Scrap It and Start Over?

How American Health Care Killed My Father is a long and provocative article about the mess our system is in, and how currently proposed reform, even single-payer, won't fix it. A sample quote:

[H]ealth insurance is different from every other type of insurance. Health insurance is the primary payment mechanism not just for expenses that are unexpected and large, but for nearly all health-care expenses. We’ve become so used to health insurance that we don’t realize how absurd that is. We can’t imagine paying for gas with our auto-insurance policy, or for our electric bills with our homeowners insurance, but we all assume that our regular checkups and dental cleanings will be covered at least partially by insurance. Most pregnancies are planned, and deliveries are predictable many months in advance, yet they’re financed the same way we finance fixing a car after a wreck—through an insurance claim.

What I'm Reading

In one house (the only building in Pompeii which no woman is now allowed to enter,) were the small rooms and short beds of solid masonry, just as they were in the old times, and on the walls were pictures which looked almost as fresh as if they were painted yesterday, but which no pen could have the hardihood to describe; and here and there were Latin inscriptions -- obscene scintillations of wit, scratched by hands that possibly were uplifted to Heaven for succor in the midst of a driving storm of fire before the night was done.

--Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad

Twain writes around what he was not permitted to write about ("no pen could have the hardihood to describe"): the erotic art of Pompeii. It's too bad we don't have an unfettered Twain here. It's likely he could have produced something more eloquent than this mixture of moralizing ("hands ... uplifted to Heaven") and prurience ("no woman is now allowed to enter" -- wink wink, nudge nudge).

So after that, it's nice to turn to Twain in a more characteristic mode, the democrat irreverently tempted to an act of lèse majesté at a reception for Tsar Alexander II at Yalta.

To think that the central figure in the cluster of men and women, chatting here under the trees like the most ordinary individual in the land, was a man who could open his lips and ships would fly through the waves, locomotives would speed over the plains, courtiers would hurry from village to village, a hundred telegraphs would flash the word to the four corners of an Empire that stretches its vast proportions over a seventh part of the habitable globe, and a countless multitude of men would spring to do his bidding. I had a sort of vague desire to examine his hands and see if they were flesh and blood, like other men's. Here was a man who could do this wonderful thing, and yet if I chose I could knock him down. The case was plain, but it seemed preposterous, nevertheless -- as preposterous as trying to knock down a mountain or wipe out a continent. If this man sprained his ankle, a million miles of telegraph would carry the news over mountains -- valleys -- uninhabited deserts -- under the trackless sea -- and ten thousand newspaper would prate of it; if he were grievously ill, all the nations would know it before the sun rose again; if he dropped lifeless where he stood, his fall might shake the thrones of half a world! If I could have stolen his coat, I would have done it. When I meet a man like that, I want something to remember him by.

But nicely, Twain maintains a sense of his place in the scheme of things:

We spent half an hour idling through the palace, admiring the cosy apartments and the rich but eminently home-like appontments of the place, and then the Imperial family bade our party a kind good-bye, and proceeded to count the spoons.

R.I.P. Obamacare?

Has health care reform been swiftboated to death? It's sure beginning to look like it. Number-cruncher Nate Silver is worried, as is Paul Krugman. (I wish the usually estimable Krugman hadn't resorted to the "only time will tell" cliché, however.) John Cole comes out and says flatly, "health care reform is over." Of course, that's just the view out here in blogworld. Anyone in the real world care to talk me down from the ledge?

I Guess He Wrote It on One of His Hikes

I got a stack of book catalogs for Winter 2010 today, and was particularly interested in this title, from Sentinel (a subsidiary of Viking):

Within Our Means
By Governor Mark Sanford

Both as a congressman and now as governor of South Carolina, Mark Sanford has fought to reduce the size and scope of government and the tax burden on hardworking citizens. He made national headlines by refusing $700 million in federal stimulus money....

Uh, I seem to remember some other headlines the governor made.

