A Post That Cites Its Sources…with Footnotes!

As I mentioned in the preceding post, the Nick’s Crusade blog is a history blog too. I think delving into history can be very valuable, not just because the strange doglegs and twists in the American story—history NEVER progresses in a straight line—are infinitely interesting, but because we become better thinkers and citizens the more we understand our prologue, the previous generations, the prior struggles, and what we’ve gained and lost since.

One thing we’ve lost—though we have gained from its absence in many ways—is the whole concept of the elite 19th century Southern Gentleman, the image of the Southern aristocrat with smooth, un-calloused hands and clean-shaven plump faces, and the brutal slave-driving that made such lifestyles possible. A lot of insight into that old image can be gleaned from the strange story of William Rufus deVane King of Alabama (my home state).

Art by Nick Dupree: Unlucky 13th Vice president, William Rufus deVane King, served only 45 days before dying of tuberculosis. Only a few of the 45 days, his last days, were on American soil, as he returned from Cuba via Mobile, then died on his plantation near Selma. He is the only vice president from Alabama ever elected.

William R. D. King——more typically referred to as just “William R. King”—was the first U.S. Senator from Alabama (alongside John Williams Walker, who was also sent to Washington—the state legislature electing two U.S. Senators per constitutional requirements—after Alabama was admitted to the Union in December 1819). King also played a major role getting Alabama statehood done, and helped write the constitution of Alabama, named the city of Selma “Selma” meaning “high seat” or “throne” in the 18th century Ossianic poem The Songs of Selma, and was president pro tem of the United States Senate, got into a Hamilton-Burr-style duel with Henry Clay,¹ and served as U.S. Minister to France and had other diplomatic posts in Naples and St. Petersburg, and was behind the writing and passage of the Compromise of 1850 and more. What’s odd is, he did all this while being…while being known by the public as super effeminate and flamboyant, and was re-elected again and again by the hardcore states’ righters in Montgomery (prior to the ratification of the 17th amendment in 1913, state legislatures elected U.S. Senators to represent their state).

I won’t say William R. D. King was gay, though it is very striking that, in a culture that almost never mentioned such things, contemporaries like Andrew Jackson publicly called him by derogatory names like “Miss Nancy,” and

Buchanan, 15th President of the United States (1857-1861) was also Minister to the UK (Court of St. James).

Still, the serious historian demands a high standard of proof: the text document equivalent of “pics or it didn’t happen.” Though there is more material suggesting King was seen as gay than almost anyone else in the 19th century, it’d be unwise to say King was a homosexual with certainty. I agree with the James Buchanan entry in glbtq: An Encyclopedia of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Culture that:

In his The Invention of Heterosexuality Jonathan Ned Katz cautions against the application of contemporary terms regarding sexuality to other times and societies in which “[w]ays of ordering the sexes, genders, and sexualities have varied radically.” He further points out that in the “pre-Freudian world [of early-nineteenth-century America], love did not imply eros”–although neither, of course, was an erotic component excluded.⁴

As King’s effeminate manner is evident beyond a shadow of a doubt, I’ll ask a broader—and, I think, more interesting—question, on gender presentation widely-speaking: how is it that such an effeminate public figure got elected by the legislators in rough-and-tumble frontier Alabama?
The answer is, there was nothing odd about William R. D. King amidst the Southern slaver planter aristocracy of his generation. It only seems strange to us, seeing through the lens of the latter half of the 20th century and its mega-strict gender roles. In the antebellum South, the elite planter could be flamboyant, his body unmarked by any of the wear and tear associated with daily labor, his beardless, cherubic visage and opulent clothing a sign of plantation riches, heralding social status as much as signaling the success—and therefore rightness—of the Old South. That kind of presentation harkens back to the aristocratic plantation lifestyles of the 17th and 18th century colonies, when it was, if anything, MORE pronounced. The kind of luxurious appearance and elite manner King exemplified was not uncommon among antebellum aristocrats in cotton country, in fact, flaunting your aristocratic bona fides was cool.

The anti-slavery left, the free soil partisans of the north who were organizing into what would soon be called the Republican Party, had picked up on this. By the time Millard Fillmore—a northerner with pro-slavery sympathies—moved into the White House following President Taylor dying of dysentery in 1850, they had a name for his sort: doughfaces, an obvious allusion to the idle, beardless planter aristocracy.
The best explanation of masculinities of the 19th century and the politics of facial hair I’ve found, is in Adam Goodheart’s amazing book 1861:

It was no accident that Northerners who sympathized with slaveholders were called “doughfaces”: in the American context, beards connoted a certain frank and uncompromising authenticity. Nor was it a coincidence that “Honest Abe” began cultivating his famous beard as he prepared to take over the presidency from “Granny Buck.”⁵

Northern free-soilers began presenting themselves as everything opposed to those they framed as the effete, decadent planter class, or as they referred to them, “the slave party.” They cultivated an image marketed as everything opposite the idle, soft-handed, soft-faced rich Southern aristocrats, they were the candidates of rough-hewn common working men with beards! They [the first decades of Republican Party free soil candidates] were one of the Real ‘Merickens who crawled out of mama and into a log cabin, grew up ridin’ a blue ox and drinking hard cider, and as a man split rails with an axe in one hand while reading law with the other. In the case of Abraham Lincoln, this backstory was kind of true, and his 1860 presidential campaign leveraged that to. the. MAX. The Republican National Convention in Chicago that (unexpectedly) nominated Lincoln for president in 1860 was held in a massive, makeshift wooden “wigwam”—Chicago’s fire marshall didn’t get any sleep that week—and the crowd badgered Honest Abe to tell the convention his “clearing the land with an axe” story…again. The Fall campaign was almost singularly about the image of Lincoln “the rail-splitter,” and was used non-stop; I’m sure some folks didn’t even know his name, just knew “rail-splitter.” To focus on the frontiersmen ethos and related manliness, and all the subtle messages within that, while not mentioning free soil doctrine, abolition, or any of the issues currently boiling over was a brilliant stroke of campaigning genius, and stands out in political history.

Adam Goodheart’s 1861: The Civil War Awakening is the best, most quick-to-understand work of social history I’ve read to date, delving into what Americans lives were really like on the eve of the Civil War. It goes into the BIZARRE social arrangements of 1861 Washington, DC, where free blacks owned slaves, and in Goodheart’s descriptions, those slaves were better off than much of DC’s free black population, who were largely stuck below-subsistence-level in squalid shantytowns, and with no “owner” to vouch for them, they were “undocumented” in a way—my term—and had no real rights to move around in public spaces and were subjected to frequent stops and harassment by police. 1861 has a whole chapter on young James Garfield’s doings at the time, and the way passions were channeled into male friendships in his social circle since expressing emotions was quite circumscribed where women were concerned. I’d like to explore that more in another post.

What I discovered by looking back at William R. King vs. early Republican campaigns—and it’s exciting when you figure something out for the first time—is that the North and South have not only undergone a political transformation, there’s been a cultural inversion alongside it. First, the obvious political inversion. Look at the electoral map following Abraham Lincoln’s 1860 presidential run. The liberal “free soil” north is ruby red, Republican. The South, pro-slavery, is the Democratic Party “solid south,” and with the exception of the fracturing of the Democrats behind several Southern candidates in 1860, then a period of Republican military rule and Republican-elections, “Reconstruction,” the solid Democratic south stays together a remarkably long time, from Andrew Jackson to like… John Kennedy’s run in 1960… Kennedy loses significant votes to Nixon in the Deep South, then in 1972 ALL Southern states peel off—a huge change from the results of the ’68 presidential election just four years before, when the solid south voted for the Dem, Humphrey, and the former-Dem-then-Dem-again, George Wallace—and REALLY break in Nixon’s favor, what with his infamous “southern strategy” and a Dem challenger perceived as wimpy. ’72 clinched the end of realignment, sealed the deal. Ever since, the South has been Republican red, with Dixiecrats like Strom Thurmond and ex-Wallace supporters defecting to the GOP in droves and Lincoln’s states up north increasingly leaning Democratic; it’s a total inversion!

What I’ve realized is, it’s also a North-South inversion of the culture of masculinity. In short, northerners are framed as effete, wimpy, decadent, out-of-touch elites today, similar to the way northerners caricatured southerners in the first decades of Whig and Republican campaigns (1840-1870ish). Now, it’s southerners that seem to treasure uber-rigid common man masculinity, and William Rufus deVane King couldn’t get elected dog catcher in today’s Alabama; despite his great wealth, I doubt he could find a place in Alabama public life due to his…different gender presentation. Southerners of today expect a working man to run for office, someone manly and “like us,” the opposite of William R. King. Thomas Frank explored today’s Republican “backlash” against “elites” in his book What’s The Matter With Kansas. This “backlash” is far more determinative than people realize, and deserves much more examination.

John Kerry got the brunt of this backlash in the 2004 campaign, with Karl Rove using the words “effete, elite Massachusetts liberal!” every day. Kerry got Buchanan’ed! Today’s Republicans are as aware of Americans’ deep-seated resentment of “the idle rich” as their northern founders were!
John Kennedy did a modern version of the “Hard Cider Campaign” in 1960; you could call it the “high-ball glass and scotch campaign.” It worked. The “effete, elite Massachusetts liberal!” line was certainly attempted against Kennedy, but for the most part it failed to stick, and he won a majority of working class voters and held the bulk of the South. Kerry failed…failed BADLY to counter the “effete, wimpy, decadent, out-of-touch” frame employed against him. Maybe John Kerry should’ve tried some form of the Kennedy strategy. Maybe he should have gone full Abe, grown a beard and had the press film him chopping firewood.

What he tried instead, photos and videos of him “huntin” backfired terribly, making him look even more phony and out of touch.

Cartoon by Nick: 2004 Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry, huntin…he says “I too enjoy leisure time practicing as a huntist!”

Unfortunately, image matters and always has mattered in American politics. Today, it matters disproportionately, and 21st century Democratic candidates like John Kerry have been awful at it. He was completely unable to fight back against the opponent’s framing him as an elite, decadent aristocrat, just as King and Buchanan and other antebellum southern gentlemen were caricatured.

Southern politics and southern masculinity has shifted dramatically, and I wonder if we haven’t lost something important. I wonder if becoming much more rigid in gender expectations isn’t narrowing what’s possible in political life, excluding not just potential 21st century William Rufus Kings, but ANYONE who doesn’t look like a square, iron-jawed working man. We’ve narrowed potential in public life, and I think that’s always bad.

Nick

Footnotes

1. Clay “believed the Globe to be an infamous paper, and its chief editor an infamous man.” King responded that Blair’s character would “compare gloriously” to that of Clay. The Kentucky senator jumped to his feet and shouted, “That is false, it is a slanderous base and cowardly declaration and the senator knows it to be so.” King answered ominously, “Mr. President, I have no reply to make—none whatever. But Mr. Clay deserves a response.” King then wrote out a challenge to a duel and had another senator deliver it to Clay, who belatedly realized what trouble his hasty words had unleashed. As Clay and King selected seconds and prepared for the imminent encounter, the Senate sergeant at arms arrested both men and turned them over to a civil authority. Clay posted a five-thousand-dollar bond as assurance that he would keep the peace, “and particularly towards William R. King.” Each wanted the matter behind him, but King insisted on “an unequivocal apology.” On March 14, 1841, Clay apologized…
Senate Historical Office. “William Rufus King, 13th Vice President (1853).” Senate.gov. (accessed May 6, 2013).
2. p. 189: Hernandez, David. Broken Face in the Mirror: Crooks and Fallen Stars That Look Very Much Like Us. Dorrance Publishing, 2010. http://books.google.com/books?id=OJ-0nNPAisgC&pg=PA189 (accessed May 6, 2013).
3. “Vice President King is sometimes confused with [signer of the Constitution in 1787 and Federalist presidential candidate] Senator Rufus King of New York. This confusion with the first King explains the rumors that persist to this day of the latter King’s wearing of ribbons, scarves and powdered wigs long after they were in fashion. Vice President King always wore the contemporary styles of the early-to-mid-1800s and he never wore a wig.” pp 13-14: Stern, Milton. Harriet Lane, America’s First Lady. 2005. http://books.google.com/books?id=5B9ngDFT2vgC&pg=PA14 (accessed May 7, 2013).
4. Rapp, Linda. glbtq: An Encyclopedia of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Culture. Chicago, IL: glbtq, Inc., 2004. http://www.glbtq.com/social-sciences/buchanan_j,2.html (accessed May 6, 2013).
5. p. 113: Goodheart, Adam. 1861: The Civil War Awakening. New York, NY: Vintage Books, 2011. http://books.google.com/books?id=bCPbnsUPhB0C&pg=PA113

The Great Mosque’s famous minaret, rebuilt to a towering height in the 11th century following damaging Mongol invasions, is lost completely.

The work of the Islamic Golden Age getting torn down by infighting and fratricidal war… seems more than a little symbolic.

This portion of Crash Course World History #14 covers the achievements of the Islamic Golden Age really well. The intellectual achievements of the Abassids included basically inventing modern medicine and mathematics, and their preservation of the texts of the greatest Greek, Roman, and Indian thinkers and reintroduction of these to Mediterranean Europe… would trigger the Renaissance.
It’s ironic that the Muslim thinkers that praise the Islamic Golden Age the most, touting its superiority over Europeans of the same period (middle ages) and calling for a return to the Caliphate and so forth, writers like Sayyid Qutb¹, are the same guys spurring the jihadists and the radicalization that is literally bombing Golden Age monuments to dust. The newest, most extremist branches of Salafi Islam have been notorious for destroying great cultural treasures, like the Buddhas of Bamiyan, or more recently destroying some of the sacred sites of Timbuktu, taking apart certain Islamic Golden Age shrines and masoleums with axes and shovels.

I have a lot of old content commenting on the Middle East in historical context, click the Middle East tag to access it.

There will be more new history content here—in-depth explorations of U.S. political history—with the Real Policy Differences video series. Here’s a sneak peek of some of the cartooning I’ve done for the series.

Stay tuned!

Nick

1. Lawrence Wright’s Pulitzer-winning book The Looming Tower covers the roots of the modern jihadist movement and al-Qaeda, with a detailed chapter on Sayyid Qutb, the founding father of the Egyptian jihadist movement. Wright chronicles Qutb’s time in the United States, where he became radicalized observing decadent 1950s New York City, and the women of Colorado.

Cartoon of a crying mitochondrion (painted by Nick). Technically a mitochondrion (singular) but he is representing the sadness of all 1000-2000 mitochondria per cell in my body

The United Mitochondrial Disease Foundation—UMDF, which didn’t exist until 1996—says there’s a lot of cases added each year, with “1,000 to 4,000 children in the United states born with a mitochondrial disease” annually. As one of my favorite mito mom bloggers put it, it feels like an epidemic. I’d agree, rates of mitochondrial disease are up, and I think environmental factors are to blame…the fact that we pump pollutants and radiation into the natural world without knowing the potential mito-toxic consequences, and then we eat, drink and breathe from the natural world, and the external becomes the internal as those food materials become the matter you’re made of, the building blocks of the human. But the causes of the mutations that trigger mitochondrial disease understandably take a back seat for people like me and families who’re in daily coping-and-survival mode.

I’ve been following some of the mito blogs, and I am awed at how parents and loved ones of mito children (kids similar to me as a kid) are using the web to support each other. I wish this had been available for me and my mom when I was a kid (back in the 1980s and early ’90s).

As a survivor of childhood mito, I’d really like to share what I know, help others avoid some of what I’ve suffered, be a knowledgable listener and advisor among the mito bloggers, though I know I don’t exactly fit in with the mom blogs. I really want to help, and when I see kids going through what I went through, the BiPap, the chronic pain—which is still a constant battle for me—I really want to talk to, help, that family. And I want to help build a network of mito-activists and mito-knowledge to help those of us dealing with these diseases, who are too often treated horribly by the medical-industrial-complex, like anyone with complex medical needs that are difficult for them to understand. We need a veritable army of people behind us just to survive the system. I’m not sure exactly how to get such a network off the ground. But paired with the experience and knowledge mito bloggers have collectively, such a community could be a game changer.

Speaking of mito knowledge, there’s been controversy recently about the study published in Nature Medicine that proved a link between L-carnitine and arteriosclerosis, gunk in your arteries that causes heart attacks and stroke. Since the study focused on giving L-carnitine to mice with normal microbiota, normal gut processes and digestion, those of us taking daily L-carnitine supplements to treat a mitochondrial disease wonder how this effects us, if at all. With its emphasis on red meat (the most carnitine-rich part of the American diet), the study has been covered heavily all over the mainstream news channels—THIS from CBS News is a representative sample—with a lot of pics of red meat and beef B-roll producers love. When I think of this study, I don’t think of beef, I think of research residents giving mice micro-baby bottles of liquid L-carnitine in their cute mouse mouths, but that’s just me.

Because of this high-profile news and the—not necessarily invalid—concerns about arteriosclerosis, I’m being pushed to discontinue my L-carnitine supplements. The UMDF recently issued a statement urging caution. Because of the specifics of my mito journey, I’m reluctant to drop the carnitine.

I first started taking carnitine through Dr. Zellwegger’s clinical trial for the FDA’s safety and effectiveness human trials 1984-1985, via University of South Alabama, before carnitine was on the market. Literally I’m getting carnitine in my baby bottle. Then we couldn’t get carnitine when the trials ended.
Then in September 1991, when I was 9, I had what I call a “mito collapse” immediately following back surgery and an intense infection at the surgical site. The thin muscle I had was gone in less than a week, the opposite of “slow progression.” I went into a tailspin, ileus, dismotility and malabsorption so extreme that I was put on TPN. All your classic mito symptoms, at least that’s how Mom and I perceived it at the time. It makes sense that, in an inborn error of metabolism, the digestive system—where the heavy lifting of metabolism occurs—would be greatly effected, and BOY was it during this time. My digestive system grinding to a halt, the futile cramping, it was the most horrific thing I had experienced up to that point. For a few months, all I could keep down by mouth was the peach-flavored version of this very specific carbonated water, something like this.
Fortunately, carnitine was on the market, and some time very close to the day I began using the BiPap, I was started on the L-carnitine. Post-levocarnitine, the digestion problems ceased, and I haven’t had any ileus or needed TPN since that time. The supplements seemed to stop the free fall.
Ileus and dismotility haven’t been a problem since, nor has there been another “mito collapse,” though there is pretty much nothing left to lose in terms of muscle, and I have been 24/7 vent-dependent for almost 20 years, 22 years if we count the BiPap. It’s unlikely I could survive another “mito collapse.”

So I’m scared to go off carnitine… but never say never. I would be willing if it’s part of an audit of my entire “mito cocktail”—which since 1996 or thereabouts has been Levocarnitine, B2 and CoQ10—in totality, with other things changed, added, a systematic approach.

Each of our journeys with mitochondrial diseases are different, certainly none are easy, and many days it feels impossible. I really hope we can communicate more, network more, putting our knowledge together and gaining strength in numbers. Please comment below or on Facebook or Twitter.

In mitochondrial solidarity,

Nick

What’s Chained CPI?
Congressman Ellison explains.

Rep. Ellison recorded this video in December. If he were recording today, he’d mention that PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA is the driving force behind Chained CPI, despite its intense unpopularity on all sides. This is a video of Rep. Greg Walden, chairman of the National Republican Campaign Committee, calling Chained CPI a “Shocking Attack On Seniors.”

The AARP is organizing against this, and the Republicans are going to use this against President Obama in the 24/7 campaign season for sure (and that’s already begun).

Chained CPI is so awful because it imposes costs on those who can least afford it, doesn’t bridge yawning budget gaps, and reinforces the false right-wing “out of control entitlements” talking point. In fairness to conservatives, they’re opposing Chained CPI, and right now the only people pushing this are from a certain, grotesque strand of neoliberalism…. Barack Obama is making this draconian plan the centerpiece of his 2014 budget proposal, David Axelrod defends it with ease on TV, and founding director of the Congressional Budget Office Alice Rivlin calls it “absolutely necessary.”

The disability community has to unite on this, and fight back with the full-throated message that we’ve earned Social Security, it isn’t an entitlement! The entire “social insurance” concept is that it’s an earned benefit. With every paycheck, a worker pays into Social Security, pays pays pays pays pays, and when they retire they receive that earned benefit. The earned benefit usually amounts to around $14,000 a year, meager, well beneath the poverty line, and that is what neoliberals want chained down as an “out of control entitlement.”

“We’re not going to have the White House forever, folks. If he doesn’t do this, Paul Ryan is going to do it for us in a few years,” said a longtime Obama aide…

This kind of thinking, “give me your lunch money now, or the big bully down the hall will take it and you won’t like how he does it” from the White House is disturbing, and a bad omen (the correct answer is “no, I’d prefer the dignity of a public fight with the enemy to a silent surrender to a quisling”).

Unless we can create a groundswell of opposition to chains and chainsaw policies, the future for the elderly and disabled is indeed bleak.

The oddball lefty blog Crooks & Liars has the best, most comprehensive sources and lib commentary on Chained CPI that I’ve seen in the leftosphere so far. Hat tip to them.

Nick

As the new About page says:

This blog is a safe space, where I highlight unreported and under-reported issues effecting people with disabilities and other underrepresented groups and the U.S. as a whole.

I really want to give underreported and unreported stories some space. That is what I think the blogosphere should be, a megaphone for the people the news media ignore.

Under racism, in the past I’ve spotlighted the legacy of slavery and the Capitol building, an anti-Latino death squad who were ignored by the media even after killing a family, and more.

Recently, comments on C-SPAN’s BookTV sparked my interest, because Appellate Judge Frank Easterbrook said something very revealing. He talked about how he and then-solicitor general Robert Bork crafted the legal reasoning that now is the dominant precedent that prohibits or stifles desegregation across America. And no one noticed. Segregation and the laws around it deserve more discussion.

This is a clip I made of Judge Easterbrook’s comments, which reveal a history few know about (c-spanvideo.org allows you to make your own clips now!) During a discussion of Robert Bork’s last, posthumously published book “Saving Justice,” Frank Easterbrook reveals how he and Robert Bork’s reasoning that school segregation “by personal choice” is not a violation, though so inflammatory in the ’70s the DOJ ordered it shredded, is now the opinion affirmed by the Supreme Court.

Click here to see the clip (which, for some reason isn’t embeddable).

Even Robert Bork thought the anti-busing opinion should be shredded at the time; according to Judge Easterbrook, Bork was worried it would empower violent bigots in the ongoing Boston busing conflict.

