Venality Vs. Haplessness: The Underlying Dialectic of American Politics

As the parties clash over impeachment, it’s good to remember the context of the battle. Here’s a selection from my upcoming book, Views from the Side Mirror: Essaying America:

You can almost see the cigars laughing.

As the conventions and campaigns come in full swing, the ceaseless commentary couches our politics as a clash between conservative and liberal.  But the two sides of the fundamental dynamics of our political environment for several decades are better captured as venality vs. haplessness.

The dynamics of venality vs. haplessness are well on display in the issues of guns and the Supreme Court.  Republicans ignore both popular will and compelling logic in their refusal to allow any form of gun control.  Theirs is a higher calling – the dollars and voters of the NRA.

Meanwhile Democrats fumble for any foothold or leverage, and continue to fail.  A failure running parallel to their inability to enable a President to exercise a fundamental right and need of the nation, to nominate a Supreme Court Justice.  While venality propels Republicans to block the process, in the hope for a future that maintains a Court steadfastly supporting their economic interests.  If the situation were reversed, and Democrats were attempting political blackmail, the Republicans would put up a firestorm of protest.

A partisanship based on ideas and conflicting philosophies is a healthy part of the democratic dialectic.  As Gandhi put it, no person or side has a monopoly on truth.  There is thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.  But venality brooks no such perception and haplessness produces no resolution.

History is shaped by both underlying trends and signal events.  Ours has been molded by a confluence of the relinquishment of a sense of the common weal from the Republican Party and the structural havoc they have wrought, which neither hapless Democrats nor horrified citizens have been able to stop.  The cries of pain that animate Trump and Sanders supporters and the unspoken millions who share that agony are results of decades of policies and programs that have systematically hurt many for the benefit of a few.

The seminal moments of how we got here are a mix of slow burns and hot moments.  It is no accident that some people rise to leadership, and the mowing down of a generation’s leaders, the Kennedys and King, left a void that lowered the bar.  The tone Nixon set destroyed the opportunities for racial accommodation that had just begun when he took office.  The Vietnam War highlighted the beginnings of catastrophic failures of American leadership and judgment that became the norm.

That became more critical when the 1994 midterm elections put into office a Congressional majority built around a shocking value system: that they no longer represented, or even needed to, the interests of the country as a whole.  That instead they were in office to stay in office and enrich those who kept them in office, and that government for any other purpose was subject to attack.

In Shakespeare or in film noir, corruption festers into long term consequences.  So it was that the 2000 election pounded big nails in the coffin of American liberty.  We had a rigged election, plain and simple: a bunch of daddy’s cronies installing the son into office.  The stench of that corruption has been rotting us ever since.  Imagine how different the world’s headlines would have been if Gore had won; think of a world without the Iraq invasion, and the lies that became the commonplace vocabulary of public pronouncements, lies that have killed so many.

Despite the closeness of the election and the questions as to its outcome, the Bush people proceeded as if they had a mandate.  While the Democrats, perhaps shocked that the nation’s highest office could be stolen, retreated into a corner of their own making.  Bush seeks a trillion dollars in wealth transfer through revised taxes, and the Democrats declare victory by saying they held it to $750 billion.  You can almost see the cigars laughing.

It’s commonplace now to reference horrendous failures of the George Bush Presidency, but doing so obscures how successful it was achieving its major priority — the concentration of wealth that will maintain an elite for decades to come. 

One can only imagine the collective gasps that erupted with the announcement some decades ago that the US will be a majority non-white nation by 2050.

The White America Wagon Train had long enjoyed an unfettered grasping of American opportunities.  They had taken land, built factories, created and exploited a mass market the like of which had never been seen.

And now they had to insure their offspring would retain what they had gotten.

The Bush years enriched companies and people within its circle, while exploiting the fears and phobias of the constituents it in theory (only) served.  Relentless in obtaining and concentrating wealth, while Democrats watched with verbal dismay and tactical failure.

