We get things in our head, a sort
of wonder I suppose, a notion,
about where to stand on the hill to see
the white blur of a steeple eight
or maybe ten miles away
at the center of a country town
whose school has been consolidated,
and the little country store, where news
and gossip spread around and maybe
a local discovery was claimed
by one of the loafers there, is closed.
Going to find that spot on the hill
in order to see from a certain prospect
a world far enough away it seems
a symbol is a walk that brings
an important silence down on us.
You could say, I guess, it makes us think—
just walking up a hill to find
a part in the distance that looks familiar.
It makes me think that walking in silence
and going up to where the woods
have made an agreement to leave
an opening—that walk has become
a plain responsibility.
Yet it seems to be a kind of freedom.
One time, a pretty good while back,
I was walking up the little hill
early in the spring before
the leaves had laced the trees together,
and I looked down the hollow and saw
a solitary splay of white,
an early patch of dogwood blossom.
It looked farther away than it was;
it struck me as a symbol inside
another symbol, a silence inside
a silence, and another silence fell
on me.  The blossom patch was strange,
but it reminded me of something—
an old woman’s puff of breath,
or a white shadow, or maybe both.
It has seemed too much to think about,
an abundance too great for words
or the slower motions of my mind,
and that itself is now a thought,
lodged in a place of its own across
from a hill and in between a distance
of other hills and things unseen—
I’ve kept it there, and I will keep it,
from loyalty or sentiment
it doesn’t matter, I’m keeping it.

© by Maurice Manning.  Printed by permission of the author.

Maurice Manning is currently a Guggenheim fellow.  His fourth book of poetry, The Common Man, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2011.  Manning teaches in the M.F.A. Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and in the fall he will begin teaching at Transylvania University in Lexington.  He lives in Kentucky.

The Chronicle’s poetry blogger, Lisa Russ Spaar, notes:   In his essay “Tales Within Tales Within Tales” (1981), novelist John Barth writes that “we tell stories and listen to them because we live stories and live in them,” and that  “to cease to narrate, as the capital example of Scheherazade reminds us, is to die.”  Luckily most of us don’t have to spin tales with the life-or-death urgency of Scheherazade, but it is true that some people are better at telling stories than the rest of us.  Why do we heed certain voices, hanging on every breath, while the logorrhea of others makes us want to put the phone down on the desk and do our taxes, or suddenly remember a pressing reason—a shrink appointment, an elapsed parking meter—to absent the premises?

“Don’t sit at the piano,” Charles Wright has been known to say, “unless you can play.”  Maurice Manning, Wright’s fellow Appalachian poet and kindred pilgrim spirit in the realms of faith and doubt, can play.  By this, I mean that he can write. And he can tell a story. In the decade-plus-change since W.S. Merwin selected his Lawrence Booth’s Book of Visions (2001) for the Yale Younger Poets Prize, Manning, a native Kentuckian, has, with a rare and credible humility, humor, and enviable formal mojo, authored four subsequent collections, each arrestingly fresh in its tellings.  A Companion for Owls:  Being the Commonplace Book of D. Boone, Lone Hunter, Back Woodsman, &c. (2004), for instance, is a series of persona poems in the voice of the eponymous figure—as myth, as man, as “ground”; Bucolics (2008) is a kind of vernacular breviary of untitled psalm/poems addressed to someone the narrator calls “Boss.”

Taking a close look at the tune and lyrics, so to speak, of Manning’s “Provincial Thought” may help account for the intimate hold his poems—seemingly simple and seemingly simply told, but concerned with complex spiritual and emotional wonderings—have over his many devoted readers. From the very start are three engaging factors—understatement, beginning with the title’s “provincial” (and its implication of something local and, if not naïve, then unpretentious) and reinforced by plain speech diction and colloquial qualifiers like “sort of” and “maybe” and “seems,” “I guess,” and “you could say”; the patient, peripatetic pacing of the four-stress lines; and a rich mix of pronouns (we, I, you—we’re all close, invested, and involved).

The story (the “thought”) Manning articulates in is not driven by plot; not a lot happens, at least not in any sort of real-time present, active way.  A speaker (and the reader, who is invited along) climbs a hill and stands in a place that allows him to see a steeple, “maybe ten miles away,” that is “at the center of a country town / whose school has been consolidated, / and the little country store, where news  / and gossip spread around and maybe / a local discovery was claimed / by one of the loafers there, is closed.”  Like Emily Dickinson’s certain slant of light, Manning’s steeple is a signal of “internal difference -  / Where the Meanings, are -,”  and these meanings, in the case of “Provincial Thought,” deepen into all that the steeple signifies: the town around it (“unseen” from this distance, but nonetheless understood),  the losses, closings, and changes that irrevocably alter a place and whose passing in actual time and enduring in imagination define who we are.

