New Neighbors in France 17 Decembre 2020

 

When I came to France on the 1st of February 2020 I had no idea that I was about to become a long term resident of my little village Civrac-en-Medoc.

The epidemic hit this area in March when president Macron announced the confinement in order to control the epidemic. I had packed for a trip of two months and thought it would return to the United States for at the beginning of April. The old joke that the way to make God laugh is to make a plan came into play. I planned God laughed and here I am almost 10 months later.

Rural communities are slow to take in newcomers. I had visited my home here in 2017 2018 and 2019 for various periods of one to three months. Getting to know people is not easy especially when you speak French as poorly as I do.

My next door neighbors Paolo and Celine and Salome’ have always been friendly although only Salome’ speaks English. But there's a saying that good fences make good neighbors.

Celine has a spa in her home and has many women who come to improve their appearances. Celine has a swimming pool in her backyard that as the year goes on, is increasingly shaded by trees growing on my side of the fence between our yards. Several years ago, she came to me and helped me to understand the trees in my yard were shading her swimming pool and asked if she could have someone come and trim my trees. She hired someone and I paid him to bring my trees down to an acceptable level.  I'm convinced that this is the beginning of our real friendship.

This year the tree trimming occurred in April and ever since then I have had a wonderful surprise at my front door at your irregular intervals. It seems that's just when I am feeling lonely or forgotten in Civrac, Celine’s smiling face appears at my door with a luscious dessert in her hands: Creme brulee’, chocolate mousse, confiture melon. The other morning she appeared with a piece of nut bread at breakfast time. Sometimes she sends Salome with the dessert. These are special treats because Salome’ can talk to me in English for a minute or two. I often return the dish by giving it to Paolo when he is out cleaning his car or sweeping the street or trimming the vines.

Paolo is a friend who keeps an eye on my house. His house, yard. plants     and curbs are perfect. One day he told my friend Guy who speaks both French and English that I needed to get the English ivy off the side of my house since it appeared to be invading under the tile roof. Guy told me and we proceeded to get someone to go up and take all the ivy off the wall and out from under the tiles on the roof.

Finding English speaking friends is much more difficult. I'm sure that Celine and Paolo would be closer friends if I could speak French. Ever so slowly I'm learning to speak French but until I do, this limits my friendships. I came in February I had two English speaking friends that I had left in 2017 and had carried on a friendship since. Guy is involved in the wine industry and Corinne runs a bed and breakfast in her family Chateau in St Yzans. I can't remember now how I found out about the Cafe Polyglotte that was held in the City Hall once a month. This is a gathering of people who speak a variety of languages and once a month gather together to find somebody to talk to in their own language. I went once in February, the first and only time it has met since I arrived here, and it was there that I met Anne Marie Kwiatkowski who has become My biggest access point to meeting people who speak English. At her dinner table I have met her family and their significant others as well as her daughter Laura is a teacher in Montpelier and Boris her son. Her most important contribution to my life has been her husband, Edmond who has been my ever present handyman who solved all kinds of household problems for which I was unprepared, especially in a French situation. He has fixed or taken me to stores to get fixed things that troubled me in my life. I seriously called him my Polish magician because he fixed the motor on my back window screen that has been broken for three years. He took me downtown to his multimedia store where I diagnose the problem with my computer screen monitor and we got a new cord for ten euros and fixed it. He diagnosed my plant problems in the backyard as Limaces which is the equivalent of slugs in Seattle. He found the workmen to come and fix my oven which had not been working for three years and tonight I will grill some salmon in it for the first time since I bought the house.

Beside being a thorough repair man, he is a former city councilman in Civrac so he knows everyone although he was not born here.  When I needed a letter from the mayor attesting to my residence in Civrac he brought Beatrice over and introduced her to me and she quickly wrote the necessary letter. I live around the corner from the Mayor’s office so we greet each other often with a wave and a Bonjour and ca va.

When I needed a tall ladder to change a smoke detector, I asked Edmond if he had one. He said no but said,” give me a few minutes”. I really don't know where he went but I suspect he went over to the city gar age and came back with a ladder that reached all the way to my 12 foot ceiling. He Insisted on climbing the ladder and changing the smoke detector making it clear but I was too old to be up on ladders.

Anne Marie had invited me to Christmas dinner, but I declined because Corrinne had already asked for me to come to their family. She told me her sister who works in the pharmacy that will give us all a COVID19 test the day before dinner.  Anne Marie told me she would go to Christmas mass with me.

Anne Marie invited me to News Years day lunch because curfew means you are supposed to be home at 8 PM.

