Irreconcilable Differences

The threat of a constitutional convention, now that nearly 3/4 of the states are in Republican hands, keeps coming up online. Oh, woe is us, if that ever happens.

But I look on it as an opportunity. 

Think of it: Suppose the states met and we decided, hey, let's break up. We could do that, legally, if we did it with a constitutional convention. It would be the best Brexit of all time, except it would be Amerexit.

We could work on those borders a little more 

Really, to no longer have to listen to Louie Gohmert or Lou McConnell or any of those guys in the Freedom Caucus.  Let them form their own country, with wonderful border walls and state religion and no abortions and no contraception and no non white people, except of course for the slaves. 

The other day a secretary in my office mentioned she had never been to Virginia. She's from Chelmsford, Massachusetts.  She's lead a full, happy life, without ever having set foot in Virginia. I have never visited Mississippi, Alabama or Arizona.  Don't really feel deprived. In fact, I really don't like most of the people I see from those Southern States. I could still visit friends in New Orleans and Austin, I suppose, if I could get a visa for a vacation: Or maybe it would be like when I go to Iceland and England, I wouldn't need a visa, just a passport.

That's better

Let those aggrieved Southerners and Southwesterners say bye-bye. They won't miss us and speaking for myself, I think I could live without them, thank you. 

Every estimate I've seen is, economically, if the South left the union, and took the Southwest with them, the remaining country would hardly notice.  Those states get far more back from the federal government they hate so much than they put in, let 'em go. And if Kansas and some of those farm belt/Bible belt states left, our food prices might rise, but likely not too much to really cause an economic hiccup. We'd still have California, which is all we really need. We can do without corn. Maybe we'd live longer.

So, we could have a non contiguous nation. In the era of the internet, we have office workers living a plane ride away. So what?  If I were going to drive across the country and had to stop at border crossings in Kansas, would that bother me? Not at all. 

The Midwest, Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota might opt to stay in with New England and the MId Atlantic states and the West Coast. That would be enough for me. 

You could still have the NFL and major league baseball: After all, the Europeans do it with soccer, across international borders all the time. 


Think how liberating that would be.  Yes, there are still guys like Jim Jordan of Ohio who remind us that not all the reactionaries are in the South, but we'd get rid of 85% of them, and those who remain in the New America might decide to go where they can live in a gated community with folks who think like they do.

Wow! How liberating. A real utopia come true.

Preserving Employees Wellness Programs Act

In another brilliant naming triumph, the Republicans have come up with the "Preserving Employees Wellness Programs Act."

Who can be against the wellness of employees? Sounds like a law even labor unions can back. 

I'm for well employees, even wellness, whatever that is. Sounds benign. Sounds good. Sounds modern. Wellness. That's more than just good health. That's, feeling, well. How're feeling? Well! I have gone to the well. I am Well man.  I am luxuriating in my own wellness.

Mutants: Can breathe underwater

But, actually, this one has that ol' Republican poison pill embedded. 
This is another one that the Republicans concocted for their corporate masters. Another one for their corporate masters, because, you know, they are the job creators.
Remember the job creators?
Turns out the job creators do not want to hire anybody for their companies who might harbor some genetic abnormality, so they want to screen their employees for genetic mutations that might mean they'd have to go out on sick leave.

Looks healthy, but what about her DNA?

That's really what this bill is all about. 
Here, sign right here. Pee in this cup so we can run drug screening on you. Sign up for your benefits package which includes health insurance for catastrophic illness, which we truly hope you are not genetically programmed to get, and by the way we are going to run a little screen on your genes to be sure.

I got nothing genetic to hide

It's nothing racial, you understand. We are just very into hiring people who will not get sick on us.  After all, when we hire you, we are making a bet on you. You say you are also making a bet on us? That may be true, but we have a way of looking into your future. Can you blame us for trying? 

You want to check my what? 

Hey, we even have a wellness program, which includes yoga, morning calisthenics and Tai Chi. But, before you get too attached, let us just do a little screening test. 

Welcome to Corporate World. 

Louie Gohmert Has a Health Plan for You

Listening to Louie Gohmert, Representative from Texas talking about his thinking on the Republican Health Care Bill this morning, I was struck by the thought:  Is this the guy who we want planning health care for American babies, women, children and men?

Texas, of course, is a very weird place and spawns some politicos with their own ideas about health systems.






