July 10, 2020

Dear Interested Readers,

 

It’s Seems Impossible To Look Away and See Beyond the Moment

 

The last six months have been a blur. I can vaguely remember the impeachment hearings in January, and the faint hope that a couple of Republican senators would be open minded enough to join the Democrats and call for John Bolton to testify. I can also remember the cynicism that characterized my assessment of senators like Lisa Murkowski and Lamar Alexander who said that hearing Bolton wasn’t necessary because it would not change their vote. Now that we have Bolton’s book, that statement is hard for me to accept.  On February 28, less than a month after the president’s “exoneration,” I wrote my first letter about the COVID-19 threat. Twice a week, since that first letter on February 28, when I sit down to write these notes, I say to myself:

 

“Enough about Trump. Enough about the pandemic. This is a blog about healthcare strategies. I must get back to writing about the importance of healthcare reform and efforts to achieve the Triple Aim.”

 

Then I fail. This blog is entitled “Healthcare Musings,” but unfortunately my recent efforts don’t deliver much on the healthcare part, and are more accurately described as just “musings.” This week Paul Krugman gave an apt description of my emotional state at the beginning of a column entitled “The Deadly Delusions of Mad King Donald: He won’t give up on a failing pandemic strategy,”

 

I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling more and more as if we’re all trapped on the Titanic — except that this time around the captain is a madman who insists on steering straight for the iceberg. And his crew is too cowardly to contradict him, let alone mutiny to save the passengers.

 

I am sure that you do not need me to describe the moment to you, but it has become a sickness with me. I read the daily papers, and all the magazine articles I can find, looking for the latest information. I watch the news reports in the evening when I should be out fishing, and listen to virtually the same report at eleven when I should be reading. By the eleven o’clock report nothing has changed, but I watch anyway. After the news, when I should be going to sleep, I am eager to listen to Stephen Colbert and Trevor Noah into the wee hours of the night do the only thing that provides any real respite, which is to make jokes about how bad things are. My sickness is so advanced that when they appear in reruns as they have over the last two weeks, I am incensed. How dare they take time off when I need them to survive the crisis!

 

You don’t need me to tell you that what we enjoyed six months ago is gone, never to return. You probably have figured out that it will be a very long time before you dance at a wedding or sit close to a friend or family member at a funeral. I don’t even have the courage to get a haircut, or have my beard trimmed for fear that the luxury will cost me my life. I just need another inch or two before I will be able to have a ponytail. To keep my hair out of my face, I’ve started putting a bandana around my head. The result is that I am no longer told that I look like Santa Claus. Now family and friends comment on my picture in my wife’s facebook posts and say that I look like Willie Nelson. Who could have imagined any of this as we celebrated the arrival of the New Year. Now mid year, just after the fourth of July when we should be enjoying baseball’s mid season All Star Game, we are eager for a facsimile of a baseball season to begin with no one in the stands. At the same time, all of the basketball players and hockey players who should be enjoying the summer off are preparing to resume their wintertime sports in the heat of summer when we should be thinking about “ice tea” and not “ice hockey.” 

 

In January I was afraid that the president would rebound from the failed impeachment effort, and be reelected by all the middle aged 401K account holders who were impressed that the stock market had cruised past 30,000. Krugman mentioned that also:

 

Until early 2020, Trump led a charmed political life. All his recent predecessors had to deal with some kind of external challenge during their first three years. Barack Obama inherited an economy wracked by a financial crisis. Whatever you think of his response, George W. Bush faced 9/11. Bill Clinton faced stubbornly high unemployment. But Trump inherited a nation at peace and in the middle of a long economic expansion that continued, with no visible change in the trend, after he took office.

Then came Covid-19. Another president might have seen the pandemic as a crisis to be dealt with. But that thought never seems to have crossed Trump’s mind. Instead, he has spent the past five months trying to will us back to where we were in February, when he was sitting on top of a moving train and pretending that he was driving it.

