I'm stoked and just have to share. I'm going to see MEN tonight at the Beauty Bar. MEN is composed partially of members of Le Tigre and bills themselves as a band and art/performance collective, with a focus on dance music and politics.
Something to catch if you can. Here's their MySpace page.
Lately, when I see proposed abortion restrictions that are almost surely not going to get very far, such as this Ohio bill that would require the father of a fetus to sign off on an abortion before it could be performed, I tend to skip past writing about them, lest I sound like a broken record. Same thing with restrictions that aren't particularly creatives, which is the same story with this bill, as it's been tried before. But I'm going to make an exception this time, because I learned something new today because of this bill.
No, I didn't learn that anti-choicers are more interested in protecting male dominance than fetal life. Nor did I learn that the anti-choice strategy is to make abortion prohibitively expensive, create delays that force women to have abortions later in their pregnancies (where they can be punished with more pain, expense, and anguish for the crime of fucking), or that they're trying to pass so many regulations that it becomes impossible for abortion providers to meet them all. I already knew all of this.
What I learned was that you can totally paternity test early in a pregnancy, at least according to this DNA testing center, which may admittedly be selling snake oil. The reason this comes up is that the bill lovingly details what the state should do in the case of disgusting sluttitude, i.e. when a woman isn't sure who the father is. That this is a point of major concern should surprise no one reading this blog, as anti-choicers are renowned for their panty-sniffing perversion. If there's any question, then of course you have to make a list of all possible candidates and get them paternity tested, which is another way of saying you don't get an abortion because you're a super duper slut. Of course, the obvious solution to this problem is to get a male friend to vouch for you. Considering that a significant number of women who get abortions cite bad relationships as the reason, I suspect there would be a lot of falsified signatures, even though it's forbidden by the bill. Not that I think that the legislators particularly care, because at least they can rest assured that you're getting extra punished by having to ask a male friend to help you, which is a big favor to ask. (Every woman reading this is taking a quick mental inventory of what man they could trust to do this without gloating about his power over you.)
So yeah, I learned something. I was curious if it was even possible to follow the letter of the law as written. Imagine you could get the men you've slept with to submit to a blood test, and you choose to do this instead of lying. Could you paternity test a fetus? Turns out that you can, from the 10th week on. And, because you're a horrible slutty slut, you'll be pleased to know that the process is unpleasant and dare I say punishing?
Guided by ultrasound, an OB-GYN uses a catheter through the vagina or a long, hollow needle through the abdomen (depending on the position of the fetus) to collect cells.
And almost surely expensive as fuck.
The bill sponsors are counting on their no-doubt sound belief that most people would sit in judgment of a woman who doesn't know who got her pregnant, because everyone supposedly knows that it's gross and disgusting and slutty and unforgiveable to have sex with two men within such a short period. And I'll bet that a solid percentage of the people who'd cast judgment have been involved in exactly that. But they didn't think of it that way! It doesn't count in their case. It's easily to mentally erase how you went out with this guy this week, and he didn't call after you had sex, so you went out with someone else the next week and figured that it was okay because the other guy didn't call. Or you broke up with that asshole and found comfort in the arms of a friend. Or you just didn't realize that the two different guys were so close in time until after the fact. I often am amused by asking people how many partners it takes to create a slut, but I also have to ask, what's the official waiting period you owe the universe after sex with guy A before you're permitted to have sex with guy B. A month? Two months? A year? If so, why? Do you owe the first one some kind of cosmic possession over your body, even if he was the one who chose to break it off?
Of course, my attitude about it is that no one owes anyone anything until they explicitly say so, and that if you want to be sleeping with more than one person at once, you're well within your rights, and if any of them want to make it exclusive, they should speak up and let you decide. Instead of just assuming that the cosmic rule that sluts are bad controls you.
But I bring up these other examples, because I know that the first thing that people think of when they think of "don't know who the father is" is a woman who's carelessly catting around town, or cheating on a partner. They go for the easiest women to judge, even though if it was one of their friends or relatives who was cheating or catting, they would see that punishing that woman with forced childbirth is beyond the pale. Most people don't think adultery should be illegal, but proposed laws like this are a way of making it just a little more illegal for women.
It may be that I have a unique group of friends, but within my peer group (at least amongst people whose romantic histories I have any sort of knowledge of), I can't say that I really know very many people that have gone their whole lives without having at two partners in a 30-day period. And that includes people are adamantly non-cheaters and not particularly promiscuous. It may not be a routine part of their lives, but it's probably happened at least once. And I tend to think that's not even controversial anymore. Sometimes you date someone for a little bit, and it doesn't work out, but you're not broken up about it, so you get right back on the horse. Or you relationship-hopped, which isn't particularly wrong, especially if you honorably break up with person A before moving onto person B. Or you hook-up with your ex, and then a week later you meet your true love. The permutations are endless, but I promise you that it's not only possible but common for people who eschew having many irons in the fire to have two partners in a short period of time.
Of course, the people who do enjoy having many irons in the fire at once, who others feel free to call sluts, are saints of sexual liberation that we should honor with big parties for their free-spiritedness, instead of calling them names. But I just wanted point out that the stereotype that people immediately go to isn't even close to the reality of the situation for most people. Not of course that this matters to a bunch of misogynist Republican Ohio legislators who'd probably also be shocked to hear women have orgasms, before moving to ban that as well.
Holy crap. I'm speechless. Take a look at not-so-svelte Neil Cavuto and Anti-Gym hardbody proprietor Michael Karolchyk, who sports a "No Chubbies" T-Shirt, take a crap on the President's nominee for Surgeon General, Dr. Regina Benjamin (see my earlier post).
