Russo's Risk Pool

Richard Russo's The Risk Pool follows Ned Hall, the only child of two estranged parents, from childhood to early adulthood. The book is a fictional first-person memoir that recounts Ned's years growing up in Mohawk, a blue-collar town in upstate NY. It's a marvelous story - engrossing and irresistible and all of the other descriptors you'll see on the back cover. Time and again, I would read another 20 pages after deciding I was done for the night - not because I needed to wrap up a cliff-hanger or an action scene, but because every place to stop was no better than any other. Russo tells the story of everyday life fluidly. The book's sole fault, in my view, is in devoting two hundred pages to Ned's first decade of life - a time devoid of love, lust, independence, and for Ned, ambition.

Growing up isn't easy for Ned, considering his mother's a lunatic and his father's a drunk. In their shadow, Ned becomes a quiet reflective introvert - a grad school drop-out-turned writer - who finds little companionship among his peers. Still, Ned's coming of age is not so unique as to defy analogy. His observations resonated with me. In his youth, Ned found few things “so curious as the mystery of how anybody could be Jack Ward and not live happily ever after." But an older Ned acknowledges that "despite living through the war, marrying a rich woman, fathering a beautiful daughter, living in the while jewel house, driving the big Lincoln, and dying in the saddle, Jack Ward had not been happy” (248).

Russo is entertaining and sharp, but especially clever. In describing Ned's mother, an obsessive woman who managed her money meticulously, Russo writes: “She always congratulated herself on the fact that she had absolutely nothing to worry about, and wouldn’t have, so long as she continued to worry all the time” (214). Sometimes, amid the cleverness, shines a simple peril of wisdom, distinguished strangely by its mundane nature. As Ned says, “there are few things better than riding a bike after a long winter. A bicycle promises spring as surely as the hollowing out of melting snowbanks, the return of songbirds, the first bright tulip bud” (233).

Ned's relationship with his father Sam Hall matures over the decades. For much of his life, there was no telling when Ned would see his father, who swooped in-and-out of town. After one good-bye, Ned relates in a steady tone, “I didn’t see him again for ten years, nor did I ever hear a word concerning his whereabouts. Not a letter, not a Christmas card” (268). As a kid, Ned is scared to approach his dad. "As usual," Ned says, "everybody seemed to know my father better than I did, and I always ended up feeling like an outsider" (101). As he spend more time with Sam Hall later in life, Ned begins to worry he shares too many of his father's poor habits (458). Not wanting his girlfriend to see any resemblance between Ned and his father, Ned keeps the two apart. Russo crafts a character who loves and reveres his father and visits him regularly, yet in his heart of hearts, knows he's terribly “afraid he [his father] would live to be a hundred” (458).

Perhaps I've quoted enough, but I want to conclude with one more quotation - my favorite in the book - where Ned reflects on his budding relationship with Jack Ward's beautiful daughter, Tria.

“Paradoxically, even though I doubted that Tria Ward felt much attraction, I began to be uncharacteristically certain that before long she would extend me the invitation. Such arrogance, I hasten to add, was far from customary. In my relations with other young women to this point in my life, I had always been rather pessimistic about my prospects, a circumstance born of experience. I’d been told that I struck most girls as gloomy, and at the university one honest sorority girl I had badgered about going out said that she had nothing against me personally, except that when she went out with a guy, like, she preferred to have a good time, you know? I knew. Perhaps I was confident about Tria because I was beginning to suspect that she was not the sort of girl who preferred to have a good time” (354).

Movie theater ethics

Is it ethical to steal from the rich to give to the poor?

Well, that's what I just did. I saw Michael Moore's Sicko last weekend. I had planned to review the film, but ya know what, it's been reviewed countless times already. For a positive take, see Krugman; for a negative take, see the National Review; for a sarcastic take, see the blog Paragon). For CNN's fact-checking, go here. I think that covers everything. Now for the juice.

In the theater, Jen and I staked out four seats. We were waiting on Ezra and Logan, who would be coming shortly, though not together. I had a ticket for Logan, as previously agreed, but not for Ezra. I thought maybe he had purchased his own. Logan hadn't arrived yet - so I held his ticket. Ezra, as it turned out, he had not yet purchased a ticket. He was simply running late. When I met Logan at the gate, Ezra informed us that the show had sold out. So there we were, on different sides of the red cord, a chasm between us. Nothing could be done, or so it seemed. Entering the cinema with Logan, I showed my ticket-stub to the ticket-checker. But when Logan tried to hand over his ticket, the checker assumed Logan also had a ticket stub and waved him through. Suddenly there we were, through the gate, with an unripped ticket! Incredible! I sent Logan on, left the gated area once more, and handed Ezra the ticket I had bought for Logan. And on we went.

