A Violation of Kindergarten Fairness Part I: An Introduction to EINKILK

Most of us have seen the poster.

The first time I caught a glimpse of it was in a Spencer's Gifts, back in the early 80s. It was displayed inside one of those aluminum-framed plastic poster flippers, sandwiched among a cluster of 80s detritus: Muppet Babies (flip), Scott Baio with feathered mullet and cut off half shirt (flip), Olivia Newton John clad in active "Let's Get Physical" headband and skin-tight Sassons (ful......ip), Sebastian Bach licking his double-necked guitar (flip), a florescent velvet-on-black rendering of Ace Frehley (flip).

But The Everything I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten (henceforth to be referenced as EINKILK) poster wasn't as easy to dismiss. Sure, it was maudlin and perhaps a bit trite - even to my naive 13-year-old eyes. (Although back then, in my sub-articulate disapproval, I likely filed EINKILK under "gay" in my mental rolodex. Gay: the seemingly boundless category assigned by adolescents across the nation for all things effete or uncool - ironic since at the time I was probably wearing irregular Bugle Boy khakis - "pegged" at the ankles - from Marshalls and a white, cropped, acid-wash jean jacket.)

In retrospect, maybe it was the tone of the poster that startled me more than anything else.

As a non-religious Jewish kid, it jolted me away from my own "Don't fuck with me; I won't fuck with you" moral comfort zone and into the Precious Moments-bedazzled realm of Born Again Christian candy-coated preachy-ness. Still, I couldn't repudiate the poster's overarching theme: Be nice; be considerate; take it easy on yourself and others. In other words, don't be a dick.

Today, the EINKILK poster is little more than a quaint relic from a less cynical era. Though America in the 80s will be forever identified with the scourges of the Cold War, cocaine consumption, material vices, greed, Reaganomics, and Z-Cavariccis, it was also a simpler time. While repression was still in bloom, cooler-than-thou hipster irony had yet to gain enough momentum to steamroll every last fragile vestige of sincerity in the public domain.

Now, sentiments such as EINKILK get re-packaged into kitsch - Urban Outfitters T-shirts, SNL sketches, or perhaps a Zach Galiafanakis bit. In the 80s, it was occasionally okay to be unabashedly corny; now, if you're caught wearing a powder blue My Little Pony T-shirt, it's with a wink-wink and a nod-nod to your cronies - an assurance that it's all just a cute, ironic ruse.

Get it? I'm cool, so why would I ever really wear a My Little Pony shirt - because My Little Pony's corny and saccharine and for little girls who dream about having little ponies as pets. Unlike me, who dreams about slaughtering them and cooking their parts in vats of broth. Though a T-shirt depicting such would be too obvious, thus tarnishing my image as a clever modern master of dripping irony.

Those of us old enough to recall that far back know that, in the early-80s, the face value of things held more currency. Back then, hope was more than a mere campaign slogan and there was only one glossary definition of Abraham Lincoln.

Okay, that last thing was uncalled for. I apologize.

In contrast, EINKILK was conceived, I presume, without a hint of pretense, irony, or self-mockery. It's a poster that softly admonishes: These are the fundamental tenets of humanism, ones you probably should've picked up when your life still revolved around snack time, nap time, and surviving the rapacious child-eating monster holed up in your closest. And if you don't know them by now, learn. Or fuck off.

EINKILK is the manifesto for the dogma of touchy-feely righteousness. And like any dogma - be it the Old or New Testaments, The Koran, Dianetics, or How to Win Friends and Influence People- there are kernels of truth to be found amidst the heaping piles of bullshit.

So ridicule EINKILK if you choose. But if the players responsible for this nation's health care mess - fat cat insurance and pharmaceutical executives; an out-of-touch media; conniving Capitol Hill lobbyists; morally corrupt insurance underwriters, the GOP propaganda power-puke machine; the food industry; timorous Democrats; and an overfed, over-treated, out-of-shape, and under-informed populace had just followed its 12 simple tenets, most of us wouldn't have to freak out about keeping our already tenuous coverage every time we switch jobs, get laid off, or discover an oblong mole on our asses.

