Coffee heat rising

Idle essays

Mr. President! Mr. President!

by

Listening to an American president who can speak intelligibly: what a thrill! As soon as President Obama began to speak to the nation on the evening of July 22, he had my attention. How I would have liked to have been among the White House press corps: Mr. President! Mr. President! So many questions.

I liked what he said about the way we may be able to make affordable health care a reality for most or all Americans, and how he seemed to recognize that though this is huge, truly huge, it’s not the only problem facing our country. I liked the way he seemed to hear the cries of Americans who face a choice between survival and penury…or between death and death. I liked the way he recognized that employers feel as much grief as workers over the failures of our healthcare system, and so, ultimately, will our entire economy.

And I would’ve like to know, really: Mr. President! Mr. President! Surely you don’t think that Medicare will be the model for this new system? What will you do about the fact that an American elder who has the misfortune to suffer an expensive chronic illness may pay as much as $40,000 a year for medications, until he has no more money, nay, not a sou, to support him in his technologically extended life or to keep his wife out of poverty as long as she survives him or to leave to his children to help keep them in the middle class?

Mr. President! Mr. President! What can we do to cover everyone in this country, even the ones who don’t expect to “get hit by a bus,” without bankrupting all of us?

Mr. President! Mr. President! The “97 to 98 percent” coverage of Americans you say will take place…is that enough? Please, will you define who can “afford” medical coverage?

Mr. President! Mr. President! How much of the proposed savings will come from…well, let’s call it what it is: rationing of health care?

Mr. President! Mr. President! What can be done to bring the partisan players together? Why do we have to put up with morons worthies who think they can use this crucial, painful issue to gain a political advantage?

Mr. President! Mr. President! How can we be sure American doctors can make not just a living wage, but the excellent pay deserved by a vocation that saves people’s lives?

Mr. President! Mr. President! Are we going to lose our choice of doctors and caregivers?

Mr. President! Mr. President! Are we going to lose end-of-life care?

Mr. President! Mr. President! Are elders going to be told they can’t have life-saving care, no matter how vigorous or productive they might be, because some statistician says they’re too old for the privilege?

Mr. President! Mr. President! Will we end up with a system of mediocre healthcare for the masses and “Bond Street” care for those who can afford first-rate medical care?

Mr. President! Mr. President! Will we have bureaucrats—whether in government or private industry—telling us which “blue pill” or “red pill” we’re allowed to have, no matter what our doctors and medical researchers think is best?

Mr. President! Mr. President! What exactly do you have in mind when you talk about “cuts in Medicare”? What will you do about the Monster from the Black Lagoon that is Medicare Part D? You say the donut hole will be half filled. But half  of 40 grand is still 20 grand…unaffordable to people on fixed incomes.

Mr. President! Mr. President! You say “the whole point of this is to encourage changes that work.” How can we know whether a change will work in the context of a profit-making culture that doesn’t care whether things work as long as money is made? What will you do about the profit-making mentality that has infested delivery of health care in our country?

Mr. President! Mr. President! You  mention the Mayo Clinic as a role model of what’s being done right. Yet Medicare’s benefits are so miserly that the Mayo will not accept new patients who are on Medicare. How will your agenda overcome this, given that a government-run program will resemble Medicare in many ways?

And you? If you were there, if you were a reporter in the White House Press Corps, what would you ask President Obama about healthcare reform?

A post with no title: What can one say?

by

It’s 9:30 at night and the temperature on the back porch, which has been in the shade all day, is 100 degrees.

Brain’s temperature is somewhere in that vicinity, too. Today reminded me of why I love teaching so bitterly.

Several weeks ago, I spent about eight hours writing an Eng. 102 syllabus and another six to eight hours on an Eng. 101 syllabus. By the time you add all the college’s required boilerplate, one of these things is about 16 single-spaced pages long. Some of said pages are very complex, indeed: braids of the textbook author’s ideas of what the students should learn and what they should already know entertwined with your ideas of what they should learn and what you know your students most certainly will not already know and the college’s idea of what some lawyer on the District board thinks they ought to know and what some veteran of the trenches knows they don’t know and may never figure out.