A Teachable Moment

Lawrence O'Donnell's interview with a town hall protester provided one of the most revealing moments in this whole foofaraw. He gets at an essential truth: Most of the protesters and tea-partyers are responding to a generalized angst. Many of them, like the young woman being interviewed, are clueless about what's at stake. All they know are slogans.

Disarmingly, O'Donnell admits that Medicare and Social Security are "socialism." Gasp! We on the left need to remember that ideas we take for granted are completely alien to a large part of the populace. And too long we have left the task of educating people to economic and political reality undone, allowing people to fall into the hands of the Limbaughs and O'Reillys and Glenn Becks.

But the Dog's Not Blue

I don't know whether to laugh or cry at this.




On reflection, it seems to me a pretty apt metaphor for the way the Republicans have been training their followers.

I'm Back

Well, actually, I haven't been anywhere. Except Facebook, which is where I've been doing a lot of posting and commenting lately. But I've decided that here is where I belong, especially in this long hot summer of our discontent with one another. I'm talking about the health care "debate." (Irony quotes intended.)

The thing that seems most obvious to me is that the Republicans are terrified -- and rightly so. They're terrified that the Democrats might actually produce a health care bill that will work -- lower costs, increase coverage. And if they do that, the GOP game is over. People love the benefits -- Social Security, Medicare -- that the Dems provided them over fierce Repub opposition.

So we get lots of lies about "death panels" and mandatory sex-change operations and a lot of other hooey. Which leads to noisy mobs shouting down one another. Some of the people shouting at these town halls are shills -- planted there by well-funded groups opposed to any progressive legislation. But some of them are genuinely scared people, whom no amount of rational argument will assuage. I only hope when the shouting is over that those who inspired the shouting, who lied and distorted, will be exposed to the scorn they deserve.

Starting with Newt Gingrich.

And Chuck Grassley.

Dickishness

Can we get Jon Stewart the National Medal of Freedom or something?

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
Dick (Uncut)
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Monday Sundries

Random thoughts while waiting for the clothes to dry.

• The Republicans are all aloft about the Obamas' trip to New York for a dinner and a show. Why couldn't they have bought a show ranch and pretended to clear brush like regular people?
• It occurred to me that it has not been so long ago, certainly within my lifetime, that Barack and Michelle Obama would have been barred from even entering that restaurant.
• I have never knowingly voted for a Republican (although some of the Democrats I was forced to vote for back in Mississippi and Texas might as well have been), but dear lord, I'm beginning to feel sorry for them. How an a party led by Larry, Curly and Moe -- I mean, Newt, Rush and Karl ever get its act together?
• We have kittens -- although we call them the Usual Suspects -- and they have taken charge. Simon is the more inquisitive one, and because of his demonstrated interest in people food, he's the one we suspect of having eaten the crusts off of an unattended peanut butter sandwich yesterday and of having nibbled the pointy ends off of some yams that were out on the kitchen counter. But it may have been Nicky, who tries to conceal his mischief behind the mask of an aggressive affection, a motor-rumbling, face-nudging eagerness to be petted whenever the mood takes him. Maggie calls him a "cuddle slut."

Finding Baum

The following review appeared today in the Washington Post:

FINDING OZ: How L. Frank Baum Discovered the Great American Story

By Evan I. Schwartz

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 400 pp., $27.

Everybody loves the 1939 MGM Wizard of Oz, but for some aficionados of L. Frank Baum's works, the film that better captures the essence of Baum's vision is the 1985 Disney-produced Return to Oz. Directed by Oscar-winning sound and film editor Walter Murch, it was a critical and commercial flop, perhaps because it doesn't stint on the dark and scary. Any kid who was freaked out by the witch and the flying monkeys of the MGM movie will be traumatized by the genuine weirdness of the Disney version, which begins with Dorothy consigned to a mental hospital because she can't stop talking about this place she calls Oz.

