But One Life...

Today, September 22, happens to have been the anniversary of the execution of Nathan Hale, the Revolutionary patriot captured behind enemy lines in New York by the British on a Saturday night in 1776 and hanged as a spy the following morning.

In the late 1950s, my parents spent a modest honeymoon trip traveling through New England, staying the first night at an inn in Coventry, Connecticut. In Coventry, they happened on the farmstead of the Hale family, preserved by an historic trust. Later, on one of many summer history trips we took as a family, they introduced us to the Hale Homestead, maintained by the Antiquarian & Landmarks Society in picturesque dignity. The place is somber, serene, beautiful and inspiring.

Nathan Hale was by all accounts a gifted, gallant, attractive and gentle soul. Son of a deacon, one of twelve children, he was serious and studious. Accepted to Yale College at the age of fourteen, he began his studies there along with an older brother, Enoch. Nathan distinguished himself, graduating at age eighteen with the intention of devoting his life to teaching and scholarship.

Indeed, Nathan worked as a small-town schoolteacher for the two turbulent years after graduation and before duty called him to service in the Continental Army. He was commissioned as a lieutenant.

General Washington and others were evidently much impressed by the young officer; later, newly promoted to captain, Hale was inducted into the Revolution's first intelligence unit, Knowlton's Rangers, and soon volunteered for a singular and perilous fact-finding mission behind the British lines. New York lay in British hands, and good intelligence was sorely needed were there to be any hope of the new United States' retaking of the city.

Nathan traveled in the guise of an itinerant Dutch schoolmaster; this incognito, barely departing from fact, nonetheless sealed his fate. Captured not in uniform but in civilian Dutch homsepun (and with his Yale diploma on his person), he lied about neither his identity nor his mission. However, after brief interrogation, Hale was sentenced without actual trial to death on the morrow on charges of espionage.

No one knows the precise location of Hale's overnight incarceration, nor the place of either his hanging or subsequent burial. At least two plaques have been erected on the facades of buildings on Manhattan's upper east side to mark a likely location for the gallows where his body would remain for three days. The capture and execution were not at first widely publicized. Unsubstantiated rumor of his death did not reach Nathan’s family until eight days after the event. Brother Enoch had to travel to New York for grim confirmation.

Yet, for all the physical obscurity into which death placed him, Hale's poise, valor and manliness in facing death so impressed British officers who witnessed it that his final words (possibly inspired by Addison) have come down to us with a clarity and haunting trenchancy that place them forever alongside quotations from more literary revolutionaries like Patrick Henry, Thomas Paine or Thomas Jefferson: "I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country."

Nathan Hale was twenty-one years old the Sunday morning he spoke those words, the final morning of his life.

The Revolution was a war fought between civilized adversaries who shared a larger, common culture. There were rules of war and principles of decency and humanity honored between them, in theory at least if not always on the field of action.

How different is the war in which we are engaged today.

Remembering Nathan Hale takes on a special relevance this September. Two Americans have been reported brutally beheaded in Iraq this week. The hellish spectacle of slaughtered schoolchildren in Beslan near the Chechen border is still raw in our minds.

Such times force the question of valor on us. Each would prefer, no doubt, that enemies as savage and unremitting as those now against us did not exist, but they do. Each might pray that there were some way of exempting himself or his loved ones from the struggle, leaving it to others; that choice is not given. Many will be spared direct casualty in this war; others will not. But more so than in any other war we might consider, this one affords a calculus of exclusion that is dark at best, uncertain, unperformable. Neither logistics nor combatant status, neutrality nor appeals to mercy can avail. The only choice of prayer left open is a prayer for valor – for the wisdom to stand on the right side of a fight and the willingness to sacrifice for it if need arises.

None are so naïve as to think that present death pays down future terror. The economy of valor does not so function; its fluctuations and values are of a very different and a higher order. It has sometimes been remarked that Nathan Hale is famous for a failed mission (New York remained occupied until well after Yorktown). Of any martyr the same could be mumbled. Such a perspective is bland, contingent, mundane. The truth, I think, is more sublime.

It is as Lincoln explicated at Gettysburg: fallen valor consecrates, clarifies and sharpens the resolve of those who survive. Nathan regretted he could make his sacrifice but once, yet he knew that others would make theirs after. It was thus one transaction in an ever-growing economy of right purposes, purchasing for future generations such as ours the strength to meet with valor the vicissitudes and struggles of a different time.

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.)