Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

Author's note: the following yuletide greeting comes from the pen of our legal staff, the august firm Dewey, Diddlum & Howe, at the insistence, we're sorry to say, of the esteemed partner who gives us most of what ends up, we're again sorry to say, being pretty poor advice most of the time. That said, we haven't mailed the firm a check in a long time (though we certainly have sent Les a lot of olives), so what should we expect?

Greetings one and all!

It's been another great year here at Dewey, Diddlum & Howe. We're doing more business than ever with some of the shadiest people imaginable, and yet they continue to pay and we continue to care, and the help continues to steal us blind while N Howe, who does all the work, looks the other way and, well, does all the work.

For this we give thanks.

And also for Michelle Bachman, Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, possibly Ron Paul, and anyone else the Republican base believes, however fleetingly, is a better candidate to run for president against Barack Obama than Mitt Romney. May they all be our clients one day, with money in their checking accounts.

Let us also be thankful this holiday season for Mitt Romney, who was VC back when most of us still thought VC was Charlie, who, as someone else pointed out, looks like a guy who might play the president in a movie calling for a president in a bit part.

Let us be thankful, too, that the Good Lord gave us the eloquent atheist and apostate Christopher Hitchens to get after all the charlatans and clowns and sanctimonious folk who make this Hobbesian existence of ours even more Hobbesian.

Let us be thankful for Facebook and other fine social networking sites, for giving us the illusion that we are close and cosy and keeping in touch. As Ibsen said, a vital lie is critical to the sanity of most of us—lies, in my case. As in: All is well so long as N Howe is doing the work. And I have olives.

Let us be thankful for Greece, btw, for their olives, for giving us civilization, for being the kind of client we here at Dewey, Diddlum & Howe would love to have if they had any money in their checking account.

Let us be thankful for snow, which we here in Louisville (if not in Summit County) have in abundance, for the moment.

For a White Christmas, Charlie Brown's Christmas, and It's a Wonderful Life.

For fudge and cookies and stuffing and pumpkin pie.

For quiet nights with the associates, after a stiff drink ...

For our clients, even the ones who don't pay their bills ...

That is all.

Sincerely,

Les Diddlum, Of Counsel (Part-time)

Dewey, Diddlum & Howe

[You Pay, We Care]

Wishing all a very merry holiday season!

cb

Penn State as Metaphor

A man high up in the chain of Penn State football is caught buggering a 10-year-old boy in the showers by a 28-year-old man, an assistant coach with Penn State football, who doesn't stop the man, doesn't call the police, but does report what he saw to someone presumably with some power to do something, being another link in the chain of Penn State football.

The matter is handled internally. In a similar fashion to the way the Catholic Church handled and continues to handle such problems. In a similar fashion to the way our financial system polices and smoothes out its more grotesque excesses that end up buggering the relatively innocent for life.

It's the rare individual, the rare program, that is brave when there is much to lose for being so. Better to sweep the mess under the rug than risk a noisy, unwieldy fuss. In the case of Penn State, one can imagine certain questions being wrestled over: Are we really going to risk bringing down a program we've spent years building just because one of our coaches has a predilection for buggering young boys? A man like Joe Paterno is going to live out his twilight years in shame over something that random and bizarre and, let's face it, just plain sick? No, that would be unthinkable. What we need to do is manage it as best we can, keep a close eye on Jerry, pay off those we need to—everyone has a price, especially the families of 10-year-old boys we have to hope—and not screw up what the rest of us have worked a lifetime to achieve. We will not let this unfortunate incident, nor any of the rest, or those in the future, compromise the program.

One can almost see the tears welling in the eyes of those coming to the conclusion they almost always do as they wrestle with their cowardice in the face of losing everything dear to them, as they come bit by bit or perhaps all at once to a decision to save themselves.

One can understand the difficulty of the struggle. The Church, before choosing to save itself from their minions of pederasts, had to save itself from other difficult messes. During World War II, for instance, ten or so years before Joe Paterno began his career with Penn State, The Church could have spoken out when it was known within their ranks that Hitler was slaughtering Jews, and many others. Why didn't they say anything? it is often asked. Why didn't they encourage the reluctant democracies that the Jews of Europe trusted to not let them down to do something, sooner? Could it be that the great Catholic Church established nearly two thousand years earlier was afraid of what Hitler, and Mussolini, would do to their world, and their Swiss guards, and their remarkably rich and lovely enclave, if they did? Yet what other reason is plausible, for the original Christian faith to not speak out when masses of humanity, not to mention the Chosen People, are being slaughtered?

And what about the United States? And Great Britain? And all those powerful Jewish And Swiss Bankers that supposedly ran the world? What up?

One can imagine the hand-wringing. But ... to risk the program for a few million Jews, and gypsies, and homosexuals? Rather, let's pray, all of us—and thank God there's a Heaven for those poor souls. Yes, we'll pray for their souls, and wait for this hell on earth to end. A few million Jews and other heathens aren't worth a Sisteen Chapel. And the Americans have already blown up a monastery.

Similarly, the banks in Europe and America—the great churches of our modern commercial times—who have lent their money foolishly to people and nations with low FICO scores and to otherwise untold numbers of greedy schemes that haven't worked out as well as they'd hoped are not going to risk the future of their organizations for the sake of some quaint principle known as free enterprise, where risks are taken and sometimes rewarded, sometimes not. No, the days of manning up to such silliness are long gone, and besides, many of their own are fine, mostly dedicated people, many of whom have families and are generally thought to be decent, some of whom donate money to good causes, to the symphony, the opera, outfits that would be in a real fix without them—yes, good people, not unlike many of the Nazi officers who were merely carrying out orders, like certains priests who couldn't help themselves or their natures, like Mr. Sandusky, surely, who says he's no pedophile, though admits to "horsing around."

Good people. Our own. Taking care of each other with all their power, regardless of the consequences, principle, Christian decency or any other kind, for as long as they can, until they can't anymore. Until the jig is finally up.

How Reading Jim Harrison Could Save Your Life

Or at least lift it a little in the near-term, yes? Perhaps we ought not ask for the world at the moment ...

I promised my friend Paul on the way back from walking the boys to school that I wouldn't dawdle around worrying about world events or how much laundry there was to do still, that I wouldn't fret over burned out lightbulbs and leaves that need raking, plants that need to get brought in before it freezes tomorrow night, that I wouldn't stare at Bloomberg or diddle away my precious time on my devices and that, rather, I would sit down As Soon As I Got Home and get to work on tailoring what everyone who has read them agrees are inspired revisions to the middle of the novel that I have been working on since the waning days of the Clinton presidency, and get the goddamned thing done, once and for all.

But here I am, feeling the need to say a word about Jim Harrison before I really buckle down and get going, before I have to get to karate at noon ...

Now, one must admit we live in a time where to manage the fear and trembling over what we're as yet still reluctant to accept is an intractable state of affairs, brought on (more than we're still willing to admit, of course) by our trusting the capitalists too much, while at the same time being greedy little pigs ourselves, we have sunk to taking comfort in platitudes, in low-fat foods and promising lotions, in headlines celebrating, for instance, the second win of the season by our local professional football team, its ranks not too long ago decimated in a way no less thoroughly than a five-year-old wielding a Harry Potter wand might have, by a hooded, high-strung, thirty-something-year-old hired in equivocal times—though hardly desperate times; desperate happened after—to replace the man who won two Super Bowls and is now the current coach of the Washington Redskins, by an owner who very soon thereafter had to admit that he'd made a big mistake, the kind for which in the old days, in more noble cultures where a person was expected to do more than say something fatuous like they "took full responsibility" to manage the magnitude of the wrong, and the shame, and the embarrassment, a person might have literally fallen on his sword. Instead, we got a new high-strung, relatively short Christian quarterback who is now, after much ballyhoo, our number one man behind center not to mention our only hope left, and our team—check it out—came out of yesterday's pitched and much-viewed battle with a spectacular three-point overtime win over a team that has so far, unless I'm mistaken, not won a game this season. To add even more significance to the day, Our Man Tim—his name is Tim, lest you're completely shut out of the world we live in now—won this game against the Dolphins, in Miami, which is fairly close to if not on the same field where he played in college. "Tim-tastic!" read today's headlines—not on the sports page, but on the Front Page of the whole fucking paper! Such are the times, even here, where they are still pretty good compared to, say, Florida, especially in Louisville ...

But I digress. The point I was going to make was that, in times like these, I'd expect that roughly 80% of my readers—a good five to ten people at least, distracted with all that they are—are asking themselves about now: "Who the fuck is Jim Harrison?"

