A Hero of My Youth

The Nation magazine asked its readers to write brief essays of 200 words about the sports hero of their youth. Here’s what I wrote about a great football player named Ernie Davis.

I was 11 the day Ernie Davis died, and I cried.

My friends thought I was weird. Who, in the white, jock South of the early 1960s, could possibly care about a black running back from Syracuse University in a faraway land called upstate New York?

Ernie broke down my own, personal racial barrier. How could he not? He outran almost everyone, and he would shake-and-bake those who kept up with him. He played both offense and defense. Watching the Saturday highlight shows, seeing Ernie break another big run or make a key interception, I realized that greatness comes in all colors.

Ernie demolished the University of Texas in the 1960 Cotton Bowl. He was everywhere he needed to be at the moment he needed to be there. Without him, Syracuse was pretty much an average team; with him, Syracuse went undefeated and won the national championship. They beat all-white Texas in segregated Dallas. It took a strong man to do that.

Ernie received the Heisman Trophy in 1963. He signed a pro contract with the Cleveland Browns. Then he was diagnosed with leukemia. He died without ever playing a regular-season game. The Browns retired his number.

I cried–cried at the unfairness, cried because my hero was dead.

Our Students and Their Destiny

On Thursday, May 26, I read an essay by former state Rep. Jonathan Pelto that appeared in the online publication, ctmirror. It dealt with the emerging approach of the Malloy administration to community-college education during a time of budget crisis. Here’s my response, which I submitted to ctmirror.

As a community-college teacher, I had multiple reactions after reading Jonathan Pelto’s excellent and depressing column, “A Giant Step in Connecticut’s Race to the Bottom.”

The first was simply that those of us who work in the community-college system know, perhaps even better than Gov. Malloy and Commissioner Michael Meotti, the dimensions of the problem that they presume to address. We see it at the start of every academic year—students who come to college unprepared to do college work. And we’ve come, reluctantly in my case, to accept that community colleges can’t quickly solve the problems that accumulated during the first 13 years (kindergarten through Grade 12) of our students’ education.

The second reaction was that someone has to try, that “someone” historically has been us, and that no effort in higher education is more important.

After reading Commissioner Meotti’s comment that the state should “reconsider” offering a college education to those who are “likely to fail,” though, I came up with a few other ideas that could deal with the problem that he perceives and save a ton of money to boot.

We know, for instance, that 75 percent of our students are going to come here unable to do college-level work in math, English, or both. Since the deficiency rates are higher in the state’s cities than in the suburbs, why not post a sign over the entrance to every urban high school in the state—a sign that says, “ABANDON HOPE ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE.” I’m assuming that, since Dante Alighieri has been dead for more than six centuries now, his inscription over the Gates to Hell is part of the public domain. And it captures perfectly the spirit of Commissioner Meotti’s analysis. After all, most of these students will graduate from high school “likely to fail” anyway. Why permit them to build up hope for four years, receive a high-school diploma, and then have the doors shut in their faces? ‘Tis kinder, surely, to discourage them from wasting time on an effort that was doomed from the start. Plus, we would drive down high-school enrollment, which would save money on teacher salaries and building maintenance.

There is a way to save even more money: Simply close the state’s urban high schools. No schools would mean no teachers, no maintenance, and even more savings. Why, especially in a time of mandatory austerity, spend anything at all on those who probably will fail anyway?

Because, of course, one of the foundational beliefs of this country is that few among us are destined to fail.

We who work at the community colleges have seen students who should have failed by every available measure, and yet who have succeeded—whether the measure of success is graduation, a transfer to a four-year institution, a promotion made possible by success in a specific course or attainment of an academic credential, or simply the satisfaction that comes with learning something new. We have seen, by the hundreds, students have succeeded in ways that crude budget analysis can’t capture. I refer specifically to the students who needed six or seven years to get their associate’s degrees because they had to complete multiple levels of developmental English and math in order to get to college-level work, because they also had to work full-time, and because they therefore had neither the time nor the money to take more than six credits in a semester.

Like every unit in public education, the community colleges face tough choices. “Ability to benefit” is no longer an abstract and obscure phrase that we can kick around in our idle time. Enrollment at my college must remain substantially flat until we can afford to hire more full-time faculty, which seems unlikely at least into the mid-range future. So we need to craft plans that allow us to achieve our mission within available resources. As we make the decisions, however, we must interpret our mission as generously and broadly as possible.

We do have a lot of thinking to do. As we deliberate, however, we need to focus on maintaining a success rate that, if properly defined, is quite admirable.

Let’s leave the talk of destiny and failure to the politicians.

If we handle ourselves well enough, we might even get them to stop talking about failure altogether. Then we can all turn our attention to keeping hope alive, which is an effort that enriches everyone who undertakes it.

Journalism forum

Here are the comments I made at the beginning of Tunxis Community College’s third Forum on the News Media. They both introduce the guest speakers and offer some reflections of my own about the topic, “Rescuing Newspapers in Troubled Times.” I hope they’re useful to anyone who happens to read them.

Good afternoon.

This is third year of Tunxis Community College’s annual Forum on the News Media. The forum had its inception in a grant provided through the college’s Strategic Initiatives Fund and, for the past two years, has been funded as part of the Humanities Department budget. The purpose of the forum, briefly, is to bring Tunxis faculty and staff together with persons who work in newsgathering to discuss issues of importance to the news media—and thus, ultimately, to society in general.

Past forums have dealt, in Year 1, with the potential of the ongoing revolution in technology to change the ways we think about news and, in Year 2, the continuing trend toward consolidation of traditional newsgathering organizations into fewer and fewer corporate hands.