 

My fear that he would be reelected has now been replaced by my fear that he will lose, but won’t leave office. As irrational as that sounds, is it more far fetched than it would have sounded late last December if I had told you that to wear or to not wear a face mask would become a political statement, or that Mayor Bill De Blasio would be photographed painting Black Lives Matter in huge letters on the street in front of the Trump Tower in Manhattan? (Click the link to see the video.) As Dylan wailed more than fifty years ago (1964), “The Times They Are A-Changin.” (Click to hear). Dylan’s words give witness to the fact that in many ways we have been here before. 

 

Come gather ’round, people

Wherever you roam

And admit that the waters

Around you have grown

And accept it that soon

You’ll be drenched to the bone

If your time to you is worth savin’

And you better start swimmin’

Or you’ll sink like a stone

For the times they are a-changin’

 

Come writers and critics

Who prophesize with your pen

And keep your eyes wide

The chance won’t come again

And don’t speak too soon

For the wheel’s still in spin

And there’s no tellin’ who

That it’s namin’

For the loser now

Will be later to win

For the times they are a-changin’

 

Come senators, congressmen

Please heed the call

Don’t stand in the doorway

Don’t block up the hall

For he that gets hurt

Will be he who has stalled

The battle outside ragin’

Will soon shake your windows

And rattle your walls…

 

These times are similar to past moments of change in ways that the president’s actions and those who have decided to discount the moment and get back to normal on their own terms do not seem to understand. They want to act like they can disregard the moment.  One gets the sense that they view the moment like a boring theater production, where they can get up and leave when things get tedious. Perhaps it would be more timely to say that this moment is not like watching a movie on Netflix  that you can turn off in favor of a mindless summer game show if the movie gets too scary. 

 

Krugman affirms my assessment and points to deeper meaning:

 

This helps explain his [the president’s] otherwise bizarre aversion to masks: They remind people that we’re in the midst of a pandemic, which is something he wants everyone to forget. Unfortunately for him — and for the rest of us — positive thinking won’t make a virus go away.

That, however, is where the second layer of delusion comes in. By now it’s clear that the cynical decision to sacrifice American lives in pursuit of political advantage is failing even on its own terms. The rush to reopen did produce big job gains in May and early June, but voters were distinctly unimpressed; his polling just kept getting worse. This year, it’s not the economy, stupid — it’s the virus.

 

Krugman is a practical economist and after describing the moment asks the pertinent question. He asks us what we can do, and his answer is not as rosy as we might hope. The logical extension of his thought is that even if we ignore the president, and do the best we can, the future will be challenging. 

 

So what can we do? Trump has another six months in office (if he’s still there after Jan. 20, God help us all). And it’s now clear that he won’t change course, no matter how bad the pandemic gets. As I said, we’re all passengers at the mercy of a mad captain determined to wreck his ship.

It’s true that federalism is our friend. Trump doesn’t actually have any direct authority over things like school openings. And many though not all states have rational governors who are trying to contain the damage, although it’s hard to keep the lid on in New Jersey or Michigan when the coronavirus is running wild in Florida.

But a lot more Americans are going to die. And if Joe Biden becomes president, he, like Obama 12 years ago, is going to take the helm of a nation in a deep crisis.

 

So I ask myself, if I can’t stop looking at this train wreck in slow motion that has the potential to destroy much of we have built, albeit in a way that has excluded many people from the pleasures that I for one have come to enjoy and expect (See that last section “Completely Looney at the Taj Garage”), how should we prepare ourselves to endure what surely must lie ahead? Do we need to find a leader who will speak as bluntly and honestly as Churchill spoke to the British at their moment of greatest despair in 1940.

 

“I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat”. We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering.”

 

It is worth noting that Churchill is not speaking to the sacrifice requested of an individual. He is speaking to the collective sacrifice necessary from his nation. We live in an age where it is easy to forget our dependence on the collective. Even referring to a “collective” might get some people thinking about the evils of socialism, or even worse be the first lurch toward a slippery slope that leads to what the president calls “far left Fascism” or God forbid, out and out communism. Our president’s core strategy for reelection appears to be to promote divisiveness by augmenting what we have to fear as individuals.  David Brooks spoke to this strategy in his column today entitled “Two Cheers for Liberalism! (Or Maybe One and a Half): Free speech has to rest on a shared morality.”

