Koan Kinship — Bill Mohr's Blog

Almost from the start of his interjection into the catastrophic dissolution of the Ottoman Empire during World War I, T.E. Lawrence most probably harbored a desire to write a book that could hold its own alongside other enduring memoirs of warfare. It’s doubtful that he anticipated how much the personal consequences. of being one of the originators of “special forces” would end up impinging on his imagined epic. His memoir tried to do too many things as a summation of his “ordinary effort” and the book holds its spot on one’s shelf largely as something to be read intermittently.

Lawrence was also a prolific letter-writer, and many readers enjoy the letters for more than just a glimpse into the daily life of an enigmatic hero; his correspondence prances through many moods with a puckish style worth savoring late at night, when one needs a literary aperitif. His single best increment of writing, however, is not to be found in his letters, but in a posthumous book, “The Mint,” which was a diary he kept of his service as an enlisted man after the Great War. The writing throughout is solid English prose, with just the right proportion of droll humor. In the chapter in which Lawrence records his response to an officer’s inquiry about why he joined te Air Force (“I think I must have had a mental breakdown, sir.”), Lawrence appears to have set himself up for a charge of “insolence,” but the incident resolves itself wit Lawrence not only getting off scot-free of any punishment, but being complimented by the officer who was performing the original barracks inspection.

Subservience was Lawrence’s method of dealing with PTSD, and by all accounts the men with whom he served benefitted from his presence in the ranks. Submission, however, cannot completely escape the recoil built into its suppressed cantilevering; the desire to hold oneself apart from others cannot help but rear up even as one immures oneself in a larger mass of obedience. What Lawrence called his “surplus emotion” found an outlet in riding his motorcycle. “The Road,” which comes very near te end of “The Mint” (it is chapter 16 of the book’s third and final part) is a five page description of one of Lawrence’s typical expeditions on his motorcycle after the day’s work was done. It is one of the ten most perfect pieces of short writing on any subject I have ever read. Lawrence’s sentences flow with a dexterity that is free of any aspect of rhetorical inefficiency. Each word thrums in an attuned demarcation.

“A miracle that all this speed waits behind one lever for the pleasure of my hand.”

The other day, I was walking near Los Angeles Harbor Arts in San Pedro and saw this motorcycle parked on the sidewalk and thought yet once again of the sentence I just quoted. Indeed, any sentence a writer has devoted full attention to seems in and of itself to be an equal miracle.

The best book about Lawrence’s involvement in the Arab Rebellion during the Great War remains Scott Anderson’s “LAWRENCE IN ARABIA: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East.” The current expansionist retaliation of Israel against Hamas and Hezbollah was predicted by Lawrence, who foresaw that the only way a Zionist nation could be maintained on the Mediterranean coast was by force of arms. A two-state solution, I would add, would still be possible, but only at the cost of a transparently coordinated policy of “mutual assured destruction.”

I just filled out my mail-in ballot and will put it in the post box tomorrow morning. It will be no surprise to anyone that I voted for Kamala Harris for President. In making that selection, I fully expect Donald Trump to lose the popular vote for the third election in a row.

Whether Vice-President Kamala Harris can break “the (gendered) glass ceiling” of American politics, however, and become the second person of color to occupy the Oval Office of the White House will probably depend on the choices made by less than a total of 25,000 voters in a half-dozen states. If the very thin margins that polls show her winning by manage to hold as votes are counted in the week following the deadline of Election Day, and if Trump refuses to concede his defeat in the Electoral College, then President Biden should resign his office, effective December 1st, and Vice-President Harris should become acting President as well as President-Elect. If the votes of the Electoral College fall in her favor, then it is crucial that the nation recognize the transition authorized by the election as quickly as possible. Waiting until mid-January will only allow a pathological liar to foment even more mischief the he did after being defeated by Joseph Biden. Trump is not a good loser, and he will do everything possible to thwart the will of the electorate. The only way to rebuff a bully is to play hard-ball and to make it emphatically clear that his rejection as a candidate is irrevocable.