All of this leads up to today when I was sitting at my table having breakfast, I heard a knock on the door. Sometimes it's the mailman or Edmond coming for a visit or Celine bring me a goodie but today when I answered the door there stood Isabella and Friedrich. When I answered the door, they handed me a red bag and said, “Bon Fete’.” Isabella is the mayor’s assistant and Friedrich is a member of the city council. They explained it was a gift for Bon Fete’ from the mayor and the city council.   It felt very special to be remembered at Christmas.  I don’t know how many others   got gift bags. It was filled with little jars of pate’ and herbs and bottles of olive oil and vinegar.  There was a bottle of Bordeaux white wine and some chocolate candy. If you think that is the end forget it. The next knock at the door was a tall Danish winemaker, Merete Larsen whom I met at Anne Marie’s table. She had invited me and I accepted her invitation to watch the process of vendange(Harvest) at her Winery, Chateau D’Escurac.

When the vendange was over she suggested we could have dinner in the future.  The other day came an email suggesting we have coffee. I responded and she said she would contact me this week.  Today she appeared with a baguette and a croissant for my breakfast and suggested she would come back at 5 PM for tea.  I said I was Zooming to the USA at 5.  She said, “I’ll see you at 6PM.” 

All these people live in a village of 660 people.  Rural France has been warm and kind to me this Christmas away from home. Don’t believe anyone who says you can’t make friends in France.

10 October 2020 After COVID 19 comes UBI

 

As I walked through the vineyards of the Medoc, I saw a scene that has occurred in millions of places over the last 40 years. A huge mechanical grape picker was emptying its grape bins into a trailer pulled by a medium sized farm tractor.  Two men were picking 20 hectares of grapes. Gone were the 40-60 Spanish, Moroccan, Polish and Bulgarian migrant vineyard workers who for endless years have appeared at the time of the vendange.  Harvest was handled by two men and machines instead of human beings. 

There are a few old, very wealthy chateaus that still pick by hand. They have housing and sanitary facilities and contract for several hundred workers to carefully hand pick the grapes.  The prices of their wine reflect the labor costs that most chateaus avoid by using machines. It is more efficient to harvest with machines. Some would insist that quality is sacrificed.

In this bucolic scene one can see the huge problem which faces the world. Technology is making it possible to do work that used to require millions of human hands by simply turning a switch and letting a machine do it. The dilemma that the society faces is how do you provide income for people to live a decent life who are willing to work but their job has been replaced by a machine. My 10 year-old grandson is in a robotics club in school building robots. Is he in the process of eliminating his future job?

The turmoil in the United States and Western Europe about immigrants is largely caused by the perception of the native workers in a society that their jobs are being taken away by low cost immigrant labor. This has been compounded by free trade which has moved many of the manufacturing jobs in the western world into areas of low-cost labor.

The workers are furious that having lost their job either to a machine or to an immigrant. They rightly perceive that their job is never coming back. So, they turned to their government for some help.

The safety net of unemployment insurance is a very leaky net. Many workers do not qualify for it and it is not a stable source of income on which they can plan any kind of decent life. So who to blame? The government immediately comes forward with a plan to retrain the workers. To do what? how long will it take? Is there any assurance that there will be a job at the end of the training.?

This resentment has been building in the western world since 1980. Workers have become more efficient in what they do but have not had wage increases commensurate with what they have done. The text structure has been changed in such a way that all the benefits goes to the top 5% of the income pyramid. The workers can see that and they are angry.

They are susceptible to leaders who tell them to direct their anger at immigrants or foreign countries or whatever. The rise of populous leaders using this technique is evident across the face of the world. Trump is the local manifestation in the United States but Brexit in the United Kingdom and the leadership in Poland and Hungary and France are all struggling with the same kind of resentment and anger in the population.

Countries with a more complete safety net which includes health care for all and unemployment for all and child care for all are being attacked as vigorously as is the United States with its leaky safety net.

The time has come for the leadership in the United States to move toward an idea which has been bandied about or 50 years. Universal basic income (UBI)is a concept that must be implemented if we are to have civil societies. We cannot continue with in a society where the workers work harder, are more efficient, and get less of the benefit while those at the top accumulate more and more with no limits.  

As these changes by technology have occurred, we have simultaneously taken away the ability of workers to organize into unions to demand a fair share of the profits of their endeavour. Politically we have made it harder and harder for unions to organize workers so that they could demand what they need. We still struggle with whether we should have universal childcare yet more than half the workforce is made up of  women who are expected to carry the baby and then go back to work the next day. Where are they to find someone to care for the child while they go to work. That's their problem.

