Sharing Work and Food - Imagine That

Here's an article by Wayne Roberts of the Toronto Food Policy Council, quoted in full because I don't know how to link to it on Facebook.

SHARING WORK AND FOOD CREATES AN UPSIDE TO THE ECONOMIC DOWN

BY Wayne Roberts

Unlike most people, Thomas Homer-Dixon doesn't think today's world economic crisis is very complicated. He thinks it's very complex, which makes for a world of difference in understanding which government anti-recession programs will fail (most of them) and deciding which ones can help.

Homer-Dixon, who chairs a centre for global systems analysis at the University of Waterloo, is one of the world’s leading thinkers in the field of “complexity theory,” and the author of several international bestsellers, including The Ingenuity Gap and The Upside of Down. He brings a missing dimension to thinking about remedies to the looming economic collapse that that’s so far been excluded from public and media debate. “If ever there was a case of experts not knowing what’s happening, it’s this economic crisis,” he says.

Hang in for the introductory lecture on Chaos Theory 101, and you’ll be able to follow and lead the economics debate in fresh ways.

Homer-Dixon is the first to admit he has no straight-ahead answers to a downturn that’s much more challenging that the Great Depression of the 1930s, to which it’s often unthinkingly compared. “We’ve never seen a collapse on this scale before in an environment of such enormous complexity and such a huge number of unk-unks,” he says, in a reference to the term used during his days working with Pentagon analysts who referred to unknown unknowns.

The way in which a relatively small proportion of mortgage defaults in one country during the fall of 2008 precipitated the collapse of a global economic house of cards expresses a telltale, if seemingly illogical, sign of complex systems in crisis – a very small cause leading to a very huge result, like the final grain of snow or shift of wind that produce a mountain avalanche.

But in Homer-Dixon’s view, that small cause, and even slightly bigger versions of that small cause – the breakdown of integrity in the global financial system, or the inequality that put home purchases beyond the reach of typical families, for example – is only a small part of an overall mix of “cascading failures.” His list of factors converging into a catastrophic perfect storm include intensified inequality, increased global warming, rising resource prices, and the “sheer productivity of capitalism – in many ways the deepest of all causes,” he says, since it produces chronic gluts in desperate search for markets. Together, they overloaded a rigid and “tightly coupled” global financial system that spread uncontrollable wildfires.
“Multiple stresses that reinforced each other” led to “a collapse of assets greater and faster” than anything witnessed during the simpler days of the Great Depression, he says. That’s why simplistic and one-dimensional rhetoric from politicians and pundits about fixing the problem, putting the pieces back together, and managing the crisis betrays a failure to understand what’s going down, he says. “Complex problems require complex solutions. It’s the law of requisite variety. We need a repertoire of responses as complex as the environment. “We must move from management to complex adaptation.”

Just as bodies under stress require core strength in the lower abdomen, economies and societies under shock require sources of core strength, what hip policy experts increasingly refer to as “robustness” and “resilience.” Government policy makers need to focus their view on the prize of supporting resilience in the population. Failure of governments to be on constant alert for the pitfalls of economic giantism or to be on guard for stresses in social resilience “is like not requiring cities to be earthquake-proof,” he says.

“Resilience means helping people to take care of themselves better in tough times,” rather than relying on specialization and expertise, he says, a guideline that puts a community’s ability to feed itself and care for each other at the top of his to-do list.

Here’s how I simplify Homer-Dixon’s analysis, in ways that he may or may not agree with.

When public money is used to keep enterprises afloat, the public has a right to demand that public benefits be spread among the general public. In my opinion, a longstanding (if best-kept secret) of Canadian employment insurance policy should be extended to all public enterprises and bailed-out private enterprises, including car companies and banks. Canada’s federal government allows workers at a company facing lay-offs to opt for everyone sharing the layoff by working a four day week, and everyone sharing the employment insurance by being covered on their one day a week of unemployment. This measure does not cost the employment insurance system a dime, since five people taking a payout for a day is the same as one person taking a payout for a week. It allows a workforce to stay intact for better times, maintains morale among workers and within a community, and protects younger workers with families, a group unlikely to enjoy high seniority.

This simple measure would abolish unemployment overnight, maintain purchasing power in the community, and buy people the time to become more resilient and self-reliant in their own lives, by gardening, cooking from scratch or insulating their walls, for example. It would even give people some time to sleep, the least acknowledged of the crucial determinants of health and well-being.

Only the epidemics of workaholism and every-man-for-himselfishism have kept this obvious low-pain remedy off the agenda for so long.

Having bolstered purchasing power in the community-at-large, the multiplier effect of that purchasing power needs to be captured for public benefit by requiring all government and publicly-bailed-out institutions to purchase local and local-sustainable food, recognizing that the food industry already produces almost as many jobs as the auto industry and can directly employ local people. Since one job for a local farmer commonly leads to five jobs producing farm inputs or off-farm processing, this doable measure is an employment bonanza that also yields major health and environmental benefits. This also fulfils Homer-Dixon’s call for self-reliant and unplugged systems that remove essentials of life from the vagaries of uncontrollable forces.

This depression does not have to hurt. Get beyond the complications into the complexity, and discover what Homer-Dixon calls “the upside to down.”

(adapted from NOW Magazine, February 26-March 4, 2009. Wayne Roberts is the author of The No-Nonsense Guide to World Food.)

BBC's The Big Read top 100 books

A friend passed this on. She says the BBC believes the average person will only have read 6 books from this list. At least 6 of these I had to read for school. It is definitely a British list but there are several important books on it.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings X
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – X
6 The Bible - X (though I may have skimmed the begats)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell X+
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott X
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller (started but didn't finish)
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare - hahahaha! About 5 or 6 of them
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier X
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien X+
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger - X
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald X
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams - X+
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck X
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll – X+
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame X
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy -
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis X
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis – X+
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini – X
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne – X+
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell X
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown -
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery - X+
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood -X
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding X
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan X
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel X+
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley X
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck - X
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac -
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding -
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville -
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens -
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett - X+
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce - (I tried, oh how I tried!)
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola - (I tried this one in French but didn't finish)
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White - X
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - X (I think so)
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery X
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare - X
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl - X
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Read - 31
Loved - 9

Recent reads that I really enjoyed:
Eva Hoffman - Lost in Translation
Heather O'Neill - Lullabies for Little Criminals
Milan Kundera - The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Sara Gruen - Water for Elephants

Currently reading (both nonfiction):
Tony Horwitz - Confederates in the Attic
Ronald Wright - Stolen Continents

On my reading shelf just waiting for me to get to them:
Isabel Allende - Eva Luna
Marie Phillips - Gods Behaving Badly
Dionne Brand - What we all Long For
Alexandra Fuller - Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - Purple Hibiscus

Anyone else have any good reads to suggest?