Nothing should happen until the national vote totals are firmly tabulated, of course, but once those totals are known, and if Harris prevails, she should immediately begin announcing her cabinet choices. If one is chosen to be the President, then one should not hesitate in the least to act presidential.

In the fall of 1970, I saw a notice in a newspaper that the British poet Michael Horowitz was putting on a poetry reading. I had purchased a copy of his anthology, CHILDREN OF ALBION, just the week before and had been spending a fair amount of time reading the work of Adrian Mitchell, Roger McGough, Brian Patten, Pete Brown, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Spike Hawkins, John Cotton, Anselm Hollo, Edwin Morgan, Tom Raworth, Gael Turnbull, and John Arden. Fortunately, I spotted the notice just in time to attend and read one of my own poems. The most memorable moment in the evening was Bernard Kops’s “Shalom Bomb,” which was received with considerable appreciative laughter and applause. It would take me years to fully absorb everything I learned from his poem and his performance of it, but even as I was hearing it out loud, I recognized that it was a crucial early lesson in poetry directed to the public sphere. Given the history of terrorism by bad actors the past half-century, on behalf of any number of dubious causes and insidious organizations, Kops’s poem remains one of the great rebukes of that kind of reprehensible behavior that I have ever encountered.

You can find Kops’s poem in Horowitz’s anthology, CHILDREN OF ALBION, as well as on-line.

https://www.andrewwhitehead.net/blog/shalom-bomb-for-peace

The three story building at 401 S. Mesa Street in San Pedro, California was known as “The Loft” for well over a quarter century. A hundred years ago, it was the site of a laundry for the ships that used San Pedro as a harbor. In more recent decades, it was a warehouse for the Harbor Shipping company. Artists started using spaces in the top floor in 1995, and eventually almost a dozen artists were in residence there.

The building is now known as Los Angeles Harbor Arts, and it will officially open under that name on October 3, when a ribbon cutting ceremony will take place, along with music and food, starting at 5 p.m.

The event is taking place on the First Thursday of October, since “First Thursdays” are the day that the artists in the building traditionally open up their studios to the public in the evening.

LAHA
401 S. Mesa Street
San Pedro, CA
Thursday, October 3
5 p.m.
FREE

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The paintings underneath are by Bill Mohr.

Tuesday, September 17, 2024

Amidst all the social turmoil and brouhaha of national political campaigns, each home has its private sorrow. The Ohio and Molino Avenue junctions with Sixth Street in Long Beach include a set of neighbors that have gotten to know each other over the past two decades. Almost all of us have and have had animals as part of our extended families. The passing of one of our companions is a poignant moment of tender reflection for all us living in this section of South Rose Park.

Today I want to pay homage to Pepper, who always made us smile a little more emphatically when we encountered him as he walked with Barry and Betsy.

Thank you, Pepper, for being part of our lives.

In loving memory
Pepper December 7, 2010 – September 7, 2024

(The photograph is derived from a 3-D image, so forgive the blur.)

Monday, September 16, 2024

In my previous post, I sketched out my objections to retail medical care as epitomized by HMOs.
I know first-hand how one’s life is put at risk when one is forced to endure the deliberate delays imposed on a person by the process of “pre-authorization.” The HMO hope is that delaying treatment will cause you to die before they need to expend any serious money to provide for your care. Such was certainly my case in the summer and fall of 2010, when my heart was obviously inn distress. There was no excuse for a HMO denying me an adequate test for three months. The situation was not helped, of course, by the fact that the HMO doctor I was assigned to was not capable of diagnosing the condition of my heart. Mediocrity, Inc.

As I approached the age when I could free myself from the bondage of HMO strictures, I asked myself why I should risk being assigned to someone I don’t trust just because a HMO is too cheap to provide expedient care by a competent specialist. Yes, HMO “advantage” plans appear to be cheaper, but that’s part of how they recruit “investors” (aka “patients”) to be part of their Ponzi scheme.

