Seven Reasons to Vote for Mitt Romney

The Supreme Court upheld Obamacare this morning. Thank goodness for Mitt Romney. He learned his lesson in Massachusetts. What was he thinking back then? If elected president he promises to do what SCOTUS wouldn’t: get rid of the Affordable Care Act.

You want what?

Get behind him. Get out the vote. This is what his election will mean for you:

1.     If you get seriously ill, you may not have to add expensive health insurance premiums to your woes. Your insurance may well be cancelled.

2.     If you lose your health insurance and you’ve been sick in the past (and not too sick at that), you won’t have to worry about wading through the confusing morass of health plans. You won’t be able to get one.

3.     If one of your kids decides to move back home from the commune, you won’t have to argue with her about whether she should pay for health coverage on your plan until age 26. She won’t be able to get on it.

4.     If you have coverage, you can take comfort that your insurer will always be there for you as there will be no limit on the premium increases it can demand to boost its profits.

5.     If you get a chance to experience the joy of shopping for your own individual insurance plan, you will not be deprived of the character-building rigors of arduous study. Insurance exchanges that make it easy to compare prices for policies that are all required to offer certain basic features, like 100% coverage for annual physicals, won’t exist.

6.     When you get old (say it ain’t so) and are on a Medicare prescription drug plan, your donuts will still have holes.

7.     You won’t be deprived of one of your main cocktail party grouses: high health insurance premiums. Without all those young healthy people mucking about in the insurance pool, you can continue to pay the high price of exclusivity.

Before the Court’s ruling, polls showed that two-thirds of Americans wanted the Court to strike down Obamacare. There we go again (as Reagan might have put it). An activist Court has gotten out of step with the popular culture. Take heart, though, with all the good reasons I’ve set forth above, I’m optimistic that we can rise up and elect a Congress and president who can do what we want them to. That is what we want, isn’t it?

Sowing and Reaping: the Fear Edition

As a father, I always felt terrible when I frightened my children. I was not much more than a child myself when I had my first son, and sometimes I acted like it. He and I both had temper tantrums. I had been raised with spankings, so I passed them along now and then. Over the years I mellowed, and by the time I had my last son, twenty-five years after the first, I was a shadow of my old terrifying self. My youngest son even shamed me into dropping spankings. They weren’t much more than occasional irritated swats by then, but he wouldn’t put up with them. It’s wrong to hit people, he told me, with withering moral clarity, at age four. That was the last one.

None of the moments of which I am proud as a father involved making my children fear me. So I was shocked to see a brass plaque set in the large patio of a church in my neighborhood that contained, in bold letters, the following inscription: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.”

Really? In my experience, the only thing people who are taught to fear learn is to be afraid. Well, that’s the first thing they learn. After not too long, they learn other things as well. They learn to lie. They learn to hide from the one they fear. They learn to hate. Of course, hating your earthly father is (usually) less risky than hating your heavenly father, the one you have been taught will meet you at the pearly gates with a thumbs up or down for eternity.

If you fear someone you can’t afford to hate, you look around for some other target, someone else to blame for the dreadful conflict you feel inside. Non-believers are obvious candidates for this transference. Gays. Abortionists. Catholics. Jews. Muslims. Take your pick. Anyone who isn’t afraid of the same god you are, anyone who isn’t suffering for his faith as reverently as you.

I haven’t been religious for a long time, but I was an altar boy and my great grandfather was an Episcopal minister, so I thought I had a grip on what religion, at least protestant and protestant-like religions in America, were all about. Love your neighbor. Turn the other cheek. The Golden Rule. That sort of thing. I knew about the wrathful god of the Old Testament (even thought he was kind of cool in a Terminator sort of way, with all that smiting of firstborn and parting of waters), but I understood he had been put on the shelf as vain and somewhat unstable, like the gods of pagans. I thought he had been replaced by the kinder, gentler message of the man my great grandfather believed was god’s son.

As I’ve gotten older, though, I’ve come to see that I was wrong. There is still a lot of religious anger out there. And it’s not confined to fanatics who strap on suicide vests and blow themselves to kingdom come. You can see it in the contorted faces of a crowd of Evangelical Christians confronting abortionists or gays. You can feel it in the Catholic Bishops’ bitter condemnation of their own progressive nuns.

All this anger isn’t doing a thing for our relationships with one another. Anger is corrosive enough to eat away even the strong love of a child for a parent. Imagine how quickly it can dispense with regard for someone you don’t even know, someone for whom your hatred has little cost to you. Hating should be hard. It should be painful.

I don’t know what is being preached in churches, temples and mosques today, but I hope it isn’t fear. If I could go to my neighborhood church and dig up that plaque, I would replace it with one that offers not a prescription for wisdom but a warning: Fear of the Lord is the beginning of intolerance.

