The Sewer Mayor
In 1999, when I ran for mayor and won, I argued that my background in public health would help us, especially in winning the approval of NAFTA, ADEQ, Rural Development, WIFA, and so forth. Why this turnaround in voter support? The answer is simple: the city had to get the job done quickly, or the state of AZ would take over and do the job themselves. (I once challenged a senior state Water Infrastructure Authority (WIFA) on this point: Had the state ever taken over this job?
The answer was that they had taken over the sewer and water projects for cities larger than Bisbee. Given this threat, Bisbee had to act. And the previously council had succeeded in winning approval to move forward in the application process. Bisbee owes Mayor Lyle Reddy thanks for his effort, but the council would not settle down to business. I ran, even as a newcomer, because i had identified three other councilors who were pledged to get the job done. I also said my career in public health and my experience as a New York State health official would help the process. I thought we had the experience and the four votes to move the inertia in Bisbee then and now.
The job descriptions of City Manager, City Council, and Mayor changed during the sewer crisis as Bisbee set a path to the future. Approval for the NAFTA/ EPA Sewer Project required a different kind of mayor, council, and city manager. The threat of not winning the NAFTA grant concentrated the Bisbee voters wonderfully. The consent order was a detailed description of the requirements of the city to meet the sewer crisis. And, as this was NAFTA funds, we competed with small border cities in Arizona/Mexico area, overseen by the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality. We were running out of time and the state's patience.
Winning NAFTA, EPA, and state ADEQ support for the wastewater project was crucial for the town's future.
Continue reading "The Sewer Mayor" »
Posted at 10:36 PM in acceptance, health care reform, public health | Permalink | Comments (0)
Two economists from the University of California, Berkeley, say Medicare for All would be a big tax break for most Americans.
These proposals would eliminate private health insurance because private insurance is a poll tax on working Americans and retirees. Private health insurance is regressive. Secretaries pay the same for a comprehensive health insurance plan as do highly paid executives.
Why should that be? It only seems "fair" because we think of private health insurance as a commodity. Secretaries pay the same thing for a Cadillac as does the company president, (which is usually paid for by the corporation, anyway).
Here's another way to think about 'Medicare" for All. When I was in the Army, and if I were sick or injured, I went to an Army doctor or to an Army hospital, where I would receive the same care as the Commanding General. In the Army or in the Veterans Administration or in the Civil Service, health care is offered on the same terms as for all.
I am astonished that other economists who regularly write for the New York Times like Paul Krugman don't make this point.
If I were Joseph Biden, I would make a phone call to these two economists and take a meeting and then check with Krugman to see if he agrees.
Medicare for All is a game-changer, not just for Democratic candidates, but for Democrats generally.
Posted at 08:36 AM in health care reform, politics | Permalink | Comments (0)
Today, I'm taking P.T. and it's getting hard. While doing so, my trainer happened to mention Fort Huachuca, in Sierra Vista, and that he was stationed there.
I said, I was supposed to be discharged there but went to MD, instead. I said I went to the Army Language School in Monterey, CA. He did also. I studied Korean. He did also. (He is much younger than me.)
He said in doing PT in Monterey, they discovered he had a serious problem with his shoulder and it deserved surgery. So he was out with medical discharge.
I spoke some Hangul (Korean) to him, and he said he hadn't gone very far. I told him my story about awarding $500 to the Mayor of Uijongbu, where I was stationed because a soldier had destroyed a small house belonging to a Korean woman. The commanding general in Korea, a General Beauchamp, ordered me to do it. I did so, speaking to about 30 people. They seemed pleased. One said my Korean was very good.
Then I left. I never met General Beauchamp. He commanded, in Korea, the Seventh Division and I Corps. Both divisions went to Vietnam. They wanted me to go to OCS but I said I wasn't jumping out of an airplane. The officer said "We'll get you out of the airplane" I said no thanks.
I came home t and was discharged in MD, and went back to University of Texas. Years later I met Carole, who lived near where I was discharged. Years later I met Carole in D.C., got married (again)I went to Hopkins. French was my required language and I did okay.
And here I am at 82.
That's my story and I am sticking to it.
Ahn Yung Oi, Kea Sae O. (Goodbye)
Pai Shi., my name in the Language School Classes. AKA Dan
When people in Bisbee asked me "Why Bisbee?" I didn't tell them this story. I told them another one. I told them that we came to Bisbee because of Betty King, our good friend and former student of mine. Betty was living in Bisbee, was the Cochise County health officer. Years before, I had helped Betty get a summer internship in Arizona in the early 1980s and she had stayed for a few years and met her husband Joe. Joe lived in Bisbee. He was a legal defender and after a short while, they moved away and vowed to come back someday. And after Kansas City and Washington, DC, Betty heard the county was looking for a new health officer and she applied and got the job. And when she heard that I might be thinking of retirement and leaving New York for somewhere out west, she sent me a note, telling me about the place.
But of course, all this wasn't the real reason. The truth was that I left New York because Mario Cuomo blinked and didn't run for president. I knew after listening to Cuomo's radio announcement that he was not running, sitting there in the Tower Building on the 14th floor in the office of one of the Department's press people and down the hall from where my old boss used to sit, Dr. David Axelrod used to sit and who was lying in a coma in a hospital downstate somewhere after a stroke, that all the things I dreamed of, all the things I worked for when Axelrod talked me into coming to New York, were out the window.
Continue reading "Life in the Vertical Dimension" »
In a few days I will review two good but different books on the cholera epidemic in London, and Dr. John Snow's role discovery of the origins of the epidemic in the sewers of London. One of the two books gives us a wonderful picture of Snow, a pioneer in the history of public health.
