we can do it for everyone!
Great interview the other night between Bill Kristol and Jon Stewart.
Stuart got Kristol to admit that a) the government runs the best health care delivery system in the country and b) only the military deserves that level of care.
Kristol, who never stops grinning no matter how stupid he looks or sounds, wouldn't admit to the logical inference: the rest of us are getting second-class medical care.
Stewart couldn't stop grinning, and neither could I.
Thursday, July 30, 2009
Monday, July 27, 2009
Health Care Scams, Er, Subsidies
I just read this article in the NYT.
My immediate reaction is that Congress is trying to expand the existing for profit health care system rather than admit it is broken beyond repair.
All those "subsidies" will end up in the hands of the insurance companies who will continue to invent ever more ingenious ways to avoid paying for health care.
What a scam.
My immediate reaction is that Congress is trying to expand the existing for profit health care system rather than admit it is broken beyond repair.
All those "subsidies" will end up in the hands of the insurance companies who will continue to invent ever more ingenious ways to avoid paying for health care.
What a scam.
Thursday, July 2, 2009
Michael Jackson
I've thought more about Michael Jackson in the past few days than in my entire life. I was never a fan. It's not that I disliked him, it's that I never bothered to listen or watch.
Yesterday I watched some videos on YouTube: "Billie Jean," "Thriller," a compilation of dance moves, a performance from MTV. Suddenly, I'm a fan. He possessed such beauty and projected so much energy and light. His dance style is mesmerizing--and not just the big moves, like the Moon Walk, but the smallest gesture.
I have to admit that I also looked at videos that traced the alterations he made to his face. I don't know whether to understand these as symptoms of a profound mental illness or manifestations of artistic impulses, a courageous willingness to shape his face as a sculptor shapes clay.
Ultimately, I am filled with a kind of awe for the man and sadness at his untimely (and probably unseemly) death. I hope his family, especially his children, can move through their grief with dignity and find their path, their work and their love.
Yesterday I watched some videos on YouTube: "Billie Jean," "Thriller," a compilation of dance moves, a performance from MTV. Suddenly, I'm a fan. He possessed such beauty and projected so much energy and light. His dance style is mesmerizing--and not just the big moves, like the Moon Walk, but the smallest gesture.
I have to admit that I also looked at videos that traced the alterations he made to his face. I don't know whether to understand these as symptoms of a profound mental illness or manifestations of artistic impulses, a courageous willingness to shape his face as a sculptor shapes clay.
Ultimately, I am filled with a kind of awe for the man and sadness at his untimely (and probably unseemly) death. I hope his family, especially his children, can move through their grief with dignity and find their path, their work and their love.
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
Reading LeGuin
I read two novels this week by Ursula K. Leguin. They aren’t her best-known or most celebrated, but I sure did enjoy them.
City of Illusions (1967) is about a man living on a world (Earth) whose mind appears to have been razed. He is found wandering naked in the woods and taken in by the people who live there. In some ways he appears to be human; in others, he is clearly not. In search of answers to his origins and identity, he travels on foot to the City, at first alone, then in the company of a woman. Within the city, cared for (or imprisoned by) a group of people, the Shing, who claim to be human and who offer him a version of history at odds with that of the people who rescued him, he recovers his lost self.
The Beginning Place (1980) is about a young man, Hugh, whose life is profoundly unhappy. One day he discovers a kind of alternate world within the woods near his house and begins to spend more and more time there. He meets a young woman, Irena, who has for many years felt that the woods belonged to her alone. At first antagonists, then companions and finally lovers, Hugh and Irena put themselves in the service of the people living high on a mountain in this alternate world. They kill a dragon, then escape back to a reality now made inhabitable by their love for each other.
While I was reading these two novels, I preferred City of Illusions. The hero’s dilemma drew me in, as did his quest to discover the secret of his past. And I loved the way LeGuin worked out the end of the novel. It was very deft and convincing. Reading The Beginning Place made me feel somehow impatient. I felt for her characters who suffered so much. But the novel moves very slowly. It takes pages and pages for the two protagonists to meet and they don’t embark on their quest—they don’t even hear about it really—until the last third of the novel.
Despite this, I think that The Beginning Place is the better novel, if only because I find myself thinking more about it. I love how the fantasy place seems to exist both as an alternate reality and as a shared psychic reality where the two protagonists learn to face their deepest most heart-rending fears. LeGuin does something like this in her justly famous short story, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” In both works she somehow evokes allegory without subsuming one realm to the other. It’s a remarkable achievement.
For me, one the best moments in the novel comes when it becomes apparent that Hugh and Irena perceived the dragon very differently. For Irena, it was female, with short, useless arms and prominent teats running down her belly, a grotesque version I think of her mother whose life is defined by powerlessness and fecundity. For Hugh the dragon was . . . well, the text doesn’t say. When Irena insists that the dragon was female, Hugh “shook his head, with a sick look, his pallor increasing. ‘No, it was—the reason I had to kill it—he said, and then put out his hand groping for support, and staggered as he stood” (163). And there you have some of what makes LeGuin great. The fantasy world is real, that is, material, located in space if not time. Hugh and Irena bring a leather coat and a wool cape out of it. It’s also a shared psychic space where two wounded humans help each other face down their worst fears. In suggesting far more than she ever tells us, LeGuin creates another reality, a space for her readers who singly or in community join in the quest and (maybe) discover a new truth about their own world, their own minds.
