tales of copper city

Happy Mother's Day, Carole

I suppose that there's a "niche" Mother's Day card for step-mothers, but instead I want to simply acknowledge that my, Carole my wife of 46 years, is a Mother, a Step-Mother to our daughter Valerie.  

I remember the first time that Valerie and Carole met; Val was 7 and she had come to North Carolina for a Christmas visit, her first.  She got off the plane wearing an wonderfully colorful outfit and when she entered the old, and small, Raleigh-Durham airport in 1972, I could see her cut her eyes over to the woman standing next to me.  She was darling (and I made a joke about her outfit befitting the Italian Water Polo team, which really went over big.)  Over the years Val has shared our life in North Carolina, Washington, D.C., New York, and Arizona. 

Being a Mom isn't easy, and that's true for step-Moms too.  But Carole and Val have made it work beautifully.  In the early years we became accustomed to Val suddenly wanting to go home, a week or so early, during her summer visit, and one year she enrolled in a Friends School in Durham only to cut that short half-way through. But we learned to roll with the punches and over time, I think Carole's kindness and her thoughtfulness  has changed both of their lives.

A story about acceptance and serenity

I write about the Serenity Prayer from time to time and still the idea nags at me, and there's one feature about the concept that I think we in recovery can get wrong, and sometimes do.

The original version of the Serenity Prayer, written by Reinhold Niebuhr as a sermon footnote, included the following words: "the courage to change the things that should be changed."

Bisbee makes Huffington Post

"Tiny, Bohemian" Bisbee, Civil Unions, our friends Councilor Gene Conners, Mayor Adrianna Badal, and brilliant artist Gretchen Baer all made Huffington Post today. What a difference gay marriage or civil unions have made for all of us. 

Life in the contingent (funky) dimension

I once wanted to write a short story about a man who moved to a town like Bisbee and bought a blue house. In the story, the man didn't truly understand why he came to that town and bought such a colorful house. He only knew that the life that was now behind him, a life of striving, was finished. What he wants now is a life lived differently. While the man cannot live his life over, he can at least live the rest of his life, long or short, awakening his heart to another world. I didn't know how the story would end, but I knew what I wanted to name it: "The Blue House."

I never finished the story but I knew it was important. And then I saw a painting in a gallery in Jerome, AZ titled, "The Blue House." The house was on the side of a mountain, like so many in Bisbee. And the gallery itself looked out over the vast valley that lay stretched out below another town that housed a Phelps Dodge mine. Seeing the picture began to open me up to the mysteries of the story and why I wanted to write it.

"My Darling Clementine"

A  few days back we watched "My Darling Clementine," with Peter Fonda, Ward Bond, Linda Darnell, Walter Brennan, and others, a 1946 movie by John Ford, in black and white. This is a superb movie, so much better than "The Gunfight at O.K. Corral."  The latter has long been a favorite of mine; I've never seen "Silverado" which is another version of the same movie.  But Ford's 1946 classic captures the eerie, scary emptiness of the West, and Peter Fonda's straight and solemn acting was perfect. I still like the Lancaster/Kirk Douglas movie, which is far better known to the American public, but in my view, the Ford movie surpasses it.  

The introductory dissertation on the history of the black and white film, and how it was mishandled and how John Ford left near the end, helps us understand how important it is to preserve these original classics.

One complaint about the Ford version: they use the Monument Valley backdrop to frame Tombstone and "The Gun Fight at O.K. Corral" seems a lot more like the Chiricahuas, the Huachucas, and the Dragoons that frame the town..

Both are great movies but "My Darling Clementine" reveals the virtures of stark simplicity. Victor Mature plays Doc Holliday in the 1946 movie and if you can forget all those movies of him with his shirt off; Mature's "Doc Holiday" works. The concluding scenes of Fonda dancing with Clementine in a community square dance celebrating the building of a church, was a perfect finish.

Both movies rebuke the stock westerns that are essentially "shoot-em-ups"; the West was a scary dangerous place.

Praying on empty

One of the best ways to understand the relationship we call praying is to understand the relationship the Bible calls ‘waiting for God.’ Waiting for God is a very important idea in the Bible, in both the Old and New Testament.