The more I listen to the pundits and the more I think about 2020, I think the Democrats MUST campaign hard to beat the Horse Loose in the White House. He is increasingly erratic and volatile. He wants Russia back in the G-8, he wants to withdraw our contribution to NATO, and on and on and on. Have we gone crazy enough to forgot that Trump won due to the efforts of Russia and its trolls? As someone pointed out the other day, Part I of the Mueller Report is entirely about how Russia subverted our election with the knowledge of the GOP. And they are going to try and do it again.
Russia want to move in on the Balkans and Crimea was a first step. The put constant pressure on the Baltics. Russia also wants to break out from its northern European homeland and extend its hegemony to the Balkans.
I plan to vote for Joe Biden for president and I think he would be wise to choose either Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, or Cory Booker as his running mate.
And then Biden should go after The Horse Loose in the White House.
Watching MSNBC is painful. Day after day, night after night, we hear the same lament: Donald Trump is in the pocket of the NRA.
Donald Trump's racism is palpable, undeniable, and so are his policies. So why don't we say so?
Ditto the GOP.
Why don't we call out the GOP's lack of patriotism and Moscow Mitch's tolerance of a tyrant leader of Russia while blocking measures to keep our elections safe from Russian Meddling?
If Donald Trump sullies the reputation of the American republic, if he toadies to Russia and to its ex-KGB leader, why don't we say so?
If the GOP is in the pocket of corporate wealth, why don't we say so in a way that makes the country wake up? Why don't we show the public how corporate wealth and the GOP are not on the public's side? Surely we can show how corporate wealth works and how the public is being robbed?
If the GOP is giving away public land to unscrupulous developers, and if the GOP is the party of the super rich, why not show what we mean by this?
Why can't we just say all of these things, and so much more, building a political campaign against the lies of Trump and the GOP?
Why not shout all of this out loud? To not do so and to pretend we can beat Trump mainly on the basis of better, policy change and the promise to make the country safer from gun violence, corporate greed, Russian imperialism, and corporate greed, can't we surely win? We must seek these changes and the GOP will block them because they are tools of the NRA
What alternate strategy does the Democratic party possess? To not expose this contemptible human being in the Oval Office spouting his racist policies while bilking of the public, aren't we Democrats in the grip of magical thinking?
The powerful sermon by the National Cathedral, "Have We No Decency?" at Trump and his politics is the question asked of all of us, and especially to President Trump, the question the Army lawyer, Joseph Welch st the Senate hearings that brought down Senator Joseph McCarthy. Will impeachment turn not just on the plain evidence that Trump knowingly accepted assistance from foreign power, Russia, in our past election. He asked the question, "Russia, Are You Listening? And the GOP turned a blind eye.
The question, "Have We No Decency" is now our question, the question for the GOP and its racist agenda: "Have We No Decency?"
Check out this Vimeo, "Horse Loose in a Hospital.
A horse loose in a hospital
Why Not Broadcast (Television, Radio) the Mueller Report?
I keep hearing that almost no one has read the Mueller Report. Okay, so I am reading it or listening to it.
But here's the thing: why not televise and dramatize the Mueller Report? Why not broadcast it with actors on PBS. CBS, CNBC and even, yes, dear Lord, Fox News.
Surely it isn't beyond the ken of modern communications to find a way for the public to learn the report by having them listen to it, perhaps in segments?
Could we not have a series of actors/announcers take on segments and issues in the report, dramatizing it even? Why is this so hard?
Why not do the same for radio audiences?
Continue reading "This is all contingency" »
Posted at 07:19 AM in acceptance, life itself, politics, public health, waiting for life itself | Permalink | Comments (0)
Stunt After Stunt
Night after night, Trump pulls a new stunt, this time with the illegal migrants, flooding the cities to embarrass and burden Democrats. Why does MSNBC spend so much time on this? Why not turn to more important, in-depth stories. Or, shorten te attention to the news cycle, and then get the viewers to other issues?
Waylaid by An Alien Civics
I got into public health accidentally because my dissertation focus, alcoholism policy, held zero interest for political scientists who had limited interest in what I was trying to write about. I was only a little less in the dark than they about what "alcoholism" policy amounted to. My thesis advisers were Robert Peabody, a well-known scholar of Congressional politics, and Francis Rourke, who probed the politics of bureaucracy, about how agencies developed constituencies that provide sustaining political support. Hopkins at the Homewood Campus in those days (the late Sixties and early Seventies was a wonderful small, place, without pretension even though I studied on the Woodrow Wilson floor of Gilman Hall, and the floor above me, was called the John Dewey floor. While attending we lived in the Methodist Building in Washington, DC and I commuted by train every day, and I didn't know that the Methodist building, sitting next to the Supreme Court, had been constructed to provide apartments for members of Congress who supported Prohibition. Put another way, while I was riding the "Philly" train to Baltimore, Senator and Vice-President Joe Biden in those days was riding the train in the opposite direction, from Delaware to D.C.
At the same time I completed my course work at Hopkins in 1972, Tom Beauchamp, was studying on the Dewey and Pierce floor upstairs. We met later, in 1980, when I read a paper at Georgetown (where he held his faculty appointment) on public health as social justice. His wife, Ruth Faden, whom I had earlier met, had extended the invitation. Tom's reaction to my presentation was succinct: "Dan, this is merely contingency." Alas, in those early days, I didn't know this was a philosopher's way of slighting a non-philosopher's argument. Tom and I are both from Texas. Tom's father was head of the Texas Blue Cross Blue Shield programs and my father was in the wholesale grocery business.
Looking back I can't believe how foolish and uninformed I was (and my faculty at Hopkins were) about the truly explosive growth in the field of public health policy spawned by Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. We think of the Great Society in terms of racial conflict, but in truth, as Ralph Nader pointed out, LBJ's achievement put a new "civics" into our public discourse: "Sixties Civics." The Great Society put what we today call the public health perspective on the map with a long list of institutions, from occupational health and safety, environmental safety, and anti-smoking policy. The growth in government programs and research generated by Great Society funding dramatically changed the university's place in society, making society itself the source of social problems and launching the need for systemic reform and a radical rethinking of what we mean by social problems and health and disease.
