Maine in the Driver's Seat

Nobody remembers Percy Garris. He’s the guy in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” who hires Paul Newman’s and Robert Redford’s title characters to be payroll guards in Bolivia. On the way to get the payroll money Percy finds his two guards are overlooking one important point.
“Morons,” says Percy Garris, “ I've got morons on my team. Nobody is going to rob us going down the mountain. We have got no money going down the mountain. When we have got the money, on the way back, then you can sweat.”
Percy gets shot going back up the mountain.
We tend to forget this as we go through or daily life. When we get health insurance we tend to think we’re all set, we’re covered, we have our payroll guards. And as long as we don’t need insurance, the insurer is vigilant as to our health and well being, like Butch and Sundance going down the mountain. They remind us to get out blood pressure checked, to eat right, exercise, get plenty of rest…
They’re kind of like a Mom with her first child. You can’t be too careful with your first born. Make a claim and they become kind of like Dad with the second child, “haven’t we been through this before? What were you doing there anyway?” Get really sick, and they’re like a friend who owes you money.
Well, come to think of it, they’re more like Otter in National Lampoon’s Animal House, “you can't spend your whole life worrying about your mistakes! You fucked up - you trusted us!”
The thing to remember is an insurance company doesn’t make any money by paying your medical expenses. They make money on the premium. Oh, there are actuarial tables, probabilities and all that, but what it comes down to is the premium. Everything else is an expense. It’s the same way with the health professionals by the way. Nobody gets paid for making you better. They get paid for treating you.
This means the insurance company wants you to stay healthy or if you become ill to either get better or die quickly. I don’t know that they have a preference for anything other than celerity. There’s no profit in anything else.
The doctor gets paid for treating you, not for curing you. I think the ultimate exercise of this option is psychiatry where people undergo “treatment” for decades. I’m not saying it’s not necessary, I wouldn’t pretend to know such a thing. I just wonder about something that is so open ended, but I digress.
What brought me back to all this, and has me darting about the verbal landscape like a squirrel on meth was Maine Senator Olympia Snow. Right now she’s got the White House and the Congress in the palm of her hand.
When Senator Snowe became the only Republican thus far to break away from the lock-step orthodoxy that the only good health care reform is no health care reform she made sure to let everyone know that she isn’t committed to staying out of step. That makes her the most powerful person in the congress – house or senate – on the health care issue. Do you want to bet that she isn’t the envy of every member of both houses and every governor in all the 50 states?
That, my friend, is the definition of power. To be the one swing vote on an issue. Does Maine need a hospital, a highway, a bridge, an airport? Now’s the time to ask. Right now Maine’s swing vote is the prettiest girl at the dance and she can probably get just about anything for one turn around the floor.
So what do you want, Maine? The time to worry about pork barrels is when some other state’s member of congress has the swing vote. Right now you could probably get congress to pay for an even up swap of Mount Katahdin for Mount Rushmore, you might as well go for it!

When Merely Rude Is An Improvement

When I learned it was Representative Joe Wilson, (R- S.C.) who screamed, “you lie!”, during President Obama’s speech on healthcare reform Wednesday night (9/9/09), I thought it was an example of the enlightened voters of the state of South Carolina having elected a guy with Tourette's Syndrome. I gather my assumption was incorrect, but this is still a vast improvement in the behavior of South Carolinians from the House.

It was Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina who beat Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner with a cane on the floor of the Senate. So, in terms of the behavior of South Carolina Congressmen, it is a nice upgrade to have one who is merely ignorant and rude.

Maybe South Carolina politicians are less violent these days but its politicians are still as nutty as ever. Remember the Palmetto State is led by Governor Mark Sanford whose dalliance with an Argentinean journalist brightened an otherwise imprurient summer. As I write this, Governor Sanford is still in office. The allegation that he used state funds in one way or another to further his relationship hasn’t cost this avowed “Christian” his job yet, although his wife and children have moved out.

It should also be remembered also that it was South Carolina Attorney General James L. Petigru who observed on the state’s vote for secession, “South Carolina is too small to be a Republic and too large to be an insane asylum.”

If Lincoln made a mistake, aside from going to Ford’s Theatre, it may be that he didn’t just let South Carolina walk away.

In another 150 years South Carolina politicians may behave well enough to be allowed out in public...but I'm not counting on it and if Congressman Wilson comes to work with a cane or crutches I hope someone will have the foresight to keep a close eye on him.

