The Strange Wah of Trees

Dearborn Avenue Tree 

What is it about trees, anyway?  
Maybe it's just me, but trees are so much more than just there.
They don't say much, although when wind blows through birches, they can sing.

Maybe it's genetic, on my part. My paternal grandfather, I am told, was a lumberjack, or a forester or whatever you were, when you lived in the woods east of Moscow and cut down trees.   But then government men came around trying to impress woodsmen into the Czar's army, so he fled and wound up in New York City, far away from forests. 

Tree of Indeterminate Species

Maybe I got some of his amino acids in my DNA, which might explain how much I loved playing in the forests along the Potomac growing up.  

And what most impressed me, of all the many things which enthralled me when our family first traveled to New Hampshire, when I was 9, were the white birch trees we saw along the roads approaching Lake Winnipesaukee.  I discovered many splendific things about New Hampshire that trip--cools nights in the middle of August when nights were suffocating back in Washington, D.C., clear lake water, blueberry muffins--but those birch trees really captivated me. I brought four of them home, in the back of our Studebaker, a two day trip back to Washington, and I planted them in our back yard. Only one survived but it never turned white, growing in that red clay soil.

The first home I bought was in Maryland on less than 1/3 of an acre but it had a dozen sixty foot trees, and some of them did not look any too healthy and kept dropping limbs unnervingly near my house. Cutting down any one of these behemoths, I was told, would cost thousands of dollars. I was relieved to be able to leave them, when I moved to New Hampshire. I just knew one of those bad boys had my name on it. It was just a matter of time. 

I was determined to buy a new house with no big trees on the lot and the smallest possible lawn to mow. Of course, I wound up with 1 1/3 acres this time and a forest covering the back acre, with hundreds of sixty foot trees, but none of them appear to be within striking distance of my house.

I spent part of the afternoon today cutting dead limbs from a tree in our front yard. This required ladders and ropes and saws and precarious dangling from branches, but I got it done. 

Some limbs looked very dead, but inexplicably, fresh healthy branches sprout near the tips of these moribund limbs. Dead and living portions of the same tree seem to co exist in a way never seen in human anatomy. If there is no blood supply to your arm beyond the elbow, then anything downstream from your elbow, namely your wrist and fingers are going to be dead.  Not so with trees. They seem to follow their own rules. Sap flows in mysterious ways.

My neighbor stopped to ask if I was cutting down the tree. No, I told her, just a few limbs, appearances notwithstanding. 

Wonky Parallel Tree

"Oh, I'm so relieved," she said. "I love that wonky tree. It's like it grows parallel to the ground, instead of up."

When I first moved to Hampton, I wanted a Norway Maple: I saw these wonderful trees with their maroon leaves in the front yards of homes and churches all around town. The owner of Stratham Circle Nursery told me they were illegal in New Hampshire. Cannot sell them, buy them or even load them into your truck and bring them across the state line.
"How can they be illegal?" I protested. "I see them all around town."
"They passed a law," he said with an expression which bespoke what he thought of that law.
A few weeks later, my neighbor called me from the North Hampton Home Depot. He had spotted three Norway Maples on their lot, obviously delivered by mistake and the Home Depot guys had no idea they were selling the horticultural equivalent of crack cocaine.

Did I want to go get them in his truck? 
Did I ever. 
We bought the trees in cash, so they couldn't trace us. 
We drove home, careful to keep to the speed limit, as if we had a truck full of cocaine. I kept my eyes on the sideview mirrors and we held our breath as a Hampton police car drove by us.

He planted one in his backyard and I planted the other two in my back yard, out of view of the street.
Of such victories is life made sweet.

New Hampshire's trees are the source of its busiest tourist season. Leaf peepers arrive every October, filling every inn and hotel room, and causing traffic jams from Franklin Notch to the White Mountains. People like trees.  And it's not like trees do much. They are more or less just...rooted. 

There are some trees, I am told, which were alive when Jesus Christ walked the earth. I don't know if that's true, but I do believe trees can live a long time and I've seen some trees in California which have survived forest fires because their bark is so thick. Trees outlasted the dinosaurs.

