Smugglers

Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument is our favorite campground so far. It’s located at the extreme southern edge of Arizona. The nearest town of any consequence is Gila Bend, eighty-three miles north. There doesn’t seem to be any air traffic headed for distant cities, so the night sky is unpolluted by light or noise. Temperatures are in the mid-70s. The campground itself is small and lightly used, and with my new Seniors Pass, we’re camping for half price, a budget-comfy six dollars a night. At that rate, we can actually afford to do this trip again next year and probably for as long as we’re physically and mentally able.

There are also numerous BLM areas close by where you can boondock free for up to fourteen days at a time. We’ve scouted some of these along the way, and they range from isolated spots with only one or two trailers to sites just off the highway with rigs packed in pretty tight. We’re moving out in the morning to see how we like it.

We’re moving to one tomorrow

Whoo-hoo!

The stay limit is here is three weeks, and we’ll probably max out; there’s lots of hiking, as well as an excellent visitors’ center and ranger programs in the amphitheater; tonight’s is titled Bark Rangers, about working dogs in the park system. Most of these programs are not rocket surgery.

The desert landscape is as beautiful as any we’ve seen, surrounded by mountains near and distant and lush desert vegetation made possible by somewhat higher rainfall than surrounding deserts get. And it’s been a wet year after years of drought. Everything is an unlikely green right now, and the whole thing looks professionally landscaped.

But in major ways, the rules of the park and the overall atmosphere are dictated by the common border with Mexico. Outside the safety and comfort of the campground and a few close-in trails, this is “no country for old men.”

The campground is only five miles from Mexico and the small border town of Soroyta. Much of the park itself sees high traffic from illegal immigrants and drug runners. Most of the park that used to be open to the public is now closed, including a fifty-mile dirt road with several historical sites, abandoned mines and ranches. The visitor center is named for a ranger who was murdered six years ago while tracking drug runners who had recently committed a string or murders in Mexico. The park’s own brochure warns of wandering off the few approved trails and cautions to keep valuables locked up, report any suspicious activity, and, most of all, not intervene personally if you see anything suspect. No other park we’ve visited has posted such warnings.

Also, the highway is thick with Border Patrol SUVs, some of them pulling trailers with quads loaded for off-road pursuits. There are also signs of the virtual fence being built on contract by Boeing, parked trucks coverer by camouflage tarps with cameras mounted on tall poles. From what I’ve read, the fence is a near-complete failure and way over budget, but work continues.

All of which has got me thinking about the problems of immigration, drugs, gangs, cartels, murders and rapes that have people talking about Mexico as a failed state and dramatically changed the way of life for many along the border, not to mention the explosion of gangs and related violence affecting all of our cities.

I have the solution, two different measures that would be easy to enact and would reduce all the attendant problems by something like ninety percent. Make it ninety-five.

Neither idea is new.

The first is to adopt—I hate to say it—George Bush’s immigration reform package. It provided for a guest worker program which would allow Mexican nationals to enter the country legally and employers to easily hire documented workers. Despite issues of social justice, the program would substantially improve the lot of Mexican laborers by regulating wage, health and safety issues. It would also allow them to return home and reenter the United States without fear of deportation. Everybody’s happy.

Bush’s plan fell flat because it also addressed the problem of long-time residents who entered illegally and have integrated well into their communities. Many of them have been here for decades and have children and even grandchildren who were born here and thus are themselves US citizens. Bush intended a “path to citizenship” for these long-term residents, which was immediately branded “amnesty” by others in his own party, and the future of the plan quickly died.

John McCain, Arizona’s senator, initially embraced the plan but quickly distanced himself when he became a candidate for president. Sadly, of all the problems Obama doesn’t need to take on right now, immigration reform is probably first on his list.

The other simple solution that will never happen is to legalize most drugs: legalize, regulate, and tax. The drug cartels would immediately collapse, as would American street gangs. They’d probably dabble a little in murder, prostitution, and double parking, but for the most part they’d be out of work.

Despite fears to the contrary, this doesn’t mean the country would suddenly be awash in drugs. We could still regulate drug use the same way we regulate alcohol and tobacco. No shooting up in restaurants or parks. No reporting for work while high on cocaine. No DUIs or you’re back in rehab and then jail. Certain professions such as airline pilots and Sunday school teachers could still have a zero-tolerance policy.

Pretty much, the same people who use drugs now would still use them if they were legal. Availability would be about the same since, demonstrably, the War on Drugs which started under Nixon has been an abject failure.
These two simple solutions would solve so many problems and work so immediately that it’s all the more heartbreaking that the current situation is tolerated and perpetuated by small-thinking, opportunistic politicians in both parties, backed by the full faith and credit of a bunch of stupid rednecks.

Or we could do what a camper next to me suggested yesterday: shoot them all and send the bodies back to Mexico.

That could also work.

Don't tell anybody but. . . .

There are at least two things I’ve never tried and thought I never would in this life: gay sex and riding a Harley-Davidson. The thought of both is repulsive to me, and in the case of Harley riders, I’m even more repulsed by the lifestyle. I feel more than squeamish about gay sex, too, but gay people are okay with me. Kind of the way I feel about vegetarians.

But I was starting to feel a little bored by the life of warmth and leisure we’re enjoying on this trip and needed a little something to liven things up, so yesterday I rented a Harley from the local dealer and went for a long ride into the mountains north of Phoenix.

I wanted a big one, a full-dress touring bike which turned out to be an Electra Glide Classic. Cost me a hundred and fifty bucks for the day, and when Mary dropped me off to pick it up, I have to say I was turned on by all the black and chrome on the engine and the sparkly red paint which glistened in the morning sun. A handsome motorcycle, I admitted to myself, and one that promised all-day comfort with its relaxed riding position and amenities such as cruise control and a full stereo system.

The morning ride was a real pleasure and I was starting to think I’d been a little unkind over the years to The Motor Company, as Harley likes to refer to itself. I stopped by our campground—a beautiful county park in the desert outside of Phoenix—and put on longjohns and a warmer coat because the temperature was still in the low 50s. Then I turned north and headed for Payson, a town a hundred miles away along a highway marked scenic on my map.

And scenic it was. I quickly climbed out of the Sonoran Desert, beautiful enough in itself, and into a jagged, hostile landscape of rocks, rocks and rocks, big mothers that increasingly were building up into their own mountain ranges. A big vista like this deserves a big bike. The view from the road was magnificent, looking out over a mountainous landscape, with tall ranges surrounding me and snow in the higher elevations. The oddity of saguaro cacti as the dominant vegetation created a feeling of weirdness, but as I climbed, even the saguaro could no longer get a foothold and the mountains became bare and even more imposing.

And it was cold, but the Harley provided reasonable protection from the wind and I was really enjoying the bike. It put me in mind of my truck: a behemoth of the road that surprises with its planted feel and reasonable good handling, its power, and its plush ride. Kind of the ¾-ton Diesel pickup of the motorcycle world.

The road continued to climb, a four-lane highway with little traffic and beautiful sweeping turns, long climbs and descents, and the imposing Mogollon Rim that divides Arizona west to east looming ahead. An Indian casino in the middle of nowhere announced that this was Apache country, which only added to my sense of a true encounter with what I think of as the real West. By the time I reached Payson I was up into the pine forest and some now near-painful temperatures, hovering right around 40 degrees. I hadn’t brought any riding gear, but was layered up with enough clothes from the trailer than I was only moderately uncomfortable. I had on a full-face black Harley-Davidson helmet, which kept my head and face warm. I had passed on the Harley Davidson dog toys for now but figured I could pick some up when I got back.

I had lunch at McDonald’s only because they’ve decided to compete with Starbucks and serve good coffee, and a good cup of hot coffee was worth the terrible food I knew would go with it. I cannot recommend the new 1/3 Pounder.

After that, I turned around and started back into the low country, where I hoped to find higher temperatures and some interesting desert cruising.

But on the ride back, I grew to like the Harley less and less. Having kept my speed at a comfortable 70 on the ride up, I now wicked it up to a more typical 85 or so, and at these speeds the Lard Glide was decidedly wallowing in self-pity. Turns taken at 70 on the way up became white-knuckle head shakers on the way back, and even the relaxed riding position was becoming a butt-torturing device as I began my second hundred-mile leg. Also, my legs hurt.

With stock pipes, I had been impressed with the dealership-Harley’s relatively quiet exhaust note, but after a couple of hours in the saddle, the big V-twin’s thunderous clatteration started to annoy. And the relatively heavy controls were wearing. I realized the Harley’s healthy torque curve was a blessing mostly because it’s so tiring to pull in the clutch and bust my toes on the John Deere shift lever. This is a bike that just wears you out, and I see now why its riders tend to be big, burley guys; it’s a big, burley bike. I’m not man enough to ride it all day, but then I don’t generally rate manliness by a double-plus shoe size.

When I got back to camp, I took Mary for a short ride, and she wasn’t particularly impressed from the co-pilot’s seat either. I got the bike back to the dealer right at 5:30 when it was due in, glad that I had decided against the big discount for a three-day rental. I declined the offer to speak with a sales rep.

In the end, it was worth it just to be out on a bike again, and I realized how much I miss riding and started thinking about how I might bring a bike down with me next year. There’s no easy way to do it, but on two wheels, I could take a ride into Comanche country and see how I do at their casino.

Maybe I’ll also try a little gay sex.

Endnote: Tomorrow we leave for Tucson, potentially a much more interesting city than Phoenix, which impresses only by its sprawl and which I rate as one of three American cities that would be most improved from a direct strike by an asteroid. The other two are Las Vegas and Dallas, and I’ve never even been to Dallas.

A favorite author passes

A moment of quiet appreciation for J. D. Salinger. I would say that he probably touched me more deeply and personally with Catcher in the Rye than has any other writer I’ve read before or since.

