Living Haiku

Discouraged by the extreme rhetoric of mainstream Republicans as well as those I know who are on the far right, I haven't been writing much on my blog lately. Other bloggers address the ridiculous claims of the far-right better than I do, and I don't just want to repeat what I read. Also, I have returned to Facebook, having deleted the "friend" who had the most vile posts about Barack Obama and refusing to admit any new "friends" who admit to far-right views. I have enough of those friends already, family members who compare Barack Obama to Hugo Chavez, who think Obama is some kind of far-leftist and who claim they want the government totally out of their lives (no Medicare or Medicaid, no public schools, etc.), yet who had nothing to say when the Bush Administration increased presidential power, suspended habeas corpus for terrorist suspects (even American citizens), and provided unprecedented power to the NSA to eavesdrop on American citizens.

To maintain my peace of mind, I've decided to write at least one haiku every day that emerges from something I experienced or observed during the day. This is what I post to my Facebook status. Several years ago, I studied haiku in conjunction with teaching world literature classes at a university in Georgia and as a consequence, also, of having read and thoroughly enjoyed the travel sketches of Japan's most famous haiku poet: Matsuo Basho. I've been amazed by how writing haiku has influenced my perspective. Committed to writing one haiku a day, of condensing a mood or image or experience into seventeen syllables (I'm sticking to that traditional syllabic limitation although I don't believe it's a requirement), I pay more attention to small details, especially details of nature. As R. H. Blyth writes in his classic book on haiku,

Haiku is concerned with the ordinary, the everyday. It has nothing to do with exceptional things, evenings of extraordinary magnificence and splendour. It turns inwards, toward the infinitely small and subtle, not to the vast and sublime.

To pay attention and to recognize the significance of these subtle details of life twenty-four hours a day is "the Way of Haiku," says Blyth. Well, I can't claim to be totally awake to the "real nature of things" all day long, but I am paying more attention. And so, when I first saw a caterpillar on the parsley in my Victory Garden, I began looking closer and found several other caterpillars in various instar stages, the stages between molts--of the beautiful black swallowtail butterfly.

There on the parsley
a black swallowtail larva
becoming itself.

And then I began looking closer at other plants and discovered orange and black caterpillars--again, different instars--of Gulf Fritillaries, eating the leaves of the passion vine on our mailbox. Being aware and open to the small details of nature puts into perspective the pettiness of politics and the unreasonableness of those who demonize others with views (or ethnicity or lifestyle) different from their own.

Sane Conservative Voices I: Bruce Bartlett

As many mainstream Republicans have been echoing the anger and paranoia of the far-right, some sane conservative voices have been trying to break through the static. In an essay posted on the Capital Gains and Games blog, written in response to the death of Irving Kristol (the father; the son, as the writer points out, is another matter altogether), Bruce Bartlett writes:

The intellectual bankruptcy of conservatism today is even greater than it was when Irving Kristol founded The Public Interest in 1965. What passes for a conservative movement these days wears its anti-intellectualism as a badge of honor. But as Kristol correctly understood, right-wing populism has no future and fundamental changes in the direction of government policy must be based on serious research and analysis that is grounded on hard data; that is to say, reality.

Bartlett is no liberal. He was domestic policy advisor to President Reagan and deputy assistant secretary for economic policy at the U.S. Treasury Department from 1988-1993 (under President Bush). He has served on the staffs of Ron Paul and Jack Kemp. I disagree with some of Barlett's economic theories and with his (very unscientific) understanding of climate change, but I certainly agree with his assessment of the Republican party today. Sane people on either side of the political spectrum are alarmed by the lack of civility in public discourse, the paranoia manifested in the outrageous myths circulated about current domestic and international policies, and what amounts to demonization of the President.

