Downwind from Standing Rock

 

For the last few years Alaskans have been arguing over a hole in the ground.

Now, to be fair, this isn’t just any hole.

This hole is filled with a treasure vast beyond imagination.

It’s quite literally the stuff the future is made from. Gold. Silver. Copper. Molybdenum. Palladium. Rhenium. Thousands upon thousands of tons of it. It’s one of largest deposits of its kind ever identified – maybe the largest, we won’t really know until we get to the bottom of the hole.  If we ever do.

Wait, what? The stuff the future is made from? The future? Gold and silver, sure. Maybe copper. But what are those other things? Molibud a num? Moly bead enum? Moly … oh screw it. Palladium? Isn’t that what fueled Ironman’s comic book reactor? And rhenium sounds like a discount white wine from California what comes in a box.

Treasure you say?

Treasure.

Oh, yes. Treasure. Billions upon billions of dollars worth.

You see, these are the metals and rare earths that make our modern lives possible. Without these metals there would be no cell phones, no computers, no flat screen TVs, no satellite GPS, and your smart cars and smart refrigerators and increasingly smarter gadgets would be a whole lot dumber and more crude and dirty. Gold and silver aren’t just for jewelry, they’re integral to modern electronics, computer systems, and communications. Molybdenum and Rhenium are used in advanced super strong alloys like you need to build jet turbines, rocket combustion chambers, and turbo-pumps – all the stuff needed to launch the satellites that hold our civilization together. Palladium is used in catalytic converters turning poisonous exhaust gases into harmless vapor. These metals are used in everything from spaceships to medical technology.  Without these materials, you wouldn’t be reading this, because I wouldn’t have written it – I’m pretty good with a keyboard, but twenty years of military service left my hands damaged and writing longhand with a pen for more than a few lines is hideously painful for me. Without these metals and the technology which results from them, I’d have to find another line of work.

So, yes. Treasure. Vast and glittering.

To get at it will require an open-air strip mine two miles in diameter and nearly a mile deep along with tens, hundreds, of miles of underground tunnels and a vast processing infrastructure including an enormous workforce – eventually making the Pebble Mine one of the largest in the world. This mine, should it be approved would create thousands of jobs, more when you include the equipment makers, the millions of tons of supplies needed every year of its operation, the support staff, the regulators, the investment bankers, and all the industries that will eventually use the metals.

And since this is Alaska, pulling these metals from our soil makes the US safer because we are not dependent on foreign suppliers for these critical materials.

But there’s a catch.

And it’s a big one.

You see the gold and silver, the copper, the molybdenum and palladium and rhenium, are all mixed together with ten billion tons of ore.

And to get it out requires a number of very toxic technologies. Even under the strictest of environmental regulations, byproducts of the extraction process will produce billions upon billions of gallons of poisonous waste water and more than ten billion tons of toxic mine tailings. All of which will have to be contained permanently. And so the plan is to store this material in two very large lakes – one of those lakes, for example, would be over 740 feet deep (taller by 20 feet than the Hoover Dam) and more than four miles long. These lakes would be contained behind earthen dams. And that containment would have to be forever.

Yes, forever.

In the rugged, extreme, unpredictable climate of Alaska. In one of the world’s most active earthquake zones.

That material can never escape. Ever. Not even a hundred years after the last of the ore has been mined.

It will have to remain contained behind those walls forever.

Because directly below the proposed mine site is Bristol Bay, one of the world’s largest and richest fisheries and one of the world’s most unique and delicate habitats. 

Any leak, any accident, any failure of any kind and the risk is devastation on a scale so massive that it can’t even be calculated. Entire ecosystems could be lost forever. Entire ways of life, ways of life that stretch back to roots ten thousand years old, could be lost forever. The cost to America in lost food stocks alone could be more than the value of all the metals pulled from the mine when calculated over long term timescales – and if that food doesn’t come from American waters it will have to come from foreign ones.

You see, when the metals are gone, they’re gone, and you’re left with a big hole in the ground. But the fish and other seafood that are harvested from Bristol Bay are an endlessly sustainable resource so long as there’s an environment to maintain the stocks.  If you destroy it, if you destroy that delicate life-system with acid and heavy metals and ten billion tons of contaminated sludge you’ll lose it all. 

If there’s a failure, the mine owners (which are almost entirely foreign firms) will still pocket the profit from the metals. Those people will go on as before. Whether they get rich or not, it’s not their way of life that is at risk because they don’t live in Alaska. They don’t depend on Bristol Bay for their very identity. If the dams fail, if contamination gets into the environment, they’ll pay their fines – or delay in the courts like Exxon before them – and go on as before.  They have no investment in Alaska beyond money. Once the metals are gone, they leave, they’ll move on to some other place, some other hole in the ground.

All the risk is on those living downstream.

It’s their lives, those Alaskans, their way of life, that is at stake. 

If the containment fails in any way, ever, they lose. No matter what else happens, no matter who gets rich or who gets hurt, they lose. They lose it all. No apology, no amount of money, nothing, could ever give them back that way of life.

That’s the risk.

That is the risk, from the minute the first shovel-full is dug until forever.

There can never, ever, be an accident.

 

And what are the odds of that?

 

What are the odds that a lake of toxic sludge deeper than the Hoover Dam is tall won’t leak?

What are the odds an industrial operation two miles in diameter and a mile deep into the earth won’t have an accident?

What are the odds that somewhere in those hundreds of miles of tunnels, there won’t be a mistake?

What are the odds that ships carrying the chemicals to the mine won’t sink or the train from the harbor won’t derail?

What are the odds that the engineers and designers and Wall Street wizards have foreseen every possible scenario? Every possible disaster? Every failure? And adequately prepared for those eventualities?

What are the odds the EPA has foreseen every impact on the unique and fragile Alaskan ecosystem?

What are the odds that the company, or some other agency, won’t deliberately dump toxic waste into the environment through malice or negligence or sheer laziness and greed?

What are the odds Bristol Bay and that Alaskan way of life won’t be affected now or in the future?

 

The odds? Not very damned good, actually.

 

Lakes like the proposed Pebble Mine holding reservoirs fail, well, a lot. 

It’s not that the idea is entirely bad, it’s that the overall mining operation itself is already complicated and expensive. So, mining companies tend to focus on extracting the valuable ore and pay only the minimal required attention to ancillary functions – such as environmental containment.  For example: On August 4th, 2014, at a British Columbia mine very similar to the proposed Pebble Mine, a containment dam failed. Millions of gallons of toxic waste water and contaminated slurry poured through the breach at the Mount Polley Mine and into Polley Lake and then downstream into Quesnel Lake and into the Cariboo River. It took four days for the entire two mile long lake to drain almost completely and it couldn’t be stopped. The full extent of the environmental impact isn’t yet known, it’ll be years before it is. Now, the thing is this wasn’t a disaster in some Third World country with corrupt governments and non-existent regulations. This was Canada. Modern technology, some of the best mining engineers in the world, strong environmental regulations, and yet the dam failed. Why? Well, Imperial Metals, the company which owns the Mount Polley Mine had a history of over filling the tailings pond well beyond its designed capacity. They’d been doing it for years. Because they could. Because any failure would be cheaper in fines and damages than building a new containment system. Because all the risk was downstream.

In fact since 1960 there have been more than 100 major mine tailings dam failures worldwide, and thousands more minor incidents. The most recent happened just last month at a bauxite mine in Henan Province, China, where the failure of a containment dam released two million cubic meters (more than half a billion gallons) of toxic red mud which completely buried Dahegou village. Hundreds of villagers had to be evacuated and thousands of domestic farm animals and livestock were drowned. This happened in a place where the government executes company CEOs and Government officials for such failures – and yet it still happened.

But I’m not really talking about dams.

I’m talking about risk.

On March 24, 1989, Good Friday, the Exxon Valdez struck Bligh Reef and ruptured its hull. Eleven million gallons of heavy crude poured into the pristine waters of Prince William Sound for more than a week creating one of the most devastating environmental disasters in human history. The oil companies, the State of Alaska, and the federal government never anticipated such an accident and there was no plan to deal with it. Equipment, personnel, leadership, funding, and expertise were all woefully lacking.  Why? How could something like this happen? The Exxon Valdez was (then) a modern supertanker. Bligh Reef was noted on every chart and the navigation channel to the open sea through Prince William Sound was well mapped and a route tankers routinely transited hundreds of times.  The weather was good that night, or as good as it gets in Alaskan waters. So what happened? Human nature, that’s what happened. The most experienced man onboard was Captain Joseph Hazelwood, who it turned out was also a drunk.  Instead of being in the pilot house that day, he was below in his cabin sleeping off the previous night’s bender.  The vastly less experienced Third Mate was piloting the vessel through the most difficult part of its passage – the part where the Captain should have been on the bridge (and I say this as someone who has had the bridge myself during difficult passage).  Now the mate might have been able to make the passage without running the ship aground, despite his inexperience, if he’d had the proper tools at his disposal. The single most important piece of navigation equipment in this case would have been the RAYCAS (Raytheon Collision Avoidance System), a type of automated radar system which if it had been working would have set off an alarm when it detected the radar reflector mounted on top of the rocks of Bligh Reef – specifically for this purpose. But the RAYCAS hadn’t worked in more than a year because the company felt it was too expensive to maintain. The crew themselves were exhausted – ships don’t make money sitting in port, and companies don’t make money by hiring excessive hands, so tankers like the Valdez ran with the minimum number of crew possible (the Valdez’s 1989 crew was half the size it was designed for in 1977) and worked 12-14 hour watches plus overtime. And finally the Exxon Valdez, despite being a modern vessel, had only a single hull, not the double hulls designed to prevent exactly this type of accident. Why? You know why. You know the answer to all the questions above:  it was cheaper. Millions of dollars cheaper. So, exhausted crew. Failed equipment. No safety systems. Poor leadership. Utterly inadequate disaster plan. All in the name of profit.  And 1,300 miles of coastline and more than 11,000 square miles of ocean were contaminated as a result. Untold numbers of fish, sea otters, seals, and birds were killed. Entire industries were wiped out and never recovered. Today, nearly thirty years later, you can still turn over rocks along the coast of Prince William Sound and find oil from the Exxon Valdez – I’ve done it myself. 

Entire ways of life were lost forever.

