Avenging Alton Sterling?

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

One might think these two events are related. 

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

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

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

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

Clever guy.

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

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

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

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

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

Planning a Lethal Attack

How did I not see this before?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

arrogant skunk

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

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

Squirted dog 

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

She shamed me into sparing that skunk's life. 

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

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

Unsuspecting 

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


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

Hamilton and Burr: What Is Past Is Prologue

Hamilton

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

Isenberg

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

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

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

Took his pleasures where he found them 

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

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

Burr 

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

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

We can only imagine. We cannot know.

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

America's Game of Thrones Candidate: Joffrey The Donald

Emily Nussbaum

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

King Joffrey: Inherited Power

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

Inherited Wealth

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

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

Amy Davidson

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

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

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


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

Jill Lepore

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

Anthony Lane

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

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

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

Way Too Much Hugging

One of the advantages of an anonymous blog is you can say what you're really thinking without worrying about your friends chastising you or your mailbox getting filled with hate mail or rotten fish. 

The fact is, we are going to have to live with indiscriminate shootings of innocent citizens, some of them children, and likely bombings and who knows what other form of mass killings for the foreseeable future. 

So the Phantom would like to explore our options for responding to this new reality.

Let us first explore what we might want to avoid: Grief counselors. 

What, exactly, are grief counselors, who we are always told will be provided after these attacks?  What, exactly do they do or say? Are they certified in some way? Certified grief counselors? Do they do any good at all?  Why do the mayors or school principals always look so upbeat when they announce, well we've had thirty eight year olds murdered, but we've arranged to have grief counselors visit the school tomorrow. So, there: that's taken care of. Aren't I a good mayor?

And shrines. No more flowers or teddy bears left at the site.   Really, who are these messages and toys really for? Spare us. They are simply a mess to clean up and what do they do with all this stuff?  

And no more decals, T shirts or other commercial products like all the "Boston Strong" stuff after the Marathon bombing. What did that mean? Boston strong. "We" are "strong" in the face of two maniacs blowing the legs off innocent bystanders and killing children at the finish line.  Give me your $2 and I'll give you this decal for your car and we can all feel strong and resolute. Pluleeeze.

And, most of all:  hugging. Please.  Do we really need another photo of people hugging and sobbing and consoling each other?  Are we not growing just a little inured to the sight of people hugging?

And the inevitable talk about banning assault rifles. Just stop it. Won't ever happen.  These guns, it turns out, are made for mayhem. Their bullets are high velocity but light weight which means when the hit a human body they tumble and create a big shock wave and maximal tissue and organ damage. You wouldn't want to hunt with one, unless you wanted the animal you shot to be pre-shredded. 

Casting about for models, the Phantom has been struck by the people of London and the way they bore up under the German blitz during WWII.  The Phantom is sure there was a lot of marketing and spin about the plucky, unflappable Brits, when, in fact there must have been great wailing and sobbing and anger not just at Hitler but at Churchill, but that's not what you saw on the news. On the news, they were plucky. And they never hugged. Mercifully, not a single pair of huggers after their home was blown to smithereens. 

That's what the Phantom hopes we can emulate here in America. Plucky post massacre pluck.  No hugging. No bringing of flowers to makeshift shrines. No decals. Just pluck.

Wouldn't that be a better way of dealing?  And, oh, yes, news coverage limited to one day, then move on.  

That way we can be ready for the next one. 

Orlando: Just Another Massacre, As Sure As the Sun Will Rise

Seacoast New Hampshire

When I was growing up, there was no Monday Night Football. In fact, most stores  in my home town closed at noon on Saturday, and all stores were closed all day Sunday. That was normal then.  Stores were closed Sunday, but the Redskins played Sundays and Monday morning you talked about the dreadful the team was.

There were certain things you could count on, like the seasons:   Summer came and schools closed, and community swimming pools opened.  These were things you could count on as part of American life.

Every spring, you could count on the Extravaganza show at Bethesda Chevy Chase High School to showcase local talent and people would talk about it into the summer. 

Small town America, lots of guns tucked away

Now, you can count on the monthly massacre.  

Until San Bernadino, it was always a male with a gun.  That one time a woman got involved, but as a rule, it's still  a male hater/shooter. 

Some times there's a reason given, like the guys who shoot up abortion clinics or guys who murder doctors who are connected to Planned Parenthood. 

Or maybe it's  radical Islam at Boston and Orlando, although you have the distinct impression that was just an excuse to elevate psychopathic rage into a cause. Some, like Sandy Hook or Columbine (remember Columbine?) or Aurora, it was just some white guy with a gun.  Might be a white guy killing Black church goers as in Charleston.  

As Chris Rock has noted, random mass murder does not often get connected to Black men.  Black guy will steal your purse, Rock says.  Someone opens fire on a playground: White guy. Asians, rarely, like that guy at Virginia Tech. Remember Virginia Tech?  

But mostly it's a white guy thing. That federal building in Oklahoma City--you knew that would turn out to be a white guy. Not a Black guy. Not a woman. A white guy. Man with a gun or a bomb.  Impersonal murderer. 

I can't remember all the massacres any more. Just another guy with a gun shooting people who can't shoot back, feeling good about himself, briefly.

