Dear Senator Alexander, Please Support the Health Care Law

Dear Senator Alexander,

As I have several times before, I am writing you as a citizen and small business owner firmly in favor of the present health care reforms. I support the Patient Protection and Affordable Care act recently made into law by Congress, and support continued efforts on the part of concerned citizens and legislators to improve the law until it contains a government-supported, single-payer option.

I am therefore writing you to urge you, in the strongest possible terms, to please cease all efforts to undermine or repeal PPAC. Furthermore, I am asking you to work to continue the momentum begun by the passage of the Act into law. This health care legislation is not perfect, granted, but it is an essential and necessary start. Too many Tennesseans face dire consequences if the law is repealed or if the enactment of its reforms are delayed. Please, for their sakes and for mine, change your position and stand in full support of the Patient Protective and Affordable Care Act!

Your recent vocal efforts in the Senate to spearhead the repeal effort take us backward, not forward. It is the wrong battle, waged against the wrong enemy. Speaking as one of the working poor, as a person scraping every day to make a business work in this economy, we are not the problem. We need Washington to give us support and increased safety nets like the Health Care law, not take threaten to take them away!

I realize we deeply disagree on this issue. Therefore I am hopeful that, if nothing else, I can appeal to your conscience on this matter. I am a Christian, and Scripture clearly states we must protect the least of these among us. When we do so, we honor our Creator. I hope, even if we disagree on much else, we can firmly agree on this point.

At a time when so many dire issues face our nation, I hope you will lead your colleagues in the Senate, as you have so many times in the past, to a higher ground of conversation than I have seen these past two weeks. Now is *not* the time to attach anti-Health Care amendments to each new bill. Now is *not* the time to fixate on repealing Health Care as some sort of "mandate" from the recent election. Now is the time to help the economy by moving forward, not dwelling in the past.

Thank you for your service to the state of Tennessee, and please know that I speak for a great many Tennesseans when I say that I support the Health Care law, and that repeal is not the answer.

Cordially,

David Dault

Dear Senator Corker, Please Support the Health Care Law

Dear Senator Corker,

As I have several times before, I am writing you as a citizen and small business owner firmly in favor of the present health care reforms. I support the Patient Protection and Affordable Care act recently made into law by Congress, and support continued efforts on the part of concerned citizens and legislators to improve the law until it contains a government-supported, single-payer option.

I am therefore writing you to urge you, in the strongest possible terms, to please cease all efforts to undermine or repeal PPAC. Furthermore, I am asking you to work to continue the momentum begun by the passage of the Act into law. This health care legislation is not perfect, granted, but it is an essential and necessary start. Too many Tennesseans face dire consequences if the law is repealed or if the enactment of its reforms are delayed. Please, for their sakes and for mine, change your position and stand in full support of the Patient Protective and Affordable Care Act!

Mr. Corker, two summers ago you and I spoke face to face at a town hall meeting. At that time you watched as angry voices heckled me because I asked you to help me and my pregnant wife by voting in favor of health care. That evening, you looked me in the eye and I had the feeling you were ashamed at what your constituents were shouting at me. Like me, I hope you feel we are better than that in this state.

Therefore I am hopeful that I can appeal to your conscience on this matter. I am a Christian, and Scripture clearly states we must protect the least of these among us. When we do so, we honor our Creator. I hope, even if we disagree on much else, we can firmly agree on this point.

At a time when so many dire issues face our nation, I hope you will lead your colleagues in the Senate, as you have so many times in the past, to a higher ground of conversation than I have seen these past two weeks. Now is *not* the time to attach anti-Health Care amendments to each new bill. Now is *not* the time to fixate on repealing Health Care as some sort of "mandate" from the recent election. Now is the time to help the economy by moving forward, not dwelling in the past.

Thank you for your service to the state of Tennessee, and please know that I speak for a great many Tennesseans when I say that I support the Health Care law, and that repeal is not the answer.

Cordially,

David Dault

Overheard on Limbaugh

So today, January 18, 2010, Rush Limbaugh said the following as part of his daily radio program:

The left is constantly telling anybody who will listen how rotten this country is, how rotten we are, how rotten the nation is, how unfair and unjust our economic system is. They create this environment of pessimism, self-hate, and desperation. They tell victims -- and they try to make as many people victims as possible by putting them in groups of victims.

They tell these people that they've got no chance in this unjust and unfair country. "If you're Hispanic, you got no chance. If you're African-American, you got no chance. If you're a woman and African-American, you are doomed! You have no chance. The only out for you is the military, and if you do that, you're stupid, but you really can't be blamed because this economy was so destroyed by George W. Bush, you have no future." What is this going to do to people? And this went on for eight years. And before Clinton got to ten it went on for 16 or 12 years, during Reagan and the first term of Bush. This has been a constant refrain: Uunjust, unfair America is.

