Summer Comes to New Hampshire

Summer has finally settled in, in Hampton, New Hampshire.

When I first moved here, one of my neighbors told me there are four distinct seasons in New Hampshire: Almost winter, winter, still winter and road repair season.

I've got through 9 winters up here and only one was really daunting. That winter it started snowing in early January and it snowed every single day for two months and it was cold enough the snow did not  melt between storms, so it just piled up higher and higher until it reached the roof over my front porch, so I could clear that roof by simply standing on the snow without a ladder.

Illegal Norway Maple growing in Hampton

This past winter was not like that, but it did snow most weeks between January and March. They clear the snow efficiently up here, so I missed only one day of work. 

Spring this year, however was cool and apart from a few hot days, you wore light jackets until Mid June. 

But now it's really summer. I know this because the sand sculpture on Route 27 just arose. 

Route 27 streams down toward the Atlantic until it finally ends at the sea wall at North Beach and you find yourself looking out over the gray ocean. Three miles before that happens, however, the road rises as it passes over an old railroad trestle and then it descends to cross Route 1 at the main intersection of  town.

Plaice Cove

Hampton is actually two towns: There is the town the tourists know, which is "Hampton Beach" which is a honky tonk cluttered with T shirt shops and pizza pallors and, teeming with traffic along  a broad white sand beach and people crowding the streets in flip flops and bathing suits, flaunting tatoos, displaying bodies which would look better with a little less display.

And then there is the real town of Hampton, where the year rounders live. 
This is centered at the intersection of Rte 27 and Rte 1, with the restaurant, "The Old Salt" which might be better named, "The Old Fish Fry" as it discharges a cloud of fried food smell which hangs over the crossroads. Across the street is the hardware store and next to that is Hagan's restaurant and bar,  and on the other corner is the Bistro attached to Chez Boucher, a french cooking school and haute cuisine restaurant. 

The town has finally decided to spend the money to bury the unsightly power lines which mar the scene. Or at least, the town has appropriated money to study the prospect of spending the money to bury the wires.
Spending money in Hampton is always a fight: Only recently did the middle school finally get the vote to do necessary repairs, after years of denial at the town voting during the "warrants." So it is something short of miraculous the money for burying the power lines is even being considered.

The summer ritual on Route 27 is the fashioning of the sand sculpture.  The man who owns the house on the northwest side of the route commissions a sand sculpture which covers part of his front lawn right up to the sidewalk.
My favorite was a bare breasted mermaid, languorously posed with a come hither look, but mysteriously, after a few weeks,  the breasts got reworked to include a discrete  top, or bra, which ruined the look.

Since then, the sculptures have been forgettable, but this year there is a bastardization of the old Coppertone advertisement which showed a dog pulling down the lower half of a young girl's swimming suit revealing her untanned bottom. This evolved from a much tamer drawing, and became an iconic ad which may just smack of child pornography today. 

The girl was about three or four, clearly pre pubescent, and in the 1950's and 1960's when nakedness was embarrassing and unwholesome, this was accepted as "cute" much as naked baby photos were. 

Personally, I never got all the winking and smiling about naked children, nor the relevance of children to Coppertone. You might think, well, you don't want to expose children to sunlight for fear of inducing skin cancer later in life, but in the days this ad ran, it was thought sunbathing was healthy and the add was about getting a tan and exposing yourself to its healthy rays.

Of course, over the years, this ad has been parodied from Rolling Stone Magazine to Playboy.



















In this year's sculpture she's all grown up and her bare bottom may or may not be untanned, but she cups a well developed breast in one hand and looks angry.
 The dog is just as cute as ever, but now the "Just for the Sun of It " inscription carries a different sort of implication.

If the mermaid was enough to scandalize the townspeople, then this new image ought to send at least some church goers into orbit. 

This is one of those instances you wish we still had small town newspapers in New Hampshire. Wouldn't you like to know how these images are chosen? Is it the homeowner suggesting it or does the artist have carte blanche or do they get together over beers or do they present designs to the local Rotarian club? 

Really, there is so much to ask about this transitory edifice and what it might say about life in small town New Hampshire. 

The Donald Etiquette

My brother once remarked that when the medical profession could offer cures for the vast majority of diseases it treated, then he would stop wearing his white lab coat when he saw patients or represented the profession in formal settings.


Donald at a Cabinet Meeting: drawing by   Pia Guerra

What he was saying, of course, is doctors wear white lab coats to project an image, a mystique some might call it, for the sake of those who want them to be more than simple human beings.  For the same reason, judges wear robes, priests vestments and generals wear stars on their hats. 