Well, I suppose you can hardly be blamed. Although the Seattle Times referred to him as "A force of nature in American letters," who the fuck reads the Seattle Times, right? Moreover, who has time to bother with American Letters, whatever the fuck those are in late September of 2011, when a person can just fiddle with his or her devices, or go for a run, or do some much needed work in the yard before it gets cold?

Nonetheless, I'm telling you that many of you would feel a whole lot better if you picked up one of his books and shoved your devices and stuff to the side and told everyone and everything in your face at the moment to fuck off and just sat someplace quiet and read for a while. That's all I'm saying. That, and that you could do worse than start with Jim Harrison, with, I'd say, the collection of novellas, Legends of the Fall, the worst of the three being the title story, in my opinion, the one they made the relatively shitty movie out of, with Brad Pitt, who has since been in better stuff, notably Moneyball, which you should go see rather than waiting to download it one day on your device, but ... whatever ... if you read "Revenge," or, especially, "The Man Who Gave Up His Name," and think, What was that? or, I think I'll just stick with my devices, well then, I'll leave you to your fate. Perhaps your well-diversified 401K and a shitload of Apps and skinny lattes on the fly is all you'll need for future happiness—let's hope you're right. But if you're starting to seriously wonder, and you like the novellas previously mentioned above, go down to your favorite bookstore—there still are some out there that aren't listed on the NYSE, or going broke themselves; for instance, in Louisville, there is the estimable Barbara's Book Cellar, which really isn't in a cellar, not anymore, it's right on Main Street in clear view of anyone who isn't looking down, staring at a device while heading down the street—and tell them that you want something by Jim Harrison; tell them you'll take anything they have, even his new one, The Great Leader, which you'll want in a 1st Edition, or the one before that ...

The English Major ... I'm reading it now, and I can tell you, without equivocation, that it has been a helpful tonic to my soul. It wasn't a big hit. It got okay reviews when it came out. He's not your all over NPR and Terri Gross and Charlie Rose kind of guy, though he's not Hunter Thompson or Charles Bukowski either. More like an aging Henry Miller who likes to fish. Who has a better way with words, and is probably wiser. Reviewers, especially the really esteemed ones who go nuts over stuff that oftentimes, when you read it, feels like someone added just the tiniest touch of drama along with some jacked syntax to a collection of thrown-together Wikipedia facts, that puts you to sleep in a way that your devices or a good book with vampires or zombies or thoughtful dogs, or even something by Shel Silverstein, never would—anyway, those people feel like they have to be careful and not too effusive about Jim Harrison, in the same way that one should be careful with certain thoughts that come to mind and not just blurt out, for instance, how someone's seventeen-year-old daughter is fucking beautiful. All to say, it's best if you're a reviewer, and want to stay esteemed, to be a little circumspect when reviewing a book by Harrison, who, himself, is not circumspect in any way that I've been able to detect, especially when it comes to the driftings of the human mind, and to human appetites generally, even the lingering ones of a sixty-year-old, who, himself, the hero of The English Major, finding that his libido has left certain parts of his anatomy raw and itching, says he has "endured rather than prevailed."

Here are the lines that follow that one: "My senior students had yawned when I tried to teach them the glories of Faulkner's Nobel Prize speech. A chunky little cheerleader named Debbie who would later grow into a human bowling ball squeaked, 'I don't get it.'"

See what I mean?

Here's another one (and I'm only to about page fifty): "My AD (alcoholic doctor) friend had said at a poker game that there was a certain kind of monkey that will give up lunch to see photos of female monkey butts. AD tends to say odd things when he's trying to pull a bluff during a poker game in order to throw the rest of us off."

This meditation comes in the context of our hero, who has gone traveling around the United States in his Taurus with 250 thousand miles on it, in the wake of his beloved dog dying, and his less than beloved wife having left him—the first line of the book, the laconic and oddly affecting, "It used to be Cliff and Vivian and now it isn't."—and him running into a student from twenty-five years earlier, who is forty-three now, in a terrible marriage, thinks she might be bipolar, and finds that the state of Nebraska brings out a kind of randiness in her that our hero at first finds exciting, yet, by turns, even with a stash of Viagra and Levitra given to him by AD, is growing weary of—he's sixty, after all. The sort of guy his dad had said would end up "high-minded and low-waged" from reading to much Emerson. His girl for the moment, Marybelle, has by contrast only slowed down due to a sunburn she got along a Nebraska river, and is now wearing only one of his T-shirts as they travel onward. "A gas station attendant in Chadron was treated to a sleeping beaver shot when he washed our windshield. He smirked and blushed highlighting his troubled skin."

It isn't so much that his heroes are dirty old men as they are caught off guard by things, by images, like those seen by our gas station attendant, that can't be easily disposed of. That one can no easier avoid thinking about having seen it than, say—as Harrison does, through another character in his new book—a person can stop thinking about having seen a white horse.

Anyway, lest I keep on ... I've got to get to my novel before I have to get to karate (too late!), and then go pick up the kids before I get Ian off to hockey, and then to the karate I missed earlier, and to the homework, and eat and clean up before I get to sleep at a decent hour so I'm not tired in the morning and can write again tomorrow.

You know how it is.

And all I'm saying is, if you get tired of worrying, of thinking if you just go a little faster and stay positive that the economy and jobs and the stock market and even the Greeks and the prospects for print and literary fiction in particular will break out of it's current obdurate range, and that property will take off again and we'll all be rich if we're just patient and pray and are hopeful every day no matter what and don't raise taxes here in this difficult economy at what is surely a very brief if difficult moment brought on by trusting the wrong people and behaving like fools ourselves for many, many years ... when you finally come to terms with the fact that it's been a long, long night of partying and more kegs and whiskey and weed and all the rest at five in the morning isn't going to amount to much for very many, that we're looking at a long hangover and a big mess to clean up and possibly even a few lawsuits here and there before we get that skip back in our step again, think about picking up some Jim Harrison and doing a little correcting yourself. You just might be glad you did.

Bachman's Promise

During a President Bachman Administration, gas will drop to under two dollars again ...

"That will happen," she says.

Talk about cool!

But imagine if I—Bartleby Productions and, uh ... Ministries—could get your gas down even further, say to under $1.85/gallon ...

Before the election!

How cool would that be?

Of course, seeing through such a highly ambitious and delusional plan will require some financing. And I realize many of you are stretched, but ... ten dollars a day, all of it fully tax deductible (unlike campaign contributions), seems like a more than reasonable amount for me to try and hustle from y'all, and given the worthwhile nature of the goal, I'm sure that ...

If you really care about getting back your cheap gas, you'll have me set up the Pay-Pal—or pay me cash; actually, cash is preferred here at BP&M—as soon as possible in order to get on this bit of business right away, and not wait (and in the meantime pay double) until Prez MB and VP Ricky are sworn in.

Our operators are standing by ...

This week's poll: Will Gold hit $2000.00 before the Rapture? Give us your thoughts.

Amy and the Debt, Baby

Obscured by Amy Winehouse's "unexplained" death (the whistle-blower in the Murdock case who died last week, his death was also "unexplained"), by the further death of scores in Norway at the hand of a right-wing nutcase The Onion couldn't have dreamed up, and by, on a positive note, persons of the same sex being allowed at long last to marry in the State of New York, is another eleventh hour stand off in Washington, this time over raising the debt ceiling, something that, contrary to the noise and fuss about its being historic in nature, has been done an average of nearly once a year since the Federal Reserve was created, ostensibly to preserve the value of our currency, near the start of World War I.

Like the bailout of the banks, and the auto industry, and all the "quantitative easing" that has come down the pipe (and will continue to come down the pipe, in various costuming), this deal will get done because people with money and power will insist on it. We will not default on our debt and risk the wrath of bond-holders worldwide. Moreover, we cannot afford even slightly higher interest rates given our indebtedness (as we could the last time we were into this situation, when the Vietnam War and The Great Society got to be too much for the nation's pocketbook, back in 1980 or thereabouts); we will not risk having our debt downgraded by the ratings agencies that did such a fine job, btw, of separating the wheat from the chafe ahead of our last crisis, but never mind.

So, while our debt is a looming disaster waiting to happen, it isn't, blessedly, as looming as Europe's, or Japan's—ours, as the giant bond fund PIMCO says, is the least dirty shirt of the bunch.

We're screwed, but others, friends of ours, are screwed worse! Thankfully!

