Clinton Wore Trump Down

By the end of 90 minutes, Mr. Trump, who has bragged about his vitality, as opposed to Ms. Clinton's fragility and low energy, looked spent and dissipated.

Hillary does have a high wattage smile and she used it effectively in the split screen set up, laughing at Donald Joffrey as he gave vent to his flight of ideas, his stream of consciousness, fleeing the hard questions about his sticking to the Birther lie long after it was clearly exposed. 

Along the way, he floated a few of the hard core beliefs of the off the grid crowd, T party Republican faithful:

1/ He paid no federal income tax lo these many years because he was too smart for the system and it was all perfectly legal and, anyway, if he had paid the Democrats would have "squandered" his hard earned money on social problems for the poor.

2/ He cannot see what is wrong with his whole Birther rag--he actually did Obama a favor by making him produce his birth certificate, missing the point that what he was saying and what his rabid fans truly believe is that NO Black man can be authentically American, least of all one who thrashes a white man for the Presidency. Obama is ispso facto, illegitimate because he is Black.  As the acting head of the DNC pointed out later, her own grandfather had no birth certificate because he was born a slave and in the South not having a birth certificate meant you could not vote. 

3/ He blames Hillary for not having solved the crisis in the Middle East, for allowing the rise of ISIS, for trade deficits with China, for the collapse of manufacturing in the rust belt, for violence in the inner cities, for, you name it, because, after all, she has been in government for 30 years and if she couldn't solve all those problems by herself, what good is she?  
Hillary, on her part, failed to point out in a democracy, unlike in a privately held company, you have to get other people to work with you, even if you are President. Not even Tom Brady could win games unless he has cooperation from those who play with him.  It takes a village, or a team, and Trump's Republican Tea party cohort does not want to play along in any way whatsoever. The Republican plan is to destroy government, except for the parts they like, like defense contracting, which supports most of the South, where nobody else, aside from the federal government is much interested in investing a dollar.

4/ And, oh. It's just fine to stiff the workmen who built your casinos--all you have to do is claim the quality of the work was poor and then grind them down with your lawyers, fighting them in court. 

But the big question is this: Was he not completely exposed as time went on?

I mean, I haven't seen flight of ideas, stream of consciousness, fragmentation of thought, grandiosity, delusions of grandeur, paranoid ideation like that since I did my rotation on the psych wards in medical school.

That man would have come up before the committee which decided who was well enough to go home and he would not have got a single vote. What he would have got was a decision for heavier medication.  

Or maybe a padded room.

Here's another question for the 2nd amendment, off the grid, super patriots:  If it is easy, can it be patriotism?  Does patriotism not demand risk or sacrifice?  If this is true, then how can Mr. Trump be any kind of patriot?  He doesn't even do the hard thing of paying taxes.

And we haven't even really talked much about those rapist Mexicans streaming across the border or those Muslims who all hate us.

Trump: A Reagan for the 21st Century

The thing about Donnie John is we have seen this all before. 

Ronald Reagan was an empty suit, likely in early stages of Alzheimers, but he charmed the non reading public, told us all we had to do was to unleash the pent up energies of the stallions of capitalism, and we could have morning in America again.

Just let the rich men do what they want and they'd hire all the small people to build their houses, work in their factories, park their cars and we'd all grow, as the rain dripped down from the high canopy and nurtured growth in the forest below.

Oh, it was all so beautiful. We'd be winning again.

The deficit tripled and the economy did not do well for the 99% but the way they remember it is Reagan was the best President ever. 

They still love him. Named National Airport after him. Still wax nostalgic over the good old days when Ronald Reagan was in office. 

He could really read those lines--as long as Peggy Noonan could write his stuff, you could prop him up in front of a camera and the guys in the factories and on the farms just swooned.

Disarm American Cops

Unarmed Bobbies:  They are unarmed in England. Why not here? 

Okay, I know it's an un American thing to suggest, but really, we should disarm police here in America.

Yes, that would be a radical thing to do, and no this does not mean all police would be unarmed, but it does mean the guys on the beat would be unarmed. They could, of course call for help from armed police.

A compromise might be to leave the armed cop in the car and send an unarmed guy out to talk to the motorist. But that might not accomplish much; we see videos all the time now, of the first cop talking more or less civilly and a second or third responder leaping out of his car, gun blazing.