Previous participants have included Keith Burris and Lee Giguere of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Ct., Shawn Beals of UConn’s distinguished student newspaper, The Connecticut Daily Campus, Robert Weisman of The Boston Globe and Joseph H. Zerbey of The Blade in Toledo, Ohio. They’ve been joined by several of our Tunxis colleagues—Steve Ersinghaus, Rachel Hyland, Patrice Hamilton, and John Timmons.

This year’s topic for discussion is local and specific in its focus: “Rescuing Newspapers in Troubled Times.” Our guests are two distinguished journalists—Michael Schroeder, who is publisher of The Bristol Press and New Britain Herald and James Smith, who is executive editor of the same two publications. As for the Tunxis staffers this year, well, you’re stuck with just me…for reasons that I hope to make clear in the next few minutes.

Both Mike Schroeder and Jim Smith seem to have been born, as Jim once said of himself, with printer’s ink in their veins.

MICHAEL SCHROEDER

Mike Schroeder reports that he’s been in the newspaper and publishing business since 6th grade when he began producing a two-cent-per-copy, carbon-paper newsletter. He was editor of his high school newspaper, and later of his college newspaper, The Daily Trojan at the University of Southern California. He spent 15 years at Newsday, the great daily newspaper of Long Island. Since then, he has worked on startup publications in New York, Boston, and Israel—the latter of which was published in Hebrew, which I’m pretty sure is not his first language.

Today, as I said, he’s publisher of The Herald and The Press. He says that, as publisher, he focuses primarily on the business side of the publications, but he’s always willing to write an editorial or story when he’s really fired up or (this is his own quotation) “when we’re short on staff and have a hole to fill”—an assessment that shows that he really does understand the complexities of producing a local newspapers with limited resources.

In his communities, he is active in Rotary and is on the board of Long Island Youth Mentoring, the New Britain Symphony, the Museum of American Art, and the New Britain Chamber of Commerce. During the week, he lives in an apartment in Bristol and commutes weekends to Long Island where he lives with his wife, Janet.

JAMES SMITH

Jim Smith has been a part of Connecticut journalism for, as I count it, four decades. Jim was raised in New York in a newspaper family. He was at The Hartford Courant for 14 years. His first beat at The Courant was covering the city of Bristol. He worked there as city editor and sports editor. He’s been managing editor of the Register-Citizen in Torrington, The Day in New London, and The News-Times in Danbury, editor of The Connecticut Post in Bridgeport, executive editor of The Record Journal in Meriden, and currently executive editor of The Press and The Herald.

Jim has received the Distinguished Writing Award from the American Society of Newspaper Editors for a series of columns on the free press that have been compiled and published as a book, A Passion for Journalism: A Newspaper Editor Writes to His Readers. A Passion for Journalism was published by Plaidswede Publishing of Concord, N.H., which last year published his first novel. He’s been a Pulitzer Prize juror and president of the New England Society of Newspaper Editors. Currently, he’s on the executive committee of the Connecticut Council on Freedom of Information.

Under his editorship, the New London, Danbury, Meriden, and Bridgeport publications all were named New England newspapers of the year in their various circulation categories.

Jim is also planning to retire effective December 31 of this year. This will let him pursue independent writing and editing projects and spend more time with the four daughters and two grandchildren that he shares with his wife, Jacky, who is managing editor of The News-Times in Danbury.

On a personal note, I have to say that I’m quite sure Jim has earned the right to retire. But I must also add that his retirement will be a loss to daily journalism in Connecticut.

AS FOR ME

As for me, I’m Bob Brown, professor of History and English here at Tunxis. I’m also, I have to confess, a recovering journalist. I spent a quarter-century in Connecticut journalism, working at The Courant, The Chronicle in Willimantic, the Journal Inquirer in Manchester and, most of those years, at The Bristol Press where I was reporter, columnist, editorial-page editor and, ultimately, editor.

I left The Press in 1996 and left journalism altogether in 1998 to come to Tunxis.

My decision to quit as editor of The Press was a wrenching and painful one, reached over more than a year. In the end, I left because I felt as if I had no choice. The newspaper had been acquired in the early 1990s by the Journal Register Company, a newspaper group based in Trenton, N.J. which also owned The New Haven Register and Register-Citizen in Torrington and would eventually acquire both The New Britain Herald and The Middletown Press.

It became clear to me quickly that the mission of the Journal Register Company was to squeeze out every penny of profit by cutting costs wherever possible even if it meant sacrificing the quality of the publications.

It was journalism, if you will, as practiced by bloodless beancounters.

—

A couple of examples cinched the point for me.

1—One of the fascinating elements in the production and distribution of a daily newspaper, at least before the age of the Internet, was this: Newspapers would buy the most advanced printing and production technology, requiring an increasingly skilled workforce, and then often rely for distribution on an 11-year-old kid with a bicycle.

The responsibility for getting the paper to those kids, and getting them to distribute it promptly, falls to the Circulation Department—and the key people in that operation really are the people called district managers, each of whom is responsible for distribution in a specific geographic area.

During the mid-1990s, The Press had five district managers. Over the course of several months in 1995, each of them left for another job. Because we were under a corporate hiring freeze, our circulation manager was told he could fill none of the positions, which meant there was no one in charge of dealing with the carriers or the complaints of readers who had not received their afternoon newspaper.

At that time, we were a newspaper essentially assembled at night and distributed early the next afternoon. Our circulation office closed at 6PM. All calls afterward were forwarded to our newsroom. For two weeks, I had one of our news clerks compile the names and numbers of people who had not gotten their newspaper. My memory is fading a bit now, but I’m pretty sure that we received well over 1,000 phone calls in a single week from more than 700 separate subscribers. And still, the hiring freeze continued.