Without a universal health care system how can they take care of their family including their elderly parents and their children except by finding a job that has health care benefits and staying there no matter what the situation is. On the day that the plant closes it's their problem.

As their parents age because we're living longer they're torn between going to work and holding on to their job and their income and caring for their elderly parents. If they choose to care for their parents, as one would expect a child to do, the fact that they lost their job: it's their problem.

If their children want to go to college and ask their parents to be cosigners on loans to pay for the exorbitant costs of college they are saddled for the rest of their life with the debts of their children as well as their own debts. If their child doesn't find a job to pay off their loans and the parents would like to move out of their big house as they downsized into retirement they can't because they have loans for their kid’s education depending on the equity in their house. It's their problem.

Thinkers on both sides of the aisle have come to the conclusion at various times that a universal basic income is the answer. it is always been dismissed as socialism. The turmoil in the society which we are now seeing is the result of that refusal to face the need as a society to provide a decent standard of living for everyone.

This is not a far-out leftist idea. In Alaska the oil revenue from the oil fields is put into a fund which is distributed every year to everyone in Alaska. Is that socialism? Norway has a similar program collecting the oil revenue from the North Sea and distributing it to all Norwegians. Is that socialism?

Alaska the home of the true libertarian individualists who braved the world’s hardest weather on an individual basis and the Norwegians who faced the same kind of nature have come to the same conclusion. Maybe all the revenue in Alaska should be taken away from the people and given to the oil company executives. How long do you think it would take for that to happen.?

The objection to the UBI proposal is that the money would go to a lot of undeserving people. I do not notice the Alaskans making that distinction nor the Norwegians. If one were certain that there was a basic income available for all, some people might be willing to accept that as a decent living. There will still be those in the society who want to make more money and have more stuff and they are free to do that in Alaska and in Norway.

The second objection to a UBI proposal Is that we have no money. Any serious consideration of our tax structure shows that there is plenty of money available in the top 5% of the income pyramid. Simply raising the rate back to the levels that were existed during the Kennedy administration would produce an enormous amount of money. Presently we're not taxing the Internet on any serious basis. Financial transactions are not taxed because they benefit the wealthy. There are a number of places from which the UBI proposal could be funded. The objections to a UBI proposal are basically the same ones that were raised when Social Security was started in 1935. If we created a fund into which dedicated taxes was put we could provide a UBI to all the families and childless adults in society.

If you stopped reading several paragraphs ago because you dismiss the idea of a UBI as the rantings of the socialist consider the fact that it was a libertarian Alaskan governor with the blessing of Milton Friedman from the University of Chicago that in place the Alaska fund.

 Anyone who sits down and seriously thinks about the future of the third wave of high tech and robotic world in which we are living has to consider where the new jobs are going to come from. They're being wiped out faster than most people can imagine. The day is just around the corner when you will not drive your own car unless you want to. There is plenty of evidence that all transportation will be done by technology in the form of driverless cars.

When my father lost his job back in the 50’s he was an insurance company employee and while he was looking for a job he drove a cab to put food on the table for our family. Every morning when he went down to the cab company at 5:30 in the morning I went with him. I was the dispatcher for the Downers Grove cab company. Those days are never coming back and the chaos which is now upon the United States created by people who believe that you can force people to go to work if you simply don't give them any money to buy food in any other way, do not understand human beings. The anger and chaos that is fomenting in our society is based on the feeling of frustration and anger that goes with having a family and no money to buy food to put on the table or to pay the rent for the house or apartment.

One only has to look to history to see how this has affected our society. All through the depression people lived on the edge and their children's nutrition suffered and when the Second World war came and we needed recruits for the military. Thousands of young men were rejected because of nutritional deficits created by that period of depression and poor nutrition. The school lunch program of today was started by Harry Truman not because he cared about kids or learning or anything else. He wanted to be sure that the children who were growing up in the United States would be healthy enough to go into the military. We are risking our children again by creating a situation in which food banks and the generosity of friends are the only source of food for families. 

I’m so old that I can remember when my grandmother who did not have Social Security and Medicare who came to live with our family for three months of every year.  She had four daughters and she rotated through their houses every year for four or five years before she died. My parents had discussions at night when we children were in bed over how they were going to pay for grandmas health care bills. My father was struggling to pay for his four children and suddenly found himself burdened with his wife's mother. Nobody was happy when she came because she was an unhappy and demanding old lady and she took it out on us children. My mother worked part time for the telephone company to supplement her family income. She was only able to do that because grandma was child care to the family.

