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Health for Profit

Imagine your doctor telling you this:

Well, Bill, you have a very serious illness. In fact, if we don’t do something about it, you’re going to die. Fortunately, we have a cure. It costs $1 million. Do you have it? No? Oh, that’s too bad. Well, it’s been nice knowing you. Please give my best to your family.

Unimaginable, right? No doctor would ever say that. Never. What the doctor would say would be more like, “Well, Bill, we better make an appointment with our team of surgeons, anesthesiologists, oncologists, anthologists, and scientologists, and get you into surgery as quickly as possible so we can save your life.” Yeah, that’s more like it. The doctor cares about you. He is working hard to save your life. Nobody is going to let you die. Then all those doctors and hospitals would just send their bills to your insurance company.

In Canada, they would send their bills to the provincial agency in charge of health care (OHIP, where I live). There would be no need to check with them before hand: other than some cosmetic surgeries and exotic experimental treatments, pretty well everything is pre-approved. OHIP would then pay the bill. Done.

In the U.S., however, they would have to negotiate with your HMO or your insurance company and arrive at an agreed upon treatment plan. The doctor gets paid for doing surgery, not for keeping you healthy. He wants to do as much surgery as possible so he can retire early. But the insurance company or HMO wants to keep their money so they can pay it to shareholders and reward their top executives with mind-boggling salaries, private jets and country club memberships, and numerous vacations. They will do everything they can to keep from having to pay for your surgery. “Well, it’s not as if Bill is really all that well-liked anyway…”

Christian doctors, who hold an incredibly high regard for human life of course, charge only a modest amount, even if they know they could get a lot more. Ha ha.

The cost of medical treatment is a reflection of a number of factors, including scarcity and necessity. The U.S. has opted for a free enterprise model. Supposedly, all those doctors and hospitals will keep their costs real, real low, because they have to compete with each other for patients. So hospitals advertise the odd special: “New stem-cell leukemia treatment– was $350,000, but marked down, this weekend only, to $285,000. Folks, these are close-out prices!”

A kidney transplant can be a regular bargain at $120,000, if there are no complications. And that doesn’t include all the drugs you need afterwards.

Treating someone who’s been in a serious accident can cost $80,000! Just for a few hours in OR! That sounds a bit pricey for me. Couldn’t I try the emergency room at St. Mary’s? I hear they give coupons.

Well, where does the $350,000 come from? What exactly do you get for $80,000? Who gets most of the $120,000?

Well, look at a hospital. It’s got offices, computers, janitors, cooks, nurses, receptionists, presidents, vice-presidents, administrators, human resources staff, training staff, support personnel, vision statements, and so on. Some of the money goes to doctors, of course, and they’re probably over-paid (compared to teachers, at least), but they don’t get anywhere near the $350,000 total. I’ve seen some medical catalogues: hospitals pay big bucks for equipment that looks like it ought to be a lot cheaper. A little plastic tube costs $14.00. It looks like you could get it free at Wendy’s with a Kid’s Meal Cheeseburger.

Well, the reason these medical tools are so expensive is volume. They don’t make enough of them. I think everybody should own their own surgery kit. If they sold enough of them, the price would really come down.

Then we could just rent a surgery room somewhere, hire a doctor for, say, $250.00 an hour, and do the operation there. That would be true free enterprise. And why should only doctors have the right to do surgery? What if you knew somebody who was really good at it? I’ll bet the competition would really reduce the costs.

I’ll bet you could do the kidney transplant for less than $3,000. Instead of nurses, you could have your aunt or grandmother come in and tidy up, change the sheets, hand the instruments to the doctor, and count sponges. Instead of filling out ten zillion forms and arguing with your HMO, you could just give the doctor your car, or a year of yardwork, or your stereo.

A big, big problem is that about half of all the medical treatment in North America goes to terminally ill elderly patients. An 86-year-old guy with bad kidneys gets some heart pain, so we zap him into surgery and perform a triple by-pass. Because he’s old and weak, he’ll take about three months of constant care to recover. A week after he starts walking again, they’ll find cancer or something, and do some more surgery. There goes the family inheritance. So this guy worked hard for fifty years, got married, had kids, contributed to his employee pension plan, bought insurance, bought a house as an investment, scrimped and saved and invested and wasted not… only to get sucked dry by doctors in the last six months of his life. It’s like some kind of horrible, dirty trick they play on all of us. You think you’re getting ahead, but THEY, whoever they are, the holders of wealth in our society, get it all back from you in the end. Your children and your children’s children have to start all over from scratch. That sucks.

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The Sacred and the Weighty

A recent study reported that the more religious a person is, the more likely he or she is to be overweight. In fact, fundamentalists are kings of the hill– Southern Baptists weigh more than any other brand of Christian.

This is a shocking revelation, indeed. But it doesn’t surprise me. It could mean one of several things:

1. Christians have more food than other people. That’s not possible, because Christians give so much food away to the needy. So let’s rule that out.

2. Christians eat fattier food than non-Christians. Again, not likely. The body is “the temple of the Lord”. Christians don’t fill that body with smoke, alcohol, or other people’s bodily fluids.

