Avuncular American

US Health Care: What's So Difficult?

Anyone passing through Brussels and interested in the history of medicine would do well to visit Notre Dame à la Rose in Lessines (photo, left), a town to the west of the city.  Given over to historical tourism since the 1980s, as a "hôtel Dieu" it served to heal the poor for hundreds of years.  You'll be forgiven if you think you're in a cloistered monastery: nuns dispensed treatment for body and soul in a self sufficient complex, replete with its own river and mill, vegetable garden, and farm.

You'll never complain about your doctor again once you've seen the wax image of his 17th century forebear (photo below, right).  Just take a look at his instruments (those were the days of bleeding and trepanation) and count your lucky stars that you only have to say "aahh" on a dry popsicle stick tongue-depressor.

Basic as the care was, it was the best that was on offer at the time, and the nuns, doctors, and other personnel knew that if they didn't care for the sick poor, no one would.  Not only would they care for body and maybe save souls, but they would have the personal satisfaction of salvation, and of doing the right thing.

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Okay, fast forward to the US Congress this week, where Representative Mike Rogers, Republican of Michigan, said this of President Obama's efforts to make health care available to all Americans:

You will have to call a bureaucrat and hope to God his calculator is more compassionate and smarter than your doctor. (NY Times)

Obviously Rogers hasn't checked with his doctor, who may be one of the 450,000 clamoring for health care reform.  Nor has the good Congressman had to deal with an insurance company "gatekeeper" whose job it is to find every conceivable excuse to disallow treatment of patients.  Give me a government bureaucrat any day.

Here's what I can't understand: all the statistics show that the US spends way more than other advanced countries on health care, but gets results that are sub-prime, to say the least.  The same Republicans who decry "government" intervention passed a massive giveaway to private insurers via Medicare during the Bush years.  Their defense of health care appears to exclude dispensing it to anyone save the insurance industry lobbyists who finance their campaigns.

Do they just want to send people to the Poorhouse, that other institution from a bygone era that has gone the way of the hôtel Dieu?

Come on, people, it's not so difficult.  Other countries spend far less, with better results, and it's just not an issue in politics.  It's a human right.  Something that the good nuns and doctors of the hôtel Dieu understood centuries ago.

Cairo: Obama's 3 Rs - Respect, Rectitude, Resolve

No need for me to reprise President Obama's speech today at Cairo University - the White House website should have the text and video up soon, and the BBC already has an annotated version.  With our time zone advantage, we watched it live from our living room in Brussels, and a very stirring speech it was.

Respect was a repeated theme, no small matter for a religion - Islam - which has been the target of Western fear and disdain well before George W. Bush's benighted sojourn in the White House.   Whatever Rush Limbaugh may sputter tonight about the President of the United States quoting the Koran, Barack Obama's use of strategic texts from the Bible, the Torah, and the Koran struck a chord in the Cairo audience.

The man from Illinois had an Abe Lincoln air of moral rectitude when delivering The Truth to the audience.  Islam is too great a religion to be associated with terrorism (the unmentioned word), and there has to be room in the Middle East - specifically Jerusalem - for the people of the three great monotheistic religions.

The Truth, to Israeli listeners, also means that settlements are a major roadblock to a negotiated solution.  Hamas was addressed in a civil tone, perhaps a hint that change is afoot in the US attitude towards the party that won the Palestinian elections.

No one who has witnessed this President's first several months in office, or who listened to his speech in the Arab world's largest city, can doubt his resolve to do his utmost to bring a solution to the Israel-Palestine question.

More proof that Americans did themselves proud when they elected this man who, almost single-handed, is bringing the 3 Rs back to America's place in the world.

Aldous Huxley: Political Uses of Crowd Delirium

This is not a full-blown book review, but having invested several weeks' worth of bedtime reading and just having finished Aldous Huxley's 1952 nonfiction work, "The Devils of Loudun," I feel that it's worth comment.  I confess that I first came across the subject thanks to Ken Russell's 1971 demoniacally extravagant epic, "The Devils," seen when I was less squeamish in my choice of films.  English novelist Huxley is best known for his futuristic 1932 novel, "Brave New World," discussed a couple of years ago by Margaret Atwood in The Guardian.