What was I like at that age? Read Catcher in the Rye.

Me and about a million other guys.

More on the road

With the big storms coming in, we left Anza Borrego on Monday instead of Thursday as planned. We should have left Sunday, as we still drove through heavy rains and high winds, although there wasn’t any major flooding yet.

We took shelter for a full week in Mission Viejo, just east of Laguna Beach. My cousins Mary and Chris run a household that thrives on near-chaos. They’ve been taking in abused foster children and adult women for about forty years now and always have a house full of people and activity. Some of these guests stay for years, most of them get their lives off to a good start, and many of them stay in close touch. While we were there, live-in guests included Vera, a battered woman who has been with them for two years; Jason, their older son who has health problems; and Steve, a grandson of twenty who hasn’t quite figured out where he’s heading yet. Mary and Chris require that he have a job and be in college earning passing grades, and he goes along with the rules, although I don’t think he’s going to be a big success in college until maybe he gets a little older. Great kid, though. He turned twenty while we were there.

The weather finally broke on Saturday, and Sunday morning we left for Joshua Tree National Park. The western half of the park is high-altitude Mojave Desert, and that’s where we’re camped. The most interesting feature here is the granite rock formations. As they cooled and pushed up through an upper layer, they cracked and weathered, so that now they form massive formations of boulders, both giant and small, nested together in every imaginable pattern. They look like cushions stacked in perfectly fitted but wild disarray.

Our campground has the quite uninspired name of Jumbo Rocks. There is also the occasional totally unexpected palm oasis where water seeps up near the surface.

The downside here is that we hadn’t anticipated how cold it would be at this elevation, about 4,000 feet. The climate, though not the vegetation, is much like the Pinnacles: mid-50s during the day, dropping quickly into the twenties at night. We came down here to get warm, after all, and tomorrow, after only three days, we’re heading for some of the regional parks in the Phoenix area. Again, our guidebook, Southwest Camping Destinations, offers a number of choices.

We’ve saved a lot of money in camping fees over the last ten days. Staying with cousin Mary was free, of course, though I did insist on buying a few meals out in return for their hospitality. The camping fee here at Joshua Tree is only ten dollars a night.

Still, travel is expensive, and I’ll have to face the cold reality of my online bank statement tomorrow. It might determine how much longer we can run around out here in the desert.
But in four days when I turn sixty-two, camping fees in many parks drop to half the usual rate. I also start receiving Social Security next month, so I guess it pays to be old.

Anza-Borrego

Anza-Borrego Desert State Park is California’s largest state park, and indeed the largest state park in the US. Most of it is Mojave Desert wilderness, set aside to protect native plants and animals, among them the endangered Desert Bighorn Sheep, of which only 750 survive. Around the borders of the park are a few scattered campgrounds, mostly undeveloped.

Palm Canyon, where we’re staying, is the largest and most developed, with about a hundred sites with power and hookups for RVs. We’re surrounded on three sides by mountains, and if you like dramatic desert scenery, you would love it here.

We’ve taken a number of hikes, most notably to Palm Canyon. It’s a two-mile one way, mostly easy trek up a desert wash, and for the last half-mile or so the trail runs along an improbable stream. At trail’s end is a beautiful desert oasis with palms and ferns and little waterfalls. Only the seventy-two virgins are missing to keep it from qualifying as a genuine paradise on earth. Despite it’s being the most-used trail in the park, we met only a few other hikers along the way.

One of the pleasures of travel during the school year is, not surprisingly, the absence of children. I love children, (no I don’t), but they’re noisy, and campgrounds are usually noisy places. Nine months a year, though, it’s pretty much just retired people like us that we meet, the exception being some weekends in some parks. We stayed here a week and had reserved another, but we realized Thursday night that this was the MLK three-day weekend (thus are our national heroes reduced) and by Friday families were arriving in large numbers.

Yesterday, Saturday, we drove five miles out a dirt road recommended only for four-wheel drive vehicles, (our truck is), and then hiked up a steep and rocky trail to Wind Caves, only to discover a troop of Boy Scouts camping there. We chatted with one of the adults sitting well away from the campsite, and he said he had to get away from the noise. Said he wasn’t sure he could make it through the weekend. Mary told him she had done it for thirty years, and he just kind of groaned.

The scouts managed to mostly spoil the effect of the wind caves, naturally sculpted sandstone caves used for shelter by Native Americans for thousands of years, but it was still a great view of the badlands, and the drive in up the narrowing canyon was exciting.

We have a reservation here until Thursday, but we’re leaving tomorrow, four days early because of a forecast for a series of storms that will hit the west coast starting tomorrow. The San Diego paper says this storm will join one of the four record storms since records were begun in the 1860s, and even allowing for a lot of media weather-hype, it sounds like a good idea to clear out early. Five days of rain are forecast, maybe more, and flash floods are likely, as are high winds. We can’t travel if the wind is much above thirty miles per hour, so we’re hoping to cut out early and make it over to the LA area, where my three delightful cousins live. They’re the last and the closest of my relatives I have any contact with, and I only see them every several years.

As I write, I’m hoping we didn’t wait a day too long as the wind is coming up fast and thick clouds are gathering. With luck, the wind will back off when the rain starts tomorrow and we can make our escape, much as we did when we left Klamath Falls, now five weeks ago.

After a week with the cousins, we’re coming back this way heading for Arizona, but we’ll probably stay in Joshua Tree National Monument a little to the north. Anza-Borrega, though, will be on our list of stops in years to come. We’ve talking to several people who have been coming here for years.

Adventures

We like to think of our winter travel as an adventure, but really, you can have about the same level of adventure at home by taking a warm bath. You could break your hip, but how many of us worry about that in the comfort of our home? I do.

A typical day in camp consists of reading, dozing in a chair, taking a nap (not at all the same as dozing in a chair), studying a little Spanish for me, sewing for Mary, going for a walk, and various other activities that will not raise your blood pressure more than a few millibars.

In fact, our trip to date has been so low-key and relaxing that I’ve been having roaring anxiety dreams every night, usually some variation of I’m still working and arrive at school totally unprepared to teach my classes. When I was actually teaching, I didn’t need this particular nightmare since it happened often enough in real life. Now that I get paid at the end of every month whether I even make the bed or not, my subconscious is punishing me by pretending that I still have something to worry about.

A few days ago, we thought we might be having an adventure when we drove our 4-wheel drive, high-clearance truck over a sandy two-track road five miles through the desert to a trailhead. What if we got stuck? Who would ever find us? When we got there, palms a little sweaty, there was a ranger in a jeep, probably ticketing offending dog owners for not having their dogs on a leash, which seems to be how the rangers spend most of their law-enforcement time.

(More later, maybe, on the changing official attitude towards dogs in county, state and national parks.)

In addition to the ranger, there were a handful of compact sedans with not-great tires which had somehow made it in.

The few occurrences which have reminded me that I’m no longer at home watching a Colbert rerun have involved coyotes. Back in Pinnacles, we were sitting around the campfire and our dog Nick grew increasingly uncomfortable and fixed on something just outside the ring of light. After telling myself it was nothing or maybe a deer or stray cow, I scanned the zone of anxiety, which is that area around me at night which I can illuminate with a powerful flashlight, and discovered not one but two Wileys moving towards us with the clear notion that Jack Russell terriers were excellent canapés.

Despite popular belief, coyotes do sometimes attack people, and they often pick off stray pets. In fact, their principle diet in the urban/rural interface where they are most numerous is the house cat, followed closely by toddlers. If a coyote has your cat, it’s best not to interfere, but most people will fight for a toddler. (Not everyone, apparently: “The dingoes got my baby!”)

We quickly took the dogs back inside Fort Arctic Fox (our trailer) and let the fire burn itself out. Later I went down to the flush toilets to make a poop but carried my walking stick with a sharp point and tapped it noisily on the ground while I made quick circles with the flashlight and occasional shouted “ bad doggies go home!. I actually did see another coyote which seemed to be considering whether or not my slight limp of late qualified me as one of the old and weak that it was his job to cull.

Last night I took the dogs out for a last walk before bed We ambled down to almost the end of our loop, several sites past where the last RV had left on its outside light, when some deep inner voice told me “go no further.”

“Farther,” I correct my inner voice.

We turned back to the trailer and both dogs made a poop, so I cleaned it up with a doggy bag and dropped them off in the trailer. Then I left my walking stick leaning up against the desert-weathered picnic table and made my way the hundred meters or so to the garbage to throw away the poop, but just before I got there a group of coyotes broke into full blood-clotting song, and they were very close, right in the campground I was quite sure. I kept my calm and didn’t run, which prompts the predator’s response to chase. With a great effort of will, I took the few extra steps to the trash bin, making sure to slam the top down as I started the fearsome walk back to safety.

The coyotes continued to howl, which could have meant “fresh meat!” or just “Is Colbert a rerun tonight?” but I walked determinedly back to safety and shut the door firmly behind me with a big exhalation of stressy breath.

Close call.

Santa Cruz

Today marks three weeks on the road. We left Pinnacles a week ago and traveled to Santa Cruz, where we stayed for five days at New Brighton State Beach. Again, we were more than a bit shocked at the camping fees: $35 per night for a site with no hookups. We started to consider the possibility that we will have to return home sooner than we planned, but for now we’re still heading south and planning to be out for at least two months. I’m still thinking four months, but I’m happy just to be traveling and still moving south.

