The Primate Press

I know Barack wants me to be doing my part to support healthcare reform, and to donate my money to Organizing for America, and explain his proposal to my friends who aren’t yet on board. And I know I haven’t been paying much attention, what with trying to make a living after becoming un- and then self-employed, and all the other things I’ve been up to – really since the election.

But right now there’s something I want Barack to do. Mr. President humbly insists that he can’t do this without me, and that I have to be like an activist and start a movement to get it done – but I personally feel pretty useless right now. Right now one thing has to be done for any healthcare reform to happen and only Barack Obama can do it.

Stop trying to convince the Republicans. Start trying to convince the 52% of Americans that oppose this bill. If they like it, Republicans are irrelevant. That’s what I want Barack Obama to do.

Maybe that’s impossible. Why do 52% (or more depending on the pollster) oppose this bill? Maybe it’s just bad. Maybe the Republicans do have the pulse of America, and the Democrats are out of touch.

Right. Perhaps 52% of Americans believe, like Senator John Barasso of Wyoming, that they all should have “catastrophic insurance coverage that required them to pay for most services out of pocket,” because “Americans would make better, less costly health care choices” then. Or, perhaps 52% of Americans believe we simply cannot afford to cover the uninsured, the “more than 30 million people over 10 years” Obama would cover, because we can’t afford the programs we already have, like Medicare. I’m sure they’re leary, but do they really believe the nation that could afford to attack Iraq does not, when it comes down to it, have it in its capacity to find a way?

Republican politicians are ideologically rabid about these issues. They disagree philosophically. Americans in general do not.

For example, consider the December CNN poll that had 61% of Americans opposing the health care reform bill in its form at the time, which included a “public option.” The same poll showed 53% FAVORING a public option, as a general idea.

Maybe they’re against the current bill because it’s not liberal enough! as the Huffington Post would have you believe. But that’s just as gross and self-serving an assertion as the Tea Partiers claiming they represent America.

52% of Americans quite simply don’t like the bill because they believe, while it might help some people, it’s not going to help them personally. Most Americans get good health insurance through their employers right now, and while they may be paying somewhat more, it’s a pretty good situation. In this recent ABC poll, 53% of Americans believe if the bill becomes law their premiums would go up, and 50% that the quality of their care would be better if no change was made. They are unsure, and so do not want to take the chance of ruining something that’s working for them.

Obama claims this won’t happen, or at least that if there is a price increase it’s because benefits have also increased. I don’t know if Barack is right or not, but why do people in general believe he’s wrong? Because they’ve dissected the bill and found evidence to the contrary? Because they have been won over by a well-formed and cogent Republican argument? No, because the extraordinary ruckus made by the massively powerful, corporately-funded conservative PR machine has succeeded at its singular mission. To raise enough doubt in normal people’s minds to make them balk. That’s all. No one’s convinced anyone.

It’s Obama’s job to convince them. Not mine. Only Obama can do it.

Oh, God. The One. She’s one of those.

Well, let me just explain why. First of all, even though it may seem like it’s existed forever, this power of the conservative media, which can really claim only a 25% minority of true believers, to incessantly influence public opinion, is an extraordinary force. Never before the past decade has so much money been riding on, and bankrolling, the defeat of public policy that displeases big business. Never before has technology made the dissemination of falsely or suspiciously-based doubt so immediate and so cheap. Never before has corporate America been so motivated and so well-poised to literally warp the debate with views that hardly anyone shares. This is an extraordinary situation in which to promote a bill whose goal is to help people, perhaps, but at bottom is not in line with the interests of corporate America.

On top of all that money, the goal of raising doubts is pathetically easy to accomplish. Distractions, fear, oversimplification and blatant lies are all fine tools any buffoon can master. FactCheck.org might call them out again and again, but the goal has already been accomplished. Communicating an idea is hard; derailing communication takes no hard work, intelligence or talent at all.

I do not believe that Obama has magical powers or is Jesus with a tan. I do believe he is an extraordinarily talented communicator, with a deep and broad knowledge of the issues, and the indispensable ability to educate. I also think – oh, I guess I know this – that he is in an extraordinary position to unleash these abilities on the public, as he is the president. He is the One! – but only because we need someone extraordinary, in an extraordinary position, to counteract this extraordinary situation.

(This happened repeatedly in the campaign, by the way. People were unconvinced, Obama was so young, the media was saying such outlandish things. Then Obama would make a concerted effort to aim his extraordinary powers of communication and explanation in opposition to the misinformation, and people would come around. This is called, being a leader.)