In a recent column in Forbes, Bartlett addresses the Republican mantra that cutting spending will ameliorate the fiscal problem. It won't work, he writes, because Congress will resist cutting spending, no matter which party is in control of Congress, because the nature of the federal budget has changed, and because the population has changed (aging population will resist cuts in entitlement programs such as Medicare). And Republicans, he points out, never seriously address cutting entitlement programs:

On the contrary, they defend entitlements when Democrats suggest cutting them. The Republican National Committee has run television ads opposing cuts in Medicare because Obama proposed using such cuts to fund health reform. Many demonstrators at right-wing tea parties were seen carrying signs demanding that the government keep its hands off Medicare.

He also addresses the oft-repeated lie that Reagan cut spending:

When I raised these facts [about Medicare and the increasingly aging population] with a prominent Republican recently he counted that Reagan had cut spending. But he didn't. Spending rose from 21.7% of the gross domestic product in 1980 to 23.5% in 1983 before declining to 21.2% in 1988. And that improvement came about largely because favorable demographics caused entitlement spending to temporarily decline from 11.9% of GDP in 1983 to 10.1% in 1988. (Last year it was 12.5% of GDP.)

In a column on fiscal responsibility, Bartlett addresses the myth that tax cuts always illustrate fiscal responsibility:

Beginning in 1982, [Reagan] supported higher taxes almost every year of his presidency.....Reagan's successor, George H.W. Bush, promised during the 1988 campaign that he would never raise taxes--read my lips: no new taxes, he said at the Republican convention. But faced with large deficits and the need for Democratic congressional support for deficit reduction, he abandoned that pledge in 1990 and supported a large tax increase in return for tough spending controls.

Bartlett goes on to discuss how Clinton's tax increase, roundly criticized by Republicans, triggered "a huge economic expansion" and a surplus that George W. Bush inherited and then squandered:

Taxes were cut willy-nilly throughout the Bush years, and spending shot up for wars, new entitlement programs and any Republican-sponsored pork barrel project. Bush left office with a deficit of 3.2% of GDP--a reversal of 5.6% of GDP compared to the surplus he inherited."

In his article "The GOP's Misplaced Rage," Bartlett addresses the anger of those town-hall meetings we saw over the summer:

I think conservative anger is misplaced. To a large extent, Obama is only cleaning up messes created by Bush. This is not to say Obama hasn’t made mistakes himself, but even they can be blamed on Bush insofar as Bush’s incompetence led to the election of a Democrat. If he had done half as good a job as most Republicans have talked themselves into believing he did, McCain would have won easily.

Conservative protesters should remember that the recession, which led to so many of the policies they oppose, is almost entirely the result of Bush’s policies. According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, the recession began in December 2007—long before Obama was even nominated. And the previous recession ended in November 2001, so the current recession cannot be blamed on cyclical forces that Bush inherited.

And Bartlett puts forth the idea that this Republican anger is not born out of any real disenchantment with liberal policies but out of the petulance of having lost an election:

In my opinion, conservative activists, who seem to believe that the louder they shout the more correct their beliefs must be, are less angry about Obama’s policies than they are about having lost the White House in 2008. They are primarily Republican Party hacks trying to overturn the election results, not representatives of a true grassroots revolt against liberal policies. If that were the case they would have been out demonstrating against the Medicare drug benefit, the Sarbanes-Oxley bill, and all the pork-barrel spending that Bush refused to veto.

There is plenty with which I can disagree with Bruce Bartlett, I'm sure, but his sane conservative voice reminds us that liberals and conservatives can find common ground in order to make our republic truly strong. Loudly supporting fringe behavior such as Joe Wilson's shouting out to the President of the United States "you lie" is not the way to do that. The Republican Party needs to back away from the abyss.

Health Care Reform--Polling doctors

The New England Journal of Medicine has posted the results of a health care reform poll focusing on doctors' opinions: "Doctors on Coverage — Physicians’ Views on a New Public Insurance Option and Medicare Expansion". The initial poll was sent to a random sample of 5,157 U.S. doctors (some excluded from the original list of 6,000 because of their being in training or their practicing medicine outside U.S. territories). The doctors were divided into four groups:

• primary care physicians,
• medical subspecialists, neurologists, and psychiatrists
• surgical specialists and subspecialists, and
• other specialties

The physicians were asked which of three options for expanding health care they preferred:

• "public and private options, providing people younger than 65 years of age the choice of enrolling in a new public health insurance plan (like Medicare) or in private plans;
• private options only, providing people with tax credits or subsidies, if they have low income, to buy private insurance coverage, without creating a new public plan.
• or a public option only, eliminating private insurance and covering everyone through a single public plan like Medicare."