To participate, say on Facebook, copy and paste into your own notes then delete my comments add your own and tag the friends you want to share this with.

Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read.
2) Add a '+' to the ones you LOVE.
3) Star '*' those you plan on reading.
4) Tally your total at the bottom.
5) Tag your friends including the person whose list you saw!

February 27, 2009 - Something There, All Right

There’s something there, all right.

This morning I go to Ocean Medical Center for my thyroid ultrasound. The test itself is a breeze – I’m in and out of there in less than 10 minutes.

The technician asks me if the doctor told me anything about what she’s supposed to look for. I explain that the PET/CT scan picked up an abnormality on the thyroid, probably some kind of nodule.

Which side is it on?

That, I don’t know.

She commences to scan. I’m lying on my back, looking up at the ceiling, while she squirts a little warm gel at the base of my neck and commences to move the handheld scanning device around.

When she gets to the left side of the thyroid, she finds it. A roughly circular dark area. She shows it to me on the screen. “I can’t say for sure,” she tells me, “but it’s my guess that’s what they’re looking for.” I notice she’s dragging the cursor across that part of the image, doing some measurements.

“How big do you figure it is?

“A little less than a centimeter.”

No surprises, there. They saw it on the PET/CT, and here it is again. I find it hard to understand how the grainy ultrasound picture gives the docs any better resolution than a CT scan, but the ways of radiology are exceeding strange.

I believe this is the very same room I was in when I had my abdominal ultrasound back in the fall of 2005, that started this whole process for me. My feelings today, though, are 100% different. Back then, I was clutching that prescription script from Dr. Cheli that read, “Suspect lymphoma” and anxiously wondering what all this meant. Today, I’m a veteran of a great many tests and scans, most of them much more onerous than this simple procedure.

The vast majority of thyroid nodules, I’ve learned, are benign. So, no sense borrowing trouble.

As Dr. Wendy Harpham reminded me in a comment on my last entry, one small silver lining on the cancer cloud is that you do get scanned all the time, which means there’s a greater chance of picking up any further problems – even unrelated problems – at an early stage.

I should learn more next week. I wonder if another biopsy is in my future, or if they’ll be able to tell from the ultrasound alone what sort of nodule this is....

3D Wallpaper

My Prediction: Dow Jones bottom at 6,437.

Move over, Market Gurus and Wall Street Know-It-Alls. I have figured this out. The end is near.

This year's stock market, scene of gloom and doom, busted dreams and broken hopes, the worst since our grandparents were children, will soon hit bottom. It will end its dismal, sickening decline, and start its rousing dramatic recovery, precisely when the Dow Jones Average hits the following point: 6,437.

(By contrast, it opened today at 7,112. So it just needs to loose another 675 points and we can call it a day.)

How do I know this? Elementary. Contrary to popular belief, financial markets do not run on economics. They do not run on emotion, technics, quants, or any other human designs. They run on irony.

6,437 is precisely the point at which the Dow Jones Average stood on December 5, 1996, at dinner time -- just over twelve years ago. It was at that moment that Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan mounted the podium at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., to deliver the annual Francis Boyer lecture. He then proceeded to place a curse on the market. He intimated, in memorably opaque prose, that stock prices in the 1990s represented a bubble about to burst:

"Clearly, sustained low inflation implies less uncertainty about the future, and lower risk premiums imply higher prices of stocks and other earning assets. We can see that in the inverse relationship exhibited by price/earnings ratios and the rate of inflation in the past. But how do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values, which then become subject to unexpected and prolonged contractions as they have in Japan over the past decade? ”

Greenspan's "irrational exuberance" phrase became an instant hit, an icon, perhaps the single most repeated two-word quote of the decade. But the Dow Jones Average laughed in his face. It proceeded to jolt above 7,000 in 1997, then 10,000 in 1999, and finally 14,000 in October 2007. After the 2000-2001 Dot-Com bust, Greenspan himself seemed to forget earlier caution, pumping mass dosses of liquidity into housing and preaching tax cuts and deregulation with abandon-- causing him last October to admit "mistakes" that helped spark the recent crisis.
But the irony was this: Greenspan had gotten it right the first time. The stock market in 1996 was a bubble ready to burst, as it was again in 2000, as it was again in 2007. The "exuberance" behind it was, in fact, "irrational."
Markets have a way of avenging themselves. And if irony is indeed its guiding principle, then this one today is not going to free us from its bear grip until it forces us to relive the lession of December 5, 1996. Only when the Dow Jones Average touches that magic number, 6,437, will the curse be broken. At that point, "irrational exuberance " officially dies, to be replaced by "irrational pessimism" -- time for the bulls to return.


The end is near. Science is science. Greenspan was right. Sorry if this is bad news. Have some coffee.

Racist Cartoons

This week's now-notorious New York Post "monkey" cartoon -- the one showing two policemen standing over a dead monkey they've just shot and saying "They'll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill" -- has raised storms of protest. Whether the artist intended the monkey as Obama or not, the implication is hard to miss.


The controvercy raises a deeper fact. Political cartoons in America have a long history of treading into racism, zenophobia, and bigotry. And some of the worst have come from our most celebrated, main stream journals.



Thomas Nast (above right), for instance, is celebrated as the brilliant young 1870s artist for Harper's Weekly whose ridicule destroyed the regime of New York City's Boss William M. Tweed -- easily the era's most corrupt pol. Nast became the most famous, widely-read, and politically influential graphic artist of the Nineteenth Century, able to sway elections and make or break Senators. But his cartoons seethed with bigotry, against Catholics, against Irish, against immigrants, against Democrats.



Before closing the book on the current controversy, here are a few samples. The point is not to make excuses for the New York Post. Rather, to me, it's the opposite. These examples show how dangerously easy it is for artists and journalists to let passions over today's hot spot issues get in the way of good sense. Editors have a duty to to work hard, not to censor talented artists, but to make sure they express themselves clearly -- and not to allow what might have started as a simple satire against the Stimulus Bill (obvious fair game) cross the line into ugliness.


