birthday thoughts

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Today I have achieved the age of 72. I am not old, though I do make an occasional joke about geezerdom.

Last week at my regular appointment with my primary care physician, on whom I have a geezerly crush, I was asked if I had fallen in the past six months. I thought of replying, “Only in love with you, my dear,” but I bit my tongue and said merely, “No” as the question required. Later, as I was leaving she flashed me a big grin and averred, “Isn’t it good to get a clean bill of health?” which I interpreted as assurance that I am almost as good as new, youthful ardor and all.

But yesterday things turned somber. I renewed my driver’s license, since the old one expired today, and was allowed to renew for three years only, because of my advanced age. In addition—I was asked if I wished to become an organ donor. “No,” I said; thinking I’m not quite ready to parcel out my nearly new body parts yet. The young woman behind the counter smiled as she purred, “No problem.”

Now, I am in favor of organ donation. Upon reflection I think I should have answered, “Yes.” It was just that the question surprised me. I was still in a self-congratulatory mood having been given a clean bill of health. And not only that, I had just won a battle with city refuse collectors over a dumpster that had been blocking my garage door. So it’s a good thing the bountiful State of Missouri allows me to correct my error in three rather than the seven years’ licensure available to those under 70. Still, I have other, more disturbing thoughts.

Should I interpret the experience of renewing my driver’s license as placing subtle pressure upon me to get it over with and kick the bucket, cash in my chips, pass on to a better place (without, of course, my corneas, liver, and lights)? Does the redneck state of Missouri wish me dead—so as to be rid of my liberal, medicare-consuming ass? Is my driver’s license in reality a death license? Does President Obama have designs on my body parts?

—these questions boggle the mind.

button back

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Well, I got over my irrational pique and put back the Obama health care button. After a couple of days I still think the administration is honestly seeking comprehensive health care reform, even though its representatives are starting to speak of health insurance reform instead.

I’m also thinking the explanation for my various disappointments with the Obama administration is its constant effort to recruit Republican support in the name of bipartisanship. Harold Meyerson has a good piece in today’s Washington Post about why such bipartisanship is impossible and mentions some signs that the administration may be changing course. I hope so.

But it isn’t just Republicans who are poisoning the well with respect to health care. The so-called gang of six, including allegedly moderate Republicans, Charles Grassley, Olympia Snowe, and Mike Enzi also includes three Democrats, Max Baucus, Jeff Bingham, and Kent Conrad. Under the guise of seeking a bipartisan compromise, these senators, all of whom have received substantial contributions from the medical-industrial complex, seem actually seeking to prevent whatever legislation passes the Senate from containing provision for any public program or any employer mandate.

I do not believe that Baucus and Grassley are negotiating in good faith. Grassley is presently waging a reelection campaign that is filled with demagoguery aimed at the right of the right in Iowa, as witness his recent support of the Palin death-panel canard and his performance in recent town hall meetings. Baucus has received substantial contributions from the medical-industrial complex since 2005. Indeed, all gang-of-six members seem inclined at present to delay or scale back health care reform, and some are maintaining that public support for reform has eroded.

In Iowa, where only recently a majority supported reform, Senator Grassley, who claims to be listening to his constituents, is now claiming that “Iowans are more interested in making sure that Congress does not mess up what they already have.” I don’t believe him. Nor do I think public support for reform has eroded. I think rather that the weaker part of that support has now to contend with people’s fears about the economy in the wake of plummeting home values and shrinking or disappearing retirement savings. I also think sabotage of town hall meetings by activists and fringe groups has worked to the extent that it has created confusion that plays into the hands of Republican recalcitrance.

There are three alternatives, it seems to me, that the administration will ponder as it seeks a way out the morass: 1) scaling back reform in hopes of winning some Republican support, though I frankly don’t think this is meaningfully possible beyond two or three votes–Grassley will find a way to vote with the majority of Republicans who are demagoguing health care reform in hopes of bringing the President down; 2) forcing comprehensive reform through the Senate with the 51 votes necessary for reconciliation; or 3) allowing the Republicans to kill reform with a filibuster in the Senate and running against that in the elections of 2010. James Carville has proposed the third alternative–it might not be a bad idea.

What my guy stands to lose if he continues to court specious bipartisanship is any resemblance to the heroic young man who waged a remarkable campaign for office only a few short months ago. He will be perceived as just another politician.

—It’s a big thing to lose.

I’ve taken it down

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I’ve removed the “I stand with Obama” about health care link I had posted here. Apparently both the end of life provisions and the public option have been abandoned by the administration.

Mike Allen at Politico suggests that the public option was always a mere bargaining chip and quotes Marc Armbinder of The Atlantic about angry liberals, of whom I guess I am one.

