New Hampshire Heat Wave

North Hampton Beach Bungalows

Last summer, the summer of aught '15,  I stood on a six foot ladder and wielded a pruning pole to top off a few 15 foot paper birch trees growing between my house and my neighbor's driveway.  These willow birches are delicate trees and cannot bear the load of heavy snow and their brothers on the other side of the house, unprotected by buildings snapped,  and I had to cut them back and they may not survive.  Some evergreens, about the same size grow in a line with the birch trees along both sides of my property. 

This past winter was nearly snowless, at least compared to the winter of '15, when it snowed every day and the last remnants of snow persisted into May. People talked about how nice it was to have a winter you didn't have to shovel snow every day,  but the dry spell has persisted into the summer and now constitutes a drought, rare along the precious 18 miles of New Hampshire seacoast.  Lawns have turned brown and there is a watering ban.

But the trees between my house and my neighbor's driveway have taken no notice. They have grown above our roofs. 

Somehow I failed to notice until today, when I looked out my second floor window to look across at my neighbor's house and found the view blocked by a solid mass of green leaves.  I asked my wife when the trees had grown, but she hand't noticed either. She never looks out that set of windows.  We keep those blinds drawn, for privacy, but with the leaves, we need no blinds. 

Contraband Norway Maples

Walking the perimeter of my yard, I discovered growth has exploded all around. The only trees which have not tripled in size are the two illegal Norway maples, which may be trying to keep a low profile, knowing they are undocumented aliens and may be at any moment uprooted by governmental authorities. 

How has this astonishing growth happened?   These trees must have some source of water unavailable to the lawn.

Girl With Pig

On my morning bicycle ride, I ride past a farm on Timber Swamp Road. They have cows, and chickens and turkeys and two lamas, but my favorites are the pigs.  This farm inspired a painting by Obadiah Youngblood, and truth be told Obadiah is not an accomplished artist, but I like his Seacoast subjects, and the Girl with Pig speaks to that. 

Pigs just seem to belong. They don't worry about belonging; they just do. Pigs are simply not self conscious. 

It is 100 degrees F today. Mr. Tugboat, the Lab, plunged into the ocean as soon as he arrived for his morning walk down at Plaice Cove. There were six other Labs doing the same. Mr. Boat will not swim more than four feet into the Atlantic, ordinarily, unless there is another Lab going after a ball further out.  This morning he seemed only too happy to be in the water, a cool place to be.

Somehow, despite the drought, the heat, growth is happening, silently, relentlessly, mysterious, asking for nobody's permission along the New Hampshire Seacoast.

Honor Killings and Fatwas

Murdered to restore family honor

Say, what?

Two stories:  One about a woman, Qaundeel Baloch, whose brother strangled her in her own home because she had made videos which suggested sexual appetite, thus dishonored her family.  And the reporter, from Pakistan remarks casually, oh there are thousands of such "honor killings" every year in Pakistan, mostly by male relatives, fathers, brothers who feel their female relatives, daughters mostly, have disgraced them. This is what you would call, in anthropological terms, a culture more, or a group value which helps define what that culture is like, that is a value which may not be shared by every member of the group, but is embraced by enough members of the group to be considered a characteristic of that group.

The other story, on NPR about someone who had abandoned his Muslim faith and so a fatwa had been issued to kill him.  NPR got a professor of Muslim studies at some Washington think tank to explain this action, and the professor explained, as if this were all very reasonable, that not any "Tom, Dick or Harry" could issue the Fatwa--it had to come from an Islamic state and a "group of scholars" had to review the case, but if it were found that a Muslim had abandoned his faith, well then, yes, he can be legally and rightfully killed. 

And all this is said in tones of great reasonableness. 

I'm not at all sure all Muslims find this death penalty for blasphemy or apostasy to be reasonable and just, but the fact is, at least some Muslims, and Muslims in a position of power, apparently, think this is just fine.  This would be, from my point of view at least, a real problem.  

