The Old Scout

Garrison Keillor's weekly newspaper column.

Life's Variety Pack

November 3, 2009

It costs $722 to fly from St. Paul/Minneapolis to Bismarck, N.D., and you can fly from St. Paul/Minneapolis to Paris for $754. Life is unfair; we all know this. Big prizes go to mediocrities while you struggle on, unappreciated. The righteous suffer while the wicked prosper. Bernie Madoff danced around the Securities & Exchange Commission to the tune of billions and the Immigration & Naturalization people deport a good Vietnamese woman for a minor error.

I grew up with the Kellogg's Variety Pack in a family of eight and so I know about unfairness. Some mornings your beloved Raisin Bran with its crunchy chewiness is snatched away by swifter hands and you sit staring into a bowl of soggy Rice Krispies or the wretched Sugar Pops and feel resentful, cheated, abused. Some days Mother embraces socialism and cooks a pot of Cream of Wheat, take it or leave it, but you look forward to the day when you take your place in the great emporium of adult life and can enjoy Raisin Bran whenever you like.

But by then, you have transcended Raisin Bran. You long for nobler things such as a moment of brilliance deconstructing Nabokov in your American Lit seminar and winning the admiration of the delightful Jessica, who sits behind you, her mango hair conditioner sweetening the air, her beautiful knees just inches from your gluteus maximus. She is the smartest and sexiest girl you've ever met. In the Variety Pack of Love there is only Jessica, Jessica, Jessica, and all the other girls are tepid gruel in comparison. She allows you to put your arm around her magnificent shoulders. And one day she says to you over coffee, "I like you but you are not the one for me." You asked her to the homecoming dance, but no, she is going to come home with someone else.

Your heart is truly broken. Suddenly those songs on the jukebox are about you — "Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain" and "I Will Always Love You" and "Too Far Gone" — big salty tears well up in your pale green eyes and trickle down your tan cheeks.

Maybe Jessica's dismissal sends you spinning into a cult that believes that mankind is haunted and harried by the spirits of billions of people brought to Earth 75 million years ago by the intergalactic tyrant Xenu and you need to be hooked up to an e-meter to get free of them, or maybe you become a right-wing blogger and global-warming denier. Or you have your head pierced and a tiny red blinking light installed.

Or perhaps the loss of Jessica turns you into a true conservative. This is someone who believes that the treasures you inherited are probably more important than what you chose for yourself, that your family, your community, your culture, about which you had no choice, are the true gifts and all that you were ambitious to acquire on your own — fame, wealth, an elegant prose style, mastery of the tango, Jessica — are less true. This is the great divide in society: Some people accept who they are and settle into it and thrive on the predictable, and others are restless searchers and keep rewriting their lives, ever in the market for some new scheme, a new prophet, the newest True Light.

There are as many restless searchers among Republicans as among Democrats, and as many true conservatives, and a healthy society needs both. You do not want your child's school bus driver to be a restless searcher, you want him to stop at railroad crossings and look both ways. The older brother known for his constancy, his abiding faith, his discipline, proves to be an irritant to the younger brother and inspires him to feats of recklessness and to achieve a sort of breathless happiness unavailable to constancy and discipline.

The great unrequited love tears open your heart to the beauty of the world, its small rivers and upland meadows. It also makes you kinder to the next hundred thousand persons who cross your path. You kneel down beside small children and ask them how was their Halloween and what is their favorite breakfast cereal. You met grim defeat and so what? After a few months in Paris, you would've realized that Bismarck was a better fit for you. There is no Louvre, no Notre Dame, and the wind blows all the time, and winter lasts until April, but you're going to feel right at home there.

When the Tough Should Get Going

November 3, 2009

The former Marine officer Matthew Hoh, who resigned his Foreign Service post in Afghanistan because he feels the war is pointless and not worth dying for, deserves all the attention he's gotten and more. The Obama administration faces hard decisions there, and the man made a good case against deeper American involvement. He says that our presence among the Pashtun people, the rural, religious people, is only aggravating a civil war between them and the urban, secular (and, it seems, fraudulent) government of Kabul, and the role of the Taliban and al-Qaida is not central — the real issues are tribal and cultural.

American families, he said, "must be reassured their dead have sacrificed for a purpose worthy of futures lost, love vanished, and promised dreams unkept. I have lost confidence such assurances can be made any more."

