August 9, 2007
I drink tap water. In the fridge there’s always a full pitcher, plus several refilled plastic bottles ready for the car and the backpack. Until recently, there’s never been any particular principle for my doing this, except the pleasure principle.
Improbable as it seems, New York City water is delicious, if such a word can be applied to water at all. Crisp and neutral-tasting, it comes to us from snow-pack and rainfall in the Catskill Mountains a hundred miles to the northwest. It is held in a network of reservoirs buffered by city-owned forest land to protect them from encroaching development and its pollutants. It travels to the city through one huge tunnel, propelled almost exclusively by the force of gravity. This water is so pure that last week the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency granted a ten-year waiver of the federal requirement that all drinking water be filtered. Only four other large cities also qualified for the exemption: Boston, Seattle, Portland, Ore., and San Francisco.
The present system began in 1842 with the Croton Reservoir in nearby Westchester County, and was gradually expanded to include 19 reservoirs and three lakes. It now provides a billion gallons of water a day to New York City and other communities in its area.
On hot summer days, some New Yorkers still find ways to open what are supposed to be tamper-proof fire hydrants, sending tons of pristine mountain water to the sewers. When I first came to New York from drought-ridden Southern California in the 1990’s, I was appalled by this practice. I soon discovered that opening fire hydrants was a summer tradition, like stickball.
Even with a municipal swimming pool nearby, nothing was surer to start a spontaneous block party than a gushing hydrant. Little public thought was apparently given to the dangers involved: Open hydrants lower water pressure, and too many open at once keep both firefighters and people in upper-floor apartments from getting the water they need. In addition, every summer a number of children were injured or even killed by the powerful, natural force of water seeking its level.
In my first sweltering summer here, I was on Lafayette Street in Greenwich Village, where a short, bare-chested man with a can of Bud and a cigarette in one hand and a pipe-wrench in the other stood by a gushing hydrant. "Why are you wasting all this water?" I asked indignantly. "Because I want to," he snarled. Welcome to New York.
In the late 1990’s, in the face of a severe drought, this revered custom was challenged by Mayor Giuliani. Some hydrants were fitted with caps that only a special key could open, and others with sprinklers that provided a gentle spray for kids to play in. People found ways around both. Here in the Bronx, it is still common to find open hydrants manned by dads and grandpas, knocking kids down and giving spontaneous car-washes to passing traffic. I’ve gotten many a wash myself this way, before calling the Fire Department to report a violation.
While driving past open hydrants for my car-wash, I often notice people cooling their feet in the ready-made river and drinking, of all things, bottled water.
Native New Yorkers of a certain age are still very proud of the quality of their water. Even when the city was crumbling a decade or two ago, they’d say, "Well, at least the water is still great." Consumer Reports magazine, based in nearby Yonkers, runs blind tastings of pricy bottled waters along with a selection of municipal sources; almost invariably, NYC tap comes out on top.
But people here, as everywhere, have developed a fixation on the water bottle. It is their constant companion, filling the psychological place that smoking had in more innocent times: a momentary distraction, a break in consciousness from whatever thought or action happens to be happening. And it seems just as addictive, maybe even moreso because of its acceptability. In my church, no less, it is now common to see people, including choir members, readers, ushers, and even the priest himself nipping at their bottles all through the service.
I suppose, as the bottled-water industry marketers say, it’s better to be addicted to water than to all those other substances we compulsively put in our mouths. But why not just refill the bottles you already have with tap water?
It would save money, for one thing. The mayor’s office, which has recently started a campaign to promote New York’s fine liquid product, points out that drinking your recommended eight twelve-ounce glasses of water a day will cost $1,400 a year if you go bottled, and 49 cents if you go faucet. And considering that many of the top-selling waters like Aquafina are, as Aquafina’s label abbreviates, "Bottled at the Source P.W.S." - Public Water Supply - it’s hard to imagine why otherwise savvy shoppers would choose the stuff from the store.
There are other costs involved too, including the impact of plastic bottles on the environment, from manufacture to shipping to disposal, and the grim fact that 60 percent of the world’s population has no reliable access to safe drinking water.
Bottled water is one of those issues that people never thought was an issue. Slowly we are putting the pieces together and beginning to discover that it is.
I’ve been drinking New York City tap water on the pleasure principle. Now other principles are entering in.
Sunday, August 17, 2008
MILWAUKEE'S FINEST
August 2, 2007
MILWAUKEE - Wisconsin Avenue, Milwaukee’s Main Street, is anchored by two radically different structures, the Pabst Mansion on the west and the Milwaukee Art Museum complex on the east. They’re tales of two cities.
A family wedding brought me back here after years away. The Milwaukee I remember from long-ago visits probably remains the rest of the country’s stereotypical image, the town that beer made famous. Miller, Blatz, Schlitz, Pabst all had their major operations right downtown, and the first thing you did as a tourist was take a brewery tour or two, or three. You’d creep along the catwalk, peering at the enormous steel holding tanks, taking in the sweet smell of fermenting grains and watching the clattering march of bottles, cans, and kegs being filled and capped. Then you’d hit the tasting room and leave with a souvenir mug or coaster set.
You can still take a tour at Miller’s, as well as at a couple upstart micro-breweries, but the rest of the Big Guys are all gone. The last vestige of the old Pabst Brewery, its skyscraping brick chimney, is now half-dismantled; the huge vertical lettering on its side has been shaved down to "BST."
To fully appreciate the Era of Beer, visitors should make a point of touring the residence of Frederick Pabst, the mastermind of macro-brewing and macro-marketing in the nineteenth century.
What Rockefeller was to oil, Pabst was to beer. A German immigrant, he worked steamers on Lake Michigan until he married into the family of Phillip Best, who owned a small brewery in Milwaukee. In 1864, at age 28, Pabst bought a half interest in the Best Brewing Company and embarked on an ingenious expansion plan that included not only beer but all the German Gemütlichkeit that surrounds beer. By 1889, when he bought the rest of the company and changed its name to his own, Pabst had built a nationwide distribution system, a vast chain of taverns, several restaurants and resorts, and prestigious hotels from New York to San Francisco.
In 1892 he moved his family from their modest dwelling on the brewery grounds into an opulent new home on what was then aptly called Grand Avenue, Milwaukee’s Mansion Row. He also moved the Pabst Pavilion - an ornate, glass-domed basilica to beer that had showcased Pabst products at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago - next to his house, to be used as the family sun room.
Frederick Pabst died in 1904, his wife two years later. In 1908, the family sold the property to the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Milwaukee for the residence of its own potentate, the archbishop. Ironically, the pavilion, lavishly adorned with terra-cotta hop vines, beer steins, and statues of the mythical gods of brew-making, was converted into a chapel.
Over the years, the neighborhood disintegrated. Most of the elegant mansions were razed and replaced with offices, stores and low-income housing. Fortunately, by the time the archdiocese decided to vacate, the preservationist movement had taken hold, and in 1975 the property was transferred to a non-profit organization which has been restoring the mansion to its original condition and furnishings.
That’s one Milwaukee, and other than the Mansion there isn’t much left of it, except for what is called Old World Third Street toward the city center. There you still find Usinger’s sausage store and Mader’s German restaurant with its oaken interior, its waiters in liederhosen, and its dense menu of pork, dumplings, and red cabbage.
At the opposite end of Wisconsin Avenue, on the shore of Lake Michigan, is the symbol of the new Milwaukee, the Museum complex. Pabst built more than his share of civic structures in his time - the Pabst Building and the Pabst Theater are still downtown landmarks - but this cluster of buildings is something he could scarcely have imagined.