Now consider an immigrant population which arrives in a country seeking a better life, but when they arrive they proclaim they do not accept the idea of tolerance of the opinions of others.  That is simply not one of their values, because their religion tells them they should kill their sisters for offending the honor of the family or they should kill their neighbor because he has strayed from the Islamic fold. What do we do with this group? 

Has this woman disgraced her family's honor?

"Cultural relativism" may suggest no one culture should pass judgment on another, but what do you do when one culture does just that and decides to annihilate a host culture or a neighboring culture?

I'm not suggesting we ban Muslims at the borders, but is it not reasonable to require as the price of citizenship from every member of our society, the basic agreement to tolerance of different values? 

And if we have a group which speaks as a group, either by voice or by action, in a violent way, do we not have the right to condemn that group as a group?

  

Avenging Alton Sterling?

Three Baton Rouge policemen are shot to death less than a month after a Baton Rouge policeman murders a helpless Black man, Alton Sterling, the act witnessed on a viral internet posting. 

One might think these two events are related. 

But the violence against the police is incoherent. The shooter, a Black man, might be thought to have been motivated by desire for revenge of the shooting of a Black man by white police for the crime of being Black, but the shooter: A/ Did not target the white police officer who was so visibly guilty of the murder  B/ Shot to death a Black police officer, who, one would think would be blameless of harboring homicidal racial prejudice against Black people. 

This is the problem with shooters: They, ordinarily, are not rational.  

The Washington, D.C. sniper, who shot mostly white people randomly from the back of his car, using a teenager as his accomplice, was thought to be a Black man with a rage against white people. How it was decided a Black guy was doing the shooting I cannot recall, except all the people shoot, in the first week or two were white people walking about in mainly Black neighborhoods of Prince Georges County, a Black suburb or Washington. But then the sniper killed a couple of Blacks. Incoherent violence.

Turned out the Black shooter was creating a diversion: He intended to shoot his estranged wife, but he realized he would be the prime suspect if his wife was found shot dead, so he intended to make her simply one of the random victims of the Washington sniper.  So, in this case, the exception that proves the rule, the random deranged shooter was not deranged, simply murderous. He was banking  on the idea that in America, lunatics with guns simply do this and anyone, randomly, can be a victim.

Clever guy.

One wonders why white police who murder Black men are not killed by snipers more often. In fact, I cannot think of a case this has happened. 

Why not?  At least this violence would be comprehensible. What is incomprehensible, on some level, is why there is not more of this sort of violence.

One guess is that the victims of police murders simply do not have relatives or friends who are willing or inclined to risk losing their own lives or liberty for the sake of revenge. For he who goes out to seek revenge: First dig two graves. During the 1960's, a number of professors and politicians and pundits commented, sotto voice, the wonder was why the Black community had not erupted before and more universally. 

Of course, we hear from media people, trying to stoke their stories and we hear from Republican politicians how very unusual the current climate of killing and violence and strife our current day is--but these are people with ulterior motives for beating the drum.  The fact is, anyone who remembered the 1960's, when we had Vietnam and National Guard troops on every street corner in downtown Washington, DC and ghettos from Detroit to Newark to Watts to Washington burning, anyone who remembers that will view today's events as sad but not particularly intense.

For whatever reasons, the American Black population has not reacted to seek revenge. It might be interesting to figure out why.

Planning a Lethal Attack

How did I not see this before?

Today I laid plans for a lethal attack against an unsuspecting population, no individual member having done me any direct or personal harm, and yet I will execute this plot without mercy, ruthlessly, later today.

The targets in question are hornets, and they have built a magnificent nest right at the corner of my garage door, right under my nose, or, more accurately, right above my head, and I have driven under it, passed it twice a day, likely for a week or more without ever noticing it. 

The only reason I noticed it today was I happened to be working in the garage. Then I saw them, zipping in and out of their front and back doors, building, buzzing, paying me no mind, but posing a threat by their very presence, and by the threat they may or may not represent.  For all I know, they turn toward Mecca five times daily and pray, but they have never so much as thrown me a dirty look. They just live here. 