As for Thomas Nast:
He enjoyeed portraying Catholic clergy is vile creatures, in this case as crocodiles.




















He consistently drew Irishmen as semi-human gorillas, never far from a whiskey bottle and shackled to political mahcines. (The fellow with the whip is Peter B. Sweeny, famed chieftain of New York's Tamman Hall from the Boss Tweed era.)



























And for political enemies like Tweed, he considered capitol punushment just fine:

February 21, 2009 - And Now, For Something Completely Different...

Yesterday I received a phone call from Dr. Lerner, who gave me some good news and some bad news. The good news is, my recent PET/CT scan reported no change with my lymphoma. It’s been that way for a while now. My indolent disease is continuing its shiftless ways, which is just fine with me.

The bad news is, the scan picked up some abnormalities on my thyroid gland. Dr. Lerner wants me to have an ultrasound of the thyroid, to check it out.

He didn’t sound too concerned. In fact, he said he didn’t think it was much of anything, but he wants me to have the ultrasound just to be sure.

I heard Dr. Lerner use the word “adenoma” as an explanation for what this could possibly be. On the web, I found this description from a medical textbook:

“Most [thyroid] nodules rather than being cancer (carcinomas) are actually tumorous collections of benign cells variously called adenomas or adenomatoid nodules.

Whether nodules are ‘cold’ or ‘hot’ on thyroid nuclear scanning relates to their ability to trap and collect radioactive substances such as radioactive iodine or other radioactive elements used in nuclear medicine. These isotopes are either swallowed or injected intravenously and their extraction from the blood and concentration within the nodules causes the areas corresponding to the nodules to show up as black ‘hot’ spots on the scan image.

Hot nodules are rarely cancer and most often represent benign follicular adenomas. In addition, such hot nodules may in fact be overproducing thyroid hormone and may cause hyperthyroidism. The larger the ‘hot’ nodule the more likely it will be associated with hyperthyroidism.”

I thought about asking him some questions about various scenarios that could ensue, but thought better of it. He’s not going to be able to tell me anything, I reasoned. That’s why he’s asking for the ultrasound. You’re just going to have to suck it up and wait.

So, that’s what I’m doing. Dr. Lerner is going to have someone from his staff call me next week, to set up an appointment at Ocean Medical Center. Then, it will be more waiting, while the radiologist interprets the results and shares them with Dr. Lerner.

I’m not feeling too concerned about it. Seems like “waiting” is my middle name, these days. Several years ago, I might have gotten anxious, but after undergoing a couple of biopsies plus chemotherapy, an ultrasound is a piece of cake. I’m actually feeling more anxious about the wisdom tooth I’m scheduled to have my dentist extract on Monday.

It’s just another test. I’ll be hoping that, like all the other recent scans I’ve had, this one, too will prove to be of little concern.

Worst Headline Ever

If there were an annual worst headline award, The Sun would probably win pretty much every year. Today's paper screamed "'Enormous' fraud at City Hall"

It makes it sound as though the city council or mayor has been caught doing something corrupt or fraudulent. Reading the article, one finds out there were 9 civil servants (working in social services) who are accused of insurance scams with Manulife, the city's supplier of health insurance. They allegedly made fake claims. This is being investigated, has been turned over to the Toronto Police right now, and the city sent the accused employees home (with pay, which is necessary when a charge is unproven).

Rob Ford, (the only councillor interviewed in this article on the same topic, opined "I've always said corruption is rampant at City Hall," he said. "I believe this is the tip of the iceberg."

The city is scrutinized in ways the federal and provincial governments aren't. The city is more efficient than any other level of government - it has to be - and yet, it is constantly being accused of waste. Our city budget is well in line with other large North American cities, it supplies services many other cities don't have to (due to good old Mike Harris), and every penny is watched. If 9 low-level employees of a company which employed over 50,000 were to scam their health insurance, nobody would claim the company itself was corrupt.

City News coverage of the same story

A different view of FDR

To cap off President's Week, I thought you might enjoy this rare photo of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, taken from the July 1920 Literary Digest.

Just 38 years old, two years before contracting polio, FDR is still the dashing young socialite, gracing Washington as Assistant Secretary of the Navy in Woodrow Wilson's cabinet. We see him standing in front of one of his favorite cars, a Stutz roadster, holding a hunting rifle trying to mimick is famous Bull Moose Uncle Theodore.

Roosevelt that summer had used his celebrity name to win the Democratic Party's nomination for Vice President on the ticket headed by Ohio Governor James Cox. They would lose in a landslide to Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coollidge.

There is an appealing innocence to this photo. Polio, the Depression, the strains in his marriage, the trials of returning to politics, restoring national confidence in tough times, facing Nazism and Facism in World War II -- these things all were in the unknown future.

For now, we just see an easy-going young man on a sunny afternoon. Life was good.

Eric Holder: "Nation of Cowards"? Not Really.

Eric Holder, the new Attorney General, raised hackles in Washington, D.C. yesterday for calling Americans a "national of cowards" on race relations, pointing to failures to build inter-racial ties outside the workplace. I certainly respect Holder for raising a sensitive and important issue. But on the history, I think he's wrong.

The roster of heroes on this score is long and impressive and, to my mind, it deserves more attention than the cowards. Other countries have struggled with racism and zenophobia, but America is rare in addressing it so directly. Obviously, divisions and prejudice still exist. But we live in an tie of promise and good will, with Barack Obama in the White House and Holder himself making history at Justice.

As my brief contribution, I'd like to mention some heroes, specifically two relationships that crossed the divide during times when attitudes were ugly and simple handshakes required courage. Both helped lay groundwork for the civil rights successes to come later:

-- A friendship among two US Senators, Roscoe Conkling and Blanche Bruce; and

-- The work of a great lawyer, Clarence Darrow, for a ground-breaking client, Ossian Sweet.

Blanche Bruce (photo above) was the second African-American to reach the U.S. Senate (Riram Revels of Mississippi was the first), the first to serve a full term (1875-1881), and the only black senator during those years. Bruce had escaped slavery during the Civil War and gone north. He taught school in Hannibal, Missouri, and briefly attended Oberlin College. After the War, he returned to Mississippi to make money as a planter and rose in Reconstruction politics.