The Devils of Loudun is not an easy read by any means, but it is a fascinatingly true story told with erudition and insight.  A 17th century tale of possession, madness, and power in Louis XIII's France.  The power was exerted by Cardinal Richelieu (who is synonymous with "éminence grise"), the possession was probably bogus, and the madness was the mass hysteria over witchcraft that Richelieu's henchmen stirred up as a means of dealing with the Cardinal's (or the state's) enemies.  Huxley coined phrases to describe the phenomenon: "crowd delirium" and "herd-intoxication."  Think housing bubble and "irrational exuberance" in our contemporary context.

Huxley wrote The Devils of Loudun in the early Fifties, when he  had already been living in California for a number of years.  With the ravages of Nazism and Fascism still very much in evidence, and the Cold War putting a chill on the wartime cooperation with Soviet Communism, isms were central to Huxley's tale: Catholicism under threat from Protestantism, and exorcism to banish the devils that were conveniently identified with an inconvenient priest in a town that was too tolerant of Protestants.

Huxley's book is anything but dated.   Just read this:

By the beginning of the eighteenth century witchcraft had ceased to be a serious problem.  It died out, among other reasons, because almost nobody now bothered to repress it.  For the less it was persecuted, the less it was propagandized.  Attention had shifted from the supernatural to the natural.  From about 1700 to the present day all persecutions in the West have been secular...  For us, Radical Evil has ceased to be something metaphysical and has become political or economic.  And that Radical Evil now incarnates itself, not in sorcerers and magicians, but in the representatives of some hated class or nation.

In 1952, Huxley was all too aware of the McCarthy Red Scare sweeping the US.  His pacifism had attracted the FBI's attention, which at one point took a student's shorthand markings in a copy of Huxley's "Brave New World" for a secret code.

There have been other Scares.  If Reds inspired mid-century senators to hunt Communist witches, early 19th century officials were more concerned with the Black Flag, the anarchist movement that, as Barbara Tuchman reminded us in "The Proud Tower," was responsible for the assassination of six heads of state, including US President McKinley, in the two decades preceding World War One.  Here's Tuchman, writing in 1962:

No single individual was the hero of the movement... which had its theorists and thinkers, men of intellect, sincere and earnest, who loved humanity.  It also had its tools, the little men whom misfortune or despair or the anger, degradation and hopelessness of poverty made susceptible to the Idea until they became possessed by it and were driven to act.  These became the assassins.  Between the two groups there was no contact.  The thinkers... issued trumpet calls for action...  Unknown to them, down in the lower depths of society lonely men were listening.

Tuchman and Huxley wrote decades before Al Qaeda was conceived, but the worlds they describe resemble our own.  A century ago, anarchism was as ubiquitous and as deadly as Al Qaeda and its spinoffs are today.  Three centuries ago witchcraft "ceased to be a serious problem [and] died out... because almost nobody now bothered to repress it."

This is not to suggest that law enforcement and intelligence agencies cease their efforts to round up terrorists inspired by Al Qaeda and other obscurantist movements.  But I do think that the kind of fear-mongering that former VP Cheney and others exerted during their years in office needs to be buried, along with their reputations, in the trash heap of history.

Almost a century ago, fears about the end of the world at the hands of anarchists were overtaken by the very real-world butchery called World War I, started by nation-states and ending several of them.  Louis XIII's worries about witches' spells were the least of Louis XVI's concerns - he had the French Revolution and the guillotine to contend with.  Anarchists and devils were overtaken by even bigger threats.

Al Qaeda-inspired terrorism is serious, but let's put it in perspective, and deal with a few bigger concerns - accelerating climate change, worldwide deflation, populations outstripping resources - all of which are world-class show stoppers.  Witches, anarchists... Al Qaeda too will pass.

Irish Abuse Report: The Wages of Theocracy

"A theocracy in all but name" is what the late Irish author John McGahern called his country, especially in the mid-20th century post-independence years, when the Catholic clergy wielded power well beyond the church pulpit.  Power to incarcerate children, and, according to a report just released, power that resulted in the abuse of those same children.

I haven't read the report (available at the above BBC link), but the news reports surrounding its release recall two films on the subject.  "Song For a Raggy Boy" (2004), reviewed here, was dramatically over-dramatized, but apparently spot-on as far as content showing abuse at the hands of "religious," as they were called.

Superior in both dramatic content and credibility is the 2003 film "The Magdalene Sisters," a harrowing account (in part because it portrays events happening as late as the Sixties) of life in a reform school for girls.

Ireland has largely moved on from being the "priest-ridden land" that it once was.  The very fact of the abuse report's publication proves that.  But the damage caused by priests, brothers, and I regret to say, nuns (other than a few disciplinarians, my memory of Irish nuns remains positive) to thousands of children over decades is incalculable.

To say nothing of the lasting damage caused to the Catholic Church.

Theocracy: a concept of governance best left in the Dark Ages.

(Celtic cross clip art from "Ireland Fun Facts" [sic] website)

Maniacal Missionaries, Myanmar to Mideast

Those crazy American citizens who stir up trouble overseas!  The "Swimmer," aka John Yettaw, who got Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi into hot water with the country's dictators, apparently just wanted to give the (Buddhist) woman a (Christian) Bible.  No wonder the US State Department publicly expressed its outrage over the arrest of Aung San Suu Kyi, while quietly sending consular officials to meet with the "missionary" in jail.

Embassies have to do that, even though the Amcit has single-handedly given the Burmese junta just what it needed to set back the cause of democracy in Myanmar (Burma) another few years.  In some countries (think Mexico), the "arrest/detention of American citizens" requires a considerable investment of Embassy time.  (Image: the US Consular service flag, State Department).

I remember being contacted by Egyptian security officials, who had arrested an American citizen on the steps of Alexandria University.  Actually, the arrest was a way of saving him from physical harm, as he was intent on distributing Bibles to the students.  Even though Egypt has a sizable Christian minority, they know better than to proselytize in the Muslim-majority country.

But in addition to these unofficial freelancers, the US has something far more dangerous: a cadre of people in the Pentagon and in the US military bent on spreading their Christian beliefs, at the point of a gun.  In the Middle Ages, they called that the Crusades.  That is the last thing that the US needs with thousands of troops surrounded by millions of Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan.  In fact, religion is exactly what the region does not need more of.

Today Frank Rich of the New York Times gave readers a tip on an outrageous example of religious infiltration into the Rumsfeld Defense Department: a series of Powerpoint slides put up by GQ Magazine - cover sheets to the Secdef's daily Worldwide Intelligence Update for the President.  "Open the gates that the righteous nation may enter, the nation that keeps faith," intones Isaiah 26:2, superimposed on a pic of US tanks kicking up the Baghdad dust.

Think that's just some Powerpoint Ranger's innocent fiddling with pixels?  Then read Jeff Sharlet's chilling article in the May Harper's, subtitled "The Crusade For a Christian Military."  I refrain from writing the title, as I don't want search engines to pick out what incendiary stuff "the Faith Element" (a group of Special Forces in Iraq who thought the locals were ready for some Old Time Religion) liked to scrawl on their tanks.

Those consular officers in Burma might get the Swimming American out of jail and on a plane back home.  But it's going to take a huge amount of diplomacy (and a strict secular line from our new administration to its armed forces) to undo the damage caused by the zealots of the previous lot.

Religion - keep it at home, and don't mix it up with defense or diplomacy.

Pope Visits the Over-Promised Land

For those keeping track of Pope Benedict's progress in The Holy Land, press agencies say that he just landed at Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv, where he made a statement calling for free access to Jerusalem for the faithful of the three religions that venerate sites in that city.

I'm not there, but I do know a bit about the spell Jerusalem can cast over people, even those that are not particularly religious.  I spent some time there in the seventies and the eighties, mostly on the Arab side, before travel between Arab East Jerusalem and its natural Palestinian hinterland became a nightmare for the inhabitants.

Here's what brought me to use the Promised Land in the title of this post, rather than the "Holy Land" of Vatican parlance.  It was the sight of the Pope on Mount Nebo in Jordan, purported to be the place where Moses first saw "the Promised Land."  His predecessor, Pope John Paul II, had also made the pilgrimage to Mt. Nebo in 2000.  He too wanted peace, but little of that has happened in the interim.

It's probably sacrilegious of me to say this, but isn't it a bit presumptuous of a religion to claim a particular territory based on a promise by its own deity?  How about the Philistines?  Maybe they had a promise too?  I guess theirs wasn't written on tablets.

Fast forward a couple of thousand years to the late 19th and early 20th century, and the Philistines - now as Arab Palestinians, both Muslim and Christian - got to deal again with foreigners bearing more promises, this time from Europeans called Sykes, Picot, and Balfour.  Promises that compromised their rights to a home and a country.

Palestinian writer Ghada Karmi wrote about how 19th century Zionists sent a delegation of rabbis to Ottoman Palestine, to scout out prospects for settlement by European Jews.  They reported back: “The bride is beautiful, but she is married to another man.”  The "bride" was the Holy Land, but the "other man" were the Palestinian inhabitants who had seen Roman, Arab, Ottoman, and British rulers come and go.  But they couldn't withstand the people to whom the Land had been Promised.

You can get mired in controversy about Palestinians and Philistines, about whose land - those promises - and about something called the Middle East Peace Process.  I suppose the Pope has to give the MEPP a try, and he does bear a responsibility for the welfare of the Middle East's dwindling Christian population.  But the Pope will come, and he will go.

In yesterday's Toronto Globe and Mail, Fouad Twal, the Pope's Latin Patriarch in Jerusalem, told reporter Patrick Martin that "at the end of the visit the Pope goes back to Rome and I stay here with the consequences.”  He might have added that when the Pope returns to Rome, all those restrictions that make life hell on earth for Christian (and Muslim) Palestinians - temporarily eased during the Pope's visit - will be reinstated.

And the "Palestine" that remains after continuous Israeli chipping, walling, and bypassing will still look like this.

Candles, Candlemas, and Saint Blaise

If on Candlemas day it be shower and rain
Winter's gone and will not come again.

English traditional proverb

The above is from Wilson's Almanac, which appears to be a zany Australian's way of pulling together minutiae about every feast, commemoration, or anniversary on any given day.  There's a whole lot more there on Candlemas and Ground Hog Day.

Last year on February 2nd I wrote a post on the same subject, and the links are probably still good.

In Brussels on this Candlemas Day (known as Chandeleur in French-speaking countries), it be snow and cold, so I'm not sure what that means for winter.  But we did have the traditional crepes, so I'm not complaining.

My "clip art" file on this computer's Word suite only has a drawing of a Kinara for candles, but that's close enough.  I had to look up Kinara on Wikipedia - now I know.

Since we're on matters of religion and the calendar, you might want to know that tomorrow 3 February is Saint Blaise Day.  As a little Catholic in the States attending parochial school, the nuns were always sure to have our throats blessed to prevent choking from fish bones.  As good little Catholics, we were certain to ingest fish every Friday, since eating meat was forbidden.

Happy Candlemas, and be sure to chew your fish well if you haven't gotten Saint Blaise's blessing with candles crossed on your throat.  And don't light the candles.

Radical Right, Wrapped In Religion

"The Week In Religion," apparently, was a serious, ecumenical program on early American TV.  Not to be confused with The Daily Show's "This Week in God," which is anything but serious.  If you want ecumenical, thoughtful, and serious, I suggest you check out Krista Tippett's "Speaking of Faith" on American public radio.  BBC World Service mines a similar vein in its weekly "Heart and Soul."   Finally,  the Washington Post and Newsweek collaborate on an excellent website dedicated to matters of religion, ethics, and belief in "On Faith."

For me, this week's news in religion reinforced my conviction that we need to be vigilant against the creeping influence - no, make that galloping influence - of fundamentalists and what in saner, less politically correct times might simply have been called religious "kooks."  And I'm not talking about Islam.  It's Christianity that has me worried.

His Holiness and the Holocaust Denier

I'll begin with Pope Benedict XVI and his decision to bring a rather tiny minority of ultra-conservative renegade bishops, priests, and their followers back into the arms of the Catholic Church.  Other than some misguided desire for inclusiveness, it's hard to credit anything other than the Pope's sympathizing with their ideas as his motivation.  I can't imagine that there was any groundswell of support among mainstream Catholics to bring in people who believe that the Holocaust was invented.

One of the "rehabilitated" bishops, Briton Richard Williamson, believes that the available evidence

is hugely against six million having been deliberately gassed in gas chambers as a deliberate policy of Adolf Hitler ... Between 200,000-300,000 perished in Nazi concentration camps, but not one of them by gassing in a gas chamber.  I believe there were no gas chambers.

Jewish groups are up in arms, justifiably so.  But what do you expect from an infallible pontiff whose "one-sided" (according to impartial observers) decision to confer sainthood on priests and nuns killed by the Republican (anti-Franco) side in Spain's Civil War caused riots in 2007?  He's the same man who weighed in for the candidate of his choice in 2004, when he instructed American Catholics to vote for George W. Bush.  Did I mention infallibility?

Muslim Eid in Europe Tested by Extremists

The extremists in this case being a particular brand of European racist who uses a peaceful Muslim holy feast to desecrate - again - the tombs of hundreds of Algerian, Moroccan, and Tunisian soldiers at one of France's largest World War I cemeteries last night.  The tombs of Jewish soldiers were also defaced with swastikas.  The photo at left was taken after graffiti was removed from a previous desecration earlier this year.

Today is the feast of Eid al-Adha or Aid al-Kabir, which coincides with the end of the pilgrimage to Mecca.  The world over, Muslim families are gathering for a feast of lamb, and perhaps a visit to a cemetery.  Whoever desecrated the soldiers' graves knew the significance of their act.

The first time we experienced the Eid was in Tunis, in a middle class neighborhood where each back garden was sure to have orange or lemon trees.  In the days leading up to the Eid, the bleating of lambs was added to the occasional barking of dogs or street cats battling it out over garbage left on the sidewalk.

Until the Eid, when the bleating stopped.

All over Europe, authorities have taken steps to accommodate their Muslim citizens' need to slaughter sheep.  Here in Brussels, where at least 17% of the population is Muslim, this has included setting up several additional temporary slaughterhouses.  In some neighborhood schools, principals can expect up to 90% of their pupils to miss class, since the Eid doesn't have the status of a school holiday like certain Christian feast days.

The Economist recently featured an article that chronicles the impact of large Muslim populations in many of Europe's major cities:

In some of these places bad relations between Muslims, non-Muslims and the authorities are creating political opportunities for the far right.  Yet talk of civilisational war in Europe’s cobblestoned streets is out of line in one respect: it understates the ability of democratic politics, especially local politics, to adapt to new social phenomena. For cities to work, compromises have to be struck and coalitions assembled.

Here in Brussels and in other cities with large immigrant populations, first and second generation Muslims have run for and been elected to office.  Even where the local politicians are not Muslim, they are attuned to the needs of their voters.  We should expect this, and take it as a natural part of the process of immigration and assimilation that has always taken place.  I wouldn't object to hearing the occasional call to prayer - it would bring back memories of Alexandria or Algiers.  Or maybe the ecumenical mix of Melilla in northern Morocco, where the Spanish enclave featured muezzins and church bells.

Speaking of church bells reminds me that it's not just the Eid this December 8.  It's also the Catholic feast of the Immaculate Conception.   Happy feast day, and Eid mubarak.  And a plague on the house of all extremists who can't live with a little bit of religious diversity in their midst.

What's the Bush Legacy Worth? I'd Say 20 Years

If you can stomach it, read excerpts from George W. Bush's "interview" with his sister (?) for National Public Radio on his legacy: "I came to Washington with a set of values, and I'm leaving with the same set of values."

Values.  I did a word search in the White House transcript for words like "torture," "financial crisis," and "depression," but came up with naught.

True to form, the born-again President looks to a higher Father: "I have recognized I am a lowly sinner seeking redemption."  How convenient.  We'll never know whether he'll be redeemed, as that's between him and his Creator.

Earthbound punishment for torture is another matter.  According to lawyer Scott Horton - Justice After Bush: Prosecuting An Outlaw Administration - in the current Harpers

18 U.S.C. § 2340 makes it a crime for any “person acting under the color of law” to “inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering (other than pain or suffering incidental to lawful sanctions) upon another person within his custody or physical control.” The penalty for this crime—as Bush’s Office of Legal Counsel carefully noted in a 2003 memo on the subject—is up to twenty years in federal prison.

Twenty years...  That's about as long as it will take for the United States to dig out from the mess he has created.  Two decades of undoing the harm to the nation's working and middle classes.  Twenty long years of hard labor - starting with an Obama Administration - to build up the nation's moral standing in the world, after the blustering buffoons (Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld) squandered the country's ability to lead.

The White House released the transcript on "Black Friday."  How appropriate.  As he prepares to scurry off to Crawford - maybe the only place safe from international arrest warrants - Bush leaves behind a country where Black Friday shoppers literally - and lethally - stampede in the rush to the bottom.  Into a Wal-Mart, to buy what?  Melamine-tainted Chinese-made candy?  Toxic toys?  Quite a Christmas that will make.

Quite a legacy, Mr. Bush.