Sockeye Salmon Opera

Ever since I read "Omnivore's Dilemma" eight years ago, I have mostly avoided eating farm animals--cows, pigs, goats, chickens--mostly because I couldn't eat them without thinking about their sorry lives: In the case of cows, penned up in stalls, standing all day in their own poop, developing hide infections which are only imperfectly controlled with industrial doses of antibiotics, fattened with hormones. Chickens and turkeys have it even worse, penned up in coops so permeated with ammonia from their own urine the smell can knock you off your feet. Pigs are confined, too, but may have it somewhat better, overall; but pigs are very intelligent, unlike chickens. 

There's a free range farm down the road from me, where the animals roam about as they did before agriculture became industrialized, but still, the turkeys are, as one of my insightful neighbors observed, on "death row." They are death row turkeys, unaware of what awaits them in just a few weeks.

So, I decided, I really like cereal and rice and veggies and eggs and no one has to die to put that on my plate, and I live with that.

Two living creatures I don't feel bad about eating, irrationally I know, are lobsters and salmon, the fish.

Lobsters strike me as being simply large aquatic insects. They have no faces and they just scuttle and skulk about.  So I'll eat this "New Hampshire chicken" without feeling too badly. I can't bring myself to throw one in a boiling pot of water and listen to it hiss, however. I know: Irrational.

But salmon, ah, there is one of God's most inspiring creations. 
Seals, otters and dolphins are called "charismatic" mammals by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) for reasons which are obvious.  But salmon are, for me at least, beyond charismatic--they are downright inspiring.

Why no opera has been written about this creature, I cannot understand. 
Their lives are the ultimate in dying for love, in the will to return home--Odysseus is a piker in terms of the journey home, compared to the sockeye salmon. 

There is just so much there there.

They start out in a gravel pit in a cold stream of fresh water. Bears love the fertilized eggs and scoop up the caviar unimpeded. Those who survive, grow up in cold, fresh water until they feel the pull of the planet's greatest, most profound, most dangerous and unforgiving environment, the great salty ocean downstream. Talk about taking flight for the great unknown--these creatures head downstream, sometimes thousands of miles. 

In the ocean they swallow water and excrete the salt and they grow silvery and fat and basically lead lives among the sharks and killer whales and those who survive the planet's most fearsome predators, one day, decide, it's time to reproduce. Or maybe they do not exactly decide, but they feel this inexorable pull, back toward home. It's not like they are going home to mother, but they are definitely going home.  Phone home? No. Go home. 

So they seek that beautiful, cold, gravel bedded stream of their birth and swim upstream. As they do, their internal organs disintegrate. Their stomachs fall apart, but that's okay because they do not eat on this last journey home.  
They are focused on just one thing: squirting out sperm or eggs. These are not clubbers, getting drunk on a Friday night and having sex after a night of dancing, drinking and Ecstasy and going into work the next day, saying, "I got so drunk, I just don't even remember what I did." These fish are the embodiment of ecstasy. They don't need no drugs or rock and roll. 

They have only one raison d'etre at this stage: They want to have salmon sex.  Talk about obsessed. They don't want to eat, or to socialize, or to sunbathe, or to hang out at the salmon cafe drinking espresso. They don't try to capture prey and feed. They don't go sight seeing or hang out together,  getting all nostalgic about how great their home stream was.  
These fish, which have turned this really sexy red color are only interested in one thing: Copulation. They want to find that special someone and lay down some sperm and eggs together.

I should say something about the color red. Red is the color of Jessica Rabbit's dress for a reason. Red is bordello red. Red is hot.  Just saying. 

And there is no coyness here. The females are just as hot to trot as the males. They are into it. And once they find that big red male, they are into him. None of this, "I really shouldn't" or "I'm not that kind of girl fish." 

Those who survive the upstream gauntlet and reach the place of their birth are not just red, they are a different shape. The males have developed a hook nose and a big hump on their back, which, presumably, makes them look like the ultimate studly fish to the females. 

There's a brief round of fighting, where the dominant males establish their superiority and select a hot female, who may also have a role in deciding who she thinks is hot, and the two pair off and squirt out their gametes into this little depression the female has made in the gravel stream bed, to contain the sperm and eggs. 

