Law and Disorder: Special Stupidity Unit

Defense attorney: "Your Honor, while it is true that my client was present in the 7-11 on the night of the 24th and that he did point a loaded revolver at the cashier while requesting him to empty the cash register, I'd like to point out that -- as the surveillance video from the store has clearly shown -- my client did not ONCE say to the cashier that this was an armed robbery. He did not once use the words 'armed robbery', and therefore, Your Honor, he cannot be charged or convicted of the CRIME of armed robbery."

Judge: "Very well. Case dismissed!" 

This seems to be the way Trump followers think about the words "quid pro quo" or "abuse of power".

What Would Trump Do?

On the local Finnish radio this morning they had a long segment (for some reason) about the time John Lennon said the Beatles were more popular than Jesus.

I remember there was a backlash over that, especially in the South, with folks burning Beatles records with the same kind of enthusiasm that some people used to burn Tyndale Bibles (sorry, couldn't help that -- been reading "Wolf Hall" and thinking about all the Christian-on-Christian hatred that was going on back in those days when Henry VIII decided he wanted a new and better queen).

Anyway, I got to wondering how Trump's supporters would react if Trump said he was more popular than Jesus. (And judging by the actions of Trump's base, he probably IS more popular than Jesus with those folks.)

I wish some reporter would ask that question. Are you now more popular than Jesus? I would love to see him stumble over his answer. He might understand that the "correct" answer is no. But he might also be so happy with the comparison that he might flip into Trump-mode and say something idiotic. "Look, they say Jesus walked on water, but I'm building the wall. Jesus never would have done that, what I'm doing. He wouldn't keep those immigrants out."

Old-Timey Camps and Wagon Trains

It’s often interesting to take a step back and look at recent events through the lens of history. And, boy, is this ever true today in the US when it comes to the illegal immigration issue. A couple of examples come to mind. 

Take the reaction of some conservatives when confronted with the harsh conditions in which the US government is holding young migrant children along the southern border. I’ve seen some of these supposedly good Christians on social media trying to blame the immigrant parents for putting their children at risk by making a dangerous trek through Mexico to find a better life in America. We shouldn’t feel bad about children sleeping on concrete floors, they would say, because it was their parents’ choice to put them in harm’s way! What kind of parent would subject their child to an arduous and dangerous journey like that? 

And then we have the wagon train. 

By that, I mean the groups of American settlers crossing the continent by ox-drawn wagons in the 1840-50s to start a new life in Oregon or California. For the sake of safety during this 2000-mile trip, these emigrates formed groups that today might be called “caravans”. Sometimes they paid “wagon masters” to lead them across the plains. Maybe we’d call them “coyotes” or “people smugglers” today. 

The first major trek of this kind was the Great Migration of 1843, in which a thousand-odd emigrants traveled the Oregon Trail, a legendary route that all American schoolchildren learn about. Years ago, on a family road trip to Yellowstone National Park, I insisted on making a detour to South Pass, the relatively low swag in the rugged Rockies that gave Oregon-bound emigrants easy passage over the mountains. 

Another storied mountain pass in American lore is Donner, along the California Trail in the Sierra Nevada. That is where a party of emigrants, taking to the trail too late in the season, were stranded in an early snowstorm and -- as everyone in America, maybe even Donald Trump, surely remembers -- had to resort to cannibalism to survive. 

Okay, that was an extreme form of hardship, but it’s fair to say that the typical trip for these families looking for a better life wasn’t a walk in the park. It’s estimated that one out of ten died along the way. They were trudging across desolate stretches of land, passing through hostile territory, always on the lookout for Indians who didn’t take kindly to Europeans invading their land. And the environment itself could be unforgiving. I’ve heard that, as sensational as Indian attacks on the open, treeless plains could be, more emigrants died from lightning strikes than from arrow strikes. 

When I was growing up in the US, these wagon trains still held a special place in the popular imagination. There was a hit TV show about them when I was a child. In my youth, a highlight in my hometown of Ellijay, Georgia, was the yearly “Wagon Train” festival, where dozens of people, often in cowboy getups, rode horses and wagons across Fort Mountain from the town of Chatsworth. I believe they’ve long since stopped doing that, but it was a feature of our lives for many years. 

