We Are Home Again. But We Were Always Home

We Came Home to Apple Blossoms

It seems much longer than a week since we left the little Arizona ghost town where we spent the winter and, as it turned out, spring. Five days on the road (by the calendar) felt about a month long. In light of what was happening in cities across the country, we abandoned the plan to travel I-80 and instead took old U.S. highways, mostly through farm towns, back to Michigan through New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, and Indiana, and we arrived at our old northern Michigan farmhouse after sunset last Sunday evening. 

Only six days ago? Is that possible? Those six days feel as if they have been a second long month, maybe two months. -- Now my sister tells me today is Friday, not Saturday. It was only five days ago. Even harder to believe....

As we initially prepared to leave Cochise County, Arizona, crossing the country in the time of coronavirus had been our most serious concern, and that never went away. (With restaurants closed, we made the trip on granola bars, trail mix, dried fruits, apples, and string cheese, with a couple treats of chicken from gas stations and one day a bag of fast food cheeseburgers obtained via the drive-through lane.) But we waited until after Memorial Day to leave, with Wednesday the designated departure day after a Tuesday of laundry and packing the car and cleaning up the cabin, and then the murder of George Floyd occurred on the evening of Memorial Day, which was already the strangest and most surreal Memorial Day in living memory, due to coronavirus….

Important demonstrations. Legitimate protests. There were also, in and near some of the crowds of protesters, opportunistic looters and even outsiders who came into Minneapolis or New York or Chicago bent on destruction. There were bursts of violence from more than one source, and while it was sometimes hard to know what was happening, it certainly seemed that the country, already as politically divided as it has been short of the Civil War and already strained by imposed isolation and shuttered businesses in an attempt to prevent the spread of a global pandemic, was now falling apart altogether. No, not falling -- imploding. 

So while the Artist was at the wheel, as busy as I was consulting the road atlas, I was just as often busy on my phone, looking for news or texting with family, especially family in St. Paul and Minneapolis, and when it was my turn to drive he kept trying to find a clear radio station with news. Had we been here before? In 1964? 1967? 1968? 

Then our little car began to run badly. It is still running badly, but it got us home, limping across the prairies and up along the Lake Michigan shore. Just one more thing to worry about.

So, a stressful trip? But friends, we had it easy! Eating gas station chicken in a parking lot somewhere on the Great Plains, we recalled American history and the days when Black Americans had to travel with the Green Book in order to plan their routes to be assured of finding meals and lodging at all. “And there was no food in gas stations back then,” the Artist remarked. As for staying in motels along the way, we are sometimes challenged to find one that will accept our dog (with or without an exorbitant added fee), but we are never turned away. No, we have it easy there, too. 

(In case you’re wondering, motel clerks were usually masked and gloved, but almost no one else was, in motels or at gas stations, once we left New Mexico behind.)

And we are not homeless. We don’t have to live in our car or in a motel. (One motel where we stayed seemed all the home many people there had.) Our mild ordeal was only five days long, and we are home now.

Friends congratulate our safe return -- by e-mail and text and phone, of course, not in person. Because even alongside demonstrations and protests and political commentary and speeches and outbursts there is still coronavirus, and so we must self-quarantine, which means we remain dependent on others to collect our mail and pick up groceries for us. But we have it easy in that respect, too, with more volunteers than necessary offering to help us. And the weather is lovely, perfect for working outdoors, always my solace in times of stress.

Yes, we are tired. Stress, lots of it. Utter exhaustion. But I know we are not the only ones feeling it because it has to do with much more than five days on the road.

While few people were crossing the country by car last week (on larger highways, trucks seemed to outnumber cars by at least an 8:1 ratio, but traffic was still light), all across the land a relentless tidal wave of news and the weight of our country’s entire history bore down on us all. “As ye sow, so shall ye reap.” 

“I’m tired of the hate,” one Facebook commenter wrote. I believe, from other things she said, that she referred to hate she feels is directed toward the occupant of the White House, not to hate coming from the White House, which is what disturbs me the most. If only we had a calm, encouraging captain at the wheel of state! But we don't, and what we have there is exhausting, too. The current president, when asked difficult questions, calls the press “enemies of the people” and – well, let’s not review all the name-calling and finger-pointing from the White House. Let’s just remember that it is part of the job of the press to ask difficult questions, and it is the job of the president to deal with that, whether he likes the questions or not. 