And yet, I plan for their destruction, just because I know some members of their population have stung people and may yet sting me.  

I walked down to the hardware store with my photo of their house of worship--one of the pleasures of small town New Hampshire life is I can walk to the hardware store, and the four people who work there know me. The hardware store guy looked at the photo and suggested one of two types of spray, both of which spray 20 feet, one of which sprays a foam which coats the nest.  
"That bad boy is lethal from 20 feet, rapid fire, high velocity," he said. 
And I do not need a license for it, and can open carry it around town, or even into the state Legislature in Concord. Well, actually I'm not sure about that. I'm not sure the wasp spray manufacturers have a lobby quite as powerful as the NRA.

The cans were only $5 each, which as the hardware store guy noted is chicken feed compared to what my Emergency Room bill is likely to be.

I carried my weapons of mass destruction home and set them up with a ladder and a baseball bat.  Then, I started to assemble my attack outfit. I could not find my ski mask, which my wife has packed away, but I have a hoodie and gloves and safety goggles, and gloves and bicycle clips for my jeans and boots, which will still leave my neck and ears vulnerable. 

But I'm still reasonably confident because I have one big thing going for me: The element of surprise. They'll never know what hit them. 

Unlike people, however, who tend to duck and cover or to run, the hornets will come right for me, and being intelligent insects, they'll know how to find me. So I do not expect to escape unscathed.  I am sad about what I am about to do. It's cruel, and I'm not entirely sure it's necessary.  But I don't see how I can live with the risk, not just for me but for my dog and my neighbors.

arrogant skunk

The last time I turned homicidal was over the skunk.  The skunk came to eat the berries dropped by the tree on our front lawn and when my unsuspecting lab trotted out for his 10 PM pee, the skunk panicked and sprayed him right in the face and the dog yelped and wept and ran around and we could not get that stink out for weeks and the dog was miserable. I went looking for a bow and arrow at Dicks, but I told my neighbor about all this, the neighbor who loves coyotes and other unpopular mammals and she arched an eyebrow and said, "So, you are going to take a life, kill a skunk for doing what skunks do?"  

I tried shining lights, pounding on metal pans, screaming, throwing things at the skunk, but he just looked over his shoulder at me and went on eating the berries, which apparently were irresistible to the skunk, and, as it turned out my dog also liked the berries. 

Squirted dog 

"That skunk is dead meat, " I told my neighbor. 
"So you are going to be a killer," she said.  "Congratulations."

She shamed me into sparing that skunk's life. 

But she's away for the summer, so the hornets have no such advocate.

Something about knowing I'll likely come to harm seems right about all this. These are living creatures, who have never actually done me harm and yet I will destroy them.  The organization of their nest is a marvel. I've looked inside through one of the portals and the interior architecture is gorgeous.  Their bodies are black and yellow striped and they do not fight among themselves but are organized and cooperative. 

Unsuspecting 

If they could, I'm sure they'd negotiate with me to build a wall around their nest, and they would want me to pay for it.


P.S.
The deed is done.  The attack went as planned, spray, gas, toxin @ twilight, with hornets falling dead out of the nest and the nest more or less disintegrating under the foam, and some hornets flying out, but none finding me. After dark, I returned and used my bat to knock it off its moorings.  The next morning I examined the ruins. What they had in there were eggs, and some larvae had begun to hatch. Some were still wriggling the next morning. 
So all they were trying to do was reproduce--lay in eggs in orderly little honeycomb like cubbyholes.   
No malicious intent. They were just completing their life cycles. 
Did they have to die? 
If I had been less fearful, more tolerant, they would have hatched their young, and then what? Maybe they would have flown off and I could have removed the nest without loss of life.
On the other hand, they may have stung me and all the neighbors.

