Shakespeare on Healthcare Reform

We sometimes hear that the United States has “the best healthcare system in the world.” But there are at least two objections to that claim.

First, it is somewhat anomalous to call our fragmented approach a “system.” Consider that the federal government alone has six major health care provider or insurance programs: Medicare, Medicaid, the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), the Department of Defense TRICARE programs, the VA's clinics and hospitals, the Indian Health Service, and the US Public Health Service. Through these efforts the federal government provides (or in the case of Medicaid, helps to fund) health care to about one-third of Americans and research and prevention activities that can benefit everyone. 

Below the federal level there are myriad public and private entities that also contribute to the delivery of health services. These of course include private hospitals, physician practices, long term care facilities, hospices, employer-owned clinics, etc. There are state- and county- and city-owned hospitals; state and local health and public safety and environmental departments; and other government-sponsored human services. And in the private sector are the many charitable entities that sponsor recreational facilities, youth development programs, and health education.

Calling this gallimaufry of services a system turns logic on its head.

A second objection to the claim of “best healthcare system in the world” is that our overall health status is poor relative to that of other industrialized nations. Consider this data from a recent Modern Healthcare article:

●  The US ranks 26th out of 35 developed countries in life expectancy;

●  Our infant mortality is 3 times higher than Japan’s, higher than every other Western nation, and only better than countries like Mexico and Turkey;

●  New mothers in this country die at a rate of 17.2 per 100K births, a 46% increase in the last two decades; and

●  More than 27 million Americans lack health insurance, most of those being either poor and/or members of an ethnic minority.

In sum, for those who are covered by some form of insurance or who can afford to pay out of pocket, the highest-quality healthcare on the planet is available in the United States. But not everyone can access the care they need, so the claim that we have the best healthcare system in the world is dubious, if not risible.

These thoughts raise a fundamental question: Should we have a right to healthcare? This is the profound topic known as “distributive justice” — how goods, benefits, and burdens should be fairly allocated in a society. Uwe Reinhardt (the late, great Princeton economist) phrased it this way after President Clinton’s health reform initiative failed in 1997:

As a matter of national policy, and to the extent that a nation’s health system can make it possible, should the child of a poor American family have the same chance of avoiding preventable illness or of being cured from a given illness as does the child of a rich American family?

The Hermit Philosopher thinks the answer is a clear, resounding “yes.” But politicians and policy makers are chary of confronting the issue explicitly because moral questions are complex and fraught with emotion, and a thoughtful response doesn’t make a good sound bite or campaign slogan. Thus, we grub on in a muddle, making great progress in science and bringing about wondrous cures, while the public policy questions remain mired in rancor, confusion, litigation, and political posturing.

For more than a century have these issues haunted us. Theodore Roosevelt called for national health insurance in 1912. FDR tried but was unable to make it part of Social Security. Truman’s ideas went nowhere, and LBJ had to settle for coverage of the elderly and poor (Medicare/Medicaid). Richard Nixon proposed a plan that might have resulted in universal access 45 years ago, but the Watergate scandal ended his tenure. Bill Clinton’s proposal went down in flames. And the current President is doing all in his power to decimate the Obama era’s Affordable Care Act, which is the closest we’ve come yet to systemic reform.

In the next few months political candidates will spew millions of words bloviating about healthcare, but darkness, chaos and conflict will continue to “hover through the fog and filthy air.” The result will be little more than "tales told by idiots, full of sound and fury and signifying nothing." 

Lord Macbeth and the witches would understand.

There's a Word for That

In his previous post the HP noted that he doesn’t do numbers well. He can’t fathom Sudoku, for example, and calculus is a mystery. But it’s a different matter when it comes to the English language: he’s a cruciverbalist (crossword puzzle enthusiast) and logophile (lover of words) who can string together 26 little symbols known as letters to form words and meaningful sentences using proper grammar and syntax.

Yes, there’s an infinite number of ways those letters and words and sentences can be combined, but somehow that seems easier than the study of the measurement, properties, and relationships of quantities and sets using various symbols such as:

The HP’s interest in words was heightened by a college course titled “Greek and Latin Derivatives.” That sounds arcane, I know, but it is one of the two most useful classes he ever signed up for … the other being typing, which he learned in summer school at age 13.

