Year Three
It is with no small amount of pride that I note today’s second anniversary of this Blarg. When I started writing, I kept it a secret because I was unsure how long I would keep at it, for there are few things sadder than a failed blogger. To a certain extent, I still keep this blarg a secret. I don’t publicize it much. I’ve even stopped pressuring my friends to read it. Perhaps my only readers are the eager salesmen of “herbal Viagra” who post so many comments, and misguided fans of Natalie Portman’s butt. I recently overhauled this website, with completely new software that requires registration in order to post comments. I used to get an occasional comment from a friend or a colleague or a complete stranger, in the midst of the tens of thousands of spam messages that ultimately crashed the site and necessitated the switch. I […]
The Two Barbaras
What kind of readers find Barbara Ehrenreich’s recent books remotely edifying? How far up their own asses are these people? I have to admit that I’ve yet to read the book in which she passes for working poor, although I did read her earlier piece in Harper’s magazine that served as a teaser. The fact that some of the lowest-paid service workers have to live in motels because they can’t afford a full month’s rent on an apartment was the only revelation for me (in New York, even our motels are too expensive, so people cram dozens of bodies in small apartments). Do you want to know how the poor live? Talk to your janitor, waitress or telemarketer. The paucity of actual interviews in Ehrenreich’s books saps the story of emotional resonance and dulls her political points. This tendency is exacerbated in “Bait and Switch,” in which our supposed heroine […]
More On Inequality Sickness
Following up on my previous post, in case I wasn’t clear (“Are you following me?”), here is a simple graph that argues much more clearly that inequality is making us sicker: This chart represents diabetes rates by income group (divided simply into thirds; the richest third of the population, the middle third and the poorest third) in the UK and the US. First, note that the poorer you are, the likelier you are to have diabetes. In America, this is not surprising, because our poor lack health care. In the UK, however, the poor has the same health care as the rich (or at least the middle class), and yet they are still more likely to have diabetes, although not nearly as likely as their American counterparts. But now, compare the poorest Brits to the richest Americans. Lower rates of diabetes! Both groups receive similar quality of health care, so […]
Cinema Fascists and Other Ghouls
“Pan’s Labyrinth” is a sort of gothic fairy-tale for adults and weird little kids. Like Jim Henson’s “Labyrinth” and “Dark Crystal,” this beautifully shot Spanish language film from Guillermo del Toro guides a ten year old girl through a dark fantasy world full of monsters and ghouls with questionable motivations. The world of the labyrinth exists largely in the imagination of the girl, Ofelia (Ivama Baquero), who is interpreting the far more horrific real world she inhabits, in which Franco’s Fascists are exterminating the remaining rebels in the dreary spring of ’44. In a bit of a cop-out, the filmmakers allow the audience to imagine that Ofelia’s fantasy world might be real, thus dulling the impact of a surprisingly sad ending. Sergi Lopez is almost cartoonish in his villainy as the Captain, which is fine by me. Call me old-fashioned, but I like my Fascists all snarling and evil. His […]
Dr. Robin Hood
Dean Robinson’s “Health Politics and Inequality” class has taken some surprising turns. Jill Quadagno’s book, “One Nation, Uninsured” served as an efficient history of how we got the lousy system of health care that we have, so the questions of how and what kinds of alternatives we ca have were neatly dispensed with. Basically, the “simplest” and fairest universal system would be to simply expand our already existing Medicare system to cover everyone. That would give us the Canadian “single payer” system (which, coincidentally, is also called Medicare). Of course, to fund the program, the government would have to institute a new payroll tax on employers. For employers who already pay around a quarter of an employee’s salary in insurance premiums, this would essentially replace those premiums and would probably lower their costs and improve their market position, as it would serve to “take health care out of competition” by […]
Another Terrifying Labor Statistic
The Center for Economic and Policy Research has released a report that finds that one in five union activists can expect to be fired during an organizing campaign under George Bush’s watch. Overall, a pro-union worker had a 1.4 percent chance of being illegally fired for his sympathies in 2005. An organizer’s gut reaction to authors John Schmitt and Ben Zipperer’s paper might well be, “Oh, great, just what my organizing committee needs to hear!” The fact is that workers already know that organizing is risky (and organizers don’t suger-coat the risk). Combined with threatened and actual plant closures, terminations and employer animus are the greatest reasons why half of all union representation elections lose and so many more campaigns never even come to election as activists are fired as a chilling example to their coworkers not to step out of line. The report’s numbers are based on cases where […]
A Press More Bumbling Than the Dead Prez
If Gerald Ford was trying to live down his image as a bumbler, he made a curious choice of dying right after Christmas when most of the half-way decent reporters must be on vacation. On a good day, the New York Times annoys the crap out of me, but a couple of doozies slipped in that have really driven me nuts. In a television column that itself comments on how substitutes are reporting the news of Ford’s death, reporter Alessandra Stanley notes: On “Today” the NBC correspondent Andrea Mitchell mentioned that she last spoke to Mr. Ford in California last February, “when he came over to see me, and we had lunch.” (It is hard to imagine a former president in his 90s going out of his way to meet a television reporter, so it was hard not to suspect that Mr. Ford was going out of his way not […]
What the Hell Happened to James Brown?
David McReynolds laments the now-obvious gap in his record collection, and asks where is a good place to start with James Brown. And, since he also laments the lack of consideration of arts and culture in our little corner of the the movement, and I need an excuse to get my nose out of health care policy textbooks, I’m wrtiting to recommend “JB40.” Ordinarily, I agree with that old “Kids in the Hall” joke that “Greatest hits are for housewives and little girls,” but Brown’s career is so expansive and encompasses so many distinct periods that no regular album could serve as a proper introduction. In fact, I just had this conversation with Alan Amalgamated last Friday, and if I were superstitious I would think that I cursed James Brown to die two days later. I’m a “jinxy motherfucker,” Alan says. To avoid the crap that passes for radio, Alan […]
The Land Where It’s Never Christmas
The Guardian of London has a heart-warming seasonal story about a small town called North Pole in Alaska, where it’s Christmas 365 days a year and all the town’s residents (including the school children) answer “letters to Santa” that come in from around the world. Last spring, a group of about a dozen of North Pole’s sixth graders were caught “making a list and checking it twice.” Their Columbine-style massacre plot was narrowly thwarted. Perhaps the incessant holiday “cheer” drove them to it, writer Jon Ronson wonders? I was thinking about North Pole while doing some grocery shopping this morning in Kew Gardens, the Land Where It’s Never Christmas. All the shops are open as normal. Perhaps they’ll close an hour early for the big day in deference to the rest of society. There are no Santas around, the streetlights are plain and unadorned and almost no houses are decorated. […]
Cults Bands of the “80’s-90’s”
The other day I was debating who might be the “most influential bands of the 90’s,” which is a more polite way of saying “whose fault are the 00’s (uh-oh’s),” which is awfully unfair to a host of excellent bands. It’s not their fault that popular music fractured into a multitude of sub-genres, or that mass media melted down into niches like blogs and podcasts. It’s certainly not their fault that rock and roll is a highly derivative art form, for they did not choose their followers. Easily, one of the most influential bands of the 90’s was Pavement. Slackers, shoegazers, ironic smartasses – it’s almost as if they bothered to draw up the blueprints for modern indie sensibilities. But they were too busy getting stoned and covering “School House Rock” songs. A lot of misguided critics and fans expected Pavement to do something Important ten years ago. Following a […]