Erratum

While picking on Marge in my penultimate post, I mistyped when I said she had already gone to Kansas City (like you care) which I thought because she had been missing at the last two meetings (like we care). She plans to go to KC to a conference this summer. The staff at TSJ wishes to thank Senator Babson who always knows what Marge is up to and brought it to our attention. I kinda don't think Commissioner Webster reads this blog, but my apologies. Anygate, we're more gossip than gospel at the SJ.

Methadone to the madness

The words of Mark Sisti, the State’s celebrated drug lawyer, were chilling and telling, “you have tons of heroin, tons of methadone, tons of crystal meth…your area has gone cosmopolitan,” he told a Sun reporter who was covering a drug related story this week. And this a mere month or so after the Conway Selectmen made it clear they were not interested in addressing this potentially devastating problem for the Conway area by considering a methadone clinic in our midst. They simply didn’t want to hear it. But do they really think it will go away?

In an afternoon of googling methadone maintenance treatment (MMT) in an effort to discover the effectiveness of clinics, I found no information that proved or disproved that existing clinics contribute to crime in the communities they serve. But the statistics that have been gathered and recorded across the nation over the last decade prove that the clinics work.
What is certain is that heroin and other opiate addictions can be and are controlled by substituting methadone and because the substitute is taken orally, proliferation of diseases commonly transmitted by multiple user needle use, is significantly contained. So too is the transmittal of sex related diseases and HIV/AIDS.

The main difference between heroin use and methadone treatment is that the heroin “user” suffers from “uncontrolled, compulsive, and disruptive behavior,” then of course they “crash” which involves physical pain and sickness that is so wrenching to the physical system and psyche that only a hair of the dog treatment will soothe the effects of withdrawal. It’s sort of like staying drunk to avoid getting a hangover.

Methadone relieves the user of the heroin hangover as well as eliminating the euphoric rush and subsequent high that produces the bizarre and often illegal behavior associated with addiction. It has the additional benefits of being legal and cheap which reduces the need to commit crimes in order to afford the next round. This last becomes important to the taxpayer when their home is not broken into and robbed, police are not put at risk, courts and jails are not jammed with these somewhat problematical characters that are most likely going to go through withdrawal while at the Crowbar Motel.

But let us not sugar coat this semi-solution. The reasons Robert Potter wanted to build one of his clinics here will make most people not want it in their back yard. The closest other clinic is in Rochester. That would make Conway a sort of Vegas for “biscuit” or “dollie” seekers. (I forsee a Sun headline: Valley of the Dollies.) Since the treatment (there is no actual “cure”) requires daily communion because you never really get off the stuff, people will be moving closer to the area. And just because these new neighbors are not necessarily a threat to the community, in terms of crime, studies show that the employment rate amongst those in treatment does not improve after addiction has abated. In all likelihood a certain collegiality will develop and they could start hanging out with each other. It also makes sense that since the rate of recidivism is one out of five, there will be some bad apples looking for mischief requiring more police.

But, mark Mark Sisti’s words, there is, right now, “tons” of the stuff around. And because there is no clinic, no one is getting help. They are out there looking for ways to finance the next fix and if you have never gone through withdrawal or not read Trainspotting, you have no idea what these people will risk to get their mitts on the appropriately named “junk.”

The Daily is replete with mayhem and misdemeanors that are drug related. Not long ago we read that seven quite young local people were arrested for beating almost to death a former compatriot who finked on a pot deal. It was reported that a 20 year old girl who was involved had urged the others to kill the guy. Anybody who doesn’t think that Sisti’s words are haunting and prescient has their heads buried deep in the sand.

I talked to Dennis Robinson who runs the County Jail and he said that he was as freaked out as I was that “kids” that age could be involved in crime of that magnitude. “But it is on the rise and it is coming this way,” and he know of what he speaks. It is his job to book them through the jail and report the statistics while the press is writing it all down.

He could also tell you that $13 a day for methadone seems like a bargain versus the cost of incarceration. For starters an inmate must be provided with three meals a day at $3.15 each. That’s $9.45. If the inmate is on meds, the County has to cough up. If he or she has to be transported they get to eat at Mickey Ds on your dime. The citizenry pays for their laundry, the guard’s salaries and benefits, the debt on the building and on and on and on. Then, they are let out so they can do it all over again. About one in five of everyone sitting down at the Hotel Robinson couldn’t get enough of the place the first time around. It’s clean, they’ve got TV, you don’t have to work, free clothes and it’s just so darn easy to get used to. Which is good for them, bad for you, because they are going to spend a lot of their life in there, or some place like it, and it’s your treat.

