Dazzling Mastery: Departures, Crosby Stills, Coaches, Gurus and Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

The line from the Crosby, Stills etc song "Teach Your Children Well,"  which reversed the chorus into "Teach Your Parents Well," struck me, in the 60's as fatuous, but now I can see it.

Watching a Japanese movie, Departures,  about a cello player who learns a new profession, a sort of ceremonial body preparer for an undertaker, my older son remarked, "That's so Japanese: It's all about mastery and becoming a virtuoso."

This connected with something I had heard on NPR about how the Japanese teach children: The teacher typically has the student who could not solve the problem put his work on the blackboard at the front of the classroom, not to humiliate the child but to instruct everyone--this is where you can go wrong here. Let's learn from this. There is no humiliation in failing, while you strive to learn and master something. Learning is expected to be a struggle, and defeat and getting it wrong part of the process. The real thrill of become a master is the struggle past your own failures.

My brother, who was head of a department in a medical school, observed the best doctors he trained were often athletes, not the students who had never got less than an "A" from kindergarten on. "The athlete knows how to accept getting it wrong, having the flag thrown at him, and he is not demoralized by this. He is coach able. Next time, he'll get it right. So he actually grows and comes out way ahead of the gunners, the strivers who are all about never making a mistake."

Watching my younger son, as a nine year old, devour an opponent in a wrestling tournament, my older son, two years his senior, shook his head and said, without lament, just as a matter of observation: "He is, right now, better at something than I will ever be at anything."

I could see what he meant: His brother was throwing one perfectly executed move after another at his opponent, and it was a clinic in technique and timing. His brother was totally in control of the match, supremely competent and it brought smiles to his coaches, who would nudge by standers after each spectacular move, and say, "I thought him that."

Of course, my older son was wrong. He came to master kayaking. He was coached by a woman who was an Olympian, daily, patiently, over years. And for one brief, shining moment, found himself in third place after the initial runs at the slalom course for the Olympic trials, at age 17. He looked around the holding pool at the Olympians he was trying to displace and he saw them, all of them 10 years older than he,  looking at him, wondering who the hell this kid was. I wanted to tell him, "I think you are probably as good now as your brother was then." But he was too far away, and he was in his own zone, thinking about the upcoming run. He did not make the Olympic team, but he did prove his virtuosity that day.

Later, he struggled to become a virtuoso as a musician, but he ran up against the limits of his own talents, or possibly against his own proclivity to underestimate himself.  He said, "When I came to NYU, I thought I was a real stud with the saxophone. I came out of high school thinking, 'Move over Coltrane, here I come.' But now, after 6 weeks at NYU, I realize, if I practice really hard, eight hours a day, I might just become average." 

New York University brings talented musicians and actors from all over the country and throws them together. It is a humbling experience for most.

Watching their progress, as these two brothers grew, I learned something about the most valuable part of talent for most mere mortals. There are some people whose genes simply set them apart and above everyone else, and they are often identifiable from an early age. But for 99.5% of everyone else, virtuosity is a halting, humbling process:Two steps forward, one back.

The younger brother, such a star at age 9,moved up in levels of competition, stage by stage, and at each stage, he suffered defeats, set backs, frustration, but he persisted. As a high school sophomore, his wrestling technique was impeccable but he simply did not have the power, the sheer muscle to ever win a major tournament. Still, he sought out ever higher levels of coaching, until he found a guru of national quality.

 Finally, as a high school senior, he grew into his body, put on muscle and at 5'10" he was a monster of a 140 pounder. He won every tournament his senior year, upsetting all the boys who had been winners all their lives, but had never had to reassess themselves, to think anew. Finally, in the national prep tournament, he used a move he had learned from his guru to beat a wrestler from Blair Academy--a powerhouse program whose wrestlers were never beaten and almost never even behind in their matches. He actually pinned his man. 

But, in the championship match against the Pennsylvania state champion, he lost, by a point, after having his man on his back.  There was outrage in the field house. Calls of "Hometown justice!" rang out--the tournament was held in Pennsylvania. The refs had stopped the match with the Pennsylvanian on his back because the refs ruled he was in danger of being injured. 

But the younger brother shrugged it off. "Who would have predicted I'd place 2nd in this tournament?  I'd never placed higher than 8th in the last 3 years."  This is not a person who gets "down on himself," who gets in his own way.

Watching these two boys, I learned from all this.  As a little leaguer, I had been a mediocre baseball player. I was intimidated by the best fast balls and fell away from curve balls. But, returning to the game as an adult, I took the lessons I learned from my sons.  I went to the batting cages and dialed up the speed to 85 miles an hour, faster than any I ever saw in games in my adult league. At first, total ineptitude, but gradually, after much failure, I learned how to catch up to the fast ball.

For curves, I found a master to teach me. He was unwilling, at first. "I don't teach adults," he said. 

"Why not?"

"They just won't learn. They won't change. They won't take my advice."

"Just try me."

He taught me to hit the curve, and in the first game after my lessons, the pitcher threw me a curve. By now, pitchers were throwing me anything but a fast ball. I hit that first curve I saw into right field. 

Standing on first base, I thought, my children have taught me well.