A screen cap of Benjamin is on the right. Does she look wildly obese to anyone? Did anyone protest about C. Everett Koop's portly figure as a disqualification to serve? Wow. Weight-proportional-to-height status is not the sole marker of health anyway. Jim Fixx, a slim long-distance running advocate, dropped dead of a heart attack. Obesity is clearly a health risk, but so is family history of cardiovascular disease, or Type II diabetes, whether you smoke, along with a variety of other factors. I certainly don't see Dr. Benjamin, who, by any stretch of the imagination, is qualified to serve, is worthy of this sort of disgusting slam.
Womb control advocate Randall Terry was really working hard to rachet up the level of crazy to stratospheric heights at his latest presser, this one regarding health care reform legislation. In fact, he has developed ESP -- if the bill isn't rejected he sees violence ahead. Not just any random violence, mind you, but acts we haven't seen in this country since the Civil War, including violent "reprisals against those deemed guilty".
Christian at Right Wing Watch introduces the video of Terry with this observation:
At a typical Randall Terry press conference one can expect to hear all sorts of overheated rhetoric about abortion – that it’s murder, that abortion clinics are places of "mass genocide," and so forth. But in recent weeks, he has amped up his rhetoric to insane new heights over the healthcare legislation before Congress, which he claims would pay for “child-killing.”
At today’s press conference, however, Terry was quick to point out that he has supposedly been a "non-violent" leader for 25 years, and he ridiculed those who accuse him and other right-wing leaders of "stirring up domestic terrorism”:
Earlier this week Terry called for the rejection of the bill and warned of "violent convulsions" of a level that hasn't been seen since the Civil War if the bill is passed.
These fringers are frightening.
The bloggers at Overthinking It came up with a word that has crept its way into my vocabulary, since it's so perfect at describing a very 21st century phenomenon: earony. Earony is when someone strikes an ironic pose about something, but actually they love it earnestly, even though they can obviously see the silliness of it. That's what I thought of when I read Holly's post about Campbell's Fully Loaded Chunky Soup ads. Here's one:
The message of the commercial is, "Yes, we are trying to sell you soup with over-the-top manly man sales pitches, and we know that you know that's silly, but eat the soup. It's for men." Classic earony. My guess is that their market research showed that they had a huge customer base in the young bachelor set, particularly with young men who shy away from doing feminine things like cooking or washing dishes, and were eager to consume 100% of their meals from items you could microwave. That, and older married men whose wives don't have the time to feed them lunch on the weekends. I'm not trying to bash all men, by any stretch---I'm just saying that this sort exists and I suspect they're the audience for the ad.
While I was in England, I had a revelation about what kind of products get the manly man sales pitch, though all credit goes to the London resident we stayed with for a night, who told me about how cider companies had hit on the perfect pitch to sell cider to men there. Cider has always been seen as a female beverage, and so men shy away from it (true enough in the U.S., too, though I don't think cider's all that popular to begin with for women, either), so the cider companies, according to my friend, had started pushing the idea that men can pour it over ice and get that manly man refreshment, because as advertisements tell us, men are always doing some strenuous activity that demands constant refreshment. And, according to my friend, it was a successful campaign with the sad effect of people pouring cider over ice. The flaws in this pitch were quite evident to this Texan, seeing as how I was wearing a light coat in May while hearing this story and had no desire to see an ice cube anytime in the near future. Americans may think it's weird that you can go for days and even weeks in England without consuming a beverage poured over ice, but to me, that's just common sense, once you take the weather into consideration.
But I digress. The point is that sometimes when you see something like that with a slightly different culture's tweaks to it, it can be eye-opening. Now I'm acutely aware whenever I see a product that's getting the Manly overhaul, because now I suspect that the market research shows that men don't buy said product, because they think it's feminine, and the advertisers are trying to get around the problem of anxious masculinity.
Obviously, this isn't true for all the products out there that are sold with the Real Men Buy Me pitch. Some products have been advertised that way forever, because they were already associated with masculinity. Beer comes to mind as the most immediate example. But at some point in time, advertisers for other products started to borrow the tropes in order to convince men that their masculinity is not in question because they bought this product.
Grooming products, even ones like razors you think men could buy without shame, are some of the worst offenders. Sometimes you get the impression that men are supposed to be shaving with breaking edge technology culled from jet engines when watching razor ads. The Axe body spray ones are so bad---their pitch seems to be, "Use our body spray and no one will ever mistake you for the sort of pansy who knows how to read"---that I think they broke the mold. In my imagination, whoever came up with the admittedly hilarious Old Spice ads that veer off into the truly ironic was sitting there watching an Axe body spray ad, and thought, "Well, that's the end of the road for the 'our perfume will make your cock bigger' pitch." However, I have to wonder if the Old Spice ads have been successful at all in increasing Old Spice sales. Watching the one with Bruce Campbell, I couldn't shake the impression that they're hoping to get a resurgence with young hipsters, who could wear it with earony, much like the way they drink cheap beer like MGD. My guess is no. Visual representation of droll hipster humor is one thing, but scent is so evocative, and there's not really a way to get around the fact that smelling like grandpa is going to make potential sex partners think of grandpa. But what do I know?
Watching these soup ads, then, makes me realize that someone probably thinks that eating soup is girly. Which makes sense. Few foods are more associated with Mom than soup, since it's something Mom produces when you're sick, and feeling weak and vulnerable. In fact, the association of soup with weakness probably also inspired this ad campaign. That half explains this ad campaign, with the other half being the target demographic of bachelors and occasionally stranded married men. Because despite decades of feminism, most food ads are aimed directly at women. Interesting, then, that when marketers target men to sell food to, they stick with foods that they assume are temporary holdover ways to feed yourself until a woman can come in and do it properly.
Sarah Haskins should do a handful of "Target: Men" episodes to break the whole thing up.