The libretto of this song, then, is an ostinato (< Italian, “stubborn”) re-turning to and exploration into the significance of

Going to find that spot on the hill
in order to see from a certain prospect
a world far enough away it seems
a symbol. . . ,
a recurring walk that, finally comes to feel for the speaker both like a “plain responsibility” and a “kind of freedom.” It is the tune, the music, of Manning’s lines, though, that lends the poem its subtle but primal magnetism, its aura of devotion.  As the speaker unfolds his tale within his tale within his tale,

I looked down the hollow and saw
a solitary splay of white,
an early patch of dogwood blossom.
It looked farther away than it was;
it struck me as a symbol inside
another symbol, a silence inside
a silence, and another silence fell
on me,

it is the closely keyed modulations of the vowels that hold and patiently mold the meditation, the long “o”s in particular—suppose, notion, loafers, closed, going, hollow, slower, own, motions—so that the word “symbol,” finally, seems itself to be a blossom patch, a puff of breath, or a white shadow, whatever it is that is “too much to think about, / an abundance too great for words / or the slower motions of my mind,” an entity that “is now a thought, / lodged in a place of its own” and that, whether “from loyalty or sentiment/ it doesn’t matter” (and that “from” is so deftly placed—are we keeping the symbol away from loyalty or sentiment or out of loyalty or sentiment, or both?) is now made manifest and in safe “keeping” by the poem.

Reading the work of Maurice Manning affects me with the mysterious force I feel reading Robert Penn Warren’s “Tell Me a Story”:  “Long ago, in Kentucky, I, a boy, stood / By a dirt road, in first dark, and heard / The great geese hoot northward. . . . // I did not know what was happening in my heart.”  Penn Warren’s poem ends this way:

Tell me a story.

In this century, and moment, of mania,
Tell me story.

Make it a story of great distances, and starlight.

The name of the story will be Time,
But you must not pronounce its name.

Tell me a story of deep delight.

That in our century, our moment of mania, the “provincial thought” of Maurice Manning heeds this call is ample cause for heeding Manning’s poetic voice, as well.

*

N.B.  For the summer months, Lisa Russ Spaar will take a hiatus from her weekly “Monday’s Poem” postings, though she will present monthly columns on contemporary poetry.  The weekly poems and commentaries will resume in September.

(Photo by A.C.K.)

So I fly with my friend, Dr. Smirnoff, and I go where I need to  be. But I have never exactly “relaxed” when approaching an airport.

Trains, however, usually relax me. Often when planning my trip to N.Y.C. from Hartford on Amtrak, I permit myself the luxury of indulgence. I bring my headphones, an actual fun book, and a sandwich from home to eat during the three-hour journey. I can take a nap, lose myself in a novel, and not worry about turbulence up ahead.

True, if it some terrible weather happens–such as drizzle–the trains could be delayed for hours. But even that usually doesn’t bother me all that much (unless I have a lunch scheduled; then a small sizzle of panic can set in) because you always feel–if worse came to worse–you could exit the train and either go home or rent a car and get to your destination. This is not something available to you in terms of air-travel, especially if you’re circling O’Hare. You can’t say to the crew “Okay, enough already. Drop me off and I’ll get car service from here.”

But I have a complaint to make to the Amtrak folks. It has nothing to do with drizzle delays or with the fact that babies are permitted in the so-called Quiet Car, which is not a policy I understand, but I’m not making a fuss.

I’m complaining about the fact that you raised my fear-of-flying anxiety level deliberately by one of the ads you’re using to promote the use of trains: You have a huge poster in Penn Station announcing “Our Cabins Never Lose Pressure.”

Amtrak, did you really need to bring that up? I understood your other posters, the ones about how your method of transportation permits passengers to move around, go to the observation deck, and the rest, but did you need to raise the specter of those little oxygen masks dropping from the ceiling if the airplane cabin loses pressure?

Did you want to sound smug, arrogant, and so-darned-sure of yourself?Did you want the direct comparison?

It doesn’t seem to suit you. I was talking to other folks in Penn Station as we were waiting for our gate announcements, all with the desperate gaze of those trying to get the last plane out of Casablanca, and we were talking about the posters. Our collective response seemed to be this: “Well, what they really wanted to say was ‘Unlike planes, we don’t crash, but actually that’s not true. So they had to stick with cabin pressure.’”