What stuck me was how similar, at least on the surface, this sounds to a message written by Dr. Carter G. Woodson, in 1933, in his book The Mis-Education of the Negro:

THE "educated Negroes" have the attitude of contempt toward their own people because in their own as well as in their mixed schools Negroes are taught to admire the Hebrew, the Greek, the Latin and the Teuton and to despise the African. Of the hundreds of Negro high schools recently examined by an expert in the United States Bureau of Education only eighteen offer a course taking up the history of the Negro, and in most of the Negro colleges and universities where the Negro is thought of, the race is studied only as a problem or dismissed as of little consequence. For example, an officer of a Negro university, thinking that an additional course on the Negro should be given there, called upon a Negro Doctor of Philosophy of the faculty to offer such work. He promptly informed the officer that he knew nothing about the Negro. He did not go to school to waste his time that way. He went to be educated in a system which dismisses the Negro as a nonentity.

I'd like to suggest, however, that there is a vast world of difference between Dr. Woodson saying this from a place of oppression, and Rush saying similar things from behind the gold-plated microphone of the EIB Network. To see the similarities on the face of the messages (that minorities have been fed a load of ideological horse manure about their proper place in society) is to miss the fundamental point.

For a member of the master class to point this out (and El Rushbo is always happy to point out, with his "nicotine stained finger," that he is part of the master class) is perhaps gauche, but has no possibility of being a call to revolutionary consciousness. When Dr. Woodson names it, however, he names not only the problem itself but those who perpetrate and profit by it.

When patriotic critics speak of the inequalities facing the minorities in this country, it is not to score points in the political game. It is to name a problem that, God willing, will be rectified.

The key question, the one El Rushbo doesn't actually ask, is who constitutes the "they" spreading these messages of inferiority? Woodson knows. Were he alive today, Woodson would be pointing steadily at the man behind the gold-plated microphone, and the powerful interests for whom he speaks.

Dear Senator Corker, redux.

Senator Corker,

I heard one of your Republican colleagues on NPR this morning saying that he thought the "American people had spoken" in rejecting health care reform. This is disingenuous.

When I looked you in the eye this summer at that rally and told you about the fears my wife and I had had as a young couple just out of school with no resources to pay for COBRA and a baby on the way, I appreciated that you seemed sympathetic to our plight. You were sympathetic despite the crowd around me jeering that we "shouldn't have gotten pregnant," implying, I suppose, that we should have destroyed or rejected our precious daughter, Maggie, instead of rejecting and working to change a system in which parents like us are forced to make tough and impossible choices for the convenience of maintaining the "status quo" of a health care system that is greedily and monstrously out of control.

As one of your constituents, I have contacted you in the past to say that I am in favor of a SINGLE PAYER SYSTEM and a GOVERNMENT OPTION. I am in favor of radically reducing and curtailing the influence of health care lobbyists on Capitol Hill (including the donations they make to the campaigns of you and your colleagues), and that your poor and working constituents especially do not have time to wait while you and the Republicans obstruct and play politics.

I am writing to say that I am STILL for these "impossible" outcomes. Moreover, I know I am not the only one of your constituents writing to tell you this.

What I think, sir, is that when you and your colleagues refer to the "will of the American people," you are simply only attending to the polls you and your benefactors in the health care industry find most expedient.

I think you and your fellow Republicans' behavior these last months during the debate on health care has been shameful. We need drastic, not incremental change, and we need it now. People are dying, sir. They are dying from a system that denied them access to care and to affordability; they are dying from "preexisting conditions."

The rhetoric that has flown in the past months about "denial of choice of doctors" and "death panels" ignores the fact that these conditions are already in place with the system we have, only they are factors currently of the "free market approach" you love and esteem so much.

In rural central Tennessee and now in Memphis, as an educator and a pastor, I have seen with my own eyes the devastation the "business as usual" approach to health care has brought to honest and hard working families. At the Saturn plant, in Culleoka, in Nashville, and here in Collierville and Memphis, there are a whole bunch of hurting (and dying) folks that just want the kind of access to decent, affordable, effective health coverage and care that you and your colleagues in the Senate enjoy every day.

Whether you call it "socialism," sir, or just good merciful common sense, I am an American, and your constituent, and I am asking you to get off your kiester and work for it.

Cordially,

Dr. David Dault
Assistant Professor of Religious Studies
Christian Brothers University
Memphis, TN

Hell yeah.

Brother West, tellin' it like it is.

Brother West on Democratic Socialism and the legacy of Dr. King

Cornel West, honorary chairperson of the Democratic Socialists of America, spoke earlier this week with Tavis Smiley of Public Radio International about socialism and capitalism, as they apply (or don't) to the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Barack Obama.

Listen to the interview here.

C'est Interresant

I was just tidying up my corner of cyberspace when I came across a blip on the radar that intrigued me.

Apparently there is a blog in France, Things Which Must Be Disseminated, that picked up one of my old posts.

I can't vouch for the rest of the content there (I've only just discovered it, and have not done much exploring of the rest of the posts) but I was a bit tickled that someone around the globe found some use for something I had to say. Glad to have folks reading. Thanks.

Weapons of Mass Distraction

Trust me. I have dropped a name or two in my day.

