New York on the Eve...

New York. The Greatest of American cities; the most dubiously American of American cities.

New York. Sitting out the bulk of the founding Revolution a ramshackle encampment for the British.

New York. During the Civil War, the scene of the North's most virulent anti-Union riots and racial pogroms.

New York. Corrupt, devious and energetic; so perfected under its Tammany ward bosses it later taught its younger sister Chicago how to place the dead on the voter rolls.

New York: the Liberal, the Anarchistic, the Mercenary, the Europhilic, the Slick, the Urbane, the Profane, now to play host to the Republican National Convention, that quadrennial party of and by and for the party of Lincoln and Roosevelt (Teddy) and Reagan and Bush pere and -- W.

It's Sunday. The convention does not start until tomorrow. We've already had naked nutcases in Herald Square, rappelling radicals climbing the Plaza and (I'm sorry, this one is just unconscionably wicked) bushels of golf balls cast under-hoof to unstring innocent police horses.

Well, it is for just such that America mobilized after 9/11 to save itself and its own. And, somehow, do we not today cherish even our wackiest of domestic wackos, knowing how beleaguered our open nation stands by sly and resourceful homicidals from afar?

Many are advocating that workers avoid the city entirely: take the week off, get the hell out. How luxurious for those who can. And how utterly feckless.

I will be in Manhattan, and would be nowhere else. Frankly, I don't expect to see the rhythms as altered as is predicted. Likely, advance hoopla has overrun reality.

But, then again, it may be interesting.

The Olympics in an Age of Anxiety

The Olympics draw to a close. Many watched. Many did not.

Historically, the fostering of athletes has been to nations what the display of martial plumage is in nature – a device to impress, intimidate and deter prospective enemies. Not so long ago, in a world of neatly symmetrical if scary Cold War balance, there was something especially compelling and therapeutic in the spectacle of rivalry played out decorously and peaceably on the fields of athletic honor.

From the beginning, war has been the paradigm. In ancient Greece, the fiction of a sacred armistice during the games belied the constant contention among the city-states. At the close of the 19th Century, the modern games were envisioned by Baron Pierre de Coubertin as a potential balm to France's wounded ego in the wake of ignominious defeat in the Franco-Prussian war.

The pride and patriotism of athletes were reciprocal to the pride and patriotism of spectators, each contributing to and enhancing the other.

The Olympics today seem different. But then, everything does. Commerce, war and innocence have all been altered. Our rivals among nations no longer seem worthy of our previous high-minded, sportsmanlike regard. And, worse, our true current enemies are nowhere represented on the fields, but lurk silently elsewhere conspiring for a very different and desperate kind of victory.

Sincere patriotic conviction on the part of some athletes is still evident, and uplifting. In the case of others, however, it may stand in question.

Is it too cynical to wonder what the typical, private concerns of today's losing athlete are? A young person who has exhaustingly and single-mindedly devoted him or herself to many years of rigorous privation in training; has foregone pleasures, sacrificed comfort, become alien to cultural normality – when such a person fails, is that moment's unfathomable disappointment still consoled by the nobility of an effort well-made and a nation humbly gratified? Or are the moment's honest anxieties really entailed with future professional prospects, commercial viability and sponsorship contracts?

Honor and the sublimation of war no longer compose the essence of the Olympic experience. An element we might call the spiritual has fled; what remains is, well, bodies: self-absorption, narcissism, freakish physical exceptionalism and (take 4-woman volleyball, for instance!) sometimes almost lubricious carnality.

The meaning of the games are now collapsed into literalness; they are concrete, calculated and commercial. What was once a sacrament is now a commodity. What were the viewership numbers, the sales racked up, the deals brokered?

This blogger hopes that games four years hence in Beijing, and eight years hence in New York (I know, I know, London remains the bookmakers' odds-on favorite for that one), occasion will be ripe for profound revision of this year's valedictory remarks.