Psalm 62, “For God alone my soul waits in silence,” captures biblical waiting perfectly.

We moderns wait differently. Waiting for us exacts a grudging patience, a waiting for something that we don’t have but should have if only things would go our way. We wait at the mailbox, we wait for a raise, or we wait for traffic to clear. We wait for what we "know" we need,  for what we "know" we deserve.

But waiting in the Bible, like all true prayer, is about the transforming power of not having, of not possessing God. If when we pray to the God we do not possess or do not have, if we do not make the God of our hope and our faith into another idol or another possession, we are strangely empowered and transformed, we are given life anew by a God who waits for us.

This is praying for a life of surprise, of meeting ourselves again for the first time, a prayer for the new creation. This is praying on empty.

When we are emptied of all pretensions of having or controlling the God to whom we pray, to the God whom we do not possess, we are filled with the promise of life itself, life together, life in community: “Thy Kingdom come.”

Then we may pray the Lord’s Prayer for our time and place, the prayer for our life together and a health that is deeper than death.

 Our Father,

Giver of life renewed,

Word among us,

Your work be done,

Your New Creation fulfilled.

Give us your bread.

Have us accept,

As we have been accepted.

Save us from death’s dominion.

Your kingdom forever.

One more time: The Silence of God

From time to time I write about James Carse's book, The Silence of God, as a modern spiritual classic.  Carse offers a powerful argument that God's silence is a kind of presence that is waiting for us to speak and act. Here is still another way of looking at Carse's ideas.

Back to Sweden

I'm reading Henning Mankell again, this time his novel, The Troubled Man. The novel features Wallander, who tracks a former high navy officer who mysteriously disappeared, and his wife was found dead, and murder is suspected. The question is, was this naval officer an agent for the U.S.S.R.? Was his wife? Shades of the Wennerstrom affair... 

The blurb in Amazon sets out the plot:

A retired navy officer has vanished in a forest near Stockholm. Kurt Wallander is prepared to stay out of the relatively straightforward investigation—which is, after all, another detective’s responsibility—but the missing man is his daughter’s father-in-law.

The Serenity Prayer and Bisbee, one more time

Given that I last wrote about "serenity" and "acceptance" as' being in the world differently,' I thought I might provide the link to an earlier post recounting the rather astonishing connection between labor history in Bisbee, the famous Deportation Strike of 1917, and the Serenity Prayer.

Serenity is being in the world differently

The post originally appeared in 2009; I think it might be a good way for me to start again thinking about serenity and acceptance.

What is serenity?  We talked about this last night at a meeting. Most agreed that serenity, and not just stopping drinking, is the truest goal of the program.

But what do we mean by serenity?  An absence of strife, conflict?  A placid demeanor?  Equanimity, as the Buddhists put it, a calmness in stormy seas?

Then, one person at the small table in the Episcopal Fellowship Hall where we meet said something that stopped me:

"Serenity,' he said, "is being in the world differently." He did not say that serenity is something like rolling with the punches of the world, or enduring people who are, generally speaking, enormous pains in the ass, including ourselves.

He said simply, "Serenity is being in the world differently."

What the GOP values: the rich, the very rich, and the super rich

Read this scary article by Kevin Drum on the stumbling blocks to agreement on avoiding going over the fiscal cliff.  Apparently, the GOP has dug in against raising taxes against the rich, the very rich and the super rich.  Drum has the details.

How can a political party favor groups that are barely noticeable statistically, pandering to their desire to avoid paying more in taxes in a time when we risk slipping back into recession?

I am writing now in a new blog, titled, "Hidden in Plain Sight."  The point of the blog is to bring to light the number of times a political party or a political group "values" the needs of tiny minorities in our electorate while also threatening the well-being of the majority or indeed the whole economy.  The maneuver or dodge or slight-of-hand is conducted in plain sight but still remains hidden and hard to see because the media refuses to call them on their maneuver, or the the public can't grasp how their well-being is disregarded to shower favors down on the super rich.

In the case of the "fiscal cliff" the hangup is not over macro-economic or budgetary policy but rather the refusal of the GOP to raise taxes on a tiny minority of the rich, the very rich, and the super rich.  And when the President called them out on this, the GOP bitterly complained that he was being confrontational in a tense budgetary situation. 