And I thought about the value of other people. I went to public schools, and I learned somehow, to distrust my teachers. Rightly or wrongly,  I thought most of them were only a page ahead of me in the textbook.

But later, in college, I could see the professors knew their fields well. You could ask them a question and not get that deer in the headlights look of panic. They smiled, and launched into an answer which told you they not only knew the answer to that question but they could open a whole world of knowing they had only hinted at in their lecture. Graduate school, was the same. I was being taught by masters, by virtuoso's who could bring me to a higher level.

I had seen the value of the virtuoso, in the careers of my sons--the wrestling guru who taught my second son, and the former Olympians who taught my older son. 

There is no greater gift another human being can give than what he can teach you. No money, no social status, no material worth can approach the power of being able to transform one human being. 

The Karate Kid, the movie about a karate master who teaches a boy mastery is a Hollywood version of this idea. It has the neat trick of revealing the master's strategy only slowly, with the reveal held back until the moment of appreciation, but it is still a worthy subject, almost never done in movies. There are plenty of movies about coaches giving inspirational speeches, but almost none about real mastery. This is understandable: What Hollywood screenwriter really knows anything about mastery in other areas, beyond writing scripts?

But mastery is out there, and it is the great hope for humankind. 
When a Nobel laureate in medicine is asked how he had the imagination to think of the path toward his discovery, toward his breakthrough, he typically says some version of, "I stood on the shoulders of giants." 
That is the most important thing which distinguishes the species homo sapiens. It is the thing on which all progress depends. 

Discovering Ray Charles and Michael Jackson

One of the pleasures of youth is how exciting everything is when it's new. 
Then you start to analyze it, tease it apart, learn how to do it and the magic dissipates, but you have learned something and that is pretty cool, and it doesn't wreck what you've learned, but it changes where you get the pleasure from.

When I was six or seven, I learned how to catch a football, how to fake while running with the football, and I learned how to swim, and how to swim faster to compete, and I learned wrestling, which is much more technique than strength. And learning those things never wrecked them for me, but simply made them more interesting. Much later, I learned how to hit a baseball and how to track down a fly ball, but those things could only be taught to a point.

I tried to learn French, but never did, not much. In retrospect, I think a lot had to do with the way it was taught. I did way better and learned much more with some teachers than with others.

And I learned all sorts of techniques in my chosen profession, and that was really fun, because the people who taught me were very good teachers and because I was old enough to appreciate what a debt I owed them for taking the time to teach me something they could have done in a third the time, but they took the time to teach me.

But now, in my dotage, things have gotten  to be repetitive. My father used to say, you're not good at anything until you've done it so many times, it's a little boring. The famous practicing something 10,000 times or 10,000 hours. 
 I'm still learning baseball, but a what you can learn about baseball is limited by your reflexes, your eyesight and the condition of your joints.

So, I'm trying to learn to play the piano.
It is not exactly agonizing, but it is not easy. There are a lot of moving parts: where the notes are, which fingers to hit them with, triads, chords, octaves.  It's like one of those computer games, where you are flying the plane and all sorts of stuff is coming at you, all  at once.
It's way more complicated than learning typing, which you do by simple repetition in a month or two and after a while you cannot even write down where the keys on the board are--your fingers find them by themselves. My fingers will never find the piano keys by themselves. 

One problem with playing piano is there are seven notes and only five fingers on one hand. You'd think they could have worked that one out, but for some magical reason, you need seven different notes. Certain notes just don't sound right together, but others sound great together. Explain that.

Which brings me to Ray Charles. He does all this stuff, using two hands, one hand doing something different from the other,  and he sings at the same time and as much as I have loved his stuff , now I love it and am amazed anyone can hit the keys, sing the notes and inject phrasing and emotion into it all at the same time. Anything he does sounds better than almost anyone else--just listen to him play Fur Elise. It just comes out of nowhere, and then he slides into "I Got a Woman." 

 My piano teacher tells me Ray Charles  learned it the same way I am learning it, painfully, slowly, step by step. My piano teacher says someone taught Ray Charles to play piano,  but I do not believe a word of that. He just came out of the womb doing this. I am suffering through each step and will never get close. But that thought doesn't depress me; on the contrary, it excites me to think a person whose genetic code is 99% like that a chimpanzee, just like mine, can use that remaining 1% to do astonishing things no chimpanzee and certainly not I, can ever do.

And then there is Michael Jackson. Never could understand what all the excitement was about with Michael Jackson. Still don't get why my musician son thinks so highly of his music.  But his dancing.  Just try doing what he does. And he can sing as he's doing it.  I watched the Youtube of the first time he did the moon walk steps singing "Billie Jean," and had to pick myself up off the floor. I knew it was coming. The Youtube people tell you it's coming, but he holds off until he's into the last eighth of the song and then, after a bunch of other pretty astonishing moves, he just does it. You can hear the audience gasp, if you can hear the sound over your own gasp. And then you are waiting for him to do it again, and he does it again, just before the end, as if to say: "I can blow you away any time I want. But I only want to just right now." 

So even at my advanced old age, with my involuting brain and less than prime body, I can still experience something new. I can still be wonder struck.