“G&LD” taught how to parse English words derived from those two languages and discern their basic meanings without recourse to a dictionary. Take “cruciverbalist,” for example. If you can see that cruci- comes from the Latin crux (“cross”) plus verbum (also Latin, “word”) you can intuit that it’s referring to someone (the -ist) who enjoys crossword puzzles.  

So enamored of the subject of words is he that the HP keeps an Excel spreadsheet with definitions of more than (note: not “over”) 500 rare and wonderful words he’ll probably never use but likes to think about.

For example, there’s a word that names a phrase like “abso-blooming-lutely.” The word is tmesis – separation of a word or group of words by one or more intervening words, in this case the intensifier blooming.

By the way, would you know that the inserted word or phrase is known as an infix? Not bloody likely.

Here are a few other cool examples from the spreadsheet:

• Ambisinistrous – adj: clumsy with both hands, as opposed to ambidextrous
• Cockalorum – n: a self-important or boastful person. [I’m thinking of a certain someone who’s been in the news on a daily basis for the last few years.]
• Einstellung effect – n: a mindset; a set of assumptions, methods or notations that is so established that it creates a powerful incentive to continue to adopt or accept prior behaviors, tools or solutions; also described as mental inertia, "groupthink," or a "paradigm."
• Jactitation – n: false boasting or claim, especially one detrimental to the interests of another. [That same someone comes to mind.]
• Mondegreen – n: a word or phrase resulting from mishearing another word or phrase, especially in song lyrics. E.g., "the girl with colitis goes by" for "the girl with kaleidoscope eyes" in the Beatles song "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds."
• Nidicolous – adj: remaining with the parents for a long time after birth. [You could say to an adult offspring who wants to move back in with you, “Don’t be nidicolous!”]
• Paralipsis – n: drawing attention to something by first claiming that we don’t mean it. E.g., when someone says, “I wouldn’t say so-and-so is a ____, but...” we understand that that’s exactly what they are saying.
• Uliginous – adj. swampy; slimy; slippery. E.g., “An unctuous undercurrent of uliginous untruths."

The HP is such a word nerd that books on the subject occupy nearly three feet of shelf space in his library. Three examples are shown here.  Clockwise from upper left they are:  The Lexicographer’s Dilemma: The Evolution of “Proper” English from Shakespeare to South Park,” by Jack Lynch;  Word by Word: The Secret life of Dictionaries, by Kory Stamper; and  The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary, by Simon Winchester.

The first two are somewhat technical, but Winchester’s book is an enthralling linguistic detective story. It’s the nonfiction account of how a delusional, incarcerated murderer and “madman” – Dr. William Chester Minor – struck up a correspondence with the principal editor of the OED – James A.H. Murray – and contributed greatly to its success.

Dr. Wm. Chester Minor

After fatally shooting a man but being acquitted in 1872 by reason of insanity, Minor was committed to an asylum where he lived until his death in 1920. He was allowed to keep his large personal library of antiquarian books, and from these he obsessively compiled quotations of the way particular words were used. Hearing of a call for volunteer contributors, Minor began sending his examples to Murray for inclusion in the OED’s first edition (published in 1884).

Minor was perhaps Murray’s most prolific contributor, but it was many years before he learned of the doctor’s background, finally visiting him in 1891. In 1899 Murray complimented Minor’s contributions by writing, “we could easily illustrate the last four centuries [of English usage] from his quotations alone." 

James A.H. Murray

USA Today said of The Professor and the Madman, “It’s a story for readers who know the joy of words and can appreciate side trips through the history of dictionaries and marvel at the idea that when Shakespeare wrote, there were no dictionaries to consult.”

Logophilia sounds like a mental disorder, and I guess it can become an obsession. But I’m not ashamed of my epeolatry (“the worship of words,” from Greek epos, word). It’s part of who I am. It helps put the “P” in HP.

# # #

What Are The Odds?