Spoiler Alert - In the Bedroom

One of the most disappointing movies I’ve ever seen is a film called “In the Bedroom.” I was looking forward to seeing it for a number of reasons; the plot was intriguing, it had two of my favorite actors – Tom Wilkinson and Sissy Spacek- and it had a Thomas Newman score. It didn’t hurt that it was set in Maine either.

Wilkinson and Spacek are Matt and Ruth Fowler and their college age-son (Nick Stahl) is dating a somewhat older woman (Marisa Tomei) who has two children and a jealous ex-husband (William Mapother). The movie takes its time, but doesn’t waste ours, showing us the characters and how they relate with one another. As we get to know them we can almost see what’s coming, the ex-husband kills the son. The legal system is headed to an unsatisfactory end. It’s is unlikely the prosecutor can get a murder conviction and will likely accept a lesser pleading, probably manslaughter. While all that is being worked out the ex-husband, the killer is out on bail.

Matt and Ruth see him regularly in their small town. We watch as they go through what one reviewer described as the paralyzing impotence of grief. It’s tough to watch but thoroughly engrossing film-making. The acting is superb. So what makes it so disappointing? The ending. What seems to produce resolution for the story, Matt kills his son’s murderer, doesn’t work for the characters or the movie. To me it was a cheat on the rest of the movie and particularly annoying because the rest of the film is so good. But the ending just didn’t fit with the characters. They were real and the film didn’t have a real ending, it had a movie ending. No disrespect to the Governor of California but it had an Arnold Schwarzenegger ending.

Okay, but the movie came out in 2001 so why bring it up now? Because I was reading Dick Cavett’s blog in the New York Times on line and he wrote this…

“Dominick Dunne…was a great talk show guest. When he launched quietly into one of his murder tales, you could hear a pin strike the floor.

Maybe his most amazing accomplishment was living with the knowledge that the man who murdered his daughter served less than four years in prison, then lived in the same town (L.A.) as Dominick. ‘How can you manage not to be consumed with rage and fantasies of revenge?’ I asked him once, and he said, ‘You can’t.’ We agreed that killing him would be poor revenge, relieving him of all life’s problems. My suggestion — letting him out in the desert with a bullet through both knees — failed to shock him. “That pales beside my fantasies,” he said.”

Sad as it is, that ending makes more sense than the movie’s ending did.

You Call This a System?

