November
5, 2013
Tuesday,
election day. Alabama's 1st
congressional district seems a sleepy, southern, almost back-water,
place to begin, but it is here that the US Chamber of Commerce has
chosen to throw down its monied gauntlet and back a former AL state
senator who is running against an equally well-supported Tea
Party-backed candidate. Is it a bit of an overstatement to say that
the “soul” of the GOP may at stake? Watch as the returns come in
tonight.
A
book's wonderful beginning and end.
Last Wednesday's visit to the DPL (Denver Public Library) yielded
The Men Who
United the States
by Simon Winchester, prolific author, resident of Sandisfield,
Massachusetts (MA), by order of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, a
2006 officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE), and, more
recently, newly-minted American citizen.
The
book's subtitle urges the reader on: America's
Explorers, Inventors, Eccentrics, and Mavericks, and the Creation of
One Nation, Indivisible.
How can you not wonder who will be included among the eccentrics and
mavericks? No doubt history buffs will enjoy the entire book, but
the author's memorial dedication (to his mother-in-law), introductory
note, preface, and epilogue are must reads for all who value and
wonder about the sense of community and citizenship where they live.
In the Memorial, Winchester
explains how he came to weave America's story around the five primary
elements: wood, fire, earth, metal, and water. In his Epilogue, the
author recalls the impact of Sherwood Anderson's classic, Winesburg,
Ohio. He then goes on to relate how
the creation of his town's monthly newspaper, the Sandisfield
Times, ushered in – and continues
to foster – a sense of community.
Between
the introductory notes and epilog, Winchester recounts a myriad of
little, many unknown, details about America's inexorable westward
expansion by trails, early “corduroy” turnpikes, rivers, canals,
wagon trains, railroads, and interstate highways. The lesser known
exploits of the eccentrics and mavericks are interwoven amongst the
more well known episodes.
Ironically,
as I drove home, National Public Radio (NPR) had a segment about the
mostly forgotten “Lincoln Highway,” which was not included in
Winchester's index. The Lincoln Highway was the early 20th
century's first road across America. It stretched from New York City
to San Francisco, generally following the routes explored by
Winchester. However, It was a highway in name only, a hodgepodge of
surfaces: dirt, brick, plank, early asphalt, but, outside the cities,
almost invariably dirt. The route was the brainchild of Carl Fisher
(“father” of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway) and existed long
before America had even begun to consider a national highway system.
To use a later highway mapping term, the Lincoln Highway was
America's original “blue highway.” (See William Least Heat Moon's
book, Blue Highways.)
The NPR link is http://www.lincolnhighwayassoc.org/info/
A
lovely autumn-orange avenue. A
nearby street in the Denver Tech Center has a row of ash trees that
turn iridescent orange each fall. Last week, a pale late afternoon
sun shone through the trees, casting a fitting, ghostly glow over
the adjacent sidewalk. One has to hope that the “emerald ash
borer” blight, now marching westward, does not take its terrible
toll here – at least not in the near future. During Halloween week
we had a day of the “Seattle drizzles,” but things dried quickly
and the leaves fell anew, skipping about on the yard, the front and
rear decks. Here is an appropriate autumn quote from a
“Passport to Paris,” the current exhibit at the Denver Art
Museum: “There are no lines in nature, only areas of color.”
Édourad
Manet.
Halloween
night, 2013. There were a myriad of ghosts, goblins, ghouls,
zombies, and other denizens of the night. Most came with parent(s)
in tow and most were adorned with safety-wise glow sticks. At the
end of the evening, there were even a few treats left for the master
of the house.
Keep
Your Plan?
What a mess and it appears that the bungling IT company tasked with
writing the computer code for the federal ACA was also paid – and
bungled – the coding for many of the states' web sites. Last
Wednesday, right-leaning columnist Jennifer Rubin wrote:
The
major
news networks
have
discovered what conservatives figured out a long time ago: You
don’t get to keep your insurance plan
– that
is, if it is not Obamacare-compliant, if your employer has been
forced to alter or drop his plans and/or if you are priced out of the
individual market, as many people are discovering they are. This was
entirely foreseeable and indeed baked into the cake, if you will. As
soon as the administration decided that gold-plated insurance — not
low-cost and high-deductible catastrophic coverage — was to be the
norm, those people who had the latter were not going to get to keep
the plan they liked.
Indeed,
throughout the past week everyone in the administration's health
care-related hierarchy was subjected to the veritable third-degree
when they testified before Congress or spoke to the press. When he
spoke in Boston this past Wednesday, even the President was forced to
retract his earlier rosy predictions about the ease of the roll out
and an individual's ability to keep their present health care plan at
their current price. It was nothing if not hysterical that it was
the usually dour Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, who tried
to inject a bit of levity into the situation. “Unsurprisingly,”
he said, “just 12 percent of Americans think the rollout has gone
well. That’s less than the 14 percent of Americans who believe in
Bigfoot.” Gee whiz, just when I was going to book a trip to the
northwest hoping for a sighting!
All
of the Washington dunderheads (the President included) can not seem
to grasp this simple economic truth: our profit-driven health care
market will always seek to raise premiums, while weeding out
the elderly and sick, those most likely to drive up costs and lower
profits. The following caution from Margaret MacMillan, though
intended for an earlier wartime era (the origins of WW I), seems
hauntingly relevant to our current 21st century health
care predicament: “We should never
underestimate the part played in human affairs by mistakes, muddle,
or simply poor timing.” Amen!
SNAP
(food stamps). Grinches of all stripes and at all levels of
government are trumpeting this past Friday's across-the-board cuts in
this portion of the nation's safety net. The careful observer might
have noted that none of these “spokespersons” seem to be too thin
or in need of additional nutrition; in fact, a few would benefit from
pushing back from the table.
NSA
on the line.
Jealousy or real fear? Bernard
Kouchner, the former foreign minister of France, bluntly
noted in a radio interview:
“Let’s be honest. We eavesdrop, too. Everyone is listening to
everyone else. But we don’t have the same means as the United
States, which makes us jealous.” Frankly, I am more worried about
my metadata being “stolen” by logging onto Secretary Sebelius's
suspect health care website than by the NSA.
The
Netherlands' changing welfare system. This small, proud European
country recently became a “changed-nation,” as its reigning
monarch, 75-year-old Queen Beatrice quietly abdicated, handing the
reins to her son, Willem-Alexander. In the King's first annual
parliamentary speech, written (as is customary) by the current
Liberal party cabinet, Willem noted the some very visible
deficiencies in the Dutch welfare system. True, he said, changes
have been made, but the nation's economic and social welfare systems
need to keep pace with a continually changing and globally linked
world. The article linked below looks at the Netherlands and draws
comparisons with the problems and changes in the Scandinavian
countries to the north.
English
society, a reflection of America? In last Saturday's [London]
Daily Telegraph, Jeramy Warner reflected on the apparent
decline in four vital areas of English society: (1) the lower living
standards for the coming generation; (2) a larger percentage of the
family budget going to the necessities of life; (3) the declining
levels of education where “those leaving the workforce are better
educated than those joining it”; and (4) a coming health care
crisis, “fundamental is that a poor start to
life will significantly impair later health outcomes.” These
are all areas about which America should be equally concerned.
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