Again, the truth in politics is not hard to see even if it's in front of our nose; we can't see it until the media learns what the actual negotiating snags are and then puts that truth in front of the public's eyes.

"What Obama Must Do About Guns." David Remnick

There is an excellent article in the current New Yorker by David Remnick, "What Obama Must Do About Guns."  The article doesn't include a list of policy proposals.  Instead it points to the reality that despite the fact that gun ownership is declining, mass killings have proliferated and there wasn't any effort to renew the ban on assault weapons allowed to lapse during the administration of George Bush.

How public health "thinks"

Public health is all about preventing loss, not assigning blame, and this distinction is almost always lost in our politics. We need to know more about the young man in CT, but we really need to know more about how to set up reasonable controls over lethal weapons.

I am teaching my last class on public health policy this coming spring and I decided to point to two older posts of mine on public health that still seem relevant today:  one is what makes public health "public," and the second is on the drug-related violence in Mexico that has many of its most dangerous roots here in the U.S. with our ridiculously-easy access to guns and our enormous appetite for drugs, especially marijuana.

Garry Wills on guns

I always read what Garry Wills has to say about politics and political culture, and his recent post on guns in the New York Review of Books, "Our Moloch," is perfect. 

Please! Enough with the praying!

The tragedy in Connecticutt is unspeakable. Locally, here as elsewhere, people are gathering in churches, to pray together. As expressions of community and solidarity, this is understandable. 

But for Pete's sake! Prayers will not help reduce gun violence, not one bit. We need tougher gun laws, law lowering the per capita level of gun ownership in this country, if we are to reduce our rates of gun violence.  Gun-related violence is a huge public health problem, like drugs, or smoking, or HIV. Let's stop kidding ourselves by endlessly repeating the "story" of what happened in Connecticutt. The story is not the point; the levels of gun ownership, legal gun ownership, in this country are off the charts. Read Lisa Belkin's sober statistics in The Huffington Post. We need less stories, less media feeding frenzy, and more serious attention to lowering the levels of gun ownership, per capita. 

William Saroyan

One favorite author of mine that I haven't written about is William Saroyan. I think I first started reading him while spending a year at the Army Language School in Monterey, California, from 1957-1958. It could have been earlier, in high school. The only book that I have of his now is Razzle Dazzle, a collection of plays, short essays, and prefaces, published in 1942. I treasure it.

To me, Saroyan, more than most writers, exuded a love of everyday life, the "dailiness" of life. To me, Saroyan's plays, novels, and stories exuded vitality and joy. His plays were sometimes produced on the television show Omnibus, that ran in the late 1950s. 

He was Armenian and I wonder if Armenians, as ultimate survivors, can write about life with a kind of unseriousness that comes with living one day at a time. Many critics dismissed Saroyan for his unseriousness and his casual, off-the-cuff writing style. Hemingway was stung when Saroyan criticised his book on bullfighting and immediately dismissed Saroyan out of hand.

But Saroyan was serious about his "unseriousness." I think Saroyan would have loved Bisbee, and its large streak of unseriousness.  

Paul Krugman and the GOP's dead end politics

In one acidly accurate column Paul Krugman unmasks the "existential crisis" of the modern GOP, as well as the peril this poses to our politics for the coming years. When someone smart looks beyond the headlines, and opens our eyes to political reality, it's truly painful.

"We're Not All in this Together."

Paul Krugman makes the painful point that the class war aspect of our politics was part of the 2012 victory, and also part of the current debate over the Fiscal Cliff. Leave it to our leading economist to wake us up to the reality of class in America.

I think this is also something that all interested in public health might remember; values matter, and while public health stresses the health of the community, this does not mean that we're all in this together, in the struggle to improve the nation's sorry standing among other democracies.

The paradox of public health is a double one: the health of all of us together depends on improving the health of the least of us, the health of the poor and the lower middle class. The double paradox is that by increasing their health, the health of those who are better off within the income ladder improves also, but somewhat less dramatically.

"How Long, Oh Lord?"