2—For me the breaking point came in 1996. The hiring freeze had reduced the staff in the newsroom by 25 percent. Then came the order to begin publication of a Sunday newspaper—a 17 percent increase in workload with 25 percent fewer people.

It simply couldn’t be done either well or effectively. The end result would be a publication that reflected no credit on the people who put it together and offered nothing of value to the people who bought it.

I need to be clear on one point: There is nothing wrong, and everything right, with newspapers earning a healthy return on investment. A newspaper that loses money over a sustained period is a newspaper that eventually will cease to publish. Newspapers cannot FORCE citizens to subscribe. Government, blessedly, does not support newspapers through either taxation or subsidy.

It used to amuse me greatly when an outraged reader would call to object to a particular article or photograph and end by saying, “You just printed that so you could sell more papers.”

The fact is that everything that goes in a newspaper is designed to “sell papers.” The first job of a newspaper is to be read, and the way to do that is to convince people that they should buy the newspaper.

Beyond that, however, good journalists have always believed that the bottom line is not the only way to gauge a newspaper’s success. A good newspaper is a newspaper that informs, entertains, and comments on the news. It acts responsibly in gathering the news, adhering to generally accepted standards of fairness and social responsibility.

A good LOCAL newspaper, as Jim Smith has observed, performs another function: It is a mirror for the community. When the community looks at it on a daily basis, the community sees itself.

In the end, I concluded that the Journal Register Company, despite all kinds of lip service to the contrary, didn’t care about any of that other stuff—that its bottom-line only mentality had begun to affect the quality of the newspapers, that the damage would grow over time, that the communities would realize as much, and that eventually the communities would stop reading.

I didn’t want to participate in the gutting of a newspaper about which I cared a great deal, so I left and, though it gives no pleasure to say so, what I thought would happen is pretty much what happened.

In the summer of 1996, The Bristol Press had a circulation of approximately 22,000. By 2009, the number had fallen to well below 10,000. The Herald had faced an equally precipitous drop in readership. Not so coincidentally, the Journal Register Company found itself forced into bankruptcy. What happened in Connecticut had clearly been repeated in Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Michigan where the company owned newspapers.

As part of its plan to reorganize, the company announced that it would close certain of its publications—including The Herald and The Press.

That event very nearly came to pass in January 2009.

The Press and The Herald were within days of closing their doors when a buyer emerged, Central Connecticut Communication, and the region met Mr. Schroeder for the first time.

As Mike Schroeder tells it, he had breakfast with a good friend who had read a New York Times article on the decline of local newspapers in New England, using The Bristol Press as its focus. His friend asked if he had ever thought about buying and publishing such newspapers. After first shrugging off the suggestion, he reconsidered. Less than a week later, he was in the area—meeting with the publisher of the two newspapers and with the mayors of the two cities. He came away satisfied that there was a chance that the two communities would give a fair trial to new ownership.

Negotiations began a week later and were concluded barely in time to keep the doors open.

Mike Schroeder himself describes the situation he faced: “A staff that didn’t know me and had taken a pounding over the past few years, working in decaying buildings that had more history than future in them, in an unforgiving economy and a rapidly declining industry.”

As he faced this reality, he also had a chance to take a good job out of journalism at a Fortune 500 company on Long Island.

He chose journalism and brought Jim Smith in as executive editor.

That was nearly two years ago. Anyone who reads the two newspapers can see a change: More professional publications, more local news, a clear focus on community journalism in all aspects from news to arts to sports.

The most obvious evidence of change is the most recent:

In October, The Herald was named best small newspaper in New England by the New England Newspaper and Press Association.

It seemed only natural to invite the publisher and executive editor to talk about how they did what they did, their vision for the newspapers and the communities they serve, and anything else that seems relevant about the process of rescuing newspapers during troubled times. I’ve suggested that Mike Schroeder speak first and provide an overview of what happened and what he hopes will happen in the future and that Jim Smith might talk specifically about the news operation. They’re free, of course, to do whatever they want.

First, Michael Schroder.

Coke-Sniffing Monkeys and Headline-Seeking Republicans

Someone dug up the fact that the economic stimulus package of nearly $820 billion included about $70,000 to study the effect of cocaine on chimpanzees. Every Republican to the right of Karl Marx began chattering and howling like rhesus monkeys on methamphetamine. It may be good politics to go on like that, but it’s yet another case where the catchy headline and nifty sound byte substitute for real thought.

Why assess the impact of cocaine on monkeys? The reason is simple beyond belief: Because we can’t experiment on human beings.

We can all agree that cocaine addiction is a bad thing in people.

One supposes that we can further agree, though this might be giving too much credit to the compassion of some of these Republicans, that it is a good thing to help cokeheads of the human variety to wean themselves from their addiction.

Monkeys are the creatures must like us in physiology and brain structure. Experimenting on them just might offer insight into ways to help their human cousins escape what can so easily become a nightmare. If anyone is entitled to object, it’s the monkeys and their human defenders from groups like PETA. The less squeamish among us will recognize animal research of the life-saving and -enhancing variety for what it is: a regrettable necessity.

The specific study in question was explained favorably by Adi Jaffe, a Ph.D. candidate from UCLA, who blogs about drug addiction for Psychology Today. He writes that researchers put a series of lone monkeys that had been previously identified either as dominant or subordinate into a cage next to a large group of unfamiliar monkeys who shrieked and jabbered like, well, Republican politicians. When the ordeal ended, the monkey was returned to normal surroundings and allowed to pull on levers that would provide either food or cocaine. The evidence seems conclusive that subordinate monkeys were more likely to dose themselves with cocaine than were dominant monkeys.