Maybe we’ve been watching too much Mad Men to accept ads at billboard-value anymore, but nobody in my little clutch of random passengers liked the message behind the media. The images are sort of charming–very WPA, nostalgia-generating–but it’s not very sporting of you to say, essentially,  “We think you have a better chance of surviving if you use our vehicles rather than the silver bird that goes in the sky.”

Bon voyage and take some of the pressure off your passengers, OK?

Mao Sugiyama, a self-described “asexual” from Tokyo, cooked up, seasoned and served his own genitalia to five diners at a swanky banquet in Japan last month.

Just days after Sugiyama’s 22nd birthday, the artist underwent elective genital-removal surgery, divvied up the severed penis shaft, testicles, and scrotal skin between five people, and garnished it with button mushrooms and Italian parsley.

The sociological imagination fails me. There is nothing to do but turn to my more anthropological guideposts. The first and most obvious thing to say, a la Levi-Strauss, is that once Mao Sugiyama added button mushrooms and some parsley, the raw genitals moved into the cooked world of culture. But what kind of culture produces the conditions of existence such that a man has his genitals surgically removed, cooks them, and serves them in exchange for $250 a plate? (And is it just me, or does that seem like quite a low price for the privilege of consuming another human’s body parts?)

What kind of culture indeed. On the one hand, we have capitalism pure and simple: The surgeon removed the genitals for profit; the chef cooks them up for profit. On the other we have a far more complex world whereby modernist notions of gender, sexuality and the body are collapsing and what is replacing them is a bricolage of do it yourself identities mixed with new technologies and ways of communicating.

For instance, Sugiyama identifies as asexual not in the way many asexuals do–not interested in sex the verb–but in his own way of asexual as in not interested in sex the noun. Sugiyama doesn’t wish to be male or female and believes by removing his/her/its genitals he/she/it is now unburdened from such embodiment.

Sugiyama used Twitter to find his diners, tweeting:

 I am offering my male genitals (full penis, testes, scrotum) as a meal for 100,000 yen …Will prepare and cook as the buyer requests, at his chosen location.

Of course, my disgust at the consumption of a man’s genitals at an art gallery where 70 onlookers watched as they munched on crocodile meat is itself a product of culture, not nature. As Marshal Sahlins pointed out in La Pensee Bourgeoise

 The reason Americans deem dogs inedible and cattle “food” is no more perceptible to the senses than is the price of meat. … No object, no thing, has being or movement in human society except by the significance men can give it.

The significance men (and women) give to genitals, especially male genitals, is quite obviously that of the “sacred.” Male genitalia stand in for masculinity itself. So sacred are male genitals, that over a half million Americans have purchased “Neuticles,” little scrotum replacement implants that allow

 your pet to retain his natural look, self esteem and aids in the trauma associated with altering.

So when, in an act of art, Sugiyama reshaped his/her/its body as without sex, Sugiyama also pushed us to the limit of what we can and cannot imagine. Sugiyama forced us to look at sex, sexuality, bodies, and appetites as malleable and permeable and ultimately consumable. Which of course they always are. It’s just confronting that fact– on our dinner plates–is something most of us cannot stomach.

One consequence of global warming (Wikipedia)

If a picture is worth a thousand words, than one with dutifully data-derived dancing dots doubtless deserves double. So, it is with gratitude to the Department of Commerce and its subordinate agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (dupes of the commie climate-change conspiracy, all of them), that I alert y’all to the following Web site, which provides an intriguing, readily understood picture of global carbon-dioxide levels based on sampling stations around the world, as well as going back in prehistoric, pre-human time. It’s even fun to watch. Just click here, and then be patient; it takes a few seconds to load and a few minutes to watch, but repays the investment. In case you missed it, CLICK HERE.

That’s right: HERE.

A few things worth emphasizing:

1. The modern baseline starts at 1979 and notwithstanding all the sexy gyrations, the mean annual  level rises consistently (it’s “monotonically increasing,” to employ a bit of quantitative jargon), up to 2011, the most recent year for which data are available.
2. Every year, CO2 levels are consistently more variable in the northern hemisphere than in the southern, because there is significantly more forest cover in the North than in the South.
3. The dramatic annual variation in the North corresponds to seasonal changes, with CO2 withdrawn from the atmosphere during the spring and summer growing seasons and then added during autumn and winter.
4. If, as some climate-change denialists maintain, increased CO2 causes increased forest growth that in turn would reduce CO2 levels, there is no evidence of this happening. Quite the opposite: global CO2 levels keep rising.
5. To see pre-industrial CO2 levels going back 800,000 years, just be patient: After the dancing dots have migrated up to 2011, it takes about another 30 seconds for the next data sets to load. Unlike the 1979-2011 data, which come from a network of global sampling stations, these numbers are derived from ice core analyses.
6. It is always possible to argue that the observed—and irrefutable—CO2 increases are not due to human impact, but doing so takes substantial creative argumentation and (to my mind at least) an ideologically based refusal to acknowledge what Stephen Jay Gould nicely described as scientific truth: “An assertion for which there is so much evidence that it would be perverse to deny it.”