The edifices he commissioned were of his day - weighty, dark, ornate, symbols of power and amassed wealth. The museum buildings defy gravity and capture light and air. The War Memorial Center, designed by the Finnish architect Eero Saarinen and opened in 1957, is a stark rectangle of concrete, floating on cantilevered stilts. Adjoining it is the building that put Milwaukee on the international architectural map, the Quadracci Pavilion. This masterpiece by Santiago Calatrava of Spain is a cavern of concrete and glass 90 feet high, shaded by its signature "wings" that open and close like an umbrella. Photos of the place cannot do it justice; it is a dynamic of light and movement that must be experienced, and it’s reason enough to visit Milwaukee.
Between the mansion and the museum is a revitalizing center city, with apartments, shops, and restaurants replacing the breweries and grimy factories that for so long lined the Milwaukee River that the town was built around. Except for Frederick Pabst and his crowd, the Good Old Days weren’t as good as this.
To me, one sign of a healthy community is bookstores, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that despite the encroachment of the national chains, the locals are holding their own. Besides the five-store chain of Harry W. Schwartz Bookshops, there are several used-book specialists downtown, including the cluttered Renaissance on Plankington Avenue and the scrupulously ordered Downtown Books on Wisconsin, to which I immediately became addicted.
Summer outdoor entertainment is extraordinary. The weekends are filled with festivals reflecting the city’s ethnic diversity: German, of course, but also French, Italian, Mexican, American Indian, African, Polish, Arab. Something for everybody.
Two Milwaukees - one to imagine nostalgically, and one to get to know.
MILWAUKEE - Wisconsin Avenue, Milwaukee’s Main Street, is anchored by two radically different structures, the Pabst Mansion on the west and the Milwaukee Art Museum complex on the east. They’re tales of two cities.
A family wedding brought me back here after years away. The Milwaukee I remember from long-ago visits probably remains the rest of the country’s stereotypical image, the town that beer made famous. Miller, Blatz, Schlitz, Pabst all had their major operations right downtown, and the first thing you did as a tourist was take a brewery tour or two, or three. You’d creep along the catwalk, peering at the enormous steel holding tanks, taking in the sweet smell of fermenting grains and watching the clattering march of bottles, cans, and kegs being filled and capped. Then you’d hit the tasting room and leave with a souvenir mug or coaster set.
You can still take a tour at Miller’s, as well as at a couple upstart micro-breweries, but the rest of the Big Guys are all gone. The last vestige of the old Pabst Brewery, its skyscraping brick chimney, is now half-dismantled; the huge vertical lettering on its side has been shaved down to "BST."
To fully appreciate the Era of Beer, visitors should make a point of touring the residence of Frederick Pabst, the mastermind of macro-brewing and macro-marketing in the nineteenth century.
What Rockefeller was to oil, Pabst was to beer. A German immigrant, he worked steamers on Lake Michigan until he married into the family of Phillip Best, who owned a small brewery in Milwaukee. In 1864, at age 28, Pabst bought a half interest in the Best Brewing Company and embarked on an ingenious expansion plan that included not only beer but all the German Gemütlichkeit that surrounds beer. By 1889, when he bought the rest of the company and changed its name to his own, Pabst had built a nationwide distribution system, a vast chain of taverns, several restaurants and resorts, and prestigious hotels from New York to San Francisco.
In 1892 he moved his family from their modest dwelling on the brewery grounds into an opulent new home on what was then aptly called Grand Avenue, Milwaukee’s Mansion Row. He also moved the Pabst Pavilion - an ornate, glass-domed basilica to beer that had showcased Pabst products at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago - next to his house, to be used as the family sun room.
Frederick Pabst died in 1904, his wife two years later. In 1908, the family sold the property to the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Milwaukee for the residence of its own potentate, the archbishop. Ironically, the pavilion, lavishly adorned with terra-cotta hop vines, beer steins, and statues of the mythical gods of brew-making, was converted into a chapel.
Over the years, the neighborhood disintegrated. Most of the elegant mansions were razed and replaced with offices, stores and low-income housing. Fortunately, by the time the archdiocese decided to vacate, the preservationist movement had taken hold, and in 1975 the property was transferred to a non-profit organization which has been restoring the mansion to its original condition and furnishings.
That’s one Milwaukee, and other than the Mansion there isn’t much left of it, except for what is called Old World Third Street toward the city center. There you still find Usinger’s sausage store and Mader’s German restaurant with its oaken interior, its waiters in liederhosen, and its dense menu of pork, dumplings, and red cabbage.
At the opposite end of Wisconsin Avenue, on the shore of Lake Michigan, is the symbol of the new Milwaukee, the Museum complex. Pabst built more than his share of civic structures in his time - the Pabst Building and the Pabst Theater are still downtown landmarks - but this cluster of buildings is something he could scarcely have imagined.
The edifices he commissioned were of his day - weighty, dark, ornate, symbols of power and amassed wealth. The museum buildings defy gravity and capture light and air. The War Memorial Center, designed by the Finnish architect Eero Saarinen and opened in 1957, is a stark rectangle of concrete, floating on cantilevered stilts. Adjoining it is the building that put Milwaukee on the international architectural map, the Quadracci Pavilion. This masterpiece by Santiago Calatrava of Spain is a cavern of concrete and glass 90 feet high, shaded by its signature "wings" that open and close like an umbrella. Photos of the place cannot do it justice; it is a dynamic of light and movement that must be experienced, and it’s reason enough to visit Milwaukee.
Between the mansion and the museum is a revitalizing center city, with apartments, shops, and restaurants replacing the breweries and grimy factories that for so long lined the Milwaukee River that the town was built around. Except for Frederick Pabst and his crowd, the Good Old Days weren’t as good as this.
To me, one sign of a healthy community is bookstores, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that despite the encroachment of the national chains, the locals are holding their own. Besides the five-store chain of Harry W. Schwartz Bookshops, there are several used-book specialists downtown, including the cluttered Renaissance on Plankington Avenue and the scrupulously ordered Downtown Books on Wisconsin, to which I immediately became addicted.
Summer outdoor entertainment is extraordinary. The weekends are filled with festivals reflecting the city’s ethnic diversity: German, of course, but also French, Italian, Mexican, American Indian, African, Polish, Arab. Something for everybody.
Two Milwaukees - one to imagine nostalgically, and one to get to know.
WHAT WOULD T.R. DO?
July 18, 2007
Well, what would you do about Iraq? Go ahead: fantasize, free-associate, be imaginative, develop your own scenario. Your ideas are just about as good as those of the President, the candidates, the legislators, the generals, the so-called intelligence community, the media commentators, and the professors and ex-operatives who’ve written all those books that everybody talks about but nobody reads.
Remember "Stay the course"? It used to be Bush’s mantra of gritty resolve, contrasted with the wimpish "Cut and run." Now it’s an apt description of national immobility - foreign policy on autopilot, mere maintenance, acknowledgment of helpless stuckness. You know where Condi Rice has been lately? Staying on the golf course.
Though the President discarded "Stay the course" some months ago in favor of "creative engagement" or whatever he called it, he continues to repeat the word "victory." He once had a personal definition of victory, remember? - "An Iraq that can govern itself, sustain itself, and defend itself." But he’s gone minimalist lately; the word "victory" just dangles there out of his mouth, alone, a beautiful Cartesian self-evident truth. Victory is victory.
The problem with the word "victory" is that it is a war-word. And the problem with the country as a whole, from the politicians to the generals to the media to the man in the street, is that it thinks it is at war when it is not.
