Pollster Cassandras Warn Dems of Tragic Flaw
Pat Caddell and Doug Schoen, “pollsters to the past two Democratic presidents, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, respectively,” issue a devastating warning to hubris-blinded Dems. Their WaPo op-ed sums up the facts on the ground more succinctly and stingingly than anything else I have read.
Bluntly put, this is the political reality:
First, the battle for public opinion has been lost. Comprehensive health care has been lost. […]
Nothing has been more disconcerting than to watch Democratic politicians and their media supporters deceive themselves into believing that the public favors the Democrats’ current health-care plan. Yes, most Americans believe, as we do, that real health-care reform is needed. And yes, certain proposals in the plan are supported by the public.
However, a solid majority of Americans opposes the massive health-reform plan [… and] believe the legislation will worsen their health care, cost them more personally and add significantly to the national deficit. Never in our experience as pollsters can we recall such self-deluding misconstruction of survey data. […]
The notion that once enactment is forced, the public will suddenly embrace health-care reform could not be further from the truth […]
Second, the country is moving away from big government, with distrust growing more generally toward the role of government in our lives. Scott Rasmussen asked last month whose decisions people feared more in health care: that of the federal government or of insurance companies. By 51 percent to 39 percent, respondents feared the decisions of federal government more. This is astounding given the generally negative perception of insurance companies.
CNN found last month that 56 percent of Americans believe that the government has become so powerful it constitutes an immediate threat to the freedom and rights of citizens. When only 21 percent of Americans say that Washington operates with the consent of the governed, as was also reported last month, we face an alarming crisis. […]
[T]he issue, in voters’ minds, has become less about health care than about the government and a political majority that will neither hear nor heed the will of the people.
This would be Greek tragedy if it weren’t such a farce. You know what happens to those who don’t believe Cassandra.
Dave Eggers Stole My Metaphor!
Writing is a deep-sea dive. You need hours just to get into it: down, down, down. If you’re called back to the surface every couple of minutes . . . you can’t ever get back down.
I really have used the exact same analogy. What I elided in this passage was “by an email.” Because, yes, but it’s “by anything.” I keep saying that I don’t want to write, really write, in this (caregiving) situation because I will constantly be interrupted, yanked to the surface, as if by a fretful fisherman who keeps checking his bait. The Person from Porlock on a Groundhog Day loop. (Follow that link, you’ll be glad you did.)
“I procrastinate worse than anybody. I need eight hours to get maybe 20 minutes of work done. I had one of those yesterday: seven hours of self-loathing.”
For some of us, at least, plowing through a nauseating zone of dysphoria (thicker at some times than at others) is necessary pretty much every time to get to the sort of plasma state where real writing happens. It feels like death because you get attached to the comfortable, cooled shell of your normal everyday consciousness, and it has to go. You have to shed yourself the way atoms are stripped of their electrons. That takes heat and pressure, and, for a living thing with attachments and habits, pain and suffering.
This is why I would assert that most blogging isn’t “real writing.” You keep your personality on and dabble in the shallows, for the most part. To an obligate writer (in the sense that scientists speak of, say, an “obligate carnivore”), blogging is cheating. Althouse, who posted this, remarked:
Oddly, Eggers is motivated by his sense of how short life is. All that time getting going and thinking about how short life is? Oh, the pain. Blogging, by contrast, is the continual relief from that pain.
Partly, and partly avoidance of it. If you crave much more than relief, it’s on the other side of the pain.
Lucky Stupid.
I earned that title tonight.
My theory: near misses and nonfatal mistakes are among the greatest blessings. When you do something harmfully dumb, yet no harm comes of it, it’s a priceless wake-up call. You have a much better kind of guardian angel than one that never lets you fuck up. For one thing, you won’t make that particular mistake again for at least five years, so strike one dumb thing from the list of menaces you pose to yourself and others. More generally, and even more valuably, you will not trust yourself to be in a trance again for some time to come (much less than five years, though, I’m afraid).
Here’s what I did.
Got J dressed, up, into the van, and drove to the dojo. Early class today, it’s Saturday. It was still light. We were just a little late. Our friend the karate teacher was expecting us and sent two green belts out to help us get out of the van.
The van is wonderful, I bought it on eBay for about two thousand dollars (compared to five figures for any newer second-hand one) — it’s a 1989 Dodge Ram with a built in Braun elevator lift, and the engine seems indestructible as it approaches 100,000 miles. It has only one major shortcoming for us: the frame of the lift is too low for J’s height in the wheelchair, so I have to tip him back, lean him against me and maneuver him under this “low bridge” every time to get off and onto the lift platform.
The newly renovated Durham streets are contoured to slope downward to the curb. When we park in front of the dojo and I swing down the lift platform, it slopes downward toward the street, as it doesn’t anyplace else. Sometimes I can tip the wheelchair back anyway, sometimes not. It helps if someone grabs the frame near the footrests and lifts, helping it tilt back to lean on me.
Often Sensei Nathan helps us but sometimes he sends strong senior students out to do so. These were two who hadn’t done it before. I unfastened the four-point restraints from the wheelchair, got out of the van and lowered the lift platform, got back in and turned the chair to face through the frame. I asked the green belts to tip the wheelchair back, leaned it against my body, and exhorted J not to stop us by grabbing the frame. I wheeled the chair forward on its back wheels — and screamed as it dropped two, two and a half feet to the street.
