It’s a good thing we all agree this couldn’t happen off Florida’s coast. Otherwise, the Seth McKeel Act* enabling oil drilling in sight of Pass-a-Grille might seem a smidge ill advised. That is all.

*I’m aware there is no such act. This is what is known as gentle political humor.

photo credit: ben.gallagher

Another Speaker, Tip O’Neill once said: ‘All politics is local.’ And I say to you tonight that when it comes to health care for all Americans, ‘All politics is personal.’

Those who read Metro I4 closely, both of you, would have found that phrase and theme familiar.

On July 13th, I wrote a post, partly about health care, titled: Ultimately, All Politics is Personal

It included this passage:

There’s an old saying that “all politics is local.” That could just as easily read: “All politics is personal.”

That’s right folks, it’s your worst nightmare. I’m mainlining high grade sulfuric political thought right into the veins of the she-devil herself. And I feel fine.

photo credit: House Committee on Education and Labor

On one hand, I’m thrilled. I know of no other elected official – national, state, or local – who has, within the last decade, openly challenged the dominant economic establishment within her sphere of influence and won. It’s a remarkable accomplishment for principle and good government, even it proves temporary. Go ahead, name me another politician anywhere with a record to match it.

I’m also worried. I’ll probably vote for Dockery over Alex Sink if it comes to that: I prefer a reasonable populist to a reasonable corporatist. And I fear that Dockery, as a result, will honestly, but relentlessly, move Florida government to the right, particularly on funding issues. And I fear that she’ll help Republicans in Florida seize the mantle of good, transparent government from Democrats and further build their state house majority.

At a time when our traditional words for describing political inclinations are losing all relationship to the way politics actually functions on the ground, Dockery has carved out an original and powerful niche, if Republican voters are smart enough to seize it: She’s a reasonable populist.

Here’s what I mean. Think back to the bailout of U.S. banks. If you remember, the first vote failed because the grassroots and principled wings of both parties revolted. The “left” objected because it saw the deal as class warfare, with the wealthy and powerful hoovering up the resources in the middle class to sustain a system that wasn’t working for most of America even when it functioned. The “right” couldn’t stand the idea of spending $700 billion on banks should be allowed to fail. Too much government intervention in the private sector. Moral hazard and all of that. It was the corporately-funded “center” of both parties that eventually sowed enough terror of financial Armageddon to snag the few votes it needed. We’ll never know if everything would have collapsed; but we do know that the bipartisan vote has proved an incredibly sweet deal for the banking-industrial complex. In this, as in most cases, the “reasonable center” kept the populist wings of both parties from getting what they want, and large economic and corporate interests were served first. We’ll see if that proves to be the right long-term policy.

Contrast this to Dockery’s role in the CSX deal, which bears striking resemblance to the bailout, albeit on a much smaller scale. Opposition on the left sees it a union-busting, liability-transferring, massive taxpayer subsidy of CSX, a powerful and rapacious corporation, brokered by Gov. Bubble himself, Jeb Bush. Opposition on the right sees it as the same thing, minus the concern for the union-busting. They also just hate government spending on transit or other public interest projects. The fact that the CSX deal uses a crappy transit project to camouflage the near monopolization of Florida’s shipping economy by CSX and a few key landowners doesn’t change the principled Tea Party-type opposition to government investment.

But unlike the bailout, in the CSX deal, a “mainstream” politician actually saw the legitimacy of the grassroots arguments of both left and right and relentlessly argued them and organized on behalf of them. Dockery united the activists on both sides for the public good. There is nothing the bipartisan architects of our unfair and corrupt economic structure fear more than that. (I happen to think that the Republican grassroots is completely oblivious to the consequences for themselves of what they think they believe, but that’s a different matter.)

Typically, the establishment “center” pits the grassroots of both parties against one another for the benefit of big economic interests. And the people who claim to represent them generally go along. (By the way, if you think Marco Rubio is a conservative, ask him if he supports the CSX giveaway. Believe me, anybody endorsed by Gov. Jeb Bubble, R-Lehman Brothers, believes conservatism means giving your money to large economic interests so they can do whatever the hell they want with it. Charlie’s no better, of course. But if Rubio’s a conservative, I’m a penguin.)

Dockery doesn’t go along, nor does she believe her political role is to suppress the legitimate interests and concerns of the grassroots, or to harness them for cynical benefit. Wonder or wonders, she’s capable of actually looking at a piece of legislation, deciding for herself if it’s beneficial or a swindle, and acting accordingly. That reasonable assessment of fact, driven by fiscal prudence and jealous protection of tax dollars, is what conservatism claims to be, but really isn’t. I’ve joked that I would like conservatives if any existed. Well, one does. To that end, expect Dockery to push for a major overhaul of the Florida Department of Transportation, an government organization that has evolved largely into a taxpayer-funded, interest-free private investment bank for big development and business interests. That’s the kind of reform that doesn’t fit neatly into political shout-fests on television, but it would strike a real blow against the capture of state government by private interests. The grassroots on the right and left would high five gleefully over that.

I have little doubt that Dockery would beat Alex Sink if she won the Republican primary. I have much greater doubt that the roiling Republican electorate in Florida is capable of realizing the power that a reasonable conservative populist could wield in the service of what they claim to be their beliefs. We’ll see. If Dockery can’t convince the Republican base of the value of reasonable populism, maybe someone on the left can. Dockery has left a beautiful blueprint.

I, too, have head all the rumors swirling around my relative absence from Lakeland Local and Metro I-4 News in the last month: Chuck fired me from my volunteer gig over disagreements concerning facial hair; the Obama administration has tapped me to serve as “Obnoxiousness Czar”; I was trampled by wildebeasts, and the Kenyan National Park Service is covering it up. None of these, wish as we might, dear reader, is true.

My actual excuses, for the most part, are quotidian: The little boy’s fall baseball season is in full swing; my lovely wife, the doyenne of downtown, lost her appendix last week (a moment of silence please for that charming, yet useless piece of flesh); my bill-paying job expects to me work from time to time. Sigh.

But there is one more reason. For the last month or so, I have directed the bulk of whatever creative energy I could muster to a new project, a blog study of the almost famous Cross Creek Trial of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Yearling, Cross Creek and a number of other novels focused on the rural area near Gainesville where she lived on and off from roughly 1930 until she died in the 50s. I have a bit of a unique perspective on this trial: My great aunt, who I was very close to, with help from my great-grandfather, represented the woman who sued Marjorie over how she was portrayed in Cross Creek, which was a sort of stylized memoir. Here’s my little kicker introduction from the blog, which you can access here.

In 1943, as World War II raged, my Great Aunt Kate Walton, one of Florida’s first female lawyers, sued Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and writer Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Baskin on behalf of Zelma Cason, a onetime friend who felt defamed by Rawlings’ portrayal of her in the book Cross Creek. The lawsuit and trial, and the core American arguments that surrounded it, make for riveting reading and study. Whether you’re a Marjorie fan, history buff, or relative of mine, I hope you’ll take some time to learn with me about this this unique moment in Florida’s development, when people of great substance and ability clashed over the power of language and the sanctity of the individual.

And here’s a quick rundown of those core arguments from my first post on “Blogging the Cross Creek Trial.”