In subsequent posts, I will make a direction connection between the not-so-lofty standards of EINKILK and how we, as a society, have done everything possible to violate them (though I'm still struggling conjure a remotely relevant metaphor for Warm Cookies and Cold Milk are Good For You. My suggestion box is wide-open for that one.

Grassley: Government is a "Predator"

Say what you will about the Republicans, but they sure as hell know how to stay on message, irrespective of whether that message is quasi-rational or bordering on the maniacally insane. You see, West Virginia Senator Jay Rockefeller had a proposal this week that would've offered a fiscally responsible public option to compete with health insurance companies, which would inevitably temper their current stranglehold on the health care system.

From The New York Times:

Mr. Rockefeller said the Congressional Budget Office had estimated that a government insurance plan could slice $50 billion from the cost of Mr. Baucus's bill, originally put at $774 billion over 10 years...

..."The public plan will be optional, "Mr. Rockefeller insisted. "It will be voluntary. It will be affordable to people who are now helpless before their insurance companies."

After Rockefeller's proposal was predictably rejected by his buddies in the Senate Finance Committee, New York Senator Chuck Schumer took his own shot, issuing a similar proposal. Naturally, that went down in flames, too.

Mr. Schumer said the public option would hold down costs because it would not have to generate profits, answer to shareholders or incur marketing expenses.

It would also save over $300 billion a year in dumb-ass administrative waste, which would cover the entire cost of a public option. Oh, and in case anyone still cares, it would offer a happy medium between getting raped by an Aetna insurance adjuster and never having to worry about filing for medical bankruptcy.

Ronald Brownstein, senior writer at the National Journal, quotes economist Len Nichols, who emphasizes the need for a public option if there's to be reform of any kind - since health insurers are, you know, greedy, profiteering bastards.

Locally dominant insurers often pay providers excessive reimbursement rates to discourage them from participating in rival insurance plans. That dissuades other insurers from entering the market, which, in turn, frees the leading insurer to raise its premiums to cover the inflated reimbursements.

"The only people who lose in that," Nichols says dryly, "are the patients."

In other words, a competing public option is both ethically and fiscally responsible, insofar as it would prevent private insurers from their business-as-usual tactic of exploiting a flawed health care system. Oh, and by the way: Duh.

So then what's the problem? Well, if you haven't already heard, there's a war on. The War on Logic:

But Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the senior Republican on the committee, said a government insurance plan would have inherent advantages over private insurers. "Government is not a fair competitor," Mr. Grassley said. "It's a predator." He predicted that "a government plan will ultimately force private insurers out of business," reducing choices for consumers.

There you have it. Private health insurers do everything in their power to drop sick and needy individuals from their roles (by instituting a practice called rescission) - and get to vastly increase their premiums on a moment's whim - they've been known to hold open enrollment on the upper floors of non-retrofitted buildings so as to discourage elderly, handicapped, and chronically ill people from signing on, and government is the predator? Hello, my name is Charles Grassley, and I'm full of shit.

And just to review, Grassley's claiming that, if there is a public option to compete with private insurance companies, the private insurers will go out of business. Why ever might that be? Would it have anything to do with the fact that a public option would be cheaper, of equal or better quality, more efficient, more accessible, and waaaayyy less terrifying?

Sounds to me like private insurance companies are building an inferior product and either:

A. Need to get up off their collective asses and improve their product

Or

B. Need to either step aside or diversify their brand (Aetna golf clubs, Kaiser Mouth Wash, Wellpoint Douche Bags, etc.)

Or how about the perfect synergy: A Blue Cross fast food franchise? Serve up fried chicken sandwiches and other thousand calorie bombs in the dining area, and then, replacing Playlands with on-site clinics, offer customers on-site bypass surgeries, amputations, and other invasive procedures resulting from obesity and diabetes. You can call it Blue Burger. Yummy.

