Thomas Pynchon's schlmiels

The first Thomas Pynchon book I read was V. Benny Profane became my hero because he was clumsy, becausehe was clumsy, but his clumsiness was explained by such a brilliant convention: he was clumsy because he was a schlemiel, and schlemiels were at war with the world of inanimate objects. I was an ungainly guy, and all my life I’d struggled to be able to do the physical activities that came naturally to other kids.

Profane was just the first in a line of schlmiel heroes of Pynchons, heroes who, I think, are self-portraits. Not every book has one, but most do. Tyrone Slothrop of Gravity’s Rainbow; Zoyd Wheeler of Vineland; and now Doc Sportello of Inherent Vice.

Pynchon’s relationship with these characters has evolved. Tyrone Slothrop, especially, seemed to be the butt of all the world’s jokes. The narrator of GR kept reminding us that Slothrop’s main flaw was that he just didn’t feel much, didn’t have many emotions. Sportello is also pretty cut off from his emotions, lustful at times, lonely, frightened that his world of surfers and hippies is going to be stolen away by the new Ronald Regan mindset; but never really subject to moments of passion. But whereas Slothrop’s emotional neutrality always seemed to be a character flaw, Sportello’s character is just a given circumstance of the book. There’s a sense that it’s too late to change it, and maybe it doesn’t need to be changed.

Inherent Vice

by Thomas Pynchon

Oct 17

I'm in Connecticut right now, visiting my grandfather, looking around the little city of Wallingford, on vacation, dipping into the dozen or so books that I'm curious about, including one about the city of San Francisco, about the way it represents the concept of Manifest Destiny, the idea that America's westward expansion is both an advance of a Christian nation into a Western Hemisphere Land of Canaan and the rebirth of the Roman Empire. The visual part of my mind is still nibbling away on the feast the new environment here offers me, sights you just can't see in Anchorage Alaska, all these old buildings, cemeteries, thick trunked trees, churches with roof-tiles like reptile scales on their spires--and I'm thinking of all the effort that must go into preserving these traces of old New England culture, Yankee culture, a culture that's at once inspiring and offensive, a culture which is linked to those founding fathers we're all supposed to admire and which also seems especially to embrace all the ugly, elitist, exclusionary traits of America.

My mind's a jumble of ideas. It's usually a jumble of ideas.

To me, Thomas Pynchon represents a sort of salvation, a messy, rummage sale of a mind that's able to take the chaos of life and order it, but that chooses instead to rearrange it into a different sort of jumble.

This new novel of his is a delight, and it touches on the politics of arranging and rearranging American space, the political forces that lie behind the sudden destruction of neighborhoods, the big monies that invest in new casinos, the monetary carrots that are dangled in front of metropolitan police departments and that therefore help determine how the law is enforced and that therefore determine who is effectively a criminal and who is not, and that therefore...and that therefore...and that therefore...

All these threads of logic that weave themselves into a tapestry that we don't have time to look at exactly...Nor time to summarize in full...

Who reads Thomas Pynchon? Sadly, I've met almost nobody who does. Two people in college, but after that, nobody. Maybe the Internet will help bring me to someone who does. I always daydream that if I were to meet a woman who shares my passion for this guy and his writing, I'll have found my wife. We'll see. In the meantime, I feel like it's time to use this book as an excuse for organizing and disorganizing some of my thoughts on this old fogy who has defined how it is I see the world, maybe more than any friend, lover or teacher ever has.

Top Headline September 10, 2009

Congress Unanimously Passes the New “Obama is a Nazi with Gay Cooties” Health Care Reform Plan