"So when [caribou] want to go on a date, they invite each other to head over to the pipeline. … So my real concern now [is] if oil stops running through the pipeline … do we need a study to see how adversely the caribou would be affected if that warm oil ever quit flowing?"
--Rep Gohmert


Lyndon Johnson was from Texas and he got Medicare passed into law, but that was 1965 and he knew enough to stay out of the way of people who knew what they were talking about--you had to say that for Johnson.

Ted Cruz, Senator from Texas, on the other hand thinks you can tell the United States has way better health care than, say all of Western Europe, because we order more MRIs than all those countries with government run health care. That is because we're number one in health care, of course, not because of the profit motive, which, in the eyes of Senator Cruz and Representative Gohmert can only be good, because the profit motive is what drives capitalism, which is always better than godless communism, radical Islam and socialism, not necessarily in that order.


"You know what really gets me, as a Christian, is to see the ongoing attacks on Judeo-Christian beliefs, and then some senseless crazy act of terror like this takes place. … . Where was God? What have we done with God? We don’t want him around. I kind of like his protective hand being present."


--Rep Gohmert


In the case of the MRI's, an MRI in the USA (which is #1, USA, USA!) runs $2,000-$4,000) whereas in Amsterdam, where prostitution and marijuana is legal, that MRI will run you $75-100.  Apparently, it never occurred to the Senator from Texas, that number of MRI's might have something to do with what the MRI does for someone's bank account, more than what it might do for the patient.


Just saying.

So, this morning Representative Gohmert was saying he could vote "Yes" on the American Health Care Act--don't those Republicans have a genius for naming? I mean how can you vote against something called "American?"--if only they stripped the bill of the provision that health insurance covers stuff like maternity care, major surgical procedures and all like that. That's all jeest "Regulations" and government intrusion in the sacred business/customer relationship, requiring that health insurance policies actually cover things patients might need.


"There is no clear place to draw the line once you eliminate the traditional marriage, and it’s the same once you start putting limits on what guns can be used, then it’s just really easy to have laws that make them all illegal."
--Rep Gohmert


Oh, and Paul Ryan just recently discovered an alarming truth:  All those healthy young people across America, hard working, God fearing, Christian (and some Jews, and very few Muslims) are paying for health insurance they don't really need because they are healthy and they are paying every month and this money is being given to the doctors taking care of sick, unhealthy, probably undeserving people. If that isn't un-American, Rep. Ryan does not know what is. If that doesn't say it all about what a disaster Obamacare was, healthy people taking care of unhealthy people, forced against their will to do this. Same with Medicare--you pay from your paycheck when you are 20 years old and completely healthy for forty-five  years until you are old enough for Medicare to pay for you. That's why we've got to get rid of Medicare. And, if you die at 35 because you run your four wheel drive into a concrete wall, you don't get a dime of that money back.  And Social Security. Same damn thing! Pay for that all those years and not a dime comes back. Why, if you'd just put all that into the stock market, at least your heirs could inherit that. 


Well, let's get Obamacare first, then Medicare and then Social Security and then nobody making more than $100,000 a year will have to pay a dime in taxes and America will have fulfilled its promise for freedom and we'll definitely be #1!


Right now, with this American Healthcare Act, it's just bewildering, when you have to come face to face with a health insurance policy, all the choices you have to make, which is what the Republicans call "Freedom of choice" but which are like reading through the tax code, really painful and incomprehensible.

In Finland or Sweden or England you want health care, you go to your local doctor, who may (or may not) work for the government and he takes care of you. In America, if you are lucky, you go to the doctor and he and you and his staff tries to figure out whether your insurance company will allow you to have the tests,  prescriptions follow up the doctor thinks you need.


Hey, that's freedom! 
USA!  USA! We're number one!

Trumped Up

Is it not deliciously curious that our President's is named Trump? 

According to the Word Detective website "trumped up" dates back to the 1700's as a "fraudulently concocted" charge.
Of course, there is the trump hand, which is a winning hand.
Where do you think the meaning will settle after 4 years of our current President?


For his voters and fans, who are or will, of course be winning constantly now that he is President, of course President Trump is the winning hand.


But for the Muslims who were dancing on the rooftops on September 11th, for President Obama who was surprised to learn he had ordered Trump Tower wiretapped and that he was born in Kenya, something Mr. Obama could not recall, for obvious reasons, the fraudulently concocted side is more accurate.


Personally, I like my Trump in black, trimmed with gold.