When you are president – pretend for a moment that you are -- and you are the one in the Oval Office, the buck stops with you. You don’t shift blame by pointing the finger in every other direction. The buck stops with you. That is the job.

But yes, we all get tired! Overwhelmed! And we are tired of feeling angry and defensive and misunderstood or ignored and insulted. Tired of feeling outraged. The never-ending onslaught of news and the cacophony of Facebook posts is sometimes just too much. There is an exhaustion of spirit, discouragement brought on by repeated failures of a country we love. 

Reminder: There’s nothing wrong with turning off the news for 24 hours. Take a break when you feel overwhelmed. No law requires any American to watch and/or listen. And surely, even acknowledging the addictiveness of scrolling through Facebook posts, you have absolutely zero responsibility to follow that on an hourly or even a daily basis. Or at all!

I received a text the other day from one of my sisters that former President Barack Obama was going to be speaking on MSNBC, so because we don’t have television here at home in Michigan (gave it up years ago), I used my phone to make a hotspot and got online and watched and listened, and it did me a world of good! You can watch it on YouTube (or other places, too, if you missed it last night.) President Obama is an encourager, not a blamer or a punisher. He is calm. And he is optimistic! Good heavens! No one can accuse him of being a Pollyanna -- he gives reasons for his optimism, and as I listened I began to smile, and I thought again, yes, we can. We can be better. I really needed his encouraging, inspiring words.

Because here’s something else that occurred to me yesterday. I’d just read an essay from 2016 by Lori Lakin Hutcherson, a black woman, answering a white male friend’s question about what constitutes white privilege. And then I read comments elsewhere (not on that post) from people who are tired of the news and/or fearful and/or certain there is no hope for the country or the world. And two ideas – the question of what constitutes white privilege and the idea of giving up hope – came together in my mind, and I realized that giving up and retreating to one’s own little world is the supreme white privilege. Not everyone can do that. 

Let me be clear. I’m not saying anyone needs to be out on the barricades every day -- or even at all. You don’t have to join a public demonstration. There are countless ways to make a difference.

And who doesn't need a break now and then?

So when you feel the need, turn off the radio or television or whatever device connects you to the news. Take a break. Eat ice cream. Take a walk. Soak in the tub. Whatever helps you relax.

But don’t give up hope, and don’t stop looking for whatever small ways you can find to contribute to fulfilling hope’s promise. Because we cannot afford the luxury of some self-indulgent, extended period of mourning. There is too much that needs to be done.

It is not saintly to be hopeful or to try to make a difference. It’s human – at least, it’s the better nature we need to summon up in ourselves if we are to deserve at all the gift of life on this planet. Because this is our home, this earth. For Americans, this country. Our home. We are many different peoples, with many different ways of looking at the world, but we must share our home if it is to survive.

What Does Northport Think About the Sale of the Washington Post to the Online Behemoth?

It's big news, Jeff Bezos buying the Washington Post. I asked a few of my friends for their thoughts, many of them writers, and here are the responses:

A retired community college teacher, fiction writer, and (clearly) someone very careful with words: “This is a paradigm shift indeed.”

A career fiction writer: “Well, as [a mutual friend] said after I sent the email about Amazon trying to control the book business: ‘Well, they do call themselves Amazon, after all.’  Is this getting scary or what?”

Another fiction writer: “When you control all the media you will control the thoughts of a people.  Sad news for every American.”

A retired newspaper writer: “I think people are correct to be nervous, but he is a smart businessman and when he talks about giving readers what they want, my heart soars because for years newspapers have been giving readers what bores and confuses and annoys them – even the smart ones who WANT insight and analysis. And, if he can charge for news online in a way that makes sense – that will be the beginning of the turnaround for news organizations.”