Continue reading "Waylaid by An Alien Civics" »
Mueller Report a Bust?
Already we are hearing commentators (MSNBC) saying that "no indictments" means that Trump gets off scot-free. While we haven't seen the Report yet, we need to remember that the job of our Congress, our Courts, and the public to judge President Trump. We have to do the work of sending Trump away, not Mueller. We have tended in recent years to 'legalize' politics, letting courts and prosecutors police and punish public officials who go off the rails. The real question is whether the public will punish Trump at the polls in 2020, or whether many will feel he has been vindicated because he wasn't indicted.
The place to punish Trump is at the ballot box, not the least of which for the timid findings of the Mueller Report. It's time to defeat Trump not with scandal or exposure but with politics.
Let's start with Medicare, not with 'Medicare for All' in one big leap, that's a nonstarter but with the expansion of Medicare, step-by-step, first by lowering eligibility to 55, by making insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies bargain with government with rates, etc., and by moving child health into the Medicare program. Step-by-Step.
We have got to stop 'legalizing' politics; politics is about confronting and weakening the divisions in American politics: race and gender particularly. Trump isn't guilty of collusion; he's not that smart; Trump is a racist and sexist and he must be defeated by attacking the divides of American politics.
Posted at 05:00 PM in health care reform, politics | Permalink | Comments (0)
We Never Knew
Jane Mayer's story in the March 11 The New Yorker is about how Fox News worked a coup with Donald Trump. It's all there, including the Stormy Daniels scandal, which broke to Fox and the Wall Street Journal long before it appeared on MSNBC and other media amid the campaign.
It appears that before Trump, Fox had conducted a tirade against Obama, and it was Fox News, not Trump, that launched the birther bullshit. The more that we know we are learning that Trump is a creation of Fox News.
What seems strange to me is that I have watched MSNBC religiously, but they have never focused on this story or all the rest that appears in Mayer's article. Mayer's report and the story behind it make me realize how much of the coverage on MSNBC and others like it runs on the background stories that other media and reporters have uncovered.
I worry that the Mueller Report, which focuses mostly on the campaign and Russian interference or collusion, will leave out the larger point: that Fox News, Murdoch, Bill Shine and company drove Trump to the top of the Republican ticket...with the help of crackpot conspiracy theories.
Reading the story leaves me with a sort of helpless feeling: the world's oldest democracy has been hoodwinked by a media empire, with the collaboration of a corrupt GOP. The GOP has become not just the party of racism; it has been bought and sold by the Fox News organization which is the actual campaign headquarters for an increasingly corrupt and racist GOP. This story makes me realize how the modern GOP, the party of Lincoln has become the pseudo-advocate for a smaller government, in reality, represents the cause of racism and the Southernization of America and the water boy for Fox News.
"On Desperate Ground," Hampton Sides, the Korean War, and my time in Korea.
I am reading Ham[tpn Sides' "On Desperate Ground," and remembering the time I was in Korea in 1958, an Army Specialist 5, Sgt trained in Korean and still mystified about the Korean War, less than a decade after the harrowing events in Sides' book. The book is about the battle at the Chosin Reservoir, where Marine and Army troops where faced with overwhelming attacks by the Chinese, who had entered the War when the war moved toward the Chinese border in 1950.
I was stationed at Ouijong Bu, about 30 miles south of the border at Camp Redcloud, assigned to the 52ist Army Security Agency Batallion. I was almost fluent in Korean and would have become more fluent had I been assigned to Headquarters Company in Seoul, but the Army moves in mysterious ways.
In any event, the Army and the Marines (from Okinawa) were preparing for an amphibious training landing far to the south in Korea, Operation Sea Turtle, and in preparation, a Marine sergeant was assigned to our company and he had been in the battle. Asked about the struggle and the legend that the Marines held their ground while the Army broke into retreat, he said, "We all retreated fast, in great haste. The Chinese were everywhere. We were overwhelmed. We all were surrounded and had to regroup to slow the battle down."
We monitored the "traffic" or military communications of the North Koreans, filled with frequent threats of imminent attacks toward South Korea, threats which never materialized. That's my memory of the story we heard less than ten years after this famous battle. If I had been younger, I would have trained at the Army Language School in Monterey California ten years earlier, and landed in Korea in the midst of the Korean War recounted in Sides chilling narrative.
As we say in A.A., "Thanks be to God."
Hampton Sides's book is a retelling of the Korean War, of General McArthur's disobedience of the parameters of our military effort when MacArthur pushed the Army and Marines well into North Korea and menaced China. President Truman fired MacArthur, saying, "I fired the son-of-a-bitch." When these events transpired I was in junior high in Texarkana. At the time we weren't sure how to pronounce "Korea".
"Why Democracy is Public"
What follows is an extraordinary essay By George Lakoff and Glenn Smith. I reprint this because it has been made public by the authors. This essay was posted at Truthout, Friday, July 2011.
Why Democracy Is Public: The American Dream Beats the Nightmare
By George Lakoff and Glenn W Smith, Truthout | Op-Ed
Democracy, in the American tradition, has been defined by a simple morality: We Americans care about our fellow citizens; we act on that care and build trust, and we do our best not just for ourselves, our families and our friends and neighbors, but for our country, for each other, for people we have never seen and never will see.
American Democracy has, over our history, called upon citizens to share an equal responsibility to work together to secure a safe and prosperous future for their families and nation. This is the central work of our democracy, and it is a public enterprise. This, the American Dream, is the dream of a functioning democracy.
Public refers to people, acting together to provide what we all depend on: roads and bridges; public buildings and parks; a system of education; a strong economic system; a system of law and order with a fair and effective judiciary; dams; sewers; a power grid; agencies to monitor disease, weather, food safety, clean air and water, and on and on. That is what we, as a people who care about each other, have given to each other. (italics added)
Only a free people can take up the necessary tasks and only people who trust and care for one another can get the job done. The American Dream is built upon (Photo: Joel Davis-Aldridge / Flickr)mutual care and trust.
