Christmas Letter, 2008

Dear friends and family,

We wanted to take a few moments and fill you in on our adventures over the past twelve months. We thought about sending a Columbus Day letter, but, after some discussion, that just seemed weird. So, Christmas it is. Enjoy.

The year started with some upheaval. Charles and Allyne stopped through Nashville on their way home from St. Louis. We had a fine visit and we gave them a tour of Nashville, ate a really huge breakfast at the Loveless Cafe, and showed off our wonderful little apartment in the Whitland neighborhood. David's dad remarked that he couldn't believe a place like that hadn't been turned into condos, given the real estate market. Little did we know.

In early January, we received word that the wonderful apartment building we were living in had been sold and was being turned into condominiums. With thirty days notice, we were asked to find a new place to live and move out. Mind you, this was occurring during the period when Kira thought she would be finishing her master's thesis, and David believed (oh, yes he did) that he would have the whole Spring to put the finishing touches on his dissertation and get it defended in time for both of them to graduate in May.

Oops. Needless to say, that did not come to pass. We did not graduate in May of 2008. Instead, we moved, for six months, into a cave. At least, that was how it felt. It was an oversized, overpriced, under-heated and under air-conditioned behemoth of a place that was a semi-reasonable storage area for our things, but was by no means a home. The Cave had four windows total, and what windows it had backed out onto a high-rise construction site, which was noisy at the best of times and unbearably annoying the rest of the times.

So, like any sane couple, we fled the country.

Well, maybe it wasn't that dramatic, but we were overdue on a honeymoon, and Kira needed to see her ancestral stomping grounds in the Netherlands, and David was itching for a good excuse to learn (read: butcher) a new foreign language. So in May, Kira and David each packed a bag (one bag apiece! We took carry-on only!) and hopped the pond to Amsterdam's Schipoll airport. From there we were met by our good friend Alec, and we hopped a train to nearby Leiden, where we spent a wonderful ten days with Alec and his wife Kathy. We threw a weekend trip to Germany in for good measure, as well as several day trips to four beautiful Dutch cities and one really ugly one (Rotterdam). Kira got her first taste of international travel, and David got to taste many versions of Boerenomelete ('Farmer's Omlette'), and a pleasant time was had by all.


Upon our return to the states, we were overjoyed to join both sides of Kira's family, as the Bandstras celebrated Marjorie's 90th birthday in New Jersey, and the Hartgers celebrated Harold Sr.'s 90th birthday in Grand Rapids. There was much laughter, at least one new song, David discovered the joys of really huge family reunions, and again, a pleasant time was had by all.

In June we started packing up the Cave, in anticipation of moving (at the time, we weren't sure where, just that We Had To). Then, in good form, with our boxes packed, we skipped town and headed for the beach.

So early July was spent with Harold Jr., Susan, Philip, and Philip's friend Gabe at Oak Island, NC. A week of seafood, body surfing, pelican watching and oh-so-minor intoxication, that has come to be a yearly ritual, ensued. Nobody managed to tan, sadly, but we did see some fireworks (for several nights before, during and after the Fourth).

After our return, we moved again (second time in one year). The new place is a lovely little duplex with lots of windows and good places to take long walks through the neighborhood. It's not perfect, but it is a home, and we are thankful for it.

In August, Harold and Susan came to visit us for a long weekend, and Harold and David hung a ceiling fan and did some minor house maintenance. We took a tour of the Opryland Hotel and had a really huge breakfast at the Loveless Cafe. Then, in October, we made a trip to Cincinnati and spent a long weekend with Harold and Susan there as well, halfway between Nashville and Washington, PA.

Then, in Late October, we travelled to Chicago for the American Academy of Religion conference. David had several job interviews, and Kira slept in. While we were there we were very happy to catch up with several friends, including an old friend of David's from high school, Matt, who took us out on the town, including a wonderful dinner and a show at the famous Second City Improv Theater.