The people behind this movie "(500) Days Of Summer" owe this Insufferable Music Snob money to cover my dry cleaning bills. Why? Because I was subjected to this preview while waiting to see another movie, I yakked all over my clothes and they are to blame. I will also add that while I try very hard not to harbor prejudice in my heart against women who have ginormous Bambi eyes---because bigotry is wrong, you know---Zooey Deschanel has finally just gone too far. Of course, it's so obvious that I'm forced to believe that she's actually a darkly cynical person who is willing to ride the "so cute it's not cute anymore" train until she's sitting on a huge pile of money. So I'm blaming the men who write these roles. Even my cats know that they have to mix it up on occasion by taking a giant stinky shit as a precaution against inducing cavities. Even puppies know that you've got to slobber.
But I digress, because it wasn't Deschanel that caused me to lose control of my gag reflex. It's scene that starts off this trailer, where our young male hero falls head over heels for a woman in an elevator because she....loves The Smiths. Oh my god! He could have searched the world high and low for such a rare gem as a bona fide female human being who knows how to sing along to a popular Smiths song. I'm sure subsequent dates were full of further revelations about shared love for other obscure bands that one couldn't possible expect a woman to know of. Perhaps they will retreat to his place where he'll be astonished at her breadth of taste, so rare and precious in the ladyfolk. She could own a Talking Heads album! She may harbor love for Radiohead. Perhaps she even listens to the Beatles? It's almost too much for a man to hope for so much rare awesome taste in one woman.
Reading this essay by Doree Shafir about the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trend in "indie" romantic comedies dredged up all the pain and nausea this trailer caused me to suffer. It also caused in me, to swipe from Hugo, a "yes, no, and maybe" reaction. The yes part:
She's more of an elusive cipher, and this is a road Deschanel's been down before, in Elf and All the Real Girls. .....
The most we learn about her is that she likes The Smiths, and Belle and Sebastian, and seems to have great style; throughout the film she's decked out in adorable, vintage-y outfits......
Still, girls like Summer invariably serve as combination muse/object of obsession, usually allowing the guy in the equation to finally unlock his true creative impulses.
It's exactly these things that are frustrating. The fantasy is of quirky, fun-loving women who have no internal life, no real ambitions, and who live only to send the hero into a dreamy reverie about how he does deserve more, dammit, and gosh, isn't she cute? The problem here is that a lot of characters that get tarred with the label of MPDG are from movies where the big reveal is that actually, it turns out that even adorably quirky women have internal lives, real feelings that can be hurt, and deserve respect as human beings, not to be treated as adorable accessories for the hero. Or that's the message in "Annie Hall", at least. MPDG movies are about stripping away the tension between the fantasy of the woman with personality and understanding and the real-world ego needs of women that are equal to men's, by creating characters who are wholly the fantasy.
Shafrir mentions some examples, and my "no" reaction was that she got some wrong. "Lost In Translation" and "Breakfast At Tiffany's" don't count, even if the actresses are so adorable that it's hard not to feel a stirring of jealousy. "Breakfast At Tiffany's" is a seriously fucked-up movie in many ways,* but you can't deny that the plot is driven by Holly Golightly's failure to be the cipher she aims to be. She wants to be a MPDG because it makes her money and keeps people at arm's length, but her humanity keeps catching up with her. That's the whole point of the business with her cat being named Cat. As for Sophia Coppola's movies, I always thought she was more interested in examining how the pressure to live up to male fantasies of nubile ingenues damages the women who are objectified by it, but that's most obvious in "The Virgin Suicides".
The "maybe" part for me was due to the fact that I kept getting the uneasy feeling that Shafrir is mixing up romantic comedy fantasies with real life, because instead of lambasting these movies for leaning on a dehumanizing stereotype of women, she aims her guns at the "girls" themselves, even though, as fantasies, they don't exist.
Of course, men find these women utterly bewitching. And why wouldn't they? They're the ultimate unattainable muses. They never make any demands; they never nag; they keep everything operating on a level of fantasy. It's like they're women who read The Rules while listening to Elliott Smith. (See also: the girl in the band, who is often the ultimate ingenue.) And of course, it's not difficult to see the appeal of a woman like Summer. She's always just out of reach, making herself scarce at crucial moments and artfully dodging any of Tom's questions about whether they're boyfriend and girlfriend.
See what I mean? At some point in writing this, Shafrir moved from lambasting the male writers who try to pass off their romantic fantasies as genuine characters, which is lazy and insulting writing, and goes on to be angry with women who don't actually exist and, as such, couldn't have done anything to Shafrir to make her so angry at them. I might be overreading this, but this paragraph makes her sound like she's jealous, and that takes away most of her authority to talk about this subject. Zooey Deschanel is a real human being, and she doesn't actually flit around in the real world giving men the idea that there is such a thing as a perfect woman who doesn't get periods, doesn't have bad days, and is always eager to listen to your hopes, fears, and dreams without wasting your time by having any herself.
Reading that paragraph also gave me pause, because it falls way too much into the trap of joylessly reminding people that love is about hard work and not about that fun stuff, or maybe I just took it that way because she took a swipe at the "girl in the band", as if a woman is betraying the sisterhood by pursuing ambitions and artistic pursuits that might make her more attractive to some men. One would think that being in a band is exactly the sort of ambitious pursuit that we should applaud in women, though I do agree that a determined screenwriter could easily turn that into a MPDG trait by making the character's talent seem effortless and minimizing her investment in the outcome. This isn't a small concern, since Shafrir seems to be moving into thinking that there are tons of women out there who are willing to actually pretend to be dream girls, and now everyone who's in a band or avoids nagging is suddenly a suspect for the crime of giving men too high of hopes. I don't think that's too much the case. No matter how many books like "The Rules" are published, exhorting women to work hard at concealing their humanity from men in hopes of bewitching them into thinking they've found a perfect cipher, at the end of the day, women want the same thing out of love as do men---the be understood, loved, and supported. The poor fools who buy "The Rules" are just under the impression that you can drop the act after a set period of time, and he'll accept the big reveal, which seems unlikely if a man is actually dumb enough to be sucked into believing he's seeing a woman who doesn't want anything from him in return for giving so much of herself.