As if sleepwalking, I had lowered the lift platform down to the ground before trying to wheel J onto it. The two green belts stood there watching, either dumbstruck by my higher rank or puzzled but convinced I must know what I was doing. It was like pushing him off a cliff. Fortunately, the way the street’s contour tilts the van made the distance shorter than the three feet it would normally be.
The wheelchair made a perfect four-point landing. I couldn’t tell you whether the green belts leapt forward to catch it, or not. J was jarred and furious, but he seemed intact. Because I was gripping the handlebars, the chair’s fall yanked me forward and whacked my throat against the lift frame. Hours later, J still seems to be all right. I have a colorful foot and a sore larynx, which I have been treating with vanilla ice cream and bourbon on the rocks, thank you very much. It only hurts when I laugh.
How on earth did I do that — fail to perform a logical series of steps or, as a backup, at least to see what was in front of my eyes?? I very nearly did the same thing once before, maybe two winters ago, but caught myself. There’s evidently something about the way the platform slopes down by a Durham curb that scrambles my autopilot. I’ve certainly been preoccupied with occupational issues and adjustments to J’s medication. (We drove J’s friend to the airport Thursday and then went straight to the gym. When we got back, we found a delivery inside the door and two of the cats gone. How did that happen?? I had to retrieve Dito from Animal Services; Buzzy was still in the neighborhood. But that’s another story.) Still! What a shocker.
What a blessing. I sure as hell won’t do that again, probably ever. (Just once, I drove off without strapping down the wheelchair. J’s guardian angel, if not mine, intervened, and ever since, I am extremely conscious of tying down the chair.)
The “Uncanny Valley”
I love that term. It’s used in robotics and animation for the uncrossable gap between a synthetic and a real human being, especially a human face. When you see a simulation that’s too real, but not quite real, it badly creeps you out. You’ve fallen into the uncanny valley, a place where a child will cry with terror.
When I read about the concept, I immediately flashed on two ads, one for the brand of eye drops called Restasis and another for some brand of smart phone. In each ad, a beautiful young woman (in the Restasis ad, a red-haired, green-eyed doctor; in the phone ad, a smooth-haired, milky-skinned blonde late-teenager) is serenly commending the product. She is radiant and soothing and perfect — too perfect. Possibly “replica-based,” perfected copies of real people, these are the closest simulations of a human face that I’ve ever seen — tryouts for the much-touted coming Hollywood movies with fully animated actors (“synthespians”) — but they don’t make it out of the uncanny valley, and how very close they come paradoxically fills you with dread. (A message-board member on the Restasis doctor: “I just saw the commercial again. Man! I bet that lady has a pair of 3 foot cockroach wings underneath her labcoat. Something is definitely not human with her, but it’s hard to put your finger on. Plus, her eyes are weird as shit. She’s a freak. If she went on a mercy mission to Haiti they’d think she was a voodoo witch doctor.”) You feel you narrowly escaped being fooled, and that being fooled would somehow be chillingly dangerous.
The article at the first link above tries out physical, evolutionary, and existential explanations for that dread; all are enlightening, none is quite sufficient. I had a kind of nightmare fantasy as a child of my mother being replaced by someone (or something) that looked and sounded exactly like her, but wasn’t. This is the same fear that drives the legend of the doppelgänger, the endless reincarnations of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and the neuropsychological disorder called Capgras syndrome (which people with J’s illness can have). Why is this notion so horrifying?
My sense is that it has something to do with the life-and-death importance of trust and the leap of faith we must make with every assumption of authenticity; something, even, to do with a subliminal awareness that our perceptions are not as direct as they seem, but are the constructions of a nervous system that is itself not entirely trustworthy. “Reality” is in fact a fragile thing.
(Hat tip: Carl Zimmer)
Jacques et Jim
The old bar partners from the 1960s don’t look their age as they watch Tuesday night’s karate promotion (action pix at the link):
A small part of what they were watching: me not acting my age.
Too Swift.
Anybody remember a year or two ago when there was great but (as it turned out) unfounded worry because blogger “Jon Swift” had seemingly disappeared?
Well, now he really has. How sad!
I went back through my handful of e-mails from him and was most struck by his generosity.
And Speaking of “Lost Sounds”:
The rare tones of an elected official telling the truth.
Another must read. (Hat tip: reader_iam)
What’s Wrong With Obamacare.
I don’t have to tell you, because this says it all.
Now don’t get marooned in politics, go read Donna’s wonderful post below.
Old-fashioned Sounds
Via Megan McArdle, here’s Slate’s In Search of Lost Sounds: Why you’ve neverreally heard the “Moonlight” Sonata.
Because a lot of people my age grew up hearing more of the old, out of tune upright pianos prominently featuring chipped ivories and a funky smell… than we did well-made, well-cared for, and thus rare, older pianos, it’s easy to understand why we preferred the new.
The story is about the Frederick Historic Piano Collection – 24 pianos made from 1790 to 1928. They are housed in a small Victorian library building in Ashburnham MA and they are featured in a yearly concert series. Hearing one of those concerts and seeing the pianos is one of the most appealing reasons I can think of to visit Massachusetts.
There are several clips in the article comparing compositions by Beethoven, Brahms, and Debussy played on a Steinway to them played on pianos the composers might have actually used. I checked YouTube for more recordings by the pianists playing the old instruments, but didn’t find any. That’s a void begging to be filled.
Fascinating… and somewhat of an indictment of standardization. Heed this,autotune.
(Originally posted at OpiningOnline, but… a better fit for this audience perhaps?)
A Healing Song.
At least, I find it so.
In response to Donna’s comment, you can listen to the song without visuals:
Ambiance 