AMERICAN NARCISSIST

 

I can see Andrew Phillip Kehoe (above) as clearly, as if he was standing next to me at this moment. According to his drivers' license, he was five feet, nine inches tall, weighed 150 pounds and had gray hair,  “ ...a slight, hollow-chested man”, of 46, with thin lips. But a neighbor, when shown several photographs of the man, said, “ "I knew him well and he never looked like that.” 

Afterward, Howard Kittle, the Clinton County agent and Farm Bureau manager, received a letter from Andrew, and admitted that if anyone else had written it “I would have thought sure he was insane.'” But that was before - when he was a community leader, a trusted guardian of the township's wealth and its future. Afterward the local newspaper - the Clinton County Republican-News - was forced to wonder, “Is the building of a modern institution which equips children to meet the problems of the world a burden - or is it a privilege?” You see, the man at issue was a anti-tax warrior and an American narcissist who murdered 34 children and 8 adults.

Bath in 1927 was a little farm town of about 300 people 10 miles northeast of Lansing, Michigan. “(It) had a ( grain) elevator, a little drugstore, and you knew everybody within 20 miles” said a life long resident.  Which means pretty much everyone knew Phillip Kehoe.

In 1922 rural Clinton County closed its scattered one room school houses. They used $8,000 of their own hard earned money to buy five acres of ground just south of Bath. They borrowed $35,000 to build a two story Consolidated School building. 

Here, classes would be divided by age,  to protect the younger, smaller children from older bullies. With fewer teachers, higher standards could be required of the instructors -  even a college teaching degree. And amenities such as a library, lunch programs, athletics, music and art were added. Buses now picked children up at their front doors and returned them safely home each night. It was the foundation for a secure world that future generations would grown up in. And it was not cheap for the older generations.

The future always costs. You either invest in it now, or it proves much more expensive.  In 1922 property taxes in Clinton county were $12.26 per thousand dollars of valuation ($160 today, or over $16%). In 1923 those taxes had gone up by half to $18.80 ($235 today). This was not the decision of a few liberals. This was debated for years within the community. And over time the decision was made to invest in the future of Clinton County,  in the counties' children, and to spend the money on their  future. 

Three years later, eager to eliminate the debt quickly, the elected leaders of Clinton County paid off $7,200 of their obligation, and taxes topped out at one dollar higher (to $240 per thousand of valuation in today's dollars). It was expected taxes would now start to drop, but that did not take into account the rising inflation of the 1920's, and the selfishness of one egomaniac who chose - chose -  not to have a future, and to steal the counties'.

Let me tell you about Andrew Phillip Kehoe, the way most Americans learned of him by sharing a headline from the New York Times, dated Wednesday, 18 May, 1927; “Maniac blows up school, kills 42, mostly children; Had protested high taxes...Children Pinned in Debris. Others hurled against walls or out windows – Searchers still hunt for missing. Agonizing scenes in yard. Distraught parents find little ones dead beneath blankets...”. 

The early numbers were wrong, of course. The maniac killed eight adults and 34 children at the school, that day. The last little victim, nine year old Richard Fitz (above), would die of an infection caused by his injuries, a week short of a year after the explosion that killed him. 

Just before he murdered 34 children, the maniac had bludgeoned his wife one last time - this time to death. 

He had tired his two horses' legs together and left them in the barn stacked with all his farming equipment. Then he set the barn on fire. Before that he had poisoned and killed every fruit tree on his farm. Interestingly, it was figured by the cleanup crews, that he could have paid off his mortgage and his property taxes by selling most of his well maintained farm equipment, which, according to his neighbors, he rarely used.  

Neighbor M.J. “Monty” Ellsworth wrote later, “He was at the height of his glory when fixing machinery or tinkering...He spent so much time tinkering that he didn't prosper.”  The maniac also stood out, as a farmer, for his meticulous appearance. He changed his shirt quickly should a spot of dirt appear on it and was often seen sitting on his front porch (above), in a smoking jacket,  puffing on a cigar.  But his primary interest, his obsession, was in reducing his taxes.

The maniac had been elected to the school board in 1924, two years after the new school had opened and the first election after the new higher tax rate had been announced. His platform was to cut the cost of the new school. In 1925, after the death of Maude Detluff, the school board's treasurer, he had been appointed to fill that position. His book keeping was, like his appearance, meticulous. After his suicide, his books showed  “a long and detailed explanation” of a 22 cent discrepancy.  But in the spring of 1926, when he ran for election to officially take on that job, the voters had rejected him. Once again, the majority approved investment in the future  He stopped paying his mortgage and the insurance on his farm. Eventually, the previous owners - his wife's relatives - began foreclosure proceedings.