All it took were piano lessons, Youtube and Ray Charles and Michael Jackson. 
What a wondrous world we live in.

Lives Lived Large and Small

Most of us go through life unconscious of the choices we make steering down the roads we take. We do not think, "I have this particular gift or talent and I will use this to try to do that in life."  We are, we realize, not remarkably brilliant, not the best quarterback in the nation or the smartest student. We do the best we can, apply for positions which seem in reach and hope to make the best of what we've been dealt.

The sheriff pictured above, laughing at his trial for having lynched a Negro freedom rider knew, at some point, the best he could do in life was not college or a career in medicine or engineering. He just hoped to be a good ol' boy, with friends who liked him and would help him defend the life they had known, keeping the colored in their place and the privileges for white boys in place. He would never lead a civil rights march to make life better for an underclass or make society more just. 

Mitch McConnell knows he's got the best job he could ever have hoped for as a U.S. Senator. And if his career does nothing more than help his backward state hold on to its small mindedness, well that's the best he could have dreamed for his life's work.

The man on top, Alexandre Yersin, was Swiss, German speaking but with enough French to be able to go to Paris, where he found his way to a lab run by a short man who was already famous, named Louis Pasteur. Yersin, too, did not have great expectations.  Like the other two men, he did not think himself particularly gifted, brilliant or destined. He just worked on one problem at a time in the laboratories at the Pasteur Institute. He helped develop a vaccine against tuberculosis, and slowly, he did well enough that Pasteur offered him a position as a research associate.

But Yersin said, at a crossroads in his life, I do not think this is enough, to simply do what is expected of me and to be satisfied with the conventional rewards.

So he got on a boat, as ship's doctor, and sailed for Indochina, where he explored the rivers, heard the roar of tigers at night and thrilled to the great adventure life could hold for a man of ordinary intelligence but more than ordinary character.  He set up a clinic in Indochina and was happy to explore, to dabble in cultivation of rubber plants and to learn about a new people, the people who would one day be called Vietnamese.

When the telegram came, in 1898, from Pasteur informing Yersin of an outbreak of plague in Hong Kong, Yersin did not have to be told to hop a ship to that British colony. He knew this was a chance to apply modern science, the science Pasteur had taught him to solving the mystery of the Black Death, which had once killed 25% of all Europeans.  Yersin did not speak English, was ignored by the arrogant British military colonial governors of Hong Kong, who had invited a Japanese scientist to Hong Kong to solve the mystery.  The Japanese man was given a hospital and full cooperation of the British authorities, while Yersin worked in a humble grass hut and methodically discovered, identified and raised an antiserum to the plague bacillus. The Japanese man got it wrong, identified the wrong bug as the culprit and sailed home. Yersin went back to Indochina, where he saved lives with the anitserum he had developed--this was the days before antibiotics--when plague hit Indochina. He reported his findings in the medical literature, naming the bacteria, Pasturella pestis, after his mentor, but Pasteur would have none of it and renamed it Yersinia pestis. 

Yersin died forty years later, as the Japanese rolled through Indochina, having led a life neither he, nor his family, nor his childhood friends, nor even his colleagues at the Pasteur institute could ever have imagined. 

It was a life which happened because he was not satisfied to accept a life of limited possibilities even though he may have looked at himself and said, "I'm just an ordinary man."

Mitch McConnell and the laughing sheriff could never have a life like that, not because they have ordinary talents and intelligence, but because they have ordinary character. They can never push beyond what their friends, family and colleagues imagine for them.  They squander the possibility of making a difference in life. They desperately cling on to the small lives with a small mindedness, but worse, with mean hearts incapable of risking for the sake of making a difference in the lives of others in the direction of helping people who cannot help themselves.

I suppose this is nothing more than a modern day Christmas Carol, writ large--about men whose own lives were diminished by a meanness of spirit, when they could have been much more, could have used their lives to help rather than harm others.

Not that Mitch McConnell or the laughing sheriff would ever see it that way. 

Justice Stevens: The Indispensable Man

Graveyards, DeGaulle observed, are filled with indispensable men. The same may be said of those places where ex-Supreme Court justices go, those who saw truth and justice perverted, then retired in disgust.

The Phantom has just taken the time to read  Heller vs District of Columbia, the gun law case which consummated the NRA's thirty year quest to define a Constitutional right for individual, private gun ownership.

The prevailing opinion, 28 pages of obfuscation, dissembling, intellectual masturbation written by Justice Antonin Scalia is thoroughly demolished by Justice John Paul Stevens in a methodical, withering, devastating dissent. 

The Phantom wondered how Justice Scalia could have had the temerity to actually appear in court having been so thoroughly exposed by Justice Stevens.  But then, on reflection it occurred to the Phantom Justice Scalia cannot be embarrassed.  He is concerned here only with the outcome, and he is in the majority with those other borderline personalities:  Justices Thomas, Alito, Roberts and Kennedy. 