During the year, we also have been happy to have several friends visit us from out of town. At one point or another, Katy, Robert, and Henry all stopped through, as well as Kira's brother, Philip. In a couple of these visits, as well, we managed to work in a trip to the Loveless Cafe.

In late December, we will travel once again to Pennsylvania to see Kira's folks and, as has become our practice, flee Nashville at the slightest excuse.

Now, some specifics:

Kira did finish her master's thesis, and her degree. She got word in October that the thesis had passed, and she will officially graduate in May. Meanwhile, in September, she began a one-year residency in Clinical Pastoral Education, and is now working as a chaplain at nearby Baptist Hospital. Last January, after much soul searching, she joined the RCIA (Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults) group at Christ the King, the parish we have been attending, and during the Easter Triduum she was received into full communion, joining David in the Roman Catholic Church. This fall she was asked to be an RCIA sponsor herself, and enjoyed becoming more involved in the parish.

In January David finally said goodbye to Central Presbyterian Church in Culleoka, TN, a rural congregation about an hour south of Nashville where he had served as the (covertly not-Presbyterian) weekly minister for the last five years. Thus, for the first time since they had met, Kira and David were able to sit next to each other during worship. David was also able to serve as an RCIA sponsor, along with Kira, and to become a more active member at Christ the King. In October, after many months of rewrites and agonizing all-nighters, he was given the green light to schedule his dissertation defense. On December 4th he defended successfully, and in May you can finally call him "Dr. Bozo," and no longer simply "Bozo." He continues to teach for American Baptist College here in Nashville, and in November he signed a contract with Yale University Press to write a book called The Accessorized Bible, about the phenomenon of "boutique" scripture.

It has been a remarkable (Kira suggested "tumultuous") year, and we count ourselves blessed. Thank you, each of you, for your part in our lives. With much joy and love,

David and Kira

My favorite albums of the moment

Please note: all could change in the blink of an eye. However, this will do for now. Simply ignore that much of what follows could have been filed under My Favorite Eponimously Named Albums of the Moment. "Truth in Advertising," as that maniac painter of my ill-fated acquaintance used to say.

1. The Hal al Shedad by The Hal al Shedad. Spitting, angular, and supremely difficult music with amazing lyrics and a heavy Slint-meets-Sonic-Youth-at-your-sister's-graduation-party kind of vibe.

2. B-52's by The B-52's. Pulled this one out tonight (I still have it on LP, natch) and played the A side for Kira. She dug it. I dug it. Great guitar tone, and it sounds like it was recorded in a room with walls covered twelve feet thick in cotton. Strangely, that's a good aesthetic. Plus, the album flat out rocks.

3. Special Beat Service by The English Beat. I remember arriving at the end of one of my high school's football games with the express purpose of finding Jill, the coolest gal I knew, and putting this tape in her hands. It's that kind of album. Fast forward to earlier today, when Kira and I walked past a duo playing a steel-drum version of "Ackee 1-2-3" at a sidewalk festival. I swear the universe is conspiring to make me happy.

4. All the Best Cowboys have Chinese Eyes by Pete Townshend. Even cooler because an episode of Lost is named after it. I remember being quite taken, years ago, with the video for "Face Dances II," which is what initially made me buy the album. Every track is good, but his rendition of the old folk standard "North Country Girl" takes the cake for me every time. A brilliant album.

5. Rock N Roll by Ryan Adams. Came across this one by accident, long after its release and the buzz about it had passed. Heard the track "Burning Photographs" on the local slacker college station and my jaw dropped. Bought the album that very day. I'm told it's a bit different from his other material. That's a pity, because he has a knack for making adolescent crotch-rock with a lot of wit and a lot of heart. Also, the album's first track contains the best chorus any former philosophy major and still-unrepentant hopeless romantic could ever ask for: "Don't waste my time. This is it. This is really happening" - sung in the context of the teenage wannabe lover in all of us. Vital.

So there you have it. Go make your own list, citizen. Go.

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.

X-Files: I Want to Believe

So I've been fishing around on RottenTomatoes.com for the past few minutes, and I have to say that every snide claim Orson Welles ever made about "the critics" in his masterpiece, F for Fake, seems to be holding true.