And speaking of "How Long, Oh Lord?" Truthout reports that the FCC is likely to grant Newcorp, the Murdoch news empire, an okay to purchase two more powerful news outlets, the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune.  The existing rules do not permit ownership in more than one media market, but apparently, the chairman of the FCC is quietly planning to scrap those rules.

Truthout again reminds us that the tendencies toward monopoly still dominate our economy and, worse, our national media.  If this is permitted, Newscorp, who now owns The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, and Fox News, will own The Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune.

Every time I feel like we Americans of moderate to liberal persuasion can start to breathe easier as a result of electoral victories, the forces for monopoly strike again. If Obama can't or won't stop this move, and if the rule is allowed to stand, this can be a truly, truly sad day for the American democracy,.

Newscorp probably already has a legal strategy planned that permits the purchase of these additional newspapers to go forward, even if the Obama administration stops this move, and to let the Supreme Court clean up the mess. And the present Supreme Court contains a majority who approved Citizens United.

"Lincoln" as powerful democratic drama

Speilberg's "Lincoln" is the best movie I've seen on Lincoln (there haven't been that many, at least recently), and on democratic politics when it struggles to a powerful result. Daniel Day Lewis "inhabits" Lincoln as Geoffrey O'Brien argues in the New York Review of Books, and Tommy Lee Jones as Representative Thaddeus Stevens, the Radical Republican member of the House of Representatives from Pennsylvania is equally powerful. Far more than powerful cinema, it is film that captures a pivotal moment when the Civil War was coming to an end, a time when Lincoln and his allies pushed the House of Representatives to embrace the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, forever abolishing slavery and involuntary servitude. (The Senate had passed the proposed Constitutional Amendment the year before.)

And yet, the "involuntary servitude" of the African Americans continued in a new form, in horrendous working conditions and later in Jim Crow laws, and these laws continued up to the days of Lyndon Johnson, and the Voting Rights Act, and, in a new form, to our time, with mass incarceration of young black men.

The party of Lincoln, the GOP, beginning in the second Nixon Administration switched its headquarters to Dixie. They were following the advice of Kevin Philips, pursuing an electoral majority with the 'solid South' and the Midwest and Plains states.

Racial politics defined my gowing up years and it has "inhabited" my very view of American politics.

We can't seem to put racial politics behind us.

Lincoln was our greatest President but the drama of race and politics is still with us, and powerfully shapes the GOP today.

 How long, Oh Lord?

And, for those who, like my wife and me, cannot stop watching reruns of "NYPD Blue," there is a charming surprise awaiting at the very end of "Lincoln."

Gun sales are up after re-election of President Obama

My brother mentioned this Fort Worth Star Telegram article on the increase in gun sales after President Obama's re-election.  Apparently, among the gun-rights community there is a mortal fear that the President is going to clamp down on "gun rights."   Why is it that there is such a paranoid fear of a moderately-liberal president of the oldest democracy in the world?  Someone once said that resentment against elites is the glue of all politics, but generally that resentment is somewhat broader than the rght to own and keep guns.  And so people are buying up guns, stockpiling them against the coming clampdown.  Yikes!

Romney and the GOP– the Fools on the Hill

This column  in Truthout is harsh but so true and so accurate. This election is not just important for the victory itself, but for the future it portends and for the past it rejects. The column lays it out: Women are coming into their own and into power in the Senate and in Washington. There is no future for the GOP, the party of White People. And the Dems had better wake up also. And Katie Ellis in Huffington Post makes the same point. And especially thanks to Joni Dean, a doctoral student in our small Advanced Public Health Policy Analysis course (CPH 617) who woke me up to the broader import of Tuesday's election.

Obama

Okay, this guy pretty much says it all for me, too:

George McGovern, American hero

I was standing outside of the basement of a small, Lutheran church, just behind the U.S. Supreme Court and across the street from the Folger Library. It was late spring, warming up, and a couple of members of the local recovery group were talking, smoking.  Along came a face I recognized, Gary Hart, the rapidly ascending young man who headed up Senator George McGovern's campaign for the Democratic nomination. It was 1972. The Vietnam War was raging and Richard Nixon was running for a second term.