The irony is that the very people who have been so damaged by Republican policies regarding taxation, civil rights, the environment, and who for so long have been kept in the fold by calculated appeals to their fears — regarding the rights of women to their own bodies, of fantasies of power that identify them with their guns, and with the dream of holding on to being rich that has 99% of them voting against their own realistic interests for tax and social policies — are still turning to the same party that has destroyed them to try to make their lives better. 

This underlying dynamic was perfectly embodied in the show Confirmation, about the Clarence Thomas hearings.  The Republicans, whatever their personal feelings, lined up behind their president and were ruthless in pursuit of Thomas getting confirmed, regardless of any inconvenient facts that stood in
the way. 

The Democrats were inept in countering the assault, to the point that they were, for reasons that even watching the show remain obscure, intimidated into not putting a corroborating witness on the stand, one who had come to Washington and was left in the wings.  The result: a nominee to the court  who year in and year out has with silent efficiency delivered for them, from putting Bush II in power to allowing money to dominate the political landscape.

That relentless pursuit of power for its own sake and to further extremely narrow interests is well on display as Republicans fall into line to support Donald Trump, bending themselves into political pretzels to justify his shortcomings, his bigotry, woeful unpreparedness, repulsive temperament and pandering.  For one thing, pandering has been the stock and trade of the party for a long time; for another, they have no moral compass from which to respond, having given any up any semblance of serving all a long time ago. 

They line up behind him because they still see it's in their own best interests, and while onlookers think they are observing a train wreck, Paul Ryan & Co. are simply looking in a slightly distorting funhouse mirror reflecting their image more or less completely.

Social issues shape identity for enough people that they can be cynically manipulated by those whose interests are even simpler – money.  The accumulation of wealth.  The generational capacity to keep that wealth and the power it enables.  There are days now that foster empathy for what some Germans must have felt with the impending rise of their Nazi party; we assume it can’t happen here, as we watch it happen.

from Views from the Side Mirror:Essaying America, soon available to order from Amazon.

A surprising friendship, and the face of prejudice

Last night in the #democraticdebate the closing question asked each candidate to name a surprising friendship that had an impact on them.  I thought about what I would answer (assuming I could even speak under such pressure!).  I quickly went to my growing up in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.  It was a wonderfully diverse group I had as friends – Syrian, Greek, Italian, Scandinavian, Russian...  We lived in each other’s kitchens, I turned down food then I would kill for now!  One of my closest friends was Ronnie Khoury, whom I’ve known since kindergarten.  His mother Josephine was an intense, smoker’s voice woman born in Beirut.  During my childhood there would be periodically one of the Arab-Israeli wars.  I would go over to their house, and there would be Mrs. Khoury glued to the TV.  She would mutter “Oh those dirty Jew bastards” in despair of her homeland, then quickly spin around and say “But not you Herzog.”  That’s when I learned that prejudice can go away when you have a face, but there are too many faces.

The Wingding

Every couple of years we grow enough grapes to get a small harvest. These are cabernet franc. So Margot and I hand squeeze them (very artisanal!) to get juice. Somehow I had the inspiration to add a shot of Dutch Genever to the juice, I (sort of) figured its strong taste would complement the fresh grape juice. And it does! I named the cocktail the Wingding. Now it's wait 'til next year.

Evidently you can sell a book by its:

Cover!

Along with the title, the advice from the self-styled self-publishing gurus is the cover is the most important thing.  I will say that when I browse in a bookstore, the appeal of a cover is important, will get me to read the blurbs, inside the jacket or on the back cover.  That might get me to select a random page to get a feel for the book, but at that point it’s content, not looks, that guide me.

 Online, do those little thumbnails affect you, your decision?  I’m more inclined to click on something that gives a brief description, like the pop-ups on Netflix.  More often than not I’m searching for something specific, based on a book review or recommendation from a fellow-reader.

 But now that I’ve gotten the title down -- Views from the Side Mirror: Essaying America – I need to get to the cover.

 I have a pretty strong aesthetic sense.  The book cover for my novel, A World Between, was driven by a vision I had, of something like the Northern Lights descending on an ocean shore, obscuring what was on the other side, tantalizing in its innate beauty but also sense of danger.  I searched around to find the shoreline underlying picture, which I did, somehow, in a home page for a beach town in North Carolina!  It had footprints heading to the shore line, and I could visualize how if those footprints ended up in the version of nothing that shrouded the beach, that would be intriguing.

