Stark Raving Mad Mommy is on the case:

When I started sending e-mails out, I realized that all my autism mommy friends were also my allergy mommy friends.  Now, not all my friends with allergic kids have autistic kids, obviously.  But I think that all my friends with autistic kids have allergy kids. Some may have a handful of allergies, and some have extremely restricted diets.

I emailed Little Dude’s pediatric allergist, and asked him what the f**k was up with that if there was any research on a link between allergies and autism, and if not, could he please get on that. He replied right away, because he’s awesome like that, even though he’s the chair of one of the top pediatric allergy departments in the country.  He said that although they see a lot of autistic kids with allergies, there wasn’t any scientific evidence of a link, or one causing the other.

I did conduct a completely unscientific poll here on the blog, which showed that a full 70 percent of my readers’ kids with autism had food, medicine, or environmental allergies.  Most had a combination of those.

SRMM is excited about a new University of South Florida study linking autism and autoimmune disorders via a protein fragment. This  could help scientists understand autism’s causes better, and develop effective treatments. Our mildly autistic son also has autoimmune disorders. So do I. As I’ve gotten older — in the last five to seven years — my autoimmune disease Raynaud’s syndrome has become significantly worse, and I’ve developed seasonal allergies for the first time. Hmm.

It has also been interesting, and sad, to learn from various folks around town who work in the school system that there are a surprisingly large number of kids in this sparsely populated area who have been diagnosed on the autism spectrum. The schools have a startlingly large number of Aspies and kids with more severe autism. I could hardly believe what I was hearing. It cannot be the case that this is merely a matter of better diagnosis. I wonder if there are any reliable data correlating a rise in autoimmune disorder diagnoses with a rise in autism diagnoses in recent decades. Anybody know?

Anyway, I’ve noticed that older people around here have no idea what you’re talking about when autism and Asperger’s comes up. People my age and younger generally get it pretty clearly. I’ve heard a couple of people — neither of whom have autistic kids, but who are close to others that tod — say how frustrating it is to try to explain to older people that this is a real thing. Been there.

This morning, on my way to Baton Rouge, I dropped my seven-year-old son Lucas off at my mom and dad’s place. Dad — “Pawpaw” to our kids — had some chores to do this morning, and Lucas loves to tag along.

“I’m glad we homeschool,” Lucas told me. “That way I can go do things with Pawpaw when he has time.”

This is actually a great point. I should point out that Lucas is either at or ahead grade level in his schoolwork proper, so he’s not missing out on an education. But he’s gaining so much by the way in which he’s being educated. His grandfather is 77 years old. Nobody can say how much longer we’ll have him. He knows a lot, that Pawpaw. In Lucas, he has an eager pupil. Dad just called to say how much he enjoyed spending time with Lucas today. They saw construction workers building a driveway on his property. They went fishing on the pond. They learned about compasses. All sorts of things. “He’s Johnny-on-the-Spot, let me tell you,” my dad said to me. “Lucas is ready for anything.”

Mr. Broussard, a friend and neighbor of my folks, is a retired engineer who has an incredible workshop at his house. We were visiting them just before Christmas, and Lucas thought that workshop was one of the most amazing places he’d ever seen. Mr. Broussard told Lucas anytime he wants to come out to learn about circuits, or anything else, he’s most welcome. I’m going to set something regular up soon. I think this is just about the most wonderful thing in the world. Mr. Broussard knows a hell of a lot, and he’s willing to teach eager Lucas. I love that. I love it that we have that opportunity for our son.

Many of you have seen this before, but below the jump is a piece I wrote nearly 12 years ago for the Wall Street Journal, after my first child was born. It’s about my father’s world, and my sorrow over the fact that none of that would be accessible to my child (or children). Now, just in time, because we’ve moved to my hometown, and because we homeschool, it is. Read on:

Pawpaw’s World
What is manly virtue? Are you embarrassed to ask? He doesn’t have to.
by ROD DREHER

Friday, June 15, 2001 12:01 A.M. EDT

At bedtime, as night falls over Brooklyn and my toddler Matthew has said goodnight to Moon for the umpteenth time, I turn off the bedside lamp and tell him it’s time to sleep. Then I turn the light off, he rolls into the crook of my arm, cranes his head so he can whisper in my ear, and says, “Pawpaw.”

