Healthcare, Anyone?

I have mixed emotions about the news that the Supreme Court has upheld most of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, commonly referred to even by the administration’s supporters as “Obamacare.”

My ambivalence comes from misgivings over the law’s provenance.  The individual mandate, the controversial key provision upheld by SCOTUS, is its best-worst aspect.  Despite its allegedly socialistic origins it creates a captive market for private insurers and was the result of intensive lobbying by America’s Health Care Plans, PhRMA, and other industry groups.  The bill that passed in the spring of 2010 is a Frankenstein’s monster of special interest and pork barrel provisions that illustrate the darkest facets of our political system.  (PBS Frontline presented an excellent documentary on the bill’s journey through Congress and the Obama administration’s frustrated efforts to enact a comprehensive reform.)     

Republican politicians, led by John Boehner, have already stirred an outcry from the right.   To be sure, the GOP faithful and a flagging Tea Party movement will get a lot of mileage out of the Supreme Court’s decision in the months leading up to the November general election.  It helps that many Americans, and not just those in “red” states, have a rather distorted idea of what the healthcare law does and its constitutional implications.

Bring on the cynical pols, the pissed off seniors raving about “death panels,” and the crackpots in tricorn hats…

There but for the Grace of God… (Or, The Virtues of Keeping a Low Profile)

Scrolling through College Misery (the Greatest…Blog…Ever), I came across an item about a public school teacher in Pennsylvania who was fired for posting derogatory comments about her students online.

Naturally, I was interested because I’ve done the very same thing on my own site…a lot.  The principal difference between Natalie Munroe and me is that I’m sufficiently afraid of my bosses to do so anonymously. 

I do have other reasons for blogging under a pseudonym.  One is that I am a reserved person who doesn’t like to attract attention to himself, even in this age of omnipresent social media and brazen self-promotion.  Using a pen name helps me feel freer to express my views than I might if I used my slave name.

Another reason is that I have a lot of unpopular opinions, so unpopular in fact that they may lead to unemployment and social ostracism if expressed in the wrong place, at the wrong time, to the wrong people.  My little community may be “blue state” in its tastes and avocations, but it’s run by folks with “red state” values.  Sure, my conservative friends like to kid me about my so-called liberal beliefs, but they would probably not be so accepting if they learned just how far to the left I really am.

But mostly it’s because of the apathetic, disengaged, and worst of all entitled majority of students I deal with in the college classroom that I withhold my true identity.  I don’t always have a warm relationship with these students because I believe it’s my job to teach rather than entertain them, stroke their egos, feed their narcissism, or encourage their delusions of adequacy.  

Because my institution is run by administrators who abet bratty behavior, I’m naturally on the defensive.  One result is that I seldom discuss my misgivings with friends and acquaintances.  I almost never share them with colleagues.  I most certainly would never tip my hand in front of my students.    

This is clearly a safe policy: Ms. Munroe was outed by her students.  It didn’t matter that many of her blog posts were about pretty mundane stuff like recipes or being a mom.  All it took was one or two where she described her charges as “dunderheads” and “ratlike” to trigger a pattern of official harassment that culminated in her firing for unsatisfactory performance.  The actions of the Bucks County school board were clearly calculated to create a chilling effect on teachers’ free speech rights. 

Am I chickenshit for saying similarly awful things while hiding behind a nom de guerre?  Yeah, probably.  I'm not always proud of having to skulk behind an assumed name.  But like many of my colleagues in both higher ed and the K-12 system, I am fighting an uphill battle.  I can't afford to unnecessarily expose myself to hostile fire if I want to see it through. 

The crux of the problem is how the public views educators and their work.  The de-professionalization of teaching at all levels is a disservice to teachers and students alike, not to mention the public welfare.  Education is not a commodity to be bought or sold.  It is a personal attribute that must be cultivated in an atmosphere of mutual respect between teacher and student. 