Najaf: Opening the Bottle

Tensions were ratcheted so high, some immediate resolution to the obscene standoff in Najaf was inevitable. A day ago, this blog envisioned the grim necessity of mastering sociological queasiness and crushing the sacred city's captors with decisive military force. Instead, a putative peace through something like diplomacy appears to have been eked out.

Peace, like food for the starving, brings instant gratification. Any kind seems better than none. Long-term health, however, requires more. What's being served up in Najaf may, sadly, be a junk peace. Worse, peace may also prove the continuation of terror by other means.

It's good that further bloodshed and further damage to the city's holiest site have been preempted. It's also good that the redoubtable Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani has finally emerged from tantalizing passivity to perform an active service for his nation.

Unfortunately, however, the furbishing of his bona fides goes hand in hand with the unmerited legitimizing of the thug Muqtada Al-Sadr.

Most ignobly, the interim Iraqi government seems even to have seen fit to grant this miscreant a pass on an arrest warrant – for murder, no less! – issued against him earlier this year under the American-led Coalition Provisional Authority.

All right: expediency trumping the rule of law; American dignity dealt another low blow; crime paying off – all of these are bad enough as immediate consequences of the junk peace at Najaf.

Worse, still, however, for the future of Iraq is the de facto certification this peace grants to demagoguery as so practical and efficient a modality in the nation's new political order. A formal faction of stupidity and hate has now been born, its birth and birthright both recorded at Najaf.

The activity of such a force in some form or other was predictable. This is the Middle East. Despite its enormous cultural, social and economic potential – and even with the incentive of its precious liberation to mobilize its better angels – it was too much to hope that Iraq might transcend utterly the traditions of savagery and ignorance so pervasive in the region.

But inviting them to the table like this is another matter entirely.

Mark these words: a dark and baleful djinn was unchained this week at Najaf. The ugliest guest at democratic Iraq's future banquet has been announced.

Iraq: Time for the Obvious

Tuesday’s Los Angeles Times ran a story that should have been intuitively obvious, but badly needed saying: “Fed-Up Residents of Najaf Turn Against Rebel Cleric” (August 24, 2004).

So much pussy-footing, hand-wringing and needless ethical paranoia have gone into both American and Iraqi government calculations about how to deal with renegade thug Muqtada Al-Sadr and other security issues, common sense and basic psychological savvy have been checked at the door.

Of course the Iraqi people realize that it's Al-Sadr’s forces – not the U.S. nor the Iraqi interim government – who are traducing the sanctity of the Imam Ali shrine. “I blame the men of the Mahdi army . . . ,” begins one representative remark. But the follow-up highlights what should have been equally easy to anticipate. “I blame the U.S. government that was able to occupy Iraq in a matter of three days and hasn't been able to enter the shrine for the past several weeks.”

Oh, we were able. It's just that too much fevered imagination conjured too many wounded sensibilities.

In neutralizing foreign “insurgents” as well as cynical domestic nihilists and power-seekers like Al-Sadr, any nicety about the Iraqi populace or the international community (which latter is by and large rooting for American failure and Iraqi government paralysis anway, at least tacitly) has been fruitless. Delicacy to date has merely compromised needed military success, and purchased zilch in diplomatic or psychological advantage.

If the Imam Ali Shrine is damaged there will, of course, be regret. But no one will really be in the dark as to whom to blame. What counts is pushing through now with those tasks the absolute priority of which has been intuitively obvious from Day One: stop the chaos, destroy its fomenters, secure the peace, begin building the future.

Healthcare Beyond Elections

For the near future, watch out for that very first column on the far left side of the very first page of the New York Times. Whatever appears there from now through November 2 is likely to be a bit of political advertising disguised as protected journalistic speech. And one guess as to whose candidacy it will likely be promoting.