 Social Security and Medicare have made it possible for me to live without turning to my children for basic needs. But the problem today is complicated for young people by the fact that they have no guaranteed income beyond the $2000 a month I got in Social Security when they retire. They have no guaranteed pension. If they're lucky they have an IRA which may give them some security in the future but that's based on the vagaries of the stock market.

The answer for a civil society to the questions of the future of all families must be a UBI (universal basic income) guaranteed by the whole society.

Jesus said, “Suffer the little children to come unto me.”

What is Limace? Where is Limace?

17 Octobre 2020

As we continue our exploration of the granularity of life as the epidemic rolls on I thought it would be good to review the recent past in my tiny world.

On 22 Aout with great fanfare I decided to create a garden in my backyard.  I went to the local garden store, Le Clerc and purchase a beautiful green glazed pot. I bought a bag of potting soil and 6 Brusselles Chou plants. I wrestled all this into my little Twingo.  I would have bought a bigger pot but my car is too small.

I drove home and wrestled the pot and soil to my tiny back yard and finally planted the Brusselles Chou.  I chose them because it was Aout and I expected to be here through the fall until election so I expected some sprouts before I left for the US.

Everyday begins in the same way for me. I water the raspberries, grape vines , the flowers in the pots at the front of the house and fill my bucket to take water  to my goat herd. Now I had a new group to take care of, the Brusselles Chou. 

Four five weeks I diligently watered them but I began to notice there seemed to be no growth. In fact I could see that something was munching on my beautifully chou. As a consequence they were not growing any bigger than the day I bought them .

If you don’t understand something you see ask a local for advice. I asked my friendly neighbor Edmond who took a quick look and pronounced, with authority, “Limace.”

He speaks French and I speak English but we communicate.  He saw a snail on my raspberries and with hand gestures, told me that it was related to escargot without the shell. In a burst of brilliance I thought of my translator. “Limace is a terrestrial mollusk without a shell but has a protective slime covering is body.”  Get the picture yet.

Some how Seattle slugs have emigrated back to France. He suggested some local chemical but my mind flashed back to my Montlake backyard where my mother was placing jar lids of beer out for the slugs to imbibe. I can’t imagine my mother buying a sixpack but there was the beer.

With that thought in mind I went to my reefer and got a bottle of La Le’ge’re, a local favorite of non wine-drinking French people and Slugs. I had saved a sardine can and so I filled it with beer and placed it near my chou. The next morning 2 slugs were draped over the edge of the can and since then my chou have begun to grow.

Seattle and France are very close together. We both have La limace.  It is a small world.      

The Goat Midwife

  September 5, 2020

When I came to France in February the last thing in my mind that I anticipated was becoming a goat midwife to a mother in distress. My story begins when I came in 2020 to Civrac to work on my book.  One day in April there was a knock on the front door. Standing outside was a middle age woman who spoke only French. Between pidgin French and pidgin English I understood that she wanted me to come around the corner and see something. Across the street from me was a overgrown house and field that that she hoped to clear, using goats to eat the vegetation She had brought three goats from Bordeaux and was going to put them inside the fence to eat down the overgrown weeds and bushes.

She made it clear to me that she would appreciate it if I would provide water for her goats by filling a wheelbarrow which was sitting by the gate. She left without giving me her name or her cell phone but indicated that her mother in law used to live in the boarded-up house across the street and that she was the owner of this property. Having plenty of time on my hands I agreed without thinking.

Morning after morning I got up from the breakfast table and carried a bucket of water over to the goats. They always hung back in the brush, appearing to be afraid of me. When day I got the idea that perhaps if I brought a dry baguette, they would come to me. Thus, began a ritual in which each morning I brought a demi-baguette. I fed it to the goats by tearing it up and feeding them each a few small pieces. They obviously enjoyed variety in their diet and came to expect me to be there every morning. They would be standing at the gate and jumping up trying to get into my pocket to get the baguette out of my pocket.

There were three goats in my herd and as one does, I began to see them as individuals. The biggest one I called Sergeant because she is the biggest and the pushiest and clearly ruled the group. The second goat had two brown stripes on her back, so I called her Corporal. Independent and clearly ready to lead she would always find a place to stand where the Sergeant couldn't push her away. The smallest and weakest of the group I called Private. She was the most reluctant to come to me and was easily pushed away by Sergeant . The goats had never made any noise in the whole time that I had been in charge of them. I tried bleating and I played the harmonica, but I was met with silence.  Remember this was during the Confinement in France for COVID19.