Yes, there once was a war in Iraq. It took place in 2003, beginning with the invasion and ending with the capture of Saddam Hussein. "Mission accomplished," the banner on that aircraft carrier proclaimed. We won the war four years ago.
Then came the period of occupation, the deployment of forces to maintain order while elections were held, a new government was created and recognized, a constitution was devised, and an army and police force were re-formed. Had those steps resulted in an Iraq that could govern itself, sustain itself, and defend itself, the occupation would have ended right there. The troops would have gone home, proud that another mission for good had been accomplished.
But that has not yet happened, nor is there much hope that under present circumstances it ever will. The work of the armed forces in the reconstituted Iraq is mostly policing, holding together what we keep telling ourselves is an autonomous government and an independent nation, while caught in the middle of multiplying factions waging their own mini-wars against each other, and us if we’re in the way.
With policing, as every cop from New York to L.A. knows, there is no such thing as victory. Fighting crime is forever. The only question for us in Iraq now seems to be: How long will we let forever go on? And on that question, everyone is paralyzed.
Just look at the Congress, with its dozens of bills floated but unpassed: immediate withdrawal, drawdown in 120 days, wait till October and see, pull into enclaves to protect the borders, draw up some more benchmarks and see, etc., etc. The only bills that pass are the full-funding ones, continuing the vicious circle.
To break the impasse, one must look again at why the Bush administration invaded Iraq in the first place. As we all know now, the weapons of mass destruction were just a pretext. The invasion was primarily a social experiment, an attempt by the neoconservative cabal to implement their utopian conviction that given the opportunity, all human beings will naturally choose democracy. Like all utopias, the experiment died a-borning. Democracies are not natural; they must be formed in a society’s collective mind over decades. Still clinging to the naïve hope that given enough time, Iraq can form itself into a model democracy for the Middle East, the great superpower has tied its own hands.
Given the possible alternatives of withdrawal - social chaos or radical Islamic takeover - why not consider the opposite approach: good old-fashioned American imperialism?
Bush says he admires Theodore Roosevelt. What would T.R. do in Iraq? Typical of his era, he was unafraid to take over countries and shape them to his purposes. This is a venerable American tradition, from the Monroe Doctrine forward. As he did with Panama and across Latin America, he’d depose the Iraqi government, set up a puppet regime to serve American interests, have the opposition disposed of, appropriate the oil fields, put everything under his thumb - in short, colonize Iraq.
Maybe it’s time to quit accommodating and just take over. To hell with those benchmarks; install a government that will do what we want it to do, now. To hell with the "surge," too; it’s emblematic of the chronic short-term thinking that has plagued this project from the start.
If the President had all the guts and resolution he always claims to have, he’d set before the people a 20-year plan for the pacification and reconstruction of Iraq.
Forget "embedding" a few U.S. troops in that clownish Iraqi army; make it a subset of our own. Commit all the forces possible, and immediately reinstate the draft to guarantee a long-term supply.
At the same time, give Iraq a New Deal, a massive Marshall Plan. Put everybody to work, WPA-style; fill the universities with American visiting professors of economics, political philosophy, and law; replace Halliburton with real businesses, foreign and domestic, large and small. And as partial payment, make every drop of oil the property of the U.S. government, with the oil companies as contractors.
The neocons thought that an Iraq free of Saddam would Americanize itself. They were wrong. Only America can Americanize Iraq. Make it a possession like Hawaii was - or California, for that matter. Teach them to think like Americans, show them how to play baseball, and give them their freedom when we’re satisfied they can handle it.
American imperialism just ain’t what it used to be. If you’re going to invade a country, do it right and do it all.
Now there’s a fantasy for you. Got any better ideas?
Well, what would you do about Iraq? Go ahead: fantasize, free-associate, be imaginative, develop your own scenario. Your ideas are just about as good as those of the President, the candidates, the legislators, the generals, the so-called intelligence community, the media commentators, and the professors and ex-operatives who’ve written all those books that everybody talks about but nobody reads.
Remember "Stay the course"? It used to be Bush’s mantra of gritty resolve, contrasted with the wimpish "Cut and run." Now it’s an apt description of national immobility - foreign policy on autopilot, mere maintenance, acknowledgment of helpless stuckness. You know where Condi Rice has been lately? Staying on the golf course.
Though the President discarded "Stay the course" some months ago in favor of "creative engagement" or whatever he called it, he continues to repeat the word "victory." He once had a personal definition of victory, remember? - "An Iraq that can govern itself, sustain itself, and defend itself." But he’s gone minimalist lately; the word "victory" just dangles there out of his mouth, alone, a beautiful Cartesian self-evident truth. Victory is victory.
The problem with the word "victory" is that it is a war-word. And the problem with the country as a whole, from the politicians to the generals to the media to the man in the street, is that it thinks it is at war when it is not.
Yes, there once was a war in Iraq. It took place in 2003, beginning with the invasion and ending with the capture of Saddam Hussein. "Mission accomplished," the banner on that aircraft carrier proclaimed. We won the war four years ago.
Then came the period of occupation, the deployment of forces to maintain order while elections were held, a new government was created and recognized, a constitution was devised, and an army and police force were re-formed. Had those steps resulted in an Iraq that could govern itself, sustain itself, and defend itself, the occupation would have ended right there. The troops would have gone home, proud that another mission for good had been accomplished.
But that has not yet happened, nor is there much hope that under present circumstances it ever will. The work of the armed forces in the reconstituted Iraq is mostly policing, holding together what we keep telling ourselves is an autonomous government and an independent nation, while caught in the middle of multiplying factions waging their own mini-wars against each other, and us if we’re in the way.
With policing, as every cop from New York to L.A. knows, there is no such thing as victory. Fighting crime is forever. The only question for us in Iraq now seems to be: How long will we let forever go on? And on that question, everyone is paralyzed.
Just look at the Congress, with its dozens of bills floated but unpassed: immediate withdrawal, drawdown in 120 days, wait till October and see, pull into enclaves to protect the borders, draw up some more benchmarks and see, etc., etc. The only bills that pass are the full-funding ones, continuing the vicious circle.
To break the impasse, one must look again at why the Bush administration invaded Iraq in the first place. As we all know now, the weapons of mass destruction were just a pretext. The invasion was primarily a social experiment, an attempt by the neoconservative cabal to implement their utopian conviction that given the opportunity, all human beings will naturally choose democracy. Like all utopias, the experiment died a-borning. Democracies are not natural; they must be formed in a society’s collective mind over decades. Still clinging to the naïve hope that given enough time, Iraq can form itself into a model democracy for the Middle East, the great superpower has tied its own hands.
Given the possible alternatives of withdrawal - social chaos or radical Islamic takeover - why not consider the opposite approach: good old-fashioned American imperialism?
Bush says he admires Theodore Roosevelt. What would T.R. do in Iraq? Typical of his era, he was unafraid to take over countries and shape them to his purposes. This is a venerable American tradition, from the Monroe Doctrine forward. As he did with Panama and across Latin America, he’d depose the Iraqi government, set up a puppet regime to serve American interests, have the opposition disposed of, appropriate the oil fields, put everything under his thumb - in short, colonize Iraq.
Maybe it’s time to quit accommodating and just take over. To hell with those benchmarks; install a government that will do what we want it to do, now. To hell with the "surge," too; it’s emblematic of the chronic short-term thinking that has plagued this project from the start.
If the President had all the guts and resolution he always claims to have, he’d set before the people a 20-year plan for the pacification and reconstruction of Iraq.
Forget "embedding" a few U.S. troops in that clownish Iraqi army; make it a subset of our own. Commit all the forces possible, and immediately reinstate the draft to guarantee a long-term supply.