Race: No major figure in the case is black. Yet, the “Negro question,” as Marjorie often referred to it, the twilight world of extra legal status in which black men and women toiled before the civil rights movement, informs nearly every aspect of the case and the experiences that led to it. In fact, easily the best, most honest, chapter in Cross Creek, called “Black Shadows,” concerns precisely this status and Marjorie’s ambivalence in confronting it. J.V. Walton and Marjorie engaged in a stirring bout of courtroom jousting over Marjorie’s account in that chapter of her behavior toward two black tenants.

The Battle for Palatka: In the first nine months of 1926, the Ku Klux Klan or its sympathizers carried out more than 60 documented extra-legal floggings in Putnam County, of which Palatka is the county seat. At least two black men, identified as Willie Steen and Ed Chisholm, died from injuries suffered at the hands of mobs. J.V. Walton, successful young lawyer and father of four pre-teen girls, including Kate Walton, led the resistance to this reign of terror and stopped it – or so family folklore holds. My preliminary research into this supports the folklore, and even embellishes it. I’m pretty convinced that you can’t understand Aunt Katie’s role in this case – and J.V.’s – without understanding the fight with the Klan.

Womanhood: It is a simple matter of fact that the key female characters in this story were all college-educated, professional, childless women. The Cross Creek Trial previews the exploding influence of professional and working women on our economy and culture, which I think is the most far-reaching social transformation of the 20th century – more influential even than civil rights. You can see it coming in the Cross Creek trial.

Writing, Journalism, and Truth: The people who wrote, marketed, and studied Cross Creek often differed in what to call it – novel, non-fiction, journalism, memoir, autobiography. There are many conflicting references, which I’ll try to document. The fact that even supporters of Marjorie struggled to characterize Cross Creek, a book describing real people, foreshadows the case, I think.

For me, Cross Creek clearly presents itself as non-fiction, a type of journalism. In that sense, it fails. Now that I’ve read Marjorie’s letters to her husband, Norton Baskin, I can say without hesitation that Cross Creek is a deeply dishonest book. Its narrator and lead character, Marjorie Rawlings, bears only passing resemblance to the real Marjorie Rawlings. The Marjorie of her letters is a far more compelling person – funny, neurotic, fearful of many things, moody, guilt-ridden, insightful, gutsy, driven by conscience, depressed, very physically unhealthy, and often resentful of her neighbors in the milieu she described, and from which she profited.

My creative writing professor in college once told us, “To write is to sit in judgment on yourself.” Marjorie does that fiercely in her letters. She doesn’t in Cross Creek. It makes the effect of everything else she writes in that book suspect.

We live in an age where longstanding conventions of journalism and professional writing are crumbling, undermined by technology and funding-model changes. In that sense, the Cross Creek trial, while fought over an insult that seems quaint compared to any comment string on a modern webnews story, anticipates many of the cultural fights surrounding journalism, law and writing going on today.

Aunt Katie and me: From the time I was about five, roughly 1976, until my family moved to Tallahassee in the summer of 1979, I spent nearly every Saturday morning with Aunt Katie – driving a golf cart around her property on the St. Johns River, cane pole fishing off her dock, listening to her read poetry, watching her smoke cigars. My wife and I had our wedding party in front of her simple cracker house on the river, now owned by a younger aunt. My kids all caught their first fish off the same dock where she and I sat together. Her death was my first real experience with grief. Anyone reading this should know my loyalties lie with her, even though I never really knew the person who sued Marjorie Rawlings. I intend to meld the ambitious 30-something lawyer who wrote and argued the case with such professional intensity with “Katie the Wonderful,” as my grandmother called her, the irresistibly eccentric aunt whose love dominates my childhood memories. I want my children and eventual grandchildren to know her. And frankly, though such a wish is well beyond my power, I want the wider world to remember her. However, I’m also aware that Aunt Katie probably wouldn’t approve of such a project, particularly that last part. As Ms. Acton and subsequent literary suitors found, my extended family always felt great ambivalence in talking about the trial, not wanting to offend Aunt Katie’s wishes. Now, with my grandmother’s passing, no one from Aunt Katie’s generation is left. And I’m going to take my chances, fully aware that I may have to answer to her one day.

So, there you have it, what I’m up to. I hope this exercise will entertain people in its own right, just because it’s a great story, whether one knows anything about Marjorie Rawlings, Aunt Katie, Zelma Cason, or anybody else. But I also hope that Marjorie’s legions of fans will engage me, along with people who know and love Cross Creek and Florida. I hope my family will share Aunt Katie stories that I don’t know, safe in the knowledge that I’ll take the blame for invading her privacy.

Whatever your angle or interest, I hope you’ll comment and argue and point me toward more and better sources. Tell me when I get things wrong. More than anything else, I hope to resurrect this trial to the cultural and historical importance I think it deserves. Help me out. Or just enjoy learning about this unique moment in Florida history, when people of great substance and ability clashed over the power of language and the sanctity of the individual.

And that, folks is what I’ve been up to. I hope to turn this into a book, and I think the blog format is great way to solicit input, learn things, and collect my thoughts. I hope you’ll find it interesting.

And I’m not forsaking LL or Metro I4 – although I do have a vacation planned for the next few days. I should be able to write more now that the site is up and functioning.

Lastly, I just want to thank Chuck, who, of course, offered his talent and expertise in building the Cross Creek Trial site and never once complained that it was siphoning energy away from my work for his sites. Chuck is one of the most generous, community-minded people I know. I’m proud to call him a friend and remain perpetually in his debt. He’s a tremendous resource for this town. Thanks, man.

If not, and if you don’t like Obamacare, I’d like hear what you would like. I’m going to list a few basic facts, as I understand them, about US health care today. I’d like any of my handful of readers to either tell me my facts are wrong or suggest a way to address them.

1) Sixty percent of Americans get health insurance through an employer. That health insurance, very roughly, costs $12,000-$14,000 each year in premiums alone. That doesn’t count copays and coinsurance. Employees typically pay $4,000 – $6,000 yearly in their premiums. Employers pay the rest. You pay about 30 percent; your employer pays about 70 percent.

2) These employer-based health costs are rising much faster than general inflation or wage increases. They are rising faster than government-paid health care – Medicare, medicaid, VA – which are themselves rising much faster any other tax-funded cost.

3) Employers – whether they be business or government – cannot absorb these cost increases forever. They will provide ever less health care, at greater cost, until they decide to drop it altogether. I personally think the dropping it altogether is likely to happen much sooner than we think if nothing changes. I base this on my experience in newspapers and how quickly the irrational business subsidy known as newspaper advertising dried up once businesses figured out it was an expensive luxury they didn’t need to continue. In in era of long-term high unemployment, I think employers will find they can drop heath care for employees and still retain them.

4) If we outlawed every medical malpractice in America – even the thousands that have great merit – we would not dent the medical inflation problem, contra Krauthammer. Texas is a good example. Even if you reduce malpractice insurance for doctors, you’re not measurably reducing the cost of care. Believe it or not, even as the son of dirty trial lawyer, I’m actually sympathetic to malpractice law reform, for its own sake. If you ever really want to kill medical malpractice suits, go to true socialized medicine. The government would slap sovereign immunity on it faster than you could say, “I object.” Go study this yourself; there’s a million conflicting points-of-view. Getting rid of malpractice suits seems to have good economic effect for doctors, but little impact anywhere else.