3. The Holy Spirit has an actual weight. Never thought of that before, did you? How much does the Holy Spirit weigh? Judging by looks, I’d say a good 40-50 pounds.

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Doris Day and the Post-Modern Era

Well, when did the world change? It changes all the time, but if you could pick a moment that defined the modern era, here’s my nomination: Doris Day turns down the role of Mrs. Robinson in “The Graduate”.

Doris Day was a famous actress who made her name playing squeaky-clean “girl-next-door” roles in sex farces. Sound contradictory? Well, I was astonished to find out that Doris Day movies were considered quite racy in their day. Doris usually played an independent career woman who had a nice job and got into fights with a nice man, played by Cary Grant or Rock Hudson, who would eventually kiss her while she struggled for a second or two until she realized that she really loved the “big lug”. Then they got married.

Doris really looked squeaky clean. She must have bathed and scrubbed her face before every shot. I hated her.

I thought her movies were phony because they wanted to titillate the viewer, while pretending that everything was as innocent as a Tupperware party. Hollywood thought that putting Doris Day through a car wash in a convertible with the roof open was titillating. But then, they also thought Elvis was convincing as a doctor and Mary Tyler Moore as a nun. More recently, Meg Ryan played a heart surgeon. Tom Hanks as an astronaut? Demi Moore as Hester Prynne??

I thought she was boring. She and Rock or Cary would squabble and fight and argue and then wind up kissing on the couch. You were supposed to figure out that they had sex, sooner or later, but they weren’t going to actually show you anything. That would be immoral. Decent people assumed nothing happened afterwards, at least, not until they got married. Hip New Yorkers assumed that something did happen, because of the way she held her cigarette or something.

You know, you never hear the Republicans say something like, “Bill Clinton and John Kennedy are both disgusting because they cheated on their wives.” John Kennedy had sex with Judith Exner, the girl-friend of a mobster, and Marilyn Monroe, among others. But the Republicans never try to publicly draw your attention to the parallels between the two men. Why not? Maybe because John Kennedy only had sex when you weren’t looking. It wasn’t reported in the papers or used as grounds for impeachment, though a lot of reporters knew about it. And John Kennedy is still very popular. Many Americans still feel cheated by his assassination. Old films and video clips show a young, vigorous, smart man. Like Bill Clinton.

Doris Day movies were always brightly lit up, in the Hollywood manner, filmed on a sound-stage in a big warehouse on a studio lot with big phony backdrops. No shadows or natural earth tones here: everything was hard and plastic.

They’re driving down the coastal highway and he’s hardly even looking at the road. He’s arguing with Doris. I always wished he would suddenly panic and spin the wheel and — pfffttt– gone. End of the movie. The owner of the theatre would have to come out and explain to the audience: “Sorry folks– I don’t know what happened. We thought the movie would be two hours. What a tragedy. Well, go home, we’ll have someone else for you next week.”

Well, by the mid-sixties, squeaky-clean Doris was dying at the box office. Her films didn’t seem very exciting or daring anymore. This was about the time, you may recall, that Faye Dunaway made her very conspicuous debut in Bonnie and Clyde. Compare Doris and Faye.  Life Magazine published a picture of Ali McGraw, braless, lying in the grass in tight jeans with her legs apart.  You can see that one of them is completely out of sync with the times.

And then Mike Nichols asked her if she would like to play the part of Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate. Mrs. Robinson is the wife of Benjamin Braddock’s father’s business partner. She smokes. She drinks too much. She gets Benjamin to drive her home one night and then flashes him. She later seduces him and they carry on a tawdry affair for several months. When Benjamin, sick with disgust for himself, falls in love with Mrs. Robinson’s daughter Elaine, she tries everything she can to destroy the relationship, even to the point of confessing the affair to her husband, and to Benjamin’s parents, and to Elaine. Bill Clinton did that too, eventually. But Benjamin pursues Elaine anyway and eventually wins her.

Mike Nichols liked Doris Day. He wanted to save her career. He was convinced that this part would make her a star once again. But Doris didn’t like the part. She thought it was vulgar.

She had no idea of what an actress was supposed to be. She thought she was supposed to be a star, a personality, a celebrity, who did toothpaste commercials and appeared on Hollywood Squares and encouraged bored suburban housewives to immerse themselves in her little titillating– but never vulgar– dream world.

She was, by all accounts, a thoroughly nice, decent person, who let an idiot husband mismanage her career until he messed it all up and lost all her money. [Debbie Reynolds, and so many others, suffered the same fate.]

Mrs. Robinson was not her “type”.

So Ann Bancroft, whose career was also in the doldrums, got the part instead. And, of course, it saved her career. She was suddenly in demand again. She made lots of money and people remember her as a decent, if not outstanding, actress.

And Doris went on to obscurity, except for the occasional radio play of “Que Sera, Sera” — it had been recorded originally for the Hitchcock film “The Man Who Knew Too Much” in 1956. It means, “whatever will be, will be” which is about as dumb a lyric as you can imagine. Well, there’s nothing you can sing that can’t be sung.

On a personal note, I have occasionally confused this song with “Is That All There is?” written by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, and performed by Peggy Lee (1969), and a much better song. The German title is “Wenn das alles ist”, which sounds even more world-weary to me.