On the way to Santa Cruz we stopped in San Juan Bautista, less than an hour away but a town I never visited when I lived here. It’s a nice enough tourist town, the likes of which we expect to see lots of on this trip, but what makes it special is the Spanish mission, which dates back to the late seventeen hundreds and which has been in continuous use since then. We were lucky to visit on a Sunday because mass was in session and I was able to stand in the open doorway and listen for awhile. The service was in Spanish and I could follow it fairly well, and the church is magnificent. I was reminded how long the Spanish and then Mexicans owned this land and all of the Southwest until we stole it from them in the Mexican-American War of the mid-1800s. That culture has lived on uninterrupted here for over three-hundred years, and it reminded me once again of the foolishness of much of the anti-immigration rhetoric.

Also, there were lots of chickens, magnificent roosters which wander loose on the streets, just as we saw in Kauai when we visited there last summer.

We wanted to stay at New Brighton for a few days before going on to stay with our friends Sue and Marty so we could visit old haunts on our own without putting them out too much as guests. In fact we went into town only once to do laundry and catch up on email and such in a coffee shop/internet café. We did drive by the old house on 14th
Avenue where I lived for four years in the early 70s and where Mary and I lived together for a couple of years before we made the permanent move north in 1975. The house, amazingly, is still standing and occupied, a one-room cinder block ugly little thing that I still love. This in the middle of a now mostly upscale neighborhood where by all expectations the house should have been torn down to make way for a new expensive home or condos.

I always have mixed feelings coming back to Santa Cruz. Much as I love it, the years I spent here were hard in many ways, especially when I graduated and had a hard time finding a decent job. The future looked bleak for a couple of years, with me working first for minimum wage in a deli in Watsonville and then as an area manager for 7-Eleven stores, by far the worst job I ever had. Although I did a good job for them, I never fit into the Slurpy culture and was finally fired. I still feel the shock of that, but it led to our decision to move away and all the good things and lucky breaks that followed for the rest of our years up to now.

Still, I’m drawn to Santa Cruz for its amazingly beautiful scenery, its artistic and intellectual culture, and its total hipness. If a modest little home could be had for less than half a million bucks, I think we’d probably move back, but as it is we have to be content just to visit. I get back mostly every year when I come down for the motorcycle races at Laguna Seca, but it’s been about fifteen years since Mary was last here.

And here it is 2010, and I’m just amazed at how time flies, or seems to have flown when I look back.

After a cool, rainy spell at New Brighton, the weather has taken a turn towards spring, with temperatures in the 70s and sunny skies. It’s always wonderful to visit Sue and Marty. Sue, Mary and I all met here now nearly forty years ago, and Sue and Marty are the only friends left who have managed to stay in Santa Cruz with its astronomical home prices and scarce employment. Marty has mostly stayed employed in the computer industry, though now he has to make the dangerous commute to San Jose every day. Sue is an artist of growing reputation.

We’ll spend a few more days here (free camping in their driveway!) and make at least one visit to Mary’s brothers in San Jose. Then we plan to head south again for a hundred miles or so and stay at Corrizo National Monument. We’re both still very happy to be on the road and are taking our time getting down to southern Arizona, which is as far as we plan to travel.

Not quite Christmas Eve, Pinnacles

We paid a premium to move our trailer to a site with electricity. It’s been cold enough here to run our propane heater often during the night, which uses expensive propane and drains batteries, so we have to run a generator much of the day to keep up. With electricity, we can run a small electric heater and keep the lights on instead of using battery lanterns, which make it feel like a cave in our trailer.

More about caves later.

The site with electricity is $36 a night, compared with $23 a night for a no-hookups site. This puts camping here at the cost of a private RV park with full hookups, not that there’s any comparison. I’m assuming the parks are having to cover their actual costs because of budget cuts, but you don’t have to multiply $36 by very few days to figure out that it adds up fast. And no WIFI.

We’ve more or less settled into a happy routine. Up about 7:30 to walk the dogs and make coffee. A few hours of reading or studying Spanish for me during the day. Mary is busy on sewing projects she’s brought along and also reading a great deal. We spend a lot of time walking the dogs, a little time with maintaining camp and cooking and eating. Every couple of days, we go for a longer hike. And evenings we listen to an hour or two of Anna Karenina, which we have on audio book.

I don’t think I would have ever read this otherwise, but as a story it’s quite engaging, and at this rate we still have a few weeks of Anna to go. I think we’ll make this a regular part of the trip with more audio books to come. We could do an all-Russian vacation but probably won’t.

Today we took an exquisite hike of about four miles to the Boundary Cave, a talus cave that connects the west and east sides of the park. The hike up was on one of the most lovely trails I’ve ever enjoyed, heavily wooded with lots of rocks covered with moss and lichen and views of the pinnacles through the canopy. I’m not exactly sure what a “glade” is, but I’m pretty sure this would be a glade.

A talus cave, I learned, is formed when earthquakes dislodge huge rocks from the peaks and pile them up in ravines. Since they don’t fit together like a puzzle, the open spaces get partially filled in but leave passages. Bats, of course, love it. We made it to the cave entrance, which was set in a magnificent rock formation, but unfortunately forgot to bring a flashlight so we couldn’t explore further. We might go up again before we leave.

Weather is still cold at night, and we’ve had a little rain, but daytimes are still generally beautifully sunny and relatively warm in the mid-50s. On a trip into town, I got online at a Starbucks and among other things checked the weather back in Klamath Falls.

Ha!

Tomorrow we’re going into Hollister to provision up again, get online, have a Mexican lunch, and explore the site of the 1950s biker takeover that inspired the movie “The Wild One.” If you don’t know the story, it was actually a rather minor incident, with a motorcycle gang buying a lot of beer and getting drunk, fighting, and breaking a few windows over the weekend. Somehow, though, Life Magazine got a reporter and photographer in. There wasn’t a lot of excitement left when they got there, so they got a few of the bikers to stage fake fights and sit drunkenly on their bikes. (Not all Harleys, btw. Brando rode a Triumph in the movie.) The article made outlaw bikers familiar and somehow fascinating to enough people to keep the myth and legends going long after Hunter S. Thompson’s The Hell’s Angles: A Wild and Terrible Saga.

The movie followed the article, and the age of outlaw bikers was born. The dark and brooding Brando didn’t make a very convincing outlaw, but Lee Marvin is actually scary.

What we’ve seen of Hollister so far suggests it’s a nice little town with great strip malls. Tomorrow we go looking for the real downtown deal.

Still at Pinnacles

I love it here, and with several days left on our reservation, I’m hoping we might decide to stay longer.

Or not.

The whole idea of this excursion is to do exactly what we feel like, and we have very few actual plans and no real commitments. If the money holds out reasonably well, we’ll be traveling for something between two and four months

Our campground sits at 1,000 feet of elevation, and it’s cooler than I expected. Daytime temperatures of about sixty degrees are perfect, but nights it drops to freezing, and there has been ice on our things outside most mornings. It warms up slowly and cools down fast, so we’re dressing warm.

In fact, on a run into town today, we stopped at the Goodwill and bought sweatshirts. Mine’s a Nike, in honor of Tiger Woods. Cost me nine bucks.

Another aspect of the cooler temperatures is that we’re going through propane quickly. We had to take the trailer with us to town, and eleven gallons cost $45. We’ve started a more serious conservation effort. I mentioned the part of the money holding out.

We’re surrounded by the steep, oak covered hills of one of California’s central ranges, beautiful in themselves, and the actual pinnacles are a few miles up the road. We’ve only been up once so far for a short but challenging hike for us, a one-mile, 1,100-foot elevation gain to a great viewpoint.

I won’t say I could have knocked this out without effort when I was younger, only that it was a slow crawl for me now. One of my big objectives of this trip is physical conditioning, so I hope to combine a vigorous walk every day with more serious hikes a few times a week.

The wildlife here is abundant. A herd of deer numbering in the dozens makes its home in the campground, not that exciting for us since deer are also common in our yard at home. But Thursday we sighted our first condors flying over the ridge above our campground. Even from a distance, the size of these birds is apparent, and there was no confusing them with the more common turkey vultures. The campground has a viewing station with high-power telescopes, and if you can lock on to one in flight, it’s easy to follow it for long periods.

Very exciting. The condor’s survival is far from certain and it’s been a treat to be able to see them in part of their natural range.

We’ve seen lots of coyote scat and heard them at night. A few nights ago we built a campfire and were enjoying the evening with our JR terriers Bandit and Nick. Nick was very nervous and kept fixing on thingsthat go bump in the night. We thought he was just being paranoid, but when I scanned the perimeter with my flashlight, there were two Wileys circling in, and they weren’t quickly scared off when I threw a few rocks at them. We’ve seen several since then. Sometimes when we’re walking the dogs to go pee at night, Nick jumps sky high at something he smells and pulls hard on the leash to get away from it. We think it’s probably coyote piss marking the location of a new fast food franchise. They’re known to quickly grab and run with little dogs left unattended for any time, so we’re extra careful.

We also saw a bobcat in camp, and I got some pictures of it at about 100 meters. Later in the afternoon, it wandered much closer, obviously hunting mice or ground squirrels (of which we have seen none) and I slowly made my way over to it taking pictures and got to within about 30 feet. I would guess its weight at about thirty pounds.

(If you’ve never heard a bobcat cry, btw, it’s about the scariest sound in all of nature. You can hear samples with a Google search, but if it doesn’t send a primal chill up your spine, you haven’t got close to the real thing.)

Shortly after the bobcat, we also sighted three feral pigs, which for all purposes are pretty much wild boar. We had seen signs of their rooting, and Mary guessed what they were before we asked a ranger, and she (the ranger) confirmed they’re common around the campground. She said that within less than a year, a domestic pig will take on all the characteristics of a wild one: a lean frame and prominent shoulder hump, plus tusks. These pigs have been wild for generations.

They are an imposing presence, and we were glad they were a hundred meters or so away and moving the other direction. The ranger also said they are shot on sight as part of an effort to eradicate them from the park, which explains two shots we heard close in yesterday.

Still, good luck with that. Wild pigs breed like rats, and I don’t know of any successful efforts to remove them.

