In Defense of Dithering

Where Citizen K. rants, the New York Times' Timothy Egan -- who lives here in Seattle's Seward Park neighborhood -- offers a cool defense of President Obama's style. I have wondered that the same "progressives" who rightly despised President Bush's strutting and preening continuously gripe that Obama doesn't act in the same way. (The Nation doesn't publish an issue without someone blasting the president for not rearing up on his hind legs and blaring like a rogue elephant.) Apparently, bluster and certitude are just fine so long as it is the bluster and certitude of the left.

R.I.P., Elizabeth Taylor

The New York Times calls her "the last movie star," and they're probably right. Born in 1932 in London to American parents, Elizabeth Taylor became an international star at age 12 with her winning turn in 1944's, National Velvet. As seemed to happen often, Taylor's presence inspired her leading man -- in this case, Mickey Rooney -- to do some of his best work. Rock Hudson was never better than as Bick Benedict in Giant, and Montgomery Clift was at his considerable best in A Place in the Sun.


The tabloid headlines and legendary marital brawls obscured Taylor's impressive range: She played and played well characters created by Tennessee Williams, John O'Hara, Edward Albee, Dylan Thomas, and William Shakespeare. She made her mark in family movies and smoldered in sprawling epics and soap operas. She played it for laughs in Father of the Bride as naturally as she evoked pity and disgust in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. 


To me, though, Elizabeth Taylor is first and foremost Leslie Benedict, the brash Maryland debutante who over the course of 201 minutes becomes the seasoned partner of a Texas rancher. (I grew up a mile from the main gate of the King Ranch, upon which Giant is based.) Over the course of the movie, the outsider becomes an insider while her principles and wit remain intact, a combination that causes her husband Bick Benedict (Hudson) to conclude that he won't understand her if he lives to be 90 (or a 100 or 150, one suspects). Taylor takes advantage of Giant's to show her character as arch, sardonic, wondering, overwhelmed, determined, warm, sympathetic, feminine, and maternal. She shifts moods as easily and naturally as you or I might change shirts. It's a bravura performance, all the more so as their isn't a trace forced or self-conscious.

Whatever the misfortunes of your personal life, Liz, you were not only one of the greats, you just may be the last of them...

Don't miss this 1949 Times profile of 16-year old "soft-spoken, rather quiet, almost shy" Elizabeth Taylor...

The savage fight scene from Giant, followed by the closing:

All Over

At 6'8", Gene Conley was big enough to be that rare athlete to play two professional sports. From 1952-63, the three-time All Star took the mound for the Boston and Milwaukee Braves, the Philadelphia Phillies, and the Boston Red Sox. For good measure, he put in six years with the Knicks and Celtics of the NBA (spaced out between 1952 and 1964), where he was a capable rebounder off the bench.

By 1964, Conley's strong right arm had given out. As he stared bleakly at the end of his sports career, he determineded to give it one more shot. Conley called Cleveland Indians executive Gabe Paul, who agreed to let Conley pitch for an Indians minor league club in order to see if there was anything left.

There wasn't.

In this memorable passage from Donald Honig's Baseball Between the Lines, Conley recounts his final realization that he was through:

So I started a game. We were playing Greensboro, North Carolina. Those kids came up to the plate and started knocking line drives all over the place. I tried flooring a few of them but they weren't impressed; I didn't have enough on the ball to scare anybody. After four or five innings they had to take me out.

I called Gabe Paul the next day.

"Gabe," I said, "I tried but I can't do it."

"I thought that might be the case," he said. "I guess you just had to get it out of your system."

"Well," I said, "It's out."

When I walked away from that telephone I was really shocked. There was no more fooling myself. It was all over and I knew it. Not only that, I didn't have a job, nothing to go back to. The basketball was about over, too. So I was pretty depressed.

I wandered around for a while, a lost soul on the streets of this town in North Carolina. Then I walked into a church and sat down in the back, all by myself. There was a service going on. After the singing this Baptist minister started preaching. All of a sudden it hit me real hard and I caved in and started crying. I just sat there in that last row and cried and cried, trying to keep my head down so as not to upset anybody. Then I felt a hand on my shoulder and I looked up. An elderly Southern gentleman was standing there gazing down at me.