Thus, in what follows, it should be noted that I am writing with the voice, not of the "expert," but as a fan. A dedicated fan.

I am a longtime fan, first of all, of the Batman mythos, and was thrilled by the work Christopher Nolan and Christian Bale did to bring the film franchise back into line with the roots of the mythology with Batman Begins a few years back. A superb film, on its own merits, that fact only makes it more amazing for its being a superhero film. (Though I do wince at the hokey physics involved in the "we need a microwave emitter to destroy the city water main" subplot - a narrative device bested in its useless melodrama only by the "Project Xylophone" sublot in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged - but I digress) .

In terms of the new film, The Dark Knight, however, I cannot give such high praise. Yes, Heath Ledger is all that and a bag or anarchic chips; and yes, I am happy - like the rest of us - that Christian Bale is the first actor since Adam West who is actually able to turn his head from side to side while wearing the costume. But (and this is a tremendous but) - I spent almost the entire film trying to will myself to like it more than I actually did. Which is sad, because I really did want to be blown away by it, but frankly, I wasn't.

Make no mistake: I am glad I saw it; it was worth watching. But I have no real desire to watch it again.

Checking RottenTomatoes just now, however, you'd think this film was the Second Coming. To quote an old friend of mine, Jesus on a Telecaster with new strings couldn't get a crowd going like the buzz afoot among the critics about The Dark Knight. 95% approval, at my recent perusal. That's quite a thundering endorsement for a film that couldn't even edit the chase scenes for consistency of street flow (watch the first Batcycle scene again - you'll catch what I mean. Its simply a mess) or getting Harvey Dent out of an exploding hospital with any sort of temporal credibility. I take some solace in the fact that X-Men III and Superman Returns were worse still. But hey, I guess, it is, in the end, just a film based on a comic book. I can let some of that slide.

The real thorn in my side, however, is that the new X-Files film, I Want to Believe, is getting absolutely hammered by these same critics. But absolutely.

Full disclosure: I am not just an X-Files fan; I am an X-Files fan who adamantly does not subscribe to the opinion that the show went downhill after Season 6. I am one of those mutants who finds all nine seasons to form a coherent and satisfying story arc. In other words, I am a nerd about this.

To digress again for a moment, allow me to make my case with a few choice points. For me, X-Files was never about the conspiracies - it is about the characters. Mulder, it is true, does have his shifts through the series (losing his "faith" in extraterrestrials, the paradoxical closure and simultaneous lack of closure about his sister, Samantha, and his strange aversion to religious convictions of any stripe), but the really interesting development throughout the series is Scully. Her portrayal by Gillian Anderson is complex and fascinating - by turns strong and vulnerable, stubborn and hopeful, faithless and faith-filled. Her slow orbit around Mulder's monomania for "the Truth" reveals that she is literally as crazy as he is, in different but equally rewarding ways for the viewer.

I submit that you do not truly get the depths of her craziness - or the orbit - until Mulder is no longer a physical presence in the series. Hence the last two seasons, 8 and 9, are not an aberration, but a completion of a trajectory that begins (you can see it - go back and check for yourself) right there in Season 1, in the earliest episodes. Without belaboring the point or psychoanalyzing too much, I'll just say that the interplay of Scully's return to her Catholic faith, coupled with the recurrent "father figure" issues she has throughout the series, leavened by the openness to the paranormal and supernatural she gains through working with Mulder on the X-Files, is handled throughout the nine seasons with gravitas and grit. Her emotional and spiritual life is messy, a hodgepodge of half-remembered catechesis and moral-compass bearings that sometimes flag from true north - in other words, her story is a lot like many of ours.

I admit that I was quite fearful, entering the theater last night, that all of this development and complexity would go by the boards, to be lost in a sea of "rearranging the story" for the purpose of shock or recklessness. I expected the worst, and was surprised beyond my hopes with a truly rewarding, well-made movie.