The truth is, Baum's Oz was always a weird and scary place, but what Murch's film gets particularly right is the author's very American ambivalence toward technology. Production designer Norman Reynolds nails it brilliantly with some steampunk-inspired creations: on the one hand such late-Victorian horrors as the gruesome electroshock machine with which Dorothy is threatened in the hospital, and on the other the lovable mechanical man Tik-Tok. The film underscores what Evan I. Schwartz suggests in his new book on the life and times of L. Frank Baum, that the road to the Emerald City began in the White City: the lathe-and-plaster facades of the Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago, behind which such technological innovations as electric light, the phonograph and motion pictures mingled with carnival humbug. And that among the prototypes for Baum's Wizard of Oz were both the Wizard of Menlo Park, Thomas A. Edison, and the master of conning the suckers, P.T. Barnum.

Baum was 44 when he published the story that made him rich and famous. He had been a chicken farmer, an actor and playwright, a marketer of petroleum products, a shopkeeper, a newspaperman and a traveling salesman. He restlessly moved his family from Syracuse, New York, to the Dakota Territory, to Chicago and – after the success of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz – to the place where restless Americans usually wind up: California. And in all of these places he encountered things that would work their way out of his memories and into his fiction. As Schwartz says, “Things he had seen in his life and had filed away for some later use were now rushing back and coming out on scraps of paper,” from the yellow brick road that led to the military school he attended (and hated) as a boy, to the fragile porcelain dishes and figurines he lugged about in his suitcase as a salesman, the inspiration for the first Oz book's Dainty China Country.

Schwartz does a fine job of unearthing the origins of Oz, and of portraying Baum as very much a man of his times – the era of the vanishing frontier and the uneasy transition from Victorianism into modernity. Among the major influences Schwartz singles out is Baum's mother-in-law, Matilda Joslyn Gage, an ardent proponent of women's rights. Although Baum fathered four sons and no daughters, he gave his first Oz book a heroine, and the hero of his second Oz book, the boy Tip, turns out to be the princess Ozma, the victim of a sex-change spell. Matilda Gage was also a devotee of Theosophy, the belief system that Helena Petrovna Blavatsky synthesized out of elements of neo-Platonism, Buddhism and Hinduism. Baum was intrigued by Theosophy and by the teachings of Swami Vivekananda, who made a sensational appearance at the Columbian Exposition.

Schwartz observes that The Wonderful Wizard of Oz “is less a coming-of-age story ... and more a transformation-of-consciousness story. Like the Buddha, Dorothy attains enlightenment.” Still, he maybe lays it on a bit thick by describing Dorothy's travels as “a journey guided by Eastern philosophy” or suggesting that Oz exists on Theosophy's “Astral Plane”: “To embark on her journey, the girl would have her own samadhi moment, projecting herself through the eye of the cyclone into the mystical realm.” Schwartz is better at dealing with the physical world than the spiritual one, as was Baum: “Frank understood from the start that the entire premise was absurd, which is why he presented the goal of his main character with humor, the real lessons of the journey to be learned from encounters with comedic characters.”

Finding Oz is underpinned by solid research, although there are times when Schwartz's sleuthing into the things Baum “had filed away for some later use” leads him into some strained conclusions. For example, he posits some kind of imaginative link between the field of lethal red poppies Dorothy encounters on the way to the Emerald City and the killing fields of Little Big Horn and Wounded Knee. And perhaps his assessment of Baum's achievement is a shade on the hyperbolic side: “Certainly no one on any list of American luminaries has ignited the imagination of the world quite like L. Frank Baum.”

If we put Baum in the company of such “luminaries” as Washington and Lincoln, Edison and the Wright Brothers and Henry Ford, Mark Twain and Walt Disney, he may not seem like as much a standout as Schwartz thinks. But the fact remains that, 109 years later, Oz continues to inspire sequels and prequels on page and stage, and the traces of Baum's fantasy can be discerned in everything from the Star Wars movies to the Harry Potter books. As Schwartz's book informs us, Baum's strange and essential gift was to see the outlines of myth within the machinery of the modern world.