The wonder is that Justice Scalia felt it necessary to even try to construct even the transparently bogus rationalization he attempted.  He invokes clauses, analyses of grammar,semantics,  imputations and disputation of history--the real wonder is he did not invoke the Holy Spirit as his source of enlightenment.  Mr. Scalia is very heavy on invoking the rights of "the people" but he is quick to dispel any notions of who he regards as real "people:" felons and other undesirables (implied perhaps, homosexuals, homo sapiens of a liberal persuasion, atheists, free love advocates) need not apply. Licenses to carry guns may be denied some of the people, just not those upright citizens like Aryan nation adherents, off the grid enthusiasts, sportsmen, citizens who live in fear of home invasions, homicidal maniacs are protected as "the people" in the 2nd amendment. 

One wonders why he simply did not say, "I just asked myself--What would Jesus do?" and be done with it.

Not that it mattered for the practical outcome--the NRA got its victory and now we really will have to pry their guns from the cold dead fingers of those who worship at the alter of Sig Sauer, Smith and Wesson and Glock.  But for those sentient beings who still breathe the polluted air, corrupted by the perversions and depredations exhaled by Justices Scalia/Thomas/Roberts/Alito/Kennedy, there is the fresh, oxygenated current which rafts across the country from the eloquent and passionate opinion from
Justice Stevens. It should be taught in every school across the fruited plains as an example of clarity of thought, precision in language and moral rectitude.

Saving Medicare From the Inside Out

A suit armed with a MBA showed up one day at the medical clinic the Phantom ran at a large New England Hospital,  and announced he was shutting down the clinic. It turned out when you looked at the overhead--the rent on on the space, its exam rooms, the salaries of the nurses and doctors, the maintenance of the facility, the clinic was in the red. 
"Oh?" the Phantom replied. "Have you talked to the heads of the in-patient services?"

Never ask a question unless you know the answer in these circumstances--since the Phantom was head of one of the two in-patient services, he knew the MBA had not spoken with the heads of those services. The in-patient services, i.e. the wards where patients admitted to the hospital were admitted, depended on three sources for admissions: The Emergency Room, the private practice doctors and the out patient Medical Clinic. By far, the biggest number of admissions came from the Medical Clinic.
Shut down the Medical Clinic and you've got empty beds on the wards and a lot of nurses and doctors and janitors with nothing to do. And then you'll see some real red ink on the system's ledgers.

"Have you spoken with the head of Radiology?  How about the clinical laboratory? Or the heads of the subspecialty clinics?"

No, the MBA had to admit. He he simply looked at the columns for the Medical Clinic expenses and receipts. 

"Maybe you ought to talk with those people, or maybe with your boss before you make a mistake which knocks the bottom out from under the monument here," the Phantom said, "And before you lose your job because you didn't understand what 'downstream' revenues mean. Ask radiology how many dollars flows to them from Medical Clinic. You shut Medical Clinic down and you'll see some hurt in a lot of other departments."

That MBA never showed up again, and the Medical Clinic remained open. 

Even now, in large organizations which employ thousands of doctors, MBA's who have no real understanding of value, inter dependency, downstream effects are wrecking havoc on these for-profit companies, on not-for-profit organizations, on "voluntary" (not for profit) hospitals,  which own physician practices.  These MBA's are the fools who rush in, who simply do not know what they do not know.

At university hospitals, where a hierarchy of physicians manage medical care and services, the physicians in charge use the MBA's to solve problems MBA's are better at solving--like getting the best price on a new MRI machine, or getting Blue Cross to understand why it would actually save money all around if a patient spent an extra day in the hospital after his coronary bypass.  

When you look at where money is wasted across vast systems, there are things which are obvious to any doctor in the trenches, which have escaped notice from "health planners,"  MBA's, "managers" and a host of government people who simply do not understand the system from the inside.

So now we have "indicators" of "high quality" in medical care, which include patient satisfaction surveys and readmission to hospital rates.

If  President Obama sent out a team of "spies" to hang out in hospitals and doctors' offices they would see areas where real money could be saved. They would have to wear scrubs, and sit around at midnight in ER's, on the wards, in the operating room suite coffee rooms, or at the bars across the street from the hospital, where doctors are tired enough, loose enough to really tell the truth.

It was disquieting to read about Mr. Obama's reaction to a New Yorker article by Atul Gawande in which Dr. Gawande reported his conversations with doctors who thought their colleagues were doing coronary arteriograms and other procedures for the money and not because patients really needed them.  it was disquieting because it revealed Mr. Obama does not know how to get untainted information--and Dr. Gawande's article did not fall into that category, despite his best intentions. Dr. Gawande was more ingenuous than either he or the President knew.  

Exceptional cases do not make for good policy or for good law. Dr. Gawande did not understand the system he was writing about. Best intentions, poor results.

