Diversity care

The Discriminations blog notes that "HR3200, the health care reform bill introduced in the House, provides, in two places, for the 'COORDINATION OF DIVERSITY AND CULTURAL COMPETENCY PROGRAMS.' It provides 'CULTURAL AND LINGUISTIC COMPETENCY TRAINING FOR HEALTH CARE PROFESSIONALS.'

"A culturally competent workforce, of course, must be a diverse workforce, and so 'NURSING WORKFORCE DIVERSITY GRANTS' are also generously provided." (Subtitle D, Part 1, sections 2242 and 2243, if you're interested.)

Surprised? Did you really imagine this bid for the government to take over health care would be all about health care? Aside from being primarily in aid of making the population dependent on an army of federal desk surgeons, HR 3200 inevitably gets in a few more licks for social engineering. Who cares if you have an M.D. from Harvard Med School and have worked 16 hours a day for weeks at a time during your residency — first things first: Do you have cultural competency? Your Spanish we can take for granted, but how are your Swahili lessons coming along?

Just scrolling through the titles, subtitles, and sections of HR 3200 is an invitation to attention deficit disorder, but don't worry, you'll be covered for that, too, once you are approved (generally within five months of acceptance on the waiting list) thanks to the generous contributions of generations yet unborn and confiscation from today's middle class wage earners.

No one with a claim on sanity would devote a sizable chunk of his lifespan to reading HR 32o0 in its entirety. But do try a sample. Subtitle B, sec. 3121, for instance, on "National Prevention and Wellness Strategy." I copied and pasted the section and asked the computer to do a word count. That single section is 3,036 words. Ten double-spaced pages.

I suspect only God knows what the entire bill contains. It would not surprise me in the least if one of the countless drones who drafted bits of HR 3200 accidentally dropped his résumé in, and it is discovered a few years hence, like a preserved ice man in the arctic.

But for the moment, all you need to know is that you cannot know how diversity care will change your life, or perhaps put a cap-and-trade on your exhaling carbon dioxide and contributing to global warning. Liberty ends not with a bang or a whimper, but with a law too large and complex for any human mind to comprehend. From here, the sound of Big Government advancing is eerily like the menacing, long-drawn-out "invasion" theme in Shostakovich's Leningrad Symphony.

What are the odds I'll be posting soon?

My job cuts into my blogging time, that's for sure.

I regret the lack of new postings more than you probably do. Still, my work — where things are exceptionally busy at the moment — has more social utility than the blog. It also pays much better.

I'm planning to do some short entries, pro tempore, just to keep my hand in.

The Great Calibrator

Things continue to look up for those of us who don't belong to the Church of Obama.

It's great fun to read the New York Times, Obama's public relations agency, trying to damp down the flap over their idol's "acted stupidly" shot from the hip about l'affaire Gates.

As an aside, I'm actually rather surprised that the heat has been turned up so high. The public knew last year that the Big O was a long-time congregant of mad-dog racist preacher Jeremiah Wright, and decided that was okay. It preferred to look at what O said, not what he did — always a mistake with any politician. O would bring us together, heal us, wash us clean of our racial sins.

Frankly, it's hard to see what that "acted stupidly" told us that we shouldn't have known already. But apparently it touched an I've-had-enough nerve. Even the slow learners seem to have twigged that Obama is the president of some of the people — the racial, ethnic, and sexual identity tribes.

If you will forgive another aside: I haven't read enough in detail about the incident to be certain of what happened, or who was "right." I doubt very much that Officer Crowley acted stupidly, but it's conceivable that he let his temper or authority get the better of him in the face of insults, while Professor Gates let his conviction about the omnipresence of racism get the better of him. The point remains, Obama didn't know the facts or truth either. He spoke reflexively, revealing his world view to be the same as Gates's.

The Times has grasped at a life preserver. Obama is in trouble for "speaking his mind," not for what's in his mind. To wit:

There is no owner’s manual for the Oval Office, no school to learn how to be a president. Perhaps most challenging for any new president is learning how powerful that megaphone really is. Every offhand word, every spontaneous remark, every comment informed more by emotion than calculation risks profound consequences.