“Students and their families must also be given the information they need to intelligently weigh the costs and benefits of the many options available to them. Better information about products and services helps consumers make more-informed choices, and nowhere is this as important as when students consider a postsecondary education. Despite requirements that colleges and universities report volumes of data to the U.S. Department of Education, there is no simple way for students to access that data and interpret its implications.”

From there, however, Romney calls for repealing President Obama’s two signature higher-education initiatives: reforming the federal student loan system and cracking down on abusive for-profit colleges. Prior to 2010, the federal government spent billions of dollars paying private banks to make student loans that the federal government then guaranteed against default. Now it saves money by issuing loans directly. Since banks are still free to lend money to students in the private debt market whenever and however they like, Romney’s call to “embrace a private-sector role in providing information, financing, and education itself” presumably means restoring a wasteful system of corporate welfare. Romney characterizes the so-called “gainful employment” regulations that will penalize for-profit colleges whose graduates can’t make enough money to pay back their loans as “ill advised.” These regulations have already been watered down after a year of intense industry lobbying and subsequently denounced by many student advocates as too weak.

And in the part of his plan that amounts to pure doublespeak, Romney responds to mounting anxiety among students and families about rising college costs by declaring that “a flood of federal dollars is driving up tuition and burdening too many young Americans with substantial debt.” Or, switching metaphors, “We must stop fueling skyrocketing tuition prices that put higher education out of reach for some and leave others with crushing debt.” As Romney notes, college tuition has risen sharply since 2008 and Obama has responded by supporting large increases in funding for Pell grants, tax credits, and other forms of student aid. The clear implication of the flooding / fueling theory is that tuition rose because of Obama’s spending on student aid, and that cutting said spending–as is all but inevitable under the Paul Ryan budget framework that Romney supports–would cure the higher-education price disease.

Econ 101 supports the basic observation that when the government subsidizes a market good, the subsidy is ultimately split between the producer and the consumer. This isn’t so much a problem to be solved as a well-understood consequence of achieving the larger social goal of making higher education broadly accessible to students of modest economic means while supporting colleges and universities in the production and dissemination of knowledge. It’s also likely that, among for-profit colleges that receive 90 percent or more of their funding from federal aid, marginal increases in federal grant and loan amounts produce commensurate hikes in tuition. To be sure, constantly-increasing college prices are a major problem for which colleges themselves bear significant responsibility. So do state legislatures that have disproportionately cut college budgets.

But that’s a far cry from saying that cuts in Pell grants and federal loan limits during a time of high unemployment and rapidly increasing college prices will impose some kind of immediate salutary discipline on the higher-education market and save students money. It won’t. Bending down the higher education cost curve is a long-term project. Cutting federal aid in the short term will deny access and opportunity to huge numbers of low-income and out-of-work students at precisely the time that they, and the nation, need higher education most.

(Photo by Kevin Dooley via Flickr/CC)

The only thing worse than not having money is wanting it.

At least that seems to be the case in certain circles. What we all needed, evidently, were greedy ancestors who could die and leave us without the taint of desire.

You’ll be called greedy if you work and save obsessively to buy a big house and fill it with antiques, but if you’ve inherited that big house and the antiques are simply identified as Grampy’s set of first editions or Mumsy’s matched Degas, then it’s OK, and you’re not greedy.

You’re aristocratic.

If you long for the stuff, having been denied it at an early age, however, then you’re lost to avarice. You’re petty bourge, baby. Those better bred than you will tsk-tsk.

We spend a lot of time judging what other people “need.”

Remember in King Lear when his two mean daughters want to strip him of his last remaining trappings of majesty? He has moved in with them, and they don’t think he needs guards. They convince themselves by saying that Lear, used to having everything he has ever wanted, doesn’t need a hundred or even a dozen soldiers around him. When they wish to take the final man away from his side, saying “What needs one?” Lear bellows, terrified and suddenly alone, from his innermost depths, “Reason not the need.”