As he walked by, I said, "Way to go!" and Hart smiled.  Someone asked, "Who was that?"  And I said, "Gary Hart, Senator McGovern's campaign manager."  The group was silent.  I knew that only one or two in the meeting were excited by the Senator's run for the presidency. I was thrilled.  And I knew we might lose but we had to try.

We did lose, big-time. And by the time the summer was over I had accepted a position at the University of North Carolina's fine School of Public Health, in Chapel Hill, and my career in public health began. I would never have predicted the direction our life together would take. But McGovern told the nation that unless we ended the calamity in Southeast Asia we were in deep trouble. And of course he was right, dead right, as he was about so many, many things.

McGovern was a liberal as was FDR and Truman and Kennedy and long before Woodrow Wilson, and it was and still is liberalism that represents hope for this nation.

I just watched Andrea Mitchell and the "News from Nowhere"

I just watched Andrea Mitchell of MSNBC news working over the White House Press Director for not agreeing to the media's assessment of the President's performance last night, as a turning point in the GOP's favor. The President was off his game but the media now want to restart the whole race, to talk endlessly about his tired, listless performance, and to make themselves, once again, the center of the everything. The press drives me absolutely crazy as they endlessly perpetuate, "The News from Nowhere." To analysts like Mitchell, politics is little more than media performance; issues, policies, results....that's just too boring and it take them out of their role as the Masters of the Universe. Any time a Dem tried to defend what the President did, she rolled her eyes. The President' performance was a disappointment but politics is about far, far more than theatrics and performance.

Was that a debate?

Jim Lehrer was terrible, and the President allowed himself to be pushed around. I doubt that the election will turn on the debates but the President lost this round. He hesitated in every sentence, he acted "professorial" when debate in presidential politics is a lot closer to wrestling and boxing than to making thoughtful, pause-filled responses.

Do people know our story?

Am I wrong but don't most of us think of our life as a "story"?  Don't most of us think that if we could tell our story in an interesting way for others, they would be amazed or at least surprised? If people knew the whole deal, how much we went through, how far we fell and how far we climbed back, wouldn't they be taken aback just a little?  Don't most of us think this way?  

Then, if I'm right that one of the biggest needs for all of us is somehow to tell our story, and if that's the case, isn't it sad how little opportunity there is to do just that? Wouldn't it be better if we were to tell the story, bit by bit, to at least someone, hoping that they are listening?

Or is it that we are always trying to tell our story, trying to slip it in, here and there, and we never stop trying?

Back to Bisbee and the Safeway

Today was flu shots for Carole and me, at Safeway. Safeway is a community center, and not just a fine grocery store.  I worked in grocery stores growing up, for most of my high school years, until my senior year and I worked for JC Penney.  Outside of family, most of what I know I learned working in those two places, every bit as much as my high school, which was one of the best in the state of Texas, and yes, that is saying something.  

Standing there, sitting there (a couple our age got up and gave us a seat!) and I smiled at a lot of people who I knew from my time as mayor.

That's the election

Romney's appalling comments about the half of the American public who's dependent on government and therefore will vote for Obama ends this presidential campaign, as far as I can see.  It's in such a moment's unveiling of an appaling ignorance that a candidate is stripped bare, and from this moment on, he will be responding to, defending and most likely screwing up, even more, his one moment of enduring stupidity.  

Romney never was fit to be president, and that's a different thing than people voting against him. Now millions know that the only reason they will vote for him is that he is is their party's standard bearer and they are going to lose because of his unbridled tongue and his stone cold hard and empty heart. 

Has it never occurred to him that nothing in his entire life was truly earned but was given to him by his wealthy family, refugees from northern Chihuahua who had to flee Utah because of their polygamy?  

I don't think most Mormons think like this; and whether too many Mormons think this way is another question. The press has done another miserable job of providing the needed background for the public to make an informed judgement.

Thanks to Romney's slow-wittedness, we have most certainly dodged a very dangerous candidate. Think what this man was likely to have done in the Middle East.

 

 

Sweden and crime novelists

My timing's is awful but suddenly, I'm dead weary of politics, national politics. Rather than writing about how this has happened, I want to write about something entirely different: mysteries, my favorite mystery or crime writers. I probably should begin with Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep, or with Ross MacDonald and his Lew Archer series and The Goodbye Look. Or more recently Michael Connelly and his detective Harry Bosch series set in Los Angeles. After all, I began my working life after college in Los Angeles.