Knowing and Remembering

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
--George Santayana

One of my grown sons is carefree about his children. The other is cautious. One lets his son jump off cliffs (metaphorically speaking), the other encourages his to enjoy more tranquil pursuits. One has children who have never been sick or had accidents. The other spent way too much time in neonatal intensive care units with premature babies. Think you can match the personal history with the protective parenting? It’s not that hard, right? Most of us would be the same way. Once burned, and all that.

It’s no accident, I think, that the Great Recession of 2008 did not happen while my grandfather was still alive. He and my grandmother rented out rooms in their house to make ends meet in the 1930s; and they were among the lucky ones. The crash of 1929, just after he became a stockbroker, and the ensuing depression, changed my grandfather forever. You couldn’t get him to borrow too much if you paid him.

The forerunner to the Great Depression was wild stock speculation fueled by easy credit. Economists are still not entirely sure why the bursting of the stock bubble triggered a depression, but I know what my grandfather thought. He believed it was the result of too much greed, too much debt, and then, as the edifice tumbled, blind panic. People grabbed their money from banks, many of which failed; commerce ground to a halt; nobody could find a job. It took WW II to jolt the economy back to life.

The Great Recession of 2008, which everyone seems to agree was pre-ordained by over-borrowing, had to wait for my grandfather’s generation to hand over the helm of the economy. Didn’t the people who came after him know the same things he did? Yes, but they didn’t feel them.

Economists like to assume we are all rational actors, but neuroscientists tell us we are not. New studies show that our economic behavior, just like some of our more basic drives, is strongly influenced by biology. Hedge-fund traders get a rush of adrenaline and dopamine when they are on the hunt. It makes them feel invincible. It enables outsized risk-taking. The other end of the neurological spectrum is the fear of debt my grandfather felt. His brain had been sensitized by financial trauma, just as a trader’s is doped by the prospect of a killing in the market. Much of the time we are acting no more rationally in the conduct of our financial affairs than a teenaged boy trying to get laid, or a rabbit running from the shadow of a hawk.

I’m not sure there is anything to be done about all this. Short of some modern “Total Recall” serum that could implant fear of stupid risks, it seems we just have to live with the limits of our experience. Perhaps economists should take that into account when they try to model future behavior. How has the population changed? Is there anyone still around who lived through that last disaster, or has our collective response been reset to naïve?

Remembering is different than knowing. The experiences we have change us in ways that reading about them cannot. They inoculate us like a flu shot, or sensitize us like a bee sting. Perhaps George Santayana understood the semantically subtle but physiologically powerful difference between knowing and remembering. As for me, I did not. I assumed that societies kept records and passed them along and that each new generation possessed the cumulative wisdom of all who came before. Not so, apparently; or at least not always.

For all who, like me, desperately want to believe we can learn from the mistakes of the past, I offer this sobering modification to Santayana’s dictum: Those who have not themselves experienced the pain of the past are doomed to plan the future with the innocence of children.

War is the Answer

I was having dinner with a friend who is smart about business and I asked him what he thought was needed, what with the Euro crisis, America’s anemic recovery and China’s slowing growth, to get the global economy going again. His answer was one word: war.

It is true that periods of great growth often follow wars. There’s all that rebuilding to do, and fewer people to do it. It’s kind of depressing, though, to think that war is the only way back to prosperity. My friend suggested that a worldwide plague might also do the trick. Anything that would reduce the number of workers, so that those who remain have more to do.

Another approach, he said, would be to figure out how to get Africa to buy more stuff. Jobs and wealth come from making and selling things, and the worldwide supply of buyers is not growing fast enough. Getting a continent like Africa rich enough to buy iPads may be tough, though, when it isn’t currently rich enough even to eat.

What we have here, to paraphrase the old movie line, is a failure to innovate. I’m not talking about microprocessor speed or social networks, I’m talking about economic systems. We’ve got the oldest system in the world, the only one really: producing and selling. A half century ago, John Kenneth Galbraith said we needed to develop something different, not to replace production as the means of economic growth, but to supplement it. He suggested public works. Build roads and schools, improve electric grids, desalinate seawater, vaccinate against disease.

Infrastructure investments usually don’t make money quickly enough to attract private capital, so they depend on government funding. That’s a tough sell these days, with austerity being the buzzword in many capitals. Even those who want to invest in public works have a hard time finding the money. In the midst of recession or fragile recovery, not many have the stomach for raising taxes. So I’m not holding my breath for a surge in public projects that would employ current workers and lay the foundations for a better society for their children.

On Memorial Day we mourn those who have fallen in combat. We pray others will not die as they have. My friend doesn’t think war is the preferable answer, he just thinks it may be the inevitable one. If populations continue to grow worldwide without sufficient economic support, they will end up fighting over resources. They will end up at war. That will be good for business, but little else.

If we really want to honor those who have made the ultimate sacrifice, we must face the reality that governments have to invest in their people, in their future. If they don’t, scarcity will be dealt with the way it always has been: the strong will take, the weak will surrender, and many will die in the process.