Lear doesn’t need soldiers any more than Scrooge needed silver or Midas needed gold, but it doesn’t stop them from wanting it because, in fact, their possessions are the only things that define them. If gluttony says you are what you eat (to which the character in Nicole Hollander’s cartoon Sylvia replies “That makes me a taco chip”), then the greedy are what they acquire.

It makes the driver of a red Porsche first and foremost the driver of a red Porsche if that object is the best, most powerful, most compelling thing about him. (Note: It often is.)

American movies love the greedy tycoon, the miser, the selfish and powerful manipulator out for his own gain. From 1924 and Erich von Stroheim’s Greed (a film version of Frank Norris’ 1899 novel McTeague) to Citizen Kane’s acquisition of the boxed-up treasures of Europe when all he wanted was paint-peeling Rosebud, to Wall Street, we get a sense that the greedy hero is more misguided than anything else. We want to forgive him or, in rare cases, forgive her. These figures are too much like our own dear selves to consider them terminally wicked.

My favorite greedy film hero is less tragic than his classier peers. When Mel Brooks cast Zero Mostel as Max Bialystock in his 1968 classic, The Producers, he created a flawless portrait of the greedy man who nevertheless remains unequivocally heroic throughout. Max, who was once a fabulously successful producer of Broadway hits, is now a gigolo, giving blue-haired ladies one last thrill on their way to the cemetery. He wears a cardboard belt. He is starving for money and what is most compelling about Max is that he is shamelessly willing to get rich without any hungering after success. Malice plays no role in his endeavors; he just wants the money.

He convinces his accountant, Gene Wilder (playing a neurotic Leo Bloom, who would make James Joyce proud) to agree to a scheme where they sell 25,000 percent of the profits to a surefire flop–a show called “Springtime for Hitler”–with plans to leave town with the leftover cash once the show closes.

Listening to Mostel sing the praises of money to thumb-sucking Wilder is a hysterical presage of Gekko’s speech. Mostel sings of “lovely ladies with long legs and lunch at Delmonico’s,” yelling with joyful envy out his dirty office window, “Flaunt it baby, flaunt it,” to a man exiting a Rolls- Royce. Mostel’s appetite is catching. When Zero kisses the piles of money he has conned out of willing fools, fondling the fistfuls of cash, saying, “Hello, boys” to all the presidents on the bills, we have Mostel giving voice to the greedy creature inside all of us. When he screams out in complete abandon, “I Want That Money,” we can cheer in a way that we never would have cheered Gordon Gekko.

Here is Greed we experienced as kids waiting for birthday presents that might or might not come; here’s greed with a small “g” that comes out of the hard-won experience of uncertainty. We might grab a little too quickly or hold on a little too long or a little too tightly because we’re afraid we’ll never see such pleasure again. Too much, as the country song goes, just ain’t enough.

(adapted from an essay in The Chicago Tribune)

Mating ritual?

If David Barash’s series on the female orgasm showed anything, it is that when it comes to evolution it is human beings on people’s agendas. It always was this way. Charles Darwin’s paternal grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, was an 18th-century evolutionist and he made it clear that it is Homo sapiens that counts.

Imperious man, who rules the bestial crowd,
Of language, reason, and reflection proud,
With brow erect who scorns this earthy sod,
And styles himself the image of his God;
Arose from rudiments of form and sense,
An embryon point, or microscopic ens!

In the Origin, Darwin said little about humans, but at the end there is no doubt who is a big (albeit unspoken) theme in the book, and in the Descent of Man published some 12 years later, we have a starring role. And coming down to our time, take Edward O. Wilson’s landmark study, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. Page after page on ants and slime molds and other denizens of the animal world, but ultimately all leading up to human beings.

The critics of evolution share this basic sense of the ordering of things. If evolution were just about fruit flies or oak trees or bacteria, I doubt anyone outside science would bother about the subject, and that 50 percent of American deniers would overnight become evolutionists. But it’s not. It’s about those beings created in the image of God and so the battle is on.

It is an important topic, obviously, and interesting. Although you wouldn’t infer the latter from the title of one recent book by one of my usually favorite authors. But if The Philosophy of Human Evolution doesn’t excite you, then try Sex, Genes and Rock ’N’ Roll: How Evolution Has Shaped the Modern World, by Australian evolutionary biologist Rob Brooks. I am not sure whether the author or the marketing department thought up the title, and I am even less sure about whether it was a good idea, but the book as a whole is a well-written overview of human nature and its evolutionary antecedents and if you want a good place to start on the subject, you could do a lot worse. (Full disclosure: I don’t know Rob well but I do count him a pal.)

