in health

“The retirement of seventy-eight million baby boomers - Americans born between 1946 and 1964 - will cause the costs of Social Security and Medicare to skyrocket.  Between 2010 and 2020 those costs are expected to rise by 70 and 79 percent, respectively.  By 2050, according to Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, these two programs plus Medicaid will take 18.4 percent of everything the United States produces.”

this warning comes from the most recent book co-authored by thomas friedman and michael mandelbaum titled that used to be us: how america fell behind in the world it invented and how we can come back.  and while i take issue with the authors using any pronouncement issued by the cato institute as unbiased and factual, truth be told, america is not healthy.

friedman and mandelbaum point of in this book of theirs the slew of problems america now faces: congressional polarization, under education, the economic stress caused by the technology revolution of the late century, and the lack of concern so far shown toward the potential environmental disaster of global warming.  basically americans are lazy and aren’t doing anything.  friedman and mandelbaum write calmly, declaring that if we set certain goals, enact positive and exact legislature now we can catch up, we can set the environment right, we can stay on top, and my generation won’t end up slinging burgers in beijing when we should be retiring.  they’re saying act now before this offer ends!

but reading their forecast, all i can conceive of is how monumental this task is.  not just innovating new technology to create cleaner energy and save the environment.  not just figuring out how to lure the brightest minds into teaching in america’s public schools.  not just completely restructuring medicaid, medicare, and social security.  in my mind, one of the biggest problems is the american public in general.  mandelbaum and friedman believe that the american public is not as divided politically as their representatives in congress, and they write from a pretty moderate (moderately-liberal) viewpoint.  but i do not think they realize that they’re writers for the new york times, a paper that is viewed as both over liberal and over intellectual and overly wordy and pompous and stuffy and yes i pay to read the paper daily and i love reading friedman’s articles but the majority of americans wouldn’t recognize his name let alone read his book and they surely would never believe that he’s anything but rabidly liberal!  and reading this book is almost on par with reading revelations.

bill clinton wrote out more dooming statistics in his recent book back to work:

“According to the Simpson-Bowles Commission, total costs for Medicare, Medicaid, and the Children's Health Insurance Program equaled 6 percent of GDP, or about 35 percent of total health-care spending, which is 17.6 percent of GDP.   That's a lot, but it's still cheaper than the same coverage would be under private plans.  For one thing, administrative costs are far lower - less than half of what private plans cost.  Overall health-care spending is $35 to $40 billion lower than it would be if the government's administrative costs were equal to those of private insurance companies.  Even more important, the inflation rate in the government programs, though high, has been lower than the rate of increase in private coverage.  As the New York Times economics columnist Paul Krugman has pointed out, Medicare spending per person has increased 400 percent since 1970, while private insurance has skyrocketed 700 percent.”

what are we to though?  what exactly can my generation and the american public do about these skyrocketing costs and our tumescent deficit.  i guess i’m absolutely a liberal in that i believe that more than simply raising taxes and maintaining healthcare benefits, we must come together as a community and a nation to discuss what exactly we need as such.  a liberal outlook favors greater equality over individual liberty.  thus to understand and work toward a greater community of fulfillment and happiness, we must come together and discuss the needs of this community.  we must make sacrifices.  we must think more about our community.  i pay taxes and can comprehend the need at times of higher taxes because i support our common good and not just my own self interest.

how then does a dialogue about healthcare needs begin?  certainly we need a better understanding of health.  we cannot allow pressure from the food industry to allow the tomato paste on pizza to count as a vegetable serving at school lunches.  we must come to grips with the effect of sugar in the diet.  and we must be frank about what exactly it is fair that we pay for as a community.

“According to CBS's 60 Minutes (August 8, 2010), in 2009 'Medicare paid $55 billion just for doctor and hospital bills during the last two months of patients' lives.  That's more than the budget for the Department of Homeland Security, or the Department of Education.  And it has been estimated that 20 to 30 percent of these medical expenses may have no meaningful impact.  Most of the bills are paid for by the federal government with few or no questions asked.' Indeed, Medicare is barred by law from rejecting any treatment based on cost.”

this was reported by friedman and mandelbaum and it brings up a tough question.  certainly we respect and love our elders.  these are our family members.  and they must be care for, just as our nation must have healthcare at any age.  yet we cannot allow our love for our families cloud our judgement.  doctors should not be allow to prescribe any treatment at any cost without proven efficacy.  and the cost to keep a person alive slightly longer unconscious and on a respirator may not be a cost the public should bear.  perhaps some costs should be private burdens.