But not for Exxon. The company was fined – and they fought that penalty for more than 30 years in Alaskan courts until they’d finally bought enough politicians and found themselves enough sympathetic judges to get the fine whittled down to practically nothing. Meanwhile they raked in enormous profits and made their shareholders rich and not one of the people responsible had to change their lives in any way – including Hazelwood, who kept right on drinking and who holds a Master’s license to this day.

It was the people of Prince William Sound who paid for Exxon’s risk. It was their lives that changed forever.

The Exxon Valdez oil spill was the largest environmental disaster of its kind right up until April 20, 2010.

That’s the day the Deepwater Horizon exploded.

Five thousand feet below the Gulf of Mexico, sub-standard materials (used to reduce costs), failed safety equipment (that wasn’t adequately maintained or routinely tested), human error, inadequate emergency protocols, and lackadaisical enforcement of regulations all came together in disaster. Methane under enormous pressure from the 18,000 foot deep bore hole surged upward into the Deepwater Horizon’s drilling room and exploded, tearing the rig apart and engulfing the wreckage in flames. The crew abandoned the platform, unable to fight the massive conflagration. Eleven men didn’t make it off and were never found, likely they died in the initial explosion. Support vessels unsuccessfully battled the flames for two days before the rig finally sank in 5100 feet of water.  But that was only the beginning of the disaster. Down below, the massive device that should have prevented this disaster in the first place and was designed specifically to cap the well in an emergency, the blowout preventer, had failed. Not one of its three redundant safety systems worked and oil was spewing uncontrolled from the ruptured well at rate of tens of thousands of barrels per day.  Once again the companies involved, British Petroleum, Anadarko, Transocean, and Halliburton had no plan for such an disaster. No one had foreseen having to cap a well 5000 feet below the surface of the ocean. The equipment didn’t exist. Plans and procedures were nothing more than than the vaguest of outlines. And while the experts worked feverishly to develop a solution, 4.9 million barrels of oil (about 210 million gallons) blew into the waters of the Gulf. The devastation was unfathomable. An untold number of marine life and sea birds died. Beaches and coastal wetlands from southern Florida to Texas saw oil wash ashore and 68,000 square miles of ocean waters were contaminated. The Gulf fishing industry across five states and Mexico was devastated. The Gulf Coast tourist industry collapsed. It took 87 days to cap the well, but it continued to leak oil into the Gulf into 2012.

And once again, in the end it was human nature, greed, laziness, and the willingness to risk other people’s lives and way of life that was the cause.

Again, it was the people of the Gulf who paid the price for corporate risk.

BP eventually agreed to pay one of the largest fines in history, but that money can’t bring back a way of life that died with a billion tons of marine life smothered in oil.

And once again those who made the decisions that led directly to this disaster remain unaffected, their lives, their way of life, continues.

I could go on. The list of similar disasters stretches back through history, from Love Canal to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, from the Castle Bravo nuclear test which despite the very best scientific minds of the time unexpectedly rendered a huge chunk of the South Pacific uninhabitable to the bombs which contaminated the Southwest from New Mexico all the way to the Mississippi and gave us the term “downwinders,” from Chernobyl to Bhopal to Three Mile Island and the Tokaimura Nuclear Plant, to just last week when a 5.6 magnitude earthquake struck Oklahoma – an area not prone to quakes until the advent of fracking wastewater injection wells – after a week of smaller temblors. 

The risk is always on those downstream, the downwinders, the ones who never agreed to take it and who rarely if ever profit from it.

This is true no matter how many times you care to run the experiment.

 

And that takes us to North Dakota and the Sioux People of Standing Rock Reservation

 

The proposed 1200 mile long Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) would transport crude oil from the oil rich Bakken Formation in North Dakota down through through South Dakota, Iowa, and into Illinois, where it would connect to other existing pipelines. The oil would then be transported to US refineries in the Midwest, East Coast, and the Gulf Coast. Most of the DAPL would be underground and is expected to move nearly half a million barrels of oil per day.  Dakota Access, the project’s lead developer, says that the pipeline would add an estimated $156 million to various state coffers and provide, temporarily, 8,000 to 12,000 constructions jobs.  Dakota Access claims the $3.7 billion project will "bring significant economic benefits to the region that it transverses” – though exactly what “significant” means after the pipeline is constructed and in operation is subject to broad interpretation. Since at that point there’s not a lot of effort required anywhere but at the ends of the pipeline (for example: The Alyeska Pipeline crosses 830 miles of Alaskan wilderness. Building it was a hell of a task. But nowadays all the action involves putting oil in one end and taking it out of the other and there’s not a lot of jobs in the middle).

But see, here’s the thing: part of the proposed pipeline would cross native American lands.

Some of that land is sacred to the Sioux – and before you get all dismissive of that, think of the outcry if Native Americans were demanding the right to bulldoze Christian churches and cemeteries to build an Indian Casino. We wouldn’t be having this discussion if the shoe was on the other foot.

In point of fact, the very land here, Dakota, is named for these people, the Lakota Sioux.  Their roots in this soil go back thousands of years and who are you to decide what is sacred and what is not to such a people?

Other portions of the pipeline cross the Missouri River – the source of water for the entire reservation, along with millions of others. If there is a failure, an accident, deliberate malice, unforeseen events, unanticipated faults, fire, flood, terrorism, any of the disasters listed above, then a people’s way of life could be lost forever.

Again, the risk here, the risk to sacred history, the risk to lives and ways of life, that risk is all downstream. If there is a failure, those who profit from the DAPL won’t have to change anything. They’ll go on as before in their offices in Sioux City and Houston and Washington and Wall Street. But the people who live on that land, whose ancestors are buried in that soil, will suffer the consequences. They take all the risk.

This last weekend, Energy Partners Inc. (a partnership of oil interests) turned dogs loose on peaceful Native American protesters – and they were protesting peacefully.  The dogs attacked people and horses which some of the Native Americans were riding. This wasn’t an accident, and it wasn’t the first time. It’s an attempt at intimidation, a deliberate attempt to silence the people who will have to bear the risk of the proposed pipeline against their will.

This last weekend, construction teams employed by Energy Partners Inc. bulldozed a two mile long, 150 foot wide path through land sacred to the Standing Rock Reservation tribe. Ancient native American cairns, prayer rings, and burial sites – some hundreds of years old – were deliberately destroyed. Remember the outcry from outraged Americans when Taliban forces destroyed ancient religious sites in Afghanistan? Those same people are curiously silent today.

The land in question is currently being contested in Federal Court. Native Americans are seeking a permanent injunction preventing the pipeline from passing under this land. Instead of waiting for the court’s ruling, the oil companies attempted a fait accompli by bulldozing a path through native lands. This is going on right now, native America people are once again fighting for their rights and their way of life, but you see very little of it in the media, because unlike those temples in Afghanistan it’s not a popular cause.

Why?

Well, you see, just as America needs those metals in Alaska, America needs the oil of North Dakota.

Our civilization, our way of life, depends on it.

Our way of life depends on it, our manifest destiny, and so the concerns of Native Americans are once again forfeit.

The risk is all on the Sioux.

The Sioux and every person living downstream on the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers.

And what are the odds there will never be an accident? What are the odds there will never be a leak, a fire, an act of sabotage, or negligence? What are the odds the company will use only the highest grade materials, despite the cost? What are the odds that same company will develop, fund, and maintain an effective emergency plan – and keep equipment and personnel standing by just in case?

 

What are the odds that a company who would bulldoze sacred ground and turn dogs on Americans will be any more altruistic in the future?

 

Understand something here, I’m not opposed to progress.

I’m not opposed to pipelines out of hand.

I’m not reflexively opposed to offshore drilling in deep waters – even including the pristine waters of my beloved Alaska.

I’m not opposed to mining.

I’m not opposed to profit. I’m not opposed to capitalism. I’m not opposed to business.

I benefit from those things every single day and I like the modern world.

The Dakota Access pipeline is part of a larger conversation. We’ve talked much in recent years about energy independence and I think this is a good conversation to have. Without American money spent on Middle Eastern Oil, Osama bin Laden would have been just another Saudi. It was money from America’s need for oil that made his family rich and let him fund terrorism across the globe. One of the primary factors in the defeat of the Nazis in WWII was the Allies’ tactic of cutting Hitler off from oil, the Petroleum Campaign, and both Herman Goering and Albert Speer said after the war that the campaign contributed directly to the defeat of the Third Reich. The more energy we can find within our borders, the less vulnerable America is.

But it’s not my way of life that is immediately at risk here.

And the Sioux – and everybody living downstream of this pipeline on the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers – shouldn’t to have to bear the entire risk for the rest of the country, for me.

It is long past time that these companies, and the government agencies charged with their oversight are required to share equal risk.

What do I mean?

Sheep.

During the Cold War, I was once stationed on the Island of Iceland.  The Icelanders didn’t want us there. You see, during WWII they were overrun by Allied servicemen, hundreds of thousands of them. More than the actual population of Iceland itself. Those troops, despite good intention, ravaged the island, destroying ecosystems and ways of life that stretched back to before the advent of Western Civilization. And when the war was over those troops left almost overnight, leaving behind an imploding economy, hollowed out jobs, and a whole bunch of pregnant Icelandic women.  By the time I arrived 60 years later the Icelanders had recovered. They’d learned their lesson, they reluctantly admitted they needed the protection of NATO and the US, being as they were without a military of their own and caught smack between Cold War superpowers, but it was on their terms not ours.

And the example which applies here is sheep.

Icelandic sheep are not cute furry little lambs like they are here in America. These creatures are massive and mean and they roam the island mostly free during much of the year. Icelandic wool is like nothing else in the world and for those who make a living from it each sheep is their life and livelihood. (Also, should you ever get to see a roundup and sorting during shearing season it’s well worth the trip to Iceland all by itself, though there are many other things to recommend the place).

As Americans, if we harmed one of those creatures in any way, say I hit one with the duty bus in the middle of a lava field because I couldn’t see the damned thing in a howling snowstorm in the middle of the seven month Icelandic winter, then we were responsible for paying not only for the value of the sheep itself, but for all the wool it might generate over its lifetime – and if it was female, all the offspring it could have potentially produced. The fines could be in the tens of thousands of dollars if you were unlucky enough to hit a young ewe with a decade of life ahead of her.  It made you very cautious, very respectful of Icelandic property and traditional ways of life. The Icelanders had found a way to share the risk, them for having us there, us for using their land. This approach, this practical Icelandic mindset, was common in the Status of Forces Agreement for things vastly more important than livestock and you were responsible for it before you were ever allowed to set foot on the island.