Our tradition has not just been to share the tasks, but to share the tools as well. We come together to provide a quality education for our children. We come together to protect each other's health and safety. We come together to build a strong, open and honest financial system. We come together to protect the institutions of democracy to guarantee that all who share in these responsibilities have an equal voice in deciding how they will be met.
What this means is that there is no such thing as a "self-made" man or woman or business. No one makes it on their own. No matter how much wealth you amass, you depend on all the things the public has provided - roads, water, law enforcement, fire and disease protection, food safety, government research, and all the rest. The only question is whether you have paid your fair share for we all have given you.
We are now faced with a nontraditional, radical view of "democracy" coming from the Republican Party. It says that "democracy" means that nobody should care about anybody else, that "democracy" means only personal responsibility, not responsibility for anyone else, and it means no trust. If America accepts this radical view of "democracy," then all that we have given each other in the past under traditional democracy will be lost: all that we have called public. Public roads and bridges: gone. Public schools: gone. Publicly funded police and firemen: gone. Safe food, air, and water: gone. Public health: gone. Everything that made America America, the crucial things that you and your family and your friends have taken for granted: gone.
The democracy of care, shared responsibility and trust is the democracy of the American Dream. The "democracy" of no care, no shared responsibility, and no trust has produced the American Nightmare that so many of our citizens are living through.
Nightmare it is, but there is no denying credit to Republicans for their skills at framing. The recent Republican "Contract from America," for instance, begins with a statement of their moral principles. The recommendations are special cases of those principles. It is a strategic initiative. Instead of a laundry list, each recommendation is a special case of a general strategy - to defund our American government.
Furthermore, they understand that about 20 percent of the electorate consists of people who are conservative in some ways and progressive in others. These are biconceptuals, sometimes referred to loosely by political professionals as "independents" or "swing voters." Republicans know their job is to activate the conservative part of the brains of the biconceptuals and they do that by sticking strictly to conservative moral principles and a clear conservative strategy. They never make the mistake of ignoring biconceptuals.
Progressives too often fail to clearly state the moral principles behind the American tradition. Our arguments often sound like an abstract defense of distant "government" rather than a celebration of our people, our public, and the moral views
that have defined our tradition and the real human beings who work every day to carry them out.
There is a distinction between government as the administration of what we, as a public, provide each other, as opposed to government control. The right wants to focus only upon control, not upon all that our tradition has given us. They do not just hide the vast positives, but they also hide the fact that governmental control, control over our daily lives, is more private than public. Private government for profit runs our lives - the health care we receive, the food we eat, the cars we can drive and the gas to fuel them, the news we get, loans for our homes, and on and on. Public government is for the benefit of all of us. Private (especially corporate) government is for the private profit of top management and stockholders. If you are concerned about your life being controlled for the benefit of others, look to the private sphere.
The institution of government, however, is not the point. We must, instead, defend the moral principles we seek to advance through our American government - and through ethical business practices, voluntary associations etc. The traditional view of American democracy sees government as embodying these moral goals, to protect and empower everyone equally.
If we are to successfully overcome the Republican demonizing of government and shared responsibility, we must restore faith in the mutual enterprise itself. Rather than simply defend government or government programs, we must positively advance the moral values of American democracy and the Dream, not the Nightmare.
That is why we support a renewed focus on public life, a public life that includes all Americans. We should focus on the public nature of our shared responsibilities.
Public life means meeting our shared responsibilities, caring for one another and building the mutual trust upon which democracy depends. The recommendations below are special cases of these moral principles. They also represent a special case of a general strategy - to restore public life to American democracy.
We must return the public to our political system and end the corrupt influence of selfish interests that have abandoned our shared responsibilities. This means public finance of campaigns, strict enforcement of the highest ethical standards in public life and protection of the sacred right to vote.
Our nation has vast national wealth: a huge continental landmass with wealth in minerals, agricultural land, forests, cities, beautiful places, as well as its public wealth, that is, the creative wealth of its educated citizenry and the collective wealth of all its citizens and corporations. We, the public, can put our nation's vast wealth to use in creating jobs that make the lives of all better: building, educating, curing and imagining. That is the Dream.
To realize the Dream, we must end the Nightmare.
We must turn back the right's assault on public and higher education and meet our traditional commitment to education. Our children are tomorrow's public. The future of democracy depends upon them.
We must rebuild our public infrastructure, a fancy term for the necessities we share: roads; bridges; dams; parks; fairgrounds; water mains; sewers; the power grid; public agencies that monitor disease, weather and food safety. Government that works for all of us can and should create jobs that serve us all by rebuilding our shared necessities.
We must come together publically to mutually ensure the health of all America. Health is not a private matter. It is a public one.
We must protect the prior earnings of American workers set aside in Social Security or private pensions. They have been earned through hard work and discipline. Taking these earnings away is theft, despite the right's use of the word "entitlements."
A public of unequal voices is not a democratic public. We need a progressive tax system through which all Americans pay their fair share and business ethics that fairly reward those whose work creates productivity and profit.
We must put the American individual above abstract corporate entities. We must end "corporate personhood," which gives transnational corporations a greater voice than individuals in our public deliberations.
We must end the move to "privatize" institutions through which we meet our shared responsibilities. When the public is removed, the private sphere takes over, charging more and often creating unaccountable monopolies that bilk the public. Privatization of the public typically means that most citizens just pay more, often a lot more.
0. Discrimination of all kinds must be overcome. Public life depends upon recognition of our equal humanity.
This is why Democracy is and must remain, public. This is why America has traditionally been a beacon to the world. This is the example America has set. We dare not give it up. The alternative is the Nightmare.