People have feelings about trees. 

My other neighbor had a gorgeous stand of birch trees on his front lawn. He claimed it had boring beetles or some infestation,  and was doomed. I made him promise to let nature take its course. You never know, I told him--those trees may rally yet. 

He waited until I went on vacation to cut it down. 

When I returned, I didn't even unpack my car.  I stomped across his driveway and pointed at the stumps: Tree murderer! 

He smiled and shook his head, "Hey, I waited until you were gone. You didn't have to see it."

He was right. That was something to be grateful for.

Metrics Run Amuck in America

Major Howard Colivn:      We can show you charts and statistics like they mean something, but you're going back to your home tonight, we're going to be in our patrol cars and them boys still gonna be out there on the corners. Deep in the game. This is the world we got, people, and it's about time all of us had the good sense to at least admit that much.
Man at meeting:                So, what's the answer? 
Major Howard Colvin:       I'm not sure. But whatever it is, it can't be a lie. 
--"The Wire"

Whether it's doctors or schoolteachers or policemen or baseball players, everyone wants to see "good" performers rewarded and retained and bad players discarded.

My mother, who taught high school for 30 years used to say, "The only important job for a principal is to know who his good teachers are, and to keep them, and to know who his bad teachers are, and to get rid of them."

The problem is, when judging human performance in complex service arenas, how do you define "good" and how do you measure it? We would all like some objective criteria in a subjective world. Objective criteria mean that we do not have to trust the evaluators quite so much. After all, the "teacher's pet" can curry favor and be promoted for all the wrong reasons.

Police departments have famously embraced "statistics" to judge the efficacy of their police officers, with increasingly notorious results. "The Wire" explored the folly of the misuse of data driven policing in Baltimore long before the recent riots there exposed the rotten core of that police culture. 

After many episodes demonstrating the perversions and distortions of good policing, Major Howard "Bunny" Colvin says, simply, "The problem is, statistics done killed this job."

Atul Gawande, writing in the New Yorker investigated what made the number one rated Cystic Fibrosis Clinic in America so very good. He was asking the question: How do you get good performance out of an organization?  So he went to the clinic and followed its director around. The director, a physician, steps into a room with a patient, scowling at the results of her pulmonary function tests, which have shown a steep decline. "What happened here?" he asks her. Turns out, at at 23 she has her first boyfriend, has moved into his apartment and she does not want to do her thrice daily "pulmonary toilet" there, which involves trying to york up sputum and involves many revolting sounds she knows would turn him off. The director explodes, "So you stopped doing your part here! What I'd like to ask you is what you are doing to make this the best CF clinic in America? You have betrayed yourself and this clinic and all we've done for you."

Of course, the patient dissolves in tears and it's clear she'll never set foot again in that clinic. But her departure means the clinic will continue have excellent statistics, the pulmonary function tests of its patients will not be polluted by her poor results and if her lifespan is shortened, at least those diminished years will not reflect poorly on the clinic.

Gawande never comments on the obvious problem here. He is too in thrall with the "success" the clinic has.

In Moneyball, Billy Bean explores the weakness of the subjectivity of the traditional baseball scouts, who look at players and judge them and their potential.  The problem with their subjective approach is they tend to pick players who "look good in jeans" but they miss the players whose bodies may look awkward but who make teams win. Employing statistics, "metrics" allows Bean to find players who were missed because they looked homely or too small but who got on base a lot and scored runs and his team thrived.

The rub here is that there is a bottom line "score" to follow to judge the success of an organization.  In teaching, medicine, policing defining the "bottom line" is often more difficult.

"The Wire" has mordantly funny scenes based on the perversion of the use of statistics.  At  the Homicide office they keep a large whiteboard where murder victims are listed and there is a column for the police officer investigating and a column for solved and a column for unsolved.  When a row of abandoned townhouses is discovered to have scores of bodies lined up inside, the higher up try to prevent more boarded up townhouses from being opened, for fear more unsolved murders will pile up on their whiteboard. The solved murder rate drops from 55% to 30% almost overnight. The police brass are apoplectic.  They are not concerned about the gang who is murdering; they are concerned about the statistics and their own jobs.