I'm keeping a running tally:
1. Obama of Kenya
2. Cheering Muslims on Newark rooftops
3. Black inner cities beset by hellish violence
4. Wiretapping Obama
5. Mexican immigrants mostly rapists
6. Muslims mostly hating everyone
7. Factories closing because of bad trade deals
8. Hillary is crooked
9. Obamacare is a disaster
10. Obamacare is in a death spiral

Stay tuned. The list grows every morning at 5 A.M.


Oh, and there's some great grape flavored Kool Aid you might want to try--there are big buckets of it just outside the White House.

Post Modern Blues: Key of Gopnik

The New Yorker and The New York Times are far more important outside New York than in it.  If you live in New York, you have so many sources of connection to what people are thinking, what's new, what's hot, what's au currant. But if you live in the hinterlands, you depend on the news from New York to keep you up to date. 

Gopnik

The paper used to arrive on my driveway, but now we get it on line. The magazine we still get in paper form. It's an event, a continuity, seeing that jazzy cover every week. And it takes all week to read through the multi-page articles, where things are examined beyond the usual sound bite. 

Like NPR radio, where I know the correspondents' names and voices,  I've got to know the New Yorker authors, Jill Lepore, David Remnick, Anthony Lane and Adam Gopnik.  

Gopnik often has fresh insights and his book reviews are often the only thing I will bother to learn about the books, but this week he showed signs of that dread New York degenerative disease, which has yet to be named, but which, tentatively, I'll call Public Intellectual Supercilious Syndrome (PISS).

Characteristic presenting symptoms are the use of "ism" words, referring to isms with which I am not much familiar  but which sound like something I can guess at, without really knowing.  

Postmodern Gopnik

"Presentism" is a new ism, which Gopnik has created for his review of several books in the March 20 issue.  It's cute because it's a play on all the isms we read about in the New York Times Book Review and elsewhere in the New Yorker, and it's a fresh statement of a phenomenon which became very evident during the run up to the last election:  "It is the assumption that what is happening now is going to keep on happening without anything happening to stop it...if, by a trick of an antique electoral system designed to give country people more power than city people, a Donald Trump is elected, then pluralist constitutional democracy is finished."

So that's cute, because he illustrates the sort of punditry he finds in the books he is about to review with this caution that what you hear about the meaning of the Trump election from many pundits is tripe, and they haven't the faintest clue what will happen next, certainly no more than you do.

Read Rousseau and Voltaire

But then we get a sentence like this one:  "Mishra's thesis is that our contemporary misery and revanchist nationalism can be traced to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's romantic reaction to Voltaire's Enlightenment--with the Enlightenment itself entirely to blame in letting high minded disdain for actual human experience leave it open to a romantic reaction."

Can't you just see a Woody Allen movie with Woody standing in line in front of some guy spewing out this sentence, and Allen going ballistic? 

But, wait. then Gopnik delivers this:  "We can't understand either the history of liberalism that produced modern life or the history of colonialism that produced Mishra's post modern collage without first understanding why the wind blew only one way."

Got that? 
Post modern collage?
Fortunately, there is Professor Google, but just try looking up post modernism and see where that gets you. 

Post Modern Author: Still love her 

Suffice it to say you could rewire your house, rebuild your car's motor, do cardiac bypass surgery, organize a global company without ever having understood either of those sentences, or even the component words, like "post modern" or revanchist--actually, that one I got.  
Does Rousseau's reaction to Voltaire actually drive anything of significance in today's America? 
Well, maybe if you are a Constitutional "originalist" and you know that Hamilton, Franklin, Jefferson and all those bewigged, silk stocking'ed founding fathers were very into the French, it might matter to you.
But really, Adam, is this the way you are going to deal with the reality of a President Trump? 
Do the coal miners in Kentucky really care about Voltaire any more than they care to know about the origins of the universe? 

Not a fan of Voltaire: He smokes Joan's post modern brand

Here's a modest proposal:  Until President Trump and Steve Bannon leave the White House, let us ban from the pages of The New Yorker and  The New York Times the word "post modern." Let us add this to the list of George Carlin's forbidden words, which will grow hair on your palms, curve your spine and result in peace without honor and will be bleeped out on radio or television should some one  slip up and let that word fly.

On Wanting to Be Irish

Sidney Reilly, the Russian Jew who took on a new identity to start his espionage career, when asked why he chose that name said, "Simple: The Irish are welcomed in every country of the world, but their own."


