This Is Osseous

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At the knee of her writer mother, Nora Ephron was taught the secret of the writer’s life: Everything is copy. She learned this sufficiently well to get a best-selling book and Meryl Streep movie out of a humiliatingly unfaithful husband.

On this principle, though on a far more trivial scale, instead of mining the rich lode of venality, sedition, and egomania that characterizes the democracy-threatening events of the day, I am here to turn my last unforgettable week into copy.

Seven days ago, after a minor league freeze, my wife strolled around the corner in the early morning hours to do fifteen minutes of exercise, slipped on a patch of black ice, and broke her right kneecap into several shards. Two men working on the adjacent house helped her to her feet —or foot — and assured her (incorrectly) that everything would be fine.

She foolishly took them at their world and tried to tough it out for a day, using a cane to attend a funeral no less, then graduated to a walker and ice packs. By the next day her knee was swollen to the size of a black-and-blue cantaloupe, and I put my flat feel down. Off to the orthopedist we went after the kind of pathetic wheedling needed to get a rapid appointment in our health care system, so much better than Canada, France or Britain.

Once there, we got to see a PA rather than a man wth a medical degree and soon the X-rays told the tale. With luck, eight weeks with the leg immobilized in a mummifying black rubber cocoon with a steel spine up the hamstring will permit the piece to knit back together. Without luck, surgery.

This was surprising because men who earn their daily bread with sharp knives are rarely known to pass up a chance to profitably use them. But the reprieve may be provisional. This week we will be off to another venue for a CT scan, and then the following day back to Ortholand where the bone whisperers may get a second chance to prescribe the knives.

I am worried because there may be a localized epidemic of this sort of thing in the neighborhood. Sometime ago, our friend across the way was walking her dog, went down, and had to keep her foot immobilized for sometime. My daughter, around Christmas, came out of a store talking on her phone, performed the same trick, and wound up in a Frankenstein boot for weeks.

And shortly after our mishap, a second neighbor came to the door to offer sympathy.
Her arm was in a sling from a break in her humerus, which is clearly no joke. Get it? She slipped on a floor she had made so clean as to be slick as ice. All of which provides plenty of useful healthy living lessons. Avoid dogs and the walking thereof. Never exercise or shop. And clean only sparingly.

Meanwhile, the victim spends her days on a walker and psychotropic drugs shuttling between bed and couch. Her daughter has taken a week of family caregiver leave from her job, a nice benefit rarely offered in my day. She and I are cooking up large pots of freezable Mexican, Cajun, and all-American stew-like substances to get us through the next week or two. Then friends of the invalid arrived with even more provender.

The victim has become the Dowager Duchess of Downton. The caregivers are strictly members of the below stairs staff, assigned to the scullery work, buttling, and chauffeur duty. Get me a glass of water. Yes, milady.

At first I feared the two girls might use their downtime for yet another viewing of the six-hour Colin Firth version of “Pride and Prejudice,” but instead the patient decided now was the time to find out what all the buzz was about concerning “This Is Us.” My counter-argument, in favor of something a bit grittier such as “Marseilles” or “Tin Star,” was voted down by an overwhelming 2 to 1 margin. Direct democracy is a bitch, and in this case I believe there’s some sort of gender bias going on. But mine is not to reason why, mine is but to watch and cry.

So I have spent the last three days in the presence of two women in full binge mode. Thus far, we have plowed through the complete first season’s eighteen weepy episodes. And another eighteen loom in my near future. Since “This Is Us” is the work of many of the same people involved in “Thirtysomething” and “Brothers and Sisters,” I realize I have suffered through a cumulative eleven seasons and 213 episodes of family travail.

If I were going to be lying on the sofa for eight weeks in an immobilized state, this might not be the way I would chose to cheer myself up. But, in this time of red and blue division and polarization, maybe it’s encouraging that we can all care about the struggles and triumphs of the flawed, uplifting, annoying, but endearing Pearson family.

Even with its substance abusers, blue collar strivers, upscale compulsives, black and white brothers, overweight sister, dying biological father, it is a far better crowd to spend binge time with than the competing TV spectacle of the Potus family. It is the difference between heart and bile. So, crank up Season Two, and let the sobbing begin.

Maybe What’s Bad Gets Gone

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Merle Miller said there are two kinds of people, those who stay home and those who leave. I might add a corollary that there are two kinds of those who leave, the ones running away from something and the ones running to something.

