Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis fulfills General Jack D. Ripper’s deepest delusion

"Have you ever heard of a thing called fluoridation, fluoridation of water? Do you realize that fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous communist plot we have ever had to face?

"I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids." 

No, that's not health czar Kennedy speaking. He's busy swimming with his family in D.C.'s free-flowing and polluted Rock Creek. It's not Trump himself, as he is pals with at least one batch of communists (Putin's gang) and is trying to strangle other communists in a place that rhyme's with whina, as in "Whina isn't China bowing to my precious tariffs?" It's not even Florida's Glorious Leader Ron DeSantis who, yesterday, signed a bill in Trump-like fashion to ban fluoride in Florida's water.

No, the lead-in quotes belong to the fictional General Jack D. Ripper in "Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb." Gen. Ripper unleashed Armageddon due to 1950s-style paranoia about the addition of fluoride to America's drinking water. 

This was a fear pushed by the conservative John Birch Society who saw a commie behind every tree, within every Liberal, even in Republican POTUS Dwight D. Eisenhower. The Birchers stoked the Red Scare and opposed the Earl Warren's Supreme Court's effort to integrate public schools. Their "Impeach Earl Warren" signs adorned highways all over the U.S. but especially in the unreconstructed South. Birchers even hated Mr. Rogers for his niceness and inclusivity. We once called them Right-Wing Nuts, then shortened it to Wingnuts, and, now, MAGA.

Project 2025 is the place where the John Birch Society meets Christian Nationalism. Their goal to remake America in their paranoid vision would be ridiculous if it weren't so frightening. They have been fomenting this hatred for generations and now it has come to pass. We are the fools who believed that America was at heart a good and strong and generous country, a place for everybody, while these nutcases were plotting their takeover. Sure, we still have humor, but there is a good portion of Americans who "don't get it." They have no sense of humor so Gen. Ripper's quotes fall on deaf ears. Trump has no wit and no humor; all he has is his greed and egomania. And his reins on a world superpower -- us, the U.S., America the formerly beautiful.

Agnes McDermott: The open road in an open car

A recommendation letter written on official stationery from United States Post-Office No. 18859, Mason, Ohio:

July 27, 1914

To Whom It May Concern:

            This letter will introduce you to Miss Agnes McDermott, who was employed by me for three and one half years, as Assistant Post Mistress, at this office. This work consisted of general office work, together with some bookkeeping.

            As to her integrity, honesty, capability and Christian character, I have the highest respect, only words of praise to offer in her behalf.

            It is a pleasure for me to recommend her, and I do so knowing from personal observation, that she is worthy of any position she may seek.

            Very Truly,

            Orville L. Girton, Postmaster

Nice rec letter. It came to me with other family documents. It was in two pieces, paper brown with age, frayed edges. I had to tape it together to read it.

I see my 25-year-old grandmother leaving her job with the fresh letter in hand intent on seeking a new and worthy position in Warren County, Ohio, only 22 miles away from downtown Cincinnati. Mason had but 737 residents when Agnes joined the P.O.

I don’t know what Agnes did after leaving the P.O. I do know that she lived with relatives, her sister Julia and brother Leo. I know that she took a road trip with chums to Colorado sometime between 1918-1920. Or maybe she and her pals set off for Colorado the summer after she left the P.O. Whenever she went, it was no mean feat. Motorcars were such a new addition to the landscape that highways were almost nonexistent.

I have no “On the Road” journal entries from Agnes but I do have plenty from Lieutenant Colonel Dwight Eisenhower’s First Transcontinental Motor Convoy in the summer of 1919. Army cars and trucks drove 3,251 miles from D.C. to San Francisco in 62 days. You can read the convoy’s daily log online. The log reported that the roads that my grandmother and friends drove from Ohio to Colorado were chucky, pine brick, fair but very dusty, gumbo mud, sandy with some quicksand, soft sand gumbo and, intermittently, good gravel roads. West of North Platte, Neb., many of the convoy's vehicles had to be rescued from a 200-yard stretch of quicksand. Dust was a constant problem, clogging carburetors and fuel lines. Cars and Army trucks broke down and slid off of bad roads. 