Being of a mostly philosophical bent, the HP doesn’t do numbers well; there are just too many of them. Oh, sure, back in high school he liked algebra and trigonometry because they seemed like puzzles, but he hit the wall when it came to higher math – calculus was, and still is, a mystery. 

A general discomfort with numbers is why he didn’t go into accounting, engineering, nuclear physics, etc. He's much more comfortable with words. 

But that said, and quite ironically, the HP often has numbers on his mind. 

Bridge involves numbers

I play a lot of duplicate bridge. At each table, there are four players, four suits, 52 cards in the deck, thirteen cards in each hand. We typically play 28 deals in a session, and it lasts about 3.5 hours. On each deal we count how many tricks we can win, figure the odds for taking a finesse (50% more or less depending on what we intuit from the bidding), calculate the chances of “setting” the opponents if we let them play the hand, and compute differential scoring for being on offense or defense. We try to remember every card played on each trick and tally the number of trumps and other key cards remaining.

The HP can usually handle these calculations, but there are other, scarier numbers at work in bridge too. For example, the odds of holding a “Yarborough” (a hand with no card higher than a 9) are 1828 to 1. The odds of holding a “perfect hand” (one that can take all 13 tricks in Notrump regardless of what the other players hold) are almost 170 million to 1.  

And get this: there are 53,644,737,765,488,792,839,237,440,000 possible different deals. That’s more than 53 octillion (5.36 x 10²⁸).

For all you chemistry majors reading this, that’s more than “Avogadro’s number” (the number of elementary particles per mole of a substance). Poor Avogadro – his famous number is a mere 602 septillion (6.02 x 10²³).

The enormity of the number of possible deals can be appreciated by considering that if each deal occupied just one square millimeter, you would need an area more than a hundred million times the entire surface area of the Earth to hold them all.

Numbers and rare events

Unrelated to bridge, and on a more practical level, the HP has been thinking about the Law of Large Numbers and the probabilities of certain rare events. For example, if the chance of something happening is 1 in 1,000 and you repeat the event 1,000 times, what is the likelihood that it will occur at least once during those 1000 occasions? It turns out the answer is 63%.

Don’t ask me to explain why—I don’t do numbers, remember?—but it makes sense intuitively. And if you understand calculus, apparently this equation proves it:

That percentage is good to know. Consider the odds of falling down a flight of stairs. They’re estimated to be roughly 1 in 20,000. Not a big deal, right? Well, maybe not on any given day, but consider how many times you go up and down stairs in a lifetime. More than 20,000, right? According to the above equation, there’s a 63% chance you’ll fall on one of those trips. (Pun intended.) According to the CDC, falls cause nearly one-third of all non-fatal injuries, and more than 800,000 of those injuries require hospitalization. Even more surprising, about every 20 minutes an older adult dies as the result of a fall.

These statistics were a reason I persuaded my homeowner’s association to let the HP install handrails on our exterior stairs. And considering the number of times our residents traverse those steps in a year, the Law of Large Numbers was bound to catch up to us at some point. It still might, of course, but at least now there’s a handrail to grab onto. 

Without the ADA-compliant handrail attached to the 2” x 8” banister on the left, there was no safe way to catch oneself in the event of a fall.

It’s a small world

In a lighter vein, odds and probabilities seem to come into play often in the form of “small world” stories. For example, when talking to the guy across the hall in my condo I learned that he is also from St. Louis, had lived in the subdivision next to ours back there, went to the same high school my kids did, and was just one year behind my younger son, whom he knew casually. So of course I wondered, “what are the odds of that?”

Then a new couple moved in, and while talking to them I found out they had just moved from the apartment building I lived in before I bought the condo. Further inquiry revealed that they lived in the exact same unit I did, one of more than 50 in that other building. What are the odds of that?

Then I learned that the guy downstairs from me is a Navy diver. He knows another Navy diver who is the son of one of my law school classmates. What are the odds of that?

