Genghis Noem

Things to feel positive about when each day seems chockablock with disheartening news.

1. We are learning so much about our own country’s constitution through the efforts of those who are attempting to subvert it. Knowledge is power so that’s a good thing, right?
2. While eggs at City Market now average above a daunting $9.00 a dozen, it means that chickens all over the country are now earning enough that they no longer need to work two jobs and can spend more time with their families.
3. February is hump month vis-a-vis the weather. Get past it and we are coasting downhill into Spring, which is a swell time. Very swell.
4. If you are reading this you probably don’t have the bird flu.

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Before she gained renown for blasting away at her pets and livestock she was already famous for mostly ignoring COVID in South Dakota and for getting herself barred from all Native American reservations in her own state.

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[Some people have an antipathy toward poetry. Perhaps it might help to think of a poem as sometimes serving as a hone, sharpening their senses and appreciation for what was already there in front of them. Here is one by a pediatrician/poet, written in 1921. ]

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Winter Trees

by William Carlos Williams

All the complicated details 
of the attiring and 
the disattiring are completed! 
A liquid moon 
moves gently among 
the long branches. 
Thus having prepared their buds 
against a sure winter 
the wise trees 
stand sleeping in the cold.

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From The New Yorker

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On the subject of pediatricians (you didn’t know we were discussing them?), long ago I had a mentor named Henry Staub M.D. who I met only after my formal pediatric training was completed. Henry was a children’s physician, an ardent community activist, and one of the kindest people I’ve ever met. As a young man with Jewish parentage he, he had left Nazi Germany just in time to avoid being drafted into the army and thus discovered.

There is much of what I became in my own professional life that I took on from Henry by osmosis, but there were two sayings of his that I still think of frequently.

“The best doctor is the one that hurts the most.” On the surface this might seem paradoxical, but what he had observed was that there was a strong tendency to be “kind” to sick children, and for that “kindness” to delay discovery of sometimes serious illness.

For example, suppose that a child presented with symptoms that might be early signs of something really damaging. If the patient had been an adult, there would have been no question about doing the required but often uncomfortable testing, but in this case the physician decides to wait and watch for a while, to be certain that investigation is required since the patient is so young. However, in not wanting to cause pain to the small one the doctor instead sometimes hurts it far more by delaying diagnosis and proper treatment.

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“I heard a very good joke yesterday, someone said: ‘Musk is not a Nazi, Nazis made really good cars.’”

Stephen Fry

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Hypnotic. Beautiful. Don’t worry that you can’t understand the lyrics. No one can.

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I believe myself to be living in a revolutionary time, where many of my long-held standards and beliefs about my country are being dissected and discarded, their fragility revealed, the spider’s web of a platform on which they rested found to be riddled with gaps … easy pickings for the unscrupulous.

One one hand there is the thuggery and brutishness of MAGA, a collection of the benighted if there ever was one. On another hand there is the aging creakiness of the Democratic Party leadership, which seems unable find the laces on its Louboutins in order to tie them properly and so to get on with the people’s business. Yet another hand says a pox on both those houses. There are other “hands” as well. We may only have two official political parties but there exist oh so many constituencies.

One of those constituencies is the most influential of all, and that is that of the extremely wealthy. This one is actually more powerful than any of the parties.

In the old days (anything more than one election cycle ago) those people ran the country and the world but much preferred being invisible. These days the one percenters have not been not just taking blatantly more than their fair share of everything, they have used their fortunes to stack every deck they can get their hands on to perpetuate and increase their privilege.

Our history shows how easy it has been to pit us one against the other so that we would ignore their machinations. For instance, in our Civil War there were 620,000 deaths. While slavery may have been the spark that started the whole bloody mess, only a very tiny fraction of the men who died in either army had ever owned a slave. So why would a threadbare farmer from Minnesota travel a thousand miles to shoot at threadbare farmers in Virginia? What was their quarrel?

Who told them that taking up arms was the proper thing to do?

Guess.

So if there is a revolution coming, count me in. I may not mount the barricades as nimbly as a couple of days ago, but if nothing else I am more dangerous because I have good eyesight and less to lose.

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