High Noon, Harvey Weinstein, and Modern Culture

There is a classic Western film called "High Noon" that was very popular in the days before most of us were born.  Like others of its genre, it was a story that pitted the decent and honorable against the forces of chaos and evil. 

Here's the plot:

Marshal Will Kane, who is much admired for having brought order and justice to Hadleyville, has just married his Quaker sweetheart and, at her request, resigned his position.  As they prepare to leave town, Kane learns that Frank Miller, a murderer arrested five years earlier, has been pardoned and released from prison.

Miller is set on vengeance and traveling to Hadleyville on the noon train.  Three fellow outlaws are waiting for him at the station, and other malefactors are celebrating in the local saloon.

The town's new marshal has not arrived, and so Kane decides to stay.  He asks for help, and is turned down by everyone:  the judge who sentenced Miller to hang, Kane's deputy lawman, the former town marshal, Kane's best friend, the mayor, the congregants at the town church and even Kane's new wife, who says she's leaving on the train, with or without him.

Kane finally recruits one man to help, but even he backs out as Miller's train approaches and Kane is writing his will in the marshal's office. 

When the train arrives, Kane stands alone on Hadleyville's empty main street to face his enemies and protect the town.  He succeeds, aided only by his new wife, who has changed her mind. 

The movie ends with townspeople gathering to thank Kane and praise him.  Disgusted, he drops his badge on the ground; he and his wife leave Hadleyville forever. 


Then and Now

This is a classic film, but it has become an artifact from history. We're more cynical now, and we have developed an appetite for Tarantino-style battles among assorted bad guys.  We have superhero movies that derive their conflict from two-dimensional characters in old comic books.  We have online "communities" where people never meet each other as human beings. 

The effects of these changes become more obvious with time.  

What we don't see much and certainly have not observed in the last month or so is a single prominent person who has confronted run-of-the-mill everyday evil, no matter the personal cost.



Harvey Weinstein, et al

This is a man who has done terrible things for more than 30 years.  He also is rich, influential in a self-regarding community and a lavish funder of that community's favorite pet projects.

His life is coming apart now, and there is no reason to feel sympathy for him or triumphal about his downfall.  What he leaves behind is the recognition that there are many others like him -- people, mostly men, who will do any rotten thing they can get away with and who will bully and attack anyone who tries to stop them.

We have police forces to keep a lid on the most obvious public outrages, but the mundane bad guys are more often encountered in day-to-day interactions.  The only deterrents to these are people who practice good values and raise honorable children. Without them, we get schoolhouse bullies, scary neighborhoods and workplace squalor.

Cases like Weinstein's fester when people lack the courage to speak the truth, which in fact is much easier than being a single lawman facing a squad of armed bad guys.  We used to watch movies like "High Noon" for a reason.

There seems to have been no Weinstein Company executive, no co-producer, no director and no talent agent who knew the "open secret" about Harvey Weinstein's piggery and stopped dealing with the man because of it.  (I hold out hope that there was at least one executive assistant in the organization who, after escorting a third ingenue to meet bathrobe-clad Harvey in his hotel suite, protested loudly and then quit in protest.)   

There apparently was not a single actress or model who called the police to report that Harvey Weinstein had raped her.  Not one of them seems to have said, "Nope, I'm not signing a non-disclosure agreement even if it means I don't get my six-figure settlement money."  

Many have explained to us that they believed they had to put up with Weinstein because their careers were at stake, but still:  These people's voices, in aggregate, could have stopped his abuses many years ago.   

Now that the danger has passed, the female claimants and their male enablers are singing like songbirds.  Many, many other people are stepping up to say that they too have been abused by other famous men.   They are being lauded as victims. 

I do feel sorrow when people have been victimized, but I'm getting a little tired of being expected to regard victims as the noblest persons among us all.  

(This reached its grotesque apex for me a couple weeks ago when a bunch of new self-styled victims staged a White Lives Matter rally outside Nashville.  My only consolations were that they were vastly outnumbered by counter-demonstraters and also by religious opponents who participated in prayer vigils in churches across the region.)

When did we last admire a person for doing the right thing, even when it involved personal cost?  Except for the occasional Tom Hanks nice-guy movie, I can't think of much in popular entertainment.  