At the same time, give Iraq a New Deal, a massive Marshall Plan. Put everybody to work, WPA-style; fill the universities with American visiting professors of economics, political philosophy, and law; replace Halliburton with real businesses, foreign and domestic, large and small. And as partial payment, make every drop of oil the property of the U.S. government, with the oil companies as contractors.
The neocons thought that an Iraq free of Saddam would Americanize itself. They were wrong. Only America can Americanize Iraq. Make it a possession like Hawaii was - or California, for that matter. Teach them to think like Americans, show them how to play baseball, and give them their freedom when we’re satisfied they can handle it.
American imperialism just ain’t what it used to be. If you’re going to invade a country, do it right and do it all.
Now there’s a fantasy for you. Got any better ideas?
HEALTH CARE AT THE BATES MOTEL
July 5, 2007
Sicko. When I first saw the title of Michael Moore’s new movie on the state of health care at home and abroad, I thought: Uh-oh, he’s doing it again, squandering an opportunity to be a real player in a critical national issue by veering to his base of leftist absurdists and letting the right write him off as the Holy Fool. Why not call it something less flippant, more engaging, more Al Gore-like? Well, maybe not.
Moore likes allusions to the classics. His last work, Fahrenheit 9/11, was a faint thematic echo of Ray Bradbury’s dystopic book and film. Sicko may well be a distant accolade to Alfred Hitchcock. Perhaps he wants our subconscious to imagine the American health care "system" as a gargantuan Bates Motel, with the insurance companies as the bloodthirsty proprietors and the federal government as their embalmed mother.
However off-putting the title may be to some, the topic itself is so timely that the movie may draw the curious of all persuasions into the theaters just to see what Moore does with it - or to it.
They won’t be disappointed. Aesthetically, the film is great satire, pitting irony against irony at every turn. Politically, it is provocative in the best sense, challenging the country and its leaders to quit dancing around the question and face it head-on: Why not universal health care?
Moore began his project with a simple little inquiry on his website, michaelmoore.com: If you’ve had any problems with your health insurance, contact me. Within weeks, e-mail responses ran to the tens of thousands. With his characteristic genius for culling through mountains of data to find the perfect illustrations, he selected witnesses with both telling cases and good camera presence, people like you and me with stories like yours and mine. Among them are a middle-aged couple forced into bankruptcy by life-threatening diseases, moving in with one of their children; a wiry, wry retiree working as a supermarket janitor to meet his drug expenses; a bearded, good-natured craftsman who cut off two of his finger-tips at his table saw and left them that way rather than pay the $75,000 his insurance company wouldn’t; a sampling of ailing 9/11 rescue volunteers excluded from the government’s paltry compensation plan; and the wide-spread news story of the deranged indigent woman dropped off at the door of the Union Rescue Mission in L.A. by Kaiser Permanente Hospital.
Unlike his previous films, Moore made no attempt to barge into the offices of the corporate big shots to gather embarrassing off-the-cuff comments, mostly because he didn’t have to: Insurance company employees were coming out of the woodwork by the hundreds with plenty of heart-rending tales of their own: There is, for example, the young customer service rep, tearfully describing her daily agony of knowing that her desperate applicants would be denied coverage because of preexisting conditions; and then the former adjustor burdened with guilt over the thousands of people whose claims he rejected - and received bonuses for.
Also unlike Moore’s other movies, this one actually shows a very bright side to the issue - unfortunately, he has to go across the border to find it, always with a clever segue. First he drops up to Canada, where a single mother from Detroit has established a common-law marriage of convenience with an acquaintance and drives up as needed for checkups and treatment for herself and her daughter. Then he flies off to England, where an American Beatles fan who broke his arm while attempting a somersault across Abbey Road (all documented on a friend’s home video) found to his amazement that the British National Health Service fixed him up immediately, for free. Then down to France, where young American expatriates relax with Moore in a lovely restaurant, telling stories of French health care complete with doctors who make house calls and nannies supplied by the government not only to do child-care but the laundry too - all without a bill.
And finally, across to Cuba, where Moore loads his dispirited 9/11 volunteers onto a motorboat, sails within bullhorn distance of the Guantanamo prison, and pleads for admittance, since Pentagon officials had proudly testified that the enemy combatants there receive top-notch medical care, including dentistry, eyeglasses, and routine annual colonoscopies, at full government expense. Failing that, he takes them to a Havana hospital, where they are welcomed effusively and are given all the MRI’s and dental work and medications denied them in the U.S.A.
The Cuban episode is a reversion to those stretch-the-truth shenanigans of his earlier works, quite obviously contrived and thus the weakest part of the film. It is also the cleverest.
After all this, Moore pops his simple question. He reminds us of all the public things that benefit us throughout our lives and over which there is no controversy: free public education, free public libraries, free public museums, free public fire and police protection. Why not, he asks, free public health care?
Of course, for all of the above, "free" is never really free, and Moore, the polemicist, sidesteps the problems of financing and cost-containment both abroad and at home. What he does do is to brilliantly illustrate the real meaning of "free" in these cases: The complete leveling of society, where rich and poor have equal access to those things essential to human well-being. Yes, taxes are higher in countries with universal health care, but most of their citizens agree that it’s a small price to pay for peace of mind.
As the population ages, there is more and more general sentiment in favor of universal health care. Nevertheless, it will take a popular revolt, led by visionary public officials, to break the back of big insurance and big pharmaceutical. This is not forthcoming - just review the half-hearted positions of the major precedential candidates on the issue, all of whom are beholden to the drug and insurance lobbies.
In the final scene, Michael Moore, that corpulent gadfly with the basset-hound eyes, lumbers up the steps of the U.S. Capitol with his bag of dirty laundry. If the French can do it, why can’t we?
Sicko. When I first saw the title of Michael Moore’s new movie on the state of health care at home and abroad, I thought: Uh-oh, he’s doing it again, squandering an opportunity to be a real player in a critical national issue by veering to his base of leftist absurdists and letting the right write him off as the Holy Fool. Why not call it something less flippant, more engaging, more Al Gore-like? Well, maybe not.
Moore likes allusions to the classics. His last work, Fahrenheit 9/11, was a faint thematic echo of Ray Bradbury’s dystopic book and film. Sicko may well be a distant accolade to Alfred Hitchcock. Perhaps he wants our subconscious to imagine the American health care "system" as a gargantuan Bates Motel, with the insurance companies as the bloodthirsty proprietors and the federal government as their embalmed mother.
However off-putting the title may be to some, the topic itself is so timely that the movie may draw the curious of all persuasions into the theaters just to see what Moore does with it - or to it.
They won’t be disappointed. Aesthetically, the film is great satire, pitting irony against irony at every turn. Politically, it is provocative in the best sense, challenging the country and its leaders to quit dancing around the question and face it head-on: Why not universal health care?
Moore began his project with a simple little inquiry on his website, michaelmoore.com: If you’ve had any problems with your health insurance, contact me. Within weeks, e-mail responses ran to the tens of thousands. With his characteristic genius for culling through mountains of data to find the perfect illustrations, he selected witnesses with both telling cases and good camera presence, people like you and me with stories like yours and mine. Among them are a middle-aged couple forced into bankruptcy by life-threatening diseases, moving in with one of their children; a wiry, wry retiree working as a supermarket janitor to meet his drug expenses; a bearded, good-natured craftsman who cut off two of his finger-tips at his table saw and left them that way rather than pay the $75,000 his insurance company wouldn’t; a sampling of ailing 9/11 rescue volunteers excluded from the government’s paltry compensation plan; and the wide-spread news story of the deranged indigent woman dropped off at the door of the Union Rescue Mission in L.A. by Kaiser Permanente Hospital.
