Saturday Morning at the Movies: Political Reality and its Discontents

Inforgraphic from
Fix-It: Healthcare at the Tipping Point

 

   There is an eminently practical solution to a terrible problem that is not an issue in this election campaign, simply because it's considered to be political impossible.  Saturday morning, about fifty dreamers who want to make it an issue, gathered at the Rialto Theater in El Cerrito to watch the movie Fix It: Health Care at the Tipping Point.

The Rialto Theater in El Cerrito,
supported by the generosity of many donors

    Our health care sysem is a slow-motion train wreck.  The U.S. spends 17% of it's GNP on health care, and even with the ACA, that figure has been on the rise — and 1/3 of all health care premiums are eaten up in administrative costs.  Most bankruptcies in the U.S. are due to medical expenses; many of those bankrupt had insurance, but it didn't cover enough.  Health care costs are only around 10% of GNP for the EU, where health care insurance is not tied to employment. They also have a higher life expectancy,

    Single-payer is a practical solution to the health care mess because when a single entity buys insurance for everybody, costs are lower and health outcomes improve.

    And alas, single payer is politically impossible when we're only hanging on to the Affordable Care Act by the skin of our teeth.  The Republican congress voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA), but last February the House failed to override President Obama's veto.  Hillary says she wants to extend the ACA by offering a "public option," which would compete with private insurance plans.  But unless there's a dramatic change of fortunes in congress, she would need to play defense too.  Donald J. Trump says he would ask congress to repeal the ACA on the very first day of his administration.

    Fix It emphasizes that single-payer saves both lives and money.  The movie was funded by Richard Master, owner of MCS Industries, which makes picture frames and decorative mirrors. The company was struggling to meet annual increases in health care insurance, and Richard decided to try and find out why. He discovered the system was broken, and that in the words of the movie's title, there's a fix.  The movie also features a Republican legislator from Pennsylvania, explaining that single-payer would be good for the economy because it would lower the cost of doing business.  Well, duh.  There's also an interview with a Canadian conservative, amazed that his fellow conservatives in the U.S. cannot grasp this logic.

    As for saving lives, many of us already know sad stories about people who could not afford treatment. One I'll never forget came courtesy of Jean's sister Anne, a retired radiation oncologist and a brain tumor survivor herself.

    Anne was invited to give a second opinion on a man who had been treated by another radiation oncologist for a nasopharyngeal tumor that had invaded his skull. Following that treatment, that doctor found necrosis spots in the man's brain and decided that the tumor had progressed even further. The man was told he had not long to live.

    However, when Anne examined the scans from the first treatment, she saw that his tumor was actually stable. The spots in his brain, all within the radiation fields of his treatment, were not evidence that the tumor had spread. Instead, they were areas of damage caused by the treatment itself, and the way it was given.

    Anne expected the man to be overjoyed when she called to tell him he would live. But she found that from the patient's point of view, her news had a serious drawback. Expected to die, his hospice care was paid for. Expected to live, he had to resume paying for his medications out of pocket. And how in the world could he afford to do that?

A smartphone commercial you would never see on TV

Gale Myra Pico with her new smartphone
August 9, 2016

    Walking on the sidewalk, sitting on a train, waiting for a table at a restaurant, most people so absorbed by their smartphones they don't look around and notice all the others doing the same thing they are, pecking away at small screens.  Does it make you feel disgruntled, like grousing that you've wandered into a remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, strange alien beings  inhabiting familiar forms?  Here's another side to the story.

    My sister Gale is a schizophrenic, and for the last 25 years she's been living

Gale, Sam, and Gabe, absorbed in their
phones, August 14 Patterson CA

in a group home in San Francisco, while coming to see me in the East Bay every month.  For the first 24 of those years, I'd arranged for her to come over by calling on her house phone.  Often nobody would answer and the voice mailbox would be full.  If someone did answer, and repeated shouts of "Gale, phone for you," elicited no response, there was no reliable way to leave her a message.  She'd conceived a firm dislike of cell phones, and had never browsed web.  In short, she lived with the technology that existed at the time she was first hospitalized, in the 1960s.

    Gale likes to read books in French, and her current favorite authors are Guy De Maupassant the Victor Hugo.  I would order books for, but my French is poor and once I made a mistake and ordered a Classics Illustrated version by mistake.  And the books would take a long time to arrive, were expensive, and Gale needed to keep a dictionary handy to look up new words.  Then last year, she suddenly agreed to accept an iPad so she could use an e-book reader.  Afterwards, the world of French literature was just a convenient click away, as were the definitions of words she didn't know.