This would, over time, likely result in a different sort of person joining the police force, because, it must be admitted, if we are being honest, in general, cops become cops because they get to have guns and some if not most of them are people who like to beat people up without having to worry about winding up in jail themselves. They are licensed sadists.

I'm just saying.

This is the way many of my Black countrymen see cops and I see no evidence they are wrong, as I encounter cops in the emergency rooms, roaming about the halls of hospitals or as I walk by them on the street or see them along the roadways.

Police are simply no longer my friends.  Police are thugs.  They tend to be failed students, men (mostly men) who had no better options in life financially, men who have a certain explosiveness and deep seated resentment. 

We need a different police force in most cities, and maybe in most smaller towns, although small town police tend to live closer to those they police and may be less likely to be thugs.

But, one way or another, we need a revolution in policing in this country, at least in the big cities and bigger suburbs. 

Taking away their guns might be a good start. 

Don't It Make My Brown Eyes Blue? The Imposter

If you want to despair about the intelligence of the American populace, with all the implications for the current election, and beyond, I submit for your consideration of the movie, "The Imposter," a documentary about the disappearance of a 13 year old boy in San Antonio, Texas, who, ostensibly, surfaces in Spain 3 years later.

The folks in this flick make the families, the police, the community in "Making of a Murderer" look like Harvard faculty.

In brief, the disappeared kid is a blue eye blond from a family with, shall we say, problems. For one thing, his mother a fifty something floozy with a thirty something daughter and son by another and the kid who disappears is 13. So she has had a late pregnancy. The 13 year old had a nephew in his 20's.  The neighbors confirm police are regularly called to the home and the 13 year old's half brother is a drug addict who has recently returned to live at home. 

The half sister flies to Spain to retrieve the "boy,"  now said to be 16.  Thing is, this 16 year old "boy" has brown eyes, black hair and looks nothing like the 13 year old when he went missing and speaks with a distinct French accent. He is in fact in his early 20's. 

The Spanish officials are suspicious but when the "boy" is able to identify family members from photos provided by the sister, (who had previously gone over these photos with the "boy") they relent. 

The American consulate officials are eager to re unite the child with his family and take the sister's word this is her brother, apparently never bothering to question the difference in eye color or the French accent. No fingerprints, dental records are requested for the missing boy and apparently no fingerprints are done on the "boy" who claims to be the American boy.

When the "boy" arrives in San Antonio, it makes the evening news and a private detective starts snooping around and compares photos of the 13 year old's ears to those of the returned "boy" and there is no similarity.

But the question in my mind is the FBI agent who interviews the "boy" and fails to question the boy's story that the  change in eye color was the result of drugs his abductors gave him.  She never picks up a phone and calls her doctor to ask if such a thing is biologically possible. I read an on line interview with this special agent, Nancy Fisher, and it became clear that her actions in the case were not fully presented in the documentary. It is also pretty clear she is not the sharpest blade in the drawer, although she was a special agent for 26 years. 

To my mind, the question was why she did not see, as the doctor who interviewed the "boy" saw immediately, that this brown eyed imposter was in fact not the blue eyed boy who had disappeared. 
It all seemed to take her too long. 

The private investigator saw it immediately, first time he saw the imposter, but she was simply struck that something smelled funny about all this.  Why she didn't have this guy in handcuffs at the first interview is what had alarm bells going off in my head.  As someone who interviews people every day, you become quite sensitive to inconsistencies in their stories.


She does notice his dark beard shadow in a boy she knows was blonde at age 13. 

It's not entirely clear how long it took her to take this guy down, but clearly significant time passed--enough for this guy to take a long joy ride in a stolen car. Meanwhile, she's had phone calls from the private detective who she warns not to interfere. 

 It is only when she takes the "boy" to a doctor in Houston when anyone questions how a boy who had been raised speaking English until age 13 now cannot shake a French accent, which he says his abductors drilled into him.

But once the doctor says this cannot be the missing boy, the FBI agent says, "Oh!" And when she goes for blood samples from the mother the mother falls to the floor and refuses to give blood.

Only when the "boy" who has now been fingerprinted and identified as a French serial impersonator wanted by Interpol, is arrested does he tell the American authorities the mother has admitted that her older son killed the 13 year old.

Of course, the impersonator turns out to be quite a nut case, and his accusations are not taken on face value. 