And it worked.

Projects like DAPL risk the lives of all the people in their shadows, they risk the fabric of the land – the legacy we intend for our children and future generations. Those that are to profit from these projects must be made to share equally, or more, in the risk. People who have had their way of life destroyed shouldn’t have to go hat in hand to the courts after a disaster, asking for satisfaction.  Projects like this, like the Pebble Mine in Alaska, or the Macando Prospect in the Gulf, or the Dakota Access Pipeline should be required to put up damages before the first shovelful of ore is dug or the first barrel of oil is pumped. A billion, $10 billion, $30 billion, $100 billion, whatever the worst case scenario is plus a margin of error.  Borrow it from the shareholders, or from the banks as a lien against the value of the company, or take it from quarterly profits. And a certain percentage should come from the taxpayer, whose representatives approved that project and are required to regulate it. Put that money into an escrow account with the signatories to include everybody downstream, every life, every job. If the project operates to completion without accident, or if there’s an accident and the company was aggressively prepared for it and dealt with it immediately and effectively, if after it’s done the cleanup and restoration meet with the satisfaction of those downstream, then the company and the taxpayer get their money back with interest – otherwise they forfeit it all. Every penny. That way those downstream get something even if the company files for bankruptcy – because the payout isn’t tied to the company’s ability to pay after the fact, but before.

That’s the risk. All or nothing.

Understand something, I’m not talking about damages here, I’m not talking about fines, I’m talking about risk.

Any fines or damages would be for the government to recover after the accident, same as now. The money in escrow would be for the people and lives affected. Not cleanup. Not mitigation. What I’m talking about is divorcing fines and penalties from personal settlements. I’m suggesting we put the settlement upfront, in advance, so that the risk might be shared by all parties with the majority burden where it belongs, on those who stand to profit the most.

I would suggest we need laws that hold company officer salaries and shareholder payouts forfeit in the event of an accident as well.

I can see a number of potential pitfalls right up front.

For example, what’s to keep somebody downstream from one day causing that accident? And then claiming his share of the resulting payout?

What’s to keep company officers from buying up interests downstream, then after they’ve extracted all they can from the project, allow it to fail. They then declare bankruptcy and quietly pocket the settlement money themselves. Then abandon both the worthless downstream properties and the remains of the company and move on – and now you know how to plot a John Grisham novel.

I can think of a dozen other ways off the top of my head to subvert this idea. And two dozen ways to prevent it. The details of how something like this would be administered fairly I’ll leave as an exercise for the reader and perhaps their congressional representatives.

 

How likely is any of this?

Somewhere between not very and no chance I would guess, but it’s an interesting mental exercise to imagine the world that would result if we all shared the risks of our society more equally.

In the end, this battle, the one being fought right now in North Dakota, affects far more than just a single Native American Tribe.

This affects us all, every single one of us.

We are all downstream.

We are all downwinders. 

We must have these metals, this oil, for those are the things from which our future is built. But we must have our past, our history, our sacred places, our way of life too, otherwise that future is hollow.

There must be balance.

This is each and every one of us our fight, our interest, our way of life, our sacred ground, our risk.

The people who stand to profit the most should willingly stand to risk the most.

The rest of us must stand with the Sioux.

Labor Day 2016

Editorial Note: portions of this essay have appeared previously here on Stonekettle Station.

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Labor Day.

Earlier this month, when a football player didn’t stand for the National Anthem a certain segment of the population puffed up its fleshy chest and declared what an offense that was to veterans.

Veterans?

As if veterans were the only people who built this country – and I say that as a veteran myself.

Why is it no one is outraged on behalf of American laborers when someone disrespects the symbols of America?

 

What?

 

Yes, I digress.

So, it’s Labor Day.

You ever stop to wonder what your life would be like if you lived a hundred years ago?

Imagine.

Imagine what it was like to be your great grand parents.

In 1915, the United States was in the middle of the Second Industrial Revolution.  It was a time of wonder and ever advancing technology. It started in the 1860’s and would last right up until the beginning of World War I. It began with steel, the Bessemer process to be specific, a cheap and easy way to mass produce strong and reasonably lightweight metals.  Strong lightweight steel was the skeleton of the modern age, the core of everything from the new cars to steamships and oil rigs to utensils and lunchboxes, to the machines that manufactured the future.  A few years before, in 1911, a tall skinny fellow by the name of Eugene Ely landed a Curtiss #2 Pusher on the deck of USS Pennsylvania and took off again – and thus was born naval aviation, a profound moment that would change the very way wars were fought and thus change almost everything else too and the effects of which are still being felt to this very day.  If you were moderately wealthy, you could buy a Cadillac with an electric starter. Despite the fact that there were still plenty of horses out there on the roads, the car had become so ubiquitous and affordable that Michigan created the first modern roads when the state started painting white lines down the middle of the more heavily traveled avenues.  Though many factories were still powered by steam, electricity was no longer a novelty.  The first modern public elevator began operation in London, England, and soon became common everywhere – leading directly to the modern city skyline.  America was booming. Her factories were churning out new products at a record pace. The western frontier had all but disappeared – oh, there were still a few bandits and cattle rustlers out there, but the wild woolly west was long gone.  The gold rushes, the boom towns and gun fights were long over.  Hell, by 1915 Wyatt Earp was living in Hollywood and working as a consultant for the new movie industry. 

It was certainly a marvelous time.

If you could afford it.

If you lived through it.

See, those churning factories were horrible places.  In 1915, most were still powered by a massive central steam engine which drove an enormous flywheel, which in turn powered shafts and belts and pulleys, which finally powered the machines.  And though, as noted above, electricity was becoming increasingly common, most of those factories were dark and poorly lit – typically illumination was sunlight through skylights and banks of single pane glazed windows.  Often boiling hellholes in the summer and freezing dungeons in the winter – both air conditioning and central heating were still decades away and all those single pane windows didn’t do much to keep out either the cold or the heat. Those factories were filled with smoke and poisonous fumes from the various manufacturing processes, lead vapor, heavy metals, acids, chlorine, bleaches, all were common.  Normal working hours were from dawn to dusk, typically anywhere from twelve to fourteen hours a day, sixty and seventy hours per week for wages that would barely pay the rent and put food on a factory worker’s table.

Child labor was common, especially in the textile industry, though in some states there were supposed to be laws regulating it.  The kids toiled right alongside their parents.  The children typically worked the same hours as adults, but for a quarter, or less, of the pay.  Pictures of the time show children working barefoot among the machines, ragged sleeves flapping near the flying belts and spinning pulleys.  Whole families hired out to the factories, the men doing the heavy labor, the women and children doing the more delicate tasks. Towns sprang up around the mills, often controlled by the factory owners. Company towns, where workers very often became little more than indentured servants.  Life in a company town was often better than the alternative on the streets of places like Hell’s Kitchen or out in the fields of the South. Company towns gave workers a higher standard of living than they would otherwise be able to afford. But the running joke was that while your soul might belong to God, your ass belonged to the company.  Mill towns and mining towns and factory towns and logging towns were common across America, places where the company owned everything from your house to your job to the church you prayed in to the store you bought your food from. And prices were whatever made the company the most profit and in many places there were laws that prevented you from renting or buying outside the company town.  The company might pay you a decent wage for the time, but they got a lot of it back too.  Get crosswise of the company and you lost it all.  Get injured on the job and could no longer work, and you lost it all. Get sick, and you could lose it all.  Get killed, and your family was out on the street.  There was no workman’s comp. No insurance. No retirement but what you managed to save – and since you probably owed a significant debt to the company store, your savings were unlikely to go very far.

Of course, you could always take a pass on factory work and return to the land.  In 1915, millions of Americans were farmers.  Farming was hard back breaking work (it still is, just in a different way) – so hard that seventy hours a week in a smoke filled factory with a high probability of getting maimed or killed looked pretty good in comparison.  Most of those farmers, especially in the South, didn’t own their fields. They were sharecroppers, living in conditions little better than slavery or the serfdom of the Dark Ages.  Of the small farmers who did own their own land or rather owed the bank for their own land, more than half lived in abject poverty.  In the coming decade, the decade of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, most would lose everything.

Most of America was powered by coal in those days and if there was anything that would make life in a factory town or in the sweltering fields look good – it was working in a West Virginia coal mining town.  It was a race to see what would kill you first, explosion, cave-in, or the black lung.  And just like in the fields and factories, children worked alongside their parents – if they had parents, orphanages were also common. And orphan labor was even cheaper than the average child, both in life and in pay. Renting out orphan labor was a good gig, if you could get it.

You could always become a merchant seaman, though life at sea was damned rough. You could move west and become a logger, though you’d probably live longer in the mines of West Virginia. You could still be a cowboy, or a cop, or carpenter none which paid worth a good Goddamn and had the added benefit of a short lifespan.

Since people got sick and injured a lot, and most couldn’t afford even rudimentary medical care, many turned to patent medicines.  The pharmaceutical industry was only loosely regulated, but by 1915 there were some few laws in a handful of states regulating the more outrageous claims for the various elixirs. The big medicine shows were gone, but there were still plenty of drug store shelves stocked with hundreds of varieties of patent medicines. Some were mostly benign, like Coca-Cola. And some were downright toxic, like Radithor, made from water and radium.  As late as 1917, The Rattlesnake King, Clark Stanley, was still making Stanley’s Snake Oil, a worthless mixture of mineral oil, turpentine, and red pepper, and fleecing sick people out of their money and making them yet sicker (hell, as late as the 1960’s TV’s commercials touted the benefits of smoking for sore throats. And, as late as 1970 there were still X-ray foot measuring devices that would give you cancer in use in a handful of shoe stores across America).

In 1915, only a few states mandated that your kids attend school, and then only through elementary.  In the South segregation and Jim Crow Laws were in full force and civil rights were decades away. Lynching was common.  On the other hand, women could actually vote in exactly five states, well, six if you included California which grudgingly acknowledged in November that females might be citizens too despite their unfortunate plumbing. 

