You Are Not Safe

From the ravages of medical care costs, even if you have health insurance. That's the thrust of this article in Salon. Now tell me . . . does this really surprise you?

The article reminds us all again of the really feeble bill that Obama got passed and called comprehensive health care reform. Progressives have not forgotten how as the process continued the health care bill was gradually diluted to a state where our masters, the health insurance industries, were happy. What we were left with was a bland bill--trumpeted by the administration as the greatest thing since the New Deal--that doesn't even protect people with health insurance from going bankrupt.

Here, in case you're not inclined to read the article, I'll summarize the main points for you:

• Obama, in concert with the health care insurance companies and big pharma, gutted the health care bill of any real reform that would threaten their interests. What got passed was, in fact, " a blank-check TARP-style bailout for the health industry"
• An Arizona report: "Health insurance is not protecting Arizonans from having problems paying medical bills, and having bill problems is keeping families from getting needed medical care and prescription medicines, a new study has found."
• "With 60 percent of all bankruptcies related to medical costs; with many of those medical-related bankruptcies occurring among those who have private insurance; and with the fear of medical bankruptcy encouraging the insured to unduly skimp on medical services, the Obama healthcare bill did purport to address the issue via caps on out-of-pocket expenses. But those weak caps -- and the bill's failure to achieve universal coverage -- promise to allow the medical debt problem to continue, just as they have in the state whose 'reforms' most closely mimic Obama's bill."
• Reduction in bankruptcies because of medical costs is not likely, despite the promises of the White House.
• American wages are still being eaten up by health insurance premiums which keep going up. "Events are proving that "real reform" and strengthening insurance industry power are mutually exclusive goals. That is, they are proving the veracity of progressives' original criticism of President Obama's healthcare legislation."

This is one of the many reasons I won't be voting for the neo-republican in the White House in 2012. 

Avalanched III

How many times this many? I have no idea.

So all those books on my shelves that are in the category of bought to read but not read yet. As you might imagine, some of these volumes have been in this status for years, in some cases, quite a few years. In this category would be books such as The Hour of our Death by Philippe Aries. It's a history of changing attitudes about death in the West for the last thousand years. It's a dense book, a commitment to read. But I still want to read it. Let me emphasize that all the books I'm going to mention here are books I still want to read. Whether they ever make it up the queue for that actually to happen . . . well, we'll see.

An even bigger read is Bob Sptiz's The Beatles, but my daughter has read this--I think she said more than once--so I feel like I have to read this one. These unread books are in all kinds of categories. Paul Krugman's The Return of Depression Economics; Will Bunch's Tear Down This Myth: How the Reagan Legacy Has Distorted Our Politics and Haunts Our Future--this was written before the great crash of 2008. Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City (serial killer at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair). The Perfect Murder: A Study in Detection (guide to best murder mysteries). Three books in the "everyday thing" category: Cod, The Box (shipping containers), Salt. Somewhat akin is Steve Almond's Candyfreak. This one, like several others mentioned here are gifts. I made a pledge--as yet unfulfilled--to read all the books that have been given me as gifts, which is no small number. If I did just that, I'd probably have at least 50 books to read.

• The World's 20 Greatest Unsolved Problems--one of many books I've started and didn't finish. Not because the book was bad, but because I got distracted by another book.
• Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything
• Daniel Boorstin's magnificent trilogy: The Discoverers, The Creators, The Seekers. I'm almost finished with Discoverers, but not yet.
• Shall I mention the baseball books that need reading? Biographies of Ty Cob, Lou Gehrig, Billy Martin. Team histories: Senators, Dodgers, Reds, Tigers, more. Sabrmetric tomes such as The Numbers Game and Baseball Between the Numbers. And some fat semi-reference works such as Rob Neyer's Big Book of Baseball Blunders, Big Book of Baseball Lineups. The book he did with Bill James on pitchers. Bill James's Guide to Managers. A couple of books about umpires. And more.
• Multiple books in the following catgories: Middle Ages, Reformation, both World Wars, Ancient history, Civil War biographies and battle books, poetry, and so forth.
• And on and on. This is just a tiny sample.