Given all of this, what do you do about it? Let’s hear some specifics. “No socialism,” or “let the market handle it”, or “people need to eat better,” don’t count. I’m talking about changes to the model.

But ultimately, I do think that building a publicly controlled rail corridor, high speed or other, linking Tampa, Orlando, and ultimately, Miami, will carry important long-term benefits for the state. And of all the rail routes discussed for Florida, the Tampa-to-Orlando stretch has greatest potential ridership. So, I’m happy to see everyone moving forward on it. (Everyone, that is, except JD Alexander and the Winter Haven folks.)

But, in the interest of intellectual honesty, and embracing the uncertainties and potential consequences of what I support, I want to make a few points:

1) Where is CSX on this? It’s important to remember that CSX gave $50,000 to Jeb’s effort to kill HSR back in the day. The inferred quid pro quo, based on what happened, was that Jeb committed to the CSX rerouting/Sunrail plan. We should be asking what quids, pros, and quos are a part of this resurgent HSR plan. CSX has been very quiet about this. So Gary or Mike, how about emailing me an official CSX position on today’s HSR plan? bitown1@gmail.com.

2) In a related question, what are the technical possibilities for the actual lines? What I mean is, could we build a new freight line in tandem with the HSR line? Would CSX use it? Would it even be helpful in diverting freight out of city cores – Orlando, Lakeland, Plant City, Tampa, included? Does the HSR corridor give us a chance to redesign freight and passenger flow in a way that works better for everybody than the CSX-designed realignment would? Could this be an actual useful public-private partnership, rather than a public-private giveaway?

3) Are elected officials and DOT technocrats prepared for the traffic mayhem that will come while building this thing? As a four-day-a-week commuter to Tampa, I support the project while knowing that it will likely make my driving life hell for some period of time. Don’t underestimate the traffic anger policymakers in the corridor are going to face when construction starts.

4) U.S. 98 v USFP? Where should the Lakeland stop go? My preliminary feeling is that Kathleen/U.S. 98 area makes more sense, with perhaps an express bus linking the station there with USFP campus. But I’m open to argument.

5) This really should have nothing to do with Sunrail. That project is a suburban commuter rail system, designed to bring people in far-flung areas of Orange, Volusia, and Osceola counties into the city of Orlando. If you’re a business person or tourist, you don’t need a commuter train from the HSR station to Debary. You need a light rail connection, or a bus, to Disney, or the airport, or I-Drive. Now, I guess it might make sense to put the HSR station between Disney and I-drive, rather than downtown. But in that case, I don’t see why any business person would use it. Anyway, we should resist efforts to link these projects. They should rise and fall on their own merits. But, as I mentioned before, I do see a chance to explore better routing of freight, using the HSR corridor.

Much has already been written about the movie, pointing to the South African setting and the grinding relations between human and alien as allegorical reminders of our intractable human social divisions. Fine. But I’m not a big fan of allegory; and I think this movie is way deeper than that. So I want to get an online conversation started about it because, frankly, my wife is sick of listening to me talk about it.

I know that Chuck, for one, was kind of meh about “District 9.” What follows is my pitch for why I hope he’ll give it another shot. For my money, it’s the best, most challenging science fiction movie since “Children of Men,” which it resembles in climax and sensibility, at least. And, strangely enough, it has the potential to get better, if some of what it hints at emerges more fully in the sequel that’s almost inevitable now that it’s a financial success.

Anyway, from now on, I’m going to assume you’ve seen the movie, so consider yourself warned because major spoilers will follow.

Four main points:

1) Of all the vivid scenes in the movie, the cockfight between alien newborns, where one bug-looking critter sticks a spine through another as mature aliens and Nigerian gangsters cheer them on and bet addictive cat food, lingers with me most. And this brief background moment only grows in power because of the articulate little boy alien we come to care for as the movie unfolds. These are babies cockfighting. Think what that means. Babies that will turn into (maybe) this charming little alien pre-teen dressed in scrounged pajamas. (A fabulous costume touch, by the way.) We’re so conditioned by movies like “Starship Troopers” and the “Alien” franchise to think of bug-like aliens as soulless special effects. I love how “District 9″ plays with these motifs to do confounding emotional things with them.

2) Which leads into the biggest mystery in the movie. The aliens brought with them weapons of massive force that only they can wield; they are more athletic than humans. So why are they so passive and accepting of their situation? And why, when we humans have learned to largely understand their language, when we control their lives, have we been unable to get them to tell us where they come from or how their culture and technology work? This is addressed in exactly one line during some of the “documentary” footage worked into the film. The speculation is that the more than a million aliens we found on the disabled ship were part of a sort of a mentally deficient worker class, whose leaders died due to illness of some sort or jettisoned from the ship at the time it showed up over South Africa. Presumably, Christopher Johnson, the main character and lone smart alien we come to know, is part of that leadership class, as is his little boy.

It’s telling that his plan, once he gets the command module working, is to get the hell off earth with his child and a one other friend who gets offed early on. He appears to have literally no contact with the “worker” aliens. The million-plus suffering countrymen or whatever they are don’t really factor into his thinking. It’s not until he sees first hand the experiments that Halliburton, errr, MNU is carrying out that he begins to worry about “his people”. As he stands over the mutilated bodies motionless, we think we’re seeing him overcome by horror. But actually, I think he’s having a moment of conscience, like Wikus has at the end. I think he’s always seen the worker aliens as alien as we have. Or at least that’s my theory, that he’s an elite member of a highly powerful and advanced slave/caste society, where the workers are mentally disabled or limited somehow. That’s a really interesting dynamic to throw as a wrench into your allegory machinery.

Now, it could be that I’m overthinking this and that what I consider a mystery is just a flaw in the movie’s logic. But I don’t think so. We’ll see.

3) The guy who plays Wikus should get an academy award nomination. A lot of commenters have talked about how bumbling and not up to the alien management job Wikus is. But that’s not right. He’s quite an effective big company operational bureaucrat. He knows the rules; and how to improvise them when they get in the way. His subordinates like him. His wife loves him. He is the embodiment of Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil.” He basically learns not to see the aliens he deals with. Then he makes one big mistake, and things flip. He finds himself unseen as the MNU guys figure out that he can fire alien weapons. The scene where he tries to resist firing the weapons and then pathetically tries to negotiate with the scientist absently shocking him is stunning. Go back and see it, Chuck. Watch how the Wikus character reassesses everything on the fly and then realizes simultaneously that no one gives a shit – and the genuine terror that causes. A tremendous performance.

4) Finally, everyone in the movie is a scavenger – the aliens, MNU, the Nigerians. Wikus. Even Christopher. They all dwell in a world devoid of creativity and selflessness. MNU isn’t even building its own weapons; its trying to figure out how to scavenge the aliens’ stuff. This is where “District 9″ most evokes “Children of Men.” It’s about the hellishness of existence that lacks the hope inherent in creation. A more religious guy than me might call such a world Godless.

But unlike “Children of Men,” there’s no direct mention – not one – of God or organized religion in “District 9.” (Shamanism doesn’t count.) That’s a conspicuous absence in a movie concerning a jarring reassessment of our species’ role in the universe – unless you consider what happens to human bodies when Wikus and Christopher start firing these alien DNA weapons acts of “God,” defined as a power beyond our comprehension.