The country could use an outbreak of good character right now.  Maybe we all should stream "High Noon" at home tonight on our big-screen televisions.

Things I Never Expected

That I would have to go through a metal detector to walk into a courthouse or go to a basketball game.

That students would have to pass through metal detectors to go to school.

That people would weaponize fertilizer, pressure cookers and small rental trucks.

That frustrated people would set out to kill as many civilians as possible just because they could. 

That one day many people would call me to ask if the Significant Other had been inside a building attacked by a missile in the form of a commercial airliner.

That one day I would call a girlfriend to ask if her children were safe from a shooter at their school.


That one day I would call the Younger Person to be sure he was at work and not running on the bike path three blocks from his apartment.

That I would get tired -- really, really tired -- of hearing politicians say, "If we do X, the terrorists will have won."

-----

“Man has free choice, or otherwise counsels, exhortations, commands, prohibitions, rewards and punishments would be in vain. ” 

― Thomas Aquinas

Summa Theologica

“It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built up upon a renunciation of instinct....”

― Sigmund Freud 

Civilization and Its Discontents 

38 Cents

Like many other buyers of ebooks, I got an unexpected financial windfall from Amazon today.  It is my share of a settlement for a collusion scheme between ebook sellers and book publishers that increased ebook prices.  

Apparently this collusion bumped up the price of ebooks by several bucks a copy.  To compensate me for my loss, I now have a 38-cent credit to spend on anything my heart desires that is sold on the Amazon website.

Seems a little disproportionate, doesn't it?

I wrote about this matter in 2014, after it was revealed that Apple had initiated the overcharging, had capitulated and agreed to pay a $400 million fine.  After that Apple changed its mind.  It took its case to a federal court in Manhattan, which upheld the fine. Then, last year, Apple tried to get the US Supreme Court to hear an appeal; the court said no.  In addition, the colluding publishers already had agreed to pay more than $150 million in fines.

Honestly, I don't see how years of court wrangling involving many states could have cost much less than $600 million in legal fees alone.  (Yes, I know, the wonderful state attorneys are on salary and so maybe the biggest chunk of money went into states' coffers, but still.  I'd be willing to give up my 38 cents for more state-based white-collar crime prosecutions.) 

Note

Over at the Ars Technica technology site, the payout also was received with skepticism.

Here are some reactions from AT's readers:

--I got my few pennies. I'm sure this really taught the industry a lesson in collusion.

--Just 38¢ for me. Can I even buy anything on Amazon for that?

--I got $.38. Not really sure what to do with all of the money I received.

--I got $3.84. My pockets are simply stuffed full of pennies.

--I got $7.82. I splurged on a new pack of disposable reading glasses and a 2lb bag of loose tea.

--I'm gonna have a rocking fun weekend!

--I'll be living it up with $14.84 of scammed-from-Apple money. Woohoo?

--I think you mean returned scammed-from-you money.

--Aww yeah! $0.76!

--Another $0.38er here. Happy the non-injury I suffered has been fully compensated.

Las Vegas

We have problems in this country, and I don't know how to solve them.  But after last Sunday, I have a few thoughts.  


A Bad Person

I prefer to believe that most people are doing the best they can, but a guy like Stephen Paddock turns this belief on its head    Forensic cops and scientists will try to discern his motives.  I don't care about his motives. There are only two relevant points for me.

First, after more than 60 years as a functional, law-abiding person, he set out to kill as many people as he possibly could.

Second, after this deliberate act, he shrank from taking responsibility.  An honorable person tries not to harm others.  A less honorable person does not harm others because he fears the consequences for himself.  A dishonorable person harms others and then kills himself to avoid unpleasantness afterward.  Stephen Paddock was a moral coward.

Maybe he had unresolved grievances.  Maybe something interfered with his mental functioning.  None of this excuses his actions.  He had enough life experience, and apparently enough money, to face his problems.  That he chose to make them our problem is a great failure on his part.  He chose to become a monster.


Guns

I was robbed at gunpoint once, a story for another day, and I would prefer to live in a country where citizens are not armed.  My problem is that I don't see how that can be accomplished.  