I Want to Believe is watchable; moreover, it is re-watchable. It is, speaking as a die-hard fan, about the most accessible entry-point into Mulder and Scully's story arc you could ask for - by which I mean, non-viewers will be able to "get" it right off the bat.

Most pleasing to me, you get the chance to see the full-blown craziness of Scully - but now with Mulder there. Seeing how they negotiate their respective neuroses and obsessions onscreen (or fail to negotiate them) was very satisfying, for many of the reasons I have mentioned above. The emotional tenor is convincing, as well. Both actors know these roles well, and though they are stretching them in new directions, the core is still there - the chemistry and the complexity are in full effect.

Most of all - its creepy. Creepy in the fine tradition of all those episodes that still make my skin crawl. Creepy - but with that inexplicable ability to remind you that there is still hope, and that in the end, the monsters will not win - that has always been at the heart and soul of the X-Files. The tone of dread and dark is palpable, but tempered with moments of true humor that flow seamlessly with the larger story. The audience laughed and gasped, both, last night, at moments when I am certain that Chris Carter - the mad genius behind it all - intended us to.

And at the end, when the credits rolled, we applauded. As a true fan, I could not ask for more than that.

You can believe it

Kira and I just got back from the midnight premiere of the new X-Files film. I'll write more about it probably, but before I go to bed I just wanted to say it's really, really good. And spooky - just the way I like 'em.

Worth your time. I'll be going back to see it again.

"When did we see you, Lord?"

In every house where I come I will enter only for the good of my patients, keeping myself far from all intentional ill-doing (from the Hippocratic Oath)

A couple of days ago I was on the phone with my Mother. She has recently undergone cataract surgery for both her eyes - a series of operations that have brightened her outlook, both figuratively and literally.

Because of a program in the city in which she resides, and because she is on a pretty fixed income right now, the procedures were very nearly free. During our conversation I made the comment, "Hooray for socialized medicine!" Mother, a lifelong Libertarian and congenital contrarian, was quick to chide me.

"This is not socialized medicine," she insisted. "Socialized medicine would be terrible!"

This is what I would call a typical conversation between my Mother and I on such subjects, and it is a disagreement we have had for decades. For her, the Market (always with a capital-'M') is the Answer (again, you can almost hear the capital-'A') to all problems - social and personal and all the potentially-unhygenic crevices in-between. I am inclined to disagree.

I was in mind of this conversation these past couple of days as I came across the following two anecdotes, related to me by various friends.

First, one friend, just recently returned from five weeks in China, told of getting a cut on her ankle, which then got badly infected. After a couple days of just trying to let it heal on its own, the wound began turning blackish, and so she went to see a Chinese physician.

At the clinic, she was immediately seen by a (female) doctor, who instructed the (male) nurse, who in turn cleaned the wound and bandaged it properly. The infection was treated with antibiotics and is now fully healed.

Total time in the clinic? Less than an hour, with a translator, no less. Total cost of the antibiotics? $1.50. Total cost for the visit itself? Fifty cents, American.

The second story, slightly less rosy, involves a graduate school colleague of mine, who has taken part of the year off for medical leave. The leave is official, recognized by the University, and is, in effect, simply a "pause" in her studies. In other words, she is still a student.

However, she was recently informed, by the administrator of the school's insurance plan, that she would not be eligible for school medical insurance while she was on school medical leave. Never mind that (to quote the Book of Esther) it was for such a time as this that medical insurance was invented in the first place; my friend has been caught up in a bureaucracy with its own illogical logic.

While I am not privy to all the details of the discussion that followed, I am reasonably certain that the frank absurdity of this was noted to the administrator by my colleague.

The points I want to make here are the following:

1) as much as I may dislike the practices of the People's Republic of China on issues of liberty, I cannot fault them for having an inexpensive health care system that seems, at least on my limited knowledge of it from my friends who have been there, to work.

