Oglallas plan to return Badlands to the bison

The Oglalla Sioux tribe and the National Park Service are drafting legislation to give 133,000 acres of the Badlands National Park over to the bison.  Plans are to establish a herd of about 1,000 in the southern part of the park. 

The Washington Post reports that a portion of the Badlands from which Lakota people were driven off to make a bombing range during World War II will be returned to tribal management for the purpose of reclaiming the prairieland and reestablishing bison in their place in the ecosystem.

For those who want a taste of range fed bison,  novelist Dan O'Brien offers a Wild Idea from his nearby ranch.

Choosing not to be a fool

That part of the nation which still labors under the delusion that the noises it makes are some kind of communication is in the throes of a massive hysterical fit over Edward Snowden.  Is he a hero, a traitor, or a self-sucking jerk off?

Who cares?  

The only thing that concerns the 99 percent, or at least should, is how to endure a new world order that holds them in serfdom.  Or more basically, to decide if one even wants to endure.   

Columnist David Brooks fears that the nation is caught up in cynicism.  He seems to ignore the fact that the choices left us are being cynical or stupid.  It seems better for most not to be a fool.  If you have to go down, it is at least better to understand what is pushing you down. 

Perhaps nothing is more stupid than the political debate under which the nation is submerged.  It centers on the idea that we can either live in a free capitalist society or a government-controlled totalitarian one,  Marxist per chance.  What those who engage in this bicker fest just cannot grasp is, what difference does it make to the 99 percent whether the force that determines the quality of their existence is a totalitarian corporation or a totalitarian government?  Have any of those people so outraged over what the NSA is doing checked their credit reports to see what kind of information corporate America is collecting and circulating about them? 

People who bicker and like to pass judgments on other people have been confounded by the Occupy movement.  They have denigrated it because it did not engage in any of those wasteful, pointless efforts that they think are mandatory rituals of activism.  Occupiers did not issue an agenda, they did not elect leaders to represent them, and when police took action against them, they chose not to be active.  The establishment thinks they were effectively vanquished.  That's okay.  Like Bartleby in Herman Melville's story "Bartleby the Scrivener,"  they have shrugged and indicated to the establshment that they "prefer not to" participate in its games and rituals.  

Some will condemn the Occupiers for not fighting the good fight.  But there is no good fight.  There is just pointless fights that resolve nothing and improve nothing.  The paradigm of this pointless waste of life and energy is the recent wars we have fought:  Viet Nam, Iraq, Afghanistan.  All they do successfully is kill people and generate hatreds that lead to more killing and dismissal of any sanctity or possibility for human life.  All we get in the end is a death count over which there is a mass clucking of tongues and an exchange of accusations and pseudo-rhetoric which corrupts the language.  

The epiphany of what we have become is the Great Recession from which some say we are recovering, but has, in fact, changed the country in irrevocable ways.  The big fact is that, according to Financial Times, the profits at the end of the Great Recession were 25-30 percent higher than they were at its onset, but wages as a share of the national income sunk to 58 percent.   The Occupy people confronted this fact and have chosen a course of inaction that will not result in angry, pointless, unproductive confrontations and more destruction of lives.  

A book was published this spring, Barbara Garson's Down the Up Escalator: How the 99 Percent Live in the Great Recession, that chronicles the way people's lives have been  changed and their way of coping with that change.  Barbara Garson, author of the satire on Lyndon Johnson, MacBird, is a master of what is known as the Wall Street Journal story.  It is a story that does not dwell on the theories and arguments about some  trend, but rather she lays out the facts of the trend and focuses on stories that illustrate how it affects real people and how they deal with it.  In this book, she relates how
"hard-working people are learning to make do with less money, less opportunity and less free time,"  and "show little interest in jumping on the treadmill required to keep up a middle-class lifestyle"  (L.A. Times review)

In one example she explores, a young college graduate watches his father who is a manager of a warehouse for a big box store have his wages frozen over the years while he is given more workers to supervise and realizes the company is trying to force him to quit.  The son has part time, rather menial employment, but decides to make it work rather than get on the hopeless treadmill he sees his father treading.  

