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.
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.
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.
Race
by Studs Terkel
It was on election day last year that I learned Studs Terkel had died . . . I was a few days behind when it came to following along with the news. I’d never read a book by Terkel, I’d only ever heard a couple of interviews with him on the radio and seen a glimpse of him in Michael Moore’s film The Big One. But he’d achieved a sort of legendary status in my mind already as a figurehead of the Left, a man who’s always stood up for the underdog, a man who always lived by humbly and treated himself humbly, a man who’d been involved in the New Deal and had suffered from blacklisting, a man perennially enchanted by the profundity of who had prospered by learning to listen to the voices of ordinary people. I imagined him as our current version of the sage of the middle ages, of Spinoza toiling away in a garret by candlelight, getting his hand dirty with the ink from a quill pen as he jotted down ideas that came not from contemplation of abstract principles, but simply from listening to what people have to say, recording it on tape, and then writing it down.
In the introduction to Race, Terkel describes a scene from his everyday life in Chicago. Hampered by poor eyesight, he would give himself an extra layer of safety when he walked across the street by holding out his palms to oncoming cars as though he were directing traffic. I love the image of this little old man in thick-rimmed glasses signaling, “Stop!” to a whole river of cars.
The stories in Race are like a pocketful of pebbles, each one with it’s own details worth attending to, none of them towering over the rest. One interesting section focuses on a the conflict between a white man(C.P. Ellis) and a black woman (Ann Atwater) in the Durham, NC . . . Ellis had a history with the KKK, Atwater was a civil rights activist, but as time went on the Ellis began to understand things differently, began to see the divide between white and black as something imposed on the south in order to distract from the real issue of oppression of the poor. He and his Atwater collaborate on various local government campaigns, and eventually he becomes an important activist in the community, champion of all races.
As a sideline, we learn that while Ellis has remained vigorous and engaged, Atwater has suffered from declining health and fallen on hard times financially. In another writer’s work, this detail might be drawn out to support some other thesis. Terkel lets it stand as it is. There’s a sense that along with being interested in the issues of race and politics, he also has a great deal of sympathy for the human beings who are involved in the social and politics clashes that define history. There’s a sense that he understands the world as a stage on which we are only players, and that many of the players have these roles thrust upon us. Throughout race, there’s the sense that there’s a tangle of prefabricated narrative we’ve all been provided with to help us think about what’s going on in the world. In the multitude of interviews, you hear the same ideas come up again and again, people positioning themselves on predictable sides of the battle lines, but the artfulness of the book is in seeing how each individual untangles the narrative in a slightly different way.
On the day I learned Studs Terkel had died, I also learned that Barack Obama had been elected president. Since then there’s been an ongoing cycle of news waves, peaks and valleys of excitement based on health care and the war in Afghanistan, stimulus money and torture memos, racial profiling and beer summits, Israeli settlements and Iranian elections, racially insulting cartoons and the call for a renewed dialogue on race. I suppose I count myself among those liberals who feel disappointed at the lack of bold moves for change. I don’t like seeing drone attacks kill Pakistani civilians; I don’t like seeing the lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgendered community put on hold in their struggle for equal rights; I don’t like hearing about Blue Dog Democrats fouling up the public option of the health care plan; I don’t like Timothy Geithner and his coterie of financial insiders cutting deals to give Wall Street an easy ride. But I also do have the sense that most of what I’ve been witnessing is a show, that we’re all being called on to take stands and argue for ourselves, to lobby and make donations and chit chat around the water cooler and pass on internet links and parrot talking points and kick up dust. As a writer, it’s always important to aware that when the dust settles and you see what the battlefield really looked like, you’ll probably meet with bigger surprises than any you might encounter in the heat of conflict.
It was on election day last year that I learned Studs Terkel had died . . . I was a few days behind when it came to following along with the news. I’d never read a book by Terkel, I’d only ever heard a couple of interviews with him on the radio and seen a glimpse of him in Michael Moore’s film The Big One. But he’d achieved a sort of legendary status in my mind already as a figurehead of the Left, a man who’s always stood up for the underdog, a man who always lived by humbly and treated himself humbly, a man who’d been involved in the New Deal and had suffered from blacklisting, a man perennially enchanted by the profundity of who had prospered by learning to listen to the voices of ordinary people. I imagined him as our current version of the sage of the middle ages, of Spinoza toiling away in a garret by candlelight, getting his hand dirty with the ink from a quill pen as he jotted down ideas that came not from contemplation of abstract principles, but simply from listening to what people have to say, recording it on tape, and then writing it down.