Ethical?

Well, Ezra may have taken a seat that a paying movie-goer would have taken, especially since the movie was sold out. True, but two comments. First, a theater doesn't actually fill every seat when it "sells out." I'm not sure why, but it doesn't. In fact, there were several other unfilled seats. Second, Jen and I had saved a seat for Ezra since our early arrival. Saving a seat for a friend is surely permissible, especially since I had done so with the understanding that Ezra would actually buy a ticket. I think the ethics deal less with fellow movie-goers and more with the business. Someone might claim that since the movie had sold out, the theater hadn't lost anything. But Ezra may have returned to see the movie and paid the ticket price then. In that case, not only does the theater lose out, so does Michael Moore - each according to their cut of the ticket price.

I would bet that those who think it's okay to enter the theater without paying find the following reason most compelling: "I mean, the movie was playing anyway, right?" That's tempting. But to see how it fails, think of the city bus. Sure it travels even if someone doesn't pay. But the rider is financially accountable to the business, which must sell tickets to sustain itself. Not paying is tantamount to stealing. Of course, it's not so simple. It was the ticket guy, after all, who missed Logan's ticket. It's not like we sneaked in through the back door. Well, no. Our act was intentional, if not premeditated. If the cashier forgets to ring something up, the buyer should speak up - with movie tickets as with milk. Bottom line: taking without paying - nevermind the details - is theft.

We debated this conundrum after the movie. It was an odd conversation, meandering between the ethics of movie tickets and the disaster of our health care system. It felt silly to be worrying about that $7 ticket when there were larger problems to discuss. But I felt at least that this $7 riddle was something we could solve. Both Logan and Ezra acquiesced to my puritanical drive - annoying as it must have been - and forked over the $7 ticket price. With $7 in hand, I got up to purchase a ticket for the Monday morning showing of Sicko - when it was sure not to be sold out - to compensate for our unsanctioned viewing. But in the shadow of the box office, as I stood amidst Harry-Potter-mania, the thought of buying a ticket in order to rip it up, all to enrich the rich and empower the powerful, struck me as nothing short of absurd. Strangely, for once in my life, it was pertinent to say, paraphrasing Voltaire: Don't let the ethical become the enemy of the good.

So we gave that $7 to the Rescue Mission. Yes?

The (d)evolution of privacy

I gave blood this morning, something I've written about in the past.

In the interview, the Red Cross worker asked matter-of-factly for my social security number, address, phone number, health status, and other identifying info.

Then, "if you don't mind my asking," she asked for my sex.

What a world we live in.

Why people steal

Fellow blogger ZT posts this story from the Washington Post:

A grand feast of marinated steaks and jumbo shrimp was winding down, and a group of friends was sitting on the back patio of a Capitol Hill home, sipping red wine. Suddenly, a hooded man slid in through an open gate and put the barrel of a handgun to the head of a 14-year-old guest.

"Give me your money, or I'll start shooting," he demanded, according to D.C. police and witness accounts.

The five other guests, including the girls' parents, froze -- and then one spoke.

"We were just finishing dinner," Cristina "Cha Cha" Rowan, 43, blurted out. "Why don't you have a glass of wine with us?"

The intruder took a sip of their Chateau Malescot St-Exupéry and said, "Damn, that's good wine."

The girl's father, Michael Rabdau, 51, who described the harrowing evening in an interview, told the intruder, described as being in his 20s, to take the whole glass. Rowan offered him the bottle. The would-be robber, his hood now down, took another sip and had a bite of Camembert cheese that was on the table.

Then he tucked the gun into the pocket of his nylon sweatpants.

"I think I may have come to the wrong house," he said, looking around the patio of the home in the 1300 block of Constitution Avenue NE.

"I'm sorry," he told the group. "Can I get a hug?"