People want you to perform a role when you are an authority figure. They need that.

In the case of the President of the United States, people like calling him "Mr. President." Staff members who knew him when, old friends call the man they knew before he was President, "Mr. President," much as, I imagine, people call the Pope "Your holiness" even if they knew him when he was just a humble priest in South America.


Pia Guerra took artist license: he's much fatter

What Donald Trump has done is to shred that practice, either intentionally or simply as a part of his oppositional  personality.  So Presidents are not suppose to say the word, "Shit" publicly. As George Carlin said, that is one of those forbidden words which is never, under any circumstances, acceptable in polite society. People use the word, all the time, but everyone understands, you are not supposed to.

When Trump addresses a crowd and says, "We gonna bomb the shit out of ISIS, when I'm President," the crowd reacts joyously, because, among other things, he has admitted them backstage--he is saying we are such good friends, we can say these things to one another. Additionally, he is sticking a thumb in the eye of all those up tight, rule obeying rule laying down types the members of his crowd despise.

The other night, Mark Shields, responding to a question about Donald Trump's tweets about Mika and Joe of the "Morning Joe" show shook his head and clucked and despaired about how low "we" have fallen.


Pia Guerra captures the essence 

You have a man in the White House who just isn't behaving "correctly." He is not obeying norms. He is indifferent to precedent. His fans love him for it, of course, but Mark Shields has spent decades playing a game of droll jibes at the powers that be, and now he is out of the game. He doesn't understand the rules. 

So what are the rules? We can only infer the rules. Observe.  Nobody is quite sure what Mika Brzeznyksi said to provoke Donald but here's a guess:

One segment that may have led to Trump’s tweets came when Morning Joe‘s panel was discussing the recent story that President Trump had put up fake TIME Magazine covers of himself at his golf clubs. Mika Brzezinski said, “Nothing makes a man feel better than making a fake cover of a magazine about himself, lying every day and destroying the country.”
(from the blog, "Heavy.")

So, Donald watches this derisive comment and follows his rule, as his Press Secretary explains, "When he is attacked, he hits back twice as hard," which in Donald's case is, "Oh, so you are really fat and ugly and you had a face lift and are still bleeding and nobody watches your program anyway, so there."
This behavior causes Mark Shields to despair. 
Not me. I think this is just swell. 

Oh, Pia! You got it.

We now know the rules. 
1. Call him "Donald"

This whole Mr. President thing is out the window. 
We no longer have to say, well you are the President and I respect the office, if not the person, so I will talk to you the way I talked to my third grade teachers, with "Ma'm" and "sir." 

In the military, you salute the rank, not the man. That is thought to be important to discipline. But in civilian life, we don't need that sort of discipline. Who are we trying to impress? Just call the guy, "Donald." Not "Mr. President," just Donald. And not Mr. Trump. You use that sort of formality as a signal of respect. But now we have doctors who go by their first names. They call you by your first name and you respond accordingly. Same for Donald.
 In Court, you call the judge, "Your honor" if you know what's good for you, but you can call Donald Donald because he doesn't have any real power over you, the way a judge would.
Actually, I like "Donald Snowflake."

2. Point to his personal characteristics:

He is not just chubby. The man is morbidly obese. Call him Fat Donald.
He is a comb over, bald guy. Call him Fat Comb Over Donald.
Hey, Donald, what is that dead yellow thing you're wearing on your head? Canary head-dress? 
He does not express himself cogently. He says he has all the best words and he claims to have a high IQ. Call him Dumb Donald. Donald Dimwit. 

Ouch, Pia.

3. Hammer away at his most obvious policy weaknesses.
--There is no such thing as "clean coal." There is no dark light, no tall midget, no immaculate stain, no fast sloth. There is just dirty coal, sometimes scrubbed and treated but never clean.
--Those factory jobs are not coming back.  The coal mining jobs are not coming back, not in any real numbers. The days of coal mining and assembly line work are going the way of icemen hauling ice on horse drawn carts, of coach men driving a team of horses, of outhouses, of lamp lighters on city streets. 

4. Refer to him without naming him, but unmistakably: 
The infant in the White House.
The thumbsucker who signs executive orders.
The phony tough guy who picks on immigrant kids and thinks he's beaten up a terrorist.

Who needs a White House Photographer when we've got Pia?

