Homer Tobin-Hochstadt 2008 - 2018

Dogs don’t usually get an obituary. I may think that Homer was an extraordinary dog, but every dog owner believes that about their dogs. Obituaries are mainly for people who knew the deceased, and many people were acquainted with Homer, and many more know of our family’s obsession with Boston terriers. So this is for them. And for me.

Homer had the best doggy life we could provide. Homer spent every day with his brother, Hector. In fact, nearly every minute. They went everywhere together, inside and out. They slept on the same bed, usually touching, sometimes with one’s head on the other’s body. They came with me to my office every day. On the few occasions they were separated, for example when one went to the vet, the other was confused, hanging near the door. I don’t know how Hector will deal with Homer’s absence.

That’s another reminder that our understanding of our pets is limited. We may be able to predict what they will do, but we can’t penetrate their little minds. Unless they display their emotions with sounds or actions in some obvious way, their thinking is a mystery.

Dogs’ minds are much simpler than ours, but they certainly do think.  They decide what to do in the situations that they confront. They obey our commands, not like robots, but more like little children, who wrestle with the conflict between what they are told to do and what they want to do.

Every dog wants to jump up and this is one of the most important things to teach a dog not to do. Our dogs’ jumping was always about being friendly. While it may be fine for the family, jumping up on children, the elderly, or people who are worried about dogs is not good. We always trained our dogs not to jump, but they still did it, especially when someone crouched to pet them. I have witnessed many amusing moments, when someone leaned down to pet one of our Bostons, who then raised up and licked them in the face. Very friendly, but not always welcome.

We have lived with four Boston terriers and none of them barked. Our first two, Hermes and Ajax, never barked. I mean that literally – I don’t think Hermes ever barked and I believe that I heard Ajax bark once. Not much good as guard dogs, but very peaceful. Neither Homer nor Hector barked for their first 7 or 8 years, then started occasionally to bark when someone came to the door. These barks were not aggressive – as soon as anyone came in the door, both dogs would wag, greet, lick, and sometimes jump up.

Like people, as dogs get older, their behavior changes. Some changes represent learning. Homer learned that when we let the dogs out in the backyard, and then forgot about them while watching TV, he could come around to the front of the house and put his paws up on the window sill. Barking here might have helped, but see previous section about barking. Homer also learned how to tell us that he was desperate to go out. He would sit down in front of us and stare silently for as long as it took to get our attention. It took us a while to figure out his meaning, but this was an unmistakable signal about what he wanted. People can train dogs, but dogs can also train people.

One change in Homer’s behavior became a problem. At age 8 or so, he began to get aggressive, a trait that is unusual among Boston terriers. He would occasionally nip at dogs who crowded him, or came near his food or his bed. Homer and Hector had always engaged in play fighting, accompanied by fearsome noises and bared teeth, but never with any intent to harm. Recently Homer seemed to be less playful in these doggy arguments.

Worst of all, Homer began to nip at children. Our earlier Bostons were delightful with little kids, but Homer and Hector entered our lives when our children were grown, and therefore rarely encountered babies or toddlers. That became a problem when babies began to appear in the lives of our children’s generation. Homer did not like animals his size other than Hector crawling onto his bed or getting near to his face. It’s hard to know what he thought about babies. Did he think they were other dogs? Was he trying to send a message about keeping a distance?

He didn’t growl or bite, just nip. But nipping a baby’s face can be dangerous and is completely unacceptable. He nipped our nephew’s son and our daughter’s friend’s son. Both of our children now have babies who will soon be crawling around. He began to nip at other dogs. Sometimes he seemed unfriendly to Hector.

That brought a painful decision, but a necessary one. We tried neutering Homer, but it had no effect. It seemed to us that there was only one alternative. Biting dogs, in my opinion, have no place in human society.

How will Hector react to Homer’s disappearance? He may be even sadder than we are.

Steve Hochstadt

Berlin, Germany

Published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, February 6, 2018

Justice: Late, But Not Too Late

Larry Nassar, former doctor to young female athletes, will spend the rest of his life in prison. As she sentenced him to 40 to 175 years in jail, Judge Rosemarie Aquilina said, “I just signed your death warrant.”