Somehow, this opinion was unearthed from the bowels of hell and embraced by the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court has again and again affirmed this radical-right reasoning that school segregation doesn’t hurt anyone and is just fine as long as the state isn’t forcing it and it’s “segregation by private choice.”

The nail in the coffin for desegregation seemed to come from Bork and Easterbrook’s brief.

With my own eyes, I’ve seen the retrenchment of segregation in the South. My hometown of Mobile, Alabama was once a good example of relative-racial harmony; Mobile boasts it was the only major city in the Deep South never to suffer race riots. Leaders on both sides of this peaceful, heavily Catholic city made negotiation work instead of the conflagration everywhere else. My college, Spring Hill College (“The Jesuit College of the South”) was praised in MLK’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail for being the first university in the Deep South to integrate, in 1954. When the KKK tried to burn a cross (highly blasphemous) on campus in response, students chased them off with rocks and baseball bats, a couple of Jesuit priests in tow. We showed how possible integration could be; we showed that not everybody in the Deep South supported the Klan. (Also, people tend to see the world through the lens of their hometown values and upbringing, and this post gives you insight into mine, where I am coming from).

It’s been sad watching my hometown leave behind their powerful legacy of peaceful desegregation without discussion, following the other Southern cities. Accelerating subsequent to the 1991 Supreme Court ruling Board of Education v. Dowell, which—in a 5-3 decision—lifted integration-busing court orders (Thurgood Marshall, on the verge of retiring, wrote the dissenting opinion) busing has been jettisoned as a relic, and the busing-integrated high school I went to, John Shaw High School, was shuttered.

There’s been a retrenchment of racial segregation throughout the South—and elsewhere too (see this article about Omaha dividing into separate segregated school districts at the request of the black minority). The reasons for re-segregation are complex and difficult to talk about; it’s clear that both communities are fueling this trend. Black communities may dislike sending children on hour-long bus rides, among other things, while white communities may want to wall off their children from the kinds of things going on in the black ghettos (which may or may not be a true perception, because in MY high school, the white kids were the ones dealing drugs).

Some relevant sources:
Justices Rule Mandatory Busing May Go, Even if Races Stay Apart – New York Times 1991 (reported on the announcement of the Board of Education v. Dowell ruling)
Schools Resegregate, Study Finds – New York Times 2003
Fighting School Resegregation – Editorial – NYTimes.com 2003
and a ton more sources are available on the Google

According to a 2003 Harvard study, following the flurry of court rulings against busing, black students were less integrated at the turn of the millennium than in 1970, “a year before the Supreme Court authorized the busing that became a primary way of integrating schools.” These trends have accelerated unabated since 2000. In many of these segregated communities, a kid has a better chance of winning the lottery than meeting a person of different ethnic background than them. It looks as though our broken judiciary will allow entire states to re-segregate, decades of progress down the tubes, because we’ve made the democratic choice for that kind of society. And in a democracy we should be able to choose that; but let’s not be blind to the destructive potential of segregation: the damage to the children socially and emotionally, the distancing of racial communities, the retrenchment of a U.S. caste system. A growing body of social science research is reaching the conclusion that school desegregation should get some credit for the drop in urban crime in the ’90s and ’00s, and that the rise in crime in recent years can be partly blamed on re-segregation (Source: Slate: Resegregation has led to a spike in violent crime).
We need to be honest about the prejudice, the pre-judging we’re all capable of, and try and do what’s right. Separate but equal can never be equal, and invites a myriad of problems.

My younger brother Jamie, who’s also on a vent, said of visiting one high school, “I felt like the little white chunk no one wants at the bottom of the can o’ pork ‘n beans.”
That isn’t good, but it is the reality in the 2000s and 2010s….

Mobile has its first black mayor now, and peace and negotiation is still the order of the day for the most part, but in places like Atlanta and New Orleans the intensifying of segregation has communities on both sides simmering with racial tension. Racial violence in Atlanta isn’t yet “only of interest to historians.” Economic and social segregation in New Orleans, not to mention the strict geographic segregation—so extreme you wouldn’t believe it—has racial discord at all time highs. Hurricane Katrina (which I barely survived in Mobile) not only devastated New Orleans bow to stern, it opened up a LOT of old wounds. Surprisingly virulent racist memes have come back, big time; too often, Louisiana whites have welcomed that stuff back with open arms.

Libertarians like Ron Paul are right to point out that laws alone can’t turn hearts and minds around, and that’s an important point, but laws provide enforcement of equal opportunity against the worst injustices. Laws that have dis-empowered the most egregious offenders, especially vis a vis voting rights and equality under the law, have driven most of the progress we’ve seen.
Bork and Easterbrook’s brief provide a window into how we got to where we are. And where we are, and the legal opinions behind it, deserve re-examination.

Nick

This video, featuring Sarah, and Jordan of the 21 disabled campaign, two college students grappling with the consequences or future consequences of the 21 cut-off and other hardships foisted on them by short-sighted Medicaid bureaucrats, will wake you up to the continuing crisis that aging out at 21 is right now, in 2013.

In this video ^ Jordan mentioned her first 21 disabled video: you can see that original 21 disabled video here that went viral and really made a difference, pressing Florida Medicaid into giving Jordan a reprieve until graduation.
I really admire how Jordan, with so little time remaining on the clock—just a few months—when she found out the 21 cut-off existed and found herself barreling toward the 21 cliff, was able to fight back effectively and win. A big part of her success was her savvy with social media, maximizing Facebook, Twitter and WordPress to get her YouTube video in front of 30,000 people in a matter of days. Neither YouTube, Facebook, Twitter or WordPress existed during “Nick’s Crusade” (March 2001-February 2003) but now that these social media tools ARE available, I hope me + the disability community writ large can leverage them effectively enough to make the bulk of internet users aware of the 21 cut-off, and then build the support necessary to end “aging out” of in-home care in all 50 states!

Sarah, who talks about her experiences first in the newest video, has no reprieve from the 21 cut-off on the horizon. She describes a situation of fighting tooth and nail to get services, waiting until age 18 to finally get some desperately needed services and supports so she could live out her college dreams, then upon arrival at the university dorms was told she would have to go home, for the excuse I’ve seen used again and again to oppress and exclude us, “liability reasons.” Sarah didn’t leave and didn’t give up, and that alone shows more fortitude than most could fathom. And now she is looking ahead at the 21 cliff, facing the prospect of the life-sustaining hands-on care that makes college possible for her going away after her 21st birthday.

Such a system as Florida has, that allows you just three years of the care you need to survive—from age 18 to 21—then pulls the rug out from under you mid-semester, is a uniquely cruel system. In fact, there is little else in American life THIS openly cruel in its impact on people with disabilities and their families, and, in my travels, I’ve not seen any other policy that poses as clear a clear and present danger to people with severe disabilities as this 21 cut-off policy does, which is why I’ll never shut up about it. Help me. Don’t let me be the only voice out there on this issue of “aging out” of life-sustaining services and supports! Given the intransigence of Florida Medicaid and the intractable nature of the Florida legislature when it comes to social programs, we will need all hands on deck to gain meaningful change for Sarah!

Awareness of this issue MUST go on the front burner. It is a nationwide problem: Raul Carranza in California, who is on a vent 24/7 like me, was forced out of college at ACLU for his 21st birthday when he no longer qualified as “pediatric” and the state became stingy (go to Raul’s web site for the full story, which is more complex than other cases, but has a very similar root cause).

Let’s do something.

IDEA 1: consider helping me with BLOGSWARM FOR SARAH: End the age 21 cut-off!. If I can get Sarah’s permission, I’d create a hub here on www.nickscrusade.org for a mass movement of blogging about preventing the dream-destroying 21 cut-off from harming Sarah and others, with everyone posting on their blogs on the issue, expressing their unique thoughts, views and ideas, and linking back to the central hub, as was done with past ADAPT Blogswarms and Blogging Against Disablism Day (BADD).
Interested bloggers, please contact me via email at nick @ nickscrusade.org or on Twitter @NickDupree or on Facebook at Nick Dupree

IDEA 2: This goes hand-in-hand with the preceding idea; just MAKE JORDAN AND SARAH’S NEW VIDEO GO VIRAL! Put the video, embedded above, or this nickscrusade.org post with the video in it in front of as many people as possible; Facebook it, tweet it, re-tweet it, email it, reddit it, SHARE IT far and wide! Whether you blog about the video or not, SPREAD IT!

We live in interesting times. Now more than ever, survivors can get involved online and share their stories with the world. It’s an amazing thing that those of us who breathe and/or move with the help of technology can now use other, Internet-based technologies to participate in the world, make our unheard voices heard, give the megaphone of the blogosphere to the unrepresented, make public the pain and oppression that has always been hidden away… but to really be heard over the social media noise, to really maximize online tools and make a difference, WE NEED YOUR HELP! You, the person reading this right now.

With hope,

Nick

I made the above animated vignette to explain how the health insurance exchanges being established under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), online marketplaces for “shopping” for health insurance, roughly, will work. People will begin signing up for health insurance plans on the exchanges October 1st, and those plans will go into effect Jan 1st, 2014. And any credible fact check will tell you, as this one from the Associated Press does, that the tax credits that fuel the exchanges, that subsidy that will make the now-$20,000-a-year bronze plan cost $5,000 for a family of four in one IRS estimate, will be delivered directly to your insurer. You won’t catch a glance of your tax subsidy.

The insurance companies are raising prices through the roof, not only because they’re required to cover much more in terms of minimum health care services, but because they know the government will pay and pay and pay. Thus, sticker shock will put anything but the new-legal-minimum bronze plans out of reach for the vast majority of participants. Pouring cash by the dump truck onto insurance companies is emblematic of our “only in America” health care non-system, and a primary cause of its deterioration.

The dump truck-full of unimaginable, astronomical sums of money won’t come from the sky like in my cartoon, it will come from the IRS. The IRS will be in charge of doling out the tax subsidies, and extracting the fines from those who don’t comply with the individual mandate to buy health insurance. I gave a thorough overview of the individual mandate and subsidized insurance exchanges recently: What Is ObamaCare? 2013-2014: Overview Part 1.

Nick

I want high-speed rail that goes up and down the Eastern United States at 500mph so I can go from NYC to my family in Washington DC and Norfolk.

Imagine the economic benefit HSR could bring to the United States and Canada, if we had two-hour trips from NYC to Toronto or four-hour trips to Montreal or Ottawa! Imagine the ability of West Virginians to zip in an hour to Washington DC for jobs that simply don’t exist in Appalachia! Imagine the life-blood this would be for tech start-ups, when suddenly software engineers and DIY white hat hackers can whoosh in from Quebec to Boston or NYC for in-person collaboration! Imagine people able to work in New York but live in relatively-inexpensive Cleveland. That kind of economic game-changer is necessity. That kind of hope is a necessity, and President Obama really tapped into that…

…and then did absolutely nothing.

That’s right, nearly three years after the sweeping promises about Chinese-style bullet trains, not a single yard of HSR has been put down. We didn’t get the high-speed bus system The Onion proffered as a post-austerity alternative either.

The below AC 360 segment, “Keeping Them Honest,” explains where the billions in funding Congress appropriated for high-speed rail went. It all went to slow rail. As is also true of the news stories that I share on Twitter, I don’t always agree with everything in a given article I post, and in the case of this “Keeping Them Honest” segment, I don’t agree with CNN reporter Drew Griffin that allocating federal funding to make extant Amtrak routes less slow is “a boondoggle,” nor is the general thrust of the report that the entire thing is a shameful waste of taxpayer dollars representative of my point of view. I know people who use that very Vermont route, and those routes need funding too. But Drew Griffin is RIGHT that the Obama Administration and President Obama himself promised Americans high-speed rail, on camera, numerous times, and so far it’s a promise they’ve not kept; the only project the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) allotted HSR funding for that can actually be construed as high-speed rail, is the California High-Speed Rail Authority (CHSRA) project to connect San Francisco to Los Angeles with a one-way travel time of at least 2 hours and 40 minutes, and it’s been bogged down with NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) lawsuits and red tape so severely that not a single track has been laid. He’s RIGHT to ask, “you’ve promised us bullet trains like the Europeans and Japanese have had since the 1980s; where’s the high-speed rail?” Why can’t we have nice things?

This high-profile failure to deliver public transportation technology that Americans need should trigger much more discussion. Why is the executive branch unable to deliver on its promises, even after Congress appropriated the funding necessary? We need to discuss the general direction here, because we’re headed for eight years of Democrats running the executive branch and still our trains are stuck at 1950s speeds, we have a 1950s power grid, and our existing transportation infrastructure (rail, roads, highways, bridges, airports, ports) got a D+ for 2013 from the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). At least one of America’s bridges may crumble this year and lead to a mass casualty event. It feels like MALAISE.

The California High-Speed Rail Authority (CHSRA) is now evidently so chastened by ridiculous NIMBY lawsuits arguing the deleterious effects of high-speed trains on “aesthetics,” that they’ve begun to move forward with a pared down, slow-speed rail plan that they promise is only temporary (the “blended plan,” they call it). The founder and former head of CHSRA has now come out against this plan, since it doesn’t meet the Prop 1A ballot initiative’s requirements for true high-speed rail. If truly rapid transit for the masses, and all its social and economic benefits, can be thwarted long-term by some wanker micro-minority concerned about—not environmental impact, since rail reduces pollution vs. cars and buses—aesthetic impact alone, then that says something very distressing about where we are headed.

I don’t usually blog about transportation, but I want this space to showcase writing about the unreported and under-reported stories, amplify the voices of the unrepresented, and this issue hasn’t gotten a third of the coverage and discussion it warrants. Our leaders make sweeping, epic promises and too often the media doesn’t follow up in any sustained way. I do wish the private sector would lay high-speed rail and bring in the newest Japanese bullet trains, a mega corporation would definitely get more media discussion than the CHSRA, but they would likely give up after a week of the BS posed by regulatory hurdles, intractable NIMBYites, and the red tape nightmare of building across multiple state and county jurisdictions.
We have to put it out there to the people, over and over again, that we need current technology for high-speed rail, we need truly rapid transit, widely available and accessible, for many reasons, but freedom of movement for the poor and disabled populations who have the greatest difficulty accessing transportation at the top of the list.

Nick

It’s like 12-step programs say, “the first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem.”

So just getting people to understand that people with disabilities exist and admit that there are multiple, severe problems with the systems we rely on to survive—to the point we cannot survive in too many cases—just getting that understanding is a major hurdle. There’s this widespread false belief that people like me are “taken care of” and don’t need community help and involvement, when we do more than ever! The institutional bias is a huge problem. Austerity is a huge problem. I need people involved, I need volunteers, and the need for assistance and advocacy that I and the disability community as a whole NEED is only increasing as austerity budgets reduce the government support we’re receiving.

We, the grassroots activists, must educate the state governors and Medicaid commissioners who are running the programs and the legislators who are supposed to oversee them as to the real problems; it’s a bizarre psychedelic upside down situation where the insiders have little knowledge of the most egregious unintended consequences their programs create. We have fallen through the looking glass, and the captains don’t notice that their ships have holes in them. The few grassroots activists who see and come to understand how Medicaid programs in their state really work after they’re been through the special interest gauntlet and legislative sausage machine end up feeling like Cassandra, the Greek mythological prophetess who predicted doom and destruction and a Trojan horse was coming, was disbelieved, and was right. It’s hard to be the one person interrupting the party to point out the horrible truths.

The captains insist their hole-y fleet is just fine; “we’re not taking on water, and wouldn’t you be better off thinking positive and being grateful for what we have?” When optimism is preached by “see no evil, hear no evil” wind-up monkey leadership, it can actually be quite harmful. Sometimes politicians and CEOs employ an almost Maoist forced optimism to squelch the legitimate grievances of individuals. In the first few months of my campaign, Nick’s Crusade, the majority of the signs were discouraging. I wasn’t even sure that I could convince people that there was a problem. I kept going because I couldn’t do otherwise.

In this lecture, Barbara Ehrenreich talks about this forced optimism, its use as a tool of social control in authoritarian societies, its destructive consequences.

This is the second part of a two-part blog post: click here for Part 1

In the 2013-2014 period, states must decide whether to opt-in or opt-out of the “Medicaid expansion.”

Though it pains me deeply that the Affordable Care Act doesn’t fix any of the problems within Medicaid, even the most egregious, lethal flaws, I do understand how important the Medicaid expansion is, especially in the Southern states. The Medicaid expansion expands the number of people covered by raising the income threshold for eligibility. That means that families who are severely impoverished, making like $12,000 a year, can now qualify for Medicaid in places they couldn’t previously. like Florida. I know that it is hard to believe, but many states, especially in the Deep South, put their Medicaid eligibility thresholds ridiculously low; in Alabama, for example, you can’t qualify for Medicaid unless you make under $251 a month (or thereabouts, it may have changed slightly since I left the state). That means that Alabama Medicaid excludes the working poor, the bulk of all impoverished Alabamians unless they’re children or too disabled to work at all, leaving an enormous swath of Alabamians uninsured and bankrupting the hospitals who provide a great deal of “indigent care.” In Alabama, several rural hospitals have had to close following Medicaid budget cuts that came down from Montgomery, because their patients are mostly not covered, and they’re very dependent on the Medicaid reimbursements they can get for caring for the few rural people who are covered. A recent study published in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that prior Medicaid expansions led to a fall in mortality rates; in other words, expanding Medicaid saves lives.

Unfortunately, the states who need the Medicaid expansion the most, i.e. Alabama, are the ones refusing the expansion.

Medicaid works through matching funds, or FMAP (Federal Medical Assistance Percentage) that go toward each state’s Medicaid program. The FMAP varies based on the income of the state… here’s a cartoon I made to explain Medicaid funding:

Click to enlarge.

As you can see, the Medicaid expansion increases the number of eligibles, and grants states enhanced FMAP to cover almost all of the costs. But the Administration and Congress have given states enhanced match before, with the “stimulus” bill, the Recovery Act of 2009 (more about this round of enhanced matching). The news media is (per usual) misleading the public. Everywhere I’m seeing print headlines, radio segments and TV talking heads saying, without nuance, that governors opting-in to the Medicaid expansion are “accepting ObamaCare.”

This reddit headline, highlighted on the Brian Lehrer Show recently, is unfortunately typical of the dominant narrative around the Medicaid expansion:

Just because this Medicaid expansion is tucked into an amendment of the Affordable Care Act doesn’t mean you’re “accepting ObamaCare” by participating in it. I agree with Chris Christie on almost nothing, but it is important to be fair to everyone. Christie isn’t flip-flopping on ObamaCare, which I explained in Part 1 is all about subsidized private insurance exchanges, he is participating in Medicaid—a state-federal partnership signed into law alongside Medicare by President Lyndon Johnson in 1965—and he’s taking the enhanced match to pay for almost all the tab new eligibles will incur.

If we’d stop mislabeling governors as “flip-flopping,” maybe more red states would opt-in to the Medicaid expansion; the Southern states need this assistance the most desperately, but are the least likely to take the Administration up on its offer.

Florida Governor Rick Scott (R – Columbia Hospital Corporation) is, so far, the only Southern governor to show any openness to the expansion. Scott’s change of heart, which since he explicitly denounced the Medicaid expansion, was really a flip-flop, is discussed here on PBS. This is one of the least awful talking head segments I have found, though its failure to distinguish Medicaid and ObamaCare clearly enough may further contribute to the confusion:

Nick

Previously: What Is ObamaCare? 2013-2014: Overview Part 1 (Insurance Subsidies)

Next: The Changing Use of Medicaid Waivers, For Evil

Oh man, I am so frustrated that people misunderstand ObamaCare—the Affordable Care Act (ACA)—and continually frame it as something it’s not. They frame it as some sort of universal health care coverage, or as some vague new program that replaces Medicare and Medicaid, or at least fixes their most egregious problems (Medicaid’s age 21 cut-off, for example). None of the above are true. I’m writing a book, a memoir of my fight against Alabama Medicaid’s age 21 cut off and a book-length exploration of the plight of young vent-dependent people in general, and if you’re wondering how ObamaCare changes things vis a vis Medicaid, it doesn’t. The Affordable Care Act expands Medicaid eligibility, but doesn’t change the underlying rules and regulations, or fill its most egregious gaps. So there’s very little about ObamaCare in my book; it just isn’t all that relevant for those of us with severe disabilities who have to rely on Medicaid and Medicare.

What is ObamaCare?

The public needs to ask this over and over again, until the wrong assumptions dissipate. Congress never debated universal health care coverage. When Congress debated the Affordable Care Act, they were debating a proposal nearly identical to a bill titled the “Health Equity and Access Reform Today Act” (HEART Act) which was introduced by Senate Republicans in 1993 as the conservative alternative to Bill Clinton’s health care legislation (which focused on an employer mandate to provide health insurance). The crux of the conservative proposal was essentially, “we want universal health care too, but through private insurance, and we’ll do that through an individual mandate; every American will have health insurance coverage.” The individual mandate means that the government requires individual citizens to have insurance.

The mandate made its political début in a 1989 Heritage Foundation brief titled “Assuring Affordable Health Care for All Americans,” as a counterpoint to the single-payer system and the employer mandate, which were favored in Democratic circles. In the brief, Stuart Butler, the foundation’s health-care expert, argued, “Many states now require passengers in automobiles to wear seat-belts for their own protection. Many others require anybody driving a car to have liability insurance. But neither the federal government nor any state requires all households to protect themselves from the potentially catastrophic costs of a serious accident or illness. Under the Heritage plan, there would be such a requirement.” The mandate made its first legislative appearance in 1993, in the Health Equity and Access Reform Today Act—the Republicans’ alternative to President Clinton’s health-reform bill—which was sponsored by John Chafee, of Rhode Island, and co-sponsored by eighteen Republicans, including Bob Dole, who was then the Senate Minority Leader.

Source: Why Republicans Oppose the Individual Health-Care Mandate : The New Yorker

By 2009, the debate had turned upside down, with Democrats supporting the Heritage Foundation‘s individual mandate as the core of the proposed Affordable Care Act, and the Republicans unanimously against the individual mandate. Inexplicably, Democrats have moved to the right and embraced the rightist policies of the past—Barack Obama has positioned himself as a George H. W. Bush-type of moderate conservative president, a dramatic break from prior black presidential candidates like Shirley Chisholm and Jesse Jackson—and Republicans have turned against their own policies after supporting them for two decades. It’s bizarro world!