“It’s been a long and difficult road, as I predicted it would be,” said President Barack Obama as he signed the new comprehensive health care reform plan into law today after its being unanimously approved by both houses of Congress.
Critics on the left suggest that in the process of seeking support from Republicans, the bill may have been “watered down too much.” Specifically, some left wing pundits have expressed concern that nowhere in the bill is the issue of health care actually addressed. But moderate Democrats in Congress welcomed the bill.
“From the beginning, I expressed my doubts that the health care reform bill should not be too radical for the American people,” said Rep Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ), “And Obama listened to our concerns.”
Alaska’s Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski agrees, showing evidence of the surprising amount of across-the-aisle success that the bill has received since Mr Obama repackaged it in his speech on Wednesday, September 9.
“During the month of August, I repeatedly came out with vague warnings that we must not attempt to solve too many problems all at once,” said Murkowski. “And the President listened and came forward with a bill that does not solve any problems at all. This is the sort of bill that I'm proud to support, because it’s consistent with the sort of policy I’ve worked for since being appointed to office by my daddy in 2002.”
National Public Radio’s political analyst Ken Rudin noted in his Political Junkie column that this legislation was groundbreaking. “For a while there we thought Obama might not be able to do it. We were afraid that this would be exactly the same scenario as the 1993 attempt at health care reform, about which I’ve written extensively. But Obama surprised us by coming out with the only piece of legislation that I can remember that not only does nothing at all about the issue that it’s supposed to solve, but it’s also the first law that’s composed almost entirely of derogatory insults from start to finish.”
Some of those so-called insults, such as “We hereby resolve that Barack Obama is a big fat Kenyan atheist,” “Barack Obama is a two-timing skanky adulterous semi-human with Nazi rabies and nasty socks he doesn’t wash” and “There’s just something icky about that Obama guy,” were key in winning the enthusiastic support of the Tea Bagger Protest movement, which once seemed an unwinnable constituency.
In addition, Obama was able to win the approval of those who'd previously questioned the high price of the bill.
“Originally, we were worried that a trillion dollars spent over ten years to help make our health system more equitable and effective would be like just throwing money away,” said Grover Norquist, head of Americans for Tax Reform. “However, the current bill includes precisely zero dollars be spent in improving the health care system. Instead, the bill calls for a mere 5 trillion dollars to be spent in the next two months in giveaways to wall street bankers who have pledged to make America safer by building robots that will more efficiently kill Afghan civilians. If that's not a solid investment in our future, I don't know what is.”
During the signing ceremony held in the Oval Office, Obama discussed his efforts to court these and other parts of the American public.
“As early as my State of the Union Speech, I called on the American people to step forward and start a serious discussion of the health care issues that face our nation, issues such as the spiraling cost of health care, the large number of uninsured, and the difficulty that small businesses have providing coverage to their employees. I asked you for ideas about these and other important questions, and you, the American people, responded not with serious debate, but with the sort of irrational conspiracy theories, fear mongering, and bizarre distortions of simple truth which are guaranteed to distract and confuse, to frustrate the honest, bewilder the sensible, and ultimately crush and destroy the well meaning spirit of the hopeful. And I listened. I listened to our national news media as they focused relentlessly on the sort of trash talk and hate speech that you, the American people, are most interested in regurgitating and obsessing upon. And, with the help of my unique network of grass roots volunteers, I helped craft a piece of legislation that proves that I am not only the president of those who voted for me last year hoping for a serious shift toward a more civilized and humane union; nor only of the equally serious fiscal conservatives who worry about the financial soundness of our nation; but especially for those are scared to talk or even think about serious issues, but do enjoy seeing people get in shouting fights and hissy fits on cable television. You see, this was never about me; it’s about you. It’s about how loud you can shout, how much you can shock, and the incredible tenacity of American wing nuts in believing that the best way to confront frightening problems is by retreating into a bizarre, violent and disturbingly childish fantasy world.”
The bill gained strong support from former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, who lauded it’s provision legalizing the use of so-called “death-panels” to hunt down and kill the “stinking gay pinko Nazi ACLU swine who voted for that nasty Obama guy who isn’t even an American citizen anyway.”
“Death panels were my idea from the start,” said Palin, “And nothing makes me happier than to see them turned against some, some, of the people in this great land of plenty and teeming along the road of character and responsibility, and job losses, and a lot of the people I’ve talked to are afraid. But I think that’s okay, because deep down there are people who honor the idea of that American soldier who’s out there dyin’ for stuff that I think I believe in and I’ll betchya you probably believe in, too. To sum up, it’s all about the future, and about jobs, and responsibility, and forward funding education which are not all, but just some of the great things that you’re just not going to be able to get if, ya know, journalists just keep makin’ stuff up.”
Palin made no comment on rumors that she was planning to run the position of Divine Empress of the Galaxy in 2012.
Asked to comment on the health care bill, Organizing for America political strategist David Plouffe said, “Of course, some of the volunteers who came out and knocked on doors and made phone calls are probably feeling a little disappointed. They were hoping to get some protection for those hard working Americans who find themselves at the mercy of big insurance companies, for those Americans who are just one illness away from going bankrupt. They were hoping for a bill with a strong public option and instead they’re being hunted down by homeland security agents carrying submachine guns. But the important thing to remember is that progress doesn’t happen overnight. The small, incremental, nearly nonexistent victories we achieve today are almost sure to lead down a possibly inevitable path to hope and change which will be achieved sometime in the unspecified future.”
Plouffe appeared to want to say more, but was force to duck for cover to avoid being hit by sniper fire deployed by incoming Secretary of Homeland Security Secretary Scott Roeder.