I hate torture/gore/sadism porn movies. Hated Seven. Won’t see Saw or Hostel. But there is something going on with the violence in District 9. I felt a visceral Old Testament thrill when the energy guns started exploding MNU guys and Nigerian gangsters alike. It’s satisfyingly hideous.

And the most satisfying scene in the whole movie is the reward for Christopher’s 20-years-in the-making creative reconstruction of the command module’s propulsion system. When he finally gets back to the mother ship, and the engines fire up for the first time in human presence, and the force blows out every window in Johannesburg, the proverbial alien shit has hit the fan. God is rewarding faith and creativity with awe-inspiring power.

So it’s telling that the movie ends with a small act of creativity, as Wikus, now fully alien, fashions flowers for his wife out of aluminum cans and leaves them at her door. We just better hope that when Christopher comes back in three years that Wikus’ acts of creativity and selflessness have redeemed us and not just him.

Ok. I admit this piece is a bit obsessive, but that’s what I do. So don’t leave me hanging. Give me your takes if you’ve seen it.

Scully: “Well, we know it can’t be a vampire.”
Mulder: “Why?”
Scully: “Because they don’t exist.”

This is what I think about conservatives, right now. They are mythological. Even Orange County mayoral candidate Matt Falconer, for whom I had great hope, just wants to tie government employee health benefits to the private sector, rather than cut them altogether.

“I do not want to eliminate employee health care, just put a limit on it,” Falconer said in an email to me. He also attached a report he co-authored looking into Orange County budget issues in which he points out that health care costs Orange County $7,000-$12,000 per employee each year. The authors complain about how much that is, but then proceed to do nothing about it. Capping spending on a thing which grows significantly in cost each year is weak sauce. Either cut it, or pay for it.

I challenge conservatives to explain why government should continue to provide health care to employees, if, indeed, government employees are coddled and overpaid and the free market provides answers to all problems.

Anyway, today we’ve got teabirthers rioting at town hall forums over the idea that the government might somehow intervene with itself in Medicare – and that would be bad, or something – as part of a far too modest insurance reform package. Below is from Kathy Castor’s town hall last night:

Funny, I remember all you Republicans dismissing these Ron Paul people as crazy when he was running in your primary. How quickly things change. But I digress. What’s missing from all this yelling and shoving, as always, is a willingness to actually embrace the consequences what you say you believe. If you don’t want big government, start cutting it.

But you won’t. Perfect example: State Sen. Carey Baker, from Lake County, wants to exempt Florida from any federal health insurance reform that emerges from Congress. But, of course, he’s all for keeping Medicare taxes and participation mandatory. States rights, indeed.

Bottom line conservatives, you can pander to teabirthers all you want. Get them to yell and fuss. But if you or they are not willing to start dismantling unsustainable things – by things, I mean Medicare, Medicaid, the US military – you’re not conservative. You’re just a dishonest liberal. You lack the courage of your convictions, which is why I’ve never shared them. They don’t exist.

I think this reform would be a perfect fit for Matthew Falconer, who is perhaps the most politically and ideologically interesting candidate running in the I-4 corridor right now. He was an invaluable ally in the battle against the CSX deal, railing against corporate socialism from the libertarian right, just like I did from what I guess passes for the ideological left in this state. He’s now running for Orange County mayor, which in that system, is essentially an elected county manager, on a fiercely anti-government platform. Check out his blog, where he bills himself as a “creative extremist,” a rather ingeniously meaningless term. For our Polk readers, think of him as more coherent version of Randy Wilkinson.

To his credit, Falconer’s brand of conservatarianism seems intellectually honest. Like Randy, he’s extremely critical of the cost and scope of the law enforcement/incarceration complex, a criticism for which I have much sympathy. Falconer also blasts the whole “economic development” talking point as a scam for funneling taxpayer money to big business. See CSX. Another position for which I have great sympathy. The Republican establishment does not like him any more than the Democratic establishment does.

He tends to write about government in language that conservatives would call class warfare if non-conservatives wrote it. An example:

I spoke today to a republican women’s club. Among the guests were some six figure government officials. When I told one I was going to be the next Orange County Mayor, his response was “yeah right.” I guess he does not like my idea that government benefits should not be better than the taxpayers who support them. I guess he did not like my plan to cut government salaries above $100,000 by 10%, including my own (and his).

Obviously, he and I differ on the nature and usefulness of government in the abstract. He seems to see it as a fixed, hopeless evil, where I see it as a thing that is useful or harmful, depending on how we the people form and oversee it. I feel certain Falconer would oppose any government-administered national health care plan, for instance.

Yet, local government provision of employee insurance is a place where our differing ideological interests could intersect and allow for some testing of abstract theories about governments and markets.

It’s important here to insert a fact that I don’t think everyone understands: If you get insurance from an employer, the premiums your employer takes out of your check cover only a small portion of the cost of your insurance. Your employer an your co-pays cover the rest, with the employer paying by far the largest chunk. That’s why COBRA is so much more expensive when you leave an employer – you have pick up the additional cost. The premium subsidies and overall costs of insuring employees are killing employers.

Accordingly, I believe the single greatest obstacle to long-term economic and social prosperity for the US is the employer-based health care system. It distorts everything – the cost of health care, the relationship between employer and employee, the quality of health care, and the entrepreneurial/innovative instinct. It’s one thing for a person to risk his or her own health care; it’s quite another to risk the whole family’s and strike out alone. As long as most of the US middle and upper class – 60 percent of all Americans – receives care from employers – albeit increasingly expensive and mediocre health care – we will never get to the kind of system that doesn’t weigh like an anvil in our national economic life. Forget taxes or housing, health care will eventually eat up the greatest portion of all our monthly incomes. It will also devour business profits. That’s a recipe for perpetual stagnation, not to mention crappy care.

I’d rather businesses realize this and stop providing health care to employees – and they will, eventually. But we could make that process quicker and easier if our local governments, which, including schools, tend to be the largest local employers, would prime the pump. From my point-of-view, I think it’s clear this would be horribly traumatic and cause very real hardship for many, many people. But that’s the point, I’m sorry to say. If local, state, and federal governments – including school systems — across the country stopped directly providing health insurance to employees, a huge chunk of the middle class and economic engine of this country would find itself in need of real health care reform. As a bonus, local governments would virtually solve their crippling financial problems overnight. Doctors and medical facilities would have radically revisit their pricing structures because millions of their best customers could no longer afford to see them. Magic of the market, indeed.

Come on, conservatives. You should love this.

Yes, people, including children, might die for lack of access in the period of transition. But what about the people who are dying now? Maybe it’s just that the children of government workers tend to be the children of people that we who write and read blogs know, not the faceless kids and adults we just hear as statistics. Many, many people in that 40 percent who don’t get insurance from employers don’t get insurance at all. 47 million – and counting – is the stat we hear. For a hideous sense of scale, that’s eight times as many people as Jews killed in the holocaust. Think about that for a second. We all just kind of shrug about those folks and write dumb letters decrying government intervention in Medicare.

I honestly think it would take only a couple of big local or state governments to drop employee health coverage to set off a chain reaction that would blow up the employer-system. The savings are too great, and governments and businesses are giant copycats. At that point, the political pressure for a national system would become overwhelming, and we could design a sustainable model that revolves around helping patients, not propping up insurance companies at ever greater cost.