In the movie, "The Commitments"  the band's manager explains how this white Irish band does the Black soul songs so well:  "We are the Negroes of Europe."

From the time I was little, I wanted to be Irish.  Not sure why.
Many of my mother's best friends were Irish Americans and we had a neighbor who actually was Irish, Mrs. Welch (married name)  and she had that wonderful lilting accent that made her sound exotic and worldly wise and when I think of Irish people I always smile, again for unclear reasons.
Flying home from Heathrow years ago, the plane started descending only minutes into our flight. Looking out my window, all I could see were clouds, white mists and then, suddenly the fields below, a patchwork of more shades of green than I have ever seen. "There's only one place we could be," I told my wife.
Sure enough, we landed at Shannon Airport and I ran from window to window in the airport, trying to get a look at Ireland.
"We've got to come back here," I told her.
Eventually, we did.

When we visited Ireland, it was the midst of the "Celtic Tiger" and the place was not at all what I expected: I expected tough, ironic people living in tough places, but the place was booming, everyone was adding on to their homes and employment was so complete they had to import Polish people to work in the convenience stores.


The people were friendly and you could almost understand them, and everyone had relatives in America who they expected you would know, because, after all you live in New Hampshire and Sean lives in Boston, just down the road.


I don't recall when I discovered not all Irish were Catholic.  In fact there were some troubles about that, I later learned.

One of my favorite Irish American girlfriends had an authentic Irish mother who was born in Londonderry.
"Derry is the name," she told me emphatically. "Londonderry is what Protestants call it. But you can be forgiven for not knowing that, at least the first time."
She was sitting on her concrete stairs leading uphill to her house and she told me about life in Ireland before she met the American sailor who became my girlfriend's father.
"I don't miss Ireland one bit, " she said. "Well, except when I do."


I'm not much of a drinker. It's something of an ordeal, but Guiness beer in Ireland is completely different than it is in the US.  As one of my friends said, "It's like heroin in a mug."
My friend, Kelleher, was much amused by my aspirations to be honorary Irish.
"The only people who want to be Irish, aren't," he said.
"I'm reading Real Lace," I told him.
He snorted, "Real Lace! Let me tell you something, all Irish are shanty Irish and that's the truth of it. Real Lace. Gawd."
How can you not like people like that?

You've Seen the Advertising: Now Read the Book

Finally, after all the months of liberals spewing venom about Trump, focused on his personality, his expostulations, his nasty friends, his inferred intentions, we have a concrete pseudo budget.

If the worst thing for a bad product is good advertising then here we have the real article: Mr. Trump intends to cut
1/ The National Institutes of Health (healthcare research) by 20%
2/ The Appalachia Regional Commission
3/ Medicaid (as part of Repeal and Replace)


Of course, he wants to slash the warm and fuzzy programs Republicans Love to Hate, but those are to be expected and are simply red meat to the tough guy Republicans, like the EPA, Meals on Wheels, the National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities, Public Television and Radio and foreign aid, all stuff the Tea Party and Rand Paul and Paul Ryan believe government has no business doing anyway.

Thing is, most people, if they have ever heard of it, like the NIH.  The coal miners in Kentucky may not care about the NIH because they don't care about medical research. But outside of Kentucky, West Virginia and coal mining Pennsylvania, there are people who actually read, or watch the news, and they may remember Tony Fauci explaining Ebola virus, or the new treatments for AIDS, or new advances in cancer chemotherapy. So this may ring a bell with some voters.


Finally, after all the ineffectual sputtering and fuming about things about Trump which  people are offended by but others love, we have an actual concrete event of governing. Putting those grand generalities into concrete action: Cut the NIH by 20%.

It will not matter to Trump voters that his Repeal and Replace comes down to cutting Medicaid and telling the states to deal with that. But cutting the NIH is the first of many things which will finally make a difference.


Ryan's plan to cut Medicaid is actually quite savvy:  Medicaid spending is what powered Obamacare and you can kill it by cutting Medicaid. And the only people that hurts are the poor and the ignorant and the dispossessed and the disenfranchised. Unless you believe Mr. Trump, (and we think Mr. Ryan does not), Dead People Don't Vote. 


It's all coming home to roost. The first step has been taken.
Let's GOVERN!

