September 13, 2024
Dear Interested Readers,
Reflections On Childless Cat Ladies and Illeagal Immigrants Consuming Pets
As 9 PM on Tuesday evening approached, I could feel myself getting more and more tense. There were big questions. Would Vice President Harris appear “presidential?” Would Donald Trump be able to stay on message? Would there be any questions about healthcare policy? Would the press be impressed with the Vice President’s policy statements and stop their recurrent suggestion that she needed to provide them more specifics when they have a much lower expectation of former President Trump? Would the debate impact the outcome of the election?
Back when I had the responsibility of doing “performance” reviews I would occasionally have the pleasure of summing up the description of the individual’s performance with the cryptic phrase, “exceeds expectations.” In retrospect, I should feel a little guilty that I had any doubts at all about the ability of the Vice President to perform beyond my expectations. Over the last few weeks, her performance has been remarkable, and she is getting better and better as she gains experience. I am delighted that the pundits also seem to have considered her debate performance to have been exceptional.
In a very negative way, former President Trump also exceeded expectations. Does he really believe that there is anyone of sound mind who would believe that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio eat the cats and dogs of their neighbors or that as an egregious form of abortion full-term babies were murdered after birth?
I have not seen in the media any self-assessing comments from the Vice President about her performance. I have seen that President Trump thinks that he did a terrific job. In a New York Times article entitled “Trump Says He Had a Great Debate. His Allies Privately Say Otherwise” that was written by Jonathan Swan, Shane Goldmacher, and Maggie Haberman we read that he did the unusual thing for a candidate of going to the “spin room” after the debate to make the claim that his performance was terrific. The article reports that he wrote on “Truth Social” his private version of Twitter:
“That was my best Debate, EVER, especially since it was THREE ON ONE!” Mr. Trump posted on Truth Social, minutes after the debate ended, referring to the two ABC News moderators.
The moderators did indeed push back on his lies, misrepresentations, and frequent failures to answer the questions they asked him.
The other big event after the debate was the surprise endorsement of Kamala Harris by Taylor Swift. Swift’s post-debate post suggests that she was pleased with the Vice President’s performance. I immediately texted my almost 22-year-old granddaughter who is a huge fan of Swift. Last spring while she was doing the spring semester of her junior year in Madrid, she and some friends attended Swift’s concert in Paris. My granddaughter’s response was a positive “Yep!” She is just one of the more than 280 million people, young and older, who follow Swift on Instagram where her notice appeared. Swift’s post did double duty by zinging J.D. Vance as you can see at the end of the post which you probably know she signed as Taylor Swift, “Childless Cat Lady.”
Like many of you, I watched the debate tonight. If you haven’t already, now is a great time to do your research on the issues at hand and the stances these candidates take on the topics that matter to you the most. As a voter, I make sure to watch and read everything I can about their proposed policies and plans for this country.
Recently I was made aware that AI of ‘me’ falsely endorsing Donald Trump’s presidential run was posted to his site. It really conjured up my fears around AI, and the dangers of spreading misinformation. It brought me to the conclusion that I need to be very transparent about my actual plans for this election as a voter. The simplest way to combat misinformation is with the truth.
I will be casting my vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz in the 2024 Presidential Election. I’m voting for @kamalaharris because she fights for the rights and causes I believe need a warrior to champion them. I think she is a steady-handed, gifted leader and I believe we can accomplish so much more in this country if we are led by calm and not chaos. I was so heartened and impressed by her selection of running mate @timwalz, who has been standing up for LGBTQ+ rights, IVF, and a woman’s right to her own body for decades.
I’ve done my research, and I’ve made my choice. Your research is all yours to do, and the choice is yours to make. I also want to say, especially to first time voters: Remember that in order to vote, you have to be registered! I also find it’s much easier to vote early. I’ll link where to register and find early voting dates and info in my story.
With love and hope,
Taylor Swift, Childless Cat Lady
There were 400,000 new voter registrations in the 24 hours after Swift’s post.