And from the point of view of any politician paying attention, there's yet a decent chance we'll get our screwing in a way where most of us won't even realize we got it, much less cast blame on who did it, and how brazenly. It'll be as though someone slipped us a mickey in a bar, and then screwed us. We won't remember a thing.

The politicians, correctly, I would say, are assuming the bit by bit screwing of, notably, savers, people on fixed income, hobbled in one way or another, possibly from serving their country in a war that didn't pan out so well in terms of booty, is preferable to draconian austerity, to bankers holding lousy debt having to actually lose money on it, to the stock and bond markets crumbling, to unemployment rates going higher still, to rioting in the streets—and I wouldn't necessarily disagree.

In any case, this is not a problem that is going to be "solved" anytime soon. We've gone way too long (at least thirty years too long) as a country, as a people at a particular time in history, doing things that history is likely to judge pretty harshly, and now, bit by bit, we're reaping the consequences, and it isn't pretty (except here in Louisville; everything is pretty in Louisville; if you want to see how a tiny part of the whole bucks the trend, come to Louisville, and bring your wallet).

Anyway, here's what I think is going to happen: Obama, through his Chief of Staff on "Meet the Press" today, says he'll veto anything that doesn't put this debt-ceiling matter to bed until 2013 (read: after the election, which, given his competition, and absent a game-changing calamity of a pretty extreme kind, he is going to win, hands down—and if you don't agree, let's put a hundred bucks on it), but, the Republicans, powerful in the way of a willful child who knows his parents will spare the rod when push comes to shove, are not going to agree to anything of the sort. They will want to keep as much crisis in the moment, or at least not far in the distance, as possible, since it is their only hope, and a slim one at that, of gaining power in 2012. They are betting that Obama, when they start with their sassing, won't grab them by the ear and haul them off to the woodshed, where, in the days of LBJ, there would be much screaming and gnashing of teeth—and they'll probably be right. And we'll get some short-term, little kick of the can deal. In spite of Obama getting in Cantor's face a few days ago, we'll get stop-gap, or something like it. And the people holding Treasuries, thinking of holding Treasuries, rating Treasuries, will wonder ... and gold will go up ... stuff like that.

To be fair, both parties know that a $4 Trillion dollar "Grand" deal isn't going to solve the problem anyway, not even close. The only people who believe that don't understand the problem, and in that scenario, a grand deal scenario, Obama wins, for shepherding a grand deal, like a good leader should, and that's no good for Republicans, who are more concerned with ideology at this stage of their history than with where their bread is actually buttered (read: not by their "base" but by the wealthy, who are tiring of these shenanigans, who can deal with a little more taxation (they're rich!), entitlements they, personally, don't need, but their customers do, will, and lots of them, soon ... whatever, so long as they know what it is and their financial people can adjust accordingly, they're good).

Obama, in short, despite his ire over the intractable opposition, will give in first. It's what a loving father does. And the child knows it.

To further understand the dynamic—given Ms. Winehouse's passing this weekend, we may as well have a tie in here—imagine the country were our daughter with, say, considerable gifts and talent, but a bad drug and alcohol problem. The Tea-Bagger wing of the Republican Party would strap her to a metal bed in the basement and have one of the better behaved, more pliable children read the Bible to her until she howled and screamed and finally straightened out—just like Ms. Winehouse might have had someone had the courage to do the right thing with her. They would lock up all the booze and drugs in the house (after they were done using them) and if the daughter wouldn't see the light she'd stay in the basement, tied up, and they wouldn't talk to her, and the well-behaved, pliable child would keep reading the Bible to her and the door would stay closed and the music turned up while she did. Clockwork Orange, Baby! Straighten up, or we just might shoot you, or read Leviticus forever.

And I say/we say, No no no!!!

Liberals would argue that the daughter needs a better job, or maybe just a job, any job, to better be able to fund her habits so that she wouldn't always have to be coming to Mommy and Daddy for help. They would try to talk to her, help her, even as she spit in their face.

Those kinds of parents, people, leaders, are always in a weak position, always getting taken advantage of. They often don't live long—at least that's what I've heard. Their consolation is that at least they're trying, and they're not crazy, at least not in a brutal way ... like the people who tie their children to metal beds and beat them like LBJ used to slap around the opposition, but he was a, well, something you don't see anymore, so ...

Stay tuned!

Sheila Bair Bids Adieu

Sheila Bair's last day at the F.D.I.C. was on Friday. There's a fine article/interview written by Joe Nocera in the NY Times Sunday Magazine—which she only agreed to under the stipulation that it wouldn't be published until she had finished her term. Nothing earth-shattering to those who have been paying any attention at all, just another reminder of who has the upper hand, and who, when push comes to shove, the Treasury and Fed are looking out for.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/10/magazine/sheila-bairs-exit-interview.html

Footnotes on Newt

If you're wondering just how small the world is, consider this, a question I was asked back in late 1994, possibly early 1995, by the woman I was then dating, who had gone to a small private Lutheran college in Iowa:

"Have you ever heard of Newt Gingrich?"

"Why, yes," I said. "He's soon-to-be, or perhaps already is, the Republican Speaker of the House ... "

"He is?"

"Yes. From back-bencher, bomb-thrower, to Speaker of the House. You watch, he'll try to shut the government down to make his point—"

"Anyway, my friend, Callista—"

"Callista?"

Note, reader: this was before Ally McBeal, the popular television show (1997-2002), before anyone, particularly me, had heard of Calista (one "l") Flockhart, who played Ally McBeal in the TV show, before almost anyone had heard of a Callista, or Calista ...

Her friend, named Callista, worked in Washington, as an intern. Apparently she knew Newt Gingrich. As in, biblically.

"As in, she's fucking him—"

All right, those weren't exactly her words. It was more like they were involved, in the way that politicians and interns occasionally get involved, because they feel so passionately about their country, and work so hard, and well, sometimes—

Only, according to the woman I was dating, who talked to her friend, the future Callista Gingrich on the phone, Speaker Gingrich (a purported Futurist, after all) really didn't care much about politics, or, for that matter, his then-current wife. Apparently he only kept her around for appearances sake: fund-raisers, charity balls and the like. No, he found the political world tedious; he was more the intellectual, professorial, big ideas man with gadgets type, who, it so happened, was looking to trade in his old mare for a younger one—a much younger one, someone who didn't mind being involved with someone much older (23 years) and quite a lot heavier, who called himself Newt, whose middle name was Leroy ...

"You've got a friend who's fucking Newt Gingrich?" I reiterated, just to be clear.

"You can't tell anyone!"

"Who would I tell?"

Who says a man never dumps his wife to marry his mistress? That nothing changes in Washington?

Below, and largely unrelated to the titillating, seventeen-year-old gossip above, is a fine article by Andrew Ferguson in the Sunday Times, who, seeking to find out just how intellectual a certain intellectual really is, bravely took on the entirety of the Gingrich oeuvre (21 books, give or take, all written with co-authors) and has a few things to say about it (NB: at one point a comparison is made between Callista Gingrich and Linda McCartney, photographers, both of them ... ).

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/03/magazine/what-does-newt-gingrich-know.html

Jennifer Egan's A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD

Jennifer Egan's not-so-new-book anymore—I bought it for my wife at Christmas, then in its sixth printing; it has since won the National Book Award, and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction—is about Time, the Goon. Time with a capital T. Time, redounding time, how it presses, and presses.

We meet Sasha, on a date with Alex, who we'll meet again, much later, at a bar in a hotel in downtown NYC not long after the Towers have been downed. She excuses herself—she's grown bored with Alex—and goes to the restroom, where she spots a woman's purse sitting casually unattended between the stalls. Succumbing to old habits—for which she is seeing a therapist, illuminating clips from the sessions seamlessly and hilariously interspersed as the scene plays out—she reaches down and slips off with the wallet inside.

Back in the restaurant, she soon discovers the woman, panicked, has a flight to catch in the morning, and is now without ID, a situation that might not have caused panic prior to 911, but certainly does now. To hell with her credit cards and money, she needs proof of who she is!

Alex, new to town, fresh, principled, not yet confused and disheartened by life and the City and to big tall growing skyscrapers blocking out his light, strikes out to help the woman. The concierge is called, and after a big fuss is made, the wallet is finally found—in the restroom, by Shasha, her nerves tingling, frayed with excitement and dread and, one suspects, the forces of transition. She returns the wallet to the woman, asks her plaintively not to say anything, tells her, candidly, that she's getting help for this problem of hers. The woman agrees to keep quiet—she has her wallet, her ID, a plane to catch in the morning. A subtle transaction has taken place. A real mess has been avoided. Sasha, whom Egan throughout the book skillfully imbues with quirky, goon-defying charms, without making her especially likable, is not one to go down with the ship.