Yesterday morning we entered a new phase. As I was filling my bucket with water in front of my house to take it to the goats, I heard a bleating sound as though a goat was in distress. I walked around with my bucket of water and there were all three of the goats waiting for me as usual. I gave pieces to Sergeant and Corporal very easily but Private stood off to one side and seemed less lively. She took one small piece of bread from me and then turned around and went and laid down. As she walked away, I saw what I thought was a hoof hang out of her vagina. At that moment, my medical training flash back into my mind. I delivered 75 babies a Cook County hospital in 1960 and knew the basic maneuvers necessary for the delivery of a newborn. The fact that I saw one foot meant to me that it was probably a breech presentation. Ordinarily a baby is born head-first, if everything is working exactly as it's supposed to. When the baby comes out in any other direction, complications occur. I figure the same rules must apply to goats.  While I was standing there contemplating my dilemma, my neighbor across the street. Denis Munoz, who is blind came out with his wife. They don't speak English and I don't speak French. Denny's wife made it clear to me somehow that she understood from the bleating that the goat was in distress. Problem: she and I are both of an age that precludes chasing goats thought blackberry bushes.

Consider for a second the situation that I was in. I speak only a little French and didn't have any idea at the moment who I should call to find out how to take care of the goat. Then his wife and I talked about it using hand gestures and our mixture of French and English and it occurred to me that there was a veterinary office next to the coffee shop where I drink my morning coffee in Begadan.  It was 12 noon on Saturday and Siri told the vet closed at 12:30 The goat had been in distress for at least six hours. Then new actors appeared in this drama. Denis’s son, Jose’, and his wife, Esther, who had come down from Paris to visit Denis had been sleeping in a room right across the street from the goats. They came out and told me that the Esther had heard the sounds of the goat and said “She's having a baby.” So now we are 4 French people and one American standing, discussing what to do. I said I'm going to go to the veterinary office and see if I can get someone to come and help.

I drove to Begadan in five minutes. It's 1 1/2 kilometers away and met the receptionist as she was closing the shutters for the weekend. Of course she spoke French and I spoke English so I began to use my cell phone as my translation device, explaining that we had a goat in distress and needed someone to look at it. Her boss, the vet, appeared and explained to  that this was a veterinary office for dogs and cats only. She gave me the phone number of a veterinary office about 1/2 hour away.

I went back down to my house and met with Denis and his wife and Jose his son and Esther his girlfriend. I gave them the phone number and they called but got no answer. What to do? I called my housekeeper, Corinne and explained the situation to her. She asked me to write it down on a text message because I wasn’t clear enough on the phone in my explanation. I gave Corinne the phone numbers and she called them and was told that the veterinarian was in surgery and wouldn't be out until about 3:30.

Corinne my housekeeper has a heart as big as all outdoors. The next thing I knew she's at my front door with her two daughters: Lison age 18 and Eva 30. We still had not seen the goat up close to make a good diagnosis. Catching a goat in a bramble of blackberries and brush was a really impossible job. A mother and two daughters and I when into the fenced area and tried to catch the goat. None of us were wearing proper clothing to be running through blackberry bushes. Lison who had a pair of shorts on was the least prepared for this expedition but managed to chase Private into a situation where she caught hold of her. She and her sister carried Private out to the gate and we, for the first time, that a chance to see what the actual situation was. Corinne had come prepared with a variety of house cleaning supplies including some rubber gloves which she put on and became a midwife. She could feel one leg but she couldn't find the other leg and so we were stumped as to how to get the kid out of the mother . So they carried Private from the gated area to my backyard and put her on my back plaza. They had other things to do and so they left me to watch the goat until the veterinarian arrived at 3:30.

I tried to work on the crossword puzzle from the New York times and I read a chapter for my book, “Wine and War in France” in the Second World war. Suddenly there was a knock on my front door and a young woman veterinarian was there. She brought with her a bag of gloves and medications and ropes. She began the same process that Corinne had done in order get the second leg so that she could extract the fetus but could not find the other leg. Finally she did find the leg and then,  was not strong enough to extract the kid by herself My job was to hold the goat down while she pulled legs, trying to extract the fetus . Finally she tied a rope to each foot and she and Jose’ pulled on the feet as hard as they could and I held the head as hard as I could and the kid was  delivered. The many hours of lack of oxygen meant that the kid was dead, mother was exhausted, and the doctor and I were exhausted. The Veterinarian tried to extract the placenta and make the goat feel comfortable. She gave her antibiotics and a shot with antibiotics. I asked her, “what do you think the goat's chances of making it are?” She said, “20%.”