2) the argument often made against socialized health care - by my Mother and those of her mindset - is that such a system would be mired in bureaucracy and inefficiency, such that those who need care might not get it at the time they most need it. What I am observing, however, in my own health care and that of others, is a similar bloated inefficiency - with the added insult of an obscene price tag.

My evidence is all hearsay and anecdotal, I admit, but the physicians I have known who are idealistic and truly concerned for the full health and wellbeing of their patients were all encouraged by the partners in their practices to leave. One now works for the public health establishment. I have been acquainted with other doctors, as well, who were concerned chiefly with dollar signs. One such soul was recently involved in callously dispossessing Kira and I of our apartment when it became profitable to turn them into condominiums. So let the reader be aware I do have a bias in these discussions. Caveat emptor.

"Health care for profit" is not simply an oxymoron - it is a blasphemy. I think of another image - a college classmate, weeping openly at graduation, not for joy, but because she had both diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis and no job yet, and therefore no job-related insurance to replace the school's plan by which she would no longer be covered. She was weeping because, despite all the high talk of the Market and its forces of supply meeting demand, she was simply uninsurable - even if she could have paid the premiums, private insurance would have refused to cover the very conditions for which she most needed insurance.

I am aware that this is a complex issue, and I am aware that the answer is not simple charity. The Nazi's, after all, gave bread to the poor. But there must be a point at which reason - and reasonable kindness - prevails, mustn't there?

I do not care what it is called - whether it goes by the name "socialized medicine" or not - but there are countries all over the globe, of every stripe of politics and resource, that are delivering efficient and affordable, if not free, health care to their citizens. The quality of this care beats the best that the American medical market seems to provide; in fact, we're pretty low on the totem pole when it comes to the effectiveness of our care system.

So, to be blunt, call it what you will, but I am tired of waiting. Health care, by my lights, should be readily available, highly effective, and free. I have little interest in discussing anything short of that anymore. We can do it, and we aren't, and that is simple foolishness and petty jingoism.

So often humans are made to suffer so that the word choice of a few can be untarnished, or for some idiocy of ideological resistance. Systems put in place to preserve the systems themselves and not the lives put in their care.

We will be judged, I am told, by how we have cared for the least among us. They deserve better than we have offered them so far.

"The New Criticism"

My ruthless pen at your throat
slashing lines, across your poet face,
the clogged arteries of your words

Every surgeon is a madman

at least,
this is what I tell myself,
standing, scrubbing hands
over the scour-bare sink

Bend the Hundred Acre Sinister

Kira and I have moved to a new apartment, and this entails, among many other things, a reorganization of books. As I was about this task today, I was suddenly pleased to note that, among the many volumes of fiction we own, Vladimir Nabokov sits dangerously close to A.A. Milne on our fiction shelf.

There are pleasures, and then there are pleasures. This morning, with that, the universe provided the latter. Thank you.

You're simply not white enough. Get out.

Do not long for the night / to drag people away from their homes.
Beware of turning to evil / which you seem to prefer to your own discomfort - Job 36:20

Several years ago, I was on the phone with someone in the office of the United States Council on Energy Awareness, and I was lying my head off. I was trying to get on their mailing list.

The fellow on the other end of the phone was, by turns, suspicious, cagey, confrontational and interrogating. He wanted to know why I wanted to be on the list of this above-board, obviously grass-roots coalition of concerned citizens, rallying around a cause I think we can all get behind: the fact that there simply are not enough nuclear power plants in America.

So I was telling him that I was a high school physics teacher, and I wanted USCEA's excellent materials to share with my classes. None of this was true, of course. But then again, I wasn't the only one on the phone who was lying.

At the time, the USCEA was a well-funded and very sub rosa arm of the marketing departments of some key power companies, and they were enacting what can only be termed a sort of jiu-jitsu on the level of America's environmental memes. The USCEA was tasked with getting the message out, on the local and national levels, that the cleanest and brightest alternative to our energy "needs" was increased (and increasingly subsidised) nuclear power. Clean and green was the angle, natch.

I was successful in my ruse, and was the recipient for a few years of their materials, until the political climate changed in the Clinton years and the organization-formerly-known-as-USCEA changed its look and name and became something else with a different name but likely a similar agenda.