 

This is a hard, exhausting time. But it’s also a pivot point. An idealistic generation is rising on the scene hungering to fill the spiritual vacuum their parents left them. There is a palpable desire for solidarity, to shake off an excessively individualistic culture.

 

Many of us think of Brooks as a conservative pundit, and he is, so it may be confusing when he espouses liberalism. The liberalism he espouses would not be understood by Donald Trump because it is not a reference to the politics of Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, it is a reference to the belief in facts and the concepts of free speech that emerged from the Enlightenment. Brooks explains:

 

I defend liberalism because I think our core problem is ignorance and incompetence and not an elite conspiracy. The world right now is astonishingly complicated, our systems need reform. I don’t think one vantage point can grasp reality or devise solutions. We have to have the open exchange of views that is the essence of liberalism.

 

I should hasten to add that it is this sort of “liberal thinking” that will be necessary to ever achieve a reform of our woefully dysfunctional healthcare system. It is also the first step in the search for a solution to our deeply divided society and what is missing when we descend into expressing our opinion about very complicated issues by wearing or not wearing a face mask.

 

Brooks is a self observing realist as well as a philosopher. He calls himself a “liberal” and then finds a way to suggest updating that liberalism to meet these times. What I liked most about his piece is the call that he makes to emotions and community. In these times it is understandable that we have fears, and that some of us deal with those fears by denying them, but we we should never forget is that we did not evolve to be “lone wolves.”  We have always fared best when we realize that we are a part of a family, a community, a nation, and now more obviously in the worldwide threat of COVID-19, the worldwide community of humankind. He says:

 

Liberalism was based on the idea that reason is separate from emotion, that we need to be dispassionate to see clearly. This is false. Emotions assign value to things and undergird reason. Because of this error, liberalism has often devolved into a detached, passionless rationalism.

Liberalism was based on the idea that the choosing individual is the elemental unit of society. It put great emphasis on individual autonomy. This is distorted. We’re also embedded creatures, members of families, and groups, shaped by our histories. Liberalism sometimes devolves into atomization, an alienated society of lonely buffered selves.

 

Brooks spends some time trying to show how we should use this moment in our shared history to understand the larger struggle between the individual and the collective. His “conservatism” shines through as he both honors liberalism and identifies it as something that is necessary but insufficient for this moment. He contends that it must be augmented by what he calls “personalism:”

 

By itself, liberalism is so thin it can’t even defend itself. When young people passionately demand racial equity, liberalism’s response is to protect free speech. Young people have a dream. Liberalism offers a neutral process. 

Which is why the constitution of liberalism has to be supplemented with the morality of personalism.

One of the reasons that America is so angry right now is that there is so much dehumanization. Racism reduces a human being to a skin color. The first casualty in a culture, political or generational war is the willingness to see the full humanity of the other. In this moment, some people seem eager even to dehumanize themselves by reducing themselves to a simple label and making politics their one identity. “Speaking as a. …”

If liberalism left little space for group identity, the current conversation makes group identity everything and leaves no space for individual conscience. You get all these absurd generalizations: White people believe this. Elites believe that.

Personalism is the belief that at the heart of any successful relationship, any successful organization and any just society, there is an earnest and ongoing effort to see the full depth and complexity of each human person. 

 

I like Brooks’ attempt to wed the needs and dignity of the individual with the larger objective of a better community. We all should have agency in our lives, but I will go a little further and say that our concept of personalism in these times should lead us to the unmistakable conclusion that personalism of the sort Brooks espouses can only exist in a community where there is equality of opportunity and reciprocal respect. There are seven billion of us here. Each of us deserves our personal space, and no one’s personal space is secure when anyone does not enjoy the full inclusion in the family of humankind. 

