June 1, 2009 -- I know there were new stories in the news this week but because so much is held over, unresolved, and still talked about that I couldn't shake the feeling of watching a TV series (it isn’t?) in summer reruns. We still await solutions to the big problems, like the Guantanamo detainees, gay marriage, energy, health care, automobile makers in crises, immigration, so I guess it is up to me to provide the answers.
I still say if we can’t abide having Guantanamo detainees sully U.S. soil with their presence, (and now even General Petraeus would have us close the base) put them on prison ships and set sail for nowhere and never make landfall. The prisoners could spend their time chipping paint. You have to have served at sea in the Navy to appreciate the chore of chipping paint. Lowly seamen are given a short, hand-held metal bar bent at the end, and must get down on the deck and whack away to loosen away the old paint so new paint may go down. The cacophony of steel banging steel in dozens of hands is hard to take, and would probably be banned by the Geneva Convention.
Nobody had listened to me on gay marriage (I’ve only seen one writer make a casual comment on this same point). The word “marriage” describes a religious ceremony. Government has no business being involved in a religious ceremony (yes California is going to continue to recognize those unions already made, but they still call it a "Marriage"). Allow any two people who want to establish a household to obtain a license for a paper called a civil union rather than a marriage license, and if they want to get “married” let them find a religious institution that will perform it for them. Let’s do it, and get on to other things.
Let’s face it. We will never have a health care system as effective as now found in other industrialized nations because we are not willing to give up the profit motive. You can’t blame the health care industry. They are companies in business to make money for stockholders, so it behooves them, or rather compels them, to make every effort to insure only the people least likely to file future claims, and to resist paying as many claims as possible. In a conversation this week with a person whose six-figure job was eliminated due to the recession, it will cost about $1,000 a month to replace health benefits lost. No chance without a job.
Why should the rest of just care? Other than the morality of the thing, there is personal risk in this for all of us. The millions out there without access to health care, particularly preventive care, are on the lower income rung of society and can’t afford to miss work if they can help it, so these are the folks serving you food, handing you change at the cash register, standing next to you in a crowd, passing on to you everything from a mild infection to the swine flu (which scientists are saying can travel on paper money).
Since we can’t eliminate the profit motive dear to the hearts of us all (Senators of both parties are resisting offering a public insurance option in the bill now under development in the Senate), I say let’s turn it around; let’s come up with a plan that pays the health care industry for keeping people healthy. Under this concept everyone would have insurance and compensation to the insurers would be based on wellness. The profit motive would kick in, all those employed currently to deny claims would be urging and goading policy holders to go for checkups and live a healthy lifestyle. In this case the wonders of the free market would shift in to gear to foster a healthier populace.
There are a number of sources of renewable energy out there if we will just get busy and use them, but as I said some time ago there is a source of renewable energy we are overlooking: Kudzu, for the making of ethanol. Kudzu, called the vine that ate the South, covers over seven million acres in the southern states. Traveling through parts of the Deep South you can see miles of it, covering fields, fences, barns, houses, anything in its way; you can practically see it growing and is almost impossible to eradicate. Cut it down, chop it up, it grows right back while you are standing there. I will wager it should make a better ethanol than corn, which makes a very poor product. We could stop the corn subsidies, get the corn growers to turn to other crops like soybeans maybe (in the Texas high country around Lubbock, farmers who used to grow cotton now grow wine grapes for an eight times better return on their money). It would also set up a clash of Midwest Senators versus Senators in the South eager for a new good cash crop in their states and the ensuing battle of special interests might be worth watching just in itself.
The Daily Beast (appropriately in this case) reported a new trend in ranching that is good for the environment and a money-maker as well: genetically engineered mini cows. These small, stocky cattle breeds eat about half as much as a regular cow, but produce up to 75 percent as much steak and plenty of milk each day. Four of them would replace three full size cows at the cost of feeding two. Should mean less gas emissions too, which scientists say are a big factor in the planet’s greenhouse problem. Is, then, Ruth Chris Steak House a polluter by proxy? Eat less steak and more tofu to save the world.
Abortion is another problem we will never solve. Not by legislation. The last time I saw data on this it said that there were about the same number of abortions performed when it was against the law as when it is legal. A pragmatist will say isn’t it better then to have them done safely and regulated than suffer the consequences of botched, unsanitary treatment in back alleys? Some doctors are repelled at aborted fetus; some are horrified when called to treat the victims of botched abortions.
Yesterday in Kansas Dr. George Tiller, a performer of abortions, was shot, as he was serving as an usher at his church, for the second time in his career, this time fatally. By someone who advocates the “culture of life” no doubt. Two quotes from Dr. Mardy’s quotations seem appropriate:
"As far as we can discern the sole purpose of human existences is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being." Carl Jung.
"This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.” Dalai Lama.
The conflict over abortion defies a solution, Roe vs. Wade being about the only reasonable compromise between two positions, yet it is under constant assault. Sometimes it seems we ought to retire a word that has become too inflammatory. “Abortion” is one. Let’s at least call it something else, like a “uterus scope.” It won’t change the procedure, but just like the Bush Administration calling the relaxing of polluting rules which allowed more emissions into the atmosphere the “Clean Air Act” for a time at least it won’t sound so bad.