If he would only stop being accommodating and do it now.

Stop trying to convince the Republicans. Start trying to convince the 52% of Americans that oppose this bill. My ordinary fellow supporters and I will pitch in by explaining the reform to people we know, perhaps. Then, use reconciliation to pass it. If the majority of Americans are on board, Republicans are irrelevant.

Does anyone really think Republicans are going to vote for any healthcare reform bill no matter what’s in it? I don’t. While I truly applaud Obama’s above and beyond efforts to invite them into non-partisan cooperation, so far his efforts have done no good. Republicans vote against everything proposed by Democrats no matter what. That’s because it doesn’t benefit them politically to cooperate (or that’s their perception.) It only benefits them to oppose, oppose, oppose. Obama may do an admirable job inviting non-partisan cooperation in Washington, but it doesn’t make Republican voters waver for a second on what they demand of their representatives.

Ezra Klein with something of the same thought in the Washington Post.

So we may disagree about to what extent a Public Option would help — it would help me personally a great deal, being self employed and relying on not getting too sick for fear of testing the arbitrary limits of Unicare’s benevolence — but do any Democrats really think it would hurt? Even just to try?  This argument comes down to, as usual, team politics. Republicans oppose this legislation because it’s from Democrats. Republicans will find a way to oppose it after the public option is off the table.

Finally, Barry Obama is seeing the light. I think the reality has set in on what that public option would really mean to the United States of America, and even a closet communist like him knows he could never get away with it.

For an illustration of just what things would be like if a public health care option ever were to be adopted, I need only mention these three words: UPS, FedEx and USPS.

Once upon a time, mail in this country was handled efficiently and effectively for everyone. Back in Colonial times when there was only UPS and FedEx, two fine private, for-profit companies, everyone knew they would get their mail on time for the lowest cost. But some liberal in Washington was not satisfied with things working efficiently and effectively, and he came up with a public option for mail — the United States Postal Service, or USPS. I think that was Jimmy Carter.

Now, you have the situation of today. A giant, federally-funded, poorly run behemoth has taken over the entire mail industry, and is the only choice. No private company can compete when the playing field includes a cheater like the US Government, propped up with a free revenue stream of taxpayer dollars. So UPS and FedEx, once the champions of high quality mail delivery, with retail stores everywhere, quickly declared bankruptcy and disappeared from the landscape.

When’s the last time you got your mail without going down to the USPS station and waiting for hours? Some resort to flying to Canada to get their mail. And with the usual waste and mismanagement of a government bureaucracy, getting our mail costs much more than it used to when free market competition kept prices low. Remember the good old days, when it only cost 32 cents to mail a letter?

And God forbid you have a problem with mailing something. Calling the USPS with a problem is a nightmare. Its customer service is nothing like the fine customer service that naturally comes into being when the free market system is unregulated. It’s the opposite of the excellent customer service you get when you call, for example, the fine private company AT& T. The electronic voice is so sincere when it assures you “your call is important to us.” The real live people are so courteous when they transfer you to another department, or the wrong department, or tell you to call back at a different number, or disconnect you accidentally for the eighth time in a row. They’re so nice when they give you the phone number of the department they’re trying to connect you to, just in case for some reason you get disconnected. And it’s no problem at all calling them back over and over, because the wait time is never longer than 20 or 30 minutes before another representative comes on the line. They always speak perfect English. You can tell by their American names that they are local employees, and not slave labor outsourced to India at a dollar per hour, as the United States Postal Service does. And knowledgeable! These people are so knowledgeable when you have a technical question about your Internet service. Not only do they know exactly what department to pass you off to, they know all the special offers they are required to bombard you with after they haven’t helped you with the problem you called about in the first place! Now that is the unfettered free market system working to help the regular joe.

Nope, if the liberals in Congress get away with this Public Option, it will be the end of American life as we know it. A government competitor in a free market industry? It’s unheard of. It’s unamerican. It’s unnatural, and we have yet to see an example of it working in our country.

Read Rest of Blog Post

What kind of man pins his hopes and dreams on a lawn chair made to fly by tying dozens of weather balloons to it? With milk jugs for ballast?

Someone sort of crazy, someone who’s a dreamer, someone “quirky”. Yeah. In the current Steppenwolf production of Up by Bridget Carpenter, Ian Barford’s Walter Griffin has all of those qualities. But still, something is missing. Somehow, it was still not this man that would do that. This production (and possibly the play) have a class issue.