They did it with their lament for Bush’s education program on August 18 (about which I’ve blogged). Now, there’s “Costs of Benefits Cited as Factor in Slump in Jobs” (Thursday, August 19, 2004) -- not really a breaking news story so much as a featured thesis piece, and one most conveniently timed. For it just so happens that, through a creative synoptic reading of various government data and an interestingly selected compilation of interview quotes, the writer mirrors precisely the conclusions of a new economic report commissioned by and for the Kerry presidential campaign, and to be debuted by and spoken about by Mr. Kerry that very same day.

Does the Times really think so ill-concealed a program of shilling for Kerry, writing page-one editorials in the format of news stories, will go unnoticed? And if so – if their readership is actually so gullible – why does the Times bother to continue in its effort to seem written for the intellectually discerning?

Now, none of this is to say that healthcare is a trivial issue or that it doesn't merit discussion during a presidential election season. And, yes, each of the candidates is addressing healthcare, offering in each case proposals consonant with the overall tenets of his party.

There are, thus, important differences in emphasis between their approaches, but neither really examines the issue beyond the parameters dictated by vote-cadging.

Notwithstanding Medicare and Medicaid (passed in 1965 and expected to be relatively modest expansions of New-Deal-style social safety-net programs), free-market dynamics have historically dominated the development and delivery of healthcare in America. The vigor of this free market has, moreover, accounted, more than any other factor, for the breathtaking range, velocity and sophistication of American medical and pharmaceutical advances in modern times.

President Bush’s second-term proposals aim at strengthening the efficiency of free-market forces in moderating healthcare costs and expanding its availability – not least by arresting the metastasis of malpractice suits. The parasitic industry of trolling for liabilities by tort lawyers who assert ever more extravagant liability claims while doctors, hospitals and the health industry pass along the mounting burden of condign legal defenses has obscenely engorged healthcare costs.

Additionally, Bush advocates ways of helping businesses employ economy-of-scale mechanisms in negotiating insurance costs, and measures intended to invigorate the sanitizing powers of competition.

John Kerry, the self-avowed "internationalist," is contemplating something very different.

Internationally, while the American health industry has been developing increasingly efficient and high-tech treatments, medications and technologies, much of the rest of the world has opted into a complex of bureaucratic conspiracies to exploit these advances unfairly. Barriers and controls imposed by foreign governments compromise the fair compensation of (primarily American) medical innovations – political sops to domestic constituencies – represent a hugely distorting factor in raising the cost of modern healthcare, one obviously beyond the power of the United States to rectify directly.

Healthcare in these countries, however, has time and again proven ultimately to be a losing enterprise. Shady practices for circumventing reimbursement protocols, rationing of care, substandard medical personnel and recourse to black markets are among the blights which, to greater or lesser degree, increasingly plague all major examples of socialized, government-subsidized healthcare systems abroad. (Those shady billing practices are instigated all too often here, too, mostly by the inefficiencies and deformations wrought by those American experiments in government controls, the afore-mentioned Medicare and Medicaid.)

But Kerry would actually import and replicate many of these kinds of control. In a manner analogous to the one scripted by Hillary Clinton a decade ago, though with some novel twists of its own, Kerry's plan would effectively make of the American healthcare system a subsidiary of the Canadian and other socialized systems elsewhere in the world. Essentially, Kerry would be domesticating unfair foreign trade practices. Call it, perhaps, policy in-sourcing – just one more ironic inconsistency in the muddle that is the overall Kerry economic philosophy: part gung-ho free-trade-ism, part benign neo-socialism, part populist protectionism.

While the impulse to have a national healthcare agenda in an election year springs mainly from political expediency, the Bush policies are, when all is said, preferable. At the least, in the spirit of the Hippocratic oath, they do no harm.

Unfortunately, however, neither the Bush nor Kerry approach to healthcare – each of which is really pitched to transient domestic economic worries – addresses larger and more global questions.

I want at least to enumerate some of those questions now.

First off, how vigilant are we of the definition of health? What are the politics of its definition? If healthcare is to be a matter for government policy debate, ought we not be fastidious as to who gets to define its object?