Why this 'wall' issue happens
The shutdown is now the news, and it will remain so for longer than we should like. By this, I mean that the closure is just one of many ways in which the GOP today tries to undermine strong government, a government that works, a government that addresses the needs and necessities of the populace, from the common defense to national welfare to facing the future with scientific research and testing and so forth. If this means I am blaming the GOP, I am, but my reason is not so much for the specific issues that Trump addresses. It is because the shutdown is another way in which today's GOP needs to shrink government, to limit spending, to stop confronting the needs of the populace, from education to public safety to peace and national security, and so on. The Wall is a symbol that evokes the fear of the successful government of sufficient capacity and mission to address the needs of the whole people, the body politic,
The GOP today is not the party of government. There are times when it has been, when it has promoted a stronger government, especially during the Civil War era, the Great Depression, WWI, and WWWII. We tend to come together during wartime and after the Civil War.
This blog entry is not the place to outline the history of the two parties in the United States. It is the place to set out the fundamental fault line that overshadows all others: the divide is slavery's legacy, from the Electoral College protecting the interests of slave owners and the South generally, and the struggle to expand slavery beyond the South which was the fundamental cause of the Civil War, a war that almost destroyed our nation. The end of the war and the North's victory did not end the divide; it ended slavery.
We are a divided republic from our very origin, and we remain a divided republic to this day. We know this. But we cannot give that division up. We exploit that divide. One party always prevails for decades, and then the other party takes the helm of the divided republic. At one point in our history, Today the GOP exploits the divide; the other party struggles to narrow the division.
The 'divided republic' is a long-winded way of saying that, with the border and fencing, Trump is shopping that division. Nearly all his claims are bogus, but with the Wall, he is cannily exploiting that division. He knows that the Wall is a way to remind us of that division and the fears and anxiety it evokes. The GOP today is the party of that division.
Drinking games, or what the anthropologists saw
There seems nothing that Malcolm Gladwell is not interested in. Take his latest book, What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures.. There are nineteen essays there, all of them written for his employer, The New Yorker. "What the Dog Saw." It is about the television personality Cesar Millan, the "Dog Whisperer," about how he works. His work turns out to be so.complicated and intricate that it requires the skills of ethologists---people who analyze animal behavior---and also psychologists, Millan's wife, dance movement experts, former clients and so on.
Continue reading "Drinking games, or what the anthropologists saw" »
Hearing from an old friend ...
I got a phone call from an old friend, Jim B., who I knew so well in our Austin days in school when he and I were both returned from the Army. This was in Austin. I leave his last name out of it because the Internet is, well, the Internet.
At any rate, I was under the impression that we hadn't been in touch for a long time, which is simply not true. It's been a while but not that long. So I sent him the note below, which will help me stay in touch with the here is now instead of everywhere else, especially instead of the evening news.
Jim, it was so good to hear from you. Unfortunately, your contact had me remember how much we have been in contact in various times in recent decades and how I had misplaced that up in my head.
It is one thing to be forgetful; it is quite another thing to realize that "My mind has a mind of its own," as Jimmy Dale Gilmore's wonderful, mournful song. I have somehow become present-minded in the very worst sense; disconnected from nearly everyone except Carole, Valerie, our daughter, and Steve and Cristen, near Dallas. That's it.
It's kind of spooky.
One thing I have never learned to do is to meditate, where this means to be present-mindedness, rather than "somewhere else." A woman I see once a week who is teaching me to walk and move more fluidly through the Alexander Movement, a meditation through movement therapy. When I broke my hip about 2 years ago, and I subsequently had two surgeries, I have become something of a recluse, Carole is seriously worried about it and I say, well, shit, I am 81. And she says, that's the last thing you should say or think. And she's right.
I need to turn off the nightly news (well, maybe I will watch one hour) and start spending more time walking (gimping) a little, and spending time in a local restaurant or two, shooting the shit, at noon. I don't do much of that anymore. My counselor said I should try and meditate and that really spooks me. I think I have become tired of my own company when that means simply being still and waiting for life itself to become present in my heart.
So that is what I am going to do, struggle to do.
P.S. As you can see from this email, I did find Alyson Krause and Union Station and they are wonderful. So I need to turn off the television and start listening and waiting for life itself to become present to me again.
Best to you and Lil,
Your friend.
P.S. I wish I could have said more about Pogue. I hope he is in good hands. His sister seems to have written him off. I frankly think he is slowly dying. God Speed.
Endeavor/Trove
We are slowly making our way through Endeavor/Nocturne and are down to the Trove episode. The plot was about a house that is haunted, and in the Trove episode there was a mysterious sound if a child running from place to place, reminding me of something else. And then I remembered: The Shining.
The Shining is a creepy, horrifying movie with a unseen child running about an empty mansion owned by Jack Nicolson. I have never seen the ending. I did see the ending of Trove and it was plausible, given what we knew about the characters and they background. But the child running in The ShiningThe Trove was in my head and that was that.
But never mind. The ending of Trove seemed plausible and satisfying. The lead, of Endeavor, Shaun Evans, is wonderful.
On another note, I am trying to use my one year old iMac and it is very difficult; I am often using the MacBook Pro to compose.
The Democratic Congress Begins
Today the new Democratic Majority in the House took their seats. Here is what I hope they focus on: First of all, use all the investigative power of the various committees to expose the crucial ways the GOP is using the shutdown to hide the crimes of the Trump administration. Don't wait until you have an orchestrated expose of the whole nine yards. Start with the current imbroglio and make headlines for the American public. The media does a lot of this but the Congress needs to create a public record of what is and . happened
The Inevitability of Impeachment
Elizabeth Drew is one of the most respected critics in Washington. She makes a sober, clear-headed view of the prospects of impeachment for Trump. She thinks it is going to happen. Judge for yourself if you agree.
Booze and Me, a Recollection
My name is Dan, and I am an alcoholic.
