The Rational Psychic

I went to a sneak preview of “Sicko” at the Lagoon theater in Minneapolis on Saturday night. I had watched “Roger and Me” when it came out on DVD and saw “Bowling for Columbine” just two nights before going to see “Sicko.” I’ve always viewed documentaries as being like good medicine: I’ll take them when necessary, but the taste doesn’t keep me coming back for more.

I do think that Michael Moore serves a purpose as a filmmaker and as someone contributing to public debate. For the first time since I was in college and listening to The Clash, I feel like it’s (maybe) OK to mention “socialism” as a valid form of managing a nation’s resources.

I feel that this view is closer to the center than I ever would have thought before. Yesterday on the internet I caught an outdoor segment of Chris Matthews’ “Hardball” in which he was talking to Ann Coulter. She was surrounded by about fifty of her fans on this outdoor set. Let me ask you, if Rush Limbaugh’s fans are called “dittoheads” are Ann Coulter’s fans called “sawdust skulls”?

The reason I bring her up is that she mentioned FDR as having been good on foreign policy for “crushing the Nazi war machine” but had been terrible on domestic policy. Why? Because he had saddled us with socialist ideals which she said we are still struggling to get rid of. I wonder what she’s referring to: Social Security or the minimum wage?

In “Sicko” Moore takes a smart tack in that he doesn’t say that we are in terrible shape because of the number of people in the U.S. who do not have medical insurance. That could lead a lot of us to think to ourselves, “Hey, I step over the homeless every day on my way to work, what does this have to do with me?”

Instead, he asks the rest of us who do have health insurance, “What do you really have and what is it costing you?” And the point it, once you factor in deductibles, co-pays and the fact that you are unsteady ground any time you have something that needs really serious treatment, you’re left wondering why more of us aren’t bankrupt over medical bills and why we aren’t carrying signs in the street?

Moore gives us lots of reasons why we should look to other nations for an example of what can be done well and use the best from each. He examines the Canadians, the British, and the French as examples. From what I can find on the internet, the United Kingdom charges rates from 10-40% (those making over $4,460, between $4,461 and $69,200, and above $69,201) and has a number of deductions allowable. France appears to go from 10-48% while Canada levies from 7-29%. VAT taxes also apply which are considerably higher than most state sales tax rates. Canada has the lowest VAT at 7%.

Some of the more humorous moments come when Michael Moore is trying to get the Canadians to understand the predicament their southern cousins are in. One Canadian fellow (we’ll call him “Bob”) describes having sawn off four of his fingers with a power saw and shows he has decent use of them after they were reattached in a Canadian hospital. Moore then tells him about an American who cut off his middle and ring fingers and goes to the hospital to have them reattached. Since he has no insurance, he is given a choice of having the middle finger reattached for $60,000 or the ring finger for $12,000. Because he’s so sentimental, the fellow chooses the ring finger. Bob, the Canadian whose every doctor’s bill is paid by the government, has a confused look on his face.

After the movie, I felt somewhat ashamed. Ashamed that I wasn’t in the streets with a bullhorn shouting my anger and demanding better treatment for myself and my neighbors. I’ve never done this before. But the stakes keep getting higher.

Next year’s Republican National Convention is being held in the Twin Cities. In one way or another I plan to be there. It’s a matter of organizing under a political banner I can work for and that my conscience will agree with.

My dear one and I are going to see “Sicko,” Michael Moore’s new movie about America’s trouble taking care of its citizens medically. It’s playing tonight at the Lagoon Theater in Minneapolis. I hope it’s something worth writing a blog about.

Last night she and I watched “Bowling for Columbine” together. She had seen it before but I hadn’t. I was surprised that this movie was controversial to any great extent. I thought he showed flexibility, rather than a dogmatic lockstep, in pointing out the disconnect between gun ownership and violent media since these factors don’t appear to bring about the same gun violence in other countries as is found in the U.S.

The connection I’ve never heard mentioned before, and that very fact seems to make it worth greater consideration, is that gun violence in America is connected with our long history of slavery, racism and hatred of all things foreign.

I found what I thought to be a balanced defense of “Bowling for Columbine” written by a fellow, Erik Möller at his site, Kuro5hin.