Those Demon Regulations

One man's regulation is another man's protection. 
So the regulation that you can't drive with a blood alcohol level above a certain number restricts your freedom. The regulation that you cannot dump lead and other poisons into the stream in back of your factory means you have  more expense to avoid doing that.
The way politicians use the word "regulation" is pejorative: a regulation is something unreasonable, something which keeps the innovative and the energetic and the aggressive harnessed and reigned in. To be against regulation is to be against the rule makers, the government, that thing which does not promote freedom but suppresses it.
There's a regulation that you have to brush the snow off your car roof so it doesn't blow off and splat on the windshield of the driver behind you. Is that a regulation the government uses to impair freedom, or to protect people?
And banks bellow and moan about regulations which dictate how much money they have to keep on hand to cover bad loans. That regulatory scheme was put in when bankers demonstrated during the financial crisis that if they were not brought under control they would not just harm themselves in the conflagration they'd started but they would start the fire which burned down all the rest of the economy.
Oh, save us all from regulations!

On the other hand, the government has been known to engage in some pretty stupid regulatory practices:  when I ran a private medical practice we were informed we could no longer do stool guaiacs in our office, until we got a license.  The stool guaiac is a simple test for blood done a smear of stool which you procure with a simple rectal exam and every intern carried a pack of cards for this purpose on his hospital rounds. You dropped the testing solution on the stool sample and if it turned green, there was blood in the stool. Hard to screw up that test. Now we needed to satisfy a regulation to allow us to do this simple test.

The back story was there was a TV news story about a lady in Maryland who had a Pap smear read as normal, incorrectly, and she died of cervical cancer, which the Pap smear technician simply misread.  Reading Pap smears is not like stool guaiac tests: You need to be able to recognize bad cells visually, looking at them through a microscope.


Barbara Mikulski, the Senator from Maryland, who had a degree in social work, but not in medical science, decided this should never happen again and she declared Maryland would become a model for high quality medical testing and she got the CLIA act passed into law, the clinical laboratories act, which required that even lab tests done in local doctor's offices be certified as being accurately done by people who had passed some sort of certification test (a boon for the  certifying racket.) 


Once the government got to regulating lab tests, they went wild. I actually talked to a state legislator, who told me she had 3,000 bills to vote on that session and she voted for the CLIA bill because she was told it would save lives by ensuring the quality of Pap smears.
It turned out there were so many tests like the stool guaiac and urine dipsticks which could hardly be done improperly if you tried, that they started exempting certain tests.  So a stupid law with stupid regulations attached got some tweaks, but you still needed to pay your annual fee of $150 for "a license to not have a license" as the CLIA official explained to me.

I asked this CLIA official  about how they inspected labs in doctor's offices across the state--there must be tens of thousands--and he told me there were 12 inspectors for the entire state of Maryland.  So we now had a law, a license and a regulation, but the goal of ensuring quality of Pap smears was completely lost.  It was all theater. Politicians could say they were lifesavers. They had passed a law to protect women.

They passed a CLIA law in various states and then they passed a federal CLIA law. So you needed a federal certificate ($150) and a state certificate ($150.) This made Senator Mikulski happy. She probably really believed she had accomplished something.  I'm betting she really did not want to know the truth about that.

Barbara was not a bad Senator, but if you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail and if you are a Senator every bad outcome that makes TV news looks like something which a law ought to control.
"There outta be a law!" 
Then comes the reaction: "There's too many regulations!"

Republicans, of course, have decried this mentality.  The classic Republican stance was embodied in Milton Friedman, the economist, who insisted we didn't need a Food and Drug Administration to ensure the safety of drugs. The makers of bad drugs would be sued out of existence. The marketplace and the courts would suffice. Of course, that could happen only after people were hurt--as in the case of thalidomide. Friedman took the extreme stance which was ideologically appealing to businessmen who wanted hands off, but it was silly. Some regulations are important. Many are stupid.

Here's my current favorite stupid regulation: To get a driver's license in the state of New Hampshire you must bring your passport and your original Social Security card. I presented these to the DMV official and she told me my Social Security card was unacceptable because I had laminated it. "I got that card 50 years ago," I told her, "If I hadn't laminated it, it would crumble to dust in your hand."  
"I don't make the rules," she said. "Don't kill the messenger." 
No driver's license for me that day. I had to go scrounge up my W-2 form, which for some reason was satisfactory. Lucky for me I am no longer self employed and I actually get a W-2 form. Otherwise, I'd be riding my bicycle everywhere.

