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.