For starters, the Second Amendment is explicit, and there is not enough support to eliminate or replace it.  

I am not a lawyer, but I can see the issue. People reviled Antonin Scalia for the Heller decision, but it is difficult to argue with plain language that says "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."  

Those who argue the other side of the verbiage -- that gun ownership should be limited to participants in a "well-regulated militia" -- similarly do not comfort me.  The Constitution was written by people who wanted citizens to be able to overthrow tyrants. The biggest groups opposing "tyranny" now seem to be that bunch who marched in Charleston last month and the Black Bloc.  Not my kind of folks.

Getting Rid of Guns

Even if we could agree on this goal, there are practical barriers to accomplishing it.

First is the sheer number of firearms in the country today.  We have spoken for years about 
300 million guns, but during those years the number has risen substantially.  According to the latest ATF reports, American manufacturers produced almost 11 million guns in 2013 and more than 9 million in 2014; only a few hundred thousand of those were sold as exports.  Also, we import millions of guns every year (3.6 million in 2014, 3.9 million in 2015, again per the ATF.)  

If we banned gun ownership tomorrow, my brother would hand over our grandfather's 22 rifle, but many other people would not cooperate.  Perhaps we could identify all those with registered firearms and use pressure to make them relinquish their weapons, but more than a few would resist.   

Then we would have the problem of finding and collecting all the illegal guns, which seem to be as available as heroin on our streets.  Cory Booker, after several years as mayor of Newark, remarked that only one of the hundreds of shootings in the city during his term had involved a legally registered firearm.  

The owners of those illegal guns would be unlikely to give them up.

If they do not, are we willing to send government agents into homes and businesses with metal detectors to search for weapons hidden behind walls or under floorboards?  To dig up lawns and parks?  To search storage lockers and the trunks and undersides of cars and the branches of every tree in the country?  

Maybe we can enact laws to ban bump stocks, a term whose meaning we all learned this week, but can we prevent people from manufacturing their own bump stocks or guns with 3-D printers?


Other Means

In fact, there are many ways to kill people, and people who are motivated toward bad ends will use them.  

In 1995, Timothy McVeigh made a bomb out of a truck full of fertilizer, parked it in front of a federal courthouse and detonated it, killing 168 people.

After that, heavy concrete stanchions were put up in front of large buildings here and in Europe to prevent access to truck bombs. 

Then, last year, a terrorist rented a large truck and drove it down the crowded Boulevard de la Croisette in Nice on Bastille Day, killing 84.  This year, similar actions have been undertaken on two bridges in London.

Little as we like the Las Vegas shooter, we must concede that he was smart, focused and disciplined.  If guns had been unavailable to him, he could have found another way to make his point, whatever the hell it was.  He could have rigged a drone to drop a bomb on the crowd at the concert.  He could have poisoned the reservoir behind Hoover Dam.  He could have piloted one of his two airplanes into the stands at a high school football game.


Security, Our New Growth Industry

After Las Vegas,  we can expect that there will be no more outdoor concerts along the Las Vegas Strip.  After Las Vegas, Nashville is reconsidering music festivals in its touristy SoBro neighborhood of three-story buildings.

After Las Vegas, will people want to line the building-dense route of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade?  

After Las Vegas, will the NYPD be interested in providing the necessary security to guarantee the safety of a million people in Times Square on New Year's Eve?

Last year's Oscars ceremony was protected by police snipers, helicopters, drones, metal detectors and gosh knows what else, and still a couple random guys managed to walk into the holding pen for the celebrities.

When you think about it, national politicians and celebrities get a lot of protection.  The rest of us, not so much.

But it is the rest of us who bear much of the burden.

Last year my carry-on bag was selected at random in the TSA line at the airport, and I watched a burly guy paw through my clothes.  Last month I was selected randomly for a patdown by a female TSA officer. 

I have come to resent these intrusions.  My last brush with the law was a parking ticket 15 years ago.  The next time a police agency brings someone to justice for a violent crime against me or my family will the first time.  I'm not holding my breath waiting for that to happen.

Unfortunately, after Las Vegas, this is just the beginning.