In the introduction to Race, Terkel describes a scene from his everyday life in Chicago. Hampered by poor eyesight, he would give himself an extra layer of safety when he walked across the street by holding out his palms to oncoming cars as though he were directing traffic. I love the image of this little old man in thick-rimmed glasses signaling, “Stop!” to a whole river of cars.
The stories in Race are like a pocketful of pebbles, each one with it’s own details worth attending to, none of them towering over the rest. One interesting section focuses on a the conflict between a white man(C.P. Ellis) and a black woman (Ann Atwater) in the Durham, NC . . . Ellis had a history with the KKK, Atwater was a civil rights activist, but as time went on the Ellis began to understand things differently, began to see the divide between white and black as something imposed on the south in order to distract from the real issue of oppression of the poor. He and his Atwater collaborate on various local government campaigns, and eventually he becomes an important activist in the community, champion of all races.
As a sideline, we learn that while Ellis has remained vigorous and engaged, Atwater has suffered from declining health and fallen on hard times financially. In another writer’s work, this detail might be drawn out to support some other thesis. Terkel lets it stand as it is. There’s a sense that along with being interested in the issues of race and politics, he also has a great deal of sympathy for the human beings who are involved in the social and politics clashes that define history. There’s a sense that he understands the world as a stage on which we are only players, and that many of the players have these roles thrust upon us. Throughout race, there’s the sense that there’s a tangle of prefabricated narrative we’ve all been provided with to help us think about what’s going on in the world. In the multitude of interviews, you hear the same ideas come up again and again, people positioning themselves on predictable sides of the battle lines, but the artfulness of the book is in seeing how each individual untangles the narrative in a slightly different way.
On the day I learned Studs Terkel had died, I also learned that Barack Obama had been elected president. Since then there’s been an ongoing cycle of news waves, peaks and valleys of excitement based on health care and the war in Afghanistan, stimulus money and torture memos, racial profiling and beer summits, Israeli settlements and Iranian elections, racially insulting cartoons and the call for a renewed dialogue on race. I suppose I count myself among those liberals who feel disappointed at the lack of bold moves for change. I don’t like seeing drone attacks kill Pakistani civilians; I don’t like seeing the lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgendered community put on hold in their struggle for equal rights; I don’t like hearing about Blue Dog Democrats fouling up the public option of the health care plan; I don’t like Timothy Geithner and his coterie of financial insiders cutting deals to give Wall Street an easy ride. But I also do have the sense that most of what I’ve been witnessing is a show, that we’re all being called on to take stands and argue for ourselves, to lobby and make donations and chit chat around the water cooler and pass on internet links and parrot talking points and kick up dust. As a writer, it’s always important to aware that when the dust settles and you see what the battlefield really looked like, you’ll probably meet with bigger surprises than any you might encounter in the heat of conflict.
How to Read A French Fry
by Russ Parsons (2001)
The book describes the process by which fluid fills the particles of flour, by which chopped bits of zucchini evaporate in a skillet as the oil surrounding them turns them golden brown. Sauces and pie crusts, mayonnaise and breaded fried chicken crusts—Russ Parsons takes us into the abstract world of chemistry in order to set up a chess-like strategy for maximizing the flavor in all these recipes.
A few years back I started enrolling in the prerequisite courses I needed in order to become a registered nurse. I started with psychology, anatomy and basic chemistry. I found I had a talent especially for chemistry, for drawing out the fish skeleton diagrams that describe carbohydrate chains, for understanding the Rube Goldberg contraptions of the cell membranes that drive the process of life. I fell in love with the menagerie of two-dimensional and three dimensional diagrams used to describe molecules—balls and sticks, maps of benzene rings, computer generated images of proteins coiled and fan-folded into structures that allowed them to carry out essential functions of life.
The paradox: I found myself immersed in a Wonderland of facts and specialized knowledge, cryptic terminology and brain-twisting challenges, all of which I found extremely inspirational. But at the same time, I had basically no time to write creatively.
In hindsight, I can get all sly with my former self and ask whether it was really a lack of time that was holding me back, or whether it was a faulty conception of what the prerequisites are of being able to write something.
It’s so easy as a writer to be intimidated. There are so many writers who have come before, and so many of them have succeeded by giving the impression of a deep and encyclopedic knowledge of . . . nearly everything. Herman Melville and the life of the whalers. Thomas Pynchon and the history of Germany after the Second World War. Annie Proulx and rough, homespun culture of Newfoundland. One imagines the time these authors spent researching their subjects and comes away feeling eminently unqualified. Not only do I not know anything about whaling, post-war Gemany or Newfoundland, I don’t even know as much about my own surroundings as these authors knew about their exotic subjects.