Of the total number of doctors polled, 43.2% of doctors responded:

• 62.9% supported the public and private option
• 27.3% supported offering private options only
• 9.6% supported offering only a public option.

Interestingly, of the four categories of physicians, primary care doctors most supported the public and private option. Also,

Overall, 58.3% of respondents supported an expansion of Medicare to Americans between the ages of 55 and 64 years. This support was consistent across all four specialty groups, with proportions in favor ranging from 55.6% to 62.4%.

So, as in the wider American public, a majority of doctors favor expanding insurance coverage by providing access through both public and private options. Just saying.

Go to the article (link above) for graphs and such. For further discussion of this poll and others, go to "Listen to Your Doctors," by Harold Pollack, posted at The New Republic, 15 September 2009.

Animal Feces--or Worse--in Your Water?

The New York Times has an interesting article on violations of the Clean Water laws, of the EPA's lax oversight during the Bush administration, and of the consequences of that laxness: "Clean Water Laws Are Neglected, at a Cost in Suffering." In interviewing "more than 250 state and federal regulators, water-system managers, environmental advocates and scientists," New York Times journalists have discovered that "an estimated one in 10 Americans have been exposed to drinking water that contains dangerous chemicals or fails to meet a federal health benchmark in other ways." The article describes the consequences of water pollution on the health of one family in West Virginia who live just seventeen miles from the state capital and on the career of one lawyer who joined West Virginia's environmental protection agency, where, he discovered, "everyone was terrified of doing their job." He eventually lost his job because he did his job; powerful industry lobbyists used their leverage with state politicians to get him fired.

In West Virginia, as in Washington, the corruption of those hired to keep the state's water safe can be seen in the revolving door of the state's environmental agencies: regulators "leave for higher-paying jobs at the companies they once policed." Pressure from the EPA has been seriously lacking, too:

Enforcement lapses were particularly bad under the administration of President George W. Bush, employees say. “For the last eight years, my hands have been tied,” said one E.P.A. official who requested anonymity for fear of retribution. “We were told to take our clean water and clean air cases, put them in a box, and lock it shut. Everyone knew polluters were getting away with murder. But these polluters are some of the biggest campaign contributors in town, so no one really cared if they were dumping poisons into streams.”

The New York Times has gathered data on "more than 200,000 facilities that have permits to discharge pollutants and collected responses from states regarding compliance." Want to see how your state measures up?: "Find Water Polluters Near You." I clicked through the pages of companies in Georgia that have permits to discharge pollutants and was surprised by the number of violators who hadn't been fined for their violations. Uh.... okay....maybe I wasn't surprised. Just disgusted.

Here is another interactive map: "Clean Water Violations: The Enforcement Record." Enforcements in Georgia: 48.2 per 100 violations. Enforcement Record for my home state of Texas: 7.6 per 100 violations. Big surprise.

Health Care Costs

Updates below

Conservatives I know--and these are the Fox-News adherents--always bring up predictable issues when we argue politics. In a recent discussion, one family member seemed to suggest that health care costs would be significantly lowered by tort reform. It's amazing to me why this person, a blue-collar worker all his life, worries so much about medical malpractice. The class of people who seem to concern him most are folks who make five or six times what he made working in a carbon black plant. Because I love him--okay, he's my dad--I usually drop the issue when the discussion becomes too contentious or when he changes the subject to another hot-button issue, a familiar technique: chase another rabbit when the first one looks like it's going to become dinner for another fox. I try to bolster my arguments with facts, but facts just don't stick with many people; too often we ingest "facts" that are watered down--or dissolved completely--and served up with a toxic salsa of paranoia, fear, and self-refential world view.

