It's About Time

I don't usually count on Time magazine (which we get because someone once gave us a gift subscription) for anything but conventional wisdom skewed to the right. But this short review of T.R. Reid's book about American health care put in a very few words what's wrong with it, and why reform is so damn essential. Boldface is mine:

The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care By T.R. Reid; Penguin; 288 pages

The U.S. health-care system is in a remedial class by itself. In no other industrialized country do 20,000 people die each year because they can't afford to see a doctor; nowhere else do 700,000 a year go bankrupt because of their medical bills. When it comes to health-care policy, an economist tells T.R. Reid, the U.S. is the "bogeyman of the world." The question Reid poses, however, isn't, What are we doing wrong? It's, What are other countries doing right--and how can the U.S. learn from them? A Washington Post correspondent with a nagging shoulder injury from his Navy days, Reid traveled the world to see how other countries' health-care systems would treat him. From Germany to Canada to Taiwan, he finds several different models for success, all with one thing in common.

When considering whether a government has a moral obligation to provide access to health care for all its citizens, Reid notes, "every developed country except the United States has reached the same conclusion."

What I'm Reading

Notes on The House of Mirth, Book One, Chapters I-IX.

Such an elegant setup in the first chapter: the introduction of Lily Bart and Lawrence Selden, the neatly handled exposition, and the seemingly incidental detail of the charwoman on the stairs. Maybe naming Selden's residence "the Benedick" is a shade heavy-handed -- that she is Beatrice to his Benedick is obvious on its own.

The point-of-view shift at chapter's end, from Selden to Lily, has an abruptness that might get a reprimand from a creative writing teacher. But we need Selden's awareness of Lily's skill at creating an image -- that both her discretions and her imprudences "were part of the same carefully-elaborated plan"; that her hair may have been "ever so slightly brightened by art"; that "she must have cost a great deal to make"; that "a fine glaze of beauty and fastidiousness had been applied to vulgar clay" -- to set up her regret that "one could never do a natural thing without having to screen it behind a structure of artifice." For Lily can't "do a natural thing" -- it is forbidden to her by the society in which she lives, the more so because of her lack of money.

The depth with which we enter both Selden's and Lily's consciousnesses also serves to highlight the shallowness of the other characters, such as Percy Gryce -- the superrich and ineffably dull collector of Americana on whom Lily decides to take "the bare chance that he might ultimately decide to do her the honour of boring her for life" -- and his mother, "a monumental woman with the voice of a pulpit orator and a mind preoccupied with the iniquities of her servants." Wharton's epigrammatic descriptions of her characters are brilliant: Mrs. Dorset is "like a disembodied spirit who took up a great deal of room." "Mrs. Peniston thought the country lonely and trees damp, and cherished a vague fear of meeting a bull."

"Misfortune," Wharton tells us, "had made Lily supple instead of hardening her, and a pliable substance is less easy to break than a stiff one." But it has also made her self-centered, a rebel without a cause other than her own, who "had never been able to understand the laws of a universe which was so ready to leave her out of its calculations." She is forced to put her trust in the one thing she believes she can rely on: "Her beauty itself was not the mere ephemeral possession it might have been in the hands of inexperience: her skill in enhancing it, the care she took of it, the use she made of it, seemed to give it a kind of permanence. She felt she could trust it to carry her through to the end." But as all of Western literature has drummed into us, beauty is not to be trusted.

It doesn't help that "poor Lily, for all the hard glaze of her exterior" -- there's that word "glaze" again -- "was inwardly as malleable as wax." Her problem lies in whether she will allow the right person to take advantage of that malleability. As she tells Selden, when she re-encounters him at Bellomont, "the people who find fault with society are too apt to regard it as an end and not a means, just as the people who despise money speak as if its only use were to be kept in bags and gloated over[.] Isn't it fairer to look at them both as opportunities, which may be used either stupidly or intelligently, according to the capacity of the user?" The trouble is that Lily doesn't use either society or money with great intelligence.

Lily is almost immediately punished for her decision to forgo church -- and therewith Percy Gryce -- and to enter into a conversation with Selden that turns into a beautiful Beatrice-and-Benedick duel of wit and emotional brinksmanship. And in her need for money, she makes an uninformed decision to trust Mr. Trenor, for which the punishment is likely to be even greater. She mistrusts Selden "because his presence always had the effect of cheapening her aspirations, of throwing her whole world out of focus," when that's precisely what needs to happen. For her aspirations are cheap: "She could not figure herself as anywhere but in a drawing-room, diffusing elegance as a flower sheds perfume."

Reasons to Be Scared

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It occurs to me, watching this exchange between Rachel Maddow and Frank Rich, that a lot of you whippersnappers are too young to remember what it was like before the Kennedy assassination. Rich himself alerted me to this in the clip, when he talks about how he sort of recalls the political climate in which the assassination took place.