So I felt pretty good about creating a creditable product, all those weeks ago.

In the interim, the college jettisoned its Eng. 101 text and took on an entirely new text from an entirely different publisher. No problem: there’s only so many ways you can express what an Eng. 101 student needs to learn (if learn she will). It’s all pretty fungible. Recreating the revised 101 syllabus took only about two or three additional unpaid hours.

Then came the announcement that lo! We have a new edition of the Eng. 102 text.

New edition. Why do textbook publishers keep churning out new editions? Because of the lucrative market in textbook resales. At the end of any given semester, college bookstores buy back used textbooks from students who would just as soon never be reminded that they took any of the courses they paid for that semester (about 90 percent of all students, I’d guess). Bookstores buy the books back for ludicrously low prices. Then they resell them for a profit to used-book dealers, who shuffle them around and reconsign them to the college bookstores, who re-resell them to the next batch of students at yet another profit.

Result? Neither the author nor the publisher makes anything on the resale and the re-resale of used textbooks. To continue to make their marginal profit, publishers a) have to jack up the prices of textbooks through the stratosphere (Amazon.com, which regularly underprices college bookstores, is selling the new edition of the 102 text for $78.10), and b) have to grind out new “editions” every two or three years. Each semester a new edition comes out, every single student has to pay the full freight, because no used copies are available. Which is the point.

Secondary result? Instructors get to die with overwork trying to keep up with the shit.

Our textbook author reshuffled her contents so that, although the underlying pedagogical message remained the same, readings were partly deleted, partly reshuffled, and partly changed. To salvage the course plan I’d created…oh, my god. I started around 9:00 this morning and finished at quarter to nine in the evening. During that time I got up twice to pee, and I was interrupted once by SDXB, who killed the better part of an hour talking about himself, and by a volunteer for the Mayo Clinic, who wasted about 10 minutes with a stupid customer service survey. I spent almost ELEVEN HOURS trying to untangle the mess made by the fake “new edition” whose purpose was to pluck the feathers of yet another incoming class of freshmen.

Sumbitch. Not one minute of this time was paid for. My pay for teaching these courses starts when I walk in the classroom door…not during the untold hours I spend preparing the classes.

Academia. What a scam!

The not-enough-long-green blues

by

{sigh} Over at Room Farm, Chance was  down in the dumps yesterday, worried about paying off the ginormous debt and feeling overwhelmed by all those little chores given to piling up if your attention is even briefly distracted. Annoying computer is again not letting me speak on Room Farm…some days it works, others it doesn’t. But her remarks do bring to mind the general summer doldrums, not the least of which is the not-enough-long-green blues.

In these parts, summer breeds cabin fever as surely as winter does for our snowbound brethren in the upper Midwest. Today the thermometer on my back porch reached a balmy 115 degrees…and believe me, you’d have to be balmy to go out in that. This leaves you inside the house, contemplating—what else? Your dreary budget and your prospects for penury, a horror show aggravated by the astronomical costs of an Arizona summer. The air-conditioner, set at 82, has been pounding steadily the entire day. Just to keep the potted plants alive, I’ve had to run water every. single. day for weeks—today being Saturday, it’s deep-watering day, so in addition to dumping the daily drench on all the potted plants, the roses and citrus need have water dribbled on them for hours. And a pool loses about an inch and a half to evaporation every day; that has to be replaced daily, lest the pump suck air and self-immolate. I’m going to have to borrow against my first-born child to pay this month’s water and power bills!

I’m turning into a mummified pickle sitting here in front of the computer all day. Other than work, work, and more work, there’s precious little to do. And boredom breeds inaction: the product of sitting on one’s duff all day is generally another day of sitting on one’s duff.

An unexpected visit from my neighbor Harriett reminded me of this. She knew the previous owners well and was curious to see how the house has changed since they left. As I was giving her the grand tour, I remembered that I hadn’t cleaned in four weeks! Old papers, junk, books, piles of shoes (bad habit: leave them on the floor wherever you slip them off your feet!), dog dunes, dirty dishes, unmade bed…eeeeeek!