But no matter whether you stay or go, run to escape or run to discover, it’s questionable whether you can ever leave your home behind. Mark Twain in India, full of years and fame, said, “ All the me in me is in a little Missouri village halfway around the world.”

Jane Smiley, in a recent piece in “Smithsonian” about Grant Wood’s Iowa, says, “What we see in our first decade makes strong impressions that influence us for the rest of our lives…everything we once knew remains in our memory — the tiny yard that looked huge, the seven-step staircase to the front porch that seemed impossible to climb. There is an eternal fascination with those locations that we knew before we gained perspective.”

I have lived more that half my life far away from where I began, but still feel like a stranger in a strange land. And it is not just different folkways, accents, enthusiasms, but something more visceral or sensual. The shape of the land itself, the trees that are not the trees that sheltered me in my earliest days, the seasons with their different durations and slants of light are odd. The architecture of the homes and schools and downtown are related, of the same genus but a different species. It is the look, the smell, the taste, that is subtly different.

Though I was an English major, when I finally got to visit the land of Austen, Trollope, Marvell, Herrick, I did not immediately warm to the place. Yet in France I felt, an immediate, pleasurable deja vu. It took me years to realize that those small, provincial towns with a river through the middle, soft air under colonnades of trees, the shop of butcher and baker were an echo of that small town, on a rocky river, where I was young.

The actual town where I grew up is actually on a stream called the Rocky River. It is greatly changed from when I was young there, now a suburb of the nearby city that is reached in twenty minutes by a superhighway surrounded by big box retailers and fast food restaurants. In my day, that acreage was the Rosbaugh farms where we bought summer sweet corn from a roadside stand. They really did pave paradise and put up a parking lot.

So many of the ugly family feuds of our national political conversation since
World War II have been about change, pro and con. Rational discussion of its inevitability is in short supply because it does not address the human longing for the way we were, the days that are no more. Republicans have been very adept at exploiting backward-looking nostalgia by blaming change on scapegoats. Democrats have been remarkably tone-deaf to the natural reluctance to abandon a fondly, if rose-colored, remembrance of a past or passing way of life, an understandable anxiety about an unknown, possibly alien and disruptive future.

Such polarization makes impossible a debate we need to have, about which traditions to conserve and which to let go, what change to fear and what to welcome. All of us want to keep some things permanent and sacrosanct. Tree huggers want to conserve a vanishing landscape and its biodiversity. Gun nuts want to shoot for sport what their ancestors hunted for game. We all want cheap goods and energy, but are we willing to pay the cost in befouled air and water?

Coal miners and steel workers want their booming industries back, perhaps less for the actual labor than for the reliability of a living wage. Newspaper reporters and editors feel their pain, having been disrupted by the same technical revolution that makes almost all jobs provisional, and possibly obsolete.

We are all sad for our loses, alarmed by impermanence, and want to preserve some of what was good and safe and true. But being a Luddite or in permanent mourning for the Lost Cause, is no solution. Blaming scapegoats for the flux won’t turn back the clock. Refusing to confront the inevitability of change won’t get you a vote in what shape the future takes.

I number indentured servants mariners, pig farmers, brick makers, blacksmiths, tanners, axe makers, blast furnace puddlers, seamstresses, silk mill weavers, schoolmarms, firemen, telegraphers, gas station owners, secretaries, punch press operators, among my forebears. My daughter works for an airline, my son for a biotech company, his boys someday, no doubt, for enterprises we cannot imagine.

Our ancestors endured the uprooting required to come here, revolution, wars, booms and busts, floods and droughts without any social safety net, medical care, workplace safety rules. We know from estate records many died with fewer possessions than clutter our hall closet or garage, an axe, some farm tools, some crockery, a few sticks of furniture.

My parents are gone and so is the small town and the rust belt city adjacent as I knew them. You really can’t go home again, nor stand athwart history saying stop. We will all be forced to go wth the rocky river’s flow. But we can try to hand down to the next generations a Constitution, equal justice under law, e pluribus unum, civil rights, and all that.

Too many of us seem intent on handing down grievance, resentment, invidious comparisons, hatred of the other, and a refusal to compromise, to tear down instead of build up. Better to celebrate American ideals, including reinvention. After enduring plenty of bangs, are we really going to be undone by divisive whimpering? Shame on us.

I leave you with the closing lyrics of “Norma Rae: “It goes like it goes like the river flows, and time keeps rolling on, and maybe what’s good gets a little bit better, and maybe what’s bad gets gone.”