Neither is Benny Salazar, Sasha's boss of twelve years at Sow's Ear Records (the book is full of similarly apt proper nouns). Their relationship, as hinted by the verb tense in the first chapter, has recently ended, but we are in book where time goes here and there (the book was purportedly inspired by the movie "Pulp Fiction," if only in the way the characters intersect through time), and so, in the wildly funny second chapter, we meet Benny many years earlier, a man full of energy and heart, who sprinkles flecks of gold in his coffee, a man with an immigrant's drive, unburdened by self-awareness, whose judgment and mojo appear to be slipping. A former musician of so-so talent (we will get scenes of these days as well, though not through Benny's eyes), he has been riding on his discovery, years earlier, of a band called the Conduits. Yet he continues to see possibilities where others, arguably for good reason, don't: in the "pure" (but possibly used up), even in a group of cloistered nuns (whose Mother Superior he is moved to, disastrously, try and kiss). Benny is one of those guys who can't keep it in his pants, who, pushing on in life, wonders what it might be like to "not always be wanting to fuck someone," and may be on the cusp of finding out.

Time shifts, backward. It is almost 1980. Rhea, one of the girls, the groupies, of the band The Flaming Dildos, narrates: " ... thank God. The hippies are getting old, they blew their brains on acid and now they're begging on the street corners all over San Francisco ... We're sick of them." We will get echoes of this sentiment later in the book, a new generation sick of an older one, scoffing at their crushed hopes and dreams, and yet ...

Rhea is friends with Jocelyn, who has already made a tragic turn that isn't fully apparent yet with a man named Lou, who has an ex-wife and six kids and knows the famous producer Bill Graham personally. He came by in a convertible one day when Jocelyn was hitchhiking and offered her a ride. Jocelyn, we find out, is the same age as Lou's son, Rolph, who, turns out, rather likes Jocelyn—and Jocelyn, in a way more befitting someone her age, feels a tenderness toward Rolph.

In the "Safari" chapter that follows, possibly the best in the book (a slightly truncated version of which appeared in the New Yorker a little over a year ago), Rolph goes on a trip to Africa with his father and sister, Charlene—Charlie, she went by, back then—and another of Lou's post-marriage girlfriends, Mindy, who is attending graduate school at Berkeley and ends up in the sack with one of the safari guides, prompting Lou to tell his son later on, after the boy unwittingly reveals to him what has happened between Mindy and the guide, that "Women are cunts." It is 1973, or thereabouts, when Lou, then about thirty-six, shares this realization with his young son, a few years, still, before the young Jocelyn falls for Lou, before she is going down on Lou by the pool, where Rolph, from his bedroom, can see.

Years later, when Lou is dying, Rhea manages, through the miracle of Facebook and email and all that, to locate the old band and the gang—all but the "magnetic" slide guitarist Scotty Hausmann, who, once upon a time, had his eyes on Jocelyn, who ultimately settled for the relatively refined Alice, who had her eyes on him, who Benny, at the time, had eyes for—to come say good-bye to Lou before he dies.

There by his pool, home, once, to all those parties, that time has now made quiet, Jocelyn, in the kind of shape one can imagine given time, finds out what happened with Rolph. Hearing it, she finally cracks and wants to kill him, imagines dumping him and his bed right in the pool. Yet, to Egan's credit, Lou isn't made out to be a total bastard. Like any good son of a bitch, his point of view is compelling at times. He smiles at Jocelyn—that old smile from another time—and tells her, "Too late."

Comes the now seemingly derelict Scotty Hausmann (we understand, rather quickly, why Rhea hasn't been able to find him on Facebook), who, in another time shift, manages to locate Benny, seemingly at his zenith as a record producer, his Sow's Ear Records having been bought for big money by a large corporation for whom he still works. Scotty catches a big fish in the East River and takes it to Benny's office, where Sasha, working out front as Benny's capable assistant, deals with him—kindly, all things considered, and with mild amusement. The two meet in Benny's office, where the view, the furniture—everything—is spectacular, prompting Scotty, who is quite possibly unhinged, to ask Benny what happened between then, when he was the star who got the girl, and now ... between A and B.

Benny and his marriage to Stephanie, living the country club life for a while. Stephanie's brother Jules Jones, out of jail after getting a little carried away during an interview with an actress named Kitty, later recruited by the former star publicist for whom Stephanie worked—La Doll—now the disgraced Dolly, to assist in PR for a mass-murdering general (one must make a living, especially when one has a precocious young daughter who will save the day in the end, and marry one of the grandchildren of one of the 19-year-old warriors Charlie, Lou's daughter, got a smile from back in the early seventies on that safari in Africa). And there is Rob, at NYU, around the time of the first election of Bill Clinton as president, who doesn't look "druggy," who Sasha, after her time as a runaway, hangs with lest her step-father's watchers spot her with someone who looks less wholesome; Rob whose father was a football coach, who doesn't like football, who may like Drew more than he likes Sasha. Drew, a strong swimmer from Wisconsin, also wholesome, it would seem, though he smokes a lot of weed. Wants to be president one day—a joke is made about him inhaling—but he and Rob end up after a night high on X going for a swim in the East River, and something happens to Rob that, oddly, perhaps, a strong swimmer like Drew isn't able to help.

There is Ted Hollander, in a chapter titled, "Goodbye, My Love"—we are back sometime between 1979 and 1992 now—coming to Naples to find Sasha, who has been MIA for some time. Ted, who has "folded" up his desire for his wife bit by bit, kept his children out of his office, so that he can focus, think about, art, who believes, worries that, he is really in Napoli, in Italy, despite being paid by his niece's step-father, for the art. He finds, in spite of all his efforts, that he is not always thinking that much of art. It is the backstory of a man who needs, just this once, to be a hero—

A long storyboard of sorts follows, told, years later—in the future, like the ending, sometime in the mid-2020s—by Sasha's daughter, who, like her peers, isn't crazy about a "wall" of words.

There has been a baby boom following two wars, and the new demographic for marketers to chase are small children, some of them quite small. "Pointers," they are called, referring to what they do with their "handsets." Communication has come to resemble the babbling of infants. People tire of talking to each other, and ask if, instead, they can "T"—text—their thoughts, even when sitting across from each other at lunch.

It is a brave new world, longing, one finds, for counterpoint, something "pure," a great concert at "The Footprint" in New York City, that comes together by means not quite pure ...

But I have already told you enough—and yet I've told you nothing. I read the excerpt in the New Yorker and had no idea, until I came upon it, that it was part of the book. Yet everything fits.

I wasn't a great fan of, say, The Keep, and nearly didn't read this effort of hers. I'm glad I changed my mind. I liked it enough that I read it twice.

A great, timely story by a great writer that in my estimation will last.

Pick it up, read it, tell your friends.

Mamet's New Groove

It's nearly always a mistake when a dramatist, particularly a good one, carries on overly about his politics. Mamet's new book appears to be a case in point.

Christopher Hitchens, the far more trenchant apostate and heretic of catholic dimension (note the small "c"), reviews ...

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/19/books/review/book-review-the-secret-knowledge-by-david-mamet.html

Living Large with Little Feat

The days when the only reason one came to Louisville, Colorado, was to get spaghetti at either the Blue Parrot or its rival splitter, Colacci's (now housing the Empire), are done.

We are no longer merely wholesome—one of the best places in the country to raise a family as judged by Money Magazine and others, routinely—but hip as well.

The place where as recently as five years ago you might have had a tough time getting a drink after ten o'clock, even on the weekend, now features art walks, live music on a regular basis, outdoor dining, drinking, espresso sipping—it's like Paris without the rain, without the little dogs shitting everywhere.

And, on Fridays in the summer, to turbo-charge wining and dining and keep our property taxes low, we have the Louisville Street Faire, which hasn't always drawn thousands of people to this once sleepy town, but it has for a number of years now.

Some recession.

This last Friday Little Feat was in town, sans, notably, Lowell George and Richie Hayward (both deceased), but still.

They rocked the shit out of the place.