5. And do not react to his Tweets or taunts by expressing hurt or indignation. Do not claim to be offended on behalf of women or short people or any other group.
React by laughing. "Oh, that dimwit again. Donald Dimwit throwing his snowflake punches. The guy's got no class. He may be rich. He may be getting richer. But he's clearly got more money than brains."

And all like that. 
But most of all, read whatever Pia Guerra posts.

A New Hampshire Hobbit in California

Yosemite is one of those places people who live in California and on the West Coast know is there but they often have not gone there themselves, because, what's the rush?
I was like that, when I lived in Washington, D.C., only it was worse in my case because I drove by the White House, the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial frequently. I could bicycle to the Mall from my house in suburban Maryland, but I was too busy with life to pause. 
For people who live in Berkeley or San Francisco, Yosemite is three hours on California freeways.

Where they got that name "freeway" is beyond me. Must have been the embedded irony in the name. California roads are not free at all, in the sense of being wide open or unencumbered. Next to California freeways, the Washington, D.C. beltway looks like a open prairie. On California freeways, trucks and cars are packed tight as sardines.

But once you get to Yosemite Park, you realize how big everything in California is.
Texas makes much of its bigness but Texas is empty big. California is full big. 

The other thing about Californians is they do not seem to cleave to the past, to the importance of heritage and tribalism. They don't seem as intent on classifying you, at placing you in a group or on a ranked list. 

I visited a medical school friend and his wife who live in the Berkeley hills with a breathtaking view of the San Francisco Bay, the Golden Gate bridge on the right and the Bay Bridge on the left. He grew up on Long Island and she is from England. They smiled at the view from their front window and said, "We're happy here."

In their neighborhood, Bernie signs have not been taken down. If you were for Hillary in 2016, you were considered right wing.  Houses have signs on them:  "Health Insurance for the 99%." This is in the front window of a private home. 

The faces on every road and sidewalk are from a United Colors of Benneton advertisement.  Black, white, Asian, South American, Polynesian. Mixes you cannot classify. And they all seem to get along. Kris Kobach should get out of Kansas and spend some time in California. Maybe he wouldn't be so worried about what an America which is not 99% white would be like. 

The thing about California, is it is a Republic of the New.  There are families which have spent generations in California, but there is a sense of newness and openness which is striking to someone fresh off the plane from the shire back on the sea coast of New Hampshire.

People have been writing about California since Mark Twain, straight through Steinbeck and Raymond Chandler and Joan Didion. I cannot do it justice. Movies are made in California and about California--"Chinatown" and "Roger Rabbit" and "The Big Sleep" and the list goes on. Fables are made about California. California is a fable, in some important ways. It's where imagination meets technology and vice versa. It's Dreamland. Disney. Wish upon a star land. 


It's no accident Silicon Valley is in California, no accident that Mark Zuckerberg hopped a plane from Harvard to San Francisco. 

It's  worth a visit. There's still hope out there. They are a long way from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Puffy Pink Guys

Okay, I admit it. I'm getting a little befuddled as I slide down the slope of advancing age. My neurons aren't synapsing the way they used to and I get confused. In short, I get mixed up.

So here's my quiz for you:  Can you tell these guys apart?

Here's the quiz:

Which one of these guys says that Sandy Hook was staged to get gun control passed and to destroy the Second Amendment?

Which one of these guys says the September 11th attack  was staged and was an inside job? A or B or A+B?

Which one of the guys below  says Obama was born in Kenya to parents from Mars?

Bonus points: Which one of the guys above says  the Deep State is conspiring with the New World Order men, who fly around in black helicopters wearing Royal blue helmets to take away your guns and to force White women to have sex with Black and Hispanic men?

Which of these guys says Hispanics from south of the border are flooding across the Rio Grande with the intention of doing "ethnic cleansing" of White, Christian Americans, as a part of the war on Christmas and, don't forget the Muslims who are coming with them? A, B or Both or Neither. (Hint: it's not neither.)
Oh, and one of these guys says President Obama refused to prosecute any people of color.

 

Another hint: The same guy says voter fraud is rampant in the United States and that 30 million votes cast for Hillary Clinton were fake, phony and fraudulent.

Now, here's an easy one: Who saw all those Muslims  dancing on rooftops, celebrating as the towers burned on September 11th?

So here's the real question: Are these puffy white guys actually all the same guy, presented to us, the credulous American public as different men?Sort of like the third season of "Fargo," where the same actor plays two brothers who are not even twins.

I mean, are these really different and distinct human beings?


