Summer Reads

Posted on by

Since man does not live by decline-of-the-west angst alone, here are a few recommendations of diverting reads to take your mind off eh quotidian scene and its garish dysfunction. There’s only so much “How Democracies Die” and “Fascism” you can bear, after all.

I often fall back for amusement on jolly old England whose literature really is jolly. From Chaucer till today, the comic muse is ever present. Alan Bennett, most famous for such bittersweet plays as “The Madness of King George,” “The History Boys,” and “People,” keeps a diary that is excerpted annually in the Times Literary Supplement.

The last 20 years or so are collected in “Keeping On, Keeping On,” along wth other occasional writing. It’s unfailingly human, amusing, touching, acerbic. His persona is of an aging. decent, shy, kindly, exasperated man vexed by life. In these pages, by such atrocities as the neglect of institutions such as the Public Health Service, historic buildings that are allowed to decay, and libraries that helped a butcher’s son make his way to Oxford.

He also chronicles his aging, the funerals he attends, the trips he takes, and the strolls in his native Yorkshire countryside. With rue his heart is often laden, but his wit is intact and sharp. I like this book so much I’m working my way through an earlier volume of diaries from the 1980s and ‘90s, “Writing Home.” Just as charming.

Bill Bryson, an Iowan who married an English girl, has spent years living there and is the author of many amusing books on his travels, his house, Shakespeare, grammar, and whatever else strikes his fancy. In “The Road to Little Dribbling,” the now 60ish Bryson goes for a ramble around Great Britain that mirrors one described twenty years earlier, in “Notes from a Small Island.”

He takes the reader to many off-the-beaten-path places that you immediately want to visit, but also writes with delightful, curmudgeonly pique about surly shopkeepers, officious National Trust docents, unhelpful ferrymen, and other impediments to the intrepid traveler.

He indulges in some heartfelt rants about issues that are similar, if more boisterously expressed, to those that annoy Bennett— littering, the decline of British rail travel, schemes to make a pound by ruining the landscape he admires, and the assaults on tradition by short-sighted and careless custodians of his adopted country’s national treasures. All while making you laugh out loud every few pages.

“Golden Hill” is an historical novel by Francis Spufford set in New York City in 1746 where a young man, Richard Smith, arrives from England and enacts the innocent abroad themes of American writers in reverse. The author, a London professor, admits he took the comic novels of 18th century writers like Fielding as an inspiration.

The New York our hero finds if filled with flinty-eyed Dutch and American merchants, political chicanery by various competing factions, the vices of a bustling port with its sailors and stevedores, and the toilsome misery of slaves and indentured servants.

Only after numerous twists and turns, love won, love lost, friendship, betrayal, duels, imprisonment, do we discover what secret mission brought Smith to the colonies in the first place.

One more book from the British Isles is “Greeks Bearing Gifts” by the Scottish author Philip Kerr. It’s the latest in his saga of Bernie Gunther who began as a Berlin homicide detective in Weimar Germany.The coming to power of the Nazis exposed him to one tricky situation after another as he tried to stay alive while maintaining his integrity.

The first three books about pre-war Gunther are wonderfully evocative and collected in “Berlin Noir.” The more recent books have treated Gunther’s wartime troubles and his attempts to navigate a postwar world where he is living under an assumed name and can no longer return to his home, now in East Germany. This episode finds him using his investigative skills as an insurance fraud gumshoe, but the past is never far away.

Finally, my favorite actress of the Golden Age of Hollywood is Barbara Stanwyck, and I finally got around to a voluminous life by Victorian Wilson that appeared in 2013. It was lavishly praised at the time, but at $40 and 850 pages, I balked.

When I was recently found it available used for $6, I bit. It was well worth the wait, though now I am impatient for more. This is just the first volume, following Stanwyck only so far as 1940 with much of her most memorable work still ahead — “The Lady Eve,” “Meet John Doe,” “Ball of Fire,” “Double Indemnity,” and many more.

You might suppose that almost a thousand pages to cover half of a film star’s life would be cuckoo overkill, but this is not just the definitive life of Stanwyck (nee Ruby Stevens) but a deep dive into the mean streets of her orphaned start in Brooklyn, her scuffling beginnings in dance halls and soon on Broadway in the Roaring 20s, and a chronicle of Los Angles and Hollywood from 1930 onward.

Stanwyck arrived there at about the same time as sound and traversed the entire period. Along the way, you meet the writers, directors, moguls, costars, agents, publicists and bit players that surrounded her. We even learn that it was the great theatrical impresario David Belasco who chose her stage name for Ruby.