It is rare that a high-level official — he was the senior State Department guy in Zabul province — resigns in protest, and in all the to-do about his four-page resignation letter, nobody had a single bad thing to say about Matthew Hoh.

The American people tend not to admire quitters, which is maybe why protest resignations are so rare. You can get up on your high horse and talk about your principles, but we suspect that you're just another slacker looking for an easy way out. Your old football coach told you that when the going gets tough, the tough get going, and by "get going" he didn't mean "write a four-page letter about your disillusionment with his coaching and the split-T offense in general" — he meant, Toughen Up, Assume the Three-Point Stance, Hit 'Em Hard, Eat Some Turf, Get Up and Hit 'Em Again.

On the other hand, you don't want to be the last man to believe in the mission after everyone else has seen the light and gone home. Sunday in San Francisco, they set out to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Woodstock by gathering 3,000 guitarists in Golden Gate Park to play Jimi Hendrix's "Purple Haze" and 50 showed up and some of them were playing ukeleles. The Sixties are over. Time to move on.

This is the great divide, between the true believers and the skeptics, and we cross over it every day, back and forth. On the one hand, we admire persistence and the good workers who go at the job and get it done, but then we listen to management huff and puff and realize that the ship is becalmed and liable to be boarded by pirates. Time to look for other work.

The boxelder bugs who flock into my house seeking shelter from the cold seem untroubled by skepticism. They march in and are squished and more bugs walk across the smeared innards of boxelder brethren and nobody is the wiser, the message is never passed on toward the rear.

Our time is brief. No matter how smart you are or pretty, the demand for you is limited. This is the hard lesson of adult life. Vancouver wants you to come and perform your work and you say yes and hundreds of e-mails fly back and forth — What beverage would Mr. Keillor wish us to place in the back seat of the limo? Fermented persimmon juice? Not a problem. Should the flower petals that young maidens strew in his path be rose or narcissus? — and then, two days before the big day, you are struck by a sore throat and propulsive sneezing. So you call Vancouver and tell them you can't come. They take the news calmly. They don't shriek, "No! No! Not this! Our lives will be shattered if you cancel, esteemed one." Your non-appearance is No Problemo.

And this is how you find out the hard truth. The world can get along without you pretty well.

You don't want to be the last person to write a novel in Esperanto or compose a 12-tone symphony, the last Socialist Labor candidate trying to hand out literature to the working class as they go into Wal-Mart, or the last Christian Science person to believe in the efficacy of prayer after all your friends have slipped away to have surgery, or the consumer of the last contaminated tuna left on the grocery shelf — you don't want that.

Time to move on. Tell the others. It's a brand-new day. Let us start making our way on out of Afghanistan, Mr. President.

Coffee With an Old Grumbler

October 20, 2009

A gorgeous fall here on the upper Mississippi, but among the old grumblers I drink cheap coffee with, the mood these days is dark, due to low interest rates and the advance of the glaciers, which is why I, sunny optimist that I am, seek out the company of the young and ebullient and drink $4 coffee, but sometimes you get stuck next to some old guy in a plaid shirt who gives you an earful about Wall Street bonuses and how the game is rigged in favor of the custom-tailored suits, and you must be polite and listen.

"Look at this. A person saves his money like he was brought up to do and he salts it away in a safe CD or Treasury note or municipal bond and it pays him a measly 2 percent interest. Why? Because the Fed has decreed we gotta have low interest to save the high-flyers and speculators who almost brought the roof crashing down a year ago, and they pour money into Goldman Sachs and these killer sharks walk away with a hundred billion in bonuses, and meanwhile guys are losing their shirts in the dairy business. What's the deal there?"

"There is a lot of human nature involved in economics, so if you are an idealist, you should take up astronomy," I tell him.

"I'm serious," he says. "You drive out west of here and you see headlights in the fields at midnight, guys putting in 16-hour days combining beans, and back east you've got people in offices with a phone in each hand, moving money around, not creating a damn thing, just playing a game, and the government can't do enough for them. Where's the fairness in that?"

"I saw your beautiful wife the other day and she looks 10 years younger," I say. "She said that you two can't keep your hands off each other. Good for you. And how about those Vikings and Brett Favre? Six and oh. Life is good. And how about those maple trees? Have you ever seen such colors?"