Potter was going to pay for the proposed clinic and the methadonee would have to buy their own daily dosage. If such a facility attracts the “wrong kind” it would have to be dealt with. But we already have the “wrong kind” and if you believe Sisti, who makes a fortune knowing the ins and outs, it’s going to cost us a fortune in the future.

I suppose it’s a good thing in some ways to have our heads in the sand; all the easier to pick our wallets.

Splitting hairs? No. Picking on Marge? Absolutely!

I asked the first question of the Commissioners, two of them anyway, on Wednesday morning: If someone is appointed to take Sheriff Scott Carr’s place from now until January (when the newly elected Sheriff will take over), who does the appointing, you guys (the one gal was late to the meeting but at least she showed up this time) or the Delegation? I was told “the Delegation.”

The Delegation is a compilation of all the County’s State Representatives whose Chair is Betsey Patten and the Vice is KHS golfer Gene Chandler. Their function is to oversee what the Commissioners do. Unlike the Commissioners, they take no heat from the prying press. There are 14 (I think) Dels. I asked the question because I had heard the rumor that Carr was going to resign and at that time, I queried the Comms, “Who would he submit his resignation to?” “The Delegates,” said Chairman Sorenson after silently polling the other two by checking left and right. It left me with the feeling he wasn’t sure.

During the meeting this week I was told that the Commissioner’s only have say so over the Sheriff’s budget. It is not clear whether they have oversight with authority when it comes to spending that budget but Dave Babson, who is mentoring me in the ways of State and County gov and is running for the State Senate for the Republicans says, “They have no such authority. He (the Sheriff) is an elected official and the only way to control what he does is to un-elect him.”

Back to my Q: Cap’t Jon Hebert, a Bartlett lad and KHS grad who has retired and come back as a part-timer, was at Wednesday’s meeting to explain how the department of 45 employees is being run with the Sheriff gone in person for the last few weeks and gone officially in ten days.

Hebert who is an articulate speaker, well in command of the facts laid out for anyone to understand what needs to take place during the next six months, and quoted the RSA (104:14) that gives the Delegation the authority to appoint an interim Sheriff. He said that he is not and will not be running for the County’s top cop job but is willing to stay until January if needed. He explained that as the Operations Chief (I think) his job is at the behest of the Sheriff and the next Sheriff will want to name his own number two. Hebert said he was “looking out for my family’s financial welfare beyond life at the Sheriff’s Department.”

I’ve know Hebert well enough to say hello to for many years. Listening to him I got the impression that it is too bad he’s not running. All that experience and stage presence, he’s just the kind of guy that could sweep the scandals of the department out the door and order a new broom. Either he figures to make a lot more than the Sheriff’s $60K salary or he is chary of the kind of exposure that his boss got.

On that. I’ve talked to other law enforcement folks who think that what Carr did to get so much attention from the press was stupid and insensitive but not illegal. Tamworth’s Chief, Dan Poirier who is a candidate for Sheriff, said, “I wouldn’t have done it. It just doesn’t look right. But I don’t think he broke any laws.”

I want to ask Scott, who has always been chummy with me, would you do it again knowing that you would get such scrutiny?

Scott blames the press for having his “good name” dragged through the ink but as one reporter said to me, “What would we write about if a guy [like Hebert] was running the show?”

Commissioner Marge, who has time to get one particular constituent fired for “harassing” her, but couldn’t make it to the public input part of the meeting on time, came breezing in (“A sail, a sail” – Mercutio) just before Chairman Sorenson ended the session exactly on time. Not one more question. It’s slightly possible that it was coincidental timing but I know that I and some others wanted to know if Marge learned a whole lot on her latest junket, this time to Kansas City. I thought it ironic that on the way in I heard on NHPR that the Governor had asked lawmakers to approve a “continuation of the ban on unnecessary out of state travel.” Naturally, I was deeply interested in her opinion on such a statement from the States highest officer and, if she felt an obligation to help him trim the budget. Her defiance of the other two Commissioners efforts to clip her wings is the only answer anyone needs, but Marge’s cranky quips are always reportable. As Vern Albright used to say, “That’s my little Margie.”