And one day I met a new player at the bridge club, got to talking to him about our common interest in health law, and gave him my business card. A few days later I saw him again and he began with, “I know someone you know, and in fact I’m married to her.” It turns out he took my card home, laid it on the table, and when his wife saw it she said, “I went to college with Stuart! How the hell do you know him?” Susan and I hadn’t seen each other in more than 50 years, but we’re now friends again. Small world, huh! What are the odds of that?

Everyone has small world stories, and they’re intriguing because the odds of them happening seem astronomical. But since we all have these stories, the odds must not very high after all. And they aren't, actually.

We all know or have known hundreds, maybe thousands of people in our lives. And each of them knows hundreds or thousands of others. The “six degrees of separation” phenomenon comes into play. (That’s the premise that every person is connected to every other person on the planet through at most a chain of six common friends or acquaintances.)

So when two strangers meet—at a bridge club or on an airplane, for example—it’s virtually certain that they have a common acquaintance. What’s really against the odds is for them to discover the connection. And it’s intriguing to imagine the scores of “small world” stories that go unrecognized in the interactions we have with people every day. (More on the small world phenomenon can be found in a scholarly article at http://www.appstate.edu/~hagemansj/smallworld.html.) 

And finally

If ever the HP is dissatisfied and ponders what it would be like to go back to his youth, all he has to do is think of calculus. At this age, those are the kinds of numbers that just aren’t worth trying to understand.

# # #

The HP's Year in Review

The HP with (from left) Clover, Romain,
Forrest, Sarah, Scott, Jeff, Steve and Henry

Greetings and happy new year from California! The Hermit Philosopher's year can be summarized in three words: busy with travel. It included about 30,000 airline miles visiting NYC, Lancaster County (PA), Atlanta, and Indiana, plus twice each to St. Louis, Portland and San Jose. Some highlights follow.

The Indiana trip was for a 50th (egad!) reunion at DePauw University. The heat, humidity and gnats of those few days in June reminded me why I'm glad I don't live in Indiana any more. 

Jeff, Steve and Henry

In NYC Henry and his grandpa had some bonding time while Steve and Jeff took in the Harry Potter show on Broadway. That's a seven-hour, two-part extravaganza with a break for dinner. We stayed in a hotel just a block from Times Square and attended the "Gazillion Bubble Show" where Henry thrilled the audience as the newest "bubble boy." 

Henry bubbling with joy

After leaving the Big Apple, we joined my sisters and their families in Pennsylvania Dutch country. That’s where our ancestors  landed in the mid-1700s and one of the few places I go where people don’t always have to ask how to spell my name. 

The first St. Louis trip was fun: attending the PGA Championship at Bellerive Country Club. The second was more somber: a memorial service for Sue, who succumbed to Parkinson’s Disease in August. She had been my friend since college and an exceptionally kind and loving mother and grandmother. She is missed by family and friends alike.

The HP taught health law again in the Executive MBA Program at Eisenhower Medical Center, Rancho Mirage. That gig required five separate 3-hour treks over the mountains and through the deert to the Palms Springs area, staying at least one night on each occasion. The students were working professionals (MDs, RNs, and hospital execs), so they brought real-life experience to the classroom and made teaching a great pleasure. I won’t be doing it again, however: I’ve passed it on to a fellow health lawyer who lives less than an hour from the hospital instead of 150 miles away as I do.

When I’m not traveling, I’m either playing bridge, working on the 9^th edition of my textbook (MS due June 30), or simply enjoying life in America’s Finest City. If you're in the area, do let me know. Though not as big as the house my ancestor built 220 years ago, I do have room for one or two guests. 

All the best for 2019 and beyond!

The Showalter manor house, built 1799

Desert sunrise near Palm Springs, CA

The Introvert Reflects

Anticipating his college reunion, the HP wrote on these pages last month: “Fifty years! Whatever happened to them all?” Now that the reunion is over, some reflections come to mind.

First among them is the realization that I feel younger than most of my classmates look. (Others will undoubtedly say the same of me.) We are all grayer, more wrinkled, hard to remember. Thank goodness for name tags!