I’m not entirely happy as to how the cover came out – the superimposition of a northern-lights like curtain isn’t entirely integrated – but it does convey some of what I saw in my mind.

Since my first idea for the book title was to play off of one of the more recent essays, Liberals Barbecue Too, my first idea for a cover was to play off that theme, and I found something I liked (I’ve used it with where the article is published on Medium): 

 I really liked the juxtaposition of the barbecue with the dogs, so very American in feeling, to emphasize the theme that these are articulations of a sensibility every bit as American as any that comes out of the Trump-etian mouth or some fantasy of hinterland America as more real than the people on my West Village block.

But as the Writing 101 dictum goes, kill your darlings.  

When I changed the name to Views from the Side Mirror, that cover, while lovely, didn’t make sense.  And naturally, a side mirror view seemed pretty organic.  So I searched the web for an image that captured that view and could serve as the basis, the undercoat if you like, of the cover.  And here’s what I found:

I really liked how this gave the side mirror feel, but also conveyed an urban sense, and the slight fog engulfing the autos was further evocative.

Then I thought I could play around with the standard side-mirror warning, and added this:

That further enhanced the overall feeling I wanted to convey, that we are talking about real issues of import.  Many of the essays, written over two decades, are, inho, prescient about our current state(s) of affairs.

 So this is as far as I got on my own.

 Next, finding a real designer – and big changes!

Publishing Quest

The Selfie Side of Publishing

So I decided, I’ll self-publish my next book.  I have essays, commentaries, OpEds, thought pieces, going back twenty years.  A few of them have been published, in newspapers, or otherwise appeared online.  And I thought, what good are they doing just sitting as files on my computer, let’s get them out into the world.

I loved that my first novel was published, it’s a charge to see it in hard copy. to see it as a Kindle, to have been the Barnes & Noble Nook Book of the Day.  But truth to tell, it’s not exactly a means to retirement.  I cherish The Story Plant and Lou Aronica for editing and publishing it, but for a book of my essays, a “slim volume,” I thought it makes more sense to self-publish, since the paths of promotion and such aren’t much different than going with a small house.

The first question, then, was what to call it.  You read up about the game, and the title is a critical element in the hoped-for of getting at least some attention.  With the cover the next most important piece (more on that in the next post).  Oh yeah, the content matters, but how you intrigue people to take a look at it is the crucial starting point.  So I gather.

My first thought was to take the piece that is fairly current, and so has come inherent currency for getting interest.  That would be my piece “Liberals Barbecue Too.”  The essence of the piece is that rural conservatives don’t have a righteous monopoly on values such as family and country, and liberals shouldn’t concede such ground to them.  More, that underneath the names there could be genuine meetings of minds and souls around the elements of what is important in life.

But hmmm.  Doesn’t using that as a title immediately limit my potential audience?  Not what one wants, although of course in this day and age “appealing to your base” is much in vogue. 

I should add that the foreword to the book is written by the President of the ACLU, my very good and rather extraordinary friend Susan Herman.  And I certainly want to put that front and center, to add credibility and gravitas for my works.  No doubt that will have a combination of culling and attracting effects. 

But still, the title is important.  I next thought of adding after that title “Essaying America.”  I love language, and like the play on essay and assay, taking the measure of the country.  That became a more solid choice, I thought, than Liberals Barbecue, which after all is just one of the 20+ works in the book 

But is that too obscure or oblique to arouse interest, would it just be passed over with glazed eyes looking for something catchier.  Even the two titles combines didn’t seem to work.

I thought more about my way of looking at the world.  Re-reading the essays, many seem prescient in their assessments and predictions, but let’s face it, they weren’t picked up and admired by the various OpEd editors I sent them too.  Even my book – which really has some terrific writing and thoughts in it – wasn’t the viral sensation. 

I’ve always thought I was somewhat orthogonal to the world, pitched at right angles to its norms, its conventions and paths to success eluding my nature.  So....