Well, I remember it clearly, and a lot of the right-wing gabble of today reminds me of it -- chillingly. Kennedy's death turned him into a hero, and neutralized all of the vitriol. But when he was killed in Dallas, I wasn't surprised, because I knew what Dallas -- and the South in which I grew up -- was like in the early '60s. Visceral hatred of Kennedy was widespread -- irrational hatred, to be sure, given that Kennedy was a moderate, even center-right politician. In fact, the things that are said in public about Obama are mild, compared to some of the things that were said about Kennedy.

But there's another element that has changed: In the early '60s, the Republican party had a substantial and lively complement of moderates like Jacob Javits and Nelson Rockefeller. And the Democrats included fire-breathing right-wingers like James Eastland, Orval Faubus and George Wallace. In short, the political parties were less polarized than they are now. All of that would change after Kennedy's death and especially after the passage of the landmark civil rights legislation -- with some support from Republicans. In other words, bipartisanship was possible then. I don't think it is now.

So I'm scared, deeply scared by the tumult and shouting. And by the fact that no one in the Republican party has the courage and the conscience to try to put a damper on it. Those who do, after all, get mocked and smeared by talk radio and Fox News. These times remind me of the times of my youth. And that's not a good thing.

What I'm Reading

I've never read Edith Wharton. Not even that bane of high school English students, Ethan Frome. I saw and admired Martin Scorsese's version of The Age of Innocence, but that's about the extent of my Whartonizing. So I took down the old volume of The House of Mirth that's been yellowing on my shelves lo these many years. (Don't know where or when I got it. Maybe in graduate school, when I figured I needed to read something by her.)

Lately, I've been "doing" American lit. Twain, as you know, if you've been following these posts. And before that Henry James's The American -- one of those early James novels that true Jamesians regard almost as juvenilia. (I've never been much of a Jamesian. I foundered in my attempt to get through The Wings of the Dove.)

One reason for my current immersion in Am Lit is my lately heightened awareness of the ongoing oddness of America's relationship with the rest of the world, as well as the current squealing on the right about the loss of "the America I knew," as some of the participants in the town halls have put it. No profound insights into that as yet.

Ch-ch-ch-changes

A rather amazing morph job of movie stars from Fairbanks (I think) to Clooney. I put my IDs in the comments. If anyone can identify my gaps, please do so.

What I'm Reading

The desire for the actual, the unmediated experience drives Twain in his travels. He never achieves it, of course, always finding his experience forced through the sieve of reputation. When it comes to art and architecture and landscape, he sometimes resorts to irony and mockery to sweep away allegations of grandeur and greatness. He is thwarted in his accounts of traveling in the "Holy Land" by a reluctance to mock the pious, and yet we can usually sense his impatience with superstition in his sly treatment of the ubiquitous venerated relics, the duplicitous guides and guidebooks, and the rock-chipping avidity of souvenir hunters. Here he sums up his own awareness of the difficulty of writing the truth:

It is easy for book-makers to say "I thought so and so as I looked upon such and such a scene" -- when the truth is, they thought all those fine things afterwards. One's first thought is not likely to be strictly accurate, yet it is no crime to think it and none to write it down, subject to modification by later experience.

One pious cliché of travelers particularly draws his fire:

The commonest sagacity warns me that I ought to tell the customary pleasant lie, and say I tore myself reluctantly away from every noted place in Palestine. Every body tells that, but with as little ostentation as I may, I doubt the word of every he who tells it. ... It does not stand to reason that men are reluctant to leave places where the very life is almost badgered out of them by importunate swarms of beggars and peddlers who hang in strings to one's sleeves and coat-tails and shriek and shout in his ears and horrify his vision with the ghastly sores and malformations they exhibit. One is glad to get away. ... We do not think, in the holy places; we think in bed, afterwards, when the glare, and the noise, and the confusion are gone, and in fancy we revisit alone, the solemn monuments of the past, and summon the phantom pageants of an age that has passed away.

Strung Out

I don't really understand this, but I sort of see where it's going.

Thoughts While Waiting for the Kettle to Boil

We call it "dog food" and "cat food." So why do we call it "chicken feed"?

The Strange Death (Maybe) of Health Care Reform

Rachel Maddow and Matt Taibbi on what went wrong:

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Thoughts While Waiting for the Toast to Pop Up

Do cats count?

I mean, yes, they matter. (At least in our household.) But do they, you know, enumerate?

It occurred to me to wonder this morning which was the primary human achievement: mathematics or language? As a word person I of course give the top spot to language. But then it occurred to me that both numbers and words are abstractions from experience. The capability to do that -- to turn what we see and do into words or numbers -- was a great evolutionary leap forward.

But cats speak. They use sounds to say I'm hungry, or Get away, or That's mine, or Keep rubbing that spot, 'k? Thanks. They express themselves on issues of the quality of life. But do they concern themselves with matters of quantity?

It does occur to me that cats do some pretty sophisticated calculations -- distance, trajectory, momentum -- to enable them to leap from the back of the chair to the top of the china cabinet. (I once had a cross-eyed cat who would make those calculations and then miss the mark, often with disastrous results to the curtains but never to the cat himself. But even he eventually learned the flaws in the data and adjusted the variables accordingly.) But are there other examples of feline numeracy?