By 1875, when Bruce reached Washington, D.C., America had already lost its wartime idealism and grown tired of Reconstruction, spawning an attitude of resentment against freed slaves. Lynchings and other crackdowns were were on the rise. Bruce, as the only black Senator, confronted stark bigotry from colleagues -- particularly fellow Mississippi Senator Lucius Lamar. On the day of his swearing-in on the Senator floor, Bruce rose to step forward and take the oath, but both of his Mississippi colleagues (Lamar and out-going Senator James Alcorn) refused to escort him. For a moment, Bruce stood absolutely alone -- until one Senator finally saw his embarrassment, stood up, and walked over from across the chamber, took Bruce's arm, and announced himself Bruce's sponsor. It was Roscoe Conkling of New York.

Roscoe Conkling was one of Washington's most powerful figures in 1975, boss of the NY State Republican machine, leader of the Republican Stalwarts and intimate with President US Grant. Conkling took Bruce under his wing, made him a protege, coached him in Senate procedures and helped him win key committee seats. They became fast friends, and Bruce would go so far as to name his first-born son after Conkling. Young men named Roscoe would populate the family tree for generations.

Clarence Darrow had never met Ossian Sweet in 1925 when he agreed to take Sweet's case. Sweet, an African-American physician, had purchased a home in a white neighborhood in Detroit. A mob of neighbors tried to drive him out, but Sweet refused to be intimidated. Mobs started congregating around the Sweet home. One night, gunshots rang out, and Sweet fired back. A white man in the crowd was hit and died.

Local prosecutors quickly indicted Sweet for murder and set trial before an all-white jury.

The recently-formed NAACP had trouble at first finding a lawyer to take Sweet's case, until they asked Darrow. Darrow was already famous from a lifetime defending headline clients from labor leaders Eugene V. Debs and Bill Haywood to most recently John Scopes, the high school tachers accused in 1924 of teaching evolution in Dayton, Tennessee. Darrow quickly saw the importance of the case and agreed to lead the defense.

His appeal to the jury based on common humanity became an instant classic:

"You are facing a problem of two races, a problem that will take centuries to solve. If I felt none of you were prejudiced, I'd have no fear. I want you to be as unprejudiced as you can be.....Draw upon your imagination and think how you would feel if you fired at some black man in a black community, and then had to be tried by them.... The danger of a mob is not what it does, but what it might do. Mob psychology is the most dreadful thing with which man has to contend. Its action is like the starting of a prairie fire. A match in the stuble, and it spreads and spreads, devouring everything in its way....the mob was waiting to see the sacrifice of some helpless blacks. They came with malice in their hearts..."

It took two trials, but ultimately Darrow prevailed, presuading the jury to reach a unanimous verdict of not guilty on ground of self defense. Ossian Sweet went free, and a precedent against housing discrimination was set forty years before the Civil Rights Act.

We don't often think of Clarance Darrow and Roscoe Conkling as civil rights heroes, and Blanche Bruce and Ossian Sweet rarely get attention for their ground-breaking roles. But if today we are keeping score on heroes versus cowards on achieving racial justice in America, then I am happy to offer them as evidence on the good side. Thanks. --KenA

For more background, see my two book recommendations for today:

-- On Blanche Bruce, The Senator and the Socialite: The True Story of America's First Black Dynasty, by Lawrence Otis Graham.

-- On Darrow and the Sweet trials, Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age, by Kevin Boyle.

February 19, 2009 - Wisdom to Survive

Today I’m reading an article from Newsweek, written by Chesley B. “Sully” Sullenberger III, Captain of U.S. Airways Flight 1549, who piloted his plane to a successful emergency landing in the Hudson River. Captain Sullenberger is a national hero, of course. His story of coolheaded competence and courage has spoken in some remarkable ways to a nation grown weary, and wary, of its leaders.

His tale of survivorship says a few things to those of us surviving a different sort of crisis.

First, although I used the word “hero” to describe him, it’s a word he shies away from:

“As my wife, Lorrie, pointed out on 60 Minutes, a hero is someone who decides to run into a burning building. This was different – this was a situation that was thrust upon us. I didn’t choose to do what I did.”

Cancer, too, is thrust upon us. We don’t choose it. Although some are quick to describe us with words like “courage” – maybe even “hero” – it’s not a mantle most of us wear comfortably. We didn’t run into this particular burning building. We woke up smelling smoke, and now we’re trying our best to find a way out of the place. Just because we’re not running around yelling and screaming doesn’t make us especially courageous, or heroic.

Second, Captain Sullenberger has something to say about what it takes to get through a crisis:

“During every minute of the flight, I was confident I could solve the next problem. My first officer, Jeff Skiles, and I did what airline pilots do: we followed our training, and our philosophy of life. We valued every life on that airplane and knew it was our responsibility to try to save each one, in spite of the sudden and complete failure of our aircraft. We never gave up. Having a plan enabled us to keep our hope alive. Perhaps in a similar fashion, people who are in their own personal crises – a pink slip, a foreclosure – can be reminded that no matter how dire the circumstance, or how little time you have to deal with it, further action is always possible. There's always a way out of even the tightest spot. You can survive.”

Indeed. We can survive. When bad news comes, when frightful challenges arise, we may feel for a time like we’re headed for disaster. There are things we’ve learned, though – or can learn – about survivorship. Such wisdom we can fall back on, when the engines flame out and we feel ourselves suddenly descending. Just follow our training, and our philosophy of life. These things will see us through.

“Those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the sky, and those who lead many to righteousness, like the stars forever and ever.”
– Daniel 12:3

Call for Submissions to Briarpatch

I like this magazine and it seems they are looking for submissions for their upcoming edition "How I learned to stop destroying the planet and love the global recession"

What if the economic recession we're presently experiencing
is not just a regrettable temporary setback in the never-ending
march of growth-fuelled prosperity, but the beginning of a
painful but ecologically necessary process of scaling back
our footprint to a more sustainable level?

How would we manage the decline so as to ensure the burdens
are shared out equitably? How would we go about reorganizing
our society and economy around conservation and community
well-being rather than economic growth and short-term profit?

The revolution envisioned above would require a fundamental
transformation in every aspect of our lives -- our jobs, our
homes, our food system, our arts and entertainment, etc.
It's certainly beyond the scope of a single issue of Briarpatch
to describe, but in our July/August 2009 issue, we hope to
sketch out some of the broad contours and specific
opportunities so our readers can get to work on the rest.