This is the  one part of the story which leaves me just a little dissatisfied: It's  the lack of real contact between the female and male. They wriggle together, side by side, but there is no real entry, coupling. Their tango is the whole act. The one moment human beings most prize is just not a thing with these fish. Squirt it out, wriggle about--that's all folks.  I don't know. Maybe it's just me, but the consummation among the salmon...well, I would have written that part of the script a little differently, but that's just me. I'm just saying.
I know this is very arrogant on my part, like I am trying to play editor to God, but really what does this say? It's like the important thing here is not any connection between the mating pair but the result, which is the production of the next generation, which is, admittedly, key to the survival of the species, but really, what about the individual fish and his and her experience? 

The female hangs around  the young for a few days--you can't really say she "raises them"-- before she dies, exhausted after her act of love (or more accurately, reproduction.) The male may find one more love to repeat his sperm squirting, but his days are numbered and he turns, literally, belly up and dies.

The bodies of these exhausted creatures wash up on the shores of the stream of their birth, their progeny percolating in the same home gravel, and the cycle begins again.

But, here's the thing--since these fish are plunging headlong off the reproductive cliff, once they head up stream, I got no reservations about eating them. They are toast anyway, so to speak.  I mean, I realize they are desperately trying to get upstream for that ultimate squirt, but as I said, it's not like they are going to be denied making that ultimately, climatic connection with the fish they were destined to mate with. They are just going to wriggle about. No big thing.  It's not like Romeo and Juliet or even Roger and Jessica Rabbit. Or  Frederic Henry  and Catherine  Barkley.  It's more like finding someone on the dance floor you think looks great, so you dance, but there's not all that much individual destiny here. So I'm less sympathetic. 
The passion here is for the journey, the devotion to the next generation. It's not "Miss Saigon" or "A Farewell to Arms" or "Dr. Zhivago" or "Gone With the Wind." Well, it's more like, "Gone with the Water."  But the individuals seem so subservient to the tide of history. It would have been a great opera for the Soviet Union--die for the ongoing life of the group. But where is the individual?
Maybe I'm just too American for this fish.
But back to eating the fish: You've had your life, fish. Now it's just a matter of which second of the last few minutes I am going to intrude upon. I'd rather get you before you turn all rank and inedible a few days from now.

So there you have it. A way better story than the spider wasp eating the spider from the inside, leaving a hollow husk. This one's got everything (almost)--the journey home, the mating dance, the great colors, the pairing of dominant players. 
Wow. 

Gitmo

Wonderful scene in "Band of Brothers" where an outraged Private David Webster shoves a gun into the neck of a German baker who is resisting giving up his daily batch of bread which the GI's are busy hauling off to feed prisoners the 101st Airborne, Easy Company has just discovered at a concentration camp at the outskirts of the town.
"Nicht Nazi!" protests the baker.
"Oh, you're no Nazi. Funny, nobody in Germany is a Nazi!" Webb screams in his face. "You had to know that camp was out there. When the wind shifts, you had to be able to smell it from here, right here in the village!"

The Baker Has To Answer

Of course, what Pvt. Webster was talking about was collective guilt, the guilt of all those townspeople throughout Germany who were looking the other way, careful to not think about what they knew as going on. "How many times can a man turn his head, and pretend that he just doesn't see?" asks the Bard.


But, of course, that's what 300 million Americans do every day when it comes to Gitmo, where men captured in the Middle East and accused of being "terrorists" are deposited, without trial, without charges, without habeus corpus, just thrown in jail and the key thrown away. They can be released when the war on terrorism is over and won, and you know when that will be.


Justifications for Gitmo have been illuminating: These are bad guys, too dangerous to keep in American prisons. They could pass instructions for assassinations from these prisons. They are not entitled to the rights of American prisoners charged with crimes because they are prisoners of war but they are not entitled to the rights of prisoners of war either. It would be too expensive to try them. Their trials could become propaganda. They are so wicked, they do not deserve anything but torture and confinement. They are presumed guilty. If they weren't guilty, they wouldn't be there.