The main thing I was aware of (and this was the main reason I wanted on their list) was that the USCEA was slick. They sent media alerts. They put ads in magazines. They encouraged you to write your representatives, and they sent you the addresses of your senators and congress persons based upon your mailing zip code. They told you the words to say in your letter, and who to say it to. And by doing this, they made it look like writing your representative was your idea, and that their words were your words.

Like I said, slick.

My lie was a noble one. I got on their list and used their materials to contact my congress persons and senators about developments in the nuclear industry I was made aware of by USCEA's media alerts. Then, I detoured from the USCEA agenda, and instead of advocating for these inanities, I would urge my representatives to reject them, like any rational and sane member of the human species would. But during my time on that list, I also received a passive education in the big business of looking small - the power of grass root manipulation of public policies.

I was put in mind of all this just now, when I happened upon a full-page ad in the latest issue of Harper's. It's on page 11, if you have a copy handy and want to turn to it, or you can download a pdf of it here.

The top of the ad is a picture of a gridlocked highway, with the caption underneath reading, "One of America's Most Popular Pastimes." The ad copy underneath that begins the wind-up to the pitch by grousing about something everyone can agree to hate: traffic congestion. "For many people," the ad copy intones, "commutes to school and work and daycare can take up to three hours a day."

Now, I used to live in Atlanta, a city which, at the time, boasted the longest commutes in the nation - both in terms of average distance and average time per day. Getting across town could be Hell (forgive the pun) on wheels, and so I take this problem raised by the quotation above seriously. Commuting is no joke.

The answer in Atlanta, of course, was the same as it would be anywhere: more public transportation, live closer to where you work, buy a bike, telecommute, learn to live on less disposed income so you can downsize your car and your job, or, you know, walk once in a while. (My particular borough of Decatur enacted some of these sensible ideas as civic policy, making streets narrower and sidewalks wider, and focusing on the development of a planned town center with equal emphases on a central shopping district and the MARTA train station. Sensible. And it worked.)

This ad, however, sees the problem - and the solution- quite differently. The solution is not sensible downsizing of extravagance, but elimination from the streets of certain demographic groups. To paraphrase: white folks can't drive where they want to as fast as they want to because there are too many brown people in the way.

That's right. It turns out this ad is not about traffic congestion at all, really. It is about immigration, and the encouragement of a buggered and reactionary immigration policy that pumps hatred and fans hysteria (their tagline at the bottom of the ad is, "300 million people today. 600 million people tomorrow. Think about it.") while doggedly asserting that the real problem isn't our binge-and-sprawl approach to civic planning or our own over-bloated addiction to car culture. It's Pablo and Enrique, the men who just bussed your table and made sure your toilet seat was clean (or - why stop at day labor? - who prepared your taxes, taught your chemistry course, or anchored your local news. Money may make the "darkies" and the "brownies" more tolerable for a while, but when push comes to shove in the fast lane, they all look the same to us, don't they?)

Where I come from, this is called race-baiting, and it's of a species with the old arguments that say, "we can't let schools be integrated because those [fill in the insulting name for African-American men] can't be trusted around our women." It is an argument from fictional consequences, perpetuating comfortable bigotries and trafficking in stereotypes.

But the ad tell us, "Together we can do something about it." We. Who? Concerned White Folks, that's who. Jane Q. Citizen, soccer mom and den mother, blameless in her SUV, uniting with other lilly-white Janes across the nation to do something about it.

Sound familiar? Spend a few minutes on the websites listed (Californians for Population Stabilization, Americans Immigration Control Foundation, and the Federation for American Immigration Reform among them) and you will discover the same modus operandi that I encountered years back with the USCEA alive and well in the immigration wars. From the websites, you can download podcasts to share with your friends, print posters to put up, and - naturally - obtain media alerts and addresses for representatives to write. After all you, Jane Q. Citizen, carry a lot more weight and persuasive power than some evil lobbyist.