Second, the town has shrunk. As a student, it was a big deal to walk from campus to “downtown” Greencastle – after all, that was eight or ten blocks away! And we would never have thought to walk ¾ mile to the cemetery where my grandparents and brother are now buried. But I made each of these treks on reunion weekend and thought little of it. Having lived in eight other states at more than 20 different addresses since graduation, my world is larger and the old haunts proportionally smaller.

Third, it was nice to see fellow alumni and recall some fun times. But despite what some might say, those years were not “the best days of our lives.” How sad it would be to think that my best days were fifty years ago. No, the best days of my life are now. I’m flourishing today, thriving, enjoying every moment. I’ve let go of the past and face the future with confidence and joy. That’s why for me a little reminiscing goes a long way.

The Main Takeaway

Here lies the main lesson learned at the reunion weekend: apropos of his epithet, the Hermit Philosopher is not very good at socializing. His inner introvert tires quickly when overstimulated by glad-handing and chit chat. Extroverted personalities are energized by others; we introverts get drained. We’re not shy, necessarily, but we cherish quiet space and “companionable silence.” That’s why a few of the reunion activities tested the HP’s social skills nearly to the breaking point.

For example, a large tent on the main campus lawn served as the venue for some all-alumni buffet meals and after-dinner speeches. In addition to being crowded with hundreds of guests, the tent (sans any fans, of course) managed quite well to contain Indiana’s famous heat and humidity. And it housed swarms of gnats that buzzed around the food, flew at your face, and drowned in your drink glass. Having lived in those conditions most of his life, the HP really didn’t need them again, and he found it a challenge to have a meaningful conversation or listen to speakers while shooing away flying insects. Under such conditions, his little introvert batteries discharged quickly.

Another meal event was held indoors, thankfully, but it too was a buffet and was preceded by a seemingly interminable cocktail hour. The HP doesn’t make small talk well – especially when his stomach is growling – so he got a little “hangry.” Thank goodness for air conditioning or the scene might have gotten ugly.

The reunion reminded me that we introverts can handle socializing only in small amounts lest we overdose. Instead of cocktail chitchat, we usually prefer deep conversations with one or two close friends. After crowded parties – which we can force ourselves to attend – we often need quiet time, time to think, “alone time.” When we don’t have the energy for further interaction, when we need to turn inward and reflect on things, we hope friends and family will give us permission. Prodding us to talk and "come out of your shell" will only make us feel self-conscious.

The HP and others like him will never be the most popular people in the room. We won’t be the “life of the party,” the ones who turn heads when they enter the room. In fact, in a large group you might not notice us at all. But if you can love and accept us as we are even though our introverted quirks don’t make sense to you, you’re making our lives happier.

Thanks for listening. I'm going back to my room now. 😊

It Wasn’t Such a Great Year

In the mid-1960s, Frank Sinatra sang “The September of My Years” —

♫ ♫   One day you turn around and it's summer

Next day you turn around and it's fall

And the springs and the winters of a lifetime

Whatever happened to them all?   ♫ ♫

    

I’m recalling this lyric because in a few weeks I’ll be attending my fifty-year college reunion. Fifty years! Whatever happened to them all?

I remember my father and grandfather of five decades ago. They attended the same college as I, graduating thirty and sixty years before me respectively, so 1968 marked a milestone year for them as well. And though it was an honor to have three generations at homecoming together, I was a little put off by how ancient they and their classmates were.

Now, even though I haven’t changed a bit since graduation, I’m one of the ancients. I’ll go back, see my classmates, and wonder, “Who are all these old people? And why can’t I remember their names?”

These musings led me to few not-so-fond memories of 1968:

January — the “Tet offensive” escalates the conflict in Vietnam, and Walter Cronkite says the war is “mired in stalemate.” (It continued for another seven years).

February — an American army officer tells a reporter “it became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it.” This becomes a catchphrase for opponents of the war.

April — Martin Luther King, Jr. is assassinated in Memphis, and riots follow in more than 100 U.S. cities.

June — Robert F. Kennedy is assassinated in Los Angeles during the presidential campaign. 