A logical next step would be to search for a healthier alternative to cocaine for the weaker monkeys. If it can work on monkeys, it may also work on humans. That would be a good thing.

Now if only we can find a way to wean politicians from their addiction to cheap headlines.

Leaving Iraq

President Obama said on Monday that our “combat mission” in Iraq would finish by the end of the month (August 2010). I’m so glad. Now, maybe we’ll figure out what the mission was in the first place.

Evict Saddam Hussein? Did that back in 2003. Kill Saddam? Mission accomplished, 2006.

Found weapons of mass destruction?

Stopped looking in 2007 because, President Bush acknowledged, they weren’t there.

“Halt the spread of terror?” Before 2003, when we invaded, there was no such organization as “al-Qaeda in Iraq.” By 2008, we had eliminated more than 40 organizers and leaders of a formerly non-existent organization. “Only” a dozen or so of the top leadership remained–again, out of none who existed in 2003.

Built a stable society based on the rule of law? Sorry, not done yet. In fact, everything we’ve “accomplished” in Iraq has achieved the opposite of civil society.

“On Point,” the NPR show hosted by Tom Ashbrook, had Jane Clayson as guest host today (August 3). She, in turn, had three legitimate experts  “on the ground:” David Finkel, whose book The Good Soldiers tells the story of the battalion with whom the Finkel was embedded; Anthony Shadid, a New York Times reporter who has written his own book on the war; and, most powerfully, Matt Gallagher, a former Army captain, whose own book is called Kaboom: Embracing the Suck in a Savage Little War.

Except for the occasional phone-in or email message, the talk was not of missions accomplished or abandoned. It dealt mostly with the pain, loss, and frustration of those who actually had to fight in the savage little war. The panelists, all of whom had seen people killed or maimed or left in trauma, talked about the toll of a war that never had a clear statement of mission and that leaves only loss in its aftermath.

They told of an officer who rescued an enlisted soldier, shot in the head by a sniper. The heroic officer carried his comrade to safety down several flights of steps. As he ran down the steps, the motion threw the blood of the wounded soldier into the officer’s mouth. Six months later, he said, he could still taste the blood. Finally, the Army has acknowledged the reality of his Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

They told of a young man who lost his legs, one arm, and most of his remaining arm when an incendiary bomb exploded in a Humvee. In the hospital, his nose fell off from the burns suffered in the explosion. Eventually, after weeks in the hospital, the young man died. He was 19. As his mother said in a letter after his death, now he will be 19 forever.

President Obama talked Monday about the completion of the combat mission. One phone-in ex-soldier said that our “mission” was achieved with the removal of Saddam. At that point, he said, we should have left them to their own country because we had given them what we intended. His words were tragic almost beyond meaning.

This soldier desperately sought a “mission accomplished.” The reality is that we got rid of Saddam seven years ago and knew then that we couldn’t leave. As Capt. Gallagher said: “If you break it, you own it.” The mission for the past seven years has been to leave Iraq less broken that we made it by our invasion. It’s not the stuff of nobility, just of moral honesty.

Every Memorial Day and each July 4, we talk about veterans, living and dead. Invariably, we talk of how they sacrificed themselves to preserve our freedom at home.

We do, indeed, owe these men and women more than we can ever hope to repay. They did what their commanders asked them to do, and their supreme commander is the person whom we, the people, elected to be president. If our president (who is also their president) made a mistake, as George W. Bush clearly did, we owe them no less than if our mutual president had asked them legitimately to fight in a conflict where our liberty was really at stake.

They were brave, and their mission is at an end. It is a tragic commentary on the end of the mission that we still can’t quite define, let alone agree about, its purpose–and, even more, that the “end” will leave tens of thousands of American troops in Iraq apparently to ensure the success of what is apparently the post-mission mission. 

None of this is the fault of President Obama, who was an unknown state legislator from Illinois in 2004, though he will taken plenty of blame. That might not be fair, but it carries a certain rough justice. The president put himself voluntarily into the middle of events.

Our combat troops and veterans did not have the luxury to volunteer. They did what they were told, which is what soldiers and sailors are supposed to do.  

We owe them honor.

That is true no matter the folly of the politicians who sent them on a mission that their nation still cannot define.

Dude, Where’s My Health Care?

Writing in all capital letters is, I’m told, the online equivalent of shouting. In my previous professional incarnation, as a writer of opinions for daily newspapers, I shouted a fair amount–mostly at people who called or visited to shout at me. Since entering the academic world, I’ve tried to keep the bad behavior to a minimum.

Sometimes, however, you just have to let go.

THERE IS NO SUCH THING IN THE UNITED STATES AS A FREE MARKET IN HEALTH CARE.

There. I feel better. Stayed on-topic, too.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the assorted characters who have descended on the “town meetings” held by Democratic congressmen to discuss the bewildering  health-insurance debates in the Senate and House of Representatives.  They actually seem, if its possible, to feel worse as they continue in their pre-programmed rants.

There is a pattern: Start with some shouted slogan about health care. (“We hate socialism.” “Medicare is broke.” “If you can’t run cars for clunkers, how can you run health care?” “No death panel is going to kill my Great Aunt Matilda.”)

So far, so bad. But it gets worse.

Sometimes, it simply gets pathetic–as in the case of the woman from Texas who broke down in gasping sobs because she had lost her country which, when last anyone looked, was right where it has always been: Canada in the north, Mexico to the south, Atlantic in the east, Pacific on the west, us snuggled in the middle.

We had the emaciated guy from Ohio who said, for no readily apparent reason, that we should be afraid of Obama.