The one big question mark I have is this: Would employees leave government en masse if we cut insurance coverage for them? I don’t think so. At least not now, because there’s nowhere for them to go. And I also think the mass shedding of employer insurance would happen so fast that there would be little benefit arbitrage out there to exploit. But I’m not certain of this. Would such a decision cause government to stop functioning? It’s a good question.

Now, if Falconer’s worldview is correct, that answer is clear cut. Absolutely not. He thinks you can cut salaries 10 percent, that government is a “country club”. As a good free market conservative, I’m sure he also thinks the market can easily adjust to provide for these middle class folks newly without insurance. So what about it, Matt? Forget the 10 percent salary cut. That’s a gimmick. Get creatively extreme. Orange County’s health care fund is expected to hit $35 million in two years, a dead recurring expense growing forever. (It may be much more than that because I’m not sure how the constitutional officers, including the sheriff, are dealt into the mix. It’s hard to tell from the budget book.) If all other Orange County governments followed suit – the schools, city of Orlando, etc. – you could save local taxpayers way more than $100 million every year. The aggregate long-term savings would be billions.

And you’d help me get this country a sustainable, patient-focused health care system. Talk about post-partisan.

In the meantime, I regret to inform you that our good sheriff has declined my offer to talk about the wisdom of continuing to outlaw marijuana. A shame. Here’s the official line from my buddy Donna Wood, a sheriff’s office spokeswoman: “The Sheriff’s opinion is that Marijuana is an illegal drug – and people who possess it will be arrested.” That, of course, is a statement addressing a strawman, but I guess even a political colossus like the sheriff needs to be careful about talking about talking freely about controversial subjects. Our president recently relearned that lesson.

In the meantime, check out this video about Amsterdam, which Fox News branded a “cesspool” because of its tolerant drug policies.

Monday marks the 40th anniversary of the moon landing of Apollo 11. For my father, Bill Townsend Jr., this entire summer marks the 40th anniversary of his service in Vietnam. In about three weeks, he’ll mark the 40th anniversary of the wound he suffered that ended his tour after about four months. Over the years, the story I heard Dad tell most often recounted the strange duty he was performing when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon. My mother, my sister, and I convinced him to finally write it down. I think it will speak for itself. Enjoy.

The moon landing would occur at 4:17 PM Eastern Daylight Time on July 20th, 1969, according to the spate of old news reruns and modern specials I’ve seen as part of the 40th anniversary. Not only the US but the whole earth, we were assured back then, was agog at the upcoming triumph. It was the first time man would touch another world.

In my world, the touchdown happened at 0317 military time–just past three o’clock in the morning–on July 21st. As momentous as the event was, the earth did not stop its turning, and half a world away the next day had inexorably come. The waning moon had set, and the meager lights of a nearby town were almost nonexistent. It was very dark.

The bridge after damage with temporary pontoon bridge.
I was sitting comfortably behind a waist-high wall of sandbags that served as a bunker among the twisted girders of an old steel bridge that crossed the Saigon River near the town of Phu Cuong from which the bridge took its name among the troops. It probably had a real name, but to us it was always just the Phu Cuong Bridge. At least once–some said twice–Viet Cong had blown up the bridge by floating down the river and breathing through snorkels until they reached the pilings. There was much speculation about how they could have carried enough explosives to do the damage we could see. The favorite story was that they buoyed a large American bomb they had recovered until it could float with buoy almost submerged, covered it with one of the large rafts of vegetation (which really did float down the river) and using straws for snorkels swam invisibly beneath the plant mats until they could tie the bombs against the pilings. Whether only one bomb had been used was frequently debated.

Whatever they did, it worked. Every piece of metal in the original bridge was twisted or broken and the engineers had propped it up with a crazy quilt of beams and buttresses that looked like the product of a madman with an erector set, the tinkertoys of that long ago time.

Being at the bridge was good duty since it was almost never attacked by land. One infantry company at a time would protect it, and a much smaller bridge across a creek about a mile away, for thirty days. Given the bridge’s history, our sole job was to continually throw hand grenades and a plastic explosive known as C-4 into the water. The idea was to keep up continuous random concussions to discourage enterprising VC aquanauts.

Three hours after midnight on the 21st I was using a flack jacket as a lounge chair and throwing my explosives. My feet were propped on an empty grenade crate. Boxes of grenades and explosives that had not been emptied were stacked around me, much higher than the sandbags. (We joked about them as our “bunker” walls.) The tinny sound of armed forces radio drifted from the small portable perched behind me. The Beatles had just come out with Get Back! And the song was much loved. Its line: “Get back, get back, get back to where you once belonged…” became a mantra for a while. The rainy season had started a couple of weeks before but this night was calm and clear. I think I remember “Get Back” drifting from the radio just before the moon landing coverage broke in.

Concertina wire waiting to be installed on the bridge.
There was an incredible surreality about our Vietnam nights. The land was entirely flat with rice paddies and the remnants of defoliated jungle. At night, you could see for many miles, and the horizon was lit up in all its circle. Like distant carnivals, streams of tracers from ricochets or apparently pointless firing into the air lit the sky, usually too far away for any sound. Distant explosions also flickered like heat lightening. We could usually recognize the types and could tell an RPG from a 105 with casual expertise. Sometimes we would see the solid tracer line going down from American gunships like a hose of fire with no separation between the individual rounds. On many nights, far away to the west in Cambodia, the B-52’s would endlessly bomb the supposed transit routes of the Ho Chi Min Trail. The flickers of light would seem continuous, and usually we could feel–though not hear–the vibration in the ground. On this night they were bombing, and I thought I could feel the faintest rumble pass through the torn metal of the bridge.

The feed from NASA through the radio was live and direct. I suppose we heard the same feed as those back home. The astronauts neared their rendezvous with something incredible, the first human touch of another world in history, and their voices were proudly professional and in charge as they counted out the approach in distance units. I remember I thrilled when they called their approach in miles and feet. Like many of our soldiers, I met metric units for the first time in the army and it still seemed traitorous to speak in “hundreds of meters” and “clicks” (kilometers). I hope my memory runs true.

As Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin closed on their landing site I made up another charge. C-4 came in sticks of 2.2 pounds–a kilo–and I pulled one from the crate. While listening to the radio I prided myself in how expert I had become. I perfectly made the hole in the modeling clay-like substance with my knife, crimped the blasting cap to the fuse, inserted the fused cap in the hole and squeezed the clay tight around the cap. I did each of the steps professionally, expertly, and felt my pride there in the dark at the adroit movements of my fingers, handling the caps where an explosion would set off the whole bridge. Only a few months before, I would have been totally inept in the darkness. Now I had mastered a dangerous task and did it with sureness and calm.

Behind me Aldrin, obviously reading an instrument, spoke in a voice that crackled slightly on the cheap radio: “twenty feet…fifteen…ten…seven,” in a tone like he was counting toothpicks. “Touchdown.” The sky was completely dark except for a faraway explosion or two. I wished the moon had not set, leaving no crescent in the sky to look at in honor of the occasion. Then, close to the river, a much longer string of tracers rippled the sky. For an instant I thought it might be a gesture in honor of the moment, like fireworks at New Years, but the colors quickly showed they were not ours.