Having said this, you can argue that teachers badmouthing students on the internet is poor form.  Maybe it is.  However, the educational climate has grown harsher of late.  Privatization of postsecondary education, the politicization of science, and criticism of the liberal arts and other non-vocational programs by right-wing politicians hasn’t helped.  The last pretenses of civility have fallen by the wayside thanks to Rate My Professors.com and other websites that allow college students to anonymously backstab faculty who haven’t sufficiently kissed their asses.   In such an environment, it’s natural to want to have your own place to vent occasionally.

So, if I’m unhappy with my job, why don’t I try something else?  My reply: Why should I?  I was here first.  I’ve committed myself to an academic career.  I believe I have something to offer my chosen profession as well as my students.  Moreover, I refuse to compromise my standards and will not change my methods in the hope that the students will like me.  My loyalty is to my profession and not the “customer.”  I’ll stick it out for as long as I can.  To do otherwise is to concede the field to people and ideas that are abhorrent to my sensibilities.  That’s why I don’t do something else.

I wish Natalie Munroe and her family all the best.  She has reminded us that we don’t suffer alone.

© 2012 The Unassuming Scholar

Borders

Standing in the U.S. immigration and customs line at Vancouver International Airport waiting to board a flight to San Francisco, I felt a twinge of mingled anxiety and resentment.

I was coming back from an academic conference in Edmonton.  I had only been in Canada a few days.  It was a short stay, but a welcome relief from life south of the 49^th parallel nonetheless.  As we inched through the endlessly snaking queue I regretted not staying longer.

My regret was amplified by being sandwiched among a bunch of returning cruise ship passengers.  Saddled with mounds of luggage, handbags, shopping bags, backpacks, and gaudily wrapped boxes of all sorts, fumbling with their passports and declaration forms, they were miserable company.  To make matters worse, the overfed, loudly dressed, loudmouthed couple behind me would not stop fuming about how they were being inconvenienced and lamenting why they should have to wait on line and jump through so many hoops to get back into their own country. 

I bit the tip of my tongue to keep from asking them to please be quiet, that we were all in the same boat and should just deal with it…but deep down, I couldn’t help agreeing with them. Travel to and from the United States, post-9/11, has become an ordeal.  It’s particularly galling when the “international” travel is to one of our immediate neighbors, Canada and Mexico.

I began mulling over the idea a few months ago when, attending another conference in San Diego, I took a day trip to Tijuana.  I hadn’t been there for several years.  Friends warned me about the drug gang violence on the border they’d heard about, urged me not to go, the risk wasn’t worth it. 

They needn’t have worried.  I had a pleasant and relaxing afternoon in TJ.  Feeling pretty good about life and the world in general, I headed back toward the border.  As I neared the pedestrian crossing at San Ysidro, my heart sank.  Even though it was ten o’clock on a weekday evening, the line to the border station was over four blocks long and stagnant.  After a spell, a young man offered to help me jump the line for ten bucks.  My impatience getting the better of my sense of fair play, I followed the guy.  He came through and got me a spot in line about fifty feet from the entrance. 

Even then, it took 45 minutes just to get in the door and another twenty to get to the Customs and Border Protection post inside.  Having a lot of time to study the posters on the corridor walls, I noticed one depicting a CBP officer of deliberately indeterminate ethnicity, her head tilted slightly upward, gazing meaningfully into the distance.  The poster was captioned, “We Are the Face of Our Nation.” 

The face of our nation was not particularly welcoming that night.  In fact, it verged on the outright hostile.  Watching a clutch of CBP officers hustle several dazed, handcuffed men past our line made me uncomfortable enough.  Arriving near the head of the line did little to allay my worries.  The officers at the windows barked orders at people to come forward, stay put, present identification, declare goods, etc.  I felt badly for the fellow in front of me who made the mistake of putting his toes a few inches over the red line we had to wait behind to be called: “Sir…SIR!!!  Get BACK behind the LINE!!!” 