Anygate, after the meeting Commissioners met below stairs in their offices (without posting such a meeting) and summoned Captain Hebert in to anoint him the interim Sheriff. According to an inside source who was kicked out of the office when he started nosing around, though they would like to kick him out just on g.p., Hebert wisely asked that the request be put in writing which they did. Alrighty then. The Comms can appoint him to do this without the Delegation being consulted after telling me in answer to a direct question, that will appear in the minutes, that the Delegation are the ones who appoint and we are not supposed to think that “something stinks in Denmark” (not Mercutio).

We don’t really know if it “stinks” but there is a whiff of incompetence mixed with ignorance of their legal duty/rules of operation, and certainly overtones of nincompoopery.

The Commissioners meet every Wednesday and begin promptly at 8:15. Try to catch it.

Farewell fairness?

I was struck by the constant commentators use of the phrase “fair but hard” when referring to what they considered to be the chief qualities of the late lamented Timothy John Russert Jr. whose soul is just a little way above our heads (as my man Mercutio would have it).
“Be against everything he’s for and for every thing he’s against,” Tim’s first MTP boss instructed him on the kind of show he hoped to see. “Not only that”, he might have added, “you will have a staff and a week to prepare while the poor schlub across from you will have to squeeze his or her prep time from an already crowded schedule.” Does that seem fair? Well, I’m not being exactly fair because Tim did have a full time job at NBC running the political end of things, no small feat in that competitive collesium. But all the carnival barkers used the same phrase over and over until it had lost all meaning, which they usually do. As they have with the constant airing of the poignant pic of Luke Russert touching his Dad’s chair in the MPR studio on Sunday. How long before it’s used in an ad for an airlines? “When you have to say farewell, fly with us.”
The most striking thing about Tim, to me, was his everyman-ness. His total insider take on the Beltway baloney. Today he will be waked at St. Albans School which is next to the magnificent National Cathedral. He could have done it there. But he will be on view at his son’s high school alma mater and Luke’s class mates have been chosen to be the pall bearers. How cool is that? I smirk at the thought of how many publicists and assistants to the muckety mucks of the political world will lose their heads over the failure to get on the list of possible contenders for such a career move as being a pall bearer to someone famous. It would be interesting to see how all the mourners in waiting are lining up and trying to elbow their way to the head of that line in the hope of being chosen to speak at the Kennedy Center tomorrow or at least get a seat that the TV cameras will pan. My guess is that no ex-Presidents need apply.
It will be hard to replace the guy on Sunday morning’s because you can’t teach people how to be smart, decent, caring, clever and hard working. You can’t just say, “be like Tim” any more than you can say to a young ball player, “hit like Ted.”

104th Bloomsday

“Stately plump Buck Mulligan…” is the way it all starts in Martello tower one fine June 16th in 1904 that changed the literary world forever. The first time I read Ulysses I read the Odyssey prior to so that I would have an idea of the analogy. I might have read all of Shakespeare and memorized Hamlet too if I really thought I was going to be able to figure out what old nimble Jimbo had in mind when he decided to do a day in the life of Dirty Old Dublin. It helped a little that I had been a Latin spouting alter boy.
I’ve written on the inside of the book cover when I read and reread the book and where I was at the time. No lectures about writing in books please. I paid $2.50 for my raggedy-ass copy at a second hand joint in Cambridge forty years ago and now it’s margins are full of my scribbles from the successive reads. I figure I must have read the thing one entire time half lit for all the times that I would have a jar while curled up with this curious tale that still has me intrigued after all these years. I’d read till the pages got blurry and then the next time I’d have to reread all that had happened while I was enjoying that last drink. Over the years, it’s got to amount to one whole read.
Once I sent in a dollar for the “One Minute Ulysses” to a clever fellow named David Lasky down in VA who nailed the story in an 8 page comic book style. I have wondered for a long time how he decided what to leave out and it reminds me of the sculptor who explained how he worked, “If I’m carving an elephant, I just take away everything that doesn’t look like it’s part of an elephant.”
Here’s my synopsis for those of you who have only read the end.
The story of two Dubliners wandering around the town for 24 hours is supposed to run parallel with Odysseus coming back the war in Troy which takes him ten years. It takes two people to tell this story and so we have the young and brilliant Stephen Dedalus who resembles the author in many ways and is some one we know of from Portrait of the Artist as a young man. Poor old Paddy Dignam has bought the farm and we meet a lot of his friends at the funeral. Leopold Bloom is there too (as he is the other half) but he is not exactly in with the crowd and we easily come to believe that it has to do with his Jewishness which he doesn’t practice and seems to resent, somewhat. After the funeral the mourners take up residence in Davey Byrne’s where much airing of the world’s worries is done at the bar. Bloom orders a glass of burgundy and a gorgonzola sandwich which has become the official meal of this day for U fans the world over.
Stephen has quit his teaching job that morning and taken what little money he is owed to town to attend Paddy’s send off. His father Simon, “a noisy man, full of his son,” holds forth at Davey’s and soon Stephen moves on with friends of his own. Bloom shoves off by himself and contemplates the letter he has from a mysterious Martha who occupies much of his thoughts, but then he has a lot of thoughts and we listen in while he goes to buy Martha soap and then heads to the baths and later the Strand where he espies poor Gerty MacDowel, a comely lass with a limp. He has impure thoughts about her but only tips his bowler as he passes. He seems to think that his amourous imaginations are justified because he’s more or less certain that his wife Molly not only shares the stage with Blazes Boylan, the famous tenor, but also his bed.
Stephen hits the bars and a bawdy house which he gets thrown out of sort of and Bloom takes him to Night Town. Nobody get’s laid but Stephen gets stewed and Bloom takes him for coffee before inviting him home. They talk and Stephen decides to pass on spending what little night is left at 7 Eccles, Blooms abode.
Bloom makes enough noise below stairs to wake Molly whose famous soliloquy while lying in bed takes up the last 40 pages employing the stream of consciousness style that has come to define Joyce. It ends “…how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again and then he said would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes”