Here is some of what you would hear, if you sent the right people to ask the right questions: 
1. There are procedures and expenses which are substantially overpaid because you do not need to be a doctor to do them but you are paying for a doctor.  These procedures could be learned by technicians in 6-18 months and done at a small fraction of the cost:  colonoscopy (current price $2500, could be done for $150), endoscopy ($1500 could be $100) , virtually all dermatology biopsies, excisions($500 could be $25) and a load of other procedures.  
2. Much of what is called quality, even in orthopedics, is simply checklist stuff and could be done for every patient by people with high school educations who are strictly supervised.  
3. There are things which really do require a high level of cerebral function and which draw on a lot of stuff you need to have gone to medical school for and these should be paid well--reading MRIs and CT scans and plain Chest Xrays, most of radiology falls into this category. The reading fees ought to be high (say $200) , but the fees for the MRIs and CT scans could be a tenth of what is charged ($200 instead of $2000). There is no reason the radiology department should pay off its MRI in 6 months or should make ten times what any other department makes.  Radiology departments have a monopoly in each hospital--there is no competition. But radiology is one of those costs which could be out sourced and real competition for the readings could occur. A CT done in Silver Spring, Maryland can be and today is read in India, by an American trained radiologist, and the report sent by email to the ER back in Maryland, every bit as fast as the doctor reading that scan from his home in Silver Spring can do it. 
 If you had no pressure applied on you as a health czar, you could convert dermatology into a specialty done by physicians assistants and nurse practitioners and you could lower radiology fees by 2/3. This would mean putting radiologist's on straight salaries and taking control of their equipment. 
4. You could improve quality of care enormously by simply appointing and paying a physician in each specialty to systematically review charts on a daily basis to be sure patients were not simply "processed" as if they were profit centers, but actually had their needs met. You would, for example, look at the primary care doctor who saw a patient with four problems, solved none of them but farmed out every problem--"turfed"-- each to a different specialist for consultation. You could stop paying primary care doctors for being traffic cops and start paying them to actually render meaningful, high quality care.

 5. You could set up a regular  conference to review of each case admitted to the hospital,  to be sure each patient who was admitted really needed to be admitted and to be sure what happened to each patient, while in the hospital was efficient and proper. This is the system teaching hospitals once had. It kept every doctor looking over his or her shoulder and it meant maximal efficiency because everyone knew someone was watching.

6. You would remove all "vanity medicine" from community and university hospitals and force the vanity doctors to set up their own hospitals as they have in England. Facelifts and cosmetic procedures are done in private hospitals, separated physically and financially from "real" hospitals for sick patients.  Plastic surgeons doing reconstructive surgery would be in the "real" hospitals, getting well paid, but the high thread count plastic surgeons doing cosmetic surgery would have to play that game on their own, outside the system we all pay for.

7. You would spend much more money on paying doctors who know what good is, to oversee the work of other doctors, and you would cut the non physician non surgeons out of the picture of quality control.  

8.  Employment of business people in health care organizations, would be limited and their function would be under the control of doctors rather than placing the money people in control.

In short, you would let the pilots tell you how to organize your air traffic control system, the engineers tell you how to build bridges and you'd protect doctors from people who have other agendas--making money, running for office, the "managers" who have been raping the system for their own career advancement.

9. You would place in charge people whose operating first principle is "Put the Patient First," and you would make them answerable to the money people, but not subservient to the money people.

10. You would, by doing all this, transform our medical system from one which has been the best in the world for 1% of our population but way behind England, Germany, Italy and a host of other countries for the 99% of citizens. And you would cut the cost of our system to a third of what it costs now.

Never happen.
But it's nice to dream.

When the Losers Write History

You really have to admire the Republican Party of the United States.  When they win an election, as they did in 2010, they were cocksure they knew exactly why, and what that election meant and they laughed off any attempt to say it was anything other than an embrace of Tea Party, shrink the government, throw out the tax and spend Democrats.

When they lose an election, well, it wasn't the message; it was the messenger and Romney was simply a poor candidate; it was simply a rejection of that one man, not of the Republican Party or of the idea that we don't really need government. And in fact, the election wasn't really a loss, just a draw because, after all, we kept the House and nothing (much) changed in the Senate.

There is none of that glum, we took a shellacking stuff. Republicans are so ever sure of themselves, there's barely a twitch of remorse, never a question of maybe we ought to reconsider ourselves, look at what we are saying, think again.

To be Republican is to be sure, to know right from wrong, to love your gun and your beer and to speak with a vaguely Western accent, in a deep growl while you drive your pick up truck home, park it  in the driveway and snatch up a beer and go out and work on the BMW, with your AR-15 by your side, just in case any black helicopter should fly over.

Squawk Box and Other Inanities

This morning, running on my treadmill, my channel surfing landed me on the Squawkbox. Becky Quick prefaced a comment with, "I was reading Paul Krugman..."
and Joe Kernen, her co host, expostulated, "OH,WHY would you ever do that? It's like reading Karl Marx."
Ms. Quick persisted, trying to get to the point she was making, but Mr. Kernen would not allow this. He started flapping his hands near his ears, and bleating, "Blah, blah, blah...I don't want to hear it."
Like some child in a cafeteria at school.
And this man is paid big bucks to be on national T.V.
Of course, I do not have to watch, and will not again, but does this not say it all...about what is wrong with our inability to be "bipartisan."
We lived in walled communities, with people who think like us, because we refuse to even listen to another point of view. This man Kernen, has a brain walled off, of his own volition. He has no hope, by choice, of ever getting any smarter.
And there is nothing wrong with this?
In fact, we are paid big bucks to behave in this infantile way.
This man, Mr. Kernen was a stockbroker before he got on T.V. He got a masters in microbiology at MIT, which apparently did not much inform him about the process by which the human mind might arrive at new insights and new knowledge, which in almost every line of human inquiry requires entertaining alternative hypotheses and considering "truths" we may not want to believe.
Apparently, Mr. Kernen has a history with Mr. Krugman, but really. Flapping your hands near your ears, in front of how many million viewers?
Such is the anti intellectualism of every day American life as manifest on CNBC.
Really, do we not even care who we place before the American public?
If I tuned into a British TV program, would I find people as low brow as Mr. Kernen?
Presumably, Britain has as wide a range of intellect as we have in America, but the face of the nation is what we see on TV, and what do we see as the American face? 