If I never borrowed or bought another book, I have enough to read here to see me to the grave. But I know that ain't gonna happen. I'll always be distracted by something else good. For example, I'm going to quit this now and go continue reading With the Old Breed, a memoir of the Pacific War by a Marine. It's a book from the Norman library.

Plutocracy, Baby

What better way to celebrate the 4th of July--Independence Day!--than this quick little portrait of the real state of the United States. It is a graphic representation of who really is independent in this country. And it ain't the vast majority of us.

This is what plutocracy looks like, brothers and sisters. I stole this right off my daughter's blog. It was so good, I thought I'd share. Do you think for one minute if this were put on billboards all over the country and televised all hours of the day and night that it would make any difference? I don't.

A huge share of the nation's economic growth over the past 30 years has gone to the top one-hundredth of one percent, who now make an average of $27 million per household. The average income for the bottom 90 percent of us? $31,244.

Note: The 2007 data (the most current) doesn't reflect the impact of the housing market crash. In 2007, the bottom 60% of Americans had 65% of their net worth tied up in their homes. The top 1%, in contrast, had just 10%. The housing crisis has no doubt further swelled the share of total net worth held by the superrich.

Related articles

• Jim Hightower: From Democracy to Plutocracy (yubanet.com)
• Ain't Capitalism Grand? (blinkutopia.wordpress.com)

Avalanched II

I couldn't pick her out of a lineup.
This is Flannery O'Connor.

So I'm looking around now at the shelves for books that are in the I-intend-to-read-and-that's-why-I-have-them category. I'm sorry to say, there are sooooo many of them. First off, I should tell you, that if you really like fiction, you probably would not be all that impressed with my library. My tastes in reading have always been much more tilted to non-fiction than fiction. Which, I suppose, is natural for a historian. There's a pitiful little section of a top shelf that has half a dozen (count 'em!) forlorn little books of fiction floating in this huge ocean of non-fiction books. There are three James Michener up there, one Tom Wolfe (I've read everything by this guy.)--I Am Charlotte Simmons--a collected works of Flannery O'Connor, one William Faulkner. Need I tell you that those books are up there because I have not read them?

I hasten to tell you that I do read fiction--my God, I'm not a Philistine!-- it's just (obviously) not my first choice. I'm thinking now about whole boxes of fiction that I got rid of on the moves. I wish I had the sf books back, although I had read all of them.

But it's really depressing to look around at the shelves and seeing all these books that I've got sitting here that I was hot to read at some point (or they wouldn't be here), but that have now melted into the scenery, no longer with that read-me-read-me look they have when they first go up on the shelf. Lots and lots of really good stuff. Just at random, a very tiny sample of this category, and let's not even mention history books, by far the largest category of books in here.

Have I mentioned the categories? I think so: poetry, reference, chess, baseball, religion, biography, and history, and miscellany. A lot of the fun books are in this latter category. In American history I've gotten rid of almost everything but stuff in my specialty--19th century South, slavery, Civil War and Reconstruction. I've got basically nothing in early American history anymore and a smattering of books in 20th century. There are unread volumes in all these history categories. Some of the ones I really want to get to are Civil War battle books, mainly because I'm writing more and more about generals and the military aspects of the war. I've got history books on other stuff too, the stuff that interests me: World War I, Nazi Germany, WWII, Middle Ages, Reformation. (I've gotten rid of tons of this kind of stuff too.)

Guess what? I'm going to let this topic spill over into another post yet again. Which is not good because it keeps you in suspense (ha, ha) but is real good for me because it's a ready-made topic, and I won't have to struggle to come up with one. I have to tell you that coming up with something to write about that I figure you all won't consider utter tripe is the biggest challenge I have to deal with with this blog. So if you think some of the crap I write about is boring, you should see what I reject.