Unlike his previous films, Moore made no attempt to barge into the offices of the corporate big shots to gather embarrassing off-the-cuff comments, mostly because he didn’t have to: Insurance company employees were coming out of the woodwork by the hundreds with plenty of heart-rending tales of their own: There is, for example, the young customer service rep, tearfully describing her daily agony of knowing that her desperate applicants would be denied coverage because of preexisting conditions; and then the former adjustor burdened with guilt over the thousands of people whose claims he rejected - and received bonuses for.
Also unlike Moore’s other movies, this one actually shows a very bright side to the issue - unfortunately, he has to go across the border to find it, always with a clever segue. First he drops up to Canada, where a single mother from Detroit has established a common-law marriage of convenience with an acquaintance and drives up as needed for checkups and treatment for herself and her daughter. Then he flies off to England, where an American Beatles fan who broke his arm while attempting a somersault across Abbey Road (all documented on a friend’s home video) found to his amazement that the British National Health Service fixed him up immediately, for free. Then down to France, where young American expatriates relax with Moore in a lovely restaurant, telling stories of French health care complete with doctors who make house calls and nannies supplied by the government not only to do child-care but the laundry too - all without a bill.
And finally, across to Cuba, where Moore loads his dispirited 9/11 volunteers onto a motorboat, sails within bullhorn distance of the Guantanamo prison, and pleads for admittance, since Pentagon officials had proudly testified that the enemy combatants there receive top-notch medical care, including dentistry, eyeglasses, and routine annual colonoscopies, at full government expense. Failing that, he takes them to a Havana hospital, where they are welcomed effusively and are given all the MRI’s and dental work and medications denied them in the U.S.A.
The Cuban episode is a reversion to those stretch-the-truth shenanigans of his earlier works, quite obviously contrived and thus the weakest part of the film. It is also the cleverest.
After all this, Moore pops his simple question. He reminds us of all the public things that benefit us throughout our lives and over which there is no controversy: free public education, free public libraries, free public museums, free public fire and police protection. Why not, he asks, free public health care?
Of course, for all of the above, "free" is never really free, and Moore, the polemicist, sidesteps the problems of financing and cost-containment both abroad and at home. What he does do is to brilliantly illustrate the real meaning of "free" in these cases: The complete leveling of society, where rich and poor have equal access to those things essential to human well-being. Yes, taxes are higher in countries with universal health care, but most of their citizens agree that it’s a small price to pay for peace of mind.
As the population ages, there is more and more general sentiment in favor of universal health care. Nevertheless, it will take a popular revolt, led by visionary public officials, to break the back of big insurance and big pharmaceutical. This is not forthcoming - just review the half-hearted positions of the major precedential candidates on the issue, all of whom are beholden to the drug and insurance lobbies.
In the final scene, Michael Moore, that corpulent gadfly with the basset-hound eyes, lumbers up the steps of the U.S. Capitol with his bag of dirty laundry. If the French can do it, why can’t we?
MAYOR MIKE MAKES A MOVE
June 28, 2007
It was hardly a surprise to New Yorkers that Mayor Michael Bloomberg dropped out of the Republican party last week. He had dropped in to it only six years ago, not because he bought the ideological package but just because he wanted to be mayor.
Assessing his chances as a Democrat with no previous political experience, he cut his ties with the party in 2001, registered as a Republican, and let four seasoned New York politicians follow the customary Democratic pattern of eating each other up in the primaries. Meanwhile, he outspent and outspoke his lone Republican primary opponent, the tired political hack Herman Badillo, and won handily. He then sat back and watched the two surviving Democrats, Fernando Ferrer and Mark Green, go at it again in a runoff.
Despite a fractured and financially drained Democratic opposition and his targeted, multimillion-dollar campaign, his was a very long shot. In June of 2001 he’d gotten a tepid endorsement from Mayor Rudolph Giuliani ("Yes, sure, I think he’s qualified to be mayor," Giuliani said at the time; "he has a lot of managerial experience."), but after two terms of dictatorial rule, the mayor had so polarized the city that his endorsement might actually have been Bloomberg’s kiss of death. The dynamic changed after Tuesday, September 11 (the scheduled date of the primary, subsequently delayed for two weeks). Now a civic hero, Giuliani re-endorsed Bloomberg, which did the trick - though not by much. In a city where Democrats outnumber Republicans four to one, he barely eked past Green in the general election.
Four years later, things were the same, only different. As the primaries approached, Ferrer and Green were eating each other up yet again, but by then Bloomberg was far above the fray. This time it was Ferrer that he beat, and by a landslide. Even in the Bronx, where Ferrer had been a popular borough president, and among Latinos, his ethnic base, his showing was unexpectedly weak. Mayor Mike, as the tabloids were now affectionately calling him, had proven himself to the people.
Rudy’s dismissive comment in early 2001 was inadvertently prescient. Bloomberg’s managerial experience turned the city around. He eliminated an inherited $6.4 billion deficit by streamlining city government and boldly, and un-Republicanly, raising taxes. He furthered Giuliani’s success in reducing crime but did it coolly and collaboratively, without the abrasion and confrontation of his predecessor. He took control of the Board of Education, something that previous mayors had found impossible, and made substantial gains in reforming the bureaucracy-bound public school system, actually improving education in the process. He committed city resources to affordable housing, sparking a building boom here in the Bronx and in the other boroughs. And showing his aesthetic side, he invited the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude to mount, at their own expense, "The Gates in Central Park," a project that previous mayors had scorned for 20 years. Those 7,500 orange banners packed the hotels in the bleak midwinter of 2005, filling city coffers with tax money and reinvigorating the worldwide tourist trade.
Like all good managers, he achieved his goals by hiring the most talented people for his team instead of doling out plums to his cronies. And like the best of managers, he did everything with elan, an appealing, level-headed optimism that has brought almost the whole city on board. Astonishing in the bruising world of New York politics, he has his critics but hardly an enemy.
He’s even defused Al Sharpton.
No wonder some people are thinking president. After the sinister secrecy and administrative incompetency of the Bush years, and the prolonged partisan deadlock in Congress, it is most refreshing to imagine, if only for an instant, a national leader who is straightforward, creative, non-ideological, practical, and collaborative, with a crackerjack cabinet of non-partisan experts and a national agenda with the nation in mind.
It is the overwhelming disgust of party pettiness and the longing for a politics of principle from a no-nonsense pragmatist that may make a Bloomberg bid realistic. Outsider candidates of recent memory - George Wallace, Ross Perot, and Ralph Nader, yes, but also party dissidents like Dennis Kucinich and Howard Dean - ignited enthusiasm from a broad spectrum of Americans searching for an alternative, but they all failed because there was something vaguely or plainly kooky about them. There is nothing kooky about Michael Bloomberg.
And nothing quixotic, either. This is a man with an uncanny sense of political timing. He’s like a star running-back, able to see a hole in the line and shoot right through it to the goal. And because he can finance an entire national campaign all by himself, he can afford to do just as he did in 2001: sit back and let the party candidates eat each other up. If he sees a hole after the February primaries, he may make a run for it. (This must be scaring the dress off Rudy, who was recently beaten by Bloomberg 56 to 29 percent in a poll of New Yorkers by the Daily News as to who was the more effective mayor.)
Meanwhile, he will go on being mayor of New York, pushing his long-term proposals for a safer and greener city, setting out broader ideas on domestic and foreign policy for his now wider audience, and building a coalition of notable backers dissatisfied with their parties’ inflexibility and impotence. Judging from the warm words and the cover of Time magazine from last week,
Arnold Schwarzenegger may be one of the first on board.