But I do totally get Shafrir's frustration. The premise of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl is that our poor hero, who deserves so much from womankind, has been left adrift in a sea of boring hags. That's why the trailer for this movie made me want to shoot myself. The audience is so in tune with the sexist premise that most women are tedious that we're actually expected to buy the idea that a man would be blown away by meeting a female Smiths fan. The answer to this isn't to demand that men lower their expectations in terms of wanting to be with women that have some spark of life, though. The problem with the stereotype is the one I thought Shafrir points out elsewhere---the MPDG's quirkiness, good taste, and love of life is portrayed strictly in terms of what men want for themselves, and we don't get much indication that there's anything going on below the surface in the MPDG.
*I haven't yet read the book, which I hear is a lot different.
Star Parker, who is apparently black, writes about how universal health care is a slave plantation...of slavery. The crux of this argument, as it is with so many conservative attempts to convince people that they're standing on the Gold Coast of liberal slavery, is that the government may take away one of those decisions you love making, like whether or not you harangue your doctor for a $86 prescription to Flomax or how long to stay at this shitty job given that you think you might have diabetes.
Autonomy in the sense of personal liberty, from a liberal perspective, revolves around the idea that we are free to make decisions about the course and direction of our lives, even though those choices may not be particularly favored by society. The liberal safety net is designed (or supposed to be designed) to allow for people to move from activity to activity, job to job, in order to figure out what works best for them - in essence, to maximize their happiness. There is a concept of shared sacrifice, but there's also a concept of shared benefit - opportunity has costs, and it makes more sense if those costs are distributed so as not to potentially ruin those who seek it. There is still room for success and failure (and the consequences thereof), but you are at least provided the chance to succeed or fail.
Conservative autonomy, on the other hand, is the autonomy of money. It doesn't matter if you're locked into constricting social roles, shut out of jobs, bolted down to a single place doing a single thing for the entirely foreseeable future, so long as nobody tells you how to spend your meager paycheck. If you were going to dinner, liberal autonomy might land you in a vegan restaurant or in a rib shack or at a really terrible taco stand, but the nice thing about it is that you have all of those options. Conservative autonomy would land you at any Applebee's that took your new Discover Card, so long as you didn't get one of those homo arugala salads.
For all the vast and sweeping talk of entrepreneurial spirit that peppers conservative boilerplate, its perception of autonomy is inherently fatal to the concept. You are not bound because you can't leave your job or because you're stuck dealing with a bill for months on end due to a bureaucratic snafu; you're bound because you may soon have the option or requirement to buy cheaper insurance that doesn't disappear once you get a better job offer. You're not bound because large corporations put a depressive effect on wages and seek out effective market monopolies, you're bound because fighting that may result in a package of hot dogs costing thirty cents more. You're not bound because your paycheck hasn't increased in half a decade, you're bound because the person who owns the company may have a three percent increase in their marginal income tax rate for every dollar they earn over $250,000, which will just come out of your paycheck anyway for no apparent reason.
The economic freedom to do exactly what you're told isn't freedom. It's illusory and tyrannical, allowing you the free will to determine which area of your life you're going to neglect and how you're going to neglect it. When you're left entirely to fend for yourself, some will become strong, but most of us will get weaker and thereby forced into certain prescribed modes of behavior. A government that doesn't fight for civil rights necessarily reinforces the inequalities that rule the day.
It's a simple question: would you rather pay the cost of freedom or try to buy it from whoever's selling it? And which one of those two models sounds more like slavery to you?
Ezra has some of the text up of remarks Obama made on a conference call with progressive bloggers, and if you're paranoid about health care reform being whittled down to meaninglessness due to congressional addiction to lobbyists' sweet nothings, I can't say his remarks were especially comforting.
I am less interested in making sure there's a litmus test of perfection on every committee than I am in going ahead and getting a bill off the floor of the House and off the floor of the Senate. Eighty percent of those two bills will overlap. There's going to be 20 percent that will be different in terms of how it will be funded, its approach to the public plan, its pay-or-play provisions.
The concern is that Obama is using the word "perfection" where your average health care reform supporter would say "feasibility". We're not stupid, and we know that for a lot of politicians, Obama included, getting something passed is more important than what actually gets passed a lot of the time, and he doesn't even try to hide this. But for people out in the real world who need health insurance, a bill that's been stripped of the most important elements, a workable public option, a health care reform bill that doesn't actually get them affordable health care is no health care reform bill at all.
There is simply too much euphemism in these remarks for my comfort levels. Also, defensiveness. Like this:
We shouldn't automatically assume that if any of the bills coming out of the committees don't meet our test, that there is a betrayal or failure. I think it's an honest process of trying to reconcile a lot of different interests in a very big bill.
It's true that a lot of people have a part to play in all this, including doctors and nurses as well as people who want to politicize certain kinds of health care (especially abortion) and see this as an opportunity to do so. But at the end of the day, there are only two major interests that are at odds, and to suggest otherwise is throwing up a red herring. Those interested parties are insurance companies and people with human bodies and all their frailties. Insurance companies want to take as much money as they can from you while dispensing few to no services, to maximize profit. Human beings with bodies want to pay what they can afford and actually get care when they need it. There's not really a way to make everyone happy in a situation where the two parties are completely at odds. Democrats may fancy that they're compromise geniuses, but this is a split the baby problem. And fuck anyone who thinks insurance company profits are as (or in many cases more) important than the health care needs of their fellow human beings.
Democrats need a strong dose of stepping back periodically and looking at the big picture, including their own precarious hold on power. I realize lobbyists are good at distracting politicians, and changing their focus from, "How will I get re-elected in 2010 or 2012?" to "How can I please this very insistent person and/or get a really sweet dinner on their dime?", but now is the time to summon the superpower of thinking about the people who voted for you, not the people parked in your office, dropping crocodile tears for their benefactors. Because those people are in a state of high anxiety right now, and they are perfectly capable of responding by not voting at all, or voting for your Republican opponent, if they've determined that you haven't done a goddamn thing to relieve their woes.