where is the line between public and private?  recently, cities such as san francisco and certain companies have started paying and supporting the medical transition between sexes.  transgendered people should have our support, but should their transitions be the burden of the public when we cannot even pave our roads and feed our children and bring basic healthcare to the public at large.  when i think of this though, i believe that the need to transition could bring a psychic pain that i cannot begin to understand, and thus perhaps we should be able to make a sacrifice for our fellow citizens.  and in cities such as san francisco, the consent and encouragement for this support does come from the public, blessing the use of public funds.

but these are the hard questions i find myself thinking of, and of which we must all think.  what sacrifices will each of us be willing to make and what do we expect from our society?

in sickness

my sister has been sick for weeks; mono perhaps.  i am getting over a cold.  i sent this text to my sister after she informed me she is indeed feeling better:

"being sick always reminds me of being very young."

and when evian asked why, i replied, "just how intense it feels to be sick when you're young and how much care is given to you.  the way time stands still.  how warm everything seems.  how strange the days become."

and evian responded, "except there isn't any special day at home, and madre is tired and/or far away."

it's these days, special days, that make up some of the most vivid fragments of my childhood.  laying sick on the blue couch in our playroom watchin tv, sun streaming in through the west facing window in the afternoon.  that sunlight which felt strange on a school day, knowing everyone else in teh world was in school or at work.  except for the television, the rest of the house seemed oddly quiet.  mom, without a mobile phone, away to pick my sister up from school.

i remember standing on the stepstool in the bathroom to examine the chicken pox that covered my body when i was seven; the oatmeal baths which couldn't completely mitigate the itching, the agony because the chicken pox were in my eyes, down my throat, covering my face.

i have a fleeting memory of staying in the pediatric ward of huntsville hospital, fascinated by a train whose track ran along the entire perimeter of the wall of the play area.  these are memories tinted with green tiles and hospital gowns.  i hated the i.v., fought with it, couldn't sleep.  i no longer remember for what i was admitted.

i remember laying on that threadbare couch, unwatching the flat projection of the tv and find myself dazzled instead by the particulate light, afternoon rays dancing with floating dust, a vision that still causes me to try to imagine how light can travel both as particle and wave.  


when i'm sick, i find my thoughts to be fuzzy, free-floating.  reality seems to shift, not just because of the emptiness of the hours spent alone in bed when i would otherwise be at school or work.  it's not just the strange quietness and aloneness, but also my direct experience of time seems to change and dilate.  the antibodies in my blood directly affect my brain, sensory input redirected, neural synaspses rewired, my sense of time altered.  i dredge up strange memories of the past, make odd connections that i think profound and should be remembered by never are.  my nasal passages congested, i still detect phantom fragrances of cotton blossom and brown sugar and oranges - for no reason at all!  these are the smells i associate with being sick.

sickness is no longer a time i need someone to take care of me.  i don't want anyone around me.  i don't want idle chatter.  i don't want to be fussed over.  like a wounded animal, i want to curl up in a dark corner and convalesce.  in fact, the only living creature i like near me when ill is my cat.  when young, my father insisted upon the curative qualities of felines for upset stomach.  now, if ill, my cat genevieve rests with me, a solid black lump on the blue comforter warming me as murder, she wrote plays on the television.

sketchbook no. 9

marketshare.

i love seeing the whole neighborhood out and engaged with one another, which happens a lot on north mississippi avenue.  living here is like living in a small town, but with the class and sophistication of a city.

we would create a sort of mutual fund to benefit the neighborhood.  each participant would contribute a certain amount to participate.  the pool of money would then be invested in the stock market or a mutual fund.  any returns from the investment could then be set aside in a separate account which could be used should any participant have an emergency or need a certain amount of money.

the point would be to generate a fund so that should my car break down or my daughter need new braces or i get laid off from my job, i could go to the neighborhood, to the rest of the participants in the fund, and ask the community to help me.  the community would come together to decide how to help themselves, to decide how best to use any investment gain, to see who needs the most help.

contemporaneity

my friend the other was asking me if what the current movements in art were, or if there could be any new movements, new manifestos, new schools. and i've been catching up on artforum (i'm a few months behind,) so i thought i would share two quotes, from the beginning and end of a piece tim griffin wrote for artforum on the venice biennial.

by the bye, who else misses tim griffin as editor in chief of artforum?