Doris went  into obscurity. I don’t know what happened to her. Is she dead? I’ll bet she became a recluse, like Mary Pickford and Marlene Dietrich and Carroll Baker… [She is a recluse, wandering Carmel, CA, apparently looking after stray animals.]

A&E’s biography was going to follow her special with one on Dinah Shore. If that’s not a bad sign, I don’t know what is.

[Updated 2011]

For the record: there is no such thing as a “post-modern” era. We are the modern era. I think some people like this phrase because it implies that there is something after progress that is not progress itself. [2011-02]

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Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend

DeBeer’s runs these ads– you’ve seen them. A lovely woman and a lovely man frolicking on a beach. The woman is lithe and lithesome, dancing… the man takes her hand and leads her up to the cottage. We understand this immediately. We know what he is going to give her: a diamond.

“How else can two month’s salary last a life-time?”

So says DeBeer’s.

“There’s a sucker born every minute.”

So says P.T. Barnum.

You’ve got this young couple. They are both just starting their careers. They have no money. They rent a small apartment. They drive a seven-year-old car that needs a lot of fixin’. They borrowed from mom and dad to buy a fridge and a stove and still do their laundry at the Laundromat. They are thinking of having a baby. They decide to get married. Yeah, that’s the order it happens in nowadays. So some stranger in a very slick suit, looking oh-so-much better off than they are, driving a leased Buick, wearing a Rolex watch, impeccably coiffured, as they say, comes up to them and says: “You should give me two months of your salary for a worthless piece of spackle.” And the girl looks into her lover’s eyes and becomes a little dewy and smiles and touches his hand and says, “Wow? You’d do that for me?”

He says, are you nuts? I’m going to give that money to an orphanage.

No, of course he doesn’t. Because the man in the leased Buick has convinced his girlfriend that he is not worth it, if he doesn’t turn over two months of his salary and accept the spackle.

Why doesn’t he just throw himself in front of a car? It makes as much sense. I’ll bet the hospital bill would also be about two months salary. And, really, she should be even more impressed– that hurt!

I’d like to see those ads on tv. A couple frolicking on the road– you only see their shadows. She goes up on her tippy toes to kiss him, then mischievously runs away across the road, while Vivaldi whines on the sound track. He runs after her but before he can get across the road, you see the shadow of a Mack Truck, and hear the screeching of brakes.

Then you see a shadow of a hospital bed, the leg up in the air, and she’s holding his hand and bending down. “St. Michael’s Hospital– where else would two month’s salary last a life-time?”

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Sunday Evening Epiphany

I was walking around at the University of Guelph yesterday, enjoying the wind and sun, and the crackling of dry leaves, when a young woman appeared on the cobblestone walkway coming towards me. She was wearing dark, tight jeans, and a black shirt open to just about where I like it, and she was carrying a backpack. She was walking alone. And a number of things about her made the day a little less unremarkable.

1. the cheerful way she walked, though she was carrying a heavy pack

2. the way her hips swayed slightly, gracefully; the way of a woman who walks confidently, but not without a sense of style. What I’m trying to get at here is how unshowy yet mesmerizing her walk was. Smooth and graceful.

3. she was partly business– shoulder-length hair, pulled back, just a little make-up–and partly show–little silver earrings that I couldn’t quite make out, and the generous display of neck.

4. she looked directly at me as she walked by and smiled and said “hi”.

It was the “hi” finally, that tingled. College students! Some strange guy appears from nowhere, right in your path, so, of all things, you say hi, hello, good evening, who are you? Her face was entirely free of parochial suspicion or feminist contempt. She looked directly at me and acknowledged that I had entered her carefree orbit.

I, who normally spend most of my time with adults or employees or whathaveyou, was slightly taken aback. I don’t spend enough time at college campuses, obviously. I walk past dozens, maybe hundreds of people every day. No one greets you, least of all with a guileless smile and cheerful “hi”, unless, perhaps, if you are directly in their way, or they’re trying to sell you something.

Hi, she said. Who are you? Do I know you? Should I know you? Are you a person I will come to know? There are possibilities here and I am listing a million of them with two letters: h-i. Hi. Hello. I see your eyes, do you see mine? We are facing each other. You are looking at my body. Do you like how I dress? I have the energy to stride down this walkway with confidence and purpose– I am going somewhere, but I see you facing me, not directly in my path, but you are there, and I am telling you that I recognize another human being who may have a million possible adventures tomorrow and I have a little smile on my face because I, too, might have a million adventures tomorrow, and for one second, I am telling you that your adventures are mine, and my adventures are yours.

Hi, I can’t stop, I have to go, and I don’t know you, so I won’t stop, but it is possible to know me, and it is possible to know you, and there’s a lot I can tell you about myself with my two letters and my stride and the way my jeans make me feel like I am sleek and purposeful, protected but free, as if these are the kind of jeans that I can slip out of in two seconds if you took my two letters and built cathedrals out of them some evening when, after my “hi”, you said “hi, what’s your name”, and I told you. And I might tell you because when I see you in my path the only thing I can think of to say to you, a perfect stranger, is “hi”, leaving open all the infinite possibilities of you saying “hello… what’s your name?”