In 1915, maybe three out of ten Americans could ever expect to own a home, most would pay a landlord their whole lives. Few had any rights in those relationships either, you paid the owner and you lived with what you got or you got thrown out. Period.

In 1915, a lot of Americans were hungry. More than fifty percent of seniors lived in poverty, but then the average lifespan was only about fifty-five, maybe sixty if you hadn’t been breathing coal dust or lead vapor all your life.  Few of those seniors had pensions, most lived on the charity of their families – if they were lucky enough to have families.  Sanatoriums were a common place for the aged and infirm to spend their brief final years. 

In 1915, if you had ten kids, you might expect six of them to survive to adulthood.  If you were lucky. Polio, tuberculosis, measles, mumps, pneumonia, whooping cough, hard labor in the mines and factories and fields, lack of social safety nets, lack of proper nutrition, lead paint, food poisoning, poverty, orphaned by parents killed by the same, would probably claim at least four of those kids. Likely more.

People from that generation always wax nostalgic for The Good Old Days – and then they immediately proceed to tell you why life was so much harder and more miserable back then.

The simple truth of the matter is nowadays we Americans live a pretty damned good life.  And we live that good life because since 1915 we’ve put systems and laws and regulations in place to improve life for all of us.  Programs like Social Security and Medicare have a direct and measurable effect on how long we live, and how well. Regulations governing working conditions and workplace safety have a direct and measurable effect on the probability that we’ll survive to retirement.  Laws that prevent the rich from owning a whole town, or abusing workers, or turning them into indentured servants, or hiring children at pauper’s wages to maintain the machines in their bare feet, have directly benefitted all but the most greedy few. 

The American dream isn’t dead, far from it. 

I’ve been to countries where dreams have died, America is far, far, far removed those hellish places. 

It is a measure of just how far we’ve come, and just how big an impact that those laws, regulations, and social safety programs have had that those who directly benefit from those very same laws, regulations, and programs can complain with full bellies just how terrible they have it.

Things like Social Security, Medicare, Workman’s Compensation Insurance, The Federal Reserve, Federal Deposit Insurance, child labor laws, federal minimum wage, occupational health and safety standards, the Environmental Protection Agency, The Centers for Disease Control, The departments of Education and Health, Labor Unions and workers’ rights, and yes, even Welfare, all of these things were created for a reason. For a good reason. For compelling reason. 

These things were created because when you leave it up to the church and charity to feed the hungry and clothe the poor and heal the sick, a hell of a lot of people go hungry and cold and ill.  It is really just that brutally simple. 

These things were created because when you leave it up to charity and family to take care of old people, a hell of a lot of old people end up stacked like cordwood in institutions. The moldering remnants of such places are all around us.

These things were created because when you leave it up to people to save for their retirement or a rainy day or for accident and infirmity, a hell of a lot of them don’t, or can’t, or won’t.

These things were put in place because when you leave it solely up to the market to weed out poor products and fake medicine and unsafe machines, the market doesn’t, or can’t, or won't, and it’s perfectly happy to go right on killing people for profit.

These things were put in place because when you leave it up to industrialists and share holders to treat their workers with dignity and respect and to pay them a living wage for their hard work, you get indentured servitude.

These things were put in place because when you leave it up to devoutly righteous people who go to church every Sunday to decide what is right and proper and moral, you end up with lynchings and segregation and Jim Crow. And that is a Goddamned fact.

These things were put in place because when you leave it up to the factory owners to decide wages and safety and working hours, you get this:

When you leave it solely up to bankers and the factory owners and the industrialists and the politicians, well Sir, then what happens is they end up owning it all and you get the privilege of paying them to eat out of their garbage can.

And for most of history, right up until very recently, that’s exactly how it was.

Fundamentally, government exists to protect the weak from the ruthless, otherwise what damned good is it?

Lately there are a lot of folks who think they want to live in 1915, rather than in 2015.

The question you need to ask yourself, on this of all days, is what century do you want to live in?

Respect: Colin Kaepernick – The Extended Cut

Wrong question. Wrong questions get wrong answers.
-- Master Gregory, Seventh Son (2014)

 

As veteran, what do you think of the Collin Kaepernick controversy?

That was the question  As a veteran, what do you think …

Readers often ask me about current events. 

Why?

Why me?

Well, because that’s what I do nowadays. That’s my job. I’m a political essayist, I write about the world, about politics, about war, about America.

But I used to be in the military. I spent most of my adult life there. I’m a retired US Navy Chief Warrant Officer. If you don’t know what that is, well, you’re in good company.

Regular readers know my background, or a bit of it anyway. As such, no one asks me “As a writer, what do you think?” As an artist. As a Michigander by way of Alaska trapped in the fetid swamps of the Florida Panhandle. Nobody asks me that. They want my opinion as a veteran.

 

And that condition changes things.

 

Let’s start with the National Anthem. 

Guess what, Folks? The Star Spangled Banner doesn’t belong to veterans.

No, it doesn’t.

The national anthem is just that, the anthem of the nation.

This wasn’t some Memorial Day parade honoring the fallen. This wasn’t some Veteran’s Day ceremony upon the hallowed ground of Arlington. This was a sporting event and a preseason one at that. Look around that stadium, how many were talking on their phones? How many were texting? Or in line for hotdogs and beer? How many were watching Colin Kaepernick instead of the flag?

How many veterans were waiting for care in the lobby of some VA hospital while that anthem was playing?

How many veterans committed suicide in that same period, finally overcome by depression and despair and the weight of their service?

How many veterans were outside that stadium, sleeping in boxes on the street, digging in the trash for food, lost in the nightmares of PTSD and mental illness?

How many veterans were gunned down on the street while that anthem played?

How many veterans bills to address these issues passed the House and Senate while that song played?

And it’s a football player you’re angry about, because he didn’t stand for a song?

You want to make this about veterans? Then you’re starting in the wrong place.

This isn’t about veterans.

Veterans don’t own the song.

Veterans don’t own a song about a flag even if it is the Star Spangled Banner.

And that flag doesn’t belong to veterans either.

The song, the flag, those are symbols of a nation, the whole nation, not just one little subset of it.

At the moment, there are around 1.4 million people (not all of which are Americans) serving in the US armed forces. That’s less than half of 1% of the total US population. Now, there are a lot more former service members than there are those currently serving on active duty. Nobody is really sure exactly how many, but estimates put the number of veterans at about 22 million, based on VA data compiled from the Department of Defense, US Census Bureau, the IRS, and the Social Security Administration. Add up those numbers and you find only about 7.3% of the total US population have ever served in the military.  About 13.4% of all American males have served. About 1.4% of American females are veterans.  Some of those vets served only a few years. Some like me served nearly their entire adult life. Like me, some served honorably and retired, some served only a few years, and some were tossed out for various offenses or medical reasons or just for being shitty soldiers.  Some like me loved the military, some hated every single goddamned terrible minute of it.  Some like me volunteered, some were conscripted against their will. Like me, some served in war, and like me some served in peace. Some drove trucks, some pushed papers, some washed dishes, some pulled triggers.  Some came home whole and some didn’t.

But no matter how you break it down, veterans are less than 8% of the total US population. 

We don’t own the flag. We don’t own the song. Those symbols represent all Americans, vet and non-vet alike. 

And this is by intent.

The people who designed this country made the military subordinate to the elected civilian leadership for a reason.

They put the military under control of a civilian president for a reason and made it answerable to the people.

And when the Framers wrote the Constitution, they purposely did not require military experience from those elected to office.

Why?

Because we are not Spartans.

We are not Romans. We are not Nazis. We are not some warrior culture bent to conquest that puts military service on a pedestal to be worshiped.

We’re Americans.

We’re supposed to be the good guys.

We’re supposed to fight only when we have to, out of dire necessity and because there are no other options and not for some goddamned glorious spectacle.

That’s who we’re supposed to be.

America isn’t just veterans. Veterans might have defended this country, but without the other 92% of the population there wouldn’t be an America to defend. America is veterans, but it’s also everybody else, bricklayers and dishwashers and road builders and firefighters and cops and engineers and scientists and doctors and teachers and students and librarians, rich and poor, young and old, hale and infirm, black, brown, white, yellow, red, straight, gay, Christian, Muslim, Jew, atheist, short and tall, male and female, immigrant and natural-born, and whatever other variation you care to name.

That flag, that anthem, represents all of those people and all of their history.

And while a lot of that history is pretty spectacular, a lot of it isn’t. A lot of it is spattered in blood and begrimed with violence.

And while America itself is a pretty great place to be – despite what some politicians want you to believe – we’re far from perfect and there’s still a great deal of work to be done. Those who forget their history are doomed to repeat it in endless cycle. The Founders knew this and they didn’t just crap out a finished product and sit back on their asses expecting it to work for everybody for all time. The idea was a more perfect nation, not a perfect one. They did the best they could with what they had. They knew it wasn’t finished so they installed mechanisms into the fabric of our country that would allow for update and refinement – see Amendments to the Constitution et al.

We’re still working on that.

America clunks along pretty well for a lot of us. But not for everybody. Not yet. And because of that history and because we are human and because we each have the freedom to see the world as we will, the process of making America work for all of us is messy and fraught with endless setbacks. And it will never be done, it’s an ongoing job so long as time passes and the nation endures.

And that means the flag, the anthem, represent different things to different Americans – and some of you are just going to have to get used to that idea.

 

Next, let’s talk about the oath.

The oath all military members swear.

Enlisted personnel swear the following oath:

"I, (state your full name), do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God."

Officers take a similar oath with some crucial differences:

“I, (state your full name), having been appointed an officer in the (service branch) of the United States, as indicated above in the grade of (rank) do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservations or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office upon which I am about to enter. So help me God."

Enlisted personnel can be drafted against their will, which means they might take the oath with more than a bit of mental reservation. A lot of conscripted guys going off to Vietnam had serious reservations regarding their enlistment. Don’t take my word for it, ask them.

Officers on the other hand can’t be drafted.

An officer must take the oath freely and without reservation – under penalty of law. If it turns out you, as an officer, are unable to well and faithfully execute the duties of your office because you have mental reservations which you kept concealed at the time of your oath, then depending on the circumstances you’re likely to face resigning your commission or sitting in front of a court martial on your way to prison.