This is my cue to tell my 20-month-old son stories of his grandfather, my own dad, who lives with my mom (“Mammy” to Matthew) in Starhill, a south Louisiana enclave where the only sounds at night are crickets and bullfrogs, not sirens on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.

Matthew’s grandparents visited a couple of months ago, and he fell hard for them. Especially Pawpaw, who shares the boy’s enthusiasm for graders and forklifts and things that go. After they went home to Starhill, Matthew kept asking for them (“Mammy! Pawpaw! See more!”) and at bedtime wanted me to tell him real-life stories about Pawpaw.

So that first week after Matthew’s grandparents left, we followed Pawpaw’s adventures hunting squirrels so his family would have enough to eat during the Depression. We joined him in the rodeo, riding bucking bulls and wrassling steers. We followed Pawpaw into the Coast Guard, and rode out a hurricane in Mobile Bay lashed to the wheel of his 40-foot cutter. Then Pawpaw piloted a dinghy in rough seas, outmaneuvering a shark to complete a mission to change a buoy’s light bulb.

Then I told Matthew about the things Pawpaw did when I was little. Once I saw Pawpaw catch an egg-stealing chicken snake by the tail and crack him like a whip, snapping the varmint’s head off. I told my boy about the hunts, when Pawpaw took me into the swamp and showed me how to stalk whitetail bucks and other game. I told him about how when the Mississippi River flooded, Pawpaw would set lines in the backwater for catfish but often snared snapping turtles, alligator gars and fat black water snakes instead.

You can imagine how thrilling this is to a little Brooklyn boy. But the other night, when Matthew’s deep breathing told me he was asleep, it struck me that I hadn’t thought about these things in years. Here I was rediscovering my father’s life through telling stories about him to my own son (a startling number of which end with the cooking and eating of a wild animal). As a child, none of this seemed extraordinary to me at all. It’s how most men lived in West Feliciana Parish, and indeed some version of this rural saga is how a great number of Americans lived until a moment ago.

Truth is, it’s more pleasurable to me in the telling than it was in the living. I was a bookish kid who longed for the big city. Though I idolized my dad for his courage and omnicompetence, I always knew I would find the meaning of my life and vocation elsewhere. But telling these stories to my son about my Southern boyhood, I’m discovering a poetry of place I hadn’t noticed before, or at least resisted.

Admittedly, this is nostalgia for a world that has largely gone. West Feliciana Parish is rapidly becoming a suburb of Baton Rouge, with domiciles for Dixie-fried bobos springing up like mushrooms in erstwhile cow pastures. Cable television monoculture is everywhere, as is the same social breakdown you see in big cities (do you suppose there’s a connection?). Sic transit gloria mundi, y’all.

So why do I keep thinking about the South these days? “Lanterns on the Levee” romanticism has never appealed to me, yet as I think about the childhood my son will have here, I can’t help reconsidering the good in what I rejected.
It bothers me that Matthew won’t have his Pawpaw around to be a friend to him. He won’t have taken in the smell of tobacco, bourbon and dried gumbo mud flaking off hunting boots that is my father’s aroma. He won’t know what it feels like to stand in a duck blind, chilled to the bone and anxious to the fingertips, waiting for the mallards to swoop in.

More important, it troubles me that Matthew won’t have Pawpaw as an example. As a new father, I am grasping for a way to articulate manly virtue for my boy in a way that doesn’t feel phony. It’s impossible to imagine speaking of “manliness” or “virtue” in the world I inhabit now, filled with well-meaning, highly educated men and women who would have to put ironic quotation marks around those words or die of embarrassment.

Am I this way too? I worry about that. My dad never does. Those words mean something to him. More Stoic than Christian, in the classic Southern tradition, he is neither a soft man nor a decadent one.

By “soft,” I mean men like–well, men like me, who make our livings from our minds, not our backs, and who are shielded by our very urbanity (or suburbanity) from the rigors of life that rural people cannot avoid. There comes with that hardness a certain realistic moral stance toward the world and what it owes one–and what one owes it.

By “decadent,” I mean ironic detachment and radical doubt masquerading as sophistication, a cast of mind that cannot produce righteousness because it doesn’t believe righteousness exists. As C.S. Lewis said, “We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings to be fruitful.”