Dog Sees God

I just wanted to throw in a quick plug for this excellent show now being performed at Out North theater here in Anchorage. It features some of our best young actors in town handling some really challenging material, and the results are incredible. I especially like the way that the script develops characters and ideas from the beloved Peanuts comic strip about philosophizing school kids. We're living in an era of official remakes, where Dr Seuss and JRR Tolkein and King Kong and Batman and the Dukes of Hazzard all have to be restarted again and again every few years in what resembles a sort of weird devotional cult behavior, returning again and again to the sources of past entertainment, leaving at their our virginal young audiences drugged into a stupor by the freshest flowers of our exotic garden of computer graphics. Some people may complain that Dog Sees God violates the sanctity of its beloved characters by showing them as high school kids who swear and and have sex and beat each other up, but to me it lends itself to exactly the sort of real, thoughtful creative exploration that made these characters interesting in the first place. If you have the opportunity, please see this show.

Grocery List

Good news! My play, Grocery List, has been accepted in the 4th Annual Chaos Theater Festival, which will take place in Chicago in November of this year! Grocery LIst had it's first public reading at this year's Last Frontier Theatre Conference Play Slam in Valdez at Prince William Sound Community College. Please stay tuned to this site for more information about the performances!

A History of Iran: Empire of the Mind

A History of Iran: Empire of the Mind by Michael Axworthy (2008)