"What's the matter, son?" he asked. "Did you lose your mother?"

I shook my head, the tears still running. "No sir," I said. "I lost my fastball."

What is Preventive Heath Care?

These before and after pictures of the tsunami will stun you. Don't miss them (scroll down)...

Paul Krugman writes that GOP staffers recently jeered at the part of a Kaiser Permanente presentation that discussed the importance of preventive health care. (It's a "slush fund," apparently.) Claiming that there is no such thing as preventive health care is the medical equivalent of saying that the world is flat, yet I've seen this showing up more and more in the comments that I monitor. There are even cherry-picked references to a CBO study. (Funny how conservatives like the CBO just fine when they can distort it to in their own interests.)

The thing is, Americans have relatively ineffective preventive health because we practice it in the context of our commitment to heroic medicine. There's much more to the concept than a yearly physical and PSA (which may not do that much good, anyway). We don't really practice what is known as population health, which includes outcomes, determinants, interventions, and policies that impact the health of a group. A group can be as small as the total number of patients in a given practice and as large as the entire population of a country, and be based on condition, locale, demographics, or some combination of the three.

At the end of the first quarter of school, my team made a presentation based on steps that could be taken to reduce the number of pediatric asthma admissions to a rural emergency department in an area with a heavy migrant worker population. We set a goal (50% reduction, based on research) and designed a program based on ED clinical staff training, patient education, check-in and check-out procedures (wherein, for example, no one left without what's called an Asthma Action Plan), home mitigation strategies, and primary care followup. We minimized other possibilities because of budget limitations and likely behavioral restrictions on the families. This is the idea behind preventive care based on population, although it doesn't address public policies that might improve outcomes even further (such as improving air quality eroded by a high concentration of pesticides).

So, if someone tells you that preventive health care doesn't work, the chances are that they don't know what it is and that they're unaware that we really don't practice it here.

Utah Teabaggers Support Gay Sex

These people are nuts. But it has been fun watching Orrin Hatch humiliate himself by sucking up to them. I mean, I thought these people were all for family values and against gay sex. But here they are: Making old Orrin give them exactly what they tried to crucify Bill Clinton for.

Two Songs About Rivers

If there's a better American song than this one, I'd like to hear it. Here's a Brit performing an aching rendition. Away, I must away:



Kris Kristofferson looks like singing "i'm gonna sit right here until I die" with Johnny Cash fulfills a bucket wish list. It tore me up every time I heard her drawl that southern drawl:

The Dean Passeth

Journalist and commentator David Broder passed away today at the age of 81.

The Dean was the ultimate insider, a man with an almost childlike faith in the senior elected officials he courted and befriended. Although he often wrote in broad strokes about the stultifying ideological partisanship that has paralyzed Congress and especially the Senate, he rarely named names out of a seeming reluctance to offend. While Broder often criticized presidents, one had the feeling that it was because he saw them as DC blow-ins unworthy of the noble men and women of the legislative branch.

Broder was a throwback, an American innocent at home who never really understood the corruption of Congress by corporate lobbyists and money. To do so would have offended his sense of the politician's noble calling to represent the people. He never explored the gap, or even the possibility of a gap, between the calling and the reality: That might have made him unwelcome at the highest levels of the DC party circuit. No gap -- especially when it wasn't really real -- was worth missing out on martinis with Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer.

He valued compromise, even though compromises almost never hold. He cranked out column after column with an almost Talmudic weighing of issues, only to conclude that there was no conclusion other than to wait and see. Somewhere along the line, he mistook an absence of point of view for intellectual integrity, and too often settled for pabulum. Today, this passes for a balanced perspective.

Although Broder was once an undeniably fine reporter, the DC political and social whirl informed his views as a columnist, and he seemed more anxious to not offend his friends (and to parrot their opinions)  than to actually analyze. He too often dealt in stereotypes and believed in his own importance, never a good thing for a supposed observer. Nonetheless, he was a rare voice of civility. Even though that came with a paucity of actual insight, I suppose it will be missed...


Citizen K. wrote critically of Broder here and here...