Holly, the gorilla, Bronx Zoo

In Europe, they have soccer hooliganism. In America, we have mass shootings. 

It's who we are now.  

Wasn't always that way. Remember when those two thugs shot the Clutters in their home in Kansas and Truman Capote went out there and wrote "In Cold Blood?"  In 1950's America, cold blooded killing was still considered freakish. 

Then came Vietnam and American boys massacred Vietnamese villagers, most famously at Mai Lai, and the mother of one of the soldiers said, "I gave you my son, a good boy, and you made him a murderer."  But that was more comprehensible, how that happened.  Then came Kent State, where American boys shot down students in cold blood. James Michner explained all that in his book. 

Now we've progressed to inexplicable murder. 

But it's just part of American life now. The massacre du jour. 

Dust bowl mother: Didn't have to worry about deranged shooter

As always, they get the Senators on TV, calling for gun laws and the Republicans droning on about how guns don't kill people.  Nothing changing there.

It's a big country.  Car safety has improved. Fewer highway deaths.  

We'll know mayhem and mass murder have really achieved status as the new normal when they stop making the lead news item,  when it's: "Oh, yeah, and thirty kindergartners were shot to death on a playground in Spokane today. In other news..."

Gustav Klimpt and Mark Twain: Wittgenstein's Vienna

Not your typical Victorian lady

Moldering on my bookshelf is a book called, "Wittgenstein's Vienna."  It was given to me by a friend who loved Wittgenstein, thought he was the best philosopher of all time. Never got around to reading it. I will now. 

Even the Nazis couldn't resist stealing this one

I'm deep into "Lady in Gold" by Anne Marie O'Connor, about a painting by Gustav Klimt, an artist I've never heard of, or if I had, made no impression on me. He was painting around the same time as Vincent Van Gogh and Gauguin, which must have been like playing for the Washington Senators when Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig were playing for the Yankees. 

Not exactly what the Pope ordered

But Klimt was good. You look at his stuff, and you say, "Wow."  It's very different from Van Gogh, who I like better, but it is just as innovative in its own way, and every bit as riveting.  

And remember, he was painting at a time, and in a society, when women were not supposed to enjoy sex. This was a time when Mahler, the great composer told his wife, who was emerging as a composer of some merit she had to stop writing music because it would distract her from her real mission in life, to serve his needs. 

Women simply tolerate sex

The thing was, Klimt was not painting in Anvers, or in the fields of Southern France or the mountains of Austria; he was working in Vienna, and unlike Van Gogh, Klimt was the court artist, having been trained in the best Austrian art school, having a father who was a master craftsman in gold gilt and Klimt had to reject all that to go his own way. While Van Gogh raged in the countryside, shouting in the wilderness, Klimt was running among the Austrian elite, and had, eventually,  to say, "No."

Gustav Klimt

But what is really astonishing about this book is the depiction of what Vienna was like as the 19th century turned into the 20th.  Freud was there, going to lectures by the artists in Klimt's crowd. Wittgenstein, of course was writing there and Mahler and Schubert were composing music there.  And who should show up?  Samuel Clemens, aka, Mark Twain, who was there trying to work his way out of a clinical depression and severe case of writer's block. 

Philo Semite

Like Klimt, Twain fell in with a Jewish crowd.  Twain wrote a friend, "The difference between the brain of the average Christian and that of the average Jew--certainly in Europe--is about the difference between a tadpole's and the Archbishop's."

Actual Semite

O'Connor describes Twain as a philo-Semite, someone who liked Jews. Who knew? Who knew this about Mark Twain? Who knew there even was such a thing as someone who likes Jews? Ask Woody Allen:  Nobody says nice things about Jews, except occasionally, other Jews, but even that is rare.  But it wasn't just Mark Twain:  Klimt found the women attractive and, yes, the Jews of Vienna tended to be the folks who saw value in art, in the arts in general, and they spent money supporting artists, but they were also, apparently, charming, asking all the right questions and responding positively to the revolutionary ideas Klimt was espousing. That's not all the Jewish women were responding to, apparently.  Klimt had what we might now call, "animal magnetism," and the ladies, and often the adolescent females, responded.

Of course, where ever you find a concentration of Jews in a developed society, you find rabid anti Semites, and the vitriol O'Connor relates is savage and virulent.  Hitler did not spring fully formed from his own egg--there had been decades of haters fulminating in Austria.  Hitler, of course, was rejected from the same art school and establishment which embraced Klimt, who was not Jewish but who found support among Jews. 

The Emperor 

The Austro-Hungarian royalty and the bourgeoisie were mainly Catholic, and very proper and uptight and sexually fundamentalist, officially, but the king and his court had well known affairs and Klimt was eager to partake in the feminine pulchritude surrounding him.  Despite outward appearances, free love abounded in turn of the century Vienna; unfortunately for some of the women, there was free love without much in the way of contraception.

This is one of those "Who Knew?" stories. Lots of famous people, seminal thinkers and educated classes struggling against what would take a few decades to fester until the underlying malignancy of that society erupted and destroyed it. 

Yet, if you were Sally Bowles, you wanted to be singing in a cabaret in Vienna.  Yes, Paris was exciting and alive, but Vienna, that's where the earthquake would be centered.