If you listened to the debate, you know that healthcare was discussed. Vice President Harris was asked about the shift from her position in the 2020 Democratic Presidential Primary debates when she was in favor of migrating over several years from the complex combination of coverage from the ACA, Medicare, Medicaid, and VA healthcare to a “Medicare For All” government-funded health system with universal access. Her response implied that the success of the Biden administration’s expansion of the ACA, lowering of the cost of insulin and other medications, and the reduction of out-of-pocket expenses for Medicare recipients were all movements in the right direction toward the principle that she believes– that access to healthcare is a “human right” and not a privilege that is a function of an individual’s ability to pay. She pledged that if elected she would continue to press for expanded access and cost reduction. I thought her answer was excellent.
When the moderators asked former President Trump about his healthcare agenda and his previous attempts to “repeal and replace” the ACA with something better, we got the opportunity to relive the dramatic moment when John McCain saved the ACA with his downturned thump. McCain blocked Trump’s attempt to repeal the ACA because Trump had offered no viable replacement for the ACA.
In his answer, Trump implied that the ACA was still terrible and that if elected he would try again to replace it “with something better.” He could not describe his plan, but he promised that it was in the works. In the debate, he disavowed Project 2025 which we know advocates moving healthcare into the private sector where the market would “fix it.”
The Presidential Debate was not the only event of importance on September 10. Tuesday was also the publication date of the latest book by Arlie Russell Hochschild, Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right. My copy of the book arrived in today’s mail, and I am excited to read it because Professor Hochchild’s previous book, Strangers in Their Own Land which was published in 2016 had given me important insights into the “blue-collar” conservative voters in “Red States” who had voted against their own best interests in 2016 when they elected Donald Trump.
Over the years, I have referenced Hochschild’s 2016 book several times. The first time was in June of 2017. At the time, I was impressed by the fact that she had made many trips to Louisiana where she actually lived at times with her subjects. Through the close relationships that evolved, she developed a compassionate understanding of her subjects, and she demonstrated that their voting preferences which seem contrary to their economic best interests, made huge sense when viewed through the lens of their culture. I knew that she was in her mid-seventies in 2016, and I was surprised when I saw that the new book comes when she is 84!
I am eager to devour her new book, but after reading Doug Bock Clark’s review of Professor Hochschild’s book in The New York Times entitled “What Makes the Far Right Tick? In “Stolen Pride,” Arlie Russell Hochschild explores the emotional lives of Americans who vote for Donald Trump,” I decided to use his analysis to introduce the book and its concepts to you now before I have read it.
I anticipate that the book will explain why MAGA America will not be swayed by a debate, and despite my sense that no rational individual who cares about our democracy would vote for Trump, the 2024 Presidential Election will remain a tight race without a certain outcome. It is not even certain that after the votes are counted the transition of leadership will be without the risk of violence.
Clark begins his book review by giving a brief review of Hocschil’s 2016 book Strangers in Their Own Land.
“Stolen Pride” is a sequel to Hochschild’s lauded “Strangers in Their Own Land,” which focused on working-class Louisiana supporters of the Tea Party during the Obama administration. That earlier book arrived in the months before Trump’s 2016 presidential win and was held up as key to understanding the constituency that had sent him to the White House. In her new book, Hochschild delves into Appalachia, the American region featured by Trump’s vice-presidential pick JD Vance in his memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy.”
I feel like I have a connection to Pikeville, Kentucky which is the economic and medical center of the region in eastern Kentucky which is the “laboratory” for Hochschild’s study. The current hospital in Pikeville, The Pikeville Medical Center, has an impressive website. The hospital is now owned by the Methodist church, and it sports an associated network that is linked by an Epic medical record.
While reviewing the history of the Pikeville Medical Center on Wikipedia, I confirmed to my own satisfaction that my mother’s brother and his family had lived in Pikeville in the early 50s while he helped build an extension to the hospital which was probably funded by the Hill-Burton Act. My uncle was a 1943 graduate of The Citadel (the military college of South Carolina) where became a civil engineer. After returning from World War II where he had built pontoon bridges as an officer in the Army Corps of Engineers, he was employed by a company that built Hill-Burton funded hospitals across the South. The Pikeville Hospital was expanded in 1952.
