Vidal, Burr, Bachmann

Gore Vidal’s Burr is a very bad book.

Michele Bachmann read it her senior year in college; she graduated in 1978. I was a bit older, working on my dissertation, when I bought a copy in 1973, soon after it came out in paperback.

She says his snotty treatment of the founding fathers was what offended her. I don’t remember exactly what irritated me, except it made me so angry I wanted to throw the book across the room. At the time, my generalization was that it represented a failure of imagination.

I’ve since continued to read his essays, including the most recent that could use a stronger editorial presence. However, I never read another of his serious works of fiction. Myra Breckinridge might be an important novel, but I’ll never know why.

I eventually did relent a little to read the three mysteries he published earlier as Edgar Box. They were readable, but not compelling enough to make me wish he’d continued writing them. As I recall, the failure of imagination in them was limited to the sex scenes. Following the hard-boiled detective tradition, Vidal felt it necessary to have his hero, Peter Sargeant, become involved with woman. However, he could only say, after he got them together, “and then they did it,” sounding much like an adolescent boy describing the wonders of something he didn’t yet know but needs to pretend he did.

Bachmann says her feelings about the book turned her from being a Democrat to a Republican. I don’t believe she’s ever said why she associated Burr with the Democrats, if it was the politics of Vidal which are snobbishly critical of both parties, or if the person who recommend the book to her was a Democrat.

In my case, I turned on the editorial establishment that had promoted the book as “wicked entertainment of a very high order,” a “tour de force,” a “novel of Stendhalian proportions,” to quote only blurbs from the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, and the New Yorker.

I’ve rarely ever read another review of a novel since, and then only of books or authors I had never heard of, usually from foreign countries. I suspect I’ve missed a good read or two, but I’m know I missed a great deal of boredom from being trapped on the same page with whatever the claque was promoting at the moment.

Pneumonia

The Affordable Health Care for America Act won’t kill the elderly, as some allege, but misrepresentations about the law and medicine in general absolutely do kill.

Recently a friend of my boss died from pneumonia. He was an uninsured alcoholic who had been sober for 15 years, ate well and spent time in the gym. He delayed going to his doctor until his temperature was rising quickly, then refused to go to the hospital. He apparently believed the antibiotics and his strong body were enough.

In the night his fever increased. His landlady saw him out in the snow, she thinks, trying to bring down his body temperature. She found him dead the following morning. As near as anyone knows, when he lay down he fell asleep and his lungs continued to fill until he couldn’t breathe.

The week before, the mother of a friend died from pneumonia in a nursing home after her father had refused treatment for her. It was bacterial in origin, possibly caused by a piece of food that had become stuck. The woman suffered from dementia and either didn’t notice the irritation or couldn’t explain it. She died less than a day after my friend heard she was sick.

Bacterial pneumonia is treatable with antibiotics. Patients with the viral form usually survive when they’re given intravenous fluids and monitored during the crisis.

As near as the daughter and my boss know, both people weren’t treated because men believed they couldn’t afford the treatment. The eighty-five-year-old woman was covered by Medicare. An emergency room would have had to treat the fifty-something man, regardless of his income or insurance status.

I don’t know if the man was uninsured because, as my boss believes, he was one of the many who have the money, but believe they’re too healthy to need insurance, or if he’d tried in the past and been refused. Perhaps being a recovering alcoholic, for Alcoholics Anonymous says you are never an ex-drinker, is itself a disqualifying pre-existing condition. The new law, with its demand for universal coverage, phases out such hurdles to medical treatment, though it can do nothing about the bitterness created by rejection.

False perceptions arise from the health care debate that emphasizes the high cost of treatment and the plight of the uninsured. We’re constantly told emergency rooms are overwhelmed as a result. The subtexts are that treatment might have become substandard and that people who use them are parasites. We certainly are told the costs are greater.

What people don’t hear is that there are new alternatives to emergency rooms, the urgent care centers. If the man had gone to one, instead of waiting to see his doctor, he would have been diagnosed faster and they probably would have begun treating him immediately because they had the necessary resources on site.

When people hear about the cost of treating the elderly who will never recover all their capacities, they don’t hear there’s a difference between treating a disease like cancer, which may kill anyway, and treating a temporary infection.

The ignorance about the dangers of out of control infections also comes from the same media sources, the ones who deny climate change and evolution. In making their arguments, they treat scientists and science with contempt. That attitude, in turn, reinforces people’s natural fear of disease and distrust of doctors who can’t treat the common cold. It makes some people less likely to listen to the medical programs that do appear on television that try to educate about diseases like pneumonia.

The media would deny its responsibility, in the same way it denied there was any relationship between its words and the actions of Jared Loughner who shot Gabrielle Gifford in Tucson on July 8. They would say they are not responsible for the individual actions of a one-time drunk or a man tired of a marriage. They would say individual actions are just that, individual, and not part of a social pattern.