Yesterday, I got a complaint forwarded to me from the administrators from a primary care doctor.  He had referred me a patient whose glycohemoglobin test was pretty dismal. This test reflects the blood sugar control for the prior three months. A low number, 6%, indicates good control a high number indicates poor control.   After two years of working with this patient, her number had gone from 13.5% to 13.8%.

She missed most of her appointments. Over 2 years she kept only 4 of 8 appointments and each time I discovered she had not initiated the insulin I had recommended. Finally, at her last visit, I asked again why she was not making the changes I suggested, not testing her blood sugars at home, not keeping appointments. 
 "Well," she said, "I don't check the sugars because they are always awful. I don't keep the appointments because I don't want to think about my diabetes. And I don't take the insulin because I think I'm already on too much medicine."
"Sounds like you're not really ready to deal with this problem," I said. 
She nodded. We had gone over all this, all her options, tried to make accommodations to her regimen to pare it down to the minimal effort but she was simply unwilling to face her disease. We explored the "why" of this but she simply smiled and said, "That's just where I am."

So, I wrote her primary care physician saying, when she is ready to be part of her own care, send her back, but we needed spots in the Endocrine Clinic for patients who might benefit.

The PCP promptly called the Medical Director, who called the administrators. "You've left the PCP dangling. Now he's got a patient with a glycohemoglobin of 13.8%. That's going to ruin his statistics. That means he'll get penalized on "quality" and his salary will drop."

Nowhere in any of this was the patient mentioned.

I was instructed to send the patient to nutritional counseling and to the Wellness Program, which consisted of three scheduled phone calls with a wellness nurse.

"Do you really think the nutritionist or the telephone nurse can convince this lady to take her insulin?"
"Of course not, but it's the protocol. This is all about process."
"How about asking the patient if she wants to see a psychiatrist?" I asked. Such referrals, in our system, have to come from the PCP, not the consultant. "Or maybe, another endocrinologist?"
"That's not the protocol."

This is not unique to our medical system. Teachers' evaluations may come down to how well their students do on standardized tests. Never mind, good teachers may be faced with the results of poverty, generations of uneducated parents who work three jobs and who do not read themselves and who do not read to their children, who are not home for their children, or parents who spend the day in a heroin stupor on the couch in front of the TV and all that produces the child in the classroom who does not do well on a standardized test and it's the teacher's fault.

In another scene in "The Wire" a young cop presents statistics at a community meeting showing the drop in crime in a neighborhood.  A woman stands up and waves dismissively at the charts and says she remembers a time when their neighborhood had a policeman on the beat, a White guy, but a good guy nonetheless. He knew her name and would sit down for a moment and ask about each of her children. He knew everyone in the neighborhood and they knew him. And when a kid got shot, or a girl got raped, and the neighbors knew who did it, they told this cop. But now the only cops they see flash by in police cars with the windows up. Nobody knows these cops and certainly would not talk to them or give them any information. How does all that show up on your charts?

These are all questions about management and intelligence at the top.  When you use the wrong metrics, you get a perversion of the ultimate aim.  Is our public education system working? Well, look at graduation rates.  What happens? Schools game the system and graduate kids who cannot read, have never learned to show up on time, if at all and so the high school diploma from an inner city school is meaningless to any employer or college. 

I'd like to know whether these problems have been solved anywhere else in the world any better than we have solved them.

Do other countries look at their police, their educational systems, their health care systems any more intelligently than we do?

Intimations of Spring

It has been a strange, anticlimactic winter along the New Hampshire seacoast.  It is mid February and I rode to the beach on my bicycle for the second time this week. 