And in a few seconds she was past me, looking ahead again, thinking ahead, perhaps about the person she is going to meet, or the room she is headed for, the comfort, the envelope of arranged bed and sheets and tooth brush and over-sized t-shirt, and a moment of wonder, perhaps, about the possibilities of people she might or might not know.

I’ve been thinking about this all night. I am obsessed with a question. If I had said, “Hi. What’s your name?” Would that have changed things? Maybe she would have laughed for the sudden improbability of the question coming from a passing stranger, and answered “why?” or “I don’t give out my name to strangers”, but maybe she would have laughed and answered reflexively, using her good manners, and then said, “Why?”. Or maybe she would have laughed and looked away quickly and walked on, and everything would once again resemble “real” life, which is what we call that phony groveling most of us offer as an excuse for social life nowadays. And maybe she would have looked away quickly, a little frightened, alarmed, or nervous.

Maybe she would have called the campus police: “He asked me my name!”

If I could do the moment over again, I would ask her name. I’d say “hi”, the same way I did say “hi”, but this time, quickly, “Excuse me– what’s your name?” and put on my friendliest possible face. And if she gave me her name, her Ann or Lisa or Renee or June or Tara or Katarina or Natasha or Mary or Maryanne or Elizabeth or Roxanne, then I would say, “I just wanted to say that your walk and your face and your ‘hi’ have added a halo to this evening. I’ll bet you don’t know how beautiful you are. I just wanted to tell you that.” But I would not tell her how much it aches just to watch her walk by.

Well, that’s my Monday morning thought. I think I’ll go back to sleep at my desk now.

 

[Written about an evening when I brought Paul to Guelph to rehearse with Bruce of a progressive jazz combo.]

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The “Heroic” Captain Smith

Almost every movie version of the Titanic renders Captain Smith the same way. Grey-bearded and reserved, dignified, and ineffably tragic. Pictures of the real guy, in uniform, seem to confirm the impression. He had a sparkling career until the Titanic disaster.  He ran his ship into an ice berg in the dead of night in calm seas. A small blemish, to be sure.

Edward J. Smith.jpg

We prefer J. Bruce Ismay, President of the White Star Line, as the villain of this story. Writers and movie-makers have moved heaven and earth to make it appear as though he was responsible for the disaster, by urging the Captain to go faster. The Cameron movie version blithely sidesteps one precious little detail: the Titanic was not capable of going faster than the “crack” Cunard ships. The Titanic was built for luxury, not speed. There was no chance of it setting any records. Cameron knows that, so he merely leaves Ismay to impress upon Captain Smith that it would be nice if they could arrive a day early. At least some movie-goers, however, are easily confused, and I’ve heard people say, after seeing the movie, that it was Ismay’s fault, for trying to break “the record”.

So, we can put that to rest. Ismay may have urged speed, but the Titanic had no dreams of breaking the record.

That leaves Captain Smith. On the high seas, the Captain has absolute authority. Ismay or no Ismay, it was Smith’s decision to proceed into an area known to be inhabited by large ice bergs at the Titanic’s top speed of about 22 knots. The Titanic had received numerous warnings during the preceding days, from other other ships in the area. Smith’s precautions consisted of posting two look-outs, usual practice on White Star ships. The look-outs did not have binoculars– they had been lost before the ship even reached Cherbourg– but then, binoculars were considered an accessory, not a necessity, at the time. A good look-out was simply supposed to have good eyes.

Nobody will ever know whether the look-outs should have seen the ice berg sooner. The ocean was extremely calm, the sky was very bright. Under those conditions, ironically, ice bergs are a greater hazard, because there is almost no wash at their edges, to make them more visible. Anyway, no one knows if Frederick Fleet was really paying attention or not. We do know that he eventually saw the ice berg, signaled the bridge, and the bridge immediately ordered the engines reversed and the helm brought about. Fleet’s testimony (he survived the disaster) about how far the berg was from the ship when he first spotted it is inconsistent.

He didn’t have a happy life, by the way, after the disaster, and he committed suicide in the 1960’s.

The Titanic was poorly designed. It was a long, cigar-shaped ship, with an undersized rudder. It didn’t respond very quickly to sharp turns. It responded enough to avoid a head-on crash, but then it grazed the ice berg under the water line. The first five compartments of the ship were breeched. Within minutes, Mr. Thomas Andrews, the ship’s designer, knew that it was doomed. The rest is history.

It is here, however, that we are able to take the true measure of Captain Smith. But before we assess Captain Smith’s performance, it is worth, for comparison’s sake, taking a quick look at the actions of Captain Arthur Rostron, of the Carpathia, the ship that picked up the survivors of the Titanic disaster.

Captain Rostron received word of the Titanic disaster around midnight, long before the Titanic sunk. He immediately issued numerous orders. First, to the engine room, to stoke up the boilers and get under way immediately in the direction of the Titanic. Secondly, to the stewards, to roust blankets and supplies. Thirdly, to his officers, to ensure space for the survivors, and calm aboard his own ship, and to prepare for receiving the lifeboats. Fourth, to the wireless operator, to signal Titanic that they were under way. He followed up on his orders to see that they were carried out efficiently. The Carpathia steamed towards the disaster site at full speed, well-prepared to deal with whatever awaited it.