The costs of the Affordable Care Act. almost all of the costs, come from the individual mandate and the associated subsidies. The core of ObamaCare, the nut meat, is the system of subsidized health insurance exchanges. The main idea is that “health insurance is unaffordable and we’ll fix that by adding subsidies that make insurance affordable, and for the poor we will expand Medicaid eligibility, then most everyone will have coverage.” Affordable Care Act proponents called this “achieving universality” by tweaking multiple pieces of the system, like a piecemeal universal health care. This rang hollow even then; it didn’t even sound like the proponents believed their own rhetoric. I didn’t buy the claims that we’d “get to universality” any more than the incredible claims about health care providers voluntarily holding down prices as part of the ObamaCare grand bargain.

The debate in Congress over the Affordable Care Act primarily revolved around the individual mandate, the potential costs and red tape nightmares involved, and, inexplicably, abortion. Though the ACA includes a firewall between its subsidies and abortion, there aren’t any abortion-funding provisions in the bill, and the legislation is not intended to address abortion at all, still, the debate centered on abortion to an unexpected degree, in the House of Representatives especially. President Obama signed Executive Order 13535 to reinforce the Hyde Amendment’s prohibitions on federal funding for abortion as related to the ACA.

During the 2008 Democratic primary, Hillary Clinton was for the individual mandate and Barack Obama was against it. I agreed with that version of Obama. The idea of requiring citizens to buy a defective product (health insurance scams) from select corporations is terrifying. The U.S. Supreme Court was asked to rule on the question of whether the federal government can require buying insurance and fine citizens for not acting, for non-activity. The court gave the individual mandate a thumbs up, as long as the fine is implemented as a tax. I think that this sets a horrible precedent in terms of the fusion of corporation and state. The Obama Administration, and future administrations, will decide which health insurance plans meet Affordable Care Act standards and are allowed into the insurance exchanges, and as we already have seen, for example with ACA requirements being waived for the most powerful companies, how corrupt that process can be.

In 2013-2014 the main provisions of ObamaCare, the subsidized health insurance exchanges—some, like New York’s, will be state-run, but where governors have refused to set up exchanges, for example Alabama, there will be federal-run exchanges—will go into effect, along with the individual mandate. Right now, only two percent of health insurance plans meet the minimum coverage requirements to be sold on the exchanges. We’ll see how things change as the requirements kick in and the exchanges come online (literally, the exchanges will be online marketplaces). Expect to see more than a few kerfuffles over the individual mandate penalty fines, plus some serious sticker shock—the cheapest type of plan under the ACA is a “bronze plan,” and according to an IRS estimate, bronze family plans for 4 and 5 person families are assumed to cost $20,000 a year in 2016—though it seems the exchanges’ subsidies may pay for the bulk of the exorbitant costs. I don’t know that pouring subsidies in won’t just incentivize insurers to keep raising prices. Removing the downward pressure on prices consumers exert when they can’t afford premium hikes, the feds saying “no matter how bad you gouge, we’ll pay it” seems INSANE to me, like something that would only make sense to an industry lobbyist.

Political cartoon by Nick, “Obama’s Faustian Bargain”

Massive subsidies that only increase are not a positive, in my view. Neither are subsidies to the health insurance companies amid an abusive dynamic “please stop killing children with preexisting conditions! Here, take $500 billion, just stop hurting us!” a positive; they’re actually the worst possible approach to this problem. And anyone who thinks abusive practices like the cruelty against those of us with preexisting conditions will end, you’re naive; new abuses and new loopholes to get old abuses through will appear on day 1. Awful unintended consequences are already arriving. The entire model desperately needs replacement.

Too often, health insurance is a scam. You pay in enormous sums each month just so the insurance company can deny you care in your hour of need. It’s essentially a very sophisticated, legal way to mug you each month. And when you subsidize something, you get more of it…

What is ObamaCare? it’s predominately a requirement to buy health insurance from select corporations with fines for disobedience, plus enormous subsidies for those selected corporations.

Next, in Part 2: the Supreme Court ruled that the “Medicaid expansion” provisions of the ACA must be voluntary for states. This has meant decision time for all 50 state governors across the country, but opting-in to the Medicaid expansion ISN’T “accepting ObamaCare.”

When I was little, Chris was the bigger kid, both in age (four years older) and heft (kids with Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy—DMD, which I don’t have—tend to be heavy, seeming to keep their baby fat, plus, until the preteen years). He was the poster child for the Mobile MDA (Muscular Dystrophy Association). I’ve gone in-depth on this blog about what it was like being in the Mobile MDA in the 1980s before. There was really a sense that “I want to be involved in the MDA, I want my kids to be involved, and raise money for the MDA, so then when my child is older and in full decline and we need all the help we can get, the resources will be there.” Parent involvement in the MDA really was seen as an investment in your children’s future, so the feeling of betrayal was intense when the MDA of Mobile (transformed and unrecognizable as the community-engaged organization it was in 1980s) didn’t help Chris in his fight for survival or even note his death.

Chris and I really became friends as young adults, when he would hang out in my chat room (Disabled Teens Support Group) that I had set up as a safe space for people like us to share the unique challenges facing young people with disabilities. I ran the group on the Delphi Forums site, which was a very, very Web 1.0 platform that you could run chat rooms and message boards on. It was a clunky, antiquated tool, even at the time, and perhaps some of the language (“Disabled Teens”) was antiquated too, but we got a lot out of it. Chris and I shared a deep context of what it means to be a young, vent-dependent man in South Alabama, the very real challenges, threats, and pain involved, and a lot of those basics could go unsaid; that, in-and-of-itself, was very freeing. He was also the only other vent-dependent friend I had outside the home that was close enough (South Mobile) to see in person. I was at one of his birthday parties; an old guy in the neighborhood called the police about the loud rock music.

Chris had a mohawk, so dark red it was almost black. He loved metal. Especially metal performed by scantily-clad women. For him, you’re either 100% extreme, balls out, hardcore, or you’re wimpy (though he used much harsher terms than wimpy). So, he tended to see me as soft and decidedly un-metal, though he developed a deep respect for my work overturning Alabama Medicaid’s age 21 cut-off, or as he put it, “kicking ass.”

Chris, with his mohawk and gaunt, angular appearance, looked metal; he’d have been perfect for the glossy cover of a metal album. And it all fit. It fit as one of the only reasonable reactions to the unreasonable policy realities in the Deep South that yank all support and shove people with disabilities and their families to tiptoe a high-wire without a safety net. And it definitely fit his hardcore words, hardcore music, hardcore aesthetic. What’s more hardcore than life on a ventilator? What’s more extreme, more on the razor’s edge, than being in your face, rocking all over Mobile County, despite being on life support? And what’s more American than saying “f**k nature, the hell with the odds, I’m here, I’m on a vent, and I won’t give up.” To me and his friends, Chris was this amazing, punk rock “only in America” kind of figure. His death was a horrible loss.

Chris was also an incredible writer; I’ve never known anyone as good as him when it comes to short fiction. He once shared one of his short stories with me, about a Viking “berzerker” warrior. His chatting with my group on the Delphi Forums, led to him participating in other Delphi communities, RPG groups, where what he was really doing was writing a novel with others. Brilliant writing!! I wish it could’ve been properly compiled and published at that time.
Though this writing on Delphi, he met a young woman in Northern Alabama who he grew to love. Chris never let anyone neuter or infantilize him for a second; his passion for women was as hardcore as everything else about him. It’s awful that he never met this girl he loved and that overall, he never could get in-person reciprocal feeling from Alabama’s female half. Like me, he ultimately got the cold shoulder from every girl he met in Alabama.
In an email about sharing his feelings with the aforementioned girl, he wrote: “If you have a dream, or something you need to say, or to let out, don’t hesitate, don’t let go of that opportunity, it may never come again.”

The only extant piece on the web about Chris’ death is this, from Inclusion Daily News: Alabama Medicaid Policy Blamed For Friend’s Death (thank you Dave Reynolds for keeping this article available nine years in; I will keep it accessible from the front page sidebar of this blog in perpetuity.) Chris’ goals in life were like anyone’s, to survive, find his niche, and thrive. His parents did everything humanly possible to help him keep going, in sports terms, “they left it all on the field.” But they were put in an impossible situation by Alabama Medicaid’s policies, which ended most in-home care for recipients at age 21, knocking them down to about 12 hours of nursing care per week, apparently with the idea that the family could provide coverage without sleep for the rest of the week 24 hours a day. No human being can do that forever, though Chris’ family and friends tried, and kept it going for five years without Chris even being hospitalized. But it’s one of those probability things, Medicaid put them in a situation without care, where it is likely that eventually, a ventilator tube disconnection event would coincide with a time his mom went to the store and only one parent was present, and too asleep to respond given the exhaustion of the care every day. That tube disconnection meant… suffocating until brain dead. His parents shouldn’t blame themselves for the impossible situation Alabama Medicaid put them in. They never should’ve been thrust into that situation; if he weren’t in Alabama, it’s likely he would’ve received some care hours each day that would have enabled his mom to leave the home for supplies with peace of mind.

There’s a lot of blame to go around, but I think Alabama Medicaid should get the brunt of it for “just following orders,” mailing out termination notices with one line, “PDN (private duty nursing) to terminate after [xx.xx.xxxx]” (the person’s 21st birthday) and phoning nursing agencies to ensure they know no hours can be billed after that date, without ever ruminating on the barbarism of their actions or considering solutions. Part of the blame goes to the several Alabama politicians who ignored numerous pleas for help from Chris and his family. And, of course, the MDA ignored their cries for help when they could’ve helped Chris’ parents organize daily volunteers, or assisted somehow, large or small.
And I feel like part of the blame goes to me. Chris died after my “victory” over the 21 cut-off in February 2003, which set up a new program for vent-dependent, or in their terms, “technology assisted,” Alabamians who are “aging out” at 21. This program made the 21 cut-off, at least where ventboys are concerned, a thing of the past in Alabama, making my home state an island of relative sanity in a sea of Deep South states (including Florida) that continue to essentially shove their most vulnerable off a cliff just for turning 21, even now in 2013. But the “technology assisted” waiver I got started had no provision for grandfathering in people like Chris, cut off five years prior to the advent of the TA waiver. I never felt less victorious than the day Chris reacted to the fact that my “victory” meant no change for him. I made sure local news channel 15 knew about Chris’ situation; they did a significant feature on him about six months before his death. But I feel guilt that I didn’t launch a national effort for awareness and I didn’t push harder to involve lawyers. I also don’t understand the premise that I survive and he doesn’t.

I need to get back in the fight. Unless I’m actively fighting so similar tragedies don’t happen again, I don’t feel like I’ve found my niche. For 2013, this book I’m writing, this memoir/exposé, is like the “tip of the spear” of my new campaign on Medicaid 21-cut-off, with the focus on vent users. The vent-dependent population can’t afford to be invisible anymore.

Nick

I want this blog to be a useful source of information you’ll not get from TV or other web sites. You certainly don’t hear about Medicaid issues like “aging out” of most in-home support at age 21, and how it impacts the ventilator-dependent population, on other blogs. You won’t get in-depth coverage of Medicaid, how Medicaid is changing in the age of ObamaCare (eligibility is broadening under the “Medicaid expansion” without addressing anything else) and the policies that must change, on many other sites. But I also feel a responsibility to spotlight the disease, not just the symptoms, strike at the root causes, cover the corruption that prevents our government from listening to us, filling the gaps in our social safety net, improving services. The corrupto-sclerosis clogging the gears of the federal machine has not been this obvious, awful, and destructive to the people, in my lifetime. Corruption has made Congress and the executive branch so dysfunctional that we’re seeing symptoms of unprecedented severity, like the oddly-named “sequestration.”

Good government has disintegrated in the acid of dysfunctional, corrupt Washington. It’s gotten SO BAD that “the sequester” is taking effect, meaning we can’t even agree that laying off a generation of NIH scientists and breaking the back of American medical research is bad, that gutting Head Start and K-12 funding is bad, that yanking housing vouchers out from under 125,000 Americans, many of them people with disabilities, is bad. Americans with disabilities will need homeless shelters—oh wait, they’re gutting funding for emergency shelters too, dumping an estimated 100,000 homeless people, who will end up on the sidewalks or end up suffering a traumatic displacement to other shelters, or more likely, emergency rooms (the standard dumping ground for populations our society hates and doesn’t want to face or deal with). This will hit New York City at the worst possible moment; in January 2013, more than 50,000 people, on average, slept in our city’s homeless shelters each night, a new record, easily surpassing past NYC averages, even those during the notorious The Warriors-looking NYC of the ’70s and ’80s. It’s likely that, by putting vulnerable populations out onto the streets en masse, we’ll create 21st century horror stories I can’t even imagine right now. All this brought to you by “the sequester.”

“Sequestration,” again, is just a symptom. The root cause is the culture of corruption and dysfunction in Washington that runs deeper, and is more corrosive and paralyzing now, than it has been during any other era in my lifetime. I believe that we have to attack corruption, and, recognizing that Team Donkey and Team Elephant swim in the same corrupt pond, mercilessly expose bribery and the quid pro quo status quo to the sunlight wherever it lives. Under the tag Bribeocracy, I’ve been trying to shed light on corruption on this blog for years. Last month, I talked about the quid pro quo status quo within the executive branch, which I hope ya’ll will understand is not okay; even if you give President Obama a pass for giving ambassador posts to top campaign contributors, I hope you won’t let him off the hook for giving out cabinet positions in the same manner, to CEOs who were top donors.

Today, I’ll talk about the “revolving door,” the phenomenon of creatures of Washington rotating in and out of lobbying and powerful positions in the White House, executive branch agencies, Congress, and Congressional staffs. These are the Senators, Congressmen, and key staffers who purport to work for the public good, then exit public service but stay on Capitol Hill to cash in on the work they did under oath to serve their district. They use their contacts and knowledge to advantage monied interests.

Some high profile examples: Rep. Billy Tauzin of Louisiana’s 3rd Congressional district, chair of the House committee that oversees prescription drugs during GWB’s first term as president, negotiated the 2003 Medicare Prescription Drug Bill—soon after known as Medicare Part D—on crazy-skewed terms in favor of the pharmaceutical conglomerates (not only were private pharmacies and citizens banned from importing affordable drugs from Canada, ever, Medicare is banned from negotiating bulk prices or paying anything below full sticker price for prescription drugs) and then turned around hardly two months later and quit Congress in order to take the helm at the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), the giant trade association he had essentially let craft Medicare Part D while chairman. It’s one of the most brazen revolving door kickbacks the media has ever ignored. In Tauzin, Louisiana lost its most powerful voice in the House—seniority means how much clout and bargaining power your state and district has in the House—and the loss of voice, and betrayal, must’ve deeply stung his constituents; they might have felt like some unstoppable vixen took their man.

In my post Living in Zomerica, I mentioned that the so-called “Fiscal Cliff Bill,” passed two hours into falling off the cliff (2 a.m. EST on New Year’s Day, January 1, 2013) had egregious corporate welfare in it. Man, that thing was stuffed like a piñata with goodies for corporate campaign contributors. But beyond the eight industries receiving subsidies that I mentioned in my prior post, reports soon surfaced of a lucrative loophole for pharmaceutical company Amgen in the Fiscal Cliff Bill. The New York Times uncovered a sordid, almost unbelievably bizarre “revolving door” story that led to the kickback for Amgen. The loophole for Amgen was negotiated by a top aide for Sen. Orrin Hatch who previously worked as a health policy analyst for Amgen. The former chiefs of staff for both Sen. Max Baucus (D – Corrupt) and Sen. Mitch McConnell (R – Corrupt) came back to Capitol Hill as Amgen lobbyists and lobbied their recent ex-bosses; it’s thought that notoriously bribable Senator Max Baucus slid the Amgen provision into the Fiscal Cliff Bill in the dark of night at the eleventh-hour, but it’s clear that there’s no daylight between Republicans and Democrats on this revolving door problem. They’re both up to their elbows equally in this cesspool of corruption.
In this Bill Moyers interview, tiny Vermont’s only representative in the House, Peter Welch, explains why he’s fighting to get Amgen’s “sweetheart deal” repealed.

A case like Rep. Tauzin’s emerged recently. Rep. Jo Ann Emerson, about two weeks after being sworn in to the 113th Congress for her tenth term, announced her resignation January 22, 2013 and took a job as CEO of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association. NRECA, where the last CEO was paid around $1.7 Million for a year, one of Washington’s largest and most influential trade associations. Now, the 8th district in Missouri’s “bootheel”—the poorest in Missouri, and one of the 10 poorest in the nation—has to foot the bill for a reported $1 million election on June 4th.

The National Rural Electric Cooperative Association was the biggest single campaign contributor to both Jo Ann over the years, and to her husband Rep. Bill Emerson, who she inherited the Congressional seat from upon his death in 1996. Both Mr. and Mrs. Emerson were lobbyists in Washington prior to serving in the House of Representatives, and seem to be entirely creatures of Washington; neither were born in or near the impoverished rural district they swore to represent. Her ties to the district are much more tenuous than her husband’s were—at least he was a Missourian—she’s from Maryland, born and raised. So even though Jo Ann Emerson was Missouri’s most senior member of Congress, so Missouri loses a lot of clout in the House upon her departure, but it’s not the same as losing a Billy Tauzin, who’s deeply connected to his district. I think that understanding a district is essential to representing it. When I met with my Rep. in Mobile, Jo Bonner (Alabama’s 1st Congressional district, covering the entirety of Alabama’s Coastal counties, that is to say, Mobile and environs) even though we’re on the opposite sides of plenty of issues, since he comes from Mobile, we immediately have a shared culture, references, points of context, that make it easy for us to work together. Having that local connection is so very important!

The founding generation (the framers of the Constitution, founding fathers and mothers, and others of the spirit of ’76) intended the House of Representatives to be a constantly improving and updating body of the most knowledgable and wise representatives of the districts, to assess the realities on the ground, the results of the American experiment, and respond when adjustments are necessary. I know that because of bribeocracy supplanting democracy, we can’t expect good government to return in 2013, but definitely we can do better than the blatant abuse of people like Tauzin and Emerson using, then losing Congressional districts, cashing in on seniority.

Details of the sordid, weird, revolving Emerson in this CNN investigative report:

Worst revelations from the report:

Unintended consequences? Laws prohibiting members of Congress from becoming registered lobbyists for two years after leaving office have backfired, making people like Emerson even more valued hires; they can bribe and influence on Capitol Hill for two whole years without any of the regulations or limitations registered lobbyists are subject to under current law. Monied interests are gaining from the two year waiting period purportedly designed to shut the revolting door.

Jo Ann Emerson isn’t alone in leaving the House as the 113th Congress begins, she is one of five outgoing members—four Republicans and one Democrat—to abandon their constituents in favor of “influence industry” jobs.

Never stop exposing corruption.

Nick

Easter egg: mousing over a few links reveals hidden lulz in some of the tags

We’re facing really horrible corruption in our government; it’s getting so bad, we’re nearing like end-stage Byzantine Empire type corruption, with the rot of corruption undermining every government bureaucracy, every political appointment, and the decay reinforced by a corrupt people and the government feeding it back to people in this demonic loop.

This is how bad it’s gotten: it’s become so common for presidents to reward their biggest presidential campaign “donors” with cushy ambassadorships abroad, a study, “What Price the Court of St. James’s? Political Influences on Ambassadorial Postings of the United States of America,” published by two researchers (J.W. Fedderke and D. Jett) out of Penn State’s International Relations Dept. in partnership with Economic Research South Africa (ERSA) have now pinpointed the approximate price tags attached to ambassador appointments in the current system (quid pro quo is only illegal bribery if outside the campaign contribution system, kids!)

Fedderke and Jett discovered that big donors who directly contributed $550,000, or bundled contributions of $750,000, had a 90 percent chance of being posted to a country in Western Europe.

“What we can observe is data on contributions and postings,” Dr. Fedderke said in an interview. “And on the basis of that, we can infer an implicit valuation on postings in monetary terms — even if they haven’t contributed that much.”

When isolating a country’s wealth over other factors, Luxembourg came in at the top of the chart, with a posting there valued at $3.1 million in direct contributions, while an appointment to Portugal was predicted to have a value of $602,686 in personal contributions. The model suggests that bundlers can get the same posts for less: Portugal was valued at about $341,160 in bundled contributions, Luxembourg at $1.8 million.

When factoring in a country’s tourist trade, however, France and Monaco top the list, with the level of personal contributions at $6.2 million and bundled contributions at $4.4 million.

The prices, authors note, vary considerably depending on which factors to emphasize. And in some cases, the actual nominees appeared to “overpay” for their positions — raising or giving more than the model would suggest was necessary — and in some cases “underpay.” That is because some donors bargain poorly for their positions, the authors suggest, while others may possess attributes (business experience, a personal connection to the president) that aid their case. But regardless of the model, Dr. Fedderke and Dr. Jett found, political ambassadors are more likely to be appointed to those countries that are wealthy, popular tourist destinations and safe.

Source: Study Puts ‘Cost’ to Landing Diplomatic Posts – NYTimes.com

This year, the race to press the president for purchased ambassadorships is more intense than ever, due to the unprecedented flood of donations from billionaires to Obama and Obama’s “independent” (LOL LOL} Super PAC during the 2012 election cycle. Vogue editor Anna Wintour, one of Obama’s biggest bundlers, was pushing to be ambassador to Britain. But she was edged out by “someone who had done even more for Mr. Obama: Matthew Barzun, a genial former technology executive who spent 20 grueling months as finance chairman of the president’s national fund-raising operation.” “The president now has six years of relationships, not two years,” said Andy Spahn, a public relations and political consultant who, along with Jeffrey Katzenberg, the film producer, was Mr. Obama’s top Los Angeles fund-raiser. ‘So I expect that it will be a lot more competitive this time around.’” Source: Well-Trod Path – Political Donor to Ambassador – NYTimes.com
Of course, the salient point is missed, none of these people have diplomatic experience!! DUDE! What happens when delicate negotiations with Britain are needed? what if an EU Parliament meeting at the Espace Léopold in Brussels is bombed by terrorists? what if the French government falls amid nation-wide protests and general strikes? or if Spain is gripped by riots (again)? This isn’t your father’s Western Europe. A placid tourist destination can quickly turn into a global flashpoint of popular unrest and/or ground zero in the newest financial earthquake. Placing corporate donors in charge could be very self-destructive.

Now, it’s even worse. Obama has appointed the CEO of REI (Recreational Equipment Inc.) and top Democratic Party fundraiser Sally Jewell to head the Dept. of Interior, which stewards our national parks, national lands, the resources on national lands and runs the widely-despised Bureau of Indian Affairs. Media coverage of Jewell is (so far) lauding her appointment, the overwhelming majority showing positive quotes; of course, the literal merger of corporate CEO and federal agency isn’t questioned.