Last winter the streets were ice and snow covered and bicycling was out of the question.  The oak tree on my front lawn has tiny buds, in February.  Mr. Tugboat, the Lab, can hardly tear himself away from the loamy smells along the sidewalks running along Route 27, and walks are a battle, with me dragging him away from one delectable aroma to the next. Last February, he was all business, trotting down the snow packed sidewalks and streets dutifully, simply aiming  to get the walk over with and home to the full food bowl he knows awaits him at the conclusion of his morning constitutional.


I'm a little ashamed not to feel more rueful about the abortive winter. I moved up here to New Hampshire, in part, hoping for real winters and last year's winter lived up to billing. It snowed every day and did not melt until April, and I could go cross country skiing in the mornings before work, along the abandoned railroad bed behind Depot Square, all the way to North Hampton. 

Last year's winter was my wife's fault. This year's non winter is my fault. Last year, it was warm through the end of December and my wife started whining that she missed snow,  and boom, God answered in January and buried us in white, up to the eves of our front porch.  Our neighbors came by, one by one,  to tell her to keep her mouth shut in the future.  This year, the winter snows would hinge on my decision whether or not to buy a snow blower. 

I  resisted buying a snow blower--ours is the only house on our block without one and my neighbors would shake their heads at the folly of this Southern boy who refused to acknowledge he lived in northern New England now,  and required certain equipment for that life. 

Last winter, my retired neighbor, from down the street arrived to snow blow my driveway at 6 AM and he would say things like, "This is not mint Julep country, you know."  Or, "You can drink your sweet tea in the summer, but up here, in the winter, you need a snow blower."  

Ultimately, I found myself the neighborhood charity case, as neighbors took turns on my driveway. 

One of them assigned his father-in-law to take me around looking for just the right snow blower. He swore by Hondas, which would last thirty years, but I noted I am not likely to last another 30 years.

But it wasn't just my immediate neighbors:  there was my good friend who would email me every new storm, to be sure I was not thinking of shoveling.  We are members of the Democratic Club and she was sure the Democrats would lose one sure vote if I died shoveling snow.  She would allude to February obituaries, which carried the line, "Died shoveling snow."  She implied I was simply in denial about my age.  You may think you look younger than you are; you may think using a snow blower is like wearing a hearing aide, but the fact is, you need one.  "Well, you lived through another snow," she'd say, whenever she saw me. "You know, there's no prize for shoveling out your driveway. It doesn't make you look more virile, just makes you look a little clueless."  Or words to that effect.

Actually, it was sort of counter productive, her needling me. These New Englanders don't gush with the Southern expressions of false love. In the South,  women would say stuff like, "Oh, I just love seeing you come through the door!" And these were married women who were not flirting. It's just the way people talk down there.

Up here in New England, they do not gush.  They are economical and reserved in their expressions of affection.  Smiles are less toothy, more apt to be playing around the corners of the mouth.  A New Hampshire Yankee woman is more likely to hold you with a straight look in the eye and after a few beats of silence, she'll say, "I thought about you trying to drive to work through the snow this morning. You know, they make all wheel drive for northern latitudes like this." ( I drive a car with only front wheel drive.)

That's about as flirtatious as Yankee women get.  Wait, she said she was thinking about me this morning! She cares about me! Subtle, but effective.

Unless we get some bitter March snows, winter is over.  Hemingway captured the virtues of a snowy winter in A Farewell to Arms. Once it started to snow in earnest in Northern Italy, the fighting was over for the winter.  Armies, trucks, everything was frozen in place and no major offensive could be launched, so the armies just hunkered down in place and men could enjoy simply watching the sun play on the snow and the bare trees and light up the inside of rooms with that special brightness of a winter day reflecting off snow and through the windows illuminating the insides of buildings in a way you never see in summer, when light is filtered through leafy trees. 

Still, much as I hate to admit it, I can't help for being grateful for this odd winter.

 It feels like an act of divine mercy, somehow. 

Who Do You Read?

Now that I get The New York Times on online, and Salon and the Huffiington Post and Redditt Progressive, I have only one paper subscription--the New Yorker. 