Some took the story as one of love triumphing over evil. But that's too theological to be correct. I think about it in the context of prison work. After all, if this guy is caught, he could face ten years in the slammer - probably in a max-security. In Soul on Ice, (New York: Dell, 1968, p. 58), former prisoner (and revolutionary-turned-Republican) Eldridge Cleaver put it this way:

One thing that the judges, policemen, and administrators of prisons seem never to have understood, and for which they certainly do not make allowances, is that Negro convicts, basically, rather than see themselves as criminals and perpetrators of misdeeds, look upon themselves as prisoners of war, the victims of a vicious, dog-eat-dog social system that is so heinous as to cancel out their own malefactions... Rather than owning and paying a debt to society, Negro prisoners feel that they are being abused, that their imprisonment is simply another form of the oppression which they have know all their lives. Negro inmates feel that they are being robbed, that it is 'society' that owes them, that should be paying them, a debt. [Quoted in Ted Conover's Newjack, New York: Random House, 2000, p. 207]

The Washington Post didn't identify the attacker's skin color. But the point holds. Those who feel marginalized - whether by their race or their poverty or whatever - believe that they owe nothing to society. In fact, society owes them. And if society won't cough it up, they'll simply take it.

Thus, inviting the would-be robber to partake in that everlasting symbol of privilege - a glass of red wine - mollified his criminal intention. It deprived him of his motive, which was not just to enrich himself, but to be counted and recognized. It makes perfect sense that he asked for a hug. Sharing their feast of plenty, he felt like one of them. As the Washington Post reports, "In the alley behind the home, investigators found the intruder's empty crystal wine glass on the ground, unbroken."

Health insurance myths

In his NYT column today, Paul Krugman debunks the hip replacement myth:

[I]t’s true that Americans get hip replacements faster than Canadians. But there’s a funny thing about that example, which is used constantly as an argument for the superiority of private health insurance over a government-run system: the large majority of hip replacements in the United States are paid for by, um, Medicare.

That’s right: the hip-replacement gap is actually a comparison of two government health insurance systems. American Medicare has shorter waits than Canadian Medicare (yes, that’s what they call their system) because it has more lavish funding — end of story. The alleged virtues of private insurance have nothing to do with it.

Here (via the White House) is what President Bush said about universal coverage last week:

“I mean, people have access to health care in America. After all, you just go to an emergency room.”

Like this one, Mr. Bush?

Reasoning from the gut

William Saletan at Slate weighs in on the liberal-conservative question:

I have problems with liberals. A lot of them talk about religion as though it's a communicable disease. Some are amazingly obtuse to other people's qualms. They show no more interest in an embryo than in a skin cell. ... At most liberal bioethics conferences, the main question in dispute, in one form or another, is whether to be more afraid of capitalism or religion. I also hate the word progressive. It manages to be arrogant and meaningless at the same time, as though anything the left wants to do is a good idea. I suppose it's no more arrogant than values, the Republican buzzword for whatever conservatives want to do.

Eventually, though, Saletan sides with the liberals. He criticizes conservatives for being too dogmatic about questions of right and wrong, or appealing to what bioethicist Leon Kass calls "the wisdom of repugnance." Regarding the prospect of human cloning, Kass writes that "repugnance is the emotional expression of deep wisdom, beyond reason’s power fully to articulate it. Can anyone really give an argument fully adequate to the horror which is father-daughter incest (even with consent), or having sex with animals, or mutilating a corpse, or eating human flesh, or even just (just!) raping or murdering another human being?" It's not "what do you think," but rather "how do you feel?" Kass concludes, powerfully, "Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder."

I don't find "the wisdom of repugnance" compelling. Neither does Saletan, nor my former professor Felicia Nimue Ackerman, who replied: "Narrow are the souls that cannot comprehend that different souls shudder at different things." This "wisdom of repugnance" jettisons argument and relies more-or-less on gut-level reasoning. It is no way to discuss public policy in a shared society. But I don't think gut-level reasoning is merely a conservative phenomenon. Liberals and conservatives alike appeal to the gut. Vegans do it in their "arguments" for animal independence. Liberal bioethicist Linda MacDonald Glenn does it in discussing enhancement technologies, such as in the use of prenatal genetic diagnosis (PGD) to create smarter, stronger children. She writes: “To try and strive to have a perfect race—that’s a very scary thought.” In fact, nearly everyone discussing enhancement seems nuts about the idea. I see titles like: "New Breeds of Humans: The Moral Obligation to Enhance" (J. Savulescu) and "Our Posthuman Future" (F. Fukuyama).

Now I don't want to eschew gut-level reasoning altogether. Most of us, I imagine, would rush to save a drowning child (as the classic example goes) not because we feel the moral law devolving upon us (thank you, Mr. Kant) or because a quick calculus finds the child's life to be worth more than my pants (thank you, Mr. Singer). Instead, standing on the lake-side, we feel something in our gut that compels us to perceive and seek to end the suffering of another person.

Wise are the souls that understand that ethics neither ignores, nor ends at, the gut.