I realized I need to get this place cleaned up, and then I need to get out of it. Sitting here in my own litter enjoying a blue funk is not a good thing. But…I also realize I can’t afford to spend money entertaining myself. Kathy and I are going to a chamber music concert next weekend, only ten bucks apiece—but that’s about it. I’m broke: can’t afford a cleaning lady, can’t afford to go out, can’t afford to travel, can’t even afford to fill my car’s gas tank without running the budget into the red.

Well, yesterday I scrubbed the joint from stem to stern, and that actually made me feel somewhat better. Then I decided to make a list of things I can do to avoid premature brain-death.  Here are a few ideas that came to mind:

Mall-walking. Some of the covered malls around here open at 7:00 in the morning for folks who would like to get a little exercise without expiring of heat exhaustion. La Maya and I have already started doing this; but it’s not necessary to have a walking buddy to enjoy this free activity. Just keep moving so you don’t have time to look at the (closed!) stores.

Free or low-cost community activities. Next Saturday I’m going on a photo walk with Paradise Valley Community College staff and students.

Take a hobby outdoors. When the extreme heat breaks (it will, as soon as the monsoon rains start), I intend to take a few pencils and a pad of paper to the park to do some drawing.

Invite friends to a casual (read “inexpensive”) dinner. M’hijito is entertaining me and friends at his house next weekend: smoked spareribs with whatever veggies and salad we can come up with.

Clean house. Yah, I know: bleagh! But it’s amazing how much a tidied-up and clean environment changes your outlook on life.

Visit a museum on “bum’s night.” Many museums open for no admission one day per week or per month.

Window-shop in commercial art galleries. Restrain yourself from buying, and this activity can be every bit as interesting as a tour through a contemporary art museum.

Take the dog for a walk. It’s free.

Play with the cat. Also free.

Wrap up your breakfast or dinner and go on an early morning or sunset picnic. Costs no more than you would have spent for food, anyway.

Volunteer. Serving up chow at the local food bank may make your own circumstances look pretty good while it gets you out of the house and into contact with other human beings.

That’s about as much as I’ve managed to dream up. What do you do to chase away the not-enough-long-green blues?

You couldn’t make this stuff up!

by

In the wee hours of the morning, past the midnight deadline for shutting down the state government, our august leaders in the legislature passed an excruciatingly bad budget. That doesn’t mean, however, that we’re rescued, because the governor still has to pass or veto it. And there’s a good chance she will veto, because they took out her one-cent sales tax hike.

Local reporting here is so poor it’s hard to get a straight story—or much of any story—about what’s going on. Apparently they also took out the proposed flat tax, but getting details isn’t easy; the Arizona Capitol Times and the Arizona Guardian, which report decently on statewide issues, are by subscription only, so you can’t get into the story past the lede. The Repulsive offers a few details on its website, ruminating on whether the governor will veto or not (she has threatened to veto any bill that doesn’t include a sales tax increase) and reporting in a cursory way about the massive cuts to education and health care this thing entails.

Brewer (the guv) has ordered that state operations continue as usual and told state workers to appear at work on time this morning. Some observers think that indicates she intends to sign at least part of the bill. The Guardian suggests she’ll veto all but one of the package, leaving just enough in place to keep the government running for a while.  She has ten days in which to make a decision.

One of the liveliest political bloggers in these parts drove up from Tucson to attend the legislative session, which went on past 1:00 a.m. According to him, the Democrats forced voice votes on a series of proposals to ameliorate the most vicious effects of the retrograde budget package, which of course the Republicans knee-jerked down—providing plenty of grist for the 2010 elections.

Meanwhile, most of the state’s parks, except for a few where local municipalities volunteered to oversee them temporarily, have already closed down. The Republican party, evidently grasping the implications for its political future, is calling for increases in clean election funding and in the amounts PACs can contribute to candidates by way of helping out prospective GOP candidates.

As for my own Beloved Employer, the prez sent out an e-mail telling everyone to report to work as usual and claiming that only 25 percent of the institution’s funding comes from the state.

Arizona State University, which has nearly 20,000 students attending summer classes and programs, more than 10,000 staff and students involved in research supported by a wide range of funding sources, and 70,000 students arriving in 6 weeks for the fall semester will remain open for service during this period of financial decisions by our partner, the State of Arizona.