If Moore can give me as many new ways to think about the U.S. healthcare system in “Sicko” as he gave me ways to think about gun violence in “Bowling” I’ll be pleased.

The first time I went to college I earned an English degree. And not one of those technical B.S. degrees, mind you, but a philosophically pure, doing-it-for-love-of-the-language-and-literature Bachelor of Arts degrees.

I had no idea about planning for the future. I had no idea what it took to get a job and earn a living. I was beginning to suffer from bipolar illness and was very depressed much of the time. And when I wasn’t, I still had extremely low self-esteem.

I began to feel like I was really doing something worthwhile when I started taking poetry workshops from Kathy Callaway and writing poetry. She was our writer-in-residence and she taught me that what I was doing with poetry was important to someone—if only to the small writing workshops and seminars she taught.

I thought she was the greatest person ever to teach at Mankato State University. And in the area of writing she easily could have been. I had such a huge, sloppy, dependent crush on her. I stopped by her house either on a Saturday or a late afternoon when she wasn’t teaching. I think I was hoping we’d sit and chat about poets she had met or she would give me some secret that would help me get a first book of poetry published by age 22. Of course, the fact that I couldn’t distinguish a crush from physical attraction made the situation even more potentially disastrous

Instead of any of these possibilities becoming real, I felt the wrath of a very private person who had her own problems to deal with. I wrote her a note of apology in which I promised not to treat her like a “fifth Beatle.” She apologized for going so far with her anger. However, she let me know in no uncertain terms that I was NOT to bother her outside of school hours.

My idea of intimacy was changed by Kathy Callaway. What she gave me was much more than her physical presence. For the first time I was introduced to contemporary writers who believed that the life “of the mind” was worth pursuing and cultivating.

Without fail, Kathy used her poetry as a window onto the possibilities that writing poems allowed, unafraid to reveal her own crowded biography in the process. Her beautiful but ill friend, Françoise, “shattering” the eggs of geese “like heresies.” In the poem, “Staple Supplies,” she visits a diner during winter, “…curing puerperal fever with a hangover. This is Duluth, so the man on my right is old, has a gutted face, is talking.” And the final lines of the poem broadcast some kind of quiet hope. And I think she’s telling us that although this is the hope she discovered for herself, we are capable of it if we’re willing to go through the journey:

“At the top I turn facing the lake and see

white straight out for miles, sundogs in all directions,

and out of the deep blue fissures in the bay

already the steam columns are rising. They’re

fixed sixty feet in the air, all day, all day,

towers of clarity, etchings with no ink

and I’m leaning, pressed whole on the empty air

printing and printing.”

To be able to say such things with a poem was as unsettling to me as finding out your first-grade teacher smoked in the break room. I thought that the idea of including yourself in the poem, or any art form, was to call attention to yourself in an attempt to create fame and generate income.

Instead, Kathy performed the more serious task of pleasing herself first while taking care to produce something that is neither intellectually nor emotionally sloppy.

And for her students, the children of Swedes and Germans who saw only work ahead for their descendants, Kathy invited poets like Gerald Stern and William Stafford to spend a day or two with us, teaching and reading their work. I wondered if she ever questioned her ability to turn at least a few of us into poets. Did she make her efforts in spite of her knowledge of our uncertain writing futures?

In the last poem of her book, Heart of the Garfish, Kathy talks about her mother—a special education teacher from the days when people used cruel words to describe the kids in such classrooms:

She’s in a cast-shot of the school’s

Peter Pan. An enraptured Captain Hook

looms over her; Wendy looks sly,

and the star in green rags

weeps with a loneliness he cannot put to words.

A giant, a mongoloid, an autistic in camouflage—

mother’s in the middle, holding hands

as if love and connection might be willed.

A stubborn look to her eye.

Never mind history, it says.

Here we all are.

Sorry to be a lazy blogger. I had two kids’ soccer events to go to this weekend, one of them 45 minutes away and the other 2 hours away. Griffin scored a goal and was extremely happy the whole weekend. He counts his stint as goalkeeper as a successful one.