I have a vague sense that maybe I have led the meeting before. You might think I would remember, but that's part of the talk. That and the fact that I am 80.
My first A.A. meeting was in 1969, in Washington, D.C. We met in the basement of a small Lutheran church located across the street from the Supreme Court and the Library of Congress's Shakespeare Library. The area was Capitol Hill where the House of Representatives, the Senate, the Supreme Court, My wife Carole and I lived in the Methodist Building, located next to the Supreme Court. The apartments there were mainly for members of Congress to have apartments away from their home districts. Carole, who worked on Capitol Hill for a member of Congress was allowed to rent an apartment there for us newly-weds of two years. She worked on Capitol Hill as an Administrative Assistant for a member of the House of Representatives.
I had quit my job as a Washington representative of a large aerospace company, the North American Aviation Corporation, a famous airplane, and aerospace corporation, the company that sent the Apollo into space, and earlier had made bombers and fighter planes during WWII. Our offices were on K. Street, in D.C., the street where most other aerospace company's offices were.
The job was to take to lunch the staff of the Navy, Army, and Air Force who headed the aerospace research, as well as the office of the Secretary of Defense. I was on an expense account, a good one. And one of the main things that happened at those lunches was drinking, a lot of drinking. I nearly always returned to the office pretty dazed, and sobered up, and then lumbered off to a bar to continue the drinking.
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Posted at 09:26 AM in acceptance, alcoholism, life itself, politics, public health | Permalink | Comments (0)
Waiting for the Big One in New York
I don't know when I first started thinking about universal health care in images from the sea, but somehow The Ninth Wave, Eugene Burdick's political novel of the mid-Fifties came to mind. I first read Burdick's book in the early sixties, as a political science undergraduate at the University of Texas. I found the story (about a manipulative political adviser) dull. But recently I returned to the book, drawn back by Burdick's use of the big wave as a metaphor for politics. In his opening scene a handful of surfers sit out on the Pacific waiting for the big wave that changes everything.
The image suggests political timing and waiting, often for long periods of time. People like me—policy entrepreneurs-sit out on the ocean's edge, watching, hoping, readying, policy for a a major in our democracy.
Big waves are prime movers, transforming causes shaping and changing what lies in front of them. They push out far beyond their boundaries. Waves are forces in their own right, not just millions of drops of water. They also suggest the darker side of political change. Policies like universal health care forces to be reckoned with: they change politics not just health care. The big wave was my sign of hope for universal health care and for American politics generally. I don't accept the simplistic view that we didn't pass universal health insurance because we are different from Europe, another instance of American exceptionalism–Tocqueville's term. I believe the failure to pass universal health care is a central flaw in modern America.
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Still an Alien Ethic in a Strange Land?
In 1975, I published a brief article in the American Journal of Public Health, titled, "Public Health: Alien Ethic in a Strange Land?" In my essay, I noted that the prevailing theory for addressing the nation's alcohol problems results from answering a simple question: Why are some people unable to control their drinking?
I noted that for many citizens, the question seemed obvious, almost self-evident. Most people drink. Most people drink without problems. Some people, however, suffer serious alcohol problems including alcoholism and its consequences of cirrhosis, cancer of the esophagus, stomach, and so forth. Why does this minority suffer issues when so many others do not?
I also noted that there was a growing body of epidemiological research that asked a very different question: why do some societies have more problems with alcohol than others? What causes the rates of alcoholism in countries, or states or regions to vary?
These questions that focus on the varying rates of alcohol problems receive a very different set of answers: the levels of problems with alcohol, from rates of cirrhosis to alcohol-related traffic crashes are related to the total amount of alcohol each society consumes. The more everyone drinks, the more alcohol problems we can expect.
This equation has not been received as good news by the alcohol industry.
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Posted at 08:28 AM in alcoholism, health care reform, public health | Permalink | Comments (0)
George Lakoff on Trump
Trump puzzles me as much as he worries me. Why does he act so defensive, so needy when he is interviewed or during his speeches? He grows
One of the most interesting thinkers in America today is George Lakoff. Here is his take on Donald Trump.
Lakoff is a cognitive scientist. He explains in his long essay what this means: basically, it means that people tend to think metaphorically, and in the context of "frames". By this, he means that people think in terms of frames, in Trump's case in terms of the family.
Lakoff wondered during the 2016 election for president, most of what he read seemed off the mark.
The answer came from a realization that we tend to understand the nation metaphorically in family values: We have founding fathers. We send our sons and daughters to war. We have homeland security. The conservative and progressive worldviews dividing our country can most readily be understood in terms of moral worldviews that are encapsulated in two very different common forms of family life: The Nurturant Parent family (progressive) and the Strict Father family.
Trump employs the Strict Father or conservative family frame.
I urge people to read Lakoff's analysis of American politics today, and especially in terms of Trump's victory. I am trained in political science but nothing I ever read or studied in political science of today comes close to the acuity of Lakoff's insights in American politics....and not just now.
More on this later.
Debacle in Quebec
Here is a good summary of the embarrassing, humiliating performance of our light-weight president in front of other world leaders. Paul Krugman is a Nobel Laureate in Economics and if anyone is capable of assessing the falsity of Trump's claims it is Krugman. Let's face it, Trump is an ignoramus who is psychologically damaged and a huge swath of the American public doesn't have a clue or doesn't care. One of the reasons so much of the public remains in the dark is that the media loves the ratings this clown brings to the networks. The upshot is that for the majority of Americans, politics is the news from nowhere.
Why Health Care Reform is Essential to Our Nation's Political Health
Health reform, whether like that of Canada, Germany, England or France, you find that most in these countries accept the fact that health care, universally provided and available, helps advance the health of the people while also strengthening the body politic against division.
Put another way, health care, universally provided, helps heal the divides of any democracy; in England, it is class, in Canada, it is class and regions, in France, it is a mixed system that provides universal health provision while healing the divides of class and regions.