Here's what it looks like from the viewpoint of Joe or Jane Voter: The bank bailout was a giant giveaway of our money to the assholes who got us into this horrible economic situation, a giant payoff as a thank you for fucking us over and pissing in our faces. The economic stimulus package doesn't seem to have any effect at all on the exploding unemployment rate. We're still in an unwinnable war in Iraq. Outside of appointing a popular Supreme Court justice, the Democrats have done nothing for us.
The Republican argument will be mild, but effective: No one's going to do shit for you, but at least if we're the people putting the screws to you, we won't be spending nearly as much tax money on it. It won't be true---Republicans are more efficient at digging the country into debt than Democrats could ever dream of being---but their perceived honesty about how they're not going to do shit for you will feel refreshing to the public, who will reward them by saying, "Palin who?" and voting for them.
This can all be averted if the Democrats actually put the voters first on health care reform. For most people, health care costs are a constant worry, even in flush times, and right now, it's seems like so much more mandatory flushing of cash down the toilet. They will be incredibly grateful if they get some relief. More to the point, they'll be interested in protecting health care once its in place, and they'll trust Democrats to do that. Out of pure self interest, Democrats need to consider very carefully whether or not they want to pass health care "reform" that doesn't result in easily understood benefits for your everyday person. If we don't see it in our wallets, or at least in a burden lifted off our shoulders, it didn't happen. Simple as that. Sometimes Democrats feel like that boyfriend who tells you over and over how much you mean to him, but then he doesn't call, forgets dates, and gives you a card and a CD for a band you told him you didn't like for your birthday. And after you've put up with it for awhile, you DTMFA.
My usual, shall we euphemize, casual posting schedule has been further restricted by an impending move which, although it's but a stone's throw away*, is conspiring with insanely hot-for-Portland weather to take my free time from zero to somewhat less than.
But I did want to drop by and just mention that I'm mildly confused by the recent actions of my senior Senator who, known for his dedication to health care, has suddenly decided to become obstructionist - or then again, maybe not. The issue is so divisive**, Colin Meloy urged us all to call Wyden and complain from the stage at the Decemberists show on Saturday night while, as near as I can tell, describing the situation entirely incorrectly.
On balance, it appears, Wyden's not fucking us over as much as picking some strange bedfellows to get the work done, but it makes me sweat nonetheless. My discombobulation is so severe that I wrote Wyden a scathing e-mail vowing support for anyone who ran against him before realizing that I may have gotten the wrong end of the stick, but anytime the name Wyden appears alongside Landrieu and Lieberman my hackles will remain raised.
It doesn't help, of course, that this is so intensely personal. After spending five figures per year the last several just for premiums, only to build up an additional five-plus figures in disallowed procedures, I can't even watch Sicko for fear I'll throw a clot out of frustration, let alone spend time crunching numbers and figure out subtleties. I generally consider myself well-acquainted with political nuance, but health care turns me into a reactionary narrow-mind.
* Literally, if you have a good arm.
** Edited, because I realized that the stage banter of a folk-art-rock frontman are not necessarily the A-number-one indicator that an issue is confusing.
Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., one of the nation's pre-eminent African-American scholars, was arrested Thursday afternoon at his home by Cambridge police investigating a possible break-in. The incident raised concerns among some Harvard faculty that Gates was a victim of racial profiling.
Police arrived at Gates’s Ware Street home near Harvard Square at 12:44 p.m. to question him. Gates, director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard, had trouble unlocking his door after it became jammed.
He was booked for disorderly conduct after “exhibiting loud and tumultuous behavior,” according to a police report. Gates accused the investigating officer of being a racist and told him he had "no idea who he was messing with,'' the report said.
Police report available here.
Now, I can understand why the police might think that a middle-aged black man was breaking into a home during lunchtime by trying to ram the front door with his shoulder, because it's what many middle-aged black men do with their time, between Young and the Restless commercial breaks.
This goes back to my point about post-racialism. I'm sure that a significant number of people will read this and think that this is just a black man screaming racism because he handled a situation poorly, because a significant number of people like being dead fucking wrong. This is a part of an extensive pattern in Cambridge, which is the epicenter of what should be a post-racial revolution. The need for affirmative action or even the recognition of racism is supposed to be mitigated or even destroyed by the fact that a black man is President; one would think that at one of our nation's premiere universities, the sight of black people doing slightly out of the ordinary things would no longer be reason to suspect criminal activity. If there's one place where we should be able to assume that black people, absent obvious markers to the contrary, are behaving in rational and non-criminal ways, it's at Harvard.
*The man pictured above is Professor Gates, ten seconds before he presumably stole the computer monitor. Or would have if he hadn't been arrested.
I've been hearing this "no one in America goes without health care because of the emergency room" line from Republicans since at least the 90s. At least Mitch McConnell accepts that this isn't, to use his word, "efficient", though of course he neglects to mention that 20,000 Americans die every year because of lack of coverage. The dramatic and childish imaginations of conservatives are such that they can't imagine health care the prevents death as being anything but something that involves being rushed to the hospital, as if people don't perish quietly from long term diseases.
But obviously, the biggest gap with reality that this talking point exposes is the Republican willingness to subject 1/5th of the country to a choice between bankruptcy or death/mutilation. That's why I find the emergency room talking point so baffling---surely, they have to know that most people, when they think of emergency rooms, think first of being billed (to pull from recent personal experience) $1,500 to have a small piece of glass removed from their foot. I'm sure that the retort would be that it wasn't an emergency and I should have been a savvy consumer who fished it out myself, but of course, that would have meant going after my foot with a melon baller, since we'd already extinguished all other options because I didn't really feel I could afford emergency room bills. In other words, for all the talk about the market and free choice, there is no such thing if you're facing a medical emergency. Non-emergency care needs do get put off and ignored, until they become emergency care needs and avoiding massive debt is impossible.