When they cite evidence is it always from the same sources?
1/ The website  Planet Paranoia.
2/ Breitbart News
3/ The Heritage Foundation


And I have to ask the question Barney Frank asked of a lady in the crowd who persisted with questions about these things: Excuse me, Ma'm, but on what planet to do you spend the majority of your time?

I Miss Reality (Winner)

Somewhere behind a concrete wall paces a twenty something with the unlikely, but highly appropriate name of "Reality Winner," who decided to inform the American public that the Russians tried (and, who knows?, maybe succeeded) to hack and infiltrate the voting machine software, or the voting tabulation software or the cyber super highway software in the 2016 Presidential election. She may well find herself among miscreants of various descriptions from the Group W bench, as Arlo Guthrie would say:  robbers, murderers, mother rapers, and, of course, litterbugs.
Her offense, of course, is one of revelation. 
For that she was clapped in irons, denied bail and strip searched, dressed in an orange prison suit and isolated from the American public.

Just wanted to say, "Reality, I miss you. Wish you were here."

Mere Spectators: Semper Fi

"But contempt for the intellect has a strange way of not being passive. One of two things may happen: those who are innocently credulous may be come easy prey for those who are less scrupulous and who seek to 'lead' and 'inspire' them. Or those whose credulity has led their own society into stagnation may seek a solution, not in true self-examination, but in blaming others for their backwardness."
--Christopher Hitchens

One of my imaginings of Heaven, has been that you get up in the clouds and they tell you the truth about all the things you had wondered about, been deceived or deluded about on Earth.  "Oh, so that's why I got that cancer! It was that radon in my basement."  Or, "Oh, so that's why that girl would never go out with me--she was in love with my room mate!"  That sort of thing.

The trouble is, the enlightenment comes too late. It's that old saw about the pathologist, who does the autopsy--he knows everything, but too late.

Often, it comes down to that observation of Bill Clinton, who noted how liberating it was to be done with his Presidency so now he could say whatever he really thought, without having to parse every sentence with some constituency or interest group in mind. "The trouble is," he noted ruefully, "I can say exactly what I think, but now nobody cares what I think."

This is the position of most every codger, like me, out there. This is why people like Warren Buffet and Mitch McConnell hang on to their jobs into their 70's and 80's. Once you give up power, that is the capacity to put your opinion into action that affects other people, you become irrelevant, invisible.

This may be why some elderly men fantasize about becoming professors at universities, where twenty somethings will hang on their every word, as so many idiots hung on former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan's words, words which had the power to move markets, at least for a day. 
Of course, the problem with that fantasy is precious few of people in their 70's and 80's have any real wisdom to impart, and even if they did, the twenty somethings would be no more interested in it than they are in listening to Bill Clinton. Who's he? What does he matter?

I'm not sure this is as true in other countries--Japan comes to mind. Maybe even England. But from my worm's eye view it looks to be the case in America, at least among my circle of friends.  Teenagers and twenty somethings have little or no interest in me or anything I have to say, and I can't blame them. They are either polite but itching to move on to more interesting people, or they completely ignore me.

 I wonder if I did the same when I was their age?

I think there were some older people I was interested in, but mostly because they seemed at least passingly interested in me.  There was a woman, who must have been all of forty years old, who used to come to the swimming pool where I was a lifeguard and she would sit in her aluminum folding chair next to me in my lifeguard stand and we would chat about things.  I was maybe 18, and she was a MUCH older woman--forty, one foot in the grave,  but she seemed amused and interested in my questions and answers. 
I really cannot recall what it was we talked about. She must not have had a job, because she was there during the day. But she was a sort of summer friend, across the generational divide.
There were also friends of my mother, who were school teachers, who seemed interesting in some ways, but guarded because they were school teachers.

There was a neighbor who had been an Army Air Force pilot in World War II.  He had been shot down and captured in Europe and spent a year in a prisoner of war camp. His name was Jim Juntilla. He was from Minnesota originally but he became a lawyer and worked at the Federal Communications Commission. I know that because he was somehow involved in a case involving Playboy magazine, and laws relating to mailing Playboy though the U.S. Postal Service. He had lots of Playboys around his house, which his kids read avidly. 

He read Catch-22 lying on his couch in his living room, laughing so hard tears ran down his face. "This is the closest thing to what it was really like," he said. "So true."
This was 1957, you have to understand. The war had only ended 12 years before. That would have made him about 32. I was 10. 
I read the book and it was disorienting. It was not at all like the other war books I had read or the movies about the war I had seen, and aside from Westerns, everything in those days was about The War.  The book had no heroes like the fearless, grim, determined, admirable heroes I was familiar with.  I tried to get him to tell me more about his war, but he wasn't interested in sharing that with some kid.