Health care reform is like the weather. Everybody talks about it but nobody does anything about it. Theodore Roosevelt made health care part of the Bull Moose Party platform. Yep, the idea has been around that long but it still takes some people by surprise. Seems like the issue was a real stunner for Arizona Republican Jon Kyl.
“But the President and some Democrats insist we must rush this plan through. Why? Because the more Americans know about it, the more they oppose it. Something this important needs to be done right, rather than done quickly.”
Jon Kyl, the Senate Minority Whip, said that with a straight face. I know, I just checked the video and he didn’t even crack a smile. That makes him either the best dead-pan comedian since Buster Keaton or one of the least informed, most disingenuous people on Capitol Hill. That would be quite an accomplishment right there.
Jon, you need to know that the health care “system” has been debated since Harry Truman. That’s 60 years. Jon, you were six years old when the discussion began. Unless you’re a rock formation, taking 60 years isn’t rushing anything.
You’re not a rock formation, are you Jon?
Ted Kennedy’s been working on this for 40 years, Jon. Do you read the bills that are proposed in the Senate? Does somebody on your staff read them? Do you pay attention when they brief you?
So before the thing gets completely out of hand we all need, “… to learn your clichés. You're gonna have to study them, you're gonna have to know them…” as Crash Davis said in Bull Durham. Although for us, unlike Nuke LaLoosh, the clichés are not our friends. So as your self appointed ombudsman without portfolio here are some of the words and phrases you’ll want to be on the lookout for.
Health Care System. We don’t have a health care system in America. We have a patchwork health insurance system. It works a lot like our car insurance system. With car insurance we bet the company several hundred dollars every few months that we’re going to have an accident. They bet that we won’t. Then we all…er…most of us…make that…some of us do our level best to make sure the insurance company wins the bet.
With health insurance we make essentially the same bet. Except we’re not really allowed to place the bet except through an employer. It’s possible to play the game without the boss being part of it but that’s usually prohibitively more expensive if you can find an insurer willing to take your money at all. Imagine if the only way you could insure your car was through your employer. Crazy, right? So we only do that with our health because, you know, a car is really worth something.
Insurance companies, both auto and health –they’re mostly the same outfits -, are out to make a profit. This is America, we’re all out to make a profit, nothing wrong with that. Like everyone else, they make a profit by taking in more money than they pay out. So if you start costing the insurance company money, winning the bet as it were, they drop you like a dirty diaper.
Auto or health it works the same way. And if you have a bad record as a driver they just won’t insure you at all. It’s the same with health insurance, they call it a pre-existing condition and they won’t insure you. You’re a bad bet. They’re here to make money NOT to keep you healthy.
You don’t want the government handling your health care. Maybe that’s true but anytime you hear that from a member of Congress, the House or the Senate, remember the government is handling their healthcare. That may not be true in all cases but I tried to find out who, if anyone, has opted out and my Congressperson told me they don’t reveal that information.
Still, if a government option for health care was such a terrible idea you would think that everyone in congress would opt out wouldn’t you? Maybe they’d insist that having the government provide health care for our service members be privatized. Maybe every right-wing nut in America who’s over the age of 65 would opt out of Medicare and Social Security. I don’t think any of that is happening. What would be the point of keeping it secret? It’s like the Doomsday Machine in Dr. Strangelove, “…the whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost, if you *keep* it a *secret*!”
The American Healthcare System is the best in the world. I’m sure for those who have the best health insurance available this is the best of all possible worlds. For everybody else, not so much. And if you’re among the rising number of uninsured, well, as the fishermen say, “you’re scrod.”
According to the C.I.A.’s World Fact Book the United States ranks 42nd in the infant mortality rate. This is for the rate of deaths per live birth in the country. Forty second! 41 countries are better at taking care of their brand new, living, breathing infants than we are.
Who are those guys? Well that’s where it gets pretty embarrassing. Singapore, Sweden and Japan are the top three, in that order. But Cuba beats us too. Cuba. Come on, they’re still driving around in ’53 DeSotos and even with a two-barrel carburetor economy they take better care of the babies than we do?
Do you want a government bureaucrat determining your health care? The words “government bureaucrat” are meant to scare the living bejeezis out of you. Bureaucrat is the part that scares me. Ever tried to actually argue with your health insurer about whether you’re covered for that little procedure you had to have? Did you go to the right doctor? Did you get a referral? Did you bleed to death filling out the forms with the nice people in the hospital emergency room? We already have a bureaucracy, we’re just determining which one to use.
It will lead to rationing of health care. That’s always said like it’s something different than what’s going on now. If you’re uninsured your ration is zero health care. If you’re sick or injured enough they may treat you in the hospital emergency room, the most expensive place to receive care on the planet. Otherwise you’ll just have to wait until Congressman Foggybottom’s daughter’s husband loses his job and they’re without health insurance before you’ll see him getting board anything that changes the “system” we have now.
In his autobiography, “Growing Up” Russell Baker describes an uncle as a man whose approach to discourse was that, “No story worth telling can possibly be helped by a blind adherence to the truth.” Keep that in mind as the health care debate drags on, I hope for less than 60 more years.

Bill 'em Hillary

This is an open letter to the Islamist Republic of Iran. Hey Mahmoud, you know those three hikers you took into custody on the border with Iraq? Keep ‘em. I mean it. They’re all yours. If they’re dumb enough to go as “tourists” to Iraq and then go “hiking” along the border with Iran these people are either so incredibly stupid or so totally lacking in common sense that I don’t want them back.

I know those of you who are nicer people than I am are shocked, but really how much time do we want the State Department to spend on these Three Stooges? Yes, I’d feel very differently if they were my family and at least a little differently (maybe) if I actually knew them, but think about it. There’s still a war that we’re disentangling ourselves from in Iraq. We’ve already got out hands full with Iran trying to get them not to build a nuclear weapon, while they’ve got their hands full handling a popular uprising over the kind of election shenanigans that would have Newburyport’s Andrew J. “Bossy” Gillis or Boston’s James Michael Curley or Providence’s Buddy Cianci blush.

Then there’s the little matter of the shooting war in Afghanistan, the Arabs and the Israelis are still at each others throats, there’s those two little whack jobs in North Korea and Venezuela, and if that’s not enough a number of “first world” nations are still P-O’d at us over allowing our economy to go in the crapper and drag theirs along with it. I could go on because, as Sheldon Harnick put it in The Merry Minuet, “the whole world is festering with unhappy souls…” I think the State Department has more than enough to do than to have to deal with getting these three out of Iranian custody.