The Garden of Love and Trust

Not long ago I was leaning on someone I didn’t know well to pay money he owed me, and he said he was offended that I didn’t trust him. It made me wonder about myself. Am I just too cynical? When someone gets offended that I don’t trust him, my first instinct is to reach for my wallet to be sure it is still in my back pocket.

Every day here in Paris, Meg and I encounter young girls who ask us to sign a petition they carry on clipboards. They are pretty and slight. They smile and point to a paper that already has a few signatures. The way they gesture without speaking gives the impression that they may be deaf or mute and seeking support for some organization that would help them. We’re not Parisians, so we assumed our signatures would be of no use to them. After being approached many times, though, we became curious and asked a security person in the Tuileries what the girls wanted. Your money, he said. They are pickpockets.

Every little forest dweller comes out at the time of day when it is safest and goes about his business with one eye out for predators. Just about the first thing we tell our children when we send them out to play is not to take candy from strangers. It’s a dangerous world out there. Trust is almost unnatural.

We humans give it our best shot. Children trust their parents, for a while; Darwin set that up. Lovers trust their mates, until they don’t, until a careless gesture or hint of indifference causes a shiver of doubt, the way an open window lets in a chill.

Remember the lyrics of that old Linda Ronstadt song? “Love is a rose, but you better not pick it, it only grows when it’s on the vine.” Well, trust is a gardenia. It grows in the same garden as love. And in all but the most tender conditions, its beautiful white petals turn brown. If you are lucky enough to find it in bloom, enjoy it while you can.

Talk This Way

As far as I can tell, other countries developed their languages so that I could make an idiot of myself for their personal amusement. I’m in Paris now, butchering their beautiful French. I know a little Italian and Spanish too, and, under pressure, I find myself saying buongiorno and de nada as often as merci beaucoup. It’s embarrassing. I must say, the French are good sports. They never laugh out loud. Their smiles are rueful and indulgent, the way one might regard the naiveté of a child.

"Do you understand the words
coming out of my mouth?"

When I’m not trying to talk to Parisians, I watch them: walking in the park, kissing, holding hands, tucking a blanket around a baby. They do all that stuff the same way I do. So do Czechs, Germans, Mexicans and Italians (except, in the case of Italians, for that thing they do with their hands when they speak, which I love but am too repressed to be any good at).

Somehow, humans all over the world have evolved to do everything the same except speaking. You might think that, given our common ancestry, the genetic expression that results in so many identical physical traits would also have supported a common language. I have no idea why it did not, but the differences are startling: Mandarin is not one bit like English; Italian couldn’t be farther from Russian.

Which brings me to this question: Are our thoughts as different as our languages?

Do you remember that discussion you had with your friends when you were young about whether when you each say you are seeing the color red you are in fact both seeing the same thing? Or whether you are merely calling something you see differently by the same name? In the absence of seeing through another’s eyes (and brain), the best anyone can say about that is that there is no way to know.

So when I describe a feeling I am having as anger or sadness, how can you and I know that what I am actually feeling is the same thing you feel when you say you are angry or sad? If the parts of our brains where speech is developed produce such different languages, might not the underlying thoughts be just as different?

In America, we’re having a particularly tough time lately getting along with the Muslim world. Our languages are very different, but we think that when we speak through translators we can understand each other. We know, of course, that cultural differences will remain even after the words are known, but what if there is more to it than that? What if our differences go beyond culture, all the way down to how the neurons in our brains talk to one another. What if speaking or thinking our respective words for “god” or “wife” or “loyalty” causes fundamentally different activity in our brains? Different connections, different triggers of base instincts, different adrenal responses, different passions.

Sometimes when I’m trying to make myself understood in another language, I slow my speech and exaggerate my syllables, maybe even throw in a little Franglish. I’m sure my efforts are comical, and I’m pleased to do my part to entertain others by being a hapless American. In matters weightier than ordering a cup of coffee or finding the bathroom, though, our language barriers may be more serious. If our words don’t mean the same things to us, if they affect us emotionally in fundamentally different ways, even with the best translation we may never understand or be understood.

The Great Migration

Why do people have to be this lonely? What's the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?
― Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart


All over Paris, people are walking. They go in ones and twos and groups, but all together they seem to move as a herd. Along the sidewalks, through the museums and now, as I sit and watch, down the broad central pathway of the Jardin des Tuileries. Meg and I have dropped out of the flow and are taking in the great migration as it passes before us. Others nearby have paused as well. Some are taking photographs to remind them later where they have been, perhaps to help them find their way back. Soon enough, they and we will get up and re-enter the steady march.

It makes me wonder why we do this. There are obvious reasons, of course. A pleasant stroll on a beautiful day for relaxation and exercise. Many of us from other countries have come to explore the history and beauty of this great city. Seeing her helps us understand more about how we humans have come to be what we are today. This is why we stare at ancient art in the Louvre. This is why we are fascinated with archbishops and kings and their churches and castles.

I wonder whether there might be another reason too, one of which we are less consciously aware. In the past we were migratory by nature. Before we learned to plant grains and domesticate animals, we wandered for a living—literally. A tribe could linger in one place only as long as the food supply lasted. Then, it was move on or die. Perhaps our current wanderings are merely vestigial manifestations of that primitive instinct to search for new and better habitat.