Like many academics, I suffer from an almost indescribable inferiority complex. If the world's economies aren't enough to make you feel irrelevant in your life's work, your students are always there to seal the deal. The fear that no one, but no one, will care that I am breathing has, on occasion, driven me to some gauche behavior. And, I mean, come on. I have some really interesting friends. Lots of them are quite accomplished in their fields. Several of them are famous. A handful are really famous (and one, admittedly, is infamous).

So, on those occasions when I am weak from my fears of irrelevance, I have dropped a name or two, or stretched my own importance, thanks to the borrowed importance of my more accomplished friends and acquaintances.

I am reminding you of this, dear Reader, not because I am particularly proud of this behavior, but rather to establish my bona fides for the invective that is to follow.

Some of my friends and acquaintances are in the military, or loosely associated therewith. Thinking back to the build up to the most recent Iraq war, I recall many of those acquaintances and friends taking me to task for my hesitancy about, you know, invading. What I recall hearing, more than once, was a strange form of name dropping that, I think, is akin to what I was describing in myself above.

When I would argue against invading from the evidence I had (the evidence that was available in the media and through my researches beyond the limitations of the American media), these jolly ol' Jingoes would get a knowing look on their face and a sage twinkle in their eyes. These old Hawks, mind you, are ancillary. They are factotums. They are sideliners now, and armchair warriors at best. Yet they wanted me to know that they were in the know. And they knew something I didn't.

"Well, I can't say much now. But I've been talking to [fill in the blank], and he's close to Colin Powell, you know, and he said...."

The upshot of what "he" said, in these cases, was that there was a whole lot of intelligence that was simply too sensitive to leak to the media, but if we (us common folk) ever knew the full extent of it, we'd be demanding ol' Saddam's head on a pike and thanking Dubya and Co. for invading when they did. The implication, in other words, was that the evidence I had was irrelevant, in light of the evidence that I didn't have.

Now, of course, it turns out they actually didn't know something I didn't, after all. They wanted to feel important and in the know. They (and lots of other folks) bought into a culture that was fed off equal parts fear and self-aggrandizement. That latter factor, I think, was what gave these Hawks (some of them quite well placed and influential - hey, I told you I know important people, didn't I?) the impetus to take the little crumbs of rumor they had and talk like they had fat seed cakes of certainty.

Let them eat cake, indeed. And we did. And why not? After all, "they knew something we didn't." A-yup. And we should have known better. Take it from one old name dropper to another.

But if you don't believe me, perhaps you'll believe one of the knowiest in the know fellas in the game, Tony Blair, himself. Yesterday he pretty much admitted that the whole WMD justification was a pretense, and that he would "still have thought it right to remove" Hussein regardless of whether there were WMD's or not.

This has led a prominent international lawyer, Phillipe Sands, to remark that Blair may now be open to war crimes prosecution, given that he joined into the war, and the justificatory posturing that preceded it, "irrespective of the facts on the ground, and irrespective of the legality" of invasion in light of the lack of positive evidence.

There's a full story on this developing fiasco here.

Tony Blair, however, is not our problem. He merely is a good, close friend to our problem. He had tea with our problem just last week, in fact, and they had such a fine time, and...

Let me venture this: there is a deep inferiority complex at the heart of this nation. It has been endemic for generations, and it became epidemic in the last ten years. From Enron to the housing bubble to the credit crunch, we as a nation are running amok, from one fiction to the next, trying our best to feel relevant and important without the substance of fact or character to bolster us. The names we are dropping now, however, are names like "patriotism," "freedom," "security," "opportunity," and, yes, "hope."

These are the names of acquaintances whom these days we barely know. However, if we drop the names often enough, and broadly enough, everyone will assume we're still all old chums, won't they? And if those listening to us are convinced by our associations, then that's close enough to being real, isn't it, to fill the hole?

Sure it is, chum. That's the ticket. Take it from one old name dropper to another.

Overheard on Facebook

Concerned citizens on the move, tweeting us to victory:

"Please pay attention to terriorist, they r on facebook also, I spoke to the fbi, an they said that it can be possible an that facebook has to deal with this correctly, ;-)"

The fbi is right, kids. Please pay attention to terrorist. Srsly.

The Nicene Creed, Colbert style

Yep. The whole creed. You go, Stephen. Nice ending, too.

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Books that changed my life: Biodegradable Man: Selected Essays, by Milton Mayer

When folks ask - and sometimes they do - I describe myself, vocationally and ideologically, as an "ex-newspaperman." My history, my context, my weapon of choice, is the long narrative, the nonfiction essay. The biting phrase, lemon-peppered with political bent and righteous indignation, is my mother-tongue. Mencken, Lardner, Trilling - these are my kin. Hell, even ol' Uncle Karl, the salty Marx himself, was a foreign correspondent before the long years of the British Museum and Das Kapital. In my mind's eye, I sweat ink. Young men, as the old Latin teacher once hissed, standing atop the writing desk, throaty and Brooklyn-born, I love woids!

But of all those many woids I love, by far the woids I love the most are those of Milton Mayer.

