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?
Sunday, August 17, 2008
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.
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
FROM ALASKA TO IRAQ
By Roger Repohl
THE BRONX, N.Y. - Last week the PBS documentary series “The American Experience” aired “Building the Alaska Highway,” Tracy Heather Strain’s taut and telling account of one of the most spectacular engineering feats of World War II: 1,500 miles of road cut through virgin land in the harshest of environments and completed in under eight months.
Think about that. Now think about Iraq.
After the attack on Pearl Harbor in December of 1941, faced with the very real possibility of a Japanese invasion from the north, the War Department set as top priority the construction of a supply route from Dawson Creek in British Columbia, through the Canadian Yukon to outside of Fairbanks, forging the last link between the 48 states and the heart of the Alaska Territory. Conceived by bureaucrats with little first-hand knowledge of sub-Arctic terrain and weather, the Alaska-Canada (or Alcan) Highway was begun in March of 1942. Eleven thousand soldiers of the Army Corps of Engineers, most of them raw recruits with no road-building experience, were sent up to do the job. Three of the seven regiments were African-American, put to their first great test of the war and proving their resourcefulness and grittiness. In addition, five thousand experienced Canadian and American civilian construction workers, supervised by the Public Roads Administration, complemented the force.
The plans of the bureaucrats were modified by reality. Seat-of-the-pants engineering built the highway: every obstacle forced a workaround, every failure forced a try-again. Bridging rivers and blasting rock were one thing; muskeg bogs that immobilized trucks and mosquitoes that ate you alive were quite another.
Enduring mythic hardship - frostbite in April, sweltering heat and insect-bite in July - these men completed the project on November 20, 1942, months ahead of schedule. And none too soon; that summer the Japanese had captured two of the Aleutian Islands at the westernmost tip of Alaska. The highway allowed a military buildup in Alaska that stymied the enemy’s ambitions and supplied the Soviet Army on the Eastern Front.
How was this remarkable feat of engineering and construction accomplished, and with such speed? It had to do with two things: attitude and apparatus.
As for attitude, the Army of 1942 was drawn from a nation of survivors of the Great Depression. Not only had people learned to endure economic hardship for over a decade, they had also been trained by Franklin Roosevelt to think collectively. Facing the Depression required a mustering of national will and the application of centralized power. When the U.S. Congress declared war in 1941 (yes, it actually declared war, not granted “war powers” to the President), the people’s will and the government’s power shifted from the enemy within to the enemy without. Would the U.S. have been able to conquer two mighty nations in less than four years had it not been steeled by its fight against poverty?
As for apparatus, the U.S. Army was an integral self-sustaining whole. It was not just a fighting force, it was its own support force as well. It maintained its own equipment, supplied its own provisions, built its own bridges and roads. It had all-around general expertise, invaluable for meeting all the unknowns and unexpecteds of war. There was little that it couldn’t do on its own, because its resources were its own and applied in a unified way.
Now think about Iraq. Think about Halliburton and Blackwater. Think about how long it’s been and how much has been spent and how little has been done. It’s all about attitude and apparatus.
The attitude of the country and its military subset is very different now. Ronald Reagan, FDR’s ideological opposite, retrained the nation away from collective commitment and toward individual gain. He trained it to see government as obstacle, not instrument. Self-interest, not the common good, became the operating ethic. Privatization was seen as the means to shrink an inept, costly federal bureaucracy while allowing free-market competition, efficient and self-regulating, to provide the best services at the lowest cost. The Invisible Hand of capitalism, not the meddling hand of central planning, would guide the nation.
Reagan’s social philosophy, like FDR’s before him, has endured long after he left the scene; its high-water mark may have been reached in the present administration, with its schemes for privatizing even the most hallowed national trust like public lands and Social Security.
Nowhere has this attitude been more misapplied than in the apparatus of the military. Over the years, and especially during the Rumsfeld tenure, the armed services have come to be run on a business model. The Army’s job is to fight; why should it have to deal with food or construction or other peripherals when private firms can do it all better and cheaper?
The multi-billion-dollar outsourcing mess in Iraq has proved that model wrong. Beyond the enormous profits made by private companies for support services, and beyond the spotty and shoddy attempts at “reconstruction,” is the debilitating effect of self-interest upon a military campaign. In Iraq it has reached right up to the fighting itself, where legions of mercenaries from firms like Blackwater compose a parallel army, making exponentially more money than the soldiers serving their country.