Agnes didn’t get to travel across Wyoming as she and her pals detoured south to Colorado. Eisenhower & Company encountered lots of Wyoming wind (no surprise) and rickety bridges built for travel by horse and wagon. It was good that engineer unit was part of the convoy as they had to strengthen some bridges and rebuild others.

Eisenhower was late to cross-country travel. Between 1913-16, suffragists made at least three long-distance automobile trips to promote the suffrage amendment. The earliest, according to the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, was in 1913 when women drivers from all 48 states took turns driving cross-country collecting signatures on petitions calling for a national suffrage amendment. These women crusaders confronted some of the same problems as Eisenhower’s expedition although they didn’t have a platoon of engineers to help them over the rough spots. Sara Bard Field’s and Marie Kindberg’s 1915 tour in an open-air Oldsmobile included a “machinist” and she saw plenty of action. In 1916, Nell Richardson, Alice Burke and their kitten Saxon drove their “Golden Flier” 10,000 miles visiting cities coast-to-coast.

Grandma was not a suffragist. Somehow, she and her friends made it the 1,194 miles to Denver and explored the Rocky Mountains by automobile along dirt roads, some little more than one tracks cut into a steep mountainside that probably got its start as a mule trail or even a trail blazed by Arapaho and Cheyenne tribes. Grandma loved the mountains and returned to stay. 

Agnes may have used her post office reference while job hunting. She worked as a domestic when she met my grandfather, Martin Hett, at a Hibernian Club function. Cities with largest Irish immigrant populations boasted at least one chapter of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, named after references to ancient Ireland by the Greeks and Romans. Denver had three AOH clubs.

My grandparents were an odd match, this tiny ex-postmistress from Ohio a decade older than my tall, lanky and uneducated Irish grandfather. They were married in 1922 and had three children. The middle one became my mother, Anna Marie Hett.

I knew my grandmother as a nice lady who treated us kids to ginger ale and cookies. By the time I moved back to Denver in 1978, she had been dead for four years from complications of arteriosclerosis. In those days, it was called “hardening of the arteries” or that is how it was referred to by my mother the nurse. I was 23 when grandma passed, too busy at school to travel from Daytona Beach to Denver for the funeral. I couldn’t imagine her younger and pregnant, someone who gave birth to my statuesque mother and her sister and their 6-foot-5 baby brother who played college basketball. Whatever was in my mother’s DNA cocktail added to her husband’s Shay-Green mix, brought me to six-feet-tall by the seventh grade and my short but memorable stint as a high school b-baller.

I have nothing written in Agnes’s hand. I can find plenty of official documents online through ancestry.com. Birth certificate, death certificate, census records. Some blank spaces in her personal life cry out to be filled in but, it many cases, there’s nobody around to do that.

I imagine my grandmother tootling along with her pals in an open-top Model T. The road is rough, the way, dusty. She leaves behind her dreary old Ohio burg. She looks ahead, ready for new adventures in a new place. The wind riffles her hair. She can’t imagine that one day it will turn gray and she will be betrayed by the arteries bearing oxygenated blood to a brain trusted by the U.S. Post Office in Mason, Ohio.

But that is exactly what happens.

This 1960s Boy Scout wonders if Trump knows anything about the Scout Oath

Did U.S. Army General and Supreme Allied Commander of Operation Overlord (and later president) Dwight D. Eisenhower ever go ever go to a Boy Scouts of America Jamboree and invite the crowd to jeer his predecessor, Army artillery officer and WWI combat veteran (and later president, the guy who okayed the big nuke drop on Japan) Harry S. Truman?

Hard to imagine, isn't it? But Trump has submerged us so far into his own sewer that on Monday, he invited the crowd to jeer his predecessor, Barack Obama, and cheer The Donald, himself, our celeb president. Obama, by the way, was in Boy Scouting as an international Cub Scout. Trump, of course, was not. Both men have served as honorary Scout leaders, one excelled at the task and the other, our current president, brought shame upon the Scouts forever.

Ike and Harry both addressed the Scouts at jamborees. When he addressed the Scouts, Truman (according to The Washington Post),

extolled fellowship: “When you work and live together, and exchange ideas around the campfire, you get to know what the other fellow is like,” he said. 

