As with most Ricochetti, one of @drbastiat ‘s posts, Strange Things Aren’t Getting Better, got me a-thinkin’.  Yeah, I know.  A-thinkin’ isn’t my best look.  The Lovely and Talented Mrs. Mongo probably echoes your thoughts.  She has told me numerous times, “Honey, go do something physical or dynamic or ballistic.  Go beat somebody up, or shoot up something, or blow something up, but in the interest of all that is good in this world, don’t set yourself to a-thinkin’.”

Too late.

Before I moved to Hilton Head, I practiced for 20 years in a small town in the mountains of east Tennessee.  I loved it there.  Everybody knew everybody, the schools and churches were wonderful, and it was a great place to raise my kids.  It had a cute little downtown (pictured at right), with cute little shops on each side of the road, and a traffic circle with a war monument in the middle.  Like every other small town in America.  Lovely.

One day when I left the office on my way home, I pulled out right behind a big green military truck, which was going maybe 25 miles per hour.  I grumbled as I followed for nearly a mile through town.  When we got to downtown, the military truck pulled off to the side, revealing a roadblock and lots of cops right at the entrance to downtown.  One of the cops walked up to my window and greeted me warmly:

Cop:  “Hey, doc!  Great to see you!”

The funeral of Prince Phillip, husband of the Queen, was one of the most moving royal events of the last few years. This was perhaps the most iconic shot of the entire event:

She was utterly alone. For many watching the proceedings from home, the sight of the newly widowed Queen Elizabeth II, who will turn 95 next week, was perhaps the saddest image of the day. https://t.co/afjqGsf3Rv

I own a house in Texas, but I lay my hat in Tennessee, so you could say I have taken Sam Houston’s path in reverse, traveling east instead of west.  As a result, I sometimes wonder if the “hero of San Jacinto” ever missed the purple mists that regularly settle over the mountains where he once roamed with the Cherokee, or if he put where he grew up out of mind after establishing a new republic in the 1800s.

The truth is, in my case, I can feel deeply homesick for Austin a full year after leaving it, as I think of fresh-lime margaritas in hundred plus heat, as I recall the joys of live music in old beer halls where people two-step in cowboy boots.  There are few scenes as pretty to me as a sunrise over spring fields covered in bluebonnets, miles of highways draped on either side with the wildflowers that were once planted through the efforts of Lady Bird Johnson.  I miss the boats and bats by Town Lake.  I think it’s cool how children are still taught to be proud of being born in the place their great grandfathers’ settled.  The sky really is bigger on the plains, which makes a soul feel more free.

What if someone posted something that is genuinely funny, but that some people think is worthy of a beheading?

In the event that you either A) missed yesterday’s podcast, or B) are morbidly curious enough to see the podcast being made, here is the video version.  Actually, it really is fun to watch Troy Senik’s animated reactions to the mischief our conversation generated, so I do hope you will enjoy the proceedings:

I’ve always had a fondness for Canada. Not the actual thing, but the idea of Canada I have in my head. Unspoiled forests, resolute Mounties, briny fishermen in hardscrabble towns where traditions go bedrock-deep,  magnificent architecture. It’s like a parallel version of the US:  select the top tier of the US states, do a copy-drag, reproduce it, and run a simulation to see how the cloned version would do if you moved the French sliders to the maximum settings,  and tweaked the national character settings vis-a-vis their powerful neighbor so they were always trying to balance pride and envy, contempt and admiration, resentment and gratitude. 

In the Canada of my old imagination, it has cosmopolitan cities with dreadful 70s cement architecture built by men with egregious sideburns, and I still like it. They built a whole nation up there, another iteration of Western Civ. Australia without the lethal fauna and convict history. It’s fun to think about a nation that fused the US and Canada, how it might have shaped our own culture. 

CAQH is a website that serves as a sort of repository of data on doctors. I have to re-attest every 120 days and update my data. For example, uploading my latest renewal for my malpractice policy, did my office address change, hospital affiliations, and so on. I’m not sure who runs this site but, apparently, insurance companies, etc., use it to get info from one central location.

I got a notification that my “Education & Professional Training” data was out of date, so I went to look and see what the problem was. There is a new question, that I have to answer in order for my file to be considered “Complete.” It gave me the chills:

Have you completed cultural competency training?

On the other hand, there may be a more relevant question facing us today: can the Democrat Party survive with identity politics?

Four years ago I wrote an article with the above title. I speculated about the inherent instability of a political movement that is based on identity politics. I suspected that once such a movement achieved power, that the smoldering internecine battles would turn ugly (and perhaps violent) and tear the power structure apart. This brief article asked a lot of questions, but I put the third paragraph in italics, as I think that is our primary concern here today – four years after I wrote this:

I read a fascinating article by Paul Mirengoff a few days ago on PowerLine, with a similar title. I made a quick post over breakfast to get the opinion of my esteemed Ricochet colleagues (…and the rest of you, too!). I have given this a great deal of thought since then, because it highlights a dichotomy I’ve never been able to resolve. The Democrat party has been the party of identity politics for as long as I can remember (I’m 48 years old). It has always reminded me of European governments, which are typically incredibly complex coalitions of many different groups who have little in common. These groups need each other in order to project power, but they don’t necessarily like each other all that much. The Democrat party includes trial lawyers, unionized factory workers who drive huge pickup trucks, environmental wackos who drive Priuses, teachers’ unions, and so on. They have nothing in common, other that their desire for power. I can understand that. I was an athlete for a long time, and I had to work with people that I didn’t necessarily like if I wanted to win. That’s the way the world works.

Paroxysm: NOUN

1. A sudden attack or violent expression of a particular emotion or activity.‘ a paroxysm of weeping’