None of these lame excuses from the fearful and those incapable of abstract thought or concrete argument deserve reply. They are, in purest essence the argument of fascism. All that matters is authority and protecting the tender American public from imaginary hobgoblins.




Of course, Mitch McConnell is not the only problem here:  Chuck Schumer in a revealing exercise of political cowardice supported McConnell and all those who sailed with him on this.


We will be judged not by our generosity to the most fortunate among us, but by our actions toward the least fortunate, Franklin Roosevelt observed. The same can be said of the Gitmo star chamber: We will be judged, like that German non Nazi baker by how we looked the other way and ignored this American concentration camp.

Pvt Webster actual and actor: The voice of conscience

Richard Hofstader on Donald Trump: Nothing New

Reading "Alexander Hamilton" and "Fallen Founder" about Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, it is clear there is nothing more nasty about today's politics than we have had through the centuries--from John Adams, who exploded in vituperative diatribes against Hamilton and Jefferson, to the incendiary expostulations hurled against Lincoln. This is what a representative democracy looks like.
In fact, our "democracy" sailed off into despotic waters under John Adams, who was so intolerant of criticism of himself, he made it a crime.  And the hostility toward immigrants of his party, the Federalists was every bit as nasty as Mr. Trump's.

The Alien and Sedition Acts were four bills passed by the Federalist-dominated 5th United States Congress and signed into law by President John Adams in 1798.^[1] They made it harder for an immigrant to become a citizen (Naturalization Act), allowed the president to imprison and deport non-citizens who were deemed dangerous (Alien Friends Act) or who were from a hostile nation (Alien Enemies Act), and criminalized making false statements that were critical of the federal government (Sedition Act).
--Wikipedia

But it is still astonishing to read what Professor Richard Hofstadter wrote in the late 1960's.  He was writing about a mindset prevalent at his time, but he writes to us from the past about someone we know today.

American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated in the Goldwater movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. But behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wing. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind. In using the expression “paranoid style” I am not speaking in a clinical sense, but borrowing a clinical term for other purposes. I have neither the competence nor the desire to classify any figures of the past or present as certifiable lunatics. In fact, the idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.

--The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Richard Hofstadter

Tom Hayden: Gone But Not Forgotten

If memory serves me well, I think it was 1966, and the war in Vietnam was stoking up and I was pretty deeply immersed in my own problems trying to compete for grades as a pre medical student when Tom Hayden came to campus as part of a blandly titled panel discussion, "Options for Students with Respect to Military Service."  There was a pretty big crowd of undergraduates, no co-eds (women did not have to serve) but for pre meds to show up, and engineers, you knew everyone, in his own mind, had come to the conclusion he needed to know about this.


There was a marine sergeant, who worked at a recruiter station in Providence, who outlined our obligations under the law, which in that year meant each of us could be drafted until age 36, and for each year of deferment we took in college, we would tack that on so for one year, we'd be eligible until age 37, two years 38 and so on.


Then a guy who had graduated the prior May and who had opted to go to jail talked about what that was like.


Another guy talked about how he had crossed the border to Canada and begun the process of renouncing his American citizenship and becoming a Canadian citizen.


Another guy talked about becoming a conscientious objector and working in a hospital on an Indian reservation, before being sent to jail.


None of the options struck me as being at all attractive.


Then Tom Hayden summarized my thoughts:  Canada, jail or the draft. Then he nodded to the marine on stage, "But as bad as the other options are, think about what joining him would mean for you."


We had all seen it on Walter Cronkite every night.  Guys just like us, guys our age, slogging through swamps, past villagers in rice paddies who looked at American soldiers as if they were aliens from outer space--which wasn't far from the truth. American soldiers holding children who had been napalmed, shot or otherwise maimed by a war machine that had nothing to do with serving our country or defending it. 


Muhammad Ali would say, "I ain't got no argument with them Cong."


And we all agreed with him.


Of all the speakers that night, Tom Hayden stood out. Without making any grand speeches, without saying much more than, "You guys are bright enough to know what you ought to be doing," he convinced most of us, the right thing to do was to avoid service, if we could figure out how.