Retired public school teacher: “Certainly true – ‘The Post will mine data about its readers in ways not seen before in the newspaper world.’ I wonder what that means for the paper, its reporters, its readership. We don’t read a newspaper any more, except for my brief online viewing. (The local paper is still free online.) I get too much news from CNN and take complete breaks now and then. Most of what we hear is depressing or silly or just plain mean, it often seems to me. All the sides of “big” stories have their own facts, and it’s hard to know what to believe.  We’re currently watching ‘House of Cards’ on Netflix, and I’m completely skeptical of the whole political system and journalism industry. I’m also unhappy with the education system (at least around here) – so books are a welcome relief. So is yoga.”

Retired state employee (not teacher): “Not sure.  Certainly it will make the Post an e-business but that will probably help keep it alive.  More likely it will go off to the right and give him a ton more leverage on Government than he has already.  But, that's normal now where buying influence is the norm.  Wow, it's still morning but my cynical button is already pushed in.”

Retired university professor of history: “In recent years, visits to DC and via other links regarding this once great newspaper, I felt it was increasingly stogy, predictable, though reliable in a sturdy way (esp when Catherine Graham ran things with an amazing deft touch). Though the editorial page kept up, more or less, competitive with the NY Times (Sunday), the Post seemed almost dead in the water as the winds of change blew harder (pardon the allusion). [A friend] was so put off, after taking it daily for 4 decades, that he got his news on line from the NY Times. I think that, like most literate Washingtonians, he will keep a close eye on what comes.  I more or less felt among 'friends' vis the Post, but a great news system has to be up front and OUT front not therapeutic, not calming the herd, but leading it, like a wolf pack, out front. It was like that in the 70s . . . . When a major organ like this is merely transmitting the canon, the nation is not well served.”

The last reply deals with the newspaper as it has been in recent years, rather than with the sale. A retired law professor had a lot to say, but he said in person, and I neglected to take notes. Also, it would be interesting to hear what some younger people think, so if by some miracle any young person's eyes fall upon this post, please feel free to leave a comment. 

So what does this small bookseller blogger think?

One observation made on Facebook was “He knows how to sell things.” My reaction to that was, That isn’t all he knows. Right off the top of my head I can think of four big additional areas of his knowledge. He knows: (1) how to stomp out competition; (2) how to beat out unions; (3) how to manipulate government, at every level, to his benefit (see first and second points) and to his competition’s detriment; (4) how to keep running on investors’ money despite recent surprising and spectacular losses. (That link is worth following to read the article.) Interesting, isn’t it?

Does your idea of a free press include many competing viewpoints? Do you think we have that now and/or what would encourage it? Are you comfortable with falling wages and salaries? (Have unions encouraged workers to expect too much?) Should reportage and government be bought and sold, subject only to market forces? (Have they always been for sale?) What about more and more people putting their eggs in a single basket – something like Dutch tulip bulbs? Will there really be a big payoff eventually for all investors – and are you on the bandwagon?

Although most people probably do not think of him primarily as Aristotle’s pupil, Alexander the Great is a familiar name worldwide. Did he truly weep when he had “no more worlds to conquer” or upon being told that the number of worlds was infinite – and therefore, presumably, beyond his insatiable reach? What price did Alexander pay for temporarily gaining [most of] the world? Would you pay such a price? Who else paid heavily? Here is a quick biography of his life and accomplishments. Like Molly Malone, in the end he died of a fever, and no one could save him. In the long run, no one gets out of life alive.

The least ambitious goal of any business, I suppose, would be simply to survive, to stay alive, forever struggling, while the most ambitious (here the word ‘overweening’ comes to my mind) would be to take over the entire world. Between these two extremes (and no, whatever you imagine of my bookstore, I do not fall at the absolute bottom of the scale) we can imagine a wide range of possibilities of flourishing (to use one of Aristotle’s favorite ideas), each step up in profitability matched by an increase in complexity and responsibility. Hmmm. Lots to think about there....

Moving along, though, it baffles me how the same people who fear a “single payer” for, say, health care, when the proposed payer is the federal government, have no fear of a “single seller,” however wide that seller casts his product net. Data mining? Terrifying and un-American if done by government! Done by a mammoth corporation? Okay? Really? How so?