I love those books and many others like it, but I choose to start with Sweden and with Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo's Martin Beck series, which, along with Henning Mankell's Wallander series, are the very best kind of mystery fiction. And I am fully aware that others have other lists, but this is mine.

My very first encounter with the Swedish couple's series was with Roseanna, their first novel of the 10 book series. Roseana opened a whole new world for me, a world in which I glimpsed the lives of others, their professional lives, their social problems, and how their national homicide police worked together. And I was captivated.

The politics of resentment versus the politics of hope and social justice

Yes, I watched the president's speech, and yes, it was a fine speech; Obama doesn't do bad speeches. And so were Joe Biden's, and Bill Clinton's speeches. Especially, Bill Clinton's speech. But there is a problem, one that will likely be seen as "liberal perfectionism" or the tendency to reject the very good by comparing it to a perfect standard. I'm not into that, as the picture that follows will surely reveal. As we were watching, I was also celebrating my 75th birthday.

Carole and I listened to the speech, and she took a pic with my new iPhone to send to my brother Steve, who is also a huge Obama fan. I sat and watched the speech with my "Health Reform is Still a BFD," T-shirt. And Obamacare is a BFD.

No, Obama didn't blow it!Part III. The New New Deal

As the best answer to the question, "Did Obama blow it?" read this important, vital book by Michael Grunwald, The New New Deal: The Hidden Story of Change in the Obama Era.  I'm embarrassed to say that I had no idea of the scope and scale of change introduced by what we charmingly have called the "Stimulus Bill" Never have so many talked about a piece of legislation with so little insight as to what it really actually contained, and I admit I'm one of those who thought of the legislation as just public spending to stimulate the economy.  It was far, far more than that and Grunwald's book tells the story.

The first chapter of Grunwald's book contains one of the most eye-opening, thrilling stories of change going on behind the scenes that I have read in a very long time.

Yes, we have a long way to go with the economy and we know that the Republicans will try as hard as they can to keep our economy in the ditch with their Stone-Age economics.

But before they could stop things, we created some remarkable new programs and agencies that will transform our energy future, if only we can hold onto the White House.

Buy this book!

 

Did Obama blow it? Part II

The other question often raised about Obama is the Stimulus Bill, roundly criticized as "too little" for the job. But Robert Grunwald has a very different take on this piece of legislation. His Foreign Policy piece should reassure liberals and moderates that this was an imaginative and bold piece of legislation that years from now will rank with Obamacare as a masterful achievement.  

To be sure, the recession is still with us, and the reason is simple: Keynsian economics and stimulus spending is deeply distrusted by the GOP and parts of the Democratic Party whose concept of economics is, when the going gets tough, cut government spending.

God help us. 

Did Obama blow it?

Sam Stein and Ryan Grim of Huffington Post argue that President Obama promised big things but then he "blew it."  He never tried to sell ideas outside the Washington D.C. consensus. They compare Obama to LBJ and his Great Society triumphs, where the latter transformed the scope of the national government. I think the critics are a little right and a lot wrong.

They are right in that the President in bargaining for the passage of what became Obamacare seemed to abandon positions that were not all that radical, like the "public option" for health insurance.  Instead he went for a version of reform that more closely resembles Romneycare in Massachusetts. 

I think that's true but I'm not sure that this was an Obama mistake.  The issue is whether digging in one's heels for the public option would have really mattered in the long run.  The goal, after all is to get all Americans or nearly all American in a health insurance scheme, and then work to persuade the public that the scheme would be cheaper all the way around if we simply and incrementally went to Medicare for all.  I think that if Obama had fought too hard and too long for the public option he might have lost, altogether.  Please notice the public reaction against Obamacare, still a 50-50 split.  In my view this is less a "thumbs down" signal and more a "in reform that big they will blow it."  Obama, our first black president, played inside the achievable consensus of Washington.

Obama didn't try to move the center; he tried to create the center from which to further reform the system. That's was his choice and I'm not sure I would have made a different one.

