Hildegarde

So it’s Sunday, and things should be pretty calm around here, with Bach, or Mozart, or Charles Mingus. 

But that’s not going to happen, so some notes on the comments on the last post.

1) Michael’s post was a perfect example of exactly what I was talking about.

The shutdown was Christmas in October for the Obama administration on the subject of the launch of the ACA.

A lot of things went wrong–and continue to go wrong–with that launch, and none of them had to do with the shutdown.

But when the screwups continue to cascade, the administration can go, “look! it was the Republicans who wouldn’t open up the government and give us money!”

In reality, h owever, not that much of the government every actually got shut down, and the administration had considerable discretion in what it decided to call “essential” workers and what it didn’t.

We’ll leave for a discussion at another time the administration’s decision to reduce rations to troops in the field to two meals a day while funding NPR with$1.4 million.

But the fact is that HHS was not subjected to shutdown austerity at all.  It was kept fully up and running and operational all through the sixteen days of the shutdown. 

Granted, it couldn’t get any more money, but we’ve already spent about a billion dollars trying to get this thing operational, and you’ve got to wonder why that wasn’t enough.

2) No, it WASN’T because the system had to be in compliance with HIPPA.

Or, if it was, the attempt failed.

One of the biggest issues with the system at the moment is exactly that your personal information is not secure. 

The way this thing was set up, if you’ve put your information out there, it’s pretty much up for grabs. 

3) Admitting the obvious–that this thing has been badly implemented–is not the same thing as saying you’re opposed to government provision of health care.

4) Neither is pointing out that this particular bill was a very bad bill–a VERY bad bill–on about fifteen different levels.

It was, in the first place, corporate welfare for insurance companies on a grand scale. 

It was, on top of that, the most blatant example I’ve ever seen of the complete betrayals of democracy.

Instead of passing the actual law, what it did was to go “the secretary will decide” on literally thousands of different questions.

In other words, it gave Katherine Sebelius the impression that she’d inherited the divine right of kings, and she’s been using her power that way ever since. 

That’s the real issue behind the “contraceptive mandate.” 

An issue like that should have been debated in Congress and only passed by elected representatives. 

Instead, it will go to the SCOTUS, and if the SCOTUS lets it stand, that will be the end of freedom of religion in the US. 

Because freedom of religion doesn’t mean going into the privacy of your home or church and believing things and praying.

It means living your religion day by day, identifying yourself with it and using your actions and words to set an example of how that religion is to be lived.

And no, don’t tell me that this means religious employers will be allowed to “deny access” to birth control to women who don’t believe as they do.

There’s no denial of access involved. 

The condoms and the diaphragms and the pills will still be in the drug stores.  Consultations between doctors and patients will still be private.  You’ll still be able to get a prescription for birth control pills–or even the morning after pill–and go get it filled.  You’ll just have to use your own money.

And since most birth control is dirt cheap, the use your own money thing won’t deny anybody access either.

5) Anecdotes aren’t evidence, and that anecdote isn’t even an attempt at evidence in the direction of how awful it is that the US doesn’t have “unversal health insurance.”

I’m sure some people don’t go to a doctor or a hospital because they don’t have the money. Some people don’t go because they have to be forced at knifepoint to go under any circumstances.

But lots of people do go, even when the money is tight.  The largest difficulty with that is that doctors and hospitals are not allowed–get that, NOT ALLOWED–to charge patients anything less than Medicare pays.

But on top of that–why is NOT going to the doctor or the hospital when it isn’t necessary a bad thing? 

Since the people in the examples given were all right significantly after the event, then the visits would not actually have been necessary.

6) Canada may or may not provide health care for “everybody,” but the ACA won’t.

The administration’s own estimates are that it will cover only about half the people who were uninsured at the time of its passage, and will not–without further legislation–ever cover any more. 

The issue is  not the “working poor.”  The issue is people who do not work for giant corporations, who own their own small businesses or work freelance, and who therefore have to buy their insurance in the individual market.

Every single plan available to me will  be at least twice as expensive as the cheapest insurance available to me as of January 1, 2013. 

Of course, it will be that much more expensive because it will provide me with all this new, extra coverage!

The problem is that I don’t want any of the new, extra coverage. And I don’t get a choice whether to buy it or not.

7) I have always been a big fan of single payer, and I am now, but I am not naive.

What we should have had was a system that got rid of Medicaid and put everybody into what is now the Medicare system.  The roll out would have been a lot smoother, the confusion would have been a lot less, and it would have been operational a lot more quickly.

But there is no chance in hell that we will ever have a system here that BARS private medical care.  Any public system we erect will have at least some competition from doctors and hospitals that choose to operate outside the public system (that is, not accept government funded patients, as some places don’t accept Medicare patients any more) and some patients who will choose to pay out of pocket for everything rather than deal with waiting lists, restricted choices of doctors or health care plans that carry coverage for things they don’t want or even actually object to.

Actually, that was already happening long before the arrival of the ACA. 

At least some of the people who don’t have health insurance in this country are the very richest among us.  Concierge doctors take only very limited numbers of patients, who either pay entirely out of pocket whatever the doctors may ask for or pay a premium (around $7500 to $10,000 a year) over what their insurance companies pay.

In return, they experience no waiting times for anything, and in the most expensive practices, they even get housecalls.

Most hospitals these days are perfectly happy to take cashier’s checks for prime private rooms with no waiting and first-in-line access to surgical facilities, MRIs, cat scans, and the rest of it.

 Any government system will not only not fix this, it will accelerate the trend.

In England, the government provides that NHS and does not much regulate private insurers, so in that system, the middle class has been steadily bailing for private insurance plans for decades.

I know I haven’t been around much, but the book has actually picked up speed and started action like a book. I figure I’d better take the good news while I can get it.

In the meantime, though, I’ve been reading a book by Steven Pinker called The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.

This is a very long book, and I have been reading it for a very long time.  I started on October 1st, and I will probably finish sometime today.

When I do finish, I’m going to have a lot to say, m ost of it not complimentary.

In the meantime,  however, I wish to point out that it gave me a piece of information I am very happy to have.

Do you know all those studies that purport to show that liberals are just smarter, brighter, more intelligent than conservatives?