Instead, why not sign up for Traditional Medicare with a Medigap policy? Indeed, that is what my spouse and I decided to do. Unfortunately, my spouse was denied a Medicare card! We applied on August 3rd, and on August 14th, she was told “No. You don’t deserve a card.” There was no explanation for the denial. I am 76; she is 71. We both have worked decades during which we were subject to the Medicare tax. We both will lose our group health medical coverage plan on September 30th. We were both told by a Social Security worker at a Social Security office in Garden Grove, California that all the forms we turned in on August 3rd were in proper order, and that we should soon expect our cards.

And then the door gets slammed in our face.

A month has gone by and we have done everything possible to get an explanation, and no one will help us except in the most superficial, perfunctory way. We have spent dozens of hours making phone calls and writing letters and waiting in line. One worker at a Social Security office recently appeared to sit at her computer terminal and type a few sentences into my wife’s file. “My supervisor will probably get to this in about two weeks,” she said. “Next, please.”

That’s it. Social Security won’t do anything more than that. Our group insurance plan expires at the end of the month, and my spouse will have no health insurance to provide for basic care on October 1st. I have worked and been subject to the Medicare tax for over a half-century, and this is how my spouse and I get treated. She, too, worked for many years and paid this tax. It’s an outrage that amounts to a criminal offense on the part of the government.

This outcome is almost more than I can bear. It’s one thing to be young and to be treated badly. It’s quite another to be 76 years old and have to endure the sting of being told, “What a sucker you are! You thought we actually cared about you? Your job is to pay your taxes and shut up. If you end up owing hundreds of thousands of dollars because you didn’t have the Medicare coverage you worked your whole life to attain, then that’s your tough luck for being a gullible citizen.”

The irony, of course, is that it’s not as if my hope for my spouse and I to both have Medicare effective on October 1st was because we were getting something for free. Paying a Medicare tax is jut the first installment of this health insurance deal. As everyone should know, Medicare is not free. My spouse and I will pay close to a thousand dollars a month in order to have access to a choice of competent doctors. A thousand dollars a month. This is hardly a cheap health insurance policy.

Vice-President Kamala Harris says that her policy choices are different from Trump’s because she cares about “you.” Here, my dear readers, is an example of how “you” is treated by the U.S. government.

The other election choice, of course, is even worse, since Mr. Turnip has only managed to come up with “a concept of a plan” for health care reform after over nine years of thinking about it. Other than the complete replacement of the Affordable Care Act by a set of insurance companies with no guardrails on their policies whatsoever, I cannot imagine what he has in mind.

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Post-script:
Of course, health care is almost completely a matter of luck. I have had too many doctors either physically abuse me or lie to me — yes, deliberately lie to me — or simply not take seriously my symptoms, to believe that the medical system regards me as I am anything other than a piece of meat to be processed for profit.

As I have approached the age of retirement from full-time work as a professor, my spouse and I have received in the mail a steady stream of adventisements for health care plans with the name of a HMO (Health Maintenance Organization) attached to the term “Advantage”: Kaiser Advantage; Blue Shield Advantage. Ah! I ask myself: but to whose advantage? The allure of details in these advertisements would suggest that it is to your advantage (convenience, low cost, etc.), but this is merely a come-on to disguise one of the more long-running bait-and-switch operations legally at work in the U.S.

Health care in the United States, in fact, is in the hands of insurance companies and pharmaceutical industry to a degree that can only be called a Ponzi scheme. An HMO is not a “health maintenance” organization. It is a PROFIT-MAINTENANCE organization. Dozens of people working for Kaiser earn more than a million dollars a year. The CEO of Kaiser makes 20 million a year. In such a profit-generating system, The primary goal of any organization in which a large number of individuals are that well remunerated ccan only be a matter of methods that result in a massive surplus of funds. An individual’s well-being is merely a secondary side-effect that is more a matter of chance than of calculated cathexis meant to alleviate the suffering and distress of a patient. One is, unfortunately, assigned a doctor or physician assistant in a manner that resembles the red-lining that afflicted housing distribution in urban areas such as Los Angeles.