As a talking point with the intent to persuade, the "just go to the emergency room" one is stupid, so I'm forced instead to assume that Republicans actually think it's a great idea to create a huge class of people that are stuck in bankruptcy. We are talking the "hunger is a great motivator" mentality, so of course it's reasonable to think that washing the country in unnecessary debt is a great way to turn people into compliant, fearful workers. There's a lot of talk in the air about how having guaranteed health care gives people the freedom to change jobs (and therefore bargain with employers from a stronger position for better wages), and I'll add to it that being debt-free is also incredibly freeing for people, making them able to take risks and stand up for themselves in ways that people swimming in debt just can't do.
Honestly, I'm surprised there wasn't more of a move during the Bush years to recreate debtors prisons, to add extra "motivation" for people that got stuck in a health care crisis to live their lives as obedient wage slaves. Or, in some cases, as obedient because they have no other choice.
The other funny thing to me about the emergency room talking point is how it directly conflicts with Republican attempts to scare the public about lines and waiting for health care. Clearly, your average Republican politician or pundit has not been to an emergency room in recent memory, because the lack of health insurance obviously creates these horrific waits. As someone blessed with great health but not so great coordination, I've only been in E.R. in my adult life for accident-related purposes (and one prescription drug reaction), and barring the stroke of luck of being the only person at E.R. when I stepped on glass, the wait has dragged on forever. And it was easy enough to look around and see why---emergency rooms are packed with people who are just plain sick. One time after cutting my finger, I seemed to be the only person in the waiting room that was there for a reason other than pneumonia. If people were able to get health care when they first got sick, instead of living in denial and hoping it would go away, I wouldn't have had the time to finish so many thick novels while trying to distract myself from concerns like, "Will I need stitches?" Seriously, if waiting in line bothers you so much, you should be the first to support health care reform.
I saw this linked a few places, but the one that inspired me to write about it was Cogitamus, so hat tip to them. It is this rantalicious piece by Ben Domenech waxing nostalgic about the America That Was, i.e. where non-white people had the boot firmly on their neck, and of course he blames the invention of sex for the downfall of white supremacy. Or contraception, really, though he doesn't use the word, since he uses code language like "marrying later" and "narcissism" to refer to dramatic impact that contraception has had on our ability to fuck without getting stuck in loveless marriages, the only way to really build up a Great White Society, in his opinion.
But before I address his claims, as incoherent as they are, I'd like to point out an amusing contradiction that's popping up in right wing rhetoric more and more often. Early in the rant, Ben says:
Easterbrook’s question can be summed up as: “We’re rich – so why are we so unhappy?” His subject may deserve reexamination these days – with the economic collapse of the last year, millions of Americans now have monetary excuses for their unhappiness, even if they can no longer afford the therapists needed to tell them why it’s their parents’ fault. But the inherent truth is still there: despite this downturn, despite rising unemployment, the vast majority of Americans have everything they could need and more.
Indeed, I'd like him to show up at one of the growing tent cities in our society of enough for everyone, and explain this to the residents. But that's not funny. What is funny is the contradiction he coughs up just a few paragraphs later:
For the most narcissistic among us, the problem is even reaching a point in life where marriage and reproduction are viewed in positive terms.
As usual, the argument for getting pregnant at 17 and getting married ASAP is that you need to put the social demands of keeping the white race (assumed the only audience for this) numerous before your own personal happiness. Or else you're a "narcissist", which is a word that social conservatives use to disparage happiness. Hearing right wingers try to argue that their goal is increased happiness for anyone but a small and wealthy percentage of white men is always a hoot. They're borrowing modern, liberal concepts to argue against them, and yet again, they don't understand them. Right wingers are probably not as fun when they're in the more comfortable zone, panicking over the idea that someone will steal a moment of pleasure in this world, but perversely they're less effective. Indeed, I'm worried that the repackaging of old anti-humanist ideas in pseudo-humanist language might be effective. For instance, it's effectively lulled some people with lingering doubts about women's freedom to convince themselves there's a way to be anti-choice and still progressive. Even though the evidence demonstrates that there's really not. Sadly, I can see some suckers fall for the idea that in order to be happy, we have to stop being happy, though they probably won't be convinced by Domenech's ham-fisted rhetoric.
The argument that more freedom and more wealth and even more distracting entertainments (and certainly more sex) has made us less happy has a certain appeal, but only for the shallow reason that people are drawn to ironies. That the suggestion is ironic doesn't make it true, though. Sure, people are often unhappy in modern times---especially if they live in one of those tent cities that Domenech's worldview doesn't allow for---but are we more unhappy? Conservatives conflate chaos, which there is more of in the lives of middle class white people than the idyllic 50s (though there was more of it then than they'll allow), but I'm not sure that translates to more unhappiness. And if it does, wouldn't it be due to the financial shifts that cause economic chaos and living paycheck to paycheck, things that Domenech and other conservatives applaud? Domenech and others want to believe that we're unhappy despite our toys because someone had the bad taste to invent sex.
Within the next few years, the American male will hit the highest median age for marriage in the history of the country. Perhaps this is a product of the new economy. Or perhaps it is the result of a media-altered vision of womanhood – young men who have an airbrushed vision of the opposite sex in mind can become reluctant to settle for normalcy and the face to face of the real world.
I love how he assumes that men and men only are the reason that American marriage rates are rising, because women will marry the first guy who looks at them, amirite? They just want that ring, and don't care who wields it or whether it fits into their own life plans. But more of that later---what's interesting about this essay is how much Domenech assumes that it's pornography and general imagery about sexual liberation that has caused marriage ages to trend upwards. He does make room to suggest that tabloids are "pornography" that is about how family is a failure, since they track high profile celebrity divorces. Why he thinks this would influence male choices is beyond me, since those magazines are consumed mainly by women. As his argument actually shows, because if Ben opened up a single mainstream women's magazine, tabloid or otherwise, he'd discover that it's pro-marriage porn. Weddings are lovingly covered in every lavish detail, but divorcing and breaking up couples are covered in a way that makes it clear that they're transgressors. The message of the break-up stories is that breaking up is evidence that you are fucked up, so the reader can feel superior.