 

At this point it was 5:30 and everybody was ready to leave but the question was what do we do with the goat who's recovering. Someone found an old blanket and we tried to lay the goat on the blanket and cover her up. We got water and hay so she would have food. She laid out in the plaza. We covered her up and I checked on her until I went to bed at 10:30. This morning I got up and checked on her.  She was alert and responsive and had moved some in the night but was not mobile.  As I was typing this, I heard bleating.  I went to check and she was in a foetal position.  Jose’ and Esther came before their  exercise run and afterwards and agreed it did not look good but  we waited.

Over the course of 3 months being the goatherd, I became attached to them. It is amazing how their personalities engaged with me. To see Private in distress was very upsetting.  I thought about all the women in Africa at Heal Africa in Goma, Zaire and Paul Farmers PIH hospitals in Rwanda and other sites where women are taken care of in the birth process or where repairs are done in cases where the mother did not get timely help.

Seeing an animal go through this process essentially alone being taken care of by Humans with whom she could not communicate directly must been a lonely experience.  I, at least had 7 French speaking humans, who were doing all they knew to help the goat. We shared the grief or pain together. 

The next morning as I was typing this Nadia the owner of the goats appeared at my door . She had with her daughter who spoke English and so we were able to communicate. She brought a box of French pastries which I'll have to figure out what to do with.  I can’t eat them. Nadia said, “thank you for taking care of the goat.”

Then we went out to see the goat because I told her that it was my impression that the goat had died some hours before. The goat was lying in the same position and clearly was not alert and responsive.

So I lost the kid yesterday and the mother today. I never knew I could feel such loss over an animal death.  I only knew them from feeding bits of baguettes and bringing a bucket of water for 15 minutes a day contact. The bonding that goes on between living beings is something I haven't felt at that elemental level in a long time. It seems like the death of an animal brings me closer to the real desolation of death. Recently several of my friends, John Lewis and Amo Houghton have died but the sense of their passing seemed more intellectual to me then the passing of my goats.

I am going to walk in the vineyards. I walked 9645 steps thinking.     

    

 

 

Story Telling

When a politician walks into a room, according to Lyndon Johnson, the first thing you have to decide is who's for you and who's against you. Once you've made that decision you have to decide how to communicate with them. The most time-honored and most powerful form of communication with human beings is storytelling.  It's the same in every culture on the face of the earth. The most honored person in an Irish village was called the Shenachie who was the storyteller and the oral historian of the village. He was the accumulated wisdom of what it going on in the in the village and what has gone before. Good politicians are all good storytellers.  I've known some: Tip O'Neill, Tom Foley who was my mentor from the state of Washington was extraordinary storyteller. The best storyteller I  ever met was a member from Louisiana by the name of Billy Tousan.  Billy would talk almost continuously in stories. One of my favorites from him which I often used to begin speeches with was a story told me one day.  We were sitting on the floor one afternoon  and Billy told a story about Pierre Dugau who was a typical Cajun who had been out fishing in the bayous of Louisiana. As he came up to the dock with a boat loaded with fish, the game warden observed him and said, “Where  did you get all those fish, Pierre?”

 

Pierre rather matter –of –factly said ,”I just fished ‘em out of the water.” The game warden said, “Tomorrow I think I'll go out and see how you fish.”

 

Pierre said, “Suit yourself. Meet me at 5 o'clock tomorrow morning on the dock.”

The next morning the game warden appeared and climbed in the boat.  They rowed out into the bayous behind the cypress trees.

 

Pierre reached under the seat and took out a stick of dynamite. He lit it and dropped over this side of the boat. There was a thunderous boom and the stunned fish began to float up to the surface.  Pierre began to flip them into the boat. The game warden watched this performance and said, “Pierre, that's against the law in  Louisiana.”  

 

Pierre ignored him and keep throwing fish in the boat. The game warden said, “If you throw one more fish in the boat I'm gonna have to arrest you.”

 

 Pierre looked at the game warden, and reached under the seat for another stick of dynamite.  He offered the sputtering dynamite to the game warden and said, “Do you want a fish or do you want to talk?”

 

The point of the story is that people come to meetings sometimes, simply to talk and not to do anything.  I often use it as an introductory story before I give a speech because I want people to figure out what the mindset there really is. Are they there to do something or are they there just to sit listen to the proceedings?  When you find a good story is that has a point not aimed directly at the audience, they can perceive it. Jesus told parables, but very seldom, said to the people, “You're a sinner.” He talked often indirectly to them through stories.   Often politicians don't want to directly confront people with the truth that may be unpleasant or problematic, so they tell a story that allows the person in the audience to connect with the story and get the meaning without feeling attacked. It’s a skill that every good politician hones to a sharp point.