I am not going to review the book as such, but let me pick out a couple of bits to give you a flavor – not only of the topic but also of why discussion on these matters can be so hard and frustrating. (Perhaps, if you take these conceptual issues seriously, there is something to be said for The Philosophy of Human Evolution after all.)

Well, what about rock ‘n’ roll? Brooks argues that this is all a matter of sexual display and that from an evolutionary perspective functions to attract mates. He cites the numbers of offspring that rock stars tend to have – offspring from many different females.

Well yes, but! Has anyone done a comparable study on violin players? And how do they compare to horn players? I should say that my brother-in-law is principal trumpet player at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden. On our next meeting, I must ask him about these things. I never thought of him as a super-stud. Perhaps I am doing him an injustice. Although after a night of Götterdämmerung, I cannot imagine using one’s bed for anything but sleep.

Brooks is obviously right to say that the activities of young people is much connected to finding mates and having sex, but I want to see a lot more to connect up (say) the Rolling Stones to Darwinian evolutionary theory in a meaningful way – that is, a way leading to predictions and so forth. At the moment, we have fairly basic overviews and a general reference to evolution, without much else. All too redolent of Dawkinsian memetics – the worse scientific idea of the 20th century, in my opinion.

I have the same feeling of conviction and discomfort on other topics. For example, it is clear that by and large western societies favor monogamy whereas other societies go for polygyny (one male, multiple females) and except in very rare cases do not go for polyandry (one female, multiple males). Which system is natural for humans? And if one system is not natural, does this mean that we will forever be kicking against the boundaries? In particular, if polygyny is natural, does this mean in a sense that Western societies are built on a fraud and we will always be trying to get around the restrictions?

I think these are interesting and important questions. I suspect evolutionary biology can tell us something, starting with relative body sizes. Polygynous species tend to have bigger males – think walruses – suggesting that in the human case although we are nothing like the extremes we might have a polygynous tendency. I think also, dare I say it, that there are some interesting philosophical questions that Brooks doesn’t really pick up on. To what extent is one morally justified in doing things naturally? In a piece I wrote a while back, on the Catholic position on contraception, I argued that perhaps in today’s world, contraception is not all that unnatural – implying obviously that if this is so, then the practice may be okay. Does the same reasoning apply to polygyny, namely that if men have a tendency to sleep around then this makes it morally okay?

For what it is worth, my inclination is to stay with the natural-is-good link, but to argue that what is natural may be changed. My sense is that a reason for monogamy may be the changed status of women, thanks to culture. And that this may penetrate down to biology and that this then changes the “obvious” conclusions. Polygyny may no longer be quite so natural. I used this kind of reasoning in the contraception case.

Well, you can see that I cannot stay away from my own subject. Evolution is really all about us, and all about us is really all about questions of philosophy. I can live with that.

(Photo by A.C.K.)

To the liberal intelligentsia, of course, Reno should transpose his terms.  Conservatives are open-minded and liberals aren’t?  C’mon.  This is to reverse one of liberalism’s central claims, indeed, one of the things that sharply distinguishes a liberal from a conservative (and ennobles the former).  Liberalism is all about receptive minds and inclusive societies.  Conservativism is about restriction and denial.  Liberals welcome change, conservatives fear it.

Consider Reno’s first example, though.  It matches my own experience.

“The parochial tendency of liberalism was evident to me at a nearby Ivy League institution during a consultation on the common good.  Participants in our small group made intelligent comments about the details of the health-care legislation and the political process as well as finer points of political philosophy.  Yet, for all their evident intelligence and goodwill, the group found it very difficult to conceive of the possibility that someone might object to the recent health-care legislation and do so on the basis of a commitment to the common good.  They could not get their minds around the notion that a reasonable, morally serious person could worry about an expansion of the role of government in medicine.”

Note that Reno acknowledges the thoughtfulness and moral scruples of the others in the room.  He accepts their position as a legitimate position.  But in spite of their liberal traits, his interlocutors had a blind spot.  They simply couldn’t recognize the other side as another side, as a respectable opponent.  They were liberal academics committed to the very intellectual freedoms and civilities buried in the word liberal, but  their judgment had a limit, and Reno stood beyond it.

As Reno notes in his first word, the terms for this situation shouldn’t be taken from politics, but from social psychology.  At a deep level, it’s a case not of liberalism vs. conservatism, but of parochialism vs. cosmopolitanism.  The title of Reno’s essay is “The Cosmopolitan Conservative,” and he grants the academic conservative the most cosmopolitan temper of all.