Onboard the Titanic, it was a different story. Smith seemed bewildered, lost, inadequate. His officers came up to him one at a time and asked permission to send flares, prepare the life boats, roust the passengers. He seemed to have no particular views on what should be done. According to testimony at both the British and American inquiries, he generally seemed to nod his head and go, “yes, yes, good idea.”

What should he have done? He should have immediately summoned all of his officers and staff. He should have emphatically specified that each life-boat was to be filled to capacity. He should have dispatched stewards to the third class compartments to arrange for the women and children to reach the boat deck. He should have instructed the officers to ensure that at least four men with some ability or experience were dispatched to each life boat. He should have declared the bar open with free drinks for all the men. Well, just kidding. Maybe. You see, at least one drunk survived a few hours in the sea, probably because the alcohol had thinned his blood.

If he had taken decisive steps, at least 500 more people could have survived the disaster. As it was, only 705 survived out of 2200. The official capacity of the 16 lifeboats was 65 each, or 1040 total. In addition, there were four “collapsible” boats, with a capacity of 24 each, making 96, or 1136 total. With calm seas– and the seas were calm–  and a some ingenuity, they could easily have squeezed in an additional 100 above that.

So why do directors and writers continue to portray him as something of a hero? One reason and one reason alone: he went down with his ship, like all good captains do. Going down with the ship is the Captain’s way of saying “Ooops. I made a mistake. I’m really very sorry.” A captain who survives is basically saying, like Ismay, “What? I suppose you’re going to blame me for this?”

We are always willing to forgive those who say I’m sorry.  But we also have this blather, from passenger Roger Williams Daniel:

“I saw Captain Smith on the bridge. My eyes seemingly clung to him. The deck from which I had leapt was immersed. The water had risen slowly, and was now to the floor of the bridge. Then it was to Captain Smith’s waist. I saw him no more. He died a hero.”

He died a what?

I think what Daniel is actually saying is, “having contributed nothing in a moment of great crisis, he made up for it by at least not taking up space in a half-filled lifeboat that wasn’t lowered until it was almost too late.”

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Telemarketeers

A man named Bob Trottier, who worked for a telemarketing firm a few months this spring, wrote an article for today’s Kitchener Waterloo Record defending Telemarketers. “Businesses and many other services have to use telemarketing because it works, whether you grit your teeth at the intruding phone calls or not”.

This is one big piece of horse manure. Nobody has to use telemarketing. Telemarketing didn’t even exist thirty years ago, and nobody was the wiser. What Trottier really wants us to believe is that telemarketing creates new demand for products. This is good for the economy, you see. In fact, the advantage of telemarketing probably only lasts as long as it takes until a competitor with the same product starts to use telemarketing. It’s like Sunday shopping. Where’s the advantage if all the stores are open on Sunday? Thus we are led by the nose by our own short-sightedness.

The biggest mistake you can make with a telemarketer is to listen. The simplest, most effective thing to do is hang up, immediately. Don’t listen. Don’t wait for the telemarketer to shut-up, don’t ask yourself if you might actually want what they’re selling (believe me, you don’t).

I don’t necessarily believe that telemarketing should be banned. I think it would be more effective to make a law that says that the owners of a telemarketing firm must spend at least eight hours a day doing the same thing his employees are doing, calling people and pestering them in their homes. They should hear what people really think of pests.

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Crumbs

Crumbs

Robert Crumb is famous for a number of cartoons he created in the 1960’s and 70’s, the most celebrated of which was the Keep on Truckin’ schematic, which became a trademark of sorts to the Grateful Dead. He is also the originator of the Fritz the Cat character, which became the subject of a full-length x-rated movie by Ralph Bakshi. Crumb disapproved of the movie.

In 1994, Terry Zwigoff, a friend of Robert’s, made a disturbing, brilliant documentary called Crumb, about Robert, and his two brothers, Charles and Maxon. (Crumb’s sisters declined to take part in the film. You may wonder about that by the end of the film.)

rcrumb2.jpg (37467 bytes)

I say “disturbing”. Searing might be more like it. The Crumb brothers pull no punches. At times, you almost can’t believe they are saying the things they say on camera. Don’t they realize how shocking they are? Yet this is no television talk show. The brothers are never coy or evasive, and don’t really shift blame away from themselves, or try to cast themselves as unwitting victims. If there is one attractive quality about these brothers, it’s their honesty and their sense of personal responsibility.

Crumb’s father was brutally strict, and his mother over-compensated, and the three boys had some kind of weird chemistry going. From the time they were little, they became obsessively fascinated with comic books. They were extremely gifted at drawing and Robert even organized the three brothers into a production company and they created their own variations on Treasure Island.

All three were also severely socially dysfunctional. Charles, though in his forties, lives at home with his mother, almost never leaves the apartment, rarely bathes, and uses prescription drugs to keep from becoming “homicidally disturbed”. According to Robert and Maxon, he has never had a sexual relationship with anyone but himself. He had made several suicide attempts before the documentary was made, and, a year afterwards, finally succeeded, providing the film with a poignant postscript.