We all roll our eyes and go:  politicized social “science.”

And that’s probably true.

But.

It turns out the liberals the study finds to be more intelligent than conservatives are not left-liberals or progressive.

They’re classical liberals.

They’re libertarians.

(At one point Pinker says something about how libertarians have “a lot in common” with classical liberals.  That’s because libertarians are classical liberals.)

Anyway, on top of that, the smartest of the classical liberals are the ones who are classically liberal–

Economically.

Free minds and free markets, as the Reason Foundation likes to say.

Although, according to left-liberals, I’m supposed to  ate them, because they get a lot of money from the Koch brothers.

At any rate, it was sort of good that that came along to make me happy, because I was having a fairly stunned reaction to the stupidity of conservatives over the last couple of weeks.

Welcome to the shut down and the dumbest political maneuver anybody’s made in a very, very long time.

For those of you who do not live in the US, it’s important to note that the shutdown started on the same day (October 1, again) as the health care exchanges opened for the start of Obamacare.

And it’s also important to know that the shutdown happened because some members of the Republican Party wanted to defund Obamacare in any future continuing resolution, as a step to getting rid of it.

So for the last two weeks, what we’ve had is nothing but stories about the shutdown and the looming debt ceiling crisis and yada yada yada.

Into which have dropped stories here and there about how the launch of Obamacare is coming along.

And when we’ve heard that the launch is not going well, we were told:  that’s because the Republicans won’t fund the government.

And the launch of Obamacare has not been going well.  In fact, it would be difficult to exaggerate just how badly it’s been going.

Some of the problems have to do with the fact that the software seems to have been designed by a malignant chimp. 

It’s the government, so for some reason I can’t understand, they couldn’t just go out and buy a bunch of existing software that had proven workable and fit the paradigm. 

Apple didn’t even bid on doing the design.  Which says something about the bid process or something. 

But the software mostly just doesn’t work, and there are too many and the process is set up in such a way that some mistakes can only be corrected by filing standard appeals, instead of just going in to rework your account. 

The system declared a friend of mine to be unmarried and earning no money in 2013 and directed him to Medicaid.  He’s married and makes more money than will even allow him to get a subsidy.  He has to file an appeal.  The system has spoken.  End of discussion.

But there’s a lot more that’s going wrong, and it’s not a matter of software.

Practically everybody who has been buying insurance in the individual market is getting royally screwed. 

Virtually everybody who has plans from the individual market is having their plans cancelled as of January 1, 2014, because the plans don’t comply with Obamacare requirements about coverage.  They don’t include things like maternity coverage, well child coverage, mental health coverage, and a whole laundry list more.

The replacement plans people can buy come with premiums twice as high as the ones they’ve been paying–but with the same large ($4500 or more) yearly deductibles. 

A fair number of people are looking at a situation where they will not be able to buy insurance at all, with or without a subsidy, and some of those people are chronically or severely sick.

Even a number of liberal bloggers have started to blow up about this–writers tend to be freelance, and if they’ve got insurance they’ve been buying it in the individual market–and the more official liberal commentators having started calling the whole thing “a disaster.” 

That was Ezra Klein.  “A disaster.”

In other words, if Ted Cruz and his friends in the House had kept their mouths shut and passed a “clean’ CR, they’d right now be very close to getting that year postponement of the individual mandate, they’d have a country full of people leaning more to their side on the subject of the ACA–hell, they might even be on the way to maneuvering a rollback or a repeal.

Instead, they’ve given the Obama administration the perfect cover, and the Obama administration is going to use it.

Chores.

The first thing to say, of course, is that JD was right–I got the name of the Theodore Dalrymple wrong.  It’s Farewell Fear, not “Forever” Fear.

But I want to go back around to something else. 

Some time ago, I said on this blog, and meant, that only about ten percent of high school students could really handle a course in the Great Conversation–that only about ten percent would ever be qualified to go on to “college” as I defined the term.

I said it, and I meant it, but I meant it exactly the way I said it.

Very few high school students will ever be qualified to go on to that kind of work, and about half of the ones who qualify aren’t interested.

But that is not the same thing as saying that only ten percent of the population will be interested in taking part in the Great Conversation or capable of doing so.

A true liberal arts education is very demanding, and as far as I know it’s the best way we’ve arrived at so far to hand down the Great Conversation in all its complexity.

But the Conversation itself is a constant part of all of us.

It’s not just geniuses and demi-geniuses who want to know why death exists and what it means, or where morality comes from and what it consists of,  or if life has purpose and direction and what it is, or how other people live and think and feel.

I’d think that pretty much anybody who isn’t functionally brain dead thinks about these things.

And although only a minority talks about these things or reads about them or writes about them, that minority is far larger than the ten percent who will be able to handle doing a regression analysis of the Nichomachean Ethics or situating Beyond Good and Evil in both event and intellectual history.

There are a lot of things here that I think are confusing.

For one thing, I think being able to situate all this in place and time and the history of ideas is a very good thing.  It prevents a lot of misinterpretation.  It puts at least some brakes on the human tendency to read their own preferences into anything that’s labeled “important.”

But if the Great Conversation was an academic exercise only, or even principally, it wouldn’t matter at all, and it wouldn’t have come down to us.  The first universities arose in the Middle Ages in Europe.  There had already been an awful lot of water under the bridge.

People take part in the Great Conversation on a lot of different levels and in a lot of different ways.  They do it in novels of science fiction, fantasy, and mystery–and even in the “mainstream” ones.  They do it in movies and video games.  They do it in song lyrics.

 Like I said, part of me feels that you really have to be close to brain dead not to do it–although I’ve met enough people who don’t, and who resent people who do, to make me wonder what goes on in people’s heads.

It isn’t even true that only people who have been formally educated in the liberal arts who read or discuss the actual authors in the tradition.

Penguin Classics makes a living putting out volumes by virtually every recognized writer in that tradition, and they’re not making money with them as CATs (course adoption texts).

There are people today who are reading their way into the Great Conversation, picking up used books here and free-for-e-readers books there, plowing their way through first one branch and then the other, trying to fit it all together in their heads.

That approach is messy and wasteful of time and effort–I know, I spent my late childhood and adolescence working that way–but it’s not the same thing as not being part of the conversation at all.