I somehow lost time for a moment, and the radio had returned to music when I became aware. A faint smell of pot mixed with the odor of cooking blew softly down the bridge. I split the fuse end with my knife exposing the powder and lit it with my lighter. The fuse made the faintest red glow as it circled through the air into the water. The explosion was solid but somehow unsatisfying, as was the one that followed from two bunkers down the bridge. The radio kept playing music. I reached in the crate and took out another stick.

Cross posted at LakelandLocal.com

Surprisingly enough, most of the commenters seemed to agree with me, which doesn’t always happen. But one person in particular took me to task pretty thoughtfully in a pair of long comments he or she must have spent some time composing. For the purposes of this post, here’s key passage:

And Mr. Townsend I wonder if it would not be too much trouble to disagree with people without making it personal. Is the “you people” to which you refer “Baby Boomers” in general? Or just the elderly who disagree with your political position? To suggest that Mr. Feuer’s was “The Dumbest Letter Ever Written to the Ledger” is offensive on its face. if one takes the time to write out of concern, should not the concern be addressed without throwing them under the bus? No , that’s not the way we do things anymore, we need to berate, and castigate them until they are silenced. Not everyone has the ability to make a point without writing a book, but you know that. So when a concern is raised, could just a little latitude be offered.

This is a point worth discussing, I think, if just for the sake of the commenter. (If the rest of you find this entirely too much narcissism, feel free to eject at this point.)

My first reaction was to emphasize that I attacked the author’s letter, not him. But that’s disingenuous. Clearly, I stuck it to an elderly man I don’t know to make a point, complete with a couple of turns of phrase seeking malicious laughs at his expense. It was not, as my mother might say, Christian behavior. And yet I stand by it fully and regret nothing. Why?

It has to do with the relationship between the abstract and the real, or the “personal”, as the commenter says. More and more, I see this as the key divide among citizens and the institutions – public and private – we allow to govern us. Far too many citizens of all parties are ignorant of the basic consequences of their beliefs – or at least the talking points they’ve heard other people say – and are unwilling to learn about them. This letter provides a beautiful example of that. The author repeats the talking points he’s heard — “The big government takeover has to stop. Ever since liberals claimed power, it’s been one bureaucratic scheme after another.” — while demonstrating utter obliviousness to the fact that his beloved Medicare is, in fact, next to the military and social security, the largest “bureaucratic scheme” in the history of the United States. If we did away with these dreadful big-government-takeover-liberal-bureaucratic-schemes, the author would suddenly experience what it means to be old and “conservative.” Doctors and pharmacies don’t take IOUs.

So here I am, reading this letter in The Ledger. What to do? Easiest thing is to ignore it. But these types of letters, ignorant as they are, repeat, perpetuate, and help establish longterm abstract narratives that harden into political realities which have no bearing on actual reality and prevent us from taking common sense action.

Here’s a good example: the carbon tax. Such a thing could long ago have helped spur alternative energy and transit investment and development – such as the Europeans enjoy – and helped us move away from Saudi oil. But because so-called conservative Republicans over the years so successfully turned the word tax, out of all relation to its meaning in the real world, into an abstraction roughly equivalent to child molester, we never grappled with the pernicious realities of foreign energy dependence. Remember, Bill Clinton wanted to institute an energy tax at the onset of his administration. Who filibustered that to death, I wonder?

Instead, we allowed reality, in the form of religious terrorists, corrupt regimes, and opportunistic participants in energy markets to provide the tax for us last year – on their terms. It took $4 gas about six months to kill the SUV culture in this country. A sensible carbon tax might have kept it from ever developing – and left us with viable solar energy like they have in Germany or fantastic public transit and high speed rail like France. Think we’d be better off, right now? Because of the lasting power of the tax bogeyman abstraction and big economic interests to cower politicians, we can’t even do a simple carbon tax now, which leaves us with this Godawful corporate grab-bag of a cap and trade plan to fight global warming.

In the case of health care, all those people talking in the abstract about the horrors of a “government takeover” seem completely unable to even consider that the entire private health care system depends on the willingness of employers to pay for its ever-increasing cost, as I laid out here. They want to stay with a model that is almost certainly doomed if it doesn’t change. And they give no thought to the consequences of that.

You could make an argument that the tax/government takeover abstraction would be legitimate if conservatives actually embraced the consequences of treating taxes as evil. But they don’t, because that would mean real, substantive, death enducing cuts in the services those dreaded taxes buy, such as Medicare and the military. That’s where the money is, folks. Nowhere else.

And that brings us to this “ever since liberals claimed power” nonsense. It is a fact that George W. Bush, in his first term in office, backed by a mostly Republican congress, launched two wars and created the Medicare prescription drug plan, the most expansive and expensive government entitlement program since the Great Society. He did all of this while slashing taxes. He then proceeded to account for all of this by keeping the costs of Iraq and Afghanistan off budget and by pretending that his tax cuts would sunset at the end of his term in office, thereby assuring that his successor – whoever it might have been – would have to either keep up the dishonesty or acknowledge a much larger US deficit than Bush was willing to acknowledge. This is breathtaking in its irresponsibility, dishonesty, and shamelessness. Throw out the value or morality of these policies for a second and just consider their budget impact. I know of no failure of US financial governance by a president of any party that remotely compares to this massive unfunded mandate on the American people. And while a number of craven, gutless Democrats helped, this was Bush’s agenda, fully backed by the institutional Republican party and helped along by a debt and housing bubble. I’d like my commenter to either acknowledge this or tell me why I’m wrong.

It is incredibly difficult, as a political opposition, to wrestle with opponents willing to engage in this level of shamelessness. Run on actually paying for all this government action, and you’re an income confiscating socialist tax-and-spend liberal. Run on ending the Iraq War or the Medicare prescription drug plan because we can’t afford them, and you’re an America-hating senior killer. Run on some messy combination of the two, and you’re all of the above plus a wishy-washy flip-flopper. That was John Kerry in 2004.

My commenter writes: “I am not a big fan of the previous administration either.” Really? See, I hear this a lot now. Oh, I couldn’t stand Bush. Not a real conservative. Really? Who did you vote for in 2004, when all of this was well-known? Put your money where your mouth is. John Kerry, for all his many problems, actually ran on trying to pay for some of Bush’s government. Bush did not. Nor did he run on cuts. Did you vote to repudiate this most unconservative of approaches to government?

I didn’t think so. And nothing changed in the next four years.

Now that we have a president who is trying to actually address these problems (getting out of Iraq, trying to reform health care in a way that restrains cost growth, and yes, borrowing money to nudge the economy away from bubbles while preserving public education and other services), letter-to-the-editor conservatives suddenly have rediscovered the principles they claim to hold, but don’t even understand.

And therein lies the problem. It isn’t the policy; it’s the political shamelessness behind the abstractions that lead to the policy and the grassroots willful ignorance that enables it.

And that’s why I went after this letter and its writer. I hate to say it, because it’s harsh, but he’s the problem. I want all my services, but I don’t want to pay for them because I’m an anti-government conservative – or something. And he is not alone. There’s an old saying that “all politics is local.” That could just as easily read: “All politics is personal.”

If I ignore his letter, it’s just another log on the fire of a wrongheaded, but powerful narrative. If I treat this letter’s repetition of talking points as a legitimate argument, I legitimize it. I have no interest in doing that. The author’s not making an argument or even asking a question, so there’s nothing to engage with in good faith. (In contrast to my commenter.) By calling him out, and by mocking that other old saw about how much better educated the previous generations were, I hoped to discredit him and the ignorance to which he contributes.