And packed up front by the stage weren't the kids, the young hipsters, but the verily wizened old hippies and middle aged grinners wistful for the seventies, singing along to "Oh Atlanta," "Juanita," and "Dixie Chicken" (bookending the Dead's "Tennessee Jed"), wishing they'd scored some weed before the show, and maybe even some blow ("whiskey ... and bad cocaine") if their hearts could still stand it, deepen the already considerable character in some of those happy, grinning faces, making do, most of them—me, my wife, my friends—on margaritas and Boulder Beer products.

I was glad we got a sitter for the kids. They eat your cash in hurry down there.

All for a good cause, of course.

Louisville. Keeping us off the dole, ya know.

Next week The Samples are coming to town. Later in the summer, Marcia Ball—I don't know that she's ever played in Paris.

The Rapture, and The Gold in Fort Knox

A lot people I know read the newspaper in the morning (I'm that old), and while I tend these days to get most of my news from reputable online sources (so I don't feel so old), I decided, this morning, as the old-timers say, to have a look at the paper.

We get the Denver Post, a pretty good paper as papers go. Not as good as The Onion, but, today, I have to admit, they're giving the Onion a run for its money.

"Sell Fort Knox Gold?" the lead headline reads. Then, below the fold, but still on the front page, an article on the upcoming Rapture (this Saturday!—thank heavens I didn't take the car in for an oil change!), which over the years has been rescheduled, as we all know, A LOT, pretty much continuously, actually, but let's not be cynical. Apparently the next Rapture, due to be rescheduled soon (sorry, I have tics I can't help), is set for this Saturday, May 21st. And the person leading the national ad campaign to promote "Judgment Day May 21st" is of course, like every kook these days, from this our great state of Colorado, at least originally, an 89-year old "Boulder-born" fellow by the name of Harold Egbert Camping (as Dave Barry would say: I'M NOT MAKING THIS UP—I read it in the Post).

To the right of the article, still on the front page, is a graph depicting how "evenly split" the public (not just superstitiously-wired, doe-eyed evangelicals, but The Public, random people off the streets) is on the subject of whether we are experiencing "end times." In fact, a little over 20% of The Public "completely agree[s]" that we're experiencing, here and now, ahead of Saturday, end times—about the same percentage who would vote for Sarah Palin, or Donald Trump, to be the next president, and a similar number—I'm guessing—to those who think that Elvis is still alive, that Obama is a space alien, that the Federal Reserve controls their minds (which they do, but, you know, even the utterly deranged are right about a few things), that dinosaurs are merely evidence that God enjoys messing with our heads, and that the moon landing took place inside a hangar at Area 51, or perhaps in a circus tent north of Reno, not far from the annual site of Burning Man ...

A little over 20% of the public will eat out of pretty much any charlatan's hand that's handy.

But back to gold (as my neighbor cringes :-) ). Today's headline in the Post ...

Should we sell our gold at Fort Knox?

It is difficult to overstate how stunningly stupid of decision that would be, especially now, yet who are the people pitching this "plan"? Dumb old liberals who don't know a thing about money, investing, economic history, or human guile, who think we'd be better off holding a fort full of coffee beans from some totally fucking awesome places like Ethiopia and Sumatra and Bolivia, rather than stupid old gold, which is practically as worthless as a seatbelt most of the time?

Turns out, no ...

The people pitching this idea, to sell our stash of gold for, based on today's price, roughly 220 billion dollars—which we could use to buy and sell Warren Buffett seven times over, or pay roughly two months of the interest on the national debt—are our good friends at the conservative think tanks, The Heritage Foundation and The Cato Institute.

And here I thought they were all gold bugs! Like Rush, and Glenn—and me (NB: I don't have anywhere near 220 billion dollars in gold, and what I do have I don't keep in my home, so please don't come here looking for it or I'll shoot you ... with my son's Nerf rifle).

But no, Ron Utt, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, blithely says that given our debt problem (extrapolate from above, if possible) we should now sell the one thing that will surely get more valuable, in dollars, as our debt goes up, or just lingers, as our currency, under the pressure of it, wilts, though perhaps no worse than most of the others.

We might as well sell now, he says ... "at the peak."

Who knows? Mr. Utt from the Heritage Foundation might be right ... even though China is buying gold like hot cakes, as is Russia, and India, and other emerging nations, not to mention Central Banks, who are notoriously poor investors (see: Gordon Brown, Chancellor of the Exchequer, 1999), and the very rich, as well as an unquantifiable number of kooks and cranks such as myself, but never mind ... because, when all is said and done, barbaric relic that Keynes believed it to be, gold, for some who-knows-why reason, remains a time-honored measure of a nation's wealth, and will probably come in handy when, down the line, we, the world, decides on a new reserve currency to replace the dollar, which will hold its spot for the foreseeable future, but not forever, given the nature of things ...

Nonetheless, Mr. Utt, as well as Mr. Chris Edwards, Director of tax-policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute (who said, "Why not? I think it shows that the government is serious about reforming itself."), thinks we should sell all our gold, to pay two months worth of interest on the debt. Mr. Kevin Hassett, from the American Enterprise Institute, thinks we should consider selling our interstate highway system. Perhaps that would get us another month.

This is no shit, it was in the paper—

Look, I'm a sporting guy—if you, Ron, and anyone else who's game, really thinks the price of gold has topped out and thinks it's time for our nation to sell the lot, I've got a proposition for you: I'll bet you $100 cash—chump change, I'm sure you'll agree—that the price of gold hits $2000/ounce before it sees $1000 again. It's a fool's bet, but you and your friends sound like big ones, so, let me know. Seriously. It might take awhile to see who ends up right on this one, but I'm in if you are.

For what it's worth, "a senior administration official [that would be Obama's], not authorized to speak for attribution," in the same article was quoted as saying" "Selling off the gold is just one level of crazy away from selling Mount Rushmore."

All to say you have to be pretty nimble these days to stay on top of who and what is crazy what and who isn't, but—I couldn't agree more. Anyway, a good Rapture could send the price soaring.

btw: We're still almost a year and half away from the election. Anything could happen, right? Even if we get past Saturday, so ... just for fun ... who would like to bet me (Republican true-believers? Democratic worry-warts? Foreigners who think they know something about the inner-workings of our homeland?) a $100 that a Republican is going to beat Obama, in 2112?

That is, I'll take Obama, you get the Republican. A $100. Cash.

Give it some thought, and get back to me.

I bid you adieu, here at the Rattle & Hum Casino. Be sure to put on clean underwear on Saturday!

A Lament for the Insured

I just got notice a little over a week ago that my health care premiums were going up by roughly 69%.

Consider for a moment what the reaction would be here in America if, say, the price of gas shot up—suddenly, or even over the course of one or two years, by 69%. Let's say, so as to not sound absurd, that it only shot up by half that. What do suppose the reaction would be? Would Ben Bernanke not only be getting jeered, but also getting pelted with eggs, even rocks?

I took out our current medical policy back in September of 2004, several months after my wife had to quit her job at a local hospital due a difficult pregnancy with our second son, who was born, just fine, in April of that year. We carried out the $100 deductible health coverage she had through her job via COBRA, at what then, a mere seven years ago, seemed like the exorbitant cost of $1200.+/month, until the maternity bills had come through and were settled, and then transitioned to a private plan, which, then, for a family of six, with a $6500 family deductible, 100% paid thereafter, cost us $364/month.

Again, keep in mind, we're talking not quite seven years ago; interest rates since then, for more years than not, have been at or near zero, with "core" inflation, according to some of the best and the brightest, being low enough to justify such monetary policy. Recent spikes in food and energy costs, according to our Fed Chairman, are "transitory," and have nothing to do with computer-generated dollars flooding into our global system of finance, to ostensibly keep our economy from sinking further into the mire, given that wages are stagnant, that unemployment remains high, that none of us can pull easy money out of banks or the equity in our houses anymore unless we really don't need it that bad to begin with, and well, even if your dollar is worth less and less due to computer-generated dollars and other currencies proliferating around the globe, if you don't have many to begin with, you can't hardly drive up consumer prices, and so, Ben Bernanke may very well be right, for now ... and we should all be a little more like Alfred E. Neuman of Mad Magazine (is there still a Mad Magazine? If not, there should be) and not worry.

Except, possibly, with regard to health care ... and those who have been trusted to see to our needs in that regard; namely, the health insurers ...