If you equate health care reform with a public option, then, well, health care reform is dead to you. There are a lot of angry liberals tonight. They are within their rights to feel aggrieved.

Whatever may be the future of the health care debate, so called. the move to reform our health care system has now been so demagogued by the wingnuts (who can now include Charles Grassley among their numbers) and so mired in payoffs to the medical-industrial complex, that the entire mix has become toxic.

And the President, instead of leading, instead of providing clarity, caves.

It’s a great disappointment, but no less I suppose than my disappointment with the President’s validation of Bush policies on detention and the rule of law, with his willingness to force major auto manufacturers and their subsidiaries with their hundreds of thousands of workers and retirees into bankruptcy whilst propping up major banks with billions in undeserved federal dollars and rewarding venal bank executives with huge bonuses as recompense for their venality, with his adoption of the factory model of education, emphasizing test scores and rote learning at the expense of independent thinking.

I have a deal of thoughts about all this, but tonight I’m just angry. So I’ve removed the link.

home again

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I don’t think I remembered to post that we were going on vacation, but we did–go on vacation, that is. We spent ten days in Wisconsin, all but one day in Door County. The weather was wonderful, and The Alpine, a funky old resort where we always stay, was as it always is, warm, hospitable, friendly, full of people who love to stay there, as we do, and have grown fond of the Bertschinger family who operate it.

I like to buy books in Door County. My favorite bookstores are The Peninsula Bookman, in Fish Creek and Wm. Caxton, Ltd., in Ellison Bay. Caxton is actually Kubet Luchterhand, a retired anthropology prof from Roosevelt U. I didn’t manage to buy anything from him this year, but last year I bought a beautiful copy of the two-volume Victor Lowe biography of Alfred North Whitehead. At Peninsula Bookman this year I bought a mint copy of Least Heat Moon’s River Horse. A few of years back I found a beautiful copy of James Carroll’s Constantine’s Sword there.

At Solbjørg’s, in the Sister Bay Café, where we usually have brunch at least once, for the last several years I’ve bought novels by Henning Mankell to read on the Alpine veranda, a pastime we have christened “verandizing.” This year I bought and read three Mankell novels, but in order to prevent myself from running out of them too soon, I’ve decided to read Mankell only on vacation at The Alpine. Right now I’m working through the Kurt Wallander series. When I finish with them, I’ll start on the others.

The Sister Bay Café is a favorite brunch place on “the door”–what some people call the Door County peninsula, a name reminiscent of its origin in the epithet, La Porte des Morts of early French voyageurs. Waters around the door were treacherous in former and more recent times, as a trip to the Door County Maritime Museum amply demonstrates. But enough of that. Another favorite place is Al Johnson’s, whose sod roof with goats wandering about chewing the grass likely attracts as many folks with cameras as the Swedish pancakes attract hungry eaters.

On the way to “the door” we stopped for a short time in Madison, where I had a chance to visit The Overture Center, about which I wrote a magazine piece in 1983 when it was called The Madison Civic Center. Refurbished and restored a second time, The Capitol theatre still nestles in the center’s heart, an elegaic stanza in the free verse of Overture’s steel and glass. I plan to write more about this place later on.

Down the Street at Avol’s Bookstore I found a copy of Betty Adcock’s 1995 book, The Difficult Wheel. I was especially happy to find it since I hadn’t kept up with Betty’s work since Beholdings (1988). The Difficult Wheel includes a poem I remembered from the late 1970s when Betty was among the first writers in residence at Weymouth Center in Southern Pines, NC, where I had an office for a while.

The idea in those days was that poets-in-residence contributed poems that evoked the center in some way. Betty’s poem, “Written in a Country Mansion of the 1920’s Now Partially Restored as a Retreat for Poets,” evokes the gulf of time menacing between imagined raisers of the house and those first literary residents of a new decade, but it does so wistfully, as though time itself were a cosmic perplexity.

Before you could blink away erasure, before
you could wake wholly to the afternoon’s
cut flowers, the mirrors, the folded headlines
from Europe, a hand across your eyes—
you might have guessed, almost,
the longleaf pines around this house
the last of their thousand mile forest,
light changing into future, the workings of light
become knowledge towards annihilation.
And you might have seen us, strangers flickering
dark here, darker. And the whippoorwill
practicing a dying art.

A dying art, perhaps. Dana Gioia’s famous essay on the matter is worth a read. But it’s an art that many still treasure, as I treasure this poem of Betty Adcock’s, not the least because I was present when she read a draft of it to an audience for the first time. I think the year was 1979, the first year Weymouth Center operated as an independent entity. I’ve been back twice for short residencies, in 1987 and 1998. The writers’ program continues and is a feature of this year’s thirtieth anniversary celebration.