At the end of 1990, I was in my second year of college. War (the first one of ours in the Persian Gulf) was either well underway or heating up, depending upon how you mark the particulars. I was working at the campus bookstore for my work study.

One of my weekly tasks was shelving books after they came in from deliveries and were processed. The week we started back to school after Christmas break was in mid-January. It also happened to be the week of my birthday, and I made a spur of the moment decision: I was going to pick one of the books I was shelving and buy it for myself as a birthday present.

When I came across Biodegradable Man in the bin, I am not sure what first drew me to take a second look. Perhaps it was the title. More likely it was the "Selected Essays" bit. In any case, something about the book prompted me, as I was carrying it to the shelf, to flip it over and read the back. There I found the following (quoted from one of Mayer's essays inside):

If we reject Karl Marx, it has got to be because Marx too man first and last for an economic animal, moved to every other end by his economic considerations. A Calvin Coolidge who says, "The business of thei country is business," has no quarrel with Marx except on the technical nicety of the management of the enterprise. The business of this country, and every country, is liberation, liberation from political and economic servitude and from the subtler but more devastating servitudes of ignorance, bigotry and boredom. Man is a thinking as well as a feeling animal whose self-realization, unlike that of the barnyard critters, requires the life-long activity of a persistently inquiring intellect and a persistently discriminating taste. These are the objectives that the liberal arts serve, and liberal education is nothing but the beginning of their habituation. It is a platitude (but none the less valid for that) that the masterpieces of the liberal arts do not teach us what to think and feel, but how. There abides the great Latin pun - Facio liberos ex liberis libras libraque - "I make free men out of boys by means of books and balances."

If Mayer didn't have me in rallying common cause with me against ignorance, bigotry and boredom (though he did), I would not have been able to resist the grand gesture toward the benefits of the liberal arts (a muse with which I was just then becoming smitten) and the Latin. On the strength of the back cover alone, I bought the book.

It is important to let you know a bit of where my mind was at this point in my life. I had been raised, by my Mom, mostly, on conspiracy-theory laden skepticism and hyper-conservative Libertarianism. Mid-way through high school, however, the former went to work on the latter in my psyche, right around the time I was introduced to the writings of Karl Marx. What emerged from that brackish bouillabaisse of competing claims was a new me; a nascent leftist with a strong pacifist streak and a healthy wariness of what passes for both conservatism and liberalism in our current political sphere. I was angry and over-educated - precociously and verbosely ferocious - and Mayer, God bless him, seemed to be speaking my language.

Evenings for the next few weeks I spent reading from essay to essay, in sequence. I was please to no end with my purchase. The first section, America the Beautiful, was a series of six essays of cultural commentary, where Mayer examined (and skewered) and America both present and vanishing, whether the demise of hitch-hiking culture and the commuter train, or the rise of bourgeois refuges like the gated community and the country club. The middle essay, "In the Tomb," is an extended meditation on the limited comfort the art of interior design can offer to the owner of a backyard fallout shelter whom Mayer, with measured cudgels of sympathy and irony, interviews.

I loved the language, the style, and the wit of this man from the outset. His voice was a voice I both esteemed and envied. I, too, saw things in my community that I thought were absurd, and I, too, had a desire to write of them with this practiced ire.

It turns out, however, that this first section - enjoyable though it was - simply was an appetizer for all that followed. As good as Mayer was at social commentary (and he was very, very good), his real talent lay in political commentary. His was the engaged discourse of the populists of a long-lost generation, and he walked the talk.

Indeed, I quickly came to learn, Milton Mayer was that Mayer, the Mayer of Mayer vs. Rusk, a Supreme Court case I had been taught in my high school American History and Government class during my overeducated youth. Mayer had taken on the McCarthy-tinged torpor of his times, challenging the American government to a battle of quills when he was denied a passport for refusing to sign an anti-communist loyalty oath (or, indeed, any oath, Quaker that he was - but I am getting ahead of myself). He took on the government and he won, and what's more, he wrote about it, in a remarkable essay, "A Man with a Country":

It would be much more useful if a senator of a congressman - or a President who vetoes it - would resist a bad law like the Internal Securities Act [under which Mayer first went to court] or a bad regulation like the State Department's; but they will not. They will say, "It's the law. We may not like it, but it's the law." But we hanged the Nazi leaders at Nurnberg for saying that, and properly; a man who will obey the law, whatever the law, wants a form of government in which man exists for the state and not the state for man.

In this day and age, with language like that, you might mistake Mayer's rhetorical cant for those of cultural commentators on the right, those of a much less intelligent stripe - those who would resist government encroachment for more partisan, less principled reasons. But Mayer - God bless him - would have stood his ground as well against our current bumper-crop of pinheads. The Glenn Becks and the Ann Coulters of Mayer's day were eviscerated (and rightly so) in the wake of his mighty pen. "Veepings," he called the lot of 'em, naming them for the toadies they were (and remain).

So after a couple sessions of reading, I was pretty pleased with my purchase, to say the least. The best, however, was yet to come.