Avalanched

Kind of in keeping with a theme I developed yesterday--the amount of work that's burying me at this particular time--I look around me and see something else, another task (or maybe that should be tasks)  in my life that I will never come near to completing. Reading just the books I have on hand that I want to read. I work from a study; I'm surrounded on three sides by floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. No, I've not counted them. My best estimate is something like 1,300 volumes, give or take. Now, admittedly, a number of these volumes are reference works: quote books, various dictionaries and thesauri, specialized encyclopedias (military/world/US history; supreme court cases, etc.), writing and usage books, guides (science, physics). Then there reference works within the specialties: baseball encyclopedias, record books, guides, etc. and in chess there are game collections, tournament books, opening/ending/middle game guides. Several Bibles and various theological works--I've read quite a few of these, but not all.

This leaves a huge number of books that are just book books. Books that I have acquired over the course of a long and lengthening lifetime. Which were acquired for either one of two reasons: 1) I needed them for research; or 2) I intended to read them. Books in the first of these categories, necessary for research, are pretty much unobtrusive as far as my conscience is concerned. I got them for research, I see reminders of projects long since or recently finished, remember using the books and being happy I had them here in my library.

And as I scan the shelves I see quite a number of books in the second of these categories, the ones I got to actually read, that I actually have read. But depressingly, quite a few more in the second category that sit accusingly on these shelves reminding me of how fickle I can be when it comes to my reading tastes, much less my reading commitments. Take poetry collections . . . some of these Billy Collins, Stephen Dunn, Stephen Dobyns, Bob Hicok, others I have read whole and entire. Quite a few other collections, I've read a few or several poems. Others, hell, I've never even opened them. And there are a depressing number of books in all subjects that join James Schuyler Collected Poems in the category never even looked at.

It makes me sad to see how many there are in this category, nestled sometimes up against a book I read, but sometimes abutting several more that are likewise unread.

I'll talk some more about this tomorrow. This going on longer than I thought it would.

Buried

A forbidding-sized pile . . . and I wish I had the cat, too.

Man, a ton of work has just fallen upon me. It appears I'm going to be buried in history stuff for some time. I received the copy-edited proofs of a book I'm co-editing with a friend today via UPS. I'm looking at this big pile of over 400 pages, each of which must be read very carefully because this is really the last time you get to catch any errors and make corrections. After the page proofs, the next step in the process, no changes except factual errors and typos. That means hardly any changes. I am also responsible for building the index for this hummer, which can't begin until the page proofs. And I've got a sinking feeling that I will have to do the indexing by hand, unless some way can be found to either perform electronic indexing on a pdf file or have a Word file to work.

And this is just one thing on the plate. I have also received another 400+ page manuscript for a book about Confederate generals in the Trans-Mississippi theater. This one is for the initial edit. I've already encountered one chapter that is just awful. It needs a  lot of work before it gets into our book. My co-editor and I are like good cop-bad cop. Guess who the bad cop is?

A Couple of Random Thoughts

A couple of thoughts trickled through my mind today, for what reason I know not. First, I had to make one of my extremely infrequent trips to Wal-mart (or the mart of darkness, as I refer to it). I don't have to rehearse, do I, the reasons why I find going there a repulsive experience? And to all the usual reasons you can add the fact that it was beastly hot in Oklahoma today. Over 100. Not fit weather for man or beast to be out in. (In fact, although I usually--almost always take Prozac, the Boston Terrier, with me whenever I go somewhere in the car, I left her home on purpose. I wasn't about to leave her locked in the car in such heat.) Anyway, I was uncommonly aware of all the Wal-mart employees I saw today. And I could not get out of my mind the fact that these poor wretches probably could't get any other kind of job--and even so, are better off than millions of other people who can't find any kind of job in an economy even more wretched than working at Wal-mart. I thought about how fortunate I am and my kids are . . . And how sorry I am for all the victims of soulless American capitalism.

And second, the remarkable fact that tomorrow I will have been married to Susan for 45(!) years. I've been married to her my entire life, really, because I truly knew nothing about what's important before this event. And she has been my life: I could not have gotten this far without her. I have never net another person so inherently good. That I should be so blessed as to have this person love me for all those years and be the mother of my children . . . well, that's just miraculous.