This next thing has nothing to do with the topic of regulations, but just to show you how people can change when they get into Congress, here's Barbara Mikulski before she got elected:  



America is not a melting pot. It is a sizzling cauldron for the ethnic American who feels that he has been politically courted and legally extorted by both government and private enterprise. The ethnic American is sick of being stereotyped as a racist and dullard by phony white liberals, pseudo black militants and patronizing bureaucrats. He pays the bill for every major government program and gets nothing or little in the way of return. Tricked by the political rhetoric of the illusionary funding for black-oriented social programs, he turns his anger to race — when he himself is the victim of class prejudice.
[He] has worked hard all his life to become a 'good American;' he and his sons have fought on every battlefield — then he is made fun of because he likes the flag. The ethnic American is overtaxed and underserved at every level of government. He does not have fancy lawyers or expensive lobbyists getting him tax breaks on his income. Being a home owner, he shoulders the rising property taxes — the major revenue source for the municipalities in which he lives. Yet he enjoys very little from these unfair and burdensome levies.
... [T]he ethnic American also feels unappreciated for the contribution he makes to society. He resents the way the working class is looked down upon. In many instances he is treated like the machine he operates or the pencil he pushes. He is tired of being treated like an object of production. The public and private institutions have made him frustrated by their lack of response to his needs. At present he feels powerless in his daily dealings with and efforts to change them

(Wikipedia)


Which just goes to show that politicians get elected when they know how to push the right buttons, and Donald Trump didn't discover anything new; Steve Bannon did not come up with an original formula. Barbara Mikulski knew about resentment politics long ago.

Now President Trump wants two regulations expunged for every one new regulation.  That ought to make the simpletons smile.
 Of course, you can get rid of stupid regulations which affect very few people and introduce a stupid new regulation which affects large numbers.  How about we do away with the law which says car wash owners have to recirculate their water and in return we add a 25 cents a gallon gas tax?  Or how about we do away with the regulation that milk has to be stamped with an expiration date, which will help the farmers, but then we take away the regulation that requires corn alcohol be added to every gallon of gas?  How do you think the corn growers would like that swap?

Kids Intruding At Work: Professor Robert Kelly Instructs

So many friends and family have sent me the video of Professor Robert Kelly on the BBC, interrupted by his kids, I am beginning to think they are trying to tell me something.

John F. Kennedy, of course, loved the picture of his son at work with him.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mh4f9AYRCZY

There is an analysis online which elaborates on how many sacrifices Professor Kelly has made to become a professor of political science and how this sort of interview is for him likely one of the few real rewards of all that effort, and how his children have spoiled the moment, but he manages a suffering smile through it all.

The fact is, a lot of professions depend on the stage art of creating an illusion of expertise:  Judges wear black robes; doctors wear white coats; pundits on TV dress up in their snazzy clothes and use carefully chosen phrases and vocabulary to create the impression (on might say the "illusion") of knowing something more than other people.

But then you have kids intruding and the pundit has to shift gears.

I once worked with a woman physician who brought her kids, about age 6 and 4 not only to the office, but into the exam room with her.  She just loved being with her kids and it never seemed to dawn on her her patients might not be as pleased to have her children in the exam room as their mother was.  I had to close my door when her kids were scampering up and down the hallway and I was trying to talk to a patient, some under secretary of something, who had come to my office to talk about his health and now heard a commotion that sounding like a day care center over his shoulder.

Kids at work in that setting struck me as a mother over indulging her kids, unable to draw necessary lines, willfully proclaiming her priority of motherhood over physicianhood.

On the other hand, this was the 1990's, and a place where doctors practiced not from their homes but from offices in large office buildings--in the days when doctors had their offices in their homes, children intruding might have been more commonplace.

Occasionally, I had to bring one of my sons on rounds with me to the hospital. The nurses thought that was unprofessional and they hated being left with doctors' kids at the nursing station as if because they were women they had nothing better to do than to play nursemaid to the kids of any doctor who happened by.  So I made an effort to not do that and I stationed my kid outside the patient's room near the door way so I could keep an eye on him while I dealt with the patient. 

One of my patients, who was in the hospital a lot, insisted I invite the kid in. She was diabetic, spent many weekends in the hospital and she was one of the finest people I've ever had the privilege to know. When I did not bring the kid with me, she would say, "Oh, this is so disappointing. I just don't know I'm going to talk with you today, unless you go home and get your son."  