Views from the Side Mirror.  That’s what I came up with, my glances at the America of our lives and times, going back to the imperative days post 9-11 and all that followed, where new bulldozers revised old landscapes.  Human nature doesn’t change, as we see with the venality of the tech companies that initially were supposed to bring new paradigms of business decency into their operations.  No, human nature just finds new ways to express itself. 

So I started polling people with the various alternatives. 

·      Liberals Barbecue Too: Essaying America

·      Essaying America: Views from the Side Mirror

·      Views from the Side Mirror (by itself)

·      Views from the Side Mirror: Essaying America.

What’s your choice?

In the end, I thought Views, by itself, while intriguing, needed some more connecting to the themes, so I chose Views from the Side Mirror: Essaying America.

Here’s hoping I can reduce my right-angle relationship to the world to something more congruent!

BetterCare for All

The Cure for healthcare isn’t Medicare for All, it’s establishing organizations with complete responsibility for the total care, costs, quality and outcomes for a person.

Discussions of Medicare for All substitute structure for substance. They engender a debate about the trappings of care delivery, administration, and cost, but don’t address the fundamental issue, which is how to provide genuinely better care for people of all ages and economic circumstances.

The premise of Medicare for All is that a single payer will provide better and more cost effective care. But what is really needed is single entity accountability. Whether there are one or many, whether they are public or private, is not as important as that one organization and its people become responsible for the total health and care of an individual and the costs associated with that care. With incentives for doing it well, and penalties for doing it poorly. And an ease of transition for people to move from an entity that doesn’t serve them well to one that does, to maintain the benefits of competition and varied approaches based on differing conditions.

Focusing on Medicare for All promulgate a systemic flaw baked into our health insurance and provider systems. High costs and lower quality can’t just be fixed by a single payer negotiating lower drug prices, nor would providing fewer services mean better care at lower costs. The core problem is exemplified by the invidious arbitrary split in public health insurance between Medicaid and Medicare, with each providing different services spread out among many providers, none of whom have sole responsibility for the complete health of the person.

BetterCare for All need not be a win-lose proposition, of Medicare for All or nothing. The feasibility near term of a one payer system is low, whereas the feasibility of building on existing systems and frameworks to create single system accountability is much higher.

Single accountability addresses the structural flaws in the US health system, which have positioned the US to have the highest costs for healthcare in the world while ranking 11th (last place among developed nations) in the quality of care, with all the negative quality of life implications that implies.

Whether it’s Medicare, a form of Medicaid, or private insurance, unless a single entity oversees the care of a person across the so-called care continuum — home, office, hospital, facility — and the levels of reimbursement and pay are adjusted by the quality of care and outcomes of that person, the systemic problem of high costs with poor outcomes, and lack of access, will remain in place.

Health care provision is often well described as being in silos, or buckets. For example, when an enrollee in a Medicaid program has to go to a hospital, the Medicaid plan’s responsibility, oversight, even patient information, stops. Similarly, while many Medicare recipients could benefit from services in the home, Medicare doesn’t cover most of them. The same individual is arbitrarily — one should say absurdly — carved up into different components for care services. The results from this lack of coordination are severe. Estimates of excess costs stemming from lack of coordination range from $45 billion annually on up.

Our fractured system embeds structural conflicts among the major parties, to the detriment of the patient. Insurers are called payers, which sums up their primary function and the limit of their mandate, which has little to do with actual care quality. Under fee-for-service models, their incentive is to limit services provided and the costs of those services. Recently a branch of UnitedHealth Group, a huge payer, that administers treatment and addiction services for insurance plans was found to have violated its fiduciary duty under federal law by using overly restrictive guidelines and adopting financial incentives intended to restrict access to care, reflecting the perverse incentives of what should be a system promoting care, not limiting it.

Fee-for-service providers, on the other hand, want to maximize services to generate revenues, and make up in volume for the discounts they have to offer to obtain payer clients. Hence the frequent accusations of in effect churning tests and procedures, inflating costs well beyond what are necessary.