I know that, in my own case, I have to keep moving. If I stay in one place too long, I begin to twitch. Whether it is a dinner table, a house or a job, after a time I need to get up and try something else.

We live inside our own heads. We have family and friends, sure, and we interact with others, but ultimately we are alone with ourselves. I think Haruki Murakami has shaded our longing too darkly, but restlessness may be a closer cousin to loneliness than I want to believe. The only difference may be that loneliness causes us to search for others, while restlessness leaves us searching for ourselves.

Ich Bin Ein Franzose

The day the French voted for their president, some of them also had brunch in a little café called Le Valmy in the Paris neighborhood of Canal Saint-Martin. Brunch was quiche and salad with beets and green beans and smoked salmon and ham, couscous, a small dish of applesauce and cheese and coffee, tea or (naturally) wine enjoyed as causally and moderately as water. The street outside the café runs along the canal and it is closed to cars on Sundays; families with children in strollers and on hand scooters passed alongside men and women of all ages on bicycles rented from community rental sites stationed all over the city. The café Le Valmy is far from the Champs Elysees. No one was speaking any language other than French.

Parisian families in a park near their poling place.

I wished I spoke their language better so I could ask some of them about the election, about whom they supported and why. The race will come down to Nicolas Sarkozy, a kind of French neo-con, and Francois Hollande, an old-fashioned socialist. I read an essay a few days ago in The New York Times by a French journalist who said neither man is on the right track. He believes that the socialism of Mitterrand that Hollande wants to revive has been discredited; and both men are urging that France, which has been beat up by globalization, return to isolationism at a time when, the journalist believes, only fiscal austerity will save her from ruin.

In the United States, those on the right warn that President Obama is a socialist who wants to make America like France. Now, here is a Frenchman, speaking for many others too, who wants to make France more like the U.S., or at least like the U.S. our social Darwinists would have us be.

It is sometimes said that Europe is a few hundred years ahead of the U.S. in terms of its cultural and political evolution. Certainly France is ahead of us in the march toward guaranteeing health care and other social services to her citizens. But like American car companies, with their generous pensions and medical benefits for retirees, the financial burden of that generosity has become too great. There will have to be a retreat.

That seems to be the way of it, for car companies and countries alike. We want to have economic vibrancy, and we want to keep people out of the gutter. It can be tough to do both. Each time the pendulum swings one way or the other, the forces of gravity, represented by the need to work, on the one hand, and compassion for the less fortunate, on the other, exert their inevitable pull.

There is no utopia. Karl Marx didn’t find one. Nor will Grover Norquist. What I see around me here in France, though, in this neighborhood of Parisians, is people living life the way we all strive to. There are noticeable differences between our countrymen. The French (at least the ones around me as I write this) are thin. I would say they are fit--they look great--but they smoke too much. On the other hand, they are way less addicted to their smartphones. They seem happy in a way we all want to be, gathered in warm conversation, embracing, kissing on both cheeks like they really mean it. They also--men and women--wear neck scarves with a casual flair I could never pull off. A toddler across the way grins shyly when I make a silly face. As we get up to leave, I glance over and see that she is contentedly breast feeding while her mother chats happily with a woman who must be her own mother.

We have no need to fear becoming like the French. They are us, and we are them. Each of us rides the bob of our political pendulum, swinging between productivity and compassion, looking toward one another as our paths converge and diverge under the influence of the forces of social and economic gravity.

Where Are U

You helped him pack his car for the trip. You offered, for the umpteenth time, to go with him. I’ll be fine, Dad, he said, and you thought he would but still you wanted to be there to help him if he needed it. There would be things to buy for his room, things you hadn’t already thought of and packed in his car.

He set off alone on the long drive. You tried not to worry about the trip. You had paid for new tires for the car and had your mechanic check it over one more time. You waited by the phone for him to call. Two days went by. Three. You couldn’t stand his mad need for independence any longer, so you cracked and called him.

How is it? you asked. Um, I’m not sure yet, he said. What? Well, I haven’t found it yet. What? The school. It’s supposed to be here in this town, but I can’t find it. What? Listen, Dad, I’ve got to go. Don’t worry. It’s here somewhere. Love you.

This is the way it feels when your grown children, the ones long past college, well out in the world, get in a tight spot. It feels like they’ve gone off to college, driving their little cars all by themselves (as my mother would have put it), and they can’t find their schools. You can’t help them. You know that. Still, what you want to do more than anything is go to them and hug them and tell them everything will be all right, that you will always be there, even though you understand now that you are no longer what they need.