Because the oak trees have had an abundance of acorns this year, the bird population is very high. Common are jays and magpies, quail and, not surprisingly, the acorn woodpecker. Also lots of hawks, golden eagles, and the always comely turkey vultures.

I suppose you have to be here to appreciate all this, and I’m very glad we decided on a whim to make this our first stop. We’ve been the only campers here until two other RVs came in today, but they’ll be gone after the weekend and we’ll have the park to ourselves again, save for the hikers and climbers who drive up to the trailheads early in the morning and leave late.

The rest of the time, it’s just us and the chickens.

Thursday, 12/17, Pinnacles

Our first full day here was very enjoyable. We went for a few walks around the camp area, finished setting up the trailer, and did a lot of reading and hanging around. We practiced yoga separately, which felt wonderful with our mats in the soft leaf bed from the oak trees and the warm sun on my back. I also did about an hour of Spanish. All in all, I was surprised how quickly the day filled up without either any sense of boredom or rushing. If anything, I would have enjoyed an extra hour or two for Spanish.

We haven’t explored the park beyond the campground yet. Plenty of time for that as we’ll be here another ten days or so. In camp, though, there is an abundance of wildlife to watch: a dozen or so deer which are quick at home with us campers, plus a large variety of very numerous and active birds: we’ve identified quail, turkeys, acorn woodpeckers, scrub jays, magpies, and our old friends from home the Oregon juncos. We haven’t seen any condors yet, though a very serious birder camped here yesterday uaesaid he could pick some out in the trees on the ridgeline above us with his very serious scope mounted on a tripod.

Other than him, we’re alone in the camper section. We’ve seen one tent in the tent section. There’s a lot of activity during the daytime, though, with workers busy building new rail fences and making other repairs and improvements. Stimulus money, I’m thinking, and glad to see them at work.

Last night we built a fire and were listening to Anna Karenina on audio disc, but were startled by an animal noise, a kind of combined grunt and growl. We both thought it was a deer, but we turned the disc off the listen more closely. Didn’t hear anything more. There aren’t any bears or cougars around, so we weren’t worried about getting eaten. It was getting cold, though, so we went in shortly after. It’s been warm and sunny during the day, about 60 degrees, but down to freezing at night.

This is a good test of boondocking since we don’t have any hookups. I ran the generator for a few hours yesterday and am not worried about the batteries, but water could be a few problem. The trailer carries sixty gallons, which seems like it should be a lot, but we’re down to 1/3 according to the indicator in the trailer, despite taking showers in the park shower/restroom. We’ve been out only three days now, and I was hoping we could get a week or more if we were careful. It doesn’t look like we’ll get anything like that now, though the indicator isn’t too accurate. For here, there’s a dump station and fresh water in camp, so we’d only have to hook up and drive over to them. Out in the desert, it would be a bigger undertaking.

Today we’re going into town for a few supplies.

Overall, we’re both enjoying the trip very much so far, but then it’s only been a few days. And we wouldn’t mind if it were a little warmer, but I think this is going to be typical of the weather. Actually, it’s very nice during most of the day, and we just layer up when it’s cooler.

Ross and Mary’s Voyage of Discovery: Chapter One

Mary and I left Klamath Falls on Monday, December 14th. We had the trailer up at the house for a couple of days and were hoping to get out Monday, but weather reports kept changing. After a week of sub-zero temperatures, now we had a series of storms coming in, and it was looking like the better window would be later in the week. By Sunday afternoon we had a few inches of snow on the ground, and I chained up the truck and trailer, mostly so we could be sure of just getting down our steep hill. Once we got on the highway, I was optimistic we would have good pavement. I thought we could drop the chains and drive with the truck in 4-wheel once we got on the road.

By Monday morning, though, the weather report was calling for heavy snow that night, so we decided to make a run for it. It took us until 1pm to finish packing and loading, which was something of a bigger job than usual since we’re planning to be gone somewhere between two and four months, considerably longer than we’ve been gone before.

The escape from Klamath was only a little harrowing. We had bare pavement all the way, but at Weed, the junction with I-5, we hit heavy winds, which I expected. I would guess 20 mph, with gusts as high as 40. The trailer was definitely getting seriously pushed around. By this time, it was also raining hard and the temperature was only 36. We had just made it out in time.

We were thinking to stay in Redding and try something we’d heard about but never yet done ourselves, which was to camp free in a Wal-Mart parking lot. Not that I don’t hate Wal-Mart as much as the next enlightened liberal, but free overnight parking and a chance to stock-up on any last minute supplies is hard to pass up. With our Garmin GPS, I did a search and found one in Red Bluff, so we motored on down I-5 another thirty miles and Flo led us right to it.

(Flo is the voice on the GPS, and when in doubt about directions, we always go with the Flo.)

Staying at Wal-Mart was actually kind of fun and we especially appreciated the free camping. Our first real stop is Pinnacles National Monument, and we were surprised that dry camping (no hookups) is $23 a night. We’re used to paying $10 to $15 a night in Forest Service or BLM campgrounds, and some of the parks and monuments we plan to visit in the Southwest are also free, so it’s hard to understand the high prices here, especially in the off-season.

But we’re staying twelve days and are looking forward to it. Pinnacles lies in the oak foothills (some would say mountains) that separate the Salinas and Central Valleys of California. What makes the park interesting is that it’s composed of the remains of an ancient volcano, mostly eroded away now but with peaks rising to above 3,000 feet. The landscape is dramatic and beautiful. Mary and I camped here with a friend almost forty years ago, probably our first camping trip together. We’re looking forward to some hiking and caving, and if we’re lucky, we’ll also see some condors, which were successfully reintroduced here some years ago.

We’re also looking forward to being warm. Part of the reason for our trip, which we hope to repeat in coming years, is to camp and explore the desert Southwest, but we’re also here as snowbirds, fleeing the snow and freezing temperatures of the Oregon high desert. It’s not that I hate winter, it’s just that after all these years, I mostly hate winter.

So, although I was surprised that the temperature was only 28 this morning, it’s sunny today and should get up to about 60.

Yes!

We’ll have to go into Hollister once or twice for supplies while we’re here, and we already saw a Starbucks, so we’ll stop by to surf the web and check our mail and I can post this rambling first entry of our trip. There’s no WIFI here and not even any cell phone reception.

What’s the latest news on Tiger Woods? Talk about roughing it!

Stephen and Eve

I thought Colbert went easy on tonight’s guest, Andy Schlafly, son of Phyllis The Wicked Witch of the Right, and founder of Conservapedia, an online alternative to the liberal bias of Wikipedia.

Here’s the Conservapedia definition of liberal:

“A liberal (also leftist) is someone who rejects logical and biblical standards, often for self-centered reasons. There are no coherent liberal standards; often a liberal is merely someone who craves attention, and who uses many words to say nothing. Liberalism began as a movement for individual liberties, but today is increasingly statist, and in Europe even socialistic.”

I just love a concise, unbiased definition. Stephan could have just read that and asked, “WTF?”

Still, Colbert did take his shots at Conserva earlier when “On October 7, 2009, [he] called for his viewers to incorporate him into the Conservapedia Bible as a Biblical figure and viewers responded by editing the Conservapedia Bible to include his name.” This resulted in articles on topics such as “Stephan and the Ark.”

For more on Conservapedia and other “alternative conservative sites” here’s a link to the evil Wiki:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservapedia

[You still gotta cut and paste the links. Blogger is messing with me.]

Small world

Mary and I exchanged Christmas presents yesterday. Actually, we both kept the one we had bought for the other. We gifted each other (why not make another new verb? It’s all the thing to do) a pair of Kindles, and when we opened them, we found we had to register them if they came as a gift, but they were already registered to the gifter, not the giftee, so we said, well hell, let’s just keep our own.

Not very Christmasy (also written “Christmas-y”),but each year I try to move a little further away from any recognition of Christmas as a special day. Part of this has to do with not being a Christian and resenting this imposed holiday, part is a rejection of the commercialization of Christmas. Part is protecting myself from the melancholy of not being eight-years-old anymore.

But hell, I still want some presents.

I’m very enthused about the Kindle and have wanted one since I read a little about the new features, which include a dictionary that allows instant access to definitions as you read. “Bumptious” is now in my active vocabulary, and pretty soon I’ll be sounding like George Will or the recently departed William F. Buckley even. Also, by searching for a name in the current document, you can almost instantly generate an in-order list of all the references to a single character, which should come in handy when I’m reading mysteries because usually when the bad guy comes back on the stage in the last pages and has our hero at gunpoint in an isolated warehouse, I can’t remember who this bad guy is. Of course, it’s almost always a minor character from page forty-three whom I’ve completely forgotten. So now, I can search and go back to page forty-three and remind myself that he was the doorman that the crime boss whispered to as he was entering the banquet surrounded by bodyguards.

Ah ha!

I’ve already downloaded a couple of books, plus the New Yorker, which is not available here in my little town, and today’s Washington Post just to see what the Kindle version looks like.

This is a very practical tool for us as we prepare to head out on our winter travels to the Southwest:

Pioneers! O Pioneers!

COME my tan-faced children,
Follow well in order, get your weapons ready,
Have you your pistols? have you your sharp-edged axes?

Damn straight we do, and our Arctic Fox travel trailer and Dodge ¾ ton pickup with the Cummins diesel, and now two Kindles so we’ll have very expanded access to books, newspapers,and magazines as we travel mostly in the backcountry of parks and national monuments. We’ll have cell phone reception much of the time, which allows Kindle shopping and downloads, but few bookstores or WI-FI, where we can get the news online.