I am to raise my son in an urban culture dominated–indeed, in my social and professional milieu, overrun–by men without chests. Well, my Louisiana dad has a chest, and the habits of the heart that beats beneath his breastbone are ones I want to instill in my boy.

Matthew will learn what it means to be brave and true from his father, to be sure, but the experience seems attenuated for a city kid. And he will be immersed in a permissive culture that corrodes the moral structure his mother and I will try to build. For all the drawbacks of the rural South, a man can raise a family there knowing the seeds of faith and virtue he plants in his children’s hearts will have a less hostile environment in which to grow.

And there’s one other thing. The other night, as Matthew lay sleeping next to me, I wondered where his life’s journey would take him. Please God, I prayed, never let him live too far from his daddy. Please let me be a part of his life. Then it hit me: That has been my father’s prayer every night since I left home for school 18 years ago, then went on to a career in the East.

“Oh where have you been, my blue-eyed son? Oh where have you been, my darling young one?” I used to hear Bob Dylan sing those mournful lines years ago, while in college. Years later, with my own baby boy nestled in my arms and thoughts of my own faraway father, aging and in declining health, heavy in my heart, I finally knew what they meant.

I’ve been away from the keys almost all day. I spent much of today drinking coffee and talking with Stephanie L., my sister Ruthie’s chemotherapy buddy. They had cancer at the same time, and got to be good friends in the chemo room at the Baton Rouge General. “We had a chemo party every week,” Stephanie says. I remember from talking to Ruthie during those days how much she loved her chemo buddies, and how much Stephanie in particular meant to her. I interviewed Stephanie for hours for the book I’m planning to write about Ruthie’s life and death with cancer. I learned things I did not know about my sister, and was once again left in awe at her grace and courage.

I’m not going to write much about any of this now, because I’ll want to save it for the book. One thing I will say is that I learned so much more this morning about what it’s like to live with cancer — not just survive with cancer, but to really live. Stephanie is so full of hope — it’s no wonder she and Ruthie were friends — and so articulate about her experiences, that I was inspired even more by the prospect of telling this story, which is also Stephanie’s story, and the story of everyone who walked with Ruthie until the end. Without getting the details of what Stephanie told me today — that’s for later — I can tell you it tracked what the psychiatrist and Auschwitz survivor Viktor Frankl wrote in his 1946 bestseller “Man’s Search For Meaning”:

The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross, gives him ample opportunity–even under the most difficult circumstances–to add a deeper meaning to his life. It may remain brave, dignified and unselfish. Or in the bitter fight for self-preservation he may forget his human dignity and become no more than an animal. Here lies the chance for a man either to make use of or to forgo the opportunities of attaining the moral values that a difficult situation may afford him. And this decides whether he is worthy of his sufferings or not.

Do not think that these considerations are unworldly and too far removed from real life. It is true that only a few people are capable of reaching such high moral standards. Of the prisoners only a few kept their full inner liberty and obtained those values which their suffering afforded, but even one such example is sufficient proof that man’s inner strength may raise him above his outward fate. Such men are not only in concentration camps. Everywhere man is confronted with fate, with the chance of achieving something through his own suffering.

Take the fate of the sick–especially those who are incurable. I once read a letter written by a young invalid, in which he told a friend that he had just found out he would not live for long, that even an operation would be of no help. He wrote further that he remembered a film he had seen in which a man was portrayed who waited for death in a courageous and dignified way. The boy had thought it a great accomplishment to meet death so well. Now–he wrote–fate was offering him a similar chance.

You may think that you have to have endured some great horror like a concentration camp to come by this wisdom. Not so. The punishments of the body and the soul meted out by cancer will do. (“Cancer steals so much, not just from you, but from your family too,” said Stephanie). The main thing I took away from my time with Stephanie today is the need — the chronic need — for hope. Hope is what kept Ruthie going. It’s what keeps Stephanie going. To spend time with her is to know hope.

I had not realized that Stephanie was with Ruthie on the last night of her life. Frail and grasping for breath, Ruthie accepted Stephanie’s invitation to come to a healing prayer service and talk given by Sister Dulce, a Catholic nun and healing mystic in Baton Rouge. Stephanie told me things that happened that night that I hadn’t known. There is so much mystery and beauty in this story, and in our lives.As Wendell Berry puts it, “Never forget: We are alive within mysteries.”