It remains to be seen if Mayor Mike will play as well in Ohio and Alabama as he’s playing in New York. He hardly knows that himself at this point. But his detachment from party apparatus - and a net worth of $5 billion or so - will at the very least allow him the freedom to shape the national discourse uniquely, and positively.
Watch him.
It was hardly a surprise to New Yorkers that Mayor Michael Bloomberg dropped out of the Republican party last week. He had dropped in to it only six years ago, not because he bought the ideological package but just because he wanted to be mayor.
Assessing his chances as a Democrat with no previous political experience, he cut his ties with the party in 2001, registered as a Republican, and let four seasoned New York politicians follow the customary Democratic pattern of eating each other up in the primaries. Meanwhile, he outspent and outspoke his lone Republican primary opponent, the tired political hack Herman Badillo, and won handily. He then sat back and watched the two surviving Democrats, Fernando Ferrer and Mark Green, go at it again in a runoff.
Despite a fractured and financially drained Democratic opposition and his targeted, multimillion-dollar campaign, his was a very long shot. In June of 2001 he’d gotten a tepid endorsement from Mayor Rudolph Giuliani ("Yes, sure, I think he’s qualified to be mayor," Giuliani said at the time; "he has a lot of managerial experience."), but after two terms of dictatorial rule, the mayor had so polarized the city that his endorsement might actually have been Bloomberg’s kiss of death. The dynamic changed after Tuesday, September 11 (the scheduled date of the primary, subsequently delayed for two weeks). Now a civic hero, Giuliani re-endorsed Bloomberg, which did the trick - though not by much. In a city where Democrats outnumber Republicans four to one, he barely eked past Green in the general election.
Four years later, things were the same, only different. As the primaries approached, Ferrer and Green were eating each other up yet again, but by then Bloomberg was far above the fray. This time it was Ferrer that he beat, and by a landslide. Even in the Bronx, where Ferrer had been a popular borough president, and among Latinos, his ethnic base, his showing was unexpectedly weak. Mayor Mike, as the tabloids were now affectionately calling him, had proven himself to the people.
Rudy’s dismissive comment in early 2001 was inadvertently prescient. Bloomberg’s managerial experience turned the city around. He eliminated an inherited $6.4 billion deficit by streamlining city government and boldly, and un-Republicanly, raising taxes. He furthered Giuliani’s success in reducing crime but did it coolly and collaboratively, without the abrasion and confrontation of his predecessor. He took control of the Board of Education, something that previous mayors had found impossible, and made substantial gains in reforming the bureaucracy-bound public school system, actually improving education in the process. He committed city resources to affordable housing, sparking a building boom here in the Bronx and in the other boroughs. And showing his aesthetic side, he invited the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude to mount, at their own expense, "The Gates in Central Park," a project that previous mayors had scorned for 20 years. Those 7,500 orange banners packed the hotels in the bleak midwinter of 2005, filling city coffers with tax money and reinvigorating the worldwide tourist trade.
Like all good managers, he achieved his goals by hiring the most talented people for his team instead of doling out plums to his cronies. And like the best of managers, he did everything with elan, an appealing, level-headed optimism that has brought almost the whole city on board. Astonishing in the bruising world of New York politics, he has his critics but hardly an enemy.
He’s even defused Al Sharpton.
No wonder some people are thinking president. After the sinister secrecy and administrative incompetency of the Bush years, and the prolonged partisan deadlock in Congress, it is most refreshing to imagine, if only for an instant, a national leader who is straightforward, creative, non-ideological, practical, and collaborative, with a crackerjack cabinet of non-partisan experts and a national agenda with the nation in mind.
It is the overwhelming disgust of party pettiness and the longing for a politics of principle from a no-nonsense pragmatist that may make a Bloomberg bid realistic. Outsider candidates of recent memory - George Wallace, Ross Perot, and Ralph Nader, yes, but also party dissidents like Dennis Kucinich and Howard Dean - ignited enthusiasm from a broad spectrum of Americans searching for an alternative, but they all failed because there was something vaguely or plainly kooky about them. There is nothing kooky about Michael Bloomberg.
And nothing quixotic, either. This is a man with an uncanny sense of political timing. He’s like a star running-back, able to see a hole in the line and shoot right through it to the goal. And because he can finance an entire national campaign all by himself, he can afford to do just as he did in 2001: sit back and let the party candidates eat each other up. If he sees a hole after the February primaries, he may make a run for it. (This must be scaring the dress off Rudy, who was recently beaten by Bloomberg 56 to 29 percent in a poll of New Yorkers by the Daily News as to who was the more effective mayor.)
Meanwhile, he will go on being mayor of New York, pushing his long-term proposals for a safer and greener city, setting out broader ideas on domestic and foreign policy for his now wider audience, and building a coalition of notable backers dissatisfied with their parties’ inflexibility and impotence. Judging from the warm words and the cover of Time magazine from last week,
Arnold Schwarzenegger may be one of the first on board.
It remains to be seen if Mayor Mike will play as well in Ohio and Alabama as he’s playing in New York. He hardly knows that himself at this point. But his detachment from party apparatus - and a net worth of $5 billion or so - will at the very least allow him the freedom to shape the national discourse uniquely, and positively.
Watch him.
Saturday, August 16, 2008
DOCTORS WITHOUT BORDERS, IN ANTIMATTER
By Roger Repohl
July 9, 2007
THE BRONX, N.Y. - Ten years ago, the shocking news from Britain was the death of Princess Diana. Last week it was the bungled bombings in London’s theater district and at the Glasgow airport. One of Diana’s last humanitarian causes was the care of children maimed by land mines in the Balkans. She, and we, could hardly have thought that a decade later the focus of destruction would shift to her own land.
She also could hardly have thought that this latest plot would be conceived by people trained to save lives, not take them.
The ironies of terrorism continue to astound. Among those arrested or under investigation are an Iraqi physician; a Jordanian neurologist and his wife, a medical technician; an Indian engineer; and several others scattered around the world, most with backgrounds in medicine. It’s Doctors Without Borders in antimatter, sworn to an inverted oath: "First, do harm."
If it weren’t so perverse, it would be funny that all these people with advanced degrees and technological expertise couldn’t perform a death-dealing operation as well as they could a life-giving one. They thought it was as easy to make a bomb as to make a prosthesis, but their hybris did them in.
The whole episode was tragically comic. The makeshift bombs, comprised of gas canisters and bags of nails, were packed into doctor-cars, two late-model Mercedes; the Glasgow assault vehicle was a Jeep Cherokee. Jihad goes upscale. The London plot was foiled by a couple ambulance drivers who noticed smoke inside one of the cars and notified the police. Allegedly, the two doctors who dropped off the cars in London got in their Cherokee and sped 400 miles north to the Glasgow airport, where they avoided the hassle of security check-in by smashing right into the terminal and setting their car and themselves on fire. The movies couldn’t have done it better.
The bizarre bumbling of The Gang That Couldn’t Bomb Straight was a boon for Scotland Yard. They didn’t have to pick through shrapnel and body parts for evidence; they got everything intact, so that after due investigation the cars could well be given to the British Museum to preserve for posterity a cultural artifact of early twenty-first century barbarism.
Using information right at hand in the unexploded cars (apparently not only the vehicle registrations but the cell-phone detonators complete with phone books and call histories) and data from the London street-surveillance cameras and highway licence-plate tracking devices, the police quickly rounded up the unusual suspects, including the two in the Cherokee who couldn’t even commit suicide right and a man in Australia boarding a one-way flight to India. It was a remarkable example of how well-developed and coordinated British and international law enforcement is becoming.