So I’m feeling pretty good about my new gadget and our trip coming up when I’m watching Colbert last night, and his guest is author Sherman Alexie. I’ve heard of him. Turns out he’s a Native American from the Spokane area, growing up there about the time Mary and I lived there in the late 70s. Also, the film Smoke Signals, which I’ve admired here in earlier posts, is based on one of his short stories, and he wrote the screen play. Small world, I’m thinking.

I’m pretty interested in the guy by now and ready to cue him up on my Kindle, but it turns out the whole interview is about how much he hates Kindle and how it’s destroying the relationship between authors and their readers, not to mention the independent bookstores (I’ve got some bad news here for Sherman, Kindle or not), and in fact finally destroying the printed word itself. Pretty soon, there won’t be anything left but downloads, which will offer a hugely reduced number of titles mostly falling within the bestseller category.

Again, have I got news, but still.

So Sherman won’t allow his books to be digitized, doesn’t want them getting all digit-y, and I had to go to Amazon and order the hardcopies, and I’m not sure I see such a big difference between which Amazon department I order from.

Actually, I share all these concerns but I don’t think there’s anything we can do to change much. Better maybe to try to find a way to ride the wave. Technology is now a force of nature as powerful as climate change and about as immediate as a massive meteor strike. Goodbye to the daily newspaper, the network news team, and now the local bookstore. I will miss them all if I live long enough, but actually, I think I’m about the perfect age to have enjoyed the best of everything life and human progress have had to offer, and I mostly won’t be around when the bills come due.

Meanwhile, I downloaded Anna Karenina for free to my Kindle. (It’s public domain now, so I might finally get around to reading it. Sorry, Leo.) And I have four more new books on there, plus a couple of magazines.

I’m really killing the publishing industry.

My (possibly) Irish heart

Somebody warned me off Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt because it’s depressing. I still might have started it earlier but the print in my paperback edition is small, and anymore, print size is one of the deciding factors in whether I’ll read a book or not. But I started it anyway a few weeks ago and, slow reader that I am, just finished it, and I would have missed something wonderful if I hadn’t finally picked it up.

This memoir of growing up in poverty in Ireland, “utterly heartbreaking” as one reviewer wrote, leaves me feeling far from depressed, though I admit to reaching for the Kleenex frequently as young Frank finally sails to America at age nineteen and the book comes to an end with me wanting much more. Although it’s a very personal narrative, for me it was impossible to read without a profound awareness of how truly wealthy we are to live in this country and in this time, the recession notwithstanding. At the same time, McCourt enjoyed a kind of protected youth, growing up in a brief era when poverty and violence were not so linked as they are today.

A quick look at Amazon confirms that I’ll have more to keep me busy as I try to find ways to pass the long afternoons in the deserts of Southern California and Arizona this winter. McCourt, who ended up teaching high school English and winning a Pulitzer Prize, has several other books, all of them again memoirs it seems, and his brother Malachy has a few of his own.

Angela’s Ashes was copyrighted in 1996, so as usual my “discovery” is over a decade old. It’s been a best-seller ever since, so my belated recommendation adds little to what has already been said, except perhaps to the few readers of this blog who haven’t yet come upon it.

What a difference

a day makes. . . .

Punditry on the chances for health care reform now seems to be focusing on obstacles, suggesting that it’s not at all clear that Obama will have a bill to sign. This is a complete reversal of what I was hearing just a day or two ago, when is seemed like we’d moved into the realm of forgone conclusion, even before the house voted.

An excellent reason to shit-can the filibuster: Joe Lieberman pontificating on why he would, in an act of moral conscience, prevent the bill from coming to a vote. One man can do this? One man who just last week was announcing that he would vote against the public option purely because it would be bad for the insurance industry concentrated in his state?

Oh, that Soupy Sales were still alive to hit this dick in the face with a pie. How about a nice piece of dick-face pie, Joe?

POW!

So now I’m going back to my cartoons.

Our word for today. . . .

“Mumblecore is an American independent film movement that arose in the early 2000s. It is primarily characterized by ultra-low budget production (often employing digital video cameras), focus on personal relationships between twenty-somethings, improvised scripts, and non-professional actors. Filmmakers in this genre include Lynn Shelton, Andrew Bujalski, Mark Duplass, Jay Duplass, Aaron Katz, Joe Swanberg, Todd Rohal, Ry Russo-Young and Michael Harring.

“The term "mumblecore" was coined by Eric Masunaga, a sound editor who has worked with Bujalski. Masunaga coined the term one night at a bar during the 2005 South by Southwest Film Festival, but it was Bujalski who first used it in an interview with indieWIRE.[2] The directors of the films are sometimes referred to collectively as "mumblecorps," as in press corps. Film journalists have also used the terms "bedhead cinema", "postgraduate naturalism", "Myspace Neo-Realism" and "Slackavetes," a reference to independent film director John Cassavetes.”

All of this, of course, from Wikipedia, getting to be the only reference tool you’ll ever need.

I mention it because I watched the film Quiet City last night, and although I initially found it shambling and pointless, I was rather quickly won over. It’s a very pretty film with engaging characters and only a hint at the developing romance between them.

It's enough to make you sick, but in a good way. . . .

Around here in the Klamath Basin, it just feels like another beautiful fall day, a Sunday; not much is changing except the weather, which is mixing in more cold and wet days, and next week we should have our first real snow, though not a big one will be my guess. It's so quiet you might think you were deep in the woods and there wasn't another living person within miles.

But really, it’s quite an extraordinary Sunday since last night the house passed health-care reform legislation. Let’s call it landmark. Even one Republican crossed over to vote for it.

From the little I know, it’s not perfect. We should be moving away from employer-provided health care since it puts a burden on American companies when trying to compete with foreign companies from countries where health care isn’t connected to the workplace. Still, a lot will be worked out over the next few years. For now, history has been made which should have been made a generation ago.

Now the Senate has to pass its own version, and a lot could still go wrong there. From what I’m reading and hearing, though, Obama will have a bill on his desk to sign, maybe by Thanksgiving. How appropriate.

Wednesday on PBS, Frontline is rerunning its program “Sick Around the World,” which originally got me thinking so much about all this over a year ago. I hope all our Senators will watch it as they prepare to debate and vote on their package. And I hope even Republicans, elected and not, will watch it. They may react the same way I did, which is to be struck with how uncomplicated reform might be and with how badly we need to do it now.

They might come to understand that full-coverage healthcare with a public option and even a single payer is the moderate position. Socialized medicine means every hospital and clinic belongs to the government and every health care worker, from doctors to LPNs, is a government employee. Socialized medicine works well in some countries, though it probably wouldn’t be a good choice for us, nor is it one that would ever be considered here for a very long time to come. But look to a time in the not-too-distant-future when the teabaggers and other assorted wing-nut loonies are still railing against socialized medicine while they and their families are fully enjoying its benefits.

I wonder if this will be seen as Obama’s great achievement or if he will be seen as having been aloof from the process and mostly an observer.

I just can't watch. . . .

“But barring astoundingly self-defeating behavior by Democrats, a decent bill will get to Obama's desk." So said E.J. Dionne a few days ago predicting a health-care reform bill would pass, and so quoted I a few entries back. But, I added, never underestimate the ability of the Democrats to engage in astoundingly self-defeating behavior.

Which, of course, is exactly what they're doing. Republicans have completely opted out of any discussion, so if the crazies want to get heard, they have to find forty or so blue-dog Democrats who have nothing better to do than to howl at the moon and call it music. In this case, they have two demands: no federal health-care dollars can go to illegal immigrants, and no tax dollars can go toward abortion.

Simple enough. Write that into the bill, but then exactly how are you going to enforce it? The Blue Dems don’t say, except basically anything you can come up with isn’t good enough. Simply writing these restrictions into the bill doesn’t even start to cover it. How do we know Jose’ is really a citizen, even if he was born in Pasadena and went to Harvard? The looney right doesn’t even believe the President is a citizen since his father was born in Kenya and he was born in Hawaii.

This only makes him a citizen of Kenyawaii.

And it’s not enough to say any public-option plan can’t cover abortions; any private health plan that has any publicly subsidized enrollees can’t either.

Why stop there? Why not prohibit private individuals from paying for their own abortions if they are unemployed and collecting insurance, or getting disability, or in the military, or working for an agency that has a government contract? Those are tax dollars they’re spending, and if they want to spend them to kill babies, they need to give them back and start standing at the exit to Wal-Mart with a “Need abortion, Please help” sign.

Or they could just get a job at Wal-Mart, since they probably won’t ever get health coverage there either.

Despite all this craziness, the Dems still probably have the votes to pass a bill this weekend, especially if Obama will come on down to the hill and meet with some Dems who are still sitting on the fence. Which is exactly what he was going to do until the tragic shootings at Food Hood, Texas, so now he’s not.

Huh?

Huh?!

Really, I just can’t watch anymore. I’m going back to my cartoons. Let me know how it all turns out.

Bu-bu-bu-bu-bu-bu-bu

Nation,

I’m no fan of South Park, but when a cartoon show for twenty-somethings devotes an entire episode to bashing Harley riders, I have to say “Tip of the Hat.”

You can see it here:

http://www.southparkstudios.com/episodes/251889/

(btw, I don't know why blogger isn't letting me paste in hot links anymore, but it's not. You can, of course, get there from here by copying the link and pasting it into your browser. Meanwhile, I'll have my crack team of tech-savvy interns get on this problem.)

(Next) Monday night at the movies

Here's the announcement for the next Monday Night at the Movies film at the local Ross Ragland Theater. I like the note at the end about submitting questions in advance, which at first seems rather ridiculous but then you have to consider some of the questions you get otherwise. I'll probably go.

Skye Borgman is yet another Klamath Falls native who is making it in da movies. Prior guests included directors James Ivory and Chris Eyre. There's no accounting for a jerkwater town like this producing such talent. Unless there is.