A particular favorite was the woman in Pennsylvania who warned Arlen Specter about the sinister plot to take away our liberties. At first, I thought nobody told her that W stopped being president in January.  It turns out that she’s not worried about people held without trial but about  having a Kenyan in the White House–socialism AND birth certificate, the perfect paranoid bank shot.

One guy wasn’t funny, pathetic or incoherent at all–just frightening.

He stood by the side of the road leading to the president’s own town meeting in New Hampshire. His sign said, “Time to Water the Tree of Liberty.” Strapped to his thigh was a holster complete with pistol. Was it loaded? As he said on MSNBC, you’d have to be a crazy person to carry around a pistol that isn’t loaded.

Just to remove all doubt, the slogan about watering the tree of liberty originates with Thomas Jefferson who, in one of his more tanked-up moments, observed that liberty’s tree periodically “should be watered with the blood of the patriot.” I assume, since Scary Gun Guy didn’t seem particularly suicidal, that he meant that we should use someone else’s blood. Mostly, though, I wonder where the Secret Service is when you really need it.

I’m sure all of this is just fine with the folks who ginned up this hysteria: the conservative media elite, of course, but also the insurance-industry PACs that co-ordinated and financed the town-meeting assaults. The tactic is simple enough: Get the shouting loud enough, destroy any chance for reasoned discussion, and then watch as yet another threat to the health-care oligopoly bites the dust.

That’s the secret, of course: Health care in the United States IS controlled by a vast, interlocking bureaucracy that has accumulated increasing power since the 1970s. The bureaucracy has flourished beyond the reach of government. It is as unchecked today as it ever was. The alleged “regulatory commissions” for insurance in state govenrments are pretty much toothless. Washington does even less. Every time Congress acts like it might do more, the private bureaucracy beats it down–hard.

It happened in the 1970s when Washington tried to develop the first regulatory framework of health-systems agencies, regional planning councils and the like. That time, the interlocking directorate broke the plan without even breaking a sweat.

The same thing happened in the early years of the Clinton administration, and it’s happening now.

Critics of Clinton and Obama point to strategic errors in the presentation of health-care reform systems, and they can certainly find errors or omissions in any proposal that runs to 1,100 pages.  That’s beside the point.  If you’ve followed the debates of the past two generations, you know the truth:

If Jesus, Gandhi, the Blessed Virgin and Abraham Lincoln returned to Earth today and presented Nelson Mandela with a health-care plan straight from God’s own hand, the whole bunch would be accused of socialism by sundown.

The various elements of the oligopoly don’t always get along.  Sometimes their fights can get nasty. Over the past decade, for example, a growing trickle of physicians in specific medical disciplines has abandoned practice because, they say, they cannot afford the cost of malpractice insurance. This has the apparent effect of pitting the doctors against the insurance companies and the trial lawyers. These groups indeed are bitterly divided–until it comes to any plan that threatens to produce anything like real change. Then, they stand grumpily but firmly united

The doctors who evoke health-care Armageddon over malpractice insurance are also members of the most powerful trade union in the United States–the American Medical Association. One way to control medical costs, and thus make insurance more affordable, is to break the doctors’ monopoly on medical information and authority. That would mean either letting more people into medical schools or allowing other trained non-physician professionals to perform more basic medical functions. I’ll bet a major malpractice claim that the AMA won’t allow that to happen.

The hospitals and their adminsitrators complain about the “hidden costs” of the insurance crisis. They are undeniably correct: Every uninsured person treated in an American hospital represents an expense that, one way or another, falls onto the system as a whole. Yet you’ll not find many hospital presidents out there fighting for the kind of changes that will get at the authority exercised by doctors or give someone other than the oligopoly a real voice in cost control.

Malpractice lawyers must know, on the most elemental level, that some type of malpractice reform, such as a cap on punitive awards, would be a powerful boost to the cause of affordable and readily available health insurance. This is so even though, as so much of the evidence suggests, malpractice claims really are not major factors in the cost crisis. In politics, symbolism matters. Trial lawyers for insurance reform would be powerfully symbolic. It won’t happen, for the obvious reasons, and I’ll bet another major malpractice claim on that one.

This leaves, of course, the insurance companies. A question for them, and for the folks who shout down everyone at the town meetings: How can you trust AIG to control insurance costs when it is still run by many of the same folks who drove it to bankruptcy and gave themselves million-dollar bonuses? (I’m fully aware that the question is unfair on just about every level. AIG is a vast and complicated operation, as are most insurance companies. Any kind of generalization about any corporate entity is bound to be deceptive. At this point, I really don’t care. If they’re going to force-feed the nation’s anxieties about government, the least we’re entitled to do is make them swallow a dose of their own medicine.)

In the end, we’ll get exactly what the feuding interlocking directorate really wants: No change at all. Our doctors and lawyers and hospitals and insurance companies will come up with nifty 10-point plans for reform. Meanwhile, somewhere in each of these entities, people and cash will be mobilized to turn out the scared, angry, and confused at town meetings where the real purpose is anything but to discuss health insurance.

Our uninsured population will continue to grow. The fewer and fewer of us fortunate enough to have health insurance will find ourselves paying more and more for the privilege. So it will remain until someone decides, once again, that the time has come to face up to our failure–in the face of all the noble rhetoric–to acknowledge that, in a civilized nation, affordable health care must be a right rather than a luxury.

Maybe next time, it will be different. But I won’t be betting a major malpractice claim on it.

Obamination?