One day, I finished with a patient and swept out of the room, having lost sight of him and found him talking to an old lady who was sitting in a "cardiac chair" a few yards down the hall. They were in deep and earnest discussion when I arrived and when I tried to yank him away and apologize, she never took her eyes from his and held up her hand to wave me off.  When she finished listening to whatever this 5 year old was saying, she looked up to me with visible indignation.

She was not indignant that I had brought my son to the hospital; she was indignant because I had attempted to interrupt him. 

"I am eighty-nine years old," she told me. "I raised four kids and I taught grade school for forty years.  When I tell you this is a very extraordinary child, I know of what I speak."
"Well, thank you," I said, trying to drag the kid off by an elbow.
"No," she said. "You think I'm just some old lady who likes kids and he is like one of those companion dogs.  But you ought to take some time to listen to that child. If you did, you'd be surprised, I'd bet."

Once I had him locked in his car seat I got back behind the wheel and looked up at him in the rear view mirror. 
"What were you talking about with that lady?" I asked.
"Oh, politics," he said.
"Politics?"
"Yes, and the meaning of life."

I told his mother about that when I got home. She was not at all surprised.
"You ought to talk to your son sometime," she said. "None of this would surprise you."

Nordic Noir: Nobel on Netflix

Okay, it's not "The Wire" but "Nobel" is very good. Apparently the genre is "Nordic Noir."  Previous series would likely include "The Killing" which was actually set in Seattle but it was adapted from a Swedish series. 

"Nobel" is a thriller/political/mystery with a darkness to it, a brooding, foreboding. The closest thing American TV has to these dark Scandinavian things is "House of Cards."   
It begins by following a Norwegian Special Ops team acting as part of the NATO involvement in Afghanistan. It opens as the  Norwegians  have to distinguish the suicide bomber in the public square from among all the innocent peasants, a sort of lethal "Where's Waldo" scene,  and it continues  to other missions-- rescuing a woman for reasons to which they are not privy and guarding a diplomat to a dangerous meeting,  and it melds into an intrigue which involves espionage in the dark grim and grimy mode of  John Le Carre and "The Spy Who Came In From the Cold."

I've only seen half of it, but there are some wonderful one paragraph exchanges, from the explanation by an officer to his troops about what makes killing in war different from killing in civilian life,  to the analysis of a Norwegian foreign service officer who dissuades an activist who wants  to sponsor the application for asylum for a Chinese dissident,  who may be in the running for a Nobel Peace prize (which is awarded by Norway, not Sweden.)  If the activist allows the man to apply for asylum,  it will end his chances for the Nobel prize,  because then he will simply be a man who is afraid to die, whereas if he does not seek asylum, he may be a hero worthy of the peace prize.

In another scene, a  Special Ops captain confronts his platoon leader, who wants to kill the Afghan war lord who has just days earlier exploded an IEP, killing the platoon leader's beloved comrade. Now the war lord and the platoon leader are about to face off in a village game of a sort of bloody horse polo, in an effort to win the hearts and minds of the villagers. The platoon leader wants revenge, but his captain tells him the IEP was just business, just war, and hard as it is, do not take that attack personally. This theme and event come back in a later episode and the platoon leader is able to use it to his advantage.

Added to that is the moodiness of the Norwegian settings, the spare interiors and the green parks which contrast so starkly with the dust and dirt of Afghanistan, which the Norwegians refer to as "Down There."

Mixed in are the references to the Americans, who the Norwegians consider near barbarians, likely to shoot first and ask questions later. Talk about rules of engagement--as the Norwegian soldiers see it, the Americans are sent to Afghanistan to kill, where the Norwegian soldiers are sent to be killed.

There is even a sequence which turns on its head the notion of watching a video of a violent exchange, which reminds us of the videos we see of American police officers behaving murderously--but in this case you have seen the actual scene and you know what is not seen on the video; you and know the soldiers were completely justified in opening fire and, in fact, if they had not, everyone would have died, and the diplomat they were protecting would have died with them. 

It's well written and the characters are completely involving. The hero, one of the heroes, is a short, bald but powerfully built guy who comes home to his wife, who is beautiful in a taut, willowy way, and she works for the Foreign Ministry and in one of the best introductory scenes ever, she defuses a potential debacle with the Chinese ministers with wile and imagination and you see immediately how formidable she can be. She is one cool customer. She is well matched to her husband, who is the definitive cool customer, cool and deadly.

"Nobel" also serves to remind that America is not the only country to spend blood and treasure in Afghanistan, although it does nothing to solve the mystery of why we bothered. 