Within those sources, I find I skip over articles by Bruni and Kristol and always Maureen Dowd, but never pass by Paul Krugman, Gail Collins, and yes, Russ Douthat and David Brooks. I know the New Yorker people as if they were long time friends from high school: They are my gang--Jill Lepore, George Packer, Adam Gopnik, Jeffrey Toobin, Emily Nussbaum, David Denby, Rachel Aviv, David Sedaris, to name just my favorites. 

Until they left the air, I listened to "Car Talk's" Click and Klack, Tom and Ray. 

When they were accessible, I watched Jon Stewart, John Oliver and, of course, Stephen Colbert. And I miss them now. 

So what does this mean about my world?  I have friends in my new town, but almost no one I  spend as much meaningful time with.

When you turn your attention to someone, in a regular fashion, you have done more than just spent time, but if that's all you did, that is something significant, because, as Ben Franklin observed, time is what life is made of.

A friend once remarked she enjoyed spending time together, and I took this as the highest complement. How many people can any of us say this about?

But in today's world, even in small town New England, we do not sit around the wood stove at the general store, or hang out in the coffee shop, at least I don't.  I go to work, come home, work out. On weekends, there are projects. When I played baseball, I spent time with people, but that was different. My team mates and I had loads of fun, but we were careful about the subjects we visited. We wanted to be baseball friends, not locked in argument about politics or other issues.

If I'm lucky, between tasks and projects, I can steal a little time with my friends, most of whom I have never physically met. They exist inside my head.

What a marvelous world the 21st century is turning out to be.

Downton: The Ice Princess Reigns

Okay, I admit it:  I would not miss an episode of  Downton Abbey if it meant walking through a blizzard to see it. Lately, in northern New England that exigency has not obtained and tonight  I hunkered down to watch Lady Mary wreck the life of her sister, cut her father for having treated Barrow shabbily and finally face her inadequately funded suitor to say she has reached the conclusion she and he are in love with each other and they may as well act upon it and get married.

For his part, her young swain declares his heart is pounding and he is passably well pleased she has accepted his proposal after all,  and why don't they get married before the license he has obtained expires.

Thus concludes one of the more bloodless plot lines in all of Downton. There are touching moments along the way, in fact one of the most touching of all, when Mary, the ice princess,  actually reveals a genuine emotion, going to the grave of her first husband and asking him to forgive her for falling in love with someone else.  This is a surprise, because at no time before this moment has anything suggested her hesitation to accept a new man had anything to do with her having not made peace with the loss of her first husband. 

The best lines belong to, of all people, Edith, who has grown remarkably, and who explains her surprise appearance for Mary's wedding by saying simply the time will come when their parents are dead and only Mary and she will remember Sybil, their dead sister,  or their parents or even Carson and the whole life they had at Downton and those bonds of time and memory are unbreakable.  It is Downton's finest scene.

All this reminds me of why I am so grateful to be an American, grateful my forebears did not stop in England but stayed on the ship to America. 

 When I was 25, I got to spend two life changing months in London, where I learned the Brits are not just Americans who talk funny, but are very different from us.

I realized as an American I am more materialistic, more driven than Brits, but I was also more inclined to challenge authority, and to question the way things are and ask why things cannot be different, more likely to speak my mind directly and to be less inhibited than Brits. Of course, that was 40 years ago. Things have changed in the UK since. 

A medical school professor spent considerable time with me and my fellow American students, and invited us out to his clinic in Uxbridge and after much effort on our behalf,  I asked him one day why he had been so kind to us. 

"What?" he asked, not understanding my question.
"Well, you've spent time and gone through considerable trouble to arrange teaching sessions for us, and you get paid nothing for it and as far as I can see the only return you get is our gratitude and we're not even British students. It's not like you are improving care for the U.K. We'll go back to the States, and what we learned here will benefit people you will never see."
"That," he said, with one of those faint British smiles you are not even sure is there, "Is such an American thing to say."
"And that," I pointed out. "Is not an answer."

Then he sighed and said, "If you must know, I wish I had just even one student of your quality."
This surprised me, because I thought the British students were very observant and very bright, if not always motivated. They did all clear out at 5 PM no matter what, where the American students stayed late, writing notes, checking on patients.