President Obama is now expected to nominate Penny Pritzker “Chicago hotel scion and businesswoman and Obama mega-bundler” for Secretary of Commerce. Pritzker “ranks #255 in 2012 on the Forbes 400 list of wealthiest Americans” and “was reportedly in the hunt for that job back in 2008″ but withdrew when predatory lending and toxic subprime mortgages perpetrated by the family zombie bank was exposed. That’s apparently A-okay for today’s cabinet! This is gross.
Source: Obama donor Pritzker for Commerce Secretary? – In the Loop – The Washington Post
The narrative I expect the media to spout is: “Gender equality WOO! Pritzker is the second female Commerce Secretary in U.S. history! Isn’t it great how wonderful the wonderful Obama Administration is, the greatest, most gender diverse administration evah!”
A cabinet of only uber rich people is not DIVERSE! it’s actually really awful, elitist, and undemocratic, and horrible!

It’s a very bad thing when your government won’t even consider candidates outside of the mega-wealthy 0.5% that bribe donate to campaigns.

Damn, dude! That’s corrupt.

Nick

I’m writing a memoir now, well, memoir/serious nonfiction/exposé, finally the Nick’s Crusade book, so I was interested in Tom Wolfe’s (brief) comments on Memoir. He quotes Orwell “memoir is the worst form of fiction” because you focus on the sensational, not the mundane and humiliating that makes up 75% of life (then he goes into one of his humiliations, which makes no sense to me, but whatevs).

Don’t worry dear reader, my book will be chock-full of fails and humiliations. I don’t leave out 3/4 of life; without the humiliation, it’s not very interesting.

Nick

The Plug Uglies were a gang of nativist thugs that ran Baltimore for nearly seven years uninterrupted in the 1850s. The American Party sprung from the grassroots in reaction to the flood of immigration in the mid-1800s, which meant you had a substantial population of “native” English-speaking Protestant young men unemployed or barely employed because of stiff competition from low-wage immigrant laborers who had more grasp of Gaelic or German than English. Jacksonian Democrats ended up spawning Democratic Party machines—New York’s Tammany Hall led by Boss Tweed for example—on the ward and city levels that provided jobs and patronage to the successive waves of immigrants in exchange for votes, often leaving existing populations feeling unrepresented.  As large populations of young males felt economically and politically displaced, especially when the main alternative to the Democratic Party, the Whig Party, went the way of the dodo bird, they began to organize a new political movement to express their frustrations (a major political realignment).  And local gangs of angry young men formed to support their new party and confront existing parties’ power, with polls and punches.  The most vile anti-Catholic conspiracy theories imaginable spread like wildfire through these gangs, who came to believe that Irish Catholics and other “papists” were loyal to the Pope over the Republic.  “America for Americans” was their motto, and they figured only Protestants could be true, loyal citizens.  The American Party was also known as the Know Nothing Party—because of their vulnerable position as a fledgling third party and their penchant for murder and other crimes, they tended to only answer police inquiries with “I know nothing.”  Once in the Spring Hill College library I found note of Know Nothing violence: not long after the college’s 1848 switch to Jesuit administration, French Jesuits newly arrived to teach at Spring Hill were shot and killed; two priests cornered alone in the local wetlands killed by Know Nothings in as many years.

But develop the party did, growing up from the grassroots to become a major factor in politics, winning the mayor’s office in New Orleans, Chicago, San Francisco, New York City, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, among many others.  In 1854, Know-Nothing candidates even won control of the Massachusetts legislature.¹  The local grassroots backing for political parties in the mid-19th century has no equivalent today, especially when it comes to the American Party, which was a mass movement more organized than any grassroots thing today; Baltimore was divided into 20 wards, each with its own ward boss and political clubs (like the Plug Uglies, Rip Raps, Rough Skins, Regulators, Wampanoags, Calithumpians, Tigers, Butt Enders, Bloody Tubs, etc. supporting the Know Nothings, and also clubs for the opposing Democratic Party).  The clubs often started as offshoots of volunteer fire departments, though this was a joke; the “volunteer fire companies” created more fires than they extinguished. Maryland Know Nothings had councils at the ward, city and state levels to coordinate handing out patronage jobs, organize events and campaigns, and groom and endorse candidates.  36% of Baltimore government jobs during American Party control were distributed to Know Nothing gang members as patronage appointments, though 89% of the jobs given to such “rowdies” were low-wage working class jobs, especially as ward policeman and the like.²   When Know Nothing thugs won an especially gory street battle against “upper class” voting rights reformers in New Orleans, the telegraph conveyed the news to Know Nothing clubs up and down the U.S., and Plug Uglies in Baltimore set off fireworks in celebration of the “triumph.” Affiliated gangs from Cincinnati and Philadelphia visited Baltimore several times throughout the 1850s to clink mugs and celebrate election “wins” in the center of American Party power. This was the most organized mayhem and thuggery EVER!

In New York City, the leading nativist “club” (gang) were the Bowery Boys, aligned with William “Bill the Butcher” Poole.  He was depicted in the book Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld by Herbert Asbury—informal, indeed, it’s quite heavily fictionalized, with much of the material acquired from interviews with aging gang braggarts in prison and some of it pure urban legend—and Daniel Day Lewis famously immortalized Bill in the Scorsese epic Gangs of New York (so loosely based

Daniel Day Lewis immortalized "Bill the Butcher" on the silver screen

on Asbury’s book that it is set eight years after the real William Poole’s death, and unlike Casablanca or The Godfather which won Academy Awards for Best Screenplay Adapted from Another Work, Gangs was honored with a Best Original Screenplay Oscar).  In the movie, Bill ran a small but formidable criminal fiefdom in the Five Points neighborhood, using the stovepipe hat-wearing Bowery Boys as muscle. In real life, William Poole was a member of the Bowery Boys but not a kingpin or neighborhood boss. He was involved in the Bowery Boys’ volunteer fire dept. that did more sabotaging and disrespecting rival gangs’ fire engines than actual firefighting. Bill campaigned for nativist candidates and his butcher shop—his nickname was literal, he cut and distributed meats to people who wanted to buy meats—became Know Nothing HQ. Among his contemporaries, he was most known for being really amazing at 19th century-style fists-3ft-out bare-knuckle boxing. Bill the Butcher was one of NYC’s most colorful characters, no doubt, but while the Bowery Boys shared the same habits, stovepipe hats, anti-immigrant sentiments and methods, their influence never even neared that of the Plug Uglies.

The Plug Uglies grew and grew to be the most powerful and feared club of nativist thugs in history, the term “plug ugly” itself becoming genericized to mean any such stovepipe hat-wearing street tough.   While the Bowery Boys cornered the market on crime in one neighborhood, the Plug Uglies ran an entire city, sometimes even nearing power in all of Maryland. Controlling the streets and only allowing wards to vote for American Party (know nothing) candidates was their path to power. One way they steered elections was especially extraordinary: they would “coop” any vulnerable immigrants, homeless people and men weaker than them in basements or shacks, 40-90 men to a shack, then herd them to vote over and over again in different wards wearing different clothes.  Edgar Allan Poe was slipped a mickey and “cooped” by Plug Uglies right before his death, and was seen at different polling places in unfamiliar clothes. Poe experts still speculate about the poet’s death. For her part, Poe’s cousin’s daughter and important Poe scholar Elisabeth Ellicott Poe, placed blame squarely on the Plug Uglies’ shoulders, writing a piece marking the centennial of Edgar Allan Poe’s birth and recounting his history, that “On the night of October 4, 1849, Edgar Allan Poe arrived in Baltimore from Richmond. He was going North to be married, and was last seen to alight from the Richmond train in Baltimore and go into a near-by saloon. What happened after that, in brief, was this: His drink was drugged under

"I'm just a Poe boy, from a Poe family."

direction of a gang of plug-uglies and he was voted about the city next day in the elections as a repeater while still drugged. The plug-uglies were members of a secret political organization, and their lips were sealed. But a certain Passano of that society, in after years said that Edgar Poe was kept in his coop that night. After the plug-uglies had finished with the unfortunate man he was thrown carelessly into the street, left to die if he willed. …he never recovered sufficiently to give the details of his dreadful plight.”³

Back then, you brought your own ballot with you to the polls, and they were typically brightly colored and easily identified—the American Party’s ballot was emblazoned with red stripes—hardly secret balloting.  Plug Uglies would famously discourage any voter who showed up with a ballot in hand of another color, not the red-striped ballot, by shoving a shoemaker’s awl into them, sometimes kneeing unsuspecting victims with awls strapped to their knees, or throwing them out of the nearest window.  An allied nativist gang, the Blood Tubs, discouraged immigrants from voting by dunking them in tubs full of pig blood; seeing a guy or two returning to your neighborhood covered in gore really had a chilling effect. Controlling the voting was how Know Nothing gangs controlled city officials and thus Baltimore, lock, stock and barrel.

The shoemaker’s awl, a short (and easily-concealed) spike intended for poking holes in shoe-leather became the Plug Uglies’ symbol, both indicating their status as sons of the working class and for humorous effect.  Shortly before the presidential election in 1860, in one of their largest (and last) mass demonstrations, the Plug Uglies hired a blacksmith to pound out awls with his hammer and anvil in public, forging them en masse during the rally and handing them out to supporters.  They would march in massive torchlight processions

This is what a shoemaker's awl looks like

carrying awls and awl signs and banners, one hugely inscribed with the words “with this [picture of awl] we will do the work,” more often an enormous banner depicting an awl and nothing else.  They would shout “the Third Ward is Awl right!” and “come and vote, there’s room for AWL!” while marching to polling places.

A large part of what makes the Plug Uglies interesting is their uniquely American sense of humor, common-man camaraderie, and that hard-to-capture spirit of Loki, chief of tricksters, pranks, disobedience, mayhem, chaos and the like, in Norse mythology.

This was a gang without parallel. The Plug Uglies had their own city, their own judges (who sometimes heard cases while inebriated), their own American Party mayor (Mayor Swann) and governor (Thomas Holliday Hicks), and they even had their own club song.  At the height of their influence, the Plug Uglies even had a Know Nothing presidential candidate, ex-president Millard Fillmore, and managed to sway Maryland’s votes in his favor in the 1856 presidential election, making Maryland the only state in the union he won.

Poor Millard Fillmore was the unlucky 13th President of the United States, only becoming commander-in-chief by accident when newly-elected president Zachary Taylor died of dysentery-like symptoms. President Taylor became ill after seeking solace from the oppressive heat of Washington, DC following his first

As the famed death screen from the Apple II game Oregon Trail said, "You Have Died of Dysentery."

Fourth of July celebration as president (which included the groundbreaking ceremony for the Washington Monument) and downing cold milk and cherries to cool off. The milk was evidently even more disturbed by the heat than Taylor, as the new president quickly developed gastrointestinal distress. The not-so-knowledgeable doctors of the time sought to treat poor Taylor’s “bilious diarrhea” with calomel (mercury chloride, which causes mercury poisoning and vomiting) and ipecac, an emetic—vomit inducer—of such explosive power that under the auspices of modern medicine, it has been banned for many years. These lethal prescriptions, given in mega doses of 40 grains each, finished off President Taylor; that he endured as many days as he did can only be attributed to what a strong, big bear of a man he was.

So, Taylor’s vice president, the unremarkable upstate New York functionary Millard Fillmore, whose military feats’ greatest extent was leading a militia to defend Buffalo, NY from Mexican invasion during the same war Taylor won improbable victories at Palo Alto and Monterrey, became president, to general confusion, disbelief and shouts of “Millard what the who?” The entire cabinet resigned, and bad blood was high. Taylor, though a slave-owning Virginian himself, in fact the last slave holding president ever—and the last southern man elected president until LBJ, had always taken the Andrew Jackson position on Southern radicals, that secession was off the table, and anyone inciting rebellion would be hung without hesitation and he would gladly lead the Army into South Carolina himself. Taylor, “Old Rough and Ready,” the old Mexican War hero and tough, manly military man, was given the Whig Party‘s presidential nomination after much political wrangling and deal-making, then Whigs consolidated support behind the general during the campaign, with speeches on his behalf in every state and favor and trust growing up around Taylor. No such Whig consensus existed for Millard Fillmore, and that Taylor died—just as William Henry Harrison, the only other Whig president died, early in his term—meant the death knell for the Whig Party (more on the Whig Party in a future post). Fillmore was the last president aligned with the Whigs.

Unlike Taylor, Fillmore was an early “Doughface,” a northerner with southern-sympathies, called doughfaces for leaning toward beardless southern gentility amid bearded, northern manly men⁴ (more on politics and facial hair in a future post). Not only was Fillmore a doughface, southern-sympathizing before the term doughface was even popularized, he was a doughman; I’d unequivocally call him America’s doughiest-looking president. The Fillsmorey Doughboy. And he was quickly despised by all sides.

Official White House portrait of Millard Fillmore

I don’t quite understand why Fillmore is consistently ranked as one of history’s worst presidents by historians. Yeah he inherited a bunch of intractable problems, and he wasn’t as well-suited as Zachary Taylor to steer a ship of state on the brink of sinking due to sectional strife, but who was?? He supported the Compromise of 1850 and was instrumental in its passage, which few historians denounce as totally terrible. Fillmore was responsible for California (in its present configuration, not split) being admitted as a U.S. state and a free state, the Mormons getting a territory of their own, Utah Territory with Brigham Young appointed territorial governor, and he got the Texans—who were preparing for war—to calm down and give up their territorial claims on much of eastern New Mexico, though they got to keep El Paso. All these accomplishments in one compromise bill. The worst thing that can be said of the Compromise is it included the loathsome Fugitive Slave Act, which required the North to aid in the capture and return of escaped slaves. This riled up the North, and northern Whigs like Abraham Lincoln began to think of third party efforts. But the Compromise was nothing as inflammatory as the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which compelled settlers to flood into Kansas and out-vote and out-kill each other over the slavery question, and caused the Democratic Party to split, the last vestiges of the Whig Party to disintegrate, and a third party—the Republican Party, founded in 1854—to rise from its ashes with much the same platform, except a hard-line against slavery.

I also don’t understand what possessed Fillmore to run for president again on the Know Nothing ticket. Just the fact that he’s seeking a nonconsecutive second term as President (a really weird feat, accomplished only once in American politics, by Grover Cleveland) is baffling enough. That his running mate was Andrew Jackson‘s nephew Andrew Jackson Donelson is

American Party 1856 presidential ticket, Fillmore/Donelson

even stranger. Andrew Jackson had nearly nothing in common with the Know Nothing movement; in fact, it was Jacksonian Democrats brawling in the streets against the Plug Uglies. I suppose Millard Fillmore became an American Party candidate out of opportunistic urges, and because so many Whigs—the ones that didn’t flock to the newly-mobilized Republican Party anyhow—were absorbed into the American Party. Know Nothings didn’t stump on the issue of slavery, maybe that was appealing to Fillmore, but they took a strong pro-Union position, disagreeing with radicals on both sides. This was especially true of Baltimore Know Nothings, who described themselves as “warm friends and advocates of the Union against the fire-eaters and free soilers.” Of course, many American Party men held to crazy conspiracy theories that secession was an evil plot by the Pope to destroy the U.S., so placing them on a political spectrum or finding their views in relation to other parties of the era might be too strenuous.⁵

This part of the Plug Ugly official club song shows their support for Fillmore:

We don’t like the Demmy’s, for Fillmore is our boast,
And here in old Maryland he is a perfect host,
Nor do we love the Argus, with all its boasted eyes,
For our motto is “ever on,” root hog or die,
For we are the native party…

But as we are all natives; and proudly we can brag,
As true sons of America, we’ll fight beneath its flag,
Nor from the field of honor, never will we fly,
But as good Plug Uglies we’ll root hog or die.
For we are the native party…⁶

Go to the link in the 6 footnote for a much more complete rendering of the lyrics.

By “Demmy’s” it’s clear they mean the Democrats. “Nor do we love the Argus” took some research; the Argus is a giant with a hundred eyes in Greek mythology, and newspapers tended to take its name as a symbol of the reporter (some still bear the name). Apparently, the Daily Argus was a leading Democratic-leaning newspaper in Baltimore that the Plug Uglies disdained. “Root hog, or die” is an American idiom expressing self-reliance and hard-scrabble reality; root out your own living because no one’s going to do it for you. The idiom found its way into numerous 19th century and early 20th century songs.

Even after the 1856 election, shouts of “Go Fillmore!” were common among Plug Uglies. Typically, polite society doughy types like Fillmore were horrified at the “rowdyism” of the Plug Uglies and affiliated gangs. The public drunkenness and open carrying of revolvers (usually combined) put off more respectable Know Nothings. One Harry Shriver, in the mercantile business in Baltimore, left the American Party, denouncing its “informal rascality.” “I want to be an American, but not a friend of rowdyism.” To such polite society types, the Plug Uglies would say, “come on up, there’s room for AWL! Heh Heh!”

But the Plug Uglies had serious blood on their hands; gore and death isn’t so funny.  When the Plug Uglies launched a major riot in Washington, DC in 1857, the Rip Raps, and Shifflers from Philadelphia in tow, there was panic in the White House. President James Buchanan called in the U.S. Marine Corps, who didn’t play around; they shot to kill the attackers. Unfortunately, more Washingtonians trying to vote were killed than the nativist thugs bringing mayhem across state lines. See Know Nothing Riot, Washington, DC

Their most violent battles were what the Plug Uglies called “battle royals” against Democratic party groups; some election day brawls left both sides with a half-dozen of their brothers earless, limbless or deceased.  The worst of the battle royals accompanied the 1856 municipal elections. Rioting spread city-wide, with simultaneous brawls in multiple wards. One climatic ward battle was of such a grand scale that it included old artillery piece sending cannonballs into enemy lines.  The stovepipe hats the gangsters wore were part of the battle gear, not formal wear used to accessorize on the way to the ball, kiddos! They stuffed their top hats with leather and wool scraps to cushion the skull against blows, and pulled down the hats over their ears in hopes of keeping both ears.

Photography not being widespread in the 1850s, nor typically pointed at street toughs, I wasn’t able to find a picture of one. Thus, I’ve taken up the task of cartooning a member of the Plug Uglies based on contemporary descriptions, complete with awl:

I should have made his hat bigger and pulled down around his ears, sigh.

The end of the Plug Uglies was the end of Baltimoreans’ patience with all their brawling and election day brutality. The testimony of gang violence and polling place thuggery on the day of the 1859 municipal elections to the Maryland legislature was so game changing and important that it was transcribed and widely distributed; I even have a copy (it’s easily found here on the Google). The fire companies run by “volunteers” (thug clubs) were replaced by a professional, city-run fire department. The city’s management and functions like city policemen were removed from local control and taken over by a panel of reformers who rooted out corruption. Many Plug Uglies skipped town, notably to Richmond, Virginia, to avoid prosecution under the new regime.

Ultimately, American politics also had little room for a party that was relatively silent on the slavery question that was tearing the country apart. While fire-eaters on one side argued for secession and free-soilers ranted against the “machinations of the Slave Power“ on the opposing side, the American Party’s leading voice in the U.S. Congress, Rep. Henry Winter Davis, often at the head of the table at even the most raucous Plug Ugly celebrations in Baltimore, instructed party men that the only answer to the slavery question was “to be silent.” That just didn’t fit the bill, and like the Whigs before them, the American Party shattered and was lost in the smoke of the Civil War and forgotten.

Of course, the Plug Uglies and affiliated gangs didn’t vanish overnight. Allan Pinkerton himself warned Abe Lincoln of a plot by Blood Tubs to kill the president-elect in Baltimore; for this, the Tubbers even merited mention in Shelby Foote‘s immortal series “The Civil War: A Narrative.” Some blamed the Plug Uglies for the deadly Pratt Street Riots of April 19th, 1861, when a secessionist mob attacked Union soldiers passing through Baltimore to get to Washington, DC, because whenever there’s blood in the streets of Baltimore, the Plug Uglies naturally come to mind.

A telegram unearthed by Harry Ezratty in his 2010 book Baltimore in the Civil War: The Pratt Street Riot and a City Occupied from the man in charge of Baltimore police, Marshall George Kane, shows Kane, not Plug Uglies more to blame: “Streets red with Maryland blood; send expresses over the mountains of Maryland and Virginia for the riflemen to come without delay. Fresh hordes will come down on us tomorrow. We will fight them and whip them or die.”⁷ Still, anti-secessionist Plug Uglies were deemed responsible in the popular imagination. In New York, the 6th New York Regiment sailed from Staten Island for immediate deployment, “death to the Plug Uglies” their slogan.⁸

Across North America, from New Orleans to New York, from Maryland to Manitoba, “Plug Uglies” became a synonym for 19th century thuggery and Baltimore got the worst reputation of any major U.S. port city. The gangs of The Wire weren’t the first to rule the roost in Baltimore. The Plug Uglies, Rip Raps, Blood Tubbers, etc. and their predecessors stretching back to the War of 1812 and beyond gave B’more its fearsome “Mobtown” reputation.

Guerrilla violence against immigrants, ward battles and mayhem, tubs of gore, public intoxication, forced intoxication then cooping, repeat voters, riots, awls aimed at buttocks with different politics, doughfaces and dysentery…you won’t find this in AP History! Hope you found it interesting.

Nick

Footnotes:

1. “American Party”, Ohio History Central, July 1, 2005, http://www.ohiohistorycentral.org/entry.php?rec=838
2. Towers, F. (2004). The urban south and the coming of the civil war. (p. 134). Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press. Retrieved from Google Books Preview, p. 133
3. Poe, E. E. (1909, February). Poe, the weird genius. Cosmopolitan magazine, XLVI(3), Retrieved from Google Books Preview, p. 252
4. Goodheart, A. (2011). Chapter three: Forces of nature. In 1861: The Civil War Awakening New York, NY: Knopf.
5. Towers, F. (2004). The urban south and the coming of the civil war. (p. 100).
6. Silberman, L. R. (2011). Wicked baltimore: Charm city, sin and scandal. (pp. 64-65). The History Press. Retrieved from Google Books Preview, chapter “Plug Uglies, Rip Raps, Bloody Tubs, Oh My!”
7. Ezratty, H. A. (2011). Baltimore in the Civil War: The Pratt Street Riot and a City Occupied (Kindle Locations 880-882). The History Press. Kindle Edition.
8. Hannings, B. (2010). Every day of the civil war: A chronological encyclopedia. (p. 81). Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company. Retrieved from Google Books Preview, p. 81

or…

Living in Zomerica

I started out and made my name as an activist in Alabama, where the left is deeply influenced by Martin Luther King Jr. I always spoke in the language of Biblical and moral imperatives, sometimes overtly, very much in the tradition of the Southern left, and I even had the chance to speak at Martin Luther King’s church in Montgomery (click for article and photo of that experience). I’m currently working on a memoir that details this part of my life, how I grew up in foggy South Alabama and became a successful activist.  It opens on my speech in Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church.  So, from the beginning, I feel a gap between me and left politics nationally; I come from a vastly different place than most people involved in politics.