[Update 2022: read that paragraph now, it occurs to me that a big part of Charles’ troubles may have been the side-effect of the prescription drugs.  If he stopped taking them at any time, the effects of withdrawal would have produced “symptoms” that would like be attributed to his personality, instead of to the drugs themselves and the effects of withdrawal.]

Maxon lives alone in an apartment and has been arrested several times for sexual assault. He swallows a long length of cotton cloth every three weeks to cleanse his bowels, feeding it like string slowly into his mouth, and likes to sit on a bed of nails and meditate. Like Charles, he is, frankly, a slob. He describes, with helpless amusement, how he followed a girl wearing tight shorts into a drug store and could not resist the urge to pull them down while she was waiting in line at the checkout. Unlike Clinton, there is no evasion, no excuses, no hypocrisy. He confesses to a repugnant act, but you almost like him.

Robert, who at first appears to be seriously maladjusted, eventually emerges as the sanest of the three. He manages to make a living from his drawings, develops relationships with women, marries, divorces, marries again. He has two children, years apart, one by each wife. Yet you can see that he’s not too far removed from Maxon and Charles. The difference may be that Robert succeeded in transferring his anti-social impulses into his art.

Crumb is one of the most brutally honest documentaries you are likely to ever see. The three brothers talk openly about their father’s abusive discipline, their sexual preferences and fetishes, their own hopeless perspectives on themselves and each other. Robert’s comics have always been controversial, and the film includes interviews with editors and fellow cartoonists who express their own misgivings about some of his more controversial stories. In one, for example, two characters enjoy the sexual favours of a woman with no head. They consider her perfect, since they don’t have to make conversation with her afterwards. In another, an outwardly normal, All-American family, is actually rife with incest. An editor allows that she is not sure that Crumb actually disapproves of the incest. A third example is a parody of consumerism, describing a new canned meat product called “Niggerhearts”.

When challenged, Robert Crumb, like his brothers, is not very evasive, arrogant, or apologetic. Who knows, he seems to say. Maybe I should be locked up. I don’t know why I have to draw those things but I do. They’re in me. Implied, of course, is the idea that many of these ideas are in us as well. Considering the number of awards this documentary has garnered, you would have to admit that many critics and film-goers acknowledge this. How else could you stomach such a man, or a film about this man?

It is unclear, at times, whether Crumb is parodying himself or society in general or those who think they understand society. His stories are hardly simple parables.

Another example: a black woman is convinced by several businessmen that performing degrading acts will make her a superior human being. She doesn’t outsmart them, though she realizes she’s being put on. Some readers interpret this to mean that Crumb thinks she is as foolish as the white businessmen think she is. Or is this a parody of the businessmen, and the way they attempt to turn even social oppression into material advantage? Or is it an assertion that materialism is itself the most oppressive force in our society? (I favour the last one).

Is it a sin to be truthful? Only if your truth is different from everyone else’s. Is our society ready to admit that otherwise “decent” people can harbour obscene fantasies or racist beliefs? Is our society ready to admit that even victims can be stupid?

I don’t think we are. It’s too difficult. We are far more comfortable believing that blacks are inferior and that women suffocate men or that blacks are innocent victims of racism and that women are morally better than men. We don’t like being thrown a curve. But remember that the most powerful abolitionist tract of the 19th century was Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Today, even black activists are mostly contemptuous of its simple-minded moralism’s. Why? Because someone like James Baldwin had the nerve to attack one of the most sacred icons of progressive and religious humanism in existence. And you know what? He was right.

So is Crumb merely ahead of his time?

Well, what really is outrageous nowadays? I think it is obvious that some of our values are completely screwed up. We find the Clinton-Lewinsky affair outrageous, but not the deaths of tens of thousands of Moslem Serbs. We are outraged by a school boy killing his class-mates with a high-powered rifle, but not by an organization that spends $80 million a year to promote unrestricted access to every kind of weapon imaginable. We are outraged by a school teacher who has sex with a Grade 6 student, but not by a talk show host (Larry King) who has been married five times. We are outraged by someone who clubs a gas station attendant over the head to steal $15, but not by a securities seller who rips his clients off for a billion dollars. We are outraged at a seventeen-year-old kid who breaks into houses to steal money to feed his drug habit, but not a pharmaceutical industry that is doing its level best to make us all dependent on drugs. We are outraged at Mexicans crossing the border to seek a better life in the U.S., but not at the economic imperialism that turns self-sufficient Central American economies into impoverished coffee growers for Starbucks. We are outraged when the United Nations wants to include the U.S. among the nations accountable for war crimes to a new World Court, but not when Congress continues to subsidize an Israeli government that denies the most fundamental human rights to its own Palestinian population. We are outraged when a protester burns a U.S. flag, but not when U.S. negotiators refuse to believe that fish stocks on the west coast are in danger of extinction if over-fishing continues. We are outraged when an artist puts a crucifix into a jar full of urine, but not when the record companies routinely cheat artists out of the royalties they are due by jiggering their accounting records. We are outraged by a doctor who helps terminally ill patients die without pain and in dignity, but not by doctors that routinely recommend expensive and useless surgeries to elderly patients who are likely to die within months anyway. We are outraged by cloned sheep, but not by attempts by corporations to patent human DNA sequences. We are outraged by homosexuals seeking benefit coverage for their partners, but not by the fact that we are denying AIDS treatments to impoverished African nations to protect our own patent rights.