And this:

President Dwight D. Eisenhower invoked the “bonds of common purpose and common ideals.” 

They were both officers and, presumably, gentlemen. They wouldn't stoop to criticizing fellow officers in public. In private and after a few drinks, well, that's another matter. The presidency has rules and protocol. Trump is intent on transgressing them all.

Trump has said he knows more about the military than his generals because he went to military school. That's like saying I know everything there is to know about women because I married one.

My knowledge of the military is mainly through a stint in ROTC, reading, and the stories told by veteran friends.

But I was in the Boy Scouts. I was a Cub Scout in Denver and Moses Lake, Wash. My mother was a den leader. I was a Boy Scout in four states -- Washington, Colorado, Kansas, and Florida. I attained the heady rank of Star Scout, just two ranks short of the vaunted Eagle. I then discovered girls. Merit badges didn't seem so important anymore.

The Scout Oath did. So did the law, motto, and.code.

The Scout Oath (from memory):

On my honor I will do my duty to God and to country, to keep myself physically fit, mentally awake and morally straight.

Here is the actual oath:

On my honor, I will do my best
To do my duty to God and my country and to obey the Scout Law;
To help other people at all times;
To keep myself physically strong, mentally awake and morally straight.

I forgot a few of the details. I did remember honor and duty, God and Country, and that all-important fourth line.

The oath was reinforced daily at home and at Catholic School. I've never forgotten those lessons.

I am an imperfect human being. But this Scout would never behave as Trump did on Monday.

Trump is a disgrace to the uniform he never wore. .

When Ike had his heart attack in 1955, coronary care was still in the dark ages

Building 500 on a January afternoon.

Coronary Q & A

After a short visit to the eighth floor of Building 500 on the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora

Q: If you had a heart attack in 1955, what was the likely outcome?

A: Death.

Q: You're kidding, right? I said 1955, not 1855, or 1755.

A: I kid you not. The most common nickname for a garden-variety heart attack in 1955 was "the widow maker."

Q: "Widowmaker" is what my Syrian refugee cardiologist called the heart attack caused by a total blockage of the Lateral Anterior Descending Artery or L.A.D. The kind of heart attack I had to welcome in the new year of 2013.

A: Times change. So does the language.

Q: In 1955, what was the most common prescription for the usual heart attack symptoms such as chest pain, numbness in the left arm, shortness of breath, chronic gastrointestinal problems?

A: R & R. Some time on the beach. A few rounds of golf. A relaxing day fishing by a bucolic Colorado trout stream. That was for men. Women? They didn't have heart heart attacks in 1955. It was probably hysteria. Or penis envy. Freud was in vogue.

Q: Forget Freud. Didn't doctors use electrocardiograms in 1955?

A: Not often. In 1955, President Dwight D. Eisenhower complained of chronic gastrointestinal pain. His doctor, U.S. Army Major General Howard McCrum Snyder, conducted a month-long physical of Ike without once doing an EKG. He told Ike to relax by going on a vacation and play some golf.

Q: What did Ike do?

A: He flew off to Colorado and played some golf.

Q: Why Colorado?

A: Ike's wife, Mamie Doud, was from Denver. She and Ike usually stayed at the Doud family home in what is now the Seventh Avenue Historic District. He had a heart attack on Sept. 23 after playing 27 holes of golf at Cherry Hills Country Club. According to the Encore newsletter I picked up at Building 500, once known as Fitzsimons Army Medical Center, Ike "complained of chest pains, but but continued to play, assuming it was heartburn."

Q: But it was a heart attack?

A: Right. One of the symptoms the American Heart Association warns you about.

Q: So he went to the hospital?

A: He went back to the Doud's home. "He awoke the next morning at 2 a.m. from chest pains that were not subdued by Milk of Magnesia."

Q: Even I, a layperson and not a doctor, can see the difficulty of subduing a full-blown widowmaker with Milk of Magnesia.

A: Exactly. It wasn't until that afternoon that the Fitzsimons docs administered an EKG to POTUS and "announced that Eisenhower had a coronary thrombosis condition that would be best treated at Fitzsimons."