Taking Back the Country

At the dawning of my awareness of the Supreme Court, Earl Warren was Chief Justice. Perhaps I remember him so vividly because of the yard signs and bumper stickers in my native South urging his impeachment. The idea that a Supreme Court Justice could be impeached for writing opinions people didn’t like seemed both ludicrous and thrilling. Ludicrous because even then I knew that it was the Supreme Court’s job to tell us hard truths, things we might not want to hear but were essential to our being a great nation of freedom and opportunity. Thrilling because I also knew (in a kind of smug, elitist way) that if the rednecks in pickup trucks plastered with Confederate flags and those impeachment exhortations wanted to lynch Earl Warren (and indeed, if you asked them, that’s what they really wanted), he must be doing something damned good.

"Do you think we'd look better
in black robes?"

The Supreme Court of the fifties and sixties was a guiding force for progressive policy. The country came along reluctantly. From my vantage point in a decidedly unprogressive part of the country, it seemed right that that should be the Court’s role. No one else I knew was going to do it, certainly not the white men at the nearby country club whose principal interaction with blacks was being served by them. I just assumed this was the way progress was made, through the gentle and wise leadership of nine wise men (yes, it’s true, in those days I didn’t notice there were no women on the Court). I didn’t yet know about the Court of the Roosevelt era that tried to derail the New Deal. I hadn’t yet read Plessey vs. Ferguson.

I so took for granted that the Court would always be progressive that I didn’t think too much about it when Earl Warren left the bench and after him the other lions of his era--Marshall, Brennan, Douglas—who spoke to our national conscience and called upon us to be mindful of those who did not have within their grasp the levers of political or economic power. I should have been paying closer attention, for now it seems I have awakened from a dream and someone has done what President Roosevelt famously tried and failed to do: packed the Court. Someone went back to the bar at the country club in my old town and pointed to four smug guys sitting at a table in the corner and said, Come on boys, let’s go to Washington and make us some law. They slipped on their robes (black, for a change) and slapped each other on the back, maybe exchanged a wink, and took their places on the bench.

What do you think might happen if a bunch of good old boys got a big block on the Court? We don’t have to guess, do we. Forget about affirmative action. Forget about gun control. If they have their way, I’d say we can probably also forget about abortions and expanded health-care coverage. Oh, and you know that little thing called the Voting Rights Act? That might not apply to you if you’re Hispanic and don’t have your papers in order.

Among the most frightful of the decisions already rendered or worriedly anticipated, however, is Citizens United. Frightful for the effect the Super PACs it spawned will have on our democracy, perhaps even more frightful for what it says about the worldview of the conservative block on the Court. Actually, it’s not right to grant those four men the intellectual credential “conservative.” Conservatives respect precedent. These old boys are anything but conservative. They are the modern KKK, riding down from Stone Mountain to take back this country for the people to whom it should belong.

There could be no other reason for such an obdurately wrongheaded decision. Certainly not precedent. The decision upended a hundred years of judicial precedent. Certainly not regard for democracy. No one denies that money corrupts politics. Opening campaign finance coffers to unlimited donations from corporations will undeniably lead to greater corporate influence over the legislative agenda. And how did the Justices arrive at their opinion? By saying that the first amendment protects the right of the people to free speech, that money is speech (see above), and, as everyone knows, that corporations are people.

Perhaps I’m overreacting. Perhaps this is just part of the long cycle of steps forward, steps back, steps sideways. I guess I had my hopes up, though, and now, like a boy at Christmas with lumps of coal in his stocking, I’m taking it hard. I thought Jim Crow was behind us. I see now he is not. Not his old literal self. He’s gotten wilier. His signs no longer hang over rust-stained water fountains. They don’t say “colored only.” Now they hang over the doors to Congress, and they say "rich white people only."

Back Home at the Hive

We humans have made so much progress in so many areas, especially technology, that it can be hard to remember that it’s still just us inside our high-tech skins. We still order our relationships and responsibilities pretty much the way we have since Cleopatra tempted Marc Antony. There is still a lot of lust and conquering, a lot of winners and losers. We like winners and losers. Each of us plans to be the winner. We want our shot.

It’s no big surprise, then, that we don’t like being told what we can and cannot do. We may like Mary Poppins, but we’re not fond the nanny state. We want to be free to strive. If we fail, so be it.

But every failure has a cost. And lately more of those costs are being borne not just by the person who fails but by his neighbors as well. In the not-so-long-ago past, being down on your luck could kill you. Nowadays, the social safety net might well catch you. Federal law prohibits emergency rooms from turning you away if you have a bad accident. Social security will give you enough to hold body and soul together in retirement.

That’s a good thing, right? That we’ve created a safety net. But because it’s woven from tax dollars, suddenly we all have a greater financial interest in the failure of our neighbors. Most of us are willing to help our neighbors, but what about folks we’ve never met, people who might not be doing all they could to take care of themselves? What about welfare queens?

Sometimes bad things just happen to people. You’re riding along on your bicycle and the driver of a car takes his eye off the road and in a heartbeat you’re lying broken on the street. Being born into poverty is kind of like that, except the car hits you while you’re gasping your first breath in your mother’s arms.

