Hillary, the Greatest Satan

What's the point of blogging - personal fulfillment, ego gratification, watching the patterns of your thoughts emerge in writing, so you can see yourself more clearly? And do you really need other people for that?

Since blogging is a new enterprise for me, I've been checking out other blogs to see what kind of conversations people are having. Mostly I've found communities of like-minded people saying things like, "Doesn't the New York Times suck?" and "Doesn't Hillary Clinton just scare you to death?" And their respondents generally answer in the affirmative. Yes, yes, yes, you're so right. And all those people who think the other way, they're just crazy. (That's at the right-of-center blogs, of course, where I've been spending the most time. The left-of-center bloggers are similarly outraged, I'm assuming, but in the opposite direction.) Depressing, most of it, and utterly predictable.

One of the reasons I'm blogging is to actually try to figure out why people think they way they do. If Hillary Clinton is scary, surely there's some reason you think so (beyond mere pathological hatred). If the New York Times reporters are taking bong hits while they're writing their stories, surely you can document some actual instance of egregious error or reasonable-person bias (again, beyond mere disgust that somebody is saying something you don't like).

(By the way, I'm neither here nor there on Hillary Clinton at the moment. It's summertime, for God's sake! Eventually, I'll get palpitations over the election, but not now. I may live in New Hampshire, but I'm not going to start this whole stressful cycle again for the sake of ... why are we doing this primary thing so early, again?)

My favorite political-oriented blog so far is "AmbivaBlog," because - guess what - it's strangely open-minded, neither left nor right, asking questions instead of simply answering them. I like that. It's a refreshing ideal: a bunch of people trying to figure out things together, rather than just despising the other side in tandem. Too sanctimonious? Well, that's a liberal failing, I've heard.

Morality and the Poor Beasties

Today I had lunch at an Indian restaurant with a couple of friends. I had the palek paneer (spinach and homemade cheese), and my friends each ordered the vegetable masala. The topic came around to vegetarianism. As usual, all of us said we were trending that way.

I became a strict vegetarian in high school, when I worked in a deli slicing meat and sidestepping giant slabs of beef hanging from hooks in the backroom. I regressed to "chicketarianism" in my late '20s, out of exhaustion with trying to maintain a diet that people still (but no longer) seemed confused and discomfited by. One of my friends at the Indian restaurant had been a vegetarian for four months; the other said his recent GI problem may force him off meat altogether.

And that's how lots of us are about eating meat: it's a guilty habit we're always gearing up to break.

This month's Atlantic has a terrific, unusually hard-hitting article on the topic, not (for once) about the pitiful suffering of farm animals, but about meat-lovers who acknowledge animal suffering but manage to do a moral two-step around it. They care about the "poor beasties," but never seriously enough to actually stop chewing their way through them.

BR Myers, in the first attack on Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma") I've read, describes the mental processes at work when a meat-eater debates an animal-rights advocate:

"One debates the other side until pushed into a corner. Then one simply drops the argument and slips away, pretending that one has not fallen short of reason but instead transcended it. The irreconcilability of one's belief with reason is then held up as a great mystery, the humble readiness to live with which puts one above lesser minds and their cheap certainties."

That's a process at work in any number of arenas. Encounter facts you don't like, throw up your hands, and declare it's all beyond any of us figure out.

So It's Not Just Here?

Apparently there's corruption in Italian politics - really! "The Caste," the new book that describes just how vulgar and self-serving the Italian political class has become, has ignited major buzz on the Italian blogs. This makes me think of an interesting observation made by Elizabeth Gilbert in her wonderful book, "Eat Pray Love." Gilbert spent four months in Italy trying to heal herself after a soul-crushing divorce, and became well-acquainted with the country's many pleasures, all of them, as we might expect, sensual in nature. According to Gilbert, Italians excel in the pursuit of pleasure precisely because their government is corrupt. Italy coalesced into a country only in the late 1800s, long after its western European neighbors, and has always been a mess politically. So why bother with it? Its citizens have been disappointed by their government so often that they've transferred their attention to opera, food, fashion and art, more satisfying pasttimes where they can demand quality and generally get it. That, she says, is why they boo bad opera singers off the stage but tolerated Silvio Berlusconi. Tale è vita.

Enough Already. It's Summertime.

Summer's going to be gone, and I've just now harvested my first garden tomato. It's slightly misshapen, but it's huge, bright red, and sitting in a patch of sunshine on the butcher block, waiting to be eaten.

But in what form? There are so many .... but here's a favorite.