 

I can’t take my eyes off the slow motion train wreck of this moment, but I must also listen to those who say that we can do better. Better will require a universal recognition that we have gone as far as we are likely to go unless the future is about a better world for everybody. It is a time to be involved. It is a time to plot a new course. It is a time for new attitudes. It is certainly a time for new leadership. Dylan was speaking to us all when he said:

 

Come gather ’round, people

Wherever you roam

And admit that the waters

Around you have grown

And accept it that soon

You’ll be drenched to the bone

If your time to you is worth savin’

And you better start swimmin’

Or you’ll sink like a stone

For the times they are a-changin’

 

Completely Looney at the Taj Garage

 

It has been a great week for loon watching. As the header demonstrates the loons have been putting on a show for me, my wife, my son and his wife, and her two sisters and brother-in-law who have been visiting from Washington, D.C. We are quite lucky to have a separate structure with an apartment on our property. We built it several years ago to house my two antique cars. I have a 1968 Mustang convertible and a 1973 TR6. I have had the Mustang for about 30 years and the Triumph for about 20. Both are well restored and great fun to drive on the back roads of New Hampshire. 

 

The garage is an example of scope creep. My wife did not like the idea of wintering my old cars in the garage attached to the house. To do so would mean that our other cars for normal use would sit outside in the driveway all winter. The solution I offered was that we would build a separate garage for the old cars. The garage site is positioned on a slope which made it easy to also include a full walk in, or drive-in, basement which I imagined would be a great workshop. Then I reasoned that if I added a garage door, I could also store my boats there over the long winters. It seemed a shame to not put an apartment on the top of the garage. Since there was going to be an apartment, why not add a fireplace and a deck since two things that I love almost as much as old cars and old boats are fireplaces and decks. The garage is on the hillside facing the lake so the deck has a great view of the lake.  As the project evolved, my wife began to talk about my excesses. One day as she was looking at the rising construction costs she said something like, “Are we building the Taj Mahal?” It’s hard to remember the exact flow of the evolution of the name, but I responded with something like, “No we are building the Garage Mahal.” My wife countered with, “I think we should call it your Taj Garage.” She was the project manager and is the general “decider” in our household, so that was that. Most of the time we just refer to our excessive garage as the “Taj.

 

Who knew in 2014 when it was completed that it would be so useful. We lived in the Taj during the winter and spring of 2014 and 2015 while our house was remodeled. It was quite comfortable. Now we have the perfect residence for folks coming from afar who need to be quarantined. It’s been terrific for my son and his wife from Brooklyn. It was a nice place for our DC visitors to park, and in a week or so, the next occupants will be my son, daughter-in-law, and my granddaughter who are escaping from Coconut Grove in Miami, Florida. Once a quarantine period is over there is plenty of room for people to join us in the larger house to make room for the next batch of visitors who need to be quarantined to protect my health. 

 

The picture of the loon parents in the header was lifted from a video shot by one of the DC visitors. He almost got the perfect loon shot that I described last week. One parent up with wings spread, and the other parent watching the baby. Unfortunately, the baby was lagging behind and his head was down so he was “cropped” out of the picture, but he is really getting bigger. Maybe next week I can feature the baby again.

 

I am a really lucky guy, and I know it. Visitors can come see us and we can still “social distance”  while we all enjoy the loons. The rest of the world is trying to cope with something that is a growing challenge that I mostly just read about while I get to observe some of the most interesting creatures on earth. Visitors can come and go, and we can still “social distance.”  It’s very good to be an old man who has recently turned 75 and can look back on a lifetime of  many blessings and unearned privilege.

 

Be well! Still stay home if you can. Wear your mask and practice social distancing as best you can if you must go out, even if the numbers are getting better for the moment where you live. Think about the America you want for yourself and others. Demand leadership that is empathetic, thoughtful, truthful, capable, and inclusive.  Look for opportunities to be a good neighbor. Let me hear from you. I would love to know how you are experiencing these very unusual times!

Gene