"Well," I reminded him, "Your students are four years younger than we are. And we go back to a system which provides great incentives."
"You're talking about the money," he said. "I don't believe that. Our students say the same thing. We don't work too hard, but then again, they don't pay us much.  But that's not it really:  We just do not draw the first rate students into medicine."

"If that's true, then it must go back to incentive," I told him. "My grandfather worked in a sweatshop, sewing dresses. My father went to college and got to be middle class. I'm going to take the next step up. Not that we have classes in America as you do here, but I'll be upper class insofar as we have one. Medicine is not just a job for me, it's a vehicle to social advancement."

Whenever the economy is roaring, medical school applications in the US fall. When times get tough, applications soar.  Hard driving people do tend to follow the money. Much as we like to think people go into medicine because it's a calling, and it is true in some cases, in the grand scheme of things, incentives count.

The Brits of Downton reflect all that.  Being to the manor born, or being stuck in the place you were born were part of Britain then, and if that has changed, then it is recently.  

This is the attraction of a Bernie Sanders' message:  a society in which the few live opulently and the many are told they have no real shot at a better life is a pretty dismal place, for everyone, rich and poor alike.

Kamel Daoud and Sexual Misery in Islam

I do not know enough about Islam to know whether the problems we read about in various cultures where Islam prevails is a feature of Islam, the faith, or the particular culture, whether it is Egyptian, Somalian or Indonesian.  

But the New Year's Eve events in Cologne have been connected, at least in the Western imagination,  to the rapes in Tahir Square in Cairo, where both Muslim and Western women were publicly raped for the crime of being a woman in public. 

In today's New York Times Kamel Dauod writes about the obsessional nature of sexuality in at least some Islamic societies, where women are seen as a source of destabilization, "short skirts trigger earthquakes."  Sexual feelings are so taboo that even married couples may not have sex while naked and women are forbidden to touch bananas.  Now, that has got to mean something:  Bananas! Sex is so repressed it's all anyone can think about.

Think about what that means:  If women are so irresistible, then they have enormous power over men, who are reduced to whimpering,   who must be protected from the  presence of women and their Siren call, their sight, their power to seduce men into sin, shame and damnation. This may go back to the Odyssey, which was not a Muslim tale, but Greek, but it's the same idea: Odysseus had to plug the ears of his men so they could not hear the Sirens' song, while he had to be lashed to the mast, begging them to steer the ship into the rocks, because he was so lost to the charms of these women. 

Women wear a hijab moutabaraj, "the veil that reveals" which is a head scarf with slim fit jeans, and this is, presumably a problem for the sex police, because, after all, the women are wearing the scarf. Benches in public parks are sawed in half to prevent lovers or potential lovers from sitting too close together.

We had suspected, of course, men from some Islamic cultures had a problem with women:  The 9/11 hijackers reportedly covered the motel wall art because the pictures showed women immodestly. Motel art! 

Jim Lehrer famously asked some Islamic "expert" just after 9/11, "Why do they hate us so?" The expert gave a rambling answer which, when boiled down, said, "I have no idea."

Well, Mr. Daoud may provide part of the answer. It's not that radical Islamists, ISIS, Al Qaeda, Iranian ayatollahs hate us so much--it's self loathing they suffer from.  Could it be they feel humiliated and helpless before our culture in which nearly naked women are pictured routinely, women in every day life dress in ways which reveal their bodies in attractive ways and these repressed males feel they cannot control themselves?  They see Western men in complete control, interacting with these objects of desire and they ask themselves: How can these men continue to work, to think in the face of this provocation, while we are rendered helpless?

It's a long way back to the 13th century, and I cannot pretend to know what is going on in the mind of a 20 year old who hops a plane from Minneapolis to Istanbul so he can go fight with ISIS or blow himself up with a suicide vest. 

But maybe, if you have never spent a night with a naked woman and you are promised a dozen vestigial virgins, it seems like a good deal.

What all this means when men from this background arrive in Cologne or Paris and find themselves ignored by attractive women is anyone's guess.  