    And then she learned how to use the Maps app to get around better on public transportation.  And then Pandora, to listen to Little Richard.  And then to use email — when one of hers showed up on my inbox, I'd think of how hard it had been to phone her before, and picture a small, isolated word expanding dramatically.

Gabe, Gale, ETa, and Sam, August 14 in Patterson

    But after a year, she started to feel a bit cramped in this brave new world.  It was still just as hard as ever to talk on the phone, and there were repeated problems with wi-fi at the group home, interfering with her music.  This summer she changed her mind about cellphones, and last week she got her first, an iPhone 6S+.

    She's already learned how to reply to texts using Messages, and to send new texts from Contacts, and to dial and answer the phone.  And she really appreciates being able to listen to her music on cellular data, when wi-fi isn't available.

    This Sunday Gale took her new phone with her to Patterson, near Modesto, when we visited

Eta and Gale, August 14 in Patterson

my younger son Sam. Sam has just earned his 11 month clean and sober badge — another world that's been expanding just recently.  The driver was my niece Eta, Gale's biological daughter, and my older son Gabe came with us too.  This was the first time Gabe and Sam had ever met Eta, who grew up in Israel — more expansions.

  The 3 youngsters had a good time, appreciating each other's coolness, while of course spending much time talking on the phone and texting.  But Gale was just as absorbed in her phone as they were in theirs, and everyone took time to help her.  It was all good to see, and I didn't grouse about alien beings once.

The Sweet Uses of Political Irrelevance: Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace

    Up, Simba originally appeared in Rolling Stone, and the expanded version is included in this anthology.  It describes a week in the McCain 2000 campaign, in between the New Hampshire and South Carolina primaries, and for the obvious reason it's the book's most topical essay now.  The essay Consider the Lobster, which originally appeared in Gourmet, is also useful if you doubted a lobster might really object to being boiled alive; and after reading The View from Mrs. Thompson's, you'll know for sure what 9/11/01 felt like in Bloomington, Illinois living rooms.  If you saw The End of the Tour, are drawn to literary cult figures, but are intimidated by DFW's 1,000 page post-modern masterpiece Infinite Jest — this anthology is an accessible DFW starting point.  There are some 200+ word sentences, replete with parenthetical clarifications, but I could always make my way to the ending period without getting lost.

    There are two threads running through Up, Simba.  Thread one is DFW's meditations on America's unrequited passion for a real leader, someone with personal authenticity, someone who somehow can "get us to do certain things that deep down we think are good and want to be able to do but usually can’t get ourselves to do on our own." DFW wants to believe, but wonders if such leaders are still possible, when everything sounds like a sales pitch.  You might read and decide the dream is good, its time will surely come.  Or pace DFW, you may decide that from the perspective of this ominous 2016 electoral season, there's something to be said for cynical politics as usual.  Or maybe both, as first authenticity, and then cynicism, came to be embodied for DFW in the McCain 2000 campaign.

    Thread two is a week of life on the Trail (= the McCain campaign).  After McCain upset Bush₂ (DFW's also calls him the Shrub) in the New Hampshire primary, Rolling Stone greenlighted its project of having "serious" writers cover the election.  The campaign entourage included the McCain High Command; the savvy, heroic techs (wielders of burdensome mikes and cameras); and the "pencils" (=print journalists), including the 12M (=The 12 Monkeys, the elite pencils who write for prestige publications, and whom DFW despises).  DFW rode to "THMs" (=Town Hall Meetings) in "BS1" (as the entourage dubbed the bus, short of course for Bullshit 1), and the 12M rode in relative comfort in BS2. The week's political drama, such as it was, was occasioned by McCain's mistake in countering Bush₂'s attacks by going negative himself.  But McCain's campaign didn't recover after he went positive again, and he ended up folding his cards after a disappointing performance on Super Tuesday.

    Superficially, a study in political irrelevance, a dull week in the campaign of a loser.  But it's a treat to read because DFW makes the people and places come alive, making us understand that "…the network techs … are exponentially better to hang out with and listen to than anybody else on the Trail".  This description of the techs in action at a scrum (= ring of techs around McCain as the goes to and from THMs) explains the essay title:

…the single best part of every pre-scrum technical gear-up: watching the cameramen haul their heavy $40,000 rigs to their shoulders like rocket launchers and pull the safety strap tight under their opposite arm and ram the clips home with practiced ease, their postures canted under the camera’s weight. It is Jim C.’s custom always to say “Up, Simba” in a fake-deep bwana voice as he hefts the camera to his right shoulder, and he and Frank C. like to do a little pantomime of the way football players will bang their helmets together to get pumped for a big game, although obviously the techs do it carefully and make sure their equipment doesn’t touch or tangle cords.