The issue in Iraq is more than money. The issue is fragmentation, both of resources and of will. If the military in its present configuration had to build that road in Alaska, they might still be working on it.
THE BRONX, N.Y. - Last week the PBS documentary series “The American Experience” aired “Building the Alaska Highway,” Tracy Heather Strain’s taut and telling account of one of the most spectacular engineering feats of World War II: 1,500 miles of road cut through virgin land in the harshest of environments and completed in under eight months.
Think about that. Now think about Iraq.
After the attack on Pearl Harbor in December of 1941, faced with the very real possibility of a Japanese invasion from the north, the War Department set as top priority the construction of a supply route from Dawson Creek in British Columbia, through the Canadian Yukon to outside of Fairbanks, forging the last link between the 48 states and the heart of the Alaska Territory. Conceived by bureaucrats with little first-hand knowledge of sub-Arctic terrain and weather, the Alaska-Canada (or Alcan) Highway was begun in March of 1942. Eleven thousand soldiers of the Army Corps of Engineers, most of them raw recruits with no road-building experience, were sent up to do the job. Three of the seven regiments were African-American, put to their first great test of the war and proving their resourcefulness and grittiness. In addition, five thousand experienced Canadian and American civilian construction workers, supervised by the Public Roads Administration, complemented the force.
The plans of the bureaucrats were modified by reality. Seat-of-the-pants engineering built the highway: every obstacle forced a workaround, every failure forced a try-again. Bridging rivers and blasting rock were one thing; muskeg bogs that immobilized trucks and mosquitoes that ate you alive were quite another.
Enduring mythic hardship - frostbite in April, sweltering heat and insect-bite in July - these men completed the project on November 20, 1942, months ahead of schedule. And none too soon; that summer the Japanese had captured two of the Aleutian Islands at the westernmost tip of Alaska. The highway allowed a military buildup in Alaska that stymied the enemy’s ambitions and supplied the Soviet Army on the Eastern Front.
How was this remarkable feat of engineering and construction accomplished, and with such speed? It had to do with two things: attitude and apparatus.
As for attitude, the Army of 1942 was drawn from a nation of survivors of the Great Depression. Not only had people learned to endure economic hardship for over a decade, they had also been trained by Franklin Roosevelt to think collectively. Facing the Depression required a mustering of national will and the application of centralized power. When the U.S. Congress declared war in 1941 (yes, it actually declared war, not granted “war powers” to the President), the people’s will and the government’s power shifted from the enemy within to the enemy without. Would the U.S. have been able to conquer two mighty nations in less than four years had it not been steeled by its fight against poverty?
As for apparatus, the U.S. Army was an integral self-sustaining whole. It was not just a fighting force, it was its own support force as well. It maintained its own equipment, supplied its own provisions, built its own bridges and roads. It had all-around general expertise, invaluable for meeting all the unknowns and unexpecteds of war. There was little that it couldn’t do on its own, because its resources were its own and applied in a unified way.
Now think about Iraq. Think about Halliburton and Blackwater. Think about how long it’s been and how much has been spent and how little has been done. It’s all about attitude and apparatus.
The attitude of the country and its military subset is very different now. Ronald Reagan, FDR’s ideological opposite, retrained the nation away from collective commitment and toward individual gain. He trained it to see government as obstacle, not instrument. Self-interest, not the common good, became the operating ethic. Privatization was seen as the means to shrink an inept, costly federal bureaucracy while allowing free-market competition, efficient and self-regulating, to provide the best services at the lowest cost. The Invisible Hand of capitalism, not the meddling hand of central planning, would guide the nation.
Reagan’s social philosophy, like FDR’s before him, has endured long after he left the scene; its high-water mark may have been reached in the present administration, with its schemes for privatizing even the most hallowed national trust like public lands and Social Security.
Nowhere has this attitude been more misapplied than in the apparatus of the military. Over the years, and especially during the Rumsfeld tenure, the armed services have come to be run on a business model. The Army’s job is to fight; why should it have to deal with food or construction or other peripherals when private firms can do it all better and cheaper?
The multi-billion-dollar outsourcing mess in Iraq has proved that model wrong. Beyond the enormous profits made by private companies for support services, and beyond the spotty and shoddy attempts at “reconstruction,” is the debilitating effect of self-interest upon a military campaign. In Iraq it has reached right up to the fighting itself, where legions of mercenaries from firms like Blackwater compose a parallel army, making exponentially more money than the soldiers serving their country.