"This country is skidding toward disaster and the guy you elected president has his foot on the gas."

"You need to get out and walk more, Earl," I tell him, "and not sit and brood about interest rates. Life is too short to be unhappy. So look at the long term."

What I mean by "long term" is the basic tenet that the bigger they are, the harder they fall, and what goes around comes around. In St. Luke's gospel, the CEO wound up in hell, begging for a sip of cold water, and the homeless man sat at God's right hand. This happens over and over again in Scripture, and in America we believe that the guy who gets the $100 million bonus today is on a chute that leads to a bad cocaine habit, a car crash, serious head injury and 16 months of speech therapy before he can write his Crash & Redemption memoir and go on Larry King to promote it. Just wait and see.

Among the young and ebullient, there's no worry about interest rates because they have no savings — they spend their weekly earnings and a little bit more on hair gel, iTunes, phone bills, $4 coffee and $100 jeans beautifully pre-ripped. They don't see the headlights in the soybean fields at midnight, only the lights in the bars where they go to be beautiful and cool and maintain text-message contact with friends from coast to coast and then have sex.

Sex, as we all know, is not accomplished by money alone, and that is why Wall Street traders get about 37 percent less than the average American. Anxiety has extinguished their pilot light. What works in seduction is not successfulness but comedy.

A man doesn't become a great lover by spending big bucks on clothes and hairstyling. Those clothes are going to wind up on the floor, and your hair is going to get all messed up. Your lovemaking skill is only important to one person and if, while you are in the act, you can keep her distracted long enough, she won't even notice. Jokes help.

One hundred men interviewed about their sex lives said they had sex once a week or once or twice a month. One man said, "I have sex once every two years." The psychologist said, "You poor guy," and the man said, "Yes, but tonight's the night!"

Petulance and the Peace Prize

October 13, 2009

Evidently some people were disappointed that Dick Cheney didn't receive the Nobel Peace Prize, and believe me, I sympathize — I thought Philip Roth should've gotten the literature prize instead of that grumpy Romanian lady with the severe hair — but it was Mr. Obama whom the Norwegians wanted to come visit Oslo in December and stand on the balcony of the Grand Hotel and wave to the crowd along Karl Johans Gate, and, face it, Mr. Obama is going to draw a bigger crowd than Mr. Cheney would have. When a man has shot somebody in the face with a shotgun, people are going to be reluctant to line up en masse in his presence lest he get excited again. As for Mr. Cheney's boss, he was an unlikely pick for the Peace Prize after it was revealed by a White House speechwriter in a recent memoir that Mr. Bush once said, "I whupped Gary Bauer's ass." Boasting about ass-whupping is not the mark of a Nobel Peace Prize winner. The correct word is "whipping."

Going to Oslo in December and sitting through a black-tie banquet with a bunch of wooden-faced Norwegians and eating herring and delivering a speech larded with bromides about international cooperation and no jokes is not what I'd consider a whee of a good time, frankly. Oslo is rather dark and murky in December. The sun rises during the first coffee break and sets right after lunch and this does not make for a festive mood. Bell-bottoms were not invented in Norway, nor was the mambo, or the convertible. This isn't Carnival in Rio.

Some conservative pundit suggested that the president should've declined the prize, but it is not gracious to reject a compliment, one should accept it with becoming modesty, as Mr. Obama did, that's what your mother brought you up to do. The prize isn't about you, it's about Peace, or Literature, or Homecoming, or Champion Hog, or Male Vocalist of the Year, so walk up there and smile for the cameras, say thank you and sit down.

The wailing and gnashing of teeth that you hear among Republicans is 68 percent envy and 32 percent sour grapes. Here is an idealistic, articulate young president who is enormously popular everywhere in the world except in the states of the Confederacy, and here sit the 28 percent of the American people who still thought Mr. Bush was doing a heckuva job at the end, gnashing their teeth, hoping and praying for something horrible to happen such as an infestation of locusts or the disappearance of the sun, something to make the president look bad, which is not a good place for a political party to be, hoping for the country to slide into chaos. When you bet against America, you are choosing long odds.

A person can run down the list of all that's wrong with this country, including the lobbyists who cross back and forth from public service to influence-peddling like alligators on the golf course, or the bankers who lost their minds in the great mortgage mania, but the country has a history of rising to challenges and turning away from demagogues and doing what needs to be done. Because we are a passionately patriotic people, infused with a love of our history and our land, and so we have limited patience for fools, such as the ones who now dominate the right.