Hayden's life did not follow the arc he might have wished for, but what he did in the mid 1960's mattered more than what most of us, including people like Ira Magaziner, who doubtless was there that night, later did.  What he said that night shaped my attitude toward Bill Clinton's avoidance of service, and formed my attitude toward military adventurism and eternal war. Hayden died this weekend. What he said and did will outlive him.

New Hampshire Voter Canvassing: Here Comes Honey Boo Boo

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer; 
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; 
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, 
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned; 
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity. 
Surely some revelation is at hand; 
Surely the Second Coming is at hand. 
The Second Coming!
Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man, 
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, 
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. 
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
 And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?


--W. B. Yeats, "The Second Coming"




Sunday was the kind of day you move to New England for: crisp, sunny, leaves turning a hundred shades of orange and yellow and I was out going door to door with my fearless, intrepid neighbor talking to voters not in our town, but in Kingston, New Hampshire.


We saw far more Trump signs along Route 125 on the way to our designated neighborhoods, and our list included not just Democrats but voters who the computer thought might just vote Democratic. Let us just say artificial intelligence is not yet ready for prime time.


We were thrown out of one yard with a snarl.


We saw yellow "Don't Tread on Me" Tea Party flags flying from homes, and as stickers on cars.

We were greeted with uncomfortable smiles by women who said they hadn't decided how they were gong to vote and who declined to say if they were leaning in one direction or the other, which meant to me, they were voting for Trump and just didn't want to prolong our visit.


We met one man who I had pegged as a non starter--shirtless, scraggly hair down to his shoulders, who said emphatically he was voting against Kelly Ayotte. Staggered, I asked why and he said she was for making Social Security into a voucher program and he was only 3 years from retirement.  So this guy, who looked as if he might not be aware of the end of the Vietnam war or about the invention of the internet, knew all about Kelly Ayotte and her stand on privatizing Social Security.


Go figure.

I am hoping our experience In Kingston is like David Brook's report about Idaho where he said a man told him that he is voting for Trump and everyone he knew is voting for Trump, so he figured Trump would win in a landslide. And when Brook said the national polls tell a different story he said, "Well, nobody's asked folks around here."


I sure would like to ask folks around there.  One thing I'd ask is, "When you say Hillary belongs in prison, exactly what crime do you think she has commited?"
For the most part, this seems to be more a chant than an actual complaint. The people I talk to get all vague in the eyes when I ask and say, "Well...you know." And then they start mumbling about Benghazi and emails and the Clinton Foundation as if any of that might, at the farthest stretch of imagination might constitute a crime. 

 

 I've asked folks around Kingston, NH, and if they are a reliable indication, we have to look forward to 4 years of President Trump, Heaven Help Us. And that's because Hillary belongs in prison, for some reason, and we need a wall and the country is going to Hell in a hand basket despite all evidence to the contrary. It just is.


I'm just saying. Not thinking, you understand, just saying.

Driving home, my neighbor and I talked about the value of a "ground game."  Trump has virtually no ground game, but that doesn't seem to matter in Kingston. Nobody is going door to door for Trump, but he's reaching people somehow.

Maybe, before the internet, before Facebook, neighbors going door to door mattered.

But Trump has found another way--throwing big carnivals, getting people to rallies as if they were going to a Patriots game. Getting them worked up by bringing them to the candidate, rather than by trying to bring the candidate's fans to them.

I never got an answer about why they liked Trump.


One woman said she did not like Hillary. When I asked her specifically what she did not like about Hillary,  she simply said, "She and Bill should have retired years ago."  I didn't get any accusations that Hillary had murdered Vince Foster or had compromised national security with her emails or any of the usual Rush Limbaugh stuff.  As we chatted, she did nod in agreement that Trump might just push the nuclear button if he got annoyed with Putin over some slight to his masculinity.  So, I don't know how she'll vote. She just doesn't like Hillary for inchoate reasons.


And that's the report from New Hampshire, specifics don't matter; inchoate mists shroud the mind and pull the levers. Slack jaws, unfocused eyes, inarticulate angst, head scratchers, not exactly knuckle draggers, slouch toward the polling places November 8.

What I learned from Fox News

Lebensborn Fox Ladies

Surreal as it may seem, watching Fox news can be fascinating.