But the level of incompetence of any of the Americans involved, from the family (whose motives remain suspect) to the FBI agent, to the American consular officials (who never even bother to fingerprint the "boy")  is mind boggling. Only the private detective seems to have two neurons rubbing together.

It's not exactly "The Return of Martin Guerre," or even Don Draper in "Mad Men" but in a time of identity theft, we can only look at the folks on camera and wonder.

It may in fact be an argument for more immigrants. Perhaps we need some fresh infusion of new genes into our gene pool here in the USA.

The Genteel Deplorables: Trumps Willing Accomplices

One of the most useful things about history is it allows us to see the present more clearly.

When ordinary, "decent" Austrians and Germans treated Adolph Hitler and his gang as if they were just normal people, they played a critical role in legitimizing everything he said about Jews and Slavs and Gypsies and the Master Race, and the importance of making Germany the dominant "race" which had to expand to civilize the rest of Europe and, ultimately, the world. 

Mr. Hitler had written quite clearly what he believed in "Mein Kampf" with all his racist beliefs but apparently German gentry either didn't bother to read it or if they did they reacted much as many in the crowds at Trump events do today--they smile and say, "Well, I don't buy EVERYTHING he says but he's honest and strong and he's what we need right now."

So they became willing accomplices and they went home to their nice homes, and their nice families and they looked the other way when the Nazi thugs stomped people to death on the street, when they threw bricks and Molotov cocktails through the windows of Jewish owned business and homes. When the odor of burning flesh wafted into their villages from nearby concentration camps, they shut their windows.

When Jimmy Fallon jokes and musses Mr. Trump's hair on his show he becomes a willing accomplice. He is saying, "This is a man like any other man. We can laugh together."  When Kai Risdol, on NPR, assails Ms. Clinton for not releasing the text of her Wall Street speeches while not assailing Mr. Trump for having no economic plan besides fantasy--we'll pay for day care by wringing fraud and abuse out of the system--, when Dr. Oz has him on his show, they play that crucial role of laundering the money, of making crime into legitimate transaction.

There has never been in the world's history a despot who has exercised his will without willing accomplices. 

Look around, see those enablers. 

Lost Giants; Yersin, Banting, Best, Semmelweiss

Nancy Isenberg, in the preface to her wonderful book on Aaron Burr, "Fallen Founder"  remarks "history is not a bedtime story" to be read to impressionable children in a sanitized fashion.

History, of course, is a construct, like all memory, and it serves the purposes of the present, but if you are a real historian, you follow where the evidence takes you, among dusty letters and discarded newspapers nobody else reads. In her pursuit of Aaron Burr, she found much to admire, in fact, much more than she saw in Alexander Hamilton.

Hamilton was a hothead, drama queen, determined to push his own cause, his own career, where Burr was in fact one of the first modern democratic statesmen, who compromised and listened, in the picture which emerges from Isenberg's reading.

Ask your neighbors, your kids if they've ever heard of Hamilton, Burr, Washington, Lincoln, Grant, Sherman, and likely they have. They read about these guys in school.

We teach the history of politics, government and war in our public schools, presumably because public schools are creatures of government.

But ask these same people if they have ever heard of Alexander Yersin, Sir Frederick Banting, Charles Best, or Semmelweiss or even Louis Pasteur, and you will likely get fewer affirmative answers.

Ask them who discovered AIDS, who identified the virus and who was involved in creating a treatment for AIDS and you'll get blank looks.

Who invented the key parts which allowed for the invention of the computer? What was Bill Gates's contribution to the computer revolution?

This sort of literacy is not widely imparted.

And the fact is, the stories of these giants of medicine and science are pretty gaudy. 

Conqueror of the Black Plague

Take Alexander Yersin, born in Switzerland, wandered into Louis Pasteur's lab in Paris, where he was taken under the wing of the great man and he did some useful and important work in creating a vaccine against tuberculosis, but he felt uninspired, restless and told Pasteur he needed to explore the world.  Got on a ship to French Indochina, where he set up a rural clinic, where he was thrilled to hear tigers roaring in the jungle,  when an outbreak of Black Plague broke out in Hong Kong, around 1898. Pasteur wires him and he hops the next boat to Hong Kong, where the British overlords have invited a world renown biologist and medical researcher from Japan to investigate. 
Yersin watches the great man do autopsies on the victims and realizes they are not incising the buboes, the swollen lymph nodes, to look for the causative bacteria. Getting the boot from the arrogant Brits, Yersin sets up his own lab in a bamboo hut, and extracts the goo from the buboes, and identifies the pathogen. The famous Japanese guy misses it. Yersin writes up his findings, goes back to Vietnam where a Plague outbreak occurs the next year and he raises a vaccine to it and saves countless lives in Vietnam. He names the bug "Pastuella pestis" after Pasteur but Pasteur renames it, "Yersinia pestis." After centuries of Black Death and magical thinking about its cause, mankind now knows the true cause.