Conservatism is a powerful strain in American life that ordinarily passes as common sense. Save for a rainy day. Don't foul the nest. Don't burn your bridges. Don't sacrifice the future for short-term profit. But when it contradicts itself and becomes weighted down with bigotry and cynicism, then it doesn't hold water any more.

F. Scott Fitzgerald said, "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." And conservatives tried to keep functioning through the Bush administration but the contradictions wore them down, and last fall, when the federal government wrote a blank check to stave off collapse of the financial sector, conservative principles came crashing to the ground, and now all they have in common is that they don't like President Obama. OK, but resentment of an American president being honored by the Norwegians is not a good point from which to build a Republican revival. Petulant fury isn't a winning hand in politics. Get over it.

Quality Health Care for All ... Even Republicans

October 6, 2009

OK, it was wrong of me to say last week that we should deny health care to Republicans except for aspirin and hand sanitizer, and thank you to the many readers who kindly took me to task. It was so wrong. And I withdraw the idea that death panels should circulate through red states searching for the obese and slow afoot, the wheezy and limpy, spray-painting orange stripes on their ankles, marking them for future harvest. That was very, very bad.

Republicans have the same right to quality health care as anyone else, and you can quote me on that. Even people who are crazed stark raving berserk by the thought of a president with three vowels in his last name deserve to be treated with kindness and dignity, and shot with tranquilizer darts by game wardens and wrapped in quilts and taken to refuge.

What has come along to change my mind? Fall, magnificent fall, in all its grandeur, when the maples are blazing with glory, like young romantic poets dying as they are writing their best stuff. John Keats died at 25, Shelley at 29. Stephen Crane was 28. Franz Schubert was 31, and Mozart was just a young married guy with a couple of little boys, neither of whom did much in their lives. One of them had musical talent but was crushed by the burden of his father's fame. (Great men probably shouldn't have children, so keep that in mind if you are young and wildly brilliant: Use a condom.)

The maple trees stand in the yards of we stolid Midwesterners and they cry out for unbridled passion and heartbreaking beauty and fabulous golden yellows and blazing reds, and they tell us to quit our jobs and fly away in pursuit of hopeless romance and a life of dance and poetry and spending your life creating masterpieces that the world will ignore, and of course we don't listen to the bad advice of trees, we go right ahead fixing our children's lunches and arranging little enriching experiences for them and asking them what they want to be for Halloween, and then the rain falls and the wind blows and romanticism is gone, a heap of rotting leaves on the ground. Sic transit gloria mundi, pal.

That is what fall means in St. Paul, Minnesota. It's maple trees telling us about mortality and that life is short and can't be put on Pause and each of us is as fragile and forgettable as a maple tree. We go racing past them fighting our petty battles for power and parking spaces, and then we die (arghh) and people glance at the obit and if you're young, like Keats and Shelley, they feel a little twinge, and if you aren't they don't, and then they go back to telling their kids about the importance of correct spelling and grammar, which every good parent should do.

In the great contest of autumn — Art & Adventure vs. Parenthood, Hitting the Road In Search Of The True You vs. Attending Parent-Teacher Conferences & Hearing About How We Need To Work On Sharing — Republicans vote Neither. They're mostly about maximizing profit in the short run. They are the folks who buy a healthy company and then sink it under an enormous debt load that goes to pay them a vast profit even though the company is sinking, and the creditors get shafted.

They are the ones who are dead-set against government regulation and do not mind manufacturing hamburger patties contaminated by E. coli, and if someone becomes terribly ill from eating one — a young woman in Minnesota almost died from a Cargill hamburger and will likely never walk again — nonetheless Republicans remain staunchly opposed to G-men snooping around the slaughterhouse, and so I should never eat another Big Mac or Whopper or any other ground meat other than that ground from whole sirloin by a butcher as I watch. Never.

We are back to the 19th century so far as meat is concerned. This has been accomplished by those incredibly rude men who occupy first class on the airplane and elbow themselves ahead of elderly women in line as they yammer into dangly cell phones. They have nothing to do with art and even less to do with bringing up children. They are a danger to society and an embarrassment to their children. Nonetheless, if one of them falls down with a heart attack, he should be cared for, same as anyone else.