But because I am at heart an optimist who thinks that perhaps people can change their minds when confronted with facts, carefully gathered details, and thoughtful observations, here are some facts about health care and medical malpractice, courtesy of Health Affairs: The Policy Journal of the Health Sphere (with a h/t to Matthew Yglesias and Ezra Klein for the link):

• Yes, more Americans sue their doctors than citizens in the UK and in Canada. However, "[t]wo-thirds of the U.S. claims were dropped, dismissed, or found in favor of the defendant; in one-third, plaintiffs received compensation after a settlement or judgment." Here is a table comparing the "Malpractice Claims and Payments in Four Countries, 2001."
• What about the legal costs of defending those malpractice suits?

  Legal costs are estimated to average $27,000 per claim in the United States, which adds approximately $1.4 billion in costs to the $4.4 billion paid in settlements and judgments.23 The costs of underwriting insurance against malpractice claims are estimated at an additional 12 percent, or $700 million.24 The cost of defending U.S. malpractice claims, including awards, legal costs, and underwriting costs, was an estimated $6.5 billion in 2001—0.46 percent of total health spending.

• Look at that last line in the quote above: "The cost of defending U.S. malpractice claims" is less than 1/2 of 1 percent of total health care spending in this country.

Malpractice claims do not add significantly to overall health care costs. The writers conclude that malpractice litigation is a growing problem--and it probably should be addressed. However, the claim that health care costs in this country would be significantly reduced by tort reform just does not hold up under the facts. Once again: The cost of defending malpractice claims in the United States comes out to be less than 1/2 of 1 percent of total health care spending in this country.

Can we then, please, turn to a more thoughtful, fact-supported discussion of significant ways to reduce health care costs in this country?

Source:
Gerard F. Anderson, Peter S. Hussey, Bianca K. Frogner and Hugh R. Waters. "Health Spending In The United States And The Rest Of The Industrialized World." Health Affairs, 24, no. 4 (2005): 903-914. 13 Sept. 2009. http://content.healthaffairs.org/cgi/content/full/24/4/903

Updates, more sources:For another discussion of healthcare costs and medical malpractice, see Maggie Mahar's blog, Healthbeat, and these posts: "Medical Malpractice: Fiction, Facts, and the Future; Part I and "Medical Malpractice: Fiction, Facts, and the Future; Part II.

See, also, Atul Gawande's article, "The Cost Conundrum," in The New Yorker.

Decatur Book Festival 2009, Second Day

On the second day of the Decatur Book Festival, I got a late start. My husband left home earlier in order to meet one of his favorite cartoonists, Keith Knight, at a noon venue. He bought two or three of Keith's books, too. Tom has purchased more books than I at this festival. With just a part-time job, I'm really aware of where every penny of that paycheck goes. I bought a volume of the journal Five Points, a publication of Georgia State University edited by David Bottoms, because the young woman at the booth looked so bored and because she was handing out free copies of older journal issues: a two for one. I purchased a couple of copies of the Wren's Nest latest publication because my daughter's artwork appears in this year's volume and because I like to support youthful writing endeavors. And on the second day of the book festival, I purchased a slim volume of poetry from a young woman standing on the sidewalk near the outside food court.

"Would you like to buy my book?" the poet asked.

"Not really," I replied, but then I softened my refusal by asking her a few questions before moving on. When I came back by a few minutes later and saw the woman still standing there, I thought, what the heck. What's five dollars? I'll buy one of her slim little books. I can always use the book for art projects later if I'm not moved by the poetry.

She said she was from California and that she had attended the book festival in previous years. Later I saw another middle-aged woman like me holding the poet's books while the poet bought some food from a vendor. What easy marks we are, I thought, for the young and hopeful.

Authors were everywhere hawking their books in many imaginative ways. I saw an alien right after I arrived, standing behind a board advertising Drake Highlander's book, What Not to Do When You Find a Spaceship. Drake Highlander himself was rather nondescript, a young man in his mid-thirties, I would guess, dressed in shorts and short-sleeved polo shirt. He handed me a brochure about the book and a bookmark with more information. The alien posed for me.