Early Tuesday morning, 18 May 1927, after killing his long suffering wife, and every other living thing on his property, Phillip Kehoe set his house on fire (above) and drove off to carry out the rest of his plan for revenge,

Decades earlier, Phillip's promising career as an electrical engineer in St. Louis had been cut short by a fall and a serious head injury.  So farming was the his second career choice. He married and moved to Clinton county, Michigan,  right after the First World War. He might have over paid for his farm, because land prices were inflated at time. And his wife was afflicted with tuberculosis, a wasting disease before antibiotics. But he still assaulted her, every time he felt the need to feel superior.

The Klu Klux Klan paid for and staged a funeral for Phillip. They expected to garner support by blaming his Catholicism for encouraging him to destroy the school because it was not a Catholic school. But even if all of that were true, none of it would justify the cold blooded murder of 34 innocent children, and nine adults, and the farm animals and his wife. He was probably a racist by modern standards, but all Phillip Kehoe could focus on was HIS taxes.

Before the school was built, he had opposed it. Once it was decided to build it, he insisted it should be a 10 grade institution, instead of 12 grades. He opposed the inclusion of a library, or athletic programs or a music department.  And he lost every argument. 

Once the building was constructed, the tax increase gave him enough supporters to win election to the school board, where his obstinacy continued. He even opposed giving the superintendent a paid vacation each year, and then argued it should only be one week, not two. And as he lost each of these arguments, his obsession grew, day by day. 

Words used to describe him during this time were “surly”, “obstinate”, “impatient” and “arrogant”.  Eventually he began to invest his money not in his farm, or his wife,  but in World War surplus explosives. He slipped the explosives into the basement of the new school, and rigged  them with a timer and set them to explode early on a Wednesday morning,  just after classes had begun. And just before that bomb went off, Kehoe set off the last bomb, packed into his car, killing himself , the school principle and others.  

The day after the bombing,  while still in shock and grief,  the Clinton Country Republican ran an editorial, which explains, far better than I ever could, the connection between the maniac's crime and his anti-tax fever. “That he was insane there is little doubt", wrote the editors of the paper. " But he was not always insane. To start with he was merely antagonistic. Then he became radical.. He was the victim of the progress of his own lack of balance...

"What a terrible price to pay for narrow-mindedness", continued the editorial. "What an awful calamity for one peaceful little community to bear for one man's lack of ordinary American ideals...Never before have we known of aversion of the cost of education taking such terrible form. There are, however, many people who unthinkingly hamper and discourage the progress of good schools and other institutions for the welfare and happiness of the public. What are we going to do about it?”

It is almost a century later, and the question begs to be asked again, this time of a nation which elected an admitted rapist as President, supported by the power hungry unChristian unRight, - those who object to investing in the future because they choose not to believe we have one. And what are the majority of us going to do about it?  The answer after the 6 January 2021 U.S. Capital assault and the poison of the Trump Presidency is...not yet answered,

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DEAD PRESIDENT

 

I contend William Henry Harrison (above) delivered the worst Presidential inaugural speech in history – and just in part because it was also the longest. By my count it ran to 8,424 words (the first sentence was 98 words long!), and it took darn near two hours to deliver. People in the audience that cold wet March afternoon must have thought they were dying.

When 68 year old William Henry Harrison (above) started droning on, at around noon on Saturday 4 March, 1841, it was barely 48 degrees, in a cold, cutting rain and wind. His audience of 50,000 were in agony, and he just kept talking.  And at the end of the sixth paragraph the new President actually delivered his punch line – he would not run for re-election. From that moment forward he was a lame duck. He had voluntarily surrendered half of his political power, and he wasn't even half way through his inaugural speech. And he just kept talking! In fact it has been alleged that this speech actually killed him.

“CALLED from a retirement which I had supposed was to continue for the residue of my life to fill the chief executive office of this great and free nation, I appear before you, fellow-citizens, to take the oaths which the Constitution prescribes as a necessary qualification for the performance of its duties; and in obedience to a custom coeval with our Government and what I believe to be your expectations, I proceed to present to you a summary of the principles which will govern me in the discharge of the duties which I shall be called upon to perform.”