What's odd about Grassley's point is that I've always been admonished by conservatives about how free and unfettered markets are the cornerstone of capitalism - the party's preferred economic dogma - and hence, the path toward economic salvation.

Until, that is, the losers are the ones who contribute piles and piles of money to your campaign coffers. Per Matt Taibbi's Rolling Stone piece Sick and Wrong:

Getting movement on a public option - or any other meaningful reform - will now require the support of one of the three Republicans in the group: Grassley (who has received $2,034,000 from the health sector), [Olympia] Snowe ($756,000) or [Mike] Enzi ($627,000).

This is what the prospects for real health care reform come down to - whether one of three Republicans from tiny states with no major urban populations decides, out of the goodness of his or her cash-fattened heart, to forsake forever any contributions from the health-insurance industry.

Too bad there's no opposition party in control of 3 out of the 4 branches of government to call out the GOP on its unabashed hypocrisy and corruption. Oh, wait...

Before I leave you today, and because the Democrats won't, let Wendell Potter, former head of public relations for CIGNA, remind you once again whom the real predators are:

Where My Kindle At!?

I'm one of the few human beings left on the planet under the age of eighty-five who still gets up every morning and cracks an actual newspaper. For many who still even bother to read the morning news, it's straight to the Kindle, iPhone, Reader, or laptop.

Not me.

I get a physical rush from the tactile feeling of a virginal newspaper in my hands, the muted, grainy, sickly gray hue of the paper stock folded horizontally at its center, and the eighth-night-of-Chanukah-like anticipation of wondering what the front page headlines will be as the brooding, cynical bastard within me prematurely simmers over the fact that the most important story of the day will undoubtedly be buried somewhere around page A-27.

To me, the newspaper is a crack-of-dawn companion, a distinguished mentor, and a loyal partner in commiseration. As I'm not a morning person, I rely on it to shake me from my somnambulant stupor with its heaping slabs of social injustice, worldly carnage, and hyperbolic, counterintuitive, and insufferably didactic op-eds. Oh, and did I mention the horoscopes (Me? I'm a Leo!)

Although I do make an occasional foray into the world of online news, it's never the same. I don't have a Kindle yet and possibly never will ($299.00), so I'm surely missing out on all that goodness. And, as much as that cute, trim, unassuming - yet agonizingly smug - hipster on the Mac commercials might want me to feel otherwise, my laptop monitor screen is just an austere face glaring up at me, awaiting my next command. Rather than passive-aggressively admonishing my ambivalence, a la HAL, it silently hectors me with precisely the same harrowing news stories that my cuddly newspaper seemingly reveals to me with kid gloves.

Okay, so maybe that last part's all in my head.

Still, in a strange way, there's just something so comforting about physically holding that newspaper and all its ominous headlines in my hands - an illusory sense of empowerment, perhaps - as though I'm not a victim of destiny but rather an active participant? Maybe. Because I sort of feel like, if I can hold it in my hands while reading it, everything will probably turn out all right. Did I fail to mention that I'm a control freak?

But, on an apparently slow news day (aside from a hell cauldron brewing in Afghanistan, an impending health care reform bill that's sure to be either DOA or utterly ineffectual, and a defiant, dangerous, and increasingly volatile Iran dithering about a possible stockpile of weapons-grade uranium), my usual morning raft of sanity offers me this little beauty from its front page:

In the age of the iPhone, Kindle and YouTube, the notion of the book is becoming increasingly elastic as publishers mash together text, video and Web features in a scramble to keep readers interested in an archaic form of entertainment.

Because reading words is, you know, like hard and stuff. Sometimes I feel that this country would make so much more sense to me if I were a 15-year-old girl.