I’m an extreme case. I stay pretty close to the East Manchester Home for the Socially Inept most of the time. I make it a point to leave New England only once a year and then I only go as far as Upstate New York…for the Baseball Hall of Fame Induction. In the car on the way we refer to the drivers of other automobiles as “Bloody Pirates” until we are safely back in New England. We’ve managed to do this for several years without having to call New Hampshire’s Governor John Lynch to negotiate our release from the Empire State.

I’m aware that other people leave their neighborhood. I’m not sure why they do it but I know they do. But hiking on the Iraq – Iran border? What were you thinking? You couldn’t get a reservation at the Ritz Carlton in Gaza? Your back-up plan to have dinner in Darfur fell through at the last minute?

You want to go hiking? We’ve got some pretty good places right here in New England. I would suggest that these three people avoid hiking in New Hampshire though.

About nine years ago New Hampshire got tired of having to find hikers who were ill prepared for their excursions. So state law allows New Hampshire to charge hikers who are negligent, which a Massachusetts teenager recently found out when he got a bill for $25,000 after twisting his ankle and getting lost on Mount Washington last April. That’s an unusually high figure, the number is usually just a few hundred dollars, but it’s the concept we’re looking at here, not the figures. I suggest that the State Department take a page from New Hampshire’s law book.

Secretary Hillary Clinton’s minions should be keeping track of every hour they spend working to get the three sprung from Iran. I can’t imagine this would be a real hardship since many of them are probably lawyers, the rest are related to attorneys and we all know that practitioners of the law come with a meter hard-wired into their infrastructure – you know, like a taxi cab. Keep track of the “billable hours” and when Iran finally decides that it’s in Iran’s interest to let them return to the good old U.S.A. send them a bill for the time spent rescuing them from their own mountainous hubris.

By the way we, the United States, don’t actually talk directly to Iran, we have to use a middle man. In this case it’s the Swiss. I don’t know how much pro bono work the Swiss do, but I wouldn’t be surprised if their meter is already running.

A bad day to quit

I was talking with an equally technophobic friend the other day. John and I were both trying to figure out why we have a land line phone at all. We both have cell phones. Our wives have cell phones. Our kids have cell phones. Off the top of my head I can’t come up with anyone I know who doesn’t have a cell phone. Although I have come up with a reason to keep the land line. I prefer it.

To me the cell phone, which was envisioned as a real world application of the Star Trek communicators, is a lot more like the walkie-talkies that I saw advertised on Major Mudd when I was a kid. Works a lot better in the ad than it does when you try to use it. The signal seems to break up whenever I try to have a conversation with it.

So, all things considered, if I have to have a conversation on a phone I’d rather have it via the old fashioned wired-to-the-rest-of-the-world land line. It worked for Alexander Graham Bell and it still works for me. Besides, the phone companies have spent gazillions of dollars upgrading the wiring to fiber-optics and such so I can get a crystal clear sound all the way up to the sneaker phone I have next to my desk.

That’s another problem right there isn’t it? Once upon a time the “phone company” was a megalithic monopoly which was bad. They were responsible for the call you received from its point of origin, say…Uncle Enos in Bangor, Maine, right to your ear as you sat by the little table the phone was on in the den in, say… Brookfield, Connecticut. We’re talking New England Telephone country here and they handled everything. They probably would have liked to edit Uncle Enos’ content, you know what happened to his language when he got excited, but they didn’t have quite that much influence.

On reflection, while New England Telephone was a monopoly, it was a good monopoly. Or at least it seemed that way. But somewhere in the metamorphoses into Nynex and Bell Atlantic and Verizon and, in Northern New England FairPoint, they became just another utility. Worse, now they are only responsible for getting the phone call to your house, after that you’re on your own.

Left to our own devices we generally favor inexpensive, often cheap, devices. Which is how the fiber optic cable winds up connected to a sneaker phone. Which needed to be replaced the other day.

Naturally, I had nothing to do with the process. I don’t know whether the cordless phone preceded the cell phone or the other way around. Either way the marriage of convenience and communication is still to me a marginally successful shotgun wedding. Oh, they’re married alright but they seem to fight all the time.

Okay, you’ve guessed that we have a new cordless phone. It’s charging for 15 to 20 hours right now getting itself ready to handle all of my incoming and outgoing calls. But am I ready to handle it? Probably not.

New England Telephone’s phones came with a dial. I now know that it was a godawfully slow device but at the time it seemed downright speedy. But what I miss is its simplicity. You dialed the number, it connected to the number, you talked, you hung up, done. Once a month you would get a bill that only a monopoly or a loan shark could present with a straight face. You grumbled that they ought to break up the bleepin’ phone company monopoly and you paid the bill because it was that or smoke signals.