Clark continues his introduction to the book:
… “Stolen Pride” will almost certainly be used by commentators to decode the sentiments of conservatives this election too. (Indeed, Hochschild herself launched this process with a recent essay in The Wall Street Journal.) What differentiates “Stolen Pride” from the glut of other commentary on Trump voters is Hochschild’s sustained attention to the economic and cultural factors influencing their emotions — especially their pride and shame. As Hochschild sees it, the residents of Pikeville are trapped in a “pride paradox.”
“On one hand, rural KY-5 [the 5th Congressional District of Kentucky] Republicans felt fierce pride in hard work and personal responsibility,” she writes. “On the other hand, their beleaguered economy” — hollowed out by the decline of the coal industry, globalization and other economic shifts that favor urban Democratic America — “greatly lowered their chance of success and vulnerability to shame.” Trump, Hochschild theorizes, offered these voters a way out by telling them to be proud of themselves and blame others — liberals, immigrants, the federal government — for their failures.
Former President Trump draws on and emphasizes the sense of disrespect that many Red State voters without a college degree feel toward “progressive coastal elites.” From her speeches and her choice of Tim Walz as her running mate, I sense that Vice President Harris understands the message that Professor Hochschild’s research produces, and we can feel this understanding in the way that she has directed her message of unity, opportunity, and joy in her advocacy for “a new way forward.” Clark continues:
In this story, Hochschild explains, white, blue-collar conservatives feel that they had been waiting in line for the American dream only to have Democratic constituencies — educated women and minorities, for example — cut ahead of them. In “Stolen Pride,” Hochschild elaborates that those voters saw Barack Obama as a bully helping the line-cutters advance. Trump then emerged as the “good bully” who was strong enough to fight back.
Hochschild is 84 years old. It is amazing that she has dedicated the last seven years of her life to understanding the MAGA attraction of the people of Appalachia. Clark offers praise.
At its best, “Stolen Pride” has an authority earned through seven years of research. Hochschild knows the class difference between living on a ridgeline and at the bottom of a holler…In profiling subjects from Pikeville’s many social strata — from a white nationalist to a recovering opioid addict to the local imam — Hochschild achieves a kaleidoscopic effect, in which the viewpoints of residents do merge, as she intended, to effectively represent the whole.
Clark summarizes Hochschild’s compassion and understanding as is demonstrated by her lengthy stories about individuals she grew to know over time. I remember her stories as the mechanism that gave power to her previous book about the conservative voters in Louisiana. Clark writes:
…It ’s worth highlighting the shading and nuance her interviews convey… “If you’re white and poor, people think, ‘What’s wrong with you that you’re stuck at the bottom?’” one financially struggling white man told Hochschild as he grappled with the “pride paradox.” “If I just look at my own life, I came from nothing and I got to nothing and I’m not a victim of racism because I’m white. So, to most Americans, I’m less than nothing. If it’s such a privilege to be born a white male, what could explain me except my own personal failure?”
No book is perfect for every reader. Clark wanted a little more from Hochschild than he got. He complained that there was not more of her story mixed in with the stories of the people from Pikeville.
I finished “Stolen Pride” nagged by the sense that she wasn’t giving us the full picture — most of all, of her own place in it as a retired professor from the University of California, Berkeley embedding in Pikeville to explain its residents to themselves and the nation. It’s a position that I suspect triggered at least some stereotypes that conservatives have about liberals thinking they know better. And yet her ethnography is frictionless. There is none of the grinding of opposing viewpoints so common during this contentious political time. There is little sense of what they thought of her and her project.
…I kept wondering, would her subjects say was her “deep story”? And would including that viewpoint in her book have destabilized its carefully engineered explanations? If America is increasingly divided into two countries, one liberal and one conservative, what would it have meant to compare their two deep stories in one narrative rather than have one side tell the other how it is?
I’ll keep Clark’s closing words in mind as I read this book. I begin from a position of bias. I already have a great respect for Hochschild. She is one of three writers/ sociologists-psychologists who have informed and moved me. The other two are Matthew Desmond and Jonathan Haidt. I hope that the wisdom the three have delivered in their research and books might be foundational to the new way forward that Vice President Harris offers.