I read a book like this sort of like I read a novel; what hooks me into the book is the sense of being pulled along on the ups and downs of tumultuous fortune. But a novel is structured so that the plot is simplified. The author makes sure that you have relative ease catching the name of the leading characters, that you understand the setting and can vividly picture a lot of the action. I can honestly say that of all the hundreds of historical personages I was introduced to reading this book, I can only remember one, and that’s Nader Shah, a pretty fascinating “great man” of history whose rise to power was more meteoric than that of Sarah Palin’s.
It’s no surprise that I remember clearly the main thesis of the book, which is that the nation of Iran is defined more by its intellectual character than by any set of boundaries or affiliation with a particular political doctrine. Axworthy spells this out very clearly at the beginning of the book, and refers back to the idea enough times that you really see where he’s coming from.
But there are a number of incidental observations that also stuck with me. For instance, the idea that a government’s primary role really has to be defense in order to serve any useful purpose. It’s memorable because Axworthy does not come across as a particularly hawkish thinker. He never hesitates to criticize the many Iranian leaders who brought ruin on their land by pursuing overly ambitious military campaigns. It’s an interesting principle, the primacy of defense, because it begs the question of what legitimate defense is, and of what happens when aggression is carried out in the name of defense. There are lots of examples of this.
Another observation that stuck with me was that part of the reason Iran seemed to lag behind in terms of technology and modernization is that the terrain of Iran and the organization of its communities really wasn’t suited for the sort of railroad infrastructure that was springing up around Europe and America. Although later on, Iran suffered from the discrepancies in technology, the short-term prospect of investing in these technologies just didn’t exist.
And the observation that was most memorable to me, and also the most incidental of the three I list here, was that the history of empires tends to focus almost exclusively on the causes of their decline. Having studied a lot of German and Austrian history, I immediately said to myself, “Hey, that’s true, isn’t it. Why is that?” My guess is that a lot of the modern study of history in the western world is modeled after the study of the Greek and Roman Empires as seen from the far side of the chasm of the dark ages. Perhaps there’s a crime scene investigation aspect to the study of history, where the first and best question to ask is, “Why did this death happen. Why did this empire decline and fall?” From this vantage points, you get the best access to the eyewitnesses who watched the collapse and reported on it, and these witnesses are better sources than those who were present during the victorious rise of the empire, because during the rise of an empire there’s too much distortion and propaganda, too many people with skin in the game, too much state secrecy and too many people infatuated by political slogans and aspirations. There are too many variables, too many proposals.
Over the past few months, as the debate over national health care reform has occasionally struggled its way in front of Michael Jackson and Sarah Palin to take into the tabloid tinged spotlight of the collective American consciousness, I’ve wondered a lot about what’s really being debated is the health of this nation. Just yesterday I went to an Organizing for America rally held in a local junior high school. It was impressive to see about 150 people gathered and cheering every time the concept of a public option was raised. This is a big crowd for Alaska, and it may be a sign that there’s more political will behind the reform movement than the headlines have led us to believe.
I think that a serious reform of our nation’s health care system, one that provides coverage to the uninsured and includes a public option, is going to be a much more meaningful contribution to our national defense than any invasion of Iraq or Afghanistan. And yet there seems to be an unspoken rule that says we debate the lead up to military campaigns very differently than we debate the lead up to health care reform. In our national consciousness, a war in Iraq is not very different from buying a ticket to see a movie like Transformers or Batman. There’s a sense that, whoever you are, you just gotta see it. You just gotta shell out the money. Even if you have doubts, you don’t want to miss out on this. The money’s already been spent in advance. The troops are already moving in. The demographic tests were performed years ago. Smarter people than you have decided in advance: this is the movie you want to see. How will we pay for it? That doesn’t matter. It’s just a movie. It’ll be over quickly, and after it’s over, you’re supposed to forget about it. So what if the new Transformers movie sucked. Get over it. Only geeks care about old movies.
In the meantime, there’s a different mechanism built up around health-care reform. We’re supposed to think about this sort of issue, and make a mature decision. But what’s our model for thinking? To carry on the movie model, the difference between the Iraq war debate and the health care debate is the difference between a Transformers movie and a movie like The Da Vinci Code or Angels and Demons. Yes, there’s a little more time to take in information, but not much more time.
The most salient idea to come out of the health care debate has been: Barack Obama is the Antichrist. His followers are mindless fanatics and they’re determined to take away America’s edge by euthanizing our grandparents.
Is this nonsense? Yes. But there are a lot of reasons why Barack Obama’s supporters haven’t been quicker to rally behind health care reform. Because in the months since his election, Obama has spent a lot more time meeting with the heads of big insurance companies than he’s spent meeting with the uninsured.
