Letter #148 to friends and familiares: the Incompleat Angler

“Perhaps I should not have been a fisherman, he thought. But that was the thing that I was born for.” 

-- Ernest Hemingway; The Old Man and the Sea; 1952.

"I shall make ye fishers of men..."
"Good because I am starving from the old way..."

-- Anonymous.

Recently I read a great story about the most unexpected success of a casual fisherman. I am something of an obtuse angler, too. As a kid in Sydney, I used to fish by hand and catch little yellow-tails and throw them back in. That was my down-time, often followed by pick-up cricket games. The next time I went fishing was twelve years later off of Palm Beach in 1980 when I was visiting a college bud.

We went out into the ocean in this big cabin cruiser of some apparently wealthy man, the father of my host’s roomie. This boat even had sonar to detect the schools of fish. We zipped around, this way and that, in an endless search for fish; B-O-R-I-N-G. Two highlights of that day, one inane and the other intuitive, were the one catch of the day as well as a ‘sonar’ duel between man and nature.

The rivalling sonars made for the better story. The tech finally came through and the skipper found his school. This older gentleman was anything but genteel, treating his trophy girl-friend like a toy in front of his adult son of the same age as the girl. The score with the sonar disappointed me mightily since we would be marooned for another few hours on that damn boat. B-O-R-I-N-G.

Until two dolphins with a “high sense of porpoise” cruised by, spiraling in the water and squealing. Well, now, school was out; nary a nibble. And I have always wondered whether those dolphins had somehow audibly warned those innocent fish of the peril picked up by their natural sonar. Nature 1, technology 0. We floundered for a couple more fruitless hours amid bickering among the hosts: B-O-R-I-N-G.

Then, in the waning moments, the least equipped nautically (i.e., me) got something. People were rightly floored (or decked) that it was I who snagged the only beast of the day. So, I struggled a bit, trying to keep the fish on the line. The older man was jealous – quickly emphasizing that I had captured small game judging by the negligible arc of my rod. Yes, I suspected as much and I did not care – I just wanted to get off that boat.

Finally, my catch was close enough that it surfaced intermittently, as fish do when they struggle desperately, and almost always without success, to escape back into the deep. One BIG catch about my little catch: it was a plastic bag.  Since I was the first to realize my catch was phony, I tried to ward off the expected flak by exclaiming with a dryly ironic voice, “Oh, wow! I caught a plastic bag, mahhhn!” 

Well, before the rhazzing could start, the trophy girl-friend, with whom I had been chatting as the only one paying any attention to her, laughed hysterically and said I was so cute, etc. Normally, such attention (even if patent non-sense) from a pretty lady would have been welcome. Not that day. That almost led to my being escorted over the gunwale with, “Good riddance, punk,” by you know who -- the gal's surly patron.

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My fishing days were finished, thankfully. Until duty called as a banker in the late 1990s. Calling on non-bank financial institutions – basically, finance and insurance companies – I had encountered my fair share of ethical and accounting sink-holes populated by "snow lizards"; thank you, David Rosenberg of Pittsburgh. Most executives, however, were lovely people and very honest. On the whole, insurers are a decent bunch.

There was one real sinkhole besides sub-prime lenders and that was the bond insurance niche. These guys basically substituted for banks who traditionally provided guaranteed performance (i.e., scheduled payments) under bond indentures. In a long-since saturated segment, these monoline bond insurers were on the hunt for any money they could pick up, no matter how questionable the insured security or transaction was.

In the late 1990s, one bond insurer acquired another. Think of it as in-breeding within the Ponzi family. Well, I had to help ring in the union with a fishing day with the Treasurer of the consolidated insurer. Angling off of a cabin cruiser in Long Island Sound would normally sound like a fun idea. Except that I had to get up at five-thirty in the morning to get to some ungodly suburb in Connecticut in order to launch.

Additionally, the treasurer of the merged bond insurer had come over from the acquired company – a company that I had never touched with a ten-foot pole, no matter how profitable its financial statements had appeared. Some companies just don’t pass the smell test. And then there was this dung heap. The acquiring insurer figured it could make the dung heap into fertilizer for future profits.

Fine, but count me out. Though a leader in bond insurance, that large acquiror had ceased passing my smell test sometime earlier, too. This was not the first time I met the new treasurer. Frankly, he was a well-coiffed grease-ball; anybody who goes out of his way to tell me that l am a “genius” or "really talented" wins no points with me. For one thing, though I would dearly love to be a genius, I simply and surely am not one.