Next, if healthcare is indeed some kind of right or entitlement, what are its limits? What does a basic entitlement to healthcare consist in? Is it limitless? If limitless care is (as seems evident) impossible, who sets reasonable limits on it? Are we, for instance, entitled by right to technologies and medications that existed at a certain epoch in time? That cost only so much and no more? That vary from person to person according to age or genetics? That don’t exist yet?

What are the true dialectics of thinking of healthcare as a commodity versus a right?

Does the subsidizing of care insulate a population from a mature conception of its true cost and value? And, if so, what are the consequences of thus infantilizing a public's true understanding?

Naturally, the humane and fraternal instincts always so potent and evident in American history prompt us to recoil from the notion of anyone suffering merely for lack of means. Both common sense and long historical experience, however, have taught us that attempting to reify virtuous impulses via the blunt action of government is counter-productive. If anything, the displacement of humane action to the operations of public bureaucracy robs such action of both efficiency and virtue.

Virtue has a more difficult and more active role to take than mere wishing upon the distant star of federal programming.

First, beyond the thorny economics of medicalized and technological healthcare, we need to revisit the human level of health maintenance, re-examine the seriousness and efficacy with which we inform and promote and value individual action, how we provide incentives for personal responsibility and healthy life choices (exercise, eating, alcohol, tobacco, drugs, sexual prophylaxis).

Next, on a higher level of social organization, just as visionary private sector activism has had success in making social consciousness and corporate responsibility pay dividends for various industries, it is high time for private-sector activism to promote altruism, humane pricing and mutual support as economically viable and rewarding values in healthcare, the most humane of all commercial arenas.

Finally, the infantilized fallacies of socialized care throughout the world should be reversed. But how? In the short term, only concerted diplomatic pressure and aggressive trade negotiation are viable. In the long term, however, success by example holds a higher promise of persuasion. Maintaining a vigorous free market, fostering a continually increased GDP, and evolving a domestic polity with ever more universalized access to healthcare via expanded affluence should be our goals.

Perhaps in the secularized, post-industrial and solipsistic 21st century, health itself has become too personal, too jealous, too solitary a concern. If we continue egoistically and parochially to focus hope and anxiety only on the cost of care to ourselves and our loved ones, we duplicate psychologically the very limits that form the economic and political barriers to meaningful universalization of care.

The first commercial health insurance policies were issued in 1914. In 90 years, such instruments have been elegantly and variously iterated many times but, in essence, remain the chits in a kind of grim lottery, artifacts of a more primitive and now ethically superseded form of capitalism.

The tools can be improved. But not necessarily by government. In fact, government is the wrong workshop. Government mandates are neither the sole nor the best anvil on which to forge together private and collective welfare, consumer and provider needs.

Were government to stand back and the genius of enlightened community to step in instead, insurance in its next iteration might be a product of heightened social morality as much as of neutral actuarial science.

With new tools plied by the richly layered and redundant energies of voluntary association; with webs of enlightened community aggregating both mobilized consumers and humanely responsive providers, resources answerable to the ever-expanding circle of invention could be generated, and an eventual dispensation of universal succor and support naturally achieved.

Note to the Times: Leave it Behind

The New York Times reported Tuesday that researchers for the American Federation of Teachers, poring through government data, had determined that the charter school movement supported by policies in President Bush's "No Child Left Behind" (NCLB) Act hasn't thus far proven completely successful.

The Times yesterday (August 18, 2004) attempted a one-two follow-up punch to that report with both a cover-page story on NCLB and an editorial critical of charter schools; both items are interesting for a condescending tone, gloating diction, and manipulation of fact and emotion.

The introductory melodrama of the page-one story by Diana Jean Schemo ("Effort by Bush On Education Hits Obstacles") is ripping: a troubled school in Michigan is braced for the "momentous consequences threatened in President Bush's landmark education law" – consequences that the even-handed journalist characterizes as "the educational equivalent of a hostile takeover." We bite our nails and daub our eyes at the imminent "elimination of principals and teachers and the installation of new management." Elimination? Heavens. Perhaps the legislation ought have been dubbed the "No Establishmentarian Left Ungarroted" Act.