No school to learn how to be president? Well, how about some experience outside academia and politics, experience of what it is like to have responsibility for the employees and stockholders of a business, or the very lives of the soldiers fighting a world war? How about some time as a lawyer representing various kinds of people, not just selected victim groups? Even within the political realm, having spent more than an obscure term as a Senator might be useful.

… his comment last week on the case of Henry Louis Gates Jr., a Harvard professor, was not a slip of the tongue, advisers said. Mr. Obama said what he wanted to say. The question is whether presidents can really do that.

“They want to be genuine, they want to speak their mind,” said Ari Fleischer, who was press secretary for President George W. Bush. “But there’s the recognition that you’re no longer able to muse the way you’re used to. If you’re too candid, that can really haunt you. So presidents learn the art of being circumspect. And they chafe at it. They want to be genuine. But in many ways, they all become more guarded as time goes on.”

So, the Times implies, Obama's error was not letting his prejudice slip out, but being too candid. Loose lips sink ships of state. There's a dark, seething mass of gun- and religion-clingers out there in the steppes of America who haven't yet accepted Obama's vision of Utopia. They must not be inflamed or goodness knows what they might do. Obama needs to hone his nudge-and-wink skills.

David Axelrod, another senior White House adviser, acknowledged that Mr. Obama’s comments on the Gates case had reflected a president still getting accustomed to his new position.“I think there’s something to that,” Mr. Axelrod said. “The fact of the matter is he’s a human being. As gifted and bright and disciplined as he is, every once in a while, he doesn’t use words exactly as he intended or in retrospect discussion it had meaning beyond what he wanted to express.”

So, having informed us a few paragraphs earlier that "his comment … was not a slip of the tongue, advisers said. Mr. Obama said what he wanted to say," the story now quotes an adviser who seems to suggest the contrary.

In the end, Mr. Obama said he did not regret weighing in on the Gates case, only the wording he chose because it had offended police officers in Cambridge, Mass., and because it had distracted from his push for health care legislation. He tried to fix that Friday by saying he should have “calibrated” his remarks more carefully while still maintaining that the arrest was unjustified.

So, our golden-tongued, gifted, bright, disciplined president falls back on the patent-medicine cop-out (no pun intended — well, okay, why not?) "I regret that I offended … ." But the Great Calibrator still knew the arrest was unjustified. How did he know that? Why, it's all right there, in black and white.

Mr. Misdeeds goes to town

For the first time in months, if not years, I'm feeling almost hopeful about the future of America. Maybe it's only green shoots. Maybe a freeze is coming. But for now I will water them, tend them, watch and wait. Could it be that revival is in the air?

President Obama's halo has well and truly fallen off.

He has demonstrated lately what many of us have been saying since even before his canonization: that inside the Holy Father, a petty, radical misfit is struggling to get out. And finally has.

Having promised us that prosperity was just around the corner, for one low, low price of $787 billion, he finds himself as top dog in an economically blasted country with a thousand points of blight. The United States has not responded to his behavioral therapy: there has been a stimulus but no response.

He has sought to rescue us from the ravages inflicted on our health by private doctors and insurance companies. If only our doctors and insurance were ruled by a government bureaucracy, and health care for the many were rationed to allegedly benefit the few, we'd all be sound as a dollar. Wait, bad choice of words. Sound as a politician's promise. Uh, no …

But we cannot wait, Obama says. We cannot stop to examine the 1,018 pages of the healthcare reform bill, which it is safe to say he has not read in its entirety — briefings from staff members don't count, and it's unlikely any single staff member has read it all. However, it seems that Jeff Dircksen of Government Bytes has:

… A couple of things stand out. First, the legislation empowers a very busy bureaucracy. The term "Secretary" — as in the Secretaries of Health & Human Services, Labor, Defense, and Veterans Affairs — appears 1,124 times in the bill. The Secretaries -- along with Commissioners (199 references), Committees (76 references), and Boards (17 references) are busy conducting studies, developing methodologies, and receiving recommendations among other things — some of the other things [include] requiring, limiting, penalizing, regulating, taxing, and enforcing their way to affordable health care for all.