I was somewhat more fortunate.  The officer I ended up speaking with was curt and peremptory, gimlet-eyed, suspicious.  He looked at me, at my ID, and at me again. 

“Are you bringing anything back from Mexico?” 

“No, just myself,” I said with a forced smile.  The officer glared at me, unimpressed with my feeble attempt at humor.  He jerked his head grudgingly toward the exit door.  I had been granted dispensation to go home. 

While the American CBP officer I encountered on my return from Canada was a little more courteous than the one I faced at San Ysidro, I still couldn’t help but feel as if I was somehow a suspect.   I contrast this with my experience with the Canadian border official when I arrived.  Her questions were direct and to the point, but civil—What was the purpose of my visit?  How long was I staying?  Absent was the ever-present undercurrent of suspicion I always seem to encounter when dealing with our own border officers. 

Yes, yes, I know the reasons why.  We’re at war, illegal immigration is a threat to honest native-born working people and a drain on the public purse, we have a right to control our borders.  However, our attitude toward borders and immigration is a reflection of our national character beyond the immediate issue.  In other words, our pervasive feeling of being threatened has led us to create and support the xenophobic policies that give rise to violations that heighten our sense of insecurity…a vicious circle born of self-fulfilling prophecies, if you will. 

Emma Lazarus to the contrary, we have not been welcoming of immigrants other than those from Western Europe. This hostility is partly based in fear of the immigrant as Other.  But in equal measure it’s an extension of our acquisitiveness and cupidity, of our ideological hyperindividualism, of a culture that is at its base rude and angry, its belligerence barely concealed behind a blandly smiling façade.  The antipathy against immigrants surfaces daily, in venues high and low—as we can see in Justice Antonin Scalia’s dissent in the Supreme Court’s just-announced decision concerning Arizona’s anti-immigrant law SB 1070, in which he wrote of the “evil effects” of undocumented immigration. 

I hope I’m not alone in thinking Scalia is overstating the case just a tad.  If I was a descendant of a once-marginalized immigrant minority, I would rethink using such loaded terms as “evil” to describe more recent arrivals.  Considering Scalia’s stated admiration of the nation’s founders, he would do well to remember that few if any signers of the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution were of non-English ancestry.[1]  Then again, maybe it’s a matter of who got here earlier.  After all, we stole this country fair and square.  Why share with the latecomers?

Fortunately, I don’t believe time is on Scalia’s side, or Jan Brewer’s, or the Arizona legislature’s, or the Minutemen’s, or on that of any other opponents of immigration from south of the border.  Down in Aztlán, a cultural ferment has been underway for a long time.  Not the reconquista, as some fear, but the emergence of a vibrant amalgam of Anglo and Latino cultures.  Border regions always produce cultural fusion; border walls, increased patrols, and discriminatory laws will do nothing to stop it.  Consider the emergent culture the outcome of an evolutionary process, its vitality the product of hybrid vigor.  Slowly, inexorably, albeit unnoticed by the whitest of white-bread Anglos, the new way of life is suffusing the old.  I don’t just mean salsa outselling ketchup or norteamericanos learning to appreciate Mexican cuisine that doesn’t come from a drive-thru window.  I mean lasting shifts in our national identity and worldview, ones that may actually be for the better in this age of globalization. 

The seeds for this transformation were planted before Anglo Americans arrived in the West.  From California to Texas, the Latin influence is evident in place names, culinary practices, architecture, and even the law.  (Community property laws, which are prevalent in the western U.S., are a carryover from Mexican legal codes.)  Subsequent waves of migration have enriched the cultural soil.  More are rolling in.  By the middle of the century, the U.S. Census Bureau predicts that “Hispanics” (its term; a bit dated) will comprise a quarter of the population and non-Hispanic whites will be in the minority.

Perhaps by then crossing the border will be a little easier…

© 2012 The Unassuming Scholar

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[1] William Paca, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, may have been of Italian extraction.