("Jerkwater": adj. Informal
1. Remote, small, and insignificant: a jerkwater town.
2. Contemptibly trivial: jerkwater notions.

From jerkwater, a branch-line train, so called because its small boiler had to be refilled often, requiring train crews to "jerk" or draw water from streams.]

**********

Monday Night at the Movies Presents Junk Dreams
With Cinematographer Skye Borgman
Monday, November 9th, at 7 p.m.
Click here to watch the film trailer!

The Ragland presents Junk Dreams, with introduction and lecture by Cinematographer Skye Borgman, Monday, November 9th, at 7 p.m., as part of the theater's Monday Night At The Movies free film series.

Junk Dreams is a documentary adventure that chronicles one magical journey of two ageless brothers. Ernie and Charlie Borgman board a 29 foot Chinese Junk and set sail for a 1,500 mile journey from Port Hadlock, Washington to Valdez, Alaska. The two and a half month adventure takes them along the Canadian and Alaskan coast and into the icy waters of the Gulf of Alaska. Through torrents of rain and raging waters, engine troubles and broken masts ... the two men come face to face with adventure, their true fountain of youth. This is a documentary about family. It is a story of passing along the passion for life for our children. It is a story of aging but never growing old.

Skye Borgman was born in Alaska, raised in Oregon and is a Klamath Union High School graduate. She moved to Los Angeles in 2000 with the intention of fusing photography, travel and momentum. She received her MFA from USC's Film Production program and has been working as a cinematographer, on both narrative and documentary films, ever since.

To help The Ragland shape and define the pre-screening lecture and post-screening question and answer session, please submit your questions and comments on the following film topics and themes to media@rrtheater.org before the screening on November 9th.

1. Family bonds
2. Passing along passion for life to our children
3. Aging but never growing old

Another thing I never thought I'd see in my lifetime, except for awhile there

Predictions about the chances for health-care reform have all been mostly off the mark for the last few months or so, which is one reason why I haven’t had anything to say about it recently. But E. J. Dionne today makes a remarkably sure prediction:

“But barring astoundingly self-defeating behavior by Democrats, a decent bill will get to Obama's desk. He and his party will then own the most sweeping reform of the American social safety net since the passage of Medicare in the 1960s and, arguably, Social Security in the 1930s.” He goes on to list all of the immediate benefits that will be implemented, as well as the more sweeping reforms that will begin in 2013.

You can read him here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/01/AR2009110101703.html?wpisrc=newsletter

You can never count out astoundingly self-defeating behavior by Democrats, but the momentum favors Dionne’s prediction, and if he’s right, my head will probably explode. Imagine: The United States might finally rise to the level of, say, Cuba, in its availability of good-quality and affordable health care for everyone.

As Ma says in the Faulkner novel As I Lay Dying, “Thy will be done. Now I can get them teeth.”

About motorcycles

The November Harper’s Magazine has an interesting memoir by poet Frederick Seidel entitled “About Motorcycles.” Identified as a “Memoir,” I had trouble believing it was entirely or even mostly true. I thought it might be some kind of rider’s fantasy disguised as autobiography. Among other things, Seidel claims that two different factories, MV Agusta and Ducati, prepared one-off street legal versions of their Moto-GP race bikes for his personal collection. Completely unlikely, especially since he describes the Agusta as a shaft drive for some reason. So far as I know, only BMW ever fielded shaft drive racing motorcycles.

Also dubious is the list of who’s who in motorcycle racing that he describes as personal friends or close acquaintences, including Agusta’s and Ducati’s factory owners, top designers, and team managers. Plus a couple of the world’s most beautiful movie stars.

But it seems likely the whole thing is true. Wikipedia provides this bit of information: “Seidel is independently wealthy-- that is to say, he inherited rather than earned his personal fortune-- and is fascinated by Ducati motorcycles, of which he owns four.”

As a reminiscence about a lifelong love of motorcycles, I don’t find it to be all that compelling and would recommend instead The Perfect Vehicle: What It is about Motorcycles by Melissa Holbrook Pierson. A girl who loves her MotoGuzzi: talk about unlikely!

Still, if you’re a rider and have an extra $6.95, you should probably pick up the November Harper’s, or just stop by and borrow mine.

Funny numbers

Conservative columnist and Weekly Standard editor William Kristol (who is now going as Bill) should not be confused with comedian Billy Crystal, even though they look a lot alike.


Bill


Billy







What are these guys, twins?

Kristol (the conservative) takes comfort in some recent poll numbers: “The Gallup poll released Monday shows the public's conservatism at a high-water mark. Some 40 percent of Americans call themselves conservative, compared with 36 percent who self-describe as moderates and 20 percent as liberals.”

So you might see this as an indication that Republicans will enjoy twice the support in coming elections that Democrats will, until you think for a minute about the 36 percent who self-describe as moderate. How much room for them is there in today’s Republican party?

Not much. Maybe not any. In what would otherwise be an obscure little congressional special election in New York, a moderate Republican actually managed to win the primary, which has now resulted in a Conservative Party challenger who has the backing of Sarah Palin, among other Republican notables. Kristol seems to things that’s okay: “A liberal Republican anointed by the GOP establishment for the special congressional election in Upstate New York will probably run third, behind the conservative Republican running on the Conservative Party line, who may in fact win.”

But if I were the non-comedian Bill, I think I’d be less comfortable with my own numbers and observations. “When asked how much confidence they had in congressional Republicans to make the right decisions for the country's future, only 19 percent of respondents expressed much confidence in the GOP -- well behind the confidence levels in congressional Democrats (34 percent) and Obama (49 percent).”

And I’d be downright worried about the cast of characters serious Bill points to as the leaders and worker bees of the New Republican Party: “The center of gravity, I suspect, will instead lie with individuals such as Palin and Huckabee and Gingrich, media personalities like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, and activists at town halls and tea parties. Some will lament this -- but over the past year, as those voices have dominated, conservatism has done pretty well in the body politic, and Republicans have narrowed the gap with Democrats in test ballots.”

Expect Republicans to pick up seats in the off-year congressional elections, as the minority party always does. How many they pick up will probably depend on how far they can reach beyond their base and draw in moderate voters.

If Kristol’s observations are correct, it might not be good news for the Grand Old Party and no laughing matter for moderate Republicans.

For a good laugh, I'd recommend Billy's When Harry Met Sally and especially City Slickers.

RIP Soupy Sales

"Soupy Sales (January 8, 1926 – October 22, 2009)[2] was an American comedian, actor, radio-TV personality and host, and jazz aficionado."

(Wikipedia)

Even his Wikipedia entry is good for some laughs:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soupy_Sales

As noted, he was also a jazz aficionado and worked a lot of music into his shows.

I was a huge fan of Soupy as a kid. It saddens me to learn he's no longer with us. I'm moving this to the top of my Netflix queue:

http://www.netflix.com/Search?v1=The%20Soupy%20Sales%20Collection&lnkce=acsEnhCk

And now, a pie in the face for God.

Last ride

On Friday, I leave for my motorcycle club’s annual Hardy Souls campout, held outside the town of Seneca in the Northeast mountains of Oregon. Seneca has the distinction of having the lowest temperature ever recorded in Oregon, minus 54 degrees in February, 1933. This is late October, not February, and by all the old-timers’ accounts, the winters just aren’t what they used to be. Still, in past events we’ve seen morning temperatures in the low teens, and it’s one thing to stiffly crawl out of a tent when the very ground around you is frozen hard; it’s quite another to pull on freezing clothes, get on a motorcycle, and start the long ride back home, never mind the frost on the road.

Still, it’s a grand event and one I wouldn’t miss, not just yet anyway. Last year, I was only a few weeks out of prostrate surgery, so I made the concession of going by car, for which I was richly ridiculed. This year I’ll be on my new-to-me 2006 Suzuki V-Strom, a bike built more for comfort than for speed and itself a concession to age and comfort I wouldn’t have considered even a few years ago.

But temperatures are forecast to fall only into the upper twenties with daytime temperatures approaching sixty, and already I’m making a mental list of the things I’ll take along for comfort. With the increased luggage capacity of the new bike, I’ll include a small French press and a bag of Starbuck’s so I won’t have to go from tent to tent with my begging mug and rely on the kindness of friends I’ve known for over twenty years.

Fresh hot coffee and a new bike aren’t the only concessions I’ll make for comfort. You learn a lot from experience when you travel by motorcycle for twenty-five years. In cold weather, I carry two sleeping bags, and depending on temperature, I’ll nest one inside the other or use one as a comforter. It gets cold enough inside the tent for your breath to freeze on the inside, but as long as I stay covered up, I’m deliciously warm.

For years, all my bikes have had electric grips, which keep hands from going numb and even developing frostbite, if not exactly warm and comfy. Also, I wear an electric vest which plugs into the bike’s electrical system. Again, when it’s below freezing there’s no sensation of actual warmth with these, just suffienct heat to keep your core warm enough to ward off hypothermia. The not-too recent development of toe warmers, little charcoal bags that somehow react to oxygen and toe jam, provide enough heat that toes only get cold and not downright painful.

Imagine sitting on a seat hard as a board, in twenty-degree weather and with a 70 mile-per-hour wind, and you can see that the best that can be hoped for is to be able to keep riding.

So why bother going out when I know the best I can do is to somewhat mitigate my misery? That’s hard to explain to people who don’t ride, but there’s something that-much-more exciting about beating the elements and heading out on a trip long after most riders have winterized their bikes and are home watching NASCAR. And life in camp is good. Our hosts Ed and Ellen Barton bring their truck with a hefty load of firewood and the makings of Ellen’s famous freeze-ass chili. Bjorn Klingenberg brings his vintage hand-cranked Victrola and a stack of rare and wonderful 78s featuring original recordings of World War Two-era big bands. And I get to meet and joke around with this eclectic mix of friends I’ve known for over two decades, many of them at least a few years older than me and, like me, determined to scratch out one more ride in the beautiful fall colors of the Oregon high country before the snow settles in and we have to settle for spiced cider around the fire at home.