 

 

 

 

Why have intern and fellows in your office 8-6-2020

 

A couple of days ago a 26 year old French woman turned up at my house in rural France during the pandemic.  She is presently employed at the environmental protection office of the French Government in Paris.  I had not seen her since more than 5 years ago when she was an intern in my office. In 28 years in Washington I had about 400 interns in my DC and Seattle offices. 

As we were eating lunch, I asked how she got to be an intern in 2015.  She was in the US after a year abroad from University and she decided she would like to have the experience of being an intern in a Congressional office.  She did some research and drew up a short list of 5 offices.  Her top choice was the office of “Baghdad Jim”. I got that nickname by stating from Baghdad in 2003 that George Bush would mislead us into a war in Iraq that I thought was folly.

She submitted an application to the office along with her curriculum vita.  I looked at the application of all my interns and interviewed them if it was convenient.  I noted that she was from a French university and I had never had a French student so I accepted her without meeting her. 

My criteria for interns was not the standard set of criteria. I took people from outside my district in the US and looked for interesting backgrounds. I always checked what languages they were proficient in both spoken and written.  During the 2001-2010 I had an Arabic speaker almost every year.  Their job was to read the newspapers in the Arab world and tell me what seemed important to them. I had interns and fellows from 40-50 countries.  I occasionally took high school seniors who were recommended to me. I took kids from Foreign Service families who wanted their kids to come to the US. I took kids who families needed a little distance from their youngster. We would have a conversation in which I told them that if they caused me any problem, I was going to send them straight home. I never had a problem that I knew of. 

I thought a Congressperson has a job to train the next generation for entry into government and so I wanted to give these students a chance to experience the workings of an office, close up and personally. Today I have a loose network of people who worked in my office who now are spread all over the world.

I lived in Kinshasa, Zaire for a number of months when I worked for the State Department providing mental health services for official Americans.  I don’t remember the country where I learned the African proverb: You put a seed in the ground but you may never sit in the shade of the tree that grows from the seed.  For me interns were like planting seeds.

There is a budget director for a state in Brazil who wrote and administered the plan to cope with COVID19. Another just left a job at the American consulate in Frankfort after many years there. She is a German citizen.  Another of my German fellows was one of my Arabic Speakers who had lived in Cairo and he is now teaching in Liepzig. Ornanong  worked as the chief of the political section in the foreign ministry of Thailand. 

Having interns from outside my district and especially from foreign countries was very important to me as well as good for them.  The Congress fancies that it runs the world, and yet many members couldn’t find Kosovo on a map if their life depended on it.  I wanted these interns in my office to learn our form of government but also to challenge and teach me and my staff by the questions they felt free to ask.

I told all interns that the internship was their chance to learn and that no question was too stupid to ask if they didn’t know the answer.  Their questioning of my staff as to why certain things were done a certain way allowed my staff to rethink their certainties. I also tried to get them to believe that they could ask to do things that looked interesting on the Congressional calendar.  They could pursue their own dream if they saw a spot that seemed to lead in a direction they wanted to go.

What surprised me the most was the fact that many members took no interest in talking or eating or drinking with their interns.  I heard again and again,” I haven’t even met my member.” For five years I had a dinner in my office for Australian interns as we watched the State of the Union extravaganza.   I let interns come and ask me questions, sometimes to the dismay of my staff. Mentoring takes time but has long term payoffs that you may never see.

One of my interns asked me one day how to get a job in Washington DC. I told her that she had to be ready to take a job that seemed below her skill level as a way of paying her dues into the system.  Promotion is always possible. A few weeks later an entry level job on the front desk opened up in DC.  She was almost finished with college, so I offered her the job. If she would leave college and finish her degree in the summer in addition to working for me.  She took the job which she felt was below her skills but stuck at it until the job of coordinating all my legislative correspondence came open.  She was promoted but still felt that handling all the mail was not using all skills so asked for some substantive work.  I was chair of the subcommittee on income security and family support and I gave her several issues. She did well.  She decided to get a master’s degree at night, so she worked doubly hard.  Then a spot in the US senate came open and she moved to the Senate where she was responsible for the work of one of the subcommittees on Health, Education, Labor and Pension committee.

Now she is a special assistant to the Prime Minister of New Zealand.  Neither she nor I ever imagined that would be her path. 