What principles should guide our efforts to reorganize our
lives and communities on a human scale? What initiatives
already underway deserve to be profiled, celebrated, and
imitated? What can we learn from what other people are doing
in other parts of the world? What books and films shed light
on the key issues and should be reviewed? How can our
efforts to cope with the global recession pave the way to
a more stable and sustainable future?

If you've got something to contribute to this discussion,
then we want to hear from you. We are looking for articles,
essays, investigative reportage, news briefs, project profiles,
interviews with luminary thinkers, reviews, poetry, humour,
artwork & photography that explore how we can unplug
from the growth machine and cope with the global recession.

We seek to cast a broad net in our approach, profiling
initiatives in energy alternatives, housing and urban
planning, transportation, job (re)training, ecological
economics and much more -- this is not an exhaustive list!

Queries are due by March 23, 2009. If your query is
accepted, first drafts are due by May 1, 2009. Your query
should outline what ground your contribution will cover and
include an estimated word count and a short writing sample.

Please review our submission guidelines before submitting
your query. Send your queries to:
editor AT briarpatchmagazine DOT com.

We reserve the right to edit your work (with your active
involvement) and cannot guarantee publication. Briarpatch
pays $0.05/word. http://www.briarpatchmagazine.com

Some of my blogging friends (and the non-bloggy ones too) have certainly been opining on exactly this topic - perhaps one of you wants to submit something. If I can get my act together, I just might as well.

Louis Brandeis on "Too Big to Fail"

A quick thought this morning on reading the latest plea from Detroit for a $20 billion taxpayer handout to keep General Motors and Chrysler from bankruptcy:

Before joining the Supreme Court in 1916, Louis Brandeis, one of the true great minds of Twentieth Century America, wrote a wonderful rant against the big money powers of his time called Other People’s Money: And How the Bankers Use It. In it, Brandeis described what he called the “Curse of Bigness,” which was his way of describing the big monopolistic banks, railroads, and steel companies that threw their muscle around back then to intimidate Washington, Main Street, and the public. “Size, we are told, is not a crime,” Brandeis wrote. “But size may, at least, become noxious by reason of the means through which it is attained or the uses to which it is put.”

Brandeis’s book became a big seller in 1913. It earned him the lasting hatred of Wall Street tycoons like J. P. Morgan, but it also helped create public demand for a Federal Reserve System. Brandeis’s political hero was Theodore Roosevelt, who as President happily used the new Antitrust Laws to fight "bigness" by busting trusts when he saw fit.

Today, in our modern fiscal collapse, Brandeis’s “curse of bigness” has come back to haunt us under the guise of a new doctrine: Too Big to Fail. We now see a dizzying, growing list of malefactors hiding behind its skirts:

Wall Street banks are too big to fail;
Main Street banks are too big to fail;
Detroit automakers are too big to fail;
The $700 billion bailout package was too big to fail;
The drug-taking third baseman for the Yankees is too big to fail.

Who’s next? What’s next? What kind of monster have we created?

Louis Brandeis got it right back in 1913. Bigness can be a curse, and we are paying for it now. What ever happened to the Antitrust laws? They made perfect sense to Theodore Roosevelt. Maybe it’s time to bring them back.

Rating George W. Bush

Before leaving C-SPAN's poll of presidents, I need to get two more items off my chest. One is about Abraham Lincoln, the winner at #1. Can we please take off the rose-colored glasses and treat him like a real person? I will get to this in my next post.

The other is about George W. Bush. Let's talk about him right now.

When I first was the final C-SPAN list two days ago, I quickly noticed the difference between me and the group over GWB, and I wrote this:

Finally, there is George W. Bush. The C-SPAN group places him in the bottom ten at #36. I rated him even lower, as third worst at #41. This rating obviously is the most speculative of the bunch. We still don't know the outcome of the wars Bush started and the economic cataclysms begun under his watch. But, to my mind, the potential long-term damage Bush has done to this country far out-paces the likes of a Warren Harding, Millard Fillmore, or Frankling Pierce. Unlike these other disappointments, George W. Bush was both bad AND consequential.

Let's be clear. I enjoy revisionist history. In my book BOSS TWEED, I was happy to restore the reputation of America's most corrupt pol ever, showing that Tweed, while stealing the City blind, was also a big-hearrted man who helped immigrants, built New York, and was victimized by unscrupulous "reformers." But that didn't mean be wasn't corrupt.

It is no Liberal fad to say that George W. Bush was one of the worst presidents ever. Facts are stubborn things. Bush might be a sincere nice man who loves his family, but that doesn't change the bottom line. How could the C-SPAN group rank him at #36? This son of priviledge is once again being let off the hook with a Gentleman's C?

True, a rank of 36 is no compliment. It places Bush in the bottom 10, and nobody argues that the bottom two, Andrew Johnson and James Buchanan, don't thoroughly deserve those spots.

The difference between 3rd worst (my rank) and 7th worst (the C-SPAN group's rank) may seem small, but at stake is the historical truth. The higher grade elevates Bush above four other Presidents who certainly had failures and fell far short of being role models, but who simply did too little in office to earn the bottom spots. Specifically:

• Warren G. Harding (1921-1923), died in office from food poisoning, presided over the Teapot Dome scandal though not personally implicated. During his term, he stabilized the economy, pardoned Eugene V. Debs from prison, and started no wars.
• William Henry Harrison (1841), died in office after 32 days. At 71 years old he gave a two-hour inaugural speech in a freezing snowstorm without a coat, possibly causing the cold that killed him -- not too smart. But he wasn't in office long enough to do harm;
• Millard Fillmore (1850-1853), replaced President Zachary Taylor and filled the last 2 1/2 years of his term. He backed the Compromise of 1850 that delayed the Civil War by allowing enactment of the notorious Fugitive Slave Act;
• Franklin Pierce (1853-1857), certainly no gem with a bad personality. He signed the Kansas-Nebraska Act allowing slavery to spread west. But he, too, was smaller than events arouond him.

George W. Bush was not a small President. He mattered. He was not mediocre. He was bad. The most important national challenge of our lifetimes, the attack of September 11, 2001, came on his watch. He made decisions that had consequences. The result was a string of disasters that is depressingly well known: two unfinished wars, a debt explosion, a financial collapse, a list of demoralized, ineffective Federal agencies, a sleazy re-election, inflamed wedge politics, the use of torture, the loss of global standing, and so on goes the list.


