I read The Sunday Times, so you don’t have to: Feb. 28
Good morning. I made Grandma Spevak’s sausage yesterday, grinding the meat and stuffing the hog casings myself. Now the house still smells like garlic and pork fat. Let’s get to The Times:
1, Media reports immediately following Barack Obama’s Thursday health care summit left me dismayed. The pre-event narrative that the meeting would be nothing more than “political theater” droned on after Barack had left the building, lazy reporters seemingly oblivious to what he had accomplished: Challenged to present their case, Obama demonstrated that Republicans had no case. They were empty mantras of inhumanity, tangled in their own hypocrisies. Surely superhero columnist Frank Rich will set the record straight today. Alas, Rich also chooses to dismiss the summit as “kabuki theater,” instead suggesting the biggest event of February 2010 would be the terrorist who flew a small airplane into an office building in Austin, Texas, because he was angry with the IRS. In “The Axis of the Obsessed and Deranged,” Rich discusses how the right wing is crumbling and cowering to a growing cast of conspiracy nut cases, including Austin kamikaze Joe Stack, who is being hailed as a hero by some of these folks. The cynic in me acknowledges Rich is correct. The optimist in me hopes I am also right, that Obama’s summit was setting the stage, kabuki theater or not, for passage of health care reform.
2, In “The Cost of Doing Nothing,” Karen Davis, president of a non-profit health care research group, the Commonwealth Fund, says, “People think if we do nothing, we will have what we have now. In fact, what we will have is a substantial deterioration of what we do have.” This is not simply a reactionary prediction, the story reports, but the assessment of “nearly every mainstream analysis.”
3, “Pelosi’s Struggle: To Corral Votes For Health Bill” details how health care reform passage teeters on the votes of representatives like Dennis Cardoza of California. His wife, The Times reports he says, is a doctor who “comes home every night angry and frustrated at insurance companies denying people coverage they have paid for.” That guy’s vote should be a slam dunk. And yet he may not vote for health care reform because the bill “lacks anti-abortion language he favors, and he does not think it goes far enough in cutting costs.” What Mr. Cardoza needs to understand is that the health care reform bill is not about the abortion issue: That was Roe v. Wade. As for cutting costs, the Congressional Budget Office has estimated the health care reform bill will result in a substantial lowering of the deficit. One thing we’ve learned in this debate is health care is the biggest single drag on the national economy.
4, Al Gore’s clearly reasoned op-ed piece, “We Can’t Wish Away Climate Change,” is an elegant response to the anti-global warming cabal. At stake is our ecology, as well as our economy and national security. He concedes that the task is difficult and “tracks the outer boundary of what we are capable of doing.”Gore quotes Winston Churchill: “Sometimes doing your best is not good enough. Sometimes you must do what is required.” To those standing in the way of health care reform, I’ll say the same.
5, This edition of The Times contains early reports on the Chilean earthquake, whose 8.8 magnitude is described as “vastly more powerful” than the 7.0 that hit Haiti on Jan. 12, killing 200,000 people. Damage and loss of life appears significant in Chile, although nowhere near as devastating as in Haiti, because of several factors, including better construction practices and the epicenter being farther out to sea. But you look at the photos – collapsed highway bridges that look just like American bridges – and ask: Are we ready for such an event here?
6, Rappers do it, now a few writers are doing it. In “The Free-Appropriation Writer,” we learn that a handful of books have emerged which use the words of other writers, often without credit. This has always been called plagiarism in the publishing world. A teenage German writer defended her use of a blogger and novelist’s words for her own novel about Berlin’s club scene by saying, “There’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity.” That’s probably something she learned while listening to remixes on the dance floor. “Our would-be novelist says nothing is original,” replies Patrick Ross, director of The Copyright Alliance, “yet the passages she lifted from other books were original expressions in those books, even if the ideas were not new.” If stealing is an innovation that will encourage people to read, I’m not liking the 21st Century very much.
7, The Times has increasingly been exploring blogs. While it has yet to discover The Critical Mass, it takes note of a blog called “Been Doon So Long,” and a note lamenting the marketing of wine. “You walk into a wine store and it is a bit like walking into a dream, or maybe a Borgesian nightmare. Every label from those with depictions of stately faux chateaux to the goofy bears, naughty crocodiles, 48-pound roosters, and mad fish, is seemingly shrieking at top volume, trying to tell its story.”
8, In “A Question of What to Ask,” the answer as to why results on the same issues can differ so wildly from poll to poll is often in how the question is asked. A New York Times/CBS poll asked if people favored the public option in health care reform, and supplied the context of “a government-administered health insurance plan – something like the Medicare coverage that people 65 and older get.” So 66 percent of people said yes. But when a Fox News poll asked the question, its context was “a government-run health insurance plan,” resulting in 44 percent supporting the idea. The point is, even though both questions were supposedly about the public option, they’re not the same question.
9, In Arts & Leisure, we’re reminded that the Western literary tradition “teems with pathologically violent men.” In a question provoked by the recent shooting spree at the University of Alabama at Huntsville by neuroscientist Amy Bishop, “The Violence That Art Didn’t See Coming” wonders why violent women portrayed in art, especially film, are seen as exceptions. If you’re hoping for an answer by the time you get to the end of the long essay, you’ll be disappointed.
10, Pete Hamill has the pleasure of reviewing Willie Mays: The Life, The Legend. Hamill’s tone is one of an unforgiving fan who feels the game was damaged when the Giants and the Dodgers left for California, and destroyed when performance-enhancing drugs entered the game. He longs for the old days, and is grateful for author James S. Hirsch to have allowed us to catch this glimpse of it. When Hirsch writes that Mays would play stickball with kids before his games, Hamill writes appreciatively, “The young should know that that there was once a time when Willie Mays lived among the people who came to the ballpark.”
11, Nina Simone lived among us as well, although I’m not sure I would have wanted to have a front-row seat. Princess Noire: The Tumultuous Reign of Nina Simone gives us the enormously talented and enormously difficult singer in full diva. “I will never be your clown,” she once raged to a French audience as her career was in decline, writes author Nadine Cohodas. “I don’t wear a painted smile on my face, like Louis Armstrong.”
12, In a review of Country Driving: A Journey Through China From Farm to Factory, author Peter Hessler is quoted on the dangers inherent in China’s rapid urbanization: “It’s hard to imagine another place where people take such joy in driving so badly…. They don’t mind if you tailgate, or pass on the right or drive on the sidewalk. You can back down a highway entrance ramp without anybody batting an eyelash.” Hessler’s own cross-China driving includes encounters with locals such as the fung shui master whose specialties include selecting grave sites.