HMO Health Care is a Ponzi scheme in which the maximum amount of money is collected from the maximum number of people possible, while of course only rendering the amount of service needed to keep the scheme intact. The operational culture of “pre-authorization” is the primary means by which this gap allows those who run the scheme to be very well rewarded financially. The success of this particular Ponzi scheme is that the siphoned wealth of hundreds of thousands is distributed in a manner that avoids any appearance of outright fraud. Unlike the classic Ponzi scheme, such as the one Bernie Madoff is famous for, in which an extremely limited number of people avail themselves of a mind-boggling reservoir of money, HMO schemes know that the secret to perpetuating themselves requires the caution of restraint. No one individual should be disproportionately accruing exorbitant wealth. Rather, the guardrail on greed is that “there’s plenty to go around, so let’s not get ostentatiously avaricious.”

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The election of the next president of the United States will pivot on a total of less than a thousand votes cast in two states: North Carolina and Pennsylvania. Here are two potential Electoral College maps with the outcome of the election.

Assuming that Harris wins Wisconsin and Michigan, she can lose North Carolina and Georgia and still win the election with 270 Electoral College votes.

Or, on the other hand, she can win Wisconsin, Michigan, and North Carolina, but if she loses Pennsylvania, Trump will regain the White House with 271 Electoral College votes.

Pennsylvania is to the 2024 election what Florida was to the election of 2000, in which Bush edged Gore by a handful of disputed votes, underscored by a politically motivated disenfranchisement campaign.

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Even if Harris were to win both North Carolina and Pennsylvania, Trump will challenge the outcome in a number of ways, and I have ideas for two political cartoons.

Cartoon Number One:

Image:
Trump is standing at the counter of a ramshackle bait and tackle retail store, his face scrunched with smirking impatience. A sign on the wall behind the balding man at the cash register reads:
Burner Phones — 10 percent off

Trump says: “Since when do you do background checks for burner phones?”

(Alternate line: “Just put it on my tab.”)

Follow-up Second Cartoon:

Trump is at Mar-a-Lago, siting at his desk. Phone in hand. SCOTUS Chief Justice Roberts is at his desk at the Supreme Court. Roberts is holding a newspaper, dated November 10, 2024
Newspaper headline “Harris Wins White House”

Trump’s Caption: “I just need you to find me four more votes.”

As such, given this likely scenario, what Harris and her campaign must begin doing right now is filming — and buying time for — a two week advertising campaign that will culminate on the Wednesday night before Thanksgiving Day. Every airport television at the bars where people are sipping their drinks and waiting for their flights should be filled with brief snippets of factual statements that remind people of the legitimacy of the vote. . What is needed is that on Thanksgiving Day, November 28, Americans have accepted Harris’s victory in the election, even if it is by the thinnest of margins. Advertising based on facts is the only guardrail that will preserve democracy.

It wouldn’t hurt, of course, to remind people of one thing I am certain of: Trump will lose the popular vote for the third election in a row. “Three time loser! Three time loser!” That should be the mantra of November 15th, 2024.

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The problem with Kristoff’s column is that it’s not the supporters of Trump as a candidate for president that I wish to demean. Rather, it is their unwillingness to accept the results of a free and fair election. They were fine with the election of 2016. Why? Because they won. However, when their candidate loses, suddenly it becomes a case of the other side having “stolen” the election and then exploding in fory and trashing the Capitol building to vent about their disappointment.

Trump is going to lose the popular vote for the third time in a row.

Can his supporters say that out loud and admit that this is a true statement?

If they can’t, then it is not being some kind of supercilious, smug member of a cadres of “elites” to say that we as a nation have a real problem.