Of course President Obama should have waited to speak until he had all the information in the case of Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. vs. the Cambridge Police Department. Speaking before knowing (or thinking), however, is a most human failing. It hardly brands the president as the racist that everyone on the right, from Limbaugh to the combined infotainment staff at Fox News, would love for him to be.

And the painful truth of the matter is that plenty of people, mostly but not exclusively of color, have plenty of reason to doubt the assertion that the police officer is always the citizen’s best friend.

I’m a white guy, but I’ve had my own experience with unfair arrest. It occurred during my first year of college. The police in Charlottesville, Va. (not the U.Va. police force but the ones who worked for the city) broke up an antiwar demonstration on a Friday night in May. Having achieved their goal, they ran onto the university grounds, broke into fraternity houses where mostly undressed brothers were engaged in protracted negotiations with their weekend dates, seized students from dormitory rooms, and arrested people who had just stuck their heads outside to see what all the noise was about.

In all, 68 of us were herded into the storage compartment of a Mayflower moving van and hauled to the police station where we spent the better part of the night in jail. The following Tuesday, at arraignment, the prosecutor and judge agreed that charges should be dropped against just about everyone. I presume that included the Shakey’s Pizza boy who was caught in the dragnet as he attempted to deliver a pizza to the home of the university president.

That’s a story from one of the nation’s elite public universities which, at the time, had a minority enrollment of less than 5 percent.

People who have lived in less-pampered circumstances know all about improper use of the police power by government. And sometimes the indignities are so searing as to become a part of the community’s historical memory.

Richard Wright, in Uncle Tom’s Children, tells a series of stories that show just how hard the realities can be. In one vignette, he is working as a delivery boy and is stopped by the police after making some deliveries in a white neighborhood. In Wright’s own words:

“‘Get down and put up your hands,’ the policemen ordered. 

“I did. They climbed out of the car, guns drawn, faces set, and advanced slowly.

“‘Keep still,’ they ordered.

“I reached my hands higher. They searched my pockets and packages. They seemed dissatisfied when they could find nothing incriminating. Finally, one of them said:

“‘Boy, tell your boss not to send you out in white neighborhoods after sundown.’

“As usual, I said:

“‘Yes, sir.’ “

That happened in the early 1920s, which suggests strongly that the sort of racial profiling that gets written about today is embedded in the public-safety culture.

On the door to my office, I have a full-page magazine advertisement from the American Civil Liberties Union.  It has side-by-side snapshots of Martin Luther King Jr. on the left and Charles Manson, the demented mass murdered, on the right. The ad points out that the person on the left is 75 times more likely to be stopped by police than the guy on the right.

Ravi Shankar, the poet-in-residence at Central Connecticut State University, wrote in The Couranton Sunday about his own experience with profiling, which actually happened earlier this year. Shankar is of South Asian descent, which is to say that his complexion is darker than my own and many other white males.  Barely a block from dinner in New York City, he was pulled over by police and shoved into a paddywagon for a trip to overnight jail.

Why?

The explanation from police was that they were serving an outstanding warrant. When Shankar pointed out that the warrant was for a white man, several inches shorter than he, the police simply told him that he would get his day in court. Shankar’s own suspicion is that he caught got up in the competition between police houses to see which could round up 100 people the quickest.

Bitter memory tells some people that such events are not rare. All indications from Obama’s two books, with their raw and painful descriptions of his youth, are that he might be a person with first-hand memories.

As it turns out, memory may have hurt Obama in this case. Sgt. James Crowley’s history is that of an exemplary cop.

Still, the circumstances are unusual. The police received a telephone call about strange doings outside the Gates home.  By the time Crowley got on the scene, the professor had managed to get inside his home. Gates gave every indication of being exactly where he was entitled to be, yet Crowley asked him to step outside.  The two exchanged words, and Gates ended up in handcuffs. Crowley does not need to be a racist for people to suspect that he may have imbibed the culture of profiling that clearly does exist in law enforcement.

In the end, Obama turned a gaffe into an opportunity. The “beer summit” with Sgt. Crowley and Dr. Gates got us to thinking again about the world’s most diverse nation and its complicated social and racial currents with their swirls and eddies of race, ethnicity, gender, and age.

God knows, we can never think about that too much. If we’re willing to be honest, too, we will have to acknowledge that we should have been thinking about it all along–not simply when the first minority president of the United States spoke too quickly at a press conference.

Obama is no racist. He is a guy, like all of us, who has memories shaped by the culture in which he lives.  No matter how much some of us might dislike the idea, “all of us” even includes Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly and the no-brain trust that decides what distortions Fox News will go with today.

Channeling History

My students tell me that they love to watch the History Channel.

I tell them that I can’t stop them, because they’ve mostly reached the age of majority and have a right to make their own mistakes, but that they need to be careful. There hasn’t been much text- and site-based research to prove that space monsters built the temples at Angkor Wat, and I’m still not sure what Ice Road Truckers (Sundays at 9PM/8Central) has to do with our understanding of the past.

As someone who teaches history, and has actually done some research and study on historical matters, I’m agnostic about the History Channel’s broad-gauge marketing of the past.

I’m particularly annoyed by a two-hour documentary titled Hippies.

The music moves me, and the images come from a past that I can remember. Many of the too-many generalizations actually make a little sense. But the prevailing assumptions drove me nuts–specifically the notion that, somehow or other, the “hippies” were also the “baby-boomers” and that the hippie movement was a celebration of boomer values.

It’s an appealing theory. Too bad the chronology is all wrong, which that means the supposed history is still-born.

The study of history begins with chronology.  Events happen in a certain order. People are born before they die. Eighty-five years passed between the American Revolution and the Civil War. And the “baby-boom” began after World War II, not before or during.