Nassar may have been the most successful serial abuser of young women in history. Judge Aquilina invited 156 women to testify in her courtroom about their assault by the hands of Nassar, beginning in 1992, 25 years ago. Over and over, he penetrated their vaginas with his fingers or his fist as part of his “therapy”. Some were younger than 10.

Nassar earned his medical degree from Michigan State University and worked there as a sports doctor. He became famous as the doctor for USA Gymnastics for nearly 20 years, which is in charge of the Olympic gymnastics team. His life of crime began to unravel when Nassar was first publicly accused in September 2016 by former gymnast Rachael Denhollander. But his sexual abuse had been reported to authorities many times long before that.

In 1997, Larissa Boyce reported what Nassar was doing to the MSU women’s gymnastics coach, Kathie Klages, and another girl confirmed that she too had been “treated”. Both girls were shamed into silence. A women’s track coach was told in 1999. Athletic trainers were told in 2000. In 2004, clinical psychologist Dr. Gary Stollak was told. That same year, Brianne Randall, 17 years old, told the police in Meridian Township, near the Michigan State campus, that Nassar had touched her vagina and breasts. The police never told MSU.

MSU President Lou Anna Simon was told in 2014 that a police report had been filed against a sports doctor. She let her subordinates handle it and never saw the report. The subordinates included 3 other MSU doctors and the athletic trainer, as well as Dr. William Strampel, dean of the College of Osteopathic Medicine, who decided Nassar’s actions were medically appropriate. At least 14 MSU employees were told about Nassar’s actions.

USA Gymnastics paid star gymnast McKayla Maroney over $1 million to keep quiet about Nassar’s abuse. The agreement included a $100,000 fine if she revealed what Nassar had done to her.

The only thing that stopped Nassar’s abuse was the public accusation by Rachael Denhollander last September. She was motivated by a story the month before in the “Indy Star” that USA Gymnastics had a long history of ignoring reports of sexual abuse by coaches.

How do serial abusers manage to continue their criminal activity? One reason is that making such accusations is deeply painful. It is difficult for a teenager to complain about the nature of their treatment by a doctor, especially if he is advertised as a “miracle worker”. At a preliminary hearing, Shannon Smith, one of Nassar’s attorneys, asked Denhollander if she was coming forward for the money. Denhollander explained some of the cost of telling the truth. “My advocacy for sexual assault victims, something I cherished, cost me my church and our closest friends three weeks before I filed my police report. I was left alone and isolated.”

The institutions who protect abusers circle the wagons against accusers. The vice chair of Michigan State’s board of trustees, Joel Ferguson, called victims’ lawyers “folks chasing ambulances” looking for a “payday”. A famous former prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, was hired to by MSU investigate, and President Lou Anna Simon claimed in April that MSU was conducting a “thorough internal review”. In December, Fitzgerald exonerated the University by writing that nobody there knew what Nassar was doing. It turns out that Fitzgerald had been hired to defend the University against lawsuits. His team interviewed none of Nassar’s victims.

The lifelong sexual abusers who have made news were all protected by a cone of silence. Penn State administrators looked the other way when they heard about Jerry Sandusky’s abuse of boys. Reporting about Harvey Weinstein detailed the many people in Hollywood who knew about him and did nothing. Now a scandal has erupted in Germany about the star TV director Dieter Wedel, who was allowed to continue his predatory behavior by state-funded television channel Saarlaendischer Rundfunk, which knew about his abuse in the 1980s.

Denhollander wrote,  “The first step toward changing the culture that led to this atrocity is to hold enablers of abuse accountable.” In Nassar’s case, the enablers are renowned institutions.

Some Americans apparently feel that men are under attack. I disagree – men who abuse women are under attack and it’s about time. But there may be a backlash from defenders of the male-dominated status quo, the patriarchal assumptions which allowed unpunished abuse to be so widespread. Trump was put into office because many white men and women feared that a world was crumbling where white male sexual dominance was a fundamental assumption. They didn’t care that he abused women and bragged about it; in fact, many supported him because he so openly violated new standards of correct behavior.