That gap is now a chasm. After I moved to New York City in August 2008, the economy went belly up, and I saw every aspect of the world change. New York City’s hospitals began to crumble in a serious way. Several important hospitals closed. The state rehab hospital I was stuck in until September 10th, 2009, will close in 2014 and the patients they don’t move to the new location in Harlem—probably around 2,000 people out in the cold (by my own math) because of less available space—will be screwed. Living in this facility, the fact that most of my fellow patients had no hope of ever getting out, that the system is never going to respond, that I got out due to LUCK, was very clear to me.

For a time in fall 2008, it seemed the bad actors that built an elaborate house of cards atop mortgage scams and derivatives fraud would face the consequences of their actions, and, after going through bankruptcy as their victims had to, would finally make way for a new generation of financial professionals who would re-build. Instead, the Democratic party-run Congress gave the bad actors trillions, so an awful system can continue to hurt the American people. Constituents went ballistic; naturally, calls and letters were 100-1 opposed to TARP. Initially it was voted down in the House, right-wingers from Texas had the most impassioned arguments against this shocking, bald-faced corporate welfare. Then Vice President Cheney swooped in, lobbyists and their millions came knocking, and TARP passed overwhelmingly. Former IMF chief economist Simon Johnson characterized this as a “quiet coup.” That corporate influence could override the will of the people, and so quickly, indicated to me that FDR’s nightmare, private entities becoming more powerful than the state, was here.

Unhappy events abroad have retaught us two simple truths about the liberty of a democratic people. The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic State itself. That, in its essence, is fascism — ownership of government by an individual, by a group or by any other controlling private power.
The second truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if its business system does not provide employment and produce and distribute goods in such a way as to sustain an acceptable standard of living. Both lessons hit home. Among us today a concentration of private power without equal in history is growing.

— President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Simple Truths message to Congress (April 29, 1938)

I had always thought of government having enormous potential to be an instrument for all Americans, we the people, doing things together that we can’t do as individuals; after all, civil rights legislation triggered a tectonic shift in Alabama. But there I was, in a state hospital on the island in the East River named after FDR, realizing that everything had changed.  The U.S. experiment trying to have a democracy and unrestrained influence of plutocrats over elections simultaneously was over; the transformation into corporate state, by which I mean government of the corporation, by the corporation, for the corporation, was complete. The corporate class has utterly monopolized the levers of power via campaign finance; government will not be an engine of good for the foreseeable future. This was a very difficult conclusion for me to come to, I want government to be a change agent, but the conclusion became unavoidable.

The state is such a marionette, it props up banks that were already exsanguinated by malfeasance and mismanagement; instead of shuttering dead banks, the marionette pumps in billions and billions, creating zombie banks. These zombie banks are a new and disturbing sight in America, insolvent and decayed, but remaining open thanks to government largesse.  They take deposits, but no longer function as banks in the traditional sense; they don’t do loans or extend lines of credit to small businesses, but they may eat other banks and turn them into zombie banks. TARP wasn’t temporary as promised. It’s still reanimating zombie banks, and since the continued aid isn’t reviving the banks, I wonder if the purpose isn’t simply funneling wealth upwards to the puppet masters, the banks’ primary role to be conduits.

We also have zombie financial firms, zombie real estate, zombie schools, zombie hospitals. Too many of us have become zomericans.

A few months after that, I applied for affordable housing. I got a rejection letter back about 60 days later. It said that the Section 8 list had been closed since 2006, and “your application has been destroyed.” Great feeling.
In the Fiscal Cliff Bill, Goldman Sachs got subsidized housing for their building in Manhattan (triple tax exempt, no local, state or federal taxes, plus they get Liberty Bonds, only supposed to be for WTC reconstruction). Not kidding. Even in a time of supposed austerity.  This alone has really changed my thinking. For details, see Naked Capitalism | Eight Corporate Subsidies in the Fiscal Cliff Bill

If it weren’t for a series of serendipitous and bizarre events that made it possible to move in with Alejandra (my partner), who has affordable housing through a different, local, program, I’d still be in the facility. I’ve lived here since September 10th 2009, in Lower Manhattan. I am bizarrely lucky, and know it. And I’m very grateful.

We live very close to Zuccotti, so we observed the Occupy Wall Street movement closely. Alejandra and I are part of the Occupy “disability caucus,” trying to bring disability issues to the attention of the wider movement. Just holding meetings where people with disabilities can talk openly about their predicament following the collapse of the economy has been very valuable; our concerns never see the light of day in media and political circles. And contrary to media portrayals, the old economic configuration is gone and never coming back.

Occupy Wall Street is a reaction to the economic system dying, its apparent murder via mismanagement, malfeasance and predation shoving it off the cliff. There’s no complex list of demands. It’s a protest of the crimes of the bad actors of Wall Street, the resulting collapse of the economy and the attendant suffering, and our political system’s inability to even see the problem. The Occupiers tend to be students or recent grads who bought into the American dream, got into debt pursuing advanced degrees, then realized the economy had capsized and there were no jobs with a living wage, much less jobs in their fields they expected would provide them desperately needed upward mobility and loan repayment. A lot of dreams shattered on the iceberg of the 2008 economic collapse. The concerns expressed by Occupy Wall Street are completely legitimate.

The response to Occupy by the NYPD, the FBI, the rest of our agencies was awful. It removed any doubt I had that we have a corporate state, because the security establishment (NYPD, FBI, etc.) responded to protests against the obviously harmful practices of corporations like Goldman Sachs as a direct attack on the state itself. Though it was called Occupy Wall Street, the NYPD never let the protesters get near Wall Street around the NYSE building; they cordoned off the area around it and sent a very clear and violent message whenever Occupiers tried——in non-violent marches—to get past the barricade. Several times, I saw Occupiers, by the thousands—amazingly strong numbers, cross in front of our building to get closer to Wall Street. The most violent responses from the NYPD came in these moments, that’s when the tear gas and rubber bullets came out, that’s when you have officers breaking heads and mounted police blocking streets with highly coordinated Roman-style formations. I learned a lot from this. It seemed very important to protect the people in and around the NYSE from even seeing the protests. They also—in the final weeks of the occupations in Lower Manhattan—had a new satellite-dish-looking technology that disabled cell phones, cameras, and other digital devices, so the more violent incidents couldn’t be photographed or documented in any way.

Both the NYPD and FBI have acknowledged the non-violence of Occupy Wall Street. The movement has hewed to Martin Luther King’s teachings of non-violent civil disobedience almost flawlessly. But simultaneously the FBI labeled it a terrorist group. Heavily censored FBI memos (released in response to a FOIA request, but not until the media lull between Christmas and New Year’s to reduce exposure) revealed a lot about the government response to Occupy. The JTTF (Joint Terrorism Task Force) was deeply involved in monitoring the movement and writing memos about “the threat” to banks and other financial institutions; the memos’ tone treats the corporations like they’re the customers. Then there’s the infamous assassination memo, revealing the FBI knew an outside group in Texas planned to kill Occupy “leaders” with suppressed sniper rifles “if deemed necessary.” The memos provide a rare, disturbing look into the thinking of our security establishment, which, by the way, hasn’t lifted a finger to investigate ridiculously obvious malfeasance on Wall Street. For an excellent analysis of these memos, and links to the documents themselves, see: Naked Capitalism | Banks Deeply Involved in FBI-Coordinated Suppression of “Terrorist” Occupy Wall Street

A lot of things, especially the economy, have changed dramatically for the worse since autumn 2008. The system has decayed to a frightening degree. But it isn’t that I hate the rich. I don’t. And I don’t blame capitalism; capitalism at its best, when not corrupted beyond all recognition, encourages lower prices and better services through competition. Giant corporate welfare troughs like TARP and ObamaCare, requiring every American to buy health insurance from select companies, enshrining certain banks by name as “Too Big To Fail,” these things have nothing to do with capitalism. This is Mussolini-style corporatism. Corporatism is the problem. The segment of the corporate class that’s monopolized the Congress and executive branch with big money, the estimated .05% of Americans who max out at the legal limit for campaign contributions each year, these guys are the problem, not “the rich” writ large. As I document in a recent post, we’re now in the America of Congressman Bribo and the House of Bribasentatives. We’ve allowed a tiny, shadowy minority to monopolize the levers of power, which makes impossible the aim of our founding fathers, for, as Federalist No. 52 put it, a Congress “dependent upon the People alone.” (Source) Since we have allowed this, which isn’t a “conspiracy,” but rather total spinelessness and capitulation of our craven political class in the face of a corporate class that very openly pursues its self-interest with more and more sophisticated methods, we increasingly enter FDR’s nightmare, and the attendant “acceptable standard of living” problems that he mentioned.

My thinking has changed dramatically. Back in Alabama, surrounded by GOP wins in the 94% Soviet-range, I thought electing Democrats en masse would put us on a better path, or at least help a little via incremental reforms (I was always skeptical of the powerful). Now, I realize movements are everything. Now, the Left gets most of my resentment. They have capitulated and betrayed their own to such an extent, for so long, monstrosities like ObamaCare, which, at its core is $400 billion in subsidies to the dying private health insurance industry, are embraced as “liberal.” ObamaCare is not progressive; it takes us backward. It doesn’t address any of the Medicaid issues I have fought to bring to light over the years. Instead, it is almost solely about federal cash propping up zombie health insurance, as jobs increasingly no longer provide health insurance. We’ve entered an economy based on freelancing and short-term contracts, and I’m not saying that it is necessarily bad in-and-of-itself, but it’s the reality and instead of addressing the reality, ObamaCare addresses employer health insurance plans that are increasingly a relic of the 20th century economy. The economic configuration we grew up with is GONE. ObamaCare is like inventing a better 8-track player in 2012, there is a major disconnect from reality.

Ultimately there is no power to narcissistic, self-indulgent thinking. Authentic thinking originates with an encounter with the world.

— Abraham Joshua Heschel, in Ch. 5 of Who Is Man? (1965)

The disconnect between the liberal establishment and the realities for the rest of us has increasingly widened as the Left courts the same donors at the top of the corporate food chain, the .05%. That disconnect upsets me the most. It means they’re not encountering the world, not seeing the painful realities and unintended consequences of their policies. The hermetically-sealed bubble they live in is obvious when liberal pundits are baffled by protests. “Why are they protesting?” they ask, as debt, unemployment, and hunger reach unprecedented levels.

Death of the Liberal Class by Chris Hedges presents overwhelming evidence of the Left’s “death.” Obama is particularly appalling. I felt some guarded optimism at first, but what faith I had that Obama would help quickly evaporated; I don’t see anything that this administration has done as great. The few times Obama admits there are serious problems under his administration of happy optimistic shiny wonderfulness, like when he did the Q&A on immigration on Univision, he acts powerless to lead, or even affect change in any of the federal agencies that answer to him. Has corporate influence neutered him that thoroughly?

Here are my own observations: I’ve never heard Obama say the words “poor” or “poor people.” There’s no connection to Martin Luther King’s legacy or his poor people’s campaign. The newspeak-esque language that’s used is always “middle class families,” or “working families,” which is not only bloodless and doesn’t acknowledge the suffering out there, but also sends the message “don’t worry corporate lobbyists, we only want to help families that work, not those pitiful lazy wretches who can’t find work.” Never is the disintegration of the family that’s happened in-tandem with economic disintegration mentioned. Though the homeless heavily dotted the streets of Washington DC in 2003 when I was there, and it must be exponentially worse post-collapse, Obama can’t find the strength to say the word “poor,” much less mention the homeless people he must pass in the presidential limousine.

The fact that the left media meekly pleads with Obama: The Nation | White House Meeting with Low-Income Americans? —Obama has not met meaningfully, not once, with poor people or anti-poverty activists (but the author still can’t say the P-word!) and Salon | Will Obama cave on Social Security? shows how far we’ve fallen.

The bubble seems so impenetrable, it’s looking like the Orwellian caste system: there’s the Inner Party: the 0.5%, the segment that controls the elections, the president, Congress, and the corporate class, then the Outer Party: the craven media, political parties, left and right organizations, universities, etc., who are recognizable by their eagerness to serve and provide cover to those within the Inner Party so they maintain the pillowy cocoon of economic safety during the present instability. Then, there’s everyone else. I’m reluctant to call us proles, since there’s still a lot of wealth in our ranks, even an upper-middle-class, but we don’t have much voice and the Outer and Inner Party aren’t very aware of our concerns.

The collapse of The Left is so complete that Mussolini-style corporatism is now the “center,” and pursued doggedly by the Obama and his administration of corporate courtiers. I now blame The Left more than the GOP, much more than the Tea Party, who are responding to the economic collapse and bailout culture same as Occupy. I wish Occupy and the Tea Party could band together and fight the bailouts that are continuing.

We need to look at HOW it got so bad. The corporate culture is suspect #1. It bombards us constantly like the TVs in Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty-Four you can never turn off. Turn that $#!T off. Too often, the messages coming through are “buy our newest product, and [subtext] buy this thing, it’s all you need to be happy! You don’t need community, church, a moral core, the Bible, etc etc etc.” The messages coming in via mass corporate culture are usually the exact opposite of the inherent value of human life, humans having inherent value and sanctity and dignity, instead, the only value lies in what you produce, your income, or how ruthless you are. Not to mention the pornification of everything; if I had a daughter, I would burn the TV. Several rabbis have pointed out, the dominant mass media culture is closer to the ancient Greek culture that glorified the body and beauty over everything else, than Jewish and Christian cultures that glorified spiritual and intellectual ability. The messages we’ve become acculturated with, have resulted in our loosening our grip on the moral imperatives we must hold fast to….

We’ve lost a lot. Movements which forced President Nixon to sign important legislation like the Clean Water Act, OSHA, etc., they’re gone now. The labor movement is mostly gone.
What do we need to do to fight back against corporate dominance, national decay, and the zombification of everything? First, we need a realistic assessment of where we are and how bad it’s gotten. Then, we have to, on the macro level, build new regional and national movements that articulate the concerns of the poor and disabled, in language that flows from the conscience and moral imperatives that can’t be denied. Only radical love can beat radical evil; I’m for radical love. Occupy Wall Street needs to come back into the streets, but much more is needed. We need the kind of movements that are so powerful, the corporate state has to respond, like Solidarity in 1980s Poland or Tahrir Square in Egypt. Movements are everything.

On the micro level, we must rebuild community. Americans have too often bought into the cult of the self, that if you just buy the new product, you don’t need others. We’ve been lulled into isolation, buying the idea that government will take care of those in need: the poor, the disabled, the elderly. Even when Medicare and Medicaid did provide for the material needs of people like me, which is less and less true today, there’s a need for social and spiritual connection. I myself really need community. We have to rebuild communities that provide those connections. Churches and synagogues need to be a part of this effort, and need to articulate the moral imperatives that give movements their power.

Here’s an example of the moral thinking movements need, from Catholic theologian Paul Tillich:

…When Augustine equates the Kingdom of God with the church and the Kingdom of Satan with the great world empires, he is partly right and partly wrong. He is right in asserting that in principle the church is the representative of the Kingdom of God; he is wrong in overlooking the fact…that the demonic powers can penetrate into the church itself, both in its doctrine and institutions. He is right to the extent in which he emphasizes the demonic element in every political structure of power…

— Paul Tillich in Theology of Peace

…The technical development is irreversible and adjustment is necessary in every society, especially in a mass society. The person as a person can preserve himself only by a partial non-participation in the objectifying structures of technical society. But he can withdraw even partially only if he has a place to which to withdraw.

…It is the task of the Church, especially of its theology, to describe the place of withdrawal, mainly the “religious reservation.” It is the task of active groups within and on the boundary line of the Church to show the possibilities of attack, to participate in it wherever it is made and to be ready to lead it if necessary.

…Christian action must find a way to save the person in the industrial society.

— Paul Tillich, The Person in a Technical Society

We have to find the strength to build very new movements that articulate the reality the poor face. We can’t wait for a moribund Congress and Goldman Sachs-controlled presidency to do it. Without national renewal, we face national collapse.

Looking forward to your comments,

Nick

Recommended reading: The Working Poor: Invisible in America by David K. Shipler

The Death of the Liberal Class by Chris Hedges

Feed your brain a long-form meal, not a sound-bite

Full podcast: Inside Washington’s Money Machine : Planet Money : NPR

We all know the political fundraising climate of our time…the bar for campaign costs keeps going up and up and up. Team Obama said that they had to raise a record $One Billion for the 2012 re-election run, THEN THEY DID, the cycle continues, campaign costs go up exponentially, largely driven by soaring TV ad time prices, and the government world is more and more and more focused on campaign fundraising.

In order to raise the obscene amounts of money necessary, politicians have to spend more and more of their time (time they should be using serving us, the voters and constituents) chasing down donors. They have to send the message that they’re carefully counting who’s giving how much, to create a competitive atmosphere. And send not-so-subtle signals that there’s going to be a return on the investment. Often, these signals are about as subtle as a foghorn at a funeral.

Political graft has become so aggressive, you now have situations like the one described on Planet Money above, implicit quid pro quo no longer carries enough cost certainty for some, some Congressmen are furious when expected PAC graft payments don’t come in fast enough!

Right now, we have a system of open, legal bribery; ALL the incentives and thus, inevitably, ALL the policymaking energy is lined up against efforts to help normal constituents, and lined up for the special interests that give money to elect candidates. This totally skews the system so that the corrupt incentives make the government serve powerful private interests first and the public good only accidentally, but it remains completely legal.

I am desperate to address the crisis of campaign bribetributions making government only serve moneyed interests (not democracy but bribeocracy). If the powerful will never let us remove campaign bribetributions from our system, how do we realign the corruption to serve the people NOT just narrow interests with fat stacks of $$$$???

The Storms Within

People forget, but though humans DO have a spiritual core, they’re coming from tens of thousands of years in the cave as well. Certain things are in-born, hard-wired in the base end of the forebrain, or reptilian brain or whatever you may call it; right next to things like fight or flight, territoriality, hunger and other instincts in the lower brain are our sexuality and some fundamental guides of human attractiveness, passed straight down from the caveman/cavewoman experience.

Those looking for a good cavewoman to pair with, knowing all too well that the pairing would need to produce like eight kids within a decade before the end of your life expectancy at age 30 to have maybe two of your offspring survive in a bleak era of horrendous infant, child and adult mortality—something that would continue to be a huge factor in the everyday lives of humans until the emergence of modern medicine in the 20th century, would automatically look for a cavewoman with a healthy look like she could carry eight babies, full breasts that look like they could feed two babies at once, nice skin signaling health, and a good-looking symmetrical face (a subconscious indicator of good genes in all humans). This is hard-wired in the brain as guideposts pointing toward female attractiveness, as shown by its prevalence today across cultures on all six inhabited continents.  A deep, bedrock thing in the mind; though largely subconscious, it remains ubiquitous.

Those looking for a quality caveman to pair with would automatically seek out the strongest, most battle capable male, who could kill wildebeests and rival tribesmen so the she and the offspring can survive (ironically, with acts of violence, including literally beating an adversary’s brains out, an act of protection and love for the woman). The images of males that women are interested in tend to feature images of strong men, not naked as men like to look at women, but in clothes that convey a status or role as providers and/or protectors, e.g. men in uniform, firemen calendars, etc. What’s attractive in the human male (for most) is more subtle and complicated, but it’s no less hard-wired.

So where does that leave men with permanent disabilities? I’m a guy who’s continually trying to find my way as man, and be a good man alongside severe disabilities in the mix, things like needing a ventilator and intact breathing tubes an inseparable part of my lived experience day-in and day-out and a real barrier. So I’ll speak to that—not meaning to say the path of the disabled male—I include the gay male here, similar challenges—is harder than other paths. And no denying it can be super difficult for women with disabilities given the ableist society we live in, and ambitions today rightfully dwarf the cavewoman’s (and not meaning to discount the struggles of those on transgender or gender queer paths either, which, in my view, is no less hard-wired a position than mine, as evidenced by the cavemen AND the animal kingdom). Of course, regardless of gender, everybody wants the same basic foundational things, to feel safe, wanted, needed, like they matter. This is just “write what you know,” about the lived experience of gender, not “gender theory,” and not intending to say the path of the disabled male is harder, but it is different, very different.

Cartoon created by Nick, May 2nd, 2012

Women with disabilities, predominately, can still have the fundamental elements of female attractiveness society expects, there is obvious beauty abundant here (I admit, I’m biased in favor of disabled women) while men with disabilities have an incredibly difficult time being providers and protectors. It’s an uphill battle feeling valuable in any sort of male gender role a disabled guy has attempted to carve out. Men can have physical attractiveness too, no question, we can rock the good-looking symmetrical face with the best of ‘em; but while that may open doors, it won’t take you far beyond that because everybody tends to, consciously or unconsciously, want men to be protectors and providers, and frankly so do I.  I don’t think women who want that from men are “superficial,” I see it as a legitimate, totally valid need. And focusing on what the man offers and actually does is, truly, less “superficial” than how men size up women, which, until a guy matures, will heavily tilt toward the body. Anyhow, to be useful in that way, protecting, providing, being a doer, taking specific actions, physical or not, that matter to someone, is a core thing in the male psyche (granted, “writing what I know” here does involve projecting forth my own feelings and perspective, but I do think a lot of this is universal across men).

If you don’t believe these male gender roles/attitudes are largely hard-wired, here’s one powerful example from my childhood.  When my younger brother and I were little kids, my mom tried to reduce violent toys from our play, no toy guns, bows, arrows, swords, etc; I respect the intention there.  But “boys will be boys,” and will play cops and robbers with forefingers as pistols, have light saber duels with paper towel cores, draw great biplane battles (may or may not include King Kong or Godzilla) in school notebooks, and much more.  When my brother Jamie was like 5, he put a ball in the exhalation manifold, essentially turning part of his ventilator into A CANNON.  That was when mom realized, that kind of thing is deep-seated, irreversible.  I’d contend that there’s caveman programming involved, that boys are somehow preparing to guard the women and children in the cave.