It’s a big book because it’s a sweeping saga of an era. I can’t recommend it highly enough to anyone who loves the movies of the 1930s and 1940s as my mother did. She passed the passion on to me.

However, her favorite actresses of the era were Joan Blondell, Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, rather than Stanwyck. That never made sense to me until this book caused the penny to drop. Mom’s favorite Hollywood heartthrob of that period was Robert Taylor. She may never have forgiven Stanwyck for marrying him and forcing her to settle for my father.

Neither Form Nor Substance

Posted on by

In public life, as in much else, there’s a difference between form and substance. When looking into this I discovered the distinction goes back as far as Aristotle’s physics, but also pops up everywhere from law to accounting where it isn’t enough to follow the proper form if it is used to disguise errors or omissions in substance.

This came to mind when considering recent examples of Donald Trump’s behavior. In addressing the NFL’s requirement that players stand for the national anthem and dissenters remain out of sight and therefore out of mind, Trump suggested those refusing to conform should leave the county. Presumably because the expression of views he doesn’t want to hear is unAmerican.

This confusing of form with substance is common. Saluting the flag is an outward formal display of patriotism, but is hollow if just for show. The substance of patriotism is understanding and embracing the founding principles that govern our country, one of which is to be free from thought control or coercion.

Similarly we are all familiar with vigorously genuflecting churchgoers or religious leaders who observe the form of their faith but who do not actually practice the substance. Jesus could be rather harsh when it came to these whited sepulchers.

Politicians are famous for, and often scorned because of, their saying one thing and doing another, for mouthing the words of the democracy while trying to enact a program that undermines that form of government. Some politicians are certainly weasels, but others are simply operating in the sausage factory where delivering a deliciously democratic product may entail some pretty gruesome steps.

The amazing thing about Trump that appalls his detractors and delights his acolytes is that in both the substance and the form of his behavior he pays no attention to the ordinary norms of manners, morality, and legality.

From the moment he began his campaign by promising to protect good Americans from Mexican rapists and murderers crossing the border, each day has brought a new transgression of established norms. For Memorial Day, he turned the most solemn of national observances, commemorating blood spilled in defense of liberty, topsy turvy.

He chose to tweet a list of his supposed accomplishments in office and to suggest they made the sacrifice of generations of patriots all worthwhile. Instead of thanking the fallen dead for the last full measure of devotion, he implied they owed him a round of applause.

Often his aides try to get Trump to observe the established forms, but he can’t be bothered. So, he recently read a boilerplate speech urging Republicans to turn out for the 2018 midterms because they are just as important as the 2016 presidential election. But he stopped in mid-pitch to say, obviously this wasn’t true, his election was a much bigger deal, and to ask who wrote this crap he was given to say.

When it comes to the actual nuts and bolts of governing, he is equally uninterested in substance. He riffs on those themes that got him elected and says he is accomplishing his goals even when they are unachievable.

And he has a complete disinterest in the complexity of drafting legislation or conducting foreign policy. If it can’t be reduced to pictures or a soundbite, forget it. So, he recently promised yet again that Mexican would pay for the border wall that he claims is being built, even though they won’t and no actual wall-building has taken place.

His fans love him for talking tough and claiming he will bring back jobs, build infrastructure, fix healthcare and cut taxes, but the substance is often the opposite. He says nobody is tougher on Russia, but he profited from Russian efforts to throw the election his way, and has done nothing to punish Russia for it or to prevent more of the same in 2018. The tax cut that was supposed to help the working man not the fat cats went 80% to the latter. The healthcare fix is nowhere to be seen, and millions of people have lost protection since his election.

He guaranteed he’d separate himself from his business interests to avoid conflicts, yet his presidency has been a festival of profiteering, nepotism, self-dealing and emoluments. His vow to stop China from stealing jobs has turned into the lifting of sanctions on a Chinese company that is not just an intellectual property thief, but a security threat. This just so happened to coincide with the granting of lucrative trademarks to his daughter Ivanka and a $500 million Chinese investment in Indonesian development that will benefit Trump properties.

There have been plenty of people in American government before who have been closet racists, nativists, profiteers, but they have kept it out of sight and been punished when exposed by their own party or by voters at the ballot box.

In Trump’s case, the corruption is out in the open and celebrated. Shamelessness is in vogue. His followers and his own party see, hear, and speak no evil, motivated out of either fear of the next mean tweet from the head of their party or a decision to put power and party ahead of country.