Garson sees the beginnings of the Great Recession and its consquences beginning in the 1970s with outsourcing and offshoring of American jobs.  Then with Ronald Reagan's firing of air traffic controllers and officially embracing trickle-down economics, government joined corporations in the subjugation and economic disenfranchisement of American wage earners. One of the people she presents in her book is a Viet Nam veteran who frequented a cofee shop she worked at after he was discharged from active duty.  She relates he told her that in Viet Nam, "his company had stayed stoned the whole time. “Our motto,” he once told me, “was ‘let’s not and say we did.’”  That tactic of survival is in a way what the 99 percent are adopting.  They are surviving with what they have and doing without all those trappings that once defined the middle class.  Garson writes, “If the majority of Americans was earning less and producing more, who was going to buy all the stuff?” 

She says, "If you’re not a worker, not a consumer and you don’t earn significant income from investments, then you don’t have much of a place in capitalist society,”  And that is where the 99 percent finds itself.

Wage earners have been excluded from the opportunities that the middle class spent a century in building. As the KOS reviewer says:

We know the policies that would fix [America]. What we don't know is how to get there, how to overcome a broken Senate and a gerrymandered House and both political parties being more responsive to big money than to working people.

The response of the 99 percent is not action, but simply logic.  If you are excluded from partaking of the products of your labor, why participate in the labor?  By withholding participation and consumption, the establishment will eventually implode upon itself and fall into the black hole it has spent so much time and energy creating.  In the meantime, we can use those remnants of the economy available to us and use our "wit, shit, and grit" to get along.   

As the establishment falters, we can replace it with forms of government and a culture of sustenance that respects people and returns opportunities to them.

It takes patience and the spirit of creativity, quiet industry, and humor.  It will come to pass, and decency may inherit the earth.  

When politics are down and dirty, why bother?

My hopes for my grandchildren include their escape from South Dakota.  This has stirred some positive Democrats to come to the defense of their state and to launch some lofty speculations about what could redeem the state from its single-party government  and its descent into a hate-based version of conservatism.  

This week I turned over my duties as an officer in a county Democratic Party after almost 15 years.  I am allied with the Party on most issues.  I do not think government has the right to overrule women in their choices about their own bodies and their families, or the right to interfere in anyone's choices about those they wish to share and build their lives around.  I do believe that government has to be big enough and strong enough to enforce the standards of equality and justice for each individual and to provide recourse for people being oppressed, suppressed, and defrauded  by bureaucracies and corporations.   In its role as guardian of liberty, equality, and justice,  I think that government must help those who wish to protect the environment from wasteful and polluting human activities,  that it must establish policies to make healthcare accessible to those who are excluded from it, to provide a safe and efficient infra-structure so that the enterprises of its people can function and prosper, that it must regulate finances for the benefit of the people and not the crooks, and that it must operate on a frugal budget adequate to carry out those functions.  

There are many in the Democratic Party who think that in order for the Party to regain power and influence in the state they must relinquish those principles which identify the Party.  To those who think that the only way to grasp onto a shred of political power is to give up basic principles, then why not simply become a Republican?  Those who think that the essential liberal values are too important and defining to be sacrificed are regarded as left-wing extremists.  To win elections, the strategists say, one has to give up the very values that define the Democratic Party.  This intelligence comes from those political theorizers and strategists who comment on blogs and have, apparently, never faced the situations that real people find themselves in or actually engaged in a political campaign.  They have a wide range of notions of what the Democrats must do to regain power.  And most of those notions involve being a Republican.

Some Democrats are in a quandary because what they think are the only people who could be viable candidates for Sen. Tim Johnson's Senate seat have declined to run.  That leaves Rick Weiland, a man with a strong record of work and service, but who has lost two previous attempts to make it to Congress.  Those keyboard strategists have already dismissed him, because he does not seem to possess that "star" status that makes the political heart flutter and the mind go blank.  But they mostly dismiss him because he is a Democrat who has not dutifully renounced his values in order to appear to be what they term a moderate.  Which, as Rick Weiland says, is a Republican.  

Those keyboard strategists seem to think that being in power, even at the cost of any political integrity, is more important than representing the issues that concern real people who are struggling against a state government that has no interest in them.  