from tim griffin's "Out of Time," artforum, september 2011

he begins:
"Among the more puzzling preoccupations of dialogues around art during the past five years has been 'the contemporary,' a seemingly self-evident description that, to date, has operated largely in reverse - that has been put forward, in other words, as a meaningful denomination and subject of inquiry in advance of any actual deductive relationship to the surrounding world. The hope, it would seem, is that the term employed by itself, and evocatively, will help tease out some general understanding of the conditions for artmaking and its reception today. Yet, unlikely as this might be the impulse is easy enough to fathom: Artists, art historians, curators, and critics alike wish to find historical trajectories in art today where none immediately announce themselves; a disorienting air of atemporality prevails instead. Indeed, the imperative for historical precedent or distinction becomes only more urgent in light of spectulative obsessions with the 'new' in a radically expanded art system whose borders have become so porous as to erode the very ideation of art. Hence, large-scale international exhibitions often tend these days toward long durees of low-grade curatorial anxiety, continually setting up historical counterpoints for recent artwork on the one hand - is modernism our antiquity? - and almost daring artists to cross the lines between artistic and larger social contexts on the other. If there is a substantive sense of 'the contemporary' to be employed here, it is likely the 'out-of-jointness' that philosopher Girogio Agamben ascribed to the term: Something is contemporary when it occupies time disjunctively, seeming always at once 'too soon' and 'too late,' or, more accurately in terms of art now, seeming to contain the seeds of its own anarchronism."

and he ends,
"...we would do well to take a closer look at Christian Marclay's The Clock,, 2010, which was awarded one of this year's Golden Lions. An absolute tour de force of research and editing, the piece plots every minute of a day by incorporating scenes from myriad films ranging widely in origin and genre, with each scenario being passed seamlessly to the next. Someone knocks on the door in one frame, and another person from a different film - an utterly changed time and place - answers. Or an alarm goes off in a mid-1950s bedroom, and someone from the 1970s awakes. Yet one must still, I think consider the position of the audience member viewing this film (moreover, this film about cinematic habits and behaviors oriented around time): One never quite lives in the moment being watched, but rather waits, always looking for whatever might be coming next. Or, to cite philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, "What we perceive as present is the vivid fringe of memory tinged with anticipation." Ironically, anachronism is our foundation. A more apt representation of art's position can hardly be found."

palestine and education, science, and culture

Yesterday, UNESCO voted and accepted the Palestinian bid for membership, thereby straining United States relations with the agency and the United Nations in general. The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, or UNESCO, promotes education, literacy, and gender equality worldwide and is also responsible for designating world heritage sites. The U.S. donates each year a large part of the UNESCO budget, funding almost a quarter of its budget actually. However, as UNESCO has now recognized Palestine as a full member and thus as a internationally recognized nation, the United States will now be forced to suspend contributions to the organization due to American legislation prohibiting involvment in any United Nations organization that supports any country not recognized by a state by the US, which in this case specifically means Palestine. As the Palestinians submitted their bid for membership, American ambassadors and representatives attempted to dissuade the Palestinians from continuing. As Palestine attempts to be recognized by the United Nations as a souvereign nation separate from Israel, US officials, including President Obama, denounced this move as premature. Though Israel and the PLO exchanged letters of recognition in 1993, the United States argues that any move toward peace must originate from direct negotiations between the two countries. American officials have not moved to change US legislation to allow continuing funding to UNESCO, and seem to express no sympathy with this Palestinian effort. Instead of going forward with this bid for full membership with UNESCO, the US has suggested having Palestine sign UNESCO conventions as a "non-state" observer, such as the European Union is recognized. This would potentially allow the organization to list World Heritage sites currently in Israeli control as Palestinian. But the EU is not a nation; it is an economic zone, thus I think the comparison made by this suggestion is bunk. Palestine wants nationhood and the "two-state solution" has been the ultimate goal in negotiations between Israel and Palestine for years. Why undermine that goal now? In part, I blame the election cycle. I blame pressure from the Israelis. I blame Obama's weakness. There is no reason the US government should renege on its its cultural, scientific, and educational obligations to the Palestinians and to the world due to pressure from Israel, a wealthy county to which we already contribute too much aid. I can think of no reason Obama would oppose UN recognition of Palestine, of Palestinian state-hood, of Palestinian involvement in UNESCO other than pressure from Israel and fear of alienation of Jewish voters in the upcoming presidential election. For a president who originally suggested the Palestinians move to achieve recognition from the UN, Obama needs to give back his Nobel peace prize if he is now going back on his word to ensure his own re-election.