Over the past few months I’ve spent a lot of time working as a nurse in the operating room with surgeons and anesthesiologists. I’m privileged to spend so much of my time with these people, some of the best-educated people in the state of Alaska. None of them are really shy about speaking their minds when it comes to political issues, but it’s surprising that there really hasn’t been a lot of intelligent comment on the health care debate. When the issue get’s mentioned at all, it tends to be derisive. “Under ObamaCare, we’re not going to be able to do anything but tonsillectomies,” or “Did you heart them rip Dr Obama a new asshole on tv today?” At the same time that a lot of these docs were making jokes about the new dawn of American socialism, I saw a lot of these exact clustering in the hallways and talking excitedly about how they were taking advantage of the Cash for Clunkers program.
One thing that’s become clear to me over the past few years is that physicians are very smart, but they’re no more likely to form mature political views than anyone else. Just as anywhere else, there’s a lot of diversity of political opinion, and it’s an open secret that in the operating rooms where I work you get a harder time shooting your mouth off in support of a liberal point of view than you do of a conservative point of view.
Here’s a joke I heard recently from a surgeon who will remain nameless: “Did you hear that Obama’s going to tax aspirin now? It’s white and it works.”
Okay. That’s really low. Not only is that joke racist, it’s just not funny.
Physicians often don’t see nurses as their peers. That’s built into the structure of the health care system, and there’s reason for it. I can’t perform surgery, I’m not qualified, at least not at this point, to perform anesthesia. But I’m not stupid, and I do know that racist jokes are a far cry from rational debate.
One of our surgeons, Dr Mark Kimmins, has actually spent a lot of time seriously thinking and speaking in public on the issue of how the health care system works. One day I stopped him after an operation and asked him what he thought of the whole health care debate. While he didn’t exactly state that he was going on record, I don’t think that he’d hold it against me if I quote him when he told me that he thinks a nation ends up with a health care system that reflects its national character. He told me that he would give me a thousand dollars sight unseen if I could go into the doctor’s lounge right now and get any sort of consensus at all among whatever chance assemblage of physicians happened to be in there in the moment. Dr Kimmins spoke a little bit further about his own experience working with both the Canadian and the US health systems. Is the Canadian system perfect? He doesn’t think so, but he also doesn’t think that it’s a travesty. According to him, the nightmare situation where you have a government bureaucrat saying, “No, this surgery simply is not approved” just does not exist in Canada. But as with any system, including the current one we have in America, there is the system between infinite demand and finite resource.
I recently talked to a friend of mine who got a job loosely associated with the insurance industry after he lost a job in the restaurant industry after breaking up a brawl (My friend said, as an aside, that if his unemployment claims didn’t go through, he planned to sue the restaurant). I asked him what he thought of health care reform. He told me that he just doesn't think health care is a right that the government should be supporting. He’s happy with his own health insurance; he hasn’t been to the doctor in a few years and resents the thought of paying money for people who aren’t as smart about their own health care. He then digressed into talking about the fact that what he’s really upset about is the fact that his financial situation is a mess, and that he does fault the government for this because in all he years of education he’s had, he never got a firm grounding of personal finance.
I didn’t put my friend on the spot during that conversation, but I’m putting his thinking on the spot right now. It seems like what he’s doing is cherry picking his rights and responsibilities. At the moment, he feels like the government has a right not only to educate him, but also rather to make choices about his education, and if he comes away from the education making poor personal choices about money, well that’s the government’s fault. At the same time, he’s pretty sure that he’s in a situation now where he doesn’t have to worry about health care. If something bad happens to him, he’s covered, and nothing bad is likely to happen.
Well, I hope for his sake that he’s right. But I know a lot of people who think they’re covered until they get into a catastrophe, after which point they get a rude surprise.
I’m not perfectly happy with the presidency of Barack Obama so far, but I think that he’s right in calling for health care reform, and that we still do have a great opportunity for pushing such reform through in the next couple of months. I was heartened to see that the Organizing for America event I attended last night included some strong rallying cries in favor of the public option.
Health care reform is a complicated issue and I don’t pretend to be a great authority on it, but I do think that I’ve taken steps toward real understanding of the issue. I made a choice last night to throw my own weight heavily behind the Organizing for America initiative to push health care reform through. Do I have doubts? A few. Of course I do. I’m throwing my support behind the passage of legislation that hasn’t been written yet and that’s certain to come in a form that’s needlessly complex and inaccessible to the public understanding. But I’m also convinced that if this legislation does not pass, the situation will get much worse for ordinary Americans; many of us are not covered, and those of us who are find ourselves totally at the whim of whoever provides our coverage. Moreover, I agree with the assessment of Dr Kimmins: America will get a healthcare system that reflects its natural character, and I still do have hope that America’s national character is evolving and maturing toward something more civilized, more humane, and more likely to result in prosperity than the nightmare of the Bush administration.