Letters to the Editor: Dear Eddie,

The latest salvo of silly incivilities in the Sun’s letters section hit a little close to home. Having foisted some of my own personal problems on the public via that medium, I wondered (my adoring fans not withstanding) if my own public beeves are perceived as some of the other rabid rantings are. I have backed off in the past because one soon realizes that it is not about the message after awhile but about wounded egos, gotchas and the perception that one is really quite clever on the printed page and that soon the New Yorker or the New York Post will come calling to have us take over the editorial section.
It also occurred to me that while at the Ear, we never received the kind of frothing that people like to vent in the Sun’s pages. It was always yes, please and thank you, and the ever so infrequent, “nice job”, which you will also be hard pressed to see in the Daily. I have personally told Nate when I think he has nailed a story, but I have never seen a letter that praises his prose or his Mickey Spillane like keenness for detail on the Maureen MacDonald murder case or taking to task the County Commissioner known as the “Minister of Tourism” for her outsized spending habits.
I’m sure I’ve never seen a letter praising Lloyd for his sports reportage, although several tele-talkers did mention him for canonization by having a Kennett High sports facility named after him. No, most of the letters, much like my own, tend to be self serving and have a certain quality of “can dish it out but can’t take it.”
Once I talked to Rob Figuly about doing a “personality piece” in another publication. He demurred, and said he would get back to me but I knew he never would. That kind of paranoia does not take kindly to the light of day, even though I assured him it was a fluff piece. If he had seen the other ones I did, he might have been tempted by the possibility of a little flattery. But his antennae were up and it is the Valley’s loss, I suppose.
There aren’t a lot of letter writers like Ron (the collective sigh out there is almost audible) but over the years there have been some pretty persistent pens that have embellished those same pages with their bombast. One thinks of the Susan Bruce fans who claim that she is a know nothing feminazi whose politics are to the left of Manny Ramirez (not his politics, his position). Don’t these guys love to jump all over her, so to speak. They rant, they rave, they accuse her of giving away the government. But it can’t be lost on anyone that they read her. What works better for a writer than knowing you have a loyal following that read every letter you type?
In a way, it is surprising how well most of the letters are written. Almost always with passion but also well organized (I said most) and grammatically appropriate, if not up to Catholic School or AP standards. I especially enjoy when students write in and we all muse that the kid’s mother wrote it. Naw, I’ve seen lots of stuff from High Schoolers that would put most adults to shame. I was recently at Williams College, on the top of almost anybody’s get into list, and three Kennett kids are matriculated there and bolstering up the school’s ski teams.
I don’t always have time to read all the letters nor do I want to take from my precious store of unused time to try to fathom what Laura Slitt will be going on (and on) about this time. Pavlov tells me that it’s going to be something about how people should not eat meat because it hurts the cows feelings, nor should they raise rats to help cure cancer. How ever much validity her point may have, I wonder how many readers she has convinced to come to her side over the years of beating that same drum.
Today’s batch of bashing concerning Ken Martin’s dust up with the Couture Construction Co., Children Un-Ltd, Carol Hounsell and Dawn James is classic. Imagine all the players are under five feet tall and at recess with no teacher around. One of them is suggesting that the footwear of one of the other’s mother came from the military, while the next one is challenging, “O yeah, you wanna bet?” and still another is injecting the heart piercing and ego crushing, “nanny nanny boo boo.” Yet, however unbecoming for adults, it is pretty good theater and where I work, it was the talk of the town for about four and a half minutes.