And we wonder why we have lost leadership in the world.

It is ironic that the United States should have been founded by intellectuals, for throughout most of our political history, the intellectual has been for the most part either an outsider, a servant or a scapegoat. 
--Richard Hofstader
author, Anti intellectualism in American Life

Death, Murder and the Second Amendment

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
--Second Amendment, United States Constitution

Talking to parents in Washington, DC in the 1980's and 1990's I learned that in parts of Southwest Washington, DC parents and their children frequently slept under their beds because bullets came whistling through windows and walls all night long. Gunfire at night was as pervasive as crickets in the suburbs.

When the random shooting and death of a child in the inner city occurred, it did not even make the pages of the Washington Post. Those kids lived in a zip code that didn't matter. (To quote The Wire.)

We cannot disarm this nation, which already has 300 million guns, we are told, and that may be true.  But if we ever can expect to diminish the availability of guns, we have to recognize there are four men who will stand in its way: Justices Scalia, Thomas, Alito and Roberts. These men agree with those millions (?) of Americans who believe gun ownership is their right, guaranteed by the 2nd Amendment.

The Phantom is mightily confused by this. He reads the 2nd amendment and sees that the only people who are guaranteed a right are people who are members of a well regulated militia, and we know that militia is not some Syrian or Afghan militia, but more of the Minutemen ilk, the guys with three cornered hats and muskets. 

And, if it's the second amendment we are talking about, then the only guns the Constitution protects would be military guns, aka attack rifles, not your Saturday night special, your Sig Sauer or your Glock.  What those 18th century slave owning founding fathers wanted to protect was the "free state" and they didn't want the government to have to pay for this, so they said, the people could buy and keep and bear the arms to do this job. 

The Phantom is not suggesting we ought to protect AR-15 guns and outlaw all the others. He is just reading the 2nd amendment, which is only one sentence long and it comes down to, "I'm just saying."

Newtown, Congo, Young Men, Grace Metalious

Hard on the heels of the news out of Newtown, Connecticut is today's summary of the week's news in the Sunday New York Times, with an extraordinary story by Jeffrey Gettleman about the ordinary viciousness of life on planet Earth, this one focused not on America, but on the huge central African nation of Congo.  He reports on the rampant raping of women by young men carrying AK-47's in what are called militias. "What's the strategic purpose of putting an AK-47 assault rifle inside a woman and pulling the trigger? Or cutting out a woman's fetus and making her friends eat it?"
As chilling is his simple observation about cruelty not directed at women: "I met a pair of soldiers who had chained a chimpanzee to a corroded railway tie, leaving the animal in a pile of its own feces, staring up at us with rheumy eyes as the soldiers howled with laughter."

Police and pundits alike are quoted, decrying the murder of "innocence" at Newtown. Presumably, they meant, the murder of "innocents," that is, six year old children. But, no, they often extend their remarks to include the adults in this "idyllic" town where adults moved to raise their children in a protected environment, where children could grow up feeling safe from predators.

Of course, there is no such place on earth, not Norway, not small town America.

Wherever there are people, particularly young male human beings, you will find savagery lurking. 

Right next to the story about Africa, where young men stride about villages grinning, with babies squirmy in death throes on their bayonets, is a story about crowds on New York city streets, where people walk among each other, reading cues, and never colliding. There is another about the aging of Japan, where the first grade class in Nanmoku has just a single student this year. No fear of mass murder in that school. In fact, enrollment in the whole school system there is down from 1,250 to 37 over the past 50 years. Japan does not have a problem with young men and guns or bayonets, presumably because it has so few young men. But it did once, and they were as vicious or more vicious than any on the planet--just ask the women of Nanjing. 

The authors of Freakonomics, have suggested the drop in the murder rate, which began in the United States about 20 years after abortion was legalized resulted from the reduction of unwanted children, so fewer young men were around 20 years later to rape and shoot. 

That may apply to the everyday ghetto violence, but what do you think about the mass murderer? As Chris Rock has noted: When you hear about a man who grabs a lady's pocket book, hits her over the head with it, and runs away--Black man. When you hear about a man who walks into a school yard with an AK-47 and mows down six year old children--White guy.

Young, white guy. The people who shoot "randomly" do not typically emerge from the angry underclass, the poor, the spat upon. They seem to come from among the comfortable, from among those to whom much as been given.  And they seem to slaughter after planning, and that planning is designed to protect them from being injured, interfered with. Like the lions and predators on the nature shows, they do not attack other lions--they go after the young and the defenseless, where there is less risk of injury to the predator.