There were many lovely things about the production, especially the sweet portrayal of the two teens, the staging of Phillipe Petit on his highwire, and the best moment of the play when 16 year old ** Griffin joins him up there on a high of love.

But always in the scenes between Walter and his wife, the actors seemed uncertain about how to proceed. That’s because the imagery doesn’t make sense without a certain indication of class. Who pins his dreams on something like that? Someone quirky, crazy, that’s  true — but also someone of the lower middle class. The shear futility of the dream, which is the beauty of it, is a characteristic curse of a certain class. The lawn chair, the desperation that drives such a need for escape, the fatal touch of one’s 15 minutes arriving too soon — on David Letterman — these are all images that make sense only in the context of a redneck.

Ian Barford just seems and looks too yuppy-ish for this role. In the role of his wife, Rachel Brosnahan is too North Shore, and Martha Lavey, as spectacularly refined as she is, is far too aristocratic for the role of a tarot card reading con artist. That down and dirty sense of class, something along the lines of what Mickey Rourke would do, is not only essential to the aesthetic, it’s essential to understanding the play. My favorite part about Superior Donuts was how Michael McKean was in such perfect register as far as class, ethnicity and age. I wish the characterizations in this play could have had that subtly of class register, not because they need to be faithful to the “true life” story, but because it’s essential to the expression.

This might be a problem with the writing too, I’m not sure. Perhaps Carpenter shied away from writing the truck driver that inspired her because it was not something she knew well enough. Certainly the Steppenwolf crew shied away from it, either because they missed that element, or because they couldn’t relate to it.

With that piece of the puzzle, I can see what inspired the writer to write about it. It’s a beautiful and poignant image of the futility of all of our hopes. It’s a sad and moving play, and, thank goodness, not bittersweet or quirky in the least.

Only with the element of class do we understand the desperation of the need, and the peculiar object of a flying lawn chair that is at once low tech, cheap and wildly independent. Only with that specificity does the image stir our own feelings of ultimate futility.

Preventive testing not covered by insurance: $166. Medically necessary root canal without dental insurance: $1280. One doctor visit in excess of calendar year limit: approx. $300. Out of pocket costs since April, when I was laid off: $1776. Public health care option: priceless.

The Art Institute’s thesis that “the Edvard Munch of popular imagination—a tortured, bohemian rebel who seemed almost a living version of the famous figure in The Scream—was in fact a myth, carefully constructed during Munch’s lifetime by critics, historians, and the artist himself” would be much more interesting if the real Munch was actually a good painter.

Abundantly evident from this show is the fact that the reason these myths are the focus of audiences, critics and popular imagination is because to fixate on the work for its own sake is totally boring. I surmise also that Munch himself invited the myths for certain similar reasons.

The main deficiency in Munch’s work is that the entire canvas is not treated with the same amount of interest and care. The galleries are filled with large paintings in which almost the entire acreage is ignored; one moment of intense interest is repeatedly contained within miles of wasted canvas. Invariably you could cut out nearly the entire painting and be left with the only interesting part. Often you can cut out the entire painting.

The faces are the thing he was interested in; the faces are exquisite and alive — the faces contain the entire expression. But the “backgrounds” and the rest of the scenes are dead and ignored, and different. The paintings aren’t integrated.

A prime example is his Sick Child paintings, of which there were two versions in the show. The dying child’s face is filled with pathos, and a peculiar existentialist sense of the futility of everything (for that’s what this motif is surely about) — everything that these paintings are reputed to say, and uniquely in Munch’s voice. But the rest of the painting — bed, room, parent — don’t contribute. The more famous Anxiety is another. And if the faces are covered, as in Kiss by the Window, there is nothing whatsoever to look at of interest. What we have is just a bad painting.

Similarly, the idea in the show’s thesis that he had other, here-to-fore under-acknowledged influences, such as Monet, would have been more interesting if his unique genius had transformed these influences into something entirely his own. For example, it is fascinating to consider how Van Gogh was impressed with the “scientific” dots of Seurat, and how dutifully he went about incorporating the idea into his own language — and to behold how expressive and unlike Seurat is the product. But Munch never improved on or made his influences his own. “Summer Night: Inger on the Beach” is a derivative corpse compared to the sparkling Monet in the same room, “On the Bank of the Seine, Bennecourt”.