What exactly determines our outrage? What is it that most excites us about someone else’s sin? Isn’t it probable that when we proclaim our outrage, especially when we do it in the strongest possible words, we thereby hope to impress others with our own purity, and deflect suspicion away from ourselves? Since no one suspects us of murdering children in Rwanda or robbing old women of their lives’ savings, we don’t get too excited about those crimes. But if someone were to suspect us of sexually harassing an attractive secretary…. well, we’ve probably had a thought or two about it, haven’t we?

What is most telling about this analysis is not that we seem to be so defensive about certain human failings. It’s that the human race, in general, doesn’t really care all that much about starving children or ethnic cleansing or torture or exploitation. We really don’t. But we badly need to pretend that we are virtuous, so, by common consent, we identify certain transgressions as worthy of our hysteria. We draw lines in the sand, and then go ballistic when someone crosses one of them.

I don’t really like Robert Crumb. At best, he is a maladjusted misogynistic misanthrope. But he is articulate and honest, and his cartoons are the work of a genius. There is a soft underbelly to American public morality, and Crumb pokes a sharper stick at this underbelly than anyone else.

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She’s a Femme Fatale: Raging Hypocrites

It was sort of inevitable, don’t you think?

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Henry Hyde’s “indiscretion”.

It has just been revealed that the Republican Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Henry Hyde, had an affair with a woman named Cherie Snodgrass, about thirty years ago. She was married, and so was he. We have also been informed that Dan Burton, one of Clinton’s harshest critics, fessed up that he has fathered a child in an extramarital affair. And Representative Helen Chenoweth of Idaho has also confessed to an illicit liaison. Well, let’s not be disingenuous here: they didn’t voluntarily fess up– they were caught. Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole, of course, are not with their first spouses anymore. Any details, Newt? Come one, Bob, let’s get this out into the open.

Ah, you say. But isn’t the issue perjury?

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The trouble is, for the Republicans, that they have had to justify Kenneth Starr’s report on the basis of the argument that Clinton’s personal sexual behaviour is relevant. And whenever these clowns appear on TV to argue for impeachment, they don’t talk much about legalities: they talk about trust and morality and values and leadership. Besides, Clinton’s perjury occurred during testimony which was eventually ruled “immaterial” by a judge in the Paula Jones case. That’s a pretty thin case for impeachment. But you understand the two-track strategy of the Republicans. They know that the public will not be outraged by the perjury which gives them the legal pretense to impeach, but they think the public might be outraged by the sexual relationship, which, however, cannot be the basis for an impeachment. So they are trying to blur the distinction. You are supposed to be so outraged at Clinton’s personal conduct, that you will consent to impeach him on a trivial legal issue Well, that’s how they got Al Capone. The well-known gang-meister was finally indicted for…. yes, tax evasion!

There is only one solution: Henry Hyde, Dan Burton, Helen Chenoweth, Newt Gingrich, Bob Dole, and whoever else comes out of hiding soon enough, should all be impeached.

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If I were Henry Hyde, who is in charge of the committee for impeaching adulterers, I’d do the honorable thing and impeach myself first, just to show the American Public that the judicial system doesn’t play politics, and that the Clinton thing is not just a partisan Republican pogrom against a Democratic President, but a reflection of the Republican Party’s earnest devotion to purity and decency in government. So long Henry. Nice knowing you Dan. May you find healing and fulfillment Helen. I hope something comes along for you Newt.

The Republicans, by the way, have demanded that the FBI investigate whether the White House had a hand in getting these stories to the public. Think about this. The Republicans, who have just insisted on publishing extremely intimate details about the President’s sexual liaison with a 21-year-old intern, are outraged, I say, outraged, that someone should expose, with no detail whatsoever, the adulteries of some of their own. Who do they think is buying this? It’s too much! It’s insane! It’s a crazy world!

One last piece of craziness: the Republicans are arguing that the public needs to know these details, and that the impeachment proceedings should hear the evidence in public, and that all the information Kenneth Starr has gathered should be released, because it is important that justice been seen to be done publicly.

All of these decisions were made in a closed session of the Judiciary Committee Meeting.

* * *

While the Republicans were busy rationalizing themselves, Lou Reed, former leader of the Velvet Underground, was putting on a performance of his own. Lou Reed’s Velvet Underground was quite possibly the most aesthetically progressive rock band of the 1960’s. Listen to their stuff: you can’t believe it was recorded thirty years ago. It has a visceral rawness to it, the kind of edgy authenticity so-called alternative bands would die for. Nico, the lead singer on some of their most haunting ballads, is now dead, destroyed by years of drug abuse… not. She died in a bicycle accident. Lou Reed has found a second career walking the border between revision and nostalgia.

So where do you think they performed? At some dark night-club in New York? No, in the White House. President Vaclav Havel of Czechoslovakia was Bill Clinton’s guest this weekend. I wonder if Reed performed one of his better tunes, “Femme Fatale”:

Cause everybody knows (she’s a femme fatale)
The things she does to please (she’s a femme fatale)
She’s just a little tease (she’s a femme fatale)

If you would have told me, thirty years ago, that some day the Velvet Underground would be playing the White House!