There’s socialization to be tough cavemen from infancy on up as well.  Author of Raising Boys, Dr. Steve Biddulph, mentions a study that’s shown “parents hug and cuddle girl children far more, even as newborns. And they tend to talk less to boy babies.”  This study is discussed in a bit more detail in page 87 of Baby Boys: An Owner’s Manual.  I also found evidence in the literature that boy babies tend to toss aside stereotypically girl toys and go for the stereotypically boy stuff, here and here.

Another thing that causes difficulty on the path of the disabled male is that society usually expects men of action to take physical actions (go to place, do thing, go to other place, do another thing, go to work, come back, go to work, etc) not predominately mental actions (write a story); in this way the modern male gender role can be super restrictive sometimes.  This focus on physicality is particularly harsh in high school and college where so many are on the hunt for compatible mates; I feel like even the great author of The Iliad and The Odyssey, Homer, would get the cold shoulder, cut off from the cool cliques like any other disabled guy.  A blind, itinerant storyteller like my man H wouldn’t last long in the brutal, unforgiving teen culture.  It’d be “run him off like the hobo he is!”  High school and college impose an especially painful paradox on guys: during the period that cerebral skills matter most for that man’s future, the cerebral matters least to his peers.  Untold numbers of potential geniuses are squashed in the egg this way.

Men are not expected to have the physical passivity/motionlessness that my disability entails, society tends to think of that as a stereotypical female trait, and, again, expect men to be men of action. Maybe that goes a long way toward explaining why I’ve been mistaken for female so often in my teens and 20s—almost always by women—including one bizarre incident at an airport when the TSA lady asked my mom if I am supposed to go in the security line for “males or females,” despite the fact I had arrived with heavy 5 o’clock shadow stubble, looking more Bogart than Bacall.  I can only speculate that I was mistaken for female because I sit passively still in the wheelchair, lacking masculine body language to signal my boyness. Stuff like that rattled me a little, and definitely left me wondering and feeling like an outsider looking in at normals.

Warren Farrell, who writes books about male psychology, has some interesting insights and ideas on this stuff, that women’s gender roles have changed drastically over the past 50 years while men’s roles remain, he says, fairly unchanged since approximately 1961.  This has put “boys and men are decades behind girls and women psychologically and socially, and increasingly behind women academically and economically.”  At the high school I went to, boys were most often academic losers, and boys’ attendance at the college I went to has fallen from 60% and 50% male incoming classes 20 years ago to 25% or less today, reflecting a global trend in enrollment in liberal arts colleges.  Guys don’t know what path they’re to follow anymore.   And I can’t really blame them, given they’re in a society that increasingly frowns on young boys sword-fighting with paper towel rolls or playing index finger pistoleer, in one 2010 case, a Michigan elementary school even suspended a boy for excessive forefinger fire, but still needs them to be soldiers when they grow up.  While crackdowns on such “violence” in the public schools continue, this same America simultaneously expects teens to kill and be killed with real violence and real firearms in our unending foreign wars. “He had heard the clinking of the grenade, but he was disoriented after being shot,” says this recent riveting narrative in Stars and Stripes about shredded flesh, blood and survival from Afghanistan.
  Dr. Farrell suggests more flexible male gender roles for the 21st century.  I hope he’s right and that such shifts prove doable, because as the years go by, it seems headlines about the “boys’ crisis” the U.S. and Canada is experiencing were onto something.

As for disabled men and boys, I feel like a lot of us won’t have much of a chance. Too often, the path of the disabled male is so difficult and the expectations they face—and the expectations they place on themselves, remember, a lot of it is hard-wired—so harsh that they give up; the percentage of men with severe disabilities (on ventilators, etc.) who have already given up is probably fairly astronomical based on what I have observed over the years.  Giving up too often seems the only option if there’s no care to even get you out of bed because of malevolent budget cuts against Medicaid services, lack of access to work or social opportunities, even lack of a wooden plank ramp to literally get you in the doors of your community; in short, the ubiquitous barriers in an ableist society.  A disabled man who has given up, and spends his life playing video games while his loved ones work to support him may feel like a useless gelding, and that humiliation can become a self-reinforcing loop of pain, the tender masculine heart eventually in lockdown mode; “why bother, I’ll never produce anything of worth.”  “I’m not needed anyway.”  “I can’t do anything.”  To be useless is to not be a good man, and to not be a good man is not to be a person, and to be subhuman means existential terror.

Neither men nor women deserve humiliation.  Men are sensitive to words just as much as any human, and if people can avoid the kind of “castrating” language discussed in this—brief and simplistic but surprisingly on target—YouTube video by relationships author “Kara Oh,” then great, all the better to avoid hurting each other.  Guys are fairly simple, I think, just wanting to matter and be a valued shiny knight, at root.  If a guy is stuck in a self-reinforcing loop of pain and humiliation already, thus already has storms within, and then someone he trusts adds insults on top of it, that’s like adding a hurricane to a hurricane, the perfect storm.  It can deepen that humiliation spiral until the male psyche breaks down like an old car.

To conclude, the path of the disabled male means running the gauntlet of ablism, societal expectations, your own expectations, on and on, day-in and day-out.  My own desire to have some sort of valuable role as protector or provider or something useful continues.  I’ve tried to put out that fire; after all, how’s a mostly bedbound guy on a ventilator gonna assume any sort of role that would be recognizable as a male gender role anyway?  But that fire won’t go out, and it’s part of what keeps me doing things, keeps me from giving up.  Sometimes I feel that giving up trap‘s gravitational influence tugging on me, and I have to lean against that.  I don’t want to get into that spiral. Though I’ve had my down weeks and months, and times of inactivity—especially when hit with recurring illnesses—but not just due to illness, I admit to down times purely due to ineptitude, depression and/or confusion over what to do next.

Where do I fit in?  How can I be the protector and provider I want to be in this messed up world?  I didn’t have much male guidance growing up, especially after becoming dependent on a BiPap in 1992 and a trach and ventilator in 1994, which more or less made me “a shut-in” for the better part of a decade, and I was a very inquisitive youngster, so I have asked “where do I fit in as a man?” since I was a young teen.  I’m 30 now, and realize the only path to resolve that is to forge ahead and find your own answers.  I DO NOT want to be a victim, that crap gets old quick.  I’d like to feel useful in any role I can carve out, regardless of what anyone expects or thinks; if I can somehow offer worthwhile contributions, give back to my partner/wife and loved ones, I have succeeded.

A controversial essay wasn’t my aim here; my purpose was to shine some light on the lived experience of the path of the disabled man a bit, acknowledging that this barely begins to scratch the tip of the iceberg on this topic; human societies and the people in them are fully immersed in sexuality, gender roles and their expectations, and sex differences, from womb to tomb.  If even one person got some new insights, some illumination into life as a man with a disability, great.   If one person who loves a man learns a little more about the storms inside the masculine heart, and reaches a bit more harmony with him, all the better.  Discord between the yin and yang destroys worlds, while harmony heals them.

May we all find harmony,

Nick

This is the first in a series of book and article reviews I’ll write, taking you through the stacks and exploring old and not so old books about humanity’s story (history). In this case, I’m exploring a fairly rare social history from 1965, probably not something you’d find on the shelves of your local public library or Barnes & Noble. If you like this review, leave a comment below

Heroes Without Glory: Some Good Men of the Old West by Jack Schaefer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It’s seldom that a historical writer captures both the close up, the individual stories, attitudes and essence of the people who contributed to an era, and the wide-view, what the society was like, simultaneously. But by telling the stories of how a diverse cross-section of men contributed to Western settlement, Jack Schaefer did just that with Heroes Without Glory: Some Good Men of the Old West. Schaefer offers detailed portraits of the good men that made building communities in the unforgiving wilds of the territories possible; as Louis L’Amour once wrote—and I’m paraphrasing from memory—”this was a big country and needed big men and women to fill it, big of spirit, big of heart” and it’s these “big” goodmen that Schaefer focuses on. The goodmen, instead of oft-discussed badmen, desperadoes like Billy the Kid, Black Bart, Jesse James and the Younger Gang, Butch Cassidy and “The Wild Bunch” gang and the whole rogues gallery of Western history, who were evidently the subject of frenzied interest at the time of this book’s first publication (1965). In the preface, Schaefer places himself squarely against what he dubs “the cult of the badman,” denouncing the “cultists” for capitalizing on the morbid interest in the “badmen,” who he says impeded growth out West, tearing down and attacking civilization.

This is a book about the goodmen who built the West, a book of lengthy, in-depth biographies of the unheralded pioneer mailmen, explorers, doctors, cowboys, etc. who made the territories livable. Schaefer is clearly drawn to men of extreme patience and fortitude, men of action, not of words. Thus he spends time profiling men like the nearly non-verbal John “Snowshoe” Thompson, a self-described “slow, simple Norski” who used Norwegian snowshoes and techniques to deliver the first mail and supplies (including life-saving medicines) from Nevada to California over the treacherous pass in the Sierra Nevadas. And man of few words and many cows, John Chisum, one of the first cattle barons. He begins the book with eccentric trapper James Capen Adams (“Grizzly” Adams) who spent almost all his life wordlessly among his favorite grizzly bears, in nature. This book made me think about how the Old West ethos, with its focus on action uber alles and the man of action eking out a living from undeveloped wilds as opposed to the buffoonish and idle man of words back east, changed what’s considered manly from the close of the Victorian era up into the present-day. Perhaps without intending to, Schaefer gives us insight into what would become the mold for “manliness” throughout the 20th century.

Why I gave this book Four stars: I’m a big believer that social history is where it’s at, that to really understand the people of a certain time and place, you need to read the words of the people who were there and learn from those everyday folks the rhythms of that past culture, how the society functioned, etc. This book does that. How new settlements functioned, how U.S. territories in the 19th century worked, really fascinates me. As always, the little details hook me; the fact that the biggest bear “Grizzly” Adams ever caught became the model for Charles Nahl‘s design of California’s bear flag (though keep in mind that there were literally over a dozen bear flag designs adopted to varying degrees until a standardized design was finally adopted in 1953), that bovine thievery was a problem, cows trying to break into horse stables and steal the horse’s hay a constant issue out west, that John Chisum maintained his wealth as a Texas cattle baron through the trials and tribulations of the Civil War because he had the foresight to realize that Confederate currency may not hold up, so whenever he got his hands on rebel money, he exchanged it for more cows as soon as possible. I love that stuff.

My favorite part of the book is its biography of Dr. Charles Fox Gardiner. Originally from New York, where King of England, Charles I, had granted the Gardiner family a private island off Suffolk County—Gardiner’s Island—in 1639. In the mid-1800s, Charles Fox Gardiner trained as a doctor in New York City, on Roosevelt Island—then known as Blackwell’s Island—at one of the predecessors of Goldwater hospital. Then he took his skills west to aid the frontier mining communities in Colorado Territory. That this book contained an account of pioneer medicine is why I picked it up. It doesn’t disappoint on that score.

Gardiner built a shanty for his office with a blue and gold sign outside. No one trusted the new guy initially, but slowly his reputation grew by word of mouth and he had a steady and growing practice on his hands. “Patient after patient was unable to pay, then out of nowhere one would pay $100. Unusual but fascinating,” Gardiner said. I found the insights into pioneer doctors fascinating, and I hope to find the book Gardiner himself wrote about his experiences, Doctor at Ridgeline, in an accessible format soon.

The downsides of Heroes Without Glory: Some Good Men of the Old West. come with the author’s old-fashioned views and ancient prejudices that really filter the content, and in some cases really stink it up, especially regarding the native tribes of the West. The only Native American “goodman” profiled is Chief Washakie, leader of the Eastern Shoshones. Washakie was indeed a great leader of the Shoshones, and a pivotal figure in not only American Indian history, but also of the Old West in whole. Indeed, we may not even know the name Shoshone today if not for Washakie; the loose band of Shoshone tribes may have been wiped out by enemy tribes, and probably wouldn’t have even become a federally-recognized tribe without his forceful leadership. Most important was his political skills; Washakie secured a large reservation, Wind River Indian Reservation, in what is now Wyoming, for his fairly small band of Eastern Shoshones because he was such a forceful and well-known leader and peacemaker for his people. Schaefer artfully highlights Washakie’s remarkable achievements, but disturbingly, Schaefer seems to herald Washakie more for his exceeding patience with the constant oppression, control and expropriation of lands previously reserved for the Shoshone. Every decade, Uncle Sam would bite off another giant piece of the land he’d promised to them, and one year they forced them to half the Wind River Reservation with the Arapaho, their ancient rivals. Washakie didn’t—probably couldn’t—fight back, and shared all he could with the Arapahoes.

The Indian leaders that met such humiliations with arrows and repeating rifles aren’t mentioned here. It’s also sucky that this book doesn’t profile a single woman; that amounts to cleaving the history of the West in half! Going in with a wide open mind, one can still appreciate this stuff. But no mind is open enough to like the biography Schaefer includes on Valentine T. McGilicuddy. I thought the chapter on McGilicuddy would focus on his years as a trailblazing frontier Army surgeon and surveyor, but is mostly an account of McGilicuddy’s long tenure as Indian Agent on Pine Ridge Reservation in the Dakotas; it’s one of the more offensive views of Indians you’ll find, paternalistic, infantilizing, ugh. You can skip this chapter if you’d like. But it’s also historical evidence of how loathsome the reservation system has been.

It can be invaluable to read older perspectives. I give this four stars because it’s a rare social history, with great detail of how it really was in biographies of (in order of appearance) Grizzly Adams, George A. Ruxton, John “Snowshoe” Thompson, John Phillips, Washakie, John S. Chisum, Thomas J. Smith, Valentine T. McGillycuddy, Charles Fox Gardiner, and Elfego Baca. Definitely worthwhile for Wild West aficionados and history buffs.

View all my reviews

So, as I said in Part 1, it’s very important to assess presidential candidates in a just and fair manner, and too often the news media is blaring the one sentence “not concerned about the very poor” sans context. But, to be honest, Romney’s answer is even worse when examined in its full context and nuance. Gail Collins over at the NYT wrote an excellent line-by-line breakdown of Mitt’s full statement. I won’t reprint her words here but I highly recommend you take a look.

Romney’s statement (read it here in full) singles out the 95% of Americans in the middle as his main concern. He’s not concerned about the top 1% and that leaves the bottom 4% he isn’t concerned about. Basic arithmetic shows the bottom 4% are those earning under $5,000 annually, a group politicians barely notice exist, much less spend time helping. This category would probably encompass mostly the elderly and disabled, and the homeless, including a lot of homeless veterans.

The most intelligent and spot-on post I’ve seen on this so far in the sprawling blogosphere is from the Columbia Journalism Review’s Campaign Desk: Three Thoughts on Mitt Romney’s ‘Very Poor’ Day : CJR
What makes it great is it actually does what journalism should, dig beneath the noise and the claims and try and unearth the facts. It points out that when Romney says the bottom 4% have a “very ample safety net” and it’s the middle class that needs help, it reveals a deep misunderstanding about the safety net in his brain. The article points out that social programs, for example Medicaid, spend more on long-term care for the elderly and disabled than on any other line item, and plenty of those folks qualify under medical assistance and Medicaid keeps them perched barely on the edge of a middle class quality of life. The article also cites data showing that many beneficiaries of Medicaid are actually middle-class families—certainly families in that broad “90-95 percent of Americans” that Romney says he wants to help—who “would otherwise be stuck with the full tab for care for their elderly and disabled relatives.” Medicaid is life support for the middle class as much as it’s a “safety net” for “the very poor.” More people should be cognizant of this data. Paul Ryan is: he hates that Medicaid is benefiting the middle class.

When pressed by CNN’s Soledad O’Brien after his initial “very poor” remark, Romney went on to say “We will hear from the Democrat Party about the plight of the poor.”
Essentially, he’s saying that’s their job, not Republicans’ role.

This references a political balance that may have existed 30 years ago, when Tip O’Neill and outspoken liberals controlled the House of Representatives and made sure the concerns of the poor were heard sometimes, but most certainly doesn’t exist now. No Democratic party leader that would remotely try to balance the scales toward the poor has existed since the era Tip O’Neill clinked high ball glasses in the Oval Office with Ronnie after 6 o’clock, and spent all his working hours before 6pm standing up to President Reagan, fighting for his blue-collar, poor base. He was by the unions, for the unions, and that doesn’t exist anymore. That is over; Tip O’Neill died in 1994 and no one remotely like him has succeeded him. Nancy Pelosi, the longest-serving Democratic Speaker of the House since O’Neill (she served four years) spends more time cozying up to corporate interests than unions. Instead of O’Neill, a hardscrabble Catholic boy from a poor Irish district, fighting the good fight for every day blue-collar people, we have Pelosi, an aloof elite holding a net worth of approximately $58 million in real estate, stock, and businesses she and her husband own, and is now facing an insider trading scandal. Sadly, Chris Hedges is right about the death of the liberal class.

When was the last time you heard Pelosi or Obama, or even the Clintons talk about the very poor? About the impoverished elderly? About people with disabilities? About the marginalized and excluded bottom 4% of Americans who have no apparent “trampoline out of poverty”? If I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard “from the Democrat party [sic] about the plight of the poor” over the past 20 years, I doubt I’d have enough nickels to make a phone call. Democrats frequently speechify about “working families,” when the problem is American families aren’t working, they can’t find enough work to make ends meet; too much of our economic base has been off-shored, and there hasn’t been enough innovation to replace what’s been lost. Obama and Pelosi talk about the middle class, campaigning for that big demographic same as Mitt Romney is, minus mentioning the “very poor” at all.

So given the Democrats abdicating their past role as fighters for the poor, we have to ask the Republicans as well, Romney included, for assistance for those trapped at the bottom, for help fixing the safety net and the upward ladder.

Unfortunately, the video footage is coming out, showing that “the people who need the help most are not the poor” is a recurring theme in Romney’s stump speeches. This is really troubling stuff, particularly after all the data has again and again shown the U.S. to lead the developed world in poverty [Source]. Also, as Romney says “if [the safety net] has holes in it, I will repair them,” he’s simultaneously pushing forth a tax plan that would blow a hole in social programs’ funding like we’ve never seen: Romney Tax Plan Would Require Slashing Social Safety Net … Says Romney Economic Adviser. It is disturbing that Romney says we have a “very ample safety net” while the next minute pushing a tax plan that—based on the analysis of his own economic adviser—would require slashing the very social programs he’s saying he’ll “repair.” Yet another contradiction from Willard “Mitt” Romney, the human mystery wrapped in an enigma. I want to reform the system to revolutionize how it sees us and respects our individual freedom, we need a very big change, I like the possibilities in some of Senator Wyden’s ideas for replacing Medicaid—which he calls a “caste system”—with something better and more equitable; what we don’t need is to destroy the program, death from a thousand cuts.

Still, I hope for some kind of educational moment can come out of this. That’s why I’ve written Romney HQ a letter. I have nothing against Governor Romney as a person, I’m sure he’s a great, affable guy, and I’d love to meet him to work on bringing individualized funding, choice and competition to Medicaid/Medicare instead of “one size fits all.” We don’t really know what kind of Republican Willard is deep down or how he’ll really govern—is he a lefty Rockefeller Republican like his dad, a moderate pragmatist like George H. W. Bush, a hard-right Reagan-and-Ayn-Rand type?—we don’t know. So why not assume he can be very reform-minded like his dad; why can’t Mitt be the one to lead the way in revolutionizing Medicaid and Medicare to be completely different? Choice, competition, individualized budgeting, cash and counseling—let’s go!

After all, Romney supporters like to refer to Mitt Romney as “Mr. Fix-it.” I’ve seen dudes holding “Romney: Mr. Fix-it” signs prior to the debates on cable news. I found this image on mittromneycentral.com:

Fan art by MittFan12 (Steve Thomas)
In a bizarre interlude, me finding this “Romney Mr. Fix it” image led to me stumbling into the mittromneycentral.com chat room by accident. Most of the supporters in the chat were polite and cordial in answering my questions, and I left there with more respect for Team Romney than I came in with…

Mitt Romney, please fix the safety net.

So, there’s been a dust up over Mitt Romney’s “I’m not concerned about the very poor” comments on CNN.  A lot of the blogosphere is mindlessly blasting this quote sans context, and the TV news even worse, so Team Romney isn’t wrong to protest how this has been “taken out of context.”  Cable news has been bad.  So bad: stopping short of breaking it down into a few syllables and grunts between prescription drug advertisements.

But, to be honest, Romney’s answer is even worse when examined in its full context and nuance.

Here’s Mitt Romney’s “I’m not concerned about the very poor, I’m not concerned about the very rich, I’m campaigning for Americans in the middle” the relevant part of his interview with Soledad O’Brien, with all the context and nuance he gave CNN:

ROMNEY: You know, just let people get to know you better. The nice thing about what happened here in Florida is I got a chance to go across the state, meet with people. They heard what I am concerned about. They understand how I will be able to make things better.

I think people want someone who not just throws an incendiary bomb from time to time but someone who actually knows how it takes to improve their life, get home values rising again, to get jobs again in this country, and to make sure when soldiers come home they have a job waiting for them. And make sure people who are retired don’t have to worry about what’s going to happen at the end of the week.

This is a time people are worried. They’re frightened. They want someone who they have confidence in. And I believe I will be able to instill that confidence in the American people. And, by the way, I’m in this race because I care about Americans. I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there. If it needs repair, I’ll fix it.

I’m not concerned about the very rich, they’re doing just fine. I’m concerned about the very heart of the America, the 90, 95 percent of Americans who right now are struggling and I’ll continue to take that message across the nation.

O’BRIEN: All right. So I know I said last question, but I’ve got to ask you. You just said I’m not concerned about the very poor because they have a safety net. And I think there are lots of very poor Americans who are struggling who would say that sounds odd. Can you explain that?

ROMNEY: Well, you had to finish the sentence, Soledad. I said I’m not concerned about the very poor that have the safety net, but if it has holes in it, I will repair them.

O’BRIEN: Got it. OK.

ROMNEY: The – the challenge right now – we will hear from the Democrat Party the plight of the poor, and – and there’s no question, it’s not good being poor and we have a safety net to help those that are very poor.

But my campaign is focused on middle income Americans. My campaign – you

can choose where to focus. You can focus on the rich. That’s not my focus. You can focus on the very poor. That’s not my focus.