What will happen to Roe vs. Wade assuming Judge Sotomayor wins her appointment to the Supreme Court?” This sounds like one of those jokes that go “Six Priests, Two Rabbis, and a Minister went out to play golf” etc. She will make Catholic number six in the aforementioned religious makeup of the Court. Most people do not believe it will change anything. Apparently she fits the description of a "cultural Catholic," raised a Catholic, imbued with its values, but does not attend Mass regularly. She does not have a very active religious life, but evidences a commitment to social justice and community service.
Just as it was in the election of 2004, an appointment to the Supreme Court was just about the most important thing at stake in 2008. These appointments shape our lives for years to come. E. J. Dionne Jr. in the Washington Post unearthed this quote from a speech by a junior Senator opposing the appointment of now Chief Justice Roberts: he rules on “behalf of the strong in opposition to the weak.” And Obama got it right at the time. The Chief Justice has ruled against the individual in favor of the big guys every single time such a case has come before the court, at least 33 times, if I remember it correctly. Roberts will most likely serve another 30 or more years.
We are now immersed, as predicted, in a campaign of racist and sexist attacks on Judge Sonia Sotomayor by the radical right. It is not coming to a great degree from Republican Senators. They don’t have to. They let Rush, Newt, and former congressman Tom Tancredo do it for them, calling her racist a bigot and an “angry woman” (the worst sin of them all). Ann Coulter also weighed in. Tancredo told CNN that she is a member of La Raza, which he called a “Latino KKK” (they don’t tar and feather, they just marinate in hot sauce). Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post came up with this great comment: “Limbaugh doesn't ask to be taken seriously. He just asks to be paid.”
If you would like to rub elbows (or scales) with conservative elite, join them on a 10-day cruise in the Mediterranean and the Adriatic. There will be smokers featuring H. Upmann cigars (if you go please bring me back one … it’s been fifty years since I last smoked an Upmann), seminars, and intimate diners with celebrities like Karl Rove, former U.N. ambassador John Bolton, Dick Morris (he who sucked toes), and Cal Thomas. They are cruising on Holland America’s Noordamin, a ship I once cruised on. I wouldn’t do it again until they fumigated the ship. There are still some openings if you are game, for as low as $5,000 (plus another grand if you want a window and you might need a breath of fresh air).
How can we fix the Big Car Companies crises? Health care reform might get that expense off their backs which would help make them competitive. Foreign car makers were able to go into Southern states in need of sources of jobs, wheel and deal for infrastructure and tax advantages to build new state of the art plants. That is hard to duplicate in Detroit but some kind of offsetting similar breaks should be worked out by the new owners, the Fed (or us). Design new styles but give them new names Do away with names like Buick. Call them something else, brand names with flare. New brands. The old brands are cursed.
Sometimes a new name is all you can do. Until we can have an air-tight border, and lots of luck there, we will have illegal immigration. Meanwhile, change the name to “overextended visitors” and live with it like we have been living with it for years and years, and profiting from it.
According to the New York Times, around the country some principals of grade schools and high schools are convinced they have a new problem: hugging, hugging in the hallway between classes, hugging where ever it is they meet. Hugging has replaced the simple handshake they say. So? (to quote Dick Cheney). These people should have been around in the 1940s and watched us dance. When the number was slow you couldn’t have gotten a butter knife between the bodies. It was the vertical equivalent of today’s lap dance.
When we lived in Rhode Island we occasionally attended a mass at a nearby convent. It was in the sixties when the church was allowing experimentation with the mass, and at the Convent the sisters played guitar, sang vigorously and at the appropriate moment went on a serious hugging spree of everyone in attendance. A lot of pent up affection apparently, but though a little unsettling, very nice.
In an era of violence instead of banning it altogether or enforcing “the three second rule” they should be happy about this. Human contact beats a text message or Facebook. Most young women I know greet me with a hug, and I must say I appreciate it. My talking clock speaks to me in a female voice as does my computer but it’s just not the same. I’ll take flesh on flesh any day. Loosen up, people.
William Safire, the language maven, in his New York Times columns of late has been searching for a universally agreed upon hand signal to thank another driver for a courteous act, like letting you in the traffic line. In Sunday’s column he reported that he had over 700 replies. While there were many reasonable suggestions, there was not one that cried out “I’m the one.” My thought on this is that instead of taking our hands off the wheel and making a gesture, we should invent some device to do it for us. A special horn, like the old klaxon “ah-ugh-guh” might do it if everyone knew what it stood for. Or the old Bermuda Carriage Bell like my buddies who drove little Triumphs in the forties favored. Of course we could invent a devise that, like a Jack in the Box which at the push of a button would jump up and wave, or hold a sign that said Thank You. But it would have to go on the top of a car like a police light, and rotate, sine you wouldn’t know in advance which side warranted the gesture. Requires more thought. And it’s good to see Safire busy with matters of this sort rather than the old days when he wrote speeches for Richard Nixon, or columns beating the drum about weapons of mass destruction and the need to invade Iraq. He is like a toothless old lion but a very articulate one (except for the articulate part, that’s an image that hits too close to home. I’ll have to go brood on it).
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