Rick Weiland represents a political choice, not an abject submission to the majority party and those who endorse it.  Those Democrats who dismiss Weiland have not the political wherewithal to recognize that whoever runs for the Democrats is taking on the Republican establishment, not just one candidate.  And that establishment has put into office two of the most feckless and unproductive people in Congress.  One wonders why these Democrats dismiss and denigrate Rick Weiland rather than go after the records of the feckless twins, John Thune and Kristi Noem.  Their major legislative initiatives were contrived by the febrile minds of conservatives, which make up fantasies to rail against.  John Thune sponsored legislation to prevent the EPA from imposing a tax on bovine flatulence.  The EPA never intended or even considered such a tax.  But John in his belief that he had a big issue in saving cow farts from the EPA persisted.

Kristi Noem took the same tactic when she promoted the legislation that would prevent the EPA from regulating the dust raised by farming.  The EPA looked to see if there was a public health menace in farm dust which contains the residue of herbicides and pesticides, but it never considered coming into farmland and telling tillers of the soil to keep the damned dust down.  

Our brilliant Democratic strategists dwell on Rick Weiland, who has never been involved in any stupid political stunts of the magnitude of Thune and Noem,  and they solemnly designate him a loser against the records and personalties of the likes of the dust and fart chasers.  These strategists have the right to form and express their opinions, but other people have the commensurate right to dismiss them as stupid and totally obtuse to the real issues that confront so many people in South Dakota and the nation.  Before the Internet, such opinions were generally confined to the corner tavern where they could be expressed and then forgotten by the next morning.  Now they circulate through the cyber atmosphere like cow farts and toxic dust.

It is one of the reasons that people who believe some constructive things can and should be done give up on the absurdity that politics have become.   One of the most notable counteractions to the insult-and-abuse obsessions of current politics is the Occupy Wall Street movement.  It is misunderstood and assumed to have petered out.  Its critics moaned that it failed to announce an agenda and get organized to take some kind of massive action other than make known its dissatisfaction with a country being controlled by the one percent. People so indoctrinated in politics as usual fail to grasp that the Occupy people see the usual modes of announcing plans and organizing people are what the movement wants to avoid.  The usual mode for conducting political business has deteriorated over the years to the point that it is mired in malice, bickering, and  total moral and intellectual inertia.  Occupy people see our political structures as nothing more than obstacles to addressing social issues, and they are convinced that circumventing politics-as-usual is the only way to deal with the problems we face.

An example of circumventing the established order is J.R. Fleming of Chicago who found it absurd that foreclosed houses in the Southside of Chicago were empty and abandoned by the  banks while thousands of people are homeless.   He has formed an organization  that occupies and restores abandoned houses and puts people in them.  He tells interested people: 

“The government failed us. The market failed us. Harvard, Yale and the University of Chicago failed us. Our government — the government — doesn’t belong to us. Forget them; they forgot us. We need to solve our problems ourselves.”

So, while people bicker over candidate personalities and exchange ignorant, ego-driven political opinions, the people who confront the real problems that need solving avoid politics and get to work in ways that actually accomplish something.  The first major accomplishment is getting free from our political system.

The police may close down the Occupy demonstrations, but they can't reach the real work being done. 

Where are all the young Democrats?

I spent a week in Denver to, among other things, join the celebration of grandson Julian's first birthday.  We celebrated grandson Kace's first birthday last month in Aberdeen.   As I ponder the futures of the two boys, I find a nagging hope that Kace can find his way out of South Dakota.  The state has no  future because of the state of its present.  And it has worked toward its present state for a century.   In the past decade, however, it has made a decisive commitment to matters that seem to insure a bleak future.  The prevailing attitude toward education is the tip of an iceberg of denial and ill-will that seems to be emerging as the essential character of the state.  

 Monday morning after some e-mail exchanges with her friends, my wife gave me the news that her former boss, Stephanie Herseth Sandlin, has announced that at this time, she will not be running for any public office.  She joins another very talented young person, Brendan Johnson, in declining to run for office.  Actually, their decisions may be the best hope in working toward improvements that could return South Dakota to a viable state which can produce a future.  In the announcements that they will not seek public office at this time, both Stephanie and Brendan commented that they wish to devote their energies and efforts to their present positions outside of politics.  Brendan Johnson is the state's U.S. attorney who has made great strides forward in reconciling and coordinating federal and tribal justice systems.  The dominant attitude of South Dakotans toward the native Americans is a cultural malignancy that has done severe damage to the state.  Stephanie Herseth Sandlin has stated that family is a big consideration in her decision, but she gave equal emphasis to her job with Raven Industries, a leading corporation centered in South Dakota.  