It's Unbelievable

I just encountered this little tidbit informing me that (presumably) supporters of Michelle Bachman, the bubble-brained bimbo from Minnesota who thinks she has what it takes to be president, have gone to changing the entries on Wikipedia for John Wayne and John Quincy Adams to fit the botched rendition of facts she's rendered in speeches. She claimed that John Quincy Adams is one of the Founding Fathers. Yeah, right. He was John Adams's kid and was a young teenager when the American Revolution ended. And to make it even more amazing, she refuses to back off this position . . . She continues to claim that JQA is a "Founding Father." The other issue involves the birthplace of John Wayne. She got this wrong in a speech, confusing Waterloo, Iowa, with Waterloo, Indiana.

This is trivial stuff, right? But when you have got people willing to go and change information on an online encyclopedia to fit a twisted untrue version of events because a political candidate they support doesn't know what he/she is talking about, you have to shake your head in complete wonderment. What is wrong with these people? Have they gone completely nuts? It has to be some explanation like this. No one in possession of their faculties does such a thing. But we live now in an Orwellian universe. This kind of thing is normative. Me, I still find it unbelievable.

Related articles

• Michele Bachmann Flubs History Again (alan.com)
• Michele Bachmann sets record straight: 'I'm a substantive, serious person' (dailykos.com)
• Michele Bachmann (R-Mars) Refuses to Admit She Was Wrong About Founding Fathers (littlegreenfootballs.com)

Actually, Some Good News

I got this notice in email today from Change.org. It caught my eye because of mention of a MLB team:

And the Minnesota Twins make 5. To cap it all off, CBS reported on Tuesday that the Minnesota Twins will be the 5th pro baseball team to make an "It Gets Better" video to help prevent suicide by teens who are bullied for being gay. Every team that's made a video (Twins, Red Sox, Cubs, Mariners, and Giants) has done so after a local Change.org member started a petition asking them to. As these victories add up, the cumulative effect is eroding the culture of homophobia in men's pro sports.

Well, I didn't know that. In fact, I barely knew there was a campaign "It Gets Better" going on, much less that the likes of the Chicago Cubs were involved in it.

Disgusted

Oh, there's a lot going on in the world. New York passes a gay marriage bill. And I read that we taxpayers are paying more for air conditioning the troops in Afghanistan & Iraq than we are for the entire NASA budget. (Are you frigging kidding me??) Just roll that one around in your head for a second or two. Does it give you a headache? All kinds of other stuff happening, too.

But what's really on my mind right now is the drubbing the Texas Rangers have taken over the last four games they have played. The team looks like crap of late. (I have noted before how one's feeling of well-being and contentment if one is a baseball fan is directly proportional to the fortunes of your team.) All at home. And against a couple of chump teams: the Houston Astros and the New York Mets. The Rangers managed to win 1 of these games. It was my painful experience to watch two of these games. The last game of Houston series, game 1 in this stretch of 4, the Rangers blew in the top of the 9th inning. The closer, Nephtali Feliz, has a meltdown and gives up 4 runs. And the last game of the 3-game series against the Mets today was just a horror show. Mets little dribbly-ass hits rolling through the infield. At least three atrocious calls by three different umps, all of which cost Texas runs. Sloppy defense. I don't even want to talk about it anymore.

Just one more thing. I wonder what kind of penalties are attached for ballplayers to say that the umps made some awful calls? Both Ron Washington, Ranger manager, and Derrick Holland, the Ranger pitcher, refused to say anything about the awful umpiring. Is it about later retaliation? Hell, Washington got tossed out of the game. Anybody watching knew what he thought of the calls.

Here's the article that got me to thinking along these lines. The whole damn thing was disgusting.

Related articles

• Downs' game-winning shot off Feliz powers Astros (cbssports.com)
• Rangers' Andrus exits early with sprained left wrist (cbssports.com)