A little over half-way through the book is a quiet little essay, an essay entitled "Sit Down and Shut Up." This essay was a description of Mayer's first encounter with the Religious Society of Friends - the Quakers, as they are more popularly known. This little essay, to say the least, has had a profound effect on my life.

You see, up to that point, I had little truck with organized religion. I had been raised an atheist, as I mentioned. In high school I had dabbled with some eastern mysticism, reading the Tao te Ching and the Bhagavad Gita and the like. I had been to an Episcopal church a few times with my friend Robert, and Sewanee was an Episcopal school, but in 1991 I would have told you I was a long, long way from Western religion, let alone Christianity.

But God is not without a sense of humor, and moreover is patient (and kind). Mayer's little essay is no more than four pages long. Midway between the third and the fourth pages I read this:

What do I know about the Quakers? I know that they were persecuted, not merely as dissenters, but for many of their positive tenets, such as their denial of special priesthood; their indifference to sacrament, including their refusal to take oaths; their complete democracy of organization, down to the point of determining action on any issue by the "sense" of the Meeting and not by vote; their historic opposition to war, though in this, as in all temporal issues, they refuse to bind individual conscience; and their recognition, as original as their opposition to slavery, of the complete equality of women with men.

Having read that for the first time, I went back and read the essay again. And then a third time. At that point I think I must have said, "If there were still Christians like that, I shouldn't so much mind being a Christian."

Thanks to Mayer, I idealized the Quakers. I idealize them still, having spent twelve years of my life being one, starting that next fall, in 1991. I idealize them even though contemporary Quakers are, by and large, a long way from the enemy-less pacifism of which Mayer wrote (most of them, myself included, discovered over time that when they weren't being partisanly aggressive, they were still itchingly passive aggressive). I idealize them even though most Southern Quakers, reacting to the fundamentalisms of the Bible belt, are a long way from Jesus as well. No matter what they are, I love and always will love the Quakers of that page, the page Mayer wrote. That page gave me a hope, a direction, a fervor, and - God help me - a religion, for the first time in my life.

How can I estimate the effect that essay had upon me? The effect is incalculable. My career, such as it is, and all my schooling, from bachelor to master and beyond, has been shaped by the glimpse of the Kingdom that paragraph held for me. That essay helped me get right with Jesus, though it took a long, long time for me to realize that truth.

Those who knew me in my twenties are better equipped than I to decide whether I was too bad, or too good, a Quaker to remain one. Like Mayer, I love the Society of Friends despite the problems and shortcomings I see in them. Unlike Mayer, who remained a fellow traveler of the Friends throughout his adult life, I eventually made my break with them. Though I admit I delayed the formal severance until long, long after I had stopped attending Meetings for Worship with the Friends. I delayed, in fact, until the last, the absolute last, possible moment.

My journey continues, the journey begun in that essay, in this book. Though I am now, and shall remain, a Catholic (and I leave it to those who know me now to decide whether too bad or too good of one), I am deeply thankful for that mystic stillness I learned as a Friend. I am terrified by many things in this world, but not by silence. Silence, the Living Silence, is a friend to me.

I carry that silence in a special place within my heart, a place right next to my ire and my righteous indignation. As my heart pumps the ink I let pass for my blood, the cadence of the beat, to the words that I write, to the joy of a well-turned phrase landing pie-like on the face of yet another Veepings - all of that is thanks to old Milton Mayer, and for that, for so much more, I salute him.

Detourning Women

Ladies and gentleman (and ladies): detournement.

(Thanks to Jennifer Randles for bringing this to my attention.)

Senator Corker responds

Dear Dr. Dault,

Thank you for taking the time to contact my office about supporting a public health insurance plan option in comprehensive health care reform. Your input is important to me, and I appreciate the time you took to share your thoughts.

I strongly believe that no issue requires an innovative cure more than our country's ailing health care system. No matter whose statistics you believe, millions of Americans, including 800,000 Tennesseans, lack adequate health insurance. Beyond the chaos this causes to our health care system and the American economy, the human and emotional toll is enormous. I believe, as you do, that all Americans, regardless of medical history or preexisting conditions, deserve the opportunity to have access to high-quality health insurance coverage that is both affordable and transferrable between jobs. I also agree with you that increasing efficiency, reducing fraud, and maximizing competition between health insurance plans is the best way to achieve the best health insurance system.

I want you to know that I am meeting regularly with doctors, hospital representatives, the insurance industry, and patients like you to get a well-rounded perspective on every option available that presents a possible solution. As the Senate debates comprehensive health care reform, I assure you that I will be working with my colleagues to craft legislation with the best possible balance of choice, quality, and affordability among health insurance plans. The insight you have provided in your letter will certainly help my staff and I more effectively look in to this issue.

Thank you again for your letter. I hope you will continue to share your thoughts with me.

Sincerely,

Bob Corker
United States Senator

Tales from the Health Wars

When I was in college, a good many years ago now, it was right around the time of the first Gulf War. You might not remember the name of Tom Costen, but I remember that name. Tom was the first American pilot shot down and killed when the conflict broke out. Tom was also a Sewanee graduate.