City of Illusions (1967) is about a man living on a world (Earth) whose mind appears to have been razed. He is found wandering naked in the woods and taken in by the people who live there. In some ways he appears to be human; in others, he is clearly not. In search of answers to his origins and identity, he travels on foot to the City, at first alone, then in the company of a woman. Within the city, cared for (or imprisoned by) a group of people, the Shing, who claim to be human and who offer him a version of history at odds with that of the people who rescued him, he recovers his lost self.
The Beginning Place (1980) is about a young man, Hugh, whose life is profoundly unhappy. One day he discovers a kind of alternate world within the woods near his house and begins to spend more and more time there. He meets a young woman, Irena, who has for many years felt that the woods belonged to her alone. At first antagonists, then companions and finally lovers, Hugh and Irena put themselves in the service of the people living high on a mountain in this alternate world. They kill a dragon, then escape back to a reality now made inhabitable by their love for each other.
While I was reading these two novels, I preferred City of Illusions. The hero’s dilemma drew me in, as did his quest to discover the secret of his past. And I loved the way LeGuin worked out the end of the novel. It was very deft and convincing. Reading The Beginning Place made me feel somehow impatient. I felt for her characters who suffered so much. But the novel moves very slowly. It takes pages and pages for the two protagonists to meet and they don’t embark on their quest—they don’t even hear about it really—until the last third of the novel.
Despite this, I think that The Beginning Place is the better novel, if only because I find myself thinking more about it. I love how the fantasy place seems to exist both as an alternate reality and as a shared psychic reality where the two protagonists learn to face their deepest most heart-rending fears. LeGuin does something like this in her justly famous short story, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” In both works she somehow evokes allegory without subsuming one realm to the other. It’s a remarkable achievement.
For me, one the best moments in the novel comes when it becomes apparent that Hugh and Irena perceived the dragon very differently. For Irena, it was female, with short, useless arms and prominent teats running down her belly, a grotesque version I think of her mother whose life is defined by powerlessness and fecundity. For Hugh the dragon was . . . well, the text doesn’t say. When Irena insists that the dragon was female, Hugh “shook his head, with a sick look, his pallor increasing. ‘No, it was—the reason I had to kill it—he said, and then put out his hand groping for support, and staggered as he stood” (163). And there you have some of what makes LeGuin great. The fantasy world is real, that is, material, located in space if not time. Hugh and Irena bring a leather coat and a wool cape out of it. It’s also a shared psychic space where two wounded humans help each other face down their worst fears. In suggesting far more than she ever tells us, LeGuin creates another reality, a space for her readers who singly or in community join in the quest and (maybe) discover a new truth about their own world, their own minds.
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Mr and Mrs Madoff
Says he: she "cries herself to sleep every night, knowing all the pain and suffering I have caused."
Say I: she cries herself to sleep every night, trying to figure out how she POSSIBLY manage on the 2.5 million the judge left her.
And what's up with that? Some dude is suspected of dealing drugs and the Feds sweep in and take everything and never ever have to give it back even if it turns out that the suspicions were groundless.
Oh, yes, I am feeling testy today.
Say I: she cries herself to sleep every night, trying to figure out how she POSSIBLY manage on the 2.5 million the judge left her.
And what's up with that? Some dude is suspected of dealing drugs and the Feds sweep in and take everything and never ever have to give it back even if it turns out that the suspicions were groundless.
Oh, yes, I am feeling testy today.
Thursday, June 4, 2009
Carve These Words in Stone
"It is a sign of neither courage nor power to shoot rockets at sleeping children, or to blow up old women on a bus. That is not how moral authority is claimed; that is how it is surrendered."
Barak Hussein Obama
Barak Hussein Obama
Terrorists in Kansas
I’ve been thinking about all morning about Megan McArdel's long and very provocative post called A Really Long Post About Abortion and Reasoning By Historical Analogy That is Going to Make Virtually All of My Readers Very Angry At Me.
She actually makes two analogies. The explicit analogy, the one referred to in her title, compares abortion to slavery "for two reasons. First of all, it was the last time we had an extended, society-wide debate about personhood. And second of all, as now, there were structural political reasons that it was much harder--nearly impossible--to change slavery through the existing political process."
While I am intrigued by the analogy, particularly for its ability to make sense of the fervor of the anti-abortion stance, there are a couple of problems which render it useless.
First, the idea that we haven’t had a debate about the nature of personhood since the nineteenth-century strikes me as untrue. The entire women’s movement has been about the personhood of women, and it isn’t resolved. I think that much anti-abortion energy stems from the belief that women are not full persons because they (we) cannot be trusted to make moral decisions. If there’s an analogy to be made with slavery, it might be better to compare women to slaves because anti-abortionists seem to think that women’s bodies belong to someone or something in a way that men’s bodies never do. It would be even more apt to compare children to slaves because we widely agree that they are somehow the property of their parents. But this is only to underscore one of the hypocrisies of the anti-abortionists: most them don’t seem to give a damn about what happens to children after they are born. If they did, they would devote at least some of their considerable energy on child welfare.