Grace Metalious wrote a brave, infamous, by today's standards quite mild pot boiler about 50 years ago, about a New Hampshire village which appeared, on the surface, to be picturesque, quaint, sexless and all "innocence" but which, below the surface was roiling with lust, greed, avarice and rape. It was called Peyton Place.  It was a decent book, and it made her famous, and she was not saved by that fame. She is buried in a pretty cemetery near the towns she described. But the violent emotions she described were not buried with her. 
There are twenty somethings growing up not five miles from her grave, who put in Congo with an AK-47 in their hands would be just as vicious as any native. 

Grover Norquist: Ingrate in Chief

Grover Norquist wants to drown the federal government in his bathtub.
It's a good laugh line, but consider the idea: No federal government. 
Back to States Rights and maybe not even that.
As I was reading about the Civil War, after seeing the movie, Lincoln, something leaped out at me: Until the Civil War there was no federal paper currency. Private commercial banks issued bank notes, and profited handsomely from this, but as the Civil War revved up, the economy needed a more universal, accessible medium of exchange, so the federal government issued "greenbacks."
Can you imagine how the US economy of the 19th and 20th centuries could possibly have grown as it did had our currency remained "privatized?"
So the federal government provided this very basic part of our economy's "infrastructure." 
This is likely true of other parts of American life--what the federal government has done is simply so big, you cannot see it, unless you think hard, or walk up high above to look down. 
There's a scene in one of the Indiana Jones movies,  where Indiana and his father are looking for a cross, which marks the spot, but the cross encompasses the entire floor they are standing on and they cannot see it until the father climbs up to a balcony and looks down, and then the cross is very apparent--so big you miss it.
What the federal government does for us is likely the same. So big you miss it.
Like the simple expedient of money, federal currency.
I am not enough of an economist or sociologist or anthropologist to bring to mind other essential things for which we need the federal government.
The Republicans want to privatize Medicare and Social Security, which of course would be a way of destroying these programs, but you can at least imagine a world without them
But what about no Coast Guard? I suppose that could be privatized.
No army,navy, marines? Well, to some extent these have been privatized already.
No FAA? No air traffic controllers? Privatize it. Might work.
What about an FDA? Milton Friedman said we didn't need a Food and Drug Administration to keep unsafe drugs off the market--the threat of lawsuit would do that, he said. Which just goes to show was an ignoramus Milton Friedman, the dean of the famous Chicago school of economics, was. The Nobel prize winning economist could say something so stupid because, well, he was Nobel prize winning Milton Friedman. But, of course, he missed the basic point that the whole idea of the FDA is to prevent bad things from happening, not simply to impose a cost to them. It would be less than complete comfort to the child born with stubs for arms and legs, after his mother took thalidomide during his gestation, that his mother recovered a settlement from the class action law suit.
What about the Center for Disease Control, the National Institutes of Health, which provide for the public health, prevent and manage epidemic diseases, uncover basic scientific advances to treat cancer, diabetes, infectious diseases and all sorts of afflictions of humankind?  Would privatizing all these work better, more efficiently when the basic motive is profit?
What about the National Oceanographic and Aeronautical Administration, which monitors fish populations--over fishing driven by the profit motive--and the air? Where is the profit in clean air?
What about the National Geographic Survey, which measures the melting of polar ice caps? Where is the profit there?
And what about federal laws like Glass-Stiegel,  which prevented banks from becoming too big to fail, which insisted on a separation of banks which keep the savings of citizens separate from the bank schemers who would risk everything on mortgage backed securities?
I need your help, gentle reader, to bring to mind those things government, motivated by the commonweal, the common good, does things better than private industry motivated by the profit motive.
I suppose this is the basic argument between those who believe in a government which does what cannot be done by non government vs the Ayn Rand crowd, the Paul Ryans and Grover Norquists who believe government, especially federal government,  is good for nothing.
These Norquists and Ryans are the political equivalent of the off the grid people, who want no part of the electrical grid, the water and sewer systems, the armed defense of the nation because they realize to take any of this basic infrastructure, to avail themselves of any of these basic services,  means they would have to become indebted to the government which provides them, i.e., they'd have to pay, Heaven forbid, taxes. 
So they take to the hills, the woods, the mountains, to create an island to themselves, with the guns and bullets made in the factories, supplied with water, electricity, means of transportation and communication to get those guns to market, provided by the federal, state and local governments where those factories produce their guns.

Lincoln, Euclid, Obama and Verbal People

The Phantom remembers a remark made by his mentor during his fellowship at a university medical school. The mentor was speaking about another fellow in the department, assessing his worthiness, his strengths, his weaknesses.  "Well,"the mentor said, with a raised eyebrow, "He's verbal." 
This was not a compliment.  In a world where you had to do things, measure things,  "verbal" was not a quality much valued. The connotation was  "verbal" was used to cover for a lack of other abilities.  It was almost akin to "slick" or  "lacking substance," or "dramatic but not authentic."

But in certain jobs, verbal can be essential. Lincoln was garrulous, always telling stories, allegories.  He loved Aesop's fables and spun little fables of his own, conveying a moral with each. 