I took both of these oaths. First as an enlisted man and later as a commissioned officer. As the latter I administered the oath to others many, many times.  The one thing both of those oaths have in common is this part: I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same.

We swear our oath, our lives, to the Constitution.

Not the flag.

Not the anthem.

Not to the president.

Not to congress.

Not to the citizens.

Not to a political party or ideology.

Not to a race.

Not to a religion.

We swear our oath to the Constitution.

But what does that mean? That we swear to give our lives for some raggedy old piece of paper? Is it the sacred paper itself that commands our allegiance? Some old piece of parchment, yellowed, handwritten in an archaic language, falling apart, stored away in a nitrogen-filled box somewhere in the National Archives. Is that it?

No?

What then?

Ah, I see. It’s not the paper -- whether it be that hoary old original document or one of those mass produced little booklets supposed patriots and politicians like to toss around. The paper doesn’t matter, it’s the ideas written on it. 

We swear our oath to an idea.

This idea: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

We swear we will bear true faith and allegiance, and give our lives if necessary, for that idea.

That idea was the foundation of the United States of America.

That idea was the very first words spoken by the new nation.

A war for that idea, tens of thousands dead for that idea, a decade of argument and bitter debate and endless compromise later and that idea became the Constitution of the United States.

That’s what we swear our oath to.

That’s why the Founders and the Framers made us subordinate to the civilian leadership – so that we would never forget that our place, our duty, is to defend the life, liberty, and happiness of all Americans. The ones we agree with and identify with and call brother and the ones we don’t. This is why Americans should be appalled and alarmed by the recent tendency of presidents to wrap themselves in military custom. The president is the civilian Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces, not the General in Chief. The president shouldn’t be wearing military garb or rendering a salute. His civilian status should forcefully remind every American of their military’s subordinate role in our society every single day, especially it should remind the president and generals.

We are not Rome, and if we wish to remain so then this reminder is vital.

Okay, stop right there, Jim, I hear you say in that tone you use when you’re pretty sure you’ve got me. Back up. What about “enemies, foreign and domestic?” What about that?

What about it? We just covered that.

We, we military, we don’t get to decide who is and who is not an enemy, or who is and who is not an American – check the Constitution if you don’t believe me.

The military’s job is to defend the country, not rule it.

That’s not our job. And for a damned good reason.

It’s your job.  

We are a representative democracy, a constitutional republic, not a mob, not a military dictatorship. It is our elected civilian government’s job as constrained by the law and limited by the Constitution to decide who is and who is not an enemy. 

If you don’t like how they’re doing it, then elect better leaders. You’re the check, you’re the safety stop.  

Only about 50% of you vote. What kind of safety system only shows up 50% of the time?

If you want a better nation, you have to be better citizens.

You are who that flag, that anthem, represents.

 

And that takes us to your question:

AS A VETERAN, what do you think about Colin Kaepernick's decision to sit during the National Anthem?

That was your question. That’s how you phrased it. As a veteran.

If you’d asked me as a citizen, as a civilian, as a writer, as an artist, as a father, as a patriot, as a transplanted Michigander by way of Alaska living in the hellish fetid dinosaur infested swamps of the Florida Panhandle, I might have a different answer – then again I might not.

But that’s not what you asked.

You asked me to speak as a veteran, and as a veteran there is only one answer.

The very first thing I learned in the military is this: Respect is a two-way street.

If you want respect, true respect, sincere respect, then you have to give it.

If you want respect, you have to do the things necessary to earn it each and every single day. There are no short cuts and no exceptions. This is true of men and true of nations.

Respect cannot be compelled.

Respect cannot be bought.

Respect cannot be inherited.

Respect cannot be demanded at the muzzle of a gun or by beating it into somebody or by shaming them into it. Can not. You might get what you think is respect, but it's not. It's only the appearance of respect. It's fear, it's groveling, it's not respect. Far, far too many people both in and out of the military, people who should emphatically know better, do not understand this simple fact.

There is an enormous difference between fear and respect. One is slavery, the other is liberty.

Respect has to be earned.

Respect. Has. To. Be. Earned.

Respect has to be earned every day, by every word, by every action.

Respect has to be given freely.

It takes a lifetime of words and deeds to earn respect.

It takes only one careless word, one thoughtless action, to lose it.

You have to be worthy of respect. You have to live up to, or at least do your best to live up to, those high ideals – the ones America supposedly embodies, that shining city on the hill, that exceptional nation we talk about, yes, that self-evident truth that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

To earn respect you have to be fair. You have to have courage. You must embrace reason. You have to know when to hold the line and when to compromise. You have to take responsibility and be accountable for it.

You have to keep your word.

You have to give respect, true respect, to get it back.

There are no short cuts. None.

And any veteran worth the label should know this. All of it. If they don't, then likely they weren't much of a soldier to begin with and you can tell them I said so.

If Colin Kaepernick doesn't feel his country respects him enough for him to respect it in return, you can not make him respect it.

You can not make him respect it.

It is impossible.

 

If you try to force a man to respect you, you'll only make him respect you less.

 

With threats, by violence, by shame, you can maybe compel Kaepernick to stand up and put his hand over his heart and force him to be quiet. You might.

But that's not respect.

It's only the illusion of respect.

And, yes, you might force this man into the illusion of respect. We’ve done such things in the past, beaten the illusion of respect into people of color. So you might. Would you be satisfied then? Would that make you happy? Would that make you respect your nation, the one which forced a man to his knees, into the illusion of respect, a nation of little clockwork patriots all touching their forelock to the tyranny of ideology and pretending satisfaction and respect?

Is that what you want?

If that’s what matters to you, that illusion of respect, then you're not talking about freedom or liberty. You're not talking about the United States of America. Instead you're talking about every dictatorship from the Nazis to North Korea where people are lined up and made to salute with the muzzle of a gun pressed to the back of their necks.

That, that illusion of respect, is not why I wore a uniform.

That's not why I held up my right hand and swore the oath and put my life on the line for my country.

That’s not why I administered the oath to others.

That, that illusion of respect, is not why I am a veteran.

Not so a man should be forced to show respect he doesn't feel.

 

That's called slavery and I have no respect for that at all.

 

If Americans want this man to respect America, then first they must respect him.

I didn’t say you had to agree with him.

I didn’t say you had to agree with his methods.

Just as I don’t have to agree with those who exercise their Constitutional right to stand on the corner in this little Southern town waving their bibles and loudly damning me to their hell.

Just as I don’t have to agree with those who exercise their Constitutional right to daily scream NRA talking points at me and carry their semi-automatic dick-extenders into the grocery store.

Just as I don’t have to agree with the pundits and the press who exercise their Constitutional right to create paranoia and hate and falsehoods whole cloth.

Just as I don’t have to agree with either the Tea Party or the Occupy Movement, or the drooling idiot Sovereign Citizens who march on the White House periodically to demand the president be tried in a kangaroo court and hung from the nearest lamp-post, I don’t have to agree with any of them when they exercise their Constitutional rights to assemble.

As a citizen, I might disagree with one hell of a lot of the ways other Americans exercise their rights, I might have no respect for their actions or their words and I might even write about it here in less than respectful language.

But as a veteran, I do have to respect them – whether they are worthy of it in my opinion or not. Because I swore my oath to the ideal that they have every right to believe as they will. That, that right there, was the whole damned point of my service in the first place.

Here’s what that respect got me this week: 50,000 plus messages of respect in return.

See how that works?

The same is true of men and true of nations.

If America wants the world's respect, it must be worthy of respect.

America must be worthy of respect. Torture, rendition, indefinite detention, unarmed black men shot down in the street, poverty, inequality, voter suppression, racism, bigotry in every form, obstructionism, blind patriotism, none of those things are worthy of respect from anybody -- least of all an American.

That does not mean there aren’t many things to admire about America.

But those great things don’t give you a pass on the bad stuff. 

Our Founders expected us to fix those things, to keep making America better. Not great again, better. If you can’t see that, then perhaps those men had a higher opinion of us than we deserve.

Now, doesn’t all this also mean if Kaepernick himself wants respect, he must give it first? Give it to America? Be worthy of respect himself? Stand up, shut up, and put his hand over his heart before Old Glory?

No. It doesn't.

Respect doesn't work that way.

Power flows from positive to negative. Electricity flows from greater potential to lesser.

The United States isn't a person. It's a vast imperfect construct. It is a framework of law and order and civilization designed to protect the weak from the ruthless and after more than two centuries of revision and refinement it exists to provide in equal measure for all of us the opportunity for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That’s the exceptionalism we talk about, that right there.

If you want to be exceptional, then you have to be exceptional.

If being exceptional was easy, everybody would be exceptional.

Living up to the promise of the Declaration is hard. Living up to the ideals of the Constitution is hard. If it was easy, we wouldn’t need to have this conversation.

All the power rests with America. Just as it does in the military chain of command. And like that chain of command, like the electrical circuit described above, respect must flow from greater to lesser first before it can return.

It doesn’t matter if Colin Kaepernick is a well paid pampered athlete.

It doesn’t matter if Colin Kaepernick is the worst quarterback who ever fumbled a play, or the finest baller to ever set foot on the gridiron.

It doesn’t matter if Colin Kaepernick is an arrogant jerk of a human being or the nicest guy you ever met.

It doesn’t matter if you think Colin Kaepernick doesn’t do enough for his cause or if he spends his money in a fashion you don’t approve of.

It doesn’t matter if you respect him.

What matters is that he is an American and he has every right to speak his piece, to use his voice and his position to make what difference he can if he so desires – and yes, to suffer the consequences of his actions if necessary. That’s his choice.

That’s his right. You don’t have to respect it, but as a veteran I must. Not to do so would make a mockery of the very things I swore my life to defend.

And that’s what you asked me, as a veteran. Remember?

To you the National Anthem means one thing, to Kaepernick it means something else. We are all shaped and defined by our experiences and we see the world through our own eyes. That's freedom. That's liberty. The right to believe differently. The right to protest as you will. The right to demand better. The right to believe your country can be better – just as the Founders themselves did – that it can live up to its sacred ideals, and the right to loudly note that it has not so far. The right to use your voice, your actions, to bring attention to the things you believe in. The right to want more for others, for the people who are important to you, freedom, liberty, justice, equality, and respect.

A true veteran might not agree with Colin Kaepernick and in fact might adamantly disagree, but a true veteran would fight to the death to protect any American’s right to say what he believes.