Curious? Yes! Smart? Eh, perhaps. But, a “genius”? Forget about it. Mr Slick was a man whom I did not trust at all. So, I arrived with my fellow bankers with hair dishevelled, cow-licks prominent and overall expression pouty; clearly neither a morning person though, perhaps, a person in mourning. (And yes, that sink-hole cratered a few years later, just as I figured it would; no retirement plan for the world's oldest profession!) We finally set off into Long Island Sound after Mr Slick had finished kissing my ass since I was the guy with the bank’s checkbook….B-A-R-F.

Of the six people on that cruiser, I was absolutely the most out of place, not only in terms of zero enthusiasm and unkempt appearance but also my fishing experience and ability.  Long Island Sound apparently has many blue fish – allegedly difficult to catch – and ‘stripers’, or ocean bass. When I got ‘spoke to’ by the senior manager in our delegation, I reluctantly picked up a rod and gave fishing a go along-side the slick.

Et voilà! Before I knew or understood what I was doing, I was hauling in many fish, perhaps the most. My haul included an apparently elusive blue-fish; that claim about the blueys, however, may have simply been more ass-kissing. Truthfully, I have no idea. To cap the day off, I even caught the largest striper of the day. That fish was one heavy BASStard; I swear it was fifteen pounds, maybe more.

Soon enough I received a photo in the mail of me holding that big dude with a putrid smile on my face and the (by then drunk) slick with his arm around my shoulder. So much for all those Dale Carnegie sales courses I had laboured through as a young and incorrigible misanthrope. At least somebody hosted a big dinner that week-end with that striped creature, duly stripped, as the guest of honor.

Needless to say, I was never sent from Central ‘Casting’. Yet life runs in a full circle. These days, when I spend some time in the Adirondaks thanks to the generosity of my sister and her family, I will cast a little here and even less there in the quiet end of Long Lake. As it was for me fifty years ago in Sydney, my down-time is not goal oriented; it is simply restful and the fish are lucky that I am the one with the rod.

Letter 147 to friends and familiares: letter to Hillary Clinton.

"I would rather play against a sore loser than any kind of winner I know...." -- ¿who knows?

''If the election had been on October 27th, I'd be your president'' -- Hillary Clinton; May 2017

Dear Senator / Secretary Clinton,

In November, I voted for you after some thought and hesitation, but with relative ease since Mr Trump was, and remains, unacceptable as a Presidential candidate or incumbent; in essence, I had progressed from being a Never-Trump Republican to a Must-Stop-Trump Republican. Yes, I was dismayed though not altogether surprised by President Trump’s victory in the Electoral College; were that election held today, I would likely vote for you again.

Fortunately, my fears of President Trump’s authoritarian tendencies – while quite real today and going forward – implied an under-estimation of the strength of the institutional constraints in place. While allegations of the conduct of Mr Trump and his inner circle during the President’s campaign and afterward remain rife, if yet unproven, the accountability is now in motion.

Your behavior since November, however, has often been regrettable. Your recent appearance at a Book Expo shows that side of you that attracted us who voted for you. Too many times, in the months since the election, however, you have blamed several parties as being instrumental to your unexpected – and, implicitly by your reckoning, undeserved – defeat six months ago. Comments refuting each point follow the factor identified.

FIRST, the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Director Comey acted to protect the independence of the FBI, without which the integrity of a central pillar of the rule-of-law would have been hopelessly compromised during its investigation of your e-mail practices. Director Comey did make a surprise announcement on October 28th, per a pledge he had previously made to a Congressional Committee, and affirmed the conclusions he had reached in July forty-eight hours before the election. 

Forty-eight hours was more than sufficient time to undo any damage to you or your electability. Throughout the July-to-October time-frame, it is clear that the Director was fully aware of the consequences of his actions, including a high probability of his dismissal; that is, he owned his choices. Additionally, by mid-October, people already knew enough to decide their votes. The Director's actions may have reinforced the preferences of certain voters; l have to doubt that they changed more than a tiny and inconsequential number of minds.

SECOND, the Russians, with or without Wikileaks. From what I can see, the majority of Russian meddling – outside of possible collaboration with the Trump campaign – seems to have been dissemination of Russia Today. While RT’s objectivity is not up to the standard of the Voice of America, this is a highly visible activity by a relatively low-rated television and news outlet. Wikileaks and fake news, however, pose more serious questions, one worth investigating for obvious, perhaps ominous, reasons.

Nevertheless, the contents of those e-mails disseminated by Wikileaks – not the alleged hack itself – influenced voters. Responses by Party surrogates of stating that the e-mails were "stolen" without addressing their contents fooled no one. The loudly proclaimed fake news argument was more likely to be a subset of biassed and parsed reporting against, and calculated to hurt, both campaigns.