In short, white European settlers putting their children through the ordeal of a five-month journey in dangerous circumstances in order to reach a new and better home is celebrated – even cherished -- in American pop culture. It no doubt warms the hearts of those conservatives who get nostalgic over John Wayne Westerns. Meanwhile, mestizo Central Americans doing the same today are to be condemned, demonized. Could it be there is a double standard at play here? 

The other example I had in mind was “concentration camps”. This is how some Democrats have been referring to the detention centers along the southern border where migrants -- children as well as adults -- are being incarcerated, often in deplorable conditions. Conservatives have taken umbrage at any suggestion that these overcrowded facilities can be compared with the notorious concentration camps of Nazi Germany. Others have argued that using the term “concentration camp” outside the context of the Third Reich somehow insults the memory of Holocaust victims. 

A side note to this issue is the little history lesson that some folks have provided, namely that the term “concentration camp” was in fact coined some decades before the Nazis, during the Boer War in South Africa, an ugly enough episode of history where different tribes of white Europeans fought each other over the empty Veld. This factoid was even mentioned in the BBC-HBO miniseries “Years and Years”, about a Trump-like figure rising to power in a post-Brexit dystopian Britain of the near future. I highly recommend it. 

The term “concentration camp” may be modern, but the concept is not, and my own historical connection to it is the fact that my hometown in Georgia was the site of a real, actual concentration camp, Fort Hetzel. This was in 1838, when the state of Georgia, with the help of the US Army, was undertaking a gigantic land grab, a campaign of ethnic cleansing. 

Up until then, Ellijay, located in a shallow valley surrounded the Southern Appalachian Mountains, was part of the Cherokee Nation, which had been doing its best to assimilate to the invading Europeans by, for example, adopting Christianity and a US-style of government. Not that it did them much good. 

By 1838, whites had already been settling on Cherokee land in Georgia, even more so after gold was discovered there, sparking America’s first Gold Rush. Pressure had been building for the Cherokee to give up their homeland in exchange for a reservation in faraway Oklahoma. One faction of Cherokee leaders did eventually agree to this, but against the will of most of their people, who had to be removed from their farms under threat of force. Those rounded up in the mountains surrounding Ellijay where brought to Fort Hetzel, to be gathered there, or “concentrated” if you will, until time for their forced migration west. 

As far as I know, there is no historical plaque in Ellijay commemorating this event. Nothing marks the site of the stockade where over a thousand Cherokee men, women and children, forced off their land, forced to abandon their fields and livestock, were imprisoned in a confined space for months. 

Growing up in Ellijay, my only real source of information about this tragic event was "The Annals of Upper Georgia: Centered in Gilmer County" a chronicle written by a local amateur historian (and husband of my second-grade teacher) George Gordon Ward. Here’s a passage from that book about the roundup of local Cherokee: 

“Touching incidents were common during removal. An unnamed Indian mother, her violent protestations evidently having been unheeded, was driven into camp at East Ellijay, then Fort Hetzel. Her frenzied condition continued but the white soldiers could not understand her. 

“Then they called an interpreter, who translated the startling fact that when she was seized and forced from her home, some of her small children, in a panic of fear, had fled to nearby thickets and were probably still there.” 

Desperate children separated from parents being held against their will in a concentration camp. Sound familiar? 

According to Ward’s account, the soldiers returned to the woman’s home with her to locate the children. The family was reunited – in the concentration camp. No word on whether they all survived the forced march to Oklahoma. 

It goes without saying that the Removal is a particularly dark stain on American history, which isn’t that pristine to begin with. As events of the last week have shown, things haven’t necessarily gotten better.

Fun with Ladders and Doctors

I don’t usually talk about health issues on social media, but I recently became (once again) a health care consumer when I fell off a ladder at the mökki about a month ago. You could say I fell off the roof, since I was still at roof height when the ladder slid out from under me, dropping me like a rock flat on my back onto our porch. The fall fractured one of my shoulder blades, and it hurt like hell. Considering the kind of health issues some folks have to endure, it was no big deal. Still, it required a hospital visit and, just to be on the safe side, an ambulance. And did I mention, it hurt like hell.  