The issue in Iraq is more than money. The issue is fragmentation, both of resources and of will. If the military in its present configuration had to build that road in Alaska, they might still be working on it.
Friday, May 18, 2007
THE LEISURE TO LEARN
By Roger Repohl
THE BRONX, N.Y. - It’s etched in my memory, an icon of education: Warm spring day in New York, sun streaming through the open window of my office at the college, trees in bud, birds in song. Half a dozen students are there, declaiming on politics, religion, and dorm food. One sits on the window sill, sunning herself; another sits atop the office desk, yoga-style; a third sits on an uncomfortable wooden chair; the rest sit cross-legged on the floor. They’re there for no reason in particular; they were roaming the halls, found the open door, and settled in. They’re seniors now, chafing to graduate. Two years before, they’d taken my intro course in religious studies and, sometimes to my annoyance, had challenged just about every idea I put forth. They’d relished the verbal battle, and I’d relished battling back.
The dialectic went on past the final exam, and two years later they’re still at it. I’m still at it, too, testing their reasoning, rebutting their assertions, and having my own rebutted. They’re in training for the life of the mind. Beyond the confines of classroom and library, there in that sunny room, they’re getting an education.
This indelible scene dates from 1994. In the years that followed, fewer and fewer of these free-wheeling sessions occurred. Students still came to argue, but seldom about politics and religion; instead it was about grades. “Be careful, they’re little lawyers,” the department chairman warned me. “They’ll press their case till you relent.”
Last year, the U.S. Department of Education issued a report by its Commission on the Future of Higher Education. Among other things, it called for standardized testing of college students, primarily to bring “accountability” to colleges, similar to what is happening to elementary and high schools under the No Child Left Behind Act. In a way, it’s understandable. Average costs for four years of college now range from $63,400 to $133,000. Shouldn’t parents and prospective students, the argument goes, have some hard criteria by which to judge whether they’ll get what they’re paying for, whatever it is that they’re paying for?
Like the SAT for college applicants, these tests would check students’ ability to read, to write, to analyze, and to solve mathematical and logical problems. They would be administered in the freshman and senior years, thus revealing the effectiveness of the teaching. Apparently, the testing would be generic; knowledge of the information and analytical tools within one’s major would not be included.
The thought of measuring the results of a “higher education” infuriates and insults many professors and administrators, but the thought was inevitable, because non-elite colleges have now become higher high schools, trying to do something with the growing numbers of students whom they accept though they are practically illiterate. It is not uncommon for professors (myself included) to complain that they have been forced over the years to lower the bar of performance in their courses, assigning fewer readings because students cannot read, assigning more basic readings because the students no longer possess core knowledge in any subject, assigning fewer and more basic writing projects because the students can barely write.
Of course, an institution could just turn those candidates away, but they need the income-stream. When my college instituted an “open enrollment” policy late in the last decade, taking almost anyone who applied, it was good for the bottom line but spelled the end of college as we knew it.
Today, college has become what high school was 40 years ago, yet another four-year attempt to shape people up for the work-force. The mission is now to stop the hemorrhaging of lower education.
Despite this dumbing-down, statistics show that a good number of people graduate from four-year colleges with little more than a piece of paper to show for it. One federal study done in 2003 revealed that just 31 percent of college graduates were able to explain and analyze non-technical passages. A college degree by itself is no longer a reliable indicator to employers that a person possesses the skills necessary to perform acceptably. And thus the cry for standardized tests.
The traditional college model is based on the presumption that the work in the lower grades was basically informational and operative, involving the memorization of vast amounts of facts and the acquisition of language and computational skills, both of which can and should be subject to standardized testing. College could then build upon this foundation and, in the liberal arts at least, be “philosophical” in the literal sense, involving the acquisition of wisdom through wide reading, incisive writing, and intense dialogue with the wise. Becoming philosophical is not something that can be subject to standardized testing.
That’s the very idea of the traditional college horarium: Unlike the lower grades, rigidly structured with classes five days a week, class-time is reduced to three hours precisely to allow the leisure to read and to dialogue on critical ideas and issues. There isn’t much leisure in college today, for faculty or for students. Faculty are too busy doing remedial work (and in the future, teaching to the test) to engage in the interplay of ideas. Students hold part-time or even full-time jobs to make tuition, and the courses themselves have become little more than just another job, except they have to pay for it instead of getting paid. Do the work, get the grade, get the diploma, get out.