My focus is on middle income Americans, retirees living on social security, people who cannot find work, folks who have kids that are getting ready to go to college. That – these are the people who’ve been most badly hurt during the Obama years.

We have a very ample safety net, and we can talk about whether it needs to be strengthened or whether there are holes in it. But we have food stamps, we have

Medicaid, we have housing vouchers, we have programs to help the poor. But the middle income Americans, they’re the folks that are really struggling right now, and they need someone that can help get this economy going for them.

O’BRIEN: All right. Mitt Romney, congratulations to you on your big victory last night. Thanks for talking with us. appreciate it.

CNN, Transcript of Soledad O’Brien interview with Mitt Romney, Feb. 1, 2012

For me, the “not concerned about the very poor” comment is one of the least disturbing parts of his answer here.

First, it’s what he said immediately following that: “We have a safety net there. If it needs repair, I’ll fix it.” That anyone who has been a leader in government can still essentially wonder aloud IF the safety net needs repair astonishes me. After all the tragic deaths (like the 12-year-old boy who died for lack of a dentist to simply pull a tooth) and horrible suffering that’s been well-documented and displayed, how can anyone not know our safety net needs a major shoring up if not—my position—a total rethinking and restructuring?

To quote from a 2007 blog post I wrote:

For those with severe disabilities dependent on Medicaid, the Republican cuts from 1995-2007 have had horrible consequences. I’ve had to fight like hell to survive. In 1996 in Alabama, Medicaid started gutting EPSDT (the federally-mandated program providing nursing care for those in need) and sending out termination notices to families in the mail. Then in 1999-2001 we had more aggressive cuts. They changed the rules so it’s only a temporary program to train caregivers to stay with their child 24/7, and they keep repeating that it is not the government’s role to “babysit” your child at all (even if your child is on life support and routinely coding). And now it is 2007 and Alabama barely funds it at all. We’ve almost been rolled back into the 1970s level.
I’ve had friends die. I’m sick of tolerating this evil like it is a valid policy position. It is in no way valid nor deserving of our deference and patience. It is nothing but immoral…
…

I have seen too much suffering and death because of inadequate supports and invisible safety nets and I am frakking traumatized that people are still pushing this destructive right-wing mythology that if we chip away at government funding even further, that this will magically increase services. It has been tried for years and has failed every time.

Excerpted from my post Vigorously Insisting On A More Perfect Union: Fighting Cuts, Demanding Universal Health Care | Nick’s Crusade
This “Demanding Universal Health Care” post was published by the Greenhaven Press imprint of Gale Publishing in the 2008 edition of Opposing Viewpoints: Health Care, if anyone is interested.

I think Romney needs to hear these stories, hear the details of how our lives are effected by the swiss cheese safety net.

Some of my other blog posts may prove instructive:
Feds Fiddling While State Medicaid Programs BURN | Nick’s Crusade (a critique of how ObamaCare will impact Medicaid, amid a report of budget cuts in the South leaving people with disabilities in their own waste)
Government-Sponsored Ablism and Segregation Tears Families Apart | Nick’s Crusade (an essay against state-sponsored institutionalization, segregation, and oppression)
Medicaid: Why It’s Broken and How To Fix It | Nick’s Crusade (highlights the broken parts of Medicaid, including funding disparities, poverty mandates and the ultra-expensive and antiquated practice of unnecessarily institutionalizing people, and lays out some solutions)

I plan to drop Willard “Mitt” Romney a note, you could do the same. Let him know what problems in “safety net” programs need his help, concisely and politely. Appeal to his “Mr. Fix-it” rhetoric. I don’t know if anyone will be able to connect and begin a constructive dialogue with Team Romney, but if even one person did, it would have a wonderful impact.

info@mittromney.com

Mitt Romney for President
P.O. Box 149756
Boston, MA 02114-9756

More thoughts on Mitt Romney’s “very ample safety net” comments in Mitt Romney: Can You Help Us, Mr. Fix It? (Part 2)…

[the Institute of Medicine (IOM) report Relieving Pain in America:
A Blueprint for Transforming Prevention, Care, Education, and Research] Issued at the request of Congress as part of President Obama’s health reform legislation, the report calls for a “cultural transformation” — an attitude shift on the level of that seen over the last 50 years toward smoking — to spur more coordinated action to help treat Americans’ pain. Pain patients have long been viewed with skepticism and suspicion, rather than understanding, presenting a barrier to care. Rising rates of prescription drug misuse, addiction and overdose have further led to the establishment of legal and regulatory barriers, such as prescription databases, that can prevent even legitimate pain patients from getting much-needed drugs.

Source: IOM Report: Chronic, Undertreated Pain Affects 116 Million Americans | TIME.com

It seems Congress is not on the side of transforming the way we help people in pain, they’re on the side of the “skepticism and suspicion” and “legal and regulatory barriers,” not to mention the fear mongering over pain medications.

Last month, my Senator, Chuck Schumer made local TV news headlines ranting, not just about abuse of prescription drugs, but “Rails Against FDA Testing Of Super-Potent Painkillers” as NY1′s headline blared atop their story at www.ny1.com. He doesn’t even want these new medications—extra-strong meds that pharmaceutical companies have created to help people in real pain—to be tested and approved for legal prescription and sale by the FDA for fear of abuse. He’s even saying that FDA approval of new pain meds will “add fuel to the fire” of crime and lead to increased robberies, playing up the recent armed raids for oxy and vicodin at two Long Island pharmacies. Absolutely the height of alarmist rhetoric here.

Since I moved to New York City in 2008, I’ve noticed that Senator Schumer tends to make local news across the state with big, scary headlines (in Mobile, AL where I’m from, the U.S. Senators show up as footnotes on the local news, if at all). Team Schumer probably realizes—rightly—that getting his name in the TV headlines that soccer moms and such (i.e. the community-minded folks who tend to vote most, “the likely voter”) might catch as they go through their morning routine or night-time winding down is crucial for his reelection. Schumer

has evidently always been a “tough on crime”-type of politician, a key supporter of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 (VCCLEA) that instituted a federal “three strikes and you’re out” life-imprisonment policy, and since the attacks on 9/11, he’s become a big “tough on terrorism”-type of politician. For example, last May, Senator Schumer similarly made the local news across New York State with his plan for a security crackdown on trains, especially pertinent to New York because New Yorkers are some of the train-ridingest people on the continent. See: Schumer calls for ‘do not ride’ list for Amtrak – NEWS10 ABC: Albany, New York News. These are the kind of headlines Schumer gets. People concerned about unnecessary, Fourth Amendment-crushing, possibly gropey, searches every time you board a train, including me, complained online.

His camera-hogging ways, I get it. Salon called him a “incorrigible publicity hound,” and that’s ok. Be what you are, man. Embrace it. But this time “going too far” is especially “too far” because it could accidentally hurt people with chronic pain who are already hurting.

Here are the local headlines I’m concerned with:
Schumer warns FDA on danger of newest painkillers | Democrat and Chronicle (Rochester, NY’s newspaper of record)
Schumer Rails Against FDA Testing Of Super-Potent Painkillers – NY1.com (NY1 is a 24/7 cable news channel for New York metro area news)
Sen Schumer: ‘Super Painkillers Could Lead To Violent Robberies’ « CBS New York possibly the fear mongeriest headline of the year, though it does present an alternative viewpoint in the video report if not the text summary.
Senator Charles Schumer warns FDA on danger of new painkillers | 7online.com (WABC-TV, the ABC affiliate for NYC.) Watch the video report embedded below, doesn’t provide an alternative viewpoint!

Only one of these scary headlines includes a balancing, alternate viewpoint within. That’s their most egregious journalistic failure: they only give audiences the scare monger’s viewpoint, they only offer shock words.

First, they are leaving out important context like these are MEDICINES for people in real pain. The context and tone treats painkillers as no different than street drugs, omitting the therapeutic intent and quality of life benefits (very real.) Note the language used by the ABC-7 reporter Lucy Yang, the term “the streets“ repeated twice. “At least one [pharmaceutical company] is past the lab stage and now trying to get this super-drug on the streets by next year.” “Of course, before any such narcotic could hit the streets it would have to be approved by the FDA.” Stopping just short of calling pharmaceutical manufacturers street pushers, there.

More language to red-flag from the channel 7 report, including one of the opening lines, “officials report more deaths [from prescription drugs] than heroin, crack, and cocaine”—which officials, Ms. Yang? Please source such a shocking claim. “Despite that, we’re told attempts are underway to introduce a super-drug” “you don’t have to look far to see the violent and punishing reality of addiction to painkillers” “potent and enslaving” “pure painkiller”

Second, why do all these reports reference the robberies on Long Island?  I disagree that the all-too-common oxy and vicodin hold-ups (which are AWFUL, I don’t want to minimize that) would be effected either way whether the FDA approves new narcotics or not. They are linking two completely unrelated stories, echoing Senator Schumer, for shock effect. Journalists should be questioning the Congress critters, holding their feet to the fire, not mindlessly parroting their press releases. Tying past narcotics violence to the unrelated matter of future possible FDA approval of new narcotics seems like pure fear mongering to me.

Third, a look at Schumer’s own language: “the very same people who try to get our kids to use things like oxycodone and vicodin will start peddling this drug, which when abused is poison.” “It would instantly become the most sought-after drug by addicts and criminals.” From the CBSTV-2 story, Schumer said: “Crooks like Oxycontin and Vicodin, yet you leave the doctor’s office, the dentist’s office, the oral surgeon’s office after you have a root canal, they routinely give you 20 to 30 of these pills. That can’t happen with these new powerful drugs.” He’s simultaneously condemning new drugs and old drugs, and nearly finger-wagging at the whole concept of treating post-surgical pain with narcotics. Wow.

The drug in question, according to the CBS channel 2 video report, is Zohydro. Zohydro is hydrocodone like Vicodin, Lortab and Lorset is, but it’s the first long-acting timed-release capsule hydrocodone created. I have chronic pain; I can’t take any of the time release stuff. However, I know numerous people who could benefit from Zohydro and other new medications. This could be a miracle drug for people who’re allergic to—or for whatever reason can’t use—the only other time release painkiller out there, Oxycontin. I’m sure that, for many, this could be a life-changing medicine; long-acting squelching pain, giving people with chronic pain their quality of life back, liberating them to get out of bed. You don’t see that side of the argument on TV, but the benefits of effective pain management are huge, and important.

People can build up a tolerance to pain meds like bacteria can become resistant to antibiotics, and like humans need new antibiotics, humans need new painkillers. We need new pain meds developed and approved for prescription use. People in chronic pain need more options.
Zohydro is also a good step because it isn’t packed with liver-killing acetaminophen that is so commonly combined with opiates. I reported before on the FDA’s bizarre regulation making opioid-acetaminophen combination meds easier to get than purer alternatives because they figure if people know it can destroy their liver they won’t abuse it. This insanity has led to too many deaths, tragedies, and liver transplants, so the FDA itself has been reconsidering recently.

I’m saying consider another perspective (which the media won’t give you). Medication mostly does have a big positive impact. Don’t block or take away pain meds that are giving people quality of life.

Consider this nursing home and hospice facility perspective:

Timely access to controlled medications also continues to be a challenge in the long-term care setting due to drug shortages and what some consider excessively strict federal regulations.

“The Drug Enforcement Agency’s interpretation of the Controlled Substances Act is one barrier that’s impeding timely access to appropriate controlled medications for nursing facility residents and those enrolled in hospice programs,” notes Jennifer Hardesty, PharmD, FASCP, clinical services manager for Remedi SeniorCare.

There is no question that pain’s effects on quality of life are far-reaching. Not only does pain diminish pleasure and interfere with social relationships and one’s ability to stay active, it is also linked to other debilitating conditions, such as depression and anxiety.

Full article: No pain = all gain – McKnight’s Long Term Care News (disclaimer: only includes nursing home perspective)

In the New York metro area, there’s been an oxy crime wave; it has led to a law enforcement crackdown. Doctors are more reticent to prescribe. Visible DEA enforcement actions have created a very real chilling effect that is making it harder for those already having a hard time with chronic pain.

I have nothing against Senator Schumer as a person, I’m sure he’s a great, affable guy, and I’d love to meet him to work on bringing individualized funding, choice and competition to Medicaid/Medicare instead of “one size fits all.” I’m just saying let’s not accidentally snag people in real pain in the “war on drugs” dragnet, let’s be level-headed, let’s not fear monger.

Prior to his 2003 commencement address at the Rochester Institute of Technology, the RIT website lauded Senator Schumer: In the past 25 years, Schumer has become known as a leader on national issues and a tireless fighter for New York. The Rochester Democrat and Chronicle called him “an accomplished, far-sighted legislator,” while The New York Times wrote that he “is a more serious lawmaker with more rooted values, sounder policy positions and a deeper commitment to the common good.”

All I’m asking, Senator, is please live up to your reputation as a committed fighter for the “common good,” include ailing constituents with chronic pain in that common good, and please be “far-sighted” about how federal drug policy can impact the quality of life of the elderly, the terminally and chronically ill, and disabled populations who live with the most severe pain.

Thanks for reading.

Sincerely,

Nick

It’s clear to me that the sum of human knowledge is like a thimble in a sea of what we don’t know, and we’re finding more new questions than answers.  However, if science can find the answers to these amazing questions, it will revolutionize everything.

Below, I’ve assembled a list of these recent new theoretically impossible discoveries, and while some impossibilities are more easily explained than others, and indeed, some are far more revolutionary than others, I think you’ll find *all of them* fascinating.

1. Three Huge Planets Share an Orbit! 

Source: io9.com: Bizarre solar system crams three giant planets into fraction of Mercury’s orbit

This discovery is the least impossible on the list, but still incredibly bizarre, especially when you consider the model of “clearing the neighborhood” planets follow right after their formation, securing an exclusive, uncontested orbit for themselves by knocking all other objects out of their path. Since the International Astronomical Union’s new 2006 definition of a planet requires that an astronomical object “clears its neighborhood” to be defined as a planet, this discovery raises serious questions about the IAU’s definition.

The Kepler spacecraft observed these three planets, two Neptune-like gas giants and one rocky, terrestrial planet twice the size of Earth, orbiting weirdly close to their sun, the newly-discovered Kepler-18 star which is eerily similar to our Sun.  The three planets are so close together that they’re constantly pushing and pulling each other out of their natural orbits, the substantial gravitational fields of each preventing cataclysmic collisions. Since the rocky planet is even closer to its sun than the planet Mercury is to our Sun, it would be even hotter than Mercury (442 Kelvin) and not even microbial life could call it home.

But, if you imagine Earth sharing its orbit with others, getting yanked around by the gravitational pull of two gas giants, it would cause VERY WEIRD climate fluctuations.

We don’t know why these three didn’t clear “their neighborhood.”  The situation they’re in isn’t supposed to be possible really.

To learn more about the Kepler spacecraft and its planet finding mission, click here.

2. The Pulsar in the Crab Nebula is Impossibly Powerful

Source: io9.com: One of the most intensively studied objects in space has been identified as an impossibly powerful neutron star

Astrophysicists have observed the often studied pulsar (also known as a neutron star) in the center of the Crab Nebula pumping out radiation at energies far greater than current astrophysical models can explain.  There’s currently no theory to give us any possible answers to why this pulsar is emitting gamma rays exceeding 100 GeV. 100 GeV! That’s 100-billion electron-volts, or 100-billion times more energetic than visible light.  That’s supposed to be impossible.

3. Impossibly Large Planet Discovered

Source: Space.com: Largest Known Exoplanet Discovered

An exoplanet (from the Greek prefix exo- “external” or “outside”) is a planet outside our Solar System. In 2007, the Trans-Atlantic Exoplanet Survey coordinated out of the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona (the first observatory to photograph the then-unnamed Pluto in spring 1915, then the observatory where Clyde Tombaugh officially confirmed and discovered Pluto) also known as the TrES Project, discovered the largest-ever exoplanet to date. It’s a gas giant, 1,400 light-years away, nestled closely to its star in the constellation Hercules, but it’s SO giant it theoretically shouldn’t exist.

There are currently no models to explain why TrES-4b, one of the first “puffy planets” observed, is so puffy, not to mention why it exists. Data obtained from precise measurements of the starlight blocked when the planet crosses in front of its star (the transit method) indicates TrES-4b is 70% larger than Jupiter, but only 3/4 of its mass. Not only is it the largest planet ever seen (as of 2007) it’s also the least dense planet discovered; it’s roughly the density of cork! According to current models, we don’t know why it exists, the mass is so little that the upper atmosphere would be escaping in a comet-like tail! Why the entire gas giant doesn’t similarly escape into space is so baffling that the TrES Project team and shook their heads and had no other avenue than sent the problem to astrophysics theoreticians. Leading theories speculate that the planet’s inexplicable existence has to do with the intense heating given TrES-4b’s close proximity to its sun, and/or an alien greenhouse effect, with hydrogen in the atmosphere trapping the other gases inside and keeping the gas giant cohesive.

The questions themselves have revolutionized what we know is possible for exoplanets.

For more information: National Geographic: Largest Known Planet Found, Has Density of Cork

4. Did Neutrinos Break The Unbreakable Speed of Light??

Source: io9.com: Faster-than-light neutrinos could be proof of extra dimensions

This last item is by far the most impossible, as exceeding the speed of light is one of physics’ brick walls. Einstein’s theory of general relativity explains the speed of light as an immutable cosmic speed limit, and in the near-century since Einstein first presented the theory of general relativity, no one has been able to disprove it. In fact, data continues to mount supporting the theory; for example, recent measurements near the Sun taken by the Cassini spacecraft prove that Einstein’s predictions about the heavenly bodies’ (stars, planets, etc.) gravity bending space-time are true. More on that in a moment. So far, everything we observe about nature and physics, has been unfailingly consistent with Einstein’s elegant theory, and the theory of general relativity has stood the test of time like a stone lighthouse, unperturbed by the tides of history and the vicissitudes of science and its constant discoveries.

Until now (possibly). The recent neutrino speeds recorded in CERN’s OPERA neutrino experiment (CERN is the European Organization for Nuclear Research, well-known for its gigantic particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider) rocked particle physics last month. If the clocks prove correct, and that’s a big IF, and it’s true that neutrinos moved from CERN in Switzerland to Italy 60 nanoseconds faster than the speed of light, meaning FTL (faster than light) travel isn’t impossible, then that’s an unexplained hole in Einstein’s theory of relativity, and a big one! (Wondering what a neutrino is? Click here.) Not only would FTL travel come into play, but a pandora’s box of impossibilities would open up, everything from time travel to brain-twisty weirdalities like future you sending current you an email from the future with a faster-than-light internet (FTernet!)

It could mean evidence of a fifth or more dimensions, and thus the first observable evidence of string theory. String theory is an attempt at a “theory of everything” that would elegantly reconcile/combine Einstein’s theory of general relativity (addressing the big, cosmological, astrophysics and planetary mechanics problems) with what we’ve learned of quantum mechanics (atomic, sub-atomic, and now, sub-sub-atomic and lower, scale) in the intervening decades, the big astronomical, and small, quantum, questions answered in one string. String theory’s calculations have pointed to possible extra dimensions to explain where dark matter is, and how Earth’s gravity is so light considering the enormous mass of the planet. To answer fundamental physics problems like these, some suggest that gravity (and dark matter—watch Dr. Michio Kaku explain that dark matter may just be the gravitational pull of regular matter from a parallel dimension) are leaking into other dimensions, and they have produced compelling math to back up their ideas. Unfortunately, if string theory isn’t falsifiable, meaning it’s impossible that some observation or experiment will produce a reproducible result that conflicts (or doesn’t conflict) with the theory (because we don’t have the knowledge nor the technology to run experiments that test whether or not it works) then string theory isn’t really scientific, just pure mathematics, and it will wither on the vine. However, if CERN’s FTL neutrinos accidentally uncovered an extra dimension, it would move string theory to frontrunner while keeping general relativity intact, because the 60 nanoseconds FTL incident could be accounted for by the neutrinos cutting across a dimensional shortcut, proving Einstein’s cosmic speed limit is still impossible to get past within normal, four-dimensional space-time.

But a far more likely solution to the 60 nanosecond mystery is a weirdness with CERN’s clocks caused by the curvature of spacetime. As mentioned above, the heavenly bodies, Earth included, by virtue of their mass and gravity, curve spacetime, meaning that gravity is very slightly heavier at the CERN site near Geneva than in central Italy, and thus the clock on the beginning side of the neutrinos’ trip could be tens of nanoseconds slower than the clock at the finish line in Gran Sasso, Italy, and the clocks would have to be precisely synced to compensate. That gravity effects time is nothing unknown or new, but we don’t know whether or not the clocks on both ends were possibly out of sync, not exactly calibrated down to one nanosecond correctly. If such a clock synchronization problem is confirmed, it could shave up to 30 nanoseconds off the speedy neutrinos’ journey, reducing them to a much less-significant and much more easily explained 20 nanosecond over-FTL speed. Source: Faster-than-Light neutrinos face time trial : Nature

"Two-dimensional analogy of spacetime distortion. Matter changes the geometry of spacetime, this (curved) geometry being interpreted as gravity. "

Source: Spacetime – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Me, and lots of space fans like me, are hoping that scientists find a way to prove the FTL barrier really was broken, or discover more about the dimensions the mathematics implies. No one wants this explained away as a clock synchronization anomaly.

For more information: Discovery.com: Faster-than-light neutrino research “Almost Certainly Wrong”

New Scientist: Faster-than-light neutrinos? New answers flood in

OPERA neutrino anomaly – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The History of U.S. – Latin American Relations: An Overview
Nicholas F. Dupree

The history of U.S.-Latin American relations is a long and bloody one checkered by imperialist aggression and exploitation. The United States had a head start building its democratic institutions because it spawned from Britain, a constitutional monarchy whose fledgling parliamentary democracy was far ahead of most of the world at the time, and the U.S. built on that with a constitution and a government based on a revolutionary ideology. American revolutionaries, like the French revolutionaries that followed, were driven to spread their pro-freedom, anti-monarchist ideology, but unlike France’s First Republic, America’s first republic was not only more moderate, it could quickly stabilize amid its isolation and relative lack of competitors for the continent. Surprisingly rapidly, the United States was moving aggressively west and south to spread their revolutionary state and colonize land held by loosely organized indigenous tribes and a Spanish Empire spread thin and in relative decline.