Despite Obama's foot-stamping impatience, and his order that Congress will pass the thing before the August recess, it's not going to happen by his deadline. Maybe never. Too many people are questioning whether our undoubtedly imperfect healthcare system is actually that bad. Too many people are doubting that the answer is to have a national infirmary run by a dozen layers of managers and string savers.

It's even whispered in some quarters that those wonderful-in-theory systems in Canada and the U.K. aren't quite so wonderful when the rose-colored glasses slip off. Not when you're a file number with an illness that severely downgrades your quality of life or even chances of survival and you wait months till the functionaries in some monstrous cubicle farm decide you can have your operation. Canada and the U.K. have abolished capital punishment, except for patients in their national health services.

And not least, Obama acting stupidly in re Gatesgate. I suspect a few minds were opened like clamshells as a U.S. president delivered a judgment on an incident that was none of his business, and demonstrated that he is spring-loaded to perceive bias everywhere. As he told the NAACP, "The pain of discrimination is still felt in America. By African American women paid less for doing the same work as colleagues of a different color and a different gender. By Latinos made to feel unwelcome in their own country. By Muslim Americans viewed with suspicion simply because they kneel down to pray to their God. By our gay brothers and sisters, still taunted, still attacked, still denied their rights."

Well, guess what. Ordinary, un-hyphenated, un-identity-obsessed Americans are getting a little tired of being taunted and attacked at home by their own president, when he's not traveling the world apologizing for our sick, discrimination-riddled souls.

Can tin haloes be recycled?

Caught in a literary Yale-storm

Michael Blowhard, of 2 Blowhards fame, protests the narrowness of academically correct fiction in a posting about an Open Yale course (I accidentally typed "curse" — hmmm) on "The American Novel Since 1945." He says:

Take that course and you'd learn little if anything about postwar crime, horror, romance, or western fiction. You'd discover next to nothing about erotic fiction or humorous fiction. You'd remain clueless about the enduring influence of writers like Mickey Spillane and Jacqueline Susann. (I bet you also wouldn't wake up to the history of the postwar American publishing business.) Yet you'd emerge convinced that you'd "done" the postwar American novel. And you'd have Yale's imprimatur bolstering your confidence about that judgment.

Here are the novels that will be taught to litivores seeking the Yale professor's insights.

Let's see: I've actually read a couple of them (Lolita and, when I was a pup, On the Road). I've read quite a few of Philip Roth's novels, although not The Human Stain, and Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, though not Franny and Zooey. I vaguely recollect that a writer I think highly of praised Wright's Black Boy. The names of Flannery O'Connor, John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison, and Cormac McCarthy are known to me.

But I have to confess complete ignorance of Maxine Hong Kingston, Marilynne Robinson, Edward P. Jones, and the "students' choice," Jonathan Safran Foer. I am culturally deprived (I accidentally typed "depraved" — hmmm). Get me a grant. Who's the Obama literary czar?

Should I happen to take Professor Amy Hungerford's course — she's not half cute, is she? — to improve my mind, here are some of the conundrums, condoms, and carborundums I could explore.

Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior:

Referring to examples throughout the syllabus, but especially Maxine Hong Kingston's Woman Warrior, Hungerford describes the overriding tendency of American novels written after 1945 to explore the tension between individual and collective identities and to interrogate the artistic and political stakes of competing notions of authenticity.

Is Amnesty International on the case? Are harsh interrogation methods, including waterboarding, used to interrogate the … erm, I'm not sure what the object of the verb is, "stakes" or "notions." Why must notions of authenticity compete? Why can't they cooperate? Why can't we all just get along?

Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping:

The loss of identity that Emerson describes as becoming a "transparent eyeball" in the woods, Robinson brings into the realm of the home, the built environment. The individual voice and its guiding consciousness are all mixed up in the material substance of the world, giving them a concurrent fixity and fragility that it is Robinson's talent, and our challenge, to explore.