A History of Iran: Empire of the Mind

A History of Iran: Empire of the Mind by Michael Axworthy (2008)

I read a book like this sort of like I read a novel; what hooks me into the book is the sense of being pulled along on the ups and downs of tumultuous fortune. But a novel is structured so that the plot is simplified. The author makes sure that you have relative ease catching the name of the leading characters, that you understand the setting and can vividly picture a lot of the action. I can honestly say that of all the hundreds of historical personages I was introduced to reading this book, I can only remember one, and that’s Nader Shah, a pretty fascinating “great man” of history whose rise to power was more meteoric than that of Sarah Palin’s.
It’s no surprise that I remember clearly the main thesis of the book, which is that the nation of Iran is defined more by its intellectual character than by any set of boundaries or affiliation with a particular political doctrine. Axworthy spells this out very clearly at the beginning of the book, and refers back to the idea enough times that you really see where he’s coming from.
But there are a number of incidental observations that also stuck with me. For instance, the idea that a government’s primary role really has to be defense in order to serve any useful purpose. It’s memorable because Axworthy does not come across as a particularly hawkish thinker. He never hesitates to criticize the many Iranian leaders who brought ruin on their land by pursuing overly ambitious military campaigns. It’s an interesting principle, the primacy of defense, because it begs the question of what legitimate defense is, and of what happens when aggression is carried out in the name of defense. There are lots of examples of this.
Another observation that stuck with me was that part of the reason Iran seemed to lag behind in terms of technology and modernization is that the terrain of Iran and the organization of its communities really wasn’t suited for the sort of railroad infrastructure that was springing up around Europe and America. Although later on, Iran suffered from the discrepancies in technology, the short-term prospect of investing in these technologies just didn’t exist.
And the observation that was most memorable to me, and also the most incidental of the three I list here, was that the history of empires tends to focus almost exclusively on the causes of their decline. Having studied a lot of German and Austrian history, I immediately said to myself, “Hey, that’s true, isn’t it. Why is that?” My guess is that a lot of the modern study of history in the western world is modeled after the study of the Greek and Roman Empires as seen from the far side of the chasm of the dark ages. Perhaps there’s a crime scene investigation aspect to the study of history, where the first and best question to ask is, “Why did this death happen. Why did this empire decline and fall?” From this vantage points, you get the best access to the eyewitnesses who watched the collapse and reported on it, and these witnesses are better sources than those who were present during the victorious rise of the empire, because during the rise of an empire there’s too much distortion and propaganda, too many people with skin in the game, too much state secrecy and too many people infatuated by political slogans and aspirations. There are too many variables, too many proposals.
Over the past few months, as the debate over national health care reform has occasionally struggled its way in front of Michael Jackson and Sarah Palin to take into the tabloid tinged spotlight of the collective American consciousness, I’ve wondered a lot about what’s really being debated is the health of this nation. Just yesterday I went to an Organizing for America rally held in a local junior high school. It was impressive to see about 150 people gathered and cheering every time the concept of a public option was raised. This is a big crowd for Alaska, and it may be a sign that there’s more political will behind the reform movement than the headlines have led us to believe.
I think that a serious reform of our nation’s health care system, one that provides coverage to the uninsured and includes a public option, is going to be a much more meaningful contribution to our national defense than any invasion of Iraq or Afghanistan. And yet there seems to be an unspoken rule that says we debate the lead up to military campaigns very differently than we debate the lead up to health care reform. In our national consciousness, a war in Iraq is not very different from buying a ticket to see a movie like Transformers or Batman. There’s a sense that, whoever you are, you just gotta see it. You just gotta shell out the money. Even if you have doubts, you don’t want to miss out on this. The money’s already been spent in advance. The troops are already moving in. The demographic tests were performed years ago. Smarter people than you have decided in advance: this is the movie you want to see. How will we pay for it? That doesn’t matter. It’s just a movie. It’ll be over quickly, and after it’s over, you’re supposed to forget about it. So what if the new Transformers movie sucked. Get over it. Only geeks care about old movies.
In the meantime, there’s a different mechanism built up around health-care reform. We’re supposed to think about this sort of issue, and make a mature decision. But what’s our model for thinking? To carry on the movie model, the difference between the Iraq war debate and the health care debate is the difference between a Transformers movie and a movie like The Da Vinci Code or Angels and Demons. Yes, there’s a little more time to take in information, but not much more time.
The most salient idea to come out of the health care debate has been: Barack Obama is the Antichrist. His followers are mindless fanatics and they’re determined to take away America’s edge by euthanizing our grandparents.
Is this nonsense? Yes. But there are a lot of reasons why Barack Obama’s supporters haven’t been quicker to rally behind health care reform. Because in the months since his election, Obama has spent a lot more time meeting with the heads of big insurance companies than he’s spent meeting with the uninsured.