More than 75 percent of ASU operating revenues come from sources other than the state of Arizona. Specific tuition driven and research driven revenues fund our summer operations. As a result we will focus our attention relative to state funding interruptions on our planning for the fall semester.

A state government shutdown lasting through the opening of the fall semester on August 24 would impact staffing and program availability significantly.

The exact impact and the ability of the university to operate normally will be evaluated on a weekly basis moving forward.

In the interim all assignments and work of the university will move forward.

Evidently intended to stave off panic, this missal is full of speciousness. Twenty-five percent of the university’s budget is huge, more than enough to shut the place down. It is, after all, a state university, not a private college. And it has already sustained cuts that have forced it to can hundreds of workers, closing down entire academic programs. The likelihood that the state will shut down and stay shut down through the middle of August, when fall semester begins, is nil. But that little bit of drama does allow him to segue quietly to the remark that operations will be reassessed on a week-by-week basis. In other words: at any time you could be laid off…

My paycheck notice is online, but it remains to be seen whether the money actually will be deposited in the credit union on Thursday. I’m expecting it will. But as for next payday: it’s anyone’s guess.

Beloved Yard Dude Gone

by

Gerardo the Yard Dude Extraordinaire has disappeared from the scene. He’s not answering phone calls, and that’s not like him. So La Maya (another of his clients) and I are worried something’s happened to him.

Of late, he’s had a hard time getting good workers, partly because many migrants are staying in Mexico for lack of work here, and partly because the rabid Sheriff Joe’s publicity racist anti-undocumented worker campaign has resulted in so much harassment for Latinos that people who jump through all the immigration hoops to enter the country go to friendlier locales. Gerardo himself is very smart and very good at what he does. But some of the characters he’s hired lately have been annoying. He does a lot of the work himself, and so he’s not riding herd on these guys—and they’re guys who need to be watched every minute. The result is not always ideal.

Meanwhile, speaking of rabid, the dratted palm trees around the pool have gone into a reproductive frenzy. Why people plant palms around swimming pools (or anywhere, for that matter) beats me. They’re one of the messiest trees around. They grow out of the top, sprouting a new topknot of fronds each spring. The previous year’s growth then dies, creating an ideal nest for cockroaches. At the same time, the plant springs a crop of long flowering wands, which drop millions of tiny, crisply sharp blossoms all over the ground and into the pool. The things are too small to be caught by most pump pot and skimmer baskets, and so they get sucked into your pump. Not good. Worse: the fertilized flowers produce BB-sized seeds. These rock-hard little fellows also drop into the pool, where the pool cleaner picks them up and chokes on them, resulting in a nice repair bill.

So, once a year you have to get a guy to come round and trim the palm trees, at rates ranging from $25 to $45 apiece. Some people have them taken out, but in a yard like mine, where the pool is built within a couple feet of the wall, removing the stumps would pose quite a challenge. Besides, in such a confined area there’s not much else you can plant that will cast even a modicum of shade.

Gerardo was doing the job for $25, very cheap. So I cringed at the thought of having to track down someone else to do the palms and, BTW, the monthly yard work.

At this time of year, dozens of itinerant workers roam the neighborhoods looking for palm tree work. They litter your front door with cards. So I picked one whose name I vaguely remembered from last year: Joel G.

I’m impressed:

1. He’s Mexican. Several amazing experiences have left me strongly preferring Mexican over Anglo landscape workers.

2. He showed up promptly to provide an estimate. He must live nearby, because he was here 15 minutes after I called.

3. He looks substantial and honest. OK, I know you can’t tell a book by its (etc.), but gut instinct goes a long way toward assessing character. He’s clean-cut, neatly dressed, and has a frank, straightforward manner. At first inspection, I’m guessing this is probably a decent man.

4. His English is excellent. That helps a lot, because my Spanish leaves a lot to be desired. Like…oh, say, Spanish.

5. He charges a reasonable price, only $5 a tree more than Gerardo.

6. He also advertises a number of other skills, the very skills M’hijito and I have need of: he can install watering systems and lay gravel. If his price is right there, too, we may hire him to do the landscaping at the downtown house.