They might also suggest the solution was eliminating malpractice laws. Regulations and contracts may have dictated what an institution or physician could have done in these situations.
However, I do wonder what ethics can condone a nursing home that doesn’t begin treating a treatable infection immediately or a doctor who doesn’t call the ambulance or send a nurse with a man obviously in need of treatment. I wonder what is their moral obligation to seriously inform people of their choices when they can see the people there are talking to are laboring under serious misunderstandings of medical situations.

Ideas, diffused through an atmosphere of misrepresentations and paranoia that feeds of people’s instinctive fears of the unknown or uncontrollable, indeed can kill as swiftly as the infections they abet.

Fire and Ice

Here in the Española valley of northern New Mexico, we’ve now experienced serious displacements cause by fire and ice. Our reactions to each were very different.

More than a decade ago, when the Cerro Grande forest fire threatened Los Alamos, and the employment of people in the valley, people came together. The evacuated either moved to shelters or in with friends. The people responsible, the US Forest Service, held daily news conferences on the progress of putting out the fire. The individual tragedies, the lost homes, were part of a greater story, the threat to a national laboratory that contained radioactive materials.

The loss of natural gas for five or six days when morning temperatures hovered around zero isolated people. No matter how drafty the houses, people had to stay in them. There were no public areas to visit, no restaurants selling warm meals: they were all closed to conserve electricity and few employees would have come to work if they’d tried to open.

One man in Española couldn’t visit his wife in the hospital. His house varied between 30 and 35 degrees. He was trapped by the need to stay home to protect what he could from the threat of broken pipes, so his wife would have a place to return to. We all were trapped by our plumbing, and even the rich discovered they weren’t immune from poor architectural design.

The people responsible, New Mexico Gas Company, cancelled press conferences. The local media, headquartered a hundred miles to the south in Albuquerque, didn’t begin to cover the story until after the Super Bowl, and then only after people in Taos, angry the gas promised for Sunday hadn’t materialized, had begun to rebel and created something to be televised. Pictures of frozen water simply weren’t as compelling to the national media as those of a raging fire.

The greater story had no overriding national interest - the national laboratory has a different source for its natural gas. It was simply one of the compounded consequence of individual attempts to stay warm, a variation of what we now call irrational exuberance.

When cold hit Texas the week before the Super Bowl, furnaces worked longer. The utilities responded to the stress in places like Dallas by instituting rolling brown outs in the more remote areas, especially the western part of the state that produced the natural gas shipped into New Mexico.

When outside temperatures fell way below zero, as low as -18 by the Santa Fe airport on February 3rd, furnaces worked harder, and the natural gas company responded by cutting off service to more remote areas to keep urban centers warm.

Everyone felt they were the victim of someone else, and most responded by denying the reality of the problem. Instead of keeping one part of a house habitable and keeping the rest just warm enough to stop pipes from breaking, people insisted on keeping their entire houses the usual temperature and continuing their usual lives. They were upset they couldn’t have their daily hot showers.

While some people responded to the calls for conservation, my boss’s mother told me she didn’t turn down her heat because she didn’t want to get sick. Her son told me he had turned up his heat because the house had began to cool between furnace cycles.

The economy began to define the seriousness of the disaster, not nature. When the gas went out the day before a normal payday, some people in Taos bought 20 space heaters each, while one of our employees in Española didn’t have enough spare cash left to buy one while they were in stock.

The people in the gas company operations center had no awareness of the difficulty of bringing the gas back in rural areas where poverty dominates; they were only concerned with protecting the physical plant from a complete breakdown. The governor, Susana Martinez, had only been in office for a few weeks and had no staff to respond.

It’s too simple to dismiss her feeble response as that of a Tea Partier who doesn’t believe in government. When things become extreme, human responses tend to overrule ideology. During the Cerro Grande fire, a libertarian, Gary Johnson, was governor. One interview I remember was one in which he lamented his powerless to do anything about a raging wild fire - picking up a shovel and tossing some dirt simply wasn’t enough.

But things were different. It wasn’t just the differences between fire and ice, spring and deep winter. There was also a difference in our expectations.

In the intervening decade, many had become more and more isolated in media created bubbles that mediated their responses to reality. An unexpected disaster that challenged the security of that bubble was more than a discomfort, it was a threat to a whole set of cultural values, and they responded, as people often do with severe threats, with denial, with an attempt to maintain normality.

The media, who created the bubble, especially those who broadcast the more demagogic commentators, were enamored of the power of social media in Egypt. Some began to show people how to turn on their own meters after the utility company had turned them off before relighting each appliance that was safe. Meantime, other stations were showing the number of substandard furnaces the technicians couldn’t legitimately relight.

The genuine risk of an explosion or fire wasn’t part of a world that operated like a Hollywood script where real poverty doesn’t exist. My next door neighbor’s gas had no pressure. He’s a middle class engineer, but I was still thankful he was at work when the gas company arrived and wasn’t the one to troubleshoot the problem. The federal regulation on orderly relighting after a mass outage suddenly made sense, even if it didn’t fit the current political world view.

Since the gas has been restored and morning temperatures are above zero, people with money and enough education to understand the physics of heat and cold, aren’t talking about what to do to prevent another disaster. They know they can’t do anything about Texas or out-of-state utilities. They’re wondering how to protect themselves, how many space heaters to buy, if a generator is necessary, what to do to protect the pipes.