The Sunday after Tom was shot down, the pastor at All Saints Chapel on campus preached a sermon in his honor. Actually, it wasn't so much of a sermon as a full-on eulogy. I remember that Sunday morning, and Tom's name, because that church service was pretty pivotal in my life.

The pastor did a fine job with the eulogy, all things considered. He certainly was clear that what had happened - Tom's being shot down and having died - was a tragedy. I had no quarrel with that part of the sermon. It was a tragedy, and the whole war was a tragedy, and I and my male friends were scared to death we somehow were going to get caught up in it and die ourselves.

I was waiting, however, for the pastor to give the rest of the story. I was waiting for him, from the pulpit, to fix his eye on the congregation and remind us that - no matter how tragic the loss of Tom Costen was - it was equally tragic, and wrong, that he was sent to drop bombs on villages and towns and possibly (or probably) harm innocent civilians - women and children - in the process.

I waited for the pastor to do what I thought was his Christian duty, no matter how difficult, in naming that uncomfortable truth. However, he did not speak that truth. He finished the eulogy, and left it at that.

I wasn't a Christian then. Hell, I was just barely a theist. That was the morning I stopped singing in the choir at that Episcopal church (the chapel, being in the center of campus, was the center of life and arts, so I had joined the choir the year before, interested somewhat in the Christian mumbo-jumbo, but mostly baffled. By that point, however, I had at least figured out that Jesus would not be cool with the bombing part). So I left, and did not return. I wish sometimes that I had had the good sense to go talk to the pastor and confront him about it, but I didn't. A few months later, I happened upn the local Quaker meeting - but that's a whole 'nother story entirely.

Why I relate this old memory, here and now, is that last Sunday I saw a pastor be gutsy in a pulpit, and preach a homily with some balls, and it got me thinking about that old, old Sunday of my youth.

This past Sunday Father Val, our pastor here at the Cathedral in Memphis, preached a simple and straightforward sermon in which he reminded those present that Catholic social teaching about the protection of life does not end with the birth of a child. He reminded the congregation that the Church considers health care - for everyone - to be a basic human right.

Father Val went on to speak of Mother Theresa, of blessed memory, who would confront visitors to her mission in Calcutta, who wanted to help her, and challenge them to leave and find their own Calcuttas - not in remote India but in their own home cities. Father Val related this story and then challenged us - challenged us - to take that example to heart. He challenged us to remember that all human beings, as children of God, have the right to demand of us, and loot of our comfort and excess, for their basic health and welfare. He suggested that, following the words of Mother Theresa, that we might find some Calcutta right here in our midst, and that getting involved in these conversations about health care and getting right with Jesus and the poor might be a wise course to take.

I tell you, it was a gutsy homily. I left the church that morning with a feeling wholly different that the feeling I had, all those years ago, in the wake of the tragic death of Tom Costen.

You know, they say Lincoln once snuck into the side door of a church in D.C., and slipped out right as they were passing the collection plate. An aide accompanying him asked him what he thought of the sermon.

"It was fair," the Great Emancipator replied.

"Only fair? Not great?" pressed the aide.

"It was not a great sermon," Lincoln concluded, "because the pastor failed to ask anything great of the congregation."

I think last Sunday, Mr. Lincoln would have been pleased. Lord knows I was.

***

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Dear Senator Corker and Senator Alexander

I am writing to encourage you in the strongest possible terms to change your position on the health care debate. Please become an advocate for the hard working people of Tennessee who are being bankrupted and ill-treated by corporate insurance companies who value profits over people, who deny legitimate claims made after years of premium payments on the basis of recission (i.e., retroactively applied "pre-existing condition" status found after a claim has been made), and who refuse to offer affordable coverage to all citizens. Senator Corker and Senator Alexander, I pray that you will come to support not only health care reform and health insurance reform in the strongest manner possible, but that you will also fully and visibly support the public option, to allow the people of Tennessee, and of America, the greatest number of choices for their health. Thank you for your service to this state, and please, for all our sakes, do the best for your constituents. Health care and health insurance reform, WITH a public option, NOW!

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You can reach your representatives' offices by calling the toll-free switchboard at 1-866-210-3678, or by going to the Write Your Representative website.

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Getting involved in something great feels good. You might should try it, if you haven't in a while. Just a suggestion from a good pastor I know. Thought I'd pass it on to you, friend.

Richard Henry Lee...

...Virginian statesman and delegate to the Continental Congress of 1776, is best known for the motion that led to the Declaration of Independence. He made the motion on June 7, 1776, and the deliberations stretched on into weeks. Finally growing impatient, Lee again arose in the assembly in early July and declared:

"Mr. President, we have discussed this issue for days. It is the only course for us to follow. Why then, Sir, do we longer delay? Why still deliberate? Let this happy day give birth to an American Republic. Let her arise, not to devastate and to conquer, but to reestablish the reign of peace and law. The eyes of Europe [and the world] are fixed upon us. She demands of us a living example of freedom that may exhibit a contrast, in the felicity of the citizen, to the ever-increasing tyranny."