For one thing, I have the historical perspective of reading American newspapers from the 18th and 19th centuries, a time when newspapers were unabashed about being the voice of political parties. There was no pretense of objectivity; the staff of these papers were making their case, and the language, the cartoons, the images were every bit as bad, and worse than what we see on Fox or in the Trump universe.


Rush Limbaugh in 1830 would have been just another blowhard in the storm.


NPR interviewed a former managing editor of the Washington Post who said nobody who worked on the reporting (journalist) side of the paper was allowed to have a bumper sticker for any political candidate and was forbidden from even making a contribution to any political campaign.  And I thought, "what a self important moron." He said he did not want any of his staff having in their mind a point of view, but he wanted them to remain objective and clear headed, as if a human being is incapable of separating his own opinion or inclinations from the imperative of seeing the other side. 


Did he not know that lawyers and debaters are trained to argue either side of a debate, and that is considered essential training? You arrive at the debate on Roe v Wade and you don't know which side you'll be arguing until a minute before the debate.


This whole idea of the sanctity and purity of journalists as the ultimately objective human beings, who are not sullied by a point of view was jarring. As if a gynecologist should not be able to have sex with his wife, for fear this would contaminate his relationship with his patients. He might not be able to see his female patients with objectivity and dispassion, if he harbored passions for any woman.

Lebensborn circa 1936

But watching Fox this morning was enlightening because it so clearly showed what it looks like when all pretense of objectivity is jettisoned. What this looks like is intriguing, as every story takes on a political hue.  A story about a white policeman in North Carolina who was shot in the arm by a Black man he was trying to arrest was presented as just another example of why "Black Lives Matter" is an anathema. This was followed by a video of a female police officer who was pummeled by a man she was arresting because she was afraid to shoot him because she knew the liberal media would be all over her if she shot the man.  So Fox has a point of view:  Police are the good guys. The liberal media is vilifying the police and by doing so is putting their lives at risk. The police are all that stand between us and the next Willie Horton.

She's got it.

The next segment was all about how the liberal media in cahoots with the Clinton campaign distorted Donald's Trump assertion that he will not automatically accept the results of the November 8 vote, when all he was doing was what Al Gore did in the 2000 campaign, when Gore did not concede until the re counts and the Supreme Court ruled.  That's all Donald Trump was saying; he wants to be able to protest if things are close and if things look fishy.

Lebensborn: Born to Breed Aryans

This was followed by stories about how Democrats in Texas have been going to nursing homes where they search out demented residents, where the Dems go door to door in Hispanic communities where "nobody speaks English" and in poor communities of illiterates, carrying absentee ballots and getting these demented, illiterate and non English speakers to sign these ballots, which the Dems submit.


"Well, if that isn't fraud, I don't know what is!" says one of the blondes helpfully--they are nearly all blonde on Fox--just in case the viewer at home missed the point.

Hold that Smile! Oh, Roger loves it.

Next was an "expert" who analyzed Hillary Clinton's statement from the debate in which she avowed her plan would not add a penny to the deficit and he informed his viewers that Donald Trump would get the economy going by cutting taxes on the rich and on businesses and on "everybody who pays taxes" and this would cause an economic boom, which, after a year of correction would ultimately wipe out the deficit. This professor was especially authoritative because he had a British accent.

Ms. Hoover, could fit right in on Fox

Then I flipped over to CNN, where they were interviewing a blonde, pretty woman, a Ms. Margaret Hoover, a Republican, who would have looked right at home as a Fox news woman, but she was brighter and she did not show all her teeth in the Fox grimace cum grin which all females on Fox seem to cling to as if they all had tetanus.  Alisyn Camorata interviewed them as if she did not loathe Trump (which she clearly does) and then asked the reply from a Clinton supporter, in a scene, which at least superficially looked more "fair and balanced." It was more balanced because the Trump side did get some time.

So what did I learn? I learned that if you have got as far as high school, you would recognize the Fox News as an extended infomercial for right wing views, not much difference from Rush Limbaugh, who was shown in several clips attacking the liberal media over its coverage of the Trump proclamation of not accepting the vote, unless he is the winner. But the CNN program was actually more persuasive because it at least waved in the direction of honest debate, even if it wasn't.