Prevention

I still want to believe that most people are doing the best they can.  So far I personally have not been disappointed.  

But if somebody knew what Stephen Paddock was planning and did nothing to stop him, that person has failed as a citizen and, more, as a human being.

We have no idea how many relatives and friends have acted to frustrate people with bad plans -- confiscating guns and knives, warning targeted victims, calling police or hauling disturbed people to mental hospitals.  There must be many of these quiet heroes who deserve our gratitude even if we never learn their names.

Yes, if we see something we should say something.  I'd like it better if we framed that idea as a moral imperative.

Cities, Growth and Amazon

I've been spending time the last couple years in downtown Nashville, where the most common street sign is either the first or the second one below. 

It's nearly impossible to walk or drive two blocks in any direction without having to maneuver around at least one of these. 

Nashville is booming, thanks to its three big industries:  county/pop music, healthcare and state government.  The Economist reported last year that 81 people were moving into the metropolitan area each day; others say the number is higher.  Home prices are increasing, and so is construction of apartment buildings and townhouses and, farther out, single-family homes.  

In addition, the city is playing a huge game of infrastructure catchup.  Its population, 174,000 in 1950, has blossomed into an MSA (metropolitan statistical area) population of 1.8 million as of last year.  Traffic is pretty bad, and while there is talk of a five-spoke light-rail system, there is no plan to fund such a thing, whose buildout would take perhaps 20 years.

This of course is the sort of problem cities would love to have.

Where Tower Cranes Are

One rough measure of the health of a city is the number of tower cranes employed on major construction projects in its area.  Recently the Nashville Business Journal crowed about the number of tower cranes here -- 28 -- and ran this national map. Only New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Seattle had more tower cranes.  If you've read about rents in those areas, you won't be surprised.

Actually, the map is now inaccurate.  One tower crane that had been working just down from our Nashville building was dismantled last month.  The process took a week and closed all traffic on the entire block.  Next month, the new 45-story tower of apartments and condos will open.

Where Tower Cranes Are Not

The US population is shifting.  Some cities like Nashville are attracting new residents.  Other cities have been shedding population for decades.  

Here are a few of those population losers.

--Detroit.  Its population crested at almost 1.85 million in the 1950 US Census and then dropped more than 60 percent by 2010.  Since then, another 50,000 people have left, leaving 672,000 people to maintain a built infrastructure designed for many more. 

--St. Louis.  Its 1950 population was more than 850,000 but is now below 320,000.  As is the case in other cities, residents seem to have relocated to surrounding suburbs.  

--Memphis. For most of its history, Memphis had twice as many residents as Nashville.  Its metro area population now trails Nashville's by 500,000, and the trend seems to be continuing. 

-- Cincinnati -- 300,000 residents in 2010, down from more than 500,000 in 1950.

    

-- Cleveland -- 400,000 residents in 2010, down from 900,000 in 1950.

I could go on about Buffalo and Akron and other cities, but you get the point.

Amazon

Recently Seattle-based Amazon has announced plans to build a second, equal-sized headquarters facility somewhere else in the country.  Every city and town in the Midwest and East craves this business, and for good reason:  Amazon estimates it will need 50,000 employees to staff the new facility, with an average compensation level of $100,000 a year.  

Cities and states are being invited to submit proposals next month, which sounds similar to a professional sports team hinting that it might move its franchise to a city in exchange for a locally financed arena.  We'll see if that analogy holds up. 

Nashville, a go-getter kind of town, naturally wants the Amazon headquarters.  When civic leaders talk of bidding for the project, they fret that the Tennessee legislature's failure to enact a suitably progressive transgender bathroom bill could hurt the city's chances.

More to the point, I would think, is the fact that Nashville is crowded already.  Home prices are expensive relative to local incomes, and traffic, especially for commuters, is very congested and getting worse.

Many commenters have offered free advice to Amazon about where to locate its new operation.  CNN, for instance, suggested these eight cities:  Atlanta, Pittsburgh, Toronto, Dallas, Austin, Boston, San Jose and Washington, D.C.

The selling points for these places, CNN argued, were good schools and large populations of high earners.  In effect, the recommendation was to choose a city that already is winning and to make it even richer.  