The C-SPAN group gave Bush bottom marks for Economic Management and International Relations, but it saved him from the cellar with C-level grades for three catch-all categories: "Crisis Leadership," "Vision/ Agenda Setting," and "Pursued Equal Justice for All." I don't buy it.
Ranking President Bush is speculative because the trail is still fresh. He just left office a few weeks ago, his wars are unfinished, his policies are still unfolding. Giving him a mediocre score may allow historians to keep their options open, to hedge their bets in case something in his legacy goes unexpectedly right. I think the record is clear enough to start him off at the near-bottom. If things go his way in the future, so be it.
Thanks for listening. --KenA

C-SPAN's Presidential Poll

Woodrow Wilson, 1916.

Yesterday, C-SPAN finally issued the full results of its 2009 Presidential Survey by some 150 historians. Here's the link to the full C-SPAN group results. As you know, I had the honor to participate and, for comparison. Here's the link to my own entry.



Not surprisingly, as soon as I saw the final C-SPAN list, I eagerly put their's and mine side by side, just to see how I stacked up. What I saw was a profile of my own prejudice staring back at me. Here's a sample:



Let's start with the top ten. We agreed on the top four (Washington, Lincoln, and the Roosevelts), though in slightly different order. But after that, we parted ways.



For instance, the C-SPAN group ranked both Woodrow Wilson and JFK in the top ten, at #9 and #6 respectively. I couldn't disagree more. I rated Wilson far lower, at #16, his dismal records on civil rights, wartime dissent, and the post-war Red Scare, as well as his failure to win acceptance of the Versailles treaty, all counting as significant demerits. Similarly, I rated JFK far lower at #17. Yes, he inspired the country, but his sparse legislative record hardly earned him a spot in the top tier. Yes, for glamour, celebrity, and style, JFK wins hands down. But is that really how we rate Presidents? Perhaps had he lived....



As for the bottom ten, I broke from the group on two notables. First, I included Richard Nixon at #36. The C-SPAN group rated him much higher, at #27. I admit to prejudice on this one: Living through the Vietnam War at draftable age could not help but affect my attitude toward Nixon. But even putting that aside, Congress had good reasons for impeaching Nixon in 1974. His temperament -- seen in his enemies list, wiretaps on his own staff, and conspiracies galore -- was perhaps the worst of any President, and it overshadowed any positive accomplishment.



Finally, there is George W. Bush. The C-SPAN group places him in the bottom ten at #36. I rated him even lower, as third worst at #41. This rating obviously is the most speculative of the bunch. We still don't know the outcome of the wars Bush started and the economic cataclysms begun under his watch. But, to my mind, the potential long-term damage Bush has done to this country far out-paces the likes of a Warren Harding, Millard Fillmore, or Frankling Pierce. Unlike these other disappointments, George W. Bush was both bad AND consequential.




So that's my first take on the final, official C-SPAN list, and I look forward to debating these points on many more Presidents Days to come. Hope you have a happy one --KenA

February 14, 2009 - Could the Stakes Be Any Higher?

One of the hardest treatments for us cancer patients to wrap our minds around is stem cell transplants. The biology of DNA is so intricate, and the calculation of the odds of success so complex, that making a decision about whether or not to pursue such treatment is a monumental task.

David Arenson, a chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) survivor, does as good a job of writing about this as any. You can read his effort in his February 13 blog entry. Although he has a different disease than mine – leukemia vs. lymphoma – CLL and NHL have many similarities.

David describes his decision-making process as “like looking through Mr. Magoo glasses and saying there are objects in the sky twinkling at night without knowing which are stars, which are planets, and which are airplanes passing by.” Then he goes on to describe, in rather greater detail than you’d expect for a scientific layperson wearing Magoo glasses, just what some of those celestial objects are. The acuity of his vision is sharper than most, despite the disclaimer.

The decision as to whether or not to go for a stem-cell transplant is always a tough one. There are trade-offs – not exactly “damned if you do and damned if you don’t,” but something along those lines. Here’s how David describes it:

“There is an anonymous quote I ran across that sums up my opinion: ‘There are always two choices. Two paths to take. One is easy. And its only reward is that it's easy.’

Dragging out the chemo is the ‘easy’ choice here, but in a way it is also the hardest. It is a personal statement that ‘I accept that CLL will shorten my life, and that I will live three, five, maybe eight more years.’

Making the ‘hard’ choice to go for transplant is saying, ‘I know there is a reasonable chance that I could be cured of CLL and I am willing to accept the risk of getting killed in the process, or living with inconvenience afterward, in order to have a longer life.’”

David is 52: the same age as me. He’s at a prime age for a stem-cell transplant and will be for some time. Yet, the older he gets, the worse the odds become. His disease is evidently more aggressive than mine, but not so aggressive as to lead his doctor to stare him in the eye and say, “For God's sake, man, go for the transplant, or you won’t be alive next year.” It’s something of a roll of the dice, and no one can advise him definitively on what decision to make.

Go for the transplant now... wait a few years and see how the science develops... reject the whole idea because of the nasty things runaway graft-versus-host disease (GVH) could do – it’s not a simple either-or choice, but rather a whole spectrum of options.

What it comes down to, when all the complex genetic calculations are completed, and the national donor registry has been searched with a fine-toothed comb, truly is a roll of the dice. And the stakes could not be higher.

You have my sympathy, David – and in a very personal way. I could very well be sitting where you are, at some point in the future.

February 11, 2009 - Time: On My Side?

Today’s my PET/CT scan. It’s routine, but – as always – there’s low-level anxiety as I prepare to await the results.

At Jersey Shore University Medical Center, the PET/CT machine sits on a trailer pulled up to a sort of loading dock at the hospital. It’s here a few days a week, and at other hospitals the rest of the time. (I think I heard a tech say this one migrates between here and Massachusetts.) That’s how expensive these machines are – nobody can afford to have them sit unused for any length of time, so they take them on the road. Deals on wheels, for the hospital bean-counters.

I think it’s a pretty ingenious solution, actually. You know, bring the mountain to Mohammed, that sort of thing.

My visit is utterly unremarkable. I’ve had 3 or 4 PET scans in the past, so I know what to expect. First, I get jabbed in the fingertip to have my blood sugar tested (no diabetic worries, the tech tells me, peering into her little handheld device: my blood sugar is 94, which she says is excellent). They have to do the blood sugar test because the PET scan centers around an injection of a radioactive glucose solution, which – the theory goes – gets sucked up by any ravenous, fast-growing cancer cells, which are subsequently revealed to the scanner’s inquisitive electronic eye. (It wouldn’t be a good idea to send sugar solution racing through the bloodstream of a diabetic, which is why they do the precautionary test first.)