Early on, America’s founding generation had their eyes (and territorial ambitions) pointed South. Presidents Jefferson and John Adams saw Cuba and Puerto Rico as “natural appendages” of North America that should break away from Spanish influence and join the United States. John Quincy Adams thought Cuba an “apple” fallen from the North American tree and that it should end its “unnatural connection” with Spain and rejoin its source, America. (Smith, 2007, p. 25) Thomas Jefferson had an impressive collection of Iberian writers in his library at Monticello, and actively promoted learning of the Spanish language.

“Spanish,” he wrote in a note accompanying a Spanish-language dictionary that he gifted to Peter Carr in 1787; “Bestow great attention on this, & endeavor to acquire an accurate knowledge of it. Our future connections with Spain & Spanish America will render that language a valuable acquisition. The antient [sic] history of a great part of America, too, is written in that language” (Works V: 322).1

But alongside the founding generation’s interest in Latin America, loomed skepticism. The prevailing views of the time included deep doubts about the ability of newly independent Latino populations to adopt republican values and effectively govern themselves, given racial and cultural differences and the dark legacy of oppression and violence from Spanish colonization. “I fear the degrading ignorance into which their priests and kings have sunk them, has disqualified them from the maintenance or even knowledge of their rights, and that much blood may be shed for little improvement in their condition. Should their new rulers honestly lay their shoulders to remove the great obstacles of ignorance, and press the remedies of education and information, they will still be in jeopardy until another generation comes into place, and what may happen in the interval cannot be predicted, nor shall you or I live to see it,” Thomas Jefferson wrote (Smith, p. 46) in an 1811 letter to Dupont de Nemours.2

John Quincy Adams echoed Jefferson’s views (p. 46), and as the United States became a power on the world stage competing for land and resources, it sought to seize them without seizing the diverse populations that lived there. “By the late 1830s, the idea of manifest destiny signified a racist nationalism that preferred to incorporate into the Union ‘unsettled’ and ‘empty’ lands—such as those taken from Native American peoples and, soon thereafter, Mexico.” (Loveman, 2010, p. 57) After the “Mexican Cession” of 1848, in which Mexico “ceded” 55% of its territory to the United States, the limits of Manifest Destiny were undecided, and the question of further annexation was fiercely debated among the varying factions in Congress, especially in the Senate. Seizing “Mexico proper,” including the entirety of the Yucatan peninsula, and Cuba, were both the subject of heated debates, but ultimately they were just too different for Congress and the public to support annexing. Cuba was too black (Smith, p. 26) and Mexico was too Indian: as the New York World wrote, “Mexicans are Indian, aboriginal Indian, and they must share in the destiny of the Indian.” (p. 49) Neither Mexico nor Cuba were incorporated into the United States, despite an unprecedented surge in U.S. imperialism in the 1890s and early 20th century that brought U.S. borders to their greatest territorial extent after Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Guam, Hawaii and more were brought under U.S. control. American militarism and expansion were led by William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt at the helm of a newly modernized and powerful army and navy, and like-minded Republicans like Albert Beveridge and Orville H. Platt at the helm in the Congress. These American imperialists believed, in the words of Senator Beveridge, that “God has not been preparing the English-speaking and Teutonic peoples for a thousand years for nothing but vain and idle self-contemplation. No. …He has made us adept at government that we may administer government among savage and senile peoples.” (p. 51) This view would have driven even more aggressive expansion had their not been deep anxieties among the people and their Congress over “inferior peoples” becoming U.S. citizens. “Racism cut at least three ways. It inspired and justified American territorial expansion, but it also limited its reach due precisely to the indisposition of many Americans to incorporate into the Union “inferior peoples” as equals and citizens. It also underlay the slave/free divide in American domestic politics.” (Loveman, 2010, p. 57)

Once the United States had emerged as a 20th century world power after McKinley and Roosevelt’s wars of expansion, it was ready to put the Monroe Doctrine’s shaky record keeping European powers out of the Hemisphere throughout the 19th century behind it and enforce a U.S. sphere of influence in the Americas in earnest. The U.S. positioned itself to defend its gains in the new global race for land, resources, arms, military bases, trading-posts and colonies, called the “Great Game” in Britain, and the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine was designed do just that: no opportunistic Europeans would bring their game into the U.S.’ backyard. Roosevelt’s Corollary insisted that the United States could intervene in any Latin American republic where instability reigned; the U.S. would send troops anywhere in the Americas where European powers could possibly see an opening due to unpaid debt or revolutionary turmoil. And send troops they did: TR sent troops to seize the “Isthmian Canal” in Panama and took over the customs collections of the Dominican Republic until debt to the U.S. and other great powers (Netherlands and France) were paid in full. (Smith, pp. 56-57) A similar scheme of occupation and repayment was imposed in Haiti with much less success. (p. 60) The customs repayment scheme actually led to war in Nicaragua, where the Americans’ fears of the “Bolshevist” revolutionary government of Mexico establishing its own “sphere of influence” and “primacy” over Central America (p. 67) collided with the Nicaraguan people’s anger and aspirations to be free from the yoke of crushing debt, and a guerrilla insurgency erupted (p. 59). President Coolidge only withdrew the Marines from Nicaragua in 1924 after imposing a fraudulent election that ousted disobedient liberals in favor of pliant “conservatives” led by Adolfo Diaz, who would focus on debt repayment. The Marines came back five months later amid rumblings of possible rebellion against Diaz and further unrest. U.S. efforts to “break kneecaps” in Central American and Caribbean states for payment due didn’t end until the Great Depression and looming threat of World War II necessitated it.

The last Marines withdrew from Nicaragua in 1933, and the Marines’ nineteen-year occupation of Haiti ended in 1934. The Great Depression made such foreign entanglements financially untenable, and Americans looked to the prospects of increased inter-hemispheric trade to aid recovery (p. 74) Soon, the U.S. would concern itself with an even more dire task, countering Axis attempts for world domination; with German and Italian fascists competing to influence fledgling republics in Latin America, Washington could ill-afford its previous “Big Stick” foreign policy. Brazilian trade with Germany was at an all time high, and the Ação Integralista Brasileira (AIB) “formed in 1932 as a deliberate imitation of the Fascist parties of Benito Mussolini in Italy and Salazar in Portugal,” (Leonard, 2007, p. 145) had taken over Brazil’s government, given themselves unlimited “emergency powers,” and decreed the Estado Novo, “the new state,” along the lines of Portugal’s integralist Estado Novo. Brazil was obviously part of Hitler’s empire-building strategy; in Congress, a young Fiorello LaGuardia ranted against Brazilian collaboration with Nazi Germany (Smith, p. 76). Chile remained neutral at this time, having strong ties with the German military and an active German-Chilean minority, and still embittered over the Americans’ siding against them in the 1879-83 War of the Pacific and the U.S. adoption of the Smoot-Hawley tariff, which had hurt Chile economically. (Leonard, p. 162-165) And Argentina, despite being a “closet ally” who supplied the Allies with crucial food during the war, (p. 184) was bogged down in a power struggle with its Nazi-sympathizing military, who were devoted to ultra-conservative, virulently anti-Semitic Argentine Catholicism (p. 188). Ultimately, Argentina didn’t end diplomatic ties with Germany until January 1944 (pp. 162-163).

But Mexico, so important to U.S. national security for its bountiful oil reserves and immediate proximity along the U.S. border with the American Southwest, was Washington’s most pressing concern in the lead-up to World War II. The Cårdenas administration (1934-1940) was just stabilizing and consolidating control over a Mexican polity that for decades had been in revolutionary flux (p. 17). Mexicans were beginning to interpret the European battle between the communists and fascists, especially the Spanish Civil War, through their unique revolutionary lens, and whether Mexico would side with the United States was unclear during Lázaro Cárdenas’ rule as he remained neutral. “Capitalists, businessmen, Catholics, and middle-class Mexicans who opposed many of the reforms implemented by the revolutionary government sided with the Spanish Falange” (p. 18) i.e., the fascist movement, and Nazi propagandist Arthur Dietrich and his team of agents in Mexico successfully manipulated editorials and coverage of Europe by paying hefty subsidies to Mexican newspapers, including the widely-read dailies Excelsior and El Universal (pp. 18-19).

The situation became even more worrisome for the Allies when the major oil companies boycotted Mexican oil following Lázaro Cárdenas’ nationalization of the oil industry and expropriation of all corporate oil properties in 1938, (p. 19) which severed Mexico’s access to its traditional markets and led Mexico to sell its oil to Germany and Italy (Smith, p. 79). In Mexico and throughout Latin America, Franklin Roosevelt’s “Good Neighbor Policy” was necessary at such a delicate time, and in the case of the Mexicans, ultimately led to the Douglas-Weichers Agreement in June 1941 that secured Mexican oil only for the United States, (Leonard, p. 21) and the Global Settlement in November 1941, a rare example of the U.S. putting national security concerns over fairness for American oil companies (p. 22-23).

But such “Good Neighbor” agreements and “soft power” influence were self-interested in the end, accomplishing the abrupt end of German Fifth Column activities in Mexico, and after the attack on Pearl Harbor, all nine Central American and Caribbean republics declared war on the Axis nearly in unison in a show of seldom-seen Hemispheric solidarity (Smith, p. 86). Unfortunately for Latin America, the United States’ inter-American strategy would drastically shift as soon as their interests did.

The post-war world, with Russia and the United States locked in a Cold War that threatened to involve, if not destroy, every state on the planet, was not kind to the republics of the Americas. Washington soon divided Latin America simplistically along “with us or against us” red lines, and fear of communist infiltration, both real and used as a political football, was rampant. During the 1952 U.S. Presidential Election, Republican nominee Dwight D. Eisenhower accused the incumbent Democratic party of pushing Latin Americans into the arms of wily Communist agents waiting to exploit local misery and capitalize on any opening to communize the Americas (Smith, p. 127). From that point on, the “Big Stick” foreign policy came back to Latin America in various forms and guises until the ’90s, with the U.S. consistently backing the same type of elite-led fascist regimes they were trying to undercut during WWII.

Up to the time of Reagan and the Iran-Contra scandal that embarrassed the United States on the world stage, U.S. foreign policy supporting fascist local elites as long as they were suitably pliant and reliably anti-communist was commonplace. One would hope that the current non-interventionist tack toward Latin America under the Obama administration is due to assessment of tough historic lessons learned and not mere economic constraints. Future repeats of the George W. Bush approach to the Americas, with “second acts” for several notorious Iran-Contra figures (see Observers Warn of U.S. Manipulation in Nicaragua) and the CIA’s Venezuelan Coup Attempt of 2002, is certainly cause for concern. The future of U.S.-Latin American relations I’d like to see, is one where Simon Bolivar’s famous statement “the United States seems destined by Providence to bring misery to the Americas in the name of liberty”4 seems something solely relevant for historical background, instead of something that’s directly related to current events and threatens to crop up again in U.S. Foreign policy at any moment.

Works Cited

Leonard, T. M., Bratzel, J. F., Rankin, M., Smith, J. & Scheinin, D. (2007). Latin america during world war ii. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield.

Loveman, B. (2010). No higher law: american foreign policy and the western hemisphere since 1776. Chapel Hill, NC, USA: The University of North Carolina Press.

Smith, P. H. (2007). Talons of the eagle: dynamics of u.s. – latin american relations (RFB&D Daisy Audiobook),

Footnotes:

1: Bauer, Ralph. (2009). Thomas Jefferson, the hispanic enlightenment, and the birth of hemispheric american studies Dieciocho: Hispanic Enlightenment, 32(1), Retrieved from http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-11917558/Thomas-Jefferson-the-Hispanic-enlightenment.html

2: Ibid.

3: Garcia-Navarro, L. (2006, November 2). Observers warn of u.s. manipulation in nicaragua. NPR, Retrieved from http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6423982

4: LaRosa, M., & Mora, F. O. (2009). Neighborly adversaries: readings in u.s.-latin american relations [2nd Edition]. (RFB&D Daisy Audiobook),

This is a survey of the most viewed posts ever on this site…

China’s Age of Discovery: The Voyages of Zheng He

This post, about the explorer Zheng He and the voyages of his grand treasure ships, is usually the most viewed post for any given week. Not only does the post shed light on the way-ahead-of-their-time ways that the Yongle Emperor projected power and influence with technology like the printing press and an enormous Navy (techniques that would seldom be used with such sophistication until the 19th century) but it also remains very relevant because it details a Chinese period of prolonged international engagement, trade and wealth only rivaled by the high water mark of Chinese power today. The end of the treasure ships, with hardliners burning them as an isolationist backlash swept the empire, illuminates a pattern you see over and over again in Chinese history: after the inevitable bust comes following an economic boom, Conservative Confucians take over and crackdown on trade after a harsh isolationist reaction. Today, China-watchers and investors, and indeed the PRC regime, worry about another cycle of isolationist backlash cropping up if Chinese people in the underdeveloped heartland don’t feel enough improvement in their lives from foreign trade and become angry.

The Griffin Was Based On A Real Creature!

Rivaling “Zheng He” for the Top Search term leading people to my blog is “griffin” or related key words. This post is shockingly well-visited, and it’s one of the quickest ones I’ve written. I saw a program on the History channel about mythical creatures that suggested the Griffin came from ancient Scythian warriors who came upon dinosaur skulls and spread stories about Griffins to intimidate enemies, and decided to blast a quick blog post. I guess people really like Griffins.

Donald Duck As A Nazi. Really.

This post, coming in a distant third in views, generates hits from the sheer bizarreness of the video it highlights, a war propaganda-era Disney short with Donald Duck dreaming he is a Nazi. Even though the film is clearly meant to mock and underline the failures of the Nazi system, seeing Donald in a Nazi uniform is still WEIRD!

Special mention: Vigorously Insisting On A More Perfect Union: Fighting Cuts, Demanding Universal Health Care

This blog post of mine was published by the Greenhaven Press imprint of Gale Publishing in their Opposing Viewpoints Series, which is heavily used both in libraries and high school and college courses, to introduce differing views of the issues. it’s in the 2008 edition of Opposing Viewpoints: Health Care, if anyone is interested.

Also check out my comic art, Theodore Roosevelt and the Rough Riders vs. Zombies over at Superdude.org — it’s can’t miss!

Nick

Many disabled people have rejected this model. From the Taxi Driver Training -- Democracy, Disability and Society Group, UK

The social model of disability sees disabilities as normal aspects of life, not medical problems requiring "treatment," with the real problems coming from inaccessibility and ignorance of disabled people. From the Taxi Driver Training -- Democracy, Disability and Society Group, UK

I wanted to talk about the social model of services and supports for people with disabilities, and barriers to implementing it.

When you think about disability internationally, most disabled people in countries around the world are taken care of by their own families and their own communities. In Alabama, where I’m from, and in many of the poorer states, they didn’t get the medical model at all until federal funding in the 1960s. Prior to that, all you had was a kind of quasi-social model, with families and neighbors taking care of their disabled children, the same way they did in the 19th century and from time immemorial. A new social model of services and supports would essentially work like an enhanced version of that, with disabilities normal phenomena that communities live with and provide for.

In the first world countries, as families are working almost entirely outside of the home, they have no recourse but to use government services to help take care of their disabled children and adults. In Alabama, the attitude is that the most harsh, spartan medical model is all they can afford, and that they can’t afford to innovate. They have missed an opportunity to save money by re-imagining a social model that would put the power back in the hands of families and people with disabilities, instead of forcing them to spend on treatments that the medical model wants for them.

Across the country, budget cuts are removing the medical model more and more from our lives, because the states can no longer afford the kind of medical services that they’ve been paying for. The medical model won’t be the force it has been without enough public funding. So there’s more need than ever to implement a new social model of services and supports. In one of the conferences that I attended (TASH Boston ‘02) there was a session on what drives people to put their loved ones into nursing homes. And the number one reason found in studies was that when someone becomes incontinent of bladder and bowel, the family doesn’t want to deal with it, and puts them in a facility. There was one story where a mother wanted to put her autistic son in a facility just because he couldn’t figure out how to zipper his pants, though he could otherwise engage in self-care. This is the institutional bias, up close and personal, and it is ridiculous. We can no longer afford to put people with disabilities in segregated, medical model institutions. The funds saved by turning the institutional bias on its head and closing more of these terrible, outdated, freedom-killing institutions is great. We can’t afford these awful dinosaurs financially, and we can’t afford it in the human toll, in the human potential and spirits that are locked up.

To escape that fate of being put away forever in a nursing home, I had to fight Alabama Medicaid policies that would cut off home care services at age 21. My campaign, Nick’s Crusade, led to the Dupree v. Alabama Medicaid lawsuit, which used the Olmstead decision to end the practice of Alabama cutting off ventilator dependent people from in-home services once they turned 21. It was a victory that helped half a dozen people stay in their homes, but it didn’t solve the underlying problem, that even in the home, the medical model of home nursing care tends to segregate, restrict and limit the liberty and potential of people with disabilities.

I ended up having to leave college because of problems with home nursing care, and eventually I began to outlive my family’s ability to take care of me, and ended up relocating to New York City in August, 2008. Because of difficulties getting home care approved and started, home nursing agencies that are dysfunctional and cruel, and relentless ablism faced by me and my partner Alejandra, my first 378 days in New York were spent in a city rehab hospital. It was my first stent in a facility, and I learned a lot about the system that keeps unnecessary institutionalization going and told the world in The First Video Blog Series From Inside An Institution In History. Make especially sure to watch my videos What Life In An Institution Is Really Like, And Why This Entire Model Should Be Replaced and Too Many Setbacks To Count (about the barriers and delays to getting home, with music).

Because Alejandra and I love each other, we made the decision to spend our lives together, as many people with and without disabilities do. However, most people with disabilities living in the U.S. run into the so-called “marriage penalty” if they receive federal Social Security benefits, which are reduced by one-third if two recipients marry. Choosing to declare our commitment to each other despite this policy, we held a commitment ceremony in Central Park on June 6, 2010. It was also an opportunity for others in the community to learn about and share their experiences with this injustice.

Getting the supports needed to maintain my health and safety, attain freedom to access the community and resume college remain problematic. I write and draw webcomics, such as Theodore Roosevelt and the Rough Riders vs. Zombies. I was going to show my work from a table at the MoCCA Festival, and ended up canceling because we didn’t have the help for getting me up in the chair and out to the festival. For me as a disabled man, “freedom,” means that I have good caregivers around me that can help me do stuff. Without those people, I’m stuck in my room at best, and, at worst, dead.

Nurses, personal care attendants, and other home caregivers will always remain enormously important in any model because in first world countries the cost of living is high, and thus the people doing the bulk of the care will be the ones who can do it without losing their apartment. Paid supports should be budgeted by the disabled person (see individualized budgets and the Cash & Counseling program) so that both the caregivers and the patient aren’t constantly battling middlemen–agencies and Medicaid, and so the patient can give their best staff higher pay and bonuses. This essay isn’t meant diminish the importance of nurses and PCAs but to re-imagine them as part of a support community that form around people with disabilities; with families and communities that refuse to shelve their people in prison-like nursing facilities, that refuse to use a strict, heartless medical model inside the home, that say NO to materialism and profiteering, and instead focus on care and caring. Personal care is incredibly intimate and sensitive, caregivers see and touch and care for wounds, deformities and vulnerabilities that no one else sees, this is soulful and special work; it should never be callously commodified or turned into a cold assembly line in a nursing facility. The people who are good at going into someone’s home and making them clean, comfortable, giving them care and freedom, are very special people. In a new social model, friends and neighbors of the disabled person partner with and lend their support to these special caregivers, helping them and assisting them to assist their patient. The caregivers in turn helping the friends to help their patient. They care about each other and collaborate to help the disabled person. The community loves and supports each other.

Relying on Medicaid to give me ALL the assistance needed to live a real life in the community will always be difficult as long as Medicaid is locked-in to the medical model. It’s near impossible without friends and volunteers in your community lending some support. What is needed is the social model: normalization of disability: for society at large to start seeing people with disabilities as equal members of families and communities, instead of undue burdens. If someone in the community had cared about the kid who couldn’t manage the zipper on his pants, he wouldn’t have been at risk of institutionalization at great cost to his community. If the community would give their time and love more, we’d need Medicaid, the increasingly dark, Kafkaesque bureaucracy that pays for services for disabled people, less.

There are plenty of ways for the community to support people with disabilities. When I was hospitalized for several months in early 1992, Bettie Hudgens, the founder of the Communications department at Spring Hill College, where my mom taught, created a sign up sheet so that volunteers would visit me every day, so I would have someone checking in on me during the hours mom was teaching. The signup sheet allowed the community to organize around me so that every day was covered. We need that kind of community building now more than ever.

Communities will eventually be forced to choose, will they pay more and more for Medicaid as its red tape continues to render it hilariously dysfunctional like a Soviet department, or will friends and neighbors pitch in to help the elderly get in and out of bed, and change soiled clothes so they wouldn’t have to be segregated in institutions, so their people with disabilities will have less involvement with the heartless Medicaid bureaucracy and be less exposed to the whims of the politicians that fund them. It’s up to us to implement a new social model, as the old models begin to collapse.

Nick

A study using census data from nine countries shows that religion there is set for extinction, say researchers.

The study found a steady rise in those claiming no religious affiliation.

The team’s mathematical model attempts to account for the interplay between the number of religious respondents and the social motives behind being one.

The result, reported at the American Physical Society meeting in Dallas, US, indicates that religion will all but die out altogether in those countries.

The team took census data stretching back as far as a century from countries in which the census queried religious affiliation: Australia, Austria, Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Switzerland.

BBC News – Religion may become extinct in nine nations, study says

I know that I open myself up to potential ridicule by posting such unabashed pro-religion views.  But I see people across the world living in despair, and more disconnected from each other in daily life than ever before. Americans work more and more hours than any other people on earth, go home alone, veg out on fake corporate food and culture, rinse and repeat. In this rat race culture, devoid of much meaning and largely disconnected from religious traditions, spirituality couldn’t be more important, and religion is key as an organizing force that I hope will foster more human connection, community building, artistic expression (see Religious Art} and fulfillment to a bleak, materialistic world.  We need it now more than ever.

Nick

Dr. El-Kikhia tells Jon Stewart that he had to leave Libya in 1980 after yet another crackdown on Benghazi. He says he was trying to drive to work one day when the police choked off traffic, directing the traffic flow so that all incoming cars had to go past a series of hanging corpses–a message to the people of Benghazi about what will happen to dissidents.

The interview doesn’t have time for details, but one should note that Benghazi and its province Cyrenaica have long hated its rival in the west, Tripoli. I know at one point, Benghazi forced Qaddafi’s troops out and have built a 4-star hotel where the barracks was.