Well, … actually, that is kind of what I thought thirty years ago. After all, we knew that we were all going to be fifty some day, and none of us really believed we were going to start listening to Frank Sinatra or Perry Como after we turned 40.

Now if you would have told me that Congress, in solemn session, would be listening in rapt devotion to intimate details about the President’s affair with a young intern– I would have thought you were mad.

Anyway, it’s happened. The most anti-establishment rock artist of the 60’s has played the White House. This has cosmic significance. As soon as I can think of what that is, I’ll try to write about it.

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That Wild and Crazy Green Party

The Green Party in Germany has some really interesting ideas. In the past year, they have proposed the following:

  • no one is allowed to make more than one trip by aircraft every five years
  • all men must be inside by 10:00 p.m., to make the streets safe for women
  • the gas price should be tripled

Don’t you wish that we had a Green Party? Actually, I think we do, but they never seem to win any seats. Maybe their ideas are different from the German Green Party, adapted for North American sensibilities, and thus too drab and boring to attract serious attention. But think about this: Joschka Fisher, the leader of the Green Party, has just quit smoking, changed his diet, and now jogs six miles a day. I think that’s the kind of guy I would like to have as a leader. Lots of self-discipline and self-control.

I really think we could learn from the Green Party of Germany. We need to have more imagination. We need to think of more different things that we haven’t tried before. Like, instead of one leader for as long as the party stays elected, why don’t we rotate the leadership among five or six colorful individuals? Do you think we’d ever have a black or a woman as prime-minister or president otherwise? Not a chance. Well, wait, we did have a woman prime-minister– Kim Campbell– for about six months. Maybe we’re crazier than I give us credit for.

But how about these for some imaginative new ideas for the next election:

  • let’s all drive on the left side of the road for a year or two. Why? I don’t know. Just to see how we like it. For one thing, we’re missing all the scenery on the left side. This would give us a year to see it. Then we could go back to normal.
  • ban bicycles and pedestrians from our downtowns. Let’s let cars use the sidewalks and bicycle paths and see if it improves the traffic flow. Let’s make a rule that you can only drive on the sidewalk if the road is really busy, otherwise pretty soon the sidewalks will be crowded too. This goes for parks too– what are we saving the grass for anyway? The dogs and geese? And so what if it gets muddy: at least the SUV owner’s will finally have a reason for that four-wheel-drive, if they actually know how to engage it.
  • Did you know that once they make a law, it never goes away by itself? It practically never goes away at all: they just keep amending and adding provisions and stuff. This worked fine when countries only lasted a hundred years or so, but we’ve been around a long time and we still have all those laws from ages ago, plus all the new ones they’ve added since them. So none of us really understands the law anymore. Let’s get rid of all the laws and start over. On a chosen Friday, we will announce that all of the laws are cancelled. Then we’ll take a whole weekend and write up new ones. And no lawyers will be allowed to take part, so everyone can understand the rules. No more “whereas” and “notwithstanding” or any of that crap. Let’s just clear them all out, burn the law books, and then sit down and make up the new laws that we really need.

I’ll bet we only need about five:

No stealing. No killing. No cheating. No lying. If you make a mess, you have to clean it up yourself.

  • ban polkas. This would be great. All the polka-lovers would be out there demonstrating, marching with their tubas and accordions. Then we could look real stern and say “maybe”. After a year or two, we could pretend to give in and allow some polkas. Why? Because I think our society would be safer with people demonstrating for polka music than with people demonstrating for more grunge or punk rock, or, heaven forbid, guns, or abortions, or stuff like that.
  • no chief executive can earn more than ten times what the lowest-paid employee earns. Do you really think that any chief executive is worth more than ten times what you’re worth? Well, what exactly are you worth?
  • declare a statute of limitations on all crimes, injustices, wars, and sexual harassment. A woman recently sued her cousin for sexual harassment that occurred 45 years ago. The native peoples keep asking for money for treaties we broke hundreds of years ago. Japanese-Canadians didn’t get compensated fairly for having their property comfiscated and being moved into camps during World War II. And women keep complaining that in the times of the Romans they were treated like property. Fine. We acknowledge your status as victims. But if we go back far enough, even the Dutch have a few gripes. It’s getting too complicated to figure it all out. If everybody has a gripe, then we’re all even. Let’s promise not to do it again and get on with our lives. My statutes of limitations:
    • broken treaties – 50 years
    • murder – 25 years
    • assault – 15 years
    • robbery – 10 years
    • harassment – 7 years
    • pay equity – 5 years
    • polluting the environment: for as long as the effects of the pollution are detectable. If the corporation responsible is defunct, the shareholders are responsible. If they are dead, their descendants are liable.

Hey– if the descendent of writers and musicians can collect royalties on their works, then the descendants of shareholders can pay for the cost of cleaning up their messes.

But I see I’m being inconsistent. The effects of other crimes also obviously last a long time. So I say even pollution will have a statute of limitation of, say, 25 years after the pollution occurred. But in return, all shareholders of any company that creates any kind of toxic substance as a result of the processes used to create their products must put a bond to guarantee any possible clean-up costs if the company goes under. Better yet, they all pay into a clean-up insurance fund.