I do notpresume to know all the factors considered in their decisions, but I do know their backgrounds and know that both are people whose decisions would not include any of the provincial exclusions and hate-based discriminations that have become issues in the state's political dialogue.  Even if a person opposes those exclusions and discriminations, they become issues forced upon them during campaigns, and they divert attention away from the issues of creating a future in the state which addresses matters of liberty, equality, and justice.  And opportunity.  But South Dakota is mired down by prejudicial, bigoted attitudes, and people who want productive and contributory lives come to the realization that they must either move or resign themselves to hoping that they can make changes that make such lives possible.  That latter option is clouded by the reality that the prospect of such changes has become increasingly remote of late.  

Most significantly, the demographics of the state, as reflected in its recent elections to state and federal offices, have made politics an unlikely vehicle for change.  In 2010, when the South Dakota Democratic Party needed a candidate to run against John Thune for U.S. Senate, party supporters asked a number of officers to work at recruiting some good candidates.  I was among those, and had the opportunity to interview some very qualified and capable young people.  That was a time when I was confronted with a reality about the prospects of South Dakota.  The people I talked with had reviewed the possibilities and found that engaging in state politics could be lethal to family life and to any aspirations to lead a mindful life.  They thought that exposing their families to the kind of defamation and denigration that the John Thune campaign used in 2004 would be unconscionable, and they could not see how it would be possible to do anything  constructive in a political environment seething with provincial malice.  The people I talked with seemed to have a consensus that anything good for South Dakota would have to come from outside the political arena.  

Brendan Johnson and Stephanie Herseth Sandlin have both serious demerits against their candidacies:  they both hold degrees from prestigious universities outside the state--in the east.   Herseth Sandlin went to Georgetown U. after graduation from Groton High School on a scholarship.  She then obtained  a law degree from there.  Brendan Johnson moved to Washington,  D.C., from Vermillion, when his dad was elected to Congress,  for his high school years.  He then returned to graduate from the U. of South Dakota.  But then, he obtained his law degree at the University of Virginia.  Woops.  Accomplishments in academics and professional life outside of South Dakota are lethal, particularly if those places carry the aura of prestige. Many South Dakotans hate accomplishment and performance that exceed anything that might raise the level of expectations in South Dakota.  The GOP has been successful in fanning that resentful sense of inferiority into a political rage that wins elections.  If you hold degrees from institutions that demonstrate excellence and you manage to accomplish things in high places, you have committed the unforgivable sin against South Dakota.  Unless the state needs someone of such attainment and accomplishment to go to Washington to bolster the federal subsidies on which the state depends for its existence, it will not elect such a person to Congress.  

Any smart potential candidate must consider how their accomplishments and experience will be regarded in South Dakota, and how such a background might be contrived as defamation and abuse against them and their families.  Such potential candidates must also think seriously about how they can represent the people who are committed to resentment and hatefulness to the nation.  Does one really wish to be obliged to these kind of people?  Of course, successful politicians must deny or ignore the presence of the ill-willed and malevolent among their constituents.  To those who wish to build a sustaining culture and a nation of true liberty, equality, and justice,  politics does not offer much opportunity for service.  And so, many young Democrats opt out of active participation.

And there is the matter of opportunity in South Dakota.  The Governor actually went to the Mall of America to try to recruit young people to the state.   There are number of groups touting life in South Dakota and attempting to lure young people to return.  I spent the past week with  a large number of young people who have left South Dakota.  When telling them of the efforts to lure young people, the inevitable reply is, "To do what?"  One of the emigrants said it was her intention to return, but after the elections of 2004 and 2010, she said the state showed an aspect of life that is simply too discouraging.  She is among those who started her education in the state, but finished out-of-state.  She said there is no opportunity in the state to use her degree, and the fact that she earned hers out-of-state would always be a demerit.  She will build her life where she has opportunity to do so.

Jobs are by no means the only factor young people consider.  The culture and the opportunities it offers to pursue talents and interests are limited.  Stifling.  Often absent. Where denial is a way of life, there is very little life. 