The rising age of marriage has many causes, including the economic reality that having a steady career in your early-to-mid 20s is beyond most people's grasp and the growing acceptance of cohabitation. But the primary reason, and one that Domenech only hints at with his concern about "pornography", is that effective contraception has become so mainstream. Decoupling sex and reproduction means that people can marry when they like for love. What reasonable people consider a boon to human happiness, however, sticks in the craw of wingnuts, who can't get past the "when they like" part. How dare people exert so much control over their own destinies?
The focus on the rising male age of marriage is interesting. Part of the "compassionate conservative" strategy is to acknowledge that being mouth-breathing misogynists is less than appealing as a sales tactic, and so to shift towards "chivalrous" arguments, in hopes that people think it's a kind of feminism. I think the hope is by painting men as the villain, they'll seem like the "real" feminists, as if feminism was based on bashing men instead of lifting women up. And so the rising age of marriage is, like many things in the conservative bogeyman pantheon, blamed on feminism for allowing men to be their natural, horrible selves---addicted to pornography, "narcissistic", unable to get past the natural male revulsion for female personalities to force themselves to marry. And the only way to tame men's disturbed minds is for women to be submissive and get pregnant a lot. It's all nonsense, of course---the smallest association with the real world will demonstrate that men quite often enjoy women's company and not just their genitalia---but it's the best they can do when trying to come up with pseudo-non-misogynist arguments for misogyny.
The rest of the essay is just more of the same disturbed wingnut obsessions strung together---nostalgia mixed with a worshipful tone of men who have irrefutable claims to masculinity (as the weenies with keyboards fear they do not), a simplistic hope that reducing women to baby factories will right all supposed wrongs. It's just interesting that even in an incoherent rant like this, wingnut strategies to dress up their mean-spirited beliefs are clumsily employed.
UPDATE: People have pointed me to this DKos diary, where it appears Holmes was not diagnosed with a brain tumor, but a cyst, and she has repeatedly appeared on TV claiming the tumor story. While that's not particularly surprising, that even underscores the bottom line is her story proves we need reform because she had to put a second mortgage on her home, borrow from friends and her husband took a second job to be able to afford the $100k U.S. surgery.
***
I have to agree with this assertion over at Eschaton -- "The reality is if you get real sick, no matter if you're insured or not, you're probably financially fucked." The partisan bickering over how much it is going to cost is ludicrous -- the cost is just one part of the problem, the fact that we have so many people uninsured and worse, under-insured, is the reality of too many Americans and to get everyone adequate care will likely cost trillions.
Those of us who do have decent insurance, are rightfully concerned that government mucking around in the system and playing politics with something that should be a right -- equal access to GOOD medical care for all -- is going to end up a big mess.
I'm not going to debate the merits of one plan or another here; I'm just looking at health care as a "frequent flyer" consumer with pre-existing conditions who sees doctors and specialists several times a year, and has adequate insurance that still has left me with long waits to see a specialist (3 months is not unheard of), and dealt with substandard care.
In our current system nearly everyone has horror stories about waiting for insurance to approve the most basic common sense things -- like one extra day in the hospital after a c-section, or trying to get a medication not yet in generic form that you and your doctor know works and the insurance company insists on a different generic substitute or you pay outright. The number and type of what I call "drive-by" surgeries, where they kick you to the curb a couple of hours after you've been opened up on the table is astonishing -- they wanted to do that for my gall bladder surgery and I begged to stay overnight because I've had complications after ambulatory surgery before that landed me back in the ER the next day. Thankfully it was approved, because I was right -- I developed a fever and had serious difficulties that I wouldn't have been able to manage at home.
But what if the insurance company had said no. That happens all the time. It happened to me several years ago, I wasn't able to stay overnight and went into the drive-through surgery; I developed a serious staph infection. It required a second surgery a couple of weeks later. Oh, and I had to pay a lot out of pocket for that second surgery even though I wasn't responsible for the need for it, even with insurance. A little time and attention would have saved everyone a lot of grief.
And prescription insurance -- well big pharma makes us all pay for the price controls in other countries. I totaled up medications I take each month to see what they would cost if I didn't have insurance -- over $900/month! That's insane. John's story is no better, and again, he has insurance.
I didn't know what my good plan covered until I got asthma as a result of my allergies. Now I know that my asthma drugs cost a whopping $471 a month. That's $5,652 a year. After Blue Cross' paltry share, that leaves me with $4,152 a year in asthma drugs (not counting any other prescriptions I may have to take for other unrelated problems that may arise). My insurance costs me nearly $420 a month. That's another $5,040 a year. And the premium goes up around 25% a year. Imagine how much it's going to be in ten years when I'm 55. And the joke, Blue Cross will still only give me $1500 in prescription drug coverage ten years from now - that's the way their policy works. I got $1500 when I started 12 years ago with them, and I'll have $1500 in ten years.
The problem here -- and I'm calling out all of the elected officials on the Hill -- is that while they are bickering about numbers (it will be huge no matter what we end up with I want all of them to answer one question: do they believe every person in the country is entitled to the same health care choices and offerings as Congress? If not, why not?
"It's too expensive" is not a legitimate answer.
That answer is loaded with the difficult truth underlying the debate -- a lot of people determining the fate of our health care system believe there should be a tiered level of care -- that some people are deserving of A+ quality care with all the options available, and some are not, and should be satisfied with something less, or fewer options because they poor or underinsured. If this is the case, state it now.
If Congress is satisfied with their current care, why not price out that model to cover everyone, and work the numbers. Obviously Dear Leader didn't put a price tag on his war adventures and we're still running up an endless tab that produced death and destruction that Congress keeps funding.