Maybe it's not about religion. Maybe, as Mr. Daoud suggests, it's all about sex.

Now that is something Westerners can understand. 

Muslim Women and the Head Scarf

Elif Batuman writes an intriguing piece in this week's New Yorker about visiting Turkey and the ineffable sense of alienation she experienced, walking about towns and cities, how she was treated, or more accurately, ignored, and treated as a non person. But then, without thinking much about it, she happened to put on a head scarf while visiting a holy shrine and forgetting about it, she walked around town with her head covered,  and her world changed. 

Without her head scarf she would sit in a restaurant, an unescorted woman, and be ignored; no waiter approached, and other diners stared. Wherever she went in the headscarf, both men and women smiled, offered help, and generally made her feel welcomed and embraced.  Bare headed, she was shunned and if not despised, at least she became a non person, at worst a pariah. 

She felt she had compromised her Western, enlightened values when she conformed to the convention of the head scarf, the symbol of male oppression, of infantilization of women, but then she began to ask herself, what was so dreadful about conformity, about simply accepting the practices of the group in a small way? 


It is a stunning piece about what happens when the individual accepts Groupthink, and the revelation is there are benefits as well as risks.

She asks important questions, and they are in a sense trans cultural: any American girl facing American high school conventions has had to deal with dressing a certain way, looking a certain way.

Maud once upbraided Mad Dog for suggesting that as long as immigrants dressed like Americans, looked like Americans, spoke like Americans, they were, in fact, Americans.  Maud asserted, quite rightly, none of this should be necessary to be accepted as an American. 

But listen to Ms. Batuman on her own confrontation with the demands and rewards of conformity:

CREDITILLUSTRATION BY ANNA PARINI

When I went into a store, a man held the door for me, and I realized that it was the first time anyone had reached a door before me without going in first and letting it shut in my face. Most incredibly, when I got to a bus stop shortly after the bus had pulled away, the departing vehicle stopped in the middle of the street, the door opened, and a man reached out his hand to help me in, calling me “sister.” It felt amazing. To feel so welcomed and accepted and safe, to be able to look into someone’s face and smile, and have the smile returned—it was a wonderful gift.

How long can I keep wearing it? I found myself thinking, as the bus lurched into motion and cars honked around us. The rest of the day? Forever?

I wondered why it hadn’t occurred to me sooner to try wearing a head scarf—why nobody ever told me it was something I could do. It wasn’t difficult, or expensive. Why should I not cover my head here, if it made the people who lived here feel so much better? Why should I cause needless discomfort to them and to myself? Out of principle? What principle? The principle that women were equal to men? To whom was I communicating that principle? With what degree of success? What if I thought I was communicating one thing but what people understood was something else—what if what they understood was that I disapproved of them and thought their way of life was backward? Did that still count as “communicating”? And now a glimmer appeared before me of a totally different way of being than any I had imagined, a life with clear rules and duties that you followed, in exchange for which you were respected and honored and safe. You had children—not maybe but definitely. You didn’t have to worry that your social value was irrevocably tied to your sexual value. You had less freedom, true. But what was so great about freedom? What was so great about being a journalist and going around being a pain in everyone’s ass, having people either be suspicious and mean to you or try to use you for their P.R. strategy? Travelling alone, especially as a woman, especially in a patriarchal culture, can be really stressful. It can make you question the most basic priorities around which your life is arranged. Like: Why do I have a job that makes me travel alone? For literature? What’s literature?

It is a thought provoking piece.  It may help explain why some Islamic women choose to remain in bondage, allow themselves to be treated like children or possessions.  With Hillary Clinton running for President, with the New Year's Eve Cologne attacks by Muslim men directed at unescorted German women, Ms. Batuman's article offers a sort of explanation, if not a convincing defense of just going along to get along.

Big Pharma: The Face of American Capitalism

Smirking Shkreli

The smirking visage of Martin Shkreli personified the face of American capitalism as most doctors see it every day. 