Happy birthday, America. Don't forget where you came from.

My new media crush

Thanks to a recent episode of The Daily Show that I watched on my laptop, I learned a little bit about MSNBC and Air America host, Rachel Maddow. Turns out she watches The Daily Show on her laptop, too - because she doesn't have a TV either. Cool.

And there are lots of other things we have in common, too. We're both wryly witty, we both like radio a whole bunch, we're both sorta-lefty, sorta-not. Oh, yeah - and we both dig girls. So much in common! I can't believe I didn't know about her before.

I'm totally crushing, here.

[Sigh...]

The Iron is Hot

What, exactly, constitutes a "crisis" in this nation?

On the way to answering this, let's take a moment for a history lesson. A chartered corporation is, under American law, what is known as "juristic person." That is, in the development of legal precedent around the issue, corporations in America have, over time, been treated - from the standpoint of the law - more and more like human beings. There is a certain logic to this, of course. Corporations engage in commerce, just like real persons do, and therefore the "naturalization" of corporations as "citizens" is tantamount to the removal of impediments to commerce. Good business sense, there.

A strange moment happened in 1886, however. The Supreme Court that year heard a case known as Santa Clara County v.Southern Pacific Railroad. Prior to the rendering of the actual judicial decision in the case, Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite stated clearly, "The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of the opinion that it does."

While this opinion was not a proper legal precedent, it has been reported and repeated as if it were, resulting in a de facto extension of Fourteenth Amendment protections to American corporations.

Now remember, it took seventy years to begin to "fully" extend these rights to actual flesh-and-blood American persons (persons who happened to have the "wrong" color flesh or "non-white" blood), if we take the civil rights decisions of the mid-1950's as a benchmark. Of course, it could be argued that the Fourteenth Amendment has never actually been fully inclusive of the actual flesh-and-blood human persons it was (ostensibly) designed to protect. Our legacies of Jim Crow, and still-economically-and-racially-segregated cities, attest this fact.

Thomas Jefferson opposed the chartering of corporations, unilaterally, deriding them as "monopolies of commerce," and a threat to the health of the nation. So the 1886 "decision," and its effects, it can be argued, mark a radical change from the founding ideals of American government. The most radical effect of these changes is the preference of fictional persons over actual flesh-and-blood persons.

We see this effect writ large today, as our country groans and flexes its fear muscles over the pain being felt by many of these corporate "persons" - today mainly banks and financial institutions, yesterday semi-government loan agencies. We are being cajoled into swallowing a truly staggering amount of debt - nearly a trillion dollars - to assuage the suffering of these fictional persons.

The one upside to this 700 billion dollar debacle is this: all talk of universal health care "costing too much" is, by my lights, instantly nullified.

I was just reading the New York Times, and they reported recently that the estimates for the cost of universal, comprehensive health care for (nearly) all Americans would be somewhere in the 60- 90 billion dollar range. That is somewhere in the range of one tenth the cost of the proposed bailout.

It is a bargain at that price, certainly, but it is a clincher when you add that real flesh-and-blood humans, not legal fictions, would be directly helped by such a move. That, it seems to me, is a clear mandate for enacting such measures immediately - especially since we now know the money and the means are obviously available.

On NPR's "Marketplace Morning Report" this morning, Scott Jagow used words like "crisis" and "peril" to describe the situation. Dan Gretch, commenting from Miami, talks about the man in Miami Lakes whose condo is now losing value.

Excuse me?

Come to Nashville, and I will introduce you to Steve, who occasionally lives in the Post Office at night when the weather is cold. Folks in my city - real flesh-and-blood people - don't have homes, and they don't have health care. Their concern is not about losing investment value or market share. Their concern is about losing teeth, getting beaten up or harrassed by police, or their kidneys failing.

I don't say this to diss the man in Miami Lakes. I feel for him, too. His losses, relative to his context, are significant. But in both cases - Steve and the man in Miami Lakes - we are talking about people.

It is a very different thing to talk about a fictional person, and its pain, and its groaning, as if it were equal in importance, or more important, than Steve. Steve - though insignificant by economic indicators - is a living human being. No matter how little he contributes, he is, he must be, considered more important than any legal fiction. His pain and hardship must be considered more real and more important than the pain and hardship of any legal fiction.

Let me put this in concrete terms. Imagine there is a burning building. Inside the burning building is a baby and a corporate charter. The firemen who rush into the building ignore the baby and use all their resources to secure and protect the piece of paper from damage.

Think about that for a minute, and then try and convince me that such behavior is not a textbook definition of moral perversity. Yet the equivalent of this abhorrent, evil, immoral action is being played out before our very eyes this very day.

I say, do not stand for it. Stand for something better.

I say, stand up for the health and safety of your flesh-and-blood sisters and brothers - the guy in Miami Lakes, sure, but especially for the "least of these" among us, the millions of Steves in the post offices and under the bridges of America.

Stand up by contacting your representatives and saying to them that if they vote for the bailout of fictions and against the healthcare of real persons, you will vote them out of office.

