The New York Times Opinionator column has a long and edifying post, complete with videoclips about the townhall and healthcare kerfuffle. Aside from the public theatre, which I think might be healthy, you occasionally get someone who has more reasoned thoughts like commenter David D.
The basic fact is that everybody wants to live, nobody wants to pay. Rationing is a fact of life. Health care reform is simply a matter of trying to change people who are currently in charge with a different group of people. Those who are being replaced will fight against change, those who stand to benefit from such change will also try hard to make it happen.
Insurance companies are currently in charge, so they don’t want change. Lawyers are also benefiting from the current health care system, so they want to keep it as is. Specialists who make a lot of money don’t want change. Most primary care doctors bear the brunt of the work, so they want change. Most patients who understand that they are one illness away from bankruptcy want change.
Michael Pollan’s latest in the NYT Mag covers the rise of cooking shows and decline of cooking. He makes the point that even as we watch more cooking shows, we cook less and eat more.
Those who are enabling this transition, the people of the prepared food industry, have no interest in a return to increased cooking time. In fact, they are only trying to channel military capabilities into a (relative) peace-time economy.
Those corporations have been trying to persuade Americans to let them do the cooking since long before large numbers of women entered the work force. After World War II, the food industry labored mightily to sell American women on all the processed-food wonders it had invented to feed the troops: canned meals, freeze-dried foods, dehydrated potatoes, powdered orange juice and coffee, instant everything. As Laura Shapiro recounts in “Something From the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America,” the food industry strived to “persuade millions of Americans to develop a lasting taste for meals that were a lot like field rations.” The same process of peacetime conversion that industrialized our farming, giving us synthetic fertilizers made from munitions and new pesticides developed from nerve gas, also industrialized our eating.
Pollan spends a good deal of time grousing about television’s portrayal of cooking, particularly The Food Network’s: lots of flash and virtuosity that keeps the viewer watching but uninspired to cook. This is for the most part true, though my kids tend to kitchen adventures after an episode or two of Alton Brown’s “Good Eats.”
It would be better if Pollan dove into a little field reportage, or if he wrote about his own eating and cooking habits. Rather than nagging about the flawed behavior of others, perhaps, like Barbara Kingsolver, Pollan is on the verge of writing about how a food revolution, a revolution where we spend longer growing, cooking, and eating will transform us.
Fun facts found along the way:
Andrew Sullivan tries to win over the MSM:
Grow some, guys. And get over yourselves.
This book about Boston’s secret places had me thinking about the secret places in my own neighborhood and city.
There’s this tunnel in Highland Park that I’ve always wanted to share with people. Of course once a secret is shared or published it doesn’t become a secret anymore. The secret becomes familiar, even banal.
Then again, there are some things that are so encased in shadow and rumor that no amount of light and perspective will change our opinion of them as secret.
But if you want success in life or photojournalism, go with the obvious.
Yesterday’s Boston Globe had a decently-sized article on slow movements. The article mentions a slow math movement and a slow physics movement. I think he was just figuratively piling it on. I do, however, think that there should be a course of study for those of us who are slower at math and physics. How about spending a year on Newton’s Laws of Motion or your thirties on trigonometry.
Am rather weathered from celebrating our 98th. Liz has known me for almost half her life and I have known her for more than half of mine. Better stop. This is sounding like an algebra problem.
One of last night’s guests said she has observed me driving and has given me the nickname Putterer because of my slow pace and the absent look on my face.
Like most of the nicknames I have been tagged with over the years, I am not overly fond of it. For one, one of my childhood pets was named Putter. My mother, when she wanted the attention of one of us, had a habit of running through the family names, including the dog, until she got to the right child, sometimes overshooting the mark, so to speak: Sharron-Randy-Jeannie-Johnnie-Susie-Mark-Putter-Mark.
The other reason I wouldn’t like being called Putterer is because it’s true, but
only partially true. I sometimes drive slower than normal not through habit but by choice; my absent look is sometimes due to being absorbed by the scene, the scene being more than what is beyond the windshield.
As unamerican as it may seem I’m tempted to go beneath the speed limit–at least when nobody’s behind me. As I travel at what I call flivver speed, I can inhabit a certain consciousness that some experienced in the early part of the last century. The first trip in an automobile, one capable of moving at 25 miles per hour, would be mind bending for an adult. You get the feeling of going faster than your feet could take you, faster than nature provided for.
At 20-25 miles per hour, your pulse can quicken. Your lifebeat increases. Culturally we adopted musical forms, jazz and ragtime, that provided the accompaniment for our movements.
Past the age of the flivver, to the time of the Model A, what music complements the speed: Benny Goodman, Chuck Berry, Flatt & Scruggs, Booker T. & the MGs? The tempo of a speeding auto I believe corresponds to none of them. The quantitative change bears a qualitative change, one that leaves the concept of music in its tracks. We may play music as we travel. But it is vestigial and alien? Crack a window and you’ll hear the music, the tires on the asphalt the wind rushing into the car. It’s a crazy sound we still haven’t caught up with.
And don’t even mention jet travel.
I put cup hooks up, hung up the flag, and — the most difficult task — posted a picture to my blog.
Now I just need to get one of my sons to start the charcoal.
This photo was edited with the Photo Lab Daily app and I used the cut-and-paste function.
Had to try out the cut and paste feature:
Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable. — John Kennedy