William Henry Harrison Inaugural Address

After that it was all anti-climax. Harrison droned on and on about ancient Rome, and why the ancient Greeks had collapsed. He did not get around to discussing what he hoped to achieve while he was in charge until paragraph 17, just four paragraphs from his closing. This was not the speech most people huddled freezing in the bleachers had been expecting from the man his Democratic opponents had dubbed, “General Mum”, because he'd said almost nothing during the campaign. 

This was the “Tippecanoe and Tyler too” campaign, the Log Cabin and Hard Cider campaign of nothing but empty phrases, when Harrison had kept his mouth shut because the only time he had ever been in a log cabin was when he had visited his "mistress" Dilsia, in her slave quarters. The overly fecund Virginian had fathered six children with the unfortunate lady, and ten more with his legal white wife. Did I mention it was snowing during his interminable speech? And raining? And cold? The second time George Washington took the oath, he disposed of his speech in 135 words, wham-ban, thank you, Ladies and Gentleman. But then the "Whig" President  Harrison had so much more to say about so much less than Washington did. 

“It was the remark of a Roman consul in an early period of that celebrated Republic that a most striking contrast was observable in the conduct of candidates for offices of power and trust before and after obtaining them, they seldom carrying out in the latter case the pledges and promises made in the former. However much the world may have improved in many respects in the lapse of upward of two thousand years since the remark was made by the virtuous and indignant Roman, I fear that a strict examination of the annals of some of the modern elective governments would develop similar instances of violated confidence.”

William Henry Harrison Inaugural Address

William Henry Harrison achieved a number of firsts as President. He was the first President to actively campaign for the office, and the first President to have received one million votes. Although he won by only 147,000 popular votes his electoral college victory was a landslide. He was the first (and only) President to have been born in the same county as his Vice President (Charles City County, Virginia). He was also the first President to arrive in Washington via a steam locomotive. 

And he was the first president (that we know of) to have sold four of his own children (by Dilsia), to avoid being embarrassed by their existence. The unlucky youngsters were sold “down the river” to a planter in Georgia. What a nice guy.  

You know, if Harrison had not been such a lousy human being, I would be a lot sadder that he was also the first President to die in office; 30 days, 12 hours and 30 minutes after starting his never ending inaugural address.

“Although the fiat of the people has gone forth proclaiming me the Chief Magistrate of this glorious Union, nothing upon their part remaining to be done, it may be thought that a motive may exist to keep up the delusion under which they may be supposed to have acted in relation to my principles and opinions; and perhaps there may be some in this assembly who have come here either prepared to condemn those I shall now deliver, or, approving them, to doubt the sincerity with which they are now uttered...”

William Henry Harrison Inaugural Address

What was wrong with this man? He had been running for President since November of 1811, when he had "ginnned up" a war with the native peoples, and fought the battle of Tippecanoe.  But Democratic President James Madison had not even thanked him for removing the Indian threat to the western border on the eve of the war with Britain. You see, Harrison was a Whig.  And it took another quarter of a century before his own party was willing to name him as their nominee. What was wrong with this patrician that so few of his contemporaries, of either party, were willing to trust him with power? 

About the only friend Harrison had in Washington was Daniel Webster (above). The two men were close enough that Harrison named Webster his Secretary of State, and even - thank God -  allowed Webster to cut several minutes out of the never-ending speech. Webster later claimed that he had “killed 17 Roman Counsels” in the process. Can you imagine how many useless words Harrison would have used without Daniel Webster?  I bet he used all the lost words to fill his dictionary.

“... In other words, there are certain rights possessed by each individual American citizen which in his compact with the others he has never surrendered. Some of them, indeed, he is unable to surrender, being, in the language of our system, unalienable. The boasted privilege of a Roman citizen was to him a shield only against a petty provincial ruler, whilst the proud democrat of Athens would console himself under a sentence of death for a supposed violation of the national faith—which no one understood and which at times was the subject of the mockery of all—or the banishment from his home, his family, and his country with or without an alleged cause, that it was the act not of a single tyrant or hated aristocracy, but of his assembled countrymen....”

William Henry Harrison Inaugural Address.

He waited to take the oath (above) until he had almost finished his speech. But as soon as he had been sworn in by fellow slave owner and supporter Chief Justice Robert Taney,  he quashed his audiences' frigid hopes by starting to talk again, for two more rambling protracted paragraphs. It seems that William Henry Harrison, saw the anti-climax as his milieu.. Still, he felt fine after his speech. 