For years, my job was to assist students in gaining  skills, honing talents, and providing them with some knowledge of the larger world.  It was an assumption that most of those students would move out of state to find and pursue their lives.  

That is not to say that there aren't talented and accomplished people in South Dakota, but they live in cultural enclaves where they find encouragement and appreciation.  In many cases, their activities are aligned with other places.  Supposed political observers keep telling the Democrats they have to do something different if they are to remain a viable party in South Dakota. They haven't observed carefully.  They haven't observed the fact that intelligent Democrats, young and old, are doing something different.  They are not investing their lives and futures in a political process that does not work and cannot work under current conditions.  They are expending their efforts on jobs, better educational opportunities, and families.  

South Dakota politics is a casualty of the culture wars.  Democrats have by no means given up on the principles of their party.  Like the members of the Occupy Wall Street movement,  they pursue those principles in quieter, protective ways.  You won't find their efforts reflected in the news media or in political blogs.  And you won't find them in political forums.  

Politics in America has reached a state of hopeless dysfunction.  This is the one area in which South Dakota can claim to be a true leader.  People continue to carry forward the work of building America, but their America is not reflected in any of the precincts of corporate fascism. 

In the meantime, we make provisions for Kace to live in a society that has abandoned South Dakota for now. 

Northern Beef Packers starts packing

It is a story that any community that promotes economic development should know and understand.  It is not an uplifting story.

In January, Northern Beef Packers announced that it had its financing in order and was set to increase production in its new Aberdeen plant.  In late April it announced it was laying off 108 employees because it did not have the finances to purchase enough beef to continue production.

That contradiction in statements of financial condition belies a deep problem.  Northern Beef Packers had shaky origins. The original idea for the beef plant surfaced when Huron was attempting to regain some of the meat processing business that was closed out in 1997 when a pork processing plant was suddenly shut down.  The important background, which illustrates the current nature of the meat processing industry is summarized in Sen. Tim Johnson's testimony before the Senate Judicial Committee on the matter:

On August 8 of 1997, Smithfield [Foods] purchased the Dakota pork-processing facility in Huron, South Dakota [Dakota Pork Industries]. The plant employed 750 people, slaughtered around 7,000 hogs daily. It was Huron’s largest employer and one of two South Dakota markets for slaughter-ready hogs. One day later, on August 9th, Smithfield shut down the Dakota pork plant, laid off the 750 South Dakotans who were employed there.

In 2005 Huron was chosen as the site for a turkey processing plant that was implemented through the efforts of Hutterite turkey producers.  At the same time, Ridgefield Farms, a Connecticut-based company, proposed setting up a beef processing plant to take advantage of the infrastructure being put in place to accommodate the turkey plant.  Plans for the beef plant, which was supported by the state economic development office, faltered.  Ridgefield announced plans that it was moving its proposed operation to Flandreau.  After getting $850,000 in local economic development money and support from Farmers Union Industries, it canceled all plans in Flandreau.

In September 2005, incorporation papers for Northern Beef Packers were processed for an Aberdeen-based corporation led by a local sales barn owner, who is no longer associated with the scheme.  The proposal survived zoning disputes, constant financial problems, some very bad planning and execution, and opposition from a group that did not want people of different races coming into the community to work.  As construction progressed,   lt had millions of dollars of mechanics' liens lodged against it for unpaid construction bills. 


The proposal found some financial backing from Chinese and Korean investors under a government program, the EB-5 Program.  Through this program, foreign nationals can obtain a green card to reside in the U.S. by investing a half million or more dollars in a U.S. economic development project.   The company also had some unsold Tax Increment Financing bonds that it eventually sold.  

In January, NBP seemed to think its financial difficulties were over.  Its press release stated: "The company has hired over 350 employees to date, and will continue to grow its skilled workforce to over 500 employees in the weeks ahead as production continues to increase. At full capacity, the processing plant is capable of harvesting 1500 head of cattle per shift, resulting in more than one million pounds of boxed beef and offal products produced every day at the facility."

In late April, it announced its latest financial difficulties and the layoff of 108 workers.  A local press account says it had 420 employees before the layoff.  The company says it needs to raise  $20 million to resume its production.