The editorial ("Bad News on the Charter Front") opines that "eliminating [again] the much-criticized educational bureaucracy seems to have created at least as many problems as it has solved." [Anything wrong with "replacing"? "streamlining"? "improving"?] Further, the editorial tut-tuts that "[i]n some cases, charter schools that boasted about high student achievement have been unwilling to share test data." And, presumably to add a conspiratorial fillip to the Tuesday AFT story, we are told that the researchers' insights were "unearthed from a mound of federal reports, where it seemed to have been buried." Kudos to the intrepid Indiana Weingarten and her crack fellow archaeologists.

No one has claimed that the charter-school concept is an instant panacea to the blight of educational mediocrity. No one expected every experiment to work equally well, or for success in one setting by one set of innovative educators to be instantly and self-evidently transferable elsewhere. One of the highest virtues of the NCLB Act is that it undertook the pursuit of hard and important goals seriously and promised a sustained, flexible and humbly adaptable effort in achieving them.

If one charter experiment fails at least it can, under NCLB, be more readily altered or dismantled than a traditionally entrenched public school regime can be. If a school refuses to show data supporting its claims to have achieved a certain standard, use the plenary authority granted by NCLB to do something about it. That sure beats the traditional system in which the very effort to impose standards could be institutionally thwarted and pooh-poohed at every turn.

It's time for unions, bureaucrats and their media organs to stop trying to make admirable ideals like accountability, creativity and putting children first sound like mean threats, repressions and assaults on professional dignity.

(And, while we're at it, let's fund NCLB more fully; and put the states'-rights grumbling about it to rest, too.)

The Art of the Snark

Back on the campaign trail, George W. Bush has engaged, taking off the rhetorical gloves. Good. Interestingly, even for his admirers, it is easy to forget Bush's affinity for feistiness and trenchancy after a first four-year term presiding from firmness, composure, affability and (yes) compassion.

But Bush certainly can do snarky. Remember the brio with which he deployed it to discombobulate John McCain in the post-New Hampshire phase of the 2000 primary race? The spectacle of that macho tomcat-fight afforded the kind of rush Dynasty fans used to relish in an Alexis-Krystle face-off.

Now, even in the teeth of all the recent mealy-mouthed (and disingenuous) cries for "positive campaigning," snarky is welcome, both for diversion and for clarity.

For snarkiness to work correctly, it must be sharp and focused; it is the very opposite of the cushiony tactics of obfuscation, fudging and "nuance" at which John Kerry so excels. Moreover, snarky must be executed agreeably and authentically, which Bush can do. He does the spit-turn from the stance of temperate executive to scrapper on the stump with agility and panache.

Clinton could manage it, too, though with somewhat too much ingratiation for my taste. Reagan's snarkiness was quicksilver magic. Bush the elder could not manage it at all. Neither, really, could Al Gore, who alternated instead between the hamfistedness of a wacky prophet and the tendentious tedium of an academic shrew while consistently missing the middle poise of the truly snarky altogether. One expected 1996's Bob Dole to muster it vibrantly, so felicitous had his Senate leadership quips and jibes typically proven; but Dole's tap ran strangely dry that campaign season, even where snark might have seemed most indicated, e.g., in the encounters of direct presidential debate.

John Kerry? Well, since his positions on most issues are more like riddles for the haruspices than fodder for the commentator, and since his speaking voice bears no discernible human characteristics at all, let alone any "authenticity," the notion of his effectively snarking is moot.

Finally, I note with rue Jimmy Carter's missteps in snarkiness at the rostrum of last month’s Democratic National Convention. Frankly, the wispy Nobel laureate's effort to recast himself as some kind of termagant emeritus was just sad, and compromised the dearly-purchased respectability he has spent many waning years trying to cultivate. Tough talk from a feathery moral narcissist whose single presidential term was spent more like an Avignon pope in self-imposed exile from action while a recession crept over us and American citizens languished in foreign captivity . . . ? No thanks.