But it is inaccurate to think Munch had nothing original to say. He was just unable to say it simply, directly, and without apology or extraneous baggage. Munch never really found himself as a painter, in other words. If he had he would have cropped every painting to the face alone and confined himself to portrait painting. He would have left us a body of work as painfully lovely as Kathë Kollwitz if he’d been brave enough to trim off all the empty fat and composed his paintings to be the expression, not contain the expression. He never had the courage to say exactly what he wanted to say, however, through painting and nothing more; in life and in his art there was always the protective veil of extraneous stories to dilute and diffuse. It was like his soul was given over too much to the dread and darkness that he was trying to convey to achieve the alchemical magic of turning darkness into beauty.

Like a Munch painting, the show itself contains isolated wonderful moments, making it worth the trip — Rodin’s Kiss, Van Gogh’s lemon yellow street scene. There is a striking difference when a painter who is actually interested in and who has complete, deft control of perspective as a draftsman tackles the subject of a riverside walkway in Paris with radical perspective. It might have been that the Art Institute was coyly trying to say as much with this show, because invariably the paintings of his “influences” were excellent choices and far outshown the Munchs they hung next to. But this might be giving them too much credit.

This is a thesis that would have been more enlightening if it had been applied to Van Gogh. With him it’s a sad fact that the myths of the popular imagination and the marketing world often overshadow and distract from a truly great painter. The uninitiated often are prevented from enjoying his truly imaginative and spiritual vision for thinking about how it was that he cut off his ear.

Not so with Munch. Myths about insanity and loneliness are much more fun than the paintings themselves.

Republicans in Congress are successfully leveraging the AIG crisis to critique and oppose Obama’s budget. Let’s remember that it was the Bush administration and Republican Congress of last session who gave the bailout to AIG (curious, some were allowed to fail, some were given bailouts) and DID NOT cancel the obscene bonuses as a condition of the bailout. This has been a stipulation in bailouts since then, and they could have chosen to do so. Must notta occurred to ‘em.

The unions are always asked to renegotiate their contracts in the best interests of all concerned; but when it’s the “talent” at the top, suddenly everyone’s invoking the rule of law.

I am a Democrat, but on the day after Sept. 11, 2001, I wanted nothing more than for the Bush administration to succeed. I was behind it. Though I disagree ideologically with Republicans, I had to go on faith that they would have the wisdom to respond effectively. And I was devastated as anyone to see, over the course of the next 7 years, every bit of this good will and political capital squandered. Massive incompetence, embarrassing flouting of the rule of law, blatant corruption, spectacular abuses of executive power and the obvious precedence of self interest over the interests of the people took away the Republican Party’s right to run this country. The people took it away officially on Nov. 4th, 2008. Now we all have to live with what the Democrats and Obama are going to try and do to get us out of this mess.

I don’t know how successful they’re going to be. I won’t claim that anything the Obama administration has done so far is perfect. I am saddened by the prevalence of “Clinton Democrats” because I don’t really think they’re agents for change. As far as the stimulus package is concerned, I’m sure it has many problems. However, I agree with the green initiatives and have high hopes that they will begin to undo the environmental damage done by the Bush administration, and create jobs in the process. I also agree with the general theory that a prosperous middle class stimulates the economy from the bottom up, so don’t even mention tax cuts to me as the “Only” stimulus there is.

This is how the Democratic Party differs from the Republican Party. It has always promoted dissension, and never really held loyalty up as much of a value — certainly not above truth. Because of this, the Democratic Party usually destroys itself. So don’t worry. You’ll have your government back in time. Also because of this I will never claim that my party does no wrong or is not corrupt — as the Far Right staunchly did no matter what kind of conduct came out of the Bush White House. When a member of my party — Rod Blagojevich, Roland Burris — stinks of corruption I’m going to be the loudest critic, because what I care about is the truth.

What I will not tolerate is a faction of the public rooting for and working for the current administration’s failure. Why? What can possibly be the benefit of them failing to anyone in the United States? What possibly was the benefit to anyone of the Bush administration failing miserably in Iraq? For the 8 years of the Bush administration I refrained from initiating arguments with conservatives which I knew could not be decided because of ideological entrenchment — no matter how hard it was to resist sniping. The Republican Party had their chance to run things and has lost it through their own doing. It’s not in anybody’s interest, except the bruised egos of the Far Right, to work for the failure of the Democratic Party this time around.

So, perhaps think twice before you send out your poisonous vitriole — or at least before sending it to me.