Drug companies and health insurance companies have one thing in common: They do not exist to make people healthier; they exist to maximize return for their stockholders. 

All the advertising about how much Blue Cross cares about the health of its customers or how Pfizer does God's work on earth notwithstanding, the folks who occupy the CEO suites at these companies are not concerned with humanity but with money.

As Mr. Sanders noted in the debate, American drug companies can raise your drug costs by 1000% and there is nothing anybody can do about it.

In fact, American doctors see this every day. The company which holds the patent on the drug which kills hepatitis C, which could cure the 5 million patients in this country whose lives will be shortened or made miserable by hepatitis C will charge each of these unfortunates $80,000 for the course of therapy, for a couple of dozen pills. When asked to justify this cost, the company replied that a liver transplant would cost even more, so that's how they set the price. 

In a capitalist society, with patent laws, a company without a conscience can and often does do this sort of thing. They usually try to claim the cost of the drug reflects all the millions of dollars spent in the research and complying with  regulations it took to bring the drug to market,  but this is a manifestly specious argument,  exposed in any number of ways by all sorts of different analyses. Simply put, it's a lie. If research and development were so costly, then it would be part of overhead and net profits at drug companies would be modest; but drug companies make billions and the profit margins are huge.

Mr. Shkreli, to his credit, has not tried to claim the cost of the drug he raised from a few dollars to a few thousand dollars a pill was inflated by research costs. He could hardly claim that, because the drug in question had been developed years earlier and all the R&D costs paid.   Shkrei simply bought the rights and then raised the price, as is his right in our current health care system. 

He couldn't have done this in the United Kingdom, in France or Germany or Spain or Sweden or Norway or Denmark or Finland or anywhere else on the planet except maybe Somalia, but then again, as the Republicans are always telling us, that's what American exceptional ism means. 

Snob Appeal

As a 25 year old, I spent two months in London. I went over with great anticipation, having watched British movies from childhood and I loved the way the Brits sounded and looked and behaved in those films.

Within a month I missed America and Americans intensely. The Brits did not wear well. I used to go have dinner at Earl's Court, which is where you could get an inexpensive meal and lots of Americans hung out there and I'd just drink in those familiar accents wafting around the room.

But Downtown Abbey rekindled those latent feelings of the Anglophile.  Spending an hour among men who wear white tie every night to dinner in their own homes, with ladies in evening gowns and head bands and tiaras, sipping wine, throwing witty lines about the table, has a sort of intoxicating effect. 

But the best part is talking about the shenanigans the next day. Here, in New Hampshire, there are so few people to talk about Downton with. When you find one, it becomes a sort of secret society--New Hampshire townies who watch Downton. Even if they get frustrated by it, the slow pace, the story lines which drone on--Bates and Anna: will they ever be happy?--fellow Downton aficionados form a club.

Even if you don't meet many, you know they are out there, like the secret book readers of Fahrenheit 451 --secretly watching at home Sunday nights. And you never know where you'll find them--there's a screening of Downton coming up at the opera house in Rochester, New Hampshire! Rochester is a town where you'd expect to see enthusiasm for NASCAR or gun shows, but Downton?  Portland, Maine also has movie theatre screenings, like the Rocky Horror Picture show, but Maine is schizophrenic and you know there are blue bloods lurking about in the woods and on the coast up there. 

I think Downton watchers ought to wear a little pin on their collars, "DA" or something so you can nod to them at Hannafords or Market Basket, and know, even here in the state where men wear belts and suspenders to hold up their jeans and they change their buffalo plaid wool shirts from red to blue once a week, you know there are Downton groupies out there, indistinguishable among the Ug wearing women walking along the street in Exeter. 

In Washington, DC, it was school decals on the back window of your car that signaled you were dreaming about your ascension in society, fantasizing about your life among the upper crust. Here, it would be that "DA" pin on your collar. Doesn't matter your ethnicity, what college you did (or did not) attend, what sort of car you drive, how big your house is, where you vacation--if you are a Downton person, you are one of us. 

This is Downton's swan song. A guilty pleasure. I'll miss it.