In the week since I wrote the original post on Facebook I’ve received literally tens of thousands of responses. The overwhelming majority are positive, notes of encouragement and understanding, enthusiastic and even reluctant agreement.  It makes me proud to note many of those responses came from veterans, from cops, and from Americans who put their asses on line for their fellows every day without expectation of reward or thanks. They may not agree with Kaepernick, but they stand with him nonetheless as true Americans do. A number came from non-Americans, those on foreign shores who look to America with equal parts fear and fascination and wonder at that shining city on the hill and it makes me proud that they can still admire this nation for what it is supposed to represent.

But in that same week I’ve daily posted a roster of those who don’t get it. Those who wrote me, many who claim to be veterans, who called me traitor and called Kaepernick nigger and who have daily sent me death threats and seething hate simply because I spoke of honor and duty and respect. It is these people, these haters, these dimwitted goons, who prove with their own words the validity and necessity of Kaepernick’s protest and why I stand with him.

You asked me what I think as a veteran?

You have my answer and if you don't like what Kaepernick has to say, then prove him wrong.

Be the nation he can respect.

It's really just that simple.

The Latter Days of a Better Nation, Part IV

 

Good news this morning for those who depend on EpiPens.

Well, not good news good news, but better news than yesterday anyway.

Mylan, the pharmaceutical company which manufactures the EpiPen epinephrine autoinjector, announced today that they are (not really) lowering the prices of the medical device. Mylan is also expanding its voucher program for low income/uninsured patients to provide access to the devices more or less free of charge.

The prices are still significantly higher than they were a year ago, but much better than they were last week.

This comes after weeks of public outcry over Mylan’s drastic price increases for the lifesaving device.

Over the last few years users of the Epipen saw their out-of-pocket costs increase by more than 500% in some cases, meaning that for many their costs increased from $120 per set of two EpiPens to anywhere between $400 and $700. Many severe allergy sufferers might need as many as six to eight Epipens per year depending.

It’s doesn’t take a Wall Street Pharma Bro to do that kind of math.

That’s one hell of a burden on one hell of a lot of people.

Naturally, predictably, rightfully, many Americans were outraged.

The price increases meant that for many, the EpiPen was no longer an option. And for a significant number of people, that meant a radical change in their lives. Some of the people I spoke to told me they simply couldn’t risk going outside until winter, because if they were stung by a bee they would die. They couldn’t risk letting their kids go to school because exposure to a single peanut might kill them without an EpiPen immediately available.

Now, for those who don’t suffer severe allergies, this kind of paranoia might seem overly dramatic.

It’s not.

People die.

Children die. Adults die. It happens. They always have, usually at young ages, you just never heard much about it. We chalked it up to poisoning or crib death or any of various maladies. But people have always died from severe allergic reactions. In the past many of those folks didn’t know they were allergic until they were choking to death. But now with increased awareness and education (much of it sponsored by Mylan and other Big Pharma), advancing medical technology and better diagnostic tools, many of these people are aware of their sensitivities and with devices such as the EpiPen readily available they can live normal lives.

For those not familiar, the EpiPen is a drug autoinjector – basically an automatic hypodermic needle anybody can use. You pop off the safety cap, press the tip against muscle tissue and push, a spring-loaded needle stabs into your flesh and a measured dose of a drug (in this case Epinephrine (adrenalin)) is forcefully injected directly into the muscle tissue. It sounds violent and painful and it is, it leaves a hell of a bruise (trust me on this), but you get to live which is always nice. Use of the EpiPen requires minimal training and can be used in seconds. And this matters because while epinephrine is used to treat a variety of conditions, in this case it’s being use to prevent anaphylaxis – i.e. a severe allergic reaction where breathing tissues – i.e. your throat! – can swell closed, which typically results in death via asphyxiation unless there’s somebody right there who knows how to perform a tracheotomy with a pocket knife and an ink pen. 

Having your windpipe close up is generally considered a pretty terrible way to go.

People with severe allergies, peanuts, bee stings, shellfish, etc, depend on the EpiPen for their very lives. Many carry the pen on their person at all times because should they suffer an allergic reaction there simply isn’t enough time to wait for medical personnel. Some severely affected people can literally suffocate in minutes. This is especially true in the case of children.

Overly dramatic? The ironic thing is that’s usually the opinion of the same people who think they have to have a gun immediately at the ready because it takes too long for the police to arrive.  I digress.

While there are other devices available, from other manufactures and including Mylan itself, the generic versions are cheaper but are more difficult to operate. And that difficulty is the problem. You see, the Epipen autoinjector is the standard – by design and intent.  It’s what first responders and emergency room personnel and patients themselves are all trained to use.

I myself have been taught to use the Epipen. I have trained many others. (No, I don’t suffer from allergies, more on that later). 

The generic devices work differently. And those differences can take minutes to figure out – when you don’t have minutes.

Moreover in many states, because these are medical devices, doctors have to write the prescriptions specifically for the generic version or the pharmacist can’t issue them and insurance won’t cover them (sometimes insurance won’t cover them even if the doctor does write a prescription specifically for the generic. The rules governing this are complex and difficult to understand even for medical professionals and it varies by state).

It’s complicated and frustrating and downright frightening for a lot of people who could find themselves choking to death while reading this essay.

 

A number of readers, those dependent on Mylan's Epipen either for themselves or for their loved ones, wrote asking why I hadn't posted anything on this subject either here or on my Facebook page.

 

I was waiting.

I was waiting for this, for Mylan to lower their prices.

As I said to those readers in private correspondence, I expected it to take about a week. And here we are.

Companies who depend on public approval for their stock returns don't do well when they come across to the public as greedy evil bastards willing to kill sick people for for a buck. Not unless they're defense contractors with billion dollar government contracts that is. Mylan isn’t that.  And I digress. Again.

Nor is Mylan run by a Wall Street pharma-bro like Martin Shkreli – not exactly anyway – though that comparison is so ubiquitous now I’ll be hard pressed to convince you otherwise.

But it’s true.

You see, Shkreli is an opportunistic douchebag perfectly willing to profit off the misery of sick people. He honestly doesn’t care if people die, so long as he turns a profit and he’s said so and grinned into the cameras while doing it. The man is purposely vile, he knows it and revels in his reputation. That’s nothing new for people like Martin Shkreli. He’s a hedge-fund manager, not a pharmacist, and he acts like one – absolutely no different than those greedy opportunistic Wall Street investment bankers who crashed the world economy for their own selfish ends.

The difference between Shkreli and Mylan is that his company, Turing, was by design a one-hit wonder.

Turing Pharmaceuticals owned the patent on a single critical drug, Daraprim, which is why Shkreli bought it. He knew what would happen when he jacked up the price and he didn't care – in fact public outrage was very likely his goal. Being hated made Shkreli famous. Being called the most hated man in America was the Holy Grail for Martin Shkreli.  Your hate meant everything to him because Shkreli wasn’t interested in running a drug company, he only wanted the money he could squeeze out of it before dumping it and moving on.  He wasn’t making money from those dying of AIDS/HIV, he was making money from hedging the investment. This is a well-greased Wall Street model, it's how business is done every day in America. It's just that most of the time you don't hear about it because it doesn't blatantly turn people dying of a hideous disease into Soylent Green.

Mylan is different.

Mylan is vast global pharmaceutical company registered in the Netherlands and headquartered out of Great Britain. Most of what they make is generic drugs – the less expensive formulas of name brands used by millions of low income and uninsured people all over the world.  That’s right. Without Mylan poor people would be paying a hell of a lot more for routine drugs.  

Mylan also holds the patents on certain specialty devices, such as the Epipen.

Now, Mylan has the a right to make a profit, just as Shkreli did.

Yes, I can hear you screaming. Go on and get it out your system.

But it’s true. The company has a right to make a profit. The morality of making a profit off sick people is a topic for another time and I’m not going to go into it here. It is how it is at the moment and it’s not going to change without a radical restructuring of our civilization. Deal with it.  

Unlike Shkreli, however, Mylan’s bottom-line very much depends on public opinion*. Once their stock started tanking, their response was perfectly predictable.

(*Note: The criminal case against Shkreli is still in progress, but it seems likely based on the charges and his track record that he was involved in a complex scam to manipulate the market in order to short his own investments -- basically betting against himself. If that was the case then the greater the outrage and the worse public opinion, the better his profits. It’s shady as hell and often illegal and depending on how his trial goes, maybe worth a long prison sentence. Welcome to Wall Street).

The primary difference between Mylan and Shkreli is that Mylan (like most pharmaceutical companies) has every reason to keep their customers alive, heathy*, and happy.  Dead people don’t buy Epipens.

Shkreli had no such interest.

(*Note: please don’t start in with the “Big Pharma wants you sick so they can sell drugs” nonsense.  That’s a ridiculous conspiracy theory, easily proven false as many times as you care to run the experiment. Big Pharma isn’t evil and without the drugs they produce every single day, many of you wouldn’t be here or would suffer a vastly worse quality of life. People get sick. They get injured. They have allergies. Diseases evolve, new ones emerge every day. Big Pharma profits far more from making you happy, healthy, and a satisfied customer than they ever would by keeping you sick. So just don’t**)

(**Note: Yes, I realize you will now brand me as a shill for Big Pharma and add me to the conspiracy to keep you sick. Go on. Feel free. Just do me a favor and keep it to yourself and out of my comments section. Thanks. Also, if you see my huge check from Big Pharma, please pass it along because I sure could use it)

 

All of that said, this is a damned good example of what's wrong with the American healthcare system.

 

Under this story on The Hill, commenters are waging a full out war with liberals on one side and conservatives on the other. Neither seems to have much understanding of the actual situation.

For example, commenter Scott declares:

"Regardless of who's paying (taking ACA out of the picture) they have jacked the price for pure and utter greed."

To which one Daniel Gray responded:

"THEY are the ones that invented the drug and the ability to dispense it, so THEY have the right to decide how much to charge for it. Using your logic, if you invented something that people found out later that they needed it I then suspect that you would be ok with the Government or someone else coming in and telling you that you had to sell them for $.03 each and eat the cost of developing the drug and the dispensing system that cost you close to a couple hundred million dollars, as well as the pay of all the employees and so on. These companies just cant win with people like you. If they make something you dont want them to be able to get their money back from what they spent on it, and if they do what you want and then have to lay off people because they dont have money to pay them, then you go after them for that. Stop buying into the left wing BS. Your invention, YOU set the price, not some cubical critter in DC."