Stand up by saying "no" to the insanity that would protect the piece of paper and let the human baby burn.

Stand up to a news media that cries "crisis, peril!" in the face of corporate discomfort, while remaining mute, uncaring and unnoticing of the human disaster of health care and housing in our nation.

For God's sake, stand up.

Strange bedfellows, my ass

One of the interchanges between John McCain and Barack Obama in last night's presidential debate involved McCain repeatedly reminding us that he has been "friends with Henry Kissinger for 35 years."

Kissinger, you may recall, is the ex-secretary of state for the Nixon administration. You may also recall that Kissinger has had difficulty traveling abroad of late, because judges and state officials in both Europe and South America keep trying to arrest him for genocide and other crimes against humanity.

It was Kissinger, you will certainly remember, who famously spoke out against democracy when he said, "The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves."

You, hopefully, will also recall that it was Kissinger who proudly said, in 1973, that "The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer" (New York Times, Oct. 28, 1973).

1973 was just around the time, if we are to trust McCain's math, that he began to be friends with Kissinger, "35 years" ago.

Do you suppose, in all this time, McCain might have pulled his friend Kissinger aside and taken him to task for - say - war crimes (something McCain certainly would oppose, based on his POW experience), or the trampling of nascent democracies in Central and South America, or the slaughter in East Timor?

Do you think McCain has mentioned any of these to Kissinger, even once, during these 35 years of their friendship?

No, sadly, I don't think he has, either.

Caveat emptor.

Mr. Dylan, meet Mr. Bierce

economist - n. - a weatherman who doesn't know which way the wind blows.

Top Five

Kira suggested we go to Borders last night, since we hadn't gone bookstore browsing in a while. I didn't buy anything (she got some Graham Greene, and William Carlos Williams, and a book of essays by Barbara Kingsolver) but being there got me thinking about writers that have really, truly been important in my intellectual formation.

Okay - yeah. LOTS of writers will make that cut. But I was wondering if I could isolate just a handful that were absolutely, positively (in my opinion) essential reading - or, at least, essential reading if you want to think the way somebody like me thinks (and I realize not everybody is going to want to do that - even people like me. This gets complicated).

Anyway, I thought I would venture a top five, purely for the sake of conversation. I'll annotate a bit - though not too much - so that there's some context around the names.

So here we go - Let's call it David's Top Five Essential Writers for Getting your Theory Hella Tight. (How's THAT for a pretentious overture?) - in no particular order, then. Ahem:

1. Frederic Jameson - Last night I was reading the blurb on the back of a book by a Scottish emergent-church bohunk who shall remain nameless, and it mentioned that he got a Ph.D. in "deconstruction theory." (First, I would love to find the school that actually has such a thing in its major offerings. Second, do I need to mention how vehemently Derrida argued against those two words every being placed next to each other? Ah, fair poststructuralism, we barely knew ye...) Such tripe makes one long for a good old Marxist, doesn't it? And Jameson is the best of the good old Marxists - his Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism is already a necessity, but so is everything else the man writes. Brilliant, readable, funny as hell, polymathic, and cruel to anyone evincing idiocy. You could not ask for better than that.

2. Umberto Eco - If Noam Chomsky were as wise about language as he is about politics, he would actually be Umberto Eco. I can't vouch for Eco's fiction, which I have not yet read, but I tell you on no uncertain terms you should read everything the man writes about hermeneutics and semiotics (I would suggest Interpretation and Overinterpretation as a good starting point). Then, once you have read it, you should disagree with a lot of it (because a lot of it sounds too much like Noam Chomsky), but then you should read it again, and still disagree with it, but then read it again... you get the picture. Brilliant and absolutely worthwhile even when it is flagrantly and wildly wrong. I cannot give a writer a higher level of praise than that.

3. Stanley Fish - Speaking of rereading, I find myself returning to the essays of Stanley Fish again and again, always finding that of value in them. An annoyingly clear thinker, and a master of following matters to their peskiest logical conclusions. A latter-day Scottish rationalist dressed in a tweed sportcoat, he sidles into the bar where all the sloppy thinkers are drinking, whips out his pen and simply aerates the sonsabitches (to steal a phrase once deployed in praise of Bob Black). My colleagues will remind you that the likely reason I was so annoying throughout my Ph.D. studies is that I was mainlining a lot of Fish, and such behavior will often make one Difficult. Why not start with There's No Such Thing as Free Speech (and Its a Good Thing, Too)?

4. George Steiner - Simply the most intelligent writer living today. Period.

5. Roland Barthes - It is so clear now. The book is a woman. She sees you, and she wants your eyes on her. The book will do everything in her power to make that happen. You enjoy it, and you can't help yourself. (Don't believe me? Read Barthes's The Pleasure of the Text.) Bracing stuff, this. Structuralism at its very best.

So there you have it. My top five. Simply one reporter's opinion, of course. I'd be delighted to hear your suggestions for alternatives. We can have us a theory pow wow. Go to it, kids. Enjoy.