McGreevey's Royal Gambit

The uses of adversity – in particular of self-manufactured adversity – were given a novel twist yesterday. New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevey stepped nearly naked before his state and the nation and gave the most astonishing address in modern American political history.

We knew it was something new from the outset: "Throughout my life, I have grappled with my own identity" – do politicians talk like that? Something was instantly odd, a tone previously unstruck among the usual variations on executive press conference gravitas.

Resignation from office was in the offing, that much was clear. Our ears have been attuned to those sounds from long experience. Connecticut's John Rowland tutored us to them anew only weeks ago.

But this was resignation rung in a whole new key.

Jim McGreevey confessed that he was gay. But more, a “Gay American.” I said that McGreevey had stood forth "almost" naked. It was with that one phrase, "Gay American," that he clothed himself, a flag for a fig leaf.

Let us stipulate of McGreevey what we must of any politician: he wouldn’t resign if he didn’t have to. Moreover, in resigning, he would not make disclosures hazardous to political viability if he could plausibly resign on any lesser pretext.

The back story began to unfold within moments of the speech’s conclusion.

The name of the scandal McGreevey had hoped to avert was Golan Cipel – possibly a paramour, almost certainly an object of McGreevey's desire, whether reciprocated or not. McGreevey appears, at least with respect to Cipel, to have governed much in the mode of the homosexual King Edward II flowering favors on his Galveston. People around him no doubt grew increasingly restive and resentful and concerned. One is intrigued at what proportion of naivete and recklessness figured in McGreevey's gamble.

That said, McGreevey rather impressively seems to have seized the moment and manner of his outing and then rose to their occasion, at least in rhetoric, moxie and histrionics. Even most of the observant press appeared truly caught off guard. A valid contrast is to Clinton’s admission of his Lewinsky veniality: if for no other reason than because the extremity of McGreevey's situation was not known ahead of time, his moment will be regarded as authentically historic, courageous, maybe even redemptive by some, against the sham heroics of Clinton's post-deposition, nationally-televised coming clean.

Back to the uses of adversity. Intentionally or not, McGreevey has at one fell swoop cleared back another huge swath of previously inhospitable space for future mature discussions of the issue of homosexuality and mainstream American life. No such discussions will ever again be shadowed with quite the same veil of "do we dare?" as has, shockingly, continued to hang about them, until yesterday. McGreevey's address can and will be a standard for future political candor, vulnerability, humanity -- and audacity of resource.

But if it is a gay-right's milestone, it is an odd one. McGreevey evinced a palpable sense of relief, but no "pride." Indeed, a traditional Catholicism informed the diction and the delivery, even if the tropes were in an innovatively secular mode. McGreevey conceded shame. From his wife he sought "grace." All in all, there was a conventional confusion as to whether he was right or wrong, proud or humbled. Indeed, the question presents itself: is McGreevey really right to say he's "gay" at all – with all the political affirmation that goes with that? Or is he, rather, really a very un-gay homosexual who has allowed himself to become yet another very late latter-day casualty of unenlightened thought?

Whichever is true of him, his speech will have consequences. It has changed a dynamic, redistributed momentum. There was an instant emotional reciprocation to McGreevey's self-disclosure, and there will continue to be sympathy and emotional advocacy for him, even as evidence mounts that the uses to which he put his adversity are not all about poignant spiritual pain.

Leading New Jersey State Senator Leonard Lance remarked soon after the Governor's speech that a time will come for an analysis and calculation of the practical political implications of McGreevey's resignation. There are questions about its timing, its deferral until after the November general election. Politics will in the short-term reassert themselves, probably quite quickly. So, no doubt, will the more measured aggressions of criminal investigation. But beyond all of that, down the line and for a long time to come, the Governor has triggered a psychologically potent and strategically complex shifting in the tectonic plates of social and political bedrock.