A Few Bad Apples

The summer before my senior year of college, I interned with a government agency.  My supervisor was a short, swarthy, cocky man with an inflated sense of self-worth and a confrontational air.

I remember this guy regaling me about how he wouldn’t stay in his job too much longer.  Public sector work was for suckers and the lazy, he’d tell me, in between a lot of b-school wisdom culled from the One Minute Manager and Warren Bennis.  The people he worked with were nobodies, “mediocrities” who would never make their mark.  He, on the other hand, was going to get his law degree and then go into business for himself.

I just kind of shrugged off his bluster at the time.  Over the years, I’ve heard a lot of the same crap from flabby suburbanites in sport shirts and Dockers who fantasize about being Howard Roark or John Galt but come off more as malign Walter Mittys.  I’d nearly forgotten about my summer boss of yesteryear when I stumbled across his name not long ago while web surfing. 

It turns out that he really did go to law school and start his own business.  I also learned he had just been sentenced to nine years in federal prison for running a Ponzi scheme.  It seems he bilked his investors—many of them former classmates who trusted him with their life savings—of several tens of millions dollars as well as swindling his partners in a chain of coffee shops.  I wasn’t sure at first it was the same person until I saw his mug shot posted in Google Images.  Yep, it was him, all right.  A little grayer, a little paunchier to be sure, but it was him.

Reading the news story of his sentencing, I’ll have to say I wasn’t terribly surprised at his behavior.  Ignoring his lawyer’s pleas to shut up, he tearfully begged the judge for a light sentence, saying his wife was sick with cancer and that she and their kids couldn’t cope without him.  I don’t know if that performance softened the judge’s stony heart or steeled his resolve, but the miscreant left the courtroom facing the next decade behind bars.

I’ll cop to a feeling certain schadenfreude upon finding out that this pissant Bernie Madoff was going to the pokey.  I did not like the man at all during the brief spell I knew him, and if he had done something wrong I’m glad to know he will pay for it.  And if you’re tempted to think I’m a jerk for kicking a man when he’s down, don’t.  It’s not as if he’s doing time at San Quentin or Sing Sing.  He’s a nonviolent, white collar criminal in federal custody.  Federal prison is where they send unpopular Republicans.

We also need to consider the victims.  There’s a depressing familiarity in the methods used by these charlatans.  People want to believe there’s some magic formula for getting rich quick, no matter how often these hopes are expensively dashed.  We want to believe in things like “proprietary formulas” that somehow allow investment advisers to exceed average market returns.  (In the case of Summer Boss, he told his marks that his knowledge of—get this—physics gave him a way to beat the market.  I’ve had my moments of naïvete and fallen for a few lines in my time, but Jesus…)       

The shamelessness of these people when the time comes to pay the piper punctuates their misdeeds.  I got an amazed chuckle or two reading about Summer Boss’ sentencing, but I didn’t find it particularly funny.  Begging for mercy didn’t seem to work in his case, but it has in similar situations.  An example that comes to mind was Enron defendant Lea Fastow’s sentencing.  Even though she’d known for some time she was going to jail, she asked the judge at her sentencing to delay her report date because she had no one to look after her children while her husband was serving his own stretch.   The judge was quite accommodating, even though the defendant had been an accomplice in defrauding investors and wiping out the pension plans of numerous employees working for Enron subsidiaries.  I wonder how it would have played out in the inverse if it had been a poor woman of color who had stolen from her employer.  Somehow, I doubt that the “somebody’s gotta watch the kids” excuse would fly.  Or, if it did, we’d hear the outraged bellows of the law n’ order crowd that another criminal had escaped justice, if only temporarily.