At his inaugural, President Kennedy made stirring use of that formal occasion to express a classic, if worryingly grandiose, formulation of an American credo. He promised, “we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”

In the age of Trump, this would have to be revised to read, “we will tell any lie, slander any person, undermine any institution, break any promise, corrupt any ideal in order to assure the survival and the success of me.”

Aging-Appropriate Conundrums

Posted on by

A few years ago, my doctor said I had age-appropriate arthritis. I was outraged. He might as well have said I had age-appropriate Alzheimer’s or age-appropriate cancer.

Of course, I understood rationally that the language he used was entirely appropriate. We all age, and along with it come the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to. Shakespeare knew that 400 years ago. I also knew that natural was the operative word. The Grand Canyon has age-appropriate erosion.

I just didn’t like having the notion applied to me. so this little vignette contains two big lessons. First, we all erode and eventually die. The Bible put our sell-by date at three score and ten, which means I am living on borrowed time. Lesson two, however says, I’m different. I’m special. The rules don’t apply to me. Or shouldn’t. It isn’t fair.

The first lesson is that rational. scientific facts exist. The second is that we are not rational. We don’t go by statistics and facts but by stories, narratives, magical thinking and naked self-interest. And as the heroes of our own sagas, we want not just a happy ending, but no ending.

A third lesson results from the mismatch between facts and magic. We deny death. We don’t even like to hear the word. We pass away or go to a better place. We regard death as an affront, an outrage, an injustice, an error, a plot. This is an expensive delusion.

A substantial percentage of all healthcare dollars in this country are spent on the last little bit of life. One statistic says 13% of Medicare dollars are spent on the last year of life, but that doesn’t include long term care or home health care. A more realistic accounting suggests that as much as 30% of all medical expense comes in the last year of life and a third of that, a full 10%, in the last month.

As the large baby boomer cohort ages, we are going to beggar our children and grandchildren if such spending isn’t controlled. The mandated spending on the elderly is already shortchanging spending for preventative medicine for the young so we can prolong the agony of the old. But any attempt to adjust health priorities is met with stiff resistance. The entire medical-industrial complex profits from more, not less care for the aged. And doctors are trained to intervene. Though Hippocrates said,
“ First, do no harm,” modern medicine says” Don’t just stand there, do something billable.”

When Obamacare was being created, a tiny attempt to educate gravely ill patients and their families was proposed. Doctors would be reimbursed for spending time counselling deathly ill patients about living wills, advance directives, and end-of-life care alternatives to more procedures, more pills and more misery prolongation.

Anyone who has witnessed the end of a loved one is only too aware of HAI, (hospital acquired infections), pharmaceutical side effect and drug interactions, and POCD (postoperative cognitive dysfunction). When problems acquire their own acronyms, they aren’t rare.

Enemies of Obamacare, including Sarah Palin, described such decent, rational, honest counselling for end stage patients as Death Panels, with some shameless partisan lunatics like Virginia Foxx (R-NC) even arguing the government was conspiring to put old people to death.
Using the word death doomed the endeavor. So, we retain a system that strives to maintain life at all costs, and at a gigantic profit, no matter how expensive for society, pointlessly cruel for patients, and agonizing for conflicted families.

The distinguished medical professor, policy guru, and ethicist Ezekiel Emanuel recommends an alternative course. He plans to cease all routine testing and medicating at 75, including flu shots, PSA tests and colonoscopies because they are liable to find reasons to do unnecessary procedures. He also plans to decline heroic treatment in the case of dire cancer, lung, heart, kidney or dementia diagnoses. He will also host his own memorial service at 75, so he can attend and enjoy the event.

Eccentric, you may argue, but he argues that we may be living longer – 76 for men on average and 81 for women – but that doesn’t mean our quality of life is better. In fact, we have increased our longevity at the expense of extending the number of years we live with functional disabilities that cause us to be a burden to ourselves and others.

Will he have the fortitude to follow his own advice? Will any of us? A huge medical apparatus as well as our own fear and misplaced optimism encourage the resort to extreme measures, but maybe Zeke is right, that we should respond to medicinal care at the end in the same way Nancy Reagan said we should respond to non-prescription drugs, and Just Say No. When the jig is up, it’s time to quit trying to dance.

An orthopedic doctor I consulted recently was talking to me about this issue and said he had hoped John McCain, whose diagnosis is just the sort that one should accept as unappealable, would have used the occasion to counsel others to go gently, not expensively, into that good night. He was disappointed that a teachable moment had been squandered.

Ironically, this was in the middle of proposing an operation on arthritic bone spurs in my thumb that would take up to a year to get over and at best would reduce my pain but never restore full function. Thus, plays out Act Three in the drama, choosing the lesser of two evils.