This is not because conservatives are smarter or morally better or socially more adept.  It is because conservative academics occupy a setting that constantly forces them in their daily affairs to recognize and respect the outlooks of their antagonists.  Rarely do liberal academics have to do the same.  In order to get through their work, conservatives must operate within policies and situations that they oppose ranging from diversity initiatives to curricular decisions.  They can’t just blurt out in a meeting, “This is wrong, it’s unprincipled, it violates standards!”  No, they have to enter the discussion fully acknowledging the basis for the liberal position, speaking not as a denouncer, but as an informed and constructive critic.

Unfortunately, too often the responses to them fall back upon “stock phrases,” as Reno puts it, “the liberal default to denunciation.”  When he voiced concerns about the health-care bill, he heard that “Critics are motivated by an irrational ‘fear’ and a ‘blind’ commitment to ‘free-market ideology,” etc.  In other words, his reasonable objections, which attempted to open the debate, were met with catchphrases that closed it.

Parochialism works this way.  It asserts a norm, it doesn’t argue a position.  It stigmatizes an alternative, it doesn’t refute it.  Ask any campus conservative how often he or she has seen it happen, and you’ll get a long list of occasions.

The other night I asked someone to explain the mechanism that turns the process beyond stigma and into darker hostilities, as in the case of the response to Naomi Riley’s posts.  He offered a larger explanation that I’ll rephrase here and offer as a general supposition.

“It’s like this,” he began.  “Liberalism is in retreat.  It sees threats coming from numerous sides, and it must hold onto those areas of support.  To the liberal intelligentsia and many smart liberal politicians, the university is an asset, and they desperately want to hold onto it.  They get jobs there and they promote the right ideas and research there.  They don’t want to lose it.”

He didn’t regard the “asset” situation as anything evil or conspiratorial or unusual, but it did explain why academics get so over-exercised at the presence of a conservative voice in their midst.  When I countered that it’s ridiculous for them to be concerned–a few conservatives don’t do much of anything to change the intellectual grounds of the campus–he replied that liberal academics don’t worry about changes in policy.  They worry that the acceptance of one conservative voice opens the door to two, and three, and four.  If one of them really belongs there, then the campus is no longer one side’s asset.

As I said, this is just a supposition, but it does rationalize what has often seemed inexplicable to me: That is, why academics get so upset over something that, in truth, has no apparent power to change their situations.  When I hear about the conservative “assault” on higher education, I look around and think “Where?”  When I read Naomi’s post, then witness the unfolding outrage, I wonder, “Why take a 500-word,  quick and over-the-top provocation so seriously?”  Perhaps it is precisely because liberal forces have taken the campus as their own, and sharing small zones of it with others poisons the asset.

"Yeah, but you can still sign a check with your other hand, can't ya, buddy?" (Photo by Parker Michael Knight via Flickr/CC)

Next week, Sen. Al Franken, a Minnesota Democrat, will chair a field hearing on the effectiveness of federal laws to protect patients’ access to care and privacy.  The hearing comes on the heels of Minnesota Attorney General Lori Swanson‘s accusing Accretive Health–one of the nation’s largest debt-collection agencies–of excessive and possibly illegal tactics, including strong-arming patients in Minnesota hospitals.  A voluminous six part report can be found here.  However, the issue extends beyond Minnesota as Accretive has contracts with hospital systems throughout the nation.

According to the attorney general’s report, the Illinois-based collection agency hid in hospital waiting rooms and even stalked patients in convalescing rooms to collect payments before and after treatments.  Those desperate tactics are particularly troubling because they occur when patients are seeking emergency medical care.  The cases highlighted by Swanson’s office detail clandestine debt collection schemes that not only misrepresent hospital staff, but may have a deterrent effect on individuals seeking treatment.

According to a New York Times investigation,  “collection agencies, even use scripts” and boilerplate language when interacting with patients.  Ultimately, such actions may deter individuals from receiving or seeking treatment.

Swanson’s investigation raises important legal and ethical questions.  For example, stalking patients at hospitals for bill payment might be unscrupulous, but is it illegal?  If there is some illegal practice occurring, what is it?  Are these tactics (stalking at hospitals, embedding as medical personnel, etc.) permissible if a patient refuses to pay medical bills or simply lacks the financial resources to do so?

Three federal laws, including the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (Emtala), the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA), and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (Hipaa) offer guidance on this issue as all play some role in protecting patient interests.  Indeed, each may have been violated by hospitals using unchecked, aggressive debt collection strategies, not only in Minnesota but across the country.

For example, Hipaa protects patient privacy and restricts certain uses of patient information without the patient’s consent.  Under Hipaa, hospitals are subject to the “privacy rule,” which forbids data sharing or disclosures about “individuals’ health information.”  According to Lori Swanson, Minnesota hospitals provided sensitive patient data to debt collectors in such a way that likely violated the act.  That is not all.