Many Americans fear a government takeover of business. I fear a corporate takeover of government. Which direction are we headed? (Your answer might be that I have posed a false dilemma. If so, explain!) More specifically do you have concerns about the sale of the Washington Post, or do you see it as probably a positive change? Whatever you think, what are your reasons?

Someday soon I hope to write about short stories, both in general and as exemplified in some particularly good collections, but we read all kinds of things here Up North, including national newspapers.

“Where Do You Get Your Ideas?”

Writers, story-tellers, song-writers, and artists are among those who are asked this question, and often they have no more clue than anyone else. “What made me think of that?” one might muse. Is the creative mind simply more open, more receptive, to its own emerging phantasms? Where do our dreams come from—and where they go when we wake?

How about more practical ideas—an idea for a new business or even an idea about what would be good or bad legislation for Michigan or the United States?

The deeply held ideas we call our “beliefs”? Where do they come from? From our parents, our education, television, friends, the Internet, newspapers, politicians, “spokespeople,” the air we breathe, our own independent philosophical investigations? What think you?

The best public relations is invisible. While it’s easy to spot advertising—the stuff that blatantly urges you to go buy something—PR subtly convinces you to change the way you think. Advertising urges you to do something now; PR is patient. Advertisers pay for the time and space devoted to their messages. Good PR usually gets free media space because it is presented as unbiased information.
 - Wendell Potter, Deadly Spin: An Insurance Company Insider Speaks Out on How Corporate PR Is Killing Health Care and Deceiving Americans (Bloomsbury Press, 2010)

Read that last sentence again, please. Here, I’ll repeat it: “Good PR usually gets free media space because it is presented as unbiased information” [emphasis added]. So what our politicians tell us, what we hear and read in news media, what we pass along to each other, and even our own belief-forming thought—all that is constantly being shaped by well-bankrolled, behind-the-scenes forces. Now please look again at the subtitle: This is more than a book about the health care so-called “debate,” and the author is more than just another pundit urging his opinion on you. Wendell Potter worked for 25 years in public relations.

This book is also a lot more than just another exposé. The author tells of a very personal journey, beginning with his parents’ and his own origin in a poor rural Appalachian mountain community. He also traces from its origins the development of public relations in this country—who first came up with it, where the first college class was taught, what kind of ethics restrained early practitioners, and where PR has come in less than a hundred years. For example, “crisis management” was first developed by Ivy Lee, cofounder of the Parker & Lee agency in New York, who counteracted bad publicity about industrial massacres and strike-breaking with carefully written and distributed press releases. Press releases, he discovered, did reporters’ jobs for them, and reporters were happy to hand in a release rather than investigating a story for themselves.

A contemporary of Lee, Edward Bernays, enterprising son of Jewish parents, Potter tells us, is “generally credited with coining the term ‘public relations counselor.’” It was Bernays who came up with a wildly successful campaign to attract more women to smoking cigarettes, equating smoking with equality and calling cigarettes “torches of freedom.” Why do I mention his Jewish heritage? Because according to a citation Potter’s to Bernays’s autobiography, in 1933 the noted public relations counselor was disturbed to be told by a guest in his home, a guest who had recently been a guest in the home of Joseph Goebbels, that Goebbels had “at least one of Bernays’s books” on his shelves. Hitler’s use of slogans and manipulation to move crowds was well know, also, and Potter says that Bernays “fretted publicly about ethics later in his life.”

Looking back, he said that had he known the dangers of tobacco, he would not have accepted the American Tobacco account. “No reputable public relations organization would today accept a cigarette account since their cancer-causing effects have been proven,” he wrote in 1986. Also late in life, Bernays appealed to the PRSA [Public Relations Society of America] to police its ranks, arguing that circumstances allowed unethical behavior without any sanctions, legal or otherwise. “There are no standards,” he said.

“No standards.” What does that mean? Anything goes. There are, you may object, legal limits, but let’s look closer at that idea, too.

As Americans, we treasure our freedom of speech. At the same time, we hold onto the idea that “what’s good for General Motors,” i.e., more generally, Big Business, is good for us all. Enter a new American entity, the front group. A front group is created by PR people but not identified with an affiliation to any particular corporation or political party. PR people begin with focus groups, private citizen volunteers, and they test phrases with these groups to see what responses are evoked by certain words and phrases. Say that you find, as PR folks did, that the phrase “government takeover” generates a high fear response. A front group is then organized under some intentionally vague name, chosen because the words have positive focus group response. A website is set up, and the “group” begins to issue statements warning about, say, “a government takeover” of health care. The phony group also buys advertising but never in the name of the industry or any particular business or corporation: the point of PR is to make it look like some group of public- and like-minded citizens just got together in a grassroots kind of way.

Here’s a personal backtrack: I remember in the 1970s when my employer, Western Michigan University, announced that we were going to be given a choice between our old, traditional insurance and a new health maintenance organization (HMO). What surprised me was the high correlation of features shared by the HMO alternative and “socialized medicine” as the fear-mongers had presented it. Why, I wondered, were these features (e.g., limited list of approved health care providers) nightmare outrages if part of a government program but reasonable and desirable if offered by a for-profit private company? I have never had a satisfactory answer to the question. Only slogans come back: “government takeover” and “socialized medicine” vs. “the American way.”

The best example of the industry’s secrecy is the medical-loss ratio, which, as I mentioned previously, is the measurement of the share of premium spent on actual health care. The trend since Clinton’s plan failed has been unmistakable. In 1993, the leading insurers used about 95 percent of premium dollars on medical benefits, according to the consulting firm of PricewaterhouseCoopers. The merger wave and the new philosophy about health insurance pushed MLRs down sharply, so that by 2007 the number was 81 percent. By contrast, Medicare has consistently had a ratio greater than 97 percent since 1993.

What Americans pay in and what they get back: that’s what the MLR measures, and there are the numbers. What about increasing health care costs and inflation in general?

If the [insurance] industry had chosen to raise premiums at the exact pace that it increased spending on health care from 2000 to 2008, insurers would still have made substantial profits without pushing millions of people to go without health benefits. But during those years, insurers raised family premiums 2.5 times faster than the rate of medical inflation, 3.3 times faster than that of wages, and 4.6 times faster than that of general inflation.

Insurance was costing more at the same time that those buying it were getting less, and many could not afford to buy it at all.

The picture that emerges in this book is the clear subversion of the democratic process, but Potter’s examination of the insurance industry (“Industry”? What do they make? Why is every business these days called an “industry” and every income-generating plan called a “product”?) is one case study in a much larger economic development. We all recognize that politics is rife with public relations specialists, doing all they can to shape candidates to our fears and desires. The greater truth is that every important issue that comes before those politicians, once they are in office, has also been manipulated in similar ways. What do “the people” really want? Which voices are theirs? Have we all been hoodwinked before we even open our mouths?

For example, one justly deep fear of the American people has always been the invasion of personal privacy by government. Is the parallel to socialized medicine and HMO’s obvious to you? The greatest threats to the privacy of Americans here at the beginning of the 21st century, as far as I can see, come not from our government but from private interests against which the government is able to offer little protection. Again, please look up your own sources on privacy and data mining. Do you view your concerns for privacy and for freedom as contradictory?

In 1963, in his justly famous “I Have a Dream” speech, Martin Luther King, Jr. warned of “the tranquilizing drug of gradualism” in the struggle for human rights, insisting that the present was a time of “fierce urgency.” For Wendell Potter, the present is a time of fierce urgency in the war of independent thinking against public relations. The problem is that the enemy is invisible. We have already been infiltrated. We may even be unknowingly complicit, unpaid soldiers on a side we never chose.

Potter does not tar all PR with the same brush. Like any tool, PR can be and is often used in the service of good. He does, however, end his introduction with these words:

...I believe that unless we do fight back—and with urgency—the twenty-first century will be dominated by the retrenchment of democracy and the unbridled growth of corporate power, enabled by increasingly unchallenged propaganda.

Who were “Citizens United”? Did you unite with them? Isn’t it ironic that putting the government of the United States up for sale was accomplished without any need for a bloody coup, that it was put on the auction block by our own Supreme Court (three dissenting), reasoning on principle?