In the space of a few days, Glasgow Airport was back in service and London streets and bars were once again teeming with night-life. It was reminiscent in a small way of stories about the Blitz, where not even Hitler’s bombers could disrupt Londoners’ composure. No panic, no paranoia. The abnormal is normal now. Terrorism is taken in stride as an unpredictable fact of life, something like confronting a natural disaster.
The United States may be learning from the British. Unlike the hyped-up alerts of various colors over the last five years, Homeland Security czar Chertoff quickly advised that there was "no credible evidence" that a similar act would ripple onto American shores.
The greatest mistake of the Bush administration’s response to the 9/11 disaster was the poisoning of the American mind by creating the myth of a "War on Terror." Terrorists in general, and Al Qaeda in particular, all disparate, self-interested cells, were built into a single monster, "The Enemy" - a phantom world power to be confronted militarily, as if it had a unified leadership, a standing army, and a capital somewhere, like Japan at Pearl Harbor. Swayed by this myth, the people and their representatives tremblingly surrendered most of their common sense and some of their civil liberties, backing one hastily-considered military action and civil apparatus after another, from the invasion of Afghanistan to the Patriot Act to the Office of Homeland Security to the occupation of Iraq. Any timid objections based on fact were countered by the incessant mantra, "If we don’t fight the enemy on his ground, we will have to fight him on ours."
The mantra is still being chanted by the President, even as late as last week, but finally it has lost most of its credibility among Americans, just as the President has lost most of his.
The British have rejected this myth. They treat the terrorist threat as a domestic problem, handled by the police and not the military. They also treat it as inevitable, like earthquakes or hurricanes. They use their best technology to detect warning signs and muster their resources to respond to the worst, but in many instances, no one knows the day nor the hour. There are times when good surveillance and good fortune may uncover a plot before it’s hatched, but the dragnet is always full of holes. It is clear from the London/Glasgow case that conspirators in terror come from all over the planet, live quiet, even professional lives under the radar, and then converge for a moment in time.
Sooner or later, it will be America’s turn again. So long as there lives the hatred that moved the antimatter doctors to turn their noble calling on its head, the potential for destruction remains. With vigilance, preparedness, and luck, the worst may be avoided.
July 9, 2007
THE BRONX, N.Y. - Ten years ago, the shocking news from Britain was the death of Princess Diana. Last week it was the bungled bombings in London’s theater district and at the Glasgow airport. One of Diana’s last humanitarian causes was the care of children maimed by land mines in the Balkans. She, and we, could hardly have thought that a decade later the focus of destruction would shift to her own land.
She also could hardly have thought that this latest plot would be conceived by people trained to save lives, not take them.
The ironies of terrorism continue to astound. Among those arrested or under investigation are an Iraqi physician; a Jordanian neurologist and his wife, a medical technician; an Indian engineer; and several others scattered around the world, most with backgrounds in medicine. It’s Doctors Without Borders in antimatter, sworn to an inverted oath: "First, do harm."
If it weren’t so perverse, it would be funny that all these people with advanced degrees and technological expertise couldn’t perform a death-dealing operation as well as they could a life-giving one. They thought it was as easy to make a bomb as to make a prosthesis, but their hybris did them in.
The whole episode was tragically comic. The makeshift bombs, comprised of gas canisters and bags of nails, were packed into doctor-cars, two late-model Mercedes; the Glasgow assault vehicle was a Jeep Cherokee. Jihad goes upscale. The London plot was foiled by a couple ambulance drivers who noticed smoke inside one of the cars and notified the police. Allegedly, the two doctors who dropped off the cars in London got in their Cherokee and sped 400 miles north to the Glasgow airport, where they avoided the hassle of security check-in by smashing right into the terminal and setting their car and themselves on fire. The movies couldn’t have done it better.
The bizarre bumbling of The Gang That Couldn’t Bomb Straight was a boon for Scotland Yard. They didn’t have to pick through shrapnel and body parts for evidence; they got everything intact, so that after due investigation the cars could well be given to the British Museum to preserve for posterity a cultural artifact of early twenty-first century barbarism.
Using information right at hand in the unexploded cars (apparently not only the vehicle registrations but the cell-phone detonators complete with phone books and call histories) and data from the London street-surveillance cameras and highway licence-plate tracking devices, the police quickly rounded up the unusual suspects, including the two in the Cherokee who couldn’t even commit suicide right and a man in Australia boarding a one-way flight to India. It was a remarkable example of how well-developed and coordinated British and international law enforcement is becoming.
In the space of a few days, Glasgow Airport was back in service and London streets and bars were once again teeming with night-life. It was reminiscent in a small way of stories about the Blitz, where not even Hitler’s bombers could disrupt Londoners’ composure. No panic, no paranoia. The abnormal is normal now. Terrorism is taken in stride as an unpredictable fact of life, something like confronting a natural disaster.
The United States may be learning from the British. Unlike the hyped-up alerts of various colors over the last five years, Homeland Security czar Chertoff quickly advised that there was "no credible evidence" that a similar act would ripple onto American shores.
The greatest mistake of the Bush administration’s response to the 9/11 disaster was the poisoning of the American mind by creating the myth of a "War on Terror." Terrorists in general, and Al Qaeda in particular, all disparate, self-interested cells, were built into a single monster, "The Enemy" - a phantom world power to be confronted militarily, as if it had a unified leadership, a standing army, and a capital somewhere, like Japan at Pearl Harbor. Swayed by this myth, the people and their representatives tremblingly surrendered most of their common sense and some of their civil liberties, backing one hastily-considered military action and civil apparatus after another, from the invasion of Afghanistan to the Patriot Act to the Office of Homeland Security to the occupation of Iraq. Any timid objections based on fact were countered by the incessant mantra, "If we don’t fight the enemy on his ground, we will have to fight him on ours."
The mantra is still being chanted by the President, even as late as last week, but finally it has lost most of its credibility among Americans, just as the President has lost most of his.
The British have rejected this myth. They treat the terrorist threat as a domestic problem, handled by the police and not the military. They also treat it as inevitable, like earthquakes or hurricanes. They use their best technology to detect warning signs and muster their resources to respond to the worst, but in many instances, no one knows the day nor the hour. There are times when good surveillance and good fortune may uncover a plot before it’s hatched, but the dragnet is always full of holes. It is clear from the London/Glasgow case that conspirators in terror come from all over the planet, live quiet, even professional lives under the radar, and then converge for a moment in time.
Sooner or later, it will be America’s turn again. So long as there lives the hatred that moved the antimatter doctors to turn their noble calling on its head, the potential for destruction remains. With vigilance, preparedness, and luck, the worst may be avoided.
THE SISTERS SPEAK
By Roger Repohl
June 18, 2007
THE BRONX, N.Y. - Over the years, the children who farm at Genesis Park Community Garden here in the South Bronx have been most fond of planting the "Three Sisters" for their summer gardening project. They dig up the soil, and after playing with (or running from) the earthworms and other bugs they churn up, they add compost and then shape the dirt into circular mounds. They poke kernels of corn into the mounds, cover them up, water, and wait (the hardest part). When the corn seedlings are up and growing, they plant pole bean seeds at the base of each mound and a few seeds of summer squash in between. Then they water, wait, and watch. As the corn stalks grow, the bean plants twine around them while the squash crawls along the ground. By midsummer, the kids are harvesting fistfuls of string beans and little yellow crooknecks, and some weeks later, big ears of corn (if the squirrels don’t get them first).
