"Rebellion" on Netflix

It has been observed the most vicious warfare is among people who are closely related.

Civil wars are intransigent. The Middle East, the Sudanese, the Eritreans and Ethiopians and the American Civil War--all very nasty affairs. 

And yet it has always been difficult, for me at least, to understand the Irish "Troubles" especially as they exploded just after the First World War.  During a visit to Dublin, I was stunned to read about Irish leaders, IRA leaders, who embraced Hitler. There were some IRA who decried Hitler and Mussolini but there were some prominent leaders who embraced him, hoping he could bring down the British government. 

That was difficult to understand--of course the enemy of your enemy-- but Hitler?

Watching the excellent Netflix series "Rebellion" I can now understand.

While loyalties were divided, as they often are in Civil Wars, and while some Brits in Ireland were admirable, clearly there were enough really vile Brits to provoke enough Irish into pitched rebellion.

Then there was the Catholic-Protestant thing. 

Have seen only the first three episodes, but I'm hooked.  

Yes, it's a sad statement about my own ignorance that my knowledge about the troubles should come from a fictional TV series, but just watch those three episodes and tell me you do not see a sort of truth there which non fiction would be hard put to match.

What this story is really about, however, goes beyond Ireland, to the nature of rebellion. The rebels engage in much windy rhetoric about glory, righteousness and history, but there are moments when the ideal crashes into the specific--when a detachment of rebels decked out in their mismatched green uniforms comes face to face with a determined,  unarmed British Bobby outside the "castle," and when the Bobby refuses to step aside a rebel raises his pistol and shoots the Bobby dead. 

Some of that detachment are horrified. The Bobby could have been shot in the knee, not the head, and he was unarmed. Each rebel is suddenly faced with the realization, there is no going back now. Once you have been part of this, you are either rebels or just murderers. 

There are the zealots who, when faced with the choice, announce they will die to inspire others and their comrades who say, "You die to inspire others. I'll try to live to fight another day."

And the Brits, a mixed bag, are led by ruthless, despicable officers who seem little different than Gestapo, shooting people in the head, without trial, simply imposing their will.

Whether it's Dr. Zhivago and the Bolsheviks vs the Whites or the IRA and Sein Fein vs the less violent free Irish, rebels have to enunciate an ideology and ideology has a way of curdling quickly when brought into contact with the heat of events.

"Rebellion" is strong, thought provoking stuff. Well worth a few hours of your life.

Everyday Corruption in American Life

You are admitted to the hospital for a surgical procedure. Your surgeon's office staff has told you  to use this hospital  because it is "in network" so your "surgery" will be covered there. You get a bill when you get home which shows your surgeon's fee was covered.
But then you get bills from the anesthesiologist who was not even present for your surgery--his nurse anesthetist was--but his group does not accept your insurance, so you owe him $4500. 
Then the bill from the doctor who monitored your nerve impulses electronically from his office in Sante Fe arrives--another $3000, also not covered by your insurance, although your surgery was done "in network." 
You never met or were even aware of either of these doctors, but you must have signed some forms among the thousand you signed in five minutes. 
You can refuse to pay, be sued but do you have a lawyer? 
You know the anesthesiology group and the mystery doctor have lawyers. Your credit score will be trashed.

Your senator gets $500,000 from the banking lobby and votes for a bill which scuttles protection against banking fraud, recklessness and abuse and you will be paying for the next financial collapse through high taxes. When the lobbyist handed over the attache case of money he did not say, "Now vote for this bill." That would be a bribe. He said, "We are so happy you are our friend. We know you will have our back in the future." That is perfectly legal.

You have trained for six years to become a specialist in your field of medicine. You have been evaluated daily, hourly, for the quality of your care, for your ability to analyze a wide variety of medical problems. You chose to train at a very intense, big city hospital where you would see more cases, a wider variety of cases, than most doctors who train at community hospitals will see in a lifetime. 
But before you can claim to be a specialist, you must pass a "board exam" given by the society of specialists in your field. You must pay $1500 to take the course they offer as "board review." You must then pay another $1500 to stay in the hotel where they give the exam, and another $1500 to "sit" for the exam.  
All of this supports the specialty society, in the name of ensuring the "quality" of specialists certified to practice.  Every few years you will pay again, to ensure the ongoing quality of your care. 
The society is very vigilant to protect the public health. The president of the society makes $1 million a year.  Without the society's diploma, you cannot get privileges at any hospital and without those you cannot be licensed to practice in any state.