Hamilton and Burr: What Is Past Is Prologue

Hamilton

"History is not a bedtime story. It is a comprehensive engagement with often obscure documents and books no longer read--books shelved in old archives, and fragile pamphlets contemporaneous with the subject under study--all of which reflect a world view not ours. We cannot make eighteenth century men and women "familiar" by endowing them and their families with the emotions we prefer to universalize; nor should we try to equate their politics with politics we understand. But this is what popular biographers do, and as a result, everything we think we know about Aaron Burr is untrue."
--Nancy Isenberg "Fallen Founder" 

Isenberg

When I think about Justice Antonin Scalia and his insistence he is an "originalist" simply hewing to the Constitution as its meaning was intended by the founding fathers thought, my mind starts to boil to the point it cannot process rational, considered thought. There is so much wrong with this idea, it is hard to know where to begin. For one thing, it smacks of those Bible thumpers I used to see in the South, fingering worn Bibles, mumbling their half demented phrases about how everything you need to know is right here in this book, don't need to read no others, all the answers right here. 

Why on earth would we care what Hamilton and Madison thought about the Constitution? Even if we had the patience to read The Federalist Papers, why should we bind ourselves in a straight jacket tailored in the 18th century?

And what hubris and folly to think we can actually enter the minds of 18 th century homo sapiens, even if we wanted to? 

Took his pleasures where he found them 

Since listening to the musical and reading the book "Hamilton" (now halfway through) I have been boring my friends with allusions to these works until one, in the kindest way imaginable, suggested perhaps I should consider another point of view. "There are always two sides to every story."  And Nancy Isenberg's work, "Fallen Founder,"  was more or less thrust in my hands.

From the outset, Isenberg tells us, Burr's reputation was never sustained, defended or enhanced by a dedicated bunch of relatives; Hamilton's wife, Eliza spent the 50 years after his death building his reputation. 

Burr 

I'm just at the beginning, but I can already see my image of Burr changing. 

Seeing these men through our modern lenses distorts them. We assume a Puritanical, straight laced morality projected by those oil paintings of them, with their lace collars, their silk stockings and formal poses, but they were a much livelier bunch.  Hamilton, Burr, Franklin, likely all of them save Adams and perhaps Washington, pursued the ladies with manic energy.  How they avoided impregnation, venereal disease and endless child support law suits I am curious to  know.  The colonies sound a lot like the world of New York Hospital, which the nurses often described as a "cauldron" what with all the sexual energy surging through the place; some people considered the summer camp aspects of all this offensive, even reprehensible, but most people shrugged.  There was something about living among the dying that seemed to detonate a sexual charge among the doctors and the nurses. People describe the same phenomenon among people in war zones, the hypersexuality of combat. Maybe it's simply a stress response. Copulate before you die.  And these men were facing the King's justice for treason. They were living through interesting times.

We can only imagine. We cannot know.

For now, it is instructive to consider how human beings reacted in those times 240 years ago so the bizarre behavior of the acolytes of Donald Trump can be understood as nothing unique or new, simply an angry group of intellectually deprived men who prefer to react and rattle the cage to thinking.  They are like the chimps at the zoo, screeching and jumping up and down--and in fact, reading about chimpanzee intelligence in "Are We Smart Enough to Know how Intelligent Animals Are?"  I suspect comparing a trump rally to the chimp compound at the zoo may be a substantial insult to the chimps.

America's Game of Thrones Candidate: Joffrey The Donald

Emily Nussbaum

Watching Donald Trump on stage and watching the crowds in front of him react, I had the feeling I was Arya Stark, the daughter in "Game of Thrones," who watches a play depicting the story of her father's murder, and the sympathetic portrayal of the kings and queens who committed it, while standing among a crowd of people who respond with unbridled sympathy for the murderers and with disdain for the victim.  There is no loneliness more complete than feeling alienated from the crowd around you.

King Joffrey: Inherited Power

Jews must have felt this watching Hilter bring his crowds to their feet; Muslims, Mexicans, a whole host of scapegoats must feel it now.