So I can’t wait for Friday morning. When the sun gets high enough and temperatures rise into the forties and even fifties, there's no better feeling than riding fast through some of the most beautiful scenery in the West.

I think a lot recently about how much longer I’ll be able to do this. I have many friends who still ride in their sixties. Only a few still ride in their seventies, so sometime over the next few years, I’ll likely reach a point where age and good sense tell me that this part of my life is over, that this pleasure belongs to younger men. Anticipatory grief, my friend John calls it. John's a psychologist and knows about these things.

For now and for as many more years as I can still throw a leg over, I plan to keep the real grief at bay.

¡Fiesta más fina!

PBS just ran a two-hour special, Latin Music USA, that was very informative but pretty much doomed by the broad topic and brief run-time. In two hours, the most they could do was introduce a few leading characters and offer only the briefest clips of their music. Thus, Dizzy Gillespie gets his rightful mention but we only hear him play a few notes. His Cuban protégé Arturo Sandoval gets considerably more time talking about what a great influence Dizzy was.

Too bad. When he was on, no one could play trumpet like Diz. No one.

Still, it’s a show worth watching if you love Latin music as I do, and I’m sure it will repeat.

And now, coming up tomorrow night (Thursday) also on PBS, a broadcast of the White House concert in honor of Hispanic Heritage Month, a “Fiesta Latina.” Marc Anthony headlines, with appearances by Los Lobos, Jose Feliciano, and many more.

I first saw Anthony in a Paul Simon tribute concert when he sang Simon’s Latin-infused hit “Late in the Evening”:

“Then I learned to play some lead guitar, I was underage in this funky bar
And I stepped outside to smoke myself a j.
When I come back to the room, everybody just seemed to move
And I turned my amp up loud and I began to play.

It was late in the evening, and I blew that room away.”

And did he ever. Then I saw him in El Cantante, the Hector Lavoe bio-pic where he proved that he could act as well.

A highlight from the White House concert, previewed on Youtube clips, is the First Family all dancing on stage. I guess they got the idea from Tom Delay doing the cha-cha on Dancing with the Stars. The President has the better moves and looks way less gay.

This should be a terrific concert.

Curious George

George Will today heaps scorn on Michelle and Barack Obama, not for going to Copenhagen to promote Chicago for the Olympics, but for talking too much about themselves and for using cliches. He counts the number of personal pronouns in each speech, gives an example or two of a tired chestnut, and declares, "Their separate speeches to the International Olympic Committee were so dreadful, and in such a characteristic way, that they might be symptomatic of something that has serious implications for American governance." His stunning conclusion: The president is vain.

In his short speech, Obama begins with a little personal narrative about how he came to Chicago. He continues:

"Chicago is a place where we strive to celebrate what makes us different just as we celebrate what we have in common. It's a place where our unity is on colorful display at so many festivals and parades, and especially sporting events, where perfect strangers become fast friends just because they're wearing the same jersey. It's a city that works -- from its first World's Fair more than a century ago to the World Cup we hosted in the nineties, we know how to put on big events. And scores of visitors and spectators will tell you that we do it well.

"Chicago is a city where the practical and the inspirational exist in harmony; where visionaries who made no small plans rebuilt after a great fire and taught the world to reach new heights. It's a bustling metropolis with the warmth of a small town; where the world already comes together every day to live and work and reach for a dream -- a dream that no matter who we are, where we come from; no matter what we look like or what hand life has dealt us; with hard work, and discipline, and dedication, we can make it if we try.

"That's not just the American Dream. That is the Olympic spirit. It's the essence of the Olympic spirit. That's why we see so much of ourselves in these Games. That's why we want them in Chicago. That's why we want them in America."

Not a bad pitch, I'd say. Not a single personal pronoun for three paragraphs. But what about the cliche's? Obama, Will says, makes use of "the foggy sentimentalism of standard Olympics blather." Best to stay clear of any mention of the Olympic spirit or the character-building properties of sport.

So Will's two charges are that the president is vain and uses cliches. The horror! When can we get back to the humble presidents who have led and defined America, and who invariably spoke in strikingly original language about our values, destiny, and national character?

Will has an extended list of just those very presidents, let's see, around here somewhere, but he doesn't happen to mention any just now. And failing to give credit where credit's due, he doesn't even mention that the president was not wearing blue jeans.

Anyway, I'm on the Olympic Committee and I'm looking at Chicago/Rio... Chicago/ Rio... Chicago/Rio...

Hmmmm. . .

Ya know, I think we're going to Rio!

Our word for today

unc·tu·ous
adj.

1. Characterized by affected, exaggerated, or insincere earnestness: "the unctuous, complacent court composer who is consumed with envy and self-loathing" (Rhoda Koenig).
2. Having the quality or characteristics of oil or ointment; slippery.

3. Containing or composed of oil or fat.

4. Abundant in organic materials; soft and rich: unctuous soil.

5. Diane Sawyer, television news personality, who is about to take over as anchor of the ABC Nightly News upon the retirement of Charles Gibson at the end of this year.

This leaves only one network news program, NBC and its host Brian Williams, which hasn’t gone over completely to a soft-news orientation. Props (what the hell does that mean, anyway?) to Katie Couric for what passed as tough questions in her interview with Sarah Palin when other networks were playing paddy cake, but that was the exception for Couric. Asking Palin to "name one" newspaper or magazine she read regularly (she couldn't) earned Couric the enmity of the right, but didn't qualify her as a great journalist.

Sawyer seems to want to conclude every interview with a nice big hug, and her choice to anchor at ABC signals the near death of television news in favor of info-tainment. Along with the near death of daily newspapers, it all seems to signal the end of responsible journalism. The thought of Fox News and the the internet as our only remaining sources of information is truly frightening.

Of interest is today’s column by Michael Gerson, available here:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/24/AR2009092403932.html?wpisrc=newsletter

Essential viewing

Since we reconnected to cable TV last winter, I haven’t been watching much PBS, which we used to get off of our antennae. Too bad. I just got in the mail the PBS Home Video catalogue, and it reminded me that Ken Burns’ series The National Parks: America’s Best Idea begins this Sunday. I’ve set my DVR to record the series.

The catalogue also reminded me of the Frontline documentary "Sick Around the World," in which journalist J.R. Reid “visits six capitalist democracies—France, Germany, Japan, Switzerland, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom—for their ideas about medicine and its delivery to the public. . . .” I watched this program some time ago, well before the election and Obama’s health care initiative, and it made a profound impression on me, convincing me that designing a universal health care system that would best serve American needs really isn’t all that complicated. A well-chosen Blue Ribbon Panel, with a modest budget and competent staff, could do it in a year, as I’ve argued here earlier.

I’d like to order the video and make Congress all watch it together, with no Blackberries, twittering or naps allowed, and then vote yes on the panel’s recommendation within one year or lose their own health insurance. Since I can’t do that, I’ll only say here that I strongly recommend seeing it, and you can order it for $25 from shopPBS.org. I’m going to order the companion "Sick Around America," which I haven’t seen yet and which I expect will be less encouraging.

Btw, I’ve just noticed that my spell check in the new version of Word wants to change Obama to Osama. NOW I understand why people are getting so confused.

Eh?

My friend Michael Broschat has a very interesting post on his recent Canadian vacation. All I could come up with about ours was "we seen a bear."

I’ve long thought Canada was a much more reasonable country than ours because it lacks our inflated sense of ourselves and our role and responsibilities in the world. Broschat and I were discussing Graham Greene’s The Quiet American recently, a very fine narrative of just the kind of thing I’m talking about. American history might be understood at least in part as the unintended and mostly negative consequences of our sense of our moral selves.

Also greed, but still.

I’ve long thought the world would be a better place if the North had simply allowed the South to secede. I wonder if there was ever any serious discussion of that option. In fact, it may not be too late. At no time since the civil war have we been so divided into red and blue states, and the best solution could be the two-state solution: The red states can realize their dream of small government and legalized discrimination, and the blue states can quickly evolve toward a European-style social democracy. Those who find themselves geographically and ideologically misplaced could just move.

Anyway, Broschat's post is much more interesting and thoughtful than mine, and you can read it here: http://www.michaelbroschat.com/MontlakeBlog/DisplayBlog.aspx

Stoopid hurts

I knew these were Harley riders despite the misleading club name.

2 dozen motorcycles crash on I-5 in Ore.(AP) – 15 hours ago

“WILSONVILLE, Ore. — Oregon State Police say more than two dozen motorcycles, most of them belonging to the Brother Speed motorcycle club, crashed on Interstate 5 on Friday afternoon, blocking freeway traffic for hours.Police say the bikers were behind a car when traffic slowed in the northbound lanes near Wilsonville, south of Portland.They say the bikers and car tried to slow but collided, scattering bikes across the pavement.

The Oregonian in Portland reports that two bikers with critical injuries were flown to Portland hospitals by helicopter. Rescue personnel say seven others were treated for shoulder and hip injuries and broken bones.The freeway reopened about 6 p.m., nearly four hours after the accident.”

Want some pictures? http://www.kptv.com/slideshow/traffic/20997318/detail.html

Want to see a video from the club’s website?

http://www.brotherspeedmcoregon.com/content/brothers-speed-videos

Here's more. I'm following this story via an online motorcycle forum, where 9 out of 10 posts are conspicuously lacking in any kind of sympathy for the "victims."