(There are people who like Amazon because it has lowered vegetable prices at its recently acquired Whole Foods stores and because its workers are paid well.  

         I'm less sanguine.  It's not that Amazon has demolished the traditional bookstore trade, or that it is doing much the same for retail generally, or that it appears set to try to control the grocery business, or that its founder has bought one of the most politically influential newspapers in the country.  My problem is that Amazon, a company based on algorithms, has done all of these.  To me, this looks like a prima facie case for the expansion of the definition of antitrust. But I digress.) 

If I were advising Amazon, I would encourage it to set its new headquarters in a hollowed-out city like one of the ones I described above. 

Here's what's in it for Amazon:

   -- Those cities have infrastructure -- road systems, empty schoolhouses, underused airports, cargo rail tracks and, in many cases, abandoned intracity railroad tracks waiting to be used again for new urban transit development.
       An influx of Amazon employees -- and Americans generally are happy to move for good job opportunities -- would make use of these and would appreciate the opportunity to buy or rent homes in a location where prices have not yet been bid up to unaffordable levels.

  --  Those cities also have largely empty central business districts and abandoned industrial sites ripe for repurposing and available at lower cost than similar sized, less well-located properties in Atlanta or Boston or Washington, D.C.  

  -- Amazon could show itself to be a good corporate citizen by demonstrating how a city of the industrial past can be turned into a successful city of the future.   

        It might also inspire Alphabet (Google) to abandon its plan to build a totally new techie-enabled city and to focus instead on updating an urban area that could be a showcase for a new kind of redevelopment.  

        Maybe even Facebook would decide to adopt a company town (although I personally would prefer not to live there.)  

Conclusion

Our country has cities that are thriving and cities that are not.  It also has big companies with grandiose plans for controlling larger portions of the economy.

In the US, we admire people who change their lives and succeed when the odds are against them.  Maybe it's time to show our struggling cities a similar way to change their destinies.

If big companies like Amazon took an interest in such projects, they would gain broad respect and the country might regain some of its now-tattered can-do spirit.  

I don't see any downside to this idea.

Sixteen Years Ago

I wasn't in New York on 9/11. It was a beautiful day, and I was 20 miles away, pulling weeds in the suburbs, when my father called to ask after the health of the Significant Other.

"He's fine.  Why?" I asked.

"You better turn on the TV," Dad said.

An hour or so later, I picked up the Younger Person at his school, which closed early that day.  By then, the husband of one of the teachers in the upper grades was dead.  So was the sister of a woman who lived on the next block over.  Among others.

The next week, I talked with an economist whose office overlooked the twin towers.  "I saw things I shouldn't have seen," he said.  He meant hundreds of people jumping from the scorching top floors of the buildings.

The week after that, on Sunday, we went downtown.  Lines of heavy trucks were carting wreckage out of the city, a process that took months.  The harsh, acrid smell was everywhere.

What I remember most are the pictures.  Families and friends had posted notices and photographs all over the area, hoping that loved ones would be found alive. 

All the missing people were dead, of course.  Their families, at best, might recover part of a leg or a piece of jewelry.  For most families, there was nothing to find.

I rarely think of these things now, but on this day every year the memories return.

Nature Wants Your House Back

Not my house.  At least, not yet.

When you buy a house, the bank wants its mortgage payments and the county wants its property taxes.

These are minor matters in the larger scheme, however.  The real challenge is this:  Nature wants your house back.  Over the long term, nature will win.

Some years back, the Significant Other and I bought a newly built house.

During the first big wind and rainstorm, water pushed under the sill of a slider door and left a puddle on the living room floor.   I cut a piece of lumber to fit the space, nailed it in and caulked it all around.

The next storm ripped a bunch of shingles off the roof.  I called a roofer and had them replaced.

Then a couple skunks dug their way under the house one night.  They got in a fight, and one of them died.  I called a pest control company to remove the (very, very) smelly carcass and a handyman to build a barrier at the skunks' access point.

I planted climbing hydrangeas that grew so well they started covering the windows.  I cut the hydrangeas back; they returned the next year.  I applied herbicide; two years, later the hydrangeas returned again.  I gave up.  As usual, nature had won.