Eventually he too will get what he deserves.

Steve Hochstadt

Berlin, Germany

Published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, January 30, 2018

The Greatest Show on Earth

I didn’t expect much more than a bit of diversion from the new film about P.T. Barnum, “The Greatest Showman”. A musical biopic from Hollywood is rarely a source of thoughtful history or powerful emotion. But “Greatest Showman” delivered something unexpected: a morality tale appropriate to 21^st-century America.

Phineas Taylor Barnum’s real life was far more interesting than any movie could portray. He dropped out of school at 15, ran a grocery store at 17, started a weekly newspaper in Danbury, Connecticut, at age 19, and sold lottery tickets. As an adult, besides his famous freak shows and traveling circus, he campaigned against slavery, was elected to the Connecticut legislature after the Civil War, and served as the mayor of Bridgeport.

Barnum’s passion was entertainment. He got rich by exploiting the public desire for sensation, often duping his audiences with fraudulently advertised human and animal curiosities. He displayed the “Feejee mermaid” in his American Museum in New York, the torso and head of a monkey sewn on to the body of a fish. He bought Joice Heth, a slave woman in her 70’s who was blind and paralyzed, and exhibited her as “The Greatest Natural and National Curiosity in the World,” the 161-year-old nursemaid to George Washington. She died 7 months later, and Barnum set up a public autopsy before 1500 spectators to prove her age, then rejected the results.

Barnum’s most famous attraction, whom he called General Tom Thumb, was the dwarf Charles Sherwood Stratton, a distant relative, whom Barnum began displaying at age 5. Stratton was a talented performer, whose performances went beyond the usual display of “human curiosities” to be compared by theater critics with other professional singers and dancers. Barnum and Stratton toured Europe, were presented to Queen Victoria, and thrilled audiences across the US. Stratton became wealthy and bailed Barnum out when he went bankrupt in 1856. He married another little person, Mercy Lavinia Warren Bump, in a highly publicized wedding in 1863, and the couple was received by President Lincoln at the White House.

Barnum sought ever more sensational acts. Although the couple did not produce any children, Barnum acquired a succession of babies wherever they performed. His autobiography, “The Life of P.T. Barnum”, was sub-titled “Golden Rules for Money-Making”.

Presenting complex historical characters is not Hollywood’s strength. Barnum’s contradictory qualities as showman, hoaxer, anti-slavery activist and politician are too much to fit into a big budget spectacle, much less a family-oriented musical.

Film critics did not like “Showman”.  In England, the “Telegraph” called it “insane” and “miserable”. Canada’s “Globe and Mail” said it was “empty, moronic, pandering and utterly forgettable”. These critics were expecting history, but “Showman” delivered instead a spectacle. “Showman” is itself a historical hoax, transforming Barnum into a celebrator of human diversity, who freed his “freaks” from the shackles of popular prejudice. The film’s P.T. Barnum is not a historical character, but a vehicle for a moral message not entirely foreign to the real Barnum’s political ideas.

The sacrifice of historical truth for message is the source of the sub-plot of the white-black love affair between Zac Efron as Barnum’s partner and Zendaya as a trapeze artist. Love conquers all, in this case the racial prejudices of the upper class.

Barnum profited from the presentation of freaks, but also helped to transform his unusual collaborators into respected personalities. His historical efforts to abolish the enslavement of some Americans by other Americans are transformed in the film into a broader “celebration of humanity”. Barnum exhibited Annie Jones Elliot, a bearded girl and later woman, paying her $150 a week, an enormous salary at that time.

When the bearded woman in “Showman”, the biracial singer Keala Settle, belts out “This is Me”, she speaks for all human freaks and curiosities. The song won a Golden Globe and became a hit in countries as diverse as South Korea, Sweden and Australia.

 “When the sharpest words wanna cut me down,

Gonna send a flood, gonna drown them out.

I am brave, I am bruised,

I am who I’m meant to be, this is me.”

That’s a simple message we need in 2018.

Steve Hochstadt

Berlin, Germany

Published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, January 23, 2018