THIRD, the Democratic National Committee. Your assertion of your receiving too few funds from the DNC and the Party leadership giving you nothing is difficult to understand, let alone to analyze or comment upon. To me, Mrs Clinton, your assertion is difficult to accept since there are allegations that the very same organization (the DNC) had fixed the nomination in your favor. As far as the argument that the DNC's data were poor, it is difficult to sympathize too terribly much with you. Mrs Clinton, you had three years to build your own reserve of data.

FOURTH, the "deplorables". White supremacists may have voted for President Trump but they did not elect him. Implicit in your ill-advised remark was a suspicion that you were the rightfully qualified candidate and that some dark anti-social underbelly was seeking to deny you of what was rightfully yours: the presidency. True, you won the popular vote. Nonetheless, a modest review of the results refute your sense of entitlement. True, you gained 2.9 million more votes than Mr Trump (i.e., 65,844,610 versus 62,979,636). 

Nevertheless, you were the establishment candidate – your résumé apparently made your claim to the Oval Office incontestable, at least in your mind – while Mr Trump was a candidate of (¿chump?) change. When one adds in the 7.8 million votes cast for third-party candidates – by definition candidates for change – to Mr Trump’s tally, your establishment credentials were repudiated by 4.9 million votes (i.e., 70,783,849 versus 65,844,610).

FOURTH, the main-stream press. You have argued that the fourth estate undermined your candidacy by dwelling on the private e-mail server you used as Secretary of State by magnifying it to the level of a "Pearl Harbor". This excuse is, perhaps, the most exasperating of all for three reasons.

• You argued during the campaign that the 22 million 'lost' emails on RNC servers by Karl Rove and other political functionaries in 2007 negated any appearance or instance of wrong-doing by you for use of a private server as the Secretary of State in President Obama's first Administration. By 2009, however, that practice of the Bush Administration was fully exposed and disseminated, being held to account and deemed improper, perhaps illegal. It was clear that diverting e-mails through private servers should not be permissible going forward -- especially seven years later. 

• It is a pity, ma'am, that you have forgotten a basic lesson from your Sunday-school class: two wrongs do not make a right. This argument is rather reminiscent of the 'enfant terrible' of my Party, President Nixon.

• On a pragmatic level, I question your ability to learn from past mistakes or experience. Your allegedly secretive approach to the 1993 national health-care initiative (i.e., managed competition) was never proven to have occurred; the practice was neither illegal nor unethical in any case. But it surely looked bad, contributing to the plan's eventual demise. What surprises me today remains your insensitivity toward the 'political optics' of such a seemingly covert information management practice during your tenure as the fifth most senior official of the Republic under the Constitution.

Mrs Clinton, here are seven reasons why you may have lost this election.

• A previously ignored constituency consolidated behind Mr Trump.
• Prior actions and the contents of ‘hacked’ e-mails sowed seeds of distrust. People simply refused to equate your character with President Obama's.
• Your remarks about "deplorables", etc. lent the impression that you felt entitled to the office. Americans do not warm up to attitudes that smack of landed nobility.
• Your vice presidential candidate lost his debate, badly, which had an important implication. Many voters may have disliked you and Mr Trump sufficiently to look toward their feelings about Senator Kaine or Governor Pence as a tie-breaker.
• A poorly run campaign that overlooked key battleground states.
• The Clinton dynasty, if ever extant, had ended in 1999. You were elected in one of two or three states that would support your Senatorial candidacy. While your tenure as Senator encouraged me to vote for you, it did not represent a national base.
• You were the weakest Democratic candidate of my life-time. With the possible exception of Senator McGovern (though I do not think so) or Vice President Gore (more likely), every candidate from President Johnson on (i.e., Messrs Humphrey, McGovern, Carter, Mondale, Dukakis, Clinton, Gore, Kerry and Obama) would have defeated Mr Trump. Senator Sanders certainly would have, had he been permitted to run.

Secretary / Senator Clinton, again, I believe you should have been elected because you are honest, at least on balance, and for other reasons. Your unwillingness to own up to your role in losing the 2016 election makes you come across as a poor sport, as believing you were denied of a privilege justly due to you. No one is entitled to the presidency. At least 70 million of your fellow citizens disagree with your sense of entitlement that has a whiff of arrogance.

Your role now?

Help lead your Party in passing the torch to a new generation of Americans since the Democrats have the opportunity for a political transformation as conclusive as that of the late 1920s and early 1930s. Your Party is frittering away this once-in-a-century opportunity through a level of whining and vitriol toward President Trump that will sate your appetite for vindication and feed your resentment. The key question for you, Mrs Clinton, remains whether such self-indulgence will assist your Party or the principles it stands for.