I was about to say that the mysteries and graces surrounding Ruthie’s story are so dense that it’s like something out of a book. And then I thought: it will be.

We are sticking with homeschooling in our new place, a decision that puzzles some of our new friends. The local public schools are good (people relocate from Baton Rouge to this parish because of the quality of the schools), so why wouldn’t we put our kids in them? It’s hard to explain that we’re not rejecting the public schools, or passing judgment on the people who send their kids there (which is pretty much everybody), but rather embracing an educational path that we believe is better for our kids, for various reasons having to do with the kinds of kids they are, and what we want for them.

Writing in First Things (subscription required), David Mills tells how he and his wife met queries about their decision to homeschool their children. Excerpt:

The other day someone asked about our children, and my answer worried him, or at least he claimed to be concerned. When they hear the answer to their question, many people get a look on their faces similar, I imagine, to the look they’d get if I said we refused to have our children vaccinated or let them keep rattlesnakes as pets. We homeschool our two youngest, and have done so since they were in kindergarten, with the exception of two years early on at our parochial school.

The response varies. A few people say something nice, with some of them telling you how they’d wished they had done so, or wished they could have done so, some of those explaining a little defensively why they couldn’t. Most people suddenly furrow their brows and purse their lips and declare their concerns about homeschooling, which seem always to be less often about the quality of the education as about the children’s “socialization.” Although the people who say something nice are almost always religious and conservative, the people with the quickly furrowed brows are either religious or secular, and I’ve been surprised to find out how many seriously religious and politically very conservative people dislike home schooling and jump to tell you so.

It’s a little disconcerting, their apparent concern for making sure our children fit into the society as it is. There is something both aggressive and unctuous in their alleged concern for my children that really annoys me. My wife, who is much more charitable than I am in dealing with annoying people, answers them politely, and sets about to reassure them by telling them about the homeschooling groups to which our children go several days a week and all the other activities they are involved in. Some seem satisfied, others clearly aren’t. I have so far resisted the temptation to put my hand on their shoulder, look them in the eye, and ask, “Why is it so important to you that my children be squeezed into the same mold as everyone else?”

The socialization thing. Oy. I don’t think anybody who has met our kids will be under the least illusion that they aren’t socialized. The third day we were here, our 12 year old went to the library on his own, got a library card, and inquired about volunteering there. Of his own initiative, he’s introduced himself to many of the shopkeepers on the main street. Tell me about socialization. More:

People who have no obvious stake in the matter, like most of the people who have expressed dismay at my wife and my decision to homeschool our children, tend to side with the establishment against the parents. They’ve somehow absorbed the key elements of the ideology, like the concern for “socialization,” which is either a faux concern for the children’s well-being or a real concern for their being educated outside of and probably against the ideas public schools (with exceptions, of course) inculcate and impose.

Before someone remarks that some homeschooling parents are very odd or inept or (in a very few cases) dangerous: Yes, of course, it is not a perfect system. But that doesn’t answer the question of who should educate children.

David goes on to say that the education of children is a matter of soulcraft, and, in a lovely phrase, “should be entrusted only to the craftsman who loves his materials and will have his name on the thing he creates.”

Read the whole thing. It’s behind the subscription wall at First Things, but let’s hope they’ll free it up someday — or better yet, why not buy a subscription? There’s wisdom here, beautifully expressed.

One of the unexpected pleasures of gathering material for the book proposal I’m putting together is stumbling across old blog posts I wrote about my family and my hometown that I’d forgotten about. That photo above appeared on the front page of the Baton Rouge Advocate on July 15, 2008. It depicts my brother in law, Mike Leming, on the tarmac returning with his Louisiana National Guard unit from service in Iraq. Greeting him is my sister Ruthie, his wife (who died last September, as you know), and two of their daughters (the third is out of frame). I can’t find a link to the story on the Advocate website, but I saved this excerpt:

“Everyone here with me said I could hug Mike first,” said Ruthie Leming as she waited with a crowd of family and friends for her husband, Chief Warrant Officer Mike Leming, to arrive.

Part of the group waiting to see Leming were members of the Baton Rouge Fire Department where Leming is a firefighter when not on Guard duty. They brought the seven firetrucks as a way to welcome him home.