It is, in sum, fodder to help the bigots get organized, without drawing attention to the bigotry.

I don't know when Americans became such a cowardly people. Afraid of terrorists after 9/11? I can understand that, of course - even if ultimately we figure out that we trained and financed a lot of those terrorists back in the day with our wonderful covert military-industrial foresight. Afraid of our daughters and sons dying in an interminable war? Again, I find that a reasonable danger to be afraid of.

But afraid of traffic jams?

And worse - we seem not afraid enough to actually change our way-too-comfortable lives of excess and sprawl as we grasp madly for a solution, but rather afraid just enough to pass the blame off on those "others" (pick your ethnicity) who are somehow ruining "our" dolce vita.

This is pernicious rot, and it speaks ill of us (I'm talking to you, white folks). This ad campaign is a shill, and the "concerned citizens' organizations" behind them are a hissing and an abomination; well-oiled propaganda machines designed to get the Ruling and the Comfortable terrified of potential (not even actual) discomfort, and then equip them with choice pieces of the wrong data to parrot.

Like the old Who song says, It's a put on. Don't forget you're hiding.

My recommendation? If you're really worried about gridlock, sell your car. Change your life and your lifestyle. Stop blaming some fnorded "other" for problems we bring on ourselves and perpetuate.

Or... if you really want to get some karmic traction, join the mailing lists of these bozos and use their lobbying infrastructure against them - by advocating something sensible, decent and moral to our representatives - for a change.

Meta- Update

So Kira and I traveled from May 12 - 23, heading to the southwestern Netherlands, with a weekend detour in Köln, Germany. I had toyed with the idea of blogging about our adventures while we were there, but computer time was limited - and besides, we were having too much fun adventuring and exploring for me to duff away for an hour each day blogging about it.

The result? A set of superb memories, and roughly 2,500 pictures of ruins, cathedrals, canals, people, weird stuff and windmills. We had a fantastic holiday.

Now home, and back to the business of the non-sublime. So my hope is to distract myself from the everyday over the next couple weeks with a few posts highlighting some experiences we had and photos we took. More to come.

Thanks always for reading.

Dd.

Say hi to your mother.

Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen.

Fashion is fleeting

(How's this for a shameless plug?)

As an experiment a few months back, I opened a CafePress shop and put some of my original artwork on some T-shirts, to see what would come of it.

It was a good experiment, but it has not generated the kind of interest to make it worth the expense of keeping the online shop open.

So, if you have simply been waiting for the right time to buy, this is it. As of May 5th, 2008, the Dault T-Shirts shop will be closed and the site pulled down.

And, of course, if t-shirts aren't your thing, feel free to click some other links here on the blog. I am sure you will find something interesting...

And as always, thank you for reading. See you soon, Dd.

Twilighting (a poem)

Birds, she
said, are crazy, little
machines of precision
amok in tandem
flightpaths of
bewilderment
and grace.

Parkour!

My friend Anson emailed me about a series of five webisodes he has recently directed for Dank and Nank (them being, as near as I can tell, a dadaist version of the Odd Couple)

I am not sure I understand it, but I enjoyed it. Hence, I am publicizing it. Dig:

A ribcage full of songbirds

Back in 1996, my Ground Hog's Day was interrupted. I was a passenger in a head-on car collision that, thankfully, everyone lived through. The event did, however, have some dire consequences. The driver went to the hospital with fractured vertebrae, and I cracked two of my left-side ribs. About three weeks after the accident, a guy I worked with said something that made me laugh, and one of the ribs broke all the way through. As I hit the ground, screaming, I remember thinking, "How can there be so much pain in me right now?"

Cleaning out some old boxes today, I ran across this, which I wrote a couple months after the accident, looking back at it. I've been dead-dog sick with the 'flu these past five days, and this seemed somehow fitting - so I thought I would share it. We are fragile things. That is what makes the preciousness of all these breaths so monstrously beautiful.