Both commenters are wrong in varying degrees.

Shkreli jacked up his prices out of unvarnished greed. He gleefully admitted as much – it's why he bought the expired Daraprim patent in the first place and founded Turing Pharmaceuticals. Greed was his entire business model. But again, he’s a hedge fund manager, this is what they do. This is why Wall Street needs to be regulated – a topic we’ll come back to in a bit.

Mylan increased prices for profit, certainly, because they have to make a profit for their shareholders and they have every right to do so, but that wasn't the only reason. Scott says “taking the ACA out of the picture,” but the thing is you can’t take the ACA out of the picture. Complex economic factors and unexpected market pressures driven by implementation of the Affordable Care Act factor directly into the price increase – and that is entirely on Congress who has repeatedly and emphatically failed to act.  And to a certain extent on the President who has not made this flaw (and others) in his signature legislation a national issue and publicly demanded Congress stop screwing around and get on it.

This situation, and dozens more like it, could have been avoided, if Congress would do its goddamned job and start fixing the Affordable Healthcare Act – or even replace it with something better as Republicans have been promising for eight years now but have as yet failed to produce a single legislative improvement despite majorities in both houses. And without the ACA, the costs would be even higher and 20 million more people would be uninsured.

Congress could fix this.  

That’s their job.

No legislation is perfect, it can’t be. The world is simply too complex. Legislation is too complex. Social Security, Medicare, the National Highway Act, the Voting Rights Act, the Anti-Trust Act, every major piece of legislation was flawed in some fashion. There are always unforeseen side effects. That’s Congress’s job, to fix those things and to keep fixing them as new problems emerge.

But they won’t.

And they won’t because just like Martin Shkreli, they’re more interested in their own selfish satisfaction than they are in keeping the rest of us alive.

Congress has always fixed the problems with various laws, in fact that’s about 80% of what they do. Right up until President Obama came along, when petulant childish obstructionism became more important than your life.

Congress would rather let you choke to death than give one inch to President Obama.

Then there’s the other side of the argument:

“THEY are the ones that invented the drug and the ability to dispense it…”

Wrong.

Wrong on both counts.

Epinephrine is a compound produced by the adrenal gland. It was first isolated by a guy named Jokichi Takamine, a Japanese chemist who immigrated to the United States in the late 1800s. Takamine’s 1901 patent for “Process of Making Diastatic Enzyme,” US Patent #525,823, was the very first patent ever granted for a glandular hormone. Synthetic versions were later developed and patented. Most of those patents have long expired.

Mylan didn’t “invent” epinephrine.

And they don’t own it. Nobody does.

The amount of epinephrine per typical dose is at most a few cents. Combined with other compounds to increase the effectiveness of the drug and decrease side effects (variations of which are how you make generics), each injection costs around $1.00US.

But what Mylan does own is the patent on the EpiPen autoinjector – the device that allows somebody going into anaphylactic shock to self-inject themselves with epinephrine. Or allows a bystander, any bystander trained or not, to do the same.

That’s what they’re charging you for.

But see, here’s the funny part: they didn’t invent that either.

The EpiPen was developed by Merck Pharmaceuticals from the Mark I NAAK ComboPen,

Remember I told you I was trained in the use of the autoinjector? It was the Mark I.

NAAK stands for “Nerve Agent Antidote Kit” in case you were wondering. 

Military folks, particularly those who serve on the front lines, are intimately familiar with this beast or the newer version called the ATNAA (Antidote Treatment Nerve Agent Auto-Injector).  It was designed by the US government during the Cold War specifically to help military people survive a nerve agent attack. The drugs injected are not epinephrine (atropine sulfate and pralidoxime chloride and anybody who took my class better still be able to spell pralidoxime chloride in their sleep), but the device and method of use are almost exactly the same as the EpiPen.

Mylan acquired the various patents for the EpiPen and other autoinjectors from Merck when the company bought Merck’s generic drug division in 2007.

Now, pay attention: Merck never did much with the EpiPen. It was around, people could buy it, those with allergies knew about it and bought the device or one of the various other models available, but it wasn’t common. It was fairly cheap, but a lot of people who could have benefitted from wider availability didn’t have access to it. There were several versions on the market, there was no standard, and it was hit or miss which type you might come across.

Mylan’s CEO, Heather Bresch, the woman people are right now comparing to Martin Shkreli, set about making the-easy-to-use EpiPen available to everybody.

Her plan was to make the EpiPen ubiquitous. Simple, easy to use, and available everywhere. She undertook a program to increase awareness of the dangers of anaphylaxis and severe food allergies – which is why so many people actually know about them today. She successfully lobbied the FDA to approve the EpiPen for use in treating those conditions. And she successfully lobbied Congress for legislation and funding that makes EpiPens available the same way defibrillators are – and in fact she hired the same people who designed defibrillator legislation to design the EpiPen legislation. She started programs to help uninsured and underinsured people get access to the EpiPen. She got EpiPens into ambulances and first aid kits and schools and restaurants.

These efforts have directly and provably saved many lives.

So, what am I saying here? Bresch is some kind of hero? That Bresch did all of this out of the goodness of her heart. That she isn’t out to make a profit? No, of course not. Don’t be stupid. Bresch saw an opportunity, she saw how an obscure device could be used to seize the majority of the market-share in the area of emergency allergy first aid. And she took it and pushed that idea all the way. As a result, her vison and leadership increased profits for Mylan in this one area from about $200M in 2007 to over $1.5B in 2015.

Of course she did it for profit. Of course she did. But she saved a lot of lives along the way.

That, that right there, is what a good CEO does.

Heather Bresch is no Martin Shkreli and Mylan isn’t Turing.

 

Yes, I hear you there in the back, screaming in outrage. Yes, I know. Mylan is a tax inverter. Bresch took advantage of corporate tax loopholes to cut Mylan’s tax burden and increase profits (though their shareholders are likely to get a hefty capital gains whammy this year).  Yep. And it was all perfectly legal. And frankly if I was the CEO of Mylan, I’d have done the same thing. If I could save my company millions and increase stockholder returns, I’d be negligent in my duties not to do so. That’s what they pay CEOs for. Bear with me for a bit, we’ll come back to this.

 

Now, a side effect of this increase in availability, combined with unforeseen side effects with the ACA, resulted in massive price increases for the EpiPen. Some of which was deliberate on the part of Mylan, but not all.

And so here we are caught between the rock of capitalism and the hard spot of our obligation to those in need.

And it’s not as simple as greed.

And it’s not as simple as need.

“… if you invented something that people found out later that they needed it I then suspect that you would be ok with the Government or someone else coming in and telling you that you had to sell them for $.03 each and eat the cost of developing the drug and the dispensing system that cost you close to a couple hundred million dollars, as well as the pay of all the employees and so on. These companies just cant win with people like you. If they make something you dont want them to be able to get their money back from what they spent on it, and if they do what you want and then have to lay off people because they dont have money to pay them, then you go after them for that. Stop buying into the left wing BS. Your invention, YOU set the price, not some cubical critter in DC."

None of that is true.

Mylan didn’t develop either the drug or the device.

They did have to pay for acquisition of it however. It cost them about $6.7 Billion in fact. They have to make that back – and hopefully a lot more, otherwise it was a bad deal by definition and it’ll be bad not only for Mylan, but for everybody else too.  

Now, leaving aside Mylan’s obligation to its shareholders, does the government have a right to decide what a company can charge for their product?

Should the government have that power?

What happens when government sets the prices of goods? Anybody? There’s a name for that type of government, you know. And historically speaking, how does that typically work out? I’ll leave the answer as an exercise for the reader.

The commenter above doesn’t think government should be able to regulate prices – though one suspects he might have a different outlook if he had to buy EpiPens out his own pocket to keep his kid alive.

Then again, maybe not – and I’m digressing yet again.

But – but – here’s the thing the commenter is missing: The US taxpayer paid for the original design. 

That’s right.

The US government paid for the development and design and manufacture of the Mark I NAAK ComboPen.

Now, why shouldn’t the people who paid for that design have some say, via their government, in how that device is made available to the public?

We regulate prices for all kinds of products critical to the public good, either directly or through anti-trust laws.

Electricity is a good example here. We regulate utility prices specifically because in the modern world most people can’t do without electricity, and because electricity in many areas is a monopoly.  Without regulation that monopoly could raise prices to any level they wished and people would have to pay up or learn to do without.

Mylan – by deliberate design of their CEO – owns what is essentially a monopoly on the autoinjector market.

People die without it.

The same people who paid for its design through their tax dollars.

Tax dollars that Mylan has found a way not to pay.

So why shouldn’t those people have a say in how that the device is regulated and sold?

Look here: Mylan isn’t a villain. Mylan has a right to make a profit, as much as they can so long as its legal. Mylan has a right to take advantage of the tax loopholes, they’d be fools not to. Mylan’s CEO has every right to set her salary at whatever the shareholders will accept. And if we are to be truthful with ourselves, Mylan and companies like them do a lot of good – far more good than bad and our modern lives would be radically lesser without them and in fact if it wasn’t for people like Heather Bresch, we wouldn’t be having this argument because most of you would never even have heard of the EpiPen.

Without the incentive of capitalism, this situation wouldn’t even exist and hundreds, maybe thousands, of people would be dying every year of anaphylaxis.  

But Mylan’s interests are not ours.

And you’re a fool if you expect altruism from corporations.

It is the government’s job to balance capitalism against the needs of the citizenry via regulation.

And that responsibility rests squarely on Congress.

Congress has traded away your health and safety – and your tax dollars – in their mad vendetta against the President.

They are all, each and every one, responsible. And any death that results is squarely upon those sorry sons of bitches.

Congress could fix this. They could rewrite the tax laws to eliminate the loopholes, they could set fair regulation of critical medical devices including the EpiPen – regulations that are fair both to industry and fair to the citizens who need them – and they could use the resulting increase in federal money to subsidize in various degree EpiPens and other healthcare for all citizens exactly as the president intended eight years ago. They could do all of this today, right now. But they will not.