(NB: this assumes that you are not over 65, and thus have Medicare, and, since George W. Bush, cheap access to all kinds of drugs subsidized by the American Taxpayer who can't, by law, negotiate with the makers of those drugs to get a lower price, a law primarily driven through by our supposedly conservative lawmakers at the time, many of whom are currently champing at the bit over runaway government, but don't get me started; also, this assumes you are not a veteran of some sort, ranging from one who simply goes and plays cards on weekends somewhere once in a while, to one who has seen action, possibly a lot of it, whose body and family, in some cases, have been torn and ripped and battered by what our government, often in ill-considered adventures begun by those who have never seen action, has asked of you ... the whole range of you have the VA, or Tri-Care, good, decent health-care paid for by taxes, looking out for you; and ... if you are poor, if have no money at all, and lack abilities and resourcefulness, or are old and broke and in a nursing home that takes Medicaid, you have Medicaid looking out for you.)

But soon, those of us who aren't covered by one of the tax-payer funded programs in this country (listed haphazardly, and editorialized upon, above) are going to HAVE TO BUY health insurance, because that's the best deal Obama could cut—and I believe him—with the people who gave us Free Un-negotiated Pills for Old People, and who would otherwise hand the whole system over to the kinds of folks who just told me my premiums are going up by 69% ...

And so I asked these people, at my insurance company, just out of curiosity (since it wasn't going to matter, since I can't afford to go without health insurance unless I want to take a chance at getting bankrupted by the high cost of health care), to please account for me, why, otherwise, given that costs in the developed world are so under control and in some cases even falling unless of course you count food and energy and apparently the price of insuring your health care, why ... so ... much?

And I found out, among other nonsense, amid obfuscation of this and that, that now, in the state of Colorado, insurers have to cover you for maternity benefits. Which sounds great, right? Except, what if you don't need maternity benefits? Too bad, it's the law now. Gotta have um.

Now, from a business standpoint, as I have pointed out in previous blogs (see the surreal: "What We Talk About When We Talk About Health Care," from August of 2009), and to those who have otherwise made the mistake of getting me started on the subject, it makes no sense at all for an insurer to provide "affordable" maternity coverage (or to insure a person they already know is sick, or soon to be, for that matter), since, unless you have trouble getting pregnant—as in, years and years of trouble—the insurer has as little as nine to ten months, if not less, to recover the considerable expense of having a baby in the United States—which, for the sake of accurate and easy analogy, is roughly equivalent in cost to insuring someone's funeral, provided you knew the insured had only nine months to live. There is a chance, of course—stay with me!—that he could outlive the doctors predictions, but more often than not, he won't, and may in fact die sooner, and so the insurance company, meantime, not being nitwits, being a FOR-PROFIT ENTITY answerable to shareholders who expect to make money, not lose it, needs to take every care possible, should they want to keep their salaries and tall buildings in every city, to see that they, the company, make money, not lose money, on this individual whom they are insuring before he or she dies and they have to pay for the funeral, which, as noted, costs practically as much as having a baby!

So, even though neither my wife nor I can have children anymore, and the others on our policy are males also unable to have children and incur such expense, one of the reasons cited for my premiums going up by 69% is that I now have to have maternity coverage, because the State of Colorado mandates it—a type of coverage that, back in the day, was very expensive, for obvious reasons (see above), and that you only made out on, cost-wise, if you got pregnant within 30 days of taking out your policy (not likely, unless you're fifteen), and that, therefore, you had to be an idiot to take out, and thus you only had it—maternity coverage—if you were poor and covered by Medicaid, or if you had an employer who, out of the kindness of his or her heart, and at some expense, provided such a plan for you. Which you likely took for granted ...

However, turns out a lot of women who didn't have such coverage, nor any money to speak of, still got pregnant and wanted to have their babies in a hospital, as opposed to a bathtub, or even their own comfortable room, where the resources and skills and equipment available would cost them a lot less, but might not be so good. And—surprise!—even though these women didn't have any money, or tax-payer funded program, or insurance provided by a generous big-hearted employer, the hospitals still said it was cool if they wanted to have their babies in the hospital, with their doctors and nurses and high-priced equipment and drugs. They'd sort out all the money bullshit later.

In fact we had our first-born "out-of-pocket" as they say here in the United States, if in no other first world nation, and at the time it cost somewhere between seven and ten thousand dollars—about what it cost to get decently buried in the ground. Knowing how the game is played better than most, I negotiated 40% off the top of the hospital bill with a phone call, then put the rest on my American Express—got some miles, for my next trip out of town. That's how I used to roll back when. Let's Make A Deal! And they were happy, at that hospital, trust me, to hear from me, to play ball on my terms and not have to go to the time and expense of bankrupting me, offing me to collections, paying those people 30-40% so they could then—maybe—get $25 a month in return, if not garnish some wages that I didn't have after a lengthy court battle.

You'd think there'd be easier ways. And there are. And most other developed nations have them, but not us.

But never mind.

Or rather, see who makes out in the end, and you'll understand, kind of:

Imagine the negotiation toward getting maternity coverage mandated. The odd bed-fellows, if you will. Consider who, without question, makes out better as a result. Is it the insured? Doesn't seem like it. As I pointed out, my premiums just went up 69%, much of it due, specifically, I was told, to this change of law. Which sounds like such a nice law, yet ... who gets stuck for the cost the insurers are going to have to shell out to the hospitals, and providers, who will now get paid, every time, and not have to be cutting deals, and otherwise writing off expenses on the maternity front? Not the hospitals, not the providers ...

Consider that this is, perhaps, a microcosm of how health care expenses in this country have been pushed up, and up, well beyond any measure of inflation, over the years.

Yet while we all think it is madness—the expense, the rising costs—to cut costs means that someone, somewhere, is going to make less money. Which sucks, right? Especially when we consumers can barely do our part right now to keep things fat and happy, especially for those making multi-million dollar salaries, and those in the know investing computer-generated "hot" dollars in money-making schemes around the world.

Anyway, as I was saying, our family started off in September of 2004 paying $364/month for $6500 family deductible private health insurance. A few weeks later, Ian, our older son, was diagnosed with leukemia. Had I waited another month to transition our policy from COBRA, or had he gotten diagnosed a month earlier, we'd have been bankrupted before Children's Hospital, once we were indigent, would have picked up the tab for his care. Or, since my wife is a Canadian citizen, we could have moved to Canada, which we would have, had push come to shove, and never seen a bill—though our taxes would have been somewhat higher, and we wouldn't have gotten a deduction for our mortgage interest, none of that; we just wouldn't have been bankrupted by our two-year-old son's getting cancer, and the hospital, everyone, would have gotten paid, though not quite as much as down here. And he would have gotten the same treatment. He'd have been fine either there or here, his parents would just be less broke up there. I know people in Canada who have had cancer and, trust me, they don't wish they'd have gotten it down here. A hip replacement, maybe, but not cancer.

Nonetheless, you could argue, were you the insurer, that I got a pretty good deal: our son, based on advertised, pre-discounted prices, got somewhere between $300-$500 thousand dollars in care over three years, while I only paid between $15-$18 thousand a year in premiums and deductibles. Of course, that doesn't take into account the time I spent going over EOBs (the insurance company's "explanation of benefits"), to check for mistakes (there weren't many, but the ones that there were took many hours to correct), to check which expenses, from which providers, I would have to pay, and which the insurer would cover, to then negotiate those prices, that down here, if someone in your family has cancer, then someone in that family has a part-time job. Unlike in Canada, for instance, or pretty much any other first world nation. You worry about your loved one, not about going broke. Some might argue that constantly worrying about money, even if your son is ill with cancer, keeps us on our toes; but if we were complete bums, penniless and screwed, it would all be paid for. So that doesn't really hold water.

Keep in mind, furthermore, and back to my example, that it is against the law to boost an insured's premiums based on their health history after they take out their policy, and so my insurance company—which is as good as any (and I really love my agent, and her fine staff, and that's the truth)—cannot jack my rates to offset the expenses of my son's treatment for leukemia, nor can they jack my rates because one of my big boys, Joe, plays hockey and is in the emergency room more often than Lindsay Lohan is in rehab—and Donna and I (even at my age) are both considered "premium" specimens to insure, yet—

Since September of 2004, my health coverage for six has gone from $364/month for a $6500 family deductible to, 18 months ago, $661/month for a $10,000 deductible ... to, recently, $1118/month for a $10,000 deductible ... and if you are paying substantially less than this for the same sized family, you probably have substandard coverage, which you'll regret should someone you're covering get sick, or into a bad accident. Better to go without, while you can, than to go cheap, since either way, when you need it most, you won't have it, though in the former case you'll have the consolation of knowing you didn't feather any nefarious nests with premiums.