The high cost of health care is also due to doctors and hospitals covering their butts with extra unnecessary tests to avoid lawsuits, emergency rooms flooded with people who have no insurance and cannot pay, so the cost is passed on to those who can. Big pharma counts on us to boost the profits they cannot extract from countries with price controls; doctors have to carry high liability insurance because we're such a litigious society...the list goes on and on.
Employer group policy deductibles keep rising each year, or services are reduced because the employer cannot afford to underwrite the costs to hold the line on premiums. No one should have their health care plan tied to their employment. It has to be portable and stable. COBRA, intended to provide portability of a policy for those who leave a job, is often too expensive.
And remember, if your plan is tied to your employment and you're have pre-existing conditions, you better find a large company with a big group policy and never leave that job, since small businesses are more likely to have crappier policies or heinously high premiums -- or offer no insurance at all.
The whole system is broken -- except when it's not and works just fine for a good number of people.
Why is it so difficult to put that level of priority setting on health care? Maybe I'm missing something. So back to the debate -- since any solution -- public/private/co-op will be a huge, expensive endeavor -- what is the baseline of quality services that everyone should receive? Ability to pay should not matter, because we already know we have millions of unemployed people without the ability to pay right now. We have a system where only the well-insured and wealthy are able to get expedited or specialized care.
The real underlying problem here in all of this -- and I think it's tied to the general capitalist, class-based mindset in this country -- that there's a basic assumption that the health of some Americans is worth more than others. And I'm not just talking about the super-wealthy, it goes for the "aspirational set" as well. You know, the Rush listener, the Base, the blue-collar social conservatives who dream of the wealth and upward mobility that the Republicans sell them -- until those titans of industry shut the plants down or move them overseas, and leave Joe Lunchbucket high and dry with an empty wallet, no health insurance and a family to feed. Only then does the reality set in.
Because of that there will always be a feeling out there it's essential for any reform to include a way to "get a leg up" in terms of access and services that preserves the best care for the class-based or luck-based (you have a good job with great health plan benefits) privileged, leaving anyone who doesn't getting cost-restricted, access-restricted services.
Let's take a look at an ad (R) you might be seeing on your TV right now.
The commercials running down here in NC are outlandishly slanted and misleading, particularly one from a group called Patients United Now. The ad, "Survivor," features a Canadian woman, Shona Holmes, who had a brain tumor, telling her story about her health care nightmare. She had to come to the U.S. to receive first-class care because the six-month wait to see a specialist in her country would have cost her life.
Her story is true. She's right in one respect - we do have first-class health care here -- if you have enough money you can buy any health services you need. She might be able to cross over to the U.S, but some people living here, even with insurance, can't afford jack.
What you didn't see in that ad is what she and her friends and family had to do to make that U.S. medical care happen. Holmes testified at a Health Reform Hearing before the Energy and Commerce Committee and you can see why Patients United Now didn't add this bit of business:
My family and I decided to contact the Mayo Clinic in Arizona. We got an appointment immediately and I flew alone to Phoenix, 2,000 miles from my home outside of Toronto. Within a week, the doctors at the Mayo Clinic diagnosed me with a brain tumor, pressing on my optic chiasm causing the rapid vision loss. I had to have it removed within six weeks or my vision would continue to deteriorate and I would lose my sight. This was the tip of the iceberg of treatment that I would need to seek; however, it was the most crucial.She told CNN:Three weeks after my diagnosis and unable to expedite the surgery in Canada, my husband bumped up hours in a second job, took out a second mortgage on our home, borrowed from family and friends, and rallied all of our financial resources so we could cover the $100,000 worth of expenses for my surgery and we flew back to Arizona so the doctors at the Mayo Clinic could remove my tumor. Ironically at that time a second surgery was strongly recommended by the Mayo clinic.
I required a second surgery to remove my adrenal glad. I returned to Canada and got back in line. I am here to report that surgery was done in Canada, but three years later. I will never know the amount of irreversible tissue damage that such wait times have caused. I will never get back the time, money, and life I dedicated to the fight to get the basic treatment that I was not only promised by my government, but was ordered by my government. I will never forget the experience of treatment in a facility suffering so badly from government funding shortages in staff and resources that even a pillow case on my bed was not to be found.
I know that the American health care system is not perfect, but again, I credit the system for saving my life. It is because of the choices available here in this country that I was able to receive the immediate care I needed. We as Canadians have one insurance company – the government. No option. Can’t choose another company, can’t supplement with after-tax dollars to purchase extra care. We can purchase health insurance for our pets, but not our children.
In Canada, I have very few rights as a patient. Patients there have to fight for the very basic services and care, much less any kind of specialized care. I am here today not only to tell you my own story but also to ask you, as leaders of this great country, not to destroy American health care but to keep in place the options that all Americans have for acquiring health care. Where would we Canadians go if the American health care system becomes like Canada’s?
"That's the stuff that I find so tragic -- having dinner with my friends and I know how much money I owe them," Holmes says, tears streaming down her face.Now tell me, how many Americans could say the same thing about our own system? What she had to go through to pull together $100K shouldn't have to be done either!
No one said the Canadian system is perfect; particularly in cases where specialists are needed, everyone should have timely access for serious deadly conditions. However, in this country, people who are underinsured or uninsured can be bankrupted by treatment for illnesses or injuries much less severe than Shona Holmes's brain tumor. That's the problem -- the commercial doesn't show who's left out of the current U.S. system and who is cut off from the services they need.
From my POV, given our dog-eat-dog mentality here in the U.S., it's hard to imagine a public/private/co-op system emerging that will 1) hold down costs, and 2) provide first-class care in a timely manner to everyone that compares to the best private insurance out there now or what someone with deep pockets can buy. Polls show Americans want a universal health care that is comprehensive -- but no one wants to pay for it. We can't have it both ways, and Congress knows that. To the layperson out there all of the parties out there have a lot to lose and nothing to gain in an overhaul that is drenched in partisan politics.
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