Basic questions and definitions:

How does the documentary define the “hippie” phenomenon? Immediate answer: Poorly, incoherently. Deeper answer: The “hippies” were those people who, during the early 1960s, experimented with mind-altering drugs, challenged such lifestyle conventions as marriage and monogamy, and spawned (depending on your ideology) a period of either liberation or wanton irresponsibility.

And what is the baby-boom generation? Generally, demographers identify the boomers as people born during the birth-rate surge that began in the Western world around 1947, just after the end of World War II, and continued until roughly 1964.

What names did our documentary, Hippies, evoke most often during the first hour, tracing the origins and early years–in fact a history of the hippies, pure and true?

Timothy Leary, the one-time Harvard psychology professor who attempted to turn LSD into a popular sacrament. (Born in 1920.)

Ken Kesey, the novelist who spread the gospel of LSD on the West Coast and whose paranoid masterpiece, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, captured the anti-authority spirit of the early 1960s. (Born in 1935.)

Augustus Owsley Stanley III, the chemist who figured out how to mass-produce and market LSD. (Born, like Kesey, in 1935.)

Hugh Nanton Romney, better known to a generation as “Wavy Gravy” and organizer of the Woodstock festival of 1969. (Born in 1936.)

And the musicians who created the aural backdrop for the “hippie era?” John Phillips (1935), Grace Slick (1939), Cass Elliott (1941), David Crosby (1941), Jimi Hendrix (1942), Graham Nash (1942), Jerry Garcia (1942), Janis Joplin (1943), Jim Morrison (1943). And on, and on, and on.

Why the tedious exercise in birth dates?

Simply to demonstrate that, no matter what else the baby-boomers might have been, they were not the inspiration or the driving force of the “hippie movement.”

When Leary began peddling acid at Harvard in 1962, the oldest of the baby boomers was 15 and probably interested more in American Bandstand than in transformation of human consciousness. 

In 1969, when Wavy Gravy pulled off Woodstock, I was 18. I tried to get there with a friend but turned around when his car overheated in Pennsylvania.  Mr. Gravy was nearly twice my age. (I was still 18, four months after Woodstock, when the violent Altamont festival in California marked what the hippies themselves regarded as “the end of the hippie era.”)

Who were the entrepreneurs who created the hippie momentum? They were mostly people born in the 1920s and 1930s–the period when the birth rate fell to historic lows under the pressure of Depression and war. Popular demography labels this group as the “silent generation.” As we can see, many of them were anything but silent.

(Good for them, I’d say, but that’s just me.)

So why the concern over little things like dates and demographic shifts? How’s this: The way we understand the world is filled with enough half-baked information, unexamined assumptions, and “what everybody knows is true.” To study what really happened is to realize that “what everybody knows” is usually incomplete at best or wrong at worst. Realize that, and you’re on the path to an honest attempt to make sense of the world.

And how about this: A student in one of my classes last semester began an essay by referring to “the 1960s, just after World War II.” I wondered briefly where the Korean War was hiding, and what happened to Sputnik and Elvis and the assassination of Gandhi. How about Joe McCarthy, Edward R. Murrow, and the Red Scare? And what, for that matter, about the birth of the bulk of the baby-boom generation (including my wife and me)?

A History Channel, at the least, should help us to keep the dates straight–or, in history talk, get the chronology right.

To The Moon, Alice

Ralph Kramden had a specific type of space travel in mind when he warned his wife about where he might send her.

“To the moon” was his way of telling her that he’d heard enough. And, of course, Ralph’s threats were always empty. He was too lovable, down deep, ever to do real harm to the people around him. The phrase still bubbled into memory again with the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing.

So many people have stated the obvious: We went to the moon three times, and haven’t been back since then.

The obvious implication: Something must be very wrong with us–or, alternatively, we went there for the wrong reason in the first place. In the standard formulation, “we” (meaning the Americans) got there before the late and unlamented Evil Empire. After we beat them, and they pretended it didn’t matter, we lost our own incentive.

I think that’s wrong. I think we stopped the moon trips for reasons that are powerfully human and not superficial at all.

We went there. Twelve of us walked there. The rest of us stayed behind and looked in wonder.  At some point, humility replaced wonder: We had spent more than $25 billion to take what was, in cosmic terms, the equivalent to a stroll to the apartment next door. All that effort, and we simply learned how small we are.

Viewed from the Earth’s perspective, the landings look stupendous. On a universal scale, they were infinitesimal. The logical next step, to Mars, would take more than three years . The crew wouldn’t be able to go up, hang around for a day or so, and come back. These astronauts would  have to live there for almost six months, waiting for the planets to align for the trip back.

One trip to Mars would cost billions more than all the money needed for the moon missions and all the preliminary flights. Where would that get us? Out of the condominium, perhaps, but certainly no farther than next door in an infinite, unimaginable universe.

And then where? No other spot in our own, small solar system looks even as inviting as cold, distant, water-starved Mars.

We went to the moon in hubris; we returned in humility.

I very much enjoyed listening to the reminiscences and speculations that accompanied the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing. I especially liked the edition of WNPR’s estimable local show, “Where We Live,” hosted by the equally estimable John Dankosky.

One of his guests put out a warning: If mankind doesn’t beceome extra-terrestrial, then it eventually will become extinct. The Earth will not last forever, or at least not in a form that can support human life.

No doubt.

Still, I can’t forget the words of a ditty from an elementary-school songbook when I was in 5th grade. It began with whole families piling, Jetson-style, into the family spaceship and going for a Sunday drive: “What, oh what will we do up there? What, oh what?/We’ll cruise past Mars in our rocket cars/Head them off to the far-off stars/Spend a day on the Milky Way/and blow all our cares away.”