You are not Black. You are, in fact, not poor, although you may have school debts. You do not have to contend with the daily drumbeat of insults, injustices the Black janitor has to put up with just driving to work and encountering police.

But you know, somehow, there is something very corrupt about the society in which you live.

You are not stopped by police on your way to work, not faced with demands for bribes, not on the street anyway.
The extortion is not so brazen, but it is scaled up. And it is so pervasive we don't even think about it as corrupt any more. It's just the way our country works.
People in power shake down those below them.

You open the telephone bill for your office phones and find a bill for internet services $50 a month. You do not recognize the company. You ask your secretary, the staff. None of them know anything about this. You get your internet through the office building as part of your lease. You call the telephone company and they say the charge is not theirs but was added by a company with whom you contracted; they just do the billing. You call the company and they play you a recording of your secretary saying, "Yes" to a series of questions from the company's employee. "Do you want to sign up for our service? "Yes." Your secretary says she never talked to them, but she does answer the phone and if asked if this is Dr. So and so's office, she would say, "Yes." It's a scam. You call the FCC--good luck finding that number. You spend an hour going from number to number and finally leave a message on a voice mail.

You will never see that money again. You paid the $55 bill monthly for a year before you found that item among the 14 page phone bill.

You do not live in a third world country. You do not live in Colombia or Mexico or Sicily.

You live in America. 

You find you have had several new accounts opened under your name at Wells Fargo Bank, one of the biggest banks in America, where your money should be safe.

Your President is still keen to call his defeated opponent, "Crooked Hillary."

Here's my question: In this country, who isn't?

A New Hampshire Happening

Something happened in Hampton last night and Mad Dog is hung over this morning trying to figure out what.
The ghost of Alexander Hamilton hung out as 25 citizens gathered in a living room to listen to one of 10 candidates for the United States Congress seat in the New Hampshire first discuss important issues of the day.

There were no TV ads with piano music wafting in the background.
No slogans.
No music at all, unless you count the music of the soul which wafted about the room.

They listened to Terence O'Rourke, a lawyer from Rochester, NH, talk about Healthcare, and they asked him questions, asked each other questions, just talked.

Surprisingly, or maybe not surprisingly, there was little disagreement about healthcare--even when, or especially when O'Rourke said we had to take the profit motive out of American healthcare. Hardly a voice demurred when he discussed immigration and dismissed the Louie Gohmert exhortations about the impending apocalypse building on our southern border. O'Rourke, who has prosecuted MS-13 types said when illegal aliens violate the law, our legal system can handle that.

Gomer Gohmert

Hardly an eye blinked when O'Rourke responded calmly to the screed about abortion being mass murder.  He simply said whether something is infanticide or abortion all comes down to drawing lines and when you draw the line at fertilization, conception, there is no room for discussion, but most people don't draw it there; most people agree the point of viability is a more reasonable place to draw that line.  So the explosive issue of abortion was dispatched in this room of New Hampshire citizens as if it was nothing more than a problem which could be solved by reasonable people of good will.

But then came Dodd-Frank.
Mad Dog had expected an eruption over this because O'Rourke has been going around saying the voters, the citizens of our state have been betrayed by our two Democratic senators and by one of our Representatives, who sold their votes, selling out the citizens of Main Street to pay off the debts they incurred when they took money from Wall Street.

A lot of people in that room worked hard to get Senators Hassan and Shaheen elected. And this being New Hampshire, they had drunk coffee, sailed around Portsmouth harbor with these senators.

So the stage was set for an eruption.
But O'Rourke set about explaining why the new Republican bill gutting Dodd Frank was such a manifestly bad idea. He took his time and Mad Dog was looking at his watch and looking at poster board showing we had 5 more issues after Dodd Frank to cover and calculating we might not finish until midnight if we took too long on Dodd Frank.
But O'Rourke was not deterred or rushed. He started with the Great Depression and how greed and recklessness on Wall Street had brought the country down, and how Congress eventually responded with Glass-Steagall which separated out banking from speculative finance and how that had protected us until people forgot all about the Depression in the roaring 1990's and repealed that law. And he took us through, step by step what happened as a result, when the reins and leashes on the wild horses of wall street were broken and how greed and heedlessness sent banks off the cliff and with the banks, our economy which was still tangled up with strong ropes to these banks, almost got pulled off the cliff with these financial miscreants.
He explained how Dodd Frank was fashioned to prevent this from happening again.

O'Rourke

Listening, Mad Dog's impatience gave way to fascination. This was a highly complex story, but O'Rourke, had broken it down into digestible pieces and it became comprehensible, almost obvious.