Nature owns the world.  We humans are just squatters.

I think about this sometimes when I see pictures of Detroit houses whose owners have moved on.

In fact, it happens all over the country.  Here is a house that nature is reclaiming in Aberdeen, N.J.

And here is a house in the American South that is being swallowed by kudzu.

Several years ago, a house in our town fell into disrepair. The front yard grew tall and straggly, and dead leaves overflowed the gutters. Then one of the window screens worked its way loose and dangled over the driveway. The paint began to peel, and spots of green stuff, probably fungus, appeared on the roof. I heard that the man of the household had a gambling problem -- he couldn't fight his own demons and nature at the same time. Ultimately the house was sold. It looks fine now, but I still wonder about the man, his wife and their children.


Below is a pioneer homestead cabin built in 1906 and abandoned during the Great Depression.  Structures like these, rendered unlivable, dot the prairies, the Dakotas, Montana and portions of Canada.

Nature has won, and humans, knowing their defeat, cannot muster the energy to tear down the little that remains.

No matter.  In time, nature will see to that.

The Lesson of Charlottesville

If someone had told me two weeks ago that hundreds of self-proclaimed Nazis and white supremacists would show up for a public demonstration in an American city, I would not have believed it.  And yet, 10 days ago, that is what happened.

I am not going to weigh in on the politics here.  Reasonable people already understand that Nazism and white supremacy are bad ideas, and this point has been made, repeatedly, already.  

Let's just talk about one guy instead.  

-----

At right is the mug shot of the fellow who "allegedly" drove the car into a crowd at Charlottesville, killing a peaceful demonstrator. The event seems to have been taped, and so the only questions are whether or how he will be punished. 

This guy is 20 years old.  He was raised and schooled in the United States and, except for a four-month stint in the military, hasn't done much since high school. 

Since his early teens, he has been a self-declared Nazi and white supremacist.  Here is what I have read: 

1)  In freshman year, he wrote an essay so full of neo-Nazi themes that it was shared with the school principal.  The young man wore a belt decorated with swastikas to school and was observed drawing swastikas on various occasions.

2) He harassed a fellow student, a Muslim, and called her a terrorist.

3) On a two-week class trip to France and Germany, his traveling roommate flew home after only four days because he was so offended by the young man's praise of Hitler, by his description of the French as "inferior" and by his eagerness to get to Germany, which he called the "Fatherland." (Interestingly, the accused man's father died before his son was born.)

4) By senior year, he was known as "the Nazi of the school."

-----

It is not unusual to find contrarian young people who go against the grain.  It is also legal in this country to believe what you wish.  

On the other hand, let's consider some of the things adults said after the incident:

 -- His mother said that she and her son did not talk about politics.  She thought he was going to Charlottesville because of "something about Trump."

 -- A history teacher said the young man was smart, argumentative, adamant and not particularly receptive to the idea that his beliefs might be wrong.

 -- His high school principal said, "This (he) is one outlier.  That's not who we are."

 -- The school board chairman said he'd never heard of the young man because the board only dealt with students who were facing expulsion.

 -- A man from the neighborhood said he did not know the young man, but "If he's a racist, I don't want to know him."

-----

One adult, quoted in a news report, said that the event in Charlottesville presented a "teachable moment."  I would argue that many teachable moments were not seized as this young man curdled his brain with stale ideas and vile delusions.

1) Was his mother called to visit the principal after that first freshman paper, and then after the young man was spotted wearing Nazi garb, and then he after bullied the Muslim student?  Was he referred to the school counselor and, from there, to a psychologist or a college ethics professor or perhaps even a clergyman?

2) Did anyone show him photographs of the dead bodies and skeletal remains found in 1945 when Nazi prison camps were liberated by Allied forces?  Did anyone challenge him to explain, after 300,000 Americans died fighting in World War II, how he squared being a Nazi with his US citizenship?

3) When he went on that school trip to Germany, did no one think to call ahead to a German school to ask for someone to speak with the guy?  Germany has spent more than 70 years stamping out the traces of Nazi ideology, and it has no shortage of people who have spent careers on the project.  It wouldn't have been difficult to find one of those people.