2.2.96: Invitation to the last dance. The life flashes later. All that hung in the air at that moment was clarity. Transparency. Lichtung. Giving over the body to limp buoyancy. Life collapses.

What we held, what we thought we held: these were not the same. No matter. There are certain points of inevitable closure. Boom.

At that point I was limp trusting; no other description is adequate. Later, in the hospital, fearful over Kay, the driver, I watched it on the news. It wasn't the same as being there. It never is.

Decode this, then. A haunting of memory acid-etched into the body. So many choices have passed with no consequence before this, inevitable and unchangeable. How un-American it feels to be burdened: to carry a moment, one moment, for the rest of your life.

Every medium of conduction has its own factor of resistance. Circumscribe with mathematics, enlist physics, demand a clarity mere words cannot provide. But when such a pure transparency is achieved, what is seen? How clean the glass before it shatters?

So, left with moments incestuously entwined with-us, to re-learn the language of breaking points, tolerances. So. leaving the clean, broken glass, but carrying the breaking with us. For we, like glass, are dust put to purposes and pressures; liquid, brittle, revealing. We yearn ourselves to transparency. We hope, at last, to see through this; even this.

Death of a Sneer

As of this writing, it is just under 24 hours since I have heard of the passing of one of the 'elder statesmen' of neo-conservatism, William F. Buckley. I am not sad.

Though, I will admit, unlike the death of Reagan (an event I marked with gleeful toasting, and curses on his memory for all those sleepless nights in the '80's I spent, worried that the sonafabitch was going to Drop the Bomb, and not in a Gap Band way. Oh, and for many other reasons) I am not joyful at Buckley's passing. Just notably not sad.

Strange as it may sound, when I was a child, watching Firing Line was a bonding point between my mom and me. My mother esteemed Buckley - his erudition, his star power, his von Misean lust for free-market lebensraum. Me, I didn't know any better. Blame it on my youth.

In the years since the days of those halcyon Libertarian wet-dreams, however, I have learned many things about Buckley. His friendship and early championing of Reagan is not a selling point for me. The fact that he claimed Catholicism, yet sneered at everything that the Book of Acts and the Sermon on the Mount would imply about how humans should order their economic lives, reviles me. And, like the cherry on the white, oh-so-white whipped cream, there is this:

The central question that emerges . . . is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not prevail numerically? The sobering answer is Yes – the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race. It is not easy, and it is unpleasant, to adduce statistics evidencing the cultural superiority of White over Negro: but it is a fact that obtrudes, one that cannot be hidden by ever-so-busy egalitarians and anthropologists.

National Review believes that the South's premises are correct. . . . It is more important for the community, anywhere in the world, to affirm and live by civilized standards, than to bow to the demands of the numerical majority.

—William F. Buckley, National Review, August 24, 1957

I'm sorry, but that is (if you will excuse the expression) beyond the pale.

Now I realize that many will say that Buckley repudiated his racism later in life. Frankly, I don't care. Someone with his intelligence, and particularly his religious background, should never have been a racist at all. It is inexcusable, even if he simply held these opinions in private. The fact that he used his magazine as a national bully-pulpit to trumpet these opinions is, I am afraid, damnable.

These are harsh words for a theologian to use, I realize (though perhaps no harsher than Buckley's in 1957), and so I should couch them theologically. Within Catholic understandings (a worldview in which, apparently, Buckley saw himself), such actions are damnable if they are not confessed. And perhaps he did, at some point, confess them to his priest.

But if absolution is going to forestall condemnation, it requires genuine repentance. Repentance, moreover, requires a making of amends to those wronged. I cannot speak for William F. Buckley, so I do not know if he undertook these weightier matters of the soul in private. It does not appear so, from his public actions.

But we can still hope, at some level, that his heart was changed; that he truly repented of the very un-charitable, un-loving positions he espoused. We can hope.

But in my hoping, I am still not sad. God help him, yes. God help us all, in the wake of his legacy.

Open Letter to the Space Dudes

Dear NASA,

Remember that time y'all went to the Moon?

That was way rad.

Peace,

D.