If Trump loses to Harris, the one factor he should first consider is how his willingness to play to his base on the issue of health care during his term of office affected the 2024 election. After all, abortion is fundamentally a health care issue. Therefore, instead of Trump demeaning VP Harris and Ms. Clinton with a comment about blowjobs. an accurate pairing in a social media post of “odd coincidences” by Trump would be the juxtaposition of Hillary Clinton and himself with a caption, “Isn’t it funny how heelth care impacted both of our careers in different ways?”

Let us reoollect something that Hillary and Bill Clinton would like all voters to forget, but which Trump voters haven’t forgotten. Hillary and Bill betrayed working people in the 1992 election. What part of “job training” don’t you you two dumb asses named Clinton understand? Instead of focusing immediately on the need to become training the work force to pivot with the oncoming post-manufacturing economy, Hillary Clinton (in particular)_ took the lead in trying to reform health care. Uh, excuse me, Hillary. You didn’t campaign on that. I, for one, did not vote for that. I voted for you because I heard your husband promise “uob training” at a rally I attended in 1992. And I worked phone banks for the CWA so that my first wife could get job training as she entered her early 40s.And you betrayed us, and instead failed even to change the health care system. What a belly flop!

So, health care was a big mistake as the thing to focus on in 1992.

In a similar manner, Trump and the GOP’s desire to seize the moment and go for the Supreme Court in his first term was ultimately a decision to focus on health care rather than the economy. Trump couldn’t resist a chance to play to his base, so he went for it, instead of waiting for it to happen in a second term. Subsequent to his first term — but couse directly related to his decisions in hi first term, Roe versus Wade was reversed, and now instead of economic issues being the front-runner in the 2024 election, it’s a health-care issue that has shot to the top for many women voters. Yes, grocery bills are higher, but they would be even higher if one had even another mouth to feed. Family size is a personal choice, not a state-sanctioned infringement on one’s reproductive rights.

Sunday, September 8, 2024

Early this morning, I drove to the store to get some groceries to tide us over the next couple days. At 10 a.m., driving home, the car’s temperature gauge read 85 degrees. Durin the time I had been in the store, the morning had gotten warmer, but it wasn’t viciously hot. Four hours later, the heat had intensified to an exponential degree. It was like an interest payment on a debut that was being compounded by the minute.

This afternoon, the thermometer on the small side porch of the house we rent read 106 degrees. A half-hour later, near 1 p.m., it read 110. By 2:30 p.m., it registered 116 degrees. We live about a half-mile from the shoreline, and I have to assume that the heat was close to 120 degrees just a few miles inland.

Is it possible that the thermometer outside our house was faulty? I suppose so, but when I conduct a compare and contrast recollection of this morning’s walk from the store to my parked car, and what the direct burnt of the heat felt like as I stepped outside at 2 p.m., the gap between the two instances is more than 15 degrees. The official media report the high in Long Beach today as being 104 degrees. Well, who am I supposed to believe? The media or my lying skin?.

In any case, we can only afford an airconditioning apparatus that cools down one room. the rest of the house is soaking up all the excess heat that was absorbed by the ground during the day.

This heat has arrived like a balloon payment of.a hidden tax for August having been one of the mildest summer months I can ever remember in Los Angeles. “Pay back time,” summer says.

Despite the heat, I got some work done on an article on Allen Ginsberg’s posthumous collection, “Death & Fame.” I had not read the book until I received a request to contribute to a book on Ginsberg to the published by Cambridge University Press. The book turns out to be much more interesting and vital than I expected.

The oppressive heat forced me to miss a reading set up by Lynn McGee and her cohort of friends at the “W-E Bicoastal Poets Series. When the weather cools and the video is posted, I look forward to seeing the entire program. In the meantime, I want to call your attention to Joseph Zaccardi’s poetry. Like Ginsberg, Zaccardi was born in Newark, New Jersey. His most recent book is”Songbirds of the Nine Rivers” (Sixteen Rivers Press 2023).