Banting and Best with Dog

Or think of Banting and Best. Banting is a Canadian trauma surgeon whose private practice is failing and he reads about some experiments in dogs which suggest the pancreas might be the source of something which prevents diabetes, and when this something is  lost, the dogs to develop diabetes. 
Banting takes his idea to the great expert in diabetes, Dr. Macleod,  at the University of Toronto, who believes the liver is the problem in diabetes, but Macleod agrees to provide Banting with a discarded laboratory in the attic of the University of Toronto and he provides a young PhD in physiology, Charles Best and some dogs, and between the two of them, they do the experiments which prove, to Banting's mind at least, there is something in there, which they call "insulin."  It takes them all summer of 1921 to get enough data and when Dr. Macleod returns from his summer vacation in Scotland Banting is bursting to push ahead, but Macleod still has his doubts.
It takes more experiments and more argument, but eventually, Banting convinces Macleod and the rest is history, largely unread.

Ignaz Semmelweiss, in Hungary notices women who deliver in the hospital get "child bed fever' and some die, whereas women who deliver at home never do. He asks himself: Is there something we are doing in the hospital which might cause this disease?  He notices doctors examining women after childbirth, putting their unwashed hands into the vaginas, often having come straight from the autopsy room. He postulates something on the hands of the doctors is transmitting the disease. The doctors on the hospital staff are outraged to be accused of spreading disease and they throw Semmelweiss off the staff and just about drive him to a nervous breakdown. Eventually, hand washing and rubber gloves and germ theory takes hold.

Each of these men have to fight entrenched, exalted authority and push beyond conventional wisdom toward the truth.

But who ever hears these stories in American schools?

If I had my way there'd be a course in high school, or college. There'd be an entire department in colleges, and there'd be a direct line to Tom Hanks or Spielberg--if they can make "Band of Brothers" or "Schindler's List," they can churn out miniseries about Banting and Best and Yersin and Semmelweiss and dozens of other giants who did their work, went to their graves and their stories are kept only by small cults of their descendants. 

There is a department of History of Science at Harvard, but just try that website and see how accessible these men are. 

What this country needs is a good dose of scientific literacy.

Parlez vous Francais? Do the French speak Diversity?

The daughter of a psychiatrist, a friend, once heard me describe a dream about arriving in class and finding there was a test I hadn't studied for and she said, "Oh, that's just an anxiety dream."  She knew about that. 
Once armed with that concept, I began categorizing my dreams, the ones, obviously, I could remember. 
 I had a whole warehouse of anxiety dreams.

As I got older, anxiety dreams faded, not because the world is a less anxious place, but maybe I'm just to dumb to realize how much I have to be anxious about. 

And there was was longing unfulfilled fantasy dream: a girl I adored from afar from high school would show up periodically and say, "Actually, I don't care about all these other guys who surround me at every party. You're the one I want to be with." That dream has pretty much vanished. Maybe as you get older, you long for different things.

I also had dreams of flying. Now I just fantasize about surf parasailing. But I do this as day dreaming. 

Frustration dreams are becoming more common: Not being able to find my way to wherever I'm going, missing planes at the airport, losing my passport, my keys. This must be more common in aging, as we lose capabilities. I imagine it may be more common among people living in places where the frustration levels are rising, like small town America, or France.

But what really intrigues me is the anxiety dream I never had: Showing up in French class and having the teacher start asking me questions and not being able to understand a word.  That is a dream I should have had, repeatedly. 

Maybe I never had it because 11th grade French was a living nightmare, so I didn't have to have dream about it. Ninth grade French was simply stupid and frustrating. We were given "dialogues" printed out in French and told to memorize them, so we could recite them and write them down. That was it. No real conversation. I could just barely recite them and  I was hopeless at writing them since French is very perverse when written. The only rule I could grasp was however it sounded, that was not the way it was spelled. 