Although I didn't plan it, the venues I attended turned out to be focused mostly on Southern writers. I found Tom at the Decatur Conference Center where John Yow was promoting his book The Armchair Birder in his good-humored Southern drawl. Yow first read a passage from the book where he describes his inability to catch a glimpse of a wood thrush. It's a funny passage because everyone he asks has seen a wood thrush but himself even though his own yard, he claims, is good habitat for one. After the reading, Yow led a bird-calling contest, with help from two of his friends sitting at the conference table with I-pods and recordings of bird calls. He solicited members of the audience to perform bird calls and then to compare those calls with the recordings. This was a lot of fun, and the person who won the contest, hands down, was a young woman (teens? early twenties? it was hard to tell from the back of the room where I was sitting) who did a loud, convincing, and energetic call of a sandhill crane.

Tom and I then went to hear Sonny Brewer and Rick Bragg, both from Alabama, though Bragg is the most well-known of the two as a journalist who won a Pulitzer Prize for feature writing that he did for The New York Times and for the well-received books based on his experiences growing up in Possum Trot, Alabama. Although I haven't read any of Bragg's books, I have run across his writing elsewhere and remembered the trouble he got in at The New York Times for using a stringer's reporting to write a story in the first-person as if he had done all the interviewing himself. But the big guy (almost 6-foot, 3-inches and quite a bit over 200 pounds) is funny, thoughtful, self-deprecating, and profane--as many good Southern story tellers are. He blamed his weight on the M&Ms that hotels stock in their mini-bars. "I don't drink," he said, "but those fancy hotels that I stayed in on book tours always had three-pound bags of M&Ms in their mini-bars. Now these are hotels that wouldn't have me if I weren't a well-known author on a book tour. I'd have a pound of M&Ms in the evening while watching pay-for-view and another pre-breakfast pound the next morning. Now this is true. I gained thirty-five pounds eating M&Ms."

The final event I attended was in the Decatur Courthouse and was titled "Women & The New South," featuring Janis Owens, Masha Hamilton (the only non-Southerner of the three), and Cassandra King. On her blog, Janis Owens wrote that "The title of the panel should be: Running Our Mouths, because that’s what we do." And she certainly did a lot of the talking. Raised in the Florida panhandle in what she calls the "cracker culture," Owens told one funny story after another about her life, her culture, and her family, without skipping a beat between each story. For instance, she told the story of a grandmother who was so large that the mortician had to break her legs to fit her in the coffin. When the three women opened up the discussion to questions from the audience, however, the other two authors got a chance to talk. Some of the audience members were very familiar with King's and Hamilton's books and had very specific questions. One person asked what inspired Cassandra King to write The Sunday Wife. "I made it up completely," she said. Then she paused and told the real story, that she was once the unhappily circumscribed Sunday wife who eventually left the pastor. The novel wasn't published, she said, until after her mother died, for her mother always held her accountable for leaving the pastor. Now King is married to well-known author, Pat Conroy.

Masha Hamilton, who has worked as a journalist and foreign correspondent, is also a novelist. She went to Afghanistan in 2004 and returned in 2008, and has begun the Afghan Women's Writing Project as a way to give voice to Afghan women. The website for the project describes the efforts:

The Afghan Women’s Writing Project is aimed at allowing Afghan women to have a direct voice in the world, not filtered through male relatives or members of the media. Many of these Afghan women have to make extreme efforts to gain computer access in order to submit their writings, in English, to the project.

As Hamilton was preparing to leave New York and her three children to visit Afghanistan, she thought long and hard about how her traveling to such a dangerous country might impact her children. But she also wanted her children to know that some actions are worth the risk. Just before she left for Afghanistan, she said that her teenage daughter went out one night to Central Park with some friends. When her daughter returned home, Hamilton told her that she should never go to Central Park at night, that she was very worried about her. Her daughter looked at her and said, emphasizing every word with a pointing finger, "You are going to Afghanistan and you're worried about me being in Central Park at night with friends?"