Emerson's lost identity became a transparent eyeball in the woods? Ah, yes, I remember his essay now: the old farmer, chopping down trees to add to his pasture, stopped to pick up the eyeball, irritated to have to interrupt his task. "Yah, tha' use to be Ralph all right, th'old git," his voice with its guiding consciousness said. He contemptuously tossed the eyeball aside, but it and his voice and his consciousness got all mixed up in the material substance of the world. There they remain to this day, fixed and fragile, I've heard it whispered on dark nights in the cabin at the shore of Loon Lake. Challenge enough for anybody.

Edward P. Jones, The Known World:

Professor Hungerford suggests that Jones revives a nineteenth-century form of the novel when his narrator takes on a God-like omniscience, but unlike the nineteenth-century novel's narrators, Jones's omniscient narrator provides little in the way of God-like consolation.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, and don't you dare tell Me different. I know everything, you little pipsqueak reader. But even if it was the worst of times, don't worry, be happy. That's why you read Me, for consolation. Not like that wrong number of a deity Jones — think you'll get a scrap of comfort out of him? He was the inspiration for "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" by that Reverend Edwards who used to practice his frown in front of a mirror.

Students' Choice Novel: Jonathan Safran Foer,
Everything is Illuminated:

In thus attempting to marry the nineteenth-century social novel with Postmodernist, or late Modernist, techniques, Foer participates in an emerging tradition that risks the confusion between resonant emotion and sentimental cliché.

Now this I can relate to. I'm constantly confusing resonant emotion and sentimental cliché. I'd like to believe I've had some small influence in the emergence of this emerging tradition.

The face of anarchy

If you've never witnessed a scene like this, consider yourself lucky. The chances are you live well away from the decayed inner-city core of Los Angeles, New York, or almost any big American city.

The Los Angeles Times explains the video above:

Los Angeles police released security video today that captures unruly celebrants of the Lakers NBA finals victory helping themselves to merchandise at a Shell gas station convenience store blocks from the Staples Center. The footage, shot June 14 by a security camera at the rear of the store in the 600 block of West Olympic Boulevard, shows a group of about two dozen men swarming the store and helping themselves primarily to juice, soda and energy drinks in a large cooler.

The mob shouted, “Free soda, free soda” as they grabbed merchandise in a two-minute rush in which they also smashed bottles on the floor, trampled bananas, knocked over display racks and broke a window.

To you, a sight like this might be a shocking anomaly. For the many people in the urban underclass, it's business as usual. Today, raid a convenience store. Tomorrow, boost a couple of cars and deliver them to the chop shop. If Thursday is a slow day, settle for decorating a highway-side retaining wall with more graffiti. When things get lively, the toys get pulled out and the gangs try to decorate one another with bullet holes.

To the Leftist Establishment the mob takeover of a convenience store is an incident. Thieves are "unruly celebrants." Just high-fivin' for their sports team, a little overenthusiastic. After all, they're members of a gold medal victim group. Oppressed, you know what I'm sayin'? They're freelance redistributionists. Spreading the wealth around.

Total damage from that night has been estimated in the tens of thousands of dollars, but LAPD officials said it was far less than the 2000 Laker victory celebration beset by violence and looting that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Investigators released the video today, hoping people would recognize looters and report them to authorities. Beyond security video, Vernon said the LAPD is reviewing images posted on various social media sites, including YouTube and Flickr.

Would the police even bother to make a serious effort to identify the store invaders if eight police cars hadn't also been damaged? Maybe; police can be awfully retrograde. There's something quaint, a little comical, about looking for clues, asking witnesses to come forward, as if they were trying to catch a burglar or a James Cagney-like, '40s-movie type gangster. But what they're up against isn't an individual lawbreaker, or Bonnie and Clyde. They're facing a subculture that the Liberal Establishment has in large part created.

Borderless borders. Catch and release. Taxpayer-supported childbirth and childcare for the feckless and impoverished. Enforced multi-culturalism. Racial preferences. This is not your father's America. Just ask a wise Latina.

"Free sodas, free sodas." Free healthcare. Free everything, except politically incorrect speech. Our Jacobin president and his enablers understand the convenience store party-ers in a way that the language of the Los Angeles Times does not. The Obama Crew want you to believe that they are all about giving. But what they understand is taking, and calling it giving.