What I’m getting at here is that saying that only about ten percent of the population is ever actually capable of real college work is not the same thing as saying that only ten percent of the conversation can think or read about these things at all.

The people who can do these things is a systematic and comprehensive way are vital, because they are the only way we keep the entire history of ideas alive and available.

But almost everybody joins the Great Conversation in one way or the other.

We couldn’t stop them if we tried.

Okay!

Things have been a little hectic, so here I am, finally posting the September list nearly two weeks after I usually do.

A lot of these I’ve already talked about.  But here’s the list proper:

56) Erle Stanley Gardner. The Case of the Queenly Constestant.

          q) Allen Tate. “The Man of Letters in the Modern World.”

          r) Allen Tate. “To Whom is the Poet Responsible?”

          s) Allen Tate. “Miss Emily and the Bibliographers.”

57) Azar Nafisi. Reading Lolita in Tehran.

58) Kathryn Hulme. The Nun’s Story.

59) Wendy Kaminer. Worst Instincts: Cowardice, Conformity and the ACLU.

60) Theodore Dalrymple. Forever Fear.

I’ll start by saying that I don’t think it’s one of my more interesting lists.

Allen Tate is my favorite literary critic of the post-WW I period. 

“Miss Emily and the Bibliographers” concerns the issue that exercises us here–whether a work of fiction must in some sense be “real” (as in true to actual life) to be good.

Critics had been complaining that Faulkner’s short story, “A Rose for Emily,” was outlandish and impossible.  Real life did not consist of actual people who murdered their lovers and then slept by the corpse for the next twenty years.

Tate doesn’t directly challenge the era’s critical assumption, but he does drag up an actual example of a nearly identical case from New York state, and then goes on to ask what real actually is. 

I love almost everything by Tate, so I may like this one more than any of you would.

The Erle Stanley Gardner was definitely one of the better ones.  It also constituted the first time I’ve ever wanted Perry Mason’s client to be guilty.

I’m not sure this was what Gardner was going for, but–my God, this woman was a world class jerk.

The Kathryn Hulme represents the first time I’ve read the novel on which one of my favorite movies was based.  That is, of course, the Audrey Hepburn film The Nun’s Story.

The changes from book to film were relatively minor, which was nice.  I don’t generally like changes when changes are made, with the exception of Roald Dahl’s Matilda, where the movie is definitely better than the book.

But what got me involved while reading the book for the first time was as much the material I was finding about the author herself and her life. 

When the book came out just after WWII, it was widely supposed to be based on the life on Hulme’s long time friend, a former nun named Marie Louise Habets.

In the years since, a lot of this story has been debunked, or half debunked, in various ways.

But what interests me is that Hulme and Habets lived together for many years, in what looks, these days, very much like what we used to call a “Boston marriage.”

It’s never a good idea to make anachronistic assumptions about the way in which other people at other times lived there lives, but in this case it turns out that Hulme spent quite a bit of time in the years between the wars in Margaret Anderson’s circle in Paris.

And there was nothing closeted about Anderson’s circle in Paris. 

Anderson and her lover Jane Heap founded and ran The Little Review, one of the small magazines that were the first to publish then avant garde writers like Hemingway, h.d. and Djuna Barnes.

Anderson and Heap–but not Hulme–are subjects of chapters in one of my favorite books, Women of the Left Bank by Shari Benstock.

It’s one of a small stack of books that explains why I haven’t written off Women’s Studies altogether. 

It examines a long list of women who went to Paris during the same period as the men we’ve all heard about (Hemingway, Joyce and company) and wrote, produced, and published.

A remarkable number of these women were not only gay, but solidly part of established Lesbian couples.   All of them did work that is intrinsically interesting, but many of them did work that was necessary to make the reputations of the writers who are now considered part of the canon.

What’s even more intriguing to me is that so many of the women who did make good lives for themselves were part of this lesbian company.  The ones who had recurrent bouts of work-destroying personal trouble all seemed to be straight.

That may be Benstock’s bias, or the luck of the draw, but I think I could make a case that there was, inherent in a culture which did not take women seriously, a structural cause of the differences between gay and straight couples.

Maybe I’ll reread the Benstock at some point and report on how it sounds after a distance of several years.

Right now, though, I think I’m going to go off and do some chores.

Because chores hate me…

Today, I opened my email to find this

http://thefederalist.com/2013/10/04/taking-back-the-arts/

That’s a link to a conservative article on ending federal (and other government) money to the arts.

Originally, I didn’t think very much of it, except that I was mildly annoyed.  The person who sent it to me implied that I, of course, would be in favor of such government money to the arts, and gave me a set of reasons why that would be so.

It was one of those “For God’s sake, isn’t ANYBODY listening?” moments, because I’m on record several times on this blog as being opposed to such expenditure.

In fact, I’m on record at length.

The article itself was no sparkling font of originality and wisdom.  It says what these articles more or less always say, and I agree with it.

What caught my attention was something I already knew but don’t usually think of when I think of funding for the arts, and that I should.

And that is–that arts funding goes to non-profit organizations.

And that the big problem with non-profit organizations in this country is not that we don’t require them to be politically neutral, but that we don’t require them to behave like non-profits.

The part of the article that got me thinking about this was a short paragraph about how such non-profit and publically funded theater companies routinely charge $70 apiece for tickets, thus pricing most of the people whose tax money they are using out of the experience.

This would be the case even if they didn’t get money from the NEA or other government sources, because the money they don’t pay in taxes is money that is not available for other public functions.  This is especially true of property taxes, since property taxes are what fund public schools in most municipalities.

There are, of course, some kinds of tax exclusions that have other rationales besides public utilities. We don’t tax churches because, as Jefferson said, “the power to tax is the power to destroy.”  The free exercise of religion being our first and most important right, we don’t trust governments to tax churches (or synagogues or mosques or humanist chapels) fairly and without taking sides.

Most of the time, when we grant organizations and institutions non profit status, it is because we are convinced that they are providing an important service that we want to encourage.  We assume that such organizations will provide these services in such a way that will make them largely available to the general public.

In other words, we decline to take their taxes under the assumption that they will be operating at a loss so that more people can benefit from them.

Does this sound to you like the way major nonprofits operate these days?