But most of all, he could synthesize, in words, the essence of a lot of action, tumult, conflict, passion, confusion and clarify for people what it was they had just seen and what it was they were part of. 

He did this most famously in the Gettysburg address, the most famous utterance of any American President.

But, for my money, he did this most astonishingly in his 2nd Inaugural address, which he begins in a very plain and pedestrian way, but ends in a spiral to a rhetorical high with which no marijuana or Ecstasy can compete. 

Along the way, however, he outlines the history of, the reasons for the Civil War, a war to which men flocked for a wide range of reasons. Those who fought for union were often racists; those who fought for the confederacy were most often not slave owners and were often hurt, economically, by the cheap labor of slavery. Some ardent abolitionists wanted war to cleanse the nation of the purulent wound to its soul that was slavery, but likely this was not the feeling of the majority of the men in blue who actually did the fighting, at least not until they got to the South and saw what slavery really looked like, not until they fought alongside black troops and not until they saw the gratitude and joy of the liberated thousands, who trailed behind the union armies. 

Lincoln rendered this all in his remarks at his 2nd Inauguration: 
 One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war.
 To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it. 

• He then reminds his listeners what a surprise it was, to both sides, the war dragged on so long. He reminds us all how poor we are at prediction:

Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. 
Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding.

• He slyly mocks the projection by both sides they are doing God's will:

 Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other.

• He then, without bombast and with gentle irony, undermines the thinking of the slavers that God would approve of or endorse slavery:

 It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. 
The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. 
The Almighty has His own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh."

• Lincoln almost imperceptibly slides from sounding  perplexed about  the mindset of the slave owner to the bedrock of his position, and that of the most ardent abolitionists, who arose frequently from Northern churches. He says, let us just consider if slavery really is an affront to God, would that explain the "why" of this prolonged, horrific, wrenching war?  Many a mother must have asked why she and her family should have been caused to suffer so, both North and South.

 If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him?
 Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. 
Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

There were many fine American writers of the 19th century--Melville, Thoreau, Emerson, Dickinson to name only a few. 
But none can match Lincoln, a man who learned without the benefit of an academy, but, if the movie Lincoln, has it right, could take Euclid and apply it to his own dilemma in trying to balance his awful choices. "Things which are equal to the same thing, are equal to each other." One may quibble whether or not this was actually Euclid, or ancient Egyptian, but it is a verbal mind using a mathematical formula to its own purposes.

In the movie, Lincoln's ruminations about isosceles triangles are provoked by learning one of the young men in the telegraph office is an engineer.  Like my mentor in the fellowship program, one might expect a certain disdain from an engineer, looking at a verbal man. But in this setting we have a harmony of opposites.

I think we may have the same sort of synthesizer today in Mr. Obama, a man whose words often seem too mild and balanced, calculated to bring no offense. But re reading Lincoln, you can see the reason for this tactic. Bombast has its place, but so does quiet, humble reasoning.

Strip Searching Florence Is It Fascism Yet?

What is fascism?  Wikipedia, political science professors, demonstrators at 99% rallies may all have their definitions, but for the Phantom's money, it is a form of government which places the highest priority on authority, order and control.

In the opinions written by the Supreme Court in Florence vs the Board of Freeholders, the four liberal justices  joined an opinion written by Justice Breyer, who noted that American citizens arrested for driving with a noisy muffler, driving with a faulty headlight, failure to use a turn signal, riding a bicycle without an audible bell, violation of dog leash law have been strip searched.

What is a strip search?  You are required, if you are a male, to strip naked, to lift your scrotum, to squat down and cough, to expel the switchblade knife or dirty bomb you may have concealed in your rectum, all this after an officer has examined your ears nose mouth hair scalp fingers hands arms armpits and other body openings.  Then you get a shower with a delousing agent. If you are transferred to another jail, you undergo the whole process all over again.

Justifying all this Justice Kennedy noted "People detained for minor offenses can turn out to be the most devious and dangerous criminals." He noted newspaper articles about dangerous men who were stopped for minor traffic offenses; two turned out to be terrorists and one turned out to be a serial killer.

So now the Supreme Court of the United states justifies official abuse by an attitude of guilty and dangerous until proven innocent by rectal and vaginal exam. 

Justice Roberts, perhaps sensing this may be a slippery slope goes off in another direction, saying that even if 99% of those arrested are not terrorists or serial killers, "Some detainees may have lice, which can easily spread to others in the facility, and some detainees may have diseases or injuries for which the jail is required to provide medical treatment."

So now Justice Roberts says the strip search is for the arrested citizen's own benefit, to diagnose and treat occult illness, infestation, infection and smelly armpits.

If patriotism is the refuge of scoundrels, then assertions of health benefits must be the refuge of the guilty conscience. 

The fiscal cliff is a theoretical problem.  Working the kinks out of Obamacare is an important task.  But reasserting the primacy of freedom from abuse by own government has to be obvious to anyone who has the guts to confront this reality.

Every news conference with every public official from mayor to US Senator to President ought to begin with a question about what these officials are going to do to reverse this single decision to destroy the trust in government of the average citizen.

Remember, the first thing they did in the concentration camps in Poland and Germany was to strip the people getting off the trains naked and then they sent them to the "showers."  

What have we become?