on roller skates

I met a 77 year old woman today, very put together in her faux leopard jacket from Marshalls and her newly coiffed hair. She had her daughter, her only child, at age 17.
Her father worked for Western Electric an she followed him to that company.
She had a long career there, as it got bought out by Lucent.
She had four sisters and three brothers.

The government paid for their schooling, although she did not think of her public high school as a government freebie. Her father paid his taxes, after all.
Her life was not easy. She worked hard. But her mother could stay at home and they took vacations.

Way before Ben and Jerry's

I meet people like her daily.

Remember these good old days?

All they know is their kids are not going to make more money than they did, and in fact a lot of their kids, in their 20's and 30's are moving back in with them as jobs dry up.

45 cents for a 3 course meal

These are not people who listen to NPR or watch the PBS News Hour.

They don't know why times are tough.

The work has gone overseas is all they know.

Haverhill and Methuen and North Andover are still mostly white, but Lawrence is a town which has turned.  You can walk down the street in Lawrence and hear Spanish and Arabic and Vietnamese and never hear a word of English for blocks.

Beaver Cleaver was killed in Vietnam. June Cleaver developed a problem with alcohol and father Cleaver smoked and got lung cancer and died years ago.
Peggy Sue got married and Buddy Holly died in an airplane crash.

Madonna of the Trail

Who do you think these people liked for President this last time around?