If we are ever going to close the deep gap that separates the red and blue Americas and is palpable in our healthcare, we must displace knee-jerk biases against those with a different point of view with an effort to understand what has formed their position. As Frances Peabody said in his 1926 masterpiece, “The Care of Patient,” the secret to the care of the patient is to care for the patient. [The work was delivered as a lecture to medical students in 1926 and was published as a paper in 1927. Peabody died of cancer in October of 1927, shortly before his 46th birthday.] If our nation is the patient, and if we apply Dr. Peabody’s advice, we must endeavor to care for all of our citizens and understand and respect our complexity. We need to heed what Peabody wrote:
Time, sympathy and understanding must be lavishly dispensed, but the reward is to be found in that personal bond which forms the greatest satisfaction of the practice of medicine. One of the essential qualities of the clinician is interest in humanity, for the secret of the care of the patient is in caring for the patient.
In the debate, to my ear, Vice President Harris gave more evidence of caring for everyone in the nation than did the former president. She says that she wants to bring everyone forward. I assume “everyone” includes the folks in Pikeville and the polluted communities of Louisiana, and I believe her.
An Asylum of Loons
We have endured three summers without a baby loon. I have no exact explanation for the mystery of why we have been denied the joy of watching a baby loon go from a hatchling in late June or early July to the ability to fly in October. It may be true that there has been a different reason each year. The possibilities include violent storms that damaged the artificial “island” where the mother loon sits on the nest, displacement of one of the “mates” by a new suitor, or perhaps some manifestation of disease or global warming. I know that I have paid much less attention to these fascinating birds without a baby loon to enjoy.
Even in the years when we have a baby loon, fall brings an interesting transition. Loons begin to gather in groups on the lake. A group of geese is a “gaggle.” There are various words to describe a group of ducks, but “flock” is the universal term. There are also several names for these gatherings of loons, but the one that seems most appropriate and common is an “asylum” of loons. Is that because you find “loonies” in an asylum? The call of the loon often sounds mournful or distressed so perhaps a sense of depression is also an explanation for calling a collection of loons an “asylum.” In the fall, there are times when there is enough loon noise to imagine that there is a loon concert going on in a “looney bin.”
I was delighted this week when my neighbor, Peter Bloch, published a new video showing his recent photographs of our loons. I appreciate Peter’s willingness for me to pass his photography on to you. I encourage you to click here to enjoy the three-and-a-half-minute video composed of his amazing still shots entitled “The Loons of Little Lake Sunapee–2024.” One of my favorite shots shows a loon with a huge fish in its mouth.
Peter has also captured photos of a heron. I have seen this fellow before.
Peter introduces the video with a message that is worth repeating if for no other reason than it will reveal that it was Peter who introduced me to the term “an asylum of loons.”
Now that we live on the shores of Little Lake Sunapee, I spend a lot of time out there and have been pleasantly surprised by how many loons congregate on our lake, especially in August. I saw 7-9 of them in one grouping – aka “an asylum of loons” – several times, and I have heard that there were as many as 11 at one point. It is extraordinary and ethereal to be in such proximity to loons this way.
When the numbers got higher, there seemed to be more aggressive behaviors being exhibited amongst some of these loons ~ three of the slides show a progression from squawking at each other to wing flapping, then finally one of the loons started doing something called “penguining” when it propels itself almost completely out of the water and then forwards, a seemingly impossible feat. Not long after this fight/dance, the numbers of loons seemed to start dropping, I have been seeing five now in mid-September.
Loons seem to really like hanging out with kayaks, especially those who don’t paddle directly at them or smash around with the paddle. I simply paddle to areas where they frequent, and sometimes (amazingly often) they come to seek me out. I have had them pop up within 6 feet of my boat multiple times. My new-this-summer camera and lens allow me to get stunning closeups of the loons eyes, feathers, and color patterns.
I am so grateful to these magnificent magical creatures, I feel like we have become friends out there. I talk to them and they show off for the camera ~ it seems like everyone is happy with the arrangement!
I feel very fortunate to live in such a beautiful place. I hope that you have access to a beautiful outdoor environment where pausing to look around will reveal some amazing surprises to you.
Be well,
Gene