Next is the injection itself, which is no big deal: an IV line inserted for a few minutes, to receive the injection from a syringe enclosed in a shiny, lead-lined cylinder (this, to protect the technician from frequent exposure; we patients – who are getting the radioactive slurry injected right into our bodies – are on our own).

After that, I sit quietly in a chair for 45 minutes or so, while the stuff makes its way through my body. Then, it’s time to lie down on the narrow, sliding table whose motorized works will trundle me in and out of the donut-hole of the scanner.

The hardest thing is lying on my back absolutely still for a half-hour or so, with my arms extended over my head. It’s not the most comfortable pose to hold, despite the best efforts of the PET-scan techs to position me just right. (Fortunately, I have no claustrophobia problems, which could be an issue for some people as they lie inside the scanner, looking up at the top edge of the donut-hole just a few inches in front of their nose.)

On other visits, they’ve had relaxing, new-agey mood music playing through the unit’s PA system. This time, they’ve got the thing dialed to some classic-rock radio station, complete with commercials – not the most optimal programming for getting through the long minutes of lying still. I find the best way to get through this sort of experience is by seeking to go somewhere mentally far away, which soft instrumental music helps me do. No help from the rock-music deejays, on that account.

One of the songs that comes on is the Rolling Stones’ “Time Is On My Side.” “Time, time, time is on my side, yes it is," croons ol’ Mick.

Is it, I wonder? Am I continuing to stay ahead of the curve, on this cancer thing? Or, will this scan reveal something new and disturbing?

No way of knowing, at the moment. “So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today.” (Matthew 6:34)

Gender, Jobs, Recession... and bad math

Usually the Toronto Star has pretty decent writing, but this was one of the poorest pieces I've seen in a while. There are some good points made, but the headline ("In shrinking workforce, women may surpass men") is misleading, and the writing jumps around without leading to any reasonable conclusion.

Perhaps this is nitpicky, but there is some sloppy math here. The article claims "there's a possibility women will soon outnumber men in the job force." The numbers quoted in the same article don't really bear that out, unless you define "soon" as "probably never".

According to StatsCan, there were 7,295,900 men with full-time jobs in January 2005 and 6,297,400 women working full-time.

By January 2008, that number had dropped to 7,186,800 for men and to 5,339,200 for women. And as of last month, it fell further, to 7,095,000 full-time jobs for men and slightly for women, to 5,339,000 full-time positions.

So the trend shows in the longer term women losing significantly more full-time jobs than men (from 2005-2009, men lost 200,000 while women lost 958,400 jobs, or put another way men lost 2.7% of their full-time jobs while women lost 15.2%). From 2008-2009, men lost 91,800 jobs and women lost only 200. Now there are 1,756,000 more men than women employed full-time. If this trend were to continue, exactly as is, it would take over 19 years for the number of men and women employed full time to equalize. I don't know about you, but I don't consider 19 years as "soon". In addition, most stimulus money is targeted to male-dominated industries, so if the stimulus package has any effect, traditionally masculine industries will see a boost, slowing or reversing this trend.

If they had included part-time work as well, maybe the conclusion would be justified (women's part-time job participation is about three times that of men). Here's the most recent Statcan numbers.

If it were true that women were surpassing men in the full-time paid workforce, why is this a problem? Aren't we supposed to be living in the land of equality?

One reason this is indeed a problem is that women still make less money than men, partly because pink-collar jobs typically offer lower pay and fewer benefits. Women-headed households are on average much poorer, even when there are two parents.

Economists also point out that men have lost high-paying jobs with health care and pensions but women are supporting families with jobs that are not necessarily as good.

The article also points out:

This trend can also mean a shift in family dynamics. "If more men find themselves home, that has important implications for the way families operate," said Julie McCarthy, assistant professor at Rotman School of Management. "It's not a bad thing – most men are amazing parents but traditionally, it's not their primary role. Perhaps this trend will facilitate that."

Why shouldn't men stay home and watch the kids half the time? Many men I know would love to have more time with their kids. And most kids would love to have their fathers around more.

Wouldn't it be nice if mommy's salary was enough to support the family while daddy took care of the cooking, cleaning and kids. Or perhaps, his EI benefits could help the family pay the bills (except that like Diane Finley said, "We do not want to make it lucrative for them to stay home and get paid for it, not when we have significant skills shortages in many parts of the country." This government wanted to make it easier for women to stay at home, but I guess the same doesn't apply to men.) Or perhaps a decent subsidized daycare system could help out when both mommy and daddy need their crappy minimum wage jobs, or when mommy is single.

Then I don't think we would worry so much about equal job participation rate among men and women.

February 7, 2009 - Dumbth

Yesterday I slit open an envelope mailed to me by Care Allies (formerly Intracorp), the agency that pre-approves medical tests for my insurer, Highmark Blue Cross-Blue Shield. I guessed what it was before I opened it: a routine pre-approval for the PET/CT scan I’m having this coming Wednesday.

I usually take only the briefest of glances at these letters and put them aside. As long as I see the blessed words, “we have determined that the requested services are medically necessary,” I figure I have nothing to worry about.

This time, though, I saw something in the description of the test that concerned me. The letter reads:

“APPR: PET IMAGE W/CT, SKULL-TH 78815”

“They’ve made a mistake,” I thought to myself. “Care Allies has approved me for a CT scan of the head – not the scan of the neck, chest, abdomen and pelvis I typically have. This could be trouble, if they’ve approved me for the wrong procedure.”

I went right off and dug up the paper script Dr. Lerner had given me. That made me even more concerned, because I didn’t see anything there about neck, chest, abdomen and pelvis. The handwritten script reads:

“JSUMC, PET/CT Scan, DX: Lymphoma for restaging.”

“JSUMC,” I know, means “Jersey Shore University Medical Center.” “DX” means “diagnosis.” But it sure looked to me like Dr. Lerner had left off the list of body parts that are essential to a CT scan prescription. (Previously, I’d had problems with a Care Allies CT scan pre-certification that mentioned some body parts, but omitted the others.)