So, not being part of any group covered by socialized medicine in this country, and in order to be adequately insured against a medical catastrophe so that, should it come, we aren't bankrupted, we are potentially on the hook for $23 thousand dollars a year—and that doesn't include dental, vision, any of that.

And here's something else you'll get a kick out of. In response to notification of my rate increase, I re-applied for health insurance (through the same company: it was suggested that sometimes, if you've had a policy for a while, you might be better off re-applying, and capturing a new "risk pool," that your rates sometimes, though not always, went down, sometimes a lot; now this made no sense to me at all, since around me my pool looked about the same to a little worse, but what the hell, I took more time from my day and did what they suggested), and found that re-applying, for us, wasn't going to help us much, since Ian had had leukemia ...

What? you say. Doesn't the new health care law eliminate such discrimination against pre-existing conditions? Hasn't that aspect of the law, for those under 19 years age, already kicked in? Yes, it has, but ... while the insurance companies have to take these young people with their pre-existing conditions, they are allowed to "up-charge" them. They'll take your previously ill child, but they'll charge you more, which only makes sense if you're dealing with a company whose job is not primarily to care for you and your family but rather to make a profit for its shareholders, but even so, it's a little different from what we all thought we were getting ... out of that big production that led to our current health care law. And it wasn't because Obama decided, on his own, that the insurance companies ought to be able to "up-charge"—remember that term, you'll likely hear it more—their new customers who have pre-existing conditions. No, I don't think so. Though some people probably do, and will.

So, back to the money ... how many people, do you suppose, once it becomes law to pay the insurance companies to pay for their health care, will be able to afford to do it? How many do you think will actually bother? How many companies are going to be able to foot that kind of a bill for their employees without putting their profits at great risk? How many of you (who aren't covered by our various tax-payer funded plans, and are thus relatively happy, probably, even though, ironically, you're some poor son of a bitch having to get by with socialized medicine, which we all know is just awful, like everything having to do with the government) are already paying A LOT more money for health insurance, whether through contributing dollars at work or privately? How many of you have seen these costs go up for you a lot more, as a percentage, than the price for gasoline?

So, we aren't talking free enterprise versus communism here. And even some libertarians I know would argue, or at least agree, that if everyone, as a de facto measure of our civilization and humanity, deserves (or will, one way or another, get) a certain measure of care in the event they become hurt or sick, then would it not be simpler, more efficient, more practical and less savage, to spread the cost across the population, to negotiate with the providers as a population of tax payers (as they do in Canada, with considerable success, despite having less than a tenth of our population), so that everyone can have, as it were, a decent funeral, so the undertaker can get paid and not have to hire an employee dedicated solely to cutting deals with families who can't afford a decent funeral? And then, if you want a fancy funeral—lots of flowers, an oak casket, a nice choir and maybe even an orchestra to send you out—then you get insurance. Let the underwriters do some math and see what they charge. For a fancy funeral. And if you can afford the fancy—either with your own money or the insurance company's—buy the fancy if you want; but if not, because we've all decided that the dead need to be buried, just like the sick need to be attended to, as part of our Christian heritage, our secular or ecumenically humanistic decency, then you'll still get buried. It won't be a fiasco.

That could happen here, don't you think ... if we cared about health care money like we care about the price of gas?

Osama's a Gah-nah

Neighbors say he was a quiet man who kept to himself.

"That was his place?" remarked a stunned and astonished ——, who reportedly lived "just down the street" and wished to remain anonymous for fear that his own phone and internet service would get shut off. "My wife would kill me," he added. "Without the shopping channels and 'Celebrity Apprentice,' she wouldn't know what to do with herself. And don't get me started on the children, the stuff they watch ..."

Others seemed less surprised. ——, who also preferred to remain anonymous, telling reporters it was nothing personal, he had moved here "long before the area was fashionable, before they even had a Starbuck's," under an assumed name, and "in all the hullabaloo this morning," had forgotten it, said, "At first I thought it was the infidels building a new embassy, a place for Gates and Petraeus to relax, you know, get away from all the people and the noise—you can't believe all the racket in Islamabad these days—but then, every once in a while, late at night, I'd see him out walking, The Big O, we called him, whistling along to his IPod, stealing wi-fi from the ones who didn't have a lock and a password on their systems. At first I thought he was a famous basketball player, that fellow used to play for the Lakers back in the eighties, but then I see the dialysis machine and put two and two together ..."

One woman, who insisted she did housework and occasionally made big batches of lentil soup for the reclusive post-modernist writer Thomas Pynchon, who, she told incredulous reporters, "bought back when it was just old Humboldt and La Honda hippies and fancy pants hash-head Pakistanis living here," said that she was up early and on her way to work when "the SEALS Team 6—nice boys, I give them all massage afterwards—and the CIA undertaker come out with his body. Praise Allah, aside from the bullet through his head, you never see a man look so relaxed ..." Asked by the still distracted reporters with post-modernist literary pretensions what her purported employer thought of the situation, she said she was pretty sure he hadn't heard yet, since he, too, was without phone or internet service. "Unbelievable, yes? He has the money to pay me, but can't afford a flat screen? I have to sneak over to the neighbor's while he naps to watch my soaps," she complained. "Iz not right, I tell you." When asked if she might have a picture of her employer that they could borrow and upload onto the internet down at Starbuck's, say, or maybe even sell to someone who had money and a thing for Thomas Pynchon, she replied that he had had "so much work done you wouldn't recognize him." One reporter, taking notes with a pencil and packing a 1st edition of Gravity's Rainbow, offered the woman a year's salary in silver and gold if she could get Pynchon to sign it, but the woman replied, "You have better luck chasing down helicopter, my SEAL boys, getting dead man, the ex-Laker, to sign."

Starbuck's, meanwhile, as the sun rose in this otherwise quiet, affluent, inching toward trendy suburb of Islamabad (voted the #1 place in Pakistan by both The Onion and The Islamabad Weekly to raise a family and avoid Predators), was doing what all agreed was a brisk, predictable business. "People here just want to get back to their lives," said one of the baristas, a trust-funder from Telluride who'd hiked Everest and was "just taking some time to chill," who predicted that, by sundown, the women would have everything cleaned and straightened up again and the men would be back in "drinking their espresso and cursing the West." Asked if Osama had ever come in to shoot off some emails and otherwise hold forth on the evils of America and the like, he snorted, "Nah ... him and that Pynchon, they actually got a petition going when we first decided to put up a store here, to keep us out of town. Real snobs that way. Corporate this, corporate that. Come in here and see what we're charging for an Americano and they can't stop laughing. Fuck um, I say. Fuck um both.

Awaiting Ben

There is a great bit of theater going on in the world of politics and finance—more, even, than usual. To wit: Ben Bernanke is hosting a press conference after the Fed's two-day meeting concludes on Wednesday (Fed Chairman, historically, we should note, do not have press conferences after making their often opaque and arcane Fed Statement, which is then interpreted by the press ... though other central bankers around the world do hold press conferences, and with some regularity) and there is much anticipation as to what Ben will say or tell, what kinds of questions he will field (germaine, not so germaine, utterly stupid, not so utterly stupid), what, in short, will happen at this unprecedented press conference given by Fed Chairman Bernanke.

Since QE2 (the second round of what is euphemistically called "quantitative easing," what is more pejoratively referred to as "monetizing the debt" or simply as "money printing") was announced at a meeting in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, last August, and implemented in November (the Fed buying, with dollars created by a keystroke, 600 billion in US Treasuries), the stock market and commodities, generally, have soared, while the dollar has plummeted, which has been good for companies selling overseas, and for the rich and investor classes (hereafter referred to as "The Club"), and not so good for savers, people who find rising gas and food prices burdensome, or for those on fixed incomes who aren't brilliantly placing calls on gold and silver options. Why these people aren't making much of a fuss, if not rioting in the streets (as they are in the Middle East, for arguably similar reasons), is something of a mystery. Instead they seem more or less content getting negative interest on their savings, paying more for food and gas, while the politicians discuss cutting taxes even more for the rich even as we struggle with debt that threatens to destroy Medicare as we know it, and otherwise choke the beast that would see to the basic needs we've come to count on (whether we realize it or not) given that we can't make any money in our savings accounts anymore, and don't know nuthin about no calls or puts or shit like that ...

Yet some of these same people are taking seriously (or just willfully not understanding the consequences of) the much fussed-over, utterly delusional, yet no where near sufficient to meet the task at hand Paul Ryan plan, wherein, "What is good for The Club is good for you."