Hear the echoes an earlier age when so many things seemed so possible, when the stars were so easy to reach out and grab.

Our escape-the-Earth analyst talked of an extra-terrestrial project that would not be completed for eons, an ongoing effort that would outlive by centuries the people who first launched it. The flaw is simply in his assumption that human beings are capable of undertaking such an effort. (Ethically, I’d suggest, it’s tough to argue that the past should tie the future to something so massive, but that’s a separate issue.)

Yes, human beings explore. Their explorations, however, begin in the yearning of a few people to challenge the unknown. Columbus did that, and so did Ghengis Khan. Columbus begged three ships, a crew, and some supplies from the king and queen of Spain; the Khan created the mightiest army of his era.

The Spanish saw their Western Hemisphere empire begin to shrink within a little more than two centuries. Khan’s empire split and broke and divided into distinct fiefdoms ruled by his descendants. One eon, even less, and human directions changed.

That’s an explanation that I like for the hesitation to take next steps–or even to keep going to the moon.

We are so small, and the universe is so vast. Easier for us to put a telescope in space that will allow us finally to SEE where our galaxy ends. Simpler to send up shuttle missions and international space stations to explore the space between us and the moon. For now, these are enough.

At the dawn of the Mercury project, a wise layman asked a deceptive question: When we get into space, where will we find heaven? Will it be up? Down? Sideways? Or maybe, he speculated, we’ll learn that we must search for it inside ourselves.

Look inside ourselves: Good advice then, good advice now, and the reason why we’ve not yet ventured beyond the boundaries of our own tiny condominium in the cosmos.

Elections, Iranian and American

What I do not know about the Iranian electoral system is enormous; what I do know is based on The New York Times, the newsmagzines that I try to follow, National Public Radio and, of course, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. This doesn’t make me an expert, but I’d suggest that incomplete knowledge sometimes helps us to see clearly.

I do think I know a bit about the American electoral system–enough, at least to teach a course on the subject. And right now, I’d have to say that I’m not sure the differences in election practices between us and them are as great as we seem to assume

Don’t misunderstand.

I profoundly wish that  Ahmadenijad had been voted out. Anyone who belongs to the Hitler-was-an-OK-guy school of Holocaust Studies, and is president of a country with nuclear capability, is someone who can make me wake up and worry in the middle of the night. I’d very much like to believe that his “landslide” re-election was a fraud, that the Guardian Council would recognize the fraud, and that it would take the election from Ahmadinejad.

I can’t say exactly who I would like in place of the crazy man in power. I’ve been told (we’ve all been told) that the chief rival, Mir Hossein Mousavi, is the “reform candidate,” but I wonder what that means. Reform in what sense of the word?

Mousavi didn’t win a major-party nomination. He could have sent backers out to get signatures on petitions, but it apparently wouldn’t have mattered. To get on the ballot, Mousavi only had to get the permission of no more than a dozen Iranians: the religious leaders who make up the Guardian Council. This is the same group who found Ahmadinijad to be OK last election and nitially confirmed his victory this time around. Their spiritual ancestor is the Ayatollah Khomeini, who made the Iranian revoution in the 1970s, imposed the theocracy that exists today, declared the United States to be the Great Satan, and authorized the humiliating seizure of American hostages in 1979.

Iran’s near past only makes more remarkable what seems to be happening in right now.  I say “seems to be,” of course, because Iran has done all it can to cut off communications to and from the rest of the world.  Twitter actually has emerged as one of the few effective means of getting out the word, albeit in bursts of 250 grammatically incoherent characters.

From Twitter and less-direct sources, it seems as if street protests against the election continue even though government security has tried all types of thuggery to keep folks off the street. The Guardians have apparently said that they would accept a “partial recount,” though there is great speculation over what that means. Do they mean that votes will be recounted in places where the result seems questionable?

Or do they mean “partial” as in the election of 2000 when our own Guardian Council, known more familiarly as the U.S. Supreme Court, voted 5-4 to stop the ongoing vote recount in Florida, thus rendering it, by definition, as partial and incomplete? This decision by the U.S. Guardians made George W. Bush president of the United States even though he got fewer votes than the other guy.  Boy, those Iranians sure have some stuff to learn about Western-style democracy, don’t they?

This is the first point: Whatever “democracy” means in the Iranian context, it may never be the same as our own definition of the word. I suspect that Mousavi would never have been permitted onto the ballot had he been a critic of the ruling theocracy. I’ve seen no commentator, either, who suggested that Mousavi would halt Iran’s nuclear-power program.

Look, however, at some remarkable features of Iran’s election: Opposition openly expressed, televisied debates between the two major contenders, some actual pre-election polling–all of this was new. 

That is the second, and I would like to believe, more hopeful point. Within the confines of their own cultural traditions, the Iranians took giant steps toward making it possible for themselves to exercise independence of judgment and to seek, in the language of our own Bill of Rights, a “redress of grievances.” Absent repression, which is always possible, this election stands as a breakthrough.

A caution, however: Democracies do not always agree one with another. We’d like to see the end of Iran’s nuclear-power project.  No matter who ends up in power, the program will not end. That simply was not a “campaign issue” in Iran any more than an immediate end to reliance on foreign sources of energy has ever been a serious campaign issue in the United States.

Democratic elections are one way by which nations may opt to choose the officials who establish policies, but elections do not determine policies. Sometimes, too, a seemingly democratic election can produce a most undemocratic result. 

Iranians seem to be learning the lesson this year. Americans re-learned it  in 2000. Perhaps we should humble ourselves just a bit as we try to figure out what’s happening these days in Iran.