At all?

Even a little bit?

Let us pass over, for the moment, the way in which many of these organizations pay their top administrators as if they were the employees of an investment bank.

The heads of such nonprofits as the Red Cross, Harvard College and the Yale-New Haven Hospital are compensated like any other members of the Major CEOs Club–at the lowish end of it, but only lowish.  A seven figure salary is a seven figure salary, and it doesn’t begin to unearth the perks of a first class benefits package.

What’s far worse is that most high-end  nonprofits are dedicating to charging the public whatever the traffic will bear. 

Yale University has an endowment large enough so that it could eliminate tuition for every one of its students.  It has vast property across the landscape of the city of New Haven, a minority-majority municipality that has persistant problems funding public schools and basic services.

All that property is untaxed, but far from providing education at a discount, Yale provides it at a premium. Not only are the sticker prices high–in the $60,000 range for tuition, room and board for a single year–but even its discounted prices are too high for most middle class families to cover without going into very significant debt.

Then there is the Yale-New Haven hospital, which not only charges the top end of everything for medical care, but also goes after “deadbeats” (read: sick people without the money to pay up, with no or insufficient insurance) just like any for-profit medical center. 

The question, for me, is–what are we abating these taxes for?

If nonprofits are going to behave like for profits, why accord them all these special privileges?

Why not insist that nonprofits earn their tax exemptions by behaving like nonprofits:  by charging less than a forprofit company would, by paying lower compensation than a forprofit would, by actually being charities?

And if theaters are going to have nonprofit status, with or without government money, why not insist that their ticket prices be low enough so that most people can actually afford them?

As far as I can tell, these days “nonprofit” has come to mean “need charismatic jobs for people like us, and the public be damned.”

I signed in to my email yesterday and found a comment on the post before last, on the one called “Still Life,” that gave me pause.

The comment was from Mike F, and what it said was this:

>>>

a Harvard economist, and Eldar Shafir, a psychologist at Princeton, propose a way to explain why the poor are less future-oriented than those with more money. According to these authors, one explanation for bad decisions is scarcity — not of money, but of what the authors call bandwidth: the portion of our mental capacity that we can employ to make decisions.

Worrying about money when it is tight captures our brains. It reduces our cognitive capacity — especially our abstract intelligence, which we use for problem-solving. It also reduces our executive control, which governs planning, impulses and willpower. The bad decisions of the poor, say the authors, are not a product of bad character or low native intelligence. They are a product of poverty itself.>>>

This comment struck me for several reasons.

First–the blog post said nothing at all about “the poor” in general, and it did not say that the poor were poor because of bad judgment or lack of native intelligence.

I was speaking of a very specific phenomenon, and one that I never knew existed before I started teaching my deep remedials. 

I might not have discovered it even then, except that one of my students hit the last month of the semester in the state I think of as “going to fail this course if you don’t do something quick.”

In my courses, students are allowed to write and rewrite their papers as many times as they want and without penalty until they get the grade they want.  My assumption is that my job is to teach them to write coherently, not to see who can who can win a race whose only purpose is to determine whic of them the system can safely discard.

My students are often poor, but even my deepest remedials are not usually passive to the extent of some of the people they’ve left back home, and a lot of them are not passive at all.

Nor does the level of passivity correspond in any obvious way with the level of poverty.  In the small city in which my present school is located, there is a small group of men (not organized as a group, but each independently) who go around collected returnable bottles and cans. 

They have shopping carts, acquired God only knows how, and they push them through the city picking up whatever they can find.   They are almost certainly homeless, and most of them are either alcoholics or drug addicts.

A (nonremedial) student of mine who had a secretarial job at the Department of Social Services told me that the Department had done a survey on these men to see what was going on and how they could help them. 

They found that these men made between $100 and $300 a day,

A day.

Even at the lower figure, that’s more than most of my students make, with the added benefit of the fact that it is not subject to FICA or any other kind of taxes.

They’re homeless not because they don’t have money, but because they spend their money on drugs or alcohol. 

And the Department can’t help them, because they adamantly refuse to enter homeless shelters or DSS programs, both of which insist that they get sober.

Before you start fulminating, let me get to what strikes me as most important about this.

These people are about as poor as you can get and still be living in the US, and yet they not only are not passive, they show a truly impressive ability to think, plan, and carry through. 

The fact that they make a decision–alcohol is more important than housing–that you and I think is wrong or “mentally ill” is beside the point.  They are able to formulate their wants, figure out a way to supply those wants, and put that plan into practice and stick with it over long periods and under very difficult conditions.

And, interestingly enough, sometimes they don’t make that decision.  When the weather hits the real lows of February, most of them pay their way into the local fleabag motels.  It’s more expensive in money than the shelters, but it comes with no strings attached.

The kind of passivity I’m talking about is not just a minority phenomenon because the poor are a minority.  It’s a minority phenomenon because most poor people are not passive.

My students are not passive almost by definition–they’re in school, and that takes quite a bit of activity to accomplish.  The concerted attempts to get people into school whether they want to go or not skews this a little, but not as much as you might think.

Even the most zealous inner city guidance counselor can’t make a kid come to class often enough to graduate, not even in a system where nobody counts absences on Fridays because, you know, the kids just don’t come.

Passivity of the kind I keep trying to describe–apparently with little success–would be literally impossible without a welfare state, not because the welfare state causes such behavior, but because without such a welfare state thepeople who are passive in this way would simply and inevitably die.

If your only response to a light bulb going out is to sit in the dark–even though there are light bulbs in a box in the hall closet–you must either have somebody to do for you what needs to be done, or you will not be able to stay alive.

I think part of the problem here is that it’s difficult to credit if you haven’t seen it.  I think it may be difficult to imagine if you haven’t seen it.  It can be hard to credit it even if you have seen it. 

It can be an enormously odd thing to watch in action.  If action is the word I’m looking for.

The other problem, of course, is that the quote Mike F provided seems to be yet another attempt to explain poverty in a way that makes the poor seem like automatons without agency, something that is certainly not true.