My brand new cordless phone comes with a manual. 62 pages and, unusual these days, every one of them in English.

There’s how to read the display, how to use the four way function key, using the handset menus, how to figure out where to put the phone (I have a suggestion for this but they won’t like it), how to set up the phone book, how to create phone book entries, using the voicemail and that’s before I even get to the part where I can customize my phone. That’s right. After all that my phone isn’t really ready to work with me at an optimal level yet.

So what we’re got here is an opportunity for me to save all that enormous workload I used to have when I would get somebody’s number and write it down in a little black book by having the convenience of getting somebody’s number and programming it into my phone. And for that great effort saved I can spend some quality time with my brand spankin’ new 62 page manual figuring out how make a phone call. I think I picked the wrong lifetime to give up drinking.

Positioning Statement

Here’s another technological marvel I haven’t had occasion to use yet, the global positioning device. The first reason is, as a friend of mine says, “as soon as I go out my door I consider myself to be on enemy territory.” Another reason is I almost never go anywhere that I haven’t been before.

But the GPS devices are out there and I have friends who think they’re pretty nifty. There’s one called “TomTom,” there’s one called “Garmin,” another called “Magellan,” and still another one called “Hummingbird.” I would think what you call a product like this could make a huge difference in its initial success.

So “Garmin” just mystifies me. What connection am I supposed to make? I think of Leonard Garment, who was a Special Counsel to President Nixon during the Watergate mess. Okay, most people probably wouldn’t make that connection but I don’t think of finding my way anywhere, except out of the White House, when I hear Garmin.

“Hummingbird?” Don’t they go by sense of smell or something? That may have worked to get to Gloucester, Massachusetts when there was a fishing industry, or to Berlin, New Hampshire when there was a paper mill running, but I can’t see it being much good now.

“TomTom?” I’d want to know who was going to be on the receiving end of my beats. I’m not sure my wife would let me keep drums in the passenger seat in the event we get lost, which I guarantee I would do if I missed a beat.

“Magellan” sounds promising but I wonder how many people realize that Ol’ Ferdinand never actually made it around the world. Wikipedia says that of 237 men who started out on the first trip around the world only 18 completed the trip and returned to Spain. There were about that many others who straggled back later one way or another later, but that’s not how I want our family trip to work out. Magellan himself was killed in the Philippines. No, that’s definitely not how I want my trip to The Cape to go at all.

I know there’s a whole industry out there devoted to “branding” so I would think they could come up with the name of an explorer who was able to finish the trip. Doesn’t that seem like a better idea?

Here’s one badly branded travel item, Amelia Earhart Luggage. It was an endorsement deal when Amelia was alive but once she disappeared somewhere over the Pacific in 1937 wouldn’t you think the market would have disappeared too? They were still selling Amelia Earhart Luggage in 1964. What was the slogan, “Amelia Earhart Luggage, when it gets lost it stays lost”?

Since this is America, and we always like to encourage entrepreneurship, here’s a couple of services that could become enormously successful in the hands of the right capitalist.

Lindbergh Baby and Child Care. Let’s face it, as Americans we have no historical memory so when people hear “Lindbergh Baby” they’re not going to recognize that there could be a problem, it will just be a vaguely familiar phrase that we can capitalize on. But between you and me, don’t hire a guy with a German accent named Bruno. I’m just funny that way.

Wiley Post Alaska Tours. Wiley Post was the first pilot to fly solo around the world. In these days when we have whack jobs attempting to cross the Atlantic in rowboats, on surfboards and using grandma’s china cabinet as a flotation device, what he did may sound like just another bit of flat out silly adventuring but back in the 30s, when he did it, it was a big deal. He’s mostly remembered now, if he’s remembered at all, for being the pilot of the plane that crashed and killed Will Rogers. Like I said, if he’s remembered at all. In any event, I am one columnist who will never be a customer.

On those rare occasions that I do find it necessary to leave the house, I’m pretty happy with the on-line resources like MapQuest, Google Maps, and whatever else. I like to be able to hold the directions in my hand, go over them a couple of times before I leave and I like to be able to look at them in groups of two or three rather than one at a time. It seems I’m always going someplace where the directions involve a sequence of, “travel .1 miles and bear left onto Whatsit Street.

Follow Whatsit Street for 2.2 miles.

Right onto Wherezit Road for .9 miles.

Right onto Imlost Avenue and drive for 10 miles before you admit you screwed up somewhere.

Of course this is New England so if there are road signs they’re hidden by a tree.