France, according to Dr. Tom Ricketts, of the University of North Carolina, a former student and now my teacher, and who has had much experience in France, says that beyond class region is a powerful divide in France and universal health care is part of the 'Rights of Man' which serves to bind the many facets of the French health care system. Here is more on France from Tom Ricketts:
Now to France…no, it is not classes that make the divides…the revolution lives there much more than here and the upper class lost that battle. The sense of classlessness is really dominant and runs through law and social norms. The remains of the upper class are ridiculed widely and the French view themselves as clearly "not British"--nor American, with our economic strata. What is also felt is the history of invasion, from Caesar to the Prussians (three times) and now the invasion from the colonial "experiment." The outlying parts of France are called the "Outre Mer" which translates as "overseas" but the Outre part also means "outsider" as well as "outraged"…and the play on words is played well by the right wing who see hat Trump sees, a civilization and culture being invaded from the south.
Health insurance in France is complicated and the British notion of a nanny-NHS that brought the classes together in the system is not relevant in the former. Gallia est omnes divisa in parts…. is what Caesar wrote and gave it three regions…Waverly Root divided it into three as well, "Butter, Lard, and Olive Oil" and the "average" French person will feel his nation is divided by region (Fractious Bretons and Basques, Rude and grasping flatlanders from Lille, mumbling louts from the foothills of the Pyrenees, etc) the same average French person recognizes now that the nation is a mix of cultures and beliefs (think Arab and African, "pied-noires" and remnants of Caesar's legions from Italy) but the sense of French-ness is conveyed by the Lycee and the universal curriculum of the schools, the police system that is centralized, the local mayors who answer to the central government, and the statement of the "rights of man" that does guarantee something like health care. Universal healthcare came to France only after the 1960s—though it was essentially universal after the WWII, but complicated and tied to employment or its lack. Access to care is now an issue and seen as a challenge to the capacity of the bureaucracy. But the local "village doctor" remains the norm, private hospitals, and clinics exist—sometime in the same building with overlapping staffs.
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Posted at 06:04 AM in acceptance, health care reform, public health | Permalink | Comments (0)
A letter to A.A from a member
I am a member of A.A. I have been a member for 45 years. I stopped drinking in 1969, and after 35 years, I tried drinking for three years and then gave it up over ten years ago. I owe A.A. and my fellow members my sobriety and for saving my marriage, my life, and my sanity.
But I have a problem with A.A., and I am not sure how to resolve it...or whether to resolve it.
In 1969, I enrolled in graduate school at the Johns Hopkins University. Two weeks after enrolling I joined A.A. I had become an alcoholic during my service in the Army in Korea although I didn't consider myself one. But two divorces later, and two years into a third marriage and recently enrolled in The Johns Hopkins University, I joined A.A. For the remainder of my career I remained sober. My Master's thesis was on the famous Easter case when the District of Columbia Court of Appeals declared DeWitt Easter, a chronic alcoholic, as sick rather than as an alcoholic. The police were no longer permitted to pick up chronic alcoholics on the street and sending them to Lorton prison on the other side of the Potomac. Instead, the District of Columbia converted the prison center into a treatment center and transported them across the Potomac for 30 days or so of treatment.
In my dissertation, I focused on the political invisibility of A.A. and how this undermines the Fellowship's societal impact. I also considered whether the doctrine of anonymity added to the stigma of alcoholism. Overall I speculated that anonymity weakened the visibility of a significant societal problem. Visibility or salience of a problem or issues is considered crucial for winning public support and resources for reducing the problem.
In graduate school, I focused on policy for alcoholism and chronic drunkenness and began my academic career in the field of public health. I tried to win a post in the department of political science at a university in Texas. After my seminar, and while waiting for a plane back to Baltimore, the chairman of the department said to me, "I suppose some people have to study the little problems of the world."
When I asked him what his research focus was on he mentioned a national Presidential advisory council. It was all I could do to stop myself from asking, "You and who else?"
After I failed to win an academic post at another school, I finally won a one-year appointment at the School of Public Health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The faculty there thought my dissertation research on alcohol policy and alcoholism was exciting and needed and I remained for 20 years. While there I wrote two books on alcoholism and on the history of alcohol in the U.S. and co-authored a third book, Alcohol and Public Policy, published by the National Academy of Sciences. I also wrote many articles on public health. I also wrote a third book, Health Care Reform and the Battle for the Body Politic, published by Temple University Press, the press that published my first two books.
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Acceptance: An Owner's Manual
1. Introduction: Alcohol, Alcoholism, Acceptance, and Me
I sometimes think that everything I know we learned from booze.
It started when I entered Alcoholics Anonymous (AA.) in 1969, in the basement of a Lutheran church that sat across the street from the Library of Congress's Shakespeare Library and just a block or so away from the U.S. Supreme Court. The meeting held approximately 10 to 15 persons who met twice a week. I had just a week earlier enrolled in graduate school in Baltimore, and rode the Philly train to school four or five days a week, returning in the evening.
My wife Carole and I lived in the Methodist Building located right next door to the U.S. Supreme Court, a building, as I learned some years later was constructed to house members of Congress who voted for Prohibition and who were pledged to keep it.
This discovery was somewhat startling since my dissertation research on the political consequences of the disease concept of alcoholism, and it was not so long that I found out I had much to learn about alcoholism, alcohol problems and even Prohibition. As it has turned out, alcohol, alcoholism, and alcohol problems play a huge part of the American story, and in my life as well.
I grew up in Texas without much experience with drinking. I didn't drink in high school, and just barely at the University of Texas my first year, just one night in our residence hall (an ex-Army barracks) where I lived for a few months. Drinking was not permitted until 21 in Texas, and I didn't make much effort to see what booze was all about. My family didn't drink and I didn't even wonder why. Even in the Army, I didn't drink very much until Korea, and things changed fast. In Korea, at Camp Red Cloud, the nightly entertainment was going to the Enlisted Club and drinking. A bottle of Heineken's was .25 cents. American beer was .15. A fifth of Tanqueray's Gin cost $1. Everyone drank Heineken's.