The Minnesota Attorney General’s report outlined a range of nefarious practices, including hospitals “embedding” debt collectors among their staff, including in emergency rooms.  If that is true, hospitals using such tactics may have violated the Emtala  if the practices resulted in turning away patients in need of emergency care.  That law requires hospitals receiving federal funds to provide care to individuals (regardless of citizenship or nationality) who present with an emergency medical condition.  Nearly all U.S. hospitals are regulated under Emtala, because they received federal funds through Medicare and Medicaid.  The legacy that precedes Emtala involved poor pregnant women being turned away from delivering at nearby hospitals.  In some cases, the women delivered in their cars while en route to other hospitals located miles away.  That legacy also includes immigrant patients in emergency conditions being denied treatment at hospitals that refused to provide care based on their status.  Emtala was intended to change that.  And while these laws may be perceived as working in tandem or in seamless coordination, that is far from the truth.

However, the problem is not a matter of law or the need for more law.  These laws are likely regularly trespassed due to poor enforcement and accountability mechanisms at the local and federal levels.

Hospitals incur significant debt, especially through emergency room treatment, because it is far more expensive to treat individuals in emergency rooms.  Typically, the patient’s health has been compromised and a more rigorous treatment regimen may be required. However, the working poor use emergency rooms far more frequently and sometimes primarily, because they do not have access to medical insurance.  Lacking access to medical insurance can also close the door to more cost-affordable and preventive care.

So, are such collection practices unfair game?

If hospitals are to collect on supersized patient debt (just over $39-billion in uncompensated care in 2010), calibrating what information they may reasonably share with debt collection agencies is an important issue, but one that hasn’t received adequate federal and state attention.  Compliance with Hipaa is voluntary, and the fines are minimal.  The same is true, at least for fines, with these other laws. For example, the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act limits consumer recovery to $1,000 if they file claims against debt collectors.  That penalty was established in the 1970s and has not been adjusted for inflation in over 30 years.  That type of penalty is hardly a deterrent to reckless debt-collection conduct.

Patient harassment will likely continue so long as the penalties for such abuses are only a slap on the wrist.

" . . . and your pension and benefits too . . . " (photo by Flickr/CC user outcast104)

Just a few short years ago, vampires ruled. Twilight, True Blood, and other cultural obsessions posited the vampire as perfection–a strong predator who is not merely beautiful, but never ages. Joan Rivers with a mixed martial arts fighter’s body.

But perhaps it is a sign of our times that these ubervampires have morphed into the far more campy ones in Dark Shadows. As Americans lost our appetite for the sort of blood-sucking predators who ruled Hollywood and Wall Street, vampires no longer haunted our cultural imaginary as heroes, but as villains. By the time Matt Taibbi used the phrase “vampire squid” to describe Goldman Sacks in 2009, the vampire had lost his mojo.

So perhaps it should be no surprise that the Obama campaign released an ad comparing Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital to a vampire. Needless to say, a blood bath ensued. Corporate leaders and corporate media whined that not all private equity firms are bad, that Bain Capital had “success” stories, that the unemployment rate for firms taken over by private equity firms is just slightly higher than average, and so on and so forth. Obama’s former “Car Czar,” Steven Rattner, who oversaw the auto industry bailout, complained that the ad was “unfair” since job losses are “part of capitalism” and Romney’s job at Bain Capital was not to produce jobs, but to produce profits for investors. Fox News immediately used the ad as further proof that Obama is “anti-capitalist” and coming from the far left.

Obama, being Obama and neither anti-capitalist nor far left or even left, came out firmly in the middle, saying at a news conference on Monday that not all private equity firms are bad, that Bain Capital isn’t bad, that all he meant to say is that maximizing profit is not the preparation that is needed for being the president since more is involved than producing profit, but something called the “common good.”

The Obama campaign’s vampire metaphor is hardly anti-capitalist propaganda. It is, in fact, a fairly accurate description of what happens when neoliberal economic policies lead to almost zero regulation of the market. Bain Capital did in fact bankrupt the company featured in the ad, Kansas City’s GST Steel. According to The Week,

In 2001, shortly after Romney left Bain, GST went bankrupt, 750 employees lost their livelihoods and pensions, and Bain walked away with a $12-million profit.

Alas, what Obama and the Dems are offering is not a larger critique of the no-holds-barred capitalism of the past three decades, but rather a plan to mitigate the effects of rising income inequality with government programs. As Jonathan Chait at New York magazine puts it: