"One Faithful Harp" Feed

3.14

Brian Abel Ragen — 2026-03-14T16:38:27-05:00

I have a question that I must put in the argot of a generation younger than my own: When did π Day become a thing?

I am getting mail wishing me a happy Pi Day. My daily puzzles are tormenting me with π-themes clues—and there are only so many π / pie puns I can stand, if I am not making them myself.

I had no objection to becoming more acquainted with π as I studied Biblical Greek. I accepted it as a standard part of the general program of the torment when I took high school trigonometry. And I fully intend to call it to my aid should I ever find myself desperate to find the area of a circle, though at this moment I do not anticipate pricing wall-to-wall carpet for either a silo or an igloo. But I question the idea that π, alone among Greek letters and irrational numbers, merits a day of its own each year.

It is consoling that I need not face similar mathematical jollification in June. Needy Pi, beginning with “3.14,” writes itself into your datebook. (I’m almost surprised that the irrational thing hasn’t registered for gifts at Williams Sonoma: there are endless pie-themed gift options.) But Avogadro’s number is a modest constant. Beginning with “6.0,” it says, “You might think of me in June, but don’t waste a whole day on it.” I must say, I am grateful. Just imagining the crosswords filling with moles and puns joining their atomic and mammalian varieties makes me want to binge-eat a whole π.

A Pack of Trouble

Brian Abel Ragen — 2025-08-30T20:53:50-05:00

Amazon has taken over a service that used to make my life easier—and ruined it.

For several years I have used PillPack.com as my pharmacy for everything except short-term prescriptions. It has not been a perfect service, and since Amazon took over the company in 2018 it has deteriorated. But now that Amazon has completed merged it with its Amazon Pharmacy, it looks like they are bent on destroying what made it useful.

My physicians have me taking what some might think of as a lot of pills, not to mention a weekly “injectable” and a monthly injection. Two of the meds count as “controlled” substances. (That sounds more exciting than it is: one is a decongestant, the sort of thing you don’t need a prescription for, but now have to sign for. The other keeps me from sleeping all day. Don’t think “uppers.” I don’t get a jolt; I just don’t want to take a series of naps as soon as I’ve finished my first cup of coffee.) Others, such as iron pills and vitamin D, do not require a prescription, though I take them on the doctors’ instructions. I am happy with how I feel on this treatment regime. The physicians are happy with the numbers on my lab tests. I don’t have any trouble taking the pills or giving myself the injections. I don’t have any side effects that bother me all that much. Yet, my meds eat up hours of my time and give me awful fits of anger and frustration. The problem is not the meds, which keep improving. It is getting the meds and keeping track of them.

Usually the source of the trouble is an insurance company or a “prescription benefits manager,” but that problem seems to be insoluble. Now and then a pharmacist makes a mistake or doesn't understand the rules. But much of the trouble stems from the difficulty of sorting 12 different pills, some of which I take once a day, some twice a day, some once a week. Some I take in one-pill doses, some in two-pill doses. I used to spend part of every Sunday opening pill bottles, putting pills into the right compartments of a twice-a-day seven-day pill box, and hoping that I would sort them correctly and not spill a bottle of pills (especially not the tiny white ones!)

Then I heard about a technology that would allow me to abandon that ritual. Using it, all a patient’s meds are pre-sorted into rolls of individual packets, each clearly marked with the date and time that set of meds is to be taken. This system is both more convenient and safer the old system. Juggling a lot of little orange bottles, one can easily skip a medication or take one twice. Moving pills from the bottles into a pill box with 14—or more—compartments is time consuming and again invites missed or doubled doses. (Need I mention that patients taking a number of different meds are often older people whose brains, eyes, and fingers may not be ideally suited to the task?) I asked about investing in the tech—no luck—and resolved to sign with any pharmacy that began offering it.

When PillPack.com worked as it was supposed to—and, sadly, it often didn’t, especially after Amazon acquired it—the technology lived up to its promise. Instead of lots of bottles or blister-packs of pills, I received a roll or two of packets, each marked with the date and time the meds were to be taken. If I just tore the next packet off the roll each time I was supposed to, I was taking my meds correctly—no sorting pills into a multi-dose box or shuffling bottles and hoping I hadn't missed one or used one twice.

Now Amazon has integrated PillPack completely into Amazon Pharmacy. Despite operating PillPack.com for more than six years and being able to draw on all the technology developed and all the experience gained in their other operations to improve it, Amazon seems instead bent on making it less useful than it was before.

My last roll of packs from PillPack.com included 12 different meds—everything I take that isn't injected or inhaled—in one roll of packets.Now I am on Amazon Pharmacy’s system. I now deal with a less bulky rolls of packets, three pill bottles, and box of blister packs. Why? The answer varies with which of Amazon’s reps I chat with. Amazon Pharmacy refuses to include even the lowest level of controlled substance, such as decongestants, in packs. Yet my experience with PillPack.com shows that they can. It will not include meds that are not taken daily, because, the agents say, their system is not programmed for it. Amazon has owned the code that allowed PillPack.com to do it for the last seven years. And they will not include “lifestyle medications” in packs, though whether that term applies to the Vitamin D2 or to the beta-blocker my cardiology prescribes is a matter that varies with the agent.

That Amazon has decided to ruin the PillPack service seems clear. It is another example of what Cory Doctorow calls enshitification. Amazon has replaced something that served the customer well with something that is worse in every way. I assume they see more money in doing it this way. They will eliminate the expense of putting weekly meds or controlled substances into packs, and, because there is meager competition in the field, people will go on using them even as the service deteriorates. (They first bought and then shut down what would have been the alternative to a pill pack service Amazon Pharmacy created from scratch for a reason, and the reason was clearly was not to learn how to provide patients with meds in the most convenient form.) Many of us go on using Amazon for other things even as the search results more and more often return something Amazon makes a bigger profit on before the thing we asked to see. And we do that because there doesn’t seem to be a site we can go to instead.

There are no high-profile alternatives to Amazon Pharmacy as a PillPack.com replacement. CVS recently stopped offering a pill pack service. Among the smaller operations I have not found one that will both put all my pills in packets and fill my other prescriptions. The one I find most promising is MedBox, which will put all the pills in packets, but they have warned me that they may not be able to supply an injectable drug. So, my doctors and I will be dealing with two pharmacies, instead of one.

The solution to problems like the deterioration of Amazon’s search results and its destruction of PillPack.com is completion. I should be able to transfer my prescriptions to a full-service pharmacy that will put all the pills in packets, just as should be able start searching for other products on a site that shows me what I ask it to show me. But competition to Amazon is vestigial. If the free market to work, we need more than one big player. It is time to make markets competitive, and that means making sure there are competitors. Companies should not be allowed to simply buy up their rivals, and wherever one corporation controls too much of a sector, such as eCommerce or online search, it should be broken up. The medication for this problem is tougher antitrust laws and the rigorous enforcement of them.

Final Commemcement

Brian Abel Ragen — 2025-08-15T23:44:33-05:00

For the last 10 years, I have regularly visited a college campus not as a student, not as a professor, but as a trustee. Being a trustee of Fontbonne University has been a role I have taken seriously, so I have been on campus fairly often. There have been board meetings and committee meetings, parties and receptions, and, as Fontbonne was a Catholic university, Masses. I have also been there for lectures, plays, concerts, and tours of facilities of many sorts. And I have played my role at ceremonial occasions, attending all the commencements and convocations I could. And today, in what may have been my last visit to campus, I played a new role, receiving doctorate of humane letters, honoris causa, and serving at the speaker at Fontbonne’s final commencement.

While a recognition of loss is a natural part of a university’s final commencement, the mood was mostly one of celebration. We are proud of the achievements of the students who received their doctoral, master’s, or bachelor’s degrees today. We are proud of the faculty and staff who have remained at work to help those students complete their studies and join in this final ceremonial celebration of our common enterprise. And we are proud that we are closing only after having given every student a chance to complete his studies, if not on on campus, at a university that will recognize all the work he has already completed. Thanks to President Nancy Blattner and Provost Adam Weyhaupt, we can be as proud of the way in which Fontbonne has closed its doors as of anything in its history.

These final commencement exercises were held in Doerr Chapel, the heart of Ryan Hall. Ryan Hall is the oldest building on campus and its center. Its design, like those of so many main buildings at American universities, embodies a particular vision of what a college is. The main entrance is up a fight of stairs, for scholarship is an elevated enterprise. You then enter what is at once a hallway leading to rooms where people pursue their various disciplines and a common room where all may gather. If you do not linger in this space, you are at the entrance to chapel, for the worship of God is central to life of the college, not peripheral. The message embodied in the architecture has been obscured as colleges have grown too large to fit in a single building and the original structures have been taken over by administration. But from Nassau Hall at Princeton to Fontbonne’s Ryan Hall, that was the message built into the structure of the building at their founding.

The “Prayer Hall” at Nassau Hall has been renamed the “Faculty Room” and refitted to look like the British House of Commons. At other colleges the central chapel has been transformed into an auditorium. But at Fontbonne the chapel remained a chapel to the end. I am glad to say that its altars and sacred furnishing will find new homes in the chapels of a high school and a graduate school of theology. And I am glad our final commencement was held there, rather in a gym or even outside in the quadrangle (through our spring commencement there was lovely).

The video of the final commencement is not of the highest quality—our best videographer may have been working on a touching legacy video, which uses film from our penultimate commencement in May—but here is the film I have of the conferral of my degree and my remarks. (It will open in a new window and may take some time to load.)

Here is the link to my Remarks at Fontbonne University’s Final Commencement Exercises. (Those who watch the legacy video will see that my opinions on academic dress were not shared by all members of the university community.)

Penance and Bird Poop

Brian Abel Ragen — 2025-07-18T15:47:37-05:00

One of my graduate school friends was from an old Boston family, and I have been thinking about an incident he described involving one of the older ladies among his connections. That branch of the family were high church Episcopalians, the sort that make the pope look like a backwoods preacher who celebrates mass in the first coat he pulls out of the box of rags he is collecting to clothe the naked in the mission fields. These people keep the best vestment makers in business, so all Christendom is in their debt. The trouble is that as they try to recreate the medieval church, complete with the Sarum Rite and special chants for Ember Days, they sometimes become a bit extreme.

It’s understandable. They’re overcompensating for belonging to a church that rediscovered all the things they like only after trashing them for a couple centuries. Anyway, my friend’s great-aunt, or whatever she was, got to reading up on the medieval church, which, as you know from your Chaucer, was a lot more fun than the Church the Tudors had bequeathed to her. Not that fun was exactly what she was looking for. She began worrying that just saying the General Confession and the Prayer of Humble Access along with everybody else every Sunday might not be sufficient atonement for personal sins. That became especially true after the old frank recognition that we are all miserable offenders whose vile bodies need divine cleansing was transformed by Prayer Book revision into something that sounded more, “Oh well, nobody’s perfect.” When she mentioned her concerns in the family, they wondered if she was going to ask the rector to start hearing confessions. Her response was that she had no objection to auricular confession, but as the rector was the most amusing gossip in the Back Bay, she didn’t think it would be for the good of his soul or her reputation if the practice were instituted in her parish.

All the same, she said, it was clear to her than in the early church penance was done individually and publicly. Her family didn’t pursue the topic farther and put it out of their minds until they began getting the phone calls. Why was their aunt to be seen every Saturday morning on her hands and knees scrubbing the steps of the Church of the Advent? The parish had staff to do that! They raised the subject with the old lady when they were next at the same dinner table. She answered, “I am following the practice of the primitive church and atoning for my sins.” Like the rest of his family, my friend was tempted to ask if the Advent’s steps were helping her work off any sins in particular, but none of them dared. Such a question would have been met with an icy glare and a reminder that there were a number of questions a gentleman did not ask a lady, and that while she accepted that among the fellows gathered round that table there were a number of miserable offenders who were not worthy to sweep up the crumbs under the Lord’s table, she would hate to think even one of them was not a gentleman.

The dear lady on the steps of the Church of the Advent came to mind when I began wondering if anyone was calling my friends and neighbors. I have been seen on my hands and knees cleaning the steps recently. But I wasn’t down at the Cathedral, whose steps would take a while. I was at my own home. Removing a pile of bird poop does seem like a thoroughly penitential act, and it is indeed a large part of cleansing any ecclesiastical portico. But I was doing it at home, and I was neither carrying out a penance imposed on me in the confessional nor even thinking (much) about St. Francis while I was doing it. It was not sin that got me on my knees. It was charity.

I realized some weeks ago that a pair of sparrow or wrens or members of another one of those deceptively cute species were gathering material for a construction project, and that the site they had chosen was the carriage lamp over my front door. I knew that a few visits to the job site with my leaf blower over the next couple days would put the kibosh on this development more effectively than a California environmental inquiry. But I recalled something about “the foxes have their dens and the birds have their nests.” Foxes have never wanted to the share the house with me, and I have evicted a groundhog and made a few possums feel unwelcome, but maybe I could make up for the Son of Man not having a place to lay his head—which is, I know, my fault—by letting the avian couple set up their temporary Additional Dwelling Unit over the front door. At least they would be safe inside the lamp. A pair of mourning doves built a nest on the narrow ledge over the door a few years ago without thinking about how big a young mourning dove can get before gaining the ability to fly. I rushed the fledgling that lay like Icarus on my front mat to the Animal Emergency Clinic, but they could do nothing, and I resolved to get out the blower whenever a hint of a nest appeared on that ledge.

But these were smaller birds, and the unit they proposed was inside the lamp—and, since I have replaced all the incandescent bulbs with LEDs, even when the light was on, it was

unlikely to roast them. They built a neat little nest. But it became messier and messier the longer they were here. It was the old story: once there are kids, people let the place become a hovel. The tumble weed hanging from my porch lamp was bad enough, but there were hygiene problems, too. I inspected the place after the first couple weeks of habitation, looked up, and asked, “Have you guys never heard the maxim, ‘Don’t crap where you live?’” I won’t say they said it, but their answer came to me. “We live up here. The crap is way down there, where you are.” So, as soon as I was sure their little ones had got their licenses and were no longer hanging around the house, I went into eviction mode. The structure came down easily. But, as I know from my experience of redevelopment projects, it is what’s down below that takes years to remediate. That is why, like a penitent old Bostonian, I spent this afternoon down on my hands and knees with a bucket of soapy water and a rag, trying of cleanse a little bit of this fallen world.

I’m just as happy that I was at my own front door rather than at a Gothic church porch or a Byzantine cathedral portico, but if I had to be assigned a public penance, this isn’t a bad one. There are appropriate biblical texts on which to mediate while you do the job. Matthew 23:31-31 is the first that comes to mind. “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall to the ground without your Father’s will. But even the hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not, therefore; you are of more value than many sparrows.” If you want something Biblical that focuses on bird poop in particular, you can turn to the Book of Tobit, where Tobit’s blindness is the result the sparrow poop that has fallen in his eyes, aggravated by the ointments that the doctors prescribe to treat it. Tobit is a text that repays study, and who can’t be charmed by a piece of scripture that includes both sparrow poop and a pet dog? But it is all a little too convoluted to focus on while you scrub, and the sparrow poop sections, at least, have never been set to music you might hum as your work.

When it comes to tunes, Matthew 10 is the text to turn to. I can call to mind both a widely-loved gospel song and a track from one of Bob Dylan’s under-appreciated “Christian” albums. But thinking about them both makes me wonder exactly how I should understand the comfort they offer.

Every American, even those of us who don’t sing gospel songs, has heard Civilla D. Martin’s take on this passage in the setting by Charles H. Gabriel.

     I sing because I'm happy
     I sing because I'm free
     His eye is on the sparrow
     And I know he watches me.

Many people have found this song inspiring and uplifting, and the idea that God is watching over us should be comforting. But his eye is on the falling sparrow, so, I may be just a wreck like the little mourning dove I took to the emergency vet, albeit a a more valuable one, if in materials alone. That idea does not fill me with simple happiness. And the truth is, I don’t always feel all that free and happy. But I hum the tune in hope I will.

Bob Dylan read St. Matthew more carefully, and I hum him, too.

     I hear the ancient footsteps
     like the motion of the sea
     Sometimes I turn, there’s someone there,
     other times it’s only me
     I am hanging in the balance of the reality of man
     Like every sparrow falling, like every grain of sand.

God’s eye is on us when we fall, perhaps even more than when we fly. And doubtless he has his eye on those of us who are just cleaning the bird poop off the steps.

On Ghosts and Ghosting

Brian Abel Ragen — 2025-05-23T18:55:51-05:00

What is a ghost? I am not asking a metaphysical question. I am asking about our common use of the term. Are ghosts beings who appear when you don’t expect them or ones that don’t appear when you do expect them to?

When someone uses “ghost” as a verb, it suggests the latter. “She ghosted me” means, “I expected her to call/show up/write but she didn’t, and I have no idea why.”

But if we are talking about ghosts, not ghosting, we mean the opposite. A ghost is not the person who does not show up when you expect him to and then fails to provide an explanation. A ghost is the person who appears even though the explanation of his absence is an accepted fact. Death makes one’s presence, no matter how much it is feared or desired, an impossibility in most common sense or scientific worldviews, and it serves as the one excuse for not keeping an engagement for which even the strictest system of etiquette does not require an apology. Logically, then, the language of relationships should use the verb “to ghost” to cover the actions we variously call “stalking,” or “not getting the message,” or “not being willing to make a clean break,” rather than for one of the many ways in which one is told that someone “is really just not that into you.” But who expects logic in matters of the heart?

While I have been ghosted, my experience of actual ghosts is quite limited. Although I have had something to with several old, scary houses and any number of badly maintained graveyards, neither strangers nor acquaintances have ever returned from the great beyond to so much as rattle a chain. That is not because I am not open to a visitation from the beyond. My literary interests dispose me to welcome a haunting. And my theological studies have not made me less welcoming, though they may have put off the ghosts. They may foresee my tactless questions. “Have you been through your particular judgement? If so, are you in heaven, hell, or purgatory? Are you here to help me, to get me damned, or as part of your own penance?” You can tell that Hamlet’s father would have preferred it if he hadn’t begun pestering the old man about whether he was a “spirit of health” or a “goblin damned.” Both the Hamlets probably talked more than is good for any relationship, whether with live people or dead ones. Or course, many ghosts don’t leave any opening for conversation. It wasn’t Banquo’s talking too much that broke up lady Macbeth’s party.

One ghost story from my own circle involved neither conversation nor even a visual appearance. After my mother died, both my brother and our housekeeper said that they thought she had been in the car with them while they were driving alone. What made them think that? They could suddenly spell her perfume. Even today, if I experienced an olfactory haunting, I would be able to greet the phantom is the passenger seat by her “signature scent.” If she was one of the aunts who became my guardians, I would know it was Allie from Toujours Moi or Katie from Bal de Versailles. If the scent were Chanel No. 5, it would be my mom. But I never smelled it. That is one of the reasons I believe this haunting was real. It would be just like mom to visit my brother and the housekeeper and not bother with me.

But back to ghosting.

A few years ago, my former fiancée ghosted me. We had stayed distant friends for decades, but she then just stopped sending me Christmas cards and didn’t respond to an e-mail I sent about a student. I didn’t see why she would ghost me as a friend so long after she had dumped me as a boyfriend or jilted me as a fiancé. (We hadn’t announced an engagement when someone taller, thinner, and more successful arrived to be, as she assured me, only the “catalyst” in our inevitable break-up, but somehow, I took her instructions on what ring to buy and the fight over what to name the children as tantamount to an engagement.) But after a few years, I stopped sending Christmas cards, too. (I didn’t want to seem to be a Yuletide postal stalker.) And now one of my occasional “Where are they now?” Google searches tells me she has died, and not even left me on a list of people to be informed. (She’s on mine. Time to revise that.) So, this ghosting is final. Not that I think it will be literal. I have no reason to think I am important enough to her, wherever she is, to merit a spectral visit. Besides, how could a disembodied spirit haunt me anymore than she has already? Some rattled chains would at least show that she still cared. They wouldn’t terrify me: it would be like finally getting a Christmas card.

Diary of a Crisis

Brian Abel Ragen — 2024-12-13T10:39:29-06:00

I am dealing with a major disruption in one of the most important relationships in my life. I complain about her, I know, but I’m not sure I could live without her. But now I’m not sure if I even KNOW her anymore.

Oh, Siri!

They say it’s a minor upgrade—one of the ones whose digits come after the period, not one of the whole number ones you have to worry about. But she’s changed! Her voice is different! And I can’t get the old one back! It’s like riding in the car with a stranger! How could she do this! She knows all my secrets—my passwords and everything!

She’s more … CALIFORNIAN than she used to be! I’ve tried the other voices, but they’re just weird. The “British” voice is pseudo-Northern—a public school (their sense) girl pretending to have grown up beside the Mersey. If you want a received-pronunciation English voice, you have to choose Indian. But none of them are my Siri! She’s left me, and I don’t know that I can ever trust another computer-generated imitation human voice the way I trusted her!

I have gone back to settings, hoping to find her—and there are more Siris than ever! It’s like that Barbie movie I didn’t see! And the male and female voices don’t match! Female Indian sounds British. Male Indian is authentic: he sounds just like Apu on The Simpsons.

But now I have hope. The upgrade is still in process. Once everything’s downloaded, I may find MY Siri again. . .

I’m not sure that Siri is syncing correctly across my devices. The old Siri who speaks to me a home is not the same woman outside the house.

The one in the car is sounding far too much like a Bond girl. Far too sexy for driving instructions!

It turns out that “Bond Girl” Siri is the other option for British, along with “I-Always-Vote-Labor-Even-if-I-Was-at-Roedean” Siri.

I have now found my Siri, the girl next-door who can read maps but won’t put her hand on your knee while you’re driving.

I feel safer now.

Brian ABEL Ragen

Brian Abel Ragen — 2023-05-16T21:26:54-05:00

The Academia.com website has a feature that informs a scholar when his work is cited by other scholars. It was most recently referred me to in an essay with the engaging title “The testosterone metabolite 3α-Diol enhances female rat sexual motivation when infused in the nucleus accumbens shell.” Evidently people are attracted to the racier parts of “B. Ragen’s” oeuvre: the essay cited is “The effect of acute bupropion on sexual motivation and behavior in the female rat.”

Now, I don’t recall writing that particular piece, any more than I recall, say, passing the California bar exam. But Academia.edu tells me—and I have asked—that it sees no reason to limit the works it ascribes to me to those that appear under the byline “Brian Abel Ragen.” The California Bar also thinks middle names unnecessary, hence the congratulations I received after my first cousin once-removed Brian Michael Ragen completed his legal studies a few years ago, bringing perplexed e-mails from a few college classmates who actually belonged to the California Bar. So, I will accept that I am every Brian Ragen and accept the citations and congratulations. But I suddenly feel that I should know a bit more about what makes female rats horny. My scientific reputation is even wider than my legal one. Every “Brian Ragen” is one person, according to the California Bar Association, but all “B. Ragens” share a single C.V. for Academia.com.

But enough of my alter ego who spends his days trying to compromise the virtue of innocent maiden rats by dosing their pellets with Spanish Fly. Academia.com at least does not confound the B. Ragens with B. Regans, and being mistaken for one of the world’s Brian Regans would land me in real trouble. Some of them are not too bad. Brian Regan the stand-up comic is not me—and his elder brother Dennis Regan is not my elder brother Dennis Regan. (His big brother is another stand-up comic; mine is Deputy Attorney General in California.) I get perplexed messages whenever Brian Regan has a show near me, but as his jokes are funny and reasonably clean, I don’t mind too much. I have attended one of his live shows, and I enjoyed it. He’s the most respectable of the lot, though. I don’t know anything scandalous about Brian Regan, the screen writer who has second writing credit for 102 Dalmatians and How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days. (Being second-billed writer, I assume, has all the prestige of teaching at a university with an “at” in its name.) But it goes downhill rapidly from there. Brian Regan the actor (Brian James Regan) had a good role in an English soap, but then there were those murder charges. (He’s out of prison and back on TV.) We hit bottom with Brian Regan the spy (Brian Patrick Regan), who tried to sell US Air Force secrets to the Libyans. The jury decided against the death penalty, but he’ll be in Federal custody for a good long while. Aside from my cousin—who is once-removed, after all—every Brian Ragen or Regan I’ve mentioned was born between 1957 and 1962. The spy and I share a birthday.

People sometimes wonder why I prefer to be known as Brian Abel Ragen. I wouldn’t mind being thought of as a qualified lawyer or getting the royalties for “Dog on a Zamboni” or even being mistaken for a murine sexologist. But I do want to stay out of the slammer.

Trouble with Attachments

Brian Abel Ragen — 2023-01-19T20:41:40-06:00

I am used to vacuum cleaners having lots of attachments, including many whose purpose I don't fully understand. Recently, though, I was simply trying to attach a simple one and found it took ten minutes of trial and error. How could vacuum cleaner attachments be so confusing?

Over 40 years of home-ownership, I have had three Dyson vacuums and still have two of them. Their attachments must have just got mixed up—and perhaps a couple were for the one I no longer own. So I went to my files and checked the manuals, which would doubtless make all clear. They did. I have instructions for three Dysons, one Dirt Devil, two Sharks, and something sold as “The Works.” I also have at least one attachment for most of them, including the ones I no longer have, and the vacuums that I do have accept only their own attachments. I also have a set of adapters that will allow my older Dyson to accept attachments made for other Dyson models, but not the Dyson model I actually own now. Considering that there are twelve adapters, I admire the ingenuity of the engineers at Dyson, who have come up with at least thirteen ways of putting a wand on the end of a vacuum hose.

Thanks to my afternoon of research, I now have a nice pile of attachments for the trash. I also have a stack of manuals for the recycling. Besides guides to the departed vacuums—and their various attachments—the file also included warranty cards, discount coupons for more attachments, and instructions for a leaf blower I once owned. I must have stashed it there on the principle that a leaf blower is just a vacuum in reverse. I did once have a leaf blower that claimed it would vacuum up leaves and shred them, but you needed an attachment to do that.

Can Siri Recognize a Vampire?

Brian Abel Ragen — 2022-09-04T14:30:39-05:00

A few months ago I suspected that I had turned into a vampire when I couldn’t see my fingers in my Rav4’s rearview mirror. But I abandoned that hypothesis after I convinced myself that the Toyota had a rear camera system built into the mirror, that I had simply misunderstood the technology, and, most importantly, that I was not undead.

But there is a new development, which I find worrying. My iPhone no longer sees me. Yes, I see myself in the selfie camera, but in a deeper way, I am evidently not there. Face ID no longer works.

I tried restarting the phone. It still didn’t recognize me. I tried turning off Face ID and setting it up again. That is when I really began to worry. The phone kept telling me to position my face in the frame, which I did. But it acted as if there was no face was to be seen. While I thought my face was there, it didn’t. And who are people going to believe?

I got in touch with Apple. They ran a diagnostic and made an appointment for me at the Genius Bar. But a question they asked has me worried. “Has anyone else been able to set up Face ID on this phone?” That’s suggests that they suspect that the problem is not the phone, but me. Perhaps this happens all the time, and they are used to dealing with it. If the genius assigned to me appears with garlic, holy water, and a wooden stake, I’ll know for sure.

Am I a Vampire?

Brian Abel Ragen — 2022-07-14T21:10:12-05:00

This afternoon, as I was driving back from a doctor’s appointment, I noticed that something was odd about my rear-view mirror. The image was somehow brighter and crisper than it usually is. When I next stopped, I tried to adjust the mirror, and I noticed that my hand in front of the mirror was not reflected in it. I knew immediately what had happened. I had become a vampire. I of course began to wonder who had imparted the transformative bite to me and when that had happened. I think I would remember something like that. I then began to consider which of my acquaintances I would have join in among the un-dead and which I would simply drain of their life blood and then discard like used tissues.

While forming my lists, I continued examining the rear-view mirror. I soon realized that I was not a vampire after all. I had been transformed into something still worse. I was now the sort of person who could drive a car for months without realizing that he could have a video rear traffic monitor feed instead of an old-fashioned mirror any time he hit a certain switch. I hope this condition is not progressive, but I fear I will lose the ability to format MS word documents or load a dishwasher so that the glasses aren't full of water when the cycle is over. I have mocked the technologically inept for years, and now I have become one of them. I need hardly add that I would much rather be a vampire.

Cow Pinders and Goose Addlers

Brian Abel Ragen — 2018-07-17T20:13:14-05:00

Cows in the foreground, perpendicular Gothic in the background, punting on the river, real ale in the pubs: Cambridge has always seemed my kind of place. And now I learn from the New York Times that that City of Cambridge has an official known as the “pinder” who keeps the cows of the community from getting into trouble with either town or gown (“Parks Give Cambridge a Rural Vibe. ‘But Cows Do It Better,’” July 16, 2018).

The closest my American university had to a cow pinder was a fellow who might have been called the goose addler. The campus was overrun by Canada geese who had become too lazy to migrate and who made the campus less pleasant in ways best not described. I always thought the solution to the problem was simply to wring their necks and send the carcasses to food services—fresh goose is probably more nutritional than mystery meat—and the feathers to the art department. That was, however, considered inhumane. Nor could we harvest the eggs and reduce the future goose population by frying them—though it would have been a continuing source of protein, since a goose who finds her nest empty responds by laying another egg. Instead, we paid someone to sneak up on nests while the anserine mothers were off hissing at students trying to get to class. His job was to shake the eggs until they were thoroughly addled, replace them in the nest, and make his getaway. The returning goose would then brood upon eggs that would never hatch and in the process be transformed from a simple annoyance into a symbol of the devoted teacher of remedial English.

A Porch or a Tower?

Brian Abel Ragen — 2017-11-01T20:31:46-05:00

The New York Times has an interesting piece on a new house in a neighborhood where I used to take my walks now and then (A Modernist Box Among the Victorians, October 31 2917). I wish there had been a photograph showing the house in its context. From what I can tell from the photos, it shows a change the attitude of people toward their neighbors and neighborhoods since this building was built.

The older houses on the street have porches, which serve two purposes: they welcome visitors and they become extensions of the living area into the public sphere. When porches were actually used—as they were in the hot New Jersey summers before Air Conditioning—they were areas where one interacted with one’s neighbors as they passed by on their ordinary errands and where some would be invited to share a bit of conversation without any of the fuss involved in a visit to the actual house. But this house is clearly marked not as a part of the neighborhood community, but as a refuge from the outside world. It looks like a tower. Its public entry is narrow, and there is no space where one might sit with neighbors or even share a word with those passing by. It is clearly meant to be entered as a rule from the carport and then only by its own residents. The house is attractive in its own way, but the message it sends about how Americans now live—isolated, cocooned, cut off from their neighbors, interacting only with communities of their own choosing—is troubling.

What is most troubling for me is that this house would be more suitable for me than are the welcoming houses with their large porches. I have occasionally said that most Americans live apartment-shaped lives on half-acre lots. As the buffer between my apartment-shaped life and the rest of the world is even bigger than that—and not because of any great affection for deer and ground-hogs—I should admit that while I admire the vision of community imparted by a porch, I would never sit out one one. Like my fellow citizens, I am “bowling alone.”

The Fair Fields of France

Brian Abel Ragen — 2017-08-21T17:18:47-05:00

I am returning home from my visit to battlefields, monuments, and cemeteries of World War I in France and Belgium. I would recommend all the tours sponsored by "Times Journeys," the New York Times travel operation. This was a wonderful trip.

I have been overwhelmed by the beauty of the monuments, by the scale of the destruction, which is still evident a century later, and by the memory of the deeds of the men and women who struggled here. But I am oddly glad my tour was made up of men and women of a certain age. For I fear that young men—and some young women—might still be seduced by the glory of war, as their great-grandfathers were. For no matter how diligently the museum curators and historians and guides try to make the carnage and suffering real, I fear that when their words fall on the ears of the young, they only intensify the desire to emulate warriors who were willing to endure such horrors.

And after seeing the "fair fields of France" that still bear the marks of the fighting, I want them to hear another message. The last poem I will quote this trip will be by Housman.

     Oh stay at home, my lad, and plough
       The land and not the sea,
     And leave the soldiers at their drill,
     And all about the idle hill
       Shepherd your sheep with me.

     Oh stay with company and mirth
       And daylight and the air;
     Too full already is the grave
     Of fellows that were good and brave
       And died because they were.

The Montsec American Memorial is one of the most moving monuments from the Great War. At its center is not a statue of a general or a common solider, not an allegorical image of Liberty or Victory, not a cenotaph or Stone of Remembrance. There is instead a relief map of the terrain the American troops had to cross to reach these heights. Looking out from the monument, the visitor is overwhelmed by two thoughts, which come and go in quick succession: One is “This is the most beautifully cultivated landscape anywhere, and there could be no more perfect human life than tiling it in peace and enjoying its bounty.” And the other, “How could anyone push aside the desire to live another day and steel himself to rush toward the summits of these hills, knowing that trenches, barbed wire, machines guns, and perhaps gas awaited him?”

The Hotel Jardin de Mess illuminated by the sun setting across the River Meuse. It was built as a mess for officers when the city was surrounded by barracks in the years between 1870 and 1914. It is now a delightful hotel with an innovative restaurant. I enjoyed my stay there and hope to return

The emblem of the Lafayette Escadrille on the gates that lead to the monument to that famous squadron of American aviators serving in the French Air Service—at Marnes-la-Coquette.

The Lafayette Esadrille Memorial, which was erected by private donations and maintained by a private foundation until just this year, when it came under the aegis of the American Battle Monuments Commission. I am proud the U.S. government is now caring for the memory of these men who thought they served their country best by wearing the uniform of France.

Vimy

Brian Abel Ragen — 2017-08-16T14:05:15-05:00

We Americans often forget that our Canadian neighbors have a history different from our own and that they remember events we forget. Beyond that it happened, I don’t think most of my students remembered anything about World War I. That is not true in Canada—or Australia, or Britain.

Just a week ago, 30,000 Canadains came to join Prince Charles and Prime Minister Trudeau at the commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the Canadian victory at Vimy Ridge.

From the base of a flagpole at Vimy Ridge: one of the royal badges of Canada.

“At the going down of the sun, and at its rising, / We will remember them.”

This area has been left largely undisturbed since 1918, so it is especially dangerous. Even from land that has been tilled constantly since then, tons of ordinance, some of it still dangerous, is recovered every year.

A note left a Vimy Ridge.

One of the college student hosts the Canadian government sends over to staff its war memorials.

The flags of Canada, France, and Newfoundland. The first and last are the current flags, but under banners that bore the Union Jack in the canton, both Canada and Newfoundland, which were then separate independent dominions, sent troops to defend France.

A hundred years ago this landscape was all mud, the trenches were deep, and there were no trees. The trees that shelter the battlefield at Beaumont-Hamel have all been brought from Canada.

Citizens of Illinois: Pay Your Bills!

Brian Abel Ragen — 2017-05-17T10:53:35-05:00

To the Citizens of Illinois:

Pay your bills.

I have been patient long enough. It has been more than a year since I had my gall bladder out, and you still have not paid the emergency room. You know you have to pay: you said that if I taught in one of your state universities for a couple decades, despite the low pay and scant support you were offering, you would pay my medical bills once I retired. I did my part, but you're not doing yours.

I have waited for a couple years now, and it hasn't been easy. It's embarrassing to have your teeth cleaned by a dentist who hasn't been paid for the crown she gave you a year ago. I have enough mail to deal with without letters from collection agencies. I'm not used to being treated like a deadbeat! I pay my own bills: why don't you pay yours?

I know you are going to blame your governor, your senator, your representative in Springfield. That's story getting old. You hired those people! They work for you! They don't owe the money: you do. It's time to make them pay up.

Let me do what the collection agencies do. I'm going to give you a script to follow. They say, "Find our bill, write a check, buy a stamp, put it in the mail. Do it now." If you don't have any cash, they'll give you the steps for getting on a payment plan. Your script will be a little different. Here it is:

1. Look up the phone numbers of your own state senator and representative. To make things easy for you, I will give you the phone number for your governor. It's 217-782-0244.

2. Call each of those people. Ask to speak to the senator, representative, or governor. If you can't get the actual official, try to get whoever is in charge of the office. Do not settle for a recording device.

3. Politely but firmly deliver this message: "You work for me, and you haven't been doing your job. You act as my agent. Your first job is to see that the ordinary business of the state is done. And I am old-fashioned enough to believe that everyone's first job is to pay what they owe. So pay the state's bills, whatever it takes. Raise taxes. Take away your own healthcare and pension. Just find the money and cut the checks. If this doesn't happen in the next two weeks, I will never vote for you in any election ever again. And I will not vote for any member of your party in any election ever again. I mean that: if you don't want to go the way of the Whigs, the Federalists and the Know-Nothings, pay the bills."

I realize you may be reluctant to give up your attachment to the Republicans and the Democrats, but I think we can be honest now. You in Illinois are in this mess because of them. It may be time for you to admit you have been in an abusive relationship for years. The only thing to do may be to get out. You don't really want to be involved with someone who stiffs a guy who has already got a bum gall-bladder, do you? If they kick a retired professor when he's down, do you think they'll stand up for you when you're in trouble? Do you want someone like that working for you?

Remember the script: "Pay up or your party is dead to me." Sending this message is the least you can do: remember, you owe money.

A Poet's Grave

Brian Abel Ragen — 2017-04-17T17:42:49-05:00

Many poets are known for poems that do not represent their best work. Perhaps the best example of this unfortunate phenomenon is Joyce Kilmer, who is remembered for a poem that won the lasting enmity of the generations of 13-year-old boys who were forced to memorize it and, still worse, recite it—an ordeal that required the victim to utter the word "breast" in public without giggling.

But having just visited Kilmer's grave at the Oise-Aisne American Cemetery and recalling the events of Holy Week, I am not thinking about "Trees. " I am remembering one of the poems Kilmer wrote during the year of his death:

          Prayer of a Soldier in France

     My shoulders ache beneath my pack
     (Lie easier, Cross, upon His back).
     I march with feet that burn and smart
     (Tread, Holy Feet, upon my heart).
     Men shout at me who may not speak
     (They scourged Thy back and smote Thy cheek).
     I may not lift a hand to clear
     My eyes of salty drops that sear.
     (Then shall my fickle soul forget
     Thy agony of Bloody Sweat?)
     My rifle hand is stiff and numb
     (From Thy pierced palm red rivers come).
     Lord, Thou didst suffer more for me
     Than all the hosts of land and sea.
     So let me render back again
     This millionth of Thy gift. Amen.

I am also remembering James Cagney in The Fighting 69th and hearing the echoes of "Taps" in Kilmer's "Rouge Bouquet."

cephalophores

Brian Abel Ragen — 2017-04-16T17:52:31-05:00

Nicasius of Rheims, like his brother bishop Saint Denis, is among those saints known as “cephalophores,” or head-carriers. (Both were martyred by beheading, and I think that is all the artists wanted to convey by showing them holding their heads, but helpful guides will be happy to spin tales rivaling those of Washington Irving if you seem receptive.)

—at Reims Cathedral

Compiègne

Brian Abel Ragen — 2017-04-14T13:11:06-05:00

One of the memorials at Compiègne, where the Armistice was signed in 1918.

Midwest Interiors

Brian Abel Ragen — 2016-08-26T18:17:21-05:00

Just two photos to show what you can find in Southern Indiana. The bright one is the atrium of the West Baden Springs Hotel, a wonderfully restored historic spa that is part of the French Lick resort. The dimmer one is one of the chambers at Marengo Caves, which is not far away. The pool that reflects the ceiling so perfectly is evidently only a few inches deep.

The Founders of the St. John Volunteer Corps

Brian Abel Ragen — 2015-12-03T17:02:59-06:00

I have just received photographs from the Order of St. John's investiture in Dallas in October. In one, I am at the gala dinner the two leaders of the St. John Volunteer Corps, Gray Heppner and Richard Southby. In the other, I am receiving a certificate recognizing my work as a volunteer with the Veterans Administration from H.R.H. The Duke of Gloucester, our Grand Prior.

56 years, 11 months: Lapping My Father

Brian Abel Ragen — 2015-09-22T21:48:37-05:00

I have now lived as long as my father did.

Somehow this milestone did not touch me as much as lapping my mother about a year ago did. That may be in part because she struggled to keep going until the end, devoting herself to her various projects until the cancer and the chemotherapy made that impossible. Her life ended with her last, stertorous breath. We had been waiting for that moment through years of illness and remission, and we were there to see the horrible, unedifying end. Then came the packed funeral at the Episcopal church we only visited as a family once a year and the crowds at the cemetery. An epoch was over—mostly in my life and my brother’s, but even in the life of the city. My brother treasured (and squirreled away from me) tributes of all kinds, from simple letters to richly decorated documents that reported that the city council or the county board of supervisors or one of the houses of the state legislature had ceremonially adjourned in honor of her passing.

When my father had died six weeks earlier, everything was much more muted. The world would go on as it had. We would continue to live in a house where the focus of everything was my mother’s pain. My brother, the housekeeper, and the private nurses, tried to keep her comfortable, but what relief the Darvon gave didn’t last from one appointed dose to the next. If anything, a weight was lifted from me: I no longer had to fear living in a house where my mother would no longer be able to restrain the angry, drunken, unpredictable man who would be left as my only parent. That had been my greatest fear, and only our housekeeper was tactless or perceptive enough to suggest that I might be experiencing more relief than grief.

The funeral at the Catholic parish we attended every Sunday was full of people who were “there for Helen,” and my mother left the house—impeccably dressed, as always—for the last time to do her duty to her husband’s memory. But after we got her home from the cemetery, life became again a round of pills and shots and pain. If the city fathers adjourned in my dad’s memory, it was to comfort my mother—and I don’t recall my brother poring over any proclamations of sympathy at that point. Perhaps he was just too busy making sure the nurses arrived on time. Even in our little world, my father’s death had not really changed much at all.

The truth is, it seemed as if my father’s real life had ended long ago. He seemed to spend most of his time asleep: I think I saw him wearing a nightshirt more often than in anything else. At the time, I thought he was passed out drunk all the time, but as I have approached his age myself and found myself wearing a C-PAP every night and being prescribed drugs with names like Nuvigil and Provigil, I begin to think he also had a real sleep disorder that was never treated. Whatever medical problems he had, though, it still seemed that he was drunk more often than not.

I realize that my father during his periods of productive sobriety was less memorable than my father on the rampage from drink or withdrawal or in a stupor beyond all rousing. So, my most intense recollections tell against him. So do even the parts of his life I saw. He wasn’t at his best at home. Other people saw, though less and less, a skillful lawyer or a cheerful companion, while I saw the man they would not have cared to meet.

I have always been the one in the family credited with an accurate memory for everything but names. The odd corollary of that recognition has been that I am also the one kept out of the informational loop. My mother shared family lore with my brother, not with me. On the other side of the family, my guardian aunts were even worse: they went so far as to hide an uncle’s obituary from me lest I learn about something they didn’t like to talk about. I would say their care was pointless—I had already been clued in on that big secret—but perhaps it wasn’t: if I had seen the obit, I would have talked about it, and I can understand why they would have wanted to avoid that. In any case, my memories of my father lack much of the background detail that would soften the grotesque picture my memory foregrounds.

The Harry J. Ragen I knew best was a man damaged beyond repair. He had once, of course, been something else.

Evidently as a boy he had been one of the popular kids. We occasionally got calls even years after his death from old guys who found themselves in San Diego, recalled that they had heard that Harry Ragen had ended up there, and found the name in the phone book. After the disappointment at finding that another guy their age had died too young, there were stories of a happy Iowa childhood, with my father sounding like the gregarious, relaxed boy I never was. He did, as I understand it, have the advantage of having an uncle who owned the town’s movie theater—something that could give a kid a considerable social edge in a small Iowa town in the days before television—but that didn’t seem to be the root of his popularity. He was also, unlike me again, an athlete. He played basketball—he remembered most the Protestant kids on other teams trying to tear the scapulars from the Catholic players’ necks—and tennis. He, or perhaps his brother, may have been state tennis champ.

Like me, he grew up in a house dominated by illness. His father, a haberdasher in Oskaloosa, Iowa, developed pernicious anemia in the days when the only treatment for it was consuming massive amount of raw calves’ liver.^* My father remembered with disgust how he would grind it and mix it with orange juice and try to get it down in that form, which I can’t imagine made it much more pleasant. All the same, Harry Ragen, Sr. was an invalid. Family lore had it that my father was even given a driver’s license when he was still underage so he could do some of the family errands, and as a boy I imagined him peeking through the steering wheel of something like our Chrysler Imperial instead of driving a model A. But my grandmother—a figure I knew only as a tiny woman everyone called Mamie—saw to it that the family continued its climb up the American ladder of success. She was eventually named Nebraska Mother of the Year in honor of having seen to it that, despite her husband’s illness and early death, every one of her five children not only went to college, but earned an advanced degree. That she did it during the Great Depression and in an era when few women received degrees of any sort was an achievement that deserves honor. (One daughter earned a Ph.D., two earned master’s degrees; my father and his brother earned degrees in law and medicine.)

Those five siblings formed a bond that was unshakable, even after behavior that would lead many people I know to “withdraw from a toxic relationship that I realized was really co-dependent.” The girls doted on the boys. His sisters, especially the two who never married, were my father’s confidantes and biggest fans and willing slaves throughout his life. Perhaps they acted as “enablers” of my father’s addiction, but I am not sure there is much use in casting real people in the restrictive roles of the 12-step puppet show. They certainly did try to lessen the damage he caused, and they played the same role in the lives of their other brother and of their nieces and nephews. I really don’t think there is any reason to blame them for doing their best to keep several men from hitting rock bottom at terminal velocity.

I wish I knew more about my father’s life beyond the family, but I have no sources. I only know that he earned a Ph.B. in English from Creighton University during what I think of as the heyday of Jesuit education in America. His life as a student? I know that, like other freshmen, he wore a beanie. That’s about it. He went on to earn an LL.B. from the same institution—though he traded it in for a doctoral degree later on so his younger brother with the M.D. wouldn’t be able to lord it over him anymore. (His elder sister, quite rightly, continued to remind them both that any doctorate not awarded on the basis of an “original contribution to knowledge” was merely titular.) Then he made a European tour, getting out of Germany on the last ship for America. (That’s how the story went.) And then he was drafted, in what was then a one-year contingency draft. After Pearl Harbor, he was in for the duration.

I have tried to discover what the war was like for my father. But I have failed. His stories more or less stopped after boot camp and some time he happily spent in a training camp with some of Walt Disney’s cartoonists. After that, next to nothing, though he spent most of the war in the European Theater of Operations, served for a time as encryption/decryption officer for General Eisenhower (he was in the Signal Corps), acted as a JAG officer on a number of cases, and won the Bronze Star for an act of heroism near Bergamo in 1945. (He was then scouting local phone lines in order to use them to connect front line troops with artillery support.) There must have been more stories, and my brother may have heard a few more than I did, but he would prefer me not discuss even what I do recall hearing.

I have procured what records I could from the Army, but much has been lost, and what is left tells me little. My father evidently shared some details of his experiences with my mother, which she was not above using against him during their quarrels. (His smart mouth had evidently lost him a promotion to captain—and telling my mother about it wasn’t a good idea, either.) In hope of understanding my father better, I have read many memoirs of the war. I think most of three books by people I have actually known—though one only at one remove—and genuinely admired: Flights of Passage by Samuel Hynes, Crossing the Line by Alvin Kernan, and Doing Battle by Paul Fussell. Professors Hynes and Kernan—I can’t think of them of as Sam and Al, no matter how often they have asked me to call them that—were my professors at Princeton. They intimidated me—though they did everything they could to be accessible—and as a graduate student I myself was still shyer than I am now. I hoped their memoirs of the war would help me understand my father. They didn’t. They didn’t even help me understand them better. I couldn’t really see how the cocky, exuberant flyboys so vividly depicted in the books could have become the courtly, gentle, intensely learned men I saw in the classroom.^†

I did not know Paul Fussell personally, though his son Sam was a friend of mine at Pomona College. (Sam’s own book Muscle is one of the great memoirs—and so far as I can tell he doesn’t say a word that isn’t true, though he omits a great deal, such as his years at Pomona, for narrative effect.) I did hear the elder Fussell speak on several occasions and have loved many of his books, including Poetic Meter and Poetic Form, Samuel Johnson and the Life of Writing, and The Great War and Modern Memory. I thought he was on the road to becoming one of the great American essayists until he let his bitchy persona get away from him. His book on the war may have given me a better idea about my father and the war than any other.

Doing Battle is in some ways an embarrassing read. The author shares too many details. He admits to feelings that are not to be mentioned by either the hip or the stoic. He paints a picture of someone uncomfortably like the person one is trying not to be. In all that Fussell’s book is a great contrast to the memoirs by Hynes and Kernan. Fussell’s is also a much grimmer and more cynical picture of war theirs are. And while the two future Princeton professors seem to feel primarily affection for the Marine Corps and the Navy, Fussell simply despises the Army. I think there are several reasons for these contrasts. First, while Hynes and Kernan came to the service from more or less straightened circumstances, Fussell was a child of privilege: he was the son of a lawyer in wealthy Pasadena, where he had the best possible public education. (Pasadena expected everyone to complete at least junior college.) He had plenty of money, and went on to an elite college—my own Pomona. While Kernan especially sees the U.S. Navy as a true home and doesn’t mind being an enlisted man, Fussell finds the army a place of exile and resents being ordered about by his intellectual inferiors. While Kernan appreciates the well-made uniforms and the ample food, Fussell finds everything either substandard or, frankly, tacky. Of course, the three men are also fighting very different wars. As fliers, Kernan and Hynes risk death, but they kept fairly clean and comfortable while they do it. Between missions there are showers and square meals. As an infantry lieutenant, Fussell sees death face to face, and, perhaps worse for him, lives for days on end with mud and filth and exhaustion. And while the fliers work with men selected for their aptitude and technical skill, Fussell deals with both soldiers and officers who serve where they do because of their lack of specialized skills. He not only suffers more but does it in just the company he would not have chosen.

My father did not come from as privileged a background as Fussell did, and he did not spend as much time being shot at. But coming from a protective and devoted family and having already earned the professional qualification that was much rarer then than it has since become, he may have shared Fussell’s feelings of resentment about the army and his military superiors. He certainly seems to have behaved much as Fussell did. Fussell reports that his responses to his superiors became more and more “snotty.” (That is not a word one often finds in military memoirs.) The same sort of discourse lost my father his captaincy. While I think my father had done more to earn his sense of entitlement than the young Fussell had, they both clearly felt what they were forced to do as a profound affront, one that may have changed the very conception they had of themselves.

But Fussell made a success of his life after the war, and my father did not. He was older than the men who became great English professors and didn’t have the joyous experience of education on the GI bill some of them recount. There were other things that darkened his life. Perhaps the addiction—and while I would not apply that term to most people who drink too much, I think it fits his case—explains it all. But perhaps not. Perhaps the war experiences wounded him psychically. Perhaps he just lacked the faculties that would have allowed him to flourish in the roles he found himself asked to play.

Between the war and the point where my memories begin, he had a life that I can’t find a way to imagine. He never went back to live in Iowa or Nebraska, but after he joined his mother and sisters in California, he built a successful life. He became partner in a law firm. He married an heiress who had a career in journalism. He was active in civic affairs. And then, just as I was becoming old enough to form memories, the collapse came. He left the firm, and his private practice withered. He was unreliable on boards and committees and lost his place on them. He became the man I knew. Was it the war? Was it his brother’s public disgrace? Was it something to do with the upheavals in his nation’s culture? And might he have recovered at least a bit if he had not died suddenly when he was not quite 57?

And what do I take from my father’s example now that I am older than he would ever be? I have already stopped drinking. (I started rather late but caught up to him to a greater extent than I imagined possible.) Having neither wife nor children, I am not hated by them. I get out of bed every day. I never use foul language or call people names. I rarely miss a board meeting. I still may accomplish more than I have yet done. I have not become him. I have not.

^* A later note: I have now been diagnosed with pernicious anemia myself. I give myself a shot of Vitamin B12 once a month. When I am tempted to think that progress is a myth, I think of my shot and the scene my father witnessed in the Omaha kitchen with the liver, the grinder, and the orange juice.

^† Their subsequent memoirs give a fuller picture. Kernan’s In Plato’s Cave is one of the best memoirs of a life in scholarship I have ever read. And Hynes’s Growing Seasons tells the story of the boy who would become the Marine bomber pilot.

Mark Twain Tonight!

Brian Abel Ragen — 2015-04-12T12:36:09-05:00

With Hal Holbrook after his performance in “Mark Twain Tonight!” I first saw him perform in this role when I was in High School; he is just as powerful in it now that he is 90. The political jokes—still topical after 100 years—filled the hall with laughter, and his rendition of the Shepardson/Grangerford Feud from Huck Finn had the audience utterly silent, rapt with sorrow and pity. This was Mr. Holbrook’s second appearance to benefit the Eugene Field House Foundation, of which I am secretary. We preserve the home and memory of both Eugene Field, the poet and essayist whose work your mothers read to you, whether you know it or not, of of his father, Roswell Field, who was Dred Scott’s lawyer as he sued for his freedom. An added pleasure at the even was meeting the Scotts’ great-great granddaughter.

English Professors are Sick, Sick, Sick

Brian Abel Ragen — 2014-12-09T11:01:17-06:00

I am afraid my profession has never fared well in film. Anthropology professors look like Harrison Ford in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Physics professors look like Kelly McGillis in Top Gun. They conquer the world and get the girl or guy in the end.

Male English professors are pathetic serial philanders. The best we can hope for is to lose our jobs and become unemployed stoners hooked up with Frances McDormand like Michael Douglas in Wonder Boys.

But female English Professors have it even worse. What do they get to do? Lose their memories and die. The newly-released Still Alice stars Julianne Moore as a linguist with early-onset Alzheimers. It reminds me of Do You Remember Love, a 1985 film that start Joanne Woodward as an English Professor with early-onset Alzheimers. (It was shot at Pomona College, and Woodward borrowed an academic gown from my favorite professor, who looked like a movie star and kept her memory and critical faculties through four decades of teaching.) In Wit, Emma Thompson was a Renaissance scholar who died of cancer, but lost the ability to deal anything more complicated than The Runaway Bunny before the end. Call in the CDC: we have a pattern.

I know that English teachers don't do anything very dramatic—the best we can hope for it to be inspiringly fired the way Robin Williams was in Dead Poets Society. All the same, can't Hollywood come up with a better plot for the female Professor of Language & Literature than "She dies in the end"?
(If script-writers have a body-count quota to meet, might I suggests clearing out the School of Education and the administration building?)

55 years, 11 months, 9 days

Brian Abel Ragen — 2014-10-02T18:05:04-05:00

Today I have lived as many days as my mother did. She died when I was 16, and I will always recall the date of her death: April 18. (Also the date on which my former fiancée began, though I did not realize it at the time, the process of dumping me.) I can also remember the month of her birth: May. (She discouraged greater specificity because it might have led to either celebrations that would have dulled the edge of her repeated declaration, “I never ask for anything for birthday or my anniversary: I just want you to be nice to me all year long,” or inquiries about the year of her birth, which was not a piece of information she shared lightly.) But this is my last chance to compare when she reached life’s milestones with my own pace down the road. I have already marked the days when I had lived without her as long as I had lived with her, and when I was as old as she had been went she got married—and that was 17 years ago. In a year I will also lap my father, who died six weeks before my mother, and then I will be plunging on into a stage of life they never reached.

I have anticipated this point for some time, and its approach has made me feel quite strange. That might be because I rarely hear anyone else talking about such things. Most friends of my own age still have living parents. My older friends have dealt with parents dying not too early, but, frankly, too late. The first time a person struggling with a parent who had become entirely dependent on his children said, “Brian, you were lucky,” I thought that was a trifle heartless. Having seen more, I now think it was simply true. (And, lest anyone think I had it too easy, my mother’s final illness stretched on for years, and I did not entirely escape the burden of my guardian aunts’ years of decline—although I didn’t have to bear the brunt of it.) My friends don’t think about when they will have lived longer than their parents: they wonder how they’ll live through the years of taking care of them.

My brother crossed this milestone about a year ago, but I don’t expect us to compare notes. He focuses on the positive much more than I do, and he thinks that “dwelling” on this sort of thing unhealthy. But I have been able to talk it over with a cousin. A year after my parents died one after the other of completely unrelated causes, my father’s brother and his wife went the same way. (The Ragen boys’ lungs gave out, due in part to the Judas gene I’m told I have not got; their wives died of particularly cruel forms of cancer.) When I saw Cousin Mike at a family wedding, I think he and I were both relieved to find someone else who was troubled by reaching this point. “It was really freaking me out,” he told me. “I knew I had to do something. So I bought a Bentley.” Cousin Mike is an ophthalmologist and spends his days performing LASIK operations. I’m a professional critic and spend my days thinking about things. We’re both native Californians and grew up at the height of the car culture, when gas was cheap and the highways were empty. That experience gave him a solace he can draw on in times of perplexity. It gave me the subject for a book about trying to escape the burden of the past (It’s called A Wreck on the Road to Damascus.)

I don’t have to think very long about why this milestone is troubling. Everyone’s parents–and their whole generation—are barriers between them and age and death. Once they are gone, one feels exposed to the great, unimaginable fact. That is not something everyone likes to be reminded of. After the funeral of the last blood relative in my mother’s generation, I looked at all my first-cousins on that side of the family and said, “Now that Death has completed his work with our parents’ generation, he can turn his full attention to ours.” I don’t recall that anyone regarded that as a helpful contribution to the family conversation.

Of course, almost all my cousins have the other fence against age and death—children. They may or may not be props in one’s old age—but there is a chance. And even if one never thinks about the “serial immortality” provided by generations of heirs, it would be odd if modern people were not moved and comforted by the same things that succored their ancestors. And they wanted heirs. Before the ancient Hebrews had any real hope of heaven, they counted on being rewarded through their posterity.

Somehow, though, I am the only member of my generation to never get married. And only two of us never had children. (My childless cousin, a divorcé, and I both went to Princeton. The only question in the family is whether the place turned us squirrelly or accepted us because we were that way already.) To add some irony to the story, I, the childless bachelor, have written extensively about the malign influence of the myth of the American Adam, who avoids the role of husband and father, and I have devoted myself to the study of heraldry, as symbolic system that encodes marriage and inheritance, and have even been granted a coat of arms—one that will probably never pass to “the heirs of my body.” No one will ever cry about me as they drive to work or while singing that one particular hymn. No one will ascribe his troubles to me when talking to the therapist. No one will think about me on the day he lives as long as I have.

My mother knew many disappointments, but she escaped the ones I am facing. I do have the model of four spinster aunts—only two of whom were regularly described as “crazy.” None of them ever had even a single cat. (And one of them married when still older than I am now.) There are some literary models for the aging bachelor uncle. As I recall, they tend to be disreputable, Dahl’s My Uncle Oswald leaps to mind, as does Digory’s Uncle Andrew from C.S. Lewis’s The Magician’s Nephew. The popular culture of my formative years gives no better models, unless I want to be Uncle Bill on Family Affair. (If I get Sebastian Cabot as my valet, I’ll take the job, even if it comes with three kids.) Uncle Joe on Petticoat Junction was always “movin’ kind of slow,” but that was just as well, since his sloth was a check on his irascibility. The Beaver’s Uncle Billy was such a rotter and blowhard that they had to transform him utterly before he made a second appearance. A couple decades later Alex on Family Ties got a brilliant bachelor uncle who looked like Tom Hanks—but he turned out to be a violent drunk. Still, there must be exceptions. Uncle Charlie on My Three Sons? Well, I do cook, but I lack the years in the Merchant Marine that would let me wear an apron without looking like a sissy. And the purely literary models are no better. Sterne’s Uncle Toby? Too Protestant. Thackeray’s Major Pendennis? Better connected and worldlier than I can imagine myself. I have to say that spinster aunts come off better in books than bachelor uncles, just as they do on television and in popular culture in general. After all, if you call someone a “funny aunt,” they think she makes people laugh. If you talk about a “funny uncle,” they give you the number of Child Protective Services.

But I hardly need go to a second-degree relative for a model. Though tomorrow I will reach an age mother never did, I have been turning into my mother for years. I have always been the one arranging the parties and hoping people will behave. Lately I have become but a part-time writer and a more-or-less full-time philanthropist, rushing from board meeting to board meeting, and that was how she passed most of her adult life. Sadly, I have not become a social magnet who everyone seems to love, and I have not been placed at the helm of every organization that can attract my support. I suspect, in fact, that people wish that I would just sign my checks and shut up. So I face the days ahead with some trepidation. But perhaps I’ll grow into the role. Besides, I can always buy that Bentley—though the truth is, I am more a Prius sort of guy.

Another Hand of Cards

Brian Abel Ragen — 2014-10-01T13:38:10-05:00

I have mentioned how odd I found it that I had to carry four or five health insurance cards when I was an employee of the State of Illinois, considering that all the money comes out of the same pot. I spent a couple years with another kind of coverage, but now I am back with the State, and they have dealt me a new hard. There are four this time, instead of five, but that is only because retirees are not eligible for the Employee Assistance program, which provides things like “Anger Management” classes and drug rehab. Since I am no longer likely to snap on campus, they evidently don’t care if their medical insurance provider drives me to go postal or start asking my friends visiting Thailand to mail me some Valium.

It, of course, makes no sense for me to have so many different cards and card numbers. I won’t go into what they are all for again, but yesterday I had an experience that reminded me how kludgy our system is—and how the innovations that make American business (and American medicine, until we start paying for it) don’t seem to reach our system of charging and paying for medical care.

This fall I am not worried about Ebola, which I have essentially zero chance of encountering. I am worried about the flu. A quick look at the Centers for Disease control web site tells me that about 200,000 people are hospitalized as a result of the flu every year, and as many as 49,000 die of it. I also know that when I have had it, I have been very unhappy—and that every year I age I am more likely to move from the “very unhappy column” to the “in the hospital” column. So I get an annual flu shot. This year, since I had serious surgery not long ago and have had some respiratory problems, I decided to get a pneumonia shot, too.

So there I am, the model patient. I am not putting in an already over-burdened Emergency Room under still more strain after I have been inflected. I am not taking up time in a busy doctor’s office. I am getting my vaccinations for influenza and pneumonia in the simplest and most cost-effective way possible. In other words, I am at the counter in the back of a suburban Walgreens talking to a pharmacist.

Things go smoothly until she asks for my insurance card. First, we try my health insurance card. Then we try my prescription card. If they were treating my flu shot like other prescriptions, that would tell the pharmacist how much Express Scripts would pay, and thus how much she should charge me. But the flu shot, which may prevent my needing much more expensive medical care and prescriptions, is not covered so simply. After some research, she discovers that I have to pay myself, and then file for reimbursement.

Let’s fast forward to the present, when I have downloaded the Express Scripts claim form. I now have two pages of text, lines, and boxes, which I am to fill out with a pen. I will enter the information encoded on my various cards—the form, in fact, tells me “See your prescription drug ID card.” I also find that I have to go back to Walgreens to get the signature of a pharmacist and the numbers to fill the boxes under “NCPDP/NPI Required.” I trust that either I or the pharmacist will make a mistake somewhere, which will allow Express Scripts to send everything back to me and delay sending me the payment I am now owed. (Why don’t I call Express Scripts for help? Because I know from experience that they will lie to me until I become so nasty that they break down and look in my records—while keeping me on hold—and that even after they can not longer argue the facts, they will invoke policies I have no way of researching until I give up.) Paper, signatures, envelopes, stamps, bureaucrats: the way the State of Illinois and Express Script like to do things.

But back to the pharmacy counter. Our adventure dealing with the people obligated to pay for my health care now being at their normal dead end, I need to pay. No problem. Walgreens takes ApplePay, so all I have to you is wave my iPhone and touch my finger to its “home” button. Done. Walgreens have a rewards program, and I am part of it. No card now either: I just get my virtual card up on the iPhone screen, wave it over the scanner, and my points are in the system. All that’s left is the shots. The pharmacist gets the doses ready with lightning speed, meets me behind a screen already wearing rubber gloves and ready with alcohol swabs and Band-Aids, and in less than I minute I am immunized, wearing two Band-Aids I don’t really need, and on my way.

But I am still left wondering: we me make our commerce ever more efficient and the actual delivery of medical care wonderfully smooth, so why do we still choose to apply none of that knowledge and skill to paying for health care? And once again, I see that neither the proponents of “Obamacare” nor its impassioned opponents are talking about the real problems a patient encounters. (You can, however, find them described quite well in Kafka and Dickens.)

But enough of this. I have forms to fill out. Where’s my pen? I hope I still have some White Out, in case I made a mistake!

[Update: After having had me fill out the forms and get the pharmacist's signature, ExpressScripts declined to pay for my flu shot. Since they knew what drug I wanted reimbursement for before asking for the form and the signature, I would ask, “Why not just say ‘No!’” But I know that is not how the game is played: They don’t want me to notice how often they say “No!” They want me to give up and say “The the hell with it.” If I just give up, perhaps I won't notice how many claims they deny.]

Poppies at the Tower

Brian Abel Ragen — 2014-09-01T10:01:13-05:00

As a touching part of the commemorations of the beginning of World War I, 88,246 ceramic poppies are being planted in the moat of the Tower of London, one for each British Serviceman who lost his life between 1914 and 1918. When the installation is complete, the moat will be full of poppies.

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and Prince Harry each planted a poppy.

Each poppy is made by hand. See the video at the Tower’s web site: http://poppies.hrp.org.uk/about-the-installation.

Poppies, of course, became symbols of the war because of the poem by Lt. Col. John McCrae, the Canadian physician who served as both a gunner and a medical officer though much of the war. During the Second Battle of Ypres, his battalion faced one of the first chemical attacks, but still held. Like so many soldiers, he avoided death by bullets, bombs, and gas only to die of pneumonia early in the last year of the war.

     In Flanders fields the poppies blow
     Between the crosses, row on row,
          That mark our place; and in the sky
          The larks, still bravely singing, fly
     Scarce heard amid the guns below.

     We are the Dead. Short days ago
     We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
          Loved and were loved, and now we lie
           In Flanders fields.

     Take up our quarrel with the foe:
     To you from failing hands we throw
          The torch; be yours to hold it high.
          If ye break faith with us who die
     We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
          In Flanders fields.

Some critics think the poem falls apart in the third stanza, where the pastoral and elegiac mode with which the poem opens is replaced by “recruiting poster language.” They have a point. But the poppies worn today—like those planted at the Tower—ask us only to remember and mourn, not to fight. We are free to think that if the fallen are angry, it is not at those who refused to “take up the quarrel,” but with those who started it.

Follow Your Doctor's Orders—But Don't Expect <i>Us</i> to Pay Attention to Him

Brian Abel Ragen — 2014-08-20T16:00:18-05:00

If your prescription provider only allows you a third of the pills the doctor has told you to take, should you take one pill every third day? Or should you take one pill a day for a month and then do without them for the next two months? Or should you cut them up in such a way that you can take a third of the full dose everyday?

About a half hour into a conversation with a fellow who serves as a mouthpiece for ExpressScripts, I found myself asking those questions. He replied that I should take them exactly as my physician had prescribed them. He tried to sound as if taking pills he wouldn’t let me have was an obvious and simple course of action.

During this extensive conversation, the representative of my “health care provider” also told me:

•That the prescription for which I had received a denial notice had never been received by ExpressScripts.

•That, yes, the prescription had been pre-approved, but that didn’t mean the prescription had been received.

•That if I wanted him to look for the prescription, I would have to wait on hold a listen to the same saccharine tune over and over, because he could only address my case while I was on hold. He could not do work that didn’t require my input and then call me back, because . . . well, the why was a bit cloudy.

•That, yes, the drug had been prescribed and pre-approved but that my doctor wanted me to have too much of it.

•That it didn’t matter that I had been told other things at other times.

•That I should not think his story world change, even though he had just changed his story about the prescription not having be prescribed or pre-approved. Or because his colleagues had given me other stories. ExpressScripts was committed to my health and didn’t treat its customers’ health lightly.

•That I shouldn’t doubt either the accuracy of his statements or the goodwill of his company just because they had wasted a great deal of my time and denied me a drug my doctor says I should have.

•That, yes, I should have my doctor waste more of his time pleading for the drug if I wanted to take the drug he had prescribed.

•That I shouldn’t should so hostile.

After that, I called my doctor a couple times, and he and his staff did, indeed, waste more of their time begging ExpressScripts to let me have the drug. We reached a point where I did receive the full dose, but only as two separate prescriptions at different dosages, and I had to produce paper coupons to get one of them. Then another month went by, and, whatever they had done in the past, now they would not let me refill the prescription until two week after I had run out of it again. Then we reached an accommodation whereby I got a month’s supply of the drug at the price I am to pay for drugs according the stated rules of my plan every third month. During each of the two off months I would have to pay more than a thousand dollars for the drug. Things went on like that until a test showed I should not take that particular drug anymore.

Only that last decision was about my health. Everything else was about money. The guy who fronted for ExpressScripts on the phone told me that his company does not care about money—or that, if they do, they make money by fulfilling prescriptions, not by denying them. I tried to reconcile that story with the newspaper reports that came out a couple days later about the company’s deciding to reject a whole class of prescriptions—one’s involving compounding pharmacies—because they cost too much, but I didn’t manage to square that circle. I know that I was promised healthcare in retirement in return for years of labor, but how much healthcare I get seems to be in the hands of people whose motivations do not include looking after my welfare.

I mention this colloquy with the ExpressScripts flak as more evidence that our health care system is in a shambles and that neither the defenders nor the opponents of the Affordable Care Act are paying any attention to the real problems. The insurance companies—and I include ExpressScripts in that group—have no interest in the welfare of the patient. They make money by not paying claims. My former employer, the State of Illinois, decides which of these companies to employ not on the basis of how well they further my health and welfare but—let's just say on the same basis it made the decisions that left its pension funds depleted and its former governors in jail.

I am not for having the government—certainly not the state government—take over the health care system. They do a rotten job running some parts of it, though an excellent job managing others. I am for a single, governmental payer. Private providers would complete on the basis of health results and patient satisfaction, not on widening the spread between what they pay for drugs and actual cost of the drugs they deliver. Patients would be better off, and people like the man I talked to on the phone would be able to do respectable work instead of shooting people who are being cheated through the grease.

Sorry, Wrong Island

Brian Abel Ragen — 2014-06-17T11:01:16-05:00

Mykonos is, I suppose, as lovely an isle as one could hope to see, if one's taste runs to the sun-bleached and Mediterranean. I myself prefer cool places where every living thing does not seem to be fighting a losing battle against drought. I’d prefer the heath of the Hebrides or, still better, the woods of the islands off the coast of Maine, even if that meant clouds and rain and more people appearing fully dressed.

I am not sure what men in Mykonos do now, besides tend bar. Once they must have fished, but there is no evidence of that beyond the fish in the tavernas, and they may have been flown in from the same factory ships that supply St. Louis and Milwaukee. Piracy no longer seems to be a career option, but I suspect it once was. Byron’s Corsair would have found this a congenial spot. The piety business takes up a lot of land—there are votive churches everywhere, the fulfillment of vows by desperate sailors and their families. They are touching and beautiful in their own way, but I didn't see a single priest serving them, only the old ladies who lend skirts to the half-naked tourists of both sexes and make sure a euro has clinked in the box before a candle is lit. A few guys drive busses, and in off-peak times I’m sure white-washing a whole town employs many others, but mostly the local men are out of sight. Women staff the boutiques and do more than their share at the tavernas.

I’m told that male visitors can enjoy a gay scene, if Greek love is what they're interested in. For the heterosexual male tourist, however, there seem to be only two pastimes. One is standing outside the shops holding a lady’s purse and packages while she shops for jewelry or trinkets or clothes in the over-priced boutiques. I saw retired construction workers and computer programmers and business executives from across the English-speaking world transformed into this sort of emasculated cigar store Indian and planted outside every shop in town. The other way a guy can spend his time ashore is to settle into a bar whose playlist features covers of lighter 60’s fare and get quietly or noisily drunk. Before you down more than a couple, you will have heard "Those Were the Days, My friend,” “Try to Remember the Kind of September,” and “The Fool on the Hill,” several times, along with, as instrumental interludes, several renditions of “Never on Sunday” and the theme from “Zorba the Greek.”

Being a bachelor with a bad liver, and thus excluded from participation in even those activities, I didn’t find Mykonos the most interesting place I have visited on my travels. I understand it was a pleasant simple island unfrequented much by outsiders until Jacqueline Kennedy and Aristotle Onassis brought the Jet Set here in the 1960’s. I'm sure it’s more fun for the truly rich, but I suspect that anywhere you go a part of the sad atmosphere of that era lingers. I was but a child in the 60’s, but I recall that the Kennedy era and its aftermath included not just tragedy (the assassinations, the wars), not just nobility (the civil rights struggle, the space program), not just childish rebellion (sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll), but also a brittle feeling that people were pretending to be having a great time but really were fending off a feeling of emptiness. That is part of what I always associate with the Rat Pack, with the part of “Camelot” that includes Marilyn Monroe at the President's birthday party, and the whole tawdry swinging, girl-watching, faux cool, medallions-and-turtleneck-where-my-necktie-should-be atmosphere that pervaded the time as much as pot smoke and rock 'n' roll.

I have no desire to revisit that era. I want to be where people wear their tuxes unironically or dress for a day of fishing. Or perhaps I’m just too old and too single to enjoy any place where you keep hearing a voice asking, “Is that lonely woman really me?” She’s not talking to me, but my only answer would be, “At least you can shop and giggle and swill the ouzo. I’m heading back to the ship.”

A Wingéd Horse or a Chariot of Fire

Brian Abel Ragen — 2014-04-27T13:10:03-05:00

Trains and train stations are one of the pleasures of a visit to Italy. There are many things that don’t work quite so well in Rome and Florence as they do in the American Midwest—the Internet connections that don’t quite connect, the toilets that lack seats—but the trains are what trains are supposed to be. They leave and arrive on time—even though Mussolini has been out of power for some time now. They are uniformly clean. The dining cars and at-seat meal service provide actual food with actual utensils. The ride is smooth. My generation was raised to believe that everything—especially everything involving machinery—was better here in the greatest nation that has ever been, but the Amtrak ride from St. Louis to Kansas City, while charming in its own way, is slow, bumpy, and offers only the sort of tepid coffee and wrapped but nevertheless stale sandwiches one gets while on jury duty with the county. (I find this odd, since Amtrak is a federal program, and juries at the Federal Courts are offered the best sort of unhealthy snacks, hot, strong coffee, and all upholstered chairs in carpeted rooms.)

St. Louis, like other American cities, has a large and beautiful train station that is an architectural monument. Amtrak stopped using it years ago. Its trains depart from an “inter-modal” terminal convenient for those transferring from Greyhound busses, which is less depressing than the shed (that’s what they called it) Amtrak used when it first abandoned Union Station, but is still uninspiring. Union Station has been turned into a failed shopping mall and the sort of hotel where corporations hold meetings for middle managers. I catch the train at the quaint station in Kirkwood, which is also essentially abandoned and lacks every amenity.

In Europe, the grand old stations are still used for their intended purpose. They have been updated in mostly rational ways, though the Termini Station in Rome lacked a single working ATM when I was last there. The also have interesting artworks, as if they were important places. Next to the Termini Station in Rome, there is a new statue of Pope John Paul II, which is even the subject of controversy. But I am more interested in the statues from the 1930’s on the facades of Stazione Ostiense (Rome’s other public station) and the station at the Vatican.

If I were writing in the horrible lingo they taught me in graduate school, I would say that there is a dialogue between the two buildings. But buildings, being mute piles of steel and stone that cannot form intentions or feel the sort of emotions that lead people to top or correct each other, don’t talk to each other. The creators of these buildings, however, did have something to say, and to say to each other.

Here is what you find on the facade of the Stazione Ostiense:

The sculpture is representative of much of the art of the first half of the 20th century, though not the sort of art that art historians most like to remember. It might be called art deco or some sort of realism, but you see it in New York, in London, here in Rome, and, in the extreme form called Socialist Realism (really Stalinist Triumphalism), in Moscow. Look at the buildings built for London Transport—look at Rockefeller Center.

That it chooses a mythological subject is not unusual in the high days of the mechanical age. Every American my age remembers the Texaco gas stations that displayed Pegasus as the symbol of movement and energy and progress. (We also recall the tune to “You can trust your car / To the man who wears the star— / The big bright Texaco star!” even though the guys in the sharp uniforms who pumped our gas and washed our windows and checked the oil are long gone, and we fill our own tanks and wipe our own windows and ignore the oil until the idiot light goes on and don’t really believe in progress any more.) Here is the pride of the mechanical age: man controls it all, and it takes him where he wants to go.

The train station at the Vatican speaks the same language:

The railroad is once again compared to flying horses, in this case horses that drew the chariot of fire that took Elijah away when his earthly ministry was ended. Whether heaven is just the right word for his destination is something I’ll leave to the Old Testament scholars, but that is where we Christians know he was headed. He is not the only or the most important person who arrived there along with his most important piece of luggage, his body, but he and Enoch may be the only ones who didn’t have to make do without it for a time. Both Christ and (according to the doctrine of the Dormition / Assumption) Blessed Virgin Mary had to entrust theirs to that annoying porter or customs inspector Death before getting them back.

The difference between the two images is in who is controlling what. At the Stazione Ostiense, we have Bellerophon bridling Pegasus with the bridle given him by Athena. It is clearly a celebration of the power of man—the Bridle given by the goddess of wisdom in this context can only represent science and engineering and man’s mastery over nature. (Bellerophon’s attempt to join the gods on Olympus and his precipitous fall from the back of his wingéd mount is a part of the story that would not reassure those boarding the train that they would reach their destination, so I am not surprised that there is no companion frieze depicting it.)

At the Vatican train station, the horses are unbridled. That is not because they are uncontrolled, but because their driver needs no reins. That driver is Lord himself, who appears only through the movement of his creatures. The horses taking Elijah to his destination are already on the move—and they need no wings—the wingéd angel acts more like a conductor than a charioteer, and he does not so much direct the chariot as ask the passenger to look forward, not back. Elijah himself is still pronouncing some sort of blessing on Elisha, even as the wheels turn and his mantle falls from his shoulder to be clutched by his successor.

If the public station says, “Man now has the power to go wherever he pleases whenever he likes,” the Vatican station says, “In all your travels, remember your final destination, and that you may be called there when you least expect it, leaving all your power behind.” I am afraid I have lost my early faith in what the public station says; the Vatican station’s message seems ever truer.

Contracts Are Not Binding in Illinois

Brian Abel Ragen — 2014-01-13T17:41:46-06:00

If you agree to work for 8 hours for $100, $60 to be paid today, $40 to be paid on Friday, and your boss only coughs up $20 when Friday rolls around, what is the best word for what has happened? To listen to Illinois's governor, state legislators, and major newspapers, you might think that the appropriate word is “reform.”

Under Illinois’s new “Pension Reform” law, workers will not be paid what what they were promised when the agreed to do the work. Among other things, the law will diminish scheduled annual pension increases for those who have already retired or who are about to retire. There would no longer be a 3% increase to the whole pension every year. Instead, to put it most simply, the increase would be on a lesser amount, and it would apply only to that amount each year. Thanks to the loss of compound interest, the reduction in the retiree’s income will become more dramatic with each passing year.

The supporters of the state’s action claim necessity: the state wants the money for other things. Doubtless everyone who wants to stiff a worker wants the money for another purpose, but that does not lessen the obligation to pay up. The state faces a crisis for the reason most people facing huge debts do: it spent without saving. While its retirees made real contributions to their pension plans, the state failed to make the promised matching payments. Instead, it made “notional payments,” matching real money from the workers with worthless IOU’s. It promised to make those markers good when the time came, and the time is now.

During the years I worked for it as a college professor, the state promised me retirement on stated terms. The deal was that I could retire at 55 after accumulating 20 years of service, and that I would then receive a pension to be figured by a set formula, a pension that would be increased by 3% each year. That was as much a part of the agreement—our contract—as that I would teach and do research and receive a salary nine months of the year. I did my part: I expect to state to do its part, too.

Some legislators and editorialists have tried to blame this crisis on the unions, which had too much influence over the craven legislature. But I was never represented by a union—and my university did all in its power to keep it that way. I simply took the deal the state offered. The state is responsible for all the agreements it entered into, even with those ogres the “union bosses.” But it cannot claim that people like me forced it to make unequal bargains, because we never had a chance to bargain with them at all. (If we had had a say, I think few would have given up Social Security benefits—the state did not care to pay its share of FICA—and many would have opted to have had the money deducted from their checks put into 403(b)’s beyond the state’s control.) The state cannot claim that its retirees receive payments thanks to the legislature’s largesse, and not by contractual right, because the Illinois Constitution explicitly states that a public pension is an “enforceable contractual relationship, the benefits of which shall not be diminished or impaired” (Art. XII; Sec. 5).

What is at issue here is the sanctity of contracts. No one claims that our contract was not valid: it was clearly agreed that my colleagues and I would exchange our labor for a salary, certain benefits, and a pension with annual increases of 3%. It is the responsibility of the people of the state of Illinois to honor that contract. The state is not bankrupt so long as it has the power to tax. The people of the state—who elected legislators who made promises that are now unpleasant to keep because they set aside too little year after year—are responsible for fulfilling that contract. They have no more right to hold onto what they owe us than a boss has the right to hold back a $20 bill from a casual laborer. Illinois has not enacted a reform; it is attempting a swindle.

——
N.B.: I have never been a citizen of Illinois, so I stand in relation to that state only as a party to a labor contract. While citizens of Illinois in my position may be blamed for failing to discharge their crooked or incompetent legislators and governors, I cannot. And the harm the state plans to do me is real. My annual pension is now in the mid-$30,000’s. If these “reforms” are allowed to stand, in ten years’ time, I will have lost about $30,00 of what was promised me.

Is Santa Irish?

Brian Abel Ragen — 2013-12-21T16:01:44-06:00

I have just been catching up on the important questions that roil the American media. I can’t deny that they go to the core of our civilization. A black lady is upset that Santa and Jesus don't look like her, and a white lady—a very blonde white lady—rushes to say: “Yes!! White! Peaches ’n’ Cream white! White and nothing but white! What’s wrong with that?” I feel their pain.

When I was a young Irish lad, looking at the pictures of Santa wounded me each Christmas. He did not look like my people. His countenance that of a man of Germanic stock. "Why not a Celtic Santa?" I asked, as I wept into my Christmas stocking—a stocking that would be filled on Christmas morning with a potato, if I had been good, or a rotten potato, if I had been bad. Why, O why, did the Dutch get to give Santa not only his name, but his looks, too? And why was Black Pete still working for that old honky?

But as the years went by, I learned that Christmas was not about Santa. It was about Jesus. People showed me pictures of him, too. He was also sometimes Germanic, but more often Italian. He was never Irish: his hair was never red, like our Irish friends, or snow white, like the pates of every male relation of mine over 27. Besides, it had clearly been styled with more “product” than any Irishman has ever wasted good Guinness money on. Was my savior really a guy from the former Holy Roman Empire? How could he care about a Gael?

While in this state of dejection—all caused by the continental chaps dressed up as Santa and Jesus—I sat myself down to read the Lives of Saints. It turned out that St. Nicholas was not Dutch! He was Greek. He lived in Turkey. He’d never even had a Coca-Cola, much less appeared in one of their commercials. Now I know the Greeks count as white people, but if you stand one up next to Heidi Klum, you’ll wonder if they are in the same species, let alone race. They are the olive-toned cousins of us pasty people!

Then I learned a little more about Jesus. Sure, the man was a Jew! And his mother was, too, so even the rabbis couldn’t tell you otherwise! Why, it made me think about James Joyce—and that always makes my head hurt from confusion until I remember the funny bits and start laughing. He talks about a fellow named Shem the Penman who has a brother named Shaun the Postman. I think they’re brothers, but Shem is Hebrew, Greek, and Irish, while Shaun is Egyptian, Roman, and English, so maybe they’re not related at all, at all. Shem is a prophet and always ends up drinking hemlock, or getting crucified, or starving in a potato feminine, while Shaun builds pyramids and paves roads and makes the seas safe for commerce and in general builds great empires while seeing to it that Shem does most of the work and only gets a potato, a stuffed grape leaf, and some bitter herbs for his trouble.

So there you are. Shaun’s paid for the pictures of St. Nick and our Lord and Savior, though I’m sure he had Shem do the painting. If you see either one of them looking like a fat old Dutchman or a fellow fresh from the hairstylist, you’ll know you being told Shaun's fairy stories, not the truth. And how would Shem depict the holy skin tones, if he didn’t need to please the old Shaun? Well, I’ve known blue-eyed Jews, and vitiligo can affect the whole body, so you can make them look Irish or German if you want to. My own bet would be that St. Nicholas would be a dead ringer for any stern but generous old guy in Athens today. And Jesus? If you want the right model, you’ll find him in Hebron or Nablus. Remember that in his day both carpentry and preaching were outdoor work, so he’ll have a good tan. (We will leave all thought of any ancestral connections Jesus might have had with the Jews of Ethiopia for another time.)

And to those ladies who got so upset over whether Santa looked like them, all I can say is, people are unhappy enough: don’t start them arguing about how the saints and savior parted their hair. And, whatever he looks like, Jesus loves you. But if I were you I wouldn’t be counting on a visit from St. Nicholas this year.

Admiral Kimmel and Secretary Sebilius

Brian Abel Ragen — 2013-11-26T15:28:50-06:00

The disastrous introduction of the new healthcare website has me thinking of Admiral Kimmel. Husband E. Kimmel, the Commander-in-Chief of the Pacific Fleet in 1941, was one of the last American leaders to lose his position due to a failure. Since his day, people have lost important jobs for other reasons, but not for simply presiding over a debacle.

Kimmel was by no means a bad man or an inefficient officer. He simply prepared for the wrong threat, ignored the real one, and left his command unable to respond when the attack came. The culpability for the loss of all the ships and planes and men fell on the Japanese Empire, but the responsibility for the defeat the American forces had suffered was Kimmel’s. He was removed from command of the Pacific Fleet, reduced in rank, and never received another appointment. And all because of a failure that wasn’t entirely his fault.

Since then military, civilian, academic, and business leaders have seen their careers destroyed, but rarely for simple failure. Most of the generals I can recall being dismissed during my lifetime lost their jobs because they criticized the president, not because they lost a battle. Academic leaders who have adopted disastrous policies or alienated their faculties keep their salaries and perks and go on to enjoy the sort of paid leave that productive scholars have to struggle to get. CEO’s can leave their companies “illiquid” or bankrupt and still walk away with golden parachutes, not to mention the inflated salaries they received while guiding their enterprises toward the cliff.

Now we are seeing that, once again, there are no consequences for failure in public office. That was made clear during the last administration, when the Medal of Freedom was bestowed on George Tenet, the CIA Director who put his imprimatur on the reports of Iraqi weapons of mass destructions that justified the Gulf War, after having failed to prevent the 9/11 attacks. Only the suspicion that he was in fact receiving a pay-off for producing the lies needed to support the war President Bush had already decided to start made that honor seem like a corrupt bargain instead of a ridiculous sham. It was truly farcical when the same president told the Director of FEMA, an agency then not doing much to assist the victims of Hurricane Katrina, that he was doing a “Heckuva Job.”

If any hoped that things would change with the Obama administration, they have been disappointed in this area, as in so many others. The centerpiece of the president’s domestic policy is simply not working, and no one is being held accountable. The president has taken responsibility, but only to shrug it off again. He says over and over, “That’s on us,” not “That’s on me,” and never describes where he failed. The same is true of Secretary of Health and Human Services Sebilius. She takes responsibility verbally, but does not say where she herself went wrong. More significantly, she has not resigned her post, which is what someone responsible for a significant failure should do. Still worse, the president has not dismissed her. He can hardly resign: The Constitution clearly envisages that a president will fill out his term unless he is guilty of a crime. But she serves at his pleasure, and if he still thinks Secretary Sibelius the best person for the job, he clearly does not think the disastrous introduction of his health care plan as serious a matter as he claims when he takes responsibility for it.

What both these public servants owe the people is an honest explanation of how the current situation came to pass. The first question they should each answer is, “When did you first sit down at a laptop and try to log on to the prototype website?" If they never did that, we can leave it there. These leaders were too detached to see that things worked. When a software company issues a buggy release, users wonder why its CEO doesn’t try out his own stuff. All American citizens should ask the same questions of their leaders.

The president and the secretary should then tell us why they thought the system for creating a website that they chose would work. Did they consider giving the job to a company that had done it, an eBay or an Amazon? Did they have someone who knew how such things worked in charge of the whole process? Who else in federal government actually made the decisions that led us to this point? The answers to those questions will help us do better in the future. And let’s not allow them to blame their political opponents: Once the ACA was passed, their job was to implement it despite them, if need be.

Before anything else happens, however, there has be some consequence for the failure that has become so obvious. I am not suggesting we shoot anyone, though I can’t help recalling what Voltaire said after the Royal Navy shot Admiral Byng for losing Minorca to the French: “The British shoot an admiral every now and then to encourage the others.” (I note that British admirals were largely victorious for the next 150 years.) I only suggest that someone lose a high profile job, as Admiral Kimmel did. Since it is President Obama’s duty to remain in office until the end of his term, that person should be Secretary Sebillius. Otherwise, our nation will one again send the message it has so often recently: we have zero tolerance for failure among the lowly; we do not even notice it among the great.

The Stoning of the Cantor

Brian Abel Ragen — 2013-11-18T10:15:17-06:00

Another Lost Passage from Scripture
After Garrison Keillor’s “The Stoning of the Organist.”

And, lo!, Paul walked on, and he came upon a cantor who was as sore beset as the organist before him. And Paul spoke and asked those who were gathering stones, What hath this brother done that you would stone him? His smile is broad and his expression cheerful, how can he have brought the wrath of God or man down upon himself? And the people said, He hath stood in the midst of the sanctuary, yea, even before the altar, and smiled his simpering smile and spoken that which is not in the rubrics, even the very thing that is to be found by him who reads in the service leaflet, be it the page of the hymn or the name of the church or the number of the Sunday in the weeks of ordinary time. He has, yea verify, treated the people like boobs who lack the wit of the beasts of the field or the birds of the air! But that is the least of his crimes. He has silenced the very song that the people would raise up unto the Lord, waving his arms when they sought to move their lips in praise and bellowing like the very ox of the pasture into the trumpet of Satan so that his voice, and his voice alone, filleth the temple! Had he but the humility to raise his voice from the choir loft and chant the psalm with all his skill, we would place him among the pastors and masters of the assembly, but his smiling face, his waving arms, and his impiously amplified voice are a shame and an abomination before the Lord and a pain in the very neck of all who gather to worship! If we cannot not stone him, teacher, what succor will there be for thy suffering people? And Paul answered and said, You shall not stone him. Take him instead unto the brink of the highest rock. In your pity, allow him to solo on Upon Wings of Eagles and to employ all the vibrato and tremolo and ego in which he delighteth. And when that noise be finished, cast him from the precipice. Thus you shall do to him, and to all who would lift up the microphone like a golden calf to lead the people into silence, schlock, and folly! And the people harkened unto Paul and did as he bade them. And from that day hence, the song of the assembly was loud and strong and joyous.

And the Apostle again walked on, and lo!, he came upon a priest . . .

Surgery, Robots, Bills

Brian Abel Ragen — 2013-10-27T19:49:20-05:00

This summer I had part of a kidney removed, and I have now joined the ranks of the Cancer Survivors. I will not be wearing the ribbon that seems mandatory for those who have, to use John Wayne’s expression, “whipped the Big C,” because I don’t see renal cancer as an achievement that merits a decoration, because I doubt the fruit-salad of pink and teal and white on people’s lapels has done anything except enrich the ribbon manufacturers, and because my malady is championed by two competing foundations, so I would have to choose between green and orange. Either color would be problematic: green also stands for support of the family farm, a fine cause but not what’s closest to the heart of this city boy, and, as a graduate of Princeton University, I wear too much orange as it is. My doctoral gown makes me look like the Great Pumpkin, and it was probably a mercy that my Irish father had gone to his reward before I first donned the livery colors of the oppressors of our people. And if tried for a more thoroughly Irish look by adding a white ribbon between the Green and Orange, it would not suggest peace between the warring kidney factions, but someone half as interested in breast cancer as in kidney disease.

The surgery showed everything that is best in American medicine. An operation that in my mother’s time—kidney cancer seems to be one of the Abel family curses—would have involved a large incision in the back and a lengthy hospital stay, kept me in the hospital for only two nights—and I might have gone home after one. The laparoscopic technique and robot-assisted procedure left me with only a few small “bullet holes” in the belly and no stitches that needed to be removed. The gas that expanded my abdomen into a working surgical theater did cause some pain and made me look like the Michelin Man when I returned home, but once it dissipated, I was fine. In less than a month I was traveling overseas.

So all praise to the doctors, nurses, techs, and other healers and carers. But while I am sure that those who treated me used the best practices to be found anywhere and applied them both rationally and humanely, I can’t say that about the rest of the system.

I am lucky enough to be able to afford health insurance. Since I had a “previous condition” when I left my last place of employment, I had to obtain it through the State of Missouri’s “Risk Pool.” (That is a system that forces insurance companies to cover their share of the bad risks: the term is best known from automobile insurance, where the worst drivers end up in the Risk Pool.) For the option with a reasonably low deductible, I have been paying around $700 a month—or $8000 a year. Thankfully, I can afford that.

With this coverage, my two days in the hospital has cost me about $5000, so far. I can afford to pay that amount, too—and much, much more was spent on my care. What someone in my medical and insurance situation with the median American household income of $51,000 a year would do when faced with medical expenses that reached $13,000 just for basic insurance and one brief stay in the hospital is a question that leaves me both thankful and appalled.

But it is not just a question of the money to be paid. It is how the money is collected. The hospital whose staff cared for me so well has already had a functionary threaten to sic the collection agencies on me if I don’t pay up pronto. As I pride myself on paying my bills as I receive them, that is the sort of threat I rarely have to hear. But it is hard to keep track of all the different bills that are presented—hard not just for me, but for the hospital itself. I spent part of this morning on the phone trying to discover what payments they had received, which they hadn’t, and what they would do to make sure my credit card wasn’t charged twice if the payment I had submitted previously turned up after I had allowed them to charge my card again. That was a more difficult task than I thought. They could not simply check my account to see what payments had been posted. That was impossible, because they create a new account for each patient for each day he is in the hospital, each with a different number. I cannot think of any other business that works that way. It seems to be a system designed to create confusion.

And that is only the hospital billing. The billing for the physicians is separate—and not always the same for all of them. I am now on two online networks that collect my medical information and allow me to pay my bills. That there are two of them undermines the purpose of the operation, because the information from different sets of doctors is not pooled. And some of my physicians are not in either system. My primary care physician, the specialist who discovered my cancer, the surgeon who treated it, and the hospital at which he operates are “owned” by different insurance companies or health care companies. The docs work together just fine. The organizations don’t.

At this point I am sure that some readers are beginning to suspect that I only came down with cancer so that I could use my own experience to denigrate the greatest healthcare system in the world. They may even suspect that I am a proponent of Obamacare and bent on bringing socialism to God’s Country. That is only half-true. I have not liked the Affordable Care Act since it was passed, and only support it at all because it is the only plan to expand medical coverage on the table just now. I would like a plan that was easy to understand, that would more completely ensure health care coverage for all, and that would remove the burden of providing healthcare from employers. (And, most of all, that would not further abortion in any way or trample on the consciences of some people—but I set the most important issue aside for now.)

Like anyone who has had an involuntary encounter with the American health care system, I cannot help seeing the disparity between our technical mastery and our organizational incompetence. Our physicians can do wonders to reduce human suffering. Our medical providers and insurance companies make our lives—and, by all reports, our physicians’ lives—a series of pointless battles fought for no good reason. When I think of a person living on the median household income, especially one in a household of more than one, I also think it is a system that is not only annoying, but genuinely cruel.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church, which I tend to take seriously, has this to say about the role of government in society:

The political community has a duty to honor the family, to assist it, and to ensure especially:
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
- in keeping with the country’s institutions, the right to medical care, assistance for the aged, and family benefits;
- the protection of security and health . . . (2211)

We have failed on these measures—and I hope that no one will be pharisaical enough to claim that we’ve got an “out” because our neglect of our duty is “in keeping with [our] institutions.” If ensuring that health care is available to all is socialism, the Catechism is socialist, its promulgator, The Blessed Pope John Paul, was a socialist, and I am, indeed, a socialist as well.

What the Catechism describes is the moral minimum we should set ourselves. And I don’t see how it can be achieved without universal health care.

The practical minimum we should set is that we provide universal care with as much efficiency as possible. Physicians should not spend their days arguing with insurance companies. Patients should not spend their convalescence figuring out “explanations of benefits” and dealing with dunning robo-calls from providers.

The system called Obamacare may do something to provide the minimum level of coverage for all. I do not see how it will address most of the practical problems. It has adopted the current unwieldy structure and added a new level of complexity to it. As the problems with the website show, we have just expanded a Rube Goldberg contraption with a few more shoots and pulleys instead of figuring out the simplest way of putting the ball in the bucket.

No one has ever given me a satisfactory answer to the question, “What value do insurance companies add to the health care system? “They do not make it more efficient. They do not make it easier for the physician to formulate and carry out his treatment plan. They do not make it simple for the patient to keep track of either his medical records or his medical bills. They do, however, put a lot of money that might pay for medical care and place it in the pockets of the executives and shareholders of insurance companies.

I would never want a state-run health care system, such as the British NHS was at its height. I would like a single payer system, where one entity negotiates with private health-care providers and pays the bills. They have that system in Canada, and it works quite well. We, in fact, have it here in America, and it works, too. We call it Medicare.

Medicare, however, generally only covers those of retirement age. Why can’t we simply expand it to all? I cannot help noticing that those groups who oppose “Obamacare” most vociferously are made up disproportionately of people eligible for Medicare, but they do not clamor for that “socialist” system’s abolition.

What do I want? I want a single card for all my health coverage. I want a single website for all my medical records, appointments, and communications with providers. I want the providers to be able to share information efficiently so that I don’t get the same test in three offices. I want to pay for my share of the total cost of medical care through my taxes. I am happy to be charged reasonable co-pays, especially for missed appointments, since people do not value what they do not pay for and investment in the process encourages patient compliance. And I want the people now working in the health insurance companies and medical billing offices to find new careers in fields that might actually increase the stock of human happiness.

That does not seem to me to be a radical plan. I could go on to describe how it would be better for business if they were freed from the burden of supplying health care for their employees—or the stigma of denying it to them. But I have another form to fill out in order to get the supplemental coverage that will pay more of my hospital bill because my kidney problem was cancer and not hepatitis. But if there is a reason you can insure yourself against cancer but not against infection, I have yet to figure out what it could be.

A Deal is a Deal. Right?

Brian Abel Ragen — 2013-06-01T09:37:22-05:00

Our system of economic and social relations is built on a few simple and universally agreed upon principles. We believe in private property. You can’t just take what is mine. We believe in personal autonomy and responsibility. You can’t make me work or live somewhere if I do not myself agree to it, and I am responsible for the decisions I make and the commitments I enter into. Another one of our basic principles can be stated very simply: a deal is a deal. If two or more of us enter into an agreement and one of us does what has been agreed to, the others must live up to their end of the bargain, as well. If anything of the least value is involved in the exchange, what the lawyers call “consideration,” the agreement becomes a contract and can be enforced in the courts. In other words, a deal is a deal.

That, at least, is how I thought our society worked. It seems now that is no longer true. A deal isn’t the deal if one side doesn’t find it convenient to keep up their end, even if the other side past has fulfilled its part of the bargain for years and years and years.
Three examples leap to mind. The first is the case of retirees from Peabody Coal. I do not say from Patriot coal because many of these people didn’t work for the entity spun off from Peabody. Peabody created Patriot Coal, it seems, purely to move some of its retirement obligations off its own books so that it wouldn’t have to live up to its end of the deal, which was to provide the people who had fulfilled their end of the bargain through many years of labor with pensions and health care in retirement. Using the cloak of the bankruptcy and corporation law, they are walking out on their commitments. The directors and stockholders who elected them do not seem troubled that they are breaking the basic I-did-my-part—you-do-yours rule that underlies our society. And the Federal Bankruptcy Court seem willing to abet them in this swindle.

But the officials of Peabody/Patriot are not alone in thinking that a deal isn’t a deal if one side doesn’t feel like paying anymore. Recently Time Magazine ran a story on “the end of alimony.” Whether people entering marriages today should be eligible for lifetime alimony if their relationships collapse is an issue on which I have no opinion. But future alimony is not what is in danger of being abolished. Many people – many women – entered marriages in the past on the understanding that they would be supported for life and that they would only lose that right if they themselves misbehaved or if they and their spouses together lost all their money. That was the deal. Now evidently many men (not to mention their second wives) find paying the money that they obligated themselves to provide when they first married inconvenient. Many legislatures and courts seem ready to take away alimony from women who got married thinking that, if worse came to worst, they would receive it. Even the financial part of the deal they made when they entered the marriage contract turns out not to be a deal after all.

I myself am discovering that a deal I entered into isn’t a deal. For many years I worked as a professor of English at one of Illinois’s state universities. The agreement was that if I taught, did research, and performed community service, I would be paid a salary, receive medical care and some other benefits, and that when I retired, I would receive a pension based on a set formula which would be increased by 3% each year, as well as medical care until I qualified for Medicare. All this would take the place of both a pension and Social Security, which the state had opted out of on my behalf. Each month the state deducted the agreed-upon amount from my paycheck. They were supposed to match that sum, but they never actually moved the cash into my account. Instead they made “notional” payments and assured me that the money would actually appear when the time came. Much to the state’s surprise, evidently, that time has come for too many of us, and the legislature and the taxpayers it represents no longer feel like holding up their end of the bargain. Even now, the legislature debates how far our pensions and the promised increases will be cut and how much we will be charged for our medical care. Strangely, no one in the Illinois Legislature rises to say, “Wait. A deal is a deal. The professors did their part. We are honor-bound to do ours, even if that means raising taxes or forgoing our own salaries.” A deal isn’t a deal or even a contract in Illinois.

Perhaps none of these situations seem terribly important if you are not a coal miner whose pension was transferred to a company you never worked for, a woman who raised a family counting on being supported for the rest for her life in return, or a college professor who counted on his promised pension and medical care once he left the classroom. But this trend should worry you even so. If those groups cannot call people, corporations, and governments to account when they break the deals they relied on, why should anyone else think they can count on receiving what they are promised once the work is done?

[November 2013 Update: Peabody decided to cough up more of the money it owned its retirees. The Illinois legislature is still debating plans to stiff the state’s retired professors. I can’t keep up with the divorce courts.]

Refs:

“Patriot Coal and Union Reach a Deal on Cutbacks.” New York Times, August 12, 2013.

“Ruling Favors Mining Firm in Labor Dispute.” New York Times, May 29, 2013

Bill McClellan. “Patriot Coal case shows how federal judges live by their own rules.” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 31, 2013

“Appeals court: Peabody liable for retiree benefits.” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 21, 2013

“The End of Alimony?” Time Magazine, May 16, 2013.

The Second Cousin Once-Removed <br>Is Asked to Give a Wedding Toast

Brian Abel Ragen — 2013-05-12T11:32:38-05:00

John and Jane: During most of this wonderful day I know you have only been able to gaze at each other, and since you look so lovely, that is understandable. At other times you have basked in the glow of being surrounded by those whose love has supported you thus far—your friends, old and new, the family members you have known forever, and your parents. But now and then you must have looked around the church or this banquet hall and asked yourselves, “Who are these people? Are they really related to me? How did that happen?”

Those must have been unsettling moments, and I trust they have passed quickly. But it is important to have all the uncles, aunts, cousins, and other connections here. For what you have done today is transform a perfectly good friend into a relative.

You have doubtless heard that your spouse should be your best friend. And I hope you will very often be friends and always be on friendly terms. I love the old movies where husbands and wives act like best friends—especially if they have a dog named Asta and solve murders on the side. In getting a husband or wife, however, you have not upgraded a friend. You have acquired something completely different. You will find many people who do believe in the spouse-as-friend theory. We even have a name for its long-term adherents: we call them divorcés.

Friendship is one of the great delights of life. It is not, however, essential to human life. (As C.S. Lewis said, “it has no survival value; it is one of those things that gives value to survival.”) What is vital to survival is not having friends, but having allies. And if human life is to continue, you don’t need friends. You need relatives.

Some gathered here are now thinking that that may have been true in the Paleolithic age, but things have changed. Others are thinking that, the truth is that they love their friends more than they love their families. And that second part may be true. But whatever your BFF’s tell you, the main characteristic of friendship is that it rarely lasts through the trials of life. Even some of the people who have stood up with you today may not be speaking to you in a few years—though I hope you will all truly be friends forever.

Who will always be there? Your relatives. We are all used to people having “former friends.” With complicated varieties of coupling that have arisen over the last century we all know—and probably all have—plenty of “exes.” But who ever heard of someone’s “former mother”? or “ex-brother”? or “starter uncle”? Friends come and go—but relatives, even second cousins, are forever.

It is important to remember that, if you meant what you said when you took your vows, your spouse is a relative. You will have to put up with things that would make you de-friend anyone else. Even if you both behave perfectly every moment of every day—and you won’t—you will inevitably sometimes become tiresome, annoying, or just plain boring to the person who sees you most often when you don’t have your public face on. You have not picked a new friend, since friends are always “on approval” and returnable; you have signed on a relative, who will be yours even if the item turns out not to work exactly as you hoped.

Indeed, just as you asked about the odd people at the back tables, “Who are these people? Are they really related to me? How did that happen?” you will find yourself looking across your own kitchen and asking, “Who is this person? Am I really related to him? How did that happen?” And should you have children, you will ask the same question again and again.

I understand why the brides’ magazines present weddings as the union of a princess with her best friend, since I doubt stories about people voluntarily getting a new relative would serve the advertisers’ purposes. But that is the truth of what a Christian marriage is. And let me suggest that this view is not as grim as it seems.

For your relatives, your connection is a fact, not a choice. We can’t drop you even if we want to: we will still be relatives even if we never see each other. And unless we are dead to all duty, our love for you is also a fact. We will all act on it even if seeing one another very often isn’t a top priority. In the same way, your vows have made your connection with each other an unchangeable fact. And your love for each other is also a fact, beside which all fantasies must pale. If bad times come, that will be a comfort. And in good times, you will be secure in the knowledge that you will be loved even when you are not as happy and charming as you are now. And as a bonus, you have a larger pool of people whom you can at least ask for help moving, or for a loan, or for kidney. (Be prepared for stories about bad backs, assets tied up in inaccessible trusts, and hitherto undiscovered blood disorders: I know what we’re like.)

And now, I ask everyone—both the friends I have slighted and the relatives who now rejoice in a larger, more interesting family—to raise their glasses as I give the new relatives one piece of advice: Always try to be friends—it makes family life go much more smoothly.

A Plea to the NEH for the Eugene Field House

Brian Abel Ragen — 2013-04-28T23:56:34-05:00

For many years I have served on the board of the Eugene Field House Foundation, which preserves an important part of America’s literary and political history. The foundation is now seeking to expand its facilities so as to make the historic house more accessible to visitors, the archives available to scholars, and the collections open to all who would like to view them. As part of that project, I have written to the National Endowment for the Humanities. This is my letter.

Professor Ragen’s Letter to the NEH.

There is more information on the Eugene Field House on this site and on its own web pages. The foundation will make very good use of any support it receives.

The Eugene Field House was where Roswell Field lived when he practiced law and represented Dred Scott in his bid for freedom and where the poet Eugene Field spent some of his childhood. It is all that remains of what was an impressive row of houses. While there are other fascinating historic houses in St. Louis, only the Field House recalls the world of the city’s professional middle class in the days when St. Louis was becoming a center of the nation’s culture, politics, and economic progress.

60 x 3 = 180.<br>Except When You're Counting Pills.

Brian Abel Ragen — 2013-04-28T21:35:37-05:00

In a previous post I mentioned how baffling the behavior of my health insurance provider continues to be. The saga continues.

I have been trying to get all my regular prescriptions via mail, so that I do not have to go to the pharmacy each month to pick them up. Since I am on 8 prescriptions and their delivery dates cannot be synchronized, in practice that means a couple trips to the pharmacy every week.

Getting three-months supplies of each drug by mail would be a great convenience for me and—I thought—a money-saver for the prescription provider, since the mail order provider, working in bulk, takes a smaller cut than the behind-the-counter pharmacist.

But when I submitted one of my prescriptions to be filled by mail, the mail order drug people told me my insurer had refused to approve payment for it. The drug was too expensive. Now, I have been taking this drug for over a year, and the insurance company has never balked at refilling the monthly prescription. The price of 180 pills to cover three months cannot be higher than the cost of 60 pills to cover one month. If there is any difference, the bulk purchase should be cheaper—the saving on time and packaging alone should cut off a couple bucks.

I pointed out to the nice person at the mail-order pharmacy’s customer service desk that the cost would not, in fact, be higher. I think she may have even agreed with me, but said I had to take it up with my insurer. I did. They told me to call the prescription benefits company. I did, and once again I think the nice person on the phone agreed that 60 pills over 30 days three times would cost no more than 180 pills over 90 days. All the same, she said my physician would have to contact them. I pointed out that he had written the three-month prescription in the first place, so clearly he thought that there was a good reason for it. Logic did not prevail here either.

So what it comes down to is that I wasted my time trying to do something that should be simple. The three companies that together delay my prescriptions saved not a cent and squandered at least some on the salaries of customer service representatives that they do not allow to serve customers. And my physician spent time he could have used to talk to patients or read medical journals pleading with a benefits company to provide a drug it had already approved for me in the amounts I was already receiving. To whom does this procedure make sense?

I am again led to suspect that the companies who are supposed to pay for medical benefits make things complicated simply in the hope that patients will give up, say the hell with whatever prescription or treatment it may be, and try to get along without it, no matter what effect that has on their health. If they are paid by the number of patients enrolled, that will put more money in their pockets until some frustrated client actually dies—and that, I suppose, is just a cost of doing business.

Again, I don’t see how the new Health Care System is going to address this problem.

I have just had three tests—the last two preceded by calls from the insurance company about cost-cutting—and I see a specialist on Friday. I dread the billing more than any actual procedure he may recommend.

The Pope, The President, and the Eighth Commandment

Brian Abel Ragen — 2013-04-15T17:21:01-05:00

Not long ago an article in one of the more conservative Catholic newspapers reminded its readers of something we all know, but too often forget in the heat of argument: “The Eighth Commandment is clear: Thou shalt not bear false witness.” The immediate examples of the offense he described were misrepresentations of Pope Francis’s involvement in Argentina’s Dirty War. While getting the facts of the Pope’s biography wrong is a serious matter, this writer’s audience is in little danger of breaking the commandment in that particular way. American Catholics who can be described as conservatives are not much tempted to spread lies about the Pope. In my experience, however, they are often willing to give in to the temptation to deal in lies about others. And the victim of the sin of calumny is likely to be the President of the United States, Barack Hussein Obama.

I am not, of course, saying that there is no reason to oppose Mr. Obama and his policies. I myself have filled his mailbox with pleas that he end his support for abortion, that he not require employers—and especially religious employers—to provide contraceptives, some of which may be abortifacient in effect, that while ensuring that all people are treated fairly, he not redefine the institution of marriage. (I have also asked that he stop supporting the death penalty and end the drone attacks that so often kill innocent bystanders.) Some of his comments over the years—including those about people who “cling” to guns and religion—suggest that he would prefer that religion in the public sphere influence only our sentiments, not our actions. In the last election, I did not vote for him.

That sort of opposition, however, is based on the positions the President actually holds on the issues. If we met, we could compare our positions, explain where they differed, and try to show each other where we were wrong. Since these issues are so grave, it would be a grief to me if I could not change the President’s mind, just as it is a grief to me that I and those like me have not yet been able to win the public debate on these issues. I would still oppose him, but I would know that I had treated him as I want to be treated, as an erring brother, not an enemy.

When I attend many Catholic gatherings, however, I too often hear the Eighth Commandment broken and the clear teaching of the Catechism ignored. To put it simply, people repeat lies about the President. Sometimes they have not bothered to check the facts, and sometimes they simply do not care: they seem to hate Mr. Obama so much that it does not even matter if things they say about him are true.

The slander comes in many forms, but a few of the lies are notable both for their prevalence and for the absence of any evidence for them. The first of these is, of course, the suggestion that Mr. Obama is not a natural born American citizen and therefore is not legitimately the President of the United States. To believe that wild story, one would have to believe in a conspiracy that dated back to the early 1960’s, that included both the hospitals and newspapers of Honolulu, that has since encompassed the government of the State of Hawaii and its Republican governor, and that, despite their various oaths to support and defend the Constitution, has been connived at by Senator McCain, Governor Romney, the secretaries of state and other election officials of all the states in both 2008 and 2012, and all the members of both houses of Congress who counted the ballots in 2009 and 2011. Can anyone honestly believe that no one in that long list would try to do his duty? Or that every reputable news organization is wrong, and not one has tried to scoop its competition by telling the truth? The answer is clearly, “No.” But at Catholic gatherings I still hear comments about the President being a Kenyan.

The second great lie is that Mr. Obama is a Muslim. I hope that if he were Muslim, Catholics would not oppose him for that reason. Muslim theology may be closer to Catholic theology than Mormon theology is, and many Catholics recently supported a member of the LDS Church for the presidency. The fact is, however, that he is not. He has been a practicing Christian throughout his adult life. He often attends church services. He was, for a long time affiliated with the United Church of Christ, the very denomination to which my own Protestant cousins belong—and none of their neighbors in Nebraska have ever thought them to be secretly Muslim. Mr. Obama’s mother, his father, and his stepfather were either hostile to all religion or at best tepid toward it. The schools he attended included two in Indonesia, first one that reflected the faith of that country’s Muslim majority and then one that was Roman Catholic. Back in the United States, he graduated from a school founded for the children of Christian missionaries in Hawaii. There is no evidence he has ever described himself as a Muslim. Any honest evaluation of the evidence would lead Catholics to recognize Mr. Obama as one of our “separated brethren,” that is, a fellow Christian. Like many Christians he does not accept everything we hold to be part of the Catholic faith, and we might pray that God would enlighten him. We have no excuse, however, to say he is lying about his faith. To see the video clips some Catholics spread, you would think that a person becomes Muslim by learning to say “hello” in Arabic or by noting the basic historical fact that the Arabs preserved parts of Classical culture that Europe has lost. When the President speaks to people in their own language or says something positive about their culture, he is simply being gracious, not hinting that he has accepted Islam. The recent popes have displayed the same good manners when visiting Arab lands.

Beyond the lies about the President’s birth and ancestry, I also too often hear falsehoods about his policies. It is perfectly just to oppose any leader’s proposals and actions; it is false witness to misrepresent what those proposals and actions have been. The most egregious example of this sort of false witness is the repeated talk about “Death Panels.” No version of the President’s health plan ever included panels that would pass on who was worthy of treatment and who would be left to die. It did at one point propose allowing Medicare to cover the time a physician takes to discuss “end-of-life” decisions with patients in advance. (Having such a conversation is, by the way, a good idea: after mine, I left legal instructions that direct my physicians not to initiate or terminate any medical procedure if doing so would not be in accord with the teachings of the Catholic Church.) The lies about the President’s death panels, together with variations involving the virtual elimination of all but palliative care for the elderly are still repeated by those who have not bothered to verify their facts.

There are many legitimate grounds on which to oppose the health care plan and the President’s other policies. There is never any excuse for telling lies—or for passing them on. Catholics used to be taught a word for this sin: calumny. The Catechism of the Catholic Church still lists several offenses against the Eight Commandment: it is wrong assume another person is wicked without good reason (“rash judgment”) or to truthfully disclose a person’s failings without good reason (“detraction”). Calumny is the still more serious offense of harming the reputation of another by spreading lies (2476). Before we repeat something about another person, even the President, we should all ask, “It’s a good story, but is it calumny?” It would be a blessing if the computer could be programed to ask that question whenever we hit “forward” after reading a juicy e-mail.

Finally, if those who make these sorts of attacks on President Obama cannot be swayed by the Commandments or the Catechism, perhaps they can be swayed by prudence and history. Lies are excellent tools, to begin with, but those who rely on them often find that they fail in the long run. Let’s take an example from France. As the 19th century drew to a close, the Church in France was, all things considered, in amazingly good shape. Just a hundred years earlier, all traces of Christianity were being cleared from French culture, from the Madonnas in the churches to the seven-day week. But after several revolutions and kingdoms and empires, the church had regained its place in society, along with much of its property and its moral authority. Some Catholics still felt embattled, however, and unthinkingly joined forces with a single faction in politics (the right wing) and with the military. When those groups stooped to telling lies, the Catholics did the same. One lie—the claim that a Jewish artillery officer named Dreyfus was a foreign spy—split the nation. Many Catholics became militant anti-Dreyfusards and acted as if supporting him meant opposing the Church. After years of struggle, Dreyfus was vindicated. The Church that had either tolerated or abetted those who smeared him, however, suffered an eclipse from which it has still not recovered. The anti-clerical elements in French culture reasserted their sway, and the church completely lost its influential role in culture and education. Moderates—even Catholics—did not want their society shaped by an institution that had contempt for the truth. Doubtless many good Catholics who passed on anti-Dreyfusard pamphlets were not bitter anti-Semites, just as there may be no tinge of racism in slurs against the President. But their tolerance for calumny itself made the church impotent for years to come. Catholics who deal in lies about the President rather than opposing him forcefully and honestly, may very well do the same thing.

Article referred to: “Anatomy of a Lie: The Assault on Pope Francis’ Reputation,” Register, 03/30/2013. (I have silently corrected “Thou shall” to “Thou shalt.” “You shall” would also be an option.)

Can I Draw a Single Card?

Brian Abel Ragen — 2013-01-24T19:56:47-06:00

In all the rancor over the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), I think we have forgotten what the problems with our health care system actually are. While we have been embroiled in discussions of important issues (the HHS contraception mandate) and hysteria over chimeras (“death panels”), we have forgotten the main problem. And that is that our system is frustrating for everyone, cruel to some, and pointlessly wasteful.

That was borne in upon me recently as I tried to order three-month refills of my various prescriptions. I now go the pharmacy every month for each my refills, and, since they cannot arrange for them all to be refilled on the same date, I get a series of robo-calls reminding me to pick up pills throughout the month and stop off at the drugstore at least once a week. So I very much want to get everything filled through the mail and delivered in three-month batches.

My health insurance will not allow me just to ask my pharmacist to set this up for me. Nor will it do it itself. I must first take my number from them and get in touch with the company they have contracted with to handle prescriptions. That company gives me a new number, and refers me to a third company, which they have hired to handle the mail-order prescriptions while they focus on paying the brick-and-mortar drugstores. The third company has me set up a new account with them, which is then linked to my account with the pharmacy manager, which is linked with the account at the health insurance company—which is linked to my checking account, but that’s another story. So, to get my pills I have to have three accounts, three account numbers, as well as various User ID’s, passcodes, and group numbers. I have spelled my name and reported my birthdate so often that I feel like a POW who gives only name, rank, and serial number. (Rank is the one bit of information that need not be offered up repeatedly, since we are all buck privates in the Army of Wellness.) I now hate the sound of my birthdate, both because it has become part of a Kafkaesque drone and because on its next anniversary my provider will change and I will have to do this all over again.

Why do I need so many identities? Whoever is administering the benefits, wouldn’t one number for me be sufficient? With that and a bank account or credit card number, they should have everything they need to keep track of my records and make sure they get paid.

Instead, I have many numbers and passwords and codes to keep track of. And many of them come with cards. At one point, when I had more complete coverage, I had five different cards for my health benefits, all with different logos, account numbers, and customer service numbers. I had the medical insurance card, which I was to use for hospitals, doctor visits, and some forms of mental health care. It was a nice stiff plastic, the sort you can use to open any door that does not have a deadbolt, and a slick logo. Almost matching it was the prescription card, which was just as impressive, and could be used at drugstores. Then there were two cards for care that didn’t involve M.D.’s; to mark the lower status of the D.M.D.s and the D.O.’s, those cards were uncoated paper. The dental card was at least on card stock and came with crisp, nicely rounded corners, but the vision care card had to be torn out of a badly perforated piece of paper and so had slightly ragged edges. Humblest of all was the “Employee Assistance Program” card, which had a cheery, childish logo and looked nothing like the prescription card, perhaps because you were to present it when you checked into drug rehab, needed to talk to a therapist, or enrolled in an anger-management course.

None of the cards provided any information on my health conditions—you had to go to my driver’s license if you wanted to harvest my organs and a card with no official standing if you wondered if I was allergic to Penicillin or Sulfa or wanted to know my blood type. In fact all any of the cards said was, “This person is covered by the State of Illinois, which will pay for your services, though you’ll have to wait for your money.” A sticker on my driver’s license saying “IL Med” would have served the same purpose, left room in my wallet, and saved the money wasted creating and mailing the cards and keeping track of the various different numbers that meant the same thing. Why didn’t the state, which needed the money, insist on at least a single card instead of cooperating in all this waste and trouble?

The only answer that comes to mind is that five cards meant five corporations doing business with the state, each offering its own set of campaign contributions from both management and union. (I will not even suggest any money was passed under the table: why bother when so much slides right across the top?) The redundancy and complication is bad for the patient, who is confused by the complexity and wastes his precious time figuring it out, and for the provider, who must either add an M.B.A. to his medical degree to keep track of things or hire staff who never help patients to untangle the mess of payments. But it is gravy for the insurance companies and the politicians upon whom they shower their largesse.

When the Clintons made their attempt to improve American health care, one of their targets was this burdensome system. To solve what I think of as the “Five-Card” or “Full Poker Hand” problem, they proposed a single card and they matched it with a single form to take the place of the endless variety of forms the providers had to master use if they wanted to be paid. Perhaps the forms providers deal with have been simplified somewhat, but this drive for simplicity certainly did not animate the Affordable Care Act. It is more than a thousand pages long, and many people are unsure what is really in it. That is because the insurance companies were allowed to write the various systems from which they profit into the law. While I am glad we have made some progress toward universal coverage, I do not see how we are reducing costs in the areas where they can be cut without hurting patients or actual providers. The physicians I talk to don’t see the burden of complex forms used to delay payment being lifted from them.

To return to prescriptions, years ago I had an experience that showed most clearly what the complexity of our system is really intended to do. At that time, those in my medical plan had to fill out a form for every prescription, pay for the prescription, have the pharmacist sign the form, mail it in, and wait for either payment or requests for more information. The form was lengthy, with plenty of room for errors. I was sure, though, that I had completed one satisfactorily, with every date, price, drug name, and prescription number in place and all the appropriate receipts included with it, and was surprised when it came back unpaid. I had failed to give the address and phone number of the patient. I had filled out all that information correctly for the “insured, ” and carefully checked “self” as the relationship to “insured” under “Patient #1” before listing my prescription details. But I had not filled in Patient #1’s address and phone, which were, after all, right there on the page and obviously mine since my checking “Self” meant: “Guys, that’s me. I live with myself. I use the same phone. I take the same pills. It’s all the same.” In the eyes of the insurance company, however, my claim was incomplete until I wrote in all that information again two and a half inches below. They were clearly not confused, and if the info had to be on those lines, too, for some reason, they could have copied it into them. Their end was clearly just to delay payment, even if it meant wasting my time and stamps as well as theirs. The interest on a state’s worth of prescriptions comes to real money in the time it takes to process, reject, reprocess, and approve a form.

Illinois stopped doing such obvious things many years ago. Now it just withholds payment until long after the dentists start getting testy with the patients it covers. Our entire health care system, however, seems to be devoted to perpetuating this sort of skimming by people who don’t provide any real service.

The hours with the cards, the web sites, the customer services representatives and the three companies who are involved in getting me pills through the mail make me wonder again, what value do the insurance companies add to our health care system? For the most part we are not talking about spreading risk, which is what insurance does. We are talking about providing the care that everyone needs and that has to be paid for. Does keeping the insurance companies involved in the system further the efficient accomplishment of that end? I don’t think it does.

We have not yet had a chance to see how things will work under the Affordable Care Act. But I don’t see any reason to think there will be less of the waste, frustration, and, most importantly, skimming of resources by those who do not provide care that I have been describing. I would want not a state-run system of healthcare, like Britain’s NHS. I do think I would like a single source of coverage that would foster rational competition among service providers without skimming a lot for itself. And I definitely want to carry a single card, access a single website, and go by a single number—or even just by my name and birthdate.

Found Out as a Misandrist!

Brian Abel Ragen — 2013-01-21T07:58:10-06:00

Over the years I have been said to be many unpleasant things.* This week, however, I was accused of something new: “blatant misandry.”

As a man working in the academic humanities, I had of course became used to being called a misogynist, even though I have never been conscious of harboring a hatred for women in general. In English departments accusing someone of misogyny or sexism (or of racism) is an effective tactic because it lays an almost unanswerable charge against your opponent and puts you on the moral high ground. Since a couple decades ago we humanities professors gave up believing in truth (it’s a social construction, like everything else) or privileging reason (a tool of the white male power structure that devalues women’s ways of knowing), the moral high ground is about the best advantage one can have. And it is fair play, according the rules now in place, to apply such terms to anyone who hasn’t made a preemptive show of right thinking.

But misandry? You don’t hear nearly so much about that. When the ritual anathemas are pronounced against the sexist, racist, homophobic, classist demons who must be cast out of our nurturing community, a general hatred of men isn’t in the rubrics.

And why me as an example of misandry? I am a man myself, as most people come to realize quite early in our acquaintance. While I can’t say I prefer the society of my own sex to that of women, I feel no hatred for other fellows as a group. I do wish some of you guys would behave a bit better, but that’s not because I hate you. It’s because I feel solidarity with you, and I think you’re letting down the side!

So how did I come to be called a man-hater?

The Chronicle of Higher Education ran a piece last week about what accommodations should be made for tenure-track faculty who face serious family emergencies in the years before they come up for tenure. In a touching essay using her own case as an example, the author argued for granting extensions to those dealing with a seriously ill child, as she had had to.

I added this comment:

I think very, very few people object to accommodations being made for people who are in real trouble, as this author clearly was. (And what a sad story she tells! And how well she moves from her story to issues other people face!)

What people do resent—at least sometimes with justification—is the assumption that parents, or anyone else, should always get a break because of the ordinary difficulties their life choices entail. Even the crustiest childless bachelor will be happy to see a colleague get some slack when s/he suffers a calamity; almost everyone will wonder why the troubles s/he struggles with go unnoticed while special arrangements are made for people who choose to have a child or a long-distance relationship and then feel burdened by travel or child-care.

So the author is right: while they can be abused, policies that let people deal with the duties that are thrust upon them by circumstance without risking their careers only make the workplace more humane—and more productive in the long run, I would think. But if someone thinks s/he is being taken advantage of because their woes don't fall into the right category, s/he shouldn't be ignored, either.

Those who know my work may both recognize my style and see that I have adapted a convention I usually avoid. I have used a form of “inclusive language.” (The s-slash-he pronoun and the solecism of using “their” after a singular antecedent.) I usually stick to the traditional conventions of English and use masculine pronouns with common gender antecedents. That is, I would say,

“No one has a right to an opinion until he has sought out evidence to support his position.”

not,

“No one has a right to an opinion until he or she has sought out evidence to support his or her position.”

or,

“No one has a right to an opinion until s/he has sought out evidence to support their position.”

though I might say,

“People have no right to opinions until they have sought out evidence to support their positions.”

I stick to the convention because I think it is clear that the “he” after “everyone” includes women, because I deplore the recent confusion of sex (male or female) and gender (masculine, feminine, neuter, or common), and because I resent a change in English grammar has come through a fiat pronounced by the same people who deplore “prescriptivism” when it comes to all other questions on grammar and usage. I also think that “their” is plural and shouldn’t be used with singular antecedents.

Here I decided not to have that fight, because I wanted the Chronicle’s readers to pay attention to my point and not write me off as a nasty old sexist when they saw the first masculine pronoun. That was especially important in this instance, because the essay involved motherhood and childcare, which are subjects on which a male commentator must tread warily in academic circles, lest he find himself in a discussion of his own sexism rather than the discussion he thought had entered. I have heard the feminist hiss following my comments at enough MLA Conventions to be wary here: some take feminism as an excuse to heap opprobrium on people who have tried to make rational arguments in perfect good will. When I’m trying to talk about personnel policies, there is no need to give such people an excuse to avoid my argument and excoriate my pronouns.

In a sense, I was successful. I drew no scorn for my sexism. But I did get this comment:

Aside from the blatant misandry in your post, the rest of the post rings true.

I had managed to sound like a man-hater instead of a misogynist. Was it the reference to “crusty old bachelors?” Perhaps. I should have included the cranky old spinsters to be truly inclusive. But the use of the “s/he’s” may have been the main problem, and certainly made the reference to crusty bachelors worse. To some readers, I had uncased the colours of the Monstrous Regiment of Women. Why should I be surprised that they drew fire from the embattled men, who have been taking shots from every side?

I would say that my name should have served as a clue that in talking about crusty old bachelors I might be making a self-deprecatory reference to my own sort, rather than stigmatizing the other sex. (Thus far, I have only met one female Bryan, and that’s a family surname that has been fastened to one female in each generation to appease ancestral spirits who are evidently both cruel and eccentric.) But who reads the names attached to comments posted to online discussions? While I sign what I write, most people use a nom de web, and any hints to sex, position, or nationality may be completely bogus.

From now on, I think I will just go back to using masculine pronouns with common gender antecedents. It is concise. It is correct according to authorities who wrote when people could be prescriptivists in good faith. And since I’m going to be accused of something in any case, I would just as soon bear a stigma that suits my sex.

Ref: http://chronicle.com/article/When-Bad-Things-Happen-to/136539/#comment-771045231

*Just in print, I have been called “prolix” (too often true) and “Jansenist” (false, but better that than “Pelagian”).

Down the Drain?

Brian Abel Ragen — 2012-12-28T18:16:34-06:00

I have just visited the 911 Memorial at Ground Zero for the first time. The Museum is not yet open, and the towers of the new World Trade Center remain unfinished, more than a decade after the twin towers came down. But the essential elements of the memorial are in place: a plaza full of trees containing two great waterworks created on the footprints of the two towers, around which are engraved the names of those who were killed on that awful day.

I was glad to be around so many people who had come to pay their respects even early on a cold Saturday morning. They had almost all made their way to the site as something more than tourists, and there was a natural reverence among them that didn’t need to be reinforced by calls for quiet and decorum. Many were clearly moved, especially by the tree that is said to have survived the attack and has been tended and replanted to take its place in the urban forest that will grow from the many saplings planted on the plaza. But the monument itself seemed neither comforting nor inspiring.

The two waterworks are not fountains or pools, both of which could suggest new life. Nothing bursts upward, and the cascades of water are never live-giving or fructifying. Everything flows downhill and winds up lost in what are really nothing more than two massive drains.

If the designers’ purpose was to show nothing but dead loss, their work succeeds. Looking over the names to the black orifice below, one can hardly think anything but, “All those lives down the drain.” While I cannot say that view of the events of 9/11 is untrue, I cannot see why anyone would want to embody it in a huge and expensive monument.

I know some of the reasons that the monument has taken this form. The families of the victims—or many of them—objected to the site being returned to productive use. For them, it was not just the scene of the crime, but the tomb of those they had lost, since the bodies had been vaporized in the fires or annealed into the rumble. Many traditional forms of monument would be impossible, because any specific religious iconography would be inappropriate, because no higher cause was furthered by the calamity, and because, aside from the policemen, firemen, and other public safety officers, few of those memorialized sacrificed their lives, and there was thus no place for the laurels that mark the heroic fallen.

Still, I am saddened that it was decided to mark the site with these emblems of pure loss. In cemeteries across the country I have seen monuments to people who died equally senseless, meaningless deaths, though never ones tinged with so much human malice. The victims of riverboat explosions or cholera epidemics are usually marked by something like an obelisk. Pointing skyward, those columns suggest hope. Do we now have a shared culture that cannot agree even to hope for, if not a life to come, a better life for others? That the “Survivor Tree” has become an important part of the site suggests we can.

I wish a monument embodying hope and resolve had been created for the dead of 9/ll—and I wish the monument had not been created on so vast a scale and that it had not made the site unusable. A place where people died going about the daily business of life should have been returned to its former uses, not left as two lifeless cavities. Nations that dwell on their defeats are never happy ones—as anyone who has met an Irishman still refighting the Battle of the Boyne or a Serb still breathing vengeance over that awful day on the Field of Blackbirds knows. We have left two open wounds running forever in our greatest city: I am not sure that will turn out to be healthy for our country.

But whatever a critic may say, the site will be used, and that use will make it sacred. I uncovered my head and prayed for the souls of all who died that day as I watched the water drain into the void. Beside me, a few people searched for specific names, and many craned their necks to see how the new towers were progressing. (Slowly, slowly!) Neither the ordinary people who suffered a senseless crime nor the heroes who laid down their lives for others will be forgotten. And that matters more than architecture.

Expelleramus!!! Tom Wolfe Victorious!

Brian Abel Ragen — 2012-10-30T12:52:16-05:00

I have just been reading Tom Wolfe’s new novel, Back to Blood, which I have been looking forward to for years. Thus far, I am pleased. It is exciting, involving, and full of interesting information about the various cultures of modern Miami. I’m looking forward to learning how they mark their territories, merge into each other, and enforce their own systems of status. I trust it will be another high point in Wolfe’s war to restore the novel to the position it had in the age of Balzac, Thackeray, Trollope, Flaubert, Dickens, and George Eliot, when fiction sought to show how society worked, to make us see, as Trollope put it, “The Way We Live Now.” In those days, the novel made us see how the poor and the rich, the fortunate and the miserable, interacted, all moving in a world determined by conventions of status, wealth, power, and kinship.

In novels, polemics, and plain literary cat-fights, Wolfe has for years campaigned to wrest the novel from those who are only interested the personal and the literary. Or, to put it another way, to save the novel from the M.F.A. programs and the writer’s workshops. He has sneered at the novels made from myths, fables, conventions—from other books, not from life—and at novels that focus on the over-blown egos of the author and the battered egos of puny characters. Enough of the schoolroom exercises or the whining in the garret! Bring back the big canvas and show us the world!

I think there is good evidence that Wolfe has won the war. His battle plan has been vindicated, but I think another general may enjoy the triumph. The best novel I have read in quite a while was another eagerly awaited recent release, and it does just what Wolfe said the novel should do. It is by a writer who made her name with wizards and witches.

J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books always had a keen eye for the sort of thing Wolfe is interested in—status details, in-groups and out-groups, even the questions of how some people come to be courageous. But she wrote in a genre that doesn’t claim the main stage and that on the surface seems all about using the traditional, artificial, paraphernalia of a literary form. A story about warlocks is as clearly made from other books as a novel called The Centaur or Roger’s Version. The reader might even miss the portrait of England today while rooting for Gryffindor in the Quidditch match or looking for the next horcrux.

In The Casual Vacancy, the magical trappings are gone, and Rowling gives us just the social novel Wolfe has been advocating. As in Balzac and Dickens, we move from places of poverty and degradation to places of comfort and respectability—and find that those seemingly different worlds are very much connected. We see that lives are often structured as much by status as by wealth, and that distinctions that might seem trivial shape or warp characters’ actions and fates.

While the mixture of the language of magic and bureaucracy made for great verbal fun in the Harry Potter books, Rowling’s use of another corpus of imagery, that of popular culture, adds to the power and realism of The Casual Vacancy. That some characters make a Rihanna song their anthem while others are still dancing to Tom Jones tells you almost all you have to know about them. And those are just the sorts of status and tribal details a disciple of Wolfe would pick up.

I don’t know what my experience of Back to Blood will turn out to be, but there is one area where Rowling’s novel bests Wolfe’s earlier fiction—though perhaps not in a contest Wolfe cares much about. While I wouldn’t say that Sherman McCoy, Conrad Hensley, or Charlotte Simmons were one-dimensional characters, I think that is true about most of Wolfe’s fictional creations. I think the same of most of the characters in Balzac. But in the social novels I love best, I care about the characters—even that little fool Emma Bovary and poor Charles.

In Trollope, I find the author cannot help loving all his characters: even the ones who begin as the butts of satire become people worthy of compassion if he writes about them long enough. I felt the same after finishing Rowling’s novel. To be sure, I understood how a particular society used wealth and status to structure itself, and how some people used those structures to torment or neglect others. But, more importantly perhaps, I felt the plight of many of the characters trying to manage things that to them seemed not like bits sociological data, but triumph, disaster, or simply getting by. Compassion, of course, is dangerous in literature: it can easily turn into sentimentality. That charge has often been leveled at Thackeray and Dickens, but I don’t think anyone has ever accused Tom Wolfe of being sentimental. His novels might be still better if he ran the risk his Victorian models did and let us cry over someone as they let us cry over little Nell and Colonel Newcombe.

My Foot Hurts. Is that Urgent?

Brian Abel Ragen — 2012-10-20T15:50:19-05:00

I have a pain in my right foot. I have had it for almost two weeks. It hasn’t gotten worse, but it doesn’t go away. I don’t remember having hurt myself. I can find any growth or bump, but I am not ideally situated to view the soles of my feet. I don’t know what to do.

Why am I telling you about my foot? Because I don’t know who else to tell. On the television shows I grew up with—and on Doc Martin today—everyone would know what to do. All you need to do is drop by your GP’s office, wait for fifteen minutes while having a cup of coffee, slipping through Look magazine, and chatting with your neighbors while wondering what’s wrong with them.

The trouble is that I don’t have a GP. I have a “primary care physician,” but he is an Internist, certified in specialties and sub-specialties, and no one drops in on him. Even getting to see the nurse practitioner in his office is a bit of a production. If I can’t wait for my scheduled appointments, I’m not likely to even try to see him or his colleagues.

So what do I do? Go to the Emergency Room? I know a lot of people do that, and I have gone only when I felt truly awful (awful enough to be hospitalized, it turned out). I just don’t want to be the sort of man who thinks it’s an emergency when his foot hurts.

If not the Emergency Room, how about an Urgent Care Center? To me URGENT sounds just as dire as EMERGENCY, and I just can’t see a pain that hasn’t even driven me to uncap the aspirin bottle as urgent. I might be less reluctant to go if they dropped the grandiloquent name and just called the place what the doctors themselves call it, the “Doc-in-a-Box.” That name fits the whole ambience of the establishment. When I last went to one, for a horrible backache, I found myself getting my Vicodin from a vending machine. I bought a Coke from another machine to wash down the first dose. Next time I expect them to ask me if I want a side of fries when they take my insurance card.

I understand that in other countries they preserve the local doctor who looks at non-urgent feet and other pre-emergent conditions. I understand that they also have physicians who make house-calls and do other archaic things American medicine has abandoned. I hear they have to wait to see specialists, but I have to wait for weeks to see any physician unless I go to the Emergency Room or the Doc-in-a-Box.

I will not offer any opinion on the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). I know it will not do the horrible things some people claim it will. The trouble is that I don’t have any reason to think that it will provide an answer to my simple question: When it’s not urgent and definitely is not an emergency, where do I go when my foot hurts?

When in Rome: Don't Snap, Don't Push

Brian Abel Ragen — 2012-02-26T14:20:33-06:00

I have just returned from Rome, where I was able to attend events associated with the Consistory of the College of Cardinals. The new grandmaster of the Order of the Holy Sepulchre, Archbishop O’Brien, received the ring and red biretta that mark his new status as a cardinal, as did Archbishop Dolan of New York and about twenty other prelates from around the world. I had a great time with a group from St. Louis, and I will only make two remarks.

First, I have come to believe that there is a new threat to any decorum in public ceremony, one that most of us harbor in our own pockets. That is, of course, the cellular phone with its easy-to-use camera. Cameras were always bad for public ceremonies, since they take the members of the audience or congregation or crowd out of the role of participant and put them in the role of private creator of images. But only a few people toted big cameras and the obvious disruption caused by their flash bulbs enforced some restraint. The cellphone allows almost everyone to retreat into his own viewfinder. And the cameras are no longer held at eye level, so that there is some chance of seeing over the heads of the snapshot monger. Instead, they are head high above the head, so that the view of those in the back is blocked by a sea of little screens showing tiny bits of what they obscure. Since people are willing to hold even iPads over their heads, there is not much chance for the back rows to glimpse anything, especially since people lost in the robotic viewfinder don’t even notice that fellow human beings are inconvenienced when they climb atop chairs.

If I had my way, I would ban all amateur photography at public events. Leave the image-capture to the pros, people, and actually pay attention to the event you have crossed the seas to take part in. I don’t think that policy is likely to be instituted widely in many places, but as I wait I will share a second dream. Another thing that reduces the participant to the role of spectator is amplification. It is indeed necessary at times, but too often it is needed only to overcome the buzz it itself creates. (It is always a crutch that poorly trained speakers rely on.) The effect of amplification is to take away from the people one of their most important roles: maintaining silence. The ambient buzz and the artificially loud voices make it seem not just possible, but appropriate to rustle and chat to one’s heart’s content. These are two technologies that are used mostly because they exist, not because they have made anyone’s experience richer.

Second, while I nurture all the appropriate shame for the crimes and failings of Anglo-Saxon culture from Wounded Knee to Colonel Sanders, I rejoice in a quality that our culture still nurtures better than most others. It seems to be losing it hold even among English-speakers, but we still are better at it than most of the world. Our great contribution to world culture: Queuing Up. For the most part, we are good at standing in line. We do not do it sullenly and under duress, like the Russians; we do it in a spirit of fairness and camaraderie. Most of the people of Europe, to judge from the pilgrims in Rome, were never introduced to the idea that jumping the queue is one of the most despicable acts a person can commit. The rich, the poor, the well-dressed, the sloppy, the lay, the religious—all Europeans believe that sharp elbows and unceasing efforts to contort rat-like into any space in front of someone who has been waiting longer are fair weapons in the war of all against all to get a better seat.

To my brethren on the continent, I offer this plea. Reject American culture, if you like. Burn the McDonalds, the KFC, the Gaps, even the Starbucks. Listen to your own music instead of the Delta Blues as imported through Liverpool. Stop watching our stupider movies and festooning their creators with medals. Push it all away. But learn this from us: the path to true happiness is a well-respected line with no pushing and no cutting.

I have few photos of my trip, but here is one. (It was taken during a designated photo op and I had waited in line for it.) I was evidently amusing Cardinal Dolan:

North American College, February 18, 2012

Administrators and Plagiarism

Brian Abel Ragen — 2012-02-07T16:30:21-06:00

For years I taught my students about plagiarism, thinking I was teaching about honesty itself. To pass the work of another off as one's own was ignoble, dishonest, just plain wrong. It would be as wicked for a scholar to tolerate it as it would be for merchant to tolerate the sale of tainted goods or a policeman to tolerate the use of bogus evidence. I also thought that position was one of the underpinnings of an academic world in which people were evaluated mostly by their writing.

I have not changed my views, but I cannot teach them to students without admitting that the standards I espouse apply only in the artificial setting of the classroom. The university as a whole acts on the assumption that doing your own written work is like emptying your own wastebasket: something you do only if you are not important enough to have someone do it for you. Students are still punished for plagiarism, and plagiarism might sink an applicant for tenure. But my university—from which I am semi-retired—is governed by a chancellor and a president who are both proven plagiarists and who have ample staffs to write the documents they sign and the speeches they write.

(I would find the ghostwriting less offensive if the administrators followed the lead of those honest celebrities whose autobiographies appear “as told to” the real author. Acknowledging the real author in the text of the document or program of the speech would be honest and might make clearer what jobs academic administrators actually do.)

But the question remains, do we demand students do their own work simply because we have to test them on it? Does our society, even in its academic institutions, no longer value giving credit for ideas and the eloquent expression of them to their creators? The behavior of many academic administrators says it does not.

(Ref: “Faking It for the Dean” by Carl Elliott, Chronicle of Higher Education “Brainstorm” Blog, 2/7/12.

An Editor’s Dating Advice

Brian Abel Ragen — 2012-01-27T09:03:39-06:00

A new Ph.D. writes,

So here’s the question: My dissertation was on [a literary topic], so how do I even start the process [of turning it into a book]?

Try to remember why you were ever interested in this topic. (Since for years it has been the bane of your existence, you may find that a difficult task.) Then reread your manuscript, always asking yourself, “Would this hold my interest if I were not a college professor?” Conduct this exercise while holding a pen with bright red ink and a wide nib. You will be told not to use such implements on student essays, since you might damage your charges’ delicate psyches, but you needn't worry about that with your own work: you’ve been to graduate school, so your psyche can be assumed to have been damaged beyond repair.

Ruthlessly cut everything that strikes your “common reader” alter ego as boring. Kill the references to scholars and theorists you put in only to show that you really had read them. Cut the nouns doing the work of verbs. In fact, cut any noun you cannot imagine the owner of an independent bookstore using over a cup of the espresso he sells because he can’t turn a profit on books. My guess is that he doesn’t pepper his conversation with alterity, herteronormativity, subaltern discourses, and post-post-modernist. Say whatever you want, but say it as a person talking to other people, not as a member of a lodge using some dorky lingo like a secret handshake.

Once you have translated your work into something like English, read it out loud to your girlfriend, as long as she isn’t a fellow Ph.D. This exercise will have two immediate effects: First, you will break up. That is just as well: you can’t afford a steady girlfriend until you have tenure. Second, you will realize that your prose is still not fit to be let out in public. Mark every sentence you are embarrassed to hear passing your lips. (If you are past the point of being embarrassed to discover that you sound like a pseud, a pedant, or a victim of brainwashing, give up teaching and sign up for a stint in the army or the peace corps and don’t come home until you learn to recognize b.s. when you hear it.) Revise or cut those sentences. Then ask her what your point was. (She’ll feel guilty that she’s decided to dump you, so she’ll try to be helpful.)

If you don’t recognize your point from her description of it, try to sell the MS to Peter Lang as is, count on nobody reading it if they take it, and start from scratch, trying to explain to the common reader why you were ever excited about some marks on a ream of paper or a bunch of grown men and women playacting on a stage or in front of a camera. Do not think of proceeding with this project until you have created a first paragraph that you can use as an "elevator pitch.” In fact, don’t go on until you have a first paragraph that makes you sound charming on your next first date. Once you’re happy with that paragraph—i.e., have got a second date—carry on and try to write more that appeals to real human beings. Just remember: editors have read plenty of student papers and don’t want to read any more of them. But we always like to be charmed. Treat us as if you know you have to earn our attention and will be lucky to get it. We all have cab fare and freezers stocked with cookie dough ice cream, so make an effort to please. We’re not going to sit though pages of tedium just to be polite.

A Simple Solution to the Problems in College Sports

Brian Abel Ragen — 2012-01-20T14:31:35-06:00

There is always some controversy about Division I college sports—the only kind of college sports anyone hears about. What is the root of many of the problems? It is the pretense that athletes in big-time college programs are students. They are not. They don’t have time to be.

The most honest thing to do would be to spin off the teams from the universities. Let the schools own them as investments if they want to, but make them independent, for-profit corporations and treat them and all their employees like other corporations and employees. Let the staff—the players—demand as much as the market will bear, just as their coaches do. And don’t impose on them requirements irrelevant to their jobs, such as pretending to interested in going to class. Those players who want college educations will get them, just as other working students do. Those with no interest in college education will not have to feign it, and colleges will not have to pretend people who don’t meet their admissions standards are fit to be students.

Stanford doesn’t pretend that the people working at the shopping mall it owns are students; why does it have to pretend that the people working on its football team are?

Bias in Academia

Brian Abel Ragen — 2011-12-01T12:44:25-06:00

There is no point in arguing that there isn’t a liberal bias in academia. Try finding a volunteer to advise the student Republican Club in any humanities department—especially if they want someone who is an actual Republican. But there is no reason to see conspiracy or group think at more than their ordinary levels.

An element of bias is inevitable as long a people are influenced by their economic interests. (And I cannot think of an academic, of whatever political stripe, who thinks those interests do not influence all people—except, perhaps, themselves.)

Most educational institutions are state-supported and very few forego all government funding. Their employees therefore have a very personal but rarely articulated economic interest in what might be called “big government” policies. “Big government” puts food on their tables. Those in the truly private industries—i.e., those that don't rely on government business or subsidies—see government primarily as the tax collector. It takes hard-earned food off their tables.

This bias cannot be eliminated, but it can be acknowledged. Just as professors who receive funding from corporations need to acknowledge that fact, all professors need to say—out loud—“my opinions are arrived at independently, but they are funded by the taxing power of the state.”

Bait and Switch in English Departments

Brian Abel Ragen — 2011-11-11T08:45:58-06:00

With the MLA Convention upon us, we are hearing the annual laments for a profession fallen on hard times. I’m afraid I have come to take a very jaundiced view of the whole business.

Over the years I have come to think of the English business works as a massive bait and switch. I, at least, got into the business thinking that I was going to be doing two things. First, I would be engaged in a scholarly enterprise. That is, I was be seeking an ever-better approximation of the truth about a subject. Second, I would be passing on to others something truly important, their very own cultural heritage, from which they might then take delight, solace, and even wisdom.

In graduate school I still heard a little about those ideas, but the working assumption was that they were naive pre-post-modernist b.s. There was no truth to be told about literature; all interpretations were equally true, though some might get more attention than others. And that cultural heritage was a genuinely bad thing: nothing but racist, sexist, classist, homophobic veils for the power structure. Power-relationships were the only things that might be real—though why you would study them by reading rhymes and stories was still a mystery.

Once I became a professor, the cultural heritage—much less delight, solace, and wisdom—seemed to be the last thing anyone cared about. The administration wanted remedial programs for students who couldn’t write a memo. And the “rhet/comp” specialists the administration hired because they were called writing expects seemed to want to do social work instead of teaching anyone anything. People who wanted to focus on the study of literature were steadily marginalized. All this in itself would make people like me wonder about their life choices, but the academic culture, as least as I experienced it, included few people willing to stand up for either ideas or people and many who just kept their heads down, nodded when required to, and let people’s lives be ruined rather than cross either those in power or those in office (not always the same groups, by any means). If I meet a young person who loves literature now, I may tell them to major in English as an undergraduate, but I will never tell one to get a Ph.D. or seek a job in an English Department.

Am I Just a Barrista? Yes, Professor, You Are.

Brian Abel Ragen — 2011-09-10T09:21:37-05:00

From an associate professor:

I got this one a few days ago, the day I sent out the syllabus electronically:

Good Morning Dr. B.
This is very annoying, but I bought different editions of the books. Is there any way that you could give me the chapter numbers instead of page numbers?
Thanks,
XXXXX

This is relatively minor, but revealing, I think, of a mindset in which I am to take orders from a freshman, even prior to meeting this person face to face!! Am I wrong to find this worrisome?

Gentle Reader:

There are many things you should find worrisome. If you let the behavior of college students be one of them, however, you are in for a life of worry verging on despair and an early ejection from your professorial chair, perhaps at your own volition, perhaps at the request of the customer-service officials we now cloak with traditional academic titles such as “dean,” “provost,” and “president.”

All the same, you may still be young and eager enough to care about something beyond your paycheck and your faculty parking permit, so I will venture to suggest some thoughts that may be of use as you contemplate the decline of your youthful hopes and the approaching victory of that Deity whose advent was so well described by dear Mr. Pope.

But first, let me point out that there is a tiny ray of hope to be found amid the gathering gloom. Your student has bought a book! If I read his missive correctly, he has bought more than one! Our ray of hope reveals the first sprig of a devotion to learning that you must at all costs protect as you chop back the weeds of ignorance! (I beg the reader’s forgiveness if I have strayed too far into the allegorical: a single botanical image can have me wandering about in the garden of eloquence for hours at a time.) While others have snapped up used copies in which the dimmest students of past semesters have marked the least important passages in blazing yellow, he may have even bought a new book or two. Other universities may rent out textbooks like Segways at a park or pack preloaded Kindles into the orientation goody bags as if they were credit card applications, but yours has somehow led a young person to go to a bookstore and buy something that cannot be worn to a football game or drunk with a bran muffin. Many would say that your work for the term is already done.

But the drink that did not come with the wholly hypothetical and thus calorie-free bran muffin—probably a venti half-caf soy latte with a mocha shot—brings us back to the larger subject. Let us face that subject squarely: you object to being treated like a barista by the paying customer. I urge you to look at this matter from the young person’s perspective. Had you produced a frappuccino with a shake of cinnamon when the customer wanted sprinkles, the case would be clear. You would have said how sorry you were and immediately whipped up a new beverage to order. If you had given your sunniest smile, the customer would have placed a couple quarters or a wrinkled dollar bill in the tip jar, and all would have be well. You have produced a syllabus with page numbers instead of chapter numbers. Is there some reason the student should not expect you to correct the problem with the same alacrity displayed by the barista?

You will object that you are not in a service industry, that your job is not, in fact, to make the customer’s life flow more smoothly. You will declare that you, in fact, work for truth, for academic standards, for the preservation of our culture, and that you therefore deserve all the deference accorded to physicians and to judges. Sadly, that is simply not true. Much of your work is judged only through student evaluations, so you are this kid’s servant, not, whatever degrees you may hold, the master of anything. You are in just the position of the barista: you gotta keep ’em smiling, bro, ’cause you work for tips. (Forgive my descent into the demotic.)

Now, you may pretend that the world is the one you were sold when your entered graduate school. You can demand a bit of deference, arguing that signs of disrespect for you show, in fact, a lack of respect for the whole enterprise in which you and your students are embarked. Like the barista who asks the hurried customer to say “please” and “thank-you,” you will find your tip jar empty—and management will inform you that you and they have just developed a very real need to talk. The subject will not be your research.

Or you could use this episode to teach some dreary lessons to your student. First, if you are discussing a text with others you need to be literally “on the same” page that they are; otherwise you cannot verify each other’s assertions as you join together to approximate truth. Second, all texts are not the same. Some are bowdlerized. Some are revised. Some are well-edited while others are just scanned by a machine programed to recognize Croatian. Some are even abridged. And you don’t want to be the one who calls the ship in Billy Budd the Indomitable while everyone else has seen the name Bellipotent and wishes it were easier to pronounce. Finally, if you know you are going to get instructions, wait for them—or ask for those instructions, not a waiver, ahead of time.Teaching those lessons may be part of the job you thought you had, but doing that job will not improve the all-important measures of student satisfaction.

What, then, is to be done? After embittering decades, your correspondent has only a few suggestions. Wear a tie to class. Check your fly before entering the room. Ignore all questions you don’t feel like answering. And make sure you’re putting the maximum into your 403(b).

It is borne in upon me, however, that I may have missed the main point of your inquiry. If your student is actually signing messages “XXXXX,” speak to the dean immediately. Don’t let it escalate to the OOOOO level. Universities now have policies about the use of X’s and O’s in student-faculty correspondence, and whatever has transpired, your guilt will be assumed.

Writing from a tranquil glen down the road from the Groves of Academe,
I remain, Sir,
Etc., Etc.

The Kids are Not All Right

Brian Abel Ragen — 2010-11-18T18:09:54-06:00

A professor writes,

Is it possible that we are all underestimating the extent of the depravity on today's campuses?

I think most professors and parents make it their business not to think about the question. They feign shock with the lives students actually live are described. The professor at the residential college who complains about students who are hung-over or actually drunk must be joking. Those descriptions of the “hook-up culture” are just envy and voyeurism. The mothers and fathers upset because their child is being tormented by a roommate who is sexiling him, dealing drugs out of the room, or half-crazy from roid-rage are just the helicopter parents. But I think that there is a real problem, one that we are too squeamish to look at the problem and too lazy to fix it.

Let’s look at two works by authors who belong to different generations, display different sensibilities, and are celebrated by different sorts of readers. During the last decade, both Tom Wolfe and Jeffrey Eugenides have written novels that depict undergraduate life at elite institutions. Wolfe based his work on reporting. Eugenides perhaps drew more on his own experience. I Am Charlotte Simons is a sprawling social novel. The Marriage Plot is a narrow exploration of character. But the picture of campus life I, at least, took from the two novels was not that different. The top ten university still has students who are excited by ideas and earnest in their curiosity, though they share the place with people focused on having a good time in the moment or preparing to get rich as quickly as possible. But all the students live in settings that are filthy and chaotic and they all move in society’s where sexual exploitation of one kind or another is almost the default mode of human interaction. Even the characters we come to like best are adrift and seem likely to be entering what should be adulthood without having become cultured or principled, no matter how well they have mastered some narrow body of knowledge.

Let me start by suggesting part of our problem is that we live with a lie that we cannot admit to and cannot act on. That whopper is that students of traditional college age are adults. No culture of the past has thought they are. (21 was the traditional age of majority for reasons other than numerology.) Our auto insurance companies don’t think they are. Our legislators cease to pretend they are when writing their counter-productive drinking laws. Our new health care law says that they are dependent children until eight years after they have started voting. And brain scientists say that the brain doesn’t reach adult development until about 25.

We decided to stop acting on the evidence in a fit of bad conscience over sending children to early deaths in Vietnam. (Note that there was no similar reaction to earlier drafts, since they applied to all men of military age. During World War II a bachelor in a non-exempt occupation could be called up in his early 40’s.) That some young men were being put under the supervision of drill sergeants and turned into canon-fodder was hardly a justification for removing all restraints from luckier young people, but our society was not acting rationally just then.

The colleges and universities that used to act in loco parentis have given up that part of the job. Alma Mater has found better things to do with her time and left the kids to amuse themselves with the keys to the liquor cabinet and a building full of mattresses.

Unsupervised children tend to behave badly. They torment each other. They drink irresponsibly. They don’t clean their rooms or get up in the morning. They have sex without a thought to consequences.

In the past adults handled this fact in two ways. First, they taught young people that their impulses were more likely to be wicked than innocent. Second, they did not leave them to their own devices. Boys, such as the undergraduates at Oxbridge colleges, lived among adults, who could keep an eye on them. Girls had duennas or their unpaid equivalents. And the institution of “chaperone” remained alive, well, and wide awake.

Those days are now gone, of course. If an adult other than a custodian enters a college dormitory it is a rare event. (The “house mother” is long gone.) Having no adult models for adult behaviors, such as drinking responsibly or flirting or courting respectfully, the students blunder through situations that are difficult at all ages or use the chaos as a chance to prey on the weak, ignorant, or intoxicated.

I don’t think this situation is good for education in any sense. And I think that if things are going to improve, professors will need to take a real part in campus life. As many as possible should actually live on campus. Others should regularly dine with the students. (And the students should eat together at set times, not in the various snacking venues universities have created despite their claims to value “community.”) The student activities offices should be closed and the their functions transferred back to the faculty.

I would, of course, also like to see college students treated as minors again, though I would also like to allow 18-year-olds to drink legally so that they could do it with adult supervision.

We do have a problem. It was caused by generations of adults who wanted to remain kids while having the rights of grown-ups, and who have failed to act as “pastors and masters” to students who desperately need someone to set some limits, sometimes on their own behavior, sometimes on that of those who make campus life a nightmare for the responsible and eager students.