August — Riots and mayhem surround the Democratic national convention in Chicago. Strongman mayor Richard J. Daley tells the media that the protesters were responsible, not the police. “The policeman isn't there to create disorder; the policeman is there to preserve disorder,” he says.

October — With raised fists during the medal ceremony, Olympians Tommy Smith and John Carlos protest violence against African Americans. (Fifty years later we’re still dealing with that issue. “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.”)

December — North Korea releases the crew of the USS Pueblo but keeps the ship; the Navy personnel had been held captive since January.

The year wasn’t all bad, of course. I turned 21, got appointed to the Navy JAG Corps (thereby avoiding enemy fire in Southeast Asia), and moved to St. Louis, my birthplace, which had always been the “big city” to me while living in small-town Indiana.

Still and all, it wasn’t such a fun time. And with apologies to Sinatra’s “It Was a Very Good Year,” a new lyric won’t leave my brain: 

♫ ♫   When I was twenty-one

It was an unhappy year

It was an unhappy year for draft-age boys

Who went off to war

Their lives came undone

When I was twenty-one.   ♫ ♫ 

Make Friends With Time

♫ ♫  Five hundred twenty-five thousand, six hundred minutes.

How do you measure a year?

In daylights, in sunsets, in midnights, in cups of coffee?

In inches, in miles, in laughter, in strife?

How do you measure a year in a life?   ♫ ♫

So begins the second act of “Rent,” the Broadway mega-hit musical of a few years ago. And the next lines are, "How about love? Seasons of love."

I recalled these words recently when my friend Tim, who’s been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, commented that he might not be here a year from now. In the time remaining he’s trying to enjoy every moment and take one day at a time. I guess you could say he’s measuring time in “daylights, sunsets, midnights, and cups of coffee.”

A day, of course, is 24 hours; 1,440 minutes; and 86,400 seconds. That’s a lot of moments, when you think about it; a lot of precious time not to waste, a point the Hermit Philosopher’s cousin Doug Smith makes in his book, Happiness, The Art of Living with Peace, Confidence and Joy.

Doug’s major premise is that to be happy we need to live in the present. He quotes an old Eskimo proverb: “Yesterday is ashes, tomorrow wood. Only today the fire burns brightly.”

That’s just one of many ways to make the point that we only have now. We need to use “now” effectively because it’s all we’ve got. Regretting the past and worrying about the future wastes energy. And, because it’s inefficient, multi-tasking wastes the “now.”

We all do it. As I sketched out the first few paragraphs of this post I had a football game showing on TV and was continually interrupted by email pings, text messages, and moves my opponents made on my Words With Friends app. In this “atmosphere of manic disruption,” as Michael Harris calls it in his book The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We’ve Lost in a World of Constant Connection, I realized that I wasn’t concentrating on the task at hand. I needed to make friends with time.

Time is a savings account that begins each day with 86,400 units of currency. The balance decreases steadily, reaches zero at midnight, and gets replenished in the same amount one tick later. So, the key to being happy and productive is to spend that currency wisely — be present in the moment, stop multi-tasking, and “do now what you are doing now,” as Doug puts it. When I’m tethered to my devices and trying to do many things at once, I’m not being a friend with time and I’m on the path to frustration and unhappiness.

Doug suggests a method for staying present in the moment. He calls it “thresholds,” an idea given to him by a business consultant. The technique is to think of every door you pass through as new starting point. As you cross the threshold, concentrate on where you are, not where’ve you’ve been or where you need to be minutes or hours later. Focus solely on what you’re to do in that place you just entered.

Before I started using “thresholds” I did a lot of thinking about the hereafter. I would enter a room and wonder, “What am I here after?” The “thresholds” technique helps me focus. Helps me stay present in the moment. Helps me make friends with time.

In an article about the death of David Cassidy, his daughter, actress Katie Cassidy, quotes the singer’s last words: “So much wasted time.” She then vows that this is a daily reminder for her to share her gratitude with those whom she loves and never to waste another minute.