This is, and I'm not exaggerating, the very best gazpacho recipe in the world. It's totally unlike anything you've probably ever had, smooth instead of chunky, with just a few ingredients, whizzed together in a blender for slightly smoky, cumin-y taste. It's David's recipe, actually; strangely, he can cook!

THE BEST GAZPACHO EVER

1 piece of baguette bread, about 2 inches long; cut off crust; run under water faucet and squeeze out water under bread is just moist.

2 to 3 garlic cloves (I use 3)

2 teaspoons salt

2 tablespoons sherry vinegar

1 teaspoon sugar

1/2 teaspoon ground cumin

2 and 1/2 pounds of tomatoes, cored and quartered (I use plum tomatoes, but any are fine as long as they're ripe and flavorful)

1/4 to 1/3 cup of extra-virgin olive oil (use quality oil; it makes a big difference to the taste)

Put everything into a blender and blend until smooth. Pour gazpacho into a bowl and chill in refrigerator. Serve with crusty bread (a good use for the rest of the baguette), smoked cheddar cheese, fruit and wine.

Polyps and the Holy Grail

From the NYT: Though President Bush has had episodes of mild vertigo in recent weeks, they have not interfered with his work, and he is in excellent health, the White House said yesterday in releasing findings from his annual medical checkup.

Well, excellent. It's been a summer of good news about President Bush, his vertigo, his ear infection, and his bowels, which happily are now polyp-free. That's quite a relief.

But, not to be a scold, I do want to underscore what others have already pointed out: the 'gold-plated' care our President is getting is simply unavailable to those millions without health insurance. Meaning that they'll go ahead and develop the full-blown diseases that happily will be prevented in him.

So what? If your main interest in life is money, consider that it's cheaper to prevent sickness than to treat it. And treat we will, even the fully diseased poor, because in the end, America just isn't quite callous enough to let people drop dead in the street. Our national compassion is of the last-resort kind, and that's the most expensive kind of all.

Why on earth don't Republicans get this? They're the bean-counters. If the options are to pay now, or pay more later, wouldn't it make sense to choose the former?

It's not health care alone that presents this basic choice, but given the looming national elections, it's the one we're going to be arguing about most. But here is what I've always suspected: saving money, surely the Holy Grail for conservatives, remains less appealing than that other Holy Grail: punishing those who haven't done well in our society. If everybody had access to the same excellent services, after all, how would we know who was worthy and who not? Who had worked hard, and who hadn't? Who was decent and fine and upstanding, and who wasn't?

And that, in a nutshell, is why we haven't and won't make any real progress on this issue. We can't admit that we don't want to grouped together, even for the simple purpose of ensuring minimal protection against needless suffering. We much prefer our current report-card society, where some of us get A's and some of us get D's and F's. And the people with D's and F's - well, for whatever reason, and sad to report, they just lose out. That's the real American way.

(By the way, it's true that we can't afford everything we as a country might want. My money-minded conservative consort has convinced me of this. And I get it, truly. But that's another topic.)

Thanks, Jack

Speaking of "On the Road," which turned 50 this week: an homage, borrowed from that breathless book itself:

"The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes 'Awww!' "

Bravo.

On the Road, or Not

From The Washington Post:

The House has taken a big step toward expanding the number of federal employees who could become telecommuters and work from home at least one day a week. During debate on an energy-efficiency bill, Rep. John Sarbanes (D-Md.) offered an amendment to require every federal agency to establish a telework policy. The measure would ensure that employees may telecommute "to the maximum extent possible without diminishing employee performance or agency operations."

The organization I work for went "virtual" about four years ago. Now we have staff scattered all over New England and we meet just when we need to, and in the combinations that make sense. The numbers of gallons of gas we save this way, not to mention the energy costs of maintaining a common office, could undoubtedly be calculated, and would probably (though we're small) be impressive. How much more impressive for larger companies? In this country, our hierarchical, tightly controlled workplaces haven't evolved to take advantage of our technological capabilities. Why not? If we're serious about stabilizing (or even cutting) our energy consumption, why isn't serious, broad-based telecommuting part of the answer?

(Telecommuting has other advantages as well - those that accrue to the individual, or course, but to society too. Working at home allowed me to be there when my son walked in the door from school, allowed me to be the supervisory presence that kept him and his friends out of trouble, allowed me to pick him up at school when he got sick. OK, I'll admit it, there were a few loads of laundry thrown in the washer as well, a few quick trips to the store for dinner. Did my productivity nosedive? No - because I was working at night, too, after dinner, and after my son went to bed. Surely most workplace professionals are mature enough to thrive under this sort of arrangement, yes? )