Being down on your luck can be expensive. When I did a swan dive off my bike, the paramedic and hospital bills for a scrapped nose and a sore neck totaled $11,000. A few days later, there were two terrible accidents nearby in which bicyclists were hit by cars and suffered more serious injuries: bleeding in the brain, emergency surgery, intensive care. Those medical bills were much, much higher.

What might have been done to have avoided those accidents and their costs in pain and money? The city could have put in more bike paths to physically separate bikes from cars, but bike paths or street barriers are expensive. Even a well-meaning city like ours is not going to spend a lot of extra money to reduce costs for which it is not responsible.

What if it were? What if it had to pay the medical bills for all bike accidents within its borders? It would certainly take that potential liability into account in deciding what more it might do to increase bike safety. Would it be fair to the city to make it responsible in that way? Perhaps not, but since the city is the only one who can put in bike paths, perhaps fairness shouldn’t be the primary concern. Maybe the primary goal should be to identify who can make biking safer and give them a good reason to want to do so.

The notion is similar to the idea behind mitigating the negative effects of certain commercial conduct. Cigarette manufacturers make a product that causes health problems that are enormously costly to the public. In the past, cigarette companies bore none of these costs, but lately, with litigation and taxes, some of the social costs have been shifted to the cigarette makers. Similarly, gasoline taxes have been used to pay for highway maintenance and pollution abatement. Soda taxes are being discussed as a way to reduce consumption of the liquid sugar that has spiked diabetes rates.

The new federal health care law sets up incentives (both carrots and sticks) for hospitals to reduce infections incurred by patients who are there for other reasons. There is every reason to expect they will produce good results. Recently (before the health care law was adopted), the University of Pennsylvania hospital reduced iv line infections from 30-40 per month to one per month, just by trying harder.

Some consumer products companies have been paying more attention to social costs. Starbucks, for instance, is rolling out innovative programs to recycle its used coffee cups. In one pilot, the cups go out the door with a little latte foam in the bottom and come back as napkins.

One group that has not yet volunteered or been forced to pay one penny of the social costs of its products is gun makers. I don’t see why we put up with this. Even if the Supreme Court says we all have a right to pack heat, I doubt the Constitution guarantees that gun makers can’t be forced to pick up the tab for the resulting mayhem. We’re long past letting the Cayuga River burn, so why do we let gun makers pollute our cities with handguns and not ask them to pay for the cleanup? If guns were taxed at a rate sufficient to cover their damage to society, they would be damned expensive, and much less ubiquitous.

Aligning social costs and benefits is tricky, but gradually we are realizing that in today’s world we are less like cowboys in the wild west than honeybees in a busy hive. Ultimately, what is good for the colony is good for the individual.

The next time you see something you think is wasteful, or worse—food being thrown out after a party, a garbage bag of recyclables headed for a landfill, a child requiring urgent medical care for an asthma attack because his parents could not afford an inhaler—think about what might have been done to prevent the problem. Who has the power to change the situation? Why don’t they? What could we do to motivate them to act?

When looking for corruption, the old adage is “Follow the money.” A maxim for helping us all live together in ways that provide an overall economic benefit and improve the quality of life for all might be “Follow the social costs."

Medical Emergency

A month ago I took a nosedive off my bike. Hit a curb and went right over the handlebars. My own unaided fault. You know that feeling of slow motion flying through the air? Not so much. One moment I was up, the next I was lying on my back seeing stars.

A Caltrain was passing and cars and people were stopped and someone saw a policeman nearby who called 911 and before I could blink the blood out of my eyes paramedics were asking if I knew my name. I told them I thought I was okay, but they insisted on taking me to the Stanford hospital. They didn’t seem to want to give me a choice, and I was feeling a little dazed, so I didn’t fight them.

The ER doctor ordered an x-ray of my neck. (Actually, he ordered a CT scan, which is more expensive and exposes you to more radiation, but I negotiated him down to an x-ray since his examination had turned up no symptoms of nerve-damage.) Nothing broken. He gave me a neck collar to wear until the soreness abated.

The paramedics had been nice enough to bring my bike to the hospital. Meg was out of town, so I walked home pushing my bike along beside me, thinking how much I love to walk, not really interested in biking just then. My path in the darkness was lit by passing cars and the lights of the Stanford shopping center. The sun had been high overhead when I’d done my face-plant.

Now the bills for this adventure have come. Actually, they aren’t bills. I have Medicare and a supplemental insurance plan, so I won’t have to pay anything. Here are the charges:

Paramedics                                           $2,289

These guys were great, but I didn’t get a bill from the policemen (three of them) who were also on the scene. If my house were on fire, I wouldn’t expect a bill from the firemen. I don’t want to seem ungrateful, but I guess I don’t fully understand where paramedics fit in as public-safety employees if their bills are to be paid by accident victims, or, in this case, Medicare.

Stanford hospital:

ER doctor and x-ray                              $1,129

2 ibuprophen                                          $6

“Emergency department visit”                $7,328

                        Stanford total         $8,463                    


Perhaps you are wondering what the “Emergency department visit” charge was for. Why, one might ask, should it cost over seven thousand dollars for me to lie on a bed and wait for five hours for procedures that were separately billed and took fifteen minutes?