The Three Sisters is a planting method traditional to the Iroquois and other Indian nations of the East. It maximizes the use of the land, with two vegetables growing vertically and the third horizontally, and each plant benefits the other: the corn stalks support the bean plants, the bean plants return nitrogen to the soil to feed the hungry corn, and the squashes crowd out the weeds, retain moisture, and cool the earth below.
Kids love the Three Sisters. Not only do they learn about the way of life of Native Americans, but they actually practice it. They like planting the Indian way, three days before the full moon in May, while "thinking kind thoughts." They come to realize what it is like to befriend their environment and live in harmony with it.
And then there’s ethanol.
There is something subtly perverse, as well as positively ominous, about this latest unconsidered prescription for energy independence based on fuel made from corn. I’ll consider the ominous first.
In 2005, Congress passed an energy bill containing a "renewable fuel standard" that required increasing the amount of ethanol blended in gasoline from five to ten percent overall by 2012, while enticing refiners into compliance with a tax break of what is now 51 cents per gallon of ethanol used. The oil companies enthusiastically embraced this mandate, so much so that last year they’d already beaten it by 25%, along with hiking their already swollen profit margins.
Our eco-friendly President has been pushing ethanol passionately of late, to burnish his greener image. But it is important to realize that energy independence and pollution control are two quite different things. Though research results vary (depending on what criteria the researchers use, and who funds them), the most balanced sources conclude that ethanol is no cleaner burning than gasoline and actually becomes less so as proportions increase. In last October’s issue, Consumer Reports released test results showing that using E-85, a motor fuel that’s 85% ethanol, gas mileage decreased an average of 27% over standard gasoline in the same vehicle, meaning more pollution per gallon, not less. Still, the automakers, which can trade low fuel economy for high ethanol content, are all over the media with do-gooder slogans like GM’s "Live green, go yellow."
All the above are not really ominous; they’re just business as usual among big oil, big auto, and big government. The real omens come from the convergence of food and fuel.
Over just the last year, corn prices have risen from a relatively stable $2 a bushel to close to $4, due to the demand for ethanol, which now takes 20% of U.S. corn production and may eat up half of it as soon as next year. Higher corn prices mean higher prices for all the food products that depend on corn, from pork to milk to cereal. Check your grocery bill; it’s happening right now.
Here is where the perversion enters. As with gas prices, most well-off Americans will complain about but tolerate food price increases. But those living on limited incomes will face ever greater strains on their resources, forcing more of them into food stamps and food pantries. As more and more of our grain is consumed as fuel, worldwide emergency food distributions will be cut back. Most ominous of all, farmers large and small, now profiting handsomely from the ethanol boom, will return to the dangerous one-crop practices that led to the Dust Bowl of the 1930’s, the agricultural version of strip-mining; without crop rotation, soils will require more artificial fertilization and insecticides. And then there is the very real possibility of a drought in the corn belt comparable to the current one in the Southwest. Such a combination of factors may bring about a food crisis greater than any energy crisis we’ve seen.
There is something fundamentally wrong in a deeper sense about mixing food with fuel, about putting corn into your gas tank instead of your mouth. The ethanol fix-all further disengages our already disengaged relationship to our food.
The kids in our garden are re-learning something our ancestors took for granted, something now so foreign we’ve had to give it a niche-name: "sustainable agriculture," the ways of providing local food for local people.
Compare the Three Sisters to the Archer Daniels Midland Company. The sisters speak for themselves.
June 18, 2007
THE BRONX, N.Y. - Over the years, the children who farm at Genesis Park Community Garden here in the South Bronx have been most fond of planting the "Three Sisters" for their summer gardening project. They dig up the soil, and after playing with (or running from) the earthworms and other bugs they churn up, they add compost and then shape the dirt into circular mounds. They poke kernels of corn into the mounds, cover them up, water, and wait (the hardest part). When the corn seedlings are up and growing, they plant pole bean seeds at the base of each mound and a few seeds of summer squash in between. Then they water, wait, and watch. As the corn stalks grow, the bean plants twine around them while the squash crawls along the ground. By midsummer, the kids are harvesting fistfuls of string beans and little yellow crooknecks, and some weeks later, big ears of corn (if the squirrels don’t get them first).
The Three Sisters is a planting method traditional to the Iroquois and other Indian nations of the East. It maximizes the use of the land, with two vegetables growing vertically and the third horizontally, and each plant benefits the other: the corn stalks support the bean plants, the bean plants return nitrogen to the soil to feed the hungry corn, and the squashes crowd out the weeds, retain moisture, and cool the earth below.
Kids love the Three Sisters. Not only do they learn about the way of life of Native Americans, but they actually practice it. They like planting the Indian way, three days before the full moon in May, while "thinking kind thoughts." They come to realize what it is like to befriend their environment and live in harmony with it.
And then there’s ethanol.
There is something subtly perverse, as well as positively ominous, about this latest unconsidered prescription for energy independence based on fuel made from corn. I’ll consider the ominous first.
In 2005, Congress passed an energy bill containing a "renewable fuel standard" that required increasing the amount of ethanol blended in gasoline from five to ten percent overall by 2012, while enticing refiners into compliance with a tax break of what is now 51 cents per gallon of ethanol used. The oil companies enthusiastically embraced this mandate, so much so that last year they’d already beaten it by 25%, along with hiking their already swollen profit margins.
Our eco-friendly President has been pushing ethanol passionately of late, to burnish his greener image. But it is important to realize that energy independence and pollution control are two quite different things. Though research results vary (depending on what criteria the researchers use, and who funds them), the most balanced sources conclude that ethanol is no cleaner burning than gasoline and actually becomes less so as proportions increase. In last October’s issue, Consumer Reports released test results showing that using E-85, a motor fuel that’s 85% ethanol, gas mileage decreased an average of 27% over standard gasoline in the same vehicle, meaning more pollution per gallon, not less. Still, the automakers, which can trade low fuel economy for high ethanol content, are all over the media with do-gooder slogans like GM’s "Live green, go yellow."
All the above are not really ominous; they’re just business as usual among big oil, big auto, and big government. The real omens come from the convergence of food and fuel.
Over just the last year, corn prices have risen from a relatively stable $2 a bushel to close to $4, due to the demand for ethanol, which now takes 20% of U.S. corn production and may eat up half of it as soon as next year. Higher corn prices mean higher prices for all the food products that depend on corn, from pork to milk to cereal. Check your grocery bill; it’s happening right now.
Here is where the perversion enters. As with gas prices, most well-off Americans will complain about but tolerate food price increases. But those living on limited incomes will face ever greater strains on their resources, forcing more of them into food stamps and food pantries. As more and more of our grain is consumed as fuel, worldwide emergency food distributions will be cut back. Most ominous of all, farmers large and small, now profiting handsomely from the ethanol boom, will return to the dangerous one-crop practices that led to the Dust Bowl of the 1930’s, the agricultural version of strip-mining; without crop rotation, soils will require more artificial fertilization and insecticides. And then there is the very real possibility of a drought in the corn belt comparable to the current one in the Southwest. Such a combination of factors may bring about a food crisis greater than any energy crisis we’ve seen.
There is something fundamentally wrong in a deeper sense about mixing food with fuel, about putting corn into your gas tank instead of your mouth. The ethanol fix-all further disengages our already disengaged relationship to our food.
The kids in our garden are re-learning something our ancestors took for granted, something now so foreign we’ve had to give it a niche-name: "sustainable agriculture," the ways of providing local food for local people.
Compare the Three Sisters to the Archer Daniels Midland Company. The sisters speak for themselves.
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