Don't you be so sure.

As I've said before, we're on the breast of a mommy who doesn't love us very much. The sooner we recognize this, the better, lest we discover the hard way that mommy really wasn't where it's at ...

Obscured in this Johnny come lately drama/pageant is the reality that we are, very definitely, facing serious trouble financially. The fact that we are in the warm uneasy company of those (Europe, Japan, Great Britain) who are in more serious trouble still is beside the point (unless you gain comfort from seeing others lined up against a wall and shot ahead of you). Before long, something is going to have to be done, something more substantial than what is currently being discussed in polite circles, as we are well past the point where whatever it is, if it is going to do any good, is going to be pleasant, and so ...

Are we going to share the unpleasant hangover ... or are we going to, once again, lower taxes on the rich (in a revenue neutral tax reform, which is to say in a way that doesn't raise anymore money than is currently getting raised), and, of course, not touch the military that is currently engaged in three very likely fruitless wars, and otherwise hasn't actually been called on to defend our borders, or defend the union, in roughly a century and a half, and instead gut Medicare, take an axe to Medicaid, and choke Social Security, and in doing so actually believe that's going to help get things rolling again?

Really?

We're going to seriously consider doing this in a country soon to be populated with aging boomers who haven't by and large saved well, who haven't, for years, in a world of easy credit, of a depreciating dollar, frankly seen the sense in it?

Have we really imagined what our society would look like without Medicare and Social Security, not to mention Medicaid, which, as it stands now, will be paying for indigent aging boomers to live in a nursing home as opposed your or someone else's basement ... are we going to let these programs get gutted so that the rich can "invest" more into our economy, as they are now, with their record levels of cash sitting on the sidelines, with their record amount of lending (laugh track) of the QE2 money that ended up, largely, in their hands, to do with what they more or less felt like ... and look what they did? Did they hire? Did they lend? No, they are sitting on cash, investing in stocks and commodities, not because they are evil, but because they understand the situation and are manipulating and preparing accordingly. Or because they're just greedy, and we let them do it.

What more evidence does a person who isn't utterly stunned need to see that this approach to maintaining a civilized society leads only to more people who don't need it getting more, and those with squat living in their basements, or being taken out and shot ... I don't know, but as an approach to growth and debt reduction it's a load of shit, and it's time we wake up and quit deluding ourselves. Before it is too late.

Tale of Two Pauls

This is a short tale because I need to get back to novel hammering ... but in my dawdling this morning (following yet another rousing if mildly disorienting Easter Party here on the circle in Raintree World), I checked out Krugman in the Times, wherein the Paul who is not Paul Ryan puts forth the heretical notion that, given our debt and deficits (which are considerable, don't kid yourself), perhaps we should raise money rather than give more away to the rich and the investor classes (which is what we've been doing for the last thirty or so years but don't get me started, I have a novel to work on ... )

Read on ...

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/25/opinion/25krugman.html

True Grits

I am old enough to have seen the original True Grit, with John Wayne, Kim Darby, Glen Campbell, Robert Duvall, and Dennis Hopper, in the theater when it was first released, in 1969, when I was ten years old. I was a big fan of John Wayne when I was a kid, and would be lying if I said I didn't remain one. By god, he was a man, baby.

Yet True Grit, the original, in spite of its indelible moments—"Fill your hands you son of a bitch!"—doesn't rank as one of my favorite John Wayne movies. After I saw it in the theater, I wouldn't see it again until about a month ago, by accident, on AMC, while vacationing with my mother. I liked it, thought John Wayne was great, acting well outside his usual range, but the movie, it didn't do that much for me. I had always blamed my reaction, or lack of one, on Kim Darby, who, when I was ten, wasn't my idea of the sort of girl one went down by rope into a hole filled with rattlesnakes to save. One might say there was confusion in my sympathies. I didn't have the same visceral dislike of Tom Cheney, the killer of Darby's father and the man being hunted (by a drunk and garrulous Federal Marshall, a fastidious Texas Ranger, and a young woman noisy with rectitude), as I did for, say, Bruce Dern in The Cowboys, or the bad guy played by Richard Boone in Big Jake. When John Wayne sticks that pitchfork into Richard Boone's gut and gives it a jerk at the end of Big Jake, you're going, "Fuck yeah!" Not so when Kim Darby blasts her dad's killer. You're more surprised that the gun went off. If you react, it's to the noise.

And we never really see why Ned Pepper (played by Robert Duvall in the original, and, in a typical bit of Coen Brothers cleverness, by Barry Pepper in the remake) is the sort of guy deserving to be shot in the great climactic scene on the clearing, with Rooster taking the reins in his teeth, shooting rifle and pistol both, killing all of Pepper's gang but Pepper himself, who then, just as he's about to shoot Rooster, trapped under his horse, gets blasted by the sharpshooter Texas Ranger (Campbell in the original, the very good Matt Damon in the remake). All of this, and what follows, especially in the remake, with its superior atmospherics and arrangements, its smartly stylized scenes and rhetoric (not to mention fine performances by all), falls flatter, dramatically, than it should. And in the remake, at least, there is no Kim Darby to blame; rather, as with the original, there isn't a worthy villain we can properly hate.

Not surprisingly, the remake is more violent, the gunshots more real, the splatters of blood more garish—I would let my children watch the original, not the remake— and the performances are, to varying degrees, excellent: as with the original (Wayne's, particularly), they do more than their share to carry the story. If Jeff Bridges had not won a best actor award last year, playing a cliched wreck of a musician in the so-so Crazy Heart, he'd win this year, hands down, for his portrayal of Rooster Cogburn, a performance so remarkable and nuanced that it stands alone and doesn't beg comparison to Wayne's. Matt Damon, as well, does a fine job as the Ranger LaBoeuf, without at all reminding us of Glen Campbell—though his character is awkwardly left dangling at the end of the remake (Campbell dies in the original, shortly after saving Rooster and Mattie from the pit, one of the few scenes I found clearly more satisfying, as in complete, in the original).

Hailee Steinfeld's performance as Mattie Ross, however, does beg comparison to Darby's in the original—and it is clearly better. She is a far less annoying Mattie, more convincing, and less ridiculous, in her pursuit of what she is after. It is her performance, when one does the math of comparisons, that sets the remake above the original.

Yet there is something more compositionally coherent about Darby's Mattie in the original, something separate from either's performance. The remake, unlike the original, and for no compelling reason that I can tell, is framed, and features an older, nondescript Mattie narrating at the front and back of the story, missing her arm in the end (perhaps the Coen Brothers had been reading Flannery O'Connor of late), walking away, talking about how she never married, how she dug up Rooster's body after he died and brought him to rest on her family's property—none of this is particularly set up by the preceding narrative; in the original, Mattie, still a girl (she is older in the original), ever earnest, with both arms, hints to Rooster of burying him on their plot someday, a suggestion Rooster finds flattering, if fanciful, and unlikely, before he gets his fat self on his new horse and jumps the fence, in a freeze-frame that ends the movie—and ends it more effectively, with a touch of corniness appropriate to the original's tone, than the more macabre and erratically patched coda (typical of the Coen Brothers mean-spirited excess) does the remake. But one can hardly imagine the Coen Brothers ending a movie with a man jumping a horse over a fence.

I've never read the Charles Portis novel on which the movies are based, but it seems to me that what is lacking in both is in the structure of the story, which, having looked at two movie versions now, seems focused overly on the pursuers and not enough on the pursued. One could say the same of a lot of westerns (The Searchers comes to mind), yet for all the great character work that we see in the early scenes of both movies, for all the entertaining antagonism throughout, we don't get enough menace from the villains to make for the satisfying ending we might have otherwise gotten had a real son of a bitch, and not some close to brain dead schmuck like Cheney (played as well as he could be by Josh Brolin in the remake), been pressing the narrative from the start.

And who is Lucky Ned Pepper anyway? What is there to resent, really, about him, and what do we care whether Rooster shoots him or not? Who is he going to bother if Rooster lets him go by? You don't feel that way about the villains in The Cowboys, much less the dog killer in Big Jake.

Still, it's well worth the ride just to see Hailee Steinfeld as Mattie, and Bridges's excellent work as Rooster. Just don't expect your heart to jump when Lucky Ned gets popped, the dust from his torso puffing beautifully as the bullet hits, impersonally, the trigger pulled 300 yards away by the precise Matt Damon, saving his antagonist from a villain neither he nor us knows or cares much about.