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Posted at 05:33 PM in acceptance, alcoholism, life itself, waiting for life itself | Permalink | Comments (0)
The Several Meanings of Public Health as Community
Public health seeks to advance the common health as the common good, standing for policies that improve health status, reduce health disparities, lower rates or early or premature death. This community as democratic purpose.
The community as differing views, as opening up different ways of thinking about problems. Because of William Haddon, Jr., and Ralph Nader, we think about highway traffic safety differently, as problems not with bad drivers, accidents, and so forth but as 'preventing damaging injury exchanges'.
Community offers more points of intervention: agent, hosts, and environment. Safer cars prevent damaging energy exchanges (agents); protect hosts with passive and active design (seat belt laws, safer highways, fewer road hazards like rigid, sharp structures, and so forth.
We enlarged the circle of responsibility, creating more people and options for prevention: car manufacturers, highway designers, passengers, ambulance personnel, emergency medicine skills, and so forth. Collective action often requires democratically imposed rules for us.
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Trump, MSNBC, and Acceptance
The Serenity Prayer contains two critical ideas...at least. Acceptance and Serenity. I have written more about Serenity than acceptance, but it may be that acceptance is the key idea. "To accept the things we cannot change"...is hard under any terms, today and for me, acceptance requires that I accept today's awful politics, not just for me and other Democrats but also everyone.
Acceptance does not mean agreement...it merely means coming to terms with what is the case, whether in ordinary life or in politics. Acceptance means facing what is the case, what is actually happening and said. Acceptance means, in other words, facing, accepting the reality of Donald Trump.
I am a liberal Democrat and proudly so. What is happening is the gridlock in our politics and the disappearance of truly liberal ideas is before our eyes. We can only see this reality with our eyes wide open, with acceptance. This means facing the reality of Trump and his followers and how that has changed reality. The reality today is Trump's reality; the media cannot take their eyes off him and his bizarre behavior.
The Trump era's reality means no one is listening to Democrats. Despite the endless dwelling on Trump and his slender majority in both houses, no one is paying attention to anything else.
What reality do we Democrats want to create for the public? Single Payer? Who among most citizens even knows what this means? How about lowering the prices for prescription drugs to the levels that now exist for the VA, the DOD? How about explaining carefully what this would mean for the average citizen? How about lowering the eligibility age for Medicare to 55? How about negotiating hospital spending and breaking up the monopolistic hospital pricing?
How about transforming MSNBC into a nightly exploration of new ideas, new realities instead of endless, jaded critiques for Trump? How about each night, or each week a thoughtful presentation on how things can be different with a few big, memorable ideas
Posted at 02:38 PM in acceptance | Permalink | Comments (0)
You can't make this stuff up
A woman sentenced to five years for unintentionally voting illegally. What's wrong with this country...besides racism?
Posted at 02:17 PM in politics, racism | Permalink | Comments (0)
Sacramento assassination
The violent shooting of an unarmed black man in his backyard is nothing but a death by cops. Watch and see how the City and the police try to worm out of this. When is this official "string em up" character against blacks and Latinos and poor whites.
No Trump
The very best thing I can do about Trump is to ignore him...No Trump . Why do I need to know each night what silliness, stupidity, and danger he poses? Others I respect watch him and I will pay more close attention when it matters. But all the time? Unfortunately I watch MNBC and they can't stop watching and commenting on him. That's a dilemma.
How to think about gun violence
When another mass shooting occurs, or when the subject of gun control returns to the news, nearly always one thing, the gun is missing.
There are two ways to think about violence, whether from highway crashes or from a handgun.
We can concentrate on the individual incident and ask why, and we can examine a series of incidents of gun violence or death, and explores why these various incidents occur and why.
But decades ago Ralph Nader and Dr. William Haddon Jr. took up the same issue, along with other forms of violence, like highway traffic crashes, airline disaster, and so forth.
Dr. Haddon decided to shift attention to these incidents within their societal context. He noted that gun violence and highway traffic crashes were near always focused on the individual or individuals involved, and the principal question that arose was what did these individuals do wrong? This focus on the individual is wrong, for several reasons.
There is another way to think about these incidents. We can reduce the numbers of the incidents and hope education will produce progress.
We can make guns less lethal, or we can reduce the number of guns and the occasions of gun violence with a variety of measures, from taxation to regulation to making guns less lethal.
Either way we can think less about whether gun control would have prevented this accident and more about how to reduce the rate of these tragedies.
Seoul today
I was a sergeant in the US Army stationed in Uijongbu, Korea, about 30 miles from the DMZ and the same distance from Seoul, in 1958-1959. Seoul was still pretty leveled by the Korean War. I could drive across Seoul in 30 minutes in a 2 1/2 ton Army truck. Seoul was back then a sprawling city that had been leveled by the fighting. Today it is 20 million residents, inconceivable to me. Soldiers who like me could speak Korean were mostly stationed up closer to the line, about 30 miles South.
The merry-go-round news days
The news about Trump, Moore, the Senate, sexual harassment, Russia, Assange, Kirshner, Obamacare....is endless. Day in and day out we hear this. Other important news is left aside, and each day the same stuff plus something new which is really the same stuff, and I watch it. We watch it. The triumph of Trump is that our fixation on our nutty president acts to prevent us from getting back the basic issues facing America. What about Puerto Rico? Why not take time off from "he said, she said," and actually dig into other vital issues facing us? What is happening to the State Department? What fresh hell is being brought to the Department of Education? And so on.
The best U. of Texas football game...ever?
In 1955, I saw a so-so Texas team play Bear Bryant's Texas A&M at Kyle field and win, 21-6. I was dating a twin at the time and her sister dated an Aggie. God that was a great trip from long ago, especially coming home.