Miss Elizabeth has not spent the day with me in a long time (a year?) and I was grateful to drive her around. She was in a poor mood when her team lost their second game in the afternoon. I think that was primarily due to the way her coach used her in the games: 8 minutes in the first game, then she played the entire game for their championship struggle. When I pointed this out to her, the divine Miss E said, “Yeah, that’s because Betsy [name has been changed to protect...] left after the first game and he didn’t have anyone else to play defense.”

Oh.

Pity she’s too young for “Ball Four.” If anyone knows of a good insider’s look at soccer by a player with a sense of humor I’d love to hear about it. Thanks.

Everyday I look I run into some interesting sites or blogs. One I ran into today was “Faith Promoting Rumor, subtitled: Dedicated to oddments and marginalia in Mormondom and, failing that, deep doctrinal discussion.” My picture of Mormons is a very limited one–a stereotype to be sure. I think of the fresh young white boys with their white, short-sleeved shirts, navy blue pants, ties and “Leave it to Beaver” haircuts. Pretty two-dimensional, wouldn’t you say?

When I found this site and started reading the responses and feedback generated by the readership I was amazed to find a diversity of opinion. One person was all for Mitt Romney while others stated they were excited about Barack Obama. When one poster mentioned wanting to pray for direction on how to vote for, others came back stating that God doesn’t care who we humans have for a leader. I’m afraid this all blew my mind so much that I decided to post my reply to them to give a flavor of the layers of opinion I found on the site:

“Hello. I’m not an LDS member. Most of the discussion on here I like. It’s at least kept below the level of a snarl. However, I can’t get over the idea of people believing in God picking a modern leader. I have no idea what to say about the Israelites, but I know that Congressional business is not recorded in ancient Hebrew and pretending that we are so important smacks of more pride than is good for us.

I’d also ask you to think about the current President Bush. Did God really tell him to create, or at least amplify, so much strife in the Middle East? How many Iraqis have died in our ill-informed attempt to set them on the path to “freedom and democracy”? I shudder to think of a God who would ask human beings to be his agent in such activities. By the way, when he meets with the Pope, or LDS leaders, who decides which message from God will be followed during that meeting? That would be a discussion I’d love to hear.”

I guess much of this is evidence of how some of my responses are still shaped by thinking out of the Enlightenment á la Voltaire. As Carson pointed out to me, most of the big minds of the Enlightenment may have thought that slavery as a concept was abhorrent. This matter had to be kept congruent with their other statements on human rights, after all. And yet, in the real world practical application of these ideals, they often overlooked their own prejudices toward people from Africa, Asia, India, Native people on any continent. Indeed, any people who were not light-skinned Western Europeans.

As time went on these sociological and philosophical ideas were oftentimes further entrenched by scientific experiments which aimed to prove differences and inferiority by race. Stephen Jay Gould’s book, “The Mismeasure of Man” shows examples of Victoria-era scientists who used craniometry who attempted to use skull volumes to prove the intellectual superiority of Caucasians. If the racist notion of this concept doesn’t prick up your ears, the ad absurdum lengths to which they took the the concept of racially-based superiority reduces the whole thing to a frightening silliness from our vantage point. After finding suspect ways to compare skulls and prove that Caucasians had more brain capacity, these craniometrists (Mommy, when I grow up I want to be a craniometrist!) then parsed the results to show that a Frenchman had more brain capacity than a German and an Englishman more than a Frenchman! My guess is that if you were Scots, Welsh, or Irish you needn’t even worry about being in competition with the Germans.

These ideas about difference and the apparent meaningfulness of one characteristic or another such as skin color, national origin, religion, or sexual orientation can seem quite silly, but these are ideas which have been damaging throughout history and their ghosts are with us today. For those of you over forty, do you remember parents calling children with light- and dark-skinned parents as being “mulatto” and thinking they were being respectful? I wonder if the words “bi-racial” or “multi-racial” will embarrass our children one day.

I didn’t intend to get on a soapbox and preach. I feel I’m a spiritual person but I don’t have any answers that are likely to satisfy you. I’m just thinking out loud about how much I have yet to learn and I’m trying to get on it. Thanks for your time.

 P.S. I forgot to mention an important dimension to this Victorian scientific adventure in the attempt to quantify intelligence: gender. Since it was taken for granted that women were not as intelligent as men. Although brain size can have an average difference of as much as 100 cc, a person would need to answer the question, “Does size make a difference, or do body proportions also play a role in the need for a larger brain?” Besides, isn’t one measure of intelligence for a man whether or not he would ever tell a woman he thinks men are smarter? Put me down as saying individual differences matter the most, please.