By the time he finished everyone in the room seemed to accept his version was accurate. Nobody objected. He had built his case: Undoing Dodd Frank was a bad idea. It was as if the Netherlands decided to dismantle the dikes.

So we were left to ask: Why would anyone vote to undo Dodd Frank?
Well, Republicans would do it because Republicans are all about no government. No government regulations whether it be on polluting rivers, or burning coal or on banks. Why Republicans wanted to destroy Dodd-Frank is easy enough to understand.
But why would Democrats vote for that?
Follow the money, this prosecutor said.  Half a million in contributions over the past 5 years from the banking lobby (information available on the website Open Secrets--if you know how to navigate that website) to each of our Democratic senators. What other explanation could there be?
The senators said Dodd Frank had hurt "community banks."
But how do you define "community banks?" 
One way is by how much money they control and that's below $10 billion. But these community banks all want to get bigger, to get to be big players and they acquire each other and now they have $50 billion under the control of each and if three of those fail, it would be as bad as if one "too big to fail" bank crashed.

So, saying this vote was just a correction so Main Street banks could get out from under regulations meant to control Wall Street banks is a dodge. "Community" banks are just Wall Street bank wannabes.

The citizens examined this case. What other possible explanations could there be for these votes?
Eventually, the group seemed to say: He's right. They sold their votes.
But then someone said: Okay, so they sold out. But they had to. Without money, they'd lose their next election.
And better to have a Democrat in those seats than a Republican Kelly Ayotte (friend of Joe Arpaio) or a Scott Brown (Cosmo centerfold.)

To which O'Rourke replied: Better to have Democrats in those seats who vote like Democrats. Why do Democrats always have to have compromise candidates and Congress people? The Republicans don't have that.

And so the citizens of Hampton drifted off into the night, boats which had beaten against the current, borne ceaselessly back to the past.

American Jews, Israel and Rev. Hagee

Talk about with-friends-like-these-we-don't-need-enemies, what are American Jews to think about Israel's new best buddies, the American evangelicals?

On line to vote in 2016, I talked to a man I know, I can't say he's a friend, and he told me he was voting for Trump, and seeing my reaction, which I could not conceal, he explained, "Well, it's for Israel. Obama wasn't  a friend. Hillary wouldn't be either. I have to vote for Israel."

He was Jewish, voting for Israel.
I couldn't help myself and blurted out, "But this election is about your country."

Most of the American Jews I know do not think like this guy.
They are appalled by what Israel is doing under Netanyahu, and think the Israelis are becoming the oppressors. 

"Yeah, I get it," a Jewish friend told me, "Jews got led off to the ovens like sheep and from now on, we are going to shoot first and asked questions later. But at some point, you got to start asking the questions. Jews have done way too much shooting."

"Do you actually think of yourself as a Jew?" I asked him.
"Well, no," he replied. "I sort of forget about that. I mean, who gets up and says to himself, I'm Irish? I mean it's not like I kiss my Shiksa wife good-bye in the morning as I go off to work thinking, 'I'm a Jew.' But, you know, just when I completely forget about it, someone always reminds me."

President Trump flew over two evangelical ministers to speak at the opening of the American Embassy in Jerusalem. One is a Robert Jeffress, who has apparently repeatedly said, from the pulpit, that when the Messiah arrives and the earth and seas give up their dead and Judgment Day is at hand, Jews will go to Hell.  (Well, unless they accept Jesus as their savior.) But this guy is a big Israel booster. Flown over at government expense.

"When that happens," my friend told me, "I'll consider my options."
The other evangelical pastor flown in on an American government plane was John C. Hagee, who had previously said that the Holocaust happened as part of God's plan to get Jews to leave Europe and go back to the land of Israel in preparation for the Second Coming.

Apparently, Rev. Hagee has God's private cell phone number and has asked him about the Holocaust, which, it must be admitted, shook the faith of many folks, Jews and Christians alike. But, apparently, there was an explanation all along. 

"When the Messiah arrives in Israel," my friend says, "We'll ask him whether this is his first visit to Earth, or his second."

There is a wonderful scene in "Annie Hall" where Woody Allen is sitting at a dinner table with Annie's very WASPy relatives and Woody looks at Grandma Hall who is staring back at him and you see him as Woody imagines she sees him, with those awful sideburns Orthodox Jews have and with that black hat they wear. 

Most American Jews I know cringe at the idea others will look at them and see them that way.  There have always been things American Jews do not like about being seen as Jewish.  Now, apparently, Israel is added to that list.