Over the past few months I’ve spent a lot of time working as a nurse in the operating room with surgeons and anesthesiologists. I’m privileged to spend so much of my time with these people, some of the best-educated people in the state of Alaska. None of them are really shy about speaking their minds when it comes to political issues, but it’s surprising that there really hasn’t been a lot of intelligent comment on the health care debate. When the issue get’s mentioned at all, it tends to be derisive. “Under ObamaCare, we’re not going to be able to do anything but tonsillectomies,” or “Did you heart them rip Dr Obama a new asshole on tv today?” At the same time that a lot of these docs were making jokes about the new dawn of American socialism, I saw a lot of these exact clustering in the hallways and talking excitedly about how they were taking advantage of the Cash for Clunkers program.
One thing that’s become clear to me over the past few years is that physicians are very smart, but they’re no more likely to form mature political views than anyone else. Just as anywhere else, there’s a lot of diversity of political opinion, and it’s an open secret that in the operating rooms where I work you get a harder time shooting your mouth off in support of a liberal point of view than you do of a conservative point of view.
Here’s a joke I heard recently from a surgeon who will remain nameless: “Did you hear that Obama’s going to tax aspirin now? It’s white and it works.”
Okay. That’s really low. Not only is that joke racist, it’s just not funny.
Physicians often don’t see nurses as their peers. That’s built into the structure of the health care system, and there’s reason for it. I can’t perform surgery, I’m not qualified, at least not at this point, to perform anesthesia. But I’m not stupid, and I do know that racist jokes are a far cry from rational debate.
One of our surgeons, Dr Mark Kimmins, has actually spent a lot of time seriously thinking and speaking in public on the issue of how the health care system works. One day I stopped him after an operation and asked him what he thought of the whole health care debate. While he didn’t exactly state that he was going on record, I don’t think that he’d hold it against me if I quote him when he told me that he thinks a nation ends up with a health care system that reflects its national character. He told me that he would give me a thousand dollars sight unseen if I could go into the doctor’s lounge right now and get any sort of consensus at all among whatever chance assemblage of physicians happened to be in there in the moment. Dr Kimmins spoke a little bit further about his own experience working with both the Canadian and the US health systems. Is the Canadian system perfect? He doesn’t think so, but he also doesn’t think that it’s a travesty. According to him, the nightmare situation where you have a government bureaucrat saying, “No, this surgery simply is not approved” just does not exist in Canada. But as with any system, including the current one we have in America, there is the system between infinite demand and finite resource.
I recently talked to a friend of mine who got a job loosely associated with the insurance industry after he lost a job in the restaurant industry after breaking up a brawl (My friend said, as an aside, that if his unemployment claims didn’t go through, he planned to sue the restaurant). I asked him what he thought of health care reform. He told me that he just doesn't think health care is a right that the government should be supporting. He’s happy with his own health insurance; he hasn’t been to the doctor in a few years and resents the thought of paying money for people who aren’t as smart about their own health care. He then digressed into talking about the fact that what he’s really upset about is the fact that his financial situation is a mess, and that he does fault the government for this because in all he years of education he’s had, he never got a firm grounding of personal finance.
I didn’t put my friend on the spot during that conversation, but I’m putting his thinking on the spot right now. It seems like what he’s doing is cherry picking his rights and responsibilities. At the moment, he feels like the government has a right not only to educate him, but also rather to make choices about his education, and if he comes away from the education making poor personal choices about money, well that’s the government’s fault. At the same time, he’s pretty sure that he’s in a situation now where he doesn’t have to worry about health care. If something bad happens to him, he’s covered, and nothing bad is likely to happen.
Well, I hope for his sake that he’s right. But I know a lot of people who think they’re covered until they get into a catastrophe, after which point they get a rude surprise.
I’m not perfectly happy with the presidency of Barack Obama so far, but I think that he’s right in calling for health care reform, and that we still do have a great opportunity for pushing such reform through in the next couple of months. I was heartened to see that the Organizing for America event I attended last night included some strong rallying cries in favor of the public option.
Health care reform is a complicated issue and I don’t pretend to be a great authority on it, but I do think that I’ve taken steps toward real understanding of the issue. I made a choice last night to throw my own weight heavily behind the Organizing for America initiative to push health care reform through. Do I have doubts? A few. Of course I do. I’m throwing my support behind the passage of legislation that hasn’t been written yet and that’s certain to come in a form that’s needlessly complex and inaccessible to the public understanding. But I’m also convinced that if this legislation does not pass, the situation will get much worse for ordinary Americans; many of us are not covered, and those of us who are find ourselves totally at the whim of whoever provides our coverage. Moreover, I agree with the assessment of Dr Kimmins: America will get a healthcare system that reflects its natural character, and I still do have hope that America’s national character is evolving and maturing toward something more civilized, more humane, and more likely to result in prosperity than the nightmare of the Bush administration.