Stuck in the Shallows

September 29, 2009

Every so often, sitting down to your Cheerios, you open the New York Times to the crossword puzzle and find clues such as "_ Van Winkle" and "_ of 1812" and "Buried in Grant's Tomb" and you finish the thing in five minutes flat feeling brilliant and unappreciated, some sort of national treasure, and then you spend an hour searching for your glasses and car keys and that brings you down smartly to earth. For some reason, you've parked your glasses in the top drawer of the bureau next to the pewter soup spoons and the car keys in an earthenware vase atop the clavichord.

The easy crossword threw you off stride. Up here in the North we believe that adversity is a stimulus of intelligence, so we don't want our kids stuck in the slow track in school, putzing around in the shallows, trapped in boredom and lazy thinking. We want the schools to push them, make them write whole sentences and paragraphs, grapple with calculus, learn about the Renaissance, and all the more so if they're bound to become truck drivers. What is so disheartening about politics is the putzing around in the shallows. The sheer waste of time — years, decades, spent on thrilling public issues in which the unconservative right fights tooth-and-nail against the regressive left and nothing is gained. It's like a tug-of-war between two trees.

The so-called cultural wars over abortion and prayer in the schools and pornography and gays, most of it instigated by shrieking ninnies and pompous blowhards, did nothing about anything, except elect dullards to office who brought a certain nihilistic approach to governance that helped bring about the disaster in the banking industry that ate up a lot of 401(k)s, and all thanks to high-flyers in shirts like cheap wallpaper who never learned enough to let it discourage them from believing that they had magical powers over the laws of economics and could hand out mortgages by the fistful to people with no assets and somehow the sun would come out tomorrow. The anti-regulation conservatives enabled those people. We're still waiting for an apology.

And now here comes the Supreme Court, about to rule in the case of a little plywood cross erected, as it turns out, on federal land in the Mojave Desert as a memorial to war dead — could there be anything less pressing right now? But we shall have great legal minds wrangling over something that doesn't make a dime's worth of difference to anybody whomsoever.

Thirty-six years of bitter battle over Roe v. Wade and what has it gotten us? If the decision were overturned tomorrow, not much would change. The question would revert to the states, and some would permit the termination of pregnancy, others wouldn't. Meanwhile, the effect of the battle has been quite other than what the Catholic Church could have wanted, the unleashing of angry demons, the poisoning of the body politic.

Conservatives and liberals can agree on the basics — that the nation wallows in debt, that it is shortsighted of the states to cut back on the most essential work of government which is the education of the young, and that somehow we have got to become a more productive nation and less consumptive — but the ruffles and flourishes of Washington seem ever more irrelevant to the crises we face. When an entire major party has excused itself from meaningful debate and a thoughtful U.S. senator like Orrin Hatch no longer finds it important to make sense and an up-and-comer like Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty attacks the president for giving a speech telling schoolchildren to work hard in school and get good grades, one starts to wonder if the country wouldn't be better off without them and if Republicans should be cut out of the health-care system entirely and simply provided with aspirin and hand sanitizer. Thirty-two percent of the population identifies with the GOP, and if we cut off health care to them, we could probably pay off the deficit in short order.

It's time to dump the dead-end issues that have wasted too much time already. Old men shouldn't be allowed to doze off at the switch and muck up the works for the young who will have to repair the damage. Get over yourselves. Your replacements have arrived, and you should think about them now and then. Enough with the shrieking. Pass health-care reform.

All the Rage

September 22, 2009

The president has declined to talk about racism in connection with the carpet-chewers of the Right who are suffering road rage over his existence, and he's wise to turn that one down. The country doesn't need a sermon on race or civility right now. What it needs is to believe that our leaders are trying to do the right thing, no matter how inconvenient, and if they forge ahead and fix health insurance, then the ragemeisters of the Right will find other hobbies.

Mr. Obama is a Chicago guy, and he doesn't wilt if some gin-crazed cracker from South Carolina calls him a liar, so don't trouble your pretty head about civility.