I left this session very glad that I had attended it on the spur of the moment, for these are authors whose writings I will look for in the future. One of the great things about the Decatur Book Festival is that it brings in lots of well-known authors along with a little less well-known authors and even obscure authors. There is a venue for almost every interest. What a great event!

Decatur Book Festival 2009, First Day

Yesterday we attended several afternoon events of the Decatur Book Festival, sponsored by, among others, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Dekalb Medical Center. The day was overcast, and when my husband and I set off on the mile-long walk to downtown Decatur, a few stray drops of water fell from the sky. However, there was no significant rainfall to dampen the spirits of the crowd in downtown Decatur. Our daughter attended some events at the teen gathering in a dance studio near the downtown square, and then she and friends went to lunch together.

Tom and I first went to the Decatur Public Library Stage to hear Niall Stanage, an Irish journalist who covered Barack Obama's election. Stanage first gave us the international perspective on Barack Obama, nothing new, of course, to those of us who keep up with the news, but it was good to be reminded that Obama's election "really redeemed an old idea for America" that had been eroded over the years by the Bush administration. Stanage said that while there is a small margin, a fringe on the left, that has an "implacable" resistance and dislike of America and its power, most Europeans have a fondness for America. The Bush administration policies, however, had seriously eroded that goodwill (for example, in 2000, Germans had a 70% favorable attitude toward the U.S.; by 2007, that goodwill had dropped to 30%). Barack Obama re-invigorated the fondness Europeans had for America.

What was really interesting to me, however, was the audience's response to the clips of Obama's speeches that Stanage showed to illustrate his points. The first clip was the very hopeful speech Obama gave at the 2000 Democratic Convention, the one where he says these rousing lines: "There is not a liberal America and a conservative America; there is a United States of America." I could feel the energy in the room as these words echoed in the small auditorium. People clapped after every speech with the kind of enthusiasm I remembered from the election. I swear, the middle-aged guy next to me was crying, removing his glasses and wiping his eyes. Now, cynical far-right Republicans would call this Obama-awe. I think it's something way more important: it's hope. There still remains among us liberals the hope that the country can be re-united; that we are the United States of America. But the radicals on the right, what Kevin Drum and others call the "fever swamp crowd," have just about eroded that hope in their terrorist takeover of the national dialogue.

After Stanage's speech, Tom and I parted ways to attend different events; he attended an environmentalist presentation, and I walked to the First Baptist Church of Decatur to hear Douglas Blackmon, the Atlanta bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal. Blackmon has written an exhaustively researched book titled Slavery By Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black People in America from the Civil War to World War II. The title pretty much summarizes the point of the book, and that's how Blackmon began his presentation, with a summary of his book, a summary of the re-enslavement of African-Americans in the South in a kind of neo-slavery, involuntary servitude. He reminded us that many of the early fortunes of the "fathers of Atlanta" were built on this practice of servitude and that many Atlanta-based companies we know today tie back to the brutal practices of another time.

There is an American mythology that "Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves" that Americans cling to, totally removing from memory the brutality of the early twentieth-century. Thousands of African-Americans, Blackmon said, are alive today who were born into defacto slavery in the 1920s and 1930s. Georgia and Alabama particularly supported this practice, for their economies depended upon free or cheap labor: agriculture, mining. These southern states "used the criminal justice system to create a new slavery and the fear of this system to intimidate African-Americans." As just one example, Blackmon described how a black man who wanted to leave one farmer and work for another had to get permission from his original boss. If he did not, he would be charged and slapped with a fine. This is just a small example of the ways that African-Americans were intimidated. Of course, we all know about the Jim Crow laws. Right? I left this presentation determined to buy Blackmon's book, but all the venues were out of their supply; I'll have to order it later.

Tom and I later met up for a poetry reading that ended with two very moving poems by Patricia Smith. The last one, written for the 34 victims left behind in a nursing home during Hurricane Katrina, brought tears to my eyes.