Where is the outrage?

I watch and read way too much news but I mostly watch the shows that I know and that reflect what I think, maybe, just possibly, might be as close to the truth of any on-going story that I’m following. That’s code for, almost never Fox. Fox is about as “balanced” as Ron Figuly and as “fair” as I am being to him right now.
What is truly surprising is the lack of outrage over the Texas decision to swoop in and pick up 450-odd kids because of what appears to be a phony phone call claiming that the underage caller was at risk. There was far more of a hue and cry when the Branch Davidians got bush whacked down in Waco almost fifteen years ago. But in the normal media all you get is a casual update on the status of these kids and their moms. Dads are back on the ranch doing whatever it is they do without the young’ns around, and we don’t even want to go there.
It does seem like the state of Texas messed this one up pretty bad. Can you think of any other community where it would be alright to bus a bunch of kids away from their parents and homes for eight weeks now, because of a perceived misdeed that has yet to yield anything like the much touted “shred” of evidence?
I wonder what would happen if our own Sheriff’s Department perpetrated a similar stunt on the Tin Mine Conservation summer camp. Just came in with guns drawn, a few borrowed tanks, extra deputies hauled in from their road details, several buses borrowed from the Community School in Tamworth and maybe the Gibson Center; charge them with not wearing flag lapels or something and then haul ‘em off to the hoosegow where the DOC would have to figure out how to make sure no siblings got to stay together and then find foster homes for them all over the county. Maybe have to ship some to other counties if homes couldn’t be found.
I know some folks who are parents and strong believers in the second amendment who would have a thing to say to whoever tried to take their kids away from them with or without a just cause. It is unthinkable that this indefensible action could stand without a ruckus resulting in bloodshed. Of courseI know that you know that our own Sheriff would never countenance such perversions of the law in this county but the goofball scenario only needs a few changes to simulate just what in tarnation is going on down in the Lone Star State.
The kids have done nothing wrong. No parent has been charged because as far as the public knows, no laws have been broken. And yet the children have been wrenched, as it were, from their Mom’s Mormony clad bosom to some strangely non-cultist environment for two freakin’ months! It is nothing less than outrageous and the mainstream media treats it like an ongoing story of a young family missing for a day after getting lost on the way to Dianna’s Bath.
Whaddup with that? I think it’s because “those people” are different and people in general, us “hard working white Americans”, and even some “elitists”, really only look out for our own. If those crazily coifed moms in their prairie couture and secret underwear weren’t so obviously autre, wouldn’t there be a stronger story here? One in which we all stood against the illegal nuttiness whether we’re from Texas or Tamworth? Whether they’re Mormon or Mainers shouldn’t matter. People all over the world are sticking up for the Burmese and Chinese, sending them money, and sticking up for our government spending all it can to get aid to the disaster struck. But these poor people, right on our own soil are getting it stuck to them in a way that seems dreadfully unfair at the very least.
And it doesn’t take much imagination to calculate the cost to the average Texan like Danny Del Rossi who probably didn’t even have anything to do with it. This will not be over when it’s over. Oh no! Their little patch of polygamy is going to have the finest lawyers in the land descending on them from all angles with promises of wealth beyond what is stored in the hidden bowels of the Salt Lake Tabernacle. Law suits will abound like plagues of locusts and the average Texan taxpayer will get the tab. The poor shlub who couldn’t tell a Mormon from a Doorman is going to have his wallet handed to him because somebody, and we don’t yet know who, supposedly received a call from some one, who we also don’t yet know, that may have said something could have happened to someone who may not exist, but if it did it could likely be illegal and now 500 lawyers are all over it.
Where is the outrage? It’s aimed at Hillary for staying in. At Barack for having a pastor that’s a quack. At tornadoes and earthquakes and high unemployment and higher gas prices. Meanwhile, the height of stupidity gets a pass.