And, ultimately, I hope that I’ll discredit him effectively enough to protect him from himself. There’s another saying I’ve come to love, “Those who will not learn will be made to feel.” Let this letter-writer get his wish, and if he lives long enough, and he may get to feel what it’s like when government bureaucratic schemes that help millions of people stay alive fall prey to cynical abstractions.

The Hold Steady, the self-described bar band from Minneapolis, (note the Twins sticker on lead singer and lyricist Craig Finn’s guitar) has long used Ybor City as a recurring motif in its songs. I read once that the band has no special tie to Tampa’s party district. Finn just thinks it sounds cool in songs. Which, if you think about it, makes as good a reason as any for a recurring motif. [Literary term question: Are motifs, by definition recurring? Is the phrase recurring motif redundant? Just curious.]

So when Finn, guitarist Tad Kubler (the guy without the glasses above), and the rest of the five-man band rolled into Ybor’s Ritz Thursday night, it made for a sort of post modernly-local-boys-made-good vibe. Finn talked about the “special” feeling the band has for Ybor. They played a ton of Ybor-referencing songs – more than I thought they had – and closed the regular show with “Slapped Actress” and the encore with “Killer Parties”, both anthemic highlights replete with Ybor City talk.

It was free show, sponsored by Jim Beam, rescheduled from the original show set for Jannus Landing. And that made for an exceedingly weird online ticketing scheme, in which the Ritz and promoters announced the concert as sold out when it clearly wasn’t. This is apropos of nothing, I suppose, but processes interest me, and I don’t quite understand the economic or organizational model behind all of this.

But I digress.

The night began ominously, demonstrating, I fear, just how old I am. (37, in case you care.) The opening act, a two-guy power duo called Greymarket, was playing when my friend John and I walked in. At least I think they were. I’m still trying to decide if it was music, or some government test of an experimental new sonic crowd control weapon.

Look, I like loud music. My wife is always yelling at me to turn it down, and I am slowly demolishing my hearing with maxed out head phones. But I have to tell you, I have stood next to afterburning F-15s quieter than Greymarket. I thought for a second Busch Gardens was filming a remake of the Death Jockey Howl-o-Scream ad campaign. The speakers exploded in my chest and blew my nose hair back and forth. Greymarket literally chased John and me out of the music pit and reduced us to the indignity of asking the men’s room attendant to score us some of the earplugs the Ritz was giving out to women. Best $2 I ever spent in a bathroom. Believe it.

It was a shame, really, because somewhere within the force field of murderous sound, you could hear the hint of something quite good in what Greymarket played. But trying to describe Greymarket’s music would be like trying to describe a caveman buried under a 100 feet of ice. When their set finally ended, I asked one of the young bartenders, “Was that really loud, or am I just really old?” She smiled at me diplomatically and said it didn’t seem much out of the ordinary, adding quickly that she was working in a little booth so she might not have felt the full brunt. I was unconvinced and set about lowering my expectations of the Hold Steady show and working on my excuses for standing out in the hallway.

And therein lies my segue. Expectations. The key element to enjoying any concert. As it turns out, the Hold Steady came out playing with great intelligibility. Loud, but not actively painful. About the third or fourth song, “Sequestered in Memphis,” I think it was, I yanked out my silly earplugs, reproached myself for my lameness, and started moving toward the stage with the white man’s overbite in full effect.

This was my first Hold Steady show. I’ve known about the group since last year when they started touring with my favorite band, the Drive-By Truckers. While they can’t yet match the Truckers’ sprawling canvass of musical style and visceral lyrical insight and emotion, they write catchy, vibrant songs that are easy to love quickly. And Finn’s intricate lyrics, which he half-sings, half-speaks, dance all over the place almost in their own language – call it Singlish – like a really talented rapper’s. The Hold Steady’s songs have more great one-liners than just about any band I know.

Here’s the refrain to one of their best, “Stuck Between Stations:”

She was a really cool kisser, but she wasn’t all that strict of a Christian
She was a damn good dancer, but she wasn’t all that great of a girlfriend
He likes the warm feeling, but he’s tired of all the dehydration
Most nights are crystal clear, but tonight it’s like stuck between stations – on the radio

I don’t have much of clue what the hell all that means, but it sounds great, and the music underneath is infectious. “Stuck Between Stations” absolutely rocked at Thursday night’s show. Probably the highlight for me, along with “Slapped Actress” and “Your Little Hoodrat Friend.”

The band has great charisma live. Finn, who’s bald with glasses, never stops engaging the crowd with a twitchy, dishy grin, that to me suggests a cross between a nerd and a gossip columnist. He actually mouths words off microphone between lines, as if to say, “Can you believe this shit I’m singing about?”

The rest of the guys sort of play straight men, but they play hard. And the piano/organ player Thursday night rocked a porn stache and a golfer’s fedora to great effect.

Many of songs center on the trials of a coterie of “hoodrat” teens from Minneapolis. In fact, like locations, characters with names like Charlemagne and Hallelujah (Holly for short) recur throughout different songs and albums. The character driven tales, often told non-linearly, teem with sex, drugs, and religion. In a less fun and talented band, this might get tiresome and pretentious. But Finn is a genuine poet, with a tremendous sense of irony and an empathetic loyalty to the characters he creates. He clearly loves them. Thus his word play never seems to get stale, while also generating real emotion. And it’s impossible not to nod along the spare, in many ways classic, guitar-driven rock.

I have two half-complaints about the show. The first is, unfortunately, common to most concerts. The music tended to drown out the vocals, which is a shame because Finn’s such a skilled writer and stylized singer. It’s really worth hearing the band’s full package, and if you didn’t know the songs, I don’t think you could get it from the show. But that’s hardly unique to the Hold Steady and the Ritz.

You can get it from these two great recorded concerts on the NPR website.

Speaking of knowing songs, any concertgoer’s experience lies at the mercy of the set list. And while The Hold Steady played every song with real conviction and intensity – no mailing it in here – the set list they chose Thursday wasn’t the one I would have chosen. Again, not really a complaint. They played about 25 songs, which makes for a a pretty dense show. But they played a number of songs I like, but don’t love, while leaving off quite a few I love, notably: “You Can Make Him Like You,” “How a Resurrection Really Feels,” “Banging Camp”, “Chips Ahoy”, “Chill Out Tent”, and “Lord, I’m Discouraged.” Maybe next time, because I would definitely go back.

And in keeping with the Ybor theme, they played a number of older songs with Ybor references that I didn’t know – four or five, I would say. Each one of them sounded good enough to make me want to buy it. And I probably will go back and scour their older recordings on iTunes for songs I’ve missed.

So if you think about it, from The Hold Steady’s point-of-view, based on what’s best for their career, they had an awfully successful concert if I’m any indication. I left wanting more after 25 songs. I will likely own a few more of their songs by the end of the day, and I’ve done what I can to share them with any of you intrepid enough to read. Maybe complete satisfaction is overrated.