Minority Rule

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Almost all the commonsense adages about politics are pragmatic. Like, “Politics is about addition, not subtraction,” or “All politics is local,” “or “If you like laws and sausages, you should never watch either one being made.” In other words, it’s a very human business where success is achieved by calculation, crowd pleasing and a strong stomach.

Yet, we’re experiencing an increasing refusal to compromise, even if you can’t get to 51% without it. This is either pigheadedness or idealism, depending on which side of the argument you’re on. It may make you feel superior, but it doesn’t allow you to achieve your ends.

Republicans, after years of being the minority “Party of No,” apparently can’t break the habit. Now they are saying “No” to each other. Though in charge, they have shown a very limited ability to agree among themselves, and certainly no interest in meeting anyone in the middle, even their own moderate members.

Democrats would seem to have every reason to present a unified front in order to regain a majority and accomplish their goals, but are so riven by disagreements over those goals that they are divided into a number of minorities of the minority.

Thus, both sides risk squandering the ability to govern a big country. To do so they need to win several hundred races. To do that requires two contradictory achievements —crafting a unifying message or agenda with broad appeal, yet winning a majority of votes in many diverse, local constituencies. “Is a puzzlement,” as the King of Siam sings.

You’d think there would be a few bedrock progressive things to which every bickering Democratic candidate could subscribe. Even though we are told America is fundamentally a conservative country, you’d think, after the Great Recession, that the need for robust regulation of the financial industry would be a no-brainer. Yet regulation has been so thoroughly turned into a dirty word that oversight of financial institutions is a 50-50 toss-up among voters.

Still, polls do find that there are some areas of agreement. A large majority of people want to keep Medicare and Medicaid. even 57% of Republicans agree to that. Two-thirds of those polled favor government loans for college, as do even 50% of Tea Party voters.

About 63% of Americans think more needs to be done on climate change. If you change the question, by asking if they are in favor of both adapting to climate change and protecting jobs, 73% approve. Over eighty percent favor more use of renewable energy, yet only 53% favor government regulation to promote it.

This is part of a pattern produced by decades of unanswered anti-government propaganda, largely funded by those likely to profit from a Darwinian society where no one prevents the big dogs from eating the small.

The generations who did not live through the Great Depression and World War II (or listen to their parents’ stories of the experience) take for granted many government programs that have improved life. They have forgotten where their relative comfort comes from. They are like the woman at the McCain rally who demanded that he keep the government’s filthy hands off her Social Security.

Large parts of the electorate seem to have a kind of historical amnesia. They do not quite grasp what America was like before the social safety net. Life was often poor, nasty, brutish and short for the old or disabled, education impossible for many before student loans, jobs dangerous before workplace safety requirements, everyday life risky before regulations to make cars, air travel, food, drugs, water, and air safe. They don’t appreciate that government programs provide these and many there other essentials, as well as guard our national security and economic well-being.

Democrats have seemed to assume this is obvious therefore they have failed to make the case in a personal, particular way that shows how each of their constituent’s lives are better, compared to those of earlier generations with their sweat shops, breadlines, charity wards, orphanages, and ten hour days with no minimum wage. As long as the ayes for government are tongue-tied, the nays have it.

Unfortunately, even if the Democrats get their act together, the hopes for an active, competent representative government aren’t bright. Being on the majority side in issue after issue doesn’t add up to victory. Majorities elected Al Gore and Hillary Clinton. Occasionally, courts have done the right thing, but they too are appointed by politicians, not by a majority vote.

Majorities favor equal justice under law, but never got a vote on issues where it was at stake — same sex marriage, equal pay or any number of other majority issues. Even on a polarizing issues like guns, a majority now favors universal background checks, a ban on assault weapons and high capacity magazines. Will they get a vote? Not bloody likely.

You get to a majority district by district, and to the White House by way of an electoral college based on the same state by state arithmetic. Districts are drawn by state legislatures to favor the party in power. The same bodies also get to control who is eligible to vote, and when and where. Special interests with their own agenda are often behind efforts to subvert majority rule, by means of gerrymandering, voter suppression, and litmus test court appointments.

Why do politicians do the biding of special interests, often casting votes inimical to their constituents’ interests? Because they are elected by means of money from donors (or their opponents are defeated thanks to non-stop smears in ads supplied by the same source).

And now we have a president who gained power, in part, due to the efforts of an anti-democratic donor who manipulated the election and used the Internet to cloud men’s minds, KGB Lt. Col. Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. This is not the system Madison, Hamilton, and Jay argued for in “The Federalist.”

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