Q: Don't docs now say that "minutes means muscle," that time is of the essence in the treatment of any heart attack?

A: They didn't know that in 1955.

Q: What did they know?

A: From Encore: "While the American Heart Association was founded in 1924, little was known about heart disease. Doctors knew that death could occur, but provided no causes, symptoms of treatment for coronary thrombosis.... Since the 1920s, heart disease has continued to be America's number-one killer."

Q: That's progress. So the President of the United States, the man who whipped the Nazis, received no treatment for his heart attack? No oblation? No stent? No blood thinners? No pacemaker? No bypass? No weeks of painstaking rehab on the treadmill and weight machines?

A: Those were all treatments of the future. The good news is that the president's seven weeks of rehab in Denver alerted the world to a dangerous killer. When you had your heart attack, the medical establishment had almost 60 years of research behind it.

Q: I could have died.

A: But you didn't. You walk around with a machine in your chest that regulates atrial fibrillation (A-fib) and will shock you back to the present should you ever experience catastrophic heart failure.

Q: One of my earliest memories is from Aurora, Colorado. I was four. We lived in the neighborhood across Colfax Avenue from Fitzsimons. My father pointed out the lights of Room 8002 and announced that the President of the United States was recuperating from a heart attack in that room. Memories are funny things. I'm not sure why I remember it. It's possible that my father told me about it later. He was a good storyteller.

A: When you were in Denver last week, did you get to tour Room 8002 at Fitzsimons, now known as The Eisenhower Suite? It's been lovingly restored by the University of Colorado Hospital, an entity that obviously cares about history and science. It now looks like it did in September of 1955, when the leader of the free world and his wife and a secret service detail lived there.

Q: It was a quick visit. I was in town to take my daughter Annie to some medical appointments. But I will be back. It may have led to my own recovery from coronary artery disease. In Eisenhower's Heart Attack, Clarence Lasby, M.D., states: "The eight floor became, in a way, the nation's first coronary care unit... where shifts of cardiologists, nurses, technicians, medical corpsmen, dietitians, cooks, and security staff were present on a 24-hour basis to serve the patient and his family."

A: I love historic sites and museums. I'm curious. Alive and curious. Thanks, Ike.

Young Wyoming activists come up with unique way to save the elephants

The Tooth Fairy is real. 

Two young people in Jackson Hole have come up with a compelling project to help save elephants. You may have heard that elephant poaching increases even in the face of stepped-up preservation efforts. The reason: ivory from elephant tusks. The market: China, which seems to have an insatiable appetite for the stuff. Here's the project:

THE TOOTH FAIRY PROJECT presented by Elephant Daze and WILD SCIENCE

October 4-5 from 10 a.m.-4 p.m.
FREE & OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
Center Theater Lobby, Jackson

- Elephant photography exhibit by Joachim Schmeisser and Kate Brooks
- Elephant Art Contest (awards announced Oct. 5 at 4 p.m.)
- Elephant Lifespan Exhibit
- Activism: Kids write letters asking the Tooth Fairy to send his baby teeth stockpile to China where 70 percent of elephant ivory tusks end up and where 70 percent of Chinese citizens believe elephant tusks FALL OFF and REGROW. This provocative and endearing community activation message will engage the public and the press to advance our mission: to garner media attention to save the elephant by ending legal (and illegal) ivory trade and carving in China.

The Tooth Fairy Project is supported by two young Jackson Hole activists: LILY MARVIN (11) and ALEX FRENCH (9), who are working hard to save the elephant, which they know also saves you and me.

In his second term, President Obama should say "I Like My Inner Ike!"

I recall the 1950s political slogan "I Like Ike!"

So does my thoughtful friend and writer Larry Letich.

He has penned an essay entitled "In Obama's Second Term -- Should He Have One -- Obama Must Embrace His Inner Eisenhower." He's posted it as a note on his Facebook page. If you like reasonable discourse (or even if you don't), I encourage you to read it. Go to http://www.facebook.com/notes/larry-letich/in-obamas-second-term-should-he-have-one-obama-must-embrace-his-inner-eisenhower/10151223979882305