People escape from poverty all the time.  Granted, these people tend to be Asian and South Asian immigrants, but they still begin desperately poor and don’t stay that way.  If “bad decisions” and “lack of native intelligence” are explained by the stress of being poor, what explains the Indian family with the gas station and the clothing store, the Thai family and the two Chinese families with their own restaurants, the Vietnamese family with its woodworking shop?

Nor is it the case that “nobody wants to be on welfare.”  I’ve had students–deep remedials all–hand me papers in which they declared positiviely that if they could figure out a way to get on the rolls, they would sit back and laugh at the rest of us paying their bills.

What’s more, the statement is a flat denial of what is obvious to most of us–and that is that behavior does in fact affect outcomes.

If we didn’t believe this, we would not push our own children to study and do well in school, to go on to college and get a degree, to work jobs to build up an employment record. 

What it comes down to, I think, is this:  I don’t think there is any such thing as “the poor.”

I think there are a lot of different people with a lot of different reasons from a lot of different circumstances.   There are people who are ill or seriously physically disabled.  There are people who just arrived with no money and who don’t speak the language.  There are people who made bad choices and people who made good ones that didn’t work out. 

To the extent that we’re talking about the intergenerational poor–that elephant in the middle of the room–I think the answers are varied there, too. Some are certainly my students who wanted to be on welfare (and that family whose story I posted a while back who were deliberately keeping their children away from tutors because they got more money for the family if the kids were labeled “mentally handicapped”).  Some will be born without much in native intelligence. Some will make bad choices.  Some will just be sticking with what they know.

But I don’t think  it’s helpful, and I don’t think it makes a case for providing public assistance, to redefine people who happen to be poor and somehow not quite as fully human as we are, unable to make decisions for themselves, just too stressed out to know what they’re doing, or maybe addicted, or…

You don’t make public provision for the poor and destitute because they’re deserving or because they can’t help it or even because they have some vague “human right” to it.

You do it because they’re there.

I finished reading Wendy Kaminer’s Worst Instincts: Cowardice, Conformity and the ACLU a couple of days ago, and I’ve been trying to figure out how to write about it ever since.

Kaminer is one of my absolutely favorite writers, the kind of writers whose books I look out for and always read. 

I am not sure how I missed this one when it came out, but I did.  I had heard–because hers is a name I watch for–that she had left the national board of the ACLU some time ago, and that she’d done so because she felt the ACLU was no longer the ACLU, that it was no longer an organization committed to civil liberties.

I also knew that one of her major complaints about the modern ACLU was the fact that it acquiesced in campus speech codes and “hate crimes” legislation.

In other words, if I had known this book existed, I’d have had it in house on publication day.

For those of you who have never read Kaminer, she’s the kind of liberal who makes you remember that there were, once, real liberals.  In other words, she’s not a “progressive,” but a tireless defender of individual rights.

She’s also one of the world’s most trenchant critics of the therapeutic culture.  I’ve recommended I’m Dysfunctional, You’re Dysfunctional here before, but I’ll do it again, in case you didn’t hear me. Things have gotten much worse since she wrote it, but they haven’t really changed.

I’m not sure whether to recommend this book or not. 

It’s a very good book, and I’m very glad I read it. 

But along with being a painstaking account of what happened at the ACLU to make her tenure there no longer feasible, it’s a kind of mourning. 

It’s an anguished outcry at the death of something that was very important to Wendy Kaminer, and probably to a lot of other people, including me.  It’s just that I noticed the death sometime earlier, so that by the time Wendy Kaminer left the ACLU, I had long been calling myself something other than liberal.

The loss, then, is not just that of this once venerable institution, but of an entire political idea, which no more exists in today’s world than a pterodactyl.

Except, of course, that it does.  In Wendy Kaminer.  In Theodore Dalrymple.  In me.  In dozens of other people who have been cut adrift in the politics of modern America with no party to represent us and no idea what we should even call ourselves.

I’ve settled on “libertarian,” but, given the antics of our present Libertarian Party, that isn’t a viable option for everybody.

In case you’re wondering–no, I’m not in favor of privatising the roads, eliminating all government help for the destitute, or  abolishing the public schools.

Of course, if you know anything about actual libertarianism, you’d already know that I wouldn’t be in favor of any of those things. 

Another subject for another time…

When I tried to explain all this to a friend of mine, he said that the ACLU was never the kind of institution Kaminer and I thought it was, because it never really defended anything but the rights of liberals.  It did not, for instance, go after “government backed unions,” meaning (I think) closed shops.

Thinking this over, I’ve decided that it is not entirely a legitimate criticism, on two counts.

The first is that there are legitimate disagreements over what is and is not the individual liberties side of an argument.  Your decision as to whether individual rights are being served or not by any policy will depend on what you think is going on in the real world.

If you think workers genuinely choose not to join unions, then you’re going to be in favor of “right to work” laws.  If you think that workers are coerced into claiming they want a union out of fear of reprisals from management, you’re going to be in favor of closed shops.

And yes, from where I sit, it seems glaringly obvious that right to work is the way to go–but that has to do with my personal experience, and I may be right or wrong.

The other reason I think this isn’t a legitimate criticism of the ACLU, however, is that the record belies it.

Anybody looking back over the history of the organization will see that it repeatedly–at least, up until its present administration–defended very unpopular and very un-leftist people and organizations at great cost to itself both financially and in terms of membership.

The Skokie case alone nearly bankrupted the organization and sent hundreds of people fleeing its membership rolls.  It went to bat for the conservative (and deliberately inflamatory) Dartmouth Review, a magazine whose staff eventually became the bright lights of a new generation of conservative leaders.

Those are two cases known to me, but there are dozens more, and the record is clear that the organization took those cases in spite of the fact that it knew it would get hurt. 

These days, of course, the charge of picking and choosing a few high profile cases so that you get to claim to be “nonpartisan” would be completely justified. Anthony Romero’s ACLU is just another partisan political player in a partisan political world.

What it also seems to be is yet another institution that has started to be run for its own agrandizement rather than for advancing what are supports to be its ideals.

In other words, cases were taken–or not–based on calculations as to whether taking them would provide lots of publicity of a kind that would increase both memberships and donations.

One of the most telling aspects of this situation is the fact that Romero knews–as did his board, when they eventually learned about what was going on–that this kind of behavior and these sorts of policies would bring a lot of very bad publicity.