Moral Truth

I wonder sometimes how people derive their ethical values.  For many, it comes from religion. Christianity teaches that "All men are brothers," and other faiths all preach some variation of the "Do unto others" idea.  For non-believers, philosophy reasons its way to the same conclusion. 

(We also have many people now who scorn religion and metaphysics and claim to be driven by "science."  Personally, I find this amusing.  By and large, Americans are scientific illiterates, and our current political discussions are largely emotion-driven and boil down to name-calling and finger-pointing.  I wish it were better, but this is reality.)

Even if you have none of the above, there is American history.  I hope every high school student still learns the line, "All men are created equal," one of the self-evident truths enumerated in the Declaration of Independence. 

This young man has turned himself into a pretty twisted person, and he will be held responsible.  But I wish the adults who witnessed his decline had been a lot more "pro-active," as we say, in his formative years.  His failure is not just his but also that of his community.  

Maybe this is the ultimate teachable moment.  

Healthcare -- Just Tell Us What It Costs

The Idiosyncratist has no particular opinion about either political party's healthcare policies; my only observation is that people seem to hate all of them.  

But certain ideas do make intuitive sense.

One of these is transparency -- requiring every doctor, clinic and hospital to post a price list.  This works for dentists and eye doctors and veterinarians. It's time to apply it more broadly.  

Here's a fun video that explains some of the needless complexity that has resulted from not requiring price lists.





One Situation

Last month I got a simple, single-assay blood test for a minor hereditary condition that is well managed with generic medication.  I provided the lab with my new insurance card, and the lab's crack administrative team went ahead and billed my former insurance company, which of course denied the charge.  

I was billed almost $160 for a test that should have cost $20.

After several hours on the phone and on hold, I got the matter worked out. I learned the price only after I had had the blood test and after two insurance companies had run the bill through their elaborate bureaucracies.  It was $27.

Leave aside that it's hard to trust test results generated by a medical laboratory that cannot send a bill to the right insurance company.  Let's talk about the cost implications


High-Deductible Policies

Like many people now, I have a high-deductible health insurance policy.  This does not bother me.  I'm happy to trade $10 copays for full coverage if I get a cancer diagnosis. 

My deductible is $3,000.  Like most healthy people, I don't have that much in the way of medical expenses every year, and so all my medical costs are on me. 

On at least two occasions, I have been able to save money by checking prices.

In one case, I was bit by a dog. (My fault; we were playing fetch, and I mishandled the stick.) In an excess of caution, I decided to get an overdue tetanus booster:  
      My options were these: 1) See a doctor at an urgent-care center for $280, 2) See a nurse at a pharmacy clinic for a little over $100, or 3) Get a tetanus shot from the pharmacist at Costco for $15.
      Since I'm not stupid, I chose the third option.  

In the other, I made use of pharmacies' online price lists.  I found that the 90-day price for my generic drug varied from $20 to $90.  On an annual basis, choosing the right drugstore saves me $280.  I appreciate that.

I'd be happy to do the same with other medical expenses, and I believe other people would too.  

In fact, those new high deductibles could drive down medical costs by motivating people to seek lower-priced alternatives and, indirectly, by motivating medical care providers to set competitive rates.

The only reason this not happening is that medical charges are closely held secrets.  


How It Would Work

If I make a doctor's appointment today, the receptionist will tell me, "We don't know how much the consultation will cost."
       Maybe, with transparent pricing, the receptionist could say, "The doctor bills $100 for every 10 minutes of his/her time; if medical tests are ordered, we will tell you the cost before the tests are done."

If my doctor ordered me to get an MRI at an institution s/he owned, I could consult an online service that compared prices for the same procedure.  An outfit called newchoicehealth.com already does this in some places. 
       Or, even better, I could call my insurance company and ask the price BEFORE I ran up the charge.  Shouldn't health insurers take an interest in cost management, or at least help patients who want to minimize their expenses?

If my kid fell and injured his arm, I could check prices for x-rays and stitches at the several hospitals' emergency rooms in my area and choose one.  Or, more likely, while in the emergency room, I could do the research on my cellphone and argue later if I thought the price of treatment was out of line.  
        (Goodness knows there would be plenty of time.  On my only visit to the emergency room, several years ago, it took the doctor EIGHT HOURS to diagnose appendicitis.)