Different spanks for different ranks, as they say in the army.  However, it’s clear our lack of tolerance for criminal behavior is situational.  I don’t know about you or anyone else, but I’m sick of the presumption that just because a person has made a lot of money he or she is somehow smarter or superior to the rest of us.  I’m even more tired of the argument that large fortunes are somehow earned.  (Once, when I criticized the resistance of the 1% to higher income and capital gains taxes when they could afford mansions and yachts, a friend told me in high dudgeon that my notional plutocrat had earned that yacht.  How the hell do you earn a yacht? I asked her.  Can anyone do it?  How many shifts at Wal Mart or Starbucks do you have to work to buy one?  My friend didn’t have an answer.  I wish all my arguments ended so succinctly.)

The financial scandals of the past ten-plus years carry a single, unavoidable lesson: You can’t just chalk it up to a few bad apples anymore.  The system is fraught with moral hazards.  Always has been.  We’ve had over two centuries’ experience to teach us that fact.  From the Crédit Mobilier affair to the Panic of 1873 to the Great Crash of 1929 to the mortgage meltdown, we never learn.  We don’t want to.  To accept the fundamental rottenness of the financial system would be to question our basic self-conception.  And, I think, we may prefer things that way as a society.  A few months ago, CBS’ 60 Minutes ran a piece on how Bernard Madoff was faring in prison.  Apparently, he’s thriving.  In fact, he’s something of a hero to his fellow inmates.  I’m not surprised. 

As much as I want to close my eyes and put my hands over my ears, I’ve concluded that it’s not just career criminals who admire the guy who got away (or almost got away) with it.  The rest of us do, too.  I think that’s why we’re more willing to go easy on a corner office thief than we are on a mugger.  It doesn’t take a lot of brains to rob somebody on the street, but to manipulate stocks or skim funds…well, that takes a degree of sophistication and subtlety we all wish we had, no?   That’s not criminal; that’s cleverness.  That’s just being enterprising. 

I’m sure it seems I’m dwelling on the outliers.  You might argue that while corrupt individuals exist everywhere, corporate institutions are generally clean.  I’m not so sure.  This argument doesn’t hold up when you consider that institutions are made up of individuals who shape and are in turn shaped by them.  Corporations as institutions inflict far more damage on society than all street crime put together, and their crimes are prosecuted much less frequently.  The ability of corporations to lobby Congress and state legislatures and thereby define the laws that regulate them can only create an environment in which corruption is inevitable.  Winning’s easy when the game’s rigged.

I suppose I should be happy that someone has been held to account for his crimes, even if it’s only a small fry con man like Summer Boss.  But it doesn’t restore my faith in the system.  Not when the whole barrel is rotten.

© 2012 The Unassuming Scholar

Callenbach Considered

Ernest Callenbach passed on a couple of months ago.

I first encountered his writing in a college introductory philosophy course.   The professor was a committed environmental activist, a devotee of “deep ecology.”  So, instead of reading the works of Plato, Spinoza, or Sartre, we were assigned less hoary tomes such as The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey and Steps to Inner Peace by Peace Pilgrim.  These weren’t bad books to read, but they weren’t what I signed up for. 

Adolescent wiseass that I was, I seldom passed up an opportunity to make snarky comments or ask loaded questions impugning the professor’s beliefs.  My bad attitude toward the class made me not fully appreciate its highlights, such as the time Norwegian philosopher Arne Næss guest lectured.  But the one thing I remember most from this class I took more than twenty-five years ago was gritting my teeth through Ecotopia Emerging by Ernest Callenbach.

Ecotopia Emerging, published in 1981, is the prequel to Callenbach’s earlier novel Ecotopia (1975).  The premise of both books is that northern California, Oregon, and Washington have seceded from the United States to create a self-isolated green society.  In certain respects the novels were quite prescient.  Some of Callenbach’s predictions have come to pass, such as widespread recycling, car-free zones in some cities and planned greenbelts in others, as well as a developing trend toward more sustainable forms of transportation and agriculture.  On a darker note, the eco-anarchism embraced by his characters is a premonition of the ELF and other spectral manifestations of the environmentalist movement.