I wondered the same thing, so, out of curiosity in this age of soaring health-care costs, I called the Stanford hospital billing department to ask. The pleasant woman I spoke with gave me an answer that sounded like she was reading from a script, something benignly vague about the level of emergency care. I was a level four. I asked her if that was high. She said she didn’t know. I never did figure out what the charge was for, since all my actual care--the doctor and the x-ray--was separately itemized. I assume the huge unattributed charge must be a kind of amortization of overall emergency-room facilities and staffing costs.

I thought to myself: Wow, if Medicare is paying these kinds of bills, no wonder it is in trouble. Then I asked the woman in the billing department how much of the bill Medicare actually paid. Her answer was $286. That’s right, two hundred eighty six. The hospital wrote off over $7,600, she said, as exceeding negotiated Medicare rates. If I hadn’t had Medicare or private insurance, would the hospital have expected me to pay the whole bill of over eight thousand dollars, even though the hospital wrote off most of it for Medicare? I asked. Yes, she said.

Okay, I hardly know where to start. In the first place, the size of these bills, especially the emergency department charge over and above the bill for my actual doctor care and x-ray, is ridiculous. I’m not saying it isn’t expensive to run an emergency room, but if you land there you shouldn’t become an involuntary contributor to their capital funding campaign.

Medicare obviously agrees that the bill was way out of line. They paid only a tiny fraction of it. This makes me think Medicare is not a program that needs to be reformed but rather expanded: the folks from Medicare should negotiate hospital rates for all of us.

What sense does it make to write bills like these if the only people who are actually expected to pay them, the uninsured, are almost certainly the ones who can’t afford to? What kind of silly accounting is going on here? Who is kidding whom about what? And why?

I can’t imagine the tangle of incentives and bookkeeping machinations that has gotten us to this point, but it is hard to make any sense of it. If we can find those responsible for this Alice in Wonderland world, I suggest we handle them the way the Queen of Hearts recommended.

One last note: I was not billed for a sandwich a kindly nurse gave me with the ibuprophen. I guess there is a free lunch after all.

Fantasy Woman

The young woman is sitting there naked. Lips breathlessly parted. From both sides, men are handing her purses. You can only see the men’s hands and cuffs but the impression is that they are fully clothed, probably expensively, as they compete for the woman’s attention. Whom will she choose? More than a purse is at stake here, it seems.

What is happening here?

It’s not the cover of a romance novel or a soft-porn film, it’s a full-page Lord & Taylor advertisement in The New York Times. So, what is Lord & Taylor trying to say? Come on in guys, these purses drive women wild. Surely the ad isn’t pitched to women, even though I assume women are the most likely customers for purses. If it is, the message is something like, Why buy these baubles when you can take off your clothes and get them for free.

I like sex. I love Victoria’s Secret. Maybe I should just shut up and enjoy the show, but when I see an ad like that I can’t help feeling a little ashamed of being a man. We ought to be able to love women without trivializing them, without implying that the only way they can get what they want in the world is by undressing.

Someone--I assume it’s men, but maybe it’s some women too--has a serious hang-up about sex and women. Women who want contraception are sluts. Women who want gender equality in the workplace are bitches. What we seem to hate is not the sexualization of women, but their taking control of it. We sexualize them relentlessly, as in the Lord & Taylor ad, but that’s us. That’s our fantasy. That’s the woman we want, the submissive temptress. A real woman, with her own wants and needs, scares us.

I think I understand the male side of this, but what I cannot fathom is why women put up with it. If I were a woman, I would never buy another thing from Lord & Taylor. I would never buy anything from anyone who ran ads of naked women to sell their products. (I guess I’d have to draw the line at naked men too--sorry Calvin.)

I think men are the problem here, but perhaps women are complicit. We’re all a little confused about the line between being considered sexually attractive and being objectified. Thanks to Darwin, men can pull off sexy by showing they can afford expensive suits and watches (and could therefore provide well for a family). Darwinianly, women have to show they will be good breeders and have good genes to pass along, which means showing enough of face and figure to pass that test. Somehow we managed to propagate the species for millennia, though, without women taking it all off. Many even feel nothing is sexier than imagination.

It’s hard to imagine why women in this country--educated, rich women, women who can afford expensive purses--put up with this way of depicting them and, implicitly, their worth to society. Maybe they are confused about who they are, about what it takes to be attractive and desirable. If that’s the case, let me, on behalf of all men who love Victoria’s Secret, reassure them that we don’t want to live our fantasies. We want our partners to be like us: smart, independent, thoughtful. We want them to take our fantasies out for a wild time once in a while and show up for work in the morning. They are called fantasies because they aren’t real. Women aren’t sluts. We don’t want them to be. Why do we let advertisers treat them like they are?