From the Oregon Department of Justice

Brother Speed MCEstablished: May 1969 in Boise, Idaho, United StatesYears active: 1969-present
Territory: Northwestern United States
Ethnicity: WhiteMembership: 150 full-patch members
Criminal activities: Drug trafficking, arms dealing, extortion and money laundering
Allies: Free Souls, Gypsy Jokers and Outsiders
Rivals: Mongols and Vagos

Suppost you had to go to the DMV for a flu shot. . . .

I’m so glad Mary and I have private insurance and don’t have some government bureaucrat standing between us and our doctors, telling us which procedures and medicines we can have and which we can’t. (And here I swore off sarcasm for the rest of the year and lasted less than a day.)

A few days ago we each got a letter from our insurance company explaining to us that a number of medications have been placed on a list of meds to be reviewed, and before we can renew the next time, our prescribing physicians have to contact the insurance company and justify why we need this med, why we should continue this med, why a cheaper alternative wouldn’t work just as well, and what would happen if all of a sudden we stopped taking it. The list of meds for review numbers in the hundreds according to the company’s website.

This already happened just a year ago, and our family doctor almost had a stroke he was so angry and frustrated. He had scores of patients (four score and seven, to be exact) who got the letters, and he had to cancel all appointments for a month while he wrote letters to the insurance company arguing that he got it right the first time when he prescribed a specific med for a specific condition. He also had to cut back on his golf games.

This year, I am informed the insurance company is going to review a med I’ve been on for about five years now, one that, let’s say, has substantially improved my quality of life. Without revealing a lot of personal information, let’s also say that without this medicine I turn into a vampire, and stopping it or substituting a cheaper alternative would not be in my best interests or those of society. Mary’s target med prevents certain plagues and back hair. It might be considered cosmetic.

The thing is, despite all the hassle for our doctors, I support this kind of periodic cost/benefit review. It’s an important component of keeping medical costs down, and it ensures that I still need all these prescriptions I take. Maybe chocolate pudding no longer triggers my hallucinations. Maybe you don't need that codein that the doctor prescribed six years ago for your toothache.

The problem is that the four score and twenty separate insurance companies in Oregon each have their own list of meds for review, and rather than being a once annual, or bi-annual or semi-annual, routine chore, it’s a never-ending process in the doctor’s office. Novak might have to give up not only golf but also martini lunches.

Of course, if this were a requirement in a public-option health plan, Republican lawmakers and their lunatic fringe town-hall bashing unwashed psycho mobs would be screaming about the evils of socialized medicine. But since it’s my private insurance company, all this will pass without comment or discussion in the media.

Because America still has the best health care system in the world. (There I go again.)

And btw, I almost never have to go to the DMV anymore since almost all their business can now be done online. This is not necessarily a good thing, since at my age, it's important to determine that I can at least still find the DMV and drive there without running over a child. Be that as it may, the few times I've actually had to stop by in recent years, I took a number, waited a few minutes, and was helped by a courteous and efficient staff member.

I don't know what all the fuss is about the DMV as a bad example of what would happen to virtually all services once Obama has his way and we turn into a Nazi/Socialist/Communist nation. The DMV has been more or less a pleasure to visit, way more pleasant than a visit to my family medical clinic, where taking a number might be considered to imply I might actually get back to see the doctor that day and where, literally, sooner or later, they will have me by the balls.

Let's also add. . . .

Matt Miller, who said: "Liberals should make peace with the notion that a regulated market of competing private health plans can be the vehicle for getting everyone covered. Yes, it means that unlike some other advanced countries, we'll have billions of "health" dollars siphoned off by middlemen and marketers. But if liberals think of it as a jobs program, they'll learn to love it. If everyone's covered and insurer "cherry-picking" is dead, health insurance will come to look more like a regulated utility. "

He said that and more here:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/07/AR2009090702070.html?wpisrc=newsletter&wpisrc=newsletter

Neither of these writers, whose columns just happen to appear on the same day, fully represent my thinking on health care reform. They do, though, make me think about other ways to achieve what are our commonly held goals and values, and they have every appearance of being the kind of rational, results-oriented thinkers who can move a plan forward.

See, the thing is, the Republican party has forfeited its right and responsibility to participate in this debate. What we need now is not a good compromise plan but a great new plan, and one that we can sell to the Blue Dog Democrats. The Blue Dogs need to understand that if they want the Democratic Party help they'll need to get reelected, they need to get on board with what will become the President's endorsement of the Blue Ribbon plan.

I, by the way, have no binding commitments over the next year or so and I'm very good on committees.

Pabst

The only thing worse than a horse designed by a committee might be a horse designed by a Congressional committee.

A few days ago, I suggested a “Blue Ribbon Panel” of experts to design, more or less from the ground up, a new system of paying for health care with the goals of “preserving quality, controlling costs, and covering everybody.” I now nominate Dr. Arthur Feldman, who has a column in today’s Washington Post, to serve on that committee. You can read his column here:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/04/AR2009090402274.html?wpisrc=newsletter&wpisrc=newsletter&sid=ST2009090702562

Feldman might not have it all right, but he represents an essential point of view in the debate, and sitting together at a table with a dozen or so other experts with different perspectives, I’m confident such a panel could devise and design an excellent new health care system in one year.

The report and recommendations that come from such a committee would then become the President’s proposal for health care reform, and I’m convinced Obama could bring enormous pressure on Congress to pass it. In this way, the initial bill that goes before Congress for debate is designed not by politicians whose agendas are tied up in party politics and the need to get reelected, but by representatives of true stake-holders whose agenda is to design a health care system that might truly be called “the best in the world.”

Roy Rogers; no Trigger

Saturday I went to the second annual K-Falls blues festival. I missed the first. It seems that every town bigger than a breadbox has to have a blues festival these days. But the lineup of West Coast blues bands sounded promising, even though I'd never heard of any of them before. In fact, it was an enjoyable afternoon, and all the performers were worth turning out for, if not exactly world-class.

Except the final act, slide guitarist Roy Rogers and his band The Delta Rhythm Kings. Actually, three white guys from California, but Rogers, who in fact was named for America's Singing Cowboy, turns out to be maybe the best blues guitarist I've ever heard. I sat electrified for an hour or so and would have happily stayed another hour, even though the sun had dropped behind the hills and I was getting cold.

Roger's playing features blinding speed on the fret board, frequent dramatic changes in tempo and rhythm, and an endless stream of melodic surprises. He's tourning again after a number of years in semi-retirement. If you get a chance to see him, don't pass it up.

US Out of Afghanistan?

Another writer I almost never agree with is George Will. In fact, Will fairly recently made my list of "I don't read him anymore" columnists when he pontificated about bluejeans as the cause and symbol of the decline of civilization. Really, it came down to "I don't like bluejeans," this from a guy who always wears bow ties. Big surprise.

But in his column today, Will argues that the war in Afghanistan is unwinable, that there's nothing to be gained there, and that Af-stan is no more dangerous to the US than other failed states such as Somalia and Yemen:

"So, instead, forces should be substantially reduced to serve a comprehensively revised policy: America should do only what can be done from offshore, using intelligence, drones, cruise missiles, airstrikes and small, potent Special Forces units, concentrating on the porous 1,500-mile border with Pakistan, a nation that actually matters. " He doesn't mention that a majority of Americans now feel the same way and support withdrawal of US troops.

My crystal ball doesn't show a drawdown before the start of an Obama second term, but it will happen sooner or later and it will look a lot as Will describes. We just need to watch out for Afghans wearing bluejeans.

A few more thoughts on health care

Wow. Charles Krauthammer has an excellent column today on health care reform, proposing a system which he argues will lead to universal coverage and which can pass Congress. You can and should read it here: (Doctor’s orders!)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/27/AR2009082703262.html?wpisrc=newsletter

This is amazing since I absolutely never agree with Krauthammer, and I have to wonder if he even agrees with himself in this instance since his proposal, he says, will inevitably lead to health-care rationing and, (shudder), end-of-life counseling, also known as Death Panels.

My question is what’s so bad about rationing? It’s the only way to significantly control costs, something everybody agrees we have to do.

Take a typical case as an example: A 75-year-old man has advanced lung cancer. He has a 95 percent chance of dying within two months. With aggressive and expensive treatment, there’s a good chance he could live for six months, though with serious side effects to the treatments. Or, he could accept palliative treatment for his remaining two months—hospice care which includes pain control, assistance to stay at home, and support for the family—which would cost a fraction of what the aggressive treatment would cost.

Why would anyone suggest the government has a moral obligation to pay for the aggressive and expensive treatment? The free market should be at play here. Anyone who wants additional coverage beyond what the government would offer should buy private policies, exactly like they already do with Medicare supplements. This is also how it works in Canada, our socialist neighbor to the north.

Krauthammer suggests that counseling about options at this point would constitute subtle pressure to check out early, but in my view it would amount to an opportunity to explain clearly what the patient’s options are. These panels are optional in the current proposals, by the way; I think they should be mandatory, even though that makes me not pro-life.

Also by the way, and as another example, Mary and I convened our own Death Panels with a local attorney several years ago. We now have end-of-life directives on file that make clear that if we’re brain dead with no chance of recovery—barring direct intervention by the Baby Jesus, which can always happen but isn’t likely in our case—we don’t want any extraordinary measures to keep us alive. This would include things like tube feeding, breathing machines, or deep tissue foot massage by a sexy nurse of the opposite gender.

On second thought, I’ll take the foot massage.

Of course we put subtle pressure on each other since our pension benefits continue to the survivor, but still, we think we made the right decisions. Of course, we might have chosen the tube feeding on the chance the Baby Jesus would change his mind and not hold a grudge, but I wouldn’t expect the government to keep paying to keep me alive indefinitely.

So I would buy into the Krauthammer policy in a K-Falls minute (roughly twelve minutes, actually), which means there still has to be room for compromise in the Congressionaal negotiations.

Maybe health-care reform isn’t dead after all. It just needs a foot massage.