It’s a good reminder for us all. ■

The Fog of Loss

Mission Hills. Autumn time just begun, and the Hermit Philosopher is writing in his den. Things are bleak in the house. There’s fog everywhere. Virtual fog.  Fog in the valley, where the river trickles to the bay. Fog on the ocean as sailboats dance with aircraft carriers. Fog shrouding the bridge to Coronado and the animals at the zoo. Fog in his condo and in his mind. It is the fog of grief. He has lost a dear, dear friend.

She and he were in college together. Law school too. They communed together – were intimately involved – on perhaps half a dozen occasions over the years. Each time was better than the time before. He loved her dearly.

But recently the friend began to come apart with age. Her skin turned brownish and flakey. Her spine was bent. She was literally falling apart at the seams.

The decline started right after Mr. Tulkinghorn died. He was a lawyer ­– a murder victim, you might recall – and his death precipitated a crisis among some of his most prominent clients. The HP’s friend was a major part of that story. In fact, she was that story. It was only because of her that anyone has ever heard of Mr. Tulkinghorn, his crusty old client Lester Dedlock, or the seminal case of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, which case grubbed on for generations in the chancery courts and was the great misfortune of so many suitors.

As if that were not enough trouble, poor Jo died and Mrs. Dedlock disappeared when disgraced and suspected – wrongly – of the lawyer’s murder. (The maid did it.) Mrs. D’s daughter, Esther, went searching for her but found her dead at the gravesite of her former lover, Esther’s father. About that time Lester had a stroke, Esther contracted smallpox, and her cousin Richard died of tuberculosis.

With all this sorrow, the HP’s friend had the dickens of a time, becoming more and more frail and finally expiring just last week. The HP visited her to say good-bye and extract all the memories he could. The fog-enshrouded thoughts of many years that had been marginally recorded are now saved like flies in amber, every line rewritten and preserved for a newer, stronger lover. One with a robust back and clearer skin. Heavier, perhaps, but fit for many more trysts.

Thanks go to Charles John Huffam Dickens (1812-1870) for his literary masterpiece and to Signet Classics for my frail paperback friend. 

Thanks also to Scholar Select Books for scanning and reproducing – in hardback form – a library copy of the 1885 edition of Bleak House, which sits proudly on my bookshelf in Dewey Decimal System category 823 (English Fiction) alongside A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, and others. ■

Why the Anger?

Tea Party Patriot

For quite some time the Hermit Philosopher has been trying to wrap his mind (and his keyboard) around why the “American Right” is so angry. Why they feel like outsiders. Why, for example, a Congressman would tell people, “We have to take our country back from a government that has ignored our Constitution, dismissed our Conservative values, and spent our tax dollars like drunken sailors.”

Really? From the HP’s viewpoint, this is nonsense and political pandering. The country wasn’t taken away, it merely detoured through the Great Recession. But since then unemployment has fallen by half, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has doubled, and 11.3 million jobs were added to the economy. “Red America” should have been happy.

But Mr. Tea Party Patriot and his friends remained disgruntled. The HP wondered, what have they lost? What is it they “want back?” What are they so angry about?

Recent Book Has Some Answers

Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, provides some interesting answers to these questions. 

For a number of months, sociologist and author Arlie Hochschild traveled a stronghold of the conservative right—Louisiana bayou country—and interviewed dozens of people. She consistently found stories of lives ripped apart by loss of the American Dream, stagnant wages, and fear of cultural change. Contrary to the liberal idea that these folks have been duped into voting against their own best interests, she concludes that their views make sense in the context of their lives and their emotional—albeit not their economic—interests.

Having read Strangers on the heels of Deep South (see the post of April 30), the HP is finally beginning to understand that the resentments of "red" Americans flow from what Hochschild calls a “deep story,” one that goes beyond facts or rational judgment and supports the conservative world view.

Red America’s Deep Story

The deep story goes like this—

You are patiently standing in a long line for something you call the American Dream. You are white, Christian, of modest means, and getting along in years. You are male. There are people of color behind you, and in principle you wish them well. But you’ve waited long and worked hard, and the line is barely moving.

Then: Look! There are people cutting in line ahead of you! Who are these interlopers? Some are black, others are women, immigrants, refugees. They get affirmative action, sympathy, welfare—benefits for the listless and idle. They are the “takers,” and the government wants you to feel sorry for them.