Bright and hard working young people need internships to figure out where they may fit in the governmental process. They have no real idea what government is all about, so they need to have a chance to explore the possibilities.  An English Major from a middle western university came to congress in 1989 and was assigned to the HIV-AIDS issue.  She knew nothing about it but worked hard and mastered it for my purposes.  She decided to get a Masters’s degree at John Hopkins in Health management.  She is now high up in the hierarchy of one of the medical specialty societies.  In her wildest dreams she never anticipated the career course. 

One caveat: the Chinese say that if you save a man’s life you are responsible for him forever. Interns come back for letters of recommendations.  I’ve written 7 in the month of July. My modus operandi is simple.  You write the letter you want in my voice. I reserve the right to add or subtract.  Send me an updated resume and a recent picture in case I can’t remember your face from 5-10 ago. I just got a thank you today from a young man in South Dakota who got a job in health care. 

Mentoring is the biggest secret that no one tells you about the job as a Congressperson.  You will never know whose life you have changed.  I don’t know how many people have told me of things I said to them in the past that resonated in the future.

As we mourn the loss of John Lewis I sat next to him for 12 years on the W&M committee and watched as he helped hundreds of people see a brighter horizon for themselves. They say, “A person dies twice: once when they pass away, and they pass again when they stop telling stories about them.  Mentor’s stories are long. If you want a legacy this a sure fire one.   

 

 

What is a French Holiday? Celebration of the Assumption

 

Every day I go to the store at 8:30A M to get one of the two NYT that come to Lesparre in rural France. My second wife said she could tell I was on the hunt for the NYT ,no matter where we were traveling in the world. Croatia, Italy or some African country were all the same she said.  “I was like a bird dog looking for a pheasant in the brush.”

In France I have been buying and painfully translating the Sud Ouest from Bordeaux.  It is a regional paper that tells us what is happening in the SW of France. One day I noticed the International New York as I picked up the local paper. There was only one so I felt it was a sign from the universe that I should stop reading on line. I started going to the only place I could find that sold real papers. If I got there at 8:30 sometimes there were 2 papers, some days only 1.  So my plan each day was to get a croissant and an expresso at a nearby boulangerie at 8A M.  Then I could be first in line to get into the store and make sure I got the paper.

The prize of the week is the SAT-SUN edition which includes the world’s greatest anti-Alzheimer’s treatment in the world, THE CROSSWORD PUZZLE FOR SUNDAY.  I set off on the 15 of August to get the prize. I was first and there was a paper.  I checked the date and it was 14 August ; yesterday’s paper. I checked around and no one had an explanation for the failure.  

I went home, crestfallen but determined to try today and be sure to be first in line. There were others confused yesterday.  They were looking for foreign newspapers also.  This morning I was first in line and quickly walked to the kiosk.  There was a NYT.  The problem was that it was the same paper I rejected yesterday because now it was 2 days old.  Not even fit for the bottom of the proverbial bird cage.

There were other confused customers looking for Italian, German or Spanish news.  We accosted politely a store employee but he had no explanation. I ventured the possibility that the failure was due to the fact that August 15 is celebrated as Assumption Day and perhaps that might explain the failure to deliver international papers. The puzzled clerk brightened and agreed maybe that explained the failure. “Try tomorrow”, he suggested.

Living in a country for a long time forces you to learn some of the cultural practices. On the back page of the local paper each day there is a statement of what holy day it is or what Saint’s day it is.  I read that column each day which is how I knew it was the celebration of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary. 

7 August  St.Gaetan died in1547 : 11 August St.Claire was born in Assissi in1193 and died in 1253: 12 August St. Clarisse founded a monastery in the 7^th Century: 13 August St. Hippolyte who was an anti-pope 217-235:  14 August St. Eviad died in 958 in a monastery in Switzerland: 15 August Is the Fe’te De L’Assumption of the Virgin Mary. Everyday has a holy aspect assigned to it.  In case you are wondering today is St Armel’s day  an evangelist in the 7^th century

This Saintly start for the day is followed by the events that have occurred on the Saint’s day in history. On this day in 1977 Elvis Presley died.

Every village has a church built before WWII or restored after war damage. My village of 650 souls has Church of St Peter.  I been a resident here and off and on for 4 years and the Mass has never been said here. There is a sign on the door that tells you where mass is being said In a nearby church. Itinerant priests move from place to place on Sunday. France is a Catholic country. The religious history is deep but today it is often only a patina EXCEPT when it comes to important holidays.

You don’t get your paper on a holy day.