I’m sure there are still places where students will invade professors’ offices to hold forth on politics and religion, but in my academic life, it’s just another beautiful memory of springtime in New York.
THE BRONX, N.Y. - It’s etched in my memory, an icon of education: Warm spring day in New York, sun streaming through the open window of my office at the college, trees in bud, birds in song. Half a dozen students are there, declaiming on politics, religion, and dorm food. One sits on the window sill, sunning herself; another sits atop the office desk, yoga-style; a third sits on an uncomfortable wooden chair; the rest sit cross-legged on the floor. They’re there for no reason in particular; they were roaming the halls, found the open door, and settled in. They’re seniors now, chafing to graduate. Two years before, they’d taken my intro course in religious studies and, sometimes to my annoyance, had challenged just about every idea I put forth. They’d relished the verbal battle, and I’d relished battling back.
The dialectic went on past the final exam, and two years later they’re still at it. I’m still at it, too, testing their reasoning, rebutting their assertions, and having my own rebutted. They’re in training for the life of the mind. Beyond the confines of classroom and library, there in that sunny room, they’re getting an education.
This indelible scene dates from 1994. In the years that followed, fewer and fewer of these free-wheeling sessions occurred. Students still came to argue, but seldom about politics and religion; instead it was about grades. “Be careful, they’re little lawyers,” the department chairman warned me. “They’ll press their case till you relent.”
Last year, the U.S. Department of Education issued a report by its Commission on the Future of Higher Education. Among other things, it called for standardized testing of college students, primarily to bring “accountability” to colleges, similar to what is happening to elementary and high schools under the No Child Left Behind Act. In a way, it’s understandable. Average costs for four years of college now range from $63,400 to $133,000. Shouldn’t parents and prospective students, the argument goes, have some hard criteria by which to judge whether they’ll get what they’re paying for, whatever it is that they’re paying for?
Like the SAT for college applicants, these tests would check students’ ability to read, to write, to analyze, and to solve mathematical and logical problems. They would be administered in the freshman and senior years, thus revealing the effectiveness of the teaching. Apparently, the testing would be generic; knowledge of the information and analytical tools within one’s major would not be included.
The thought of measuring the results of a “higher education” infuriates and insults many professors and administrators, but the thought was inevitable, because non-elite colleges have now become higher high schools, trying to do something with the growing numbers of students whom they accept though they are practically illiterate. It is not uncommon for professors (myself included) to complain that they have been forced over the years to lower the bar of performance in their courses, assigning fewer readings because students cannot read, assigning more basic readings because the students no longer possess core knowledge in any subject, assigning fewer and more basic writing projects because the students can barely write.
Of course, an institution could just turn those candidates away, but they need the income-stream. When my college instituted an “open enrollment” policy late in the last decade, taking almost anyone who applied, it was good for the bottom line but spelled the end of college as we knew it.
Today, college has become what high school was 40 years ago, yet another four-year attempt to shape people up for the work-force. The mission is now to stop the hemorrhaging of lower education.
Despite this dumbing-down, statistics show that a good number of people graduate from four-year colleges with little more than a piece of paper to show for it. One federal study done in 2003 revealed that just 31 percent of college graduates were able to explain and analyze non-technical passages. A college degree by itself is no longer a reliable indicator to employers that a person possesses the skills necessary to perform acceptably. And thus the cry for standardized tests.
The traditional college model is based on the presumption that the work in the lower grades was basically informational and operative, involving the memorization of vast amounts of facts and the acquisition of language and computational skills, both of which can and should be subject to standardized testing. College could then build upon this foundation and, in the liberal arts at least, be “philosophical” in the literal sense, involving the acquisition of wisdom through wide reading, incisive writing, and intense dialogue with the wise. Becoming philosophical is not something that can be subject to standardized testing.
That’s the very idea of the traditional college horarium: Unlike the lower grades, rigidly structured with classes five days a week, class-time is reduced to three hours precisely to allow the leisure to read and to dialogue on critical ideas and issues. There isn’t much leisure in college today, for faculty or for students. Faculty are too busy doing remedial work (and in the future, teaching to the test) to engage in the interplay of ideas. Students hold part-time or even full-time jobs to make tuition, and the courses themselves have become little more than just another job, except they have to pay for it instead of getting paid. Do the work, get the grade, get the diploma, get out.