The critical votes were always held by the "blue Dog" Dems who are always threatening to bolt; Obama treated them with political respect.  LBJ didn't have to deal with them on the Great Society, not after his unprecedented landslife. Johnson did have to deal with the conservative Dems and Republicans when it came to the war in Vietnam.  It was there he had a chance to seal the deal for the Great Society by beginning to withdraw from Vietnam. LBJ had a bigger window of political discretion than almost any president since FDR in 1936.  LBJ squandered it when it came to Vietnam.  He had the discretion to scale back the war and he, sadly, escalated. At least that's the way I see it.

"The Crackpot Caucus"

Timothy Egan's column, "The Crackpot Caucus" should be read by every voter in America.  It won't be, of course. It's in the New York Times.  And it's in an opinion column rather than featured as hard-core news.  The media is the "unidentified co-conspirator" in the swing to a more conservative democracy over the past decades. The media doesn't have the guts to run this story often enough to finally sink it; we are becoming the laughing stock of the modern world.  Some of us think that's okay. Many of us think is tragic and sad. But the great mass of the American voters simply are uninformed, both as to what is going on in our politics, and where it is headed and what it is costing us in meeting the needs of all the American people.

Goodbye Gladwell?

I have just read a rather startling expose by Yasha Levine of the work of Malcolm Gladwell, the New Yorker writer who writes so well, notably with The Tipping Point, and as it may turn out, writes to schill for the powerful health insurance lobby. Levine's article is published at TruthOut, and it may be the beginning of the end of Gladwell as one of our leading social critics. 

Why is public health "public" ?

Why is public health "public"? What is "public" about public health?

I have written about this question since I first entered the field. Generally we think of "public" health as that domain of health that is "organized" and "collective"—what we do together, as a community. And too often we regard "public" as somehow cleaning up a "failure"; a market failure or individual failures. The assumption is that private or market effort is the norm; public or what we do together is serve as something of a cleanup crew.  

This way of thinking about "public" is devastating to our sense of ourselves as a democracy.

The central idea of public health—that hazards to our health together should be made public, and regulated and controlled in reasonable ways, from handguns, tobacco, to safer highways and automobiles, to food safety, and to workplace safety—should become a national priority and policy. 

Public health is "public" to honor our work together to constantly seek to assure those conditions in which people can be healthy, all that we do and think and publicly value and create for ourselves as a people, as a political community. This is making public as in res publica, creating a public thing. "Public health" is to honor our health together as a public thing, a value that we create by advocating for societal changes in how we work together and share together so that we may be healthy together. 

Vulture capitalist President!

In an article in Truthout!, Mitt Romney's connections to Bain are placed in the proper context: Vulture Capitalism. Buy troubled companies, fire workers, get rid of non-profitable zones, and restart, and then sell.  This is vulture capitalism, and Romney has gotten away with his refusal to allow a closer look at how he got rich, and why he never has really left Bain Capital.

Emerson rules!

We spent the weekend with three friends, Steve, Elizabeth and Emerson Kizer.  We had a terrific time visiting, sight seeing Bisbee, and generally following Emerson from A to B. Emerson is 2 and 1/2 going on 10.  Come back soon, Emerson, and Elizabeth, and Steve.

 

 

Because he gets away with it

Rachel Maddow did a segment tonight on how Mitt Romney, when running for Governor of Massachusetts, said one thing and did another, when it came to his taxes.  The issue was that he was trying to establish Massachusetts residency in a state that requires, in its Constitution, that candidates for high office have held residency for 7 consectutive years before being eligible to run. Romney seemed not to have met those requirements, given his years in Utah not long before, but he maintained, stubbornly, persistently, and repeatedly that he was eligible, that he had met the requirements for residency and that he had paid his taxes.  Of course, later it turned out that he had not, and yet he became Governor of the state. He got away with it.

Now he is refusing to share his income tax returns in his race for the presidency and he is repeating the same number. My guess is he will stonewall us all, right up to the end, and he will get away with it, and the media will, effectively, give up.  Romney knows something about us that we should know about ourselves.  You can beat the media at almost any of its demands if you are persistent, polite, and absolutely determined to wait them out.  

Romney does what he want because he has learned that he's wealthy enough, and stubborn enough, and determined enough to do it the way that works to his advantage.