Mr. Callenbach has a deserved reputation as an environmentalist elder statesman whose principles are aptly summed in his final published essay.  I’ve retained a certain ambivalence about his best known writings.  As literature, as with so many works of fiction meant to explicate a philosophic or ideological stance, they simply don’t hold up.  Probably my main objection to both the Ecotopia novels, then and now, is their flakiness.  Callenbach’s utopia is constructed from an amalgam of green sci fi tech, New Age spiritualism, and 1960s free love.  Ecotopia often says more about Callenbach’s personal biases and private fantasies than it does any realistic vision for the future. 

Moreover, the novels betray a decided lack of political correctness by today’s standards.  An aspect I find simultaneously amusing and cringe-inducing is the promiscuous, syncretic appropriation of Native American cultural motifs by Ecotopia’s blissful natives.  Callenbach occasionally indulged in ethnic stereotyping, as seen in his description of urban enclaves dubbed "Soul City" whose inhabitants seem to have been lifted directly from an early Seventies blaxploitation movie.  His answers to such perennial social ills as violence are positively risible. In a memorable episode from the first novel, two men, decked out in war paint and drugged on psychedelics, square off in hand-to-hand combat, after which the winner carries off a maiden spectator as his prize.  This is supposed to be Ecotopia’s placebo for war and aggressive team sports.  Clearly, Callenbach was not above objectifying minorities or women to illustrate his ideal world.  

While the novels’ shortcomings often get in the way of the message, many of Callenbach’s ideas are nonetheless worth serious consideration.  For instance, Ecotopia’s correctional system is just that: Instead of large, industrial-style prisons, we see small numbers of offenders housed in the community, with their partners or family members if they so desire, gainfully employed in regular jobs but otherwise confined until their sentences are up.  Another attractive aspect of Ecotopian life is its freedom from electronic media and a return to more traditional amusements as music, poetry, and storytelling.  Ecotopia's city planning precepts are a harbinger of contemporary New Urbanism, with housing, schools, and shops contained within communitarian, kid-friendly neighborhoods. 

But by far the strongest theoretical element is Ecotopia’s social, political, and economic decentralization.  Capitalism hasn’t disappeared entirely; instead, small enterprises make up the economy’s backbone.  Worker self-management prevails, and even small family businesses must allow hired employees to take part in management decisions and profit sharing.  Because big corporations no longer exist, this obviates the need for a large state bureaucracy to regulate (and protect) them.  Ecotopia is politically devolved with as many policies made at the community level as practicable.   I’m very sympathetic to the idea of subsidiarity as social order and this element alone makes Ecotopia appealing (if only in an abstract sense).

Its virtues notwithstanding, there are better alternatives to Callenbach’s fictional paradise on earth.  The primary flaw of the Ecotopia novels is that they are too simplistic.  Callenbach to the contrary, we cannot simply compost, meditate, and screw our way to a just and equitable world.  For me, a more realistic view of an environmentally sustainable future can be found in the novel Pacific Edge, part of the Three Californias trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson.  (Robinson, incidentally, is the editor of the anthology Future Primitive: The New Ecotopias.)  The world of Pacific Edge is much different from and yet quite the same as that of the present day.  People have mostly embraced environmentalist principles and green technology, but many contemporary evils persist: Avaricious developers clash with anti-growth activists before town councils and zoning boards, the profit motive continues to conflict with human need, and politics remain the art of compromise. 

Robinson’s future is more plausible because it accounts for the truth that progress is almost always evolutionary, with few instances of punctuational change.  Even the swiftest, most violent revolutions do not produce the rapid degree of sociopolitical change that Callenbach appears to propose in the Ecotopia series.  Whatever victories are won by the green movement, rest assured they will be incremental and none of us know what the end state will look like.  But change must be imagined to be realized.  The lesson of Ernest Callenbach’s writing is that dreams of even an imperfect future are better than accepting an even more flawed present.

© 2012 The Unassuming Scholar