I’m sure there are still places where students will invade professors’ offices to hold forth on politics and religion, but in my academic life, it’s just another beautiful memory of springtime in New York.
Thursday, May 3, 2007
FRANK, COME BACK!
By Roger Repohl
THE BRONX, N.Y. - It’s always surprising to those west of the Hudson River that much of New York City has the feel of a small town. When I need a good cut of meat for a dinner party, I consult with the guys at Vincent’s Meat Market on Arthur Avenue in the Bronx’s Little Italy. When my 45-year-old Elgin windup wristwatch stops (every five years, like clockwork), I walk a block south of Vincent’s to Spinelli Jewelers, where this family store’s patriarch, not quite twice as old as my watch, takes it as a sentimental challenge: With a still-steady hand and a keen eye, he changes the mainspring and cleans the works and delivers it to me in a couple days. I’m good for another five years.
When I need a haircut, I drop in to Saverio’s Unisex Hair Styling, a block north of Vincent’s, as I’ve done for 15 years. Saverio is from that era when barbers, alarmed by the long-hair look and falling business, became hair-stylists, at least on their signs. As for the “unisex” part, that’s true: In all the years I’ve passed his window, I’ve seen only one gender on his chair. Gray-haired and full-bearded, he’s the kind of barber I like - the silent type. With the soccer game buzzing on the radio in Italian, he gives a decent cut in ten minutes for twelve bucks. I recommend him to John Edwards.
Twice a year I visit Dr. Tanzilli, the singing dentist, whose two-chair, one-man office is on the first floor of an apartment building near Westchester Square. With Sinatra, Peggy Lee, or Pavarotti playing in the background, he croons or hums along, occasionally stopping to ask you a question just when your mouth is full of gauze and suction tubes. He’s interested in you as a person, he’s unfailingly good-humored, and most importantly, he’s gentle, calming the most panicky patient. I endured years of ghoulish dentists in assembly-line offices, treating me like a specimen while making time with their cute assistants, before someone suggested Tanzilli. I almost like going to the dentist now.
It’s the same way with that other bane of life, auto repair. Finding a mechanic you trust is like finding a dentist that doesn’t scare you; it’s a miracle of good fortune. Frank was that man. I hold on to cars like I do watches, as long as they’ll run, and Frank kept them running. I first came to him on a recommendation over a decade ago, and it changed my automotive life. I used to do regular maintenance and minor repairs myself, but Frank was such a pleasure to deal with and so good to my car that I developed a dependency on him and eventually surrendered even the routine stuff into his hands.
Frank was an old-time generalist. He did everything under the hood and outside, including mufflers and windows. An Italian-American native of the Bronx with an accent to match, he opened his place on Jerome Avenue in 1963 after returning from military service. The South Bronx at that time was still prosperous, but verging on its steep decline. Unlike many businessmen who cleared out when the borough went up in flames in the 1970’s, Frank stuck around. He did take his family out of the city, buying property in Putnam County 50 miles to the north, where he could breathe fresh air and be closer to the state parks and forests where he liked to hunt and fish.
His love of nature backfired on him in the mid-1990’s, when a deer tick gave him lyme disease. It left him ungainly and sometimes spasmodic, but with the help of several personally-trained employees he carried on. His diagnoses were always accurate, his work meticulous, his prices fair.
He had the Bronx attitude, too. When my previous car, then on its last leg, failed the state emissions test, he shrugged and said, “Stay here a minute. I’ll be right back.” He walked to the shop across the street and soon returned with a valid inspection sticker. “How did you do that?” I asked. “We cheat,” he said.
Last summer I had some problem with the rear suspension and called Frank, but the number had been changed to one with an upstate area code. Wondering if he’d decided to retire, I drove over to his shop. It was closed. “Where’s Frank?” I asked the auto-body guy next door.
“He died,” the man replied. “He was killed in a car crash near his home about two weeks ago.”
All I could think of saying was, “What a way for a mechanic to go.”
“Yeah, I know. It was terrible. I miss him.”
I miss him too. We were never friends; the relationship was strictly business, and yet it was the humane way he conducted his business, his friendliness, patience, competence, and honesty that made him indispensable and irreplaceable. I’d never trusted a mechanic before.
Good professionals like these occupy a unique place in our lives. Seldom our friends, they are just as essential to our well-being. They support our personal infrastructure, and like our infrastructure, we never think about them until we need them. Only when they’re gone do we realize just how important they are.