Inherited Wealth

Trump, of course, isn't really the problem, as Kevin Baker noted in last Sunday's New York Times. Trump, he observes is, "Nothing more than the slithering id of a nervous age. He comes off too often as the candidate of "Game of Thrones" America, a bombastic, misogynistic knight errant in an endlessly wandering unfocused narrative; traversing a fantasy landscape composed of a thousand borrowed mythologies, warnings endlessly of a dire apocalypse that never quite materializes."

As alone as you may feel, reading, hearing someone express and refine your own thoughts is an intravenous infusion of life reviving fluid. 

Amy Davidson

So it is, for me at least, with the New Yorker, which arrives every week in my mailbox with my lifeline from a better, more vital world. 

When my mother moved from New York, the greatest city in the world ("Hamilton"), to what was then a sleepy Southern town, Washington, D.C., her brother provided her with that lifeline in the form of a New Yorker subscription, so no matter how bleak things got in the land of "whites only" bathrooms, red lined neighborhoods where no Catholics, Blacks or Jews need inquire,  she would have that weekly reminder humanity is not like that everywhere; back in Gotham, living brains resonated with her own.

When I moved to New Hampshire, I didn't know what to expect the people would be like. I did meet a fair number of men who wore plaid flannel shirts, suspenders and belts with their trucker hats, but there were others, native Granite Staters who popped in and out of Boston and who had visited New York at least once in their lives. I even met a woman who subscribed to the New Yorker and read it.  For years, I had subscribed but read only the cartoons, until my older son packed off to NYU, where he developed the habit of reading it cover to cover every week and eventually, he got me doing the same thing.


This week's New Yorker cover shows a John Cleese, Monty Python esque man in a bowler hat taking a "Silly Walk Off a Cliff," and nothing more insightful than that need be said about Brexit.

Jill Lepore

Inside, Emily Nussbaum delivers one of her casual, astonishing reflections on "Game of Thrones" a series I have stopped watching as often as the average smoker gives up cigarettes, and she delivers a new way of seeing this show I've loved and hated for so long:
"I groaned when, in one of the show's undeniably breathtaking battle sequences, these blue-eyed demons streamed over a steep cliff like so many black sequins spilling from an Oscar de La Renta ball gown. There were enough skimpily motivated characters, to my mind, without folding in soulless monsters defined by their unstoppability. Then somebody on Twitter argued that the White Walkers symbolized global warming--a radical existential threat that the Westerosi clans had failed to unite against, too busy squabbling over that hideous iron Barcalounger that serves as a throne. One solid metaphor and I was on board. Fine, bring on the zombies."

Anthony Lane

She relates a comment from a friend that the only thing that matters in the show is dominance, that the core of the show is essentially nihilistic. But, as she notes, it is a nihilism which arouses a response.  Yes, as human beings we can live short, brutal lives guided only by a will to take.  She sees parallels to Bernie Sanders in the High Sparrow, "a revolutionary ideologue who is obsessed with purifying the elite," and with another character, a preacher, who tells the Hound, "You don't cure a disease by spreading it to more people," to which the Hound replies, "You don't cure it by dying, either." 

We hear both ideas advocated whenever some lunatic wearing a headband and waving an ISIS banner blows up people in an airport or at a movie theater.  ISIS has shown us, if nothing else, there are people who want to live in a world of nihilistic dominance, who believe life is about hacking and chopping off body parts and subjugating others to your will. 

We often have to ponder: What am I to think of these medieval minds who speak of caliphates, who hate music, liberated women and questioning minds?  What we think about all this must arise from many minds before it can coalesce around any one response and in The New Yorker, in Nussbaum, we  have a writer who learns from GOT, from Twitter, who is no snob about where she finds meaning but who can see it and express it, and there are plenty of soulmates on the New Yorker pages--Jill Lepore, Amy Davidson, Anthony Lane--who quietly, week after week simply speak and send their thoughts out there like those radio signals we beam out into deep space, hoping that somewhere out there, there are minds who can respond.