dharma of tony

When I told my friend friend that tony had passed away, Seth explained that he hadn’t known Antonio very well but thought he had seemed smart and talented. which struck me as an odd description. Certainly Tony had always been talented, hyper-intelligent, flamboyant. He spent too many hours awake digging through the internet for new artists, new music, new movements, the next big thing. His knowledge was rhizomatic, tendrils of attention ever spreading outward. Even when I first met him as we were students together studying visual art at the Alabama School of Fine Arts, Tony had been precociously smart and talented. One of the first pieces of art he produced for an assignment had been a work fashioned after Mike Kelly: a phallic column composed from stuffed animals stitched together and hung from the top of the stairwell, stretching nearly two stories in the air. We were awed from the beginning; we were inspired and scared. But “sweet?” Was that a good word to describe Tony? This was a young man who would slap me at random moments for no other reason than an as of then undisclosed infatuation with me. He would hit me, and pinch me, and bully me. Then he would walk away as if he had done nothing wrong. Some of his pranks weren’t as painful though and I would often find myself laughing with him. He would saunter through the sculpture studio, hands clasped behind his back holding a piece of glass. He would walk up to some random student diligently working on some art project, would ask the student about his or her day, compliment that student on the work being produced, the technique employed. Then would violently throw the piece of glass or mirror to the floor producing a loud shattering sound, causing the faces of the other students working to look up in alarm, maybe causing someone to mar the art on which he or she had been working. Yet before moving from Birmingham, Alabama to Portland, Oregon, I remember explaining to another credulous peer from ASFA that Tony changed a lot after graduating, after having lived in New York for two years and resettling for a bit back in Alabama. One of my last memories is of a house party in Montevallo Tony threw which my sister and I attended. Tony seemed that night, after knowing him so long, more subdued, more chill, nicer. He was sweet to my sister and me; not just loud, insulting, and over the top as we had always known him. He danced and conversed politely, if flamboyantly, with still the occasional outburst to keep everyone interested. I attributed some of his calm that night to the fact that Tony had finally taken to smoking pot, but I was hoping there was something more here. As my sister and I drove back to Birmingham late that night, I remember saying to her that Tony seemed changed, that perhaps he had “grown-up” finally, that perhaps we could stop worrying about him. I started worrying about Antonio when he first graduated ASFA and left Birmingham to attend the Cooper Union in New York. We had spent the last year obsessing over Matthew Barney, watching endless clips from the final installation of the Cremaster Cycle which had been released the year before. With a dictionary of symbols by our side, we watched the trailer to the Cremaster Cycle repeatedly, searching for clues to unlock its meaning and we thought, yes, this is it, this has to be it. It’s was clearly over the top, so detailed, so dense; in our mind Barney was the James Joyce of our time and this was his Ulysses. We wanted to understand it, to be experts in it, and ultimately to produce art at least as great. Tony also spent that final year obsessing over his senior art show for school, creating art non-stop, art that seemed to fill the entire school, his entire life, leaving no room for anything or anyone else. And he dreamed of the Cooper Union. He wanted it so bad. We made plans to go to New York together after he was accepted. Over a map of New York City we would discuss how he would attend the Cooper Union while I was to get a job and make art for a year while waiting to get accepted into a school in the city as well. We would scour apartment listings, looking for that perfect place where we could live together and make art together. Of course Tony was accepted to the Cooper Union. Of course. No one doubted at all that he would be. He worked too hard, was too talented to be declined. But after he received that big envelope with his letter of acceptance, I decided I should stay in Birmingham, study art history, finish college there, plan for graduate school. Antonio was disappointed, but seemed to understand. From New York I received dispatches from Tony, both from Tony and from other friends. He would explain to me the latest trends, which artists to watch for, what music to listen to. He introduced me to “relational aesthetics” which seemed fascinating to me and seemed hip to him. I finished college by writing my senior paper on this new form of communicative art, though by the time I finished that work, Tony was chastising me, explaining that relational aesthetics was already passé. But other unverified, apocryphal tales filtered down to me from New York as well. After Antonio’s second year in that northern city, I heard that he had been expelled from the Cooper Union. The story would change every time I heard it. From what I came to understand, bored with his foundation art classes at the Union, Tony had taken it upon himself to make larger impression upon the faculty and his peers. He wanted to create art more exciting. So for an assignment he decided to track his professor to her apartment, knock on her door, and throw a net over her, at which point he would capture her as part of a performance art piece. It didn’t end so brilliantly though: the professor punched him through the net, made him leave, and had him expelled from the Union. After his expulsion, Tony stayed with old friends from high school for a while, though eventually he moved back to Alabama, to his family and friends there. He stayed with one friend Kyle for while and she told me a story about how night after getting a job in the city, Tony was complaining about not having any money despite how hungry he was. Kyle looked at him and looked at the pay check in his hand and just asked why he didn’t cash his check. He explained he didn’t have a bank account, and despite that it was too late to go a bank anyhow. So she walked Tony out onto the street and pointed at the four neon signs glowing around them, reading “CASH CHECKS HERE,” thus solving his problem. He proceeded to order every item off a take-out menu and ate just a few bites of each dish. Tony also stayed with another buddy Marcus for a while. I ran into Marcus one night while he was visiting his family in Birmingham. Marcus explained that Tony was a good, if strange roommate. He slept out of the way in a corner of the kitchen, though his presence would some how seem to take up the entire apartment at strange times. Such as one night when Marcus woke up around one in the morning and found Tony in the kitchen wearing a blond wig with a tape recorder, singing along to the Smiths at the top of his lungs. My sister and I basically learned Tony had come back from New York when one night at a lecture by John Waters in Birmingham we were listening to the question and answer session and we heard a familiar voice ask a question of Waters. My sister and I were sitting in the mezzanine of the auditorium and could not see the questioner, but we knew that voice. The question, if there was one, seemed to ramble on for what seemed like ten minutes with prefaces and anecdotes and references to Dennis Cooper. It was him! It was Tony. He was back in town. That was years ago and perhaps some of the only connections we have had since then have been through friends Tony has introduced me to, connections of his also obsessed with Dennis Cooper’s blog. One of these friends in Houston contacted me after his death, to reconnect with me, to comment on how surreal his passing is. And that’s the best word to describe his sudden passing, especially when you have not been right there beside him these years: surreal. And it’s surreal who I’ve reconnected with since Antonio’s death, who have contacted me: friends from high school, friends from Birmingham, friends of Tony’s from his life in Montevallo. And it seems surreal that I was not right there with him as he died. From the time when I first met him, when he irritated me so greatly, to the time when we would spend hours together flipping through old copies of ArtForum, to the time when we dreamed of making art together in New York, to the past few years when his online presence has become unavoidable, it always seemed like his personality has been so great, so bright, so determined and irritating and fascinating and provocative that he would just always be in my life in some way or another, that at some point we would probably be working closely again together. Instead now I am left posting old photos of him and reminiscing about him with my sister and wishing we had been closer these past few years. I’m left with so many questions about his continentally remote death, with regret about how removed from each other that we have been these past couple years, and yet also with all this knowledge, all these references to obscure artists and musicians and movements and philosophers that could have only been transmitted to me through Tony.

already bored by the next presidential election

obama yesterday announced the beginning of his 2012 campaign for reelection. obama said, "I'm going to need you even more this time than last time." yes, yes he will, though i'm not certain he will get that help. i'm not sure he'll be supported with the same enthusiasm as three years ago.

the new york times reports that "aids said they were eager to reach out to independent voters before republicans do." but this may be part of the problem. obama's moderate, neutral position has made him look a little ineffective. barak obama has been an accomplished president, especially considering the situation in which he found the country upon occupying the white house. i think he has supported historically important legislation such as the credit and banking reform bills, the TARP fund, the repeal of dadt; he has guided our miliary through the iraq and afghanistan wars while keeping exit a lodestar, no matter how dim, for our actions in those countries; he has been a figure of inspiration to the country and the world as a black american with a modest background and a name unusual to american politicals who nevertheless has made his way successfully in the world. barak obama will be remembered as significant to american history.

but at the same time, when they elected obama as president, americans were hoping to see a great transformation take place in this country. those who voted for obama, liberal, conservative, radical, independent, however, hoped to see pragmatic change, not the tepid, timid suggestions and support obama has this far put forward. his efforts have seemed half-hearted. this country wanted fireworks and got instead a few hopeful shots in the dark. so yes, obama does need the independent vote to gain reelction, as any president does, but he may need much more. he may have needed to do much more to rally the democratic base as he did previously.

during the last election it was independent voters who won him the election, but it was the truly liberal voters, the loyal democrats who found themselves charmed and energized and hopeful for the potential of this man; these were they who found themselves motivated to campaign, to give money, to canvas, to run voter registration drives, to care enough just to vote resulting in largest voter turnout in this country in decades.

the new york times reports that "the president's aides have set a goal of surpassing the $750 million he raised in 2008." i groan thinking about giving money to obama's campaign, about caring enough. do i want to see a republican win? absolutely not. but neither am i excited about another luke-warm second term for the obama administration. and if i'm already this unmotivated, unexcited by the beginning of the campaign season (election years are generally my favorite), how can i expect the rest of the democratic party to significantly rally, especially those young, idealistic young voters who came out in large numbers last election?