I called Dr. Lerner’s office and was put through first to someone in the billing department, then to one of the nurses. She said she’d do a little checking, and called me back a few minutes later. There’s nothing to worry about, she assured me. Everything was submitted correctly. Because this is a PET/CT scan and not just a CT scan, it’s automatically a scan of the whole body, so individual sections of the body don’t need to be specified.

“Then why does the letter I received from Care Allies mention the skull?” I asked.

“The ‘TH’ probably stands for ‘thorax,’" she replied. "It’s a PET/CT scan, skull-to-thorax.”

Mystery solved. But why, I’m led to wonder, can’t the people at Care Allies who compose these letters to patients avoid using arcane jargon and abbreviations? It seems to defeat the purpose of such a letter, which is communicating with non-medical professionals. I’m not sure, actually, that even for medical professionals “TH” would scream out, “thorax.” Clearly, this letter serves the needs of the insurance bureaucrats rather than the patients.

The late comedian Steve Allen once wrote a book called Dumbth, in which he catalogues a whole lot of misuses of the English language that are, for lack of a better word, just dumb. Its title is a word of Allen’s own invention, that describes writers’ thick-headed refusal to recognize that words they’re using just aren’t communicating. His definition:

Dumbth (pron. dumth) adj: a tendency toward muddleheadedness, or willful stupidity appearing in all segments of American life

Thank you, Care Allies, for thoughtfully seeking to communicate the details of the medical procedure for which you’ve pre-approved me. I’m afraid I have to nominate you, though, for the Dumbth Award, for your clumsy way of communicating that makes life needlessly difficult for patients like me.

China Town...

The Art of Don Simon

Don Simon, The Herd 2
This is from a series called Unnaturalism, which he describes:

Throughout history, particularly since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, mankind has been less than kind to our cohabitants on the planet. We build, produce, and consume with little or no regard to the impact it has on the environment. It is the nature of nature to adapt and evolve in order to survive, and we are forcing other species to deal with compromised, damaged, or destroyed ecosystems.

This series of triptychs depicts scenes resulting from our tragic indifference. They are rendered in a beautiful and natural way, highlighting the idea that we find this acceptable. We are numb to the damage -- and so, the unnatural becomes natural to us. This may be the saddest commentary of all.

Strangely beautiful and peaceful. View more of his art or watch a video

February 1, 2009 - Authority

My, but I’ve been busy. With my seasonal teaching gig at New Brunswick Theological Seminary still under way, I’m now working three jobs. Besides serving as pastor of the church, I’m also working part-time as Stated Clerk of the Presbytery of Monmouth (a Presbytery is a regional governing body in the Presbyterian Church, sort of like a diocese in the Roman Catholic Church). A Stated Clerk is like corporate secretary, archivist and parliamentarian rolled into one. In early January, there are all kinds of end-of-the-year reports to complete, and as a newbie Clerk, I’m learning how to do them for the first time. Bottom line is, I’ve scarcely been able to think about a blog entry, let alone write one. Until this afternoon.

Today in worship, I preached about authority. My text was Mark 1:22, “They were astounded at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes.”

During the second service, I learned about one of the pitfalls that go along with authority – at least, authority of the pastoral kind. Robin, our church’s associate pastor, had called in sick today, so I was up there all by myself, except for one of the junior-high youth who did a fine job reading the Old Testament Lesson. When it came time for the New Testament Lesson, I guess my mind was wandering, because I skipped it. Just blew it off. There was a long silence, as I just sat there. I was sure Sara, our organist – filling in for our absent choir director today – had lost her place in the service. Finally, she just moved on, launching into the choir anthem, while I continued to sit there, blissfully unaware of my blunder. When I arose to give my sermon after the anthem, it was – still unbeknownst to me – sans New Testament lesson.

The curious thing about it is – nobody told me about it. Not, that is, until I was shaking hands at the church door much later, when about the twentieth person in line gently asked, “Did you mean to skip the New Testament lesson?” Most of them knew all along that I’d goofed, but nobody felt bold enough to correct me on it.

Pastoral authority is a funny thing. When you stand up there and speak for God Sunday after Sunday, sometimes folks get a mite confused. They can be hesitant to point out errors they wouldn’t think twice about correcting, had a lesser mortal committed them.

The icing on the cake came after I walked back up the aisle, and was making ready to leave the Sanctuary by the exit nearest the church office. Little Sara, the three-year-old granddaughter of our organist, was standing there. When she saw me, she gave me a wave, then a big grin that would light up the darkest of days. “Hi, God!” said she.

I’ve been addressed as “God” before, by kids her age. “Jesus,” too, on occasion. (Never “Holy Spirit,” but I suppose the third person of the Trinity is a harder concept to grasp.) This just goes with the territory of ministry. It’s an understandable error for little minds to make, as they try to puzzle out what church is all about. Their parents tell them they’re going to “God’s house,” and after looking at the same guy standing up front in that funny-looking costume week after week, they make the logical connection.

I corrected her, of course. Her grandfather, who was standing nearby, thought it uproariously funny. The story was already making the rounds at the Communion Breakfast in our fellowship hall, by the time I made it over there a few minutes later.

“Doctors playing God” is a stereotype in the medical world. There’s even a corny old joke about that. A famous surgeon dies and goes to heaven, but finds quite a crowd of fellow new residents lined up in front of St. Peter’s imposing desk. The minutes tick by. The line’s moving very slowly indeed. The doctor, who’s been something of a V.I.P. in his earthly life, is starting to get impatient.

Finally, a man with a long, white beard, clad in a lab coat with a stethoscope around his neck, goes barreling up to the desk, passing right by the long line of applicants. Giving St.Peter only the briefest of nods, he strides right through the pearly gates.

The distinguished physician has had enough. He walks up to St. Peter and says, “I’d like to lodge a complaint. Some of us are doctors, too, and we’ve been waiting a very long time.”

“You don’t understand,” replies St. Pete. “That wasn’t a doctor. That was God playing doctor!”

(Sorry, I couldn’t resist.)

I imagine most docs hate that line about playing God. I figure most of it comes not from the doctors, though, but from the patients. All of us wish, in our heart of hearts, our medical caregivers had godlike qualities of omniscience, omnipotence and benevolence.

They don’t, of course. They’re only human. It’s a good thing for us patients to pay attention to what our medical caregivers are doing, and to ask questions when it appears something important has been omitted. Authority doesn’t carry with it infallibility.

We’re partners in this healing thing, after all.