President Obama's voice opens each segment,  telling us that diplomacy and patience would not have stopped Hitler--sometimes you have to simply oppose evil,  with force, and it reminds us of the rationale for sending troops to war there, but the story itself argues against this notion. 

This place is so impervious to Western notions of good and evil--men believe women are possessions, and educating girls is an anathema.  Murder is a way of life. Child rape is shrugged off. Afghanistan is not just backward but medieval.  Any exchange with the Afghans is a dance with the devil.

In the Trump era, this is is a powerful elixir and a bracing dose of reality. 

The Dreadful Math of Stupidity

If poverty is grinding, what is stupidity?
We creak and groan under ignorance, which makes it heavy, deflating, crushing even, but mostly just enervating. Ignorance saps the vitality, wears down the alert mind. 

Jelani Cobb points out a number I had not appreciated in the March 13th issue of the New Yorker. It takes 3/4 of the states to ratify an amendment to the Constitution and that number is, by my calculator, 37 states. Republicans now control state houses in 33 states. 

This means an amendment banning flag burning, making marriage between homosexuals illegal, or forbidding deficit spending by the federal government is no longer a long shot. 

It would take only 34 states to call for a Constitutional Convention and there all sorts of mischief could be wrought by the stupid at such a gathering.  This could make the loading of the Supreme Court with reactionary justices almost beside the point.

Paul Ryan of the simian brow, Mitch McConnell would be the moderates in this show. 

Radical things can happen when one party gains as much power as today's Republican party now has.  In the past, that radical thing was for the good: As the Civil War wound down three amendments outlawing slavery, guaranteeing freed Black men the right to vote and the requirement for Due Process got passed. But the party that did those things, ironically sporting the name "Republican," was the polar opposite of today's namesake. 

Stupid begat loathing 

Ignorance is not the same thing as stupidity.  Ignorant people may be intelligent and they may become informed and transformed from ignorant to aware.  Stupid implies the inability to learn. 

But what we have in America today is not an inability to learn so much as an unwillingness to learn, a rejection of enlightenment for reasons which are not altogether clear--fear, resentment, loathing are all candidates.  This type of stupid implies obstinance, stubborn refusal to listen.

You can say, well both liberals and conservatives could benefit from increasing a willingness to listen, but actually, this is one of those things which sounds right, but isn't. 

They were interviewing people in a rural Massachusetts town which had voted for Trump this morning. We were told these people resented people from east of Route 128 who would not listen to their concerns. The more I listened to these people, the more I thought, there's a good reason nobody listens to them: They are really stupid.

In this particular Massachusetts town, the clothing mills had closed down decades earlier and the town all but died. People told NPR they thought Trump had the right idea about immigrants. Had any immigrant taken any job in this town? Well, no, but the mills closed. That had to be because of immigrants or because of Mexico. Or something. They couldn't say. But Trump might do something.
It didn't bother them that Trump's cabinet was filled with billionaires. These down and out people respected billionaires. Billionaires must have been really smart to succeed like that. And now that they had their money, the billionaires might figure out how to get jobs for the people in this town so the poor people  could make more money.

I can now understand the appeal of Trump's blue billionaire suit and his snazzy striped ties.  He never showed up in blue jeans and shirtsleeves like Romney, trying to look all down homey. He showed up in front of his Trump airplane looking wealthy but he was there in their home town.

All this harkens back to the English king and his humble subjects: these subjects have become convinced they are stupid and inferior and the king shows up in his golden threads and great carriage, looking very superior, and he tells them he does not need them, but he will help them, not that they deserve help, but he is magnanimous and although he could live in his castle and let them live their desperate, squalid lives, he was going to help them.
All he asked is that they listen to him, adore him and support him.

But what can we actually hope to benefit from listening to any more of Donald Trump?

That we are all going to be winning; that the ACA replacement will be so much better and less expensive and cover more; that we will build a wall and Mexico will pay for it; that the wall will make any difference at all; that Muslims hate us; that we will expunge ISIS from the earth and no religious fanatics will rise to replace it; that there is such a thing as clean coal; that President Obama was born in Kenya and wire tapped Trump Tower; that vaccines cause mental retardation and autism; that climate change is a Chinese plot; that all we have to do to open up the factories again is to negotiate smarter trade deals; that immigrants are evil and criminal; that environmental regulations hurt business and kill jobs?

What stupid wrought

The lines are clearly drawn. 
The question remains: What can any of us do about it?

When we believed stupid things