More than likely, they also live in houses and have mortgages, which means they have insurance which will pay for some of the damages and repairs.

Those living in trailers are worse off. If they have insurance, it’s probably so low the payments won’t begin to cover the damages. If they bought something used or live in an old house, there’s probably no insurance. In the next disaster, they will be dismissed as constant victims by those living in the bubble because they didn’t have the minimum assets to respond.

Between fire and ice, the sense of helplessness is different. In both cases, we were the victim of human decisions, in one case a single individual who OK’d the controlled the burn, in the other the compounded consequence of individuals responding to unprecedented cold. Only in the second was the failure of the response also seen as the deliberate failure of humans with no possibility of redemption because we now have a governor who doesn’t believe anything can or should be done and has spent her time since the heat returned placing blame on everyone else.

Notes:
Albuquerque Journal. "Frozen Out," 4 February 2011, on the purchase of space heaters in Taos.

Associated Press. "Fear of System Failure Forced Brutal Choices," 7 February 2011, on the gas company operations center.

KRQE. "Relights Start Slowly in Espanola," 7 February 11, station website, on the man in Española with the sick wife.

Third World New Mexico

Paranoia flourishes where government and institutions fail.

We are living through the coldest period anyone remembers, and our heat supply was cut off on Thursday morning, soon after temperatures reached -12 here. We won’t be up until after the Super Bowl in Dallas.

The gas company has done a particularly poor job of communicating, at least through its emergency website. It blames the lowered power supply in Texas which has lowered pressure in the gas lines. The websites of the local TV stations are no better; they simply redirect you the utility company site.

There’s some news somewhere. One hears particular areas like Taos are down because of equipment or line failures. We suspect the priorities of Texas suppliers eager to leave a good impression on the wealthy visitors and provide extra power to the media crews converging in Dallas Sunday.

We look at the pattern and see outages in remote areas around Albuquerque, nothing in Santa Fe County, and then here. The pueblos, whose lines come from here, went down three hours later than we did. The utility website indicated they had separate, probably more demanding, agreements with the company.

When I walked into the post office I was asked why did I think we were singled out.

Of course I had a ready answer. We won’t squawk like the wealthy in Santa Fe. I didn’t say the obvious, because this area is poor, Hispanic, and has a long tradition of crony politics where regulations are non-existent or not respected because they were written to help family and friends.

I know some lines are good and gas exists. Every time they do a test my furnace turns on, sometimes in the middle of the night. I’m at the end of a line, several miles from the city.

A couple years ago, the local utility spun off the natural gas business to New Mexico Gas, and both suddenly used Denver addresses for their bill payments. When companies are no longer local, they don’t respond to local interests. When companies are owned by investors, they tend to out source maintenance, rather than maintain their own crews.

The thing that makes us all angry is the utility company has decided it needs to bring in crews of relighters to go house to house to turn on our appliances for us. They’ve recruited people from Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana and Colorado. We wonder about the quality of tradesmen who aren’t employed in those states fixing local problems caused by the cold.

As the postman said, give me my gas and I’ll handle the relighting.

The utility and the governor actually have responded to that particular distrust. They now list the utilities who are providing the technicians. Elsewhere, the police are accompanying the crews who have to test everything for safety before they put meters back in service.

In this area, they’re using the National Guard. I don’t know if that’s because there aren’t enough police, or if they’re no different than the rest of us, staying home keeping an eye on the water pipes, or if they’re so distrusted someone else needs to be used. The costs of a dysfunctional police force are hidden and high.

No one’s saying yet why we lost our gas service, or why we’re the last ones to have it restored. All we know is we will endure four days without heat when morning temperatures are between 4 and 10 degrees, and the areas that vote Republican are getting service before those that traditionally vote for Democrats.

Some, of course, don’t have problems. They live in areas where they still use propane. We only got gas here about 10 years ago. At least some of my neighbors still have wood stoves, although I’ve seen little smoke coming from their chimneys. Perhaps they exhausted their wood supplies in January.

I’m lucky. I have some decent space heaters and can keep the bedroom at about 68. The rest of the house is drafty and in the low 40's at night. I keep water tricking through the hot and cold water pipes in the farthest bathroom and don’t flush the toilet in the night. Even so, it got down to 39 inside last night and the fittings on the toilet are leaking.

The biggest problem is the lack of hot water. I’ve abandoned dishes for paper plates, and now dip my cooking utensils in the large pot I keep boiling when I’m in the kitchen. I can’t go to work again until I can take a shower.

A man I work with lives in a trailer with four children. He can’t afford a space heater, if any are still available after the cold at New Year’s. Friday his wife took two kids to the emergency room because they were already sick.

There won’t be any questions asked in the state capital. The governor not only supports the Tea Party philosophy, but is widely seen to be a daughter of the Texas gas and oil interests. There’s more likely to be investigations of poor construction techniques: many multi-million dollar homes in Las Campanas have broken water pipes despite having heat. Bottled water was sold out in my Santa Fe grocery Friday afternoon.