Giving Culture a Bad Name

When I was a boy, everyone who was anybody, or hoped to be somebody, wanted to be cultured. Cultured meant good taste, good manners and a good education (which, in the dictionary, at least, it still does).

Henry Higgins tempting Eliza Doolittle

Somehow though, the term has been hijacked to mean something more like tribal norms. Now, norms may be what, by common consensus, most people accept, but they aren’t necessarily cultured. Slavery was the norm in the south a hundred and fifty years ago; witch burnings in Salem a bit before that.

And so, disputes that owe more to the Hatfields and McCoys than to Henry Higgins are labeled “culture wars.” They have nothing to do with culture. They have everything to do with provincial resistance to change. They are not in good taste; they are not well mannered; and more often than not they owe little to the kind of open-minded thoughtfulness fostered by education.

The latest tribal norms to emblazon the banners of the “culture wars” are religious tenets. Historically, this is boringly unexceptional, of course. There have always been religious crusades. On all sides. Think of Christians and Muslims pushing each other back and forth across the Middle East for centuries. But those days of religious zealotry and intolerance seemed like barbaric episodes from our unenlightened past. As we became more educated, more cultured, we became more tolerant.

That’s the way it has seemed in this country for many years. Perhaps the truth is somewhat different, though. Perhaps the truth is that our tribal norms, most often expressed as religious beliefs, simply had no serious challenges. For many generations, America was a Protestant land. Most were believers, and most believed the same things. Our early settlers and founding fathers felt that their laws came from their moral beliefs, and that their moral beliefs were handed down by their Christian god. So religion and law were not separate at all, not in that sense. Religion in effect gave us our laws.

Then came the others. The Jews, of course, but they stuck to themselves. Then the Italian and Irish Catholics. Well, they weren’t so different. A few niggling differences about birth control, but most people ignored that little inconvenience anyway. But beginning in the 1950s, the secular state raised its heretical head. Not the legislative branches--they were still pandering to the accepted norms--but the Supreme Court. First in the Griswold decision striking down state bans on contraception and then in Roe v Wade.

The Supreme Court told us what the cultured believed, that contraception and abortion are matters of personal conscience, protected by a right to privacy. Apparently, some of us weren’t ready for that message. Several generations later, we are still squabbling over it, now more vociferously than in a long while.

Why is that? What’s happening here? It is the last stand of a dying norm. The Civil War of reproduction. In this case, women are the slaves. Eventually the outcome will be the same as in our first Civil War. Slavery, by color or gender, cannot endure in our society. We are too pluralistic, and too prone to libertarianism. Even when we don’t sympathize with one slave or another, we don’t want to be slaves ourselves, so we tend to band together, across norms, to fight repression.

A true culture war would be an oxymoron. People of good taste, good manners and good education can find better ways to resolve disagreements than by going to war. That’s what college dorm room discussions are for. You know, the ones that one politician recently said are threatening to indoctrinate our young people in liberalism.

Yes, that’s the threat, all right. Liberal thought. Broad mindedness. No wonder those clinging to repressive gender norms are fighting so desperately.

The Poetry Safety Net

francine j. harris won the Page Clayton Poetry Prize this year. Her poem, published in the Michigan Quarterly Review, is called “what you’d find buried in the dirt under charles f. kettering sr. high school (detroit, michigan).” What francine finds is disturbing: blood, condoms, broken fragments of high-school life and dreams. The poem is gritty and beautiful at the same time. Its beauty lies not in rendering a world we would hope to visit, but in the way it brings us into us the lives lived there. High school can be a tough; charles f. kettering high was very tough.

Page Clayton (not long out of
high school herself)

Page Clayton was my mother. The prize in her name is something Meg and I support to keep her memory alive in a way we think she would have liked, by encouraging young poets. Mom loved Emily Dickinson, another writer who gave us beautiful and disturbing poetry. I think Mom would have liked francine’s poem too. More than most, Mom retained until her death an ability to feel the struggles and frustrations of young people coming of age. Her gift was more than just empathy; it was something close to actually experiencing herself a small part of their pain.

I worry about kids like those in charles f. kettering high. The political landscape today is brutal. It’s hard to get funding for education or health care or almost anything kids need, even contraception. Every dollar is a fight. And even when there is funding, it’s hard to get it to the folks who need it. Government bureaucracies are thickets. Mothers with children who need medicine or education assistance can be too overwhelmed with the day-to-day struggle even to know help might be available.

The human spirit is amazing, though. And ultimately, it is that spirit that carries us forward. Food, education and health care are necessary, but they are not sufficient. There are stories every year of young men and women who transcend enervating environments to accomplish great things. Sometimes you want to ask: How did they do that? How did they persevere under such daunting conditions?

francine harris is the answer. Not her, literally, but what she represents. Sometimes we take wrong turns from which there is no way back. But sometimes we strike out on the right path and just keep going. We owe those journeys of courage and optimism to the spark that makes us human. For reminding us that that spark lives even among blood and discarded condoms, we owe a debt to poets like francine harris and to publications that bring us their work, like the Michigan Quarterly Review.