I felt stuck for something to write today. This sent me running for the blogosphere, looking for material. I don’t want to use the internet and my fellow bloggers for material as a standard practice. I think that gets self-referential in a way, as though you’re spending all of your time in a hall of mirrors.

Yet, since my blog-reading days have been so few to date, there are still many things and perspectives out there which are new and intriguing to me. For example, how many blogs have you run across written by an African-American male who is Christian and a socialist with a strong background in historical scholarship? I’m sorry if that kind of stuff is old hat to you, but I think the internet has such a variety of people on it that it’s still worth exploring.

Another fellow, Jonathan Deamer, gave me the idea for my blog today: The 10 secrets of writing reviews that will keep readers coming back. He uses this idea in reviewing music CDs. I haven’t bought any new CDs lately (Elvis Costello’s “King of America” hardly counts) so I’d rather review one of my favorite books, “Candide” by Voltaire.

Candide is a short book (115 pages in my Crofts Classics edition) that takes on the question of how God as an all-powerful and all-knowing being still allow evil in the world. A popular answer to this was that this is the best of all possible worlds and that suffering, even suffering in individual cases, is part of the plan. During Voltaire’s time, most authorities would conclude that one serves God best by accepting one’s lot and not trying to change it.

We are introduced to Candide, the naive hero of our story, living in the castle of the Baron Thunder-ten-tronckh in Westphalia. He is believed to be the bastard son of the Baron’s sister and an honest gentleman in the area but whom the Baron’s sister would not marry due to his not having enough noble ancestors to suit the baroness.

When we are introduced to Doctor Pangloss, the tutor for the Baron’s children and Candide, we find that Voltaire is more zealous in his attacks on over-reaching pride and hypocrisy than even Holden Caulfield. Pangloss teaches “metaphysico-theologo-cosmolonigology,” suggestive of some abstract nonsense far more criminal in nature than anything you were required to take as an undergrad in college.

We are also treated to an example of just how respectable the fine Doctor Pangloss really is. Mademoiselle Cunegonde (use your imagination with that name), the Baron’s daughter, is walking through a small wood near the castle when she sees, “Doctor Pangloss in the bushes, giving a lesson in experimental physics to her mother’s waiting maid, a very pretty and docile brunette. Mademoiselle Cunegonde…watched breathlessly the reiterated experiments…; she observed clearly the Doctor’s sufficient reason, the effects and the causes, and returned home very much excited, …filled with the desire of learning, reflecting that she might be the sufficient reason of young Candide and that he might be hers.”

These events are part of just the first three pages.

There are amazing adventures to be had. There are injustices and horrors committed against all sorts of people by all sorts of people. Catholics, Jews, Moors, Jesuits, French, Italians, English, Venetians, Turks all commit brutality without regret. Even Candide, our innocent, gets in on the action.

We meet characters who appear to die but return alive later in the book. Why? It’s just more fun that way. Plus, Voltaire gets to take a literary jab at the romance/adventure stories of the time in which mistaken identities and chance meetings always drive the plot along (sound like any bad television you’ve ever watched?). There are galley captains, Jesuits making a rebel republic in South America, the people of El Dorado, and an old woman with only one buttock.

Every chapter brings a new complication and another reminder of just why this is not the best of all possible worlds and infuriating examples of how a little bit of social reform could make a difference in people’s lives.

With all of the complications and events that drive the story we see that Candide struggles greatly to learn his lessons (the last time I reread the book, I could see George W. Bush in the part of Candide) and can never seem to look far enough ahead to avoid trouble. After an incident in which he saves Cunegonde, she asks him, “How does it happen that you, who were born so mild, should kill a Jew and a prelate in two minutes?” “My dear young lady,” replied Candide, “when a man is in love, jealous, and has been flogged by the Inquisition, he is beside himself.”