    DFW lauds the techs for their incisive, nuanced appreciation of campaign tactics, far surpassing that of the 12M.  Why did Bush₂ go negative?  Couldn't have anything to do with raw emotion, he's too much a creature of his pricey advisors; most likely he was trying to get McCain angry, to throw him off his game.  Why should McCain's game be the high road?  Because negative campaigning drives voters from the polls in droves, and McCain is asking the bored, the disillusioned, the young, to get involved.  He's the candidate who spent four years of torment as a P.O.W., so he's credible when he talks to new voters about commitment to ideals.  When he ends his THMs with “But I will always. Tell you. The truth.", he is always rewarded with wild applause.

    But not even the techs will say that parts of McCain's Chris Duren moment seem staged.  Briefly stated, here's the story. McCain released a response ad saying Bush₂ "twists the truth like Clinton," and his poll numbers did drop like a stone, as the techs anticipated they would. McCain needed to get back on the high road without looking like a wimp, i.e., a Democrat.  He found, and/or manufactured, a usable route at a THM when Chris Duren's mom said that her son, who had found an outlet for his tender idealism in the McCain campaign, had been traumatized by a phone call, presumably from the Bush₂ campaign, that disparaged his candidate.  His mom wanted to know how to restore her son's faith in America.  McCain said he'd call the young man and do his best, which he subsequently did, in a clever way that maximized media exposure.  In deference to Chris Duren, and trusting young Americans everywhere, McCain announced that he'd unilaterally pull his response ads.  No wimp he, just a statesman taking the long view.  Campaign misstep corrected.

    And so McCain: indisputably authentic as a P.O.W., but as a candidate dubious, just like all the rest?  DFW's inclined to treat the problem as a logical conundrum: if a candidate says that he will tell the truth regardless of the polls, and that makes him wildly popular, wouldn't he quite naturally want to look at the polls and see if he's in any danger of actually being elected?  An insoluble problem it would seem, leaving us stuck with a political class DFW describes succinctly, from the standpoint of the Rolling Stone demographic: "Bush₂'s " … patrician smirk and mangled cant; even Clinton himself, with his big red fake-friendly face and "I feel your pain.” Men who aren’t enough like human beings even to hate—what one feels when they loom into view is just an overwhelming lack of interest."

    DFW does mention, in passing, that McCain's scary right wing positions make him wonder, stuff like government censorship of entertainment, and invading Mexico to snuff out drug exporters.  But he doesn't go as far saying that an essential attribute of a good leader is that she (or he) wants to lead us to a good place.  Had DFW decided to live, would he now be inclined to foreground policy?

    In 2016, a real leader has emerged victorious from the Republican primary wars, after throwing away the cursed playbook, and always speaking his uncalculated personal truths.  Someone who inspires the disillusioned with the fresh enthusiasm that swept McCain to victory in New Hampshire 2000, but has never soiled himself with Chris Duren moments.  Someone who would make the 12M turn up their patrician nose, as at a foul smell.  On the downside, he wants to build a wall on the border with Mexico, says California's drought is a myth, and endorses torture.  Nobody's perfect.

    His opponent entered the national stage in 1969, when she gave a commencement address to her own graduating class at Wellesley College.  She talked about translating the ideals of the '60s into action, about making the impossible possible.  Her legions of detractors say her ambition shrank as her career flourished: the impossible became the ridiculous, and the possible became the status quo. But everyone agrees she's as good at the playbook as any guy.  That playbook says the same thing it did for Bush₂ in 2000: negative campaigning works against the insurgent candidate.  So expect Hillary to hammer Don for being a failed businessman.  And Don, clueless, will insinuate that Hillary is in league with terrorists, or somehow involved with the Kennedy assassination, any nonsense that comes to mind.  Think that's not a healthy democracy?  Then you must be a sexist, or a traitor who doen't want America to be great again.

    DFW would doubtless pass on the real leader this time, and invite us to pray for Hillary, in the same manner that he invited us to pray for Bush₂ in Mrs. Thompson's living room on 9/11/01: 

" … silently and fervently, that you’re wrong about the president, that your view of him is maybe distorted and he’s actually far smarter and more substantial than you believe, not just some soulless golem or nexus of corporate interests dressed up in a suit but a statesman of courage and probity … "

    Amen.  On November 9, let's hope the results show that there's life in the playbook yet, and that the President-elect remembers how the world looked when she gave her Wellesley commencement address.  If she doesn't, she will remain widely despised across the political spectrum, motivating millions more to flock to Trump.  Then what would happen to us in 2020?