Now I’m vetting mechanics, an occupational group with a reputation only slightly higher than politicians. Frank, why did you leave? I need you!
THE BRONX, N.Y. - It’s always surprising to those west of the Hudson River that much of New York City has the feel of a small town. When I need a good cut of meat for a dinner party, I consult with the guys at Vincent’s Meat Market on Arthur Avenue in the Bronx’s Little Italy. When my 45-year-old Elgin windup wristwatch stops (every five years, like clockwork), I walk a block south of Vincent’s to Spinelli Jewelers, where this family store’s patriarch, not quite twice as old as my watch, takes it as a sentimental challenge: With a still-steady hand and a keen eye, he changes the mainspring and cleans the works and delivers it to me in a couple days. I’m good for another five years.
When I need a haircut, I drop in to Saverio’s Unisex Hair Styling, a block north of Vincent’s, as I’ve done for 15 years. Saverio is from that era when barbers, alarmed by the long-hair look and falling business, became hair-stylists, at least on their signs. As for the “unisex” part, that’s true: In all the years I’ve passed his window, I’ve seen only one gender on his chair. Gray-haired and full-bearded, he’s the kind of barber I like - the silent type. With the soccer game buzzing on the radio in Italian, he gives a decent cut in ten minutes for twelve bucks. I recommend him to John Edwards.
Twice a year I visit Dr. Tanzilli, the singing dentist, whose two-chair, one-man office is on the first floor of an apartment building near Westchester Square. With Sinatra, Peggy Lee, or Pavarotti playing in the background, he croons or hums along, occasionally stopping to ask you a question just when your mouth is full of gauze and suction tubes. He’s interested in you as a person, he’s unfailingly good-humored, and most importantly, he’s gentle, calming the most panicky patient. I endured years of ghoulish dentists in assembly-line offices, treating me like a specimen while making time with their cute assistants, before someone suggested Tanzilli. I almost like going to the dentist now.
It’s the same way with that other bane of life, auto repair. Finding a mechanic you trust is like finding a dentist that doesn’t scare you; it’s a miracle of good fortune. Frank was that man. I hold on to cars like I do watches, as long as they’ll run, and Frank kept them running. I first came to him on a recommendation over a decade ago, and it changed my automotive life. I used to do regular maintenance and minor repairs myself, but Frank was such a pleasure to deal with and so good to my car that I developed a dependency on him and eventually surrendered even the routine stuff into his hands.
Frank was an old-time generalist. He did everything under the hood and outside, including mufflers and windows. An Italian-American native of the Bronx with an accent to match, he opened his place on Jerome Avenue in 1963 after returning from military service. The South Bronx at that time was still prosperous, but verging on its steep decline. Unlike many businessmen who cleared out when the borough went up in flames in the 1970’s, Frank stuck around. He did take his family out of the city, buying property in Putnam County 50 miles to the north, where he could breathe fresh air and be closer to the state parks and forests where he liked to hunt and fish.
His love of nature backfired on him in the mid-1990’s, when a deer tick gave him lyme disease. It left him ungainly and sometimes spasmodic, but with the help of several personally-trained employees he carried on. His diagnoses were always accurate, his work meticulous, his prices fair.
He had the Bronx attitude, too. When my previous car, then on its last leg, failed the state emissions test, he shrugged and said, “Stay here a minute. I’ll be right back.” He walked to the shop across the street and soon returned with a valid inspection sticker. “How did you do that?” I asked. “We cheat,” he said.
Last summer I had some problem with the rear suspension and called Frank, but the number had been changed to one with an upstate area code. Wondering if he’d decided to retire, I drove over to his shop. It was closed. “Where’s Frank?” I asked the auto-body guy next door.
“He died,” the man replied. “He was killed in a car crash near his home about two weeks ago.”
All I could think of saying was, “What a way for a mechanic to go.”
“Yeah, I know. It was terrible. I miss him.”
I miss him too. We were never friends; the relationship was strictly business, and yet it was the humane way he conducted his business, his friendliness, patience, competence, and honesty that made him indispensable and irreplaceable. I’d never trusted a mechanic before.
Good professionals like these occupy a unique place in our lives. Seldom our friends, they are just as essential to our well-being. They support our personal infrastructure, and like our infrastructure, we never think about them until we need them. Only when they’re gone do we realize just how important they are.
Now I’m vetting mechanics, an occupational group with a reputation only slightly higher than politicians. Frank, why did you leave? I need you!
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