Northern Beef Packers is trying start up a business in which 80 percent of beef production is controlled by four huge packers.  What the company has going for it is that it is located in the center of a high beef raising area.  Huge confinement feeding operations are coming under public scrutiny because of the use of anti-biotics and other chemical agents in the production of beef.  The demand for beef that is grown in a natural, healthier setting, and that can be tracked from birth to prime cuts is increasing.  At some points in its development, NBP has included these considerations in its planning.  From that standpoint and the fact that it can save money for regional producers on the cost of shipping cattle to market, it had an attractive, feasible plan.

With the competition of the nature it is, a major factor is marketing.  To get the company up and running, it has to have stores who want to buy and sell its product.  That means either having a strong in-house marketing force or being part of a marketing program to which it can supply a steady and growing supply of beef. You can't run a beef processing plant unless you have some place to sell your beef. Over the years, NBP has announced a number of plans and alliances with marketing groups.  Its latest scheme is to  serve the Asian export market.

A fact of business is that if you have a market to sell your product, getting the financing to buy the  raw materials is seldom a problem.  Lenders are eager to provide loans to businesses that have a market for their products.  The big question for NBP is, who will buy its beef?

As the editor of the business section for a newspaper, there is something I and other business reporters know that the news media never talks about.  That is that many, many businesses are badly run.  And there is a lot of voodoo business theories coming out of MBA programs that promote entrepreneurship as the practice of cutting costs and complaining about taxes and regulations that keep business honest and the environment clean.  Business is not rocket science.  Or any  science.  A person who can develop a competitive product or service and deliver it is a business person.  Yes, they have to learn to manage costs, but their main task is to serve a market, if there is one.  The worship of anyone who comes up with some kind of business scheme as an entrepreneur is a corporate-induced bit of foolery that the media has helped to spread.

State and local economic development organizations tend to welcome anyone who claims an interest in starting a business as a potential savior.  They do this without knowledge of the personnel involved, the business plan, or whether the business has a viable market for what it produces.  

In the case of Northern Beef Packers, it had some strengths.  It offered an alternative to the trend of consolidation that is affecting agriculture and the entire food business.  It has the potential to be part of a local economy.  Mergers and acquisitions into huge companies nearly always mean reduced quality of product or service, monopoly markets, and reduced consumer choice.  

Northern Beef Packers also had some deficiencies.  The floundering company indicates the lack of coherent and well-articulated business plan.  The fact that after announcing it had its financing in order it then announces it doesn't have enough money to buy beef is an indication of a company that simply does not know what it is doing.  And yet it has had the backing and promotion by state and local agencies.  And that is cause to question if those agencies know a good business proposition from a bad one.

NBP has to sell beef. 35 million cattle are slaughtered in the U.S. annually by 60 major beef-packing operations processing around 26 billion pounds of beef. Four firms control over 80 percent of all the beef slaughtered. Here is the top beef competition NBP faces:  

1. Tyson Fresh Meats  $12,7  billion  annual sales
2. Cargill Meat Solutions  No disclosure.  Parent company $88.3 billion
3. JBS USA  $9.4 billion
4. National Beef Packing Co.$5.4 billion
 5. Smithfield Foods $1.22 billion
6. Greater Omaha Packing Co. $830 million
7. American Foods Group $650 million
8T. Omaha Steaks International $100 million
8T. Sam Kane Beef Processors Inc. $100 million
8T. Harris Ranch Beef Co. $100 million

For Aberdeen, the question is whether NBP can sell beef or if there will be another empty plant sitting for sale to join a number of other empty buildings throughout the town. 

For sale?

 

Yep

Orb at the Kentucky Derby:  Ran the mile and a quarter race in 2:02.89 in the mud.  Did his usual tactic of  moving up from the middle of the pack in the second turn to blaze past the field to win.

The rise of the freak show

My parents, as were most parents of people of my generation, were stern about labeling other humans as freaks and responding to them with anything other than respect.  In my youth, carnivals used to come to town, set up a midway in some outlying pastureland, and pull the curious in by hordes, particularly to the freak shows.  Our parents would shame us for expressing any desire to see them, and maintained a there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-you stance.  They made clear that people who gawked at people with strange differences were among the lowest of the low.