And who ran the government for eight years? The biracial son of a low-income single mother, and he’s cheering on the line cutters! In fact, he and his wife are line cutters too, you think. And while all of this is happening, the liberal, fake news media mock you as racist or homophobic or stupid. Everywhere you look, you feel betrayed. The American Dream is slipping farther and farther away.

A Uniting Force

When Hochschild described this story to the people she interviewed, they related strongly to it. “You’ve read my mind,” one said. “I live your analogy,” said another. And last November we learned that 63 million other people also resonate with the Deep Story.

To paraphrase Leonard Pitts, Jr. of the Washington Post, these are people who dislike foreigners, oppose same-sex marriage, and were offended that the White House was occupied by a black guy with a funny name. Rather than vote for a woman and continue to feel threatened by cultural change, they united behind “a lying, narcissistic, manifestly incompetent child man” (Pitts’ words) who hasn’t a clue about how government works. 

The HP doesn’t buy into the racial finger-pointing and class resentments that underlie the Deep Story for some folks. Rather, he thinks unchecked corporate power and technological transformation are largely to blame. (Consider Amazon versus the corner grocery, and solar power versus coal mining.) Nevertheless, it’s clear that demographic and cultural changes have taken from Mr. Tea Party Patriot and millions of others the status they once enjoyed and the dream they sought. 

The Great Paradox

But here is the Great Paradox of our age, as Hochschild sees it. The people she met have poor economic, educational and health indicators and are the ones among us who could benefit most from government programs in those arenas. But they abhor the very idea of government help and view as suspect almost everything the government does. “It has gone rogue, corrupt, malicious and ugly,” one Tea Partier complained. “It can’t help anybody.”

When confronted with facts, people living the paradox are not disabused of their biases. For example, contrary to some of the common beliefs Hochschild’s subjects held: 

   - Only 8% of the federal budget goes toward “welfare”; 

   - Most people on welfare have jobs ; 

   - Fertility rates of minorities and whites are virtually identical; 

   - Government employees are not overpaid—they get less than their private sector counterparts; and 

   - Unemployment and GDP numbers are usually better under Democratic Presidents

But despite cracks in its factual foundation, the Deep Story persists as a matter of the right’s perception. And, as we all know, perception is reality to most of us.

Blue America’s Deep Story

Hochschild posits that liberals have their own Deep Story. In it, they are standing around a large public square that contains theaters, libraries, museums, schools, and similar institutions available to everyone. They are proud of this cultural infrastructure because it’s all-inclusive. People who were once “outsiders” are freely welcome. This feels to them like the American values represented by the Statue of Liberty.

But then something alarming happens. Marauders invade the public square, recklessly dismantle it, and steal the bricks and concrete from the public buildings. Those who were so proud of what they had built watch in horror as the elites who dismantled it erect McMansions with the building materials they had just stolen, thus privatizing the public realm.

Hochschild sums up the moral of Blue America’s story by saying, “The right can’t understand the deep pride liberals take in their creatively designed, hard-won public sphere as a powerful integrative force in American life.” Then she adds that ironically, the right may have more in common with the left than they imagine, for “many on the left feel like strangers in their own land too.”

Not Red vs. Blue

We won’t see an end to this culture clash any time soon. In fact, it may get worse given the impulsive and divisive temperament of the current President. But ironically, the Tea Partiers and the liberals/progressives face some common challenges—extreme automation and global capitalism, for example—and both sides call for some “activist” responses by government.

Trying to “make America great again,” the Red side wants to circle the wagons around family and church and have government provide incentives to shore up traditional industries like auto manufacturing and coal mining. The Blue side calls for government help to restore our crumbling infrastructure, invest in schools, and support newer industries like autonomous cars and solar power.

Somewhere in this great land there must be a few unifying personalities who can find common ground and restore the American Dream for everyone. It’s not a binary, zero/sum, win/lose game. We’re all in this together. 

The Deepest Story should be neither red, nor blue; it should be purple.

# # #