It was women's suffrage that tamed politics. All through the 19th century, going back to Jefferson vs. Adams in 1800, politics was a blood sport. Hecklers followed a candidate like fleas on a dog. Newspapers were rip-snorting partisan and tore into the opposition with gay abandon. The English language is rich in invective and it all got used. When you went after your opponent, you got warmed up by calling him a horse thief, drunkard, agnostic, wife-beater, agent of Satan and tool of Wall Street, and then you got to the serious stuff. But once women appeared, in their little pinafores and corsages, we became, temporarily, a quieter gentler people than we actually are and sat still at League of Women Voters forums on world federalism and perused the editorial page, written by silver-haired gents with distinguished jowls who penned judicious columns of On The One Hand This, On The Other Hand That, and nobody ever yelled at them except their wives.

That's sort of gone now. Now a column appears online and then the anonymous reader comments and the reader says, AW SHUT YER TRAP YA BIG FAT NOBODY, WHAT DO YOU KNOW? NUTTIN, THAT'S WHAT. GO BACK TO RUSSIA WHERE YA COME FROM. It's a loud raspy voice that was familiar to Lincoln and Mark Twain and now it's back, thanks to the cranky Right, which feels disenfranchised by the election of Obama. And to their delight they've found that it drives the Center-Left right up the wall.

The old union guys who built the Democratic Party enjoyed public face-offs and knew how to deal with hecklers — you get up close to them and snap their underwear — but the party's been taken over by academics who come from a medieval world where your insignia grants you a worshipful hearing. As Shakespeare wrote, 'I am Sir Oracle, and when I ope my lips, let no dog bark." But that ain't going to happen in politics.

The Right believes that if you throw enough mud, some will stick, and if you characterize health care reform as an evil plot by one-eyed space aliens, you can defeat the thing. The fact is that there are 40 million uninsured Americans and soon, if nothing is done, there will be more. This is a moral dilemma, the same as if habeas corpus only applied east of the Mississippi or that green-eyed children will only be educated through the sixth grade. Not acceptable in the country I live in. And it's up to people who care about the common good not to be scared off.

The Right is operating in the grand old irreverent American middle-finger spirit of contrarianism. The carful of kids who drive country roads busting mailboxes with baseball bats are expressing the same freewheeling spirit and the computer hackers and graffiti artists and every conscientious rock 'n' roll band for the past 50 years.

But the price of being an angry jerk is that nobody wants to invite you over for supper except your mother, and even she feels a little uneasy. It's very simple: the anonymous bums in the bleachers can abuse the umpire, but the players can't because they have numbers on their backs. Bold contrarians get thrown out of the game. The American people, by and large, don't admire wackos. A few wacko Congressmen can't do much harm, but you wouldn't want them on the County Board. You want sober people who can add and subtract. And you don't want one to marry your sister. The angry guy in a lather about Mr. Obama to the exclusion of rational thought will have to go to the weenie roast alone and nobody is going to dance with him except out of pure pity and I'm not sure he's going to enjoy that.

Nice 67 Y.O. Male Has Brush With Mortality

September 15, 2009

The doctor who saw me in the ER wrote in her report: "nice 67 y.o. male, flat affect, awake, alert and appropriate." I had appeared with slurred speech and a balloon in my head, had driven myself to United Hospital in St. Paul, parked in No Parking, walked in and was triaged right in to a neurologist who trundled me into the MRI Space-Time Cyclotron for 50 minutes of banging and whanging which produced a picture of the stroke in the front of my brain, so off to the Mayo Clinic I went and the St. Mary's Hospital Neurology ICU and was wired up to monitors. A large day in a nice 67 y.o. man's life.

I stayed at St. Mary's for four days of tests and when I left, a neurologist shook my hand and said: "I hope you know how lucky you are." That was pretty clear as I walked down the hall, towing my IV tower, and saw the casualties of serious strokes. Here I was sashaying along, like a survivor of Pickett's Last Charge who had suffered a sprained wrist. My mouth felt fuzzy but I was essentially unscathed, though touched by mortality. Which I have been on the run from for a long time. I never wanted to be a nice 67 y.o. man. I still have some edgy 27 y.o. man inside me.

But when the doctor talks about how you must go on a powerful blood thinner lest a stray clot turn your fine intellect into a cheese omelet, you must now accept being 67 y.o. and do as he says. You had intended to be a natural wonder, an old guy who still runs the high hurdles, but mortality has bitten you in the butt.