And he’s hired. We’ll see how good a job he does on the palms. If that works out, maybe we can get him going on the two houses, and that would be a great help in our lives.

I hope Gerardo is OK. Palm tree work is very dangerous—every year men are injured or killed wrestling with these nasty plants. Worse even than falling off an 80-foot-high stem is getting trapped under one of the heavy fronds: if you can’t get out quickly, you suffocate. It’s such a gruesome way to die that just about every incident hits the newspapers, and so if anything like that had happened to him, La Maya would have picked up on it, since she still gets the Arizona Republic. But other injuries and car wrecks are so commonplace no one even notices. We’re both assuming he’s met with some accident…but who knows? Maybe he took a salaried job.

Image by Ginobovara, Wikipedia Commons

More on journalism’s Cheshire cat

by

 

Reading the paper, 1863

As we noted yesterday, journalism—even its most prominent avatars—is fading away like the Cheshire cat. Money Beagle left a winsome comment to that post, in which he remarks, 

I guess great blogs like yours and mine will eventually have to save the day. 🙂

Can’t let that one lay! It’s a broad concept that raises all sorts of questions and issues. I was about to respond in the comments field but found myself going on at post length. So:

@ Money Beagle: Eventually, something vaguely like that is about what will happen. It’s not a good development, because…

First, there’s no organized way to get whatever news or newsoid we produce to a coherent audience. Audience is ultimately what matters.

Second, we have no editors! Reporters need editors for a variety of reasons, all of which apply to bloggers. In the absence of editorial guidance, discipline, and help, we’re not really doing journalism.

Third, we have no real, widely accepted code of journalistic or bloggerish ethics. While reporters often stray from the SPJ code, we have no code at all. At least journalists try.

Fourth, bloggers do not have funds for investigative journalism, the single most important function of the Fourth Estate.

Money, of course, is at the root of print journalism’s troubles. What I’d like to see is a combination of public and nonprofit funding similar to what supports PBS and NPR, only modified for the needs of print magazines and newspapers. Publications would continue to run as many ads as they could get, but advertising revenue would be supplemented by foundations. 

Donations to journalistic foundations would be tax-deductible, whether or not the groups were government or, strictly speaking, charitable entities. This policy would be put in place because of the crucial importance of the Fourth Estate to the continuing education of voters, to the health and safety of the public, and to the survival of a free society. As a more or less democratic republic, we can’t afford to lose high-quality journalistic enterprises. Just as donations to schools are deductible, so support of journalism would be deductible, for much the same reasons.

For bloggers to morph into true journalists—not Play-Nooz yappers but real journalists of the sort you find at the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, the New Yorker—we would have to organize into networks that incorporate the best organizational features of large print publications and adapt those features to a diffuse online operating model. We would need training to understand the principles of investigative journalism, political and science writing, community journalism, and basic ethics. We would need a centralized set of editors who could establish an overall mission and keep the enterprise moving coherently according to that mission, assign bloggers to “beats,” assign specific stories and projects, and oversee accuracy, quality, and integrity. We would need a master site with a layout that would effectively direct readers to content. And we would need a lot of money, which means we would need ad agents and a system of advertising that generates serious revenue. Each blogger’s site or contribution to the larger site would have to earn enough for her or him to make a living.

Few of us earn enough from blogging to live, even modestly. Those individuals who do are, by and large, not journalists. Whatever it is you can say they’re doing, it isn’t journalism.

Most of the heavy-hitting journalists in this country today are products of heavy-hitting schools—many have degrees from the Ivy Leagues. Although some highly educated and sophisticated writers reside in the blogosphere, they’re not organized and few earn enough from blogging to justify the cost of that sort of training. In a word, they have paying day jobs. If blogging is to replace print journalism, it will have to generate enough money to support more than just a few writers—full-time, not as hobbyists.

Image:
Henry Louis Stephens, “Black Man Reading Newspaper by Candlelight”
The painting is said to represent a man reading the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation in the paper
Public domain, U.S. Library of Congress 
From Wikipedia Commons