That did not deter many from availing themselves of chances to gawk at and ridicule people with those differences.  It became a matter of a community outcry when I was working for the town newspaper.  Our community was the site of a huge state mental hospital.  Most of the hospital caregivers were African Americans.  Every year the hospital had an open house on a Sunday afternoon that gathered a large attendance.  And every year, a reporter and photographer was sent out to cover the event, which the hospital administrators regarded as a community relations effort.  The photographers were forbidden by hospital policy to photograph any of the patients. This prohibition covered up something the the black caregivers were offended by and complained about to the pastors of their churches.  Visitors to the open house would sometimes come for the purpose of watching and making fun of the strange behavior of the some of the paients,  sometimes even goading them on.  The caregivers related this kind of disrespectful and abusive behavior to their own experiences with racism.  Rather than jeopardize their jobs by complaining to the hospital administrators, they expressed their concerns to clergymen, who brought the matter to the attention of hospital administrators and community leaders.  Through some sermons and some letters-to-the-editor, the matter became a public issue.

One of the pastors remarked in a newspaper column that the event was designed as an opportunity for the public to become acquainted with how some of the less fortunate people were being cared for, but many regarded it as a freak show.  The event was canceled and instead opportunities for interested public to take guided tours of the hospital were offered.  Not too long after, the hospital was closed and patients were "mainstreamed" into the community.

That did not end the matter of freak shows.  There is a good portion of the population that thrives on watching people make degraded spectacles of themselves by acting out in public.  Today, one need not seek out a carnival sideshow or an institution for the afflicted.  Television is saturated with the

shows that appeal to that need for people to watch others debase themselves.  The appeal seems to be that everyone needs someone to feel superior to and make derisive fun of.  It started with the displays of the stupid, mean Jerry Springer show, and now pervades television in the so-called reality shows.  

The most insidious aspect of people making derisive fun of other people is what it reveals about  the people who do so.  Their lives are lived, as Thoreau put it, in such miserable desperation that they need some unfortunate to feel superior to in order to give their own lives some validation.  It is a parallel to Germany of the 1920s and 1930s when after the defeat of World War I the German people were looking for some way to regain their sense of esteem and consequence.  Hitler's appeal was that he offered them scapegoats of Jews and other minorities and organized the notion of a superior race that resulted in the Holocaust.  The people felt good about themselves because they had someone to persecute on the grounds of inferiority.  This happened in the land of Beethoven and Bach, and was, of course, a direct contravention of Christian doctrine.  Christ is to some the son of God, to others the shrewdest political scientist to advance democratic principles and the most incisive social psychologist who ever lived, and he addressed this matter of holding others in demeaning contempt:

if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment; and if you insult a brother or sister, you will be liable to the council; and if you say, "You fool," you will be liable to the hell of fire. (Matthew 5:22)

 That is not to say that Christ never called anyone fool. In a parable, he has God calling a man driven by greed a fool. (Luke 12:13.  Martin Luther King, Jr.,  gave one of his brilliant sermons on this text.)  The principles laid out by Christ have been accepted as the principles of a just and equal society, and making "freaks" of other people is an act of self-degradation.  But avoiding derisive contempt for the unfortunate does not prohibit one from recognizing abject foolery among the fortunate, as Christ did in his parables. 

I hesitate to call anyone a fool, although I encounter people who qualify constantly.  There are people out there so immersed in self-righteousness borne of malice toward anyone who does not subscribe to their brand of ill-will and disrespect  that there are few other words adequate to describe the state of their human condition.  Madville Times notes one such example which demonstrates how the blogosphere has attained the aspects of a freak show. 

Some people display mentalities on the blogosphere that inspire derisive contempt.  The insult and abuse and perverse falsehoods through which they regard other people suggest that they are among those unfortunates whose attitudes, words, and actions verge into the freakish.  It imposes on one the question of whether they should be regarded with compassion like village idiots, or if they have consciously chosen to be the way they are.  On the surface, these people seem to be everyday rinktums, but on the Internet they turn into blazing assholes.  

For those who feel the need to point and giggle at poor floundering creatures, they need not seek out the circus or devious tours of a funny farm.  They need only go to the Internet.  Furthermore, the derision and contempt is often well earned.