How to Make It Happen

Some years back, one political party passed a bill called the Affordable Care Act.  The other party has been fighting to repeal that bill or pass its own ever since.  

Unfortunately, neither party has paid much mind to the elephant in the room:  affordability.

Why not a bipartisan bill, two pages long, requiring every healthcare institution and practitioner to post a price list for every service it/he/she provides?  

Yes, the AMA would squeal.  So would all the other participants in the industry that soaks up 18 percent of national expenditure.

My answer to the complaints would be this:  Tough.  People have a right to know the cost of something before they are asked to pay for it.


Note:  Here is yet another article explaining that that we spend too much on healthcare.  From the article:

"According to experts, there are two underlying reasons why the United States spends so much on healthcare:  It uses expensive medical technology, and prices for healthcare services and goods are higher than in other countries."

Trump Obsession

About 10 days ago, the leftish New Republic magazine published an article entitled,  "Is Trump Ruining Book Sales?"  The subhead:  "Authors and publishers alike are finding that it's hard to sell books in a political climate where truth is stranger than fiction."

I would posit an alternate thesis that does not involve the president:  It's hard to sell mediocre books, and most books these days are not particularly distinguished.  Plus, more authors are releasing their books online. 

I don't spend much time reading about politics, but I have been surprised this year at how absorbed the press is with the "Trump is ruining everything" theme.   Articles about seemingly unrelated topics -- book sales, history, sports, arts, fashion, whatever -- include everything from slipped-in slurs to wholesale detours to explain why Donald Trump is terrible in every possible way.  

Here are examples from just two days.    

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There’s a Monty Python sketch in which a man in a restaurant is frustrated because everything on the menu seems to have some rat in it. That’s how things are in the age of comrade Trump. It would be great if he would tweet, “I’m the reason you can’t have nice things. SAD! #inwayovermyhead.” No matter what good things happen, there’s probably a bit of Trump in it.

(The above is the first paragraph in what purports to be a review of the Fuck Yeah Fest!, a classy-sounding music event.  The article proceeds through seven more paragraphs about Donald Trump, four paragraphs about two bands, one paragraph about Iggy Pop and a concluding paragraph.)

Henry Rollins

"Enough Trump -- Let's Talk about How Great Iggy Pop Was at FYF"

LAWeekly

August 3, 2017

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"Old Walt is tasked with destroying the dark tower, which is the only thing stopping monsters from taking over the planet. Is this a metaphor for the Trump administration? Don't get your hopes up."

Peter Travers

"The Dark Tower' Review"

Rolling Stone

August 3, 2017

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Of course, the song’s success doesn’t mean that President Trump’s project will fail, or that cranky nativism will give way to happy multiculturalism. Plenty of people might be willing to watch a video by Puerto Rican artists and still not want a Spanish-speaking neighbor next door. (Although Puerto Rico is a United States territory, so if you’re American, get over it.)

Moises Velasquez-Manoff

"The Meaning of ‘Despacito’ in the Age of Trump"

New York Times

August 4, 2017

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Six months into Donald Trump’s presidency, Shkreli captured the zeitgeist of America. Like a millennial version of Trump, he was bombastic, defiant, politically incorrect, indifferent to social norms -- and, according to prosecutors, the truth -- while his expert use of social media attracted a legion of followers. Unlike Trump, he was banned from Twitter after harassing a female journalist.

Misyrlena Egkolfopoulou, Patricia Hurtado and Chris Dolmetsch

"Why ‘Pharma Bro’ Martin Shkreli Is Swaggering Into Jail"

Bloomberg.com

August 4, 2017

Thoughts

The obsession with hating Donald Trump -- and it is an obsession -- is out of hand.  

If you really, really can't stand the guy, there are practical reasons to think twice before disparaging him every chance you get.

1) Assigning Donald Trump responsibility for everything that you don't like has the perverse effect of making him seem more important and powerful than he actually is.

2) Being unable to view general topics without applying a "Trump-bad/me-good" template limits your capacity for critical thought.

Not everything in this world is about Donald Trump.