Mylan and the EpiPen is but one of a thousand similar problems that directly affect the quality of life for people all over the world. Every. Single. Day.

Those problems could be solved if the people responsible would only do the job they were elected and paid to do.

But they will not.

They will not.

 

Look, let’s get something straight here: I have no intention of being an apologist for the pharmaceutical industry. Or for capitalism itself.  But this is the world we live in and if you’re expecting altruism from Wall Street at the shareholders’ expense you are a fool. It’s not going to happen, ever – even if the company’s motto is “Do No Evil” because evil, like ethics and altruism, is subjective.

The only way to make this better for all of us is via the mechanism put in place by our Founders.

In the end, you hold the power.

Come this November, remember this betrayal. Remember this petulant, childish eight year long tantrum. These lousy sons of bitches would let your child choke to death before they cooperate with each other or the president and there’s absolutely no reason whatsoever to believe they will change in the future.

Remember that when you go to the polls to elect a new congress and a new president.

If you want a better nation, be better citizens.

If you want a better nation, you have to elect a better government.

Wishful Thinking

Jim, what happens if Trump quits the race?

What if Trump quits the race?

What if Trump craps out and goes home?

That question in various configurations is currently trending at about 90% of my inbox.

What if he quits?

There's a margin of error on that percentage in that I quit. I quit reading this morning after about 200 messages and went to play with the cat and watch it rain for a while. The number could be more or less, but let's go with 90% for dramatic effect. OK?

Good.

What if Trump quits the race?

Well ...

Okay. Sure. Why not? In a year of goddamned things, what’s one more goddamned thing? Right?

Right.

This morning Politico reports more than 70% of Republican leaders want Trump to drop out (but still support him). I have no idea what the percentage of democrats who want Trump to quit is, but it’s likely similar or higher. Maybe a lot higher.

Sure.

Folks, first, Trump is not going to quit the race.

He’s not.

The man is pathologically incapable of such an act.

If history is any guide to his pathology, Trump honestly doesn’t believe he can lose – not without some kind of flimflam. Confident of victory to the bitter end, he'll go down in flames raging all the way and blame either incompetent minions or some nebulous conspiracy for his defeat. Guys like this, well, the last time one of these people took over a modern country it ended with him blowing his own brains out in a bunker under the burning ruins of his capital city. That guy believed he could win too, right up until the moment he pulled the trigger.

Trump is not going to quit the race.

Democrats (who've been appalled from the start) and Republicans (who are just now realizing the scope of the disaster they face) are likewise both engaged in wishful thinking.

There's more than a bit of Schadenfreude on the part of liberals. Trump is the personification and the natural end result of everything they've been saying about the GOP since Reagan. Watching the monster Republicans themselves created ripping the GOP limb from limb is a pretty sweet I Fucking Told You So indeed.

But …

…the problem with monsters is that they make for lousy revenge.

Monsters by definition are unpredictable and uncontrollable and not particularly discriminating when it comes to victims. They rampage through the village savaging the innocent along with the deserving just as soon as they're done decorating the walls of the castle with their creator's intestines.

Trump's not going to quit the race.

Why should he?

What possible motivation does Trump have to drop out?

That’s what liberals want.

That’s what the GOP establishment wants.

Trump can’t give them that victory, the shame would be unbearable. He’ll blow his own brains out first.

Trump, whatever his other motivations might be, is an attention whore. That is the very core of his being. For all his wealth and fame and success, he’s still just an insecure little teenager who craves popularity and approval. You see it in his every comment, in his every response to even the smallest criticism. If you point out that he never served in the military, he puffs out his chest and says that his prep school experience was even more difficult than actual military service and his toadies all nod, it’s true, it’s true. If you suggest that Trump is “only” a millionaire, he pulls out his wallet and brags about his supposed billions. If you make a joke about his small hands – a joke anybody else would laugh off or ignore because it’s just so utterly idiotic – Trump becomes dangerously enraged in the same manner a high school jock does when somebody questions his sexuality. When Trump is criticized by the father of a fallen soldier – something any other politician would wisely ignore – Trump doesn’t just respond, he attacks, he turns the soldier’s family into terrorists, enemies of America, Fifth Columnists, he attacks their religion, their integrity, their honor, their grief, their patriotism. Trump goes after the fallen soldier himself – a man who gave his life in the service to the country and is no longer able to defend himself – smearing the dead man’s reputation, questioning his service and sacrifice. And his toadies all nod, it’s true, it’s all true! Yeah, you tell ‘em, Mr. Trump! You tell ‘em!

Trump is all the worst aspects of American culture. He’s Super Sized. His entire life is a dick measuring contest. He has to be the smartest, the richest, he has to have the biggest cock, the hottest girl, the best car, the tallest building. Anything less is a personal insult. Anything less makes him feel small and insecure.

This? This presidential race? This was tailor-made for his ego.

If he wins, he gets everything he ever wanted, power, fame, riches, attention, access, the ability to shake the world.  If he wins he finally gets the things his money and fame can’t buy.

If he loses, he becomes a martyr, the victim of both liberal and conservative conspiracies brought down by evil unseen forces.

Either way, he’ll bask in the resulting attention for the rest of his life.

But if he quits of his own accord he becomes just another forgotten loser.

 

Given what you know of Donald Trump, now why would he do that?

 

Trump is not going to quit the race.

But what if he did?

What if Trump kicks over the board and goes home?

What if one day he suddenly realizes that the path to true political immortality is to be the one guy – the one guy – who in the entire history of the United States becomes the first major party’s candidate to drop out. Screw it. Leaving the Republican Party holding the bag.

He’d throw America into absolute chaos and his place in history would be assured.

He doesn’t care that history would see him as a villain, hell, he’d love it!

What if he wakes up to this idea?

What then?

What if Trump quits?

That’s an interesting question.

And there’s no real answer … or rather there is, but you’re not going to like it.

First of all, it won’t be Mike Pence.

At least it won’t automatically be Mike Pence.

A number of folks seem to be under the impression that the Constitution somehow applies here and if Trump drops out then his running mate steps in to replace him. But that’s not how it works. Trump hasn’t been elected to office, he’s just a the GOP candidate. The Constitution doesn’t govern how political parties nominate their candidates and doesn’t dictate order of succession in the event a candidate craps out before the election – in fact the Constitution doesn’t say anything about political parties at all.

It would be up to the Republican National Committee, the party itself, to replace Trump should he drop out. There’s a Republican Party rule for this, Republican National Committee Rule No. 9, Filling Vacancies in Nominations. If Trump were to drop out (or blow his brains out, or otherwise be unable to fulfil his obligation as the Party’s nominee), then the RNC can employ one of two methods to select a new candidate. The RNC can itself vote on a new candidate where each state would be given the same number of votes as they had at the last national convention – or – the party can reconvene the national convention and go through the entire process all over again.

There are obvious problems with both methods, but either way it’s a fairly straightforward process…

…that would likely result in chaos, massive uncontrolled infighting, and an implosion of the party.

The first method would simply toss the ball back into the hands of the very people who nominated Trump in the first place.

In a practical sense, it would be a logistical impossibility.

And why would the establishment RNC, the very people who’ve been fighting Trump, go along with this option? The Ted Cruz supporters think obstruction is a dandy idea and it’s likely the RNC would deadlock just trying to figure out what to do next.

The second method would be not only a logistical nightmare, but a financial disaster as well. The RNC would have to pay for a whole new convention. With no notice. Hell, just renting the convention hall would be damned near impossible given the timeline – they’d end up having it in a cow pasture and be grateful for that.

Imagine throwing together a national political convention with a week’s notice. Go on.

They couldn’t do it. Which means they’d have to go with the first method, the one that elected Trump in the first place. Which nobody would want. Which means they’d want to do the second option, but they can’t, so they go ‘round and ‘round and by the time the infighting stops the GOP as a national force is a footnote in political history.

But that’s the easy part.

The hard part is who?

Who would they nominate? The also-rans would have to relight their campaigns after quitting. Jeb Bush. Ted Cruz. Ben Carson. Mitt Romney. There are legal and political issues. Money. National support. Staffing. They’d hit the ground months behind Clinton’s Juggernaut and never catch up. Not to mention they all lost to Donald Trump. And the candidate has to be approved by a majority vote, which would be almost impossible for an extremist such as Cruz or an unpopular unlikable wishy-washy nebbish like Jeb.

Could they nominate Mike Pence? You mean the guy coupled to Trump, who (in this fantasy) just quit and screwed over the entire Republican Party? That Mike Pence? Sure. I would rate the likelihood of that happening about the same as the RNC nominating Chelsea Clinton, but it could happen.

The obvious choice for the RNC is to draft Paul Ryan – assuming the committee could agree and Ryan was dumb enough to accept a job as pinch-hitter for a nomination that’s almost sure to be a soup sandwich of legendary proportions. And which would throw the House back into chaos. Ryan might be better off crunching his fake tooth and sucking down the cyanide while laughing manically and waving his middle fingers at the entire country. Later, Loooosers!

The bottom line is whatever method the RNC used, the replacement candidate would be a last minute panic selection by a party in utter disarray.

Not exactly a recipe for success.

And the real hard part is when.

If Trump drops out now, right now, then there’s still time to hold a convention and nominate a new candidate and get him (or her, since we’re talking Republican fantasy here) onto the various state ballots.

But only if Trump drops out now.

The closer to November we get, the more impossible it becomes.

Once states start printing ballots – and mailing out absentee ballots – all bets are off. How each state deals with this situation is largely up to the various states and a tangled myriad of obscure, rarely used and in many cases untested state and federal laws. This is how dead people get elected to office.  I would guess the resulting legal challenges alone would be enough to throw the entire election – and thus the country – into anarchy.

 

It’s an appealing fantasy for a lot of people, Trump crapping out.

But at this point, as insane as it may sound, the best thing for the nation’s future is that Trump stick it out to the bitter end.

 

Then again, you know…

There are those on both sides of the political divide who are desperately hoping Hillary Clinton will soon be indicted for (something something gazpacho!).

Imagine it.

Both Clinton and Trump suddenly out of the race at the last minute.

The nation left without a viable major party candidate, Republican or Democratic.

The power of political parties finally broken and a return to a more democratic republic as first envisioned by the Founding Fathers…

As long as we’re playing this game, I mean.

What?

No, I suppose not.