I was lucky enough to hear the commentary this morning by NPR’s Scott Simon on Morning Edition Saturday berating blogs as “bad literature.”
To borrow a phrase from fellow bloggers, “Well, duh!”
First of all, this has been a problem not merely since the beginning of the World Wide Web; the problem of the proliferation of bad literature is at least as old as moveable type. Books may have been expensive in the 15th Century, but kings and princes were rich: they could easily, and did, commission thousands of forgettable volumes of their or their favorite writers’ works. We don’t read them now simply because they were forgettable. Now used bookstores are full of wretchedly forgettable novels, screeds, volumes of questionable verse–many of which were the bestsellers of a few years ago. The advent of the Web simply makes this kind of schlock more easy to create and see.
But Simon misses the point entirely. We save our in-depth works for EastWesterly Review or Take2; literary journals are printed quarterly not simply because they are woefully underfunded but because it takes time to make critical judgements and to sort through submissions. Blogs are not about great literature. They are about quick, informal communications–more virtual salons than grand missives to history (with apologies to salon.com).
It is equally obvious that Simon has never spent any time teaching or taking lower-level creative writing workshops at any of our esteemed institutues of higher learning. If he had, he would realize that most people think they’re poets. Students take these classes usually because they think they will be fun, will meet an elective requirement, and will maybe prove to a few people how good our budding Dylan Thomases really are. If blogs keep more of these people out of those classes, it will save their poor instructors the grief of having to read the scattershot lines of these half-wits–not to mention the difficulty of having to tell a sensitive student how horribly his work truly “blows.”
President Bush says we have to “stay the course” in Iraq.
What I want to know is this:
What course?
Continue Reading…
I have yet to hear an adequate explanation of why health care costs keep rising so fast. Reasons abound: the aging population, the fact that we’re all too fat and sedentary, the extraordinary increase in expensive medical technology of late, the need for insurance companies to make up for stock market losses . . . . All of them probably contribute: a problem this big is bound to be complex. Some of them we can’t do much about: people get old, and trying to get Americans to change their lifestyles is a bit like herding cats, except that cats are trainable.
But the last two seem to me to be something we can actually fix–or if not fix, at least ameliorate. They arise, as no one wants to admit because it’s blasphemous in America to do so, from a failure of the free market system. The fact that we even allow something as important as health insurance to be subject to the vagaries of the market seems a little short-sighted and foolish. But, of course, that’s the real way these companies make their profits–and if that doesn’t work, they have to raise your premiums, and if that prices you out of the market, too damn bad. Insurance comapnies are in business to make money, and if your own health is deleterious to the bottom line, guess what? You get the boot.
The seeming need for the hottest and greatest medical gadgets comes from a similar problem. In order for health care providers to compete with one another, they must be able to call upon all those great technologies. You wouldn’t go to a doctor who didn’t have his own combined MRI, laproscope, laser-surgery suite, would you? The problem is that if one guy in town has it, everybody has to have it to keep up. And, again, there’s no way they’re going to just eat the expense: they’re going to pass the costs along to you–and, if you use insurance to pay for your health care, to everyone else too in the form of, yet again, higher premiums. We see similar problems in cable, long-distance, even local telephone services now. Remember when politicians were telling us deregulation would lead to lower prices? If technological infrastructure is involved, you can forget it.
This is where government health plans help: if you only really need one MRI for every 5,000 people, that’s all you’ll get. But this is America, and that ain’t gonna happen.
So what do we do? We can fix health care on the insurance side, at least for a few people–those priced out of the market, specifically–by doing something very simple in concept (though perhaps administratively complex): provide the same coverage offered under the pre-existing Medicare or Medicaid packages as cut-rate no-frills insurance on a sliding-scale based on ability to pay. This would cover the working poor, those in entry-level or part-time jobs (who are very often young and healthy) which rarely offer insurance, or anyone else who wanted to contribute. It would not be free, but it would help subsidize the existing free plans and would allow many to get some kind of insurance who otherwise wouldn’t. It would not solve all of the free-market problems with health care, but it would also be less subject to fluctuations in the Dow. Being a government agency, it would not need to turn a profit, but if it did, that money could be used to lower taxes on everybody else who now pay for Medicare and Medicaid–and that’s something just about all Americans agree is a good thing.