Tomorrow being September 19th, we should all be polishing up our pirate vocabularies and seeking assistance from this estimable volume: The Pirate Life: Unleashing Your Inner Buccaneer. So that we’ll all be able to undertake this enterprise with proper seriousness, I offer the following musical assistance.
It would appear as well that the authors of The Pirate Life have been banned from Facebook on grounds they are not real persons. Hmmmm . . .
The death of Jody Powell at the young age of 65—here’s a Times memorial piece I like—ensures that he will remain a whiz kid, at least in my memory. And it causes me to think again of September, 1973, when I was a very young community arts council executive running his first local festival in the Southern Pines, NC town park.
A group of politicos, stumping for Bill Hefner, running then for his first term in the U. S. Congress, came to see us. It was a fine, fall day. The park was full of folks. The Bluegrass Tar Heels had already warmed up the afternoon. Hefner’s gospel group fit right in; they had somehow missed their audience and found ours. During the singing I surveyed the park and waxed expansive about it all. At one point I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned to find a handshake and a big grin on the face of a sandy-haired fellow who introduced himself saying, “Hi! I’m Jimmy Carter. I’m the Governor of Georgia.” I don’t remember what we talked about, but I’ve loved him ever since, admired him and voted for him twice for president.
He’s in the news today, pointing out the obvious—that much of the most vocal opposition to President Obama is racist. And he’s been slandered all over the place. Perhaps the worst attack is in today’s National Review Online. Carter, these sagacious editors say, is guilty of “playing the race card.” His “accusations” are “both banal and cynical” and “right on cue.” Of course, Mr. Carter made no accusations; he responded to questions, stating a view that’s held by many supporters of the present administration. But in an incendiary political atmosphere being stoked by the racist cant of Glenn Beck, Lou Dobbs, and Rush Limbaugh, any mention of race counts as an explosive device. This, I suspect, is why Ben Smith termed Carter’s comments bad politics.
On another note, the Associated Press is reporting tonight that Mary Travers is dead, having lost the fight she has waged with leukemia for the past several years. My beloved and I heard one of the last Peter, Paul and Mary concerts here, at the Fox Theater, a few years back, a concert we attended with a politically mixed group of friends who loved that music.
Obits are already associating Travers with the liberal causes she and her partners, Paul Stookey and Peter Yarrow, espoused; but Peter, Paul and Mary belong to American history as Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, indeed the whole folk music movement do. “Their sound is gone out into all lands,” as the scripture says.
Here’s one of my favorite Peter, Paul and Mary Songs, apolitical perhaps, written by Gordon Lightfoot.
I’ve just read a powerful op-ed piece in the Arizona Daily Star in support of the President’s program of health care reform. It’s a good, strong piece full of passionate thinking and based in personal experience. The writer is Sarah Garrecht Gassen, the daughter of a friend and co-parishioner here in St. Louis. The heart of it is the author’s experience trying to find health insurance in light of the fact that she has used a prosthetic leg since she was three years old.
Gassen’s concern in this piece is primarily with reform of the insurance system, particularly with changing the familiar practice of denying coverage because of pre-existing conditions; though her anger with people who are willing to ignore “the failings of our existing health-care system because someone somewhere told them President Obama is a socialist or some such nonsense” extends beyond that one set of issues. I had thought this was relatively safe territory, believing that the clear middle-class interest in insurance reform would ensure the success of this part of the President’s program. But I fear I was wrong.
The comment thread following Gassen’s piece is filled with attacks on her and her ideas. Many of them are just flaming, but not all. One merely observes sarcastically,
Sorry about your leg Sarah. I had a similar problem when I tried to get auto insurance the day after I wrecked my car.
Damn insurance companies.
Here’s another, this one a serious ad hominem:
Sarah is a liberal journalist with no background or expertise in health care. Yet she has the pulpit and the ink to spew her opinions. She is so biased her pieces abound in poor judgement, but she can’t really help herself. This is what is frightening about these people. Be afraid, be very afraid.
But the most dismaying comment comes from a person who speaks without apparent malice—I give it entire.