Romero understood the problem, because he tried so hard to hide a lot of these decisions and policies from the board.

The board understood what was going on, because if they didn’t they wouldn’t have spent so much time trying to cover it over, lying about it, and trying to mischaracterize the content of various decisions.

And some of those decisions were positively bizarre.  One had to do with Romero’s secretly agreeing to check ACLU hires against terrorist watch lists, right at the time that the ACLU was fighting the watch lists in the courts.  Another had to do with trying to take credit for action on behalf of Guantonamo detainees that had actually been taken by a different organization.

A lot of this was less shocking than just sort of sordid and embarrassing–like Romero’s failure to tell the people who hired him that he had worked on establish the Ford Foundation’s gag rules for grant recipients, and then failing to tell them that he’d signed the ACLU on to those rules so they would get the grant money.

For me, the most painful part of the book was Chapter Eight, where Kaminer lists all the ways in which the ACLU has ceased to be a “civil liberties” organization and become a “social justice” one–and it’s very obvious she’s not in favor of the social justice thing.

In that chapter, we get everything from campus speech codes to sexual harrassment policies to a glancing look at at least some forms of affirmative action.

I could have written most of her complaints myself–and have, on and off, on this blog.

Wendy Kaminer is about my age.  This is a requiem for a world that died by the time we were both in (Seven Sisters) college, a world that we both aspired to and longed for that was gone before we had a chance to enter it.

Wendy Kaminer still calls herself a liberal, as far as I know, and she may actually be one–a liberal, not a progressive.  I call myself a libertarian, but it all comes down to the same thing.

Every once in a while, I discover something that is wonderful because it is wonderful–it’s not connected to politics or morality or any of the usual subjects.  It’s not “important” in the way we usually apply that word.  It’s something that just is, and I’m glad it exists in my universe.

The something wonderful this morning is the existence of a group of people in the UK–an apparently organized group of people–who go around rescuing sick hedgehogs from the wild, bringing them in for medical care and food and cleaning up, and then taking them back to the wild when they’re all better.

The hedgehogs seem to take very well to this treatment, and to return to the wild quite successfully.  I kept getting images of said returning hedgehogs trying to explain their experience to hedgehogs who had never had it. 

If hedgehogs had better communications systems, maybe we would find little troops of them showing up at back doors, making bids for adoption as pets.

I found the story about the hedgehogs in an article by Theodore Dalrymple in the New English Review–an old article, in a collection of them, in a book called Forever Fear.

The book had been, until yesterday, one of those casualties of my TBR list.  It’s been floating around for a while, in spite of the fact that Dalrymple is one of my favorite writers and I usually read what he writes as soon as I get into the house.

I have no excuse for why I didn’t do that with this one. I do have a suspicion that it may have arrived at a crisis point, like exam week.

Whatever happened, I finally picked the book up yesterday, and the first thing in it was the story about the people with the hedgehogs.

But this is a book by Theodore Dalrymple, and that means we did get around to the usual subjects eventually. Even the article with the story about the hedgehog society wasn’t actually about the hedgehog society.

The article that got my attention was called “Steel Yourself,” and it was about what has happened to two former steel-manufacturing towns in the UK (one in England and one in Wales) now that steel manufacturing pretty well no longer exists in the UK.

My initial reaction–before I’d read the article through, I’ll admit–was that this was not going to be a very interesting piece. We all know what happens when the jobs disappear.  Dalrymple himself has written several articles on this theme, and so have many others.

As it turned out, however, the article was not about the usual thing.  It was not about the fate of the steelworkers and their decendants. 

It was, instead, about the fate of refugees–Kurds, mostly, and also mostly young men.

The refugees have been resettled in these two former steel towns, where there is no work, and where starting businesses is nearly impossible because of regulations of various kinds.

And now, some years later, these people, who had had enough initiate and courage to brave a truly harrowing passage from their home countries to the UK–these people are, now…inert.

In fact, what Dalrymple’s description reminds me of is the parents and neighbors of my deep remedial kids, the ones who live in housing projects where garbage is lying all around on the floors and in the courtyards, where lightbulbs go out and stay out for months at a time, where, no matter how bad things got, nobody would actually get up and do anything.

Dalrymple suggests in this article that the listlessness–what I’ve called the passivity–is caused by a combination of a good-enough welfare state combined with restrictions on individual enterprise.

And this may be, of course, true–as it may be true for some inner city American Latino communities composed largely of people who were willing to brave border patrols, Minutemen vigilantes, and God only knows what else to get here.

And it is almost certainly true that we have, as has the UK, developed a class of people (social workers, low level regulators of various kinds) who have a vested interest in making sure that poor people stay poor.

In the end, though, I can’t quite see my way to accepting this as The Explanation for that passivity.

After all is said and done, these are not the only poor people in the US and the UK, and they’re not the only immigrants.

As Dalrymple mentions, as an aside, none of his descriptions of passivity, squalor and demoralization apply to the Indian and Pakistani immigrants in Britain.

They don’t apply to the Indian and Pakistani immigrants here, either or to the Thai and Vietnamese or Chinese.

In spite of the very real barriers to starting a small business, these people start them.  In spite of lackluster education systems and racial discrimination against Asians in college admissions, these people get their kids into first rate schools.

Their children become doctors and lawyers and professors and members of the Obama administration.  Their out of wedlock birthrate is nearly nonexistent.  Their arrest rate is almost as low.

I can’t see that any of the usual “explanations” of the extreme passivity I used to see in those  housing projects.  The immigrants who succeed are both religious and nonreligious. So are the ones that don’t.  The same legal and regulatory systems apply to both.  They both exist in the same economy.  At least at the beginning, they all go to the same schools.

There has to be something else going on here. I only wish I knew what. 

But what I do know is two things:

First is that anything we can do to head this sort of thing off at the pass, we ought to do. 

People who are passive to the extent and in the way I saw, and that Dalrymple seems to be describing, are no use to anybody, not even themselves.  They’re not even properly exploitable. 

If there’s something we know how to do that will bring people out of such a state, we should do it.  If we know something that demonstrably works, I’ll be happy to pay the taxes for it.

If we do not know something that demonstrably works, but we can show that removing both the majority of welfare state benefits AND enterprise-inhibitory regulation will at least reduce the incidence of this kind of thing, then we should do that.