“I’ve been worried about him,” Ruthie Leming said of her husband as tears welled up in her eyes. “We’ve been together since I was 15. He’s my best friend. I just want him to come home and I just want to hold him.”

Leming’s three daughters also waited patiently with the crowds.

“This is sort of surreal,” said Hannah Leming, 15. “I’ve seen my dad on a Webcam for a year and now I’m finally going to really see him. I am just so happy and excited. I’m going to tell him I love him and he’s been gone way too long.”

For Mike Leming, the deployment was long and stressful at times.

“We had to build a concrete barrier in Sadr City,” Leming said. “Those were some of the worst moments for me. It took seven weeks. We worked on it at night because that was the safest time to do the work, but they still shot at us.”

Still, Leming said he was happy to have served his country. “But I’m also happy to be at home,” he said.

At the time, I added the following details to my original blog post about this event:

On the drive home to Starhill from the airport, the last two miles of country road were festooned with yellow ribbons members of the community hung from trees and fenceposts. When they reached the driveway, they saw a police car had blocked the road, which was filled with neighborhood children waving “Welcome home” signs. About 150 people from the community — family and friends — lined the gravel road to cheer for Mike and welcome him home. The local volunteer firefighters had their two trucks there by the road, and used their water cannon to create an arch for him to drive under, in salute. It was quite a homecoming.

Mike comes home wearing a Bronze Star for meritorious service. He and his engineering battalion did incredible work, under very adverse conditions. Mike also worked with some soldiers from West Virginia, about whom he can’t stop talking. Friends for life, him and the Black Diamonds.

Here’s a neat story that I can tell now that he’s home. A few months ago, my sister Ruthie ran a race in Baton Rouge. The number she was assigned was 709. Weeks later, home for a break at Easter, he gave her the number he’d been assigned in a race he competed in in Iraq. It too was 709.

What an incredible coincidence, my sister thought. “That means he’s going to come home on July 9,” said my mother.

Which was rather unlikely, given that Mike and his men weren’t scheduled to leave Iraq till August. Still, my mother was sure of it. She believed that was a sign.

Last week, Ruthie got a phone call from Mike. His unit, which had already transferred to Kuwait, had departed unexpectedly early. He was phoning from Maine. He was back in the United States, safe.

Of course, it was July 9.

For all the prayers said for Mike and Ruthie and the girls, for all the candles lit, for all the good wishes from all of you on behalf of my family, I say: Thank you. And above all, thanks be to God for Mike’s safe home. May all our soldiers return likewise.

Whatever you think about this war, it must be remembered that it’s being fought — and not always fought (Mike and his men are engineers) — by men and women who may or may not agree with the war, but who promised to go if their country called, and who are honoring that promise. It’s also being fought on the home front by families like my sister and her girls, in their way. That photo above shows what this war on the home front is all about, I think. Again, whatever one’s opinion about the war, I think we can all — I think we all must — keep in mind the bonds of love that are being tried hard by this conflict, and pray and do whatever we can to strengthen those military families who are being tested in ways that most of us are not.

Today, in 2012, in light of what has happened, I would say that the hardest fights we face aren’t always on the field of battle. When Mike was deployed to Iraq, the people around here told him not to worry, that they would have his back on the homefront, that they would look after his family. And they did.

They still are.

Oklahoma is OK with me, thanks to its Castle Law, which gave Sarah Dawn McKinley the right to shoot dead the armed SOB who was trying to break into her house the other night:

 An Oklahoma 911 operator calmly advised a recently widowed mother who asked if it was permissible to shoot an intruder, officials said Wednesday.

“I’ve got two guns in my hand. Is it OK to shoot him if he comes in this door?” asked Sarah Dawn McKinley of Blanchard.

“Well, you have to do whatever you can do to protect yourself,” dispatcher Diane Graham responded during the incident on New Year’s Eve day. “I can’t tell you that you can do that, but you do what you have to do to protect your baby.”

In the end, McKinley, 18, fired a 12-gauge shotgun and killed Justin Shane Martin after he entered her residence, according to a Blanchard Police Department affidavit filed in court Wednesday.

McKinley’s husband died of cancer on Christmas Day. She was at home alone with her three-month-old son when these two thugs tried to break in. It’s a shame she had to shoot him, but good for her for having the courage to do so, and good on Oklahoma for having the castle law. Every state should.