I like this hospital. St. Mary's is a research and teaching hospital so you get to observe troops of young residents go by, trailing close behind Doctor Numero P. Uno, and watch them try to assume the air of authority so useful in the medical trade. The nurses, of course, are fabulous. Like many nice 67 y.o. men, I am even more awake and alert around attractive young women (though I try to be appropriate). A tall dark-haired beauty named Sarah brings me a hypodermic to coach me on self-administered shots of heparin, and without hesitation I plunge it into my belly fat. No man is a coward in the presence of women.

Nurses are smart and brisk and utterly capable. They bring some humor to the situation. ("Care for some jewelry?" she says as she puts the wristband on me.) And women have the caring gene that most men don't. Men push you down the hall in a gurney as if you're a cadaver, but whenever I was in contact with a woman, I felt that she knew me as a brother. The women who draw blood samples at Mayo do it gently with a whole litany of small talk to ease the little blip of puncture, and "here it comes" and the needle goes in, and "Sorry about that," and I feel some human tenderness there, as if she thought, "I could be the last woman to hold that dude's hand." A brief sweet moment of common humanity.

And that is a gift to the man who has been struck by a stroke: our common humanity. It's powerful in a hospital. Instead of a nice linen jacket and cool jeans and black T, you are shuffling around in a shabby cotton gown like Granma in "Grapes of Wrath," and you pee into a plastic container under the supervision of a young woman who makes sure you don't get dizzy and bang your noggin.

Two weeks ago, you were waltzing around feeling young and attractive, and now you are the object of Get Well cards and recipient of bouquets of carnations. Rich or poor, young or old, we all face the injustice of life — it ends too soon, and statistical probability is no comfort. We are all in the same boat, you and me and ex-Governor Palin and Congressman Joe Wilson, and wealth and social status do not prevail against disease and injury. And now we must reform our health insurance system so that it reflects our common humanity. It is not decent that people avoid seeking help for want of insurance. It is not decent that people go broke trying to get well. You know it and I know it. Time to fix it.

Vetting the Health Care Issue

September 1, 2009

I caught part of a radio call-in show the other day on which a vet was fielding questions about Addison's disease among basset hounds and a cocker spaniel's hypothyroid problem and what can be done about a bulldog who snores (he needs to lose weight), and it was interesting to discover the excellent medical care that dogs have come to expect these days. The vet was herself a dog parent, as she put it, and there was genuine feeling in her voice when she discussed the bassets' hormonal problems, something I haven't heard in the debate over health care for humans this summer.

I have not been a pet parent for 20 years so perhaps I'm not up to speed here, but back in the day, dogs slept in the garage or on the porch so they could defend the home against socialism, and if they snored, it definitely was their problem and not ours. Ditto hypothyroidism. And there was a death panel around whose name was Dad.

Dad grew up on a farm and was not overly sentimental about animals. He did not purchase jewelry for them or talk to them in a high-pitched voice. He would have blanched at the thought that the average cost of a visit to the vet with your cat is now $172. The chance of Dad paying that much to care for Snowball was about the same as Snowball's chances in hell. But that has all changed, and now the American people shell out upwards of $10 billion a year for health care for pets.

Fine. Not an issue. Nobody called in to the show to suggest that the knee operation on the 14-year-old golden retriever (a recent cancer survivor) shows a level of caring far beyond what we extend to three-fourths of the world's human population. I could have, but I don't care to upset the golden retriever community. Live and let live is my motto, dear reader. If your gerbil Mitzi needs a new heart valve and you've got the fifteen grand to spend on it, I am not here to stand in your way. Period.

And so the summer fades into September. Here on the upper Mississippi we've already felt an autumnal chill. I have gone to the State Fair and fed my child her allotment of corn dogs and deep-fried cheese curds and led her through the poultry barn so she knows where the omelet comes from and now it's time for her to resume science and mathematics and learn the subjunctive mood.

Here is an example of the subjunctive: Had we known that Republicans were so paranoid about public health, we would have packaged health care reform differently and come up with better slogans.

Perhaps there should be a public pet option.

There was real sympathy for the parent of the bassets with the adrenal deficiency, whereas the 48 million uninsured Americans (of whom two-thirds come from a family with at least one full-time worker) are merely a big fat statistic and so far Democrats have failed to produce a poster child. We can sort of imagine the misery of walking into an emergency room with no money, no plastic, no Blue Cross card, and trying to obtain treatment for some ailment that doesn't involve bone fragments protruding from the skin, but it doesn't speak to the heart the way an injured dog does.