He even stayed around for the entire inaugural parade (above)  - the first President to watch the parade as opposed to marching in it. And this was the first inaugural parade with floats, little fake log cabins pulled by horses, sort of the first mobile homes. 

That night he attended all three of the inaugural balls – the official one, the "Tippecanoe Ball" , and... and the other one.  On Monday morning - 6 March -  Harrison felt healthy enough to meet with his Secretary of the Treasury, Thomas Ewing to discuss the current national financial crises, which he had not mentioned in his endless speech. He mentioned everything else in that rambling collection of platitudes, just not that the banking system which had collapsed. But, he seemed perfectly healthy, even after all that, which proves that this loquacious aristocrat was perfectly healthy until he fell under the care of a doctor.

“I proceed to state in as summary a manner as I can my opinion of the sources of the evils which have been so extensively complained of and the correctives which may be applied. Some of the former are unquestionably to be found in the defects of the Constitution; others, in my judgment, are attributable to a misconstruction of some of its provisions...”

William Henry Harrison Inaugural Address

His fatal mistake was that on Saturday, 27 March  (three weeks after the endless speech)  he told Doctor Thomas Miller (above) he felt “mildly fatigued and under the weather.”  Doctor Miller was dean of the George Washington Medical School, and he diagnosed the President as suffering from “bilious pleurisy”.  Doctor Miller felt obliged to do something. So he slapped a mustard plaster on Harrison's stomach, and gave him a mild laxative. 

The next morning, Harrison felt worse. So Doctor Miller bled the President, until his pulse weakened. Then he subjected the 68 year old to another plaster, this time of laudanum, which caused the old man to fall asleep. While he was sleeping, Miller called in another doctor, and over the next few days these two healers gave the President opium, camphor, brandy, wine whey, and some petroleum. Oddly, after these treatments President Harrison felt so bad he was now certain he was dying. The doctors agreed, so they bled him some more. 

Anyone who inquired was told the President was “feeling better”,  right up until Harrison died, thirty minutes into Saturday, 4 April, 1841 - just one week after falling into the hands of two of the most respected doctors in the nation. So it wasn't the endless speech that killed the old man after all, it was modern medicine.  And it was worth every penny of their fee.

“Fellow-citizens, being fully invested with that high office to which the partiality of my countrymen has called me, I now take an affectionate leave of you. You will bear with you to your homes the remembrance of the pledge I have this day given to discharge all the high duties of my exalted station according to the best of my ability, and I shall enter upon their performance with entire confidence in the support of a just and generous people.”

William Henry Harrison Inaugural Address  The End.

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TIME TRAVELERS

 

I can’t believe we are doing this again. We got along for nine thousand years without doing it, and now we do it twice a year. It was a dumb idea when we did it the first time and doing a dumb thing twice a year does not make it smart. Why are we changing our clocks again?! 

The persons to blame for this are the obsessive-compulsive bureaucrats who champion the so-called Daylight Saving Time – and there is no “s” at the end of “Saving” because it’s modifying time, not daylight, which turns out to be more than a symbolic difference,  I told you these clock watchers were obsessive compulsive.  But that dropped “s” should also give you a hint that this whole thing is one great fraud being perpetrated on each and every one of us in the name of good grammar and saving daylight. Which, of course, cannot be done.

So on 10 March,  at 2:00 AM, we will "Spring Forward", adjusting our clocks again because we’re all supposed to.  It's a unity thing, I guess. One nation under a one really dumb idea. We are all dumb together because being dumb together is better than being smart individually.  I guess being smart together is not an option. And I have to tell you that I am not going to feel like  "springing" anywhere an hour earlier, no matter how you insist on repeating "Spring Forward".   Just because its the law, or a rule or something. These endless clock adjustments are an endless treadmill of dumbness.

Experts assure us that during Daylight Saving Time we’re going to save 10,000 barrels of oil a day, reduce crime and spend more time out of doors with our families during summer evenings. If you knew my family, you might not want to spend an extra hour with them, anywhere. 

Of course your iPad and your iPhone might start displaying some rare Lapland dialect if you tried to instruct it to ignore the whole thing.  But why are we doing this again?!  They first tried this half baked scheme back in World War One, and as soon as the war was over they dumped it. Because it didn't actually work. And now, every time some one-world type comes up with another energy saving idea, we are all required to smile and call it "green":  

But I wonder about all that extra fossil fuel we will burn next winter, to generate electricity to light our darkened bedrooms, not to mention run our computers, TVs, hair dryers, electric razors and toothbrushes, water heaters and all those headlights we can't get out of bed without . We used to say that people who rose early got up with the cows. Well, the cows are not getting up any earlier. Nor are the chickens. Why the hell are we?