The truth is that writing isn’t like that. Since my starting point here is Russ Parsons’s book about food, let me use that as a metaphor: if you want to make and sell a food product in the USA, there’s an established bureaucracy you have to deal with. There are standards, there are rules. If you’re selling lettuce that gives people salmonella, there are investigators that will track you down. When it comes to writing, the situation is different. Certainly, your work will be judged. If you want to get published, there are standards you have to meet. But the bureaucracy your dealing with is one far more mysterious.
I think every creative person at some point becomes familiar with the idea of the “inner critic.” The inner critic is a part of your brain that moves quickly to put a kibosh on any inspiration that we’re capable of coming up with. The inner critic is infuriatingly dynamic. Every day he sits in his little mental office and gathers new examples of why you aren’t qualified to do what you want to do. If you read a good book, the critic will tell you that your work will never be that good. If you read a crummy piece of work, the critic will tell you that it bears remarkable and damning similarities to your own work. The inner critic is ingenious and sadistically cunning. One of his specialties is to take what nourishes you and turn it into something that poisons you. Take advice for instance: there’s all sorts of advice for writers floating around out there. “Show, don’t tell.” “Write the truest sentence you can.” “Avoid adverbs.” “Write what you know.”
This last bit of advice in particular can be an extremely potent medicine and can quickly turn into a potent poison. It can be amazingly liberating, a personal emancipation proclamation when you suddenly realize that you’re able to use your own experience and forget all about emulating the style of Tennessee Williams or William Faulkner, Samuel Beckett or Thomas Hardy as you’ve fruitlessly been doing for the last few years. All of a sudden, it seems like you have a new treasure trove of subject matter. For a while, the inner critic is caught off guard. But he’s nothing if not adaptive. He begins to realize the restrictive potential of this maxim. “Write what you know.” That’s as much as saying “Don’t dare write what you don’t know. Don’t dare speculate. Don’t dare imagine.” Soon the inner critic has the statement crocheted and hung upon his office wall.
It’s easy to get caught up in the despair over how much or how little you know. Some authors can come away from a dinner party with every conversation stored verbatim in their memories. Some draw on their experiences of coming from one culture to another. Some have gone to the best possible schools, trained at the feet of the brightest possible geniuses. And here you are with apparently nothing to work with. It doesn’t seem fair. It’s not fair.
But that’s part of the truth you need to write about, the fact that nothing in this world is fair. None of us knows quite enough to get by, and none of us has quite the social skills to seek the complimentary knowledge from those who surround us. The truth is that I know that I’m inspired by chemistry, and I’m inspired by politics and world history, and I’m inspired by economics and I’ll never be authoritative enough in any of these subjects to write the sort of Pulitzer-Prize winning work that I’d like to, and that doesn’t matter. If I’d wanted, I could have taken a year after my nursing school and immersed myself in chemistry in the hopes that the study would have made me into an expert, would have given me an arsenal of expertise I could draw on for the rest of my adult life as a writer. I could write a book about the lives of chemists and physicists at the turn of the 19th century. All my facts would be correct. I would describe the ways in which methyl groups freewheel at the end of carbohydrate chains; I would describe the way that scientists like JJ Thompson used every day materials to set up brilliant experiments. I would describe the incomparable feeling of being present at the moment of a revolution in human knowledge. But probably the end result would be that I would always feel I had just one more text to read before I was prepared to start writing.
Recently I heard poet Kay Ryan speaking on the radio. She said that the best way to write about something is when you know almost nothing about it. I think this is especially useful information in our current culture, which values realism, polish and an appearance of expertise. Expertise is fascinating, certainly, but if you want to be creative, you need to rely on imagination rather than expertise. Imagination is not the rational irrigation system that supplies the rational fields of expertise—it’s the swamp water that gathers in the wetlands of ignorance.
What does this have to do with the book How to Read a French Fry? Not much, I’m afraid, except to say that this odd little hybrid of a book, not quite a cookbook but not quite a science text, is emblematic of the sort of hybrid knowledge I’m talking about. You won’t come away from it an expert in either chemistry or cuisine, but it may provide you with just the sort of disorienting intellectual spin you need to get yourself back into the dizzy state you need in order to get inspired.