Incidentally, at what point will watching video become too taxing on our intellect? Will then every video-capable device come with a pygmy wizard-gnome, there to sagely explain us through the mental rigors of guys getting whacked in the nuts with sledgehammers or two coeds making out in their dorm room? Once again, from the same Times piece:

On Thursday, for instance, Simon & Schuster, the publisher of Ernest Hemingway and Stephen King, is working with a multimedia partner to release four "vooks," which intersperse videos throughout electronic text that can be read - and viewed - online or an iPhone or iPod touch.

Wheee!

I can't wait to see how they "intersperse" video footage of Jake's impotence-induced demise due to his unrequited love for a woman he can never physically attain in The Sun Also Rises. No worries, though: I'm sure it'll be well-acted and tastefully done, as only vooks can do.

Jake: I see you were out with Cohn again.

Brett: Yeah. So?

Jake: No, I was just...

Brett: Look, I need me a REAL man. Someone who can satisfy ALL THIS!

Judging from the breathless tone of the rest of the article, The Times is clearly taking an if-you- can't-beat -em-join -em tack on this new abomination - uh, I mean synergy - because they, along with most other newspaper publications and publishing houses, are doing everything in their power just to remain solvent and relevant in an age in which information is perpetually condensed, compressed, and then power-vomited into the public sphere at light speed.

In other words, they're happy just to be up and running; any strategy at this point that will enable them to remain in business will be eagerly employed, whether it's incorporating vooks, streaming video, or mimes acting out the latest developments in health care reform.

But what's most gallingly unforgivable for me is that The Times article frames innovations such as the video-text/novel hybrid as a revolutionary movement in literature, rather than what it is more likely to be: the continued demise of written language and overall literacy. Disagree? According to The USA Today, approximately 32 million American adults are not skilled enough to read anything beyond a children's book, though on the bright side, it also means they're still fully capable of reading The USA Today. Buh-dump-bump!

At the very least, atrocities like "vooks" are the canary in the coal mine in the slow, lumbering slide into an anti-intellectual abyss (Though if you were to counter that the re-election of George W. Bush was, in fact, the seminal moment of our burgeoning idiocracy, I would have no rebuttal.)

The following is an excerpt from Susan Jacoby's The Age of American Unreason, a book that I find exceedingly appropriate for this very occasion:

The debasement of the nation's speech is evident in virtually everything broadcast and podcast on radio, television, and the internet. In this true, all-encompassing public square, homogenized language and homogenized thought reinforce each other in circular fashion. As George Orwell noted in 1946, "A man may take a drink because he feels himself a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks." It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.

(Not that I'm one to point fingers, but, extrapolating from these statistics, more American adults have watched NASCAR on a regular basis over the past year than have have read a book.)

Even more disappointing is Maryanne Wolf's apparent complicity in this movement. A few years back, Wolf penned Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, a staid but exceptionally informative reader about the ways in which the human brain adapts to, and hopefully masters, the mentally arduous task of reading. In The Times' article, she states:

There is no question that these new media are going to be superb at engaging and interesting the reader.

But in her book, Wolf emphasizes the systematic nature of becoming a proficient reader, that it is often a slow, cumbersome process that is fully actualized through fits and starts - it's difficulty deriving from the fact that the act of reading is not a skill that humans innately possess. From Proust and the Squid:

Learning to read is an almost miraculous story filled with many developmental processes that come together to give the child entry into the teeming underlife of a word usable by the child. Socrates and the ancient Indian scholars feared that reading words, rather than hearing and speaking them, would prevent our ability to know their many layers of meaning, sound, function, and possibility. In fact, early reading exposes - during the moment of acquisition - how many of the multiple, older structures contribute to each layer as they come together to form the brain's new circuitry for reading.

And then:

The more a child is exposed to written words, the greater his or her implicit and explicit understanding of all language.

So how does Wolf reconcile her exhaustive research into the reading process with her current optimism for the video-text hybrid model? To be fair, she adds:

Can you any longer read Henry James or George Eliot? Do you have the patience?

Intriguing question. Personally, I have plenty of patience for George Eliot. He's that NASCAR driver, right?