Hilarious, cher:

Just got a phone call from Julie. She had to go out to do lots of errands today, and ended up, via Yelp, in another small town at a dress shop, or a tailor’s. Somesuch place. Coming from the dressing rooms in back, she heard a queeny male voice imperiously ordering the tailor to”take out all those pleats; they make me look old.”

Surely that man is talking about Dockers, she thought.

And then the man started giving orders about what the tailor is to do to the bodice. The tailor, who is an immigrant of some sort, said in heavily accented English, “Yes sir — I mean, ma’am. I’m sorry!”

Then the tailor/clerk comes out to greet Julie, the new customer. He comes out wearing jeans and a sweater, and hands the woman a dress that’s got a black velvet bodice and sleeves, with what Julie calls “a sweetheart neckline outlined with rhinestones,” and a full white satin skirt.

“He kind of looks at me sheepishly, rolls his eyes, laughs, and says, ‘I’m so weird,'” she said. “I said, ‘Well, that’s what makes it fun!”

When the customer left, the immigrant tailor who washed up on the shores of a small Southern town said she was so confused by the gentleman’s request to be called ma’am.

Said Julie, “I just told her, ‘I love Louisiana.'”

UPDATE: I believe that my valve is starting to acclimate itself to its new environment. If only this MacBook Air resembled a Big Chief tablet. Come on, Prytania Theater, let’s have us an iPad app!

(What am I talking about? This:

I have sought escape in the Prytania on more than one occasion, pulled by the attractions of some technicolored horrors, filmed abortions that were offenses against any criteria of taste and decency, reels and reels of perversion and blasphemy that stunned my disbelieving eyes, the shocked my virginal mind, and sealed my valve.)

UPDATE.2: It has been brought to my attention that St. Francisville has its own version of The Lady Chablis: an entertainer called Ginger Snap, who performs at a restaurant in a haunted house. No website, but she has been featured in a couple of Facebook photos. Your Working Boy is on the case.

Last night on CNN, after Newt Gingrich’s defeat speech in which he barely suppressed his rage at Romney (whose negative ads destroyed Gingrich’s campaign), David Gergen observed that it sounded like Newt was committing himself henceforth not to victory, but to ruining Romney. Today, David Corn echoes that insight:

In a bitter and spiteful concession speech last night in Iowa—Kanye West could do no worse—the former House speaker, who finished fourth, signaled a shift in his mission. He would no longer be running to obtain the Republican presidential nomination; he would be campaigning to obliterate Mitt Romney. He would be Sherman; the former Massachusetts governor would be Georgia.

If Gingrich does pursue this march—and there are two debates this weekend in New Hampshire in which Gingrich can be a suicide bomber—Gingrich will be reaching the peak of his 30-year career as a Republican demolition man.

Corn says that Romney’s flip-flops give Gingrich plenty of ammunition, but I’m not sure that’s true. Gingrich was a big fat target in Iowa, because he’d never run for the presidency, and his boobery and hypocrisy had never been held up to national scrutiny. Romney ran in 2008, and he’s been running this year for a long time. It’s not news to anybody that Romney is a flip-flopper. And Romney does not have the heavy personal baggage that Gingrich does. True, Romney doesn’t inspire much passion or depth of commitment … but who else is there for Republican voters to go to? It’s hard to believe that people convinced by Gingrichian attacks that Romney’s a dud are all going to break for Gingrich. That may not matter to Gingrich, if his goal is merely to ruin Romney. But I’d bet that most GOP primary voters, though their hearts might tell them Paul or Santorum, are going to shrug and vote for Romney as the candidate most likely to defeat Obama. A bunch of sour Gingrich attacks may stretch the process out and damage Romney for the fall, but don’t forget that lots of people thought the protracted, ugly Obama vs. Clinton contest in the 2008 Democratic primaries would fatally wound Obama in the general election. Didn’t happen.

The thing to keep in mind, though, is that Newt Gingrich has one of the biggest egos in politics, and just two or three weeks ago was saying publicly that the GOP nomination was his. Newt’s all about Newt, and Newt’s not an idiot. He’s potentially a dangerous man to Romney, but at this point, I’m not convinced he’s much more than an ankle-biter.