You’d have to go to the direst poverty on the planet before you found something more inhumane, or lives less human, than what this is.

And the level of poverty I’m talking about is, for structural reasons, not achievable in a modern technological state.

What has always scared me most about this situation is that it might be a temperament, and therefore inborn and largely unchangeable. 

Dalrymple had a point, though, about those immigrants who come through great obstacles.

So I’ve got my fingers crossed.

I don’t know why I am always so surprised that what I write is taken in ways that would never have occurred to me.  It’s not as if it doesn’t happen often enough.  It happens continuously. 

But every time it happens, there I am, anywhere from nonplussed to flabbergasted.

Today I am mostly on the nonplussed side, because looking at this particular misunderstanding, I’m convinced that I should have anticipated it.

So let me clear up the central mistake–when I say I am interested interiority in a novel, I don’t mean I want to know how characters feel.

I want to know how they think.

Feeling is all right as far as it goes, and sometimes you have to know how people feel if you are going to understand how they think.

But feeling always seemed to me to be mostly chemical and untrustworthy. 

Feeling can sometimes be the result of the way we think, but it is more often the result of hormones gone wild, or a lack of sleep, or Scrooge’s bit of underdone potato.

The way people feel is not a very good guide to what they will do.  The way people think very often is, and what is more, very often provides some explanation of why.

I am not saying that people don’t often hide their real motives from themselves.  Of course they do, all the time.  But part of knowing how people (characters) think is seeing that attempt at concealment from the self.

I think how people think is interesting in and of itself, beyond any other aspect of a story.  How people think–people I don’t know, people I do know but don’t understand–is what I look for in the fiction I read.

I think one of my problems with science fiction (and some fantasy) landscapes and settings is that they make me distrust the characters as people–some of the characters are not supposed to be people.

Yes, of course, I know that some science fiction writers call characters Romulans and then have them behave exactly and think exactly as people would in the same circumstances or from the same bakbrounds.

There is just a part of me that can never get past the idea that, if I’m dealing with a Romulan, then the thought processes are possibly true for Romulans, but not necessarily for anybody else.

What people seem to want these days is less emotions (although there are entire genres devoted to nothing else) as mindlessness.

We me out characters in the most superficial way, and then we get events! adventures! people running around doing stuff that faster and faster!

This seems to be standard operating procedure in movies of all kinds, not just in one particular genre or another, and some genre movies can be among the few that try to escape brainlessness.

Into that last category, I’d put both the most recent Star Trek movie and the first one.  There are actual issues that people are thinking about.  Every once in a while, the people who are thinking about them talk about them.

Part of the problem is that movies are the preeminent art form of our era, and movies are not a wonderful medium for exploring how people think. 

In fact, I would go farther than that.  I would say that there is a limit to how much interiority a movie can display before it becomes a very bad movie indeed.  What’s more, the more it works at displaying interiority the less credible the interiority it displays seems to be.

At the end of a viewing of Interiors or Notes on a Scandal, I’m not left with the conviction that I’ve learned something new and important about human beings.

I feel instead that I’ve been subjected to two hours of pretentious idiocy about the kind of people I’d block from my friends list on Facebook. 

This is true even in cases where I am aware that, if something had been done to make the movie watchable, there might have been something worthy of being scene.

I give you Judi Dench’s character in Notes on a Scandal, who would have made a first rate murderer in any decent fair play, and who is a character type I’ve always found completely baffling when I’ve come across it in real life.

But movies are just not the place for really laying out the thought processes of human beings.  When they are done well, they appeal to the emotions at best, and sometimes to less than that. 

There are a whole lot of movies (and television shows) out there that are the artistic equivalent of roller coaster rides.  The idea is to make the viewer dizzy with the up and down and around and backwards, dizzy with the thrill itself divorced from every other consideration.

At this point, the usual thing is to blame the lack of interiority in novels these days on the Evil Media Corporations that bought up publishers and tried to get books to get the kind of profit percentages they could flog out of movies and TV.

Goodness only knows that major publishers these days produce a mind numbing array of throwaway literature, books that strive mightily to reproduce the mindless action of the worst sort of movie thriller.

I think it is also true that books are never going to bring in the 17% return on investment that media conglomerates have come to expect from their other ventures.

Even in the golden days of American literacy, publishing companies were lucky to get 6%, and the most common return was closer to 3%.

No matter how painful it may be to admit it, the simple fact is that the reading of books is now and always has been a minority taste. 

Catering to it can be profitable, but only if you’re very careful to keep your expenses under control.

The problem with corporations isn’t that they’re Evil, but that they are inevitably Bureaucracies.  Bureaucracies always and inevitably metastasize.  The more people you’re keeping on the payroll, the more money you have to make to cover your costs. 

And at a certain tipping point, you’re suddenly in the position of needing more money to operate than you can sanely expect to earn from any source at all.

But I think the bottom line here is not any of that, although none of it helps.

I think that people want different things from their novels, and especially from their mystery novels, now than they did in the time of Sherlock Holmes or Agatha Christie or Dorothy L. Sayers.

Every time I teach 102, I try to explain to my students between life in the premodern and the modern world.

To people before the period we call the Enlightenment, reality looked a lot like chaos.  Very little was predictable.  People died young for no reason anybody could really pin down.  Wars started for what seemed like no particular reason on the spur of the moment, or arrived with hordes of horsemen from regions only rumored before the event. Crimes were often committed with impunity, both because the nobility weren’t held accountable when they sinned against people of lower status than themselves, and because it was often difficult to catch the perpetrators in a world without police departments or serious forensics. 

Look at what people in the Middle Ages considered beautiful, and what you will find is the orderly and the proportionate.  Not only did poems rhyme, they often adhered to rigid structural patterns.  Every form of art–painting, music, drama, poetry, even the sermon–had long lists of rules that not only promised to make the end result predictable, but did.

Civilization in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance was the imposition of order on a disorderly (and therefore dangerous and malicious) world.