The slavery analogy also strikes me as insufficient because if fetuses are like slaves then pro-choicers are comparable to slaveholders and anti-abortionists are comparable to abolitionists. But as far as I can tell, the abolitionists operated mostly within the law. When they broke the law, say for example the Fugitive Slave Act, they did so without killing anyone. Further, with the lone exception of John Brown, abolitionists did not stage violent attacks against slaveholders, murdering them and bombing their plantations in an effort to force them to free their slaves. As a point of fact, it was the slaveholders who used violence and the threat of violence as a means to terrorize the slaves and maintain their ownership. Pro-slavers even staged a series of murderous attacks in Kansas in their efforts to ensure that Kansas was admitted to the Union as a slave state.
Again, I think it's useful to re-consider the analogy: women are more like slaves than fetuses are. The anti-abortionists are determined to hold women in a kind of bondage. They don't just want to ban late-term abortions, they want to ban all abortion. The more radical among them, the ones who are most prone to violence, want also to ban all forms of contraception. And they won't be satisfied until they get their way.
This brings me to the second analogy, which McArdel makes implicit in her claim that the anti-abortionists have no political recourse and must therefore resort to violence in order to secure their idea of justice. This is exactly in a nutshell the rationale for terrorism everywhere. And I agree: to the extent that the anti-abortionists are are willing to use violence to achieve their will, they are terrorists. Which means that the real question is, how do we deal with terrorists at home and abroad? Do we let them set the parameters of the debate? Can there even be a debate when the opposition is being forced to the table under the threat of violence?
Of course, even that analogy breaks down under scrutiny, if for no other reason than that unlike Blacks under apartheid or Palestineans under Zionism, the anti-abortionists do have political recourse, and they know it. The problem is that political recourse requires compromise, and they have made it very very clear that there can be no compromise.
She actually makes two analogies. The explicit analogy, the one referred to in her title, compares abortion to slavery "for two reasons. First of all, it was the last time we had an extended, society-wide debate about personhood. And second of all, as now, there were structural political reasons that it was much harder--nearly impossible--to change slavery through the existing political process."
While I am intrigued by the analogy, particularly for its ability to make sense of the fervor of the anti-abortion stance, there are a couple of problems which render it useless.
First, the idea that we haven’t had a debate about the nature of personhood since the nineteenth-century strikes me as untrue. The entire women’s movement has been about the personhood of women, and it isn’t resolved. I think that much anti-abortion energy stems from the belief that women are not full persons because they (we) cannot be trusted to make moral decisions. If there’s an analogy to be made with slavery, it might be better to compare women to slaves because anti-abortionists seem to think that women’s bodies belong to someone or something in a way that men’s bodies never do. It would be even more apt to compare children to slaves because we widely agree that they are somehow the property of their parents. But this is only to underscore one of the hypocrisies of the anti-abortionists: most them don’t seem to give a damn about what happens to children after they are born. If they did, they would devote at least some of their considerable energy on child welfare.
The slavery analogy also strikes me as insufficient because if fetuses are like slaves then pro-choicers are comparable to slaveholders and anti-abortionists are comparable to abolitionists. But as far as I can tell, the abolitionists operated mostly within the law. When they broke the law, say for example the Fugitive Slave Act, they did so without killing anyone. Further, with the lone exception of John Brown, abolitionists did not stage violent attacks against slaveholders, murdering them and bombing their plantations in an effort to force them to free their slaves. As a point of fact, it was the slaveholders who used violence and the threat of violence as a means to terrorize the slaves and maintain their ownership. Pro-slavers even staged a series of murderous attacks in Kansas in their efforts to ensure that Kansas was admitted to the Union as a slave state.
Again, I think it's useful to re-consider the analogy: women are more like slaves than fetuses are. The anti-abortionists are determined to hold women in a kind of bondage. They don't just want to ban late-term abortions, they want to ban all abortion. The more radical among them, the ones who are most prone to violence, want also to ban all forms of contraception. And they won't be satisfied until they get their way.
This brings me to the second analogy, which McArdel makes implicit in her claim that the anti-abortionists have no political recourse and must therefore resort to violence in order to secure their idea of justice. This is exactly in a nutshell the rationale for terrorism everywhere. And I agree: to the extent that the anti-abortionists are are willing to use violence to achieve their will, they are terrorists. Which means that the real question is, how do we deal with terrorists at home and abroad? Do we let them set the parameters of the debate? Can there even be a debate when the opposition is being forced to the table under the threat of violence?
Of course, even that analogy breaks down under scrutiny, if for no other reason than that unlike Blacks under apartheid or Palestineans under Zionism, the anti-abortionists do have political recourse, and they know it. The problem is that political recourse requires compromise, and they have made it very very clear that there can be no compromise.
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