As everybody keeps pointing out, it was Ben Franklin who first purposed Daylight Saving in his essay “An Economical Project”, (but in French, of course) (above)  in which he suggested that if authorities were to “…Oblige a man to rise at four in the morning, …it is probable he will go willingly to bed at eight in the evening." Well. duh. Unless, of course, he takes a nap. But, yeah, if you make him get up earlier he will probably go to bed earlier. 

And if we set him on fire, it is probable he will not litter. It is an interesting idea from the eighteenth century’s second most famous reprobate, but it strikes me like accepting interior decorating suggestions from the eighteenth century's first most famous reprobate, the Marque de Sade. Besides, how do we know that Ben wasn't just joking? I know the Marque wasn't, but...say... did anyone ever see these two guys in the same room at the same time?

Anyway,  if Ben was kidding, then Congressman Fred Upton (R-Mich.), who wrote the amendment to the Energy Policy Act of 2005 requiring Daylight Saving Time, missed the punch line. What a surprise, a Republican with no sense of humor.  So the same Congress that has refused to raise the minimum wage for over a quarter of a century,  found the time to steal an hour of my  sleep every March and screw with my sanity every November.  In the next election I suggest voting for Ben Franklin.

Ben was trying to save about 64 million pounds of candle wax a year. Well, look how much wax we saved by inventing electricity! And, didn't Ben have something to do with that?  Kite, key, electrical storm -  any of this sound familiar?  Listen, didn't Ben see this whole electricity thing coming? 

And speaking of electricity, according to the New Jersey Public Service Enterprise Group, Daylight Saving has “no impact” on energy demands in their service area. And the government of Kazakhstan has already dropped the whole idea of “saving daylight”.  Are Americans dumber than the Kazakhastanies? 

According to the University of California Energy Institute, daylight saving does not actually save energy, it just moves it around. And a recent study of electric bills in Indiana found that the time "shifters" are actually costing each Hoosier almost $3.00 a year MORE -  about $8.6 million each year in total, plus somewhere between $1.6 and $5.3 million in pollution costs for generating all that extra electricity for getting up and going to work in the dark all winter!  

And if that is what it costs Hoosiers (like me), think what it costing people in New Jersey!  Well, actually, it doesn't cost folks on the east coast that much, because they are on the front line of the time zone, and it doesn't cost folks in Chicago that much either. Again they are flying in the front of the time zone plane. But us folks in coach , we are getting screwed twice a year. A little more energy conservation like this and we might as well just start burning coal again. Which we are still doing. Why are we doing that? Why isn't shutting coal powered power plants a good idea for saving energy?  Better than time shifting.

And another problem with this bi-annual adjustment to our sense of reality is that our brains can’t adjust just because we tell them too. Computers solve the problem without a hitch. So while our electronics no longer need a "time patch” for programs, humans require psychiatric assistance to adjust to the depression brought on by lost sleep every spring!  

To quote from Ken Fisher’s article for ARS,  “So while the US government pats itself on the back for at least looking busy, know that the main goal – energy conservation – has not been met….Isn’t arbitrary, mostly meaningless change, great?”  Hell, no, it isn’t.

A January 2020 study by the  University of Boulder reveals that fatal car accidents "spike" 6% upward in the week following the spring forward, meaning an additional 28 deaths each year nationwide. And for citizens living in the western edges of each time zone - flying coach or in steerage -  the increased risk of death rises to 8%. 

That means, say the scientists from Boulder, that over the last 22 years, 627 people have died simply to placate Ben Franklin.  Hey! He's dead. Could we not worry so much about hurting his feelings, anymore?  And it ain't like we have to win World War One all over again.  We done did that.

Still, I’m willing to be cooperative.  If we need more daylight then let’s move the clocks forward and be done with it. Why fall back in the fall? Listen, if the majority of the population decides that at noon tomorrow we should all pretend that it is now 10:45 AM, I’d go along with that. But for heaven’s sake please stop moving the clocks back and forth and back and forth as if we were keeping time with Mexican jumping beans. Why are we doing this to ourselves? Pick a damn time and leave it the hell alone!

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