I think this book always has something to say to us today, especially with such simple-minded ideas being put forth in the public discourse. Ideas like, ‘we’re not sure if we want to tackle global warming, which will disastrously affect climate, agriculture, water availability, etc., because it might cost some businesses too much money.’ Who is being protected by such empty-headed thinking and stalling? I think that this kind of thinking is, at best, an example of the philosophy Voltaire attacked 250 years ago (the best of all possible worlds) and at worst a cynical use of this idea to cover for greed and the grab for political power. In either case, we citizens need to make more noise because this is not the best of all possible worlds for most of us.

Voltaire doesn’t offer any grand over-arching solutions to all of the problems in the book. He does offer a small, practical approach to life that could ease the trouble created by so many of the problems his characters encounter. In the end, it’s Candide who recommends, “…we should cultivate our own gardens.”

Until you have a son of your own . . . you will never know the joy, the love beyond feeling that resonates in the heart of a father as he looks upon his son. You will never know the sense of honor that makes a man want to be more than he is and to pass something good and hopeful into the hands of his son. And you will never know the heartbreak of the fathers who are haunted by the personal demons that keep them from being the men they want their sons to be.

Kent Nerburn (20th century), U.S. theologian and author. Letters to My Son, prologue (1993).

My son, Griffin, turned nine on Friday. He’s not any more special or important than my other three children. But, he is different. He’s the only son I have. And that’s what I wish I could figure out: what does it mean to have a son, to be a father to that child?

My experience I have of my child is made up of his curly, blond hair, his talkative nature and his angelic quality of being able to forgive and forget. I looked at blogs for over an hour and tried to find one that answered the question, “How do other men deal with having sons?” I couldn’t find anything that fit the bill. Perhaps other guys have a smoother way of coping with existential questions and have other things to blog about.

Like most parents, I worry over how my son is doing. I want him to be adjusted enough to get along with others. I want him to feel like he can succeed at things he tries to do. And, in several years, I hope he finds someone to love. Isn’t this the essence of a parent’s job? Or is it just a response to the failings I can trace back to my childhood?

The way I remember my father during my childhood was as a large presence. A little over 5’10” my father is still a barrel-chested specimen who has always weighed between 225 and 250. I have a photo of his grandfather working at his blacksmith’s furnace and anvil in the early 1900’s. He looks like my father’s twin.

My father certainly knew how to give me a hug or kiss when I was young, but it’s the fact of his presence, sometimes horseplaying with me and my sister, more often silent with dark moods, that dominates the majority of my childhood memories.

I don’t remember him encouraging me to go out for any sports. The only thing that was organized for kids my age in our town was Farm League baseball. I was afraid of pop flies and could imagine being maimed or getting a broken nose every time a ball came to me.

The flip side of this is that I don’t recall him pushing me to get into any sports, either. During the summer there were many days when you could find me hiking through ravines with my friends. And there were just as many days when you could have found me inside reading a book and trying to get from Sol to Pluto in the library’s summer reading program.

The way I remember it, it was hunting that really helped me see my dad in a more personal way. As though he wasn’t just the stranger who brought the most money home and taught me the difference between “wanting” things and “needing” things. When I went to hunt ruffed grouse with him near Orr, Minnesota, I saw this large man disappear and turn into someone who could walk without breaking twigs. He could find the birds’ scat in the midst of the clover and underbrush.

And if my dad shot and wounded a bird he would count that as the worst sin of a whole day of hunting. Much worse than “getting skunked,” or shooting at a bird and missing entirely. I am still very proud of him just from him showing me that he’s the type of person who doesn’t count the number of birds shot as the objective of hunting. He felt that the walk in the woods was a reward in itself.

My father has his flaws. There’s no doubt about that. He was better as a parent as I got older than when I was younger.

Instead of laying out a whole lot of goals for myself that will make me a better father I think that I can only expect that I make myself as available to my son as I can.

And if my son can forgive me my mistakes by the time he’s forty or so, I think that would also be some kind of accomplishment.

This is my pledge to you that I’ll have a new blog up later today (Sunday). I watched a soccer game that my son played in earlier today. And since his birthday on Friday I’ve been thinking about writing something about just how important it is for a man to connect with his son.

I think that it’s difficult because of all the problems we may have had with our own fathers. I’m still working those out. Now that my dad’s eighty and I’m forty-four we’re getting pretty smooth around each other. He even lets me give him a hug and a kiss on the cheek.