Uh, oh, that upper lip is beginning to droop

I might also have learned where all those "blonde" jokes come from--the ones which suggest women with blonde hair have empty heads.  I learned it is possible for a woman to stare into the camera and show an entire mouth of teeth and to hold that pose for fifteen seconds, which might not sound like a long time, but just you try that with a mirror and see how your mouth feels.

Alisyn Camerota v Newt Gingrich: Just the facts, Ma'm

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
--H.L Menchen




Just the facts, m'am.

--Detective Lt. Joe Friday

Listening to Alisyn Camerota trying to interview Newt Gingrich, I was amused to see her try to get across a point about facts, which Gingrich, who is much more sophisticated than she, deftly turned to his own advantage.

She was pressing him on Donald Trump's claims we are far less safe now than before President Obama came to office, that our cities are now horror shows rife with murder and mayhem.

"But the facts show that's not true," Camerota protested, "All the statistics show our cities are much safer."

"Well, but that's not how our citizens feel," Gingrich rejoined.

"But it's the fact."

"I'll take their feelings over your theorizing," Gingrich replied.

What got Camerota so worked up is she had done her homework, had read all the relevant studies from sources in the government and academia all of which support the idea that our cities are far safer than they were a decade ago, with respect to violent crime.

What Gingrich was saying is I does not believe these sources. He does not believe them because he doesn't want to believe that, because Donald Trump is running on fear, but there is also, truth be told, something to say for his skepticism.

"Statistics don't lie," we are told, but the interpretation of those statistics surely can.

Anyone who watched "The Wire" will know that crime statistics can be massaged--rapes can be downgraded to simple assaults, robberies to disorderly conduct. About the only thing that can't be faked is murder, because there's a body, but even then, a found body can be ruled "natural causes" when in fact it was a homicide.

There was one particularly hilarious story line in which the police hierarchy panicked when one of their detectives discovered where all the missing persons had gone--their bodies had been stacked up in abandoned row houses but the top brass did everything it could to prevent the uncovering of these bodies and the opening of these houses,  because the discovery of forty bodies would wreck the improved murder rate they had hoped to brag about. It ruined their statistics, gave lie to their myth that good police work had resulted in a drop in the crime and murder rates.

As Howard Colvin, the intrepid and upright police major remarked, "Statistics done ruined this job."  He knew statistics could be massaged, manipulated and "facts" rearranged.

This is all part of the argument that the elites control the government and academia and you can't trust anything that comes out of them. Or, as the Donald would say, "It's all lies."

Of course, the ultimate absurdity of the police statistics effort was the underlying belief was that police could prevent crime, could somehow prevent neighborhood drug gangs from murdering each other, could stop some fourteen year old with a gun from shooting another fourteen year old because he had insulted his sneakers.

When the mayor or the chief of police promises a reduction in the murder rate, he is saying with tough law enforcement we can bring the murder rate down, when in fact, the police are powerless to prevent murders; they can only investigate murders. The reasons for the basic truth of this require real understanding of real complexity, the sort Alisyn Camerota cannot get by spending two hours reading documents from the Department of Justice or papers from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. For that understanding, Alisyn would have to watch at least three seasons of "The Wire."


The problem with the Gingrich/Trump approach, of course, is when you totally abandon the effort to gather information, to understand how numbers are collected and then analyze the meaning of those numbers, you descend into the dark ages of belief and "what I feel."  From grade school onward, we try to teach our children, our future citizens how to construct an argument, and that begins with gathering evidence, then progresses to analyzing evidence. Donald Trump's admirers have always been frustrated by that, never been good at it because it requires a modicum of memory, some basic reading skills and the willingness to consider what you "feel" may actually not be real or true.

Riposte: Taking Down the Bully

Walking around my New Hampshire town with one of my neighbors,  canvassing for Hillary Clinton and the Democratic ticket, she told me a story about the policeman on the Maine Island where she has a summer house. 

Canvassing amounts to knocking on doors to remind people on our lists to vote. They are on our lists because we expect them to vote Democratic, but we had been getting surprised in this unusual election. Some Democrats told us they would vote for Trump, some just smiled and were non committal. 