Animals love us unconditionally and we love them back, maybe more than we love our neighbors, and that's just the truth, Ruth. People can be irksome, petty, especially raggedy ones — poverty does not always bring out the best in folks — and that's why it's difficult to get people to care about the uninsured.

If you put a pet option in the health care reform scheme, Republicans would be in a bind. It's one thing to oppose big government taking over from those little mom-and-pop insurance companies, but do you favor throwing Mr. Mittens out the car window when he gets old and feeble and needs an IV because he can't chew his kibble? You'd have weepy pet parents at town hall meetings waving photographs of kittycats in need of new kidneys, and finally you'd start to see some empathy. People love their animals, and if we could just agree that everybody in America should receive the same level of care enjoyed by an elderly golden retriever, we could be done with this and get ready for the World Series.

Wandering London: to stop, to stare, to compare

August 25, 2009

A pleasant late-August Sunday in London, bright and breezy, the bells of St. Paul's ringing wildly for 11:30 Sung Eucharist, like a sacred pinball machine announcing you've won ten bonus games, the square busy with people including Americans like me, whose business is being tourists. As the poet W.H. Davies wrote:

What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare?

It's my ideal vacation, to wander freely in a great city, no schedule, no check-off list, and on my way to church, I passed the true English church, the great Smithfield Market, a grand Victorian warehouse of 1868 as large as two football fields, with a majestic dome worthy of any church, where refrigerated trucks sit idling, carrying beef, pig and lamb carcasses. The meat is trucked in by night and shipped around to butchers and restaurants. Inside the truck entrance is a big marble plaque with the names of 200 meat market workers who died in World War I, the worst and most worthless war ever fought in our time. You pause and ponder and onward go.

Sunday is a day for parents to bring their children into the city to see where the parents might be living had they not had children, in the posh flats above the smart shops, leading the cool life. The children look irritated, bored, the parents thoughtful. If you're 40 and have three whiny children, 25 looks awfully good. But late last night I hiked around Chelsea and the cool life looked thin to me, the sorrows of intoxication evident everywhere, people whose big night out turned out too small, people with people they were wanting to not be with right now, the lonely late-night walkers like me.

When you walk alone, you soak up the sorrow around you until it's not bearable and you must return to the hotel, and then comes morning, a sunny day in a rainy summer, and you attend Mr. Christopher Wren's church and then hike up to Regents Park and Primrose Hill for a view of the great city, a grassy hillside populated by hundreds of Londoners sunning themselves, and you feel a sort of rarefied blessedness and lightness.

It helps that, an hour before, your sins were forgiven and the priest waved her hand and blessed you, and it also helps to be far away from America and the mounting drumbeat of Democratic defeatism on healthcare reform. Nobody is so ready to embrace martyrdom as my fellow liberals, and here they are, seven months after Mr. Obama took the oath, crying out, "Where did it go, the glory and the dream?" Get a grip. Solid majorities in the House and Senate and yet a few puffs of smoke from the other side and Democrats are full of consternation. If they back out on this young president, and if this Congress cannot pass the public option and meet the basic human needs of our people, what does this say about us?

Here in London, people are amused at the wild paranoid fantasies of the right. I don't care about that, I hold weak-kneed Democrats responsible, and if they get spooked by a few hecklers, then it's time to find replacements.

Standing in stark contrast was the simple humane decision of the Scottish government to release the Libyan Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi from prison on compassionate grounds, a man near death from prostate cancer, who was convicted in 2001 on the basis of thin circumstantial evidence and the testimony of a paid witness for the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie in 1988. A shaky conviction of a man for a crime that had to have involved many others who, it would seem, Britain and the U.S. have little interest in finding, what with Libyan oil in the balance. Mr. al-Megrahi had "patsy" written all over him. The Scots did the right thing. And caused a public uproar, and so what? Right is right.

Justice is what makes a great city like London bustle and thrive, a polyglot metropolis full of minorities and escapees from authoritarian lands — it isn't the excellent Underground or the plays of Shakespeare so much as it is the expectation of justice. If you come here, this society will go to some length to do the right thing by you. You will not be snatched up and thrown in a hole and forgotten. If you're sick, you'll be cared for. Right is right.

The Old Scout Archive