Notice her Cross: Will the French Police object?

Tenth grade French was wonderful because I had Monsieur Hassan, who was Algerian and about as benign and friendly as he could be,  and he taught us all sorts of slang and seemed delighted when we could insert it into our conversations in either English or French and everybody got an "A."

But then, in 11th grade,  there was Mrs. L.  She was  six feet two inches tall,  and she wore hair down to her mid back and she owned only three knit dresses, each of which revealed her very lumpy body in different but equally unattractive ways, and both she and those dresses remained unwashed for far too long.  

Mrs. L clearly clearly needed reassurance she was sultry and still very attractive. She  despised short boys (and I was not tall) and she  spent most of her time in the back of the room sidling up to the two basketball players, who were very tall. She sat next to them in the student desks, giggling and crossing and uncrossing her ungainly legs in what I'm sure she thought was a provocative way. 

She  had us memorize "Le Petite Prince" and other equally excruciating things and she rattled away in rapid Luxembourg  French. 

To get to her class, I had to run the length of about two city blocks, up three flights of stairs from chemistry class,  books and molecular models spilling from under my arms, and by the time I flew into my desk I was a mess, dropping things, trying to pull it all together and she would shake her head disparagingly and say something in French which she then translated for me, "You really are so disorganized. Just hopeless. Tres maladroit. "  

Then the basketball players would saunter into their desks,  a few minutes after the bell rang, and she'd beam and flutter to the back of the room and let Howard, her designated drone, do the class. She had Howard mark our papers and enter the grades into her grade book and fill out our report cards, for which Howard got an "A." 
 I did actually come to a midterm exam in her class and realized I had not opened a book--I had repressed her class so entirely, I simply forgot about it. 

I did not take French my senior year and was determined to never speak another word of French, but they made me take a language in college and it was either one year of French or two years of Latin, so I relented and my college professor was more like Mr. Hassan and we read Camus and Sartre, so in the end, I decided the French weren't necessarily so bad. 

Oh, rip off that offending religious symbol.

But now, watching the French struggle with how to deal with Muslim immigrants, I can only feel sorry for them.  They have decided to cling to a single principle and they don't know how to make that work for them: We are a secular state. No religion in public settings. 

Remember that "No sex please: We're English." Well, now it's: "No religion please: We're French." 

They want a secular society, one in which for certain parts of life, religion can be excluded and everyone can interact just as human beings or as citizens of France, without any other competing loyalties. You can be religious on your own time, or in your own place, but in certain settings, public settings like the beach or the school or court, you have to set aside every other group you might identify with or belong to and become, above all else, simply French.

The problem, of course, is when you have people who insist their religion is their most basic identity and they want to wear yarmulkes or  a cross on a necklace, or a head to toe burka or even a head scarf, well, then you find yourself faced with the police. 

We have the same problem in America, of course, but the assumption is the opposite--for years politicians, Presidents and parents have said, "I'm a Christian first, an American second."   I grew up with each day starting at  school reciting the Lord's Prayer, led my teacher, who was employed by the public school. We had Christmas trees in our classrooms and our holidays were Easter and Christmas and certainly never Yom Kippur or Ramadan. 

Eventually, the Supreme Court and the ACLU moved America to a more "religion neutral"  position, but lately the Scalia court moved America back toward the bad old days.

Here in America, most Muslims seem to want to assimilate into American life and they seem to agree with the basic idea of tolerating beliefs you don't agree with. 

In France, the problem may be, in some cases, there are immigrants who believe tolerating opinions they don't agree with is sacrilege and people who do not believe in Allah should be beheaded post haste. Maybe, if we have that problem in America, a law forbidding the wearing of a burkini or a head scarf would not seem quite as ludicrous. 

But for now, not allowing a person to wear a symbol of his or her religion seems intrusive and intolerant.  How does it hurt me to sit on the beach next to a woman who is covered head to toe? It is true, it may be jarring to see a person in a black burka walking along the beach, but how does that ruin my own experience of the salt air and the blue sea?

And the problem with giving teachers or policemen that sort of power raises the specter in my mind of that horrible Mrs. L, who was just nasty and didn't like short boys, so she'd use any pretext to make life miserable for them.