Fifty-nine percent of Americans receive health insurance through an employer, according to the ABC News Health Care Town Hall broadcast the other night. If you are among that 59 percent, would you stick to your rhetorical and supposed ideological principles? Would you pony up $10,000 when acute stomach pain you think might be an appendicitis sends your daughter to the emergency room at 3 a.m.? Would you just tell her to suck it up because that’s what conservatives do? Or might you suddenly find yourself rather open to the dreaded socialized medicine? Considering that I’m aware of no great mass of conservative seniors or veterans boycotting Medicare and the VA, guess which option I think is most likely?

For all its massive complexity and expense, the US health insurance model rests entirely upon a single, simply understood Jenga piece: the willingness of private employers to pay for private health insurance and eat its inefficiencies. Pull that piece away, and the whole system falls down in a mass of wreckage – affecting everything from public health to doctors salaries. In this way, private health insurance resembles nothing so much as the institutional newspaper industry, which also long depended on an irrational business subsidy. For years, newspapers managed to convince businesses – and classified advertisers – that they needed to use the newspaper to reach customers in their particular market. At the same time, newspapers convinced themselves that advertisers were paying for their vital community journalism. Reality, in its merciless way, with a little nudge from web technology, has greeted these twin delusions with, “Uh, no” and “Uh, hell no.”

What’s striking to me, in retrospect, is how obviously fragile the entire institutional journalism model always was, even as most of us, myself included, considered it as permanent as undertaking. I suspect, one day soon, we’ll look back on the employer-based model of “free market” health care and say the same thing, especially if the Republicans and corporatist “centrist” Democrats succeed in blowing up meaningful reform as they’re trying very hard to do.

The key health care delusion is that employers provide insurance to keep their employees healthy. No. They provide it because they’re afraid of losing employees to competitors if they don’t. The instant a critical mass of companies perceive they can retain and recruit talent without paying directly for that talent’s basic health care needs, the private US insurance industry, which depends on companies considering health insurance a part of base compensation, is doomed. It is never a good thing for your business model to depend on a single corporate standard, which could be revised in an instant.

How likely is business to wake up and say, “Not our problem anymore?” Let’s take a look at a couple of charts.

And

The first chart illustrates nicely a simple fact that I’m not sure everyone grasps. Those of us who get our health insurance through an employer do not come close to paying the cost of our own insurance. Not. Close. This, folks, is socialized medicine. It’s just corporately socialized – badly – through an enormous and unpredictable business tax. And look at the trends. They are all upward – drastically. It’s the worst of all worlds – employees are paying more, but so are employers, whose share of the costs is actually increasing. At a time when most employers are struggling just to stay in business, this is completely unsustainable. And everyone knows it. Raise your hand if your company is laying the hard sell on you to enroll in a high deductible plan. That’s the first step to dropping insurance altogether.

The second chart buttresses the first, showing how private insurance costs – paid primarily by employers – are projected to balloon over the coming decades, greatly outpacing the costs of the socialized medicine programs, which are growing too fast in their own right. For a citizen, here’s the bottom line of this chart: Government insurance contains health care costs far more effectively than private insurance. And again, I see nobody fleeing Medicare for the glories of the free marketplace because care is somehow worse.

This chart also provides the rationale for the so-called “public plan option” that has become the key source of controversy in the ongoing effort at reform. Government has demonstrated that it controls costs better than private insurance, which must turn a profit and pay big bonuses to executives. Thus, if government creates a plan to compete with private insurers for that corporate business, it’s likely to succeed, and, in turn, drive down at least the growth of costs. That’s the argument for a public plan.

However, it’s not clear to me that business still wouldn’t eventually decide – public plan or not – that they no longer need to provide employee health care. Eventually, it would come to seem odd for the companies to buy health care from the government rather than just allow government to provide it in the same way most other industrialized countries do. That’s the argument against a public option, that it’s actually a Trojan Horse for single-payer health care. Because it will undercut private insurance costs, it will eventually drive private insurance out of business, leaving no option but single payer. I happen to largely agree with this argument. I just think crowding out private insurance is entirely a good thing.

Doctors – or at least the American Medical Association lobbying group – hate this idea because it means some physicians might get paid less. They remind me very much of reporters and editors asserting how important it is to maintain the authority, rigid heirarchy, and surprisingly highly paid executive structure of the traditional newsroom in the face of budget cuts and dirty bloggers. We’re very important, damn it. How will you get along without us? Yes, yes, all true, except people vote with their money. And health care can be surprisingly elective, right up until the point when it absolutely isn’t.

Doctors clearly have greater immediate importance than journalists. But people die, or get sicker, every day in this country for lack of insurance money to pay doctors, or, more often, because of inertia brought on by what it costs to access quality primary care without insurance. What happens when a big chunk of that 60 percent of Americans with employer-based health care suddenly finds it has to pay the full cost of a visit to Watson Clinic? Either they won’t go – they’ll wait until they need the ER, which they also will not pay – or Watson Clinic will drop its prices, otherwise known as paying doctors less.

Whilw doctors may not perceive their own risk if nothing changes, I think the private insurance industry does see what’s coming. That’s why they’ve “come to the table” with what sounds like major cost control commitments. Who knows how serious or enforceable they are, but they are using them as a cudgel against the public plan. Private insurers have a very small political, and especially economic, needle to thread. If Congress does nothing, I think the private health insurance industry realizes it could face a very rapid apocalypse akin to what the newspaper industry is now enduring. If Congress adopts a meaningful public plan, I think the industry sees a slower, more gradual glidepath to the same apoclayptic end state. One could argue quite forcefully that this represents the best option for the country – a managed destruction of the employer-based model that allows the insurance industry to gradually shrink to a niche, supplemental status, much like in the excellent French model, which most observers consider the world’s best health system. But ultimately, that doesn’t serve the industry’s economic interests.

Rather, it seems that its preferred option is to commit to some cost reduction and universal, or near universal, coverage backed by government subsidy and an individual mandate. No public plan, or, more likely, a public plan intentionally larded with landmines designed to keep it from functioning well. This, to me, is worse than doing nothing.

In any event, Congress isn’t really debating heath care reform. It’s debating the future of the private health insurance industry. That’s what we’re deciding right now because all evidence suggests that the industry cannot both support itself and provide health care for all Americans. I also think, politically, this debate is about deciding who gets to blame who for bringing socialized medicine to America in the years to come.

I must admit that a very large part of me is rooting for Senate Republicans and the Mary Landrieu/Bill Nelson band of Corporacrats to succeed in blowing up the public plan, which will force the House to vote against any health care reform. I have come to believe that truly significant systemic change, the type of change driven by a fundamental reassessment of how we think about a subject, comes only as a byproduct of massive, widespread economic pain. Human beings just don’t do abstraction very well. For example, $4 gas single-handedly destroyed the Hummer culture in this country in about six months and did more to shape energy policy than any congressional initiative in my lifetime.

The face-spiter in me would take some joy in the day that the coalition of major industry associations announces that within three years its members will no longer offer health insurance to employees. They’d get to be the bad guys, and I’d get to enjoy the spectacle of watching the AMA – the progenitors of the “socialized medicine” epithet — help write the single-payer health bill it would take Congress about 15 minutes to approve. I have always said that single-payer health care would come from the business Right. I still believe that. Doing nothing will ensure it, I think.

So while I acknowledge that a public plan-based gradual reform path is probably safer for the country, I must confess that I’ve grown weary over the years of protecting penny ante economic conservative bleaters from the consequences of what they think they believe. The silence of the lambs as it all came tumbling down would be sweet – at least for a minute or two.