To go into a bit more detail, my latest little episode of careless ladder usage required:  

• a forty-minute ambulance ride, during which I got three doses of fentanyl (once again, it did hurt like hell)  
• a CT scan of my head in Malmi Hospital  
• seven X-rays of my back and shoulder in Malmi Hospital  
• blood test in Malmi
• a cross-town ambulance transfer to Töölö Hospital for more specialist examination  
• two more CT scans in Töölö, including a full-body scan to rule out internal injuries  
• another blood test, before being discharged from Töölö around one in the morning 

Luckily, the cracked scapula was the only body part damaged. My pride, from once again falling from a ladder like a klutz, is another matter.  

And the point of me talking about this at all now is the costs. The accident resulted in two medical bills. The ambulance bill was €25 ($28). The bill for everything done at the two hospitals, all the examinations, X-rays, CT scans, came to €32.70 ($36). Total. 

This is the kind of health care system we have here in Finland. I did not have to fill out any forms. I do not have any kind of private health insurance. I do not pay insurance premiums. I did not have to worry whether the doctors or radiologists treating me were “in network”. I did not have to worry that the hospital where the paramedics took me had some prior arrangement with my insurance company, which doesn’t exist anyway, since I don’t have insurance.  

I did have to give my Kela number, equivalent to the Social Security number in the States. This allowed the paramedics to access my medical records already before the ambulance ride. It is also proof that I am part of the Finnish health-care system and entitled to its highly subsidized services.  

Private insurance does exist here, as do private clinics and hospitals, but I’ve never seen the need to use them except when they were provided as part of my employer’s health benefits for routine doctor visits.  

The public system here is fine with me and is typical of European-style universal health care, or “socialized medicine”, or Medicare for All, or whatever you want to call it. Some variation of this kind of public health system is what Democratic candidates for US president have been discussing in recent debates. Universal health care should be a winning issue for the Dems, since it sets them apart from the Republicans, who are doing their level best to dismantle the imperfect, but needed, reforms in the ACA (AKA Obamacare). 

Listening to the debates, it’s clear Democratic proposals for changing US health care are still taking shape, like whether private insurance should be banned (in my opinion, no). But, if you ask me, the Finnish system would be a good model.

Nothing Is New Under The Sun

A couple little books that have often occupied my nightstand (my dusty nightstand) for at least twenty years or more are Colin McEvedy’s history atlases, published by Penguin Books. I have read (and often re-read -- I have trouble retaining information, it seems) these brief summaries of Western history accompanied by simple maps that help to illustrate the constantly shifting geopolitical jigsaw puzzle of Europe from the Stone Age to the times of Napoleon. 

Every so often reading about the complicated history of Europe, I run across a passage describing long-forgotten leaders or world events that, well, seem to resonate with  leaders and world events of 2019. 

Here is one such passage from McEvedy’s “The Penguin Atlas of Modern History” describing Louis XI, King of France from 1461 – 1483. 

“Because he was both treacherous and successful, his admirers have called him Machiavellian, but his intellectual abilities were strictly limited, his natural impulsiveness poorly controlled and his qualities, good and bad, really those of a peasant. His strongest suit was tenacity, and the only modern quality of this otherwise credulous mind was a recognition that money was the measure of power.” 

Sound familiar? I highlighted the parts that reminded me of the current, and thankfully momentary, leader of the US. Notice, I didn’t highlight “successful”. 

Another such passage concerns Nero, the last of the Julio-Claudian dynasty of Roman emperors. Nero’s reign (AD 54 - 68) suffered from thorny conflicts in Britain and Palestine and a disastrous fire in Rome (the folk-legend of which has Nero blithely fiddling away while the flames raged). But, apparently, beyond these calamities Nero had personal shortcomings that meant he was not up to the job of Emperor. 

“His position," according to McEvedy, "required of him little more than the appearance of gravity, yet this was a role that Nero, the self-declared actor, was never able to sustain.” Again, sound familiar? 

After various missteps of mismanagement by Nero, the Roman governor of Spain had had enough and marched on Rome. With the tide turning against him, even his Praetorian Guards would not defend Nero, and he had no choice but to die, in McEvedy’s words, “by his own shaky hand”.  

Of course, throughout history, violence has often been the method of unseating unsuitable and unpopular rulers. The Founding Fathers of the United States, throwing off the legacy of undemocratic monarchies, devised a more civilized and humane way of replacing such leaders who are, without question, wholly corrupt and unfit for their high office. And that method is impeachment. 

I’m beginning to wonder, why on Earth, are we not using that civilized and humane method today?