I am very sorry for your prosthetic leg situation.
However, I am tired of people such as myself on the right being accused of fear mongering.
If you want truth, the truth is much of what you hear from the right is the end result of much thought about how a government health care system will affect the country. We are not stupid as some might think and we have the right to our opinions just as much as any person on the left. I may not agree with the left, but I don’t accuse them of being non-thinkers.
Another thing I am tired of is that people with extraordinary needs are being used to set the precedent for why we need nationalized health care.
Truth be told, those people are a small percentage and I don’t think it is right to turn the entire health care system over onto its’ belly because of the few.
I have concern about the ever-increasing “me me me” mentality in this country…”the government should pay for this, the government should pay for that.” To heck with the entitlement mentality.
Finally, there are a number of very charitable organizations from churches to doctors and hospitals whose sole purpose is to assist those who need it
It’s been my thought that the struggle for consensus on health care involved persuading independent voters, those who voted for Obama in the general election because of perceived economic interest, that health care reform would benefit them, particularly that requiring insurance companies to cover everyone for a reasonable cost would benefit them.
It’s this thought that I am re-examining. I have no idea how representative the comments to Sarah Gassen’s op-ed may be of the opposition to health care reform, but if they are broadly representative I’m more worried than I was. When people who seem rational can characterize their fellow citizens who would simply like to be able to buy health insurance for a reasonable cost and be covered for their pre-existing conditions, as deadbeats possessed of an entitlement mentality, we’ve hit a new low, indeed.
In today’s New York Times. Charles Blow makes a point about discourse that I’ve seen made around the media for some time now. We’ve been told that the President is too cerebral. In fact that critique was close to the heart of the Clinton campaign for the Democratic nomination in 2008. Here’s Blow’s version:
Conservatives speak in bumper stickers. Obama speaks in thesis statements. In fact, he sometimes seems constitutionally incapable of concision.
He also seems to display a disdain for irrational excitability and confronts it with either princely dispassion, mocking disbelief or stirring oratory that speaks more to posterity than to the people in front of him.
I think Blow is right to the extent that the sloganeering arguments contained in sound bites like “Death panels. Death books. Taxpayer dollars for abortion. Kill Grandma. Take away choice,” have had an impact, or at least seem to have had an impact. Blow follows the common procedure of linking these slogans with polls showing voter confusion and antipathy to the health care proposals that are presently before the congress. Bit I’m not sure I like Blow’s prescription for dealing with that success.
In American debates, and particularly in this debate, facts are not sufficient, no matter how eloquently spoken. We want to be moved by passion and conviction and determination and faith. We coalesce around simple ideas like right and wrong, and for many, yes, good and evil.
Some may dislike this simplicity and wish it were different (I am among them), but in politics you have to play on the field where the game is.
In the first place, the arguments contained in the conservative sound bites are “one-way hash” arguments. There’s a good discussion of this type of argumentation at FactCheck.org. By my reading the cleverness of the conservative sound bites (all of which are what Huck Finn calls “stretchers” and many of which are outright lies) isn’t that they are beautifully simple as Blow claims. The problem is that they are difficult to answer seriously because the answers are complicated. And the slogans succeed, I believe, because brute populist appeals tend to favor conservative causes in today’s political climate, appealing as they do to naive individualism and to the residues of nativism and racism that still plague our social life.
Blow’s analysis invites a war of sound bites. I think that’s a losing proposition for progressives like me and for the President as well. I also think that if we do pass a health care bill and the President gets to sign it into law, there will remain a great deal of irrational opposition to it, just as there is still irrational opposition to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, even from many Americans who benefit from these programs.
One might wish that the Republican Party would abandon its determination to appeal to the worst in people. That seems unlikely, especially in the present political climate. So, yes, it’s fairly urgent for progressives and other democrats to learn to counter that appeal effectively. I don’t know how to do that, and I don’t think Mr. Blow does either. But the President and his team have a pretty good record countering it so far, and they learn fast. I’m anxiously awaiting the President’s health care speech.