A gardener came to work at our house one day, two years earlier. I hung around and watched him dig holes, as he swung his pick and uprooted things.  He was a Black man, who must have just tolerated this curious white kid watching him work.  

Turned out, he had been in the war. 
What branch? 
Army. 
Oh, I said. The Army. I liked the Marines. The Marines had the really tough fighting in the Pacific. The Army only had to fight the Germans. The Germans weren't as fanatical as the Japanese. 

He said something I didn't quite catch. 
My father happened to have walked by at that moment and caught this exchange.
I didn't understand the man because he spoke in a deep South dialect, and he didn't look at me when he said it. He was looking at the soil as he let loose his pick. He might have half smiled. Maybe not.
"What'd he say?" I asked my father, trailing after him.
"He said:They fought like Hell," my father said, smiling at me. 
"Who?"
"The Germans."
"But, they didn't have Kamikazes."
"He was there," my father said. "He knows things you don't."
I went back out and sat down and watched the gardener work.  He knew stuff I did not know. 

He was a Black man. Hard as my parents tried to teach me, I had absorbed the conventional beliefs of where I grew up, and in those days Washington, D.C. was most definitely a Southern town. Most people were from the Carolinas, Georgia, the deep South. My parents were part of the influx from the North. But for me, in those days, I assumed if he was a Negro, which is what we called them then, he was likely to be uneducated and not very smart. 

But he knew something I did not know.
Of course, he knew quite a lot I did not know, like how he had to fight in a segregated regiment because the American Army did not think it proper for Negroes to be fighting alongside White men. Bad for "unit cohesion."  And he did not mention that no matter how brave he had been fighting "for his country" when he got back to America, he was just a Negro again, and the only work for him was digging with a pickaxe. 

But I did not know any of that. I just knew he had been in that great adventure I had been so enthralled with: World War II.  
I watched him. 
"Where did you fight?"
Another clunk of the pickaxe.
"Europe, mostly."
"How long?"
"Two years."
"Did you get to Germany? Berlin?"
"Nope."
"Why not?"
"Wounded. Got sent home."
"You look okay now."
"I was lucky. "
"Lucky? You got wounded."
"Got home with both arms and legs, and hands and my balls."
"You like being a gardener?"
"It's a living."
"But you're a hero."
"Weren't no heroes. Just dead guys and guys who go out alive. No heroes at'all."

I had no idea what he was talking about, until I read Catch-22.

RUSSIANS HACKED VOTE: HILLARY CLINTON DECLARED REAL WINNER!

READ ALL ABOUT IT!

The REALITY is the real WINNER was Hillary Clinton.
Russia hacked the voting software and as vote tabulations made their way from local precincts down cyber highways to central tabulations in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida, Michigan, Wisconsin and North Carolina, the Russians were there to meet them.

They stole a page from "Risky Business" where the hero doesn't bother to alter his failing exam grades, or the reports from the teachers; he simply hacks the transcripts of his final grades, the ones which are all the colleges see.

This also explains why exit polling had Hillary Clinton winning in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, states the computers told us she lost.

And the NSA knew this all along, but you know, chain of command. Better to have the wrong guy declared the winner than have the American public lose faith in voting integrity and by extension, in democracy itself.

So our "Manchurian Candidate" was put in place by the Russians, just like in the movie. But that was fiction.

But what is fiction now?

And what is reality?

As Mr. Trump has instructed, it's anything you want to believe.

Statement is fact. Opinion is evidence and truth is whatever you can get people to believe.

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. Who controls the present controls the past. Who controls the past, controls the future.

Reality bites.

The Winner is the loser. She'll spend 10 years behind bars.
Did you see the television commercial showing Mr. Trump's successful trip where he brought peace to the Middle East?  Leni Riefenstahl filmed it.
President Trump just appointed Reality Winner to be his press secretary.
Melania is in charge of her wardrobe.

No more losers in the White House.
Only Winners.
We just dropped a nuclear bomb on ISIS.
The Mexican wall can be seen from outer space.
Obama was born in Kenya to Martian parents.

Melania has just been appointed Hillary Clinton's personal trainer.
Trump is now the Secretary of Hotels and Urban Development.
He is building an ice skating rink on the National Mall.
He'll take over for Arnold on "The Apprentice," and he'll also head Fox News.
Ignorance is Strength. Check it out