Under so-called alternative payment models, such as value-based payments, the payer shifts the burden of total cost to a provider, giving them a single, capitated rate for the set of services they provide. That of course encourages minimizing services and their related costs, with adverse impact on patients. Hospitals and large plans in turn attempt to slough off their obligations under value payment models by shifting the burden of performance to practitioners or agencies.

That structure causes a lack of alignment between who could institute improvements, such as the introduction of new technologies, and who might benefit from their use. A home care agency might be best suited to provide better technology to gain and use information about the patient in the home, but they do not benefit financially from better outcomes and so have no incentive to bear the costs of the technology.

In a recent briefing on meeting cost reduction goals for NY State’s Value-Based Payment program by its Dept. of Health, healthcare plans were specifically told to only address Medicaid payments, and not Medicare. Why? Because states pay for Medicaid, but the feds pay for Medicare. i.e., when it comes to Medicare management, the state doesn’t care! Yet the high costs and quality imperfections of our system reside as much in Medicare as Medicaid.

Medicare for All also posits an increasingly central role for hospitals in the care infrastructure. But hospitals are not well-suited to be the organizations that provide comprehensive care management. Hospital cultures, skills, staffs, training, are all built around taking care of people in the hospital. And while hospital executives might howl in protest, the simple fact is that hospitals are ill-equipped to deal with people outside their four walls, to be purveyors, or even monitors, of home and community based services. They have historically evinced little interest in doing so, and even now, with various incentive and penalties in place to try to force them to look to care in the community, they don’t do it at all or very well.

Integrated health systems, such as Kaiser, are better situated to do so. Within those systems hospitals focus on being better hospitals, nested within an administrative superstructure that manages care — and equally importantly costs — across all stages of a person’s care life. Establishing such networks or comparable managed care organizations would do more and more quickly than trying to shoehorn hospitals into a central care management role they can’t fulfill.

A recent study from the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus found that

60% of home health workers say they lack adequate patient information from hospitals to inform care, often leaving patients unprepared for treatment. Another study found that 94% of patients had at least one medication discrepancy when comparing referring provider and home health care medication lists. These problems persist, and won’t be solved by trying to change hospitals’ “personalities.”

The nation funded tens of billions of dollars to underwrite electronic health records in the abstract belief that improving the storage and access to care information would in turn have a salutary effect on care quality. Only the disparate EHRs installed in hospitals and provider systems don’t talk to each other, nor do they include effective gathering and use of information about patients where they spend most of their time, in the home or other non-clinical settings beyond the scope of EHR data collection.

Attempts to fix these issues are perforce piecemeal, since they simply mirror dealing with the different spokes of care one at a time rather than building a central hub of care management and responsibility. Various programs that try to connect some of the dots between Medicaid and Medicare still leave large gaps in between, as have those which seek to reduce avoidable hospital readmissions that cost an estimated over $30 billion a year, year after year.

Enormous strides and cost savings while improving quality can be obtained by more inclusion of information from and services in the home, where people spend the bulk of their time and where many health problems originate. Discerning these problems in a timely fashion can prevent deterioration, provide lower cost treatment options, and enable people to remain where they most want to be.

But the orientation of hospitals and providers has been to ignore the home in favor of the more costly and burdensome options of hospital, emergency room, office, and nursing home. Study after study indicates the enormous costs from poor coordination among many providers; a single entity tasked with managing the entire care of the individual, including their home, is the best solution to getting universal coverage at an affordable price.

In my former position as Director of New York City’s Energy Office, we instituted energy conservation programs with measures from swapping lightbulbs to upgrading insulation and HVAC systems which paid for themselves in 1–2 years. But there is no concept of payback in healthcare. What organizations hear is, “we have to pay for something now,” without doing the math as to the benefits over time such investment can yield, operating within an infrastructure that doesn’t incentivize them to make such calculations.

Our health care system suffers from the artificial separations of services to people — Medicare and Medicaid, between payers and providers, the isolation of home and community services from institutional ones. The cure lies in connecting these elements with strong bonds under the management of a single entity charged and familiar with the total life of the person we call a patient, but who is far more than that.

Rebuilding in Puerto Rico with City Winery