The Enlightenment brought the reign of reason and the beginnings of society-wide order.  It even brought a lot of actual order–new ways to organize cities and societies that brought with them a rise in the safety of such places through resorts to plans for public health; schemes for laying out roads and bridges that obliterated the old cowpath configurations; reformation of legal systems to make them more consistant; a steady march against the privileges of the aristocracy; and, eventually, the beginnings of modern police forces and crime detection.

To the Enlightenment mind and its inheritors (think lots of those Victorians), disorder was still the enemy.  But where the Middle Ages saw that disorder as an evil supernatural force implanted in nature itself,  the Enlightenment saw it as man’s willful rejection of reason. 

The criminal was the criminal not because he made a pact with the devil, but because he rejected the inherent goodness of reason and order.

The good news and the bad news hit almost immediately–the new concentration on reason and order did make things better, but it also made things a little suffocating.

You could have a little more reason and order than you were able to live with.

Robert’s comment was right where it said that eras of reason and emotion trade back and forth with each other.

I just think that they trade back and forth with each other on the basis of whether most of us feel more menaced by too much order or too little of it.

The Golden Age of the mystery occurred between the two World Wars. 

We are living, these days–most of us in the US–in the Golden Age of the bureaucracy, with endless pettifogging rules for every activity imaginable, with every wrongheaded incursion into our lives and thoughts labeled as “science” which, we are assured, trumps anything like personal preference or a national Constitution.

Maybe it’s not that surprising that “people thinking” is not what we look for in our entertainment.

It is Saturday, and I’m a little washed out from the week.  So far, though, the day has gone well enough.  I got the real writing done.  I’ve answered a few student e mails of the “I’m panicking and it’s the week-end” variety.

It is, I will admit, beyond my comprehension that they never panick during office hours.

Anyway, I’ve gotten all my little stuff done and I’m just waiting for the mail with my fingers crossed that it has no bad news in it.  If that comes through, I can officially declare myself to be Having A Week End, and proceed to watch very silly movies for the rest of the afternoon.

There’s been an awful lot going on in my life lately.  And, me being me, I’ve been dealing with each issue as it comes up, separately and without connecting it to anybody else.

This works very well for me most of the time.  Over the last fifteen or so years, I’ve had to deal with enormous upheavals, catastrophic illnesses, deaths in the family, serious medical problems that at least weren’t catastrophic but were scary.  Bill died.  Greg went blind and needed surgery to fix that.  We had the Great Drama of Greg’s exit from the only school he’d ever known.

Whatever.

I could do more of this if I tried, but even though most of it is fixed as well as it can be fixed, it’s really depressing.

The point I’m trying to make here, though, is that, for me, dealing with this kind of thing, getting it done, getting it over with, has always required a kind of tunnel vision.  I deal with the problem right in front of me. I shut off the problems not right in front of me. I do one thing at a time and then I sit back when there isn’t anything left.

Okay, there rarely isn’t anything left.

I’m a big advocate of this kind of tunnel vision.  I think it makes it possible to deal with enormous and overwhelming problems without being overwhelmed.

But I do understand that it also tends to make you unaware of connections where they exist and may be important.

Over the last several months, I’ve been doing a lot that directly relates to my life as a writer, and specifically as a mystery writer. 

I’ve written a book that is not a Gregor but is closer, in many ways, to the old Pay McKenna series.  I have been trying mightily, with the very patient help of this wonderful person named Margery Flax, to rejoing the Mystery Writers of America.  And, most significant, I think, I’ve left my agent of the last fifteen years and…gone back to the first agent I ever had.

There’s a lot to be said about the agent, who was also Bill’s agent (and still is, now that his books are going to e book formats and that kind of thing).  We were good friends when we were in a business relationship and we’ve been friendly ever since. 

Meredith is what I will always think of as the quintessential agent.  She’s what New York looks like to me, and probably always will.

But my point here is that it was reconnecting with Meredith that made me realize what I’ve been doing with all the small and not so small decisions I’ve been making over the last several months.

What I’ve been doing is going home–going back to the beginning of my identiy as a Writer with a capital W, the professional kind.

I have, of course, been a writer all my life, in a way.  I think I was six when I first tried to write a story of my own.  I wasn’t all that much older than that when I first tried to write a mystery series.

The dectective was a Nancy Drew clone named Susan Derringer, and at first all she had was titles–lots of them.

People ask me, very often, why I don’t go back to actual Pay McKenna series and write another installment in that.

The answer is that I couldn’t write that way even anymore no matter how hard I tried.  Pay McKenna ended just before Bill got seriously sick, and after going through all that I just don’t have the–the same mental and emotional atmosphere, I guess.

I’ve known many writers in my life who have been able to write light mysteries while going through hell on steroids, but I just don’t seem to be one of them.

Still, somewhere in my brain, I want to go back there as far as I can and reset something.

I keep thinking that my writing has become too grim, and sometimes too strident.  I’ve always been very careful about not inventing ideological markers instead of characters, but lately I’ve been sick to death of all the issues.

I wonder sometimes if the pure mystery is any longer possible in this climate.  The form was invented as a kind of anti-gothic, as the reassertion of reason against the forces of Romanticism, against the taste for emotional overkill.

Lately I think more and more that what people want is the emotional overkill.   The insistance on reason has become the mark of a bad person.  You saw it in the Trayvon Martin case, where nobody wanted to know what the law actually said, only what they wanted to happen, tell hell with everything else.

You saw it in the case of the new Miss America, who is an Indian, not an Arab, but who became the rallying point for thousands of tweets and blog posts excoriating the Miss American pageant for choosing a Muslim (always called an “Arab”) just days after the 9/11 anniversary.

The other thing I think people want that I don’t is lots of action–events! explosions! everybody chewing up the landscape!

Some people have always wanted action, of course, but the fair play mystery was always more about thinking than doing.

This is part of the reason, I think, why detective fiction has always been the one genre high culture writers and various intellectuals have always liked.  It shares the same bias in favor of mental activity as the other fiction they like.   It is interior rather than exterior in its action.

The interiority is what I found in Agatha Christie and later in the Harriet-and-Peter volumes of Dorothy L. Sayers.  It’s what I find, now, in P.D. James. 

They say that what goes around comes around, and that somewhere in the future there will be another cultural shift in favor of the reason and interiority I want.

But I’m not sure I’m going to live to see it.

And I don’t think I’m capable of recreating it on my own.