An Iraqi in Baghdad

An Iraqi reporter for the New York Times in Baghdad, Khalid W. Hassan (pictured), was killed earlier today on his way to work. On this page, colleagues at the Baghdad bureau shared memories. He was 23 years old and set to get married this fall. He was supporting his mother and three younger sisters, whom he had moved into a more expensive apartment after their previous apartment was destroyed in a truck bombing a few months ago. Khalid's father, a Sunni Arab, was shot by Sunni gunmen last fall “for the crime of taking a car ride with an acquaintance who happened to be Shiite.”

Who shot “this heavyset, pranksterish 23-year-old”? Why?


The NYT: “The murderous turmoil in Baghdad has reached a point where many families never know the killers of their loved ones, or their motives. Sunni insurgents? Shiite militias? Killers who mimic one or the other, while pursuing more private motives of greed, spite or revenge?”

Reporter Paul von Zielbauer recalled this story about Khalid Hassan:

I remember walking with him to a hotel next door, to interview an Iraqi woman about an article I was researching on love affairs in Baghdad. Khalid had eagerly put himself forth as a leading expert on the subject. On the way to the hotel, escorted by a guard with a revolver, we walked past a child seated on the curb. On a wooden plank before him, the child, scruff-faced and silent sold local candies. I walked right past him. Khalid stopped, talked to the kid, gave him a few Iraqi bills and took no candy.

“These kids are out here all day in the heat, and they have nothing,” he told me as we walked. “I feel bad for them, you know, dude?”

For all the times I have seen KHALID W. HASSAN REPORTING, thank you.

Ratatouille

If Sicko is sold out at your local theater, consider seeing Ratatouille (trailer here) instead.

In this Pixar film, a rat named Rémy dreams of becoming a chef at Gusteau's, a famous bistro in Paris. But the idea isn't palatable to the human chefs - except to a young man named Linguini who by family legacy and a little dumb luck manages to land a job there. Of course Linguini can't cook. In fact, Linguini is a blubbering idiot whose near-permanent deer-in-the-headlights expression is eclipsed only by his inability to do anything right. Linguini is a real Forrest Gump kind of character who somehow despite his idiocy manages to win our affection and sympathy.

Not just a coming-of-age story, Ratatouille is a story about how anyone can achieve great things through hard work and skill. That meritocratic message, however, is complicated by a story of inheritance. Gusteau, the man famous for saying "anyone can cook," leaves his restaurant not to his best chef but to someone with no culinary talent whatsoever: his son Linguini. Linguini, meanwhile, doesn't know he's the legal heir - which begs the question of why the chef who took over is so concerned. I also didn't understand why Colette, the female lead, falls in love with Linguini, though I suppose it's a side-story and therefore doesn't need much explaining. Finally, I wonder if Rémy could have communicated with Linguini by writing to him, given that the rat can read.

Kudos to the film for sticking to its plot, even though it suggests that the amiable chef Gusteau fathered a son out of wedlock. And despite the curious absence of female rats, the film espouses a feminist message. Colette tells Linguini: "How many women do you see in this kitchen? Only me. Why do you think that is? Because high cuisine is an antiquated hierarchy built upon rules by stupid, old men." Questions aside, this film is a delight, with gorgeous animation and perfect voices. And it's hilarious. I was laughing from my belly, such as when a mean-spirited chef tells the novice Linguini: "Let us toast, to your non-idiocy!" I'll finish with this funny exchange:

Mustafa: Someone has asked me what is new!
Horst: What did you tell them?
Mustafa: I told them I would ask!
Skinner: What are you blathering about?
Mustafa: People are asking what is new!
Skinner: What did you tell them?
Mustafa: I told them I would ask!

Pathologies of Power Preview

Expect a review of Paul Farmer's Pathologies of Power, forthcoming. I wrote previously about Tracy Kidder's Mountains Beyond Mountains, a journalistic biography of Farmer. Farmer's own writing, of course, discusses global health inequalities in greater depth. If I were to sum up the main thesis of this book, I'd quote Amartya Sen, whom Farmer himself quotes (8). The difference is that Farmer would replace "development" with "health."

“Development requires the removal of major sources of unfreedom: poverty as well as tyranny, poor economic opportunities as well as systemic social deprivation, neglect of public facilities as well as intolerance or over-activity of repressive states.” [Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom, New York: Knopf, 1999, pages 3-4.]

The other difference is that Farmer writes with a bit of a zing, fuming at one point:

“Does being human confer a right to survive?” (211).