But it was a lovely, crisp Fall day, with the leaves peaking in color, and it was a fine way to spend the day.  We had time between door knockings to tell stories.

She told me about the time her golf cart had broken down on a dark road of her island and she found herself stranded with her son, as the sun was setting.  The island is about 2 by 3 miles and shuts down in the winter, but in the summer it has about 500 households and people get around by golf carts. But hers had stopped and she faced the prospect of walking home along a dark road at night. 

Just then, the island's policeman drove by, but he did not stop.  Just drove on by.

Later, at some island social function, the policeman came by to say hello to her and to  shake her son's hand. 
The son had been away at college and the policeman asked him how he was doing. "Well, okay now," her son said, "But I would have been better the other night, when my cart broke down, if you had stopped for me and my mother and given us a ride in your Jeep, which the town paid for."
Ears perked up among the gathering of islanders.
This policeman had wanted to boost the police presence on the island, had wanted funds to build a jail. He wanted to be an important man.
"Well," the policeman said, a little flustered. "But your mother had her phone."
"Oh," the mother interjected, "So, we really don't need police here, just phones will do."

I wish I had been there to see that. I could never think that fast.

We knocked on a door and burly man opened it and stood behind a screen door and my neighbor introduced herself and told him we were canvassing for the Democrats but before she could finish he demanded: "Then show me your permit."
"What?"
"In the town of Hampton, you need a permit to solicit."
I was about to object that we were not soliciting, but engaging political activity, exercising our free speech rights, but we had been told not to confront opposition. Our job was to rally the troops, not to persuade or to confront.

We walked back to the street.

"That can't be right," I said. "What ordinance is he talking about?"
My neighbor wrote "Nut" down next to his name on our clipboard tally. It would be entered into the computer when we returned.

I checked the computer when we got back. There is an ordinance, RSA 31:102-a,  about "peddlers and hawkers" which are clearly defined as persons who knock on doors of private residences for the purpose of selling goods or services. They are required to register (although no permits are issued), but the town's FAQ's specifically says people knocking on doors for religious or political purposes are free to do so. "Watchtower Bible and Tract Society v Village of Stratton," which guarantees the right to do this sort of door to door activity as a First Amendment Right.

So, I kicked myself that I didn't say, "You'd better check your legal precedents," or something like that, but then again, we were on his property.

Nevertheless, I wish I had the presence of mind to whip out my smart phone and google it right there and say, "Well, what do you know? The Town of Hampton says I'm within my rights. Thanks for sharing." 

What that guy behind the door was trying to do was to dominate by claiming superior knowledge, when in fact, he did not know what he was talking about.  We see this at the Trump rallies, not just on stage, but among the crowd. 

People clinging not to their guns and religion, but to their sense of self respect and reacting to their own dimly perceived inadequacy. They are down because they don't know what those slick city lawyers in their expensive suits know. Well, I can play that game, too. I can claim to know stuff. I got good words. I'm very intelligent. 

Clinging to their ignorance.

Just give me what I need and we'll have law and order. We'll have a jail right here on the island and we'll keep those undesirables out. 

And there is one more thing:  Don't people ever think past the catchphrase?
"Build a Wall." Really? What does that mean?
Even setting aside the logistics and the time it would take, just for argument's sake--suppose you could wave a wand and presto, a 14 foot, electrified wall, complete with watchtowers from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf Coast.  Would that really stop people from entering our country illegally? 
Have you ever heard of tunnels?  Or simply, going around the wall, entering along the Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi or Florida Gulf coast?
Remember the Maginot Line the French built along the German border after WWI? Impregnable. No German army could get through it. Of course, the Germans didn't bother when they came back at the onset of WWII. They flew over it, and skirted around it, through Belgium. 
Walls, lines, those are what's called "static defense."  Easy to slide past.
Oh, well, they may get in, but then we'll deport all 11 million. (As if we could.)
But if we could, will they stay deported? 
There is we learn in school, ordinarily, another question.
But the guy behind the door, the guy who wants to be in the know, doesn't want questions. 
He just wants authority.