The book describes the process by which fluid fills the particles of flour, by which chopped bits of zucchini evaporate in a skillet as the oil surrounding them turns them golden brown. Sauces and pie crusts, mayonnaise and breaded fried chicken crusts—Russ Parsons takes us into the abstract world of chemistry in order to set up a chess-like strategy for maximizing the flavor in all these recipes.
A few years back I started enrolling in the prerequisite courses I needed in order to become a registered nurse. I started with psychology, anatomy and basic chemistry. I found I had a talent especially for chemistry, for drawing out the fish skeleton diagrams that describe carbohydrate chains, for understanding the Rube Goldberg contraptions of the cell membranes that drive the process of life. I fell in love with the menagerie of two-dimensional and three dimensional diagrams used to describe molecules—balls and sticks, maps of benzene rings, computer generated images of proteins coiled and fan-folded into structures that allowed them to carry out essential functions of life.
The paradox: I found myself immersed in a Wonderland of facts and specialized knowledge, cryptic terminology and brain-twisting challenges, all of which I found extremely inspirational. But at the same time, I had basically no time to write creatively.
In hindsight, I can get all sly with my former self and ask whether it was really a lack of time that was holding me back, or whether it was a faulty conception of what the prerequisites are of being able to write something.
It’s so easy as a writer to be intimidated. There are so many writers who have come before, and so many of them have succeeded by giving the impression of a deep and encyclopedic knowledge of . . . nearly everything. Herman Melville and the life of the whalers. Thomas Pynchon and the history of Germany after the Second World War. Annie Proulx and rough, homespun culture of Newfoundland. One imagines the time these authors spent researching their subjects and comes away feeling eminently unqualified. Not only do I not know anything about whaling, post-war Gemany or Newfoundland, I don’t even know as much about my own surroundings as these authors knew about their exotic subjects.
The truth is that writing isn’t like that. Since my starting point here is Russ Parsons’s book about food, let me use that as a metaphor: if you want to make and sell a food product in the USA, there’s an established bureaucracy you have to deal with. There are standards, there are rules. If you’re selling lettuce that gives people salmonella, there are investigators that will track you down. When it comes to writing, the situation is different. Certainly, your work will be judged. If you want to get published, there are standards you have to meet. But the bureaucracy your dealing with is one far more mysterious.
I think every creative person at some point becomes familiar with the idea of the “inner critic.” The inner critic is a part of your brain that moves quickly to put a kibosh on any inspiration that we’re capable of coming up with. The inner critic is infuriatingly dynamic. Every day he sits in his little mental office and gathers new examples of why you aren’t qualified to do what you want to do. If you read a good book, the critic will tell you that your work will never be that good. If you read a crummy piece of work, the critic will tell you that it bears remarkable and damning similarities to your own work. The inner critic is ingenious and sadistically cunning. One of his specialties is to take what nourishes you and turn it into something that poisons you. Take advice for instance: there’s all sorts of advice for writers floating around out there. “Show, don’t tell.” “Write the truest sentence you can.” “Avoid adverbs.” “Write what you know.”
This last bit of advice in particular can be an extremely potent medicine and can quickly turn into a potent poison. It can be amazingly liberating, a personal emancipation proclamation when you suddenly realize that you’re able to use your own experience and forget all about emulating the style of Tennessee Williams or William Faulkner, Samuel Beckett or Thomas Hardy as you’ve fruitlessly been doing for the last few years. All of a sudden, it seems like you have a new treasure trove of subject matter. For a while, the inner critic is caught off guard. But he’s nothing if not adaptive. He begins to realize the restrictive potential of this maxim. “Write what you know.” That’s as much as saying “Don’t dare write what you don’t know. Don’t dare speculate. Don’t dare imagine.” Soon the inner critic has the statement crocheted and hung upon his office wall.
It’s easy to get caught up in the despair over how much or how little you know. Some authors can come away from a dinner party with every conversation stored verbatim in their memories. Some draw on their experiences of coming from one culture to another. Some have gone to the best possible schools, trained at the feet of the brightest possible geniuses. And here you are with apparently nothing to work with. It doesn’t seem fair. It’s not fair.
But that’s part of the truth you need to write about, the fact that nothing in this world is fair. None of us knows quite enough to get by, and none of us has quite the social skills to seek the complimentary knowledge from those who surround us. The truth is that I know that I’m inspired by chemistry, and I’m inspired by politics and world history, and I’m inspired by economics and I’ll never be authoritative enough in any of these subjects to write the sort of Pulitzer-Prize winning work that I’d like to, and that doesn’t matter. If I’d wanted, I could have taken a year after my nursing school and immersed myself in chemistry in the hopes that the study would have made me into an expert, would have given me an arsenal of expertise I could draw on for the rest of my adult life as a writer. I could write a book about the lives of chemists and physicists at the turn of the 19th century. All my facts would be correct. I would describe the ways in which methyl groups freewheel at the end of carbohydrate chains; I would describe the way that scientists like JJ Thompson used every day materials to set up brilliant experiments. I would describe the incomparable feeling of being present at the moment of a revolution in human knowledge. But probably the end result would be that I would always feel I had just one more text to read before I was prepared to start writing.
Recently I heard poet Kay Ryan speaking on the radio. She said that the best way to write about something is when you know almost nothing about it. I think this is especially useful information in our current culture, which values realism, polish and an appearance of expertise. Expertise is fascinating, certainly, but if you want to be creative, you need to rely on imagination rather than expertise. Imagination is not the rational irrigation system that supplies the rational fields of expertise—it’s the swamp water that gathers in the wetlands of ignorance.
What does this have to do with the book How to Read a French Fry? Not much, I’m afraid, except to say that this odd little hybrid of a book, not quite a cookbook but not quite a science text, is emblematic of the sort of hybrid knowledge I’m talking about. You won’t come away from it an expert in either chemistry or cuisine, but it may provide you with just the sort of disorienting intellectual spin you need to get yourself back into the dizzy state you need in order to get inspired.
Scottish Folk and Fairy Tales
Chosen and Edited by Gordon Jarvie. Illustrated by Barbara Brown. (1992/1997) Published by Penguin Popular Classics. 199 pages.
I’ve been to Scotland a couple of times, once to Edinburgh for the Fringe Festival. When I was there I was especially impressed by the simple beauty of some of the street names, like “Bread,” and “Home.”
I read this book several months ago. It took me two days to read. Just recently I sat down and gave myself the daunting task of writing a full-length play. As with any creative writing endeavor, this meant pitting myself against the worst, most closed-minded, most pessimistic parts of my own psyche. There’s a part of the brain that was determined to tell me, no, do NOT continue this project, you’ve chosen the wrong subject; you’re taking the wrong path.
For some reason, the memory of this book was especially helpful to me in conjuring up whatever magic spell I needed to keep the inspiration flowing.
We all know that there are epics. There’s a pantheon of Greek Gods out there, armed with complex arsenals of symbolism, laden down with overweening vanity and ambition which send mere mortals off to launch ten thousand stanzas of carefully metered verse to delineate the rise and falls of entire empires.
It’s important to remember that the mighty Zeus doesn’t have a monopoly on magic. There are kelpies and brownies, magic walking sticks and lonely giants out there. They come out of the dark shadows of the woods and interfere in the lives of the simplest of people. To me, fairy tales like these serve as reminders to never take magic for granted. Magic is whatever leads you off the path to grandma’s house and into the woods. If you’re a writer, don’t worry too much about whether the voice that’s beckoning to you from the shadows belongs to the mighty Apollo or a humble Milk-White Doo. If it’s an invitation to get you off the well-trodden path, take it.
I’ve been to Scotland a couple of times, once to Edinburgh for the Fringe Festival. When I was there I was especially impressed by the simple beauty of some of the street names, like “Bread,” and “Home.”
I read this book several months ago. It took me two days to read. Just recently I sat down and gave myself the daunting task of writing a full-length play. As with any creative writing endeavor, this meant pitting myself against the worst, most closed-minded, most pessimistic parts of my own psyche. There’s a part of the brain that was determined to tell me, no, do NOT continue this project, you’ve chosen the wrong subject; you’re taking the wrong path.
For some reason, the memory of this book was especially helpful to me in conjuring up whatever magic spell I needed to keep the inspiration flowing.
We all know that there are epics. There’s a pantheon of Greek Gods out there, armed with complex arsenals of symbolism, laden down with overweening vanity and ambition which send mere mortals off to launch ten thousand stanzas of carefully metered verse to delineate the rise and falls of entire empires.
It’s important to remember that the mighty Zeus doesn’t have a monopoly on magic. There are kelpies and brownies, magic walking sticks and lonely giants out there. They come out of the dark shadows of the woods and interfere in the lives of the simplest of people. To me, fairy tales like these serve as reminders to never take magic for granted. Magic is whatever leads you off the path to grandma’s house and into the woods. If you’re a writer, don’t worry too